If we focus only on acceptance and immediacy, we may ignore historically conditioned patterns that are causing harm to ourselves and others. I’ve worked with a number of spiritual practitioners who are able to generate very spacious states of mind but who avoid dealing with basic human concerns like work and relationship.
Reminds me of Freud’s “love and work” as the fundamentals of mental health.
As children, we were basically powerless in the face of the adults around us. We couldn’t simply leave and navigate the world by ourselves. And, our parents had their own issues, issues that came across in their relationships with us. [...] his parents rewarded him disproportionately for demonstrating his independence.
This is called “racket” in transactional analysis. The idea is that as children we need our parents’ attention, but our parents may be selective about our emotional expression; reward some of them with their attention, and ignore the others. To get more attention we learn to convert the unrewarded emotions to the rewarded ones. And the habit often stays long after we stop being dependent on our parents, because we are not consciously aware that this is what we are doing.
For example, as a child I was often ignored or rebuked when I expressed happiness, but received compassion when I expressed sadness. So I learned to convert happiness into sadness… for example, by finding some flaw that ruined what otherwise could have been a fully positive experience, and then making that flaw the central point of the story—that made it a story that I could share with my parents and feel accepted. Nothing is perfect, so one can always find a flaw, but of course this habit reduced the amount of joy I felt in my life, and probably made me a less enjoyable person to be around.
It might seem that happiness shouldn’t be a problem in this sense. Why should it matter if people important to me do not reward my happiness with their attention; happiness is already its own reward, shouldn’t that be enough to reinforce it? -- The problem was that my parents judged my expressions of happiness as “silly”, and I have unconsciously accepted that judgement. So it took some courage to learn to enjoy the “silly” feelings.
Reminds me of Freud’s “love and work” as the fundamentals of mental health.
This is called “racket” in transactional analysis. The idea is that as children we need our parents’ attention, but our parents may be selective about our emotional expression; reward some of them with their attention, and ignore the others. To get more attention we learn to convert the unrewarded emotions to the rewarded ones. And the habit often stays long after we stop being dependent on our parents, because we are not consciously aware that this is what we are doing.
For example, as a child I was often ignored or rebuked when I expressed happiness, but received compassion when I expressed sadness. So I learned to convert happiness into sadness… for example, by finding some flaw that ruined what otherwise could have been a fully positive experience, and then making that flaw the central point of the story—that made it a story that I could share with my parents and feel accepted. Nothing is perfect, so one can always find a flaw, but of course this habit reduced the amount of joy I felt in my life, and probably made me a less enjoyable person to be around.
It might seem that happiness shouldn’t be a problem in this sense. Why should it matter if people important to me do not reward my happiness with their attention; happiness is already its own reward, shouldn’t that be enough to reinforce it? -- The problem was that my parents judged my expressions of happiness as “silly”, and I have unconsciously accepted that judgement. So it took some courage to learn to enjoy the “silly” feelings.