Human Frailty

The painted porch still stands 

~ DC ~ Leave a comment

The Painted Porch Still Stands


After Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius — and the therapists who inherited their fire



In Athens once a shipwrecked man walked into the unknown,
and found beneath a painted porch a truth he came to teach —
that suffering is not the storm, but how we call it our own,
and freedom is the quiet space our judgments cannot reach.



Zeno stood where merchants passed and named a stranger thing,
that every mind receives the world as wax receives a seal.
The impression is not up to us — it lands, it lands, it stings —
but assent, that whispered yes we give, is ours to yield or seal.



He carved philosophy in three, a body made to stand:
the logic of the mind, the physics of the ordered sphere,
and ethics as the fruit that grew from all he’d ever planned,
a tree whose roots were reason, and whose harvest was made clear.



Four virtues held the whole in place, four hinges for the door —
wisdom knowing what is real, and courage in its light,
justice reaching outward to the neighbor and the poor,
and temperance, the steady hand that keeps the compass right.



Then Epictetus, born a slave, took Zeno’s flame and said
what matters is not fortune, station, body, name, or gold —
but only the prohairesis, the choice inside your head,
the faculty of yes or no, the one thing you can hold.



Some things are up to us, he taught, and most things simply aren’t;
the wise stop grasping at the storm and tend the inner hearth.
The insult, loss, the ruined plan — these arrive and part,
but what we make of them is where our freedom finds its worth.



Then on a Danube battlefield an emperor set down his pen,
and wrote to no one but himself these midnight, whispered laws.
Marcus watched his own mind move and questioned it again —
strip the story from the thing, and see the thing because.



Do not say more than the first impression brings to bear —
the child is sick, but not yet lost; the friend has spoken ill,
but you have not been harmed unless you build the harm from air.
The Roman closed the notebook and returned to duty still.



Two thousand years the wisdom slept inside a quiet stack,
until a therapist named Ellis, weary of the couch,
reached for Epictetus and translated forward and back —
and Beck, who saw depression bloom from every whispered vouch,



built a therapy on this: the thought precedes the pain,
the automatic verdict is the flame beneath the pot.
Cognitive-behavioral care — the ancient made again,
the porch of Zeno modernized, translated, and re-taught.



The trials came, four figures deep, and one by one they showed:
a mind that questions its own tale can loosen depression’s grip;
that anxiety recedes when the belief behind is slowed,
and thousands find their footing back from where they used to slip.


So here, in scrolling, screaming times, a merchant’s ancient claim
still travels down through Painted Porch and clinic, page and screen —
the world will do what worlds will do; you do not choose the flame,
but you can choose the yes or no that lives between.

…

DCG

Prologue note: This poem traces one unbroken thread — from Zeno’s shipwreck on a Piraeus shore around 300 BCE, through Epictetus the freed slave, through Marcus Aurelius writing to himself on the frontier, into the mid-20th-century consulting rooms of Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, and out to the hundreds of clinical trials that now sit behind modern cognitive-behavioral therapy. The claim they all share is small and revolutionary: the gap between impression and assent is where a human being lives, and the whole art of freedom is learning to work inside that gap.

