The Apple Tree Abnormal Personality
They are the "perennial runner-up", the one voted most likely to succeed — and then doesn't. Meanwhile, they haunt the dating services and they are a member in good standing of the "lonely hearts club". They seem to have some sort of compulsion to never succeed at any thing. They forever fail to live up to their potential — one of the Gary Harts and Jerry Browns of the world. They are person who is "living under their Apple Tree" . . .
What's going on here is that they are completely caught up in "She is leaving" abanondonment-anihlation-anxiety with their mother. They are in effect stuck with Mom, like it or not. They are joy and excitement-avoidant due to the fear of losing all that matters to them. They have profound distrust of potential intimates and they are convinced that God will strike them dead if they ever have the gall to make something of themselves. They are totally tied up with the "tie that grinds" — and they're fit to kill about it.
There was a man who lived in the eighteenth century in New England. When he died, he was buried next to his mother in a graveyard near an apple tree. What happened was that a root from that apple tree insinuated its way into his coffin — and it proceeded to replace the material of his body, completely. The result is a total reproduction of his body as it was buried, including his clothes and wig, in apple tree root wood. The root is now in the Smithsonian Institute. This is the ultimate example of the apple tree process in action . . .
HOW DOES IT HAPPEN?
The "Apple Tree" pattern is the result of a "failed adulthood", in that the message to the individual is, "This is the best you'll ever get.". And for the parent, it is. They are stuck in the "powerless kid coziness" psychology — their life is "childhood hot-house" arrested / focussed / centered. They never got free of a cripplingly enmeshing and competence-undermining household. And they try to trap their kid in it. Furthermore, they model no alternative adult powerfulness/ meaningfulness/contributingness or spiritual destiny-based and optionful manifestation. So the child ends up with their model only, and there is no such thing as "adult coziness" or meaningful competence/contribution given.
The whole thing gets started with a mother who is, due to her learning history, severely abandonment-depressed. Her experience as she was growing up was that she was in effect "abandoned to die in the desert", and she is in the position to be functionally despairing to death. The effect of this experience is to convince her that she doesn't have what it takes to deserve or draw to her some one who would care for her. Instead, she gets fixated on trying to "romance the stone" — resulting in her marrying one. When all her efforts to get him to "rescind her sentence" fail, she is in a state of desperation. So she turns to her child for the support, love and validation she has never had.
The net effect is that she "pedestalizes" the child, and she becomes totally addicted to having that child in her life for life. By pedestalizing the child, she puts the individual in a superior, secure and supercilious position. However, it also puts the person in a demanded, drained and dependent position. It's a "safe" but totally symbiotic situation. What happens is that the mother puts her approval/disapproval of the child on a right to live/love basis, and this becomes the foundation of the child's self-estimation. Everything hinges upon it. She expects the child to be perfect and self-sufficient so they can be drawn on with impunity and given nothing. The child gets to be "needed", "admired" and "attended to", but the real situation is that the mother is role-reversing and wanting to be taken care of as a child. Unfortunately, the relationship becomes so important to both of them that they will do almost anything prevent its loss.
What then happens is a pattern of "attentive neglect". The mother effectively teaches the child to give her constant attention, completely ignoring or condemning their interests, capacities and needs. She uses her invasive attention to the child's every move as a substitute for the joy of their developing themselves for their own identity and destiny. She projects her soul onto the kid, and the kid is so vulnerable and dependent that they accept it as all that really matters. The experience is that they don't dare do otherwise, lest they die and/or lose their connection with God.
In effect, she systematically programs and prevents the development of any form of constructive self-development, self-expression, self-advancement, creativity or contribution capability. The "ultimate weapon" she uses in this process is the threat of withdrawal/ abandonment, as she does unto others what was done unto her. She carefully monitors the child's functioning for any sign of "growing away", and she moves on it instantly with what may appear to be loving guidance and protective concern, but which is really death-threatening control. She fully intends to extend the normal nine-month symbiosis period over the individual's entire lifetime by threatening their lifeline. The basic message is "Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me . . . or I'll kill you!".
