Secret Attachments: Exposing the Roots of Addictions and Compulsions

See Your Way to Self-Esteem: An In-Depth Study of the Causes and Cures of Low Self-Esteem

The Emotional Catering Service: The Quest for Emotional Independence

Freedom From Self-Sabotage: The Intelligent Reader's Guide to Success and Self-Fulfillment

From
Secret Attachments: Exposing the Roots of Addictions and Compulsions
Peter Michaelson (ISBN 1-882631-25-0. 210 pages. $15. Prospect Books Quality Paperback)

Roots of Addictive Behaviors

An addiction to a particular substance or to a behavior is a result of the addict's deeper problem: addictions or attachments to certain negative emotions that are left-over or unresolved from childhood.

Addictive or compulsive individuals are unconsciously attached to unpleasant emotional experiences that fall into three categories.

The first category is involves feelings of deprivation and refusal. This means the individual unconsciously focuses on, and indulges in, feelings of being deprived, denied, refused, drained, not getting, missing out, short-changed, ripped off, never satisfied, and loss.

Bill, a 42-year-old alcoholic, exemplified this problem. He felt his wife never gave him enough sex, even though they had sex almost daily. He believed she did not love him enough, support him enough, nor respond to him the way he wanted. His wife Sally felt drained and frustrated with his insatiable "neediness." Bill didn't know it at the time, but he secretly wanted to feel that Sally was "refusing" him somehow or other. Sally usually went out of her way to try to satisfy him, but this did not really impress him because he was more involved emotionally in experiences of her refusal. He was able to see and feel refusal even in situations where none was intended.

The second category of addictions involves feeling controlled, dominated, forced to go along with the agenda of others, and feeling helpless at the mercy of others or of forces beyond one's control. Addicts are attached to feelings of powerlessness, and that is evident in their feelings of being at the mercy of a substance or behavior.

Lilly, another alcoholic in her fifties, spent her twenty-five years of marriage passively dependent on her dominating husband. She let him make all the decisions and even allowed him to pick out her clothes and tell her what to wear. She felt she could not make a move without his permission. Her drinking was a manifestation of her unconscious willingness to be controlled, dominated, and invalidated by any person, force, or substance she came under the influence of.

Finally, in the third category, some individuals are attached to feelings of rejection, betrayal, criticism, feeling disapproved of, being seen in a negative light, condemned, excluded, and abandoned. They are caught up in feelings of being caught, shamed, and punished.

James, a banker in his thirties, stayed out late drinking heavily at bars. To appease his wife, he made up stories about clients and the necessity of working in the evenings. He flirted with the prospect of getting caught in his lies, which happened regularly, and secretly he played on old feelings from childhood of getting caught doing something "bad" and being shamed. In addition, he experienced his wife's cold withdrawal of affection and her threats of punishment, which had been major dynamics in his relationship with his mother.

The attachments to these feelings are unconscious, and so I refer to them as secret attachments. They are the result of unresolved childhood feelings and experiences with one's parents and siblings that are carried over and transferred onto people or circumstances in an addict's present life. It is the unconscious addiction to these old negative emotions that makes the addict behave so childishly and facilitates his self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors.

To put it another way, addictive personalities unconsciously recreate and recycle old childhood expectations of being deprived, denied, criticized, rejected, and forced to submit in the contexts of their present lives. Since they have not worked out these feelings, they have secret attachments to them which cause these individuals to become repeatedly entangled in experiences that produce these old feelings.

To repeat, these unconscious attachments to such feelings are like emotional addictions. Most addictive personalities are in complete denial of their emotional addictions and yet their denial, in this respect, is sincere. That's because the clever operations of their defenses hide their attachments from their awareness.

These emotional addictions or secret attachments result in a childish, victim mentality that must be transformed before addictive behaviors can be given up for good through the individual's inner growth and transformation.