From Zeno’s Painted Porch to Modern Clinics: What the Evidence Actually Shows
Zeno’s core claim — that suffering follows from the mind’s judgment of an impression, not from the impression itself — is not just a philosophical thesis anymore. It’s the theoretical spine of a therapy that has been tested in thousands of clinical trials on hundreds of thousands of patients. What follows is a compact synthesis of what has been demonstrated and how solidly.
The Direct Descendants of Zeno’s Idea
Two therapies fell directly out of Stoic assent theory in the 20th century:
• Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) — Albert Ellis, 1955. Built explicitly on Epictetus’s Enchiridion 5.
• Cognitive Therapy (CT) — Aaron Beck, 1960s. Also cited the Stoics as its philosophical origin.
These two merged into what we now call Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — today the most extensively researched form of psychotherapy in existence, and the first-line psychological treatment for depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and many other conditions in most Western national treatment guidelines.
What the Evidence Says About CBT
The evidence base is genuinely large — hundreds of randomized controlled trials aggregated into dozens of meta-analyses. Here is the state of play as it stands in high-quality reviews:
Depression and anxiety — the core indications
A landmark meta-analysis of 144 trials and 184 comparisons across four major disorders reported large effects for CBT versus waitlist controls: Hedges’ g = 0.75 for major depressive disorder, 0.80 for generalized anxiety disorder, 0.81 for panic disorder, and 0.88 for social anxiety disorder — with smaller-to-moderate effects when compared to more conservative controls like treatment-as-usual or pill placebo (World Psychiatry, Cuijpers et al., PubMed Central copy).[wiley +1]
In effect-size terms, g ≈ 0.8 is large — roughly the magnitude of moving a patient from the 50th to the 79th percentile of outcomes. In clinical terms, a 2022 network meta-analysis in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that CBT protocols reduced depression by up to 8.44 points on the Beck Depression Inventory.[cambridge]
Anxiety over time
A 2020 JAMA Psychiatry systematic review of 69 RCTs with 4,118 patients found CBT delivered moderate reductions in anxiety symptoms that persisted up to 12 months after treatment for GAD, social anxiety, and PTSD.[jamanetwork]
Transdiagnostic and internet CBT
A 2024 Nature Human Behaviour meta-analysis of transdiagnostic CBT reported effects of g = 0.74 on depression and g = 0.77 on anxiety, superior to waitlist and treatment-as-usual and comparable to disorder-specific CBT across face-to-face, group, and internet-delivered formats.[nature]
Suicidal ideation
A 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology found CBT produced significant short-term reductions in suicidal ideation and sustained reductions in self-harming behavior in adults.[frontiersin]
The honest caveats
Two caveats are worth naming clearly, because they matter for how confident we should be:
• Effect sizes shrink substantially when CBT is compared to active controls (pill placebo, attention placebo) rather than inactive controls (waitlist). One 2022 anxiety-disorders meta-analysis reported only g = 0.24 for CBT versus placebo on target symptoms — a small effect (Curr Psychiatry Rep, PMC).[nih +1]
• Study quality is variable, and the Cuijpers group has repeatedly cautioned that the true effects are still uncertain.[wiley]
The overall verdict from the field: CBT works, it works across many conditions, its benefits often last, and it is at least as effective as other established psychotherapies and comparable to pharmacotherapy for many indications — but the very largest reported effects are inflated by weak control conditions.
Third-Wave Therapies: Stoicism Returning in Full
Ellis and Beck extracted the cognitive half of the Stoic picture. What they left on the shelf — acceptance of what’s outside your control, values-based action, mindful attention to impressions — is precisely what the so-called “third wave” of therapies has been putting back in. This includes Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Compassion-Focused Therapy.
Read against Epictetus’s three disciplines, the mapping is nearly one-to-one:
• Discipline of desire (accept what’s not up to you) → ACT’s acceptance
• Discipline of action (act with your values) → ACT’s committed action
• Discipline of assent (watch and test impressions) → ACT’s cognitive defusion and MBCT’s decentering
The evidence for these:
• A 2019 systematic review found ACT and mindfulness comparable to established treatments for alcohol use disorder and superior to no treatment.[nih]
• A 2026 review of third-wave interventions for substance use disorder concluded that ACT, mindfulness-based relapse prevention, and DBT skills training yield small-to-moderate benefits on abstinence and craving, with larger gains in psychological flexibility, emotion regulation, and mindfulness.[nih]
Not as decisively evidenced as first-generation CBT, but a real and growing evidence base.
Direct Tests of Stoicism Itself: Stoic Week
Perhaps the most direct test of Zeno’s philosophy on ordinary people is Stoic Week, run by the Modern Stoicism organization every year since 2012 — now with over 40,000 participants across 13 iterations. It’s not a randomized trial, but it’s a large pre/post naturalistic study using validated well-being measures.
The results are remarkably consistent year after year (Modern Stoicism research summary, Stoic Week 2024 report, Stoic Week 2025 report):[modernstoicism +2]

