Status Updates From Beyond Death Anxiety: Achie...

The anti self is induced by ineffective or malignant styles of parenting and socialization that are fundamentally authoritarian and moralistic. This creates within the child a self-hating inner voice that seeks to destroy the very project of becoming a self that gives human existence its most significant meaning.

An important aspect of psychotherapeutic practice, based on the tenets of Separation Theory, is the knowledge that considerable anxiety is to be anticipated and must be dealt with effectively as patients take chances and dismantle their defenses.

Separation therapy represents a particularly direct assault on psychological defenses and therefore must be undertaken with a special sensitivity to both the patient’s willingness and tolerance.

When individuals lack a strong personal identity or well-developed self system, they find it necessary to distort, provoke, or withdraw from intimacy in their closest associations.

It is clear that the concept of separation or the idea of being a separate autonomous person, as described from this perspective, is different from isolation, retreat, pseudo-independence, or imagined self-sufficiency; rather it involves maintaining a strong identity and definite boundaries in close relationships.

We must learn both to acknowledge the centrality of romantic love to our lives and to maintain other relationships, other avenues to meaning. For, perhaps most important of all for the survival of love, we must not ask it to bear the weight of all meaning.

The pain of the ending is part of the happiness now.

Then they go on to offer the same solutions to their offspring. They imagine that they can control death by guarding and protecting themselves and their children and by anticipating all possible negative contingencies. Their denied and displaced fear of death is transformed into specific prohibitions that adversely affect their children’s lives by stifling their spontaneity and making them unnecessarily fearful.

Parental attitudes and fears are passed on through the generations. Parents warn their children of dangers in the same manner as their parents warned them. The result is that many adults tend to exert exaggerated control and watchfulness over themselves, as a part of a self-nurturing process that is restrictive and disadvantageous to their prospects in life.

Sadly, the more self-protective a parent is, the more he or she will act on his or her defenses with the child, become progressively mistuned, and fail to understand and encourage healthy development. In other words when parents a strongly defended, particularly in relation to death anxiety, the child is always more expendable than the parents’ defense system.

They tend to deny ambivalent feelings, imagine that love is one dimensional, and remain unaware that the feeling of love varies from moment to moment. As an alternative to facing what they perceive to be the lack of unwavering love for their child, they act as though they are loving when they are not. They do not understand that love is a phenomenon that is based on myriad variables.

The illusion of love that exists to a certain extent in most couples and families is supported by societal institutions, social mores, and beliefs. For example, the precept of unconditional parental love, a fundamental part of society’s tenets, leads to considerable guilt feelings in parents.

Indeed utilizing one’s partner to preserve a negative fantasy of who one is represents a basic dynamic in personal relationships that is more common than most people would like to believe.

Individuals who form a fantasy bond cannot be innocently defended. In attempting to protect themselves from interpersonal pain, sadness, and fears of loss - emotions inherent in all intimate relationships - they unconsciously push away or punish the people who care for them the most.

However, people’s actions indicate that they believe on some level that by relinquishing their individuality to a more powerful person, as in a fantasy bond, and by giving up their independence and points of view, they are somehow achieving safety and immortality.

The burden that these anticipations put on the relationship is tremendous: obviously no one person can fulfill such unrealistic expectations or live up to this idealized image.

Most people seem to expect far more security from their relationship or marriage than it is possible to extract. There is an expectation that all of the one’s needs will be met in the relationship and that in some sense one’s partner is the source of all happiness.

The reality is that we are all essentially alone, and there is no way to effectively become one half of a whole with another person. When we attempt to connect to another and give up our individuality, we are of little or no value to ourselves or our partners. In immersing or losing ourselves in relating to the other, we gradually disappear and have little to offer in the way of a emotional sustenance.

One of the major reasons people are afraid of intimacy is that having a deeply satisfying sexual experience combined with close emotional contact and friendship paradoxically makes people more aware of their separateness.

Every child needs warmth, affection, direction, and guidance from adults who ideally would possess both the desire and ability to provide satisfaction of these basic needs.

Feeling especially close, loving, or compassionate, they could not bear the thought of losing their partner, or themselves. The more they felt alive and vital the less they could tolerate the painful imagining of their eventual demise.

In exploring their deeper motivations, they found that there was a positive correlation between increased death concerns and denying themselves satisfying sexual experiences, cutting off feelings, and retreating from emotional intimacy.

Guilt about behavior that goes against a person’s self-interest contributes to a feeling of inwardness, withdrawal, and paranoia toward others.

Many people tend to retreat from close relationships and distance themselves from loved ones in an unconscious effort to avoid feelings of vulnerability in relation to potential loss or rejection. Therefore, the breakup of a previously satisfying relationship for no appropriate reason can be thought of as a self-destructive act, especially when one is not moving on to something better.

Still in relation to death, I have come to believe that it is the end of life, the end of me. The thought of losing those close to me, the pleasures of life, and ultimately my consciousness makes me very sad. At the same time, I love my life and my loved ones, lead a full life, feel free, and cherish every moment of my existence.

Many children have suffered in their development as their parents tried to make them into carbon copies of themselves. This defense leads to a great deal of insensitivity to the child’s true nature. Children have their own unique genetic structure there is different from either parent, and this uniqueness deserves loving and sensitive nurturance.

Altering the defensive barriers to the evolution of self offers a far more positive eventuality. In the examined life there is the possibility of powerful changes that involve a movement toward a meaningful existence. The human experience can involve genuine love and compassion, empathy, kindness, and joyfulness in being, as well as sad and painful issues of aging, disillusionment, deterioration, and mortality.

We imagine that if we deny our wants we can no longer be hurt or rejected. This inward posture of relinquishing our priorities is particularly applicable when dealing with the issue of death and dying. In a magical way illuminating life precludes death.

One of the most paradoxical truths about human beings is that very often the beloved is compelled to reject or even punish the lover who offers affection, tenderness, and sexual gratification. People usually will not permit the reality of being lived and admired to disrupt their psychological equilibrium of their defensive solution to the existential dilemma.