Abstinence, in my view, is not the final indicator of recovery or transformation. It is only the beginning. Unless we release repressed or unresolved negative emotions, we cannot possibly become self-aware and confident in a way that would preclude the chance of reverting under stress to our old addictive behaviors. . .

It may be emotionally challenging and difficult for many readers to accept and understand how we can become addicted to negative emotions because this process is unconscious and not experienced first-hand. It is hard to see deeply into ourselves because of our psychological defenses and resistance to facing unpleasant truths about ourselves.

Traditional treatment methods say that genes, biochemical imbalances, or "the disease of addiction" are responsible for our failures and limitations. The more we believe this, the more we remain stuck in a victim position, convinced that, "My problem is that I have a disease--it is the disease that controls me." This belief absolves an individual of personal responsibility.

Difficult as it seems, it is the acceptance of individual responsibility for our lives and the recognition of our unconscious emotional attachments that set us free. My system of therapy teaches people that they can manage their lives, and that they don't have to be at the mercy of impulses and desires.

An addictive personality can transform himself by understanding emotionally, not just intellectually, the following principles:

(1) The addict understands that he does have a free will and is responsible for his life and his behavior. He must learn to take personal responsibility for his distressful life circumstances and his emotional reactions to others. He learns to abstain from blaming, rationalizing his behavior, or making other people responsible for his emotional reactions.

(2) The addict learns that taking responsibility means understanding his negative emotions and reactions, and that means defining the deeper feelings that prompt his negative reactions. In other words, why is he feeling angry? What does he believe the other person is doing to him? Where does this feeling come from? He learns to understand the origins of his fears and feelings. He learns why he continues to hold onto them. He asks himself why he is sad and depressed. Rather than repressing his feelings with platitudes, excuses, or magical gestures such as the alleged forgiveness of his "tormentors," he searches for the meaning of his emotions and takes responsibility for them.

(3) The addict learns that most of his present emotional reactions are based on unresolved childhood hurts and grievances with his parents and siblings that he unconsciously transfers onto his present relationships with others, in ways that convince him he is once again being victimized. He learns to correlate these current feelings with his past feelings from childhood and to recognize his unconscious willingness to continue to indulge in feelings of refusal, deprival, criticism, rejection, and passive submission to the control of others. His parents may indeed have been ignorant, abusive, or neglectful--but the addict's problem in the present is his ongoing, unconscious willingness to continue being hurt by old feelings from his past.

(4) The addict understands that the child part of his psyche is controlling his emotional experiences, and that this inner-child part, despite its innocence and sweetness, is also self-centered, egocentric, and convinced that others do not have its best interests at heart. He learns how, to some degree, his inner child has misinterpreted and misunderstood his parents' intentions, beliefs, and actions. He sees how he continues to misinterpret the intentions of others and how he has incorporated his parents' self-defeating behavior and beliefs in his present life. He learns to recognize when he is in his child mode and learns to question why the child part of his psyche is reacting to present circumstances in such a self-defeating manner.

(5) The addict understands that he is not helpless or powerless over his addictive behavior once he learns how he transfers the past onto the present, once he learns to define his feelings towards himself and others, and once he gains insight into his self-defeating emotional reactions. His addictive behavior can be overcome, but that requires an emotional understanding of how he unconsciously provokes others into expressing negative feelings towards him and how he uses injustices or the weaknesses of others as opportunities to indulge in negative feelings. In this way, he learns how to become self-responsible rather than depending on external crutches to keep him from acting out addictively.

(6) Finally, the addict must want to change his self-defeating emotional reactions and develop the motivation and belief that he can transcend his addictive identity. He must believe that he can learn to have confidence in himself and his decisions, and lead a balanced and happy life without the fear of relapsing into his addictive behavior.

Secret attachments are emotional addictions that exist in the unconscious mind, though unfortunately they cannot be scientifically verified and evaluated under a microscope. Supported only by clinical evidence and theory, secret attachments have been misunderstood and overlooked. Nevertheless, they are real, and recognition of them needs to be incorporated into mental-health and addictive treatment programs to improve their effectiveness.