The grip we call reason 

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The Grip We Call Reason


Pain finds us all without a knock or plea,
It does not pause to ask if we’re prepared.
It floods the shore of who we thought we’d be,
And leaves us standing, naked and unspared.
But suffering is a different kind of guest,
It only stays because we hand the key.
We build it rooms and give it all our rest,
Then wonder why it never lets us be.
We grip the wound like proof that we were wronged,
We polish it and wear it like a crown.
The story hardens where the hurt belonged,
Until the self and story can’t come down.
We call it reason when it’s only fear,
We call it boundary when it’s only wall.
We dress our grasping in a robe called clear,
And swear the mirror never lies at all.
Watch how the mind repeats its oldest line,
The same tight fist rehearsed a thousand times.
We think we’re arguing some truth divine,
When we’re just guarding old, familiar crimes.
Beneath the poise, the calm, the practiced face,
A frightened child still negotiates the door.
The armor we call logic, wit, or grace
Is just the scar demanding one thing more.
To those who drown in dialogues self-made,
Who wage the war until they’ve lost the peace—
Lay down the sword you’ve sharpened and displayed,
For winning arguments will not bring release.
Open the gate and let the wound instruct,
Not rule, not reign, not build a lasting throne.
It comes to teach, it does not come to construct
A prison where you live and die alone.
Healing does not wait for perfect light,
It starts the instant sorrow loosens grip.
Choose hope not as escape, but as the fight
To let the old wound heal instead of rip.

…
DCG

Pain reaches everyone without asking permission, but suffering grows when you continue holding onto its presence. Open the gate, let it teach something, then watch it disappear, because every wound should shape you, not trap you, and healing begins the instant you choose hope instead of sorrow.”

The marble we mistake for ruin 

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The Marble We Mistake for Ruin


The lowest room we ever build has windows we forget—
a floor of shattered mirrors where the honest self is kept.
We name it ruin, name it end, and drown it in regret,
not knowing it’s the quarry where the marble first was stepped.
The heart collapses not to punish, but to help reveal
some deeper architecture that no comfort ever found.
We wince and call it tragedy, refuse the truth we feel—
that only wounds torn open let the sacred touch the ground.
We chase the feeling down the block, convinced it too will stay,
we buy the book, we breathe the app, we post the sunset’s shine,
then when it fades by Tuesday noon we blame the holiday,
convinced that joy’s a purchase we forgot to buy in line.
The ego keeps a ledger of the debts it never owed,
it audits every mirror till it finds a kinder lie.
We starve the soul on flattery to lighten what we’re towed,
then call the hunger wisdom while we let the hunger die.
We scroll at two a.m. for meaning, wrapped in someone’s voice,
a stranger’s borrowed wisdom set to rain and violins.
We nod like it is scripture, mistake volume for a choice,
then close the app unchanged and blame the algorithm’s sins.
And yet beneath the parody a truer ache remains,
that darkness is the tuition none of us agreed to pay.
No lantern holds a single flame without the dark that trains
the eye to finally recognize the shape of light as day.
Sit with it, we’re told, and so we sit and check the clock,
we scroll again for patience, then complain the peace is slow.
We want the mountain’s silence with the traffic of the flock,
we want the harvest overnight from seeds we didn’t sow.
Michelangelo once swore the angel slept inside the stone,
his chisel did not build the form — it only set it free.
Our truth was never sculpted new; it waited on its own,
for every honest fracture shows us who we’re meant to be.
So hold this page up like a glass and study what it shows—
not sculpture finished, only rubble learning to be true.
The wound, the joke, the chisel-strike are one and the same throes
that either break us into dust, or break us into you.

