Short Psychology Essays, part 2
Suicide: The Ultimate Way to Avoid The Painful Truth
Why People Are So Terrified of Death
To Those Who Have Given Up Hope
Why Live if We’re All Only Going to Die Anyway?
Shouldn’t the Best Therapy Be Free?
Psychotropic Medications Stunt Emotional Growth
What Does High Functioning So Often Disguise?
Borderline: The Hated Diagnosis
So What the Hell Is Narcissism Anyway?
Why Hypnotherapy Is Disrespectful
Suicide: The Ultimate Way To Avoid the Painful Truth
People commit suicide when the pain of lying to themselves is unbearable and the pain of telling the truth is even worse. Here the journey to manifest enlightenment – to heal all one’s childhood traumas – feels hopeless. The person’s childhood cemented the notion that deep, consistent parental love was completely out the question and that his parents were nothing more than shams. But he could never face that fact, because it was too painful – and they would have only rejected him all the more. Instead he denies it and turns his hopelessness and rage and anger toward himself. He swallows us the worst of his parents into his psyche and he fantasizes that death will free him, and bring him peace. But it will not. Death is no relief. Death will only end his journey and kill his potential to grow.
Only a few of the truly suicidal, the most isolated and alienated, end their own lives. Most express their suicidality more acceptably, through extreme passivity or self-neglect, both of which go hand in hand with a desperate but silent cry for parental rescue. A flip side of this involves people who engage in risky acting-out behavior, such as driving dangerously, using drugs and alcohol excessively, heavy overeating or under-eating, fighting violently with others when true self-defense is not involved, having risky sex, climbing mountains… Such people let the world know how much they undervalue their own lives – which is exactly what they were taught in their childhood homes.
The cure for being suicidal is to heal the ancient wounds that caused the despair. This will not be easy for him, because his parents crushed the searching side of him, and subtly threatened him with full rejection if he tried to reconstitute his healthy and seeking side. But healing is possible. A suicidal person needs to find others who can hear him and believe him and trust him – trust every little bit of horror he’s gone through and still holds inside his psyche like a poisonous abscess – until he can learn to do this for himself. He must begin his growth process in a more enlightened setting that does not crush him anew. He must find ways to look honestly at the history of his demise and feel all his grief, horror, and rage. He may lose his old numb self in the process, but he will find his life. No one who finds the path to his legitimate anger and honest grief can ever stay suicidal for long.
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Why People Are So Terrified of Death
People are only terrified of dying if parts of themselves have never consciously lived. They may have attained wealth, raised families, achieved fame, and earned societal respect, but this is not living. Real life is about being fully conscious, and for the fully conscious few, death is no terror.
Our job on earth is to live to our full capacity – to break free of the traumas blocking our full conscious connection with inner truth and release all of our gifts. We achieve this by living with the most courage and conviction and honesty we can muster. We struggle to attain self-knowledge, and we sacrifice much on the road toward it. We shed deceptive parts of ourselves, and step ever more boldly into the clear light of day. We attempt to embody the highest ideals for being human. We strive for altruism, living in service to our fellow humans. We share freely of our gifts, and in so doing honor ourselves and our process.
There is massive societal pressure to join the ranks of the numb and cold and in-denial. We are forced to honor our parents before we honor the truth of ourselves. If we succumb to this pressure, we become lost and experience silent misery. Our soul gets partially buried, but does not die. Our soul will always cry out from underneath the lies and denial piled on top of it, and will live quite appropriately in terror of death, because it knows that once we die it will be vanquished forever.
People delude themselves into believing there is an afterlife, but there isn’t any. When you die, it’s all over, and if you haven’t given your soul its true chance to speak, you have missed life’s greatest opportunity.
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To Those Who Have Given Up Hope
Alice Miller, perhaps the best published psychology writer to date, opens her most famous book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (first published in 1979), with this sentence: “Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.” Few truer words have been written. Yet eighteen years later she closes the afterward of the same book (the 1997 edition) with the following sentence: “I spent a long time looking for a total exploration of my childhood history. Now I see that this was hubris” (her italics). Alice Miller gave up, and in so doing lost her place as a worthwhile role model for the truth seeker.
