Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Parents and the Role of Death

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The man feels that his mother did not love him enough; perhaps she regularly subjected him to emotional denigration, by finding fault all the time. Or perhaps she could not give enough emotional support because she had “frozen emotions”. And so the man’s self-image is weak. If such a woman did love him, then his self-image would change dramatically. Therefore, subconsciously such a woman can strongly attract him and give him another chance to change the past, but only if he can persuade her to love him. He finds such a woman, bonds to her, but only sees his hopes for love wither away. He cannot change the woman, and so his subconscious hatred of her character type remains, as does the weakness in his self-image. If he had managed to make the woman love him, it would have had a greater beneficial impact on him than bonding to a woman whose character is complementary to his own. A complementary woman cannot change his past for him.

This kind of relationship is a love-hate relationship. It means that in childhood the child both loves and hates the parent. I consider my relationship to my mother. For the first half of my life I felt that I loved my mother. However, when my self-analysis began in my middle 40s it revealed another aspect to that relationship. The analysis began slowly, and then suddenly everything changed. I was reading the books of Friedrich Nietzsche. He was describing the hatred within a certain type of person. In a moment of illumination I realised that he was describing myself. From that moment onward I became aware of my own subconscious hatred as it emerged into full consciousness over the next few months. The degree of hatred that I had for my mother shocked me. I thought that I was just a nice guy. This hatred did not fit into my own image of myself. 

I was living with my mother at this time, to help her after her marriage collapsed. I had to walk a tightrope in order to maintain my usual image – I did my best not to show this hatred. Now I was aware that simultaneously I both loved my mother and hated her. The intensity of the hatred is the same as the intensity of the love. The usual way that this relationship functions is that the child consciously feels love for the mother, and subconsciously feels hatred towards her. The child has to repress the hatred into the subconscious mind since it will be punished if it shows this hatred openly. So the child grows into the adult, still only aware of its love for the mother and unaware of its hatred for her.

How does this kind of relationship come about?  It is the result of slow-onset trauma [¹]. How the child adapts depends on the nature of bonding.
In slow-onset trauma, bonding will normally take place before the negative aspects of the parent really begin to be felt by the child. The parent is initially good to the child, so that the child learns to love that parent. Then as time goes by the parent begins to inflict emotional abuse on the child. The child represses his negative feelings to the parent, which now begin to include self-pity and fear of that parent. The self-pity tends to make the child submissive. To keep the hatred and fear repressed, the child increases its love for the parent. To try and minimise the self-pity, it may excessively try to please that parent: if the parent is the mother, the child becomes a “mummy’s boy”.

The Mother and Boy Relationship

I consider the mother and boy relationship. The mother is now always ready to criticise the child, and this regular denigration slowly builds up in the child’s mind. Fear helps to create the trauma, though eventually hatred becomes more intense than the fear. The bonding maintains the love for the mother, but simultaneously the mother generates hatred in the child. The hatred flows in both directions: not only does the child hate the mother, but he also hates himself since he blames himself for not deserving the mother’s love. The intensity with which he hates the mother is the same intensity with which he hates himself.

The emotional component of bonding is jealousy [²]. This means that all children who bond to their parents have sexual feelings towards them. Hence when a boy bonds to his father, he has subconscious sexual feelings towards the father. This leads to the conclusion that homosexual feelings are a normal part of bonding and do not indicate any kind of perversity. I did not bond to my father, and so I am not attracted sexually to other men.

For the child, the onset of puberty increases his difficulties. Puberty sensitises the child to his sexual feelings, especially his sexual feelings towards his mother. So its sexual feelings are now associated with fear and hatred of women. The result is that it lacks self-confidence in associating with its female peers; it does not develop the social skills necessary to establish harmonious relationships with them, and hence remains sexually awkward.

One main issue of the love-hate relationship that seems most responsible for the child’s confusion is that of self-confidence. The parent has eroded the self-confidence of the child, so that it regularly becomes immersed in self-pity. The child feels that it is emotionally weak, whilst it sees the parent as being emotionally strong. Therefore it seems to bond excessively to that parent; the bonding is excessive since it functions to hide the child’s fear and depression. The underlying negative emotions ensure that the child does not show much joy in its tie with that parent. For comparison, if bonding is normal and no abuse is occurring, then the child should feel joy in the company of the parent.

