a plea for all of us to find true joy in lifeand real human connection in peace and freedom

I WANT TO LIVE, LOVE & BE LOVED

© 2021 Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert

Cover design: Susanne Bhangu

Typesetting & Layout: Susanne Bhangu

Editing: Ute Boldt

Cover Photograph: Dirk Wächter

Translation: Simon Lys

Language of the original edition: German

ISBN Softcover: 978-3-347-49004-8

ISBN Hardcover: 978-3-347-49005-5

ISBN e-book: 978-3-347-49006-2

Printing and distribution on behalf of the author: tredition GmbH, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg, Germany. All rights reserved. This work, and parts thereof, are protected by copyright. The author is responsible for the contents. No reproduction of the contents is permitted without the author's consent. Publication and distribution are carried out on behalf of the author, who can be contacted at: tredition GmbH, 'Impressumservice' Department, Halenreie 40-44, 22359 Hamburg, Germany.

Humankind is in a war with itself.A war that starts in the womb of a motherthat does not want her child.

When our life energy connectswith the warmth in our heart,we blossom.Those external appearances,that we’ve spent our lives trying to keep up,fade awayand it gives spacefor our true being.

Munich, November 2021

Contents

1. The Fundamental Questions of Human Existence 8

2. The Human Psyche 10

3. My life during the time of the pandemic 17

4. My Empirical Basis 18

5. Potential Objections and Lines of Resistance 18

6. Theory and Practice 20

7. Healthy Identity as a Primal State 21

8. To Love is an Integral Part of Human Nature 22

9. Motherly Love must be Tangible 24

10. Love and ‘We’ 27

11. A Mother’s Love and the Formation of Our I 28

12. Learning to be in Relationship 29

13. We and I 30

14. Love and Fear 31

15. The Fear-Dependency Trap 34

16. Do Not Deliberately Frighten People! 35

17. Love and Truth 35

18. Severe Rejection and a Complete Absence of Motherly Love 36

19. Love and Violence 39

20. Already Depressed while in the Womb 39

21. Traumatising Birth Processes 40

22. Psychological Splitting as an Emergency Measure 42

23. Ever New Trauma Survival Strategies 43

24. Apparently Reasonable Adults 44

25. Mother Love Mixed-Up with Trauma Feelings 45

26. Love – Longing for an Unattainable Goal 46

27. Anger, Rage and Hatred Towards the Mother 46

28. Aversion and Disgust for the Mother 48

29. Illusions of Love and Substitute Needs 49

30. Confusion, Madness and Delusions about Love 50

31. Never Able to Grow Up 52

Before we go any further, I’d like to invite you, the reader, to pause for a moment and note down what fundamental questions come up for you when you consider your own existence. I take my inspiration from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), who said:

If you live the questions nowPerhaps then, someday far in the future, You will gradually, Without even noticing it, Live your way into the answer.2

If people don’t ask questions they won’t get any answers. If we ask trivial, meaningless questions, we’ll just get a meaningless reply in return. But if we dare to ask the important questions then we are going to get answers that mean something.

2. The Human Psyche

My answers to the questions posed revolve primarily around the human psyche and its development. My basic assumption is that if a person’s psyche can develop in a healthy way, then he or she will succeed in living a good life and will be able to live together in harmony with his or her fellow human beings. If, on the other hand, our human psyche is damaged at an early stage, things do not look good - either for the individual or for entire societies.

WHAT DO I MEAN BY THE ‘PSYCHE’?

The psyche is a way of processing information. All living beings have a psyche tailored specifically to them, whether that being is a tree, an ant, a fish, a cat or a human being. The way it works is basically like this: a living organism takes in information from outside, processes it internally, stores what is important for it, and then translates the processed information, in a way that can then serve its needs, for its intentions, movements and actions.

The idea that the functions of the psyche are bound to a brain or a nervous system is incorrect. Every cell is a living organism consisting of matter, energy and the possibility of processing information. In this way, all living cells have a psyche and can learn from their experiences.3

More complex cell structures produce more complex forms of psyche and therefore different ways of understanding what is going on.

