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.