One effect of the erosion of self-confidence is that the child feels that it lacks willpower, whilst the parent radiates willpower. Suppose that the parent concerned was the mother. When the child has become an adult, it becomes attracted to strong women who radiate self-confidence. Unfortunately the kind of woman that seems to radiate the self-confidence and emotional forcefulness that the person needs is the kind of woman that resembles his mother, which is the kind of woman that he hates. The overall effect is that when he is immersed in self-pity, he desires a strong woman to support him, but when his mood switches to pride and boosts his low-level of self-confidence, he now hates that same kind of woman.

Slow-onset trauma usually produces a love-hate relationship to the parent. The presence of the love indicates that some bonding has remained. The will is not broken, but the child may manifest strong feelings of self-pity, submissiveness and dependency. For comparison, fast-onset trauma can break the child’s will, and so can break bonding. The result is that sooner or later the child (usually after it has become an adult) may experience some form of mental disorder such as catatonia [³].

A love-hate relationship can be generalised. A person may have a love-hate relation not only to a parent but also to other aspects of society. A common way to manage and stabilise love-hate relations is to direct the love and hate at different objects. For example, in religion the person may love his church but hate non-believers. Perhaps he consciously loves the religion because it offers salvation, but subconsciously hates it because it arouses guilt and shame in him. If a person does not split the focus of love and hate, then his disposition towards the object of his relation oscillates up and down as his emotions change: one moment he loves it and another moment he hates it. Whereas if the person splits the focus, so that he directs the love and hate at different objects, then he has a stable mood of love towards one object and a stable mood of hate towards the other one.

This splitting of the focus is the reason that societies always seek scapegoats. The virulent hatred aimed at “undesirable” elements of society, such as Jews, gypsies, Afro-Caribbeans, immigrants, hippies, gays, etc, always indicates the widespread prevalence of love-hate relationships that were established in childhood.

Four Effects of Trauma

I describe four effects of trauma: touch deprivation, avoidance of emotional support, excessive reactions to threats, and my adaptation.

• Touch Deprivation

When a parent is emotionally cold towards the children, then he or she is not likely to caress them and cuddle them very much. The long-term effect is that those children may grow up into adults with the inability to warmly caress and cuddle other adults and children. I call this predicament “touch deprivation”. My parents never caressed and cuddled me much, so as I grew up I suffered from this problem. I suspect that anyone who has a difficult childhood ends up with touch deprivation.

The problem is that when the child becomes an adult, he or she finds it difficult to physically embrace friends, or cuddle and caress a sexual partner, or even caress their own children. Even up to middle-age, I still felt awkward when any of my brother’s grandchildren sat on my lap – I did not know what to do with my hands. I felt awkward with expressing tender affection by means of touch. Someone with this problem may not have lovingly touched another person for years.  He may long to touch a partner in an intimate way, but be afraid of making a fool of himself if he is rebuffed. So he ends up with a deep sense of frustration.

If the difficulty is severe, it may produce the effect that the person is not only awkward in caressing another person, but he is likely to be embarrassed or jumpy if another person caresses him. The problem is even more acute for someone who has suffered sexual abuse as a child. In a crowded place like a bus or a train, it may be necessary for me to touch someone on the arm in order to move past them; if that person is afraid of touch, then she may shrink away from me or whisper “don’t touch me”.

The issue of touch is a difficult one because a person is likely to confuse it with the need for sex. Quite often the feeling of not being loved (by one’s parents) goes hand-in-hand with touch deprivation, with the effect that the man longs to be tender and touch and caress a woman’s body. In this situation, the man may think that he desires sex, when actually he may get all the satisfaction he needs just by caressing a woman.

Sex and touch are two different issues. Simply having sex will not necessarily resolve issues of touch. A person may be willing to have sex, so long as the partner does not caress her body. That person may feel that being caressed increases her anxiety so much that it turns her off sex.

A person needs to examine his or her feelings and thoughts about touching and caressing. If he feels awkward, then he may benefit by exploring various “touch” therapies and bodywork therapies. In my case, to compensate for this lack of touch, I subconsciously gravitated to bodywork therapies like Bioenergetics and eventually learned Swedish massage and some osteopathy.

Difficulties with touch often bring another issue with it: awkwardness with intimacy. The fear and hate underlying the child’s relationship to the parent inhibit the learning of intimacy skills. Intimacy in a sexual relationship has two components: verbal communication and physical caressing. To make up for this lack of ability with intimacy, the person may focus on sexual passion as the way to approach relationships; but this rarely works long-term.

