It Takes Evil to Know Evil

When I think about evil, if evil actually exists, I think Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and clowns. I don't think of children, not even disturbed teenage children.

Yet, when I was a teenager strung out on drugs and alcohol and generally getting myself into heaps of trouble, I was told I was evil . . . by teachers, administrators, police officers, and even my mother (and especially her church friends). Some people probably feel the label was/is deserved. My mother died believing I would burn in hell not only for my sins against her in my youth, but because I became an unrepentant secular Buddhist.

As near as I can tell, my teenage years, what I remember of them, were hell - there is nowhere else to go but up. I would not wish that degree of angst, that total lack of self-awareness . . . that pure all-consuming despair . . . on anyone.

Those years were hellish because I believed what those people said about me - I knew I was evil. So many people could not all be wrong, right? Plus, I had heaps of the Catholic guilt for all of the things I really had done - nothing horribly serious, but many destructive acts toward myself, other people's property, or worst of all, other people's feelings.

I internalized their disparaging label and adopted it as a core belief for many, many years.

I know how deeply a label can wound, how it undercuts anything and everything we do, we are, we believe we can ever be. The inner critic says, "After all, You are (I am) evil. What hubris in you (me) thinks you (I) ever deserve to be happy, to be successful, to be loved?"

After years of therapy and a lot of Buddhist practice, still there are remnants of that wounding, there are echoes of those old scripts that long since were rewritten and reframed. I do not really even believe in evil, but there are scars where those old beliefs once were festering wounds.

It is this experience from all those years ago that informed my response to a situation yesterday, although I did not get clear on it until I discussed it with a mentor this morning. So often things we (I) think have healed can be triggered - reactivated - by another human being having a similar experience.

This particular situation, for a variety of reasons having nothing to do with objective reality, involved someone who believes s/he is evil because of some of the things s/he has done (all of which the persona was forced to do). But for this person, for that 16-year-old part still lurking inside the adult, the sense of being evil is so overwhelming that death seems the only viable option.

In reality, this could be any one of my clients, any survivor of neglect, childhood abuse, emotional violence, sexual molestation, or a host of other interpersonal traumas. But yesterday, for whatever reason, it was this person.

In the time I spent with this person yesterday, something about the pain and despair touched that old scar within me, left me filled with deep sadness and compassion.

Why that person on that day? I don't know.

Or maybe . . . It takes evil to know evil?

What I do know is that having this new awareness of why that situation followed me home and weighed heavy on my heart allows me to connect with people in a deeper way, to be a better friend, a better partner, and hopefully a better therapist.

Understanding Porn Addiction - A Reply to The Good Men Project

Over at The Good Man Project there is a recent article called, no joke, "Theoretically a man could worry that he’s addicted to porn and it turns out he’s really not. Is there room in the diagnostic system for that possibility?”  Apparently this was a comment someone left on the post "Why Does Porn Seem Hotter Than My Partner?"

Please be aware, there is no diagnostic category for porn addiction - it's not a recognized mental illness, nor is sex addiction. Which is not to say that porn addiction does not exist - it most certainly does, and most porn addicts are not aware that they are addicts, and most of them certainly would not self-refer. 

The Editors, in their article based on this comment, offered their own definition of porn addiction:

Here’s where [the authors of the original post] are on solid ground: there are men who are aware that they have a problem with porn. These men know they have a problem because they feel like their porn habits are out of control. Their sense of being out of control gives them a lot of stress, and a part of each of them wants to change but is not sure how. I have no doubt the testimonials are genuine.

This is often how addiction or other psychological disorders are spotted and treated. Treatment often begins when the subject asks for help or when the subject identifies to himself that he has a problem. A diagnosis of porn addiction is literally “subjective” – based in large part on whether or not the subject thinks he has a problem. If he thinks he has a problem, then he probably does. This is a common threshold for a lot of conditions in the DSM-IV: the difference between a personal quirk and a disorder is how much it bothers the subject. If I have a problem with reliance on the subject’s own viewpoint, then I have a problem with psychiatry as a science in the first place.

So, if a man prefers to masturbate to porn instead of his partner and this bothers him, or if he can only get an erection to porn and this bothers him, then he has a problem.

My question is: if it doesn’t bother him very much, then can we still say that he has a porn problem? Maybe in some cases, maybe not. Maybe he’s addicted and he’s in denial, or maybe he doesn’t have a problem. That’s the tricky part.

Again, porn addiction is not in the DSM-IV, nor will it be in the DSM-5.