…

DCG

Before we name the villain 

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Before We Name the Villain


The villain stays the villain when the hero holds the pen;
the victor names the meaning of the blood upon the floor.
We judge a life by where its final chapter chose to end,
then close the book before we ask what happened there before.
Every scar has two sides, but only one is shown;
one gathers our compassion, one is sentenced with the blame.
The loudest grief is welcomed as the only grief we’ve known;
the quiet heart keeps breaking while the crowd repeats a name.
A voice is not more truthful just because it fills the room;
a whisper is not false because it trembles when it speaks.
Yet certainty attracts us like a lantern in the gloom,
while doubt is left to wander with the answers that it seeks.
We call our memory honest, but remembrance serves the need;
it edits every failure and enlarges every scar.
The ego writes its innocence in every selfish deed,
then points toward another so we will not see what we are.
No person wakes believing cruelty is their design;
we each become the hero in the mirror of the mind.
But goodness claimed in private does not make our actions kind;
the wounded we abandon know the truth we leave behind.
Blame offers easy shelter from the burden of our part;
it builds a wall of certainty where questions cannot live.
But wisdom enters only through a fracture in the heart,
when we can name the harm we caused and still choose to forgive.
The wounded sometimes wound; the frightened learn control;
the child refused affection learns to hide behind disguise.
Our suffering may explain us, but it cannot cleanse the soul;
we heal when we stop using pain to sanctify our lies.
Compassion is not blindness, and forgiveness is not flight;
to understand the darkness is not yielding to its claim.
We hold a person answerable without denying light,
for justice without mercy only changes hands of blame.
We are at once the hero, villain, witness, judge, and scar;
we are the ones who suffer and the ones who cause the pain.
The truth begins when we admit how incomplete we are;
humanity is mercy joined to honesty again.

…

DCG

The villain will always be the villain
if the hero tells the story
Every scar has two sides of pain
One gets sympathy; one gets blame
The world believes the loudest voice
Not the soul left without a choice
Truth often hides behind the glory

Because  history is written by the one who tells the story

— anonymous whispers

The seasons do not mourn themselves 

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A flower held too tight will die,
the hand that grips will lose the bloom.
We ask the world to never change,
then wonder why we’re filled with gloom.
The Buddha sat beneath a tree
and watched the petals rise and fall.
He said the pain is not the loss —
it’s holding on that hurts us all.
We think that love means keeping close,
that grip is proof of how we feel.
But love that chokes is not called love,
it’s fear disguised to seem more real.
The river does not fear the sea,
it moves and lets the old bank go.
The seasons do not mourn themselves —
they trust the turning, trust the slow.
A child grows and leaves your arms,
a face you love will one day fade.
You did not fail because it changed —
you failed to see what change is made.
There is a kind of quiet peace
in loving something meant to end,
for love that lets a thing be free
is love with room enough to bend.
The mystery is not the pain,
it’s why we fight what’s always true.
We know all things will slip away,
yet still we hold as fear breaks through.
So watch the petals while they last,
let sorrow come, then let it fall
back to the earth from which it came —
that falling is not loss at all.
For in the end we learn this much:
the flower never asked to stay.
We were the ones who begged for stillness
in a world that moves, not sways.
So love the bloom while it is here,
then bow your head when it is through.
The truest love was never keeping —
it was letting something pass through you.

…

DCG

Master, why does attachment create so much suffering? If I love something deeply, shouldn’t I hold onto it?”
“Hold this flower.” The student held it tightly.
“You are not suffering because you love the flower. You suffer because you demand that it never change.”
“Then how should I love?”
“Enjoy its beauty while it blooms. When it withers, let it return to the earth.”
The student finally understood. Love without possession. Without clinging, everything you have is temporary. You suffer less when you stop asking life to remain exactly as you want it.

— core idea directly echoes two well-known, traceable teachings:
• Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching on impermanence: “If you suffer, it is not because things are impermanent. It is because you believe things are permanent… What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not,” from The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, also discussed at Alan Peto’s overview of Buddhist impermanence.[alanpeto +1]
• A quote often attributed to Osho: “If you love a flower, don’t pick it up, because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to become what you love. Love is not about possession, love is about appreciation” (quoted here and here).[quotlr +1]
So the clip is best understood as a contemporary retelling/composite drawing on that lineage of Buddhist non-attachment teaching, rather than a direct citation of a single named source.