The only way to achieve full satisfaction in life is to totally explore and resolve the feelings around one’s own childhood history. Until we achieve this, the best we can hope for in terms of life satisfaction is the partial satisfaction of the explorer who stumbles but gets back on his feet and keeps on struggling, guided by his inner voice of confidence.
People give up hope because the path is too scary. They were too damaged when they were children and couldn’t find the resources within or beyond for guidance. Alice Miller’s conscious message in all her books is to make sense of the misery of the past to open oneself to the glories of the present and future. But even she failed. And if she who was so talented failed, then why should we dare to hope?
We must dare because if we don’t we will never be happy. We will become bitter and shriveled like Alice Miller and will write emotionally defensive and dishonest words that reach millions and subtly tell them that life’s greatest joys are unattainable.
Life’s joys are attainable, just not for Alice Miller. Alice Miller is now chaff along the road, a road that she paved a few extra miles for all of us, so that we may walk that much closer to perfection. Perfection is attainable. Ideals are attainable. Healing is attainable. Full self-knowledge is attainable. Enlightenment is attainable.
(More on Alice Miller here: An Analysis of the Shadow Side of Alice Miller.)
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Why Live If We’re All Only Going To Die Anyway?
Life is our one grand chance to contribute this world. This is our one chance to bring peace to our existences and to that of others. This is our one chance to find out the truth, and to manifest it. This is our one chance to find enlightenment and to shine at our brightest. This is our one chance to find out what it really means to live.
So many waste this chance. They disappear down the alleyways of death years before their bodies lose their heat. They cloud their minds along the same lines they were taught as children, and they recreate their ancient and forgotten traumas with all whom they come into contact. They break the psychic spines of their children, just as their own were broken.
But as long as they still breathe, and anyone still breathes, there remains hope. It is never too late to get honest. It is never to late to change your course. There is no crime too great for honest repentance, no buried trauma too great for full healing. Murderers can find heaven here on earth, and come to know and love their souls. Rapists can discover their deepest psychic truth and discover what in their history led them – that is, compelled them – to do such inhuman deeds.
We all will die. We all will leave this earth. The greatest question, however, and the one that most strongly beckons us to heal, is what shall we leave as our legacy?
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What Makes A Healer?
A healer must be humble. Humility is optimal openness to learning. Humility requires suspending one’s preconceived confidence in what is right and what is wrong and listening on a more fundamental level. The healer must be a great listener. He must be open to entering the depths of another’s story, another’s wisdom, and another’s truth. Everyone carries a lifetime of truth in their pain, their symptoms, and their buried hopes, and he must relate to it if he is to help them remove their psychic daggers from their chest.
A healer must be mature. He himself must be largely healed – or at least have a good, strong, core part of himself well along the healing path. He cannot blinded by the sway of another’s false guidance. He must have a powerful framework of self-knowledge on which he bases his growing realization of truth. If he himself has not climbed the mountains that lead to maturity he cannot hope to lead others toward the promised land. If he remains too broken he can only lead them into the blind canyons toward which his self-deceptions are ultimately unknowingly leading him – and into those which his parents already abandoned him.
A healer must be honest. He must be open about his strengths and weakness, and be devoting himself fully to healing the latter. He must have an utter respect for the healing process in his own life. He must be on the vanguard of self-questioning and be willing to take any and all steps – no matter how sacrificial – to both uncover his denial and heal his wounds.
A healer must be patient. He must know the length and difficulty of the path toward truth, and recall every trial on his own journey.
A healer must be an individual. He must have individuated from his parents. He must stand on his own two bare feet, however cold the ground, and know himself as his own being through and through.
And a healer must have guts. It takes guts to face life’s inner demons and keep on plowing through.
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Shouldn’t The Best Therapy Be Free?
Charging fees is a backbone of what keeps the therapy process professional. Not only does it allows the therapist to survive in the world, but it affirms his self-respect. He gives the best of himself to his patients, and they return the gift with something of value. Patients who pay a fee make a sacrifice – and thus buy a service. This is invaluable for them, because when the going gets ugly in therapy, as it invariably does if the process goes well, they must feel comfortable expressing their negative feelings – which are often toward the therapist – as freely as they need to. This step is made all the more difficult if patients are not clear that they – and no one else – have bought the therapist’s service.