This brings me to my next point - porn addiction exists, for sure, but there are no standardized, agreed upon measures for diagnosing addicts. Patrick Carnes teaches counselors how to assess for this problem, but he is still an outsider in the mental health industry (this does not make him wrong, only a trailblazer).

There are differences in the brain scans of sex addicts than those of "normal" people. However, the scans of a sex addict are nearly identical to those of a cocaine addict - pretty much all addiction, with the technology we have today, looks alike in the brain. So a brain scan will not clearly identify a porn addict or a sex addict, largely because sexual addictions are very frequently comorbid with other chemical addictions.

So how do we identify a porn addict?

Obviously, if it is getting in the way of daily activities, or it is destroying an intimate relationship, or if you are acting out (viewing porn and/or masturbating) at work, you have a problem.

In my opinion, all addictions share one common element - the chemical or the activity serves to "self-medicate" our painful or disturbing feelings out of awareness. When we feel the need to engage in our addiction of choice, more than likely there is an uncomfortable feeling just beneath that urge, so we engage in our addiction, the feeling goes away (for now), and then if our addiction is sexual or otherwise troublesome (crack, heroin, meth, alcohol, etc.), then we feel shameful.

Here is how Patrick Carnes conceives of the addiction cycle - it would be the same for porn as it is for sex or drugs:

THE ADDICTION CYCLE 

For sexual addicts an addictive experience progresses through a four-step cycle that intensifies with each repetition: 

1. Preoccupation—the trance or mood wherein the addicts’ minds are completely engrossed with thoughts of sex. This mental state creates an obsessive search for sexual stimulation. 

2. Ritualization—the addicts’ own special routines that lead up to the sexual behavior. The ritual intensifies the preoccupation, adding arousal and excitement.

3. Compulsive sexual behavior—the actual sexual act, which is the end goal of the preoccupation and ritualization. Sexual addicts are unable to control or stop this behavior. 

4. Despair—the feeling of utter hopelessness addicts have about their behavior and their powerlessness. 

The pain the addicts feel at the end of the cycle can be numbed or obscured by sexual preoccupation that reengages the addiction cycle.

[Carnes, Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sex Addiction, 3rd Edition, 2001, Kindle Location 462-470]

From an earlier post I did on this topic, here is more from Carnes on the core beliefs of the sex addict (likely true as well for the porn addict).

Sex addiction, like all other addictions (sex, like gambling, is often considered a process addiction rather than a substance addiction), is generally a response to developmental damage in the child, who is neglected, abused, molested, raped, or otherwise exposed to violence and/or sexuality at a young age. The result is a brain that is wired differently, a brain prone to seeking ways to escape, to numb the psychological pain.

Carnes identifies four primary areas in development that get hijacked and become unhealthy core beliefs, leading to addictive behavior.

There are four factors in a child’s development that ultimately become part of the sexual addiction:

1. self-image—how children perceive themselves

2. relationships—how children perceive their relationships with others

3. needs—how children perceive their own needs

4. sexuality—how children perceive their own sexual feelings and needs

These perceptions ultimately become “core beliefs” central to the addictive system. They are conclusions that can govern choices and behaviors during the child’s adult life.

[Carnes, 2009, Out of the Shadows, Kindle Locations 1432-1437]

In the addict, each of these areas develops into an unhealthy core belief. In examining how these beliefs comes about, Carnes offers a series of examples, including a man named Morris. Here is a brief summary of this man's childhood:

First, there is alcoholism in the family. Second, physical and emotional abuse accompany sexual abuse. Third, sexual experience is both humiliating and comforting. And fourth, the reality of the child is denied when the child’s accounts of abuse are not taken seriously. All of these are potent contributors to the addiction, as we shall see. 

By far the most important factor, however, is a sense of having been abandoned. From a child’s point of view, “you can abuse me, humiliate me, exploit me, and even not believe me, but by far the worst is if you don’t even want me.” Fear of abandonment is a constant theme in all addictions, including alcoholism. Within the sexual addiction, it is especially powerful.

[Carnes, 1454-1459]

Abandonment, in some form or another, whether literal, emotional, physical, or otherwise, is a foundational wound for addicts, but especially for sex addicts.

The sexual addiction receives its power from a fundamental concern for survival.

The first core belief of the addict is “I am basically a bad, unworthy person.” Abandonment means being unwanted. The child can only conclude that being unwanted means being unworthy and bad.