• Avoidance of Emotional Support

When one or both parents have difficulties in showing warm affection to a child, then this difficulty comes under the heading of emotional neglect or emotional coldness towards the child. The obvious reason for it is that the parents’ parents suffered from the same difficulty. The parents’ difficulties are transferred to the children. The long-term effect is likely to be the instillation of a sense of guilt in the child. He learns to hate himself. He no longer feels worthy enough to receive emotional support.

By the time he is an adult, he is uncomfortable with receiving compliments and praise from friends. I always thought of it in this way: I can receive compliments in 5 minute doses only. After 5 minutes, if I was still receiving compliments my anxiety level used to rise very quickly and I had to find a reason to hide or depart. Or sometimes I would downplay a compliment, saying that what I had done (which brought forth the praise) was nothing. The praise was activating my sense of deep guilt and self-hatred, my sense of being unworthy. Hence praise was something to avoid.

This situation produces a paradox for the person. What he lacks, what he desperately needs, is a warm emotional relationship with friends. Yet if he finds himself in such a warm situation his first thoughts are how to escape from it!  The lack of warm relationships produces deep loneliness, a loneliness he does not know how to surmount, because self-hate is far worse than loneliness. I would always prefer to avoid feeling self-hate rather than surmount loneliness.

• Excessive Reactions to Threats

I seem to have focused mainly on my non-assertive behaviour as the main effect of fast-onset trauma. My timidity was something I could not resolve, and so I had to avoid confrontations with any kind of authority. In my working life I resorted to low-status jobs that carried little responsibility.

This timidity led to a pronounced consequence once my self-analysis enabled me to attune to my subconscious mind, thereby highlighting my weaknesses. For the next 20 years I went through periods of intensely phantasising and dreaming about being bullied by a bad guy, and then fighting back to beat him. I became the good guy who crushes the bad guy. In this phantasy, trying to be assertive correlated to being aggressive. However, my aggressiveness was always excessive and over-the-top. This is a feature of severe psychological difficulties, in that options tend to be extreme ones and not moderate ones. When a person is experiencing severe psychological distress, there is little place for moderation.

Therefore, in daily life any threat will be perceived to be much more serious than it really is. And so the person is likely to over-react unless he can keep his distress controlled by a high standard of idealism, whether ethical, religious or spiritual.

• My Adaptation to Trauma

I list some of the most prominent ways that I adapted to the influences of trauma.
As a child I felt no bonding to my father, and I had a love-hate relationship to my mother. As a teenager I had no ideals and no motivation. When I went to college, I managed to get a degree in physics despite doing the least amount of work possible. As a young man I drifted through life, and then in my 30s I began my spiritual journey. I found faith in an English yoga teacher, as an expression of my need for a beneficent father figure. When this faith fell through, I eventually found faith in my own mind, as an expression of my own ability to solve my problems.  Over the years, as the practice of psycho-analysis gave me wisdom, my reliance on faith gradually faded away - wisdom replaced faith.

Roles of the Parents

One woman writer presumed that for a female child the mother gives it the sense of nurturing and the father gives it the sense of social relationships. In my view this is only partly correct. Bearing in mind her ideas on the father-daughter relationship, I assume that for heterosexual children:

The child gets its sense of social relationships from the parent of the opposite sex to it.
The child gets its sense of being an individual from the parent of the same sex to it.

These ideas mean that for a boy his sense of individuality is a masculine one, whilst for a girl her sense of individuality is a feminine one.

Therefore, for a boy, if trauma is experienced from the father, then this will have a big influence on the child’s sense of masculinity. Similarly, if trauma is experienced from the mother, then this will seriously influence the child’s feelings towards femininity. Such influences are likely to be hidden at first by the stresses of development. But as the child passes puberty the intensity of its emotions increase, and sooner or later these influences will start to manifest themselves in various ways.

Bonding always has a sexual component. When a male child bonds to the mother, she becomes his pattern of sexual femininity. He will later feel jealous of his mother’s sexuality and of women who are like her. When he bonds to the father, the father becomes the child’s pattern of empowered masculinity. He will later feel jealous of the father’s authority and of other men like him.

When the child bonds in a faulty way to the mother, he loses his sense of sexual femininity, and becomes confused. He lacks self-confidence in his relationships with girls and women, and so fails to learn adequate social/sexual skills. He may become wary of women.