A philosophy dressed in an engineers coat 

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A man once stood before the world,
in nineteen ninety-three he spoke.
He raised a warning, calm and cold:
that thirty years would break the yoke.
He named it the Singularity,
the line where all our knowing ends.
Past it lies no certainty,
just silence where the future bends.
The thirty years have come and gone,
the deadline passed in twenty-three.
We’re still here, breathing, still holding on,
not knowing what we’re meant to see.
Some call it truth, and dress it fine,
they give the guess a stamp, a note,
but read the claim and read the sign —
it’s a philosophy, wearing an engineer’s coat.
Then Kurzweil came and claimed the throne,
he gave the guess a number, bold:
two-thousand forty-five, alone,
an engine built from truths half-told.
Build one machine that’s smart enough
to build another, smarter still,
and watch the climbing turn to bluff
until the curve outruns our will.
As logic goes, it locks in place —
we’ve built machines that learn and grow.
But a chain of thought at blinding pace
is still a guess dressed up to show.
But while we argue gods and fate,
and watch the storm that’s far away,
a smaller tide is at the gate,
already rising, come to stay.
Three pounds of tissue, wet and small,
sit quiet underneath your hair.
We built machines to judge it all,
to grade the mind that’s sitting there.
But who decides what’s counted worth,
if not the heart that feels and bleeds?
A number cannot hold your birth,
or weigh the love that no one reads.
We build the thing we can’t yet know,
and hand it keys we’ve never turned.
We may not see which way we’ll go,
until the whole wide house has burned.
We thought this mind would be our god,
a throne of light to kneel before.
But watch it lean — how strange, how odd:
it’s not our god. It’s just our crutch, no more.

…

DCG

In 1993, a mathematician named Vernor Vinge stood up at a NASA symposium and made a prediction. Within 30 years, he said, we would build an intelligence greater than our own, and shortly after, the human era would end. Not in fire, in irrelevance. He called it the Singularity, the point past which the future becomes genuinely unknowable. That 30-year window closed in 2023. Here we still are. The most seductive and most abused concept in the entire field deserves honesty. Ray Kurzweil took Vinge’s warning, gave it a date, 2045, and gave it an engine. The engine is called recursive self-improvement. Build a machine smart enough to design a smarter machine, which designs a smarter one still, and the curve goes vertical. An intelligence explosion. As a piece of logic, this is coherent. We already have AI systems that rewrite their own code to score higher on tests. As a scientific prediction with a date attached to it, the Singularity is not science. It is a philosophy wearing an engineer’s coat. But notice the sleight of hand. We pour enormous energy debating a superintelligence that may never arrive, while a far quieter transformation is already rewiring the three pounds of tissue between your ears. The revolution was never the machine becoming a god. It’s the machine becoming your crutch, and that has already begun.”


Source of the statement
The clip is paraphrasing a real, specific text. Vernor Vinge — mathematician, computer scientist, and sci-fi author — wrote the exact line (“Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”) in his essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era, presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA’s Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute on March 30–31, 1993, and later reprinted in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Vinge also clarified elsewhere in the piece that he’d “be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030,” which is where the “30-year window closing” — later reference to Ray Kurzweil is a separate but related claim — Kurzweil built on Vinge’s idea and famously pinned the Singularity to the year 2045 in his own writing.

Before we forget to see

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Before We Forget to See
There is a fog that settles on the mind,
A quiet thief that steals us while we sleep—
It dulls the eyes to all we’re meant to find,
And drowns the wonder in a sea too deep.
We do not feel the pulse that keeps us whole,
The breath, the beating heart we take for granted,
Until the sickness comes to shake the soul,
And leave us mourning all the years we wanted.
Our mothers’ hands grow thin, our fathers slow,
While daily sight has blinded us to change,
We measure love in years we didn’t know
Were slipping through our fingers, quiet, strange.
A friend becomes a voice we rarely hear,
A face reduced to habit, dulled by time,
Until the silence tells us they’re not near,
And love returns too late to fit the rhyme.
The sunset paints the same old sky each night,
The ancient oak still stands where no one sees,
We trade our awe for screens of hollow light,
And let the beauty die beneath the trees.
This is the haze that creeps in, thick and slow,
A numbness dressed as comfort, calm, and ease,
It steals the color from the world we know,
And trades our senses for a slow disease.
The ones we’d break in two to lose grow small,
Reduced to habit, background, and delay,
We greet them with a hollow, practiced call,
And let their presence fade, unnoticed, away.
The eyes grow dim, the ears no longer hear,
The taste of joy runs thin, then fades to gray,
We touch the world but nothing feels quite near,
As feeling drains a little every day.
And if this haze is left to spread unseen,
We wake, we walk, we speak, but we are gone,
A hollow shell where feeling once had been,
A breathing corpse still stumbling on and on.
So look again before the flame goes out,
Before the ones you love become a name,
Before your soul forgets what love’s about,

Too numb to feel the beauty or the shame.