[Carnes, 1467-1469]

Abandonment does take many forms, and aside from the versions mentioned above, attachment psychology recognizes poor attachment as a form of abandonment, especially the absence of "mirroring" for the infant as a way to develop affect regulation (see Allan Schore). Schore refers to this as relational trauma, and the results includes inability to regulate affect (thus the 4th core belief in some form another as shown below), a sense of worthlessness, feeling fundamentally flawed, and a variety of other issues, mostly stemming from the right brain's emotional centers.

Here are the other three core beliefs and how they play out:

A second core belief comes from the first core belief about the child being a bad person. Because of personal unworthiness, the child believes, “No one would love me as I am.” Relationships with others become more tenuous the deeper this belief is. Children grow up believing that no one will accept them unconditionally. People will not be there; they cannot be trusted or depended on. If they do want a relationship, it is because they want something—not because they care. There will always be a price to pay. Minimally, there will be something that must be overlooked, ignored, or denied. To be close will mean to lose reality or integrity somehow. So intimacy is avoided.

[Carnes, 1483-1488]

***

[I]n the lonely search for something or someone to depend on—which has already excluded parents—a child can start to find those things which always comfort, which always feel good, which always are there, and which always do what they promise. For some, alcohol and drugs are the answer. For others it is food. And there is always sex, which usually costs nothing and nobody else can regulate.

This choice stems from the addict’s third core belief that is about needs: “My needs are never going to be met if I have to depend upon others.” In healthy families, children have a deep sense that their parents care for them as opposed to abandoning them.

Healthy parenting includes touching, loving, affirming, and guiding. The child feels cared for even when struggling with rules and limits. Trust in one’s self, as well as trust of others, emerges in that relationship.

When a child’s exploration of sexuality goes beyond discovery to routine self-comforting because of the lack of human care, there is potential for addiction. Sex becomes confused with comforting and nurturing. Moreover, the assumption is made that everyone else feels and acts the same. Therefore, to feel secure means to be sexual.

Consequently, the child’s relationships with people have the potential for being replaced with an addictive relationship with sexuality. Addiction is a relationship—a pathological relationship in which sexual obsession replaces people. And it can start very early. The final core belief of the addict emerges clearly: “Sex is my most important need.”

The kinds of childhood situations described here are further complicated when the children are surrounded by negative rules, messages, and judgments about sex. When addicts and their spouses study their families of origin, they are flooded with memories of events where they were told that being sexual was bad or, worse, that they were bad for being sexual.

When children’s primary source of comfort is sex and yet they are told by those whose judgments count the most that to be sexual is perverse, the conclusions they make about themselves are clear. They are unlikable. They need to hide that central part of themselves, which others will despise. Rather than repressing the sexual behaviors, they hide them or keep them secret. Needing to keep that central part of themselves secret adds to the pain and loneliness—which, in turn, creates a need for comfort, making the sexual fix that much more necessary.

[Carnes, 1494-1512]

In summary, here are the four core beliefs held by most sex addicts in one form or another (and if you substitute something else for sex in the fourth one, like cocaine, heroin, or food, these may apply to all addicts).

1. I am basically a bad, unworthy person
2. No one would love me as I am
3. My needs are never going to be met if I have to depend upon others
4. Sex is my most important need

These core beliefs were the foundation of the child's life as s/he grew up (can also be a she) become the axis of the addict's adult life - with each belief adding to the disconnect between the addict's interiority (the "world the addict experiences, with its pain and shame") and the addict's exterior persona or image that is projected to protect his secret and keep his inner life hidden. 

To cope with this disconnect, to cope with the belief that "I am a bad, unworthy person," some addicts feel that any degradation or humiliation that comes their way is justified - it reinforces their sense of failure and inadequacy.

Other addicts develop a grandiose or detached  persona (mask) that they show to the world hide their foundational guilt and shame.

Addicts create a front of “normalcy” to hide their sense of inadequacy. They may even appear grandiose and full of exaggerated self-importance. The front contrasts with actions that appear degrading or self-defeating or both. Others see decisions or behaviors as irrational, unfathomable, or even self-destructive, but not “normal.” 

Close friends and family members become angry and frustrated with the addict’s egocentric quality, especially when there is insensitivity to others. They are troubled at what looks like destructive or curious behavior that does not fit the image the addict projects. 

The belief “No one would love me as I am” also sustains the secret world. Addicts continue to believe that everyone would abandon them if the truth were known. Consequently, they have a constant fear of being vulnerable or dependent on others.