PSYCHOLOGY

One of the special features of the human psyche is that it can become aware of itself. We are, in principle at least, capable of self-awareness and self-understanding. With our psyche, we are even capable of practising the science of ‘psychology’. This comes with a special caveat of course, that those who wish to be psychologists must first be able to truly see and understand themselves. If people don’t understand themselves, they will not be able to understand their fellow human beings.

IDENTITY

People can use their psyche to ask themselves the questions: Who am I? What is my purpose in life?

The concept of identity is one of the most important basic tenets of my psychological theory. I define identity as the sum of all the life experiences that a person has had from the very beginning of their life. Their life story, their own biography is the core of their identity.

Put into a formula, this means:

I = I

The only thing that exists to the right and left of this equals sign is the respective human being: I am who I am. In this sense, each person is singular, unique and different from all other people.

IDENTIFICATION

The concept of identification must be distinguished from the concept of identity. Identification is when someone identifies with something that exists outside of themselves. This can be another person or a group to which he feels he belongs (e.g. Germans, Christians, supporters of a sports team, members of a political party or professional group, etc.). People often also identify with what they own: their house, their car, their clothes, their smartphone ...

Expressed formulaically, identification means:

I = you or I = we or I = an object / a thing

Identifications do not automatically mean giving up one’s own identity. When learning to talk, for example, children naturally identify with their mother’s language, her accent, her tone of voice. Rather than deeming this identification

we can speak in terms of ‘imitation’ or mimicry. In general, parents are the role models for their children, and their children imitate them - according to the old pedagogical wisdom: ‘It doesn’t matter how much you try to teach your children, they’ll still end up just copying you.’ In behavioural psychology this is called ‘modelling’.

But identifications can also serve to distract us from ourselves and from the lack of our own ‘I’ and will. Identifications can be used to cover up our own inner emptiness with something that is recognised and admired by others. This leads to the fact that some people often seem more than they are. They may look successful in the eyes of others because they have a family, a house, a car or a respected job. Or it may be that they are associated with the ‘in-crowd’ according to the narcissistic thinking that we can be important if we hang out with important people. But in fact those people are deeply self-insecure, the function of their healthy I is poorly developed, and left to their own devices they are barely capable of knowing who they are and what they want.

So the questions we have to ask ourselves are: How much do I believe in all that I identify with? What am I giving up of myself to belong? How much do I betray myself because of it? Have I freely chosen to do this or am I acting primarily out of my feelings of loneliness and my fears of abandonment, because I had to give up my I and my free will at an early age due to my innate need to survive as a child?

In everyday psychology, the concept of identity is often equated and confused with the concept of identification. This then leads to pointless discussions and arguments about what is, for example, your typical German or what constitutes a typical white male. Nationalists and global-socialists can spend a lifetime getting into a good tussle about all this.4 Those who equate their identity with identification inevitably end up with a kind of group mentality, as they try to separate themselves from people who are different: ‘As women, we are ...’, ‘The migrants are ...’, ’The right-wing extremists are ...’. As the person spends his time hankering after the group to which he feels he belongs, it means at the same time he must set himself apart from those who do not belong to this group. This creates echo chambers that govern our communication and the way we act.

‘We’ only talk to those who belong to our own group, who speak about ‘the others’ as something different from ‘us’. We stay in the company of those who are like us. And of course ‘we’ prefer to belong to those groups who are deemed good and progressive and to separate ourselves from those ’others’ who are

supposedly evil, backward, bourgeois, conservative, radical right-wing, anti-Semitic, and so on. These ‘others’, of course, may see it the same way, only the other way round.

When we live our lives by identification, it is natural for us to crave the security of belonging to the ‘majority’ and not to any ‘minority’ that is pilloried by society. As well as the fear of not belonging, the shame of not being right and not living up to the expectations of others usually plays a major role in this.

Basically, all this is an illusory symbiotic state where any commonality is pretence - in reality it does not exist. The contrasts and differences that actually exist are glossed over and an attempt is made to cover them up with apparent similarities.

ATTRIBUTIONS

In such symbiotically entangled relational systems, it is common for people to try to give others an identity by ascribing something to them, by essentially labelling them. When such attributions are made there is always a certain intention behind them. They serve a dual role of both symbiotic appropriation (‘You belong to me! You are my husband, my wife, my child!’) and symbiotic exclusion (‘You are a foreigner and do not belong here!’).