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From

See Your Way to Self-Esteem: An In-Depth Study of the Causes and Cures of Low Self-Esteem
Peter Michaelson. (ISBN1-882631-25-0. 210 pages. $15. Prospect Books Quality Paperback)

Critical Peeping

Haunting the nation's homes and byways is a breed of person who combines a judgmental mentality and a busybody imagination into a unique compulsion called critical peeping. This visual compulsion is unconscious and it adversely affects millions of unsuspecting people.

This peeping can be understood as the use of the eyes as well as the imagination in order to feed our unconscious readiness to take on feelings of being deprived, refused, controlled, rejected, criticized, and so on. The compulsion produces in us a judgmental mentality and a negative attitude.

Dale, a retired older gentleman, was plagued with this problem. He lived in the same town as John, his teenage grandson. Dale's daughter, Gloria, had raised John with a conscious effort to avoid the kind of rigid focus on work and household chores that she felt her father Dale had imposed on her. John was smart and self-assured. However, he did only a minimum of chores around his house and no work at all for his grandfather.

Dale had a very difficult time accepting the boy's nonchalant attitude to work. After mowing his own grass and doing other work in his yard, Dale often came into his house muttering and moaning about how his lazy grandson should have been helping him.

Gloria's mother told her that Dale often paced up and down the hallways protesting about the "spoiled" younger generation and John in particular. "The lazy bum," Dale would complain of his grandson, "I can see him now--I just bet he's lying around doing absolutely nothing."

Raised on a farm, Dale had often worked from dawn to dusk helping his parents maintain it. In his family, hard work was the greatest virtue, and shirking duties was equated with being bad and worthless. Dale still struggled with his own feelings of being devalued and worthless, and he was tempted to pin those feelings onto his grandson. His critical peeping, however, caused him suffering because, as he pointed a finger at his grandson, he was plunged via identification with the grandson back into feelings of being bad and worthless himself.

Linda, owner of a dry-cleaning business, was another critical peeper. She said in her first session, "It bothers me terribly having to look upon my husband's body."

He had once weighed 300 pounds, and had reduced his weight to 190 when they married. But his weight was creeping back up. He had on his body what she described as "quite a few unsightly stretch marks."

Linda's mother used to go through the family garbage, "looking for dirt" or ways to incriminate her kids. When the mother did laundry, she examined the contents of their pockets, saying "I do the laundry, I'm entitled to look."

Now Linda was the one looking for dirt. Her compulsion to do so now corresponded with her job, looking for dirt on her customer's clothes at her dry-cleaning establishment. She identified with her husband when she looked at his stretch marks, feeling the embarrassment she imagined he would feel knowing he was being critically evaluated.

Her mother had embarrassed easily, Linda remembered. "Mother once said to me, 'Just read this book about sex and don't ask me any questions.'"

Linda sang in a church choir and recently had felt "very nervous and embarrassed" while performing a solo. "I don't like people to stare at me too long," she said, adding that she had trouble making eye contact. When she was six years old she peed her pants in front of kids who laughed at her for it. She remembered, at eight, feeling mortified when kids pulled down her bathing suit at a public pool.

Now she looked at her husband's naked body with the eyes of a critic. She once had been overweight herself but had become trim and attractive. Her mother sent her to charm school for a few years so Linda would be sure to "look good."

"Looks were everything in our family," she remembered. "We were well known in the city and our house was on the main road to and from the airport. It was so important to my parents that our house looked perfect--with the lawn and plants and shrubs--so everyone who passed by would be impressed."

Linda looked at herself with the same critical eyes she cast upon her husband. She assumed others would look at her with her own eyes, meaning she expected others would be looking for dirt when they looked at her. She was preoccupied with the feeling that her parents disapproved of her for marrying beneath her class and for the career she had chosen. As a defense against this emotional attachment, she became the peeper, looking for dirt on others.