[Carnes, 1568-1574]

A lot of sexual addicts proclaim extreme sexual propriety, or in some circles, "postconventional moral development" - the results of this can be moral self-righteousness around sexual activity, with those who call them on their behavior being dismissed as morally underdeveloped or morally rigid.

Cover-ups, lies, and deceptions are made to conceal personal sexual behavior. The addict’s protestations of high sexual morality are like a smoke screen, obscuring the impact of sexual obsession. Friends and family tend to reject suspicions of sexual compulsivity because of the addict’s “values.” However, as evidence of powerless behavior and unmanageability mounts, these persons are confused because they do not know what to believe. In addition, they do not wish to intervene in something so personal.

[Carnes, 1604-1607]

As this quote shows, people around the addict often dismiss accusations around the addict because they do not match their experience of the addict's professed morality in the sexual realm. Those who are closest to the addict risk becoming co-addicts, according to Carnes:

By definition, the addict replaces normal human relationships with sexual compulsiveness. Loved ones feel the loss, try to deny it, and become angry, feeling despair and sometimes hope. The coaddicts’ efforts to restore the relationship are not only ineffective, they can intensify and deepen the addictive system for the addict. To compound the tragedy, coaddicts will take actions which are self-destructive, degrading, or even profound violations of their own values. Family members, as coaddicts, become part of the problem. Hence, the prefix co-.

[Carnes, 1640-1644]

 I highly recommend Carnes' books as a good foundation for understanding this addiction - he is a recovering sex addict so he knows the terrain. More importantly, however, we can learn a LOT by talking with porn addicts and sex addicts who are will to share their stories so that others might understand their experience.

Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. - A Radical Way to Break Free from Automatic Negative Thoughts

In this article from Psych Central, Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D., looks at some ways to break free from negative thinking - what I might call non-adaptive parts - through reframing our perspective on those voices/thoughts (they originally existed to help us in some way).

All of us have these negative thoughts/voices - and the more trauma we have experienced, or the more neglect as children (physical or emotional), the more negative and destructive these thoughts can be, including compulsive self-hate, cutting, or even suicide.

The key to working with these parts of ourselves, rather than stuff them down or drowning them in sex or drugs/alcohol, is to try to approach them with calmness, curiosity, clarity, compassion, confidence, creativity, courage, and connectedness - when we can do that, we are coming from our Self, our Buddhanature, or our soul (the IFS model calls it Self Leadership, but it is whatever you conceive it to be). That is where the healing comes from.

If you are struggling with these thoughts and think you might need help, you probably do need help. You can find a therapist in your area through GoodTherapy.org and/or Psychology Today, or you can seek an Internal Family Systems therapist - they are trained specifically to work with parts.

~ Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in private practice in West Los Angeles and is author of the just-released book The Now Effect: How this Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life, co-author of A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, with a Foreword by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and the author of several other apps, audio series, and training programs. You can join the Elisha Goldstein Facebook Community to keep up with important information, tips, and events.

A Radical Way to Break Free from Automatic Negative Thoughts

By Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D.

 

I often write about the demanding and criticizing voices in our heads because they are so amazingly prevalent and I figure just about anyone can identify with that and almost all of us need support with them. Every day these voices arise out of habit, telling us “I can’t do that right,” “I’m never going to achieve that,” or “I’m not good enough.”

More often than not we indulge and get overwhelmed by these limiting beliefs or as Thich Nhat Hanh says,” we water the seeds of our own suffering.” The end result is we end up hating ourselves. But what if these voices were trying to help us in some way?

That may sound crazy, but really, consider it for a moment. What if these negative and limiting voices were looking after our best interest?

Many of us have past wounds in our lives, whether it was parent seeming too busy to pay attention to us or losing someone early in life, or being the victim of assault. Voices start arising inside us to help us maintain some control over our environments to keep us safe from being wounded again. These voices may judge us or others so we don’t get too close and run the risk the danger of either losing them or being hurt by them.

Or maybe the voices just criticize us so we don’t have to face the discomfort inside and spend all of our time taking care of other people. Although at the end of the day, these voices aren’t effective in maintaining a life of health and well-being, they can be viewed as really trying to help.

The moment we can see these voices for what they are is a moment of clarity where we step into the choice to relate to them differently with greater mindfulness. This space of choice is called The Now Effect and it gives us immense mental and emotional freedom. The end result is that we can learn to be more kind and caring to ourselves instead of damning and hating.

