Anger at parents

While reading Mark Epstein’s Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught (which I reviewed here), I came across the following passage:

If people have never felt loved or accepted by their parents, for example, they will be much more likely to find themselves in intimate relationships in which they continue to feel unloved. Then they try extra hard to make themselves lovable while continuing to feel there is something wrong with them.

This struck rather close to home. Epstein argues that a proper understanding of renunciation is helpful in such circumstances:

By voluntarily forsaking compulsive patterns of thought and behaviour, where there are ongoing but futile attempts to get unmet needs satisfied, it is possible to open up other pathways that prove more fulfilling … Renunciation can be the missing ingredient when patterns like these predominate. It takes force of will to create circumstances in which something new can happen.

Which certainly accords with my own experience.

Epstein then goes on to discuss Tibetan lamas reporting being surprised at how much anger at parents their Western followers express. This is Epstein’s explanation to a Tibetan lama of this pattern.

Western parents don’t feel that their children already are who they are—they feel it is their job to make them who they should be. They treat their children more as objects than as individuals who already are themselves. Children feel this as a burden … A pressure. And they develop armour to guard against it. Their anger is a reflection of that armour … All the energy is going into the resistance … But inside, the child feels empty. They don’t know who they are or what they want. They can’t feel their own desire, they know only anger. The anger that comes from being treated as an object … A child creates a false self to deal with excessive expectations or with early abandonment: too much parental pressure—or too little … there is not enough holding, not just physical holding , but emotional holding too.

Which very much fits with my own experience. Epstein continues:

The problem with this scenario … is that the child often loses touch with who they are on the inside. After a while, they know only the armour, the anger, fear or emptiness. They have a yearning to be known, found or discovered, but no means to make it happen, not trust that is can happen.

Which also very much fits with my own experience (aggravated by having the “wrong” sexuality). One of the lamas responds:

Parents seem to see raising their children only as a duty or a job. When the child is grown they just let go. They are finished. They’ve done their job, fulfilled their obligations. The child feels cut off—they need that thread.

Back in the main narrative, Epstein continues:

Parents sometimes feel that their only purpose is to help their children separate and individuate, but they think about it in objective terms, as another thing to accomplish. Once it has happened, such parents feel useless or obsolete. Often they divorce as soon as the child leaves for college, throwing the children into crisis just as they are needing to move more deeply into themselves.

Various people may feel this scenario is familiar.

Epstein continues:

Compounding the problem is the inevitable estrangement of adolescence , when the first stirrings of grown-up anger make themselves known. Many parents never recover from these upheavals. Their emotional connections with their offspring are so tenuous that when the first expressions of disdain are hurled at them, they retreat forever. Hurt by their children’s anger, they feel ignored and unappreciated, not understanding that the child, in addition to wanting to be known by the parents, also wants to know them in a real way.

Epstein suggests that meditative retreats:

… tended to put people in a place where they could not avoid how much unfinished business they had. Treated as objects by their well-meaning parents, they were still struggling for subjecthood, but their own tendencies to their parents as “bad objects” were holding them back from their goals … By relinquishing their attachment to achieving this milestone, they could learn from how not to make the same mistake. They could stop treating their parents as bad objects, and begin to explore themselves as subjects: breaking down the false self that obscured the light within.

Very enlightening.

The Wisdom of Desire

One of the long-term blocks for me against Buddhist thought was that I was not interested in renouncing desire, which always seemed too much like renouncing one’s humanity. But that, as therapist Mark Epstein shows in Open to Desire: the Truth about what Buddha Taught, his latest rendering of the insights of Buddhist psychology for Western audiences, is not an accurate rendition of Buddha’s teaching.

Buddha renounced asceticism. The question is far more how to think of desire and how to experience it. Words (and thoughts) are abstractions, simplifications from reality. Thus, Zen Buddhism talks about mind-to-mind transmission of Buddha’s understanding from master-to-master, outside of the limitations of words and thoughts. Hence the story of Buddha holding up a flower, all his monks looking puzzled except for one (Kasyapa) who smiled and to whom Buddha then announced the passing of dharma.

