If I think about it, I have indeed really lived. Curiously, I don\u2019t often feel this way. Indeed, I have a mild neurotic complex that suggests gently in feeling tones that I haven\u2019t. Thank goodness, it\u2019s very mild: I\u2019m pretty well balanced; but I\u2019m cleaning up mild complexes. It never ends, you know. <\/p>\n
At times I become interested in my life and all I\u2019ve done, but I think that to some degree I\u2019m compensating for a lack of really deeply feeling that indeed I have done anything. Now that\u2019s neurotic: What\u2019s it about? Allee noted that I have indeed led a very varied and eventful life and I recognized that I realize this only intellectually, and with reminders.<\/p>\n
I think I have a lack of vividness in feeling my own life. It\u2019s called \u201cego-feeling\u201d in psycho-analytic terminology. It is sort of a deferential attitude, more uncertainty than submissiveness. I have a mild tendency to be unsure of even that which, if I consciously think about it, is relatively certain. I am sure of what is am very sure of, but my lack of certainty leads to a modest over-sensitivity. Few see this because I do several seemingly confident things, such as teaching classes. But push come to shove, such as in local or national politics in organizations, I tend to defer.<\/p>\n
I think this is partly temperamental and partly family of origin, the result of being disqualified. My parents seemed very sure of themselves, while I was not so sure. They had no restraint about telling me what I should be feeling, and I went along, distrusting what I was in fact feeling. I replicated this in my first marriage, choosing someone who seemed sure of herself. She was great in some ways, but this factor was not constructive.<\/p>\n
Allee noted that this is a very mild variant of the Stockholm Syndrome\u2014that the individual loses contact with their own truth. Many people who have been dominated have this, and it makes them more easily manipulated. It happens with people who are sexually or physically abused\u2014 and they are fiercely loyal to their abusers. In mild cases, such as mine, the fairly mild mental and emotional abuse was sufficient, combined with my temperament, to make me rather uncertain of my own feelings. <\/p>\n
What\u2019s intriguing is that only now can I see that however mild the dynamic, it did affect my confidence. It set me up for a first marriage where I idealized a wife who was ambivalent to me; she treated me better than my mother in many ways, it seemed. I don\u2019t have this problem with my second wife, but my tendencies to disqualify myself, to be perhaps a bit too humble in some ways, seems to be something that I\u2019ve become aware of and am realigning.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve had a local community magazine article about me and it praised me, but didn\u2019t mention my failures on the way to becoming successful. (Well, that wasn\u2019t on the table.) But truth is that I\u2019ve stumbled many times and have spent many years learning life lessons. These were not mentioned in the article, but I have noticed that in some ways, those are also the truth of my life. So much for some self-analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If I think about it, I have indeed really lived. Curiously, I don\u2019t often feel this way. Indeed, I have a mild neurotic complex that suggests gently in feeling tones that I haven\u2019t. Thank goodness, it\u2019s very mild: I\u2019m pretty well balanced; but I\u2019m cleaning up mild complexes. It never ends, you know. At times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiographical","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2162"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2163,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2162\/revisions\/2163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}