Opening page from Joel’s soon to be completed book: Healing Your Relationship with Yourself:

Ending the Conflicts Within by Developing a Harmonious Inner Family

upon a time there was a plug. Not your ordinary garden-variety kind of plug, this little plug was

produced by its manufacturer already connected to its socket. So merged together were they that it was impossible to tell the plug from the socket.

But for reasons too curious and complex to go into here, the people in power in the world into which the plug was brought did not trust the socket of which it was an indivisible part. They thought that the most important and necessary thing they could do to help the little plug survive was to teach it to see itself only as a plug among plugs. This brought much confusion and pain to the little plug. Every time that confusion and pain went unattended, it was pulled ever so slightly further from its socket.

One day it came to pass that it disconnected completely from its socket. From that day forward, strange as it may seem, just like the people in power, the little plug learned to want no part of its socket. Soon it too didn’t know the socket of which it is an indivisible part.

Now it is the nature of plugs to want to connect. So rather than staying connected to its socket, the little plug tried to find what it was missing. The only place to look for a plug seeking connection was to try to “hook up” with one or more of an ever-changing array of other disconnected plugs. And let me tell you, there was quite a pile to choose from!

It was the hope of the little plug that by connecting to another disconnected plug it could find what it once had known with the socket. So it moved from one disconnected plug to another, and then another, and then another. Much of its time in the world it spent in this way, only to know more confusion and pain than it had ever known before. Its solution for this was to try even harder to connect to this plug or that one or the other. Each new plug always held out great promise in the beginning that it would and could offer everything the socket did but, by the end, it would show itself as nothing more than just another disconnected plug, exactly like the little plug. At this point some plugs quickly or slowly, subtly or obviously, choose to fizzle out and die. Is this what the little plug should do too? Where could it turn? Oh, what to do? What to do?

Well it took many, many jolts but the little plug came to realize that the only thing the world could offer was the choice of connecting to other disconnected plugs. It had had enough of this path. It had known enough confusion and pain. It could not live the way it had one more minute. So it decided to go down a different path in search of its original socket. It decided that it would rather fail and die looking for that socket than try one more prong-to-prong connection.

You and I are that little plug. This is our story back to the original socket of which we are an indivisible part.