So, rather than damning and hating these voices that keep us down, we can learn to be a bit kinder to them, acknowledging their presence, and then choosing a different path. For example, if the voice arises “you’re not good enough, don’t even try it,” try and notice it and see it as a part of you that is simply trying to keep you safe from a past wounding experience.

Whether the negative voices come to you in relationship to abilities at work, parenting, traveling, procrastinating or issues with stress, anxiety, depression, addiction or trauma, you can acknowledge and view this wound coming to life and rather than entertaining it, thank it for trying to keep you safe and rather than cursing it, see if you can acknowledge the pain.

In that space of awareness you can get perspective, telling yourself that you know this is a difficult task, but that was then and this is now and you’re going to give it a shot anyway.

Easier said than done, but in practicing and understanding that even our damning voices have the intentions of keeping us safe, we can begin to “water the seeds of happiness” by breaking the habitual cycle of sending hate into ourselves and instead sending compassion and care.

See if you can put the Now Effect to work for you and notice how past wounding in your life may be sending you messages that keep you from getting too close to others or risking success to keep you safe from harm. When they arise, thank them for trying to keep you safe. Notice what a difference this can make than struggling with the messages.

As always, please share your thoughts and comments below, you additions here provide a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

***Announcement – The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life hit bookshelves Tuesday, February 21st 2012. Order your copy now.

NPR - To 'Hell And Back,' With A Marine And His Wife

I listened to this earlier in the week and thought it was very revealing about how so many of the soldiers coming back from Iraq and especially Afghanistan are struggling with life back home. Sounds like a good film that might be a little hard to watch.

To 'Hell And Back,' With A Marine And His Wife

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The documentary Hell and Back Again follows U.S. Marine Sgt. Nathan Harris and his wife, Ashley, as the two grapple with the physical and emotional fallout of his injuries in Afghanistan.

October 18, 2011

One Marine had been killed. A dozen had collapsed from heat exhaustion. It was 130 degrees, and their supplies of water were running out.

"That's when Sgt. Nathan Harris handed me his last bottle of water," says Danfung Dennis, a filmmaker and acclaimed combat photographer. "We first met on Machine Gun Hill."

From The Film

'How You Doin' Ma'am?'

'I Just Love My Pistol'

'That's Where It Hurts'

'He Gets So Mad'

With two deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt, the 25-year-old Harris was "an exceptional leader," Dennis tells NPR's Renee Montagne — the Marine chosen to be first off the chopper in an assault on a Taliban stronghold that would become a brutal firefight. "'He was this courageous platoon leader who was at the tip of the spear of this entire battle."

Six months later, watching a contingent of returning Marines step off the buses in North Carolina for a reunion with their families, Dennis realized that Nathan Harris wasn't among them. He'd been hit two weeks before — shot in the hip by a Taliban machine-gun round. He had nearly bled to death.

"He was in extreme pain and distress," Dennis recalls, "and feeling very guilty for having left his men behind."

Harris' agonized struggle to transition back into a society that didn't much understand what he'd been through became the focus of Dennis' documentary Hell and Back Again, which won a World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Daily stresses that get under everyone's skin — paying bills, finding parking at a Walmart — proved overwhelmingly distracting for Harris.

"It makes me want to lose my frickin' mind," Harris says in the film. "It's just like, 'My God, I would rather be in Afghanistan, where it's simple.' When you come home, it's almost more difficult than doing that stuff."

EnlargeDanfung Dennis/Docurama Films

Lingering pain from a gunshot wound to the hip is just one of the hurdles facing Harris as he tries to re-acclimate to life stateside.

Simple? In a sense.

"Back in Afghanistan, it's simply walking, fighting and do it again the next day," Dennis explains.

But not uncomplicated. Embedded with Harris' unit, Dennis went through multiple combat engagements with the Marines. His camera captures the chaos of battle up close — dirt sprays the lens when a rocket-propelled grenade detonates nearby, and the day darkens when an IED explodes, enveloping the unit in dust and uncertainty.

"When you're exposed to that much violence and that much trauma, it's a very natural response for your body to go into this emotionally numb state," Dennis says. "You have to. When you get home, that's when it comes back — and so I'm trying to blend these two worlds, Afghanistan and North Carolina, and seamlessly create one experience to show that the fighting doesn't stop when you get back."

To create that "one experience," Dennis overlays footage from Harris' daily life in North Carolina with audio from battles the two went through in southern Afghanistan. In one scene, Harris' wife orders corn dogs and fries from a fast-food drive-through, as the roar of jet engines, the beat of helicopter blades and the chap-chap-chap of machine-gun fire slowly drowns her out.

