Toward Truth: A Psychological Guide to Enlightenment

By Daniel Mackler

Toward Truth offers the reader a radical psychological guide to healing childhood traumaboth the extreme echelon of damage that the world recognizes as trauma and the other 99% that flies below the radar and is considered normal. Daniel Mackler sides with the truth of the child, not the lies of the parents, and traces the roots of trauma to the family. Toward Truth takes the groundbreaking work of psychologist Alice Miller to the next level, and in so doing offers a vision of deep, permanent, non-dissociative hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450023030

Daniel Mackler

Daniel Mackler, LCSW is a filmmaker, musician, and lover of lifeand for ten years was a psychotherapist in New York City. He is the co-editor (with David Garfield, MD) of Beyond Medication: Therapeutic Engagement and the Recovery from Psychosis (Routledge, 2008), and the director of Take These Broken Wings, an acclaimed documentary on recovery from schizophrenia without medication. He writes extensively on healing childhood trauma and reclaiming the true self. For more, visit www.iraresoul.com

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Toward Truth

A Psychological Guide to Enlightenment

Daniel Mackler

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Mackler, LCSW.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

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This book is dedicated to all who were

labeled insane by their insane families

Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long;

. . . in the end truth will out.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet

The truth shall set you free.

—The Bible

Acknowledgments

I offer my deep thanks to two people for helping bring this book to light.

First, I thank Rebekah Shaw, who not only read two different drafts of the manuscript and provided topnotch feedback, but created the art for the cover. I am eternally grateful.

Second, I thank Frederick Timm, one of my life’s great allies. I came to many of the ideas presented here through our conversations.

I am fortunate to have found such friends.

Part I

Birth to Adulthood, Trauma and Truth

I have never known a patient to portray his parents more negatively than he actually experienced them in childhood but always more positively—because idealization of his parents was essential for his survival.

—Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

—Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

Chapter 1

Truth: The Essence of Being Human

Truth is in our blood. It is the essence of our being. It is the best part of us, the core of what makes us human. It is our soul, our fundamental genetic beauty, and our spirit. We were created perfect, and despite the inevitability that we lose some of our perfection when we mature and develop in the midst of others who are wounded, we always retain the capacity to become perfect once again. The soul may be buried deeply, but as long as our hearts beat there remains hope.

When we begin to connect the consciousness of our minds with the truth in our core we embark on the journey toward enlightenment.[1] When we fully connect our consciousness with our core of truth we become fully enlightened. Then we cannot be deceived by falseness. We cannot be tricked by ourselves or others. We know our own motives and this lets us know the motives of others. We can read the lie behind the smile and the need behind the love. And most of all we can see the potential for enlightenment in everyone, no matter how lost or troubled he or she might be.

Although we all have the capacity to become enlightened, no one enters this world enlightened. Children arrive full of truth—with true needs, true feelings, and true honest expression—but they lack consciousness. That takes time to develop. Our consciousness, that special self-reflective potential we have as human beings, sets us apart from the animals. When we do not self-reflect we fail to fulfill our human potential and we remain as animals—but the most dangerous variety of animals: ultra-intelligent, destructive animals.

If children never experienced any trauma they would develop directly into enlightened beings, because nothing would block their connection between inner truth and consciousness. This trauma-created block is our unconscious mind, which, like scar tissue over an unhealed infection, shields us from the painful truth of our wounds.

The unconscious, however, does not offer full protection. Psychic wounds have a desperate desire to heal, and in order to heal they must burst free and speak their truth. When we cannot do this directly through grieving, our wounds find other ways to manifest, with a range of expression as varied as we are. Our wounds are like fertile seeds in the ground, seeking light at all costs, even if planted under pavement. They present themselves as dreams, as bodily illnesses, as mental illnesses, as depression, as lack of motivation, as sexual perversions, as relationship conflicts, as physical pain, as addictions, as unconsciously motivated accidents, and as a spectrum of behavior considered perfectly healthy and acceptable by the norm.

