The Child in the Basement
Learning to see what has been shaping our lives
In my twenties, I made a short film called The Basement. It follows a woman who becomes increasingly unsettled in her own home, convinced that there is an intruder somewhere inside it. She hears noises, senses movement, but doubts herself. Eventually, she discovers that someone really is there. A lost child has been hiding in the basement all along.
At the time I didn’t fully understand what I was making. Looking back, it’s clear my unconscious was trying to articulate something I didn’t yet have the language for. This essay is an attempt to name that something, and to explore what happens when the frightened, resourceful child we carry within is finally allowed into the light.
In both my practice and my personal life, the arrival of the exiled child has become a working definition of healing. When you can really, truly see your way of being you no longer have to resist it. And when I say see, I don’t mean analyse, interpret, or make sense of, I mean something quieter and more demanding than that. To see in this way is to witness yourself, without judgement, without correction, and without the urge to turn your experience into a problem that needs solving. More than that, it is to step directly into the discomfort of the original wound.
This capacity to offer the child within you a seat at the table of your life, rather than try to hide or improve them, is no small thing. As relational beings, we have been formed in community, and we are constantly affecting the wider field. Learning how to stay present to what is actually here, rather than rejecting the messy, angry, heartbroken parts of ourselves is a revolutionary act. One that not only changes our internal landscape, but reshapes the world we are bringing into being together.
Most of us, however, have been trained to do the opposite. We live in a discourse that privileges comfort over truth, self-improvement over humanity, and individual healing over our shared custodial responsibility. As Tyson Yunkaporta explains, “Some new cultures keep asking, 'Why are we here?' It's easy. This is why we're here. We look after things on the earth and in the sky and the places in between."
In direct opposition to this big flowing wholeness, we are taught to manage our lives: identify the problem, correct the behaviour, move on. And yet, what is actually shaping the world is not what we think we are doing. Doing is generated by how we are being, moment by moment, long before intention or choice come online.
So what is a way of being, and why is it so difficult to see? Part of the difficulty lies in three basic category errors of human perception. We tend to assume that there is a solid, self-evident world “out there”, waiting to be perceived. It certainly appears that way, but perception is not passive, it is an act of interpretation, shaped by memory, conditioning, and learning. What appears to be simply there is already being filtered through an internal mechanism that decides what matters, what belongs, and what can be ignored.
This confusion between appearance and reality is an old one. Plato captured it in the image of the cave, where shadows cast on a wall are mistaken for the world itself. In the words of Daniel Kahneman, “what you see is all there is.” The mind is constantly filling in gaps, predicting, filtering, and editing long before we are aware. In essence: there is only a world, if there is a someone distinguishing it.
This leads to a second category error. We assume that we are in the world, looking out at it from somewhere inside ourselves. And yet, if you pause and try to locate where exactly that “someone” is, the task will slip through your fingers.
“When you look for the self, you find only thoughts, sensations, and feelings. There is no solid person there.” — Charlotte Joko Beck
Thirdly, the one who seems to be looking is also something that appears. We wake up each day already inhabiting this someone, without the awareness to question how they came to be, and if they are even still here.
That someone is not innate. It is shaped early, relationally, and outside conscious awareness. At around the age of four a self-image begins to take form, not through explicit instruction, but through the unspoken ‘being’ of parents and authority figures, who communicate largely through tone, expectation, presence, and absence.
Children learn who they are by sensing themselves through the eyes of others; through what is validated, and what is overlooked. This learning happens beneath language, as a bodily sense and an imperceptible conclusion about what is required in order to belong. These early adaptations are not mistakes. They are intelligent responses to the conditions a child finds themselves in. Specifically, they are ways of surviving, and remaining oriented toward care.
But survival is not the same as living, and much of what we call a life is actually the ongoing management of early pain through habitual coping strategies stuck on repeat. We build careers, families, identities, and worlds from a way of being that belongs to an earlier time, and then wonder why certain patterns loop, or why a sense of constriction persists even in the midst of apparent success.
Until it is seen, your old way of being will continue to lead.
This is where the figure of the wise wounded child becomes important. Jung taught through a lifetime of practice that what is not brought into consciousness does not disappear, but returns in disguised form, shaping our lives from the margins. When parts of us are not welcomed into the communal fabric of life, a kind of pervasive grief accumulates and deepens across transgenerational lines.
“What we exile in ourselves we will meet as fate.” — Francis Weller
Just take a look at our world and consider for a moment the depth of unmetabolised pain powering conflict after conflict. We need to wake up.
The child who adapted in order to survive carries not only wound, but wisdom, truth and a deep sense of justice about the conditions that shaped us. When this child remains unseen, they continue to operate from the background, organising perception and behaviour without consent. When they are finally recognised, not analysed but met and felt, something profound happens.
Space opens up, what seemed stuck shifts and our experience of ourselves becomes less fixed. This is not because the past is resolved, or because the child disappears, but because the effort required to suppress, manage, or override that way of being begins to subside. Energy that was bound up in control becomes available for creativity, relationship, and present moment responsiveness.
Most people believe that freedom comes from transcending who they have been, but doing the opposite of an old pattern is still organised by that pattern. The only way that trap dissolves is by being distinguished, which is a special kind of seeing — one that is full body, and requires a great deal of self-responsibility ie zero blame and full ownership. No longer resisting your way of being, and instead welcoming the banished, scrappy, sad or furious child in from the cold. Because that survival state has been giving you the world you are currently living in.
True power will never lie in fixing the old context (fixing is just another form of avoidance) or in becoming more conscious of it as a badge of achievement. It lies in the ordinary capacity to live in the presence of others, without needing to exile parts of yourself in order to do so.
John O’Donohue spoke of belonging as something that arises when we stop forcing ourselves into shape. In this sense, welcoming the child in the basement is not an inner technique, but an ethical act. It is a refusal to continue organising life around rejection, projection and exile.
And that, quietly and collectively, is how worlds change.
What I’m walking through here is not a single idea or school of thought. It is a body of knowledge that has been emerging across philosophy, contemplative traditions, psychotherapeutic enquiry, and lived experience for centuries. Diverse thinkers have approached it from many angles, but they are circling the same recognition: reality is not simply something we observe, but something that is continuously appearing through us.
The practice at the core of my work, called BodyMind Maturation, brings these insights into a lived and accessible process. It is not a theory about consciousness, but a way of staying with experience as it is arising, without stepping outside of it to manage, improve, or transcend. Over time, this develops the capacity to meet life directly, and to fully appreciate how who we are being is shaping the worlds we participate in creating. Maturation is ultimately the wake-up call of impermanence: we get one precious life, and it is time to use it.
When I made my film The Basement back in 2010 I didn’t know how to end it. The woman discovered the child, suspended for a moment in shock and strange relief, followed by a glimpse of a police siren dancing across the brickwork. What I couldn’t do then, I do now. I imagine her bringing the little boy upstairs, into the light, wrapping a blanket around his tiny frame, and committing fully in her heart to the huge expanse of the unknown possibility opening up within her.