Thus also the collision between the purity of desire and the messiness of reality. To put it another way, the (misleading) simplicity of desire and the (actual) complexity of reality. Do we focus on the desire and what it provides and teaches, or the satisfaction, with all its potential to fall short of our “pure” imaginings?
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Epstein is interested in the ‘left-handed path’, most notoriously expressed by Tantric ideas (which are a strong part of the Buddhist tradition, particularly in Tibetan Buddhism), which accept that, in Epstein’s words:

There is a drive for transcendence that is implicit even in the most sensual of desires.

Basic to Buddha’s teaching is that there is no “self” over and above the thinking and experiencing person. So, Epstein argues:

When desire is not denied or suppressed, but instead allowed to grow in the light of there being no ultimately satisfying self or object, a tremendous development of inner life is possible.

Epstein divides the book into four sections—one on desire, one on desiring going wrong, one on how to let go of such “clinging” and the final part on how to get the most out of desire rather than being used by it.

Desire comes from incompleteness so, in Epstein’s words:

... it is a natural reaction to the human predicament … In searching outside of ourselves for wholeness, however, we set ourselves up for clinging.

To give the object of desire (person or thing or whatever) more reality (that is more psychic power) than they actually have.

Epstein connects the idea of hungry ghosts—beings always seeking nourishment that they are not equipped to digest—with transference—the experiencing of the traumas of old, unfinished, relationships in new ones: which, of course, they cannot satisfy or deal with (particularly if one is unconscious of the source of the behaviour). Thus, were renunciation comes out of self-awareness, the effect is not to dampen desire but to liberate it. It becomes itself, rather than what it cannot be or do. I was, as I have already posted, particularly struck by this in connection with interactions between parents and children and the consequences thereof.

By living in the moment as it is, rather than as it can imagined to become or be a substitute for, we get far more out of desire. Modern psychology of happiness suggests that no-mind is the way to happiness. It is also the best way to learn new physical skills.

Epstein suggests it is dangerous both to think of emotions as not being part of us—repressing them—but also to think of them as us—surrendering to them, as if there is nothing more to us.

Epstein provokes thought and understanding. He points out that Buddhism (alone of the great evangelical religions) did not spread by conquest. Buddhism also co-habits with other religions much more readily than the other evangelical religions do. Yet, as a friend reminded me in a conversation on MSN™, in Japan, Zen Buddhism became part of a package that (to use his words) generated kill-bots to an extent rivalled only by contemporary Islam (see also my review of Zen at War). All religions have their shadows and misuses.

I have found wrestling with Epstein enormously productive. From simple things like sitting in a waiting room being mind-stilling time rather than mind-agitating time. To much more profound matters, like getting over depression.

It is not a magic wand, one has to work at it. And one can have periods where understanding is blocked and progress is frustrated. That is usually because one is trapped within one’s beliefs and self-image, not willing to step outside it, to stop clinging.

Which can, of course, be quite scary. But it can so easily block oneself off from being open to sense of wholeness, energy, well-being.

Epstein uses Buddhist, Hindu (particularly the Ramayana), ancient Greek, Judaic references interweaved with his cases from therapeutic practice and his own experiences to make his points. This, along with his pellucidly clear proses, creates a sense of openness and connectedness, as if understanding can flow from many places and is open to all.

A very helpful text.

Thoughts Without a Thinker

Some time ago, I was thinking about when was the happiest time in my life, and I realised the happiest time in my life was this time. A lot of things have led to this point, but an important help along the way has been reading (and re-reading) Going to Pieces without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein which I posted about recently.

Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective is an earlier book by Epstein. It is at once more Freudian than the later book (not a good point in my eyes) but also more systematically Buddhist. Indeed, the Buddhism notably improves the Freudian content. The book moves through three parts: (1) Buddha’s psychology of the mind, (2) meditation and (3) therapy. The first part deals with Buddhist taxonomy of the mind, the problems of desire, the false notions of self. The second discusses the benefits of meditation for proper understanding. The third explains how Buddhist notions give an end-point to therapy that the psychoanalytical tradition lacks. There are some striking observations about Western mentality and its difficulties.
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Once one achieves a certain level of mindfulness, life becomes very different. (A philosophical blog has a useful post on the difference between mindfulness, metacognition and critical thinking.) No matter how long a road it was to getting there. Looking back, the effect of my own mystical experience in my mid-20s was to give a sense that other ways of feeling were possible. That there was an achievable alternative to how I normally felt, to my damaged self. But it wasn’t even close to a solution in itself. Similarly, the horrible time I had from about 1998 to 2002 had the effect of forcing me to confront and deal with things that, up to then, had merely been an "acceptable" level of psychic poison. Epstein is very good at helping to lose the fear of what one is, so one also loses the fear of what one is not. Thereby becoming comfortable with who one is, rather than barely knowing who one is.