EnlargeJoe Raedle/via Docurama Films

Director Danfung Dennis (bottom left) shot Hell and Back Again in part while embedded with Harris' unit — Echo Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.

Those scenes aren't literal depictions of what was going through Harris' mind in those moments. They're more impressionistic.

"Sgt. Harris and I never sat down and looked at the footage I was shooting," Dennis says. "He just had to trust me to tell his story. And so I think I brought in a lot of my own personal experiences of what it was like to come home from war — of how that war stays with you, the things that you've seen stay with you. And they change you."

Much of the film is literal, though — a chronicle of how the war changed Harris. In a pharmacy, picking up her husband's powerful medications, Ashley Harris speaks of the stranger she sometimes sees behind Nathan's eyes.

"He gets so mad, he turns into a different person almost. ... It's like I don't even see my husband; it was almost like someone had taken over him," she says.

Wounded though he may be, Nathan Harris is still an active-duty Marine, part of the Wounded Warriors Regiment at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Dennis says he wants to go back to the battle — "he wants to be a leader of men."

It's unlikely to happen, and Harris eventually realizes that. "So Ashley, in one way, is relieved," Dennis says. "But at the same time, I think they both wonder, what is he going to do? Nothing really seems to have the same sort of purpose or meaning once you've been over there. And so he's sort of in this transition still, two years later, [discovering] what it means to come home from war where there isn't a clear spot for you to land."

Documentary Series - Gangland

I've seen many of these episodes, but nowhere near all of them, 31 hours worth of the documentary series from The History Channel, Gangland.

From a Self Psychology perspective, these young men are seriously wounded (developmentally) and are acting out their narcissistic rage to prevent themselves from feeling the pain of their wounding. Here is how Heinz Kohut viewed it (from Wikipedia):

Such narcissistic rage "cannot progress to self-assertiveness because it is the self structure that is enfeebled and vulnerable."[24] Weakness in the self structure leads to the "development of anarcissistic vulnerability: increased sensitivity to disappointments and extreme difficulty in dealing with real or imagined slights and failures. Narcissistic injury follows such experiences and culminates in narcissistic rage."[25]

And . . . .

Kohut's explanation of narcissistic rage and depression stated, "depressions are interrupted by rages because things are not going their way, because responses are not forthcoming in the way they expected and needed." He went further to say that narcissists may even search for conflict to find a way to alleviate pain or suffering in his book The Analysis of the Self.[26]

Narcissistic rage is related to narcissist's need for total control of their environment; according to Kohut includes "the need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means".[27] It is an attempt by the narcissist to turn from a passive sense of victimization to an active role in giving pain to others, while at the same time attempting to rebuild their own (actually false) sense of self-worth. It may also involve self-protection and preservation, with rage serving to restore a sense of safety and power by destroying that which had threatened the narcissist.[27]

Alternatively, according to Kohut, rages can be seen as a result of the shame at being faced with failure.[28] Narcissistic rage is the uncontrollable and unexpected anger that results from a narcissistic injury - a threat to a narcissist's self-esteem or worth. Rage comes in many forms, but all pertain to the same important thing, revenge. Narcissistic rages are based on fear and will endure even after the threat is gone.[29]

To the narcissist, the rage is directed towards the person that they feel has slighted them; to other people, the rage is incoherent and unjust. This rage impairs their cognition, therefore impairing theirjudgment. During the rage they are prone to shouting, fact distortion and making groundless accusations.[29]

Imagine how different these boys'/men's lives would be if someone recognized the horrible wounding and fear/shame that causes them to act out this way? How many fewer men might we have in prison as a result of their gang activities if they found what they needed earlier and never had to join a gang? How many more boys would grow up with fathers is their fathers were not in prison? Or dead? 

Gangland

Gangland is a gritty, true-life documentary series exposing the world of history’s most notorious and dangerous gangs.

The Gangland series tells the insider story and we learn how the gangs shaped their times and affected the neighborhoods that they controlled.

From the destruction wrought by the heroin kingpins in Harlem of the 1970s to today’s most dangerous gang MS-13, which has spread out from the inner city to infect unexpected turf – suburban communities-gangs have a rich yet deadly history.

They usually start out as a form of protection for their members and community but then grow predatory as they feed on the very people that they purport to defend.

With exclusive interviews and rarely seen footage, this is a raw look at life inside these gangs-from those who live it and the agencies that are working to stop them.