In the same way honest people would have a difficult time giving orders to a waiter if they knew he was working for free, it is difficult for patients to really express their full selves – and thus heal – in a non-professional environment. If this weren’t the case people would never go to therapy and would instead just work out their deeper problems and conflicts with their friends or significant others, assuming these intimates were enlightened enough to be of true service. But even the most enlightened of friendships and personal partnerships cannot sustain that level of intensity. They were not intended to.
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The Limits Of Faith Healers
The world is full of faith healers who work their miracles – or at least presume to. They perform spinal surgeries with rusty knives and cure hernias with their fingertips. But what do they really heal? When it comes to healing broken emotions they are lost. And to the soul truly aspiring to know himself at his deepest level, they lack value and are a regressive and negative force.
Faith healers never ask the afflicted, much less themselves, what caused them to get so sick. If they asked they would discover the answer in people’s emotional histories, in blocked and split-off emotions, in buried, unresolved traumas often going back decades. Traumas that have not been consciously resolved and integrated fester beneath the surface and clamor for release, and if their host cannot bring them to the surface consciously, look them in the eye, feel their horror, and mourn what was lost when they were inflicted, then the traumas will find another way to express themselves – and what better way than through the metaphor of the body? Heart disease, cancer, digestive problems, skin problems, blood problems, sexual problems, brain problems – and mental problems, as psychological problems are physical in nature to some degree – are all a wonderful blank canvas onto which traumas can send out their messages to the world.
Healers, ranging from faith healers who pull out tumors with their dirty fingers to modern doctors working in the world’s most sophisticated hospitals, do people a terrible emotional disservice by curing their physical ills without first truly addressing their psychic ills. To take away someone’s cancer without first even asking, much less finding out, why he developed it is to misprioritize the value of his life and to send his deepest psyche a message that no one heard its true cry for help.
Modern society mistakes the value of life. People are obsessed with living to a hundred though they haven’t really lived with emotional truth since they were three. They are lost, and their old age is no glory or triumph. The body is a beautiful temple, but its architecture is nothing if it holds no great message within. This great message of the human being is the truth of the soul, which only comes through nurturing the inner emotional self. This is the temple’s inner sanctuary. And those so distanced from their inner selves that they have permanently walled off their inner sanctuary with concrete and metal and barbed wire have long since lost their value. Their traumatizers have won. They have been converted into the walking dead.
But for you who feel the capacity to go within, for you who have the courage and desire and motivation to learn your soul’s truest secrets, the secrets that drive you through your life, for you who want to know why and how and where and how much, you have the greatest faith, and you will heal.
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Psychotropic Medications Stunt Emotional Growth
Psychotropic medications block the path to enlightenment. They are prescribed by doctors as quick fixes for people who have emotional problems requiring solutions deeper and more complex than anything out of a bottle. Pills may get you out of the house, but they won’t lead you to your soul.
Professional opinion holds that depression and other emotional problems are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain. This is not true. Chemical imbalances are a result of the problem, not the cause. Chemical imbalances result from unresolved childhood traumas (which range from mild to extreme), which are the true causes of mental disorders. When people resolve their childhood traumas their mental problems resolve as well, which in turn balances their brain chemicals.
The journey to the soul – the no-med route – is a journey straight through hell. It is only available to the strongest and humblest: those able to face and resolve their childhood traumas. This route is almost impossible without an extremely enlightened guide, of whom there are scant few around – and it is even quite difficult with an extremely enlightened guide, because there is no way to avoid the pain and grief inherent in growth. This is why drugs (be they prescribed or not) are so popular. Drugs kill pain, neutralize symptoms, help bury and wall off trauma, and bypass healing. Taking them is easy. They demand no sacrifice. They are a soft and wonderful crutch. Their only cost, aside from the occasional side effect (some of which are terribly serious), is that they kill the spirit.
Emotional healing, on the other hand, opens up the full palette of human feelings. Healing, despite its lack of instant gratification, ultimately brings feelings of self-respect, adequacy, competence, maturity, and self-love. Healing connects you with your past and present. Healing opens the door to your true future.
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What Does High Functioning So Often Disguise?
