The Mundanity Defense Mechanism

People who can’t accept a compliment, or feel a strange badness inside when they receive a compliment. People who feel they “don’t deserve to be happy.” A man I know who feels unworthy of his spouse’s affection. People who feel anxious or depressed when they reach a pinnacle, a success, who feel not pleasure or pride in it but rather a dull bad feeling that leads them to say “no big deal – it’s what a person’s supposed to do.” People, maybe mostly women, who reject a caring, “boring” man and are attracted to the “bad boy.” People who self-sabotage (fail, drop out) right before they would have reached an achievement. They may then condemn themselves for their failure while I’ll tell them “you are actually being good to yourself. Your unconscious is telling you that after all these years you can no longer fake being well. You have always been bleeding and need to collapse, and get help.”

 

Today’s theory says that those of us who experience these perversions have been living in what I will call the Mundanity Defense, the most invisible and pervasive defense. We go about our days with mild or moderately strong satisfactions and frustrations, or with none; with piquant pleasures (a pet’s funny behaviors, a good meal, an exciting movie, sex, ad infinitum), with our thoughts, riding in our adult ocean. Our mental and spiritual life is a cloud that doesn’t touch the ground. But beneath this horizonless fog is our failed childhood where we did not receive love, but aloneness. Everything sits on top of that broken egg.

 

When we are given compliments or care, when we near success and what should be happiness and peace, we feel the past and present loss. Our child feels his home: “I do not get that.” Our adult feels, in a way, much worse: “I didn’t get that when it would have mattered, and it’s too late.” Strangely but naturally, good proves bad, pleasure proves pain.

 

This loss is the underlying problem of human life. We don’t really move on from the child’s broken heart. The rest of our life needs to cover that, and it does, until the truth is revealed by too-late love, by too-late success.

Morality is internal

I was about to ask and write about this question: What happens to a person who never learned morality from a religion or from parents, who never fell in with a group or cohort or gang with their convictions and moods, who grew up with no guidance? I was about to say that was me. At temple and Sunday school, I never listened to lessons or felt anything but a fearful pressure of alienation and overwhelm. My parents neither said nor explicitly showed anything about “good,” decency or kindness. And I had no childhood friends or teenage friends whose closeness imbued me with their philosophy of life. I grew up tabula rasa.

 

Except that I didn’t. At 15, there was a mysterious (psycho-genetic?) pull to have meaning, and I fell – half by chance, half by inevitability – into a gang of consciousness: Ayn Rand’s faux noble and vraie narcissistic emotionalized attitude of Objectivist philosophy. I say inevitable because no other literature would have worked, would have felt right and acceptable. Books on generosity and compassion and service and love and brotherhood would have made me feel ill. After all – temple and Sunday school. Books on spirituality and the great beyond – Alan Watts or Deepak Chopra, for example – made me enraged. Rand’s solipsistic rebels masquerading as individualists articulated my own life of Negative, brought to the surface and gave words and direction to my need for identity and revenge.

 

Was there a need for a personal moral system? Yes, but only to make me feel I was good and right. I, the alone and less-than was now alone and more-than, and it was good.

 

I believe each of us has a need for good-and-evil meanings because we already have a unique internal morality that is not yet judgment – a feeling and sensation continent within – that is its own literature, if we cared to write it down in several dozens of pages. It is what it is because we were loved or we were not. Mine was close enough to Rand’s to be co-opted and converted by her. Eventually, more of my true self emerged to be very different, extremely different from hers. I’ll suggest that no one’s moral system is found outside of oneself. It is only our feeling chemistry that we come to live as good or bad. Believing that we believe a book or Commandment or lesson, or our own thoughts, will only suffocate our true self and lead to some form of violence to break free of the suffocation.

My chemical Jew* (amended)

My heritage is Judaism,** and even though I don’t feel Jewish, I realize I don’t feel not Jewish. The chemistry of feelings must be that complicated. There are different sensations in the mix. When I think of Jews, my knee-jerk association is “good,” as in they are good and moral people, probably superiorly moral. This is doubtless an atavistic feeling from my early childhood where I learned the Jews are the “chosen people.” That’s a notion that is laughable to me, but no more laughable than so many other religious conceits in all the other religions I know something about. There’s an ingredient in this felt goodness that is quite perverse, as so: Just as God can’t be good because “the good” is His own fickle invention and therefore changeable by his edict, not an objective standard in the world, and yet He must be “good,” so my sense is that Jews are axiomatically “good” even when they are completely rotten people with odious personalities and rampaging murder in their hearts.

 

That’s one stubborn chemical.

 

I wouldn’t know why “the world” has enjoyed hating Jews throughout history. I can’t see that experts have actually figured this out, either. But I do think that Jews are unpleasant about their religion in a way that Christians are not. Christians are more likely to be hypocrites; Jews are less likely. This is because Jews are thinkers and self-determiners while Christians are followers and therefore prone to slip and unfollow. Christians have a picture of Jesus on their living room wall and they know His simple rules for life, many of which they will never follow well or consistently (see Bertrand Russell’s lecture, “Why I Am Not a Christian”). Jews don’t have an image of their God – He is almost entirely just an idea. They don’t really endorse some Old Testament view of Him with His anger, jealousy and revenge. They think, they analyze, they parse old parchments, shove microscope at nuance. But dispassionate thinking and complacent belief in one head seem gauchely contradictory – unbecomingly so. Who are these intellectuals who have blind faith and brotherhood in something so abstract and self-construed? If you’re going to be a sheep (goes my thinking), have a shepherd. You can’t be one and the same. 