Watch the full documentary now (playlist – 31 hours)

Robert Augustus Masters - Birthing the Man

This article came up a week or so ago - I meant to post it then, but life has been a little hectic of late and the tab simply got lost in a sea of open tabs that I wanted to post about.

But this is important stuff, and it's related in part to the session Owen Marcus and I did for the Ultimate Men's Summit (you can still register for free and download all of the talks - 10 days worth, including a talk by Robert) - how men can be adults, fully masculine and mature.

In my experience, being too strongly identified with either the masculine energy or the feminine energy leads to imbalance and loss of integrity. We need to hold those energies lightly, without attachment, and allow their fluidity to ebb and flow as needed.

For example - when I am in the gym working out, I tap as much as possible into what the mythopoetic menfolk would call warrior energy, but even then it's more samurai than gladiator - there is mindfulness. But when I go to see clients for therapy, there is much more softness, openness, and communion. When I am writing and editing, it's a more balanced mix.

More and more I am beginning to think that the goal should be to embody a healthy human being, but in order to get there, we often have to heal our gender wounds - it is this last piece that I think Robert is addressing here.

He offers a set of polarities between the traditional masculine identity (tough guy, jerk, unfeeling) and the sensitive New Age guy (wimp, limp, nice guy). We need to work the Buddha's Middle Way and forge a new path for men.

Birthing the Man

June 14th, 2011 | By Robert Augustus Masters

Some men, recoiling from hardness, get stuck in softness and hypertolerance, drawing their soft-shelled carapace ever inward, ever tighter, squeezing the power out of their breath and the heat out of their anger and the meat out of their lust, trading in their power for approval and security, chronically caving in to prove their harmlessness, confusing surrender with collapse and emotional flatness with equanimity.

Now and then they lightly potshot raw male power, smudging and scorning its lyrics, fleeing its muscular intensity and no-bullshit solidity, scrambling to please yet another surrogate of their childhood’s dominant parent, reducing themselves to not much more than psychologically sophisticated beggars for his or her multi-headed applause, little men to the end, their tears falling in deserted rooms.

In the vacuum often left by their fathers, the backslapping absence or sleepy hollow or dressed-up desolation or shaming blows or emotional constipation, the sloppy anger, the cement swirl of misguided challenge and disconnected care, the ethical sewage of buried shame, the slaps of far-from-fatherly touch… In that achingly crushed vacuum, that vacuum crowded with loneliness, that emptiness battle-numbed and flattened and silently weeping, such men ricochet rootless and anxious, bouncing around between a surplus of shoulds, castrating most of their passion and force, bottling the pain, sterilizing the screams, and storing the rest, leaving it in shadowed display in the secret museum of their gelded remains.

Fleeing their full maleness, they dwell in highrises of mind, worldly or otherworldly, greening their deserts of abstraction and self-contraction with oases of handy flesh, copulating with mirages of femininity, repeatedly sacrificing their anorexic inner warrior on cleancut toxically reasonable altars, offering his heart and belly to their deified fear while they march for peace, secretly designing and refining new weapons for their inner war, crushing their instinct to pass through a saner door, leaving their love puddling in lukewarm corridors.

Other men, hiding in the foxholes of their maleness, vacate their vulnerability and softness, paving the wasteland of their anesthetized torso, keeping a hotline open between brain and groin, a pornographic hookup of scantily-clad taboos and rising heat, their chest, inflated or deflated, a no-man’s-land, their belly, flat or bloated, a meatiness of misaligned power, their jaw and loins obsessed with thrust, their flesh burdened by decades of split-level lust and a great subterranean sadness.

Talking too loudly as they race up and down the freeways of diseased boyhood, going nowhere fast, they allow their inner warrior to be exploited, to be reduced to little more than a fighting and fucking machine, an obsessive doer impaled on consistency, a square-shouldered puppet of industrial strength shoulds, self-sentenced to solitary, isolated even in womanly embrace, too lost to lose face.

They rationalize their self-mutilation, their self-rejection, their doing time in the troughs of unnatural selection, plastering siliconed pinups on their spiritual oblivion, turning away from the enemy’s child even as they turn away from their own softness and innocence, running from the boy they once were, the broken boy still loitering in a toughened loneliness, emptied of himself, already hardened for the next command, steeling himself against feeling, against revealing and healing, thinking and shrinking himself into a logic of heartless survival and pleasurable distraction, trusting only his mistrust.