She found herself being upset with her husband's table manners, especially when company was present. When the guests had left, she would lecture him on the importance of showing more class. Playing Amy Vanderbilt covered up her attachment to being seen by others in the manner in which she imagined they saw her husband. In lecturing him, she was also giving to her husband the disapproval she had felt from her mother, another aspect of the defense against being seen as bad or inadequate.

Often she looked at other men, saying to herself, "I wish my husband were like them. Why isn't he more important, a Fortune 500 businessman instead of a supermarket manager?" Her wish that he were more important covered up her attachment to the feeling that others saw him as unimportant and unworthy, and thereby also saw her as less worthy and acceptable.

In summary, Linda peeped at others to find the dirt on them, as a defense against her own attachment to being seen critically. Unconsciously, however, the peeping became a vehicle whereby she identified with those caught and exposed by her visual acuity, as vicariously she re-experienced her old attachment to being seen in that negative light.

Behind every critical peeper is an injustice collector. This individual alleges that he is looking for injustices in order to expose them. But he is really interested in experiencing his emotional attachments to unresolved inner conflicts, which are fueled by his perception of real or alleged injustices, and he uses his visual drive or emotional imagination in order to produce these negative feelings ad infinitum.

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From

The Emotional Catering Service: The Quest for Emotional Independence
Sandra Michaelson (ISBN 1-882631-27-7. 264 pages. $15. Prospect Books Quality Paperback)

From Chapter 1

The Six Major Features

The Emotional Catering Service is a metaphor for what is commonly known as codependency. This book takes a totally new approach to codependency. It uncovers the roots of the problem--powerful unconscious attachments to self-denial or self-deprival, rejection, and feeling controlled--and provides the most effective procedures for change and growth.

This books examines the six major features of emotional catering. These features represent everyday attitudes and behavioral problems that plague most all of us to some degree, sabotaging prospects for health and happiness. The six features are summarized here and studied in depth as the book unfolds:

* Self-Denial or Self-Deprival. Why is it that we focus on what we are not getting rather than on appreciating what we do have? Why is it hard for us to receive positive feedback? Why do so many of us feel we don't deserve what we want? It is hard for us to acknowledge the good in our lives because it means letting go of our self-denying victim perspective. We have built our emotional lives around the conditioned habit of self-denial or self-deprival.

Caterers experience discomfort in receiving. They shy away from fun and pleasure, and they deny their own feelings, thoughts, ideas, and creative talents. They are confused about their wants and needs, and believe they are not entitled to their dreams and aspirations. If they have good ideas or goals, they expect them not to work out or to be well received.

* Fear and Avoidance of Intimacy. What is the real reason intimacy is so threatening? This book shows you how you are unconsciously drawn to those individuals who appear to give you the same hurts, neglects, and disappointments you experienced in your childhood. This subconscious willingness to repeat old patterns and experience old emotions is the real reason caterers cling to unsatisfactory relationships.

Many caterers find themselves in relationships filled with disappointments and frustration. As a caterer, you become involved with partners who require a great deal of maintenance (ego stroking) to be content. This sets you up for insensitive treatment, neglect, deprivation, and lack of acknowledgment.

You cling to hurtful relationships in spite of the pain and take no effective action to change your circumstances. The crumbs you receive are rationalized as cake. What you perceive as love for another person is often an emotion that has more to do with dependency and fear of rejection and abandonment. In your unconscious mind, pain means love.

Loaded with unrealistic expectations about relationships, caterers come to relationships with a begging bowl, hoping the partner will fill it up with all the unconditional love, emotional nourishment, and acknowledgment they claim they did not receive from their parents.

* Obsessive Emotional Investment in the Welfare of Others. Caretaking or catering is a psychological insurance policy against being controlled and abandoned by others. It is a strategy to avoid real intimacy. In this book, I teach you the concept of the magic gesture. This means giving to others the emotional nurturing and understanding that you feel you never received. It is an act of giving performed for the wrong reasons.