It starts in infancy, where all forms of self-initiative and self-commitment are cut off by the process of abandonment-withdrawal moves that in effect harness all the individual's resources in a "red alert" self-preservation process of self-interruption at the onset of such behaviors, resulting in immobilization. The same process is applied any time the child's interest moves to anyone other than her as well. The child quickly learns that their entire life support system is contained in her — and they had better mind their "Ps and Q's" if they want to stick around for very long the message becomes, "If you ever step out from under my tree, you'll destroy yourself!", and the individual experiences a vague but totally restrictive annihilation-anxiety.
As the child gets older, the mother is constantly hovering and smothering with demanding attention and direction that allows the child no self-determination. And when the child develops competencies as a result of the natural maturation process, she freaks out and she attacks due to fear of the child's leaving her. One of the prime ways she does this is to convey subtly, "If you really love me, . . . you'll screw up reassuringly!". And if the child can't help but grow or if they persist or resist, she pulls out the "big gun" and she conveys, "You're KILLING me!". That generates profound "matricide" feeling "success-guilt" for developing or manifesting personal power and connection elsewhere, and the individual develops a pattern of "sexcess-avoidance".
Another process that she uses is to program experiences that are "convincer-clinchers" for feeling that, 1) growing up is full of suffering and not worth the pain, 2) God and the Universe are unfair, too demanding, and hard/ harsh, 3) life is overwhelming, they don't have what it takes to make it, and they will never survive without her approval and support, and 4) they will die if they ever "step out of line". All of which is done in a very subtle, subterranean and subconscious manner, so that everyone involved is unaware. But the effect is totally power-destroying, exploitative and destiny-derailing.
The result is a kid who is totally dependent upon and vulnerable to their mother, and who is in effect klutzy in many ways. Then she gets ambivalent with what she has created. She hates the "betrayal-failure" the individual's inabilities generate, but she also loves the fact that the individual is thus totally dependent upon her, and that leads her to subtly egging the child on into more of the same despite her conscious and overt howls of protest at the results. So in effect, the individual ends up in a situation where no matter what they do, it doesn't work.
A variation on the theme pattern that can develop is where she allows the kid to develop some success skills, but only in areas that serve her. She wants to control all aspects of the individual's manifestation, and she wants them to function strictly on her terms as her "puppet on a string". In its most extreme form, this ends up as the "stage mom" like Shirley Temple's mother or the "power behind the throne" of her finely controlled politician son, like Rose Kennedy.
A little further down the pike, she begins to "rope in" the father into the process. He is often an individual who is very much like her authoritarian, battering and/or rejecting or nonavailable father, or he is a person who is himself "Apple Tree" enslaved. One way she will do this is to "de-person" or "cadaverize" the father in the child's eyes by treating him as if he wasn't there and in other ways "castrating" him. Or she will engage her son in a "Kill the King!" collusion as the Oedipal period comes on. Here she sets up a "Let's you and him fight to the death!" type of relationship with the father and the world. Or she will set up a "Sic her!" situation as her daughter comes into the Elektra period. Here she will subtly orchestrate a situation where the father reacts to his daughter as a spousal peer and sexploits her. Or the mother subtly "mission control Houston's" the "well-guided missile" father as to how, when and where to strike the daughter who is "getting out of line".
Finally, she puts in the "coup de grace" — the "death implant". This is an "If all else fails and I can't have you, then NOBODY can!" subtle and subterranean program that builds in "electrodes" that set off self-destructive emanations whenever the individual threatens to get out of her control. The effect of these emanations is to pull in or to precipitate death-dealing forces to the individual. She is so desperately dependent that she would rather "abort the mission" than lose her "lifeline", and the individual lives under a "curse" as a result.