If the norm did not consider a huge amount of unhealthy behavior to be healthy they would have to face their own inner self-deceptions. This would be incredibly painful. So instead they deny and displace and rationalize. They legitimize a certain degree of war as healthy and even necessary, a certain degree of violent punishment of criminals as healthy and even necessary, a certain degree of chemical addiction as healthy and necessary, a certain degree of non-sustainable exploitation of the earth as healthy and necessary, and a certain degree of pathology in romantic relationships as healthy and necessary. But worst of all, they defend a certain degree of abuse of children as healthy and necessary, and deny the pathology of the motives of the parents who create them.

These parents are the norm. They are your parents and my parents—and the parents of our parents, and their parents throughout history. They are the link in the intergenerational cycle that keeps unhealed wounds from healing. They pass on their lack of enlightenment to the child by failing to provide for his full needs. And his needs are legion. Only a fully enlightened parent could dare hope to meet them all.

It is a child’s birthright to expect his parents to be fully enlightened, that is, to have no unconscious, no hidden agenda, no secret motives. The child comes into this world programmed to get all his needs met, just as the daffodil bulb is programmed to become a daffodil. The child arrives fully able to express his desires. And he arrives not at birth, but at conception, when sperm meets egg. And this is where his conflict begins, because from the first his mother’s pathology, that is, her lack of full enlightenment, renders her blind to certain of his needs.

As an embryo he acutely feels her pathology. From within the walls of her uterus he feels her depression, be it latent or overt, and he suffers it as an abandonment. He shares her blood and her psychic electricity, and thus knows her truth—and her lack of truth. He intuits the unacknowledged abandonments of her own childhood that lurk in every cell of her body, because where his needs cross their path his will go unacknowledged.

She is the prime limiting factor in his psychic development. Before he ever sees the light of day he will taste her addictions, however mild and subtle and conventionally acceptable, and use them to anesthetize his own psychic sufferings for her failures. Where she overeats to assuage her psychic pain, he too will feel the deceptive pleasure of dissociation, the chemical pleasure of stepping out of the truth of his own real self. Where she smokes cigarettes or drinks alcohol or takes antidepressants to escape the upwellings of her crying soul he too will smile in spite of his inward cries—and will learn the false lesson that emotional salvation lies not within, but without.

Before he has even taken his first breath of independent air he will have learned from her failings to search externally for his inner peace. The healthier she is the less he will do this, but wherever she does not manifest full enlightenment he will learn misconceptions about the greatness of his own potential. These pathological patterns, the template for his unconscious, will be inlaid deeply over his soul—though not permanently branded into it. He designed his inner defenses so they would someday be disassembled, and given the opportunity that is exactly what he will do.

From the first his soul struggles against his bindings. His spark of life does all within its power to manifest his full truth in an honest and open way. By the time he is born he has a full arsenal of techniques with which to express himself, to protect himself, and to act out his rage at the unfairness that he is not getting the perfect parent he knows he deserves. He can cry, he can scream, he can kick, he can withdraw, he can sleep, and he can shriek. He can overeat, he can under-eat, he can vomit, and he can refuse to eat. He can bite and he can ignore. But behind it all he desires only to be seen and nurtured.

Where his parents are enlightened they will support his desire. Where they are mature they will be at one with the passion of his purpose, and will devote themselves to his every whim. Where they are healthy they will be able to read his every motive, because truth recognizes truth. They will search for the sorrow behind his acting out, and will adjust their behavior to his needs so he can grieve. Where they are enlightened he will be fortunate, because they will succeed in helping him achieve his life’s purpose: to evolve to consciousness.

But where they are unenlightened he will be in trouble. Where they are unhealthy they will misread his needs or misuse them to assuage their own buried desires from decades past. Where they are unenlightened they cannot help but lose their grip on reality and project their denial-based fantasies onto him. They will superimpose their unmet love needs onto him, and will want him to love them, and will be jealous of him for rightfully refusing to give it and for having the seeming nerve to demand love in return. They will misread his healthy anger as unhealthy rebellion and will retaliate by emotionally abandoning him.