Put into a formula, attributions mean:

You = I or You = Us or You = a thing / an object

Attributions occur in many ways. Some of which are:

Naming (‘Our child should have a Muslim/Christian/Jewish name.’)

Giving grades (‘Emma is a straight-A student.’)

Evaluative statements (‘This child only wants to annoy me!’)

Making a medical diagnosis (‘You have cancer. Now you have to have chemotherapy.’, ‘Maria is schizophrenic, so now she has to be treated with psychotropic drugs.’)

The granting of citizenship (‘You are now a German citizen.’)

Legislation (“Mr Smith or company XY is a legal entity.”).

The word ‘we’ is also used in a similar way when it comes to attributions, either in an inclusive way (‘we all believe…’) or as a means of excluding (‘we are different from the others’). Whether this does any favours for any of the people who are attributed is highly doubtful. The privileges of belonging usually have to be paid for at a high price, especially by obeying rules set by those who can bestow these special rights. The withdrawal of privileges is the way to put the

pressure on and ensure that these rules are obediently followed. The needs for one’s own personal autonomy and the possibility of living from one’s own I with one’s own free will are then restricted.

When someone is excluded by means of attributions, this can be very painful or even life-threatening for them. For example, a child who is bullied in his class because he is supposedly ‘different’ feels very bad. He may even think of suicide.

THE I

In the context of my theory, the healthy I is the essential psychological factor. I define the healthy I as the reference point for all other psychological processes in a living human organism. If this central point of reference is missing, a human’s inner psychological unity is not possible. His life therefore proceeds with a faulty inner compass, which will spin sometimes in one direction and then in the other. A person’s life becomes aimless, haphazard and therefore easy to influence and control from the outside.

THE WILL

Our will gives us the possibility to pursue goals and to stick to them, even when there is inner or external resistance. Without an I, however, our will has no clear orientation. Since, in everyday life, the human organism often has different needs at the same time, without the healthy I there is no clear way of deciding what to do or not to do in this competition of needs: For example, should I eat something right now or should I finish reading this chapter first?

THE HEALTHY PSYCHE

The overarching goal of my therapeutic work is for people to not only ask themselves the following question but also be able to answer it:

Who am I and what do I want in my life?

They can do this best when they have a healthy psyche that has at its core a stable I and free will. Then they are also in good contact with their potential for self-healing. A healthy psyche can distinguish between:

I, you and we.

Past, present and future.

Perceptions and projections.

Inside and outside.

Realistic love and unfulfillable longings.

Sensual desire and sexual greed.

Realities and illusions.

The possible and the unattainable.

Life, survival and death.

A healthy psyche carries the standard of truth and truthfulness within itself. It wants to be free to express its own aliveness, its own needs and its own abilities. It is ready for dialogue and open to communication. It is happy within itself and wishes other people to experience this happiness as well. It forms the basis for us to lead constructive relationships with other people.

THE TRAUMATISED PSYCHE

When a human psyche is traumatised by unkindness, neglect and violence, it loses these basic abilities to be oriented towards reality. This leads to the person being unable to live a good life. The traumatised psyche loses its inner cohesion and becomes divided within itself. It fragments and then breaks down into three substructures (see Figure 1):

Even if a psyche is traumatised, there are fortunately still healthy psychological parts, but there are also psychological parts that remain stuck in the traumatised state of emergency, as well as trauma survival reactions and strategies that are constantly trying to escape from the unbearable reality and are therefore in a chronic state of stress.

Figure 1: The traumatised psyche

THE SPLITTING THAT OCCURS IN A HUMAN BEINGAFTER AN EXPERIENCE OF TRAUMA

© Prof. Dr. Franz Ruppert

A particularly problematic feature of a traumatised psyche is that it resists knowing and understanding that it has indeed suffered traumatic damage. Instead, it retreats into a world full of illusions. When asked ‘Who am I?’ it takes refuge in identifications (‘I am German! I am a doctor! I support XY!’) and lets attributions (for example disease diagnoses) wash over it without resistance. If a person has a traumatised psyche they are fixated on the external. They lose themselves in associative, monologue-based speech, pointless arguing and fighting and blindly doing things.

