Short Psychology Essays, part 1
Dissatisfaction Is Mentally Healthy
Dreams and Traumatic Experiences Are Flip Sides of the Same Coin
Critique of Judith Herman’s classic, “Trauma and Recovery”
The Advantages of Being Conventional
Every Rapist Was Himself Raped
The Enlightened Person Balances Masculinity & Femininity
The Essential Difference Between Animals and Humans
Racism: A Safety Valve Against Hating Your Parents
Self-Defense: Only Valid if You Know Your SELF
Dissatisfaction is Mentally Healthy
In a world as troubled as ours, dissatisfaction is an excellent sign of mental health. Certainly there is nothing more motivating for growth than dissatisfaction. It is the root of struggle, and thus evolution. No one struggles because he wishes to, but rather because it is his calling in life. His home is the mountainside. Yet some have been granted their wish of a home on the plateau. They are the upholders of emotional compromise, and the “normal” world idealizes them for their beauty and poise. They are the world’s happy people – on the surface.
Scratch below their façade of confidence and self-assurance and you find people unsure, unsteady, and afraid – and compensating for their inner terror by holding it together with string and glue. Rarely are their relationships deeply intimate or honest, let alone mutual, and rarely are their passions harnessed to the best of their conscious beings. When crisis strikes them their poise comes crumbling down, exposing a vulnerable underbelly of intense emotion too painful for them to nurture. It is incompatible with their façade, which they rush to rebuild as quickly as possible. They cannot afford to remember their history of vulnerability – and they will blot out their memory of anyone who brings it to the fore.
But the truly growing face their vulnerability on a daily basis. Their existence reads like an open book. They know pain, insecurity, and loss of control. They live with fear, discomfort, and the constant need to self-examine, reassess, and take the risk. The ideal for them, and for the best of humanity, is to become comfortable in this state of dissatisfaction. The more one is vulnerable to the upwellings of the unconscious the more one comes to know this as healthy – and achieves a state of humility. This is not easy, but it holds the key to a satisfaction connected with the developing core of one’s character and the increasing resolution of one’s ancient traumas and one’s fantasies about reality. Those in this state achieve a joy for the journey outweighing a focus on the destination, a pleasure more in the process than the results. Of course, they love the results too, but their understanding of the process allows them the patience to achieve so much more.
To be humble is to be open to learn. And to be open to learn is to be optimally open to being wrong. Those who can find satisfaction – and even pleasure – in being wrong have the world as their classroom, and there is nothing they cannot master.
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Dreams and Traumatic Experiences Are Flip Sides of the Same Coin
Dreams and traumatic experiences have much in common.
Both involve intense emotion, though in traumatic experiences the emotion results from external stimuli, whereas in dreams it comes from internal flashbacks of the split-off trauma we carry in our psyche. No surprise that adults and children with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder often have terrible flashbacks in their dreams.
Both involve periods of dissociation. Many trauma victims emotionally “fly away” in their minds to escape the horror they are experiencing. Not surprisingly, flying dreams are common.
Both are connected with our parents. Our parents in childhood are our primary traumatizers, because when we were children they had more power over us than will anyone later in our life. It’s no surprise that parents, either overtly or covertly, symbolize so much in dreams, especially when our primary traumas start to bubble up.
Both are connected with psychosis. Extreme traumatic experiences can cause psychosis, whereas dreams themselves are nothing more than psychosis during sleep. And the most traumatized people do their dreaming while awake – by hallucinating and having delusions.
Both involve denial. Society denies all but the most intense traumas and minimizes the rest; most people do the same with their dreams. In this vein, most people believe they had a happy, non-traumatic childhood; these are the same people who wish you “sweet dreams” at night.
Both involve the repetition compulsion. We compulsively replicate our unresolved traumas in an attempt to heal them. Likewise, we often have repeats of the same dreams – or dream themes.
Both rupture the borders of our personality. Traumatic experiences force their way through the psyche like a nail through a board, whereas dreams are the psyche’s attempt to pull the nail out of the board.