…

DCG

“One of the strangest things about being human is how quickly we stop noticing things once they become familiar.
We stop noticing our health until we’re sick. We stop noticing our parents until they grow older. We stop noticing our friends until they’re suddenly gone. We stop noticing the beauty of places we see every single day. And sometimes we even stop noticing ourselves because familiarity has a strange way of making extraordinary things feel ordinary.
The people we’d be devastated to lose become background noise. The blessings we prayed for become things we walk past without a second glance. Nothing changed except our attention.
So look again at the people, at your life, at everything you’ve stopped seeing because it’s always been there. One day it won’t be, and you’ll give anything to notice it one more time.”

Before you judge

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Before You Judge


We don’t all stand beneath one sky,
though it looks the same from where you stare.
Some walk through storms that never dry,
some just learned too soon not to care.
Some were given shelter young,
before the thunder learned their name,
their fears were softened, gently sung,
while others burned in open flame.
But some who felt the water rise
chose to become someone’s dry land,
they learned to read the pain in eyes
and built a roof with their own hand.
And some were given nothing more
than legs to hold them through the rain,
no roof, no hand, no open door,
just strength enough to bear the pain.
Empathy is not to pity,
not to watch from safe and dry,
it’s stepping into someone’s city
and feeling why they start to cry.
The super empath carries two,
their own storm and yours as well,
they feel what’s yours as if it’s true,
a second heartbeat none can tell.
It empties them, this gift they give,
a quiet ache that never shows,
they hold you up so you can live
while no one asks how heavy it grows.
Yet still the world needs those who feel,
who trade their peace to make you whole,
their love is not a trick, it’s real,
the quiet work of a giving soul.
So do not judge the ones who bend
beneath a weight you’ve never known,
you have not walked it to the end,
you’ve only watched it from your own.
Before you judge, remember why
we don’t stand under the same sky,
what feels light from where it’s dry
might be a flood to someone nearby.

…

DCG

Before you judge someone, remember this. We do not stand beneath the same storm. Some are sheltered from the rain. Some spend their lives becoming shelter for others. And some have nothing but the strength to keep standing. Be gentle. Every storm looks lighter when you’re watching it from somewhere dry.

— unknown 

The Empty Throne

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The Empty Throne (A Disease of Deficiency)


A house can hold four walls and still be empty inside,
where a child grows up starving on a diet of “not now,”
love arrives late, or wearing a disguise,
and the wound gets planted before anyone knows how.
Kohut called it a disease of deficiency, plain and clear,
not evil born whole, but hunger dressed as pride,
a mirror shattered so many times it learned to disappear,
swallowing the child’s own reflection, pushed aside.
Every child needs to be seen before they’re told they’re wrong,
to be held in eyes that actually want to stay,
but disconnection hums a quieter, colder song,
and misunderstanding becomes the only language they can play.
Somewhere a parent needed a child to complete a broken plan,
to fill the hollow where their own dreams used to be,
and the child became a burden they never meant to withstand,
paying rent on a life they didn’t choose to see.
So the small self folded inward, quiet as a closing door,
building walls where open arms were supposed to grow,
self-orientation became armor, nothing more,
a fortress built from all the love they didn’t get to know.
Every unanswered cry writes a sentence in the bone,
hurt and rejection learn to wear a familiar face,
abandonment feels less like an event and more like home,
misunderstood becomes the only inherited place.
“I don’t need anyone” becomes the armor for the ache,
dissociation lets the mind quietly leave the room,
shame moves in like water finding every crack to make,
and independence is just fear, dressed up to bloom.
The child concludes, in silence, with no one to correct the math,
that if they mattered more, they would’ve been held tight,
so they carry blame like a permanent, private path,
convinced their worth burned out before they saw the light.
Guilty for wanting more than crumbs left on the floor,
guilty for a hunger that felt too big to hide,
they learn to want less, and then to want no more,
self-esteem erodes like a slow, retreating tide.
Grown now, they wear a closet full of masks that never fit,
grandiosity loud enough to drown the ache below,
rage and loneliness trade places, bit by bit,
and empathy, once starved, forgets how to show.
This isn’t blood, no gene mutation to blame or trace,
it’s a pattern handed down like a family heirloom curse,
parent to child, an inherited, invisible embrace,
the cycle spins on till someone dares to reverse.
Gabor Maté says the body keeps what the mind can’t hold,
trauma isn’t the blow — it’s the silence stored inside,
a child will trade their own self to stay in the fold,
and carry that quiet war for the rest of the ride.
So here’s the truth, plain as bone, no science left to hide —
the child of a narcissist inherits an empty throne,
crowned as royalty in a kingdom that always denied,
king of a castle built for one, and always alone.

