Sublime

responsibility that he experienced as burdensome and enervating. A baby is supposed to be selfish and cared for, something that these men were too guilty to allow themselves to feel as children or adults. Additionally, the fantasy of breast-feeding was arousing because it disconfirmed the man’s pathogenic belief that women didn’t—and couldn’t—want

This process is a reversal of the order of nature. Now the child is taking care of the parents’ needs, rather than the parents taking care of the child’s needs. This caregiver role is strangely paradoxical. In an attempt to secure parental love and avoid being abandoned, the child is in fact being abandoned. Since the child is there for the parent,

It is always easier to deal with the other gender's problems and put all of your shadow projections on the other gender. That is what the Oedipal concept is about.

"The need for protective love has a certain validity for the child, but if this attitude is maintained into adulthood, it is no longer valid. Since he does not cultivate the faculty of self-responsibility and independence, his need for love and his dependency can actually make the person helpless. He uses his entire psychic strength in order to

A MEM is typically not individuated, because he is enmeshed with his mother. His identity has been lost in serving her needs.

It is not your mother who holds dominion over your adult life, but the ideology that proclaims that each of us has been determined in the first hours after birth, or during birth itself, the ideology that proclaims a series of tiny causes and accumulating effects lead to how you are today and how you will affect your own children. You are the

These conclusions, based on unhappy childhood and adolescent experiences, went into the unconscious and became the lens through which they viewed sexuality and which then conditioned what they experienced.

Therapy promotes the great delusion of insight. It preaches and practices the blindness of Oedipus. He asked questions about who he really was, as if you could find the true acorn of your being by self-questioning reflection.13 This therapeutic fallacy builds upon another: that the acorn is out of sight, hidden, squirreled away in childhood,

Our experience shows that the codependent rupture, which creates an outward focus to gain love or affirmation, is created by a dysfunctional childhood. It is the same rupture among adult children of all family types. This soul rupture is the abandonment by our parents or caregivers. The abandonment sets us up for a life of looking outward for love