As such, both involve the essence of our life’s process. Traumatic experiences destroy life; dreams hope to reclaim it.
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“A Strong Book with a Limited Perspective”
This book is brilliant – but short-sighted. From the introduction Judith Herman provides a clear paradigm for understanding trauma and recovery: “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” What she fails to understand is how this applies to her – and those like her…that is, everyone.
The trauma Judith Herman defines is only the extreme echelon of trauma – the tip of the iceberg that rises into her conscious view. Although she rightly and masterfully connects the traumas – and posttraumatic reactions – experienced by Holocaust survivors, rape victims, children in severely abusive homes, combat veterans, and domestically abused women, because of her own denial she fails to link the traumas in these categories to the traumas experienced by the other 99% of humanity: the inflicted traumas that fly under the radar in every family around the world. Thus, if you are one of the 99% whose unresolved traumas don’t fit into her extreme categories (i.e. if you are alive, don’t fit into her categories, and are not yet fully enlightened), this book’s main value for you will be through metaphor – if, that is, you can translate the extreme cases and thereby be able to relate them to your own situation.
Traumas are inflicted on children almost ubiquitously on subtle, chronic levels by those with the greatest emotional power to mold them – their parents. Traumas occur whenever a child’s true self is not witnessed in full. If a child were witnessed in full, he would have no need to develop an unconscious mind to protect himself from the knowledge of the horror he has experienced. But Judith Herman – who idealizingly dedicates this work to her mother, and is a mother herself – fails to grip this. She mistakenly views herself as outside the cycle of victim and perpetrator. This lack of insight into herself is at the root of why she has so little understanding of the mindset and motivation of the perpetrator.
Parents who are not fully conscious – that is, parents in denial of any degree of their own buried, unresolved traumas – inevitably traumatize their children without even realizing they are doing it, and thus can take no responsibility for it. Even in the mildest cases this is emotionally devastating for children, but because so few witness what is really going on and thus call it by its rightful name – including the writer of this standard book on trauma – it goes unacknowledged, and thus is considered normal.
We understand why the Vietnam combat vet drinks himself into oblivion, but do we understand why the child in the normal family compulsively overeats or wets the bed or sucks his thumb or hates his younger brother? We understand why the rape victim later becomes phobic of sex with her consensual partners, but can we fathom the normal mother’s twisted motives for having children? We understand why the Holocaust survivor has persistent, horrible nightmares about Auschwitz, but do we put the correct face on the bogeyman in the dreams of the normal, middle-class child?
The norm is still very, very sick. Yet Judith Herman, who lives in the thick of it and writes for those who think within the box, has not figured that out. Her book is beautiful, but it misses the deeper point.
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The Advantages of Being Conventional
The world loves the conventional. No one attacks you. No one hates you. No one criticizes you. No one rejects you. No one steps on your toes while at the same time accusing you of stepping on theirs.
But the conventional are dead. They were long since routed out of the best of themselves. They were long since hated and criticized and civilized into soul-numbing defeat. They were long since divorced from the best their potential had to offer. Their now-loving parents once injected poison into their veins.
This prepared them for life in the soft lane. This prepared them for conventional work, conventional relationships, conventional parenthood, conventional life expectancies, conventional nights of warm sleep, and conventional perspective. The sick take care of their own.
But so do the healthy. The healthy freely share of their gifts. The healthy know greater truth, because they nurture their relationship with their deepest selves. The healthy don’t love you because you are dead. They healthy love you for your spark.
The healthy are not your parents. Your parents love your placid success because it reminds them every day how good of a job they did in trimming off the sharp edges of your radical truth. Your deadness proves to them that they are worthwhile people, because they are dead too.
Our world doesn’t need more conventional people. Our world is a mess, and we need a new breed of super-people to rise from the ashes of the old and truly call this stinking garbage dump of lies by its rightful name.
