Nature Vs Nurture Debate

Nature Vs Nurture Debate

By James Allard, M.Ed. (Counseling) – A Certified Counselor registered with the NS Association of Professional Counselors.

We are all born with unpredictable life energy. Just look at a little baby and notice how spontaneous its movements are. As we develop we discover through contact with our parents that this world has limitations. So we learned to focus and as we learn discipline we get this sense that we can affect this world. Slowly we develop our will. Our parents teach us rules that tell us how to behave. Some rules are respectful of our emotions, and some are not. Respectful rules allow us to express ourselves in ways that respect others in society. Disrespectful rules repress our emotions or life energy. They’re the subtle “never be seen crying” or “always smile” or “don’t show us your anger” or “be seen but not heard”.  All of our actions in life results from our emotions that we either channel or repress through these ingrained rules that we live by.

Neither Good nor Evil

The word Evil implies a judgment. We can judge an action evil because it is disrespectful of others but to say the person is evil is like saying that nature is evil. Nature is neither good or evil, it is what it is. It only produces life energy whose only function is to seek pleasure. Nurture on the other hand teaches us to either channel that life energy through the respect for rules that we live by, the end result being pleasure or to restrain its through the disrespect for rules that we live by, the end result being emotional pain. Difficult Behavior including violence is merely the behavior of a person seeking to alleviate this intense emotional pain.

 True healing occurs when people accept to reconnect with their buried childhood pain that has brought them to the difficult behavior in their lives. True healing only occurs when such people are accepted in their pain, sadness and their anger. Such acceptance is called love. Therapy is to assist the person to express the underlying feelings of sadness and anger in an appropriate fashion. In time the client feels accepted, pain and all. The client will eventually ‘move on’ in their lives, become less fearful and better able to relate to others.

The spirit underlying the Nature / Nurture debate is a desire to link nature to some of the more difficult behaviors we encounter. If we were successful at that we could then judge which nature is good, which is evil. We could prescribe medication to control this evil nature or prescribe a death sentence. That would be very convenient since it would get us off the hook for dealing with the Nurture aspect of our lives.

Emotions are our nature. They’re not evil and they don’t judge. Difficult behaviors results from the Nurture part of our lives, judgment also results from Nurture. We weren't born judgmental and we don't have to live that way. The purpose of therapy is to recover as much as possible our lost ability to express ourselves in a manner  that is appropriately shaped but also unrestrained by judgment.