Society considers those who function at a high level to have reached the pinnacle of success – and mental health. Many modern insurance companies won’t even reimburse for your therapy if you function at too high of a level. The irony is that most high functioning people don’t want to look deeply within anyway – be it in psychotherapy or any other form of self-reflection. They live their lives without ever really exploring why they live the way they do, why they surround themselves with their closest intimates, why they have children and raise them the way they do, and who they even are. To look too deeply inside would all too often reveal the lies beneath the façade, the pain and misery behind the comfort and numbness, the unhappiness and resignation behind the seeming success.
Most people are so traumatically conditioned in their childhoods to be unhappy by the very ones who should be loving them the most – their parents – that as they grow into adulthood they lose sight of how miserable they really are. They live on the surfaces of themselves and are terrified by too much realness. True intimacy disturbs them and they avoid it at all costs. Even most therapists and "spiritual" leaders don’t want to help their wards fully manifest inner truths because they are terrified of doing it themselves. Many themselves take psychotropic medications and other drugs to assuage their upwelling feelings and send these reminders of life’s ancient horrors back down into the depths of their souls, to be forgotten. What a world we live in, where so many of our supposedly most healed bypass their own internal healing processes through quick fixes!
It is difficult to function at an extremely high level in a sick society if you are honest. True honesty from the soul is antithetical to those who call the world’s present tune. Society thrives on denial. Society’s television censors life’s deeper message, and newspapers operate within the tightest parameters of emotional disconnection. But the worst offenders are families. Parents cannot tolerate their children expressing the truths with which they were born. Thus children learn, through painful and often silent indoctrination – and not uncommonly outright torture – to lie, because if they don’t they won’t get loved. An unloved child is in big trouble, because he tastes the kiss of death.
The only hope is to break from the systems that lie. Granted, we must abide by society’s rules if we wish to have food on our plates, but that does not mean that our hearts should lie for one instant. The only hope for true redemption is to tell the truth. And God bless you if you do, for though you will be rejected by those you thought loved you, a greater door will open.
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Borderline: The Hated Diagnosis
According to Herbert Strean, when therapists diagnose a patient as borderline what they’re really saying to the patient is this: “I hate you!” And while it might seem harsh for a therapist, that paragon of love and acceptance, to be so rejecting and callous, there’s often a good reason for it. This supposed “borderline” patient is the exact type that it’s easy to hate: they can drive even the best therapist literally nuts. A few years ago a Long Island therapist was asked by a local paper to define the borderline. His reply, which got him sued, probably as much because it was brilliant as because it was cynical and non-representative, was as follows: “A borderline is the patient who calls you up at three o’clock in the morning on your home phone threatening suicide, which you know he’ll never do – but you wish he really would.”
According to the DSM (the standard psychiatric diagnostic text) the patient with Borderline Personality Disorder (code 301.83, in case you’re wondering which numbers not to play in the lottery, if that happens to be your addiction of non-choice) is highly emotionally unstable, has a persistently shaky sense of self, is extremely impulsive, is prone to heavy substance abuse and acting out, is prone toward suicidal gesture (and occasionally worse), often feels chronically empty, tends toward extreme displays of anger, is generally intermittently highly depressed or anxious…and the list goes on.
But underneath it all, the borderline personality is just a specific type of wounded adult-child. Borderlines share extreme neediness with narcissists, except that borderlines are much less able to control their frustrated rage. Unlike the narcissist who woos you with charmed entreaties, the borderline sucks you in with a harpoon, or in milder cases with flypaper in your face. They’re not only pissed as hell over having had their developing needs neglected as kids, but more so for having been psychologically, if not outright physically or sexually, tortured. And they have every right to be furious.
Of course, if you’re not their parent their problems are not your fault at all, though that won’t stop them from making you feel that way. Often they idealize their parents and blame you instead, though even if they did direct their blame homeward and expect love from Mom and Dad it would be decades too late. As the healing saying goes, “they broke it, you fix it.”
Regardless, their rage spills out everywhere, contaminating all their present relationships so that few healthy people would dare want to be close to them. The borderline instills in others an extreme desire to abandon him, which, ironically, is what he fears most. As such his remaining relationships, even the therapeutic ones, are volatile. He unconsciously recreates in his dealings with others the same horrible tension of his early childhood relationships with his rejecting parents, and yet because his behavior is unconscious he fails to understand and thus acknowledge his part in it, and of course is never able to admit his deepest hope behind his sabotage: that those onto whom he projects his historical parents (his children included) will mature to the point of finally being able to love him, and thereby heal him, in spite of his nearly impossible behavior.