What happens is that any time the individual starts to move in the direction of connection or contribution, they "cross the line", so to speak. At that point, a long-ago inserted subroutine goes off that in effect sends out an "all points bulletin" to the surrounding environment that will attract in a situation where a physical illness, accident or assault terminates them. In other words, a common cold turns into lethal triple pneumonia, another driver runs a red light and takes them out, or they "enrage the Hulk", who then eliminates them. The unconscious but terrified awareness that this lurks within their system is enough to keep the individual in line for a long time . . .
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
At the base of the "Apple Tree" individual's functioning system is a profound abandonment-depression. For although mother was intimately involved with them, it was always on her terms and on her turf for her needs and priorities. They were in effect "abandoned at an early age". Compounding this depression is another, what could be called "nihilistic despair" depression that arises from their "no win" situation. If they manifest themselves, they destroy themselves and their relationship with their mother (which has become all-important to them), and they may even destroy her. But if they follow the program, they don't have a life. Their depression arises from their having to make a choice between losing their mother or losing themselves — a lose-lose situation. In effect, life becomes one long suicide-avoidant trip.
For severe "Apple Trees", only supreme selfishness and rage-release hold the nihilistic depression at bay. This is usually associated with heavy anti-authority attitudes, mixed with profound nihilistic despair. If not caught and understood early enough in their development, this can become their entire lifestyle, and the "grey marketeer" or "sleazy pieces" loser and "revolving door" criminal justice system patron is born. They ultimately become hardened and impenetrable, with a maximal negative ecological impact. The despair-depression has to be gotten to before the downward spiral into the criminal justice system gets under way or they're lost for good.
A second primary dynamic to the "Apple Tree" is their enormous unspeakable dread. They have a horrified nameless terror about "things that go bump in the night". They get especially scared when they lose the "security" of their pedestalized position or when they start to "wander too far afield". They want realistic appreciation and caring confrontation from true equals like we all do, but it scares them to death when it comes, and they tend to "self-sabotage" themselves, to rationalize it away and/or to put themselves right back where they "belong" out of a vague severe paranoia they can't quite put their finger on. It is, of course, in response to the "death implant" from "Ruth Vader", who is, in effect, trying to kill them for breaking out of the program. This is so severe, deep and crucial that it goes off even when awareness of the script pattern begins to occur — and so they tend strongly to remain completely oblivious about it.
One major outcome of this generalized dread is that the "Apple Tree" person goes into a kind of deadened passionlessness. They can't find their passion with which to start their destiny, purpose, love relationship or spiritual commitment. They don't DARE! (lest God strike them dead). It produces an amotivational apathy about "out routes" from their situation or about doing anything to make their life work. They have a pronounced feeling of non-safety as the bottom line cause of all this. It is in effect a matter of their living with severe annihilation-anxiety .
Still a third general emotion they carry around with them is a universal guilt due to lack of ego boundaries — their inability to separate themselves from the mother and from the environment, so that they assume accountability for all negativity in the ecology. They have the underlying conviction that if they have needs, wants and desires, it destroys the world (the mother/God-stand-in). They then tend to become something of an atonement-freak, trying to "make up for" what they are with the one who has the most stakes in keeping them symbiotically enmeshed and with whom there are the highest stakes involved. In addition, they unconsciously feel that they have to demonstrate their commitment to their mother by failing reassuringly.
Finally, we have the enormous resentment-rage that comes from being completely prevented from manifesting their destiny. They have a huge amount of fury at this, especially if he is a male. Males make their contribution by being effective in the world and making a difference for the children (the people of tomorrow). When that is taken away from them as a possibility, they have no function or reason for existence. They then react to that with a rage directed at the source of this outcome. In the case of the "Apple Tree" person, however, she was too subtle, pervasive and early for him to see what has happened, and so he tends to direct his rage toward any woman who makes him feel as vulnerable as his mother did, in what could be called "cave rage".