His parents will have many tools at their disposal, and the more sophisticated and clever they are the more societally acceptable their tools will be. They can ignore his desperate cries, rationalizing that he needs to learn healthy limits, all the while subliminally teaching him that the only consequence of healthy self-expression is rejection. They can pacify his misery with excess food or medications or alcohol in his baby bottle, teaching him that true hope is out of the question and the numbness of external comfort is all life has to offer. They can spank him or yell at him or humiliate him or threaten him or swaddle him or beat him in order to silence him into seeming placidity, forcing him to bottle up his rage behind a terror of experiencing even worse torture.

But perhaps the most common form of abandonment is providing him with conditional love, the most insidious form of which is love given only with the expectation of reciprocation. It is a rare parent who has had anything close to her own full emotional needs met, and where she has not and still does not she cannot help but hope, unconsciously, for her child to make up for her lifetime of dissatisfaction. She loves him primarily so that he will love her back—and she withdraws this love if he does not.

But her hope that he will rescue her is delusional—and from the child’s perspective criminal. Children are not born knowing how to love, nor should they. That is neither their purpose nor their inherent gift. Their gift is knowing how to grow, how to receive the nutrition of love that feeds the growth process, and how to learn anything short of bleeding water from a stone to make this possible.

This makes them ripe for abuse, because it offers parents who are not fully enlightened the greatest bargaining chip imaginable. Such parents remain so frustrated and enraged from their own traumatized childhoods, where they learned that love is inherently conditional, that they now have a chance to experience this dynamic from the power position. Now they need only give love, or a semblance of what the norm describes as love, to this desperate and vulnerable being in their care after they have first received it.

Anyone who thinks the vast majority of parents do not manipulate their children in this fashion is mistaken—and has not sufficiently studied the emotional depths of his own childhood. It is the basic mechanism for the intergeneration cycle of abuse, and at present it is the unspoken and denied cross-cultural definition of what it means to be normal. This dynamic is everywhere, from the worst parents right up to the supposed best.

Receiving love from the child is the primary procreative motive of a parent who is not fully enlightened. It is almost universally unconscious, though the most primitive are so blind that they see nothing wrong with it and thus at times can admit it consciously. Not realizing the ugliness in their words, they say, "My baby loves me so much. Now I know how it really feels to be loved." Similarly, little children feel their dolls and security blankets love them, but do dolls and blankets really love?

This same motive causes people to seek out pets, much as they rationalize taking in an abandoned animal primarily for its sake. A pet meets the owners’ buried needs: they project their wounded inner child onto the pet, and love—or hate—the pet accordingly. Sometimes the pet gets lucky by being adopted by an owner who projects positively onto it, and sometimes the pet has the misfortune of being taken in by someone with a need to act out cruelty.

Children of the unenlightened meet the same vicissitudes of fate, except that unlike the pet their greater success in life depends on breaking away and becoming independent. This sets up an inherent conflict for the unenlightened parent that the pet owner never has to face, because pets who are treated well rarely want to break away. Children who are treated well always do, and this inevitably makes conditionally loving parents uncomfortable, because they know that if they do their job well enough their child will someday reject them, that is, reject their ancient unmet childhood needs.

Parents who are partially unenlightened detest the idea of their child becoming fully emotionally independent. They may disguise it by nudging their child out of the house, but behind the disguise they want their child to stay dependent for life, because an emotionally dependent child is always available to be there for them. The unconscious parental desire to act out their own childhood wounds takes precedence over all other unconscious motives and infiltrates all other healthy human desires. When a parent finally receives the chance to have full control over another being’s life, she cannot help but act out her unconscious desires.

The temptation is too great, and even supercedes her healthy desires to be a good parent. This is a horrible rejection for the child, and deep in his soul he knows it. She loves him only if he loves her first. She parents him only if he parents her first. She cares for him as an entity with a self only if he abandons himself for the sake