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Every Rapist Was Himself Raped
Every rapist was himself raped. Although all were probably raped in body, all were definitely raped in spirit. No one who was not spiritually raped could ever bring himself to rape another. It would be contrary to human nature.
Likewise, every child molester was himself molested spiritually, his boundaries disrespected viciously by those controlling his fate, just as theirs were also disrespected long ago when they themselves were vulnerable and full of passionate need.
Every torturer was himself tortured, every sadist himself treated sadistically, and every incest perpetrator incested. Every vicious prison guard was a prisoner in his own vicious family, and every abusive husband spiritually beaten by his parents. Every sport hunter was himself spiritually hunted for sport, and everyone who derives pleasure from humiliating others was himself once trapped in the cycle of humiliation.
Traumas must be healed if the intergenerational cycle of traumatizing is ever to be broken. There is no other way.
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The Root Cause of Addiction
The root of addiction is unresolved emotional trauma. When traumas, be they extreme or mild, are not resolved they leave behind a slew of painful, unprocessed feelings in the unconscious. These feelings are never content to remain silent and instead clamor for release. When they express themselves openly and without disguise this activates the healing process. The healing process, however, is so painful and potentially discombobulating that very few people, unless they have a great deal of mature external support and internal self-understanding, can dare undertake it.
But a person’s inability to heal does not stop his unresolved feelings from needing to express themselves. Lacking healing as an option, these feelings instead express themselves as symptoms, of which addiction is just one subset. The purpose of addiction is to divert and assuage painful, upwelling feelings into a seemingly comfortable alternative without allowing them to become conscious. In the short-run this feels much more placid than healing, but in the long-run it only prolongs underground psychic misery and adds new consequences to an already troubled life.
The scope of addictions vary in their intensity, side effects, and degree of societal acceptance. Some are clearly weighted toward the conventionally negative end of the spectrum, like heroin addiction or gasoline-sniffing. Others, like workaholism or membership in a cult or cult-like group, are not so definitively negative in society’s eyes, and can receive societal approval and even perks. And some addictions, like having children and being in unenlightened relationships, are so pervasive, accepted, and even lauded that they are rarely even considered addictions at all – and thus form the backbone of society as we know it.
At present our society, and most of our society’s healers, treat conventionally-accepted addiction by simply helping “sufferers” find milder substitute addictions or other milder symptoms. Alcoholics Anonymous is a great example of this: its members are encouraged and even pressured to learn dissociative techniques whereby they can replace their alcohol addiction for the addiction of membership in the cult of AA. Although this might make life more consciously peaceful for the addict – who has to admit that he remains an addict in order to maintain his membership in AA, which suggests that at least AA is honest in that realm – it falls far short of helping the human race optimally evolve, or helping the individual find any deeper or more honest peace. There is no substitute for the resolution of trauma, and symptom or addiction replacement is nothing but a substitute. Emotional wounds that are not grieved poison the psyche, poison the species, and ultimately poison our world.
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Truth Is Not Subjective
There is but one truth. This one truth is reality. Reality is what is, whether we see it or not. Although truth is not subjective, our perspectives on truth can be subjective. Until a person becomes fully enlightened – and can see full truth – his vision of truth will be at least partially distorted. He will believe things to be true that are false. His knowledge of cause and effect will be limited. He will lie to himself.
Unresolved traumas block the human vision from truth. When a person cannot resolve his traumas of childhood he is prevented from facing the truth of what happened to him when he was at his most vulnerable. He is forced to deny the painful and horrible reality surrounding his experiences, and until these experiences burst through his denial they will clouds his vision of who he is and what his rightful place in the world is.
The true self, that core of who each of us is, lives awash in truth. It is connected to truth, and sees it clearly. When we reconnect with our true self and align with it in the full light of consciousness, we also know truth.
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Three Ways To Make Amends
1) The least evolved people make amends by apologizing – and then continuing their inappropriate behavior as unconsciously as ever. This is an almost completely false amend.