"Apple Tree" men have a huge "run-amok-anxiety" about "losing it". The closer they are to release of their passion and opening up to vulnerability, the more they shut down. They are often passion-avoidant and withholding as a means of preventing the unleashing of the "Hulk", as well as avoiding being "eaten" in a vulnerable relationship. This results in the "Mr. Nobody Home" trip.
"Apple Tree" men are also afraid of activating or releasing "Mr. Goodbar", who is utterly furious about his destiny-derailment and who can even kill in reaction to that. This is particularly likely to happen if their "stand-in" for the "original cast" "nemesis figure" rejects them or threatens to. In its most extreme form, this becomes the basis of the "serial murderer" pattern.
The female equivalent of "cave-rage" is "tripod-rage", the irresistible urge to kick anything with three legs. This arises from the mother's "implanting" her "tripod-rage" during the boundary-less symbiotic period in the first nine months. This is later on followed by her father's "roped in" and built-in propensities during the Elektra period and beyond to validate her mother's position by violating the individual. An extra twist here is that the "Apple Tree" woman has been made ineffective by her mother and she therefore has to depend on someone to take care of her. Yet she now is so furious at and distrusting of men that she can't do that either, and she ends up in the same fulminating fury state that the male does.
A common relationship between "Apple Tree" women and their fathers is to set themselves up and to force or entice "Daddy" to rescue her — while she resents the hell out of him for doing so and she is full of fulminating fury for being in this position in the first place. Another pattern is that to spite "Dad", she will systematically fail to "win", to succeed in any way. She thus fits in with Mom's program and gets a "settle-for" vengeance on Dad as a "consolation prize". She also packs around all the "identifying with the aggressor" guilt and shame for his having violated her.
If success in the world or effective intimacy does come or approach despite all the "Apple Tree" person's "best efforts", they have the reaction of becoming more and more furious at Mom (and Dad) as they realize that they are in the impossible double bind of "destroying God" or of "destroying themselves". It can get very intense, even reaching the point of rageful outbursts, virulent acting out and homicidal impulses.
As a result of this indignation-rage, a lot of "Apple Trees" are intensely angry at authority, such as the school system, the work world, the laws of the land, and authority figures. This has the effect of crystallizing and highlighting their dilemma and destiny, which of course greatly increases their frustrated rage. They also do a "transference" thing whereby they project their rage at their parents onto the authority system. In their experience, their fury at their parents is too dangerous to own, so they transfer it to others who occupy positions of power and influence over them.
One of the more interesting ways that this rage shows up is in an exaggeration of the "klutz" ineptitude thing as a "Here, take THIS outcome of what you've programmed me to be!", unconsciously directed at the parents. It's a kind of, "Oh, you hate my personal power, do you? Well, then take this — and this — and this!", as they fumble-bumble their way into failure after failure in a rageful spitefulness type of thing.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
The thing that characterizes the "Apple Tree's" functioning is that they are never-endingly operating significantly below their potential. They continuously perform and produce at a level way less that can be expected of them given their personal qualities, gifts and position in the world. They just consistently "don't cut it".
They feel shrouded in clouds of locust of destiny-derailing developments and processes constantly. Physical failures, relationship incompetence and spiritual inabilities abound in their functioning. They generally have a very difficult time of "making it" in the world. They are often grossly ineffectual in self-sufficiency skills and general world-handling capabilities..
There is, however, another type, where they rise up the ladder of success — only to blow it at the crucial moment in, a "Sisyphus" pattern (in which they struggle to get the boulder up to the top of the mountain, only to slip and lose it, over and over). A variation on this pattern is the "platter-slapper" who has multiple gifts but who never uses them.
