The real way that love hurts

 

How absurd it would be if a mistreated and deprived child were to look at the happy, confident students in her class and say: “While I have none of these gifts of life that chil­dren need and deserve, I am happy for them. I am happy that they have a wonderful life.” We know this would be a brain­washed or terribly neurotic child. She cannot be happy, for herself, for these children or for anyone. Yet adults say it as a rule of right behavior. An incest victim who can’t have chil­dren tells her pregnant cousin: “I’m happy for you.” A seriously ill man, the family scapegoat, says he is happy for his healthy sister, whom their mother preferred, who has a loving and stable home. He is deluding himself. The truth remains hidden because adults cover the fire of their childhood.

When we are not given the love at the beginning of life that makes us a whole person, later in life our uncon­scious will know that it is too late. Any love that we see then, any that is offered to us will trigger the pain of its deprivation. We will feel uneasy or even tragic when we are compli­mented. We will not feel comfortable with loving people.* One man I know, shamed by his mother through his childhood, at age fif­teen was praised by her for his expertise at tennis. He immedi­ately lost the ability to play brilliantly. His skill disappeared: His spirit left his arms and legs.

Many clients feel unworthy of love: They were made to feel they are unlovable and it is now too late: Love would send them hurtling back to their childhood fire, or rather, the vast desert of their starvation. A woman can’t believe her long-term boyfriend loves her. She accuses him of wanting other women though he is loyal. A man feels a reconditely bad feeling when his fiancée kisses him. We can’t charge these people to feel good about themselves. The only healing that comes will be from grieving, with convulsive tears, their loss of love to a therapist who cares about them. Then they may become a whole person.

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* This explains the phenomenon named in the codependency (or “dependency”) literature such as Robin Norwood’s Women Who Love Too Much: “If female, you are not attracted to men who are kind, stable, reliable, and interested in you. You find such nice men boring.” https://ta-tutor.com/sites/ta-tutor.com/files/handouts/ram167.pdf. That’s #15 on Norwood’s list. #1 is: “You come from a home where your own emotional needs weren’t met. Alcohol, drugs, compulsive eating or working, constant arguing, refusal to talk, and/or extreme rigidity were the norm.”

Casualities #3: Meditation diss #2*

 

There are so many tons of information, research and waxing orgasmic about this simple and dumb process that one should wonder if some ulterior motive or conspiracy or agenda is behind it. One quiets the mind, attending only to breathing in and out. Or a brain-sedating mantra is intoned – “Om” – over and over again. As to breath focus, I confess that I don’t know if the rule is to think or say aloud “breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out” as in Dan Harris’s video, or to just mutely observe one’s respiration.

There is research stating that meditation is better for the brain than sleep. There are articles about its negative psychological effects. I’d say that meditation is worse than sleep because it is a distrac­tion from bodily feeling while sleep allows unconscious buried history and its feel­ings to be released in dreams. In sleep, one’s defenses are down. As Dr. Janov noted, we wake up to unconsciousness because our network of self-soothing defenses re-engages, blocking deeper access. We are constipated souls.

Meditation is just another agent of repression. It blocks off the body’s main existence: feeling. Does it eliminate stress and anxiety that are ingrained in the nervous system since child­hood? No – it merely pushes them under briefly.

And yet there must be something good enough about a little bit of quiet, separating oneself from the rat race, for it to be so rallied around, imagined to be a wide benefit, deserving of ticker-tape parades.

I am a quiet sort. I easily go to no-thought or “no-mind” often, between therapy ses­sions, walking the dog, sitting around at night. But for me there is always feeling or the allowance of it. Body history is always wel­come to emerge and breathe. My theory is that this is the most regulating to the sys­tem: full openness. If I live to 120, we’ll know I’m right.

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* https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2014/09/mindfulness-or-look-inside-theres-bunny.html.

Let’s see why I haven’t wanted to write to you

 

Without realizing it was happening, I’ve lately felt a slight revulsion at the thought of finding and writing true things about the human psyche. I believe the main reason is my disgust with the politi­cal degra­da­tion, the atrophy of today, where the most botched people, in legions, continue to prove to be the most power­ful. The good, the sensible is no longer in vogue. It is no longer the denoue­ment of the story, which used to not end with idiots wearing horns, crapping in the sanc­tuary and drooling in glee.

Half the population is so mentally deranged that their heart swells in love for a diag­nos­able socio­path, their mind so self-medicating that their identity is a loud emptiness: nega­tivity, defiance.

It is almost impossible to open the eyes and still the rabid heart of someone who has found solace for their childhood injustice in hate and destruction.

Admittedly, another reason for writer’s block is that six-hundred-and-fifty blog posts seem to me to be enough to name the basics and the most important sequelae. People are daily “living proof” that their head floats on a sea of pain and unresolution. The adult, the adoles­cent, is a lost child in a wilderness named the present.

I agree with everyone: Happiness is good. What bothers me is that people look for it, claim it, while the shark, with razor teeth, has its mouth vise-gripping their torso. Look down (beneath the smile, the positive thoughts and the parents who did their best). There are solvents that can remove or at least soften those teeth.