2) Moderately evolved people make amends by forcing themselves to curtail their inappropriate behavior – by whatever means necessary. Generally this involves dissociating themselves from the parts of themselves which are causing their inappropriate behavior. That is, they bury their motivating feelings deeper into their unconscious. This is a step up because at least they are not behaving as traumatically toward others as their less evolved counterparts.
3) The most evolved people make amends by delving into the depths of their souls, searching out the unresolved traumas which motivate their inappropriate behavior, and resolving the trauma. This process is hell, and the conscious pain they suffer by mourning the past tortures inflicted on them thrusts them into enlightenment, benefiting not only themselves and their intimates – because their inappropriate behavior simply evaporates – but by extension all of humanity. This is the point of life.
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The Enlightened Person Balances Masculinity and Femininity
We are all comprised of the masculine and the feminine. Our job on earth is to balance the two within ourselves in accordance with our soul’s deepest truth.
The masculine is the mind, the feminine the heart. The feminine is the emotional, the masculine the rational. The masculine is form, the feminine content. The feminine is passion, the masculine perception. The masculine drives the car, but the feminine is the engine and the gasoline. The feminine is the root of the masculine.
A person who has lost his inner balance of masculine and feminine lives forever in search of it. The balance lies within his soul’s deepest template, buried underneath the distorted, trauma-laden patterns imposed on him primarily by his family, by his parents. Until he resolves his traumas he will be partially walled off and blocked from accessing the full truth within, and will forever search for his missing balance externally.
He will be drawn to others whose imbalances complement his own, and he will attempt to incorporate their imbalanced selves into himself to make himself feel whole. If blocked from his inner feminine he will be drawn toward those blocked from their masculinity – and compensating for their blockage by being over-feminine. If blocked from his inner masculine he will be drawn toward those blocked from their femininity – and compensating for their blockage by being over-masculine.
But merged relations with others will not make up for his imbalance within. He cannot make others a part of himself. Such relationships are based on mutual self-deception and are always be at risk of collapse – just as our greater world and ecosystems are at risk of collapse because of the global imbalances of our species. Only the balance resulting from inner resolution brings deep stability.
Each of us was created in balance, and if we are to live and die in peace – both as individuals and as a species as a whole – we must find our balance once again.
(If you want to read a critique on this essay - that I saved from the site's now-defunct bulletin board - try this: Masculine-Feminine Essay Critique.)
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The Essential Difference Between Animals and Humans
The essential difference between animals and humans is the ability to self-reflect. A chimpanzee, our closest genetic relative (around 99% similar in DNA), can be taught to do basically everything a human can, though of course at a more generally primitive level. But no chimp can self-reflect, that is, take that mental and spiritual leap of stepping outside of himself and seeing himself from an alternate perspective, or realizing consciously that he is alive, that his heart is beating, that he is walking the planet, that he will die someday, and that the moon is overhead.
A human being is capable of great degrees of self-reflection, but few people achieve much of it, and many of the most intellectually sophisticated achieve little at all. Essentially they live their lives as highly intelligent animals. They work, they solve great intellectual problems, they learn complex skills, they multi-task at profound levels, they have profound memories, they learn numerous languages with radically different syntaxes, they mate in unusual and complex ways – but they often never stop to truly reflect on their existences, much less the utter depths of their existences.
To fully become a full human being – that is, a fully enlightened human being – one has to master the art of self-reflection. This involves resolving one’s deepest traumas, opening the deepest doors to one’s core, and then taking the terrifying and beautiful leap of looking within. The answers to all our species’ problems are there.
The answers to the whole universe are there.
And there is where it is our responsibility to go.
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The Truth About Spirituality
A spiritual person is connected with his spirit. To do this fully he must have access to his deepest psyche, and thus have resolved his most ancient psychic traumas. To get there he will have passed through hell, and thus will know how to help others get out of there too. If he has not resolved his traumas, however, they will block his conscious connection with his spirit, and will stunt his burgeoning spirituality.
