So often, as a condition for surviving trauma, one–here I speak very specifically about me, but I think this point can be generalized–develops a split between head and heart. The head retains in this split the capacity to describe emotions, even the emotions of its heart, but it always conveys them in its own vernacular. It puts them in words, where the heart puts nothing in words.
I wake up every morning feeling hated. I wake up every morning like there is nothing I can do today, or any day, ever, for the rest of my life, that would make me love myself, or feel loved by someone else. I could win the Nobel Prize, save a small village, cure cancer, rectify all the world’s ills, and it would not be enough. It is small wonder I often sleep in when I can.
Gradually, I am working my way through this. The process is unpleasant: I have to enter this emotion deeply and stay there. I don’t like it. My courage tires. But I do finally see a way out. I can and will make this turn.
Being me, though, I think in broader psychoanalytic and cultural terms. In my own case, my issue, very simply, is that my mother did not want me, and resented me for the first few years of my life, which she expressed through verbal and physical punishments I suspect were entirely disproportionate to the “crimes”, and never counterbalanced these punishments with sufficient affection for me to feel like I was not hated. Given how demanding even wanted kids can be, I would assume this is common. Look at average street, and you will see very few truly happy people, able to give and receive deep affection easily.
Culturally, I wonder about several things. Clearly, the early bonding between mother and child sets a template for that child’s life. It is critical. In my own case, I have found getting emotionally back to that period is extremely difficult, and pretty much impossible using most normal methods, like Depth Psychology (although in some cases hypnosis may help).
[Now, I feel the need to say again that I get that in many respects worrying about these things seems itself a variety of narcissism, of selfishness, that I should just “get on with it”. I have “got on with it”. I have two happy, successful kids, a decent career, an education. But I wake up every morning feeling hated, and I don’t like it. Problems remain problems until solved, and this is the solution.]
In American culture, it is common to move around a lot. One effect this clearly has is diminishing the number of females around a young child. I don’t suppose narcissism is more or less common in other cultures, but what it seems to me is likely is that even children with mothers unable to give honest affection can still find a caregiver in the person of an aunt, or grandmother, or cousin. I suspect it only takes one person to set that template of feeling loved. That that person’s presence has been made by the circumstances of our culture and economy mathematically less likely has not been much commented on.
Nor has there been much discussion of the fact that a mother with an outside job is likely to have less energy for giving affection and order to that child. When we (we is of course me, for one) comment about the superficiality of our culture, can we not trace one source of this to the role electronic media play in parenting, a role made larger by women who work outside the home? No game, no TV, can talk back to a child the way a mother can. The machines are superficial, to begin with, then the programming is awful (there were a number of shows I flat out refused to let my kids watch, like Rugrats, and Spongebob. With regard to the latter, I can literally feel intelligence leaking out my ears watching it, and my kids, now older, feel the same way): small wonder we are raising odd, emotionally detached, deeply unhappy, confused kids.
Then God. “God hates us all” is apparently an actual book, but was a fictional book in the series Californication, itself likely based on the life and work of Charles Bukowski. We (I, and then perhaps you) read:
In his autobiographical novel “Ham on Rye” he talks about his physically
and mentally abusive father, along with his apathetic mother.
Freud–being an atheist, lacking knowledge of quantum physics, of the fundamental weirdness of “reality” as best we can determine it–supposed that God was a construct made necessary by psychodynamic necessities or conflicts of some sort. I don’t know the details of what he proposed, as they are not germane to my purpose here. Suffice it to say that he viewed God as fiction.
Now, the nature of reality, the nature of life, the future of our self awareness when our bodies cease functioning: these can all be brought within the empirical domain. They are scientific questions.
And “Science” (always beware when someone is bold enough both to reify the work of many millions across millenia, and then speak on “its” behalf, especially if they self describe–always inaccurately–as “skeptics”) tells us that the God concept makes sense. If we think of God as an infinitely rich informational field connecting all life and all existence in an eternal moment–a thought, of course, that won’t really fit in our heads, but does give us a starting point for discussion–then God likely exists.
But how we FEEL about God remains, like all feelings, psychodynamically driven. And if our early experience is violence and abandonment, that feels like the NATURE of “existence”, does it not? Had Sartre felt truly loved when he was 2, would he have written what he did? I don’t think so.
So often “The love of Truth” is simply another way for clever people to project onto reality, to “ontologize”, if I might coin a word, their own head iterations of heart sentiments they cannot process.
Do you feel unloved? Then “reality” is cold. God is extinct. Science, then, will be your “langage de l’amour”. Or perhaps you will write about the hate of God. In some way, your metaphysics will be emotionally driven on a deep and in most cases entirely hidden, unconscious level.
Manifestly, it has proven psychologically very, very difficult for scientists to broaden their perspectives to include God, to include available data, and available models integrating that data into a much more interesting–and most likely more accurate–worldview.
I feel better. Something there needed to be said. Now a psychological burp of satisfaction, and on to a meditation–a medication–I don’t look forward to, but will do nonetheless.