What you do doesn't seem to work. And that may be the world's problem.

 

So much for that. I believe that anyone, unimpaired by childhood indoctrination or the neurotic need for a beatific feeling or to be a permanent child of a perfect Father, can be as good and decent as a person can be. I regret that people have needed to fall into belief camps, helping them remain children and giving them a main source of prosthetic self-esteem and fields of victims for their projected anger. As a therapist treating adults, I’ve seen very few adults – individuals with clear eyes and present needs, not past needs that they can’t quit.

 

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* Alternate title: The self-chosen people: How much humble narcissism has this created?

** I have a fancy Jewish great-grandfather. See https://www.academia.edu/36419048/David_Lubin_and_the_International_Institute_of_Agriculture and the Wikipedia article.

The disappointment

If there is to be a Volume II of my book, “I Forgive” and Other Delusions (at Amazon Kindle and soon to be in paperback), it may be comprised of my most unpleasant, dismal and hopeless articles. The following mini-piece is a sneak preview of that sort of content.

 

Innumerable adults remain emotionally dependent on their poisonous parents. “Emotional dependency” means, in these cases, that the parent, by abuse and neglect, did not cultivate the psycho-developmental growth of their child, so the child-now-adult remains in a permanent state of neediness and partial state of regression. Ask a healthy adult if he still “needs” his good parents and he may say (if he were poetical): “Yes, I cherish their love and my loving them, because I need love and beauty in my life.” Ask an emotionally damaged adult if he still needs his toxic parents and he may say “not really, but I indulge them or I feel an obligation to maintain a relationship.” But it is the person with love who will survive on his own, and the deprived one who will be needy, as needy as a four-year-old is for his mommy and daddy.

 

Some clients care to consider “autonomy” and self-esteem as values in their life and goals in their therapy. To these clients I may propagandize about “cutting the toxic umbilical cord” or, less ultimate, reconfiguring the cord to where it’s they who now set the terms. “Yes, mother, you were quite the dud. Thanks to the environment you and father created, I grew up to have no desire to live, no sense of the value of life, a feeling of cradle-to-grave torturous tedium. I won’t cut you out. But if we talk, it will be when I’m up to it. I won’t be picking up the phone when you call: It’s not enjoyable. We won’t be coming to each other’s place for dinner, for Christmas, or for family conversations. You can see your grandchildren under supervision.”

 

Even this rewriting of the relationship will be too much for most clients, which I understand. The idea – or the feeling – of taking a position that says “it’s over” in a complete way will feel like death, a new kind of death never before considered. I then point out that there are no happy choices. Staying tied to a starving and destructive parent will be to remain enslaved and to never grow. Seeing the parent through different eyes, termination resolution, will feel like a kind of suicide. But if the goal is to be more of a person, no longer a baby in a cold crib, then there is only one choice.

 

A client said that she dearly wants a hug from her solipsistic mother. We’ve talked about the parent’s universe-deep imprisonment inside her repression of her own childhood disaster, six walls that keep her safe from pain and don’t allow empathy or love out. But what if . . . what if the mother could crack open the wall and feel the truth, her childhood losses, ignite her self-protected frozen heart? Wouldn’t that rebirth their bond, enable her to finally see her daughter as a separate loved person? Wouldn’t that "automatically,"* as Alice Miller said in The Body Never Lies, produce empathy to others?

 

It would not. Emotional reliving would only shrink her to her bereft and needy child. It could not turn her into an adult, least of all a wise, strong and compassionate one. The daughter, my client, would not be receiving the hug she craves but would be giving one, to her little mother in shambles.

 

Best to walk away or stand apart, best to try to be a free adult, as awful as that may seem.

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* "Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feelings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have. My aim was to be loved as a daughter. But the effort was all in vain. In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place. On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions imposed on me. But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones." Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2004, page 20.

We ninety-percent (or less) wraiths

People believe they are living in the “here-and-now.” Or they are told that their not being in the here-and-now is a factor in their psychological problems and that mindfulness is the technique that will bring them into it. The facts are: We are not in the here-and-now, and mindfulness has no capacity to send us there. The only technique that could remove the past as our first and abiding nature – the legs on which we stand – is the fire of radical feeling-centered depth therapy: Only that could burn away our past and leave us gutted and in the emptier present.

 

The present is our illusion, a good illusion, but nevertheless an illusion. I am in the illusory present when I do therapy with clients and when I am with my wife. “Somehow” (which could be explored), being in their presence brings enough of the right chemistry that doesn’t merely hide the past, but obliterates it seemingly. Casual glance says this is because the past is immanent in these rich present moments and transcended in their richness.

 

But all other moments of my life, I am a ninety-percent wraith floating in my childhood. When I’m petting one of my cats, a different, older cat is in my lap. When I exit my car and walk to the staff entrance of my counseling center, I am a six-year-old acting big. When I take a walk at night, I am really my unfulfilled youth.

 

When I write an article – that’s slightly different, a nontranscendent fusion of past and present. Same when I listen to Chopin or Rachmaninoff or Bach or Percy Grainger. Trying to fall asleep? I’m trying to put the past to sleep.

 

I am absolutely certain that this is the state of most people, but that they don’t think about it, or if they do, they don’t dwell on it.

 

My clients are – with no words spoken about it ever – helped to be more strongly here-and-now than they have ever been, and less bogged down in their past. This is because we aim hot flames at their inner baby and inner child, at their childhood parents. We’re burning away some parts of their past (maybe even more than the ten percent that I've burned away).