It is between these, between the overly soft and the too hard, the wimp and the bully, the strategically sensitive and the reasonably numb, the de-scrotumed and the pathologically penile, the bored room and the savage space, the terminally nice and the violent, the limp and the stiff, the gentleman and the tough, the nice guy and the jerk, that so many of us rise and stand, trying to anchor ourselves in a saner, more loving land, a place bright with true man, the man at home with all his qualities.

Read the rest of the article.

Tags: men, masculinity, psychology, gender roles, wounding, culture, Robert Augustus Masters, Birthing the Man, maturity, balance, overly soft, too hard, wimp, bully, strategically sensitive, reasonably numb, de-scrotumed, pathologically penile, bored room, savage space, terminally nice, violent, limp, stiff, gentleman, tough, nice guy, jerk, polarities

Robert Augustus Masters - Birthing the Man

This month's newsletter from The Masters Center for Transformation features this excellent - incredibly important - article from Robert Augustus Masters. If you are interested in masculinity and personal transformation with a fully integral perspective, Robert Masters is the ONLY person doing this work.

Here are two small section from the larger article - follow the link - two paragraphs from the beginning and a few from the middle section. Be sure to read the whole article - it's crucial that men begin to see their position in relation to themselves, their fathers, and the cultural definitions that imprison them.

Birthing the Man

January 24th, 2011 | By Robert Augustus Masters

Some men, recoiling from hardness, get stuck in softness and hypertolerance, drawing their soft-shelled carapace ever inward, ever tighter, squeezing the power out of their breath and the heat out of their anger and the meat out of their lust, trading in their power for approval and security, chronically caving in to prove their harmlessness, confusing surrender with collapse and emotional flatness with equanimity.

Now and then they lightly potshot raw male power, smudging and scorning its lyrics, fleeing its muscular intensity and no-bullshit solidity, scrambling to please yet another surrogate of their childhood’s dominant parent, reducing themselves to not much more than psychologically sophisticated beggars for his or her multi-headed applause, little men to the end, their tears falling in deserted rooms.

*****

Some men, determined enough to stop playing buddy to their armor, be it hard or soft, and gutsy enough to unpeel and reveal and fully feel without castrating their power, find a young boy crouched in the dark, the long dark, the orphaned dark, a half-sobbing boy, a boy crushed and bleeding, hammering against the inside of their chest, hammering and hammering with tiny stammering fists, a boy bruised and divided, shoulders sagging, throat and truth far apart, a confused boy with not enough father and too much mother, already either enemy or slave to the Feminine, just like Daddy, but still nevertheless hammering and hammering, screaming to be felt, to be touched, to be known, to be held, to be initiated into the truly Masculine, screaming and screaming, squashed by grownup silence, betrayed by negative associations between vulnerability and weakness, the ignoring of his voice a choice pushing us closer to a deadly edge.

And still the boy calls, calling for the jailer’s love, the man’s love, love plain and simple, love uncluttered by mind, love clear and direct and fresh and goddamn the paternal patter, the embarrassed impotence, the slamming doors and useless explanations, the flat eyes, the resignation, the sagging duty, the congealed cries, and goddamn the plastic sky, no more than the ceiling of Daddy’s hungriest thought, and goddamn the lame acceptance of the knot pulled so tight between sternum and spine, shutting out the boy’s calling, muting his message, his eyes clouded with smothered longing, his heart dropping between his ragged knees, his choice seemingly but to fight, flee, or freeze.

Men and men and men, do you not see the loveless shoulds so often framing your name, oozing with deadening collusion, well-dressed confusion, and slaveships of invasive expectations? Do you not sense the secondhand scent, the perfumed rot of romantic delusion, the ads of drive-through titillation, the addiction to making it big? Do you not feel the frozen or jellied jaw, the slitted or mind-fitted glance, the classroom drugging of upstart cries, the got-it-together disguise, the emotional hard-on? Or the haloed wimphood, the limping passion, the glorified sensitivity, the righteous flight from anger and lust, flashing a spiritual smile? Do you not long for more substance and less style, and to cease the denial, and to cut loose the shoulds that keep you on trial?

Men and men and men, do you not feel the unhealed hurt beneath your data-jammed mind, and do you do not feel the fear to openly confess what you’re really doing, and do you not feel the innocence you will not bless, the pain of pretending that father knows best, the price of pretending that you are not pretending, the heartbreak that cries out for more than a superficial mending?

Tags: masculinity, men, psychology, inner child, wounding, personal growth, Birthing the Man, Robert Augustus Masters, Masters Center for Transformation, Integral psychology, fathers, men's work