Selfhood is not complete without special “others” who listen, accept, guide, support, or hurt us. If these relationships do not exist, the mind will imagine their existence, attaching them to whomever seems to fit the illusions – good or bad. We create the relations and dramas that confirm our current self-image.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Gaining insight or autonomy of any kind involves breaking away from someone’s box of rules and protective embrace, and sometimes incurring their wrath. Each “breaking away” is another piece of us that transforms from child to adult – a painful but liberating process.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Following a decade of failed relationships and hostile confrontations, you begin wondering if something is wrong with you, or whether everyone you choose to associate with has a collective mental health issue. So, you go to a shrink – referred to you on Reddit – who blankets you with his, her, or their personal countertransference issues, while trying to determine whether your portrayal of the real you, or what you thought was the real you, is authentic or a subterfuge serving to hide some rather unsavory aspects of an “unconscious” real you, otherwise known as the shadow.
The first confrontation with my mortality was at age 27, after the sudden death of my uncle. For the first time, I felt the universe to be a very cold and impersonal place. My faith was badly shaken, and I felt very alone and vulnerable. I experienced a breakdown as a result, one that lasted for several weeks, until the pain finally exhausted itself.
Eventually, I recovered a sense of spirituality in my life, as the idea of an impersonal universe was both incomprehensible and intolerable to me.
© 2021 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
My clunker of an 1987 Oldsmobile came to a stop, but too abruptly for nurse Cathy’s liking. I’d applied a bit of excess pressure to the brakes, causing a slight jerking motion to our bodies, but no more. She was being Cathy the drama queen though. Her head shifted violently forward and then backward against the head rest, arms and legs splayed outward and apart, as if I’d crashed us – high impact – into a cement wall. She groped at her neck, whiplashed of course, and then her head toppled to the side, with tongue distended.
Notes from David 