[Written around 2008.]
- Denial: This is all completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with me.
- Projection: Daniel Mackler is crazy, and I do not want to indulge in his sick point of view.
- Sublimation: Why would I want to waste my time reading this junk; in fact, I just feel like going out, getting drunk, and having sex!
- Regression: This website makes me SO, SO sad. I think I’ll just curl up under the blanket and cry…but first let me delete www.wildtruth.net from my browser history.
- Humor: Oh my god, we’ve got a live one here…a “rare soul!” This guy reeks of a messiah complex if I ever saw one! LOL! Let me email a few of the titles of his essays (but not the content) to my friends so we can laugh about this kook together. And he’s a psychotherapist to boot!!! What a world we live in!
- Displacement: I was NOT abused as a child in any way, shape, or form, and I HATE the writer of this website for trying to ram his point of view down my throat!
- Intellectualization: This website describes an intrinsically interesting paradigm which strives to completely negate all the people (myself included) who had qualitatively wonderful childhoods.
- Psychosis: This website is clearly too dangerous to read, because I’m sure the government is tracking it and will track me down for reading it.
- Dissociation: Every time I read more than one short essay on this site I find myself getting really uncomfortable, then fading away, even falling asleep. Something must be wrong with this website – and I don’t think I’ll return to it. (Note to self: Tell psychiatrist to raise my anti-depressant dosage.)
- Reaction Formation/Altruistic Superiority: I feel so bad for this Daniel Mackler fellow – the pain he must feel to have to write this stuff… In fact, I think I’ll email him a referral to a therapist who can help him work through his issues. Poor guy, he’s clearly got a lot.
- Idealization-Devaluation/Splitting: This creep has the nerve to criticize my hero Alice Miller. Mackler, you don’t even get the first thing she’s talking about. In fact, you’re not fit to clean her shoes. Burn in hell, Mackler, you pompous moron.
- Hypochondriasis/Somatization: Oh god, these essays give me SUCH a pounding headache. I need some ibuprofen.
- Identification with the aggressor: God, can you imagine how Daniel Mackler’s parents must feel knowing their son is publicly writing this crap? God, I wish I could hear their side of the story…
- Religiosity: Anyone who would consider writing an essay called “Jesus Rejected His Mother” has clearly not accepted Jesus Christ as his lord and savior. And in his retelling of the “Sermon on the Mount” he has the audacity to use the King James Version of the Bible as his base of operation. Blasphemy! Remind me to include this lost soul in my prayers tonight. Hallelujah!
- Passive aggression: [The following is a fictional synthesis of many very real emails I’ve gotten over the years:] “Dear Mr. Mackler, thank you very much for sharing your point of view. You’ve clearly put a lot of energy into it and that is admirable. You are also an extremely good writer. However, I must point out that because you are a therapist you only hear the stories of a certain segment of the population and have mistakenly universalized their problems to everyone. Not everyone was traumatized. Not everyone had an awful childhood. Not every parent is damaging. (I am a parent – not a perfect one – but I love my children very much.) I think it is important that you know that your erroneous assumptions can be very harmful to people, perhaps your clients especially, and I hope, for your sake and theirs, that you reconsider what you write. Yours sincerely, …
that last one… i hear that from my own mother all the time when i mention this stuff. guess i shouldn’t expect anything less, but i never thought to consider that “passive aggression”. huh…