Briefly

I haven’t bought a copy of Mad magazine for decades, but it still hit me hard today to read that the humor magazine is dead. Although the owners will continue to republish material from the 67-year archives, no new material will be produced, except for an annual year-in-review issue. For teens of my era — almost exclusively guys, in my experience — Mad was a rebellious and subversive influence that broke the rules of our everyday lives. Mad was willing to make fun of pretty much anything, and it was a joyous sense of relief for those of us who felt repressed by a conformist culture around us. It wasn’t always funny, but when it was, it could be brilliant. The biggest single influence on my adult understanding of humor was the movie “Airplane!” but Mad magazine was a close second. Rest in peace, Alfred E. Neuman. It’s finally time to worry.

Why do we do negative things which we don’t want to do? Why do we repeat patterns in our lives that we desperately want to break? Psychologist Erin Leonard says it’s because we have an unconscious tendency to engage in “reenactments” of things from our past. Writing for Psychology Today, Leonard says we’re unconsciously drawn to things that are familiar. This leaves us engaging in relationships — over and over — with people who have characteristics which we consciously want to avoid, but which mirror something from our past relationships. We’re drawn to people and situations that allow us to relive things from our past. I’ve seen this in my own life and I suspect it’s because we’re trying — without realizing it — to relive a particular dynamic in a way that we believe will allow us to have a different outcome than the one from the past. But that normally just means choosing the same sort of person — someone who will hurt us or abandon us or abuse us. We believe we are making rational, conscious decisions for ourselves, but we’re often simply following an old script. Breaking free is difficult, and it requires a lot of courage to change.

I would rather be self-employed and make $50,000 a year than to work for someone whose approval I need and make $250,000 a year. My father’s childhood programming comes back to bite me any time I experience even the mildest disapproval from an authority figure to whom I’m obligated. My snap reaction is always to want to lash out at the person whose disapproval of something stings, but when I can be dispassionate about it, I realize that the problem is in me. I simply can’t handle tiny instances of disapproval, because my old programming says I am a complete failure who deserves punishment if I don’t make an authority figure completely happy with me at all times. It’s exhausting and depressing. Be careful about how you teach your children, because your efforts to get perfect compliance might do long-term damage that you’ll never see.