SELF-ARCHEOLOGY

The following text is from Nathaniel Branden's book "The Psychology of Self-Esteem." Self-esteem and pleasure Pleasure, for man, is not a luxury, but a profound psychological need. Pleasure (in the widest sense of the term) is a metaphysical concomitant of life, the reward and consequence of successful action—just as pain is the insignia of failure, destruction, death. Through the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for successful action and an incentive to continue acting. Further, because of the metaphysical meaning of pleasure to man, the state of enjoyment gives him a direct experience of his own efficacy, of his competence to deal with reality, to achieve his values, to live. Implicitly contained in the experience of pleasure is the feeling: "I am in control of m...

End the cycle Intellectually, the mechanism of continuous child abuse is not that hard to understand. Childhood trauma that we haven’t consciously processed we impose on our children. Most people haven’t even started to uncover their past and gain real knowledge on how the world works, or have done very little self-exploration; therefore they inevitably harm their children to the degree of their own unprocessed traumas and ignorance. The Cycle of Abuse As children, we are abused in various ways by our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers, priests, coaches, or other caregivers and authority figures. Sometimes the abuse is overt and instantaneous, like beatings or molestation – but often it is subtle and continuous, like emotional unavailability, shaming, threats, over-control, or neglect. Such experiences often start basically when we are born, and in one form or another they last for decades. All of this cripples us mentally and stunt our emotional and psychological g...

Emotional Repression ( source ) The following text is from Nathaniel Branden's book "The Psychology of Self-Esteem." The first part, called "Emotions and Repression: The Repression of Negatives," can be found here . Emotions and repression: the repression of positives   The Freudian view of human nature has caused the concept of repression to be associated primarily with negatives, i.e., with the repression of the irrational and immoral. But there are many tragic instances of men who repress thoughts and feelings which are rational and desirable. When a person represses certain of his thoughts, feelings or memories, he does so because he regards them as threatening to him in some way. When, specifically, a person represses certain of his emotions or desires, he does so because he regards them as wrong , as unworthy of him, or inappropriate, or immoral, or unrealistic, or indicative of some irrationality on his part—and as dangerous , because...

The following text is from Nathaniel Branden's book "The Psychology of Self-Esteem." Emotions and repression:  the repression of negatives Repression is a subconscious mental process that forbids certain ideas, memories, identifications and evaluations to enter conscious awareness. Repression is an automatized avoidance reaction , whereby a man's focal awareness is involuntarily pulled away from any "forbidden" material emerging from less conscious levels of his mind or from his subconscious. Among the various factors that may cause a man to feel alienated from his own emotions, repression is the most formidable and devastating. But it is not emotions as such that are repressed. An emotion as such cannot be repressed; if it is not felt , it is not an emotion. Repression is always directed at thoughts. What is blocked or repressed, in the case of emotions, is either evaluations that would lead to emotions or identifications of the nature of one...

Child abuse can be divided into various forms which are physical abuse, mental abuse, and sexual abuse . (For those who just joined us: if you think of something that could be somehow painful or harmful to an adult, it’s definitely harmful to the child. Yes, children are human beings too .) Physical abuse Physical abuse means that child’s physical body suffers harm. It includes beating, spanking, slapping, kicking, dragging, burning, yanking on any body part, unwanted tickling, and so on. Basically, any kind of touch the child doesn’t want and that is harmful to them. It also includes physical neglect through denial of food or medication, and inappropriate personal or medical care. Mental abuse Mental abuse (i.e., psychological or emotional abuse) means that child’s mind suffers harm. Mental abuse includes yelling, manipulating, fear mongering, shaming, creating false guilt, forbidding to feel certain feelings (like anger ), convincing that you have to feel certain feel...

Child Abuse in a Local Supermarket or  Children Are Human Beings I’m continuing my article series on awareness for mental health and child abuse, where I take a story or an example of child abuse, and talk about why this is harmful to the child and what effects it may have in the future. (My previous article When We Get Hurt for Being Hurt – How We Learn Not to Feel can be found here ; and my answers for Caring Witness about intervening, in a form of an article Being A Witness Of Child Abuse , can be found here .) Today I’d like to share with you another personal story about child abuse in public I’ve witnessed some time ago. I was reading parts of my journal and found this entry from last year. I think I’ve shared this somewhere on Facebook back then too, so I apologize if you have already read this. But hopefully this will be interesting for most of my readers. [Originally written on January 19, 2012; slightly edited] I was in a local supermarket, and not that far from me...