Only the fully emotionally evolved are pure and honestly spiritual; the rest are partially false, which we all are until we become fully enlightened. The world is full of pseudo-spiritual leaders, both religious and medical. They are false because they live unconsciously. They only know themselves partially. They are not deeply connected with their most profound truths. They are in denial of the rage seething in their depths, and the sorrow beneath that. But what makes them the most dangerous – primarily to those over whom they wield power – is that they can’t even admit it. Although they live a masquerade, they are so split-off that they often truly do feel happy, free, joyous, and at peace. Thus others run to follow their lead. But they only lead down blind alleys, into more denial and more untruth. They are like poison to the seeker – and they present their poison with open arms.
The greatest gift of life is for a person to know himself fully. A truly spiritual person – the ideal of humanity – knows his deepest emotional truths and has full connection with his whole range of feelings, including his joy and vivacity for living as well as his pain, fear, sorrow, and even anger. He embraces it all, light and shadow, and thus his spirituality has weight and depth. His positivity is no hologram or floating cloud. He holds truth in his hands, and his eyes see.
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What Lurks Behind Guilt
There are two types of guilt: healthy guilt, in which you feel remorse for having done something that hurts the honest growth or healing process of another, and unhealthy guilt, in which you feel guilty for telling the truth. Most children grow up feeling incredible degrees of unhealthy guilt about their existences. They feel they’ve done something wrong simply by being, and from their family’s perspective they did: they were born honest.
In reality it is parents who are primarily guilty – truly guilty – and this is how they should feel, though all but a few successfully defend against it. They created their child to fulfill their own purposes and they molded him to meet their needs. They rejected him until he buried his truth – the worst of violations – and thereafter only provided him with conditional love. They then accepted no responsibility for this crime – this crime against the BEST of humanity – because accepting it entailed first facing the painful truth of how abandoned they were by their own parents and then acknowledging how guilty they should feel by having recreated the dynamic.
Every child grows up suffering abuse and neglect by his parents (unless his parents are fully enlightened, that is, fully healed from their childhood traumas), and unless he heals his wounds he will act them out. This is the inevitable and cruel repetition compulsion that rules our unconscious psyches. Like his parents he will victimize others (and behave self-destructively) because he will bring his unfulfilled needs into every relationship he enters, thereby polluting its potential for enlightenment.
Many of course act out their unfulfilled need more benevolently than others, going the route of Mother Teresa rather than Hitler, yet even she was motivated by the unfulfilled need stemming from the neglect and horror she suffered in childhood. She simply projected her desperate and denied – and split-off – need onto her wards and poured into them the passion she unconsciously wished had been devoted to her long before. This did her wards more harm than good, because she treated them like children, nourishing their delusion of parental rescue through the thin veil of feeding their hungry bellies. (And that is when she actually fed them. All too often she manipulated them and used them for her own grandiose publicly campaign and hastened their very deaths through total medical neglect, a lesson of false love that she, who allowed herself the best and most expensive of Western medical care, hypocritically did not apply to herself.)
He who acts unconsciously blocks the path toward enlightenment. He is guilty, and we all are to some degree. The only way for him to truly free himself of guilt is to take responsibility as a maturing person and look within, heal the deepest wounds of his ancient traumas, see the truth as truth and the lies as lies. In this way his guilt will fade in his heart. But from the perspective of the family his guilt will only grow. Families consider children who get real to be evil. To break from the family and speak the truth about its lies is to break its cardinal commandment. On the path toward enlightenment there is no turning back.
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Racism: A Safety Valve Against Hating Your Parents
From the perspective of the family system, the greatest crime for a child is to feel and express his legitimate hatred for his parents. He can feel all the love he wants, but when he flips the coin he is in big trouble. The punishment is rejection by the family, even ejection from it, and no child can face that. It would kill him. This forces him to put his anger somewhere else – somewhere safer.