As to the Freudian elements in Thoughts without a Thinker, a friend made the perspicacious observation to me that a parent’s treatment of the child can be a reaction to the child. Thus, a father is likely to be more distant to a gay son (who is different in perhaps unsettling ways) while a mother is likely to be closer to a (gay) son who is more like her than expected. This is a fundamental observation that psychoanalysts managed to miss for decades. Psychoanalysis is not based on careful scientific observation, which is why Freudianism has been dying as our genuine knowledge expands. Though, one of the strengths of Epstein’s book is that he makes it clear Freud was much more open-minded and perspicacious than his later followers (a common difficulty of thinkers and their followers). And, to be fair to Epstein, he very much sees Buddhist pyschology as a way of dealing with gaps in Freudian thinking:

Freud lamented ... that psychoanalysis was unable by itself to produce an ego strong and versatile enough to accomplish his therapeutic goals. By working directly with the metaphorical experience of self, meditation offers a complementary method of ego development, one that fills the gap that Freud was left struggling with (p.155).

Even so, it is noticeable the Freudian elements have definitely retreated as Epstein develops his presentation of psychology with a Buddhist perspective in his various books.

Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

Having spent years suffering high levels of emotional pain, Buddhism was naturally a possible solution. But the typical Western summary of its path as ‘giving up desire’ put me off: to give up desire struck me as to give up being human. Getting rid of emotions (desire) seemed to be just some sort of self-inflicted emotional lobotomy. Not for me.

Actually, that is a poor way to look at Buddhist psychology (and, I suspect, Taoist psychology). The issue is not about having emotions, the issue is what significance you give them. Stilling the mind, sceptically considering the mind’s chattering, allows you to develop the capacity to put all that emotional frothing in a much healthier context. There is what happened to us. Then there is how we react to, and manage, those happenings. You can only achieve emotional balance if you can rise about your emotions, if you can learn to see yourself as the vessel of your emotions, not their prisoner.

While down in the Latrobe Valley a few years ago, I bought at a newsagent in Moe Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness by psychiatrist Mark Epstein. The book is simply about Buddhism-as-psychology – as far as I can see, what it has to say is compatible with any religious tradition. I read it, and then re-read it. It did much to change my perspective and banish my pain: I was suffering an emptiness that I did not see as emptiness but as lack – in my case, a lack of intimate love and the deeper fear that lack was just. This book enabled me to see what I was suffering was emptiness, to embrace that emptiness and to have it no longer cause me pain. I feel whole; I feel more human, not less.
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I am also much calmer, far fewer things irritate me, I laugh more. Situations of stress are much easier to handle. I have a pervasive feeling of triumph and a confidence that there is much more to discover.

Aspects of cognitive therapy have also been helpful – becoming aware of how easy it is to fall into negative feedback mental habits that are merely that – mental habits.

One of the things I like about Epstein’s book, and related works on Buddhist notions of mindfulness, is how it makes one sceptical and aware of one’s own mental patterns. My take is that I am against programming as such: I don’t want ‘better’ programming, I want, in a sense, no programming. Now, of course, you have to have reasoning processes that can be characterised as ‘programming’, but that is more operating means rather than operating instructions.

Reading Epstein’s book meant that Gurdjieff’s notion of the need to fight against sleep, the sleep of what the mind can do but normally doesn’t, made much more sense to me. (More on him here.) Though it seems to me Gurdjieff was fumbling towards much that was already in the Buddhist tradition.

(On Gurdjieff, Colin Wilson’s short biography is a good place to start. Wilson’s Rudolf Steiner: the Man and his Vision is a good antidote against grandiose posturing, and that sense and nonsense can be mixed up in the one person’s thought.)

Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart is a clear, useful text for considering how our thoughts go.