Sing a paean to Singapore and, well, Hallelujah to Hong Kong

This is to express my quiet appreciation and louder bemusement to the people of Singapore and Hong Kong who have been clicking on this blog two hundred to four hundred-plus times each day for a while now. (Google Blogger provides stats per country.) I don’t know what it’s about as, per usual, no one ever – and I mean evvverrrr, sends me comments about my articles. The mass click appears to happen during my bedtime, which is awake time in Singapore and Hong Kong. My guess, which is wishful thinking, is that these are Psychology classes (with brilliant professors) that have grasped the iconoclastic and food-for-thought nature of many of my pieces. Congratulations! You are right. I have been applying acid to scar tissue and nutrients to sick Cognitive Therapy bodies for ten years. I’m glad someone out there is appreciating my contribution. However, a client to whom I mentioned the mystery suggested that “classes” may be right, but thought they might be for ESL (English as a Second Language) students. In that case, the articles would be held as examples of purple prose poison which students would be taught to avoid.

If my hypothesis is right, I would welcome Singaporean and Hong Kongese comments, critiques and questions addressing specific posts or general ideas described. I appreciate bright students who are willing to face heresy and consider its value.

"This is what I believe!"

A 43-year-old client says that he has found a way to “defuse” conflicts with his wife. He’ll say: “I see what you’re trying to do. I’m just going to step away.” His ten-year-old daughter is distracted when he is trying to teach her math that she didn’t grasp in school. He believes there should be “consequences for her being disengaged.”

A 54-year-old client states that he accommodates his mother’s self-centeredness because he wants to be “a good son.” He can’t bring himself to criticize or get angry with his torturously mentally abusive father because “he’s not here to defend himself.”

A 35-year-old man asserts that his parents had “a very good divorce” when he was five years old.

I described my socially-incorrect ideas about “forgiveness” to a 58-year-old client. He said that “there’s nothing to forgive” because his father’s domestic violence and alcoholism didn’t affect him.

A 21-year-old Asperger’s client says “I hate myself.”

Let’s pour some acid on these clients’ custom-made beliefs.

The 43-year-old believes he has “defused” incipiently volatile conflicts with his wife by accusing her of being sly and manipulative and walking out of the room (Gottman’s famous “stonewalling”). He’s actually made the conflicts worse. He believes his daughter should be punished for not being able to focus on her math and on him. She may have ADHD, may be depressed because of her parents’ continual sniping, may be turned off by her father’s disciplinary “three strikes” mentality. Punishing a child for being hurt or injured is destructive.

This client's beliefs are just threadbare clothing over feelings of angry revenge for his own childhood, a childhood he perpetuates by remaining in thrall to his own sick, authoritarian father. Beliefs are adamant, until they crumble into the greater hurt that formed them.

The 54-year-old believes that he must be his mother’s doormat, her eternal accommodator to be a good son. Does it make him a good son not to have any self-care, to back himself away forever? He has adopted some strangely-derived justice not to criticize a father who isn’t alive to “defend himself.” What can that mean? Do we not condemn Hitler because he can’t argue back? Do I not criticize Trump the sociopath because he’s not in the room with me?

He believes he is a good son. What he means is: He is a good little boy.

The 35-year-old man believes his parents had a “very good divorce.” Can he feel what that divorce did to him at age five, how “very good” it was?

The 58-year-old has nothing to forgive as he has banished his real childhood with a violent and drunk father. Hovering above that, he may believe anything he wants.

The 21-year-old “hates” himself because it’s less painful to grow the callus of self-hate – more an idea than a feeling – than to feel the pain of being an unloved child.

I don't know if other therapists believe their clients’ theories of life. I’d advise them not to. A good rule of thumb is: “The feeling is the fact, the thought is the escape.” People will often cling desperately, time immemorial to a belief which could be some airy-fairy, cockamamie conjunction of words their humiliated inner child came up with. What they don’t want to do is feel. Feel the radical truth that defined their childhood. To go there would be to burn away the bland mantra in black, boiling tar. But the mantra is a straitjacket and the tar can be poured out. That’s when therapy happens.

Paperback "I Forgive" and Other Delusions

My book is now in paperback form. (The Kindle ebook has been out in the world for a couple months.) I had tremendous difficulty with the professional formatter. The simplified reason is that I paid $149 to Word-2-Kindle instead of the $1,200 that Wordzworth Books asked. I’m a retired typographer and know that a book that’s already ninety-eight percent meticulously formatted at Microsoft Word (for MacBook Air) should not need a thousand dollars-worth of finishing touches.

 

A consequence, though, is that I uploaded the paperback to Amazon from a state of exhaustion not confidence, and I can’t help but fear that I missed some substantive errors in line spacing, indenting, indexing, page numbers, etc. I’m half-afraid to look at the final product.* So I am encouraging readers to purchase the paperback “I Forgive” and Other Delusions in order to look for embarrassing goofs to throw in my face (by email and blog comments).

