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*

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).

Asperger smarts

Life is looser at TPS blog these days. Here is an observation based on three clients, ages 23, 21 and 21. All are male, bi- and hetero-, all qualify for Asperger’s Syndrome (or “high-functioning autism spectrum” or whatever is the delicately correct term today). Two of them have a strong intellectual bent, naming highfalutin solid and abstract ideas. The other one produces endless thoughts about his personhood and history but no worldly wisdom. Perfunctorily humble, he says “I don’t know” a lot and shows no interest in challenging that status quo.

 

All three are minute variations of what is called the “know-it-all.” They either know everything, or they know all they need to know. They are complacent, wise, glib speech-giving. They all pause zero milliseconds before rejoindering to me with their concurrence, the truth or a truer truth.

 

One would think they are Narcissists. One might fantasize: Are all young twenty-something Asperger’s men serene, bloviating, full-of-themselves, omniscient? Of course not – and neither are these three clients. Their fragile identity is clear to see. Unlike Narcissistic Personality-disordered men, whose disintegrative lost-little-boy interiors are deeply hidden, these three old boys are somewhat more inner child than surface lie. The Narcissist’s shell is seamless, polished, hard and brittle. The young men’s have hairline cracks, are smooth and slippery like thin ice.

 

Yet the surface lie is quite jazzed.

 

Here is today’s casual theory: They have to “know” – that is, to be buoyed by their head – in order not to feel. Feeling dire historical pain is anathema to most people. But to someone with Asperger’s, dire historical pain is their bedrock of lava. Bettelheim need not be right about “refrigerator mothers” to see that autism spectrum individuals were repressed from feeling at the earliest stage of their lives. This concept is evidenced by the minutely gradated continuum of out-of-syncness with self and world on which countless repressed people lie. I, for one, am far from autistic, but when I’m not knowing and talking and delivering therapy, I feel a recondite disturbance among people. As do many of my clients outside of their own medium.

 

Asperger’s is like the big personality disorders – Narcissism, Borderline, Antisocial, Schizoid, Dependent, Schizotypal – in one main way. James Masterson discovered the infant stage – separation-individuation – origin of Borderline Personality, its cause in “maternal unavailability” and the “abandonment depression.” The infant, avoiding rejection pain, must adapt to the immature mother’s extreme oscillations. For that adult, years and decades later, to re-experience that pain – by therapy or abandonment – would be, essentially, to be killed again. A similar consequence would happen were someone with Asperger’s to be thrown into his abyss of infantile buried feeling. The cause of early pain need not be an analytical or neurotic mother. It might be any birth or pre-birth force that led to pain and its chemical repression. Janov wrote extensively on birth trauma and the nine months predisposing the fetus to it. There’s some interesting (if overly creative) information at the defunct Primal Psychotherapy Page regarding birth trauma (http://primal-page.com/birthart.htm).

 

My Asperger’s young men found necessary refuge in their heads, in knowledge. Doubt and openness mean feeling, which they must avoid.

"I Forgive" and Other Delusions

This is to announce that Kindle (Amazon) is now carrying my ebook (and soon in paperback) selection of blog articles. I’ve titled it “I Forgive” and Other Delusions – feeling-centered depth therapy and psychology for adults and their inner baby. The book is significantly easier to read and search than ten years of links (in addition to having a table of contents). I’ve also “adultified” much of the content, mostly to embarrass me less. Writing in the pregnant atmosphere of active therapy tends to feature a bit too much adjectival and acid attitude. The ebook strips most of the purple icing from the cake.

 

The older I get and the more I watch, hear and read, the more I see that almost every form of psychological healing today is thought- and hope-based, shallow manipulations of mind, brute-force “intention,” one-a-week techniques, and the hell too much Carl Rogers’ passive-unaggressive approach. I am not unique in pointing out (with a flaming sword) that healing has to address deep wounds by staying with them and leading pain out. Arthur Janov’s Primal Therapy has done this with wisdom, widespread success and popularity since 1970 (until all the alarmed, upstaged psychotherapists trolled it back to Santa Monica, France, England and South Africa). My approach has always been more down-to-earth than radical Primal as it is based in the realities of the human persona – the adult that must remain itself despite deep, sometimes epiphanic work. This may be less obvious in the book’s articles than it has always been in my therapy sessions. There, profound empathy for the invisible child runs the show while birth trauma may be given just a passing nod. Articles present more of the oceanic idea behind the fluid act.

 

While not everyone (I can’t believe I’m saying this) will want to own a copy of the book, I invite you to look at the Kindle page and “read a sample.” Preface, Introduction and a few articles (including the eponymous “forgive” one) will be informative of this radical but all-natural approach. I say “all natural” because real therapy, healing therapy, is simply the caring and human acts that our child self needed when it was first hurt. We therapists are just a bit late.

