{"id":3608,"date":"2008-07-30T12:02:04","date_gmt":"2008-07-30T20:02:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=3608"},"modified":"2008-07-30T12:26:04","modified_gmt":"2008-07-30T20:26:04","slug":"fighting-demons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=3608","title":{"rendered":"Fighting Demons"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From PragerRadio.com: &quot;<span class=\"Verdana10Black\" id=\"ctl00_cphMain_lblAbstract\"><a href=\"http:\/\/dennisprager.townhall.com\/TalkRadio\/Show.aspx?RadioShowID=3&amp;ContentGuid=f99681c3-a6ba-4e05-9437-6f1e7c6ab0a0\">Dennis Prager&nbsp;talks to Dr. Stephen Marmer<\/a>, member of the clinical faculty of the UCLA Medical School and a psychiatrist in private practice in Brentwood, CA, about whether we can rid ourselves of our demons or just hope to control them?&quot;<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Dr. Marmer talks about choosing people who will repeat bad things we experienced in our early years while tricking ourselves that we&#8217;re doing otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Marmer: &quot;Dr. Robert Stoller, of blessed memory, used to say that we&#8217;re attracted by the excitement and tension of whether the person that&nbsp;we&#8217;re with is going to hurt us in the characteristic way that we were most vulnerable to. A person who has no capacity to hurt us, we&#8217;re going to find boring. We&#8217;re drawn to people who will challenge us in our areas of vulnerability and the key to whether this will be a success or not is if the two of you are committed to growth rather than to repetition.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Marmer: &quot;Consciously, they seek to undo [the damage of their childhood], but unconsciously they choose people who repeat some of the same&#8230; The thrill is &#8212; can I go into the danger zone and prevail this time while in my childhood I couldn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It&#8217;s a variation of the Groucho Marx line about not being a member of a club that will have you.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Until you stop an addiction, it&#8217;ll be impossible for you to deal with the underlying problems.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Marmer says that people from happy childhood are unlikely to develop addictions.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Life challenges only become crippling if they latch on to some vulnerability from childhood&#8230; If the current event latches on to an unfinished childhood event, that&#8217;s when it becomes a demon.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;A patient who has had many childhood illnesses&#8230;that person grows up to be a hypochondriac, to be fearful, to over-react to dangers, and stunts his life accordingly. That person is vulnerable to inflict that same over-concern about dread of disease to their children.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I would call alcoholism or any of the addictive things a demon on top of a demon. They become things unto themselves in addition to an earlier problem. If you have a demon of alcohol, then you&#8217;re trying to escape from something.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Marmer says you should ask if your romantic partner is basically kind, that you can communicate clearly, and that you are both committed to growth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From PragerRadio.com: &quot;Dennis Prager&nbsp;talks to Dr. Stephen Marmer, member of the clinical faculty of the UCLA Medical School and a psychiatrist in private practice in Brentwood, CA, about whether we can rid ourselves of our demons or just hope to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=3608\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[210,4,28],"tags":[10841,10839,10840,10837,10838,10836],"class_list":["post-3608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dating","category-dennis-prager","category-sex","tag-clinical-faculty","tag-fighting-demons","tag-marmer","tag-psychiatrist-in-private-practice","tag-robert-stoller","tag-ucla-medical-school"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}