When the child fails to bond to the father, he loses his sense of empowered masculinity and becomes confused. He lacks the ability to accept the authority of other men, especially confrontational authority figures, and so fails to learn adequate teamwork skills.

The attitudes of the child to its parents are continued into adulthood in its relationships with other men and women. I never bonded with my father because of my subconscious fear of him, and so as an adult I fear traits of authoritarianism in other men. My love-hate relationship to my mother continues into my attitudes to women. I am wary of entering into any serious relationship with them. All relationships go through positive and negative times. Positive times in a relationship do not present problems, but the negative times do. I cannot harmoniously handle a negative situation with a woman, and neither can I handle harmoniously a negative situation with a man.

Death of a Parent

Suppose that a sensitive boy develops fear and hatred of the father. The father tries to be a good father but is too authoritarian. The boy grows into an adult. Now what happens to the character of the adult when the father dies?  There are two common possibilities, depending on whether the fear or the hatred is the greater in intensity.

One possibility is sometimes noticed if the hatred to the parent has been successfully hidden for most of the child’s life (even when he has become an adult). So long as the parent is alive, it seems that the boy loves the parent. However, when that parent dies, the boy (who has now become an adult) becomes distressed and disorientated. The disorientation is due to his repressed hatred of that parent beginning to emerge into normal consciousness. Now the adult hates everything that he formerly loved about the parent, and about everything that parent stood for. Apart from his new awareness of his hatred for the parent, his life goes on as normal.

The other possibility happens when the fear is greater than the hatred. Whilst he was a child, he had to repress character traits that were in competition with the father, and so only traits which were co-operative with the father could find expression. Any aggressive and selfish traits have to remain dormant, and only non-aggressive and submissive traits can flourish. When the father dies, then sometimes the adult will now reverse this situation. The repressed competitive traits come to the fore, whilst the co-operative traits become repressed. The adult now switches to a harsher, critical character and his previous charming and courteous character disappears into his subconscious mind. The greater the fear he had of his father, the greater becomes the harshness of his “new” character. Whilst most children and adults have some inclination to aggressiveness, the harshness of the adult’s “new” character is derived from the intensity of childhood trauma. He may now evoke negative criticism from his family and friends who say that he is becoming like his father. As an example, this scenario was played out by Lenin as he grew up. When he was an adult, he could be charming to people who accepted his political views, but he was always aggressively nasty to political opponents [4].

And so violence is transmitted down the family line, from father to son, by the psychological dynamics of the family situation. There is no need to invoke genetics to explain this process.

The Purpose of Death

If we assume that the purpose of a human life is personal evolution, then why do we have such a short life span?  We might think that we could evolve much faster if we lived for, say, a thousand years each lifetime on Earth. However, the present state of society would defeat the possibilities that could be attained by living a much longer life. The reason for this centres on the difficulties of childhood. In general, adults lack the emotional and psychological skills needed to safely guide a child on its journey to adulthood.

The idea to grasp is that personal evolution gradually develops sensitivity in us. Sensitivity is the pre-requisite for developing self-awareness to an adequate degree so that we can learn to master the emotional side of ourself. As our sensitivity increases with each lifetime, we become increasingly vulnerable to the emotional difficulties of childhood.

In some lifetime our sensitivity will be enough for us to experience trauma in our childhood. I am focusing on unintentional trauma caused by significant adults who have the best intentions for the child – these are adults who lack sufficient self-awareness to understand how they are interacting with the child. For a child who is relatively mature, in terms of personal evolution, the most important forms of unintentional trauma are excessive discipline, emotional abuse and emotional coldness.

The trauma will develop negative beliefs in the child, whilst simultaneously increasing his or her depth of sensitivity. The factor that stimulates the increase in sensitivity is fear. The degree to which we can develop self-awareness is determined by our depth of sensitivity. A deep level of self-awareness requires a deep level of sensitivity. So at present, and through all history, self-awareness is being cultivated in a chaotic fashion by means of childhood trauma.

The negative beliefs produced by the child’s interpretation of its distress will eventually lead to compensatory ideals and goals. Sometimes these ideals will be mainly negative, such as the desire for revenge, and so may lead to the development of anti-social and criminal activities. Sometimes the ideals will be positive, and the person will focus his or her efforts on long-term strategies to attain these desires.

At first the ideals will be materialistic: the person may set his sights on attaining wealth, or fame, or some form of institutional power (within politics, the military, business organisations, religion). These will be the compensations for his or her unhappiness. As he matures over many lifetimes, his goals may progress to humanitarian ones, such as the pursuit of legal justice and correction of injustice, the pursuit of healing ways (doctors, nurses, and other therapists), the engagement in teaching, etc.