 

https://www.amazon.com/Forgive-Other-Delusions-Therapeutic-feeling-centered-ebook/dp/B0CM82WK28/ref=sr_1_1?crid=CYFC26VCAX9U&keywords=%22I+forgive%22+and+other+delusions&qid=1699145060&sprefix=i+forgive+and+other+delusions%2Caps%2C125&sr=8-1

There is no equivalence

[Note that this article ends with a longish link. I've published a Kindle Reader collection of those blog posts that I consider most impactful and useful. The link leads to my "author's page" and to the book, a sample read, and other information. While it may seem a bit silly, redundant, narcissistic – whatever – to put a price ($9.99) on blog articles that have always been and remain free to read, I think a more easily accessible grouping has some value. The day may come when I can afford to make a paperback version, which will be even more "user friendly."

Professors of clinical counseling and psychotherapy: Get your students to acquire this collection. You know their thinking is generic and safe. Give them some real food for thought!]

My family is Jewish, or was Jewish, as the only ones left are my sister and I. I attended Sunday school obliviously from first grade through 10^th grade Confirmation but didn’t learn a damned thing other than that the Jews are the “chosen people,” they don’t eat ham, and there are a lot of holidays. I was bar mitzvah’d and mouthed the haftorah Hebrew passage without understanding a word of it and never asking the meaning. My ceremony-culminating speech (in English) was so clichéd and fake-intent that it must have embarrassed the temple audience. In my Confirmation paper I declared my atheism and floaty ideas for my future.

 

I haven’t been to synagogue since around 1982 when my first wife dragged me there three or four times after she converted from Baptist to Jew. She was fanatical; I was an empty head floating in a pool of rancid memory-sensations.

 

I don’t have any beliefs that could be called “religious.” None, nada, nix, nihil, zero. I don’t favor Jewish people over others, though I have nothing against them. But there are millions of people – Muslims, Arabs, Palestinians, neo-Nazis and probably some Christians – who think I should be dead or killed because I didn’t convert out of my family heritage.

 

Let us judge these pathetics in a different way than we would judge bad Israeli settlers and those wreaking over-wide retribution for Hamas’s terror attack. We are judging them for a specific psychological problem: the ego-syntonic ("I'm dysfunctional and proud of it") fusion of projection (of their individual childhood-based pain, debility and misery), delusion and destruction.

 

It’s not hard to be delusional. Self-esteem deficit (which is nearly ubiquitous) can require people to believe nonsense in order to maintain a feeling of identity. A person may absolutely need to believe he is smarter than he really is or that his parents had positive intent despite all the harm they did to him. A Narcissist must believe he is perfect. It is too easy to project, blaming other people, the other political party, God and “life” for our failures (when we should be assigning first cause to our parents). It may even be a second-nature state in the human psyche, based in birth trauma or an instantly repressed infliction of soul murder in childhood,* to transiently wish the extremity of death on an animal or a person. It’s when that anti-life spasm becomes ratified as a conviction, religion or policy that we should call “evil.” It’s the converting of a mental negative – a feeling – to a mental positive – a willful delusion – that best defines evil.

 

I doubt that more than the number of Jewish people one could see under a microscope think ordinary Palestinians and Muslims should be dead or killed on “principle.” Only the minority of a species of fanatical Jews – that’s to say, the psychological complement to Jew-haters – might wish mass death on a culture. The majority are average people with a normal conscience, many of them stoked to fury, now, by instances and centuries of crimes against their name.

 

Condemn them and you have the disorder of laziness and thoughtlessness. Hate them and you may have the problem of evil. There is no equivalence between normal human rage and destructive, willful delusion.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/f.html?C=Z9SQXHR9LXA4&K=MLVRPRBZYQUM&M=urn:rtn:msg:202311010610006f590050ba27469f80c775960cf0p0na&R=1WCE5XI0R5TG0&T=C&U=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fauthor%2Flubin.the.pessimistic.optimist%3Fref_%3Dpe_1724030_132998060&H=DUO7FMZAMGSLUFMDNABUYPRDQE4A&ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

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* Leonard Shengold, M.D., Soul Murder.

"Afterword" of an unpublished book

Contemporary therapy is one of the greatest escapes and illusions available to the masses. If medical doctors were to say: “Our job is to make you believe that optimal health is but a logical, posi­tive, rational thought away,” or “We won’t operate on your damaged heart because it might hurt,” they would be like the majority of today’s therapists who believe our pain and disorder come from thinking or can be healed by thinking.

 

In a terrible daydream, I imagine the most destructive yet hidden conspir­a­torial movement, where demonic cogno­scenti have con­vinced the world that depression and mental agony and rage, existen­tial empti­ness and anxiety and trauma are dark matter that can be made light by thoughts and facts and yoga and a thousand behaviors that do not touch the source of disability: injury and pain. A tidal wave comes and we, surfers, smile as it drives us into the rocks. See what happens when we ig­nore early pain: We “forgive” parents who caused it and we perpetuate the damage into the future. We see the adult world as separate, an alien plateau above children. Children become minimized and invisible. We fail to know the source of crime. We live on momentary feel-good puffs of air.

 

See what happens when we understand that pain and injury built and bent us. We treat children with respect and they grow up to respect us. We improve our mar­riages as partners come to know each other’s fundamental needs. We may be cleared enough of our own pain that we see sociopaths for what they are, and don’t allow them to become our leaders. Empathy and care become the medium of exchange.

 

We become a place of living and feeling, not escaping.