It's Never Enough

What is wrong with wanting more?  Nothing if you really want more of what you need, and not what you want.  What’s the difference, you say?  A whole lot.   Need, very early need, turns into want when it is not fulfilled.  I want more money, sex, security, cake, beer, and on and on.  What  I mean to say is that avariciousness in any form that is out of control is driven by a deeper need.  You cannot want 8 beers a day unless there are deep pains that transmute need into want.  At his point,  need is too painful to feel directly so the brain transforms it into something attainable.  Ah, there’s the problem; old needs are usually biologic and cannot be fulfilled at age six.

We cannot go to school while nursing.   So it has to become a want, and that want not only has to reflect what was missing early on but also what life presents to us.  We later on can go buy a bottle of whiskey without ever knowing that anything is missing. The gating system and repression has seen to that.   And parents who don’t mind if their child gets used to a bit of booze; a practice in France where the child is “immunized” against later abuse, and made tipsy so she can “hold” her whiskey.

But why the obsessiveness of the want?   It is not that; it is the excessiveness of the basic need which is being fulfilled symbolically.   That is why it needs fulfillment day after day; it can never be enough if we are fulfilling something we don’t know about that is not a basic need.   The need for love and approval can become exactly that later on stage without ever knowing that something is amiss.  “They love me. They just love me,“ is the message some actors take away, but they need to be loved over and over again.    Or the need to be liked, having never been looked at or liked when young, makes the young child desperate to please, to help and to be of service, all for a drib of being liked and approved.   And it goes on as long as the need does, which is usually a  lifetime; or until the basic need is experienced  so that it is no longer  fulfilled symbolically.  The need becomes what it is; it has to be felt or it will dog us but that is a small price to pay for not having to act it out all day and all year.

So how does this work? In simple terms there are gates in the brain that also respond to methylation, which helps open the repressive gates or closes them down.   If the pain is terrible the methylation process steps in and shuts off key switches so we do not feel that deprived need any more.  Yet,  we still feel deprived, which drives us, but we do not know by what, because it is just too much to bear.  So the specific need carries on; a better way to put it is “soldiers” on.   It carries on the burden.  In ancient history, as the brain evolved and with it the possibility to feel pain, there was also evolving switches in the brain to attenuate suffering so we could go on and get things done.  That means survive.  I have to wonder, “why else the development of a repressive gating system assisted by methylation.   How is it that the brain can “borrow” methyl and use it to help our switching processes?  The brain has to find a way not to be overwhelmed so it can function properly.  If we think  that every person at a bus stop is an enemy to hurt us, we lose focus and lose our ability to combat real enemies.  If the switches malfunction we can literally go off the rails and lose our way.   We close when we should open, and vice versa.  And different biochemicals aid in differentiating when to open or close.

In neurosis everything must become a symbol of your pain.  “Can I help you miss?”   “Why do I look helpless enough to need help?”  Or an actress I know just after finishing a great play was having dinner with me.  A young boy usher approached her and said, "You were wonderful tonight miss…"  And she answered, “Wasn’t I ever good before?”  Everyone in her orbit had to praise her.  Still never enough.

Those who get hooked on money need more and more if they are trying to feel safe, safe from an early poor and dangerous milieu.  Once the chronic fear sets in, it is no longer possible to feel safe.  This is really true when our parents make us feel unsafe and even earlier when the carrying mother is anxious, takes drugs and makes the fetus feel unsafe.  Mind you, no fetus feels unsafe as a cognitive thought out affair. The pure feeling, encapsulated remains to dog us and forces us to try to feel safe later on. We don’t reach out. We don’t take chances. We don’t try new things.  Why?  If feels unsafe.   We cling to her year after year so she can make us feel safe; which never happens.  Primal forces always take precedence and supersede any current effort.

A mother starving in the womb where the baby is malnourished can produce a child who needs to eat more and more.  Give her a small nibble and she starts again to want, not need.  Need is history; want is present.  We dredge up need from the past, place it in the present and it transforms into want.  “I WANT OUT!”  is usually true at birth but not now, yet a person has to get out all of the time to put her Primal need to rest.  She now wants to get out; to see this statue or this concert or go shopping at this store.  The target does not matter.  It is what makes us aim at it.  Worse, we never know what we are acting out.  Since we do not know the cause we make up relevant act-outs and give it a rationale:  “I just love to travel.”

Here the wants that emanate from needs have lost their roots.
Attention ladies and gentlemen we have lost our connection; we hope the power can turned back on soon.  We will when we use resonance to find those roots again and experience them.  Don’t forget that the cognitive brain has to travel back in time millions of years to reach the archaic brain who holds all the secrets of our early history. And then he needs to do a dredging operation to bring it back to the surface for experiencing.  Happily.  He has to do none of that.   The system will do it for him; use the right orbito-frontal cortex to go down and take a look and then report back.  “You know what I just saw?  Sharks and alligators and strange creatures I never knew existed, but they seem to have a similar brainstem to ours.”

One thing I must add is that earlier and deeper the imprint the more obsessive and compulsive the act-out.   Never more obvious than obsessive sex.  The early drive is so relentless and compulsive that it drives the person constantly.  He  and she are  victims of  impulses because on that early remote level the reactions always expressed as pre-verbal impulses.  They are therefore the most difficult to treat because they involve life-saving mechanisms.     Remember the film ”She’s gotta have it".