Some are "semi-space cases" who are "floating ten feet off the ground". They often frame everything in "black-white" extremist/exclusivist terms that force them into making self-detrimental decisions, with the inevitable results. In some cases, the situation is so bad that they have a kind of "throw in the towel" reaction to the whole thing, so that any challenge brings immediate capitulation because they are utterly convinced that they couldn't and shouldn't succeed. The ultimate "intended outcome" of all this is that they end up in their parents' home for the parents' old age.
Generally speaking, any form of personal power or personal resource-development activates systematic self-sabotage. So does any indication of the occurrence of the kind of life success that would result in the individual's being drawn from their mother's orbit or breaking away into his/her own life plan and achievement. They immediately become failure-snatching or self-destructive in their functioning. At best, the individual ends up in a "getting nowhere" lifestyle.
They often show up having a learning disability such that their auditory memory, serial sequential encoding, cognitive mapping and other basic tool capabilities are severely handicapped. This has the effect of preventing them from acquiring the resources necessary for successful functioning. They therefore have a very large amount of competence-anxiety, depression and nihilism about being able to handle things and to succeed in life.
The result is a kind of defeated, lazy, amotivational syndrome, coupled with frequent despair-freakouts and a certain resistance to "growing up" (for fear that the dragons will eat them). They lack perseverance, and they tend strongly to effort-avoidance and payoff-focus. They are prone to be distractible, immediacy-bound, intolerant of frustration, and rather grossly immature. Going over their head in debt is a very frequent phenomenon here.
In the worst case scenario, they have a feeling of "specialness", and they become conning and scamming, with clever utilization of distraction operations to cover their tracks. They can then move on to extortionistic acting out and to putting up an impenetrable wall of "fog" around themselves to avoid any input or feedback. They then plunge irrevocably into the criminal justice system.
At the same time as they are steadily defeating themselves in the field of work and world-handling, the individual is also systematically kept from relating with other people beyond anything other than a fairly superficial level. This is sometimes done by means of the individual's evolving personal characteristics such as emotional distance or unpleasant behavior patterns that end up repulsing others. Or it can be done by the cultivation of a "nemesis-addiction" — a "fatal attraction" irresistible compulsion to totally fixate on just the wrong kind of person so that they can do no right and all they get is pain and punishment. The "programming" behind this latter pattern was along the lines of, "See! Go ahead and try to connect. You'll see that anyone else is far, far worse than staying with me!". So they end up relationship-inept and connection-starved.
"Apple Trees" believe that they don't deserve love with true commitment, and that any such connection is in effect parenticide and suicide. They therefore form mutually withholding parent-substitute relationships. They are convinced that if they commit to a bonded relationship, they will activate the "death implant" and simultaneously destroy the parent. Yet if they don't commit to a nurturing relationship, they wipe out via self-limitation and non-refueling drain-out. The whole thing leaves them in a "fit to be tied" rage and despair.
For them, sexuality is a self-destructive process, and it is totally unacceptable to them. They are intensely suppressed sexually, and they can't open up sexually for fear of annihilation, so they shut down. They fantasize sexually as a substitute, and as a result, they can't connect sexually. There is a huge split between sexuality and action that keeps them enslaved to the "nemesis"—"fatal attraction" stand-ins for the original cast fantasy figures, and of course the "ghosts of Christmases past" continue to haunt them. This guarantees that they can never connect with anyone but the original programmer, ultimately.
Yet the "Apple Tree" builds their life around intimate relationships to try to fill in for and to put a new ending on the old story with the parent. But then the more they love the person, the more they have to mess it up. They are completely incompetent in handling intimate interface, and the closer they get to the spouse figure, the more fear, self-inhibition, withholding and "drive-away" stuff that comes up. They also go into engulfment-paranoia, which they hold at bay with rage, and abandonment-annihilation-paranoia, which they keep at bay with capitulation attempts. The net effect is that they are expert relationship-demolition masters.