 

Of course, there are other reasons to own. How can people – including potential clients and therapy students and their teachers – not be sick of the cognitive-therapy fluff that has covered the earth worse than covid? Thinking does not heal wounds; it only burdens them with falseness. Therapy must go to the source of pain and let that pain out by the tools of justice: remembering, weeping, raging in a room where someone finally hears and cares.

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* Follow-up: I purchased two copies of the book and have found two blatant flaws. The text blocks are not centered on the pages but are shifted toward the inside of the book (the spine: too little white space) and away from the open end of the book. To me it's an eyesore and necessitates almost cracking the spine to read easily. Also, the type, which should be black, is a washed-out-looking gray. Despite my haranguing everyone, neither the book formatter, nor Amazon Customer Support, nor Lulu (the publisher that apparently sometimes prints Amazon's books) has accepted responsibility for the flaws. I continue to email these sources in search of an adult.

Know thyself before it's too late

I’ve encountered many, many people who do not know what it means to understand themselves. They believe that if they have a feeling as a reaction to something that happens, or as companion to a thought or a belief, that feeling is “who they are” and has no deeper cause or reason. The feeling says what it is and all that it is.

 

This error is understandable by the nature of feeling. It seems like identity. But if we cry at a happy moment, or rage at a tangled computer cord or a slow driver, or get anxious if our fourth-grader brings home a “C,” we should wonder who we really are.

 

Of course, people also believe that their assumptions and convictions, as well as their feelings, are who they are. They are often disabused of that notion in therapy where mantras like “I love my mother to death” and “my parents did their best” and “I’m never good enough” evaporate in a bleak epiphany.

 

It is rare for a parent to say to herself: Why do I want to punish my child? What is this feeling inside me that wants to deprive or hurt him? It is rare for an adult to ask himself: Why do I enjoy being sarcastic, even when I can see that it hurts someone’s feelings? It is rare for a person who says “I don’t trust people” to ask himself: What is going on inside me that makes me think that most people are untrustworthy? It is not quite so rare, but still rare for “people-pleasers” to wonder if they really care about the people they serve, if there may be something self-serving and self-preserving behind their altruism.

 

These and countless other feelings should be explored. They may not be what they seem.

 

Right now I am most concerned about all the people, millions of them, who feel good when they think about the psychologically disturbed and morally malevolent Trump. It is rare to nonexistent that any of them wonder what makes them glad about violence; why their intelligent discernment is not embarrassed by Trump’s fatuous ignorance; why a hating person makes them feel redeemed. If they could look inward, they would find the life they had to bury in their adolescent years if not earlier: injustice and unhelped loneliness and a need for some kind of revenge. This would still be boiling and churning deep below, a turbulence that they cannot see through. Were it to subside, by the gifts of care and self-compassion, their vision would be cleared and they would see a sick man whose medicine is hate and delusion.

Comments to bad news

In response to a recent George Will article in The Washington Post.

 

What a silly George he is. I recently told a Trump-defending client the following: If Biden manipulated the economy in such a way that I got an extra dollar, and Adolf Hitler manipulated the economy in such a way that I got two, I’d still opt for Biden. Psychopaths aren’t a good bet, regardless of the ephemeral prize. Everyone who claims to prefer Donald Trump over Joe Biden because of a given policy or ideological principle is showing the world that he prefers a narcissistic psychopath over an imperfect though normal person. He is revealing a special wound: that the bottommost part of his soul is retaliation pain.

🌀

In response to a New York Times article.

 

In this poisonous Trump climate, a paradox has emerged: The mentally healthiest among us have anxiety, verge on “learned helplessness,” and suffer the insidious trauma of crazymaking (as sociopathy and delusion gain great status), while those  – the Trump Republicans of today – whose fragile balance requires projection, delusion, hate and infantile dependency feel powerful and “happy.” How, The Times asks, do we support our mental health? Go to therapy. Preach to the choir. Know sanity and know that any individual MAGA child-in-adult's-clothing could be undone by a simple Socratic dialogue, that it’s only the epoxy of the masses that makes them strong.

                                                                        📝

In response to Maureen Dowd's New York Times article, "Here Comes Trump, the Abominable Snowman."

Maureen writes: "I'm puzzled about why his devoted fans don't mind his mean streak." They don't know it now, but on their death beds, today's Democrats will say: "I'm at peace. I loved life as best I could." Today's Republicans will say: "I'm angry." At the seat of people's souls is – reaching into the quiddities here – what good was given in their childhoods and what pain was never healed. It becomes a turn of mood. "I made it work" versus "I remained a victim seeking revenge."

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.