Perhaps he can bury his anger entirely and become numb. Parents love numb children, labeling them shy or quiet or reserved – or even retarded. All too often parents get help from the psychiatric community and put children on medications to make them that way.
Perhaps he can channel his anger into an addiction. Parents like this one too, as long as its destructiveness doesn’t spill onto them.
And perhaps, if his family is primitive – as the cruelest and most neglectful invariably are – then he can rage at an easy and acceptable target: other races. This is made even easier when other races – be they white, black, or other – truly do have overt problems, prejudices, limitations, and mental illnesses sewn into their fabrics and cultures.
Of course, he has a palette of other prejudices beyond racism to choose from, each with its own advantage. Sexism is convenient for expressing hatred of the parent of the opposite sex – and solidarity with the parent of one’s own. Homophobia is always safe for those insecure with their sexual orientation, and is likely to please parents of both sexes. Patriotism is popular in today’s world, especially for those who have never traveled past their own backyards. And with religious fundamentalism at least God – i.e. the most immature, fearsome, or idealized parts of your parents – is always on your side, and your enemies can rot in hell.
But those who believe their enemies will rot in hell don’t realize the following: 1) There is no heaven or hell after life, and, 2) If you don’t resolve your childhood traumas through grieving and healing then you’re already in hell, and are destined to remain there for all of living eternity.
True connection with yourself involves the content of your character. The color of your skin doesn’t matter.
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Self-Defense: Only Valid If You Know Your SELF
The only justification for killing another person is self-defense. The problem is, most people do not have the slightest clue who their SELF actually is. They were so attacked and invaded and traumatized in their childhoods by the very ones who should have been defending and nurturing them – their parents – that they grow into adulthood with a complete misperception of their boundaries as individuals. As a consequence most of their true self remains split-off from consciousness, and unless they heal they can only access their denied parts through projecting them onto others. In so doing they lose their personal boundaries. They see other people as extensions of themselves.
This allows them to justify their most twisted of actions, on a personal and even global level. It allows parents to psychically torture their children and not even know they’re doing it, and not have any empathy for their children’s cries and pain and misery. It allows people to attack innocents and call it defense, and blame the innocent’s hard head for their own broken fingers. And heaven forbid the innocent raises his hand in defense! This would only prove his guilt all the more. This has allowed so many Americans to truly believe we were defending ourselves against Iraq when in fact we nakedly, and without provocation, attacked them.
Does this then give Iraqis the right to kill American GIs in defense of their own homeland? Truthfully, yes and no. Certainly Iraqis present a far better moral case for killing GIs than the other way around, but this whole business of justifying murder is murky when you’re dealing with such a highly traumatized people as Iraqis, and even more so the fundamentalist Muslim “freedom” fighters. And of course Americans are not free from trauma. We may have some things better in the land of “democracy,” but we are nonetheless a culture ill with unhealed traumas of childhood. And traumatized people by definition act with mixed motives – because they, that is, WE ALL, have a compulsion to act out those traumas we have not yet healed.
The only way a person can sort out his own deeper motives, and therefore not disguise those that are unconscious, is to heal his deepest childhood wounds. Only then can he finally define for all time his true character, his true personality, his true boundaries, his true self. This requires that he fully understand the range and depth of the psychic assaults committed on his past child by his parents and that he let that child finally feel all his rage and hurt and sadness so he can grieve. It is vital that he process every ounce of his repressed feelings, but not act them out – not project them onto others and further obfuscate the matter.
An enlightened person, that ideal of a mature soul who has achieved full inner balance through psychic excavation, offers a defense when attacked, and is clear on the line between the two. He walks with a conscious aura around his person and knows that if others pierce it, psychically or physically, he is justified in repelling them beyond his borders – but no further. He does not recreate his childhood helplessness by walking into the fists of projected parental figures, but neither does he adopt the role of the cruel, powerful parent. He has sorted out who he is, and lives a life of self-respect – and thus respect for others.
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