This is his fantasy, and it’s a rough one to have projected onto you. Sadly, though, the only one it’s rougher for (his children aside) is the borderline himself.
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So What the Hell Is Narcissism Anyway?
Everyone is born narcissistic – that is, full of intense need. This is healthy. If a child is lucky his parents will meet all of his needs and he will grows optimally, straight through to enlightenment, straight through his development with no traumas to bog him down. But when they fail – and where they fail – he has to bury his neglected needs in self-protection. These then become a fixed part of his unconscious personality, and he will go through the rest of his life in an unconscious desperation to heal. These unhealed parts of him become the kernel of his narcissism.
For a narcissist to heal he must take responsibility for his wounds. He must excavate them, feel their pain, trace their sources, place appropriate blame, confront perpetrators either interactionally or internally, and grieve their horror. This is a nearly impossible task, but not fully so. Enlightenment is possible for anyone.
But few heal. Most avoid healing their wounds and instead seek out objects to gratify these wounds – often in the most clever, charming, and even seductive ways. The world is full of heroes and rescuers and martyrs who are drawn like magnets to narcissists. They delude themselves into believing they can fix them. These rescuers of narcissists are closet narcissists themselves, disguising their mis-attempts to self-heal through attempting to gratify others. No one attempts to narcissistically gratify anyone else unless he is in denial of his own comparable wound.
But they always fail at deeply gratifying anyone. Gratification is contrary to healing. Healing requires boundaries and a depth of insight, qualities antithetical to closet narcissism. But failure is no great loss to them, because they carry a great ace up their sleeve: they can always blame their failure on the fact that they were the victim of yet another narcissist. But this is not true. The only narcissists that truly victimized them were their own parents.
In their relationship with their child narcissistic parents are like sheriffs dealing with outlaws in the dusty Wild West: “There’s only room for one of us in this town…” To make the analogy fit, the outlaw (i.e. the child) must lack weapons, strength, or skill. Whenever he tangles with the sheriff (i.e. the parents) he always loses and gets booted out of town (i.e. the needs of the parents win, and his get neglected).
What then happens is the outlaw, if he doesn’t die some destructive death, leaves town (i.e. buries his needs in his unconscious) and goes to find another weaker town in which he declares himself sheriff (i.e. starts his own family, often with exploitable kids of his own).
Thus the system perpetuates itself…unless its members find some way to heal.
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Why Hypnotherapy is Disrespectful
Hypnotherapy demands passivity on the part of patients. Patients go into the hypnotherapist’s office, sit or lie down, and become unconscious, which is the requirement for entering a hypnotic state, i.e. a trance. And then they don’t consciously do anything. Instead the therapist does the “work,” meaning, he probes around inside their psyche, decides what’s wrong, and then proceeds to fix it…supposedly.
But from a deeper perspective he fixes only symptoms – that is, shifts them around, cuts them out, or buries them. This does a patient a terrible disservice, because it fails to hear the anguished message his soul has bottled in the symptom. Take away his symptom before you understand its message and you block the channel to his soul – and only guarantee that his soul will find another way to express itself. And this new way will likely be more intractable and destructive.
Hypnotherapy (and other manipulative forms of therapy) allows patients no deeply active role in healing themselves. It recasts them in the role of the dependent child who hopes the authoritative parent – the hypnotherapist – will heal him. This is impossible. But not in the mind of the hypnotherapist. In his ignorance and arrogance – or gently put, his denial – he welcomes this dynamic. If he didn’t he would have gone into a more patient-respecting branch of the healing profession. But first he would have healed himself.
True therapists do not heal patients. They catalyze healing. Patients ultimately have to do the true healing work themselves. Patients must consciously identify their fears, trace them to their traumas dating back to childhood, feel the terrors and horrors surrounding them – and the ugliness of their externalized manifestations – and have the strength and willingness to move forward through them anyhow. Patients provide the engine, the gasoline, and the driving, and the therapist, an expert of the inner terrain, just helps to read the map. And when the road gets rough and rocky, which it invariably does, there’s nothing like a good map reader.
People who want to be hypnotized for the purpose of growth are trying to avoid their feelings – and their deeper truth. Therapists who oblige them in this degree of self-deception are trying to do the same.
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