Traumatised people experience themselves and their fellow human beings as a big problem. They trust no one and hide behind thick inner protective walls. They numb themselves with drugs, medication and addictive behaviour. They think they have to control and monitor others all the time, because this is what they do to themselves. Everyday, with every action they take, they fuel their own unhappiness and cause their fellow human beings a lot of stress.

Generally speaking, one can say that those who do not understand themselves do not understand their fellow human beings. Those who torment themselves will also torment others.

HIGHLY LIFE-THREATENING BEHAVIOUR

A split psyche is difficult to handle. It is like a car in which the steering, accelerator and brake pedals are no longer working properly. Continuing this metaphor, it is like the accelerator and brake are often pushed at the same time by different competing parts of the psyche. Even if a tyre is flat, its owner doesn’t notice and replace it, but simply drives on as if nothing had happened. On the other hand, he may devote himself entirely to repairing small scratches on the paintwork of the car so that everything looks nice from the outside. The further accidents that inevitable occur are the traumas that are bound to happen, by driving a car in this compromised state.

People with a traumatised psyche are therefore a constant life-threatening risk for themselves as well as for others. They are unable to protect their own lives or look after their health and pose a potential danger to the lives of others. Therefore, there is nothing more urgent than to bring this psyche back into a place of healing and stop the process of its dehumanisation. Put simply, it should be the primary, most urgent task of society to do everything possible to ensure that people are not psychologically traumatised but can rely on their psyche and live their full creative potential.

3. My life during the time of the pandemic

I am writing this during the pandemic of 2020 and 2021. At the present moment, we can see violent perpetrator-victim dynamics taking place on a global scale. People are living their lives plagued by fear, panic and images of disaster. There is a (self-)suppression of their needs for life, love and freedom. They are unable to see clearly the joy in life or the way forward to peaceful coexistence on this beautiful earth. Symbiotic identifications and symbiotic attributions dominate the public arena and it is increasingly difficult to maintain a healthy identity in an environment that perceives and acts in such a delusional way.

Caught up in this situation, I am frightened by these new forms of violence and madness which dominate the globe. I have never seen anything like them before and so I endeavour to have new experiences every day, to get in touch my own love and joy in life, and gain an understanding of what is really going on. Through this, I’m also getting further insights into myself and my fellow human beings. For me, this ‘Time of Corona’ has brought an enormous boost to my inner development. I see the same is true for many other people who also seem to be waking up.

In my eyes, ‘Corona’ puts another trauma crown on the battered and bruised head of an already traumatised and symbiotically entangled world population. It furthers the process of our dehumanisation through self-alienation from our basic needs, willing self-enslavement and loss of mental clarity. I therefore ask myself: how can this process be stopped and reversed towards a healthy identity?

‘Corona’ is a great challenge for the whole of humanity, because something is happening here worldwide that affects us all. ‘Covid 19’ seems to me like a test case that humanity has to pass. Will humanity take the next step in its development and become more enlightened or will it go backwards? Will it perhaps even perish? Is this all just an essential push towards a psychologically more mature humanity? Can we use this chance to finally transform us from the symbiotically confused creatures that live solely in our heads into the wise physical beings that have until now been lying dormant inside ourselves?

4. My Empirical Basis

The sources for my findings are essentially the many therapeutic processes in which I have accompanied people, which now number in the tens of thousands. I work with people from many countries. For me, every therapy process is like a case study in which I rediscover what I already know and am confronted with something new. With the help of my Intention Method, I can reach a psychological depth in a lively exchange with other people that could hardly be achieved by other methods such as scientific testing, observation and questioning. Every day in my practice is like a treasure trove of profound wisdom. I am happy that in the meantime, independent empirical research is likewise being undertaken on Identity-oriented Psychotrauma Theory (IoPT).5

5. Potential Objections and Lines of Resistance

This book deals a lot with the love that our mothers and fathers give us and what the consequences are, both for us as individuals and for society at large, when that parental love is not sufficiently present for their children. Experience has shown me that this topic generates a lot of resistance among people who have not yet found their way to psychotherapy and self-exploration. Mothers in particular quickly feel attacked and get defensive: ‘Now you’re blaming mothers for everything!’ ‘And what about the fathers?!’ ‘There are reasons other than trauma for why there are caesarean sections, why women can’t breastfeed or why they put their child in a crèche?’ ‘What about genes?’