…

DCG

Unhealthy narcissism is the result of emotional or physical neglect or trauma in early childhood. Kohut, a famous psychoanalyst, used to say, “Narcissism is a disease of deficiency.” The most common type of trauma is that of feeling neglected, ignored, disconnected, and misunderstood by those we love. If children become more of a burden than a pleasure, or if they project upon their children their own needs and ambitions, then children retreat into self-orientation as a defensive maneuver. When a child’s needs are unmet because of a parent’s self-focus or self-interest, they feel hurt, misunderstood, abandoned, and rejected. These feelings of loss require coping mechanisms that are not usually healthy, such as defensive independence, dissociation, and shame, due to their belief that their parents’ lack of interest in them and lack of acceptance of them is the result of their own lack of value. They may feel guilty that their needs for connection, which are unmet, are too intense and burdensome, which can lead them to have very low self-esteem. Long term, they may experience lack of empathy, loneliness, anxiety, depression, rage, grandiosity, shame, exhibitionism, and emotional immaturity. These pathological defenses are passed down generationally, not genetically. Unless the cycle is broken, children will likely parent as they were parented.

—

Erica Komisar’s paper Self-Focus or Sacrifice? What It Will Take to Rebuild the Mental Health of the Next Generation, published by ARC Research in February 2025.[squarespace]
Komisar (a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst) writes:
“Unhealthy narcissism, also known as secondary narcissism, … is the result of emotional or physical neglect in early childhood, which results in the withdrawal of interest from relationships as a defensive manoeuvre… Kohut called secondary narcissism a disease of deficiency; it is a maladaptive way of protecting the fragile ego. It is a defence designed to protect the individual against anxiety and other painful feelings connected with the disappointment in their mother; rather than invest emotion or depend upon an undependable mother or attachment figure, a person invests that emotion in themselves, or leans into defensive independence.”
This lines up closely with the recording’s language on neglect, the Kohut “disease of deficiency” quote, defensive independence, and the generational, non-genetic transmission of these patterns.

Because I carry it well

~ DC ~ Leave a comment



Because I Carry It Well


There is a weight I wear like skin,
so practiced no one sees it strain,
an architecture of discipline
built to disguise the rain.
I speak a fluent, silent tongue,
denial dressed as poise,
each measured breath, each word half-sung,
to mute the inner noise.
I’ve learned to hold my face like glass,
composed, unmoved, serene,
so no one watching as I pass
suspects what lies between.
For falling apart was not a door
I ever dared unlatch,
I built my house on a silent floor
and learned to hide the scratch.
Beneath the ribs, in unlit rooms,
the wounded hold their fort,
a sanctum sealed against the glooms
no gentle word can thwart.
Why won’t we speak the truths we bear?
Because language cannot hold
the shape of loss, the shape of care
we’ve never learned to fold.
We fear the eyes too quick to stare,
the hearts too slow to listen,
we fear the weight we’d make them bear,
a burden none would christen.
So many walk in common clothes
with ordinary faces,
yet carry graves that no one knows,
in unremembered places.
They rise, they work, they laugh on time,
they nod, they pass, they cope,
and no one hears the buried rhyme
of sorrow dressed as hope.
We are the torn, the split, the two —
the one who longs, the one who hides,
we ache to let the truth break through
yet swallow it like tides.
So we stay sealed, polite, composed,
our sorrow kept unspoken,
because to show what lies exposed
feels like confessing broken.
“It doesn’t hurt,” we say, and smile,
while everything within has drowned,
this is the softest, saddest lie —

the loudest grief that makes no sound.

…

DCG

Because I carry it well doesn’t mean it’s not heavy. I’ve simply become fluent in the language of pretending nothing hurts when everything does. I make it look effortless because falling apart was never an option. Because I carry it well.”