Use of the magic gesture perpetuates feelings of disappointment and neglect. Excessive involvement in the lives of others may appear altruistic, but it really masks self-centeredness on the part of the caterer.

An effective way to pump up one's sense of value and to ensure approval is to take care of others, put their needs first, and save them from themselves. A caterer is like Tinkerbell in the story of Peter Pan, flittering around with a little wand, popping into people's lives, trying to take away their woes and sprinkle them with happiness.

Caterers focus on other person's problems, offering suggestions and advice, getting them to open up while the caterers themselves remain closed. "Helping" another consists of pontificating, lecturing, pointing out a person's flaws, analyzing his or her behavior, and giving solutions. Frustration results if the person they're trying to help resists their "great" wisdom.

* Compulsive Seeking of Approval. Why do caterers live under the microscope of other people's evaluation and judgment? What is behind the constant search to be liked and recognized? Caterers easily misinterpret and take personally other people's feelings and behaviors. For example, June, a 45-year-old teacher, could not refuse her adult nephew's request to stay with her for a few months, even though his presence would cause a disturbance in her privacy and pocketbook. Fearing the disapproval of her family, June felt obligated to take him in at her own expense. Behind her passivity was a paralyzing fear of disapproval.

As a caterer, your sense of value is dependent on how someone else sees you. You assume that others see you as not smart or competent enough. In your mind, you're always being scrutinized, evaluated, and judged negatively by others. You add to this deluge of external evaluation by emotionally sinking under tidal waves of self-reproach.

You may also believe that winning the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval" is the only way to ward off impending disapproval, shame, and humiliation. But you can't win with this approach. Striving for perfection is a method of self-torture, providing your mind with a smorgasbord of accusations of inadequacy and failure. . .

* Taking Responsibility for Others and Doing It All. Why are some people unable to delegate responsibility and feel that only they can "do it right?" Where does the expectation come from that others will fail and let you down? By doing it all and shouldering other people's burdens, we make ourselves victims of their failings and inadequacies. By doing it all, we prove how others are irresponsible, thereby creating feelings of disappointment we are unconsciously attached to.

A caterer feels he is in control when he takes over emotional responsibility for everyone. His behavior is an effort to dispel the feelings of being controlled and at the mercy of others. If a person close to him is sad, angry, or depressed, the caterer makes it his problem and may even assume he is at fault. Being overly responsible and highly competent, he does twice the work without any credit or recognition. . .

* Passive Stance Toward Life. Why does a person allow himself to be controlled and directed by others and bound by their needs and demands? In this book, I examine the origin of the caterer's entrenched belief that self-autonomy and independent emotional expression mean loss of love and acceptance.

I also explore the timid behavior of caterers such as Andrea, a 49-year-old housewife who never spoke her true feelings. A non-smoker, she was unable to say no to friends and relatives smoking in her house and passively endured their "lack of consideration." Andrea had learned as a child how to endure the apparent insensitivity of her parents and siblings by accommodating their needs and desires.

Caterers are adept at letting fate make decisions for them. They tend to be passive rather than initiating and to endure situations rather than make effective efforts to get what they want. They readily submit to others and fear confrontations. Unable to establish personal boundaries, they let other people define who they are and how their lives are to be lived.

They have difficulty speaking up for themselves, agree to do things they don't really want to do, and seldom disagree with another's viewpoint. Caters also seek advice and confirmation from others, while tolerating unacceptable and abusive behaviors toward themselves. . .

I have liberated myself and hundreds of others from the trap of emotional catering. If you have been running an Emotional Catering Service and you want to close up shop, the secret is to learn to see yourself, others, and the world through different eyes. External improvements in your life will follow after you make this internal shift.

This shift occurs when you learn emotionally, not just intellectually, that your feelings and reactions are not caused by other people's words or actions, but by your own unconscious internal reactions to what you see, hear, and imagine.