Eventually he will progress to pursuing spiritual goals. For most people, their spiritual ideals will be set within the framework of institutional religion; for a comparative few, they will find their own path to spiritual attainment.

At whatever stage of personal evolution the person has reached, the pursuit of his or her goals and ideals is powered by the emotional turmoil in the subconscious mind. This turmoil is the perpetual residue of the experience of trauma. Whilst the psychological effects of trauma can be changed, the psychic effects (the damage done to the ego whilst it was still in the process of being created) will usually remain for the rest of the person’s life.

When the person’s depth of sensitivity is not great, the overall effect of trauma is to make him or her pursue a wide range of social experiences over numerous lifetimes. However, when the sensitivity is deep enough, the effect is to gradually turn the person away from normal social activities. He or she begins to reject materialistic ambitions and instead pursues some form of spiritual ones. I think of this point as the watershed of personal evolution. It means that the most evolved people begin to drop out of society and pursue their evolutionary journey in solitude or just in the company of like-minded people. The main reason for this is that social life contains a lot of negative emotional dramas, and the person’s sensitivity finds such dramas overwhelming. He withdraws from society because he does not possess the skills needed to handle emotional dramas in a mature and balanced way. He prefers the company of compatible people who are also searching for spiritual satisfactions. So gradually the evolved person loses his or her social skills, and society loses its most evolved members as they withdraw into solitude. This state of affairs is not beneficial to humanity. 

This state of affairs cannot be changed by protracting a human life to a long term, say a thousand years. And the reason for this is that no matter how long the life is lived, the psychic pain of trauma creates wounds that cannot be fully resolved for the sensitive person. The pain remains permanently in the subconscious mind and continues to make its influence felt in various ways throughout life. Psychological therapies cannot resolve completely any psychic wounds, though they can resolve any deep feelings of injustice. This at least makes the residue of psychic pain much more manageable. Perhaps in the future, mankind will develop psychic means of remedying psychic pain.

This state of affairs can be easily summarised.
If, as a child, a person creates negative beliefs about himself and the world, then these beliefs will produce his future challenges once he has become an adult.
If the adult follows a spiritual path, then these negative beliefs will eventually produce the "Dark Night of the Soul" experience.

How can this situation be resolved so that the spiritual seeker can continue on his spiritual journey despite being affected by social dramas? What has been the traditional remedy to resolve psychic pain?  The traditional remedy is the experience of death, which resolves all pain.

The purpose of death is to clear psychic wounds from consciousness, whilst leaving intact the psychological beliefs and motivations that the pain created.
Death offers the opportunity to change which life denies !

The traditional shamanic method of clearing childhood psychic wounds is the ritual of death and rebirth, undertaken at puberty. This is experienced as symbolic death, leading to existential rebirth. This ritual is the fundamental Rite of Passage, found in many, perhaps all, aboriginal societies.

My views on this topic are based on the differences between psychological and psychic effects.  When we die, we proceed on the next stage of reincarnation [5]. When we reincarnate back on planet Earth, we bring our beliefs, both positive and negative ones, with us from the previous life. This is our psychological inheritance. But we do not bring any pain with us, except the subconscious pain of nihilism [6] – this is of much less magnitude than that of any previous trauma . So a new life offers us the chance to start again, but without the psychic chains. The tragedy is that if society has not changed for the better in the meantime, then the new child is quite likely to experience trauma all over again.

The way out of this impasse is to teach adults and children how to develop social skills so that they can handle difficult emotional situations in mature ways, ways that will not produce trauma in a young child. The social care of the child needs to be improved, both in terms of family and group interactions. The teaching of basic psychology is far more important in schools than the teaching of science or religion.

[¹]. The speed of onset of trauma, whether fast or slow, is described in the article Childhood Trauma. [1]

[²]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [2]

[³]. I describe catatonia in the article Childhood Trauma. [3]

[4]. Lenin’s state of mind at the death of his father is described in Lenin’s Childhood, by Isaac Deutscher, Oxford UP 1970.
I also have a note about his political life in the article Corruption of Power. [4]

[5]. My views on reincarnation are in the article Reincarnation Theory. [5]

[6]. Subconscious nihilism is a Well of Sorrow. See the article Philosophy of Nihilism. [6]

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