Diana’s Reviews > Beyond Death Anxiety: Achieving Life-Affirming Death Awareness > Status Update

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.