This speaks directly to what I am calling the “original invalidation,” (Malecek, 2010), in which, induced by traumatic experience of any sort (sexual, physical, emotional), one first begins to feels ashamed and less-than. One begins to experience a sense of separation and diminishment from one’s self. This usually occurs (always?) at an early enough age that one has previously been identified with one’s body as the self. Therefore one’s sense of well being, confidence, and joy are automatically shattered and decreased radically. It is the direct result of traumatically mediated damage and injury to the boundaries of an individual. One feels significantly diminished in the shaming eyes of another, “an other” who is powerful and seemingly (even actually) necessary to for the maintenance of one’s continued beingness (father, mother, etc).
This depreciation is then internalized (introjected) and becomes a quasi-truth; is internalized in such a way that one begins to operate as if it were true. One begins to see oneself in the manner in which one has been seen as diminished by the significant other – as less-than, as damaged, as only worthy or valuable if one is being a sexual object or punching bag. One then begins to feel the fullness of this, and acting as if it were true, one begins then to treat oneself in a similar, less-than manner.
This might happen in any number of ways, depending in part upon environmental influences and role-modeling – overeating, cutting – self-harming behaviors of all sorts. It marks a significant turning point in one’s psychosocial and psychosexual development. It is the loss of the innocence one usually associates with the beauty and joy of children.
It is also a tool of the corrupted patriarchy, the corrupted social system in which one lives. It is as a direct result of this diminishment of self-esteem that an individual develops all of what might be called the “social neuroses” of our times, addictions of all sorts, including the incessant, driving desire to acquire money and material accoutrements. Addiction has rightly been called slavery. It is enchainment to ideas and behaviors that would otherwise be repulsive to the individual were such a one in an uncontaminated mindset, based on the belief that one deserves whatever harm befalls one. One begins to believe in one’s own damage and the propriety of it. One begins to believe in the apparent rightness of being punished, and acts as if it were proper. This is the beginning of “self-perpetration” or the internalization of the oppressor as an introject (or internal object, as if it had an actual physical presence).
With some notable exceptions, almost everyone is socialized to meet the needs of their immediate family and the extant (dominant) society. Thus the idea and process of socialization is a form of conditioning, albeit done usually in a rather repetitive, unconscious manner that induces in children the desired state of quickly becoming “good little adults,” who are easily recognizable by those others who have already attained adult status. There is rarely, if ever, any real thought given to what the innate needs of the child might be. Rather, the goal orientation of the dominant figure is imposed upon the child as being for the child’s own good.
Of course this is related to the one-lifetime-only orientation of both psychology and religion. Adults usually have no sense of the possibility of there being multiple lifetimes. Therefore the innate soulfullness and spiritual status of the newly arriving being is not considered because the soul of that individual is considered to be “tabula rasa,” first mentioned by Aristotle (as cited in Aristotle, 1936) who wrote of the “unscribed tablet” in what is probably the first textbook of psychology (De Anima or On the Soul, Book III, chapter 4).
This concept refers to the idea of a newborn child as having a blank slate upon which the existing world will inscribe whatever knowledge and information that being may need, or even ever need to know. The implication is seriously simplistic, reductionistic, and naïve in the extreme. It leaves no room for the concept of soul, or the reincarnation thereof. (I will treat the interrelationships between Buddhism and psychology later in this book). It is obviously to the benefit of the controllers of current society (the “cultural elites”) who are usually bankers and financiers, to be able to control the working ideology of the masses. What better way than by engineering a mechanistic socialization by which all that must be honored or obeyed is induced in children from the moment of birth (to include laws, education, and economic orientation) and followed to the grave?
Parents who are obedient to laws, religious concepts, etc., cannot help but to reproduce the same in their children – barring that occasional aberrant one that actually survives a traumatic childhood with the ability to think beyond the box, to reason for oneself, to actually feel the import of oppression and throw off the yoke.
In many ways the essential structure of modern society was set up approximately 350 years ago when the British Empire created a colonial structure and began spreading its insidious tentacles across the globe. Although Turkish traders had introduced opium to China as early as the 6th or 7th century, it was in very limited quantities until the British founded the international opium trade. This led to a series of wars called the Opium Wars (1839 -1842 and 1856 –1860), after which China not only lost Hong Kong, but her ability to control the importation of opium by the British.
The essentially sociopathic nature of modern corporations worldwide is easy to explain when one remembers it originated in the needs of professional opium traffickers, viz, the British East India Company under Clive. To see it as anything other than the expression of a criminal mind-set is catastrophically naïve. They grew it in India and shipped it to China under armed escort until twenty million Chinese were addicted…By the nineteenth century, the entire British Empire would have gone bankrupt without the narcotic. The French were similarly active in Indochina, the Dutch sold anything to anyone, the Germans tried to catch up while the Americans stuck mostly to slavery. What do these countries have in common? Only this: that through narcotics trafficking and trading in slaves they were able to invest in heavy industry that put them two hundred years ahead of the field (Burdett, 2010, p. 192).
Thank you.
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