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Freedom From Self-Sabotage: The Intelligent Reader's Guide to Success and Self-Fulfillment ($15. Prospect Books Quality Paperback, 208 pp. Copyright 1999 Peter Michaelson)

From Chapter 1

The Secret World of Self-Sabotage

Just about every one of us has a story of woe, a personal drama of being defeated by our enemies, our friends, our parents, our situations in life, and, most agonizingly, by ourselves. We suspect that behind our defeat and our behavioral and emotional disruptions is some invisible saboteur. Until now we haven't been able to expose or apprehend this culprit.

This sabotaging aspect can be the primary cause of our addictions, compulsions, obsessions and phobias. It is a major ingredient in depression, low self-esteem, lack of purpose, and loss of spirit and heart. It seems to be the fuel for an inner combustion chamber that pumps out negative emotions such as anger, greed, envy, jealousy, loneliness, apathy, and the wish for revenge.

There are thousands of variations on self-sabotage. Here are just a few examples of how it has affected some people I have known:

* An attractive and intelligent woman chooses a man who she clearly sees has a drinking problem. Soon she finds herself feeling neglected and bitterly disappointed.

* A young professional has everything in place to prosper with his career. But he sits around in uncertainty and doubt, all his potential and talent going to waste.

* A housewife charges $7,000 on her credit card and gambles away all her savings at a casino. Her husband finds out and wants a divorce.

* A businessman's tennis game is solid and superb when he plays socially with his friends. But when he steps out to play in a tournament, all his skills desert him.

* An overweight woman loses sixty pounds in a heroic effort to look better and protect her health. Three months later, she's put ninety pounds back on.

* A man with a lovely wife and three bright children can't resist risking all in his dalliances with other women.

When under the influence of self-sabotage, people can be defeating themselves on several fronts at once. For example, a man's tendency to resist a controlling boss by being late to work and late with his assignments is hurting his career, at the same time that his marriage is being undermined by his desire to control and restrict his wife.

Often self-sabotage involves the predicament of seeing one's life become dissatisfying or miserable for no apparent reason. We just can't figure out what is happening. Things are obviously going badly, and we feel we would be willing to do almost anything to rectify our situation. But nothing that we try works. We just keep sinking deeper into the mire.

Self-sabotage has been called the enemy within, the shadow, and the inner saboteur. It has been referred to in clinical manuals as Self-Defeating Personality Disorder. It comes in many guises, stalking us in the form of self-denial, self-doubt, self-disapproval, and self-condemnation. At its worst, it constitutes not just self-defeat but self-destruction and self-hatred. It refers to a mysterious configuration that hides inside us and toils against our best interest. If we don’t succeed in identifying and isolating this sinister part, we can be very much at its mercy.

I show in this book the configuration of this secret part of us and what we can do to liberate ourselves from its invisible shackles. This book illustrates self-sabotage on a personal level and provides numerous exercises for freeing ourselves from it. It also shows how, as individuals coming together in a collective, we subvert ourselves as a society.

This book teaches how and why we have been blind to our self-sabotage. Readers are privy to "the Big Secret" about our human nature. You will learn why this knowledge has not been assimilated by the public, and why even mental health professionals aren't conversant with it.

Perhaps our biggest obstacle to personal growth and self-fulfillment is our resistance to seeing through the defenses we have erected to hide the truth of our secret collusion in self-defeat and suffering. Our elaborate system of defenses is designed to thwart and repel any facts or knowledge that contradict what we want to believe about ourselves and the world. In a way, we are more interested in security and self-protection than the truth about our lives.

So this book penetrates into our defenses. It exposes the unconscious patterns that imprison us in cycles of frustration and futility. This is bop, not pop, psychology. It bops you on the head with evidence of your unconscious collusion in your misfortunes. So muster your courage as I expose your secret collaboration in your own self-defeat.

This book also presents insights into the art of feeling fully alive, for living at the highest levels, and for recognizing your true essence as a being of light and love. To achieve that, we need to overcome our separation from ourselves and our readiness to identify with a false sense of who and what we are. To do this, we start by examining our negative, sabotaging elements.

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