Born Only Once, Third Edition

The Miracle of Affirmation

Baars

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498288163
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This timeless classic, Born Only Once, describes the emotional turmoil of many persons and offers hope for healing through the author's compassionate understanding of their deepest wounds. Psychiatrist Conrad Baars discusses this inner unrest in terms of the fundamental human need for unconditional love, or affirmation. When children have been denied the gift of themselves through affirmation to a greater or lesser degree, they continue to look for this unconditional love, and later as adults suffer from deep feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, uncertainty, and insecurity, as well as having difficulty relating to others.Baars describes how authentic affirmation strengthens a person to feel secure and happy in himself, able to confront the world and to relate to others with confidence. Affirmation is what unaffirmed persons and those with Emotional Deprivation Disorder need to feel at peace, strong, and secure in their own identity. Baars lists many things that unaffirmed persons can do to help themselves, but it is hoped that the reader will be moved to lead an authentically affirming life by being open to the goodness of persons, things, nature, ideas, etc. This simple way of being, of openness to being moved, can bring peace and resolve difficulties.

Chapter I

ARE YOU AN AFFIRMED PERSON?

Dear Doctor,

“I feel very depressed and lonely. I am afraid to be with people. I care to talk only to one individual at a time and then only when I think he or she will understand me. Everybody has always said that I am a good priest, but I feel I can’t be a priest anymore. I feel like a helpless child and don’t know where to turn for help. I am confused and filled with hostilities like a teenager. I am afraid, though, of acting like one because of what I might do and for fear of what people might think of me. I don’t feel that anybody understands me, not even my psychiatrist. He advised me to take a leave of absence from the active ministry, and to get a job in order to work on my “self-image.” But how can I help myself? I feel devoid of any inner strength. I am exhausted and depleted of all strength I may ever have had.

Can you help me?”

This letter, one of hundreds received during my years in private psychiatric practice, is typical of the way unaffirmed people feel.

A woman from Missouri was only half way through the chapter, “The Frustration Neurosis” in Loving and Curing the Neurotic1 when she wrote me,

“I felt that you had to be inside me somehow, or picked my brain before you wrote that chapter. The things you say your patients relate to you are the very same things I have said to someone I have been able to trust. Five or six years ago I wrote the following:

‘They expected me to be a little girl—I was never a baby.

They expected me to be a teen-ager—I was never a little girl.

They expected me to be a woman—I was never a teen-ager.

They expected me to be a wife—I was never a woman.

They expected me to be a mother—I was never a wife.

—I was never born!’ “

And a third person, already in treatment, expressed in poetic language her isolation and loneliness, her sense of abandonment, and search for identity:2

“Lord, where they live, I cannot stay

and where I live, their world comes to an end;

a little blossom only makes me feel so sad,

Smaller than ever seems my chance to be myself.

First they excluded me from the children they’d planned,

now their mind cleaves the time and grasps for power,

early they learned to ban a stranger from their land,

When bedtime comes I kiss myself goodnight

And endless suffering is softly whispered in my ear

I take it in the hollow of my hand . . .

And I protest, oh Lord, against so many murders,

Why do I have to die in my own words

And why must I be chained to my own being . . .

who shall I be, Lord, in Your promised Land?”

DEPRIVATION

These three unaffirmed persons speak eloquently of their intense sufferings and unhappiness. Each in his or her own way describes some of the symptoms of an emotional illness which in its most severe form is called Emotional Deprivation Disorder [originally called the frustration or deprivation neurosis]. It is the disorder of our times; the cause of infinitely varied misery and unhappiness. Its incidence in the Western World is growing by leaps and bounds.

However, there are even many, many more people who manifest the same, though much less intense symptoms without being in need of psychiatric treatment. Their suffering, although essentially the same as that of persons with full blown Emotional Deprivation Disorder (EDD) is less disabling, less crippling, and therefore allows more room for attempts at counteracting and coping with it.

To what extent a person will become affected will depend on the age at which a person began to be deprived of affirmation, to what extent, and by whom. But whether severely affected or only to a moderate degree, the consequences of being deprived of affirmation in early life affect our entire society at all levels and in a great variety of ways—from alienation to zero population growth. The condition feeds on itself.

Parents with Emotional Deprivation Disorder rear children with Emotional Deprivation Disorder; people with Emotional Deprivation Disorder create polarization with all its dire consequences for families, communities, countries, and the world.

It is time that this condition be universally recognized by psychiatrists, physicians, psychologists, counselors, clergy, and religious of all faiths, educators, politicians, and rulers of nations.

PERSON IN THE STREET

But, most importantly, it should be recognized by the person in the street, the common person with common sense, who ordinarily determines the ultimate fate of a nation, and in our times, of the world. The common person, even more than the professionals, can do much to stop this self- and other-defeating process of non-affirmation, to affirm those already afflicted, and to prevent its development in future generations.

Therefore, in order that all of us can determine to what extent we have been affirmed and can help each other, let me describe briefly the syndrome of the unaffirmed individual in its most severe form—Emotional Deprivation Disorder.3

1. An inability to relate to others, to form intimate friendships or a truly loving marital relationship.

The person with Emotional Deprivation Disorder feels like a child who is, or feels he or she is, neither accepted nor understood by other adults. Unaffirmed persons fear the adult world they must live in and are only happy when others make the first—and subsequent—steps in relating to them.

2. Feelings of uncertainty and insecurity.

Often persons with Emotional Deprivation Disorder cannot make decisions in personal matters. However, in matters which are strictly of a business nature they usually are not handicapped in this way. These persons are usually overly sensitive to the opinions of others, easily hurt by equivocal remarks and slights, often to the point of feeling that people are against them. Their excessive desire to please others and their fear of hurting others’ feelings characterize their non-assertive behavior with other people. They experience an extreme need for the approval of their actions by significant others.

3. Feelings of inferiority and inadequacy.

Since their feelings of uncertainty cause persons with Emotional Deprivation Disorder to fail often in whatever they undertake, they develop a sense of being inferior. This manifests itself frequently, particularly in girls, in a feeling that nobody loves them and that nobody could possibly love them. The fact that they did not receive love when they were young is later interpreted to mean that they are not worth loving.

In boys the feeling of inferiority frequently manifests itself as a concern over inadequate virility and masculine physique. Some young men with Emotional Deprivation Disorder may mention feelings of inadequacy with regard to their penis because, in their opinion, it is either too small or too large.

In men as well as in women, strong feelings of inferiority also occur in relation to intellectual capacity. Students of superior intelligence, but with Emotional Deprivation Disorder, are often convinced that they will never succeed in their studies, or that they have failed in their examinations. Others with superior intelligence or who are artistic and skillful with their hands never complete their studies or work. When they have begun something they give up after a while with the excuse that they “would not be able to finish it, anyway!”

At times these feelings of inferiority and inadequacy give rise to a deep-seated feeling of guilt. This happens when th...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• Chapter 1: ARE YOU AN AFFIRMED PERSON?
• Chapter 2: WHAT IS AFFIRMATION?
• Chapter 3: THE OPPOSITE OF AFFIRMATION
• Chapter 4: PORTRAIT OF AN AFFIRMED PERSON
• Chapter 5: THE FUTILITY OF SELF-AFFIRMATION
• Chapter 6: FROM DEPRIVATION TO AFFIRMATION—WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR YOURSELF AND OTHERS?
• Chapter 7: AFFIRMATION—THE MIRACLE OF OUR AGE
• Addendum I: ON ASSERTION AND AGGRESSION
• Addendum II: AFFIRMATION AND HAPPINESS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• POSTSCRIPT