Young women who still want to become mothers also don’t like to hear that their unresolved traumas can go on to influence their ability to be a mother. They prefer to think that they can build up their ‘resilience’ and hope that they can live in a happy relationship with their partner and become a ‘good’ mother without any trauma therapy. Many women are also sceptical about the offer to work through their traumas before they become pregnant. Some hope that there is research that contradicts my findings that trauma is inevitably passed on in the parent-child relationship.

Further opposition to my way of thinking will come from advocates of ‘gender mainstreaming’. Am I saying that lesbian or gay couples cannot be good parents for their adopted, surrogate or sperm/egg donor children? Am I denying these people their happiness in life?

From my point of view, everyone is entitled to have a desire to have children and should be able to find a way to reconcile with that. This topic is a great opportunity for personal growth. But all I’m asking is that people please also put themselves in the position of a child who, for example, in the womb of a surrogate mother, is expected to make no emotional contact with her. Such children are usually also born by caesarean section. What effect does it have on them when they are separated from their surrogate mother immediately after birth, without breastfeeding and are given over to their supposedly ‘real’ parents only days later? This example makes it particularly clear how ignorant and clueless most people are about the basics of our psychological development, namely the pre-, peri- and postnatal moments.6

I am conscious that this book is in many places a challenge to the currently prevailing mainstream. Those who have never dealt with the topic of psychological trauma may be infuriated by this and think: ‘According to you then everyone must be traumatised!’ But that’s not what I’m saying - psychotrauma is something very specific and can be clearly defined, even if there are different approaches to it, as is always the case in psychology.7 But please bear this in mind: Even if 100% of all people were traumatised, 100% of them would still have healthy psychological parts within them and could use these for healing their traumas. It is never too early and never too late to start.

Personally, I am not interested in making moral judgements about other people, determining who is good or who is bad or portraying them as hopeless cases. Every person processes their traumas differently and there are many factors and conditions that give one person little chance of getting back on track psychologically and that may help another to overcome even the most severe traumas.

The explanatory concept of psychotrauma doesn’t lay the blame of human problems as something that is wrong inside of the person (‘defective genes’, ‘bad character’, ‘lack of intelligence’, ‘malicious individual’, ‘disturbed personality’), but sees the causes as something clearly located on the outside - in the unkindness and violence that has been inflicted on people, their symbiotic

entanglements with their traumatised parents and grandparents. It is only as a result of this that people can become possibly even psychopaths and sociopaths. But even such undesirable developments can be cured, provided the person in question is willing to accept them.

6. Theory and Practice

I see myself as a scientist - as someone who traces phenomena back to their causes, as someone who takes a discriminating look at the respective underlying conditions and draws practical conclusions from this knowledge. Wherever possible, I can then offer tangible and real support.

So that unconscious dynamics in my own psyche do not blind me and make me one-sided, I constantly work through my own traumas. I have given a case study of this in the final chapter of this book.

For me, nothing is more useful than a correct theory. Half-understandings about the human psyche often do more harm than good. Therefore, my insights often generate resistance from practitioners who give little or no importance to the subject of the psyche or psychological trauma. I can assure them that their work will be much easier and they will be more successful in their profession if they have a comprehensive and sound knowledge of the human psyche and how it can be traumatised.

A NEW PSYCHOLOGY AND A NEW IMAGE OF MAN

In my opinion, the 21st century needs a new approach to psychology. This must unite what is true and clear from both the material and spiritual worlds and lead us into a real humanism that helps us to understand ourselves.8

My therapeutic work has helped me to develop a new and, I believe, realistic image of man. It is not based on religious or spiritual wishful thinking (‘God will save us’, ‘We are all immortal spiritual beings full of love.’), apocalyptic pessimism (‘We are sinful and bad and will sooner or later be punished for it with the end of the world’), social Darwinist negativism (‘Man is a wolf to man’, ‘Everyone is just out to maximise his own advantage.’), or scientific determinism (‘Everything is genetically predetermined’, ‘There is no free will’). When I speak of this new image of man, what I mean is: Depending on how our identity develops and how severely we have been traumatised, we humans can be loving and constructive beings or become unfeeling monsters. And because of our inner