Some "Apple Trees" have been "tantalizing tarantula" parented — "seduce — slap-down" sexploitated and sexualized to such a degree that they end up with the feeling that there is something totally wrong or crippled about them, due to the "all suggestion and no follow-through" experience with the parent. In the most extreme case, they end up a kind of sexualized space case. They were so sexualized that they "fog out" to avoid the experience and awareness of it. These individuals are incapable of sexual contact, much less sexual commitment.
All in all, the "Apple Tree" is a person who has been "destiny-derailed" to such a degree that they can't manifest their identity or their potential or their cosmic purpose (unless their purpose WAS to be derailed in this way for karmic or soul learning purposes). They are systematically "sexcess-avoidant" to the max, and they are enslaved to the "tie that grinds".
WHAT DO THEY NEED?
"De-apple-Treeing" is the process of removing the "Big Barrier" between God and the self. The program was a betrayal by "God" (actually "Godzilla"), and learning that that was the case has the effect of freeing them up to take on their identity and destiny. The process involves awareness-induction to a high degree. However, this has to be carefully calibrated to avoid activating disaster. They need to be self-committedly "paranoid" to deflect and derail the "automatic pilot" decimation devices.
The healing process also involves giving up on trying to "rescue" or "win over" the family. The individual has to free themselves from the family's destiny process altogether. The whole thing is in effect a "differentiation" process involving altering the parents' expectations of the individual (if the "Apple Tree" is still a child) or freeing themselves from the internalized parental expectations. They have to develop a self-concept that is reality-based, rather than programming-determined.
Another component is safe rage-release and causation-clarification so as to clear the road to self-manifestation. Also involved is for them to learn that the "death implants" are not currently "monitored". They were built in long ago, like the ingenious devices in the tunnel at the beginning of "Raiders of the Lost Arc", where a little careful attention allows you to trip the "implant" off without being "taken out" by it. If they don't work, they fizzle out.
The intervention starts with insight-induction as to the process they are run by and its causes. That puts things in perspective and it harnesses the individual's awareness as a self-modification resource. There also has to be a "working through" of all their primal feelings, particularly of the unconscious rage and the "betrayal-guilt" when they do anything self-committed.
Any incestuous connections will also have to be "worked through". The primary purpose and goal is to arrive at a state of forgiveness and even of an "attitude of gratitude" for all it taught the individual. However, there also has to be the working through of the rage, despair, fear and guilt precipitated by it first.
Another resource that is needed is the systematic "reframing" (redefining the meaning of) what happened in their childhood. This can take the form of "change history" guided fantasies ("Take a time when you failed in success and/or intimacy and go back and give that kid the resources and/or experiences s/he needed"). Or a "peel the onion" process can be done ("What would happen if you . . .?" — "And what would happen then?" — "And what would happen then?", etc.) The idea is to get at the catastrophic expectations, after which the "change history" and "ecological check" ("What function does the implant serve? Find three other positive ways that could be done without it.") processes can be done.
This should not be a "river-pushing" operation. That generates severe "backlash reactions" that can be very destructive and even dangerous. You need to be careful and to calibrate sensitively, while not capitulating to the program either. To make things even more delicate, the process can set off some interesting reactions. For instance, when they start to break out of the pattern, a "betrayal-paranoid" self and other set up pattern can sometimes go off. Or the individual may go into a self-digesting cadaverousness arising from the internal war of attrition with the programs and the implants. This can look for all the world to be an anorexic reaction. Because of these kinds of processes, the whole undertaking needs to be done in a self-paced systematic desensitization manner so as to avoid the activation of annihilation-anxiety, the immobilization-freeze, the self-derailment reactions, and vulnerability to the "death implants".
Still another facet of the undertaking is the "severing the tie that grinds" process. Here the individual has to turn around and face down the "dragon in their den". They have to "tell it like it is" to the still-Apple-Treeing parent(s). They have to give reality feedback, so that both the parent(s) and they can be liberated. In this process, they will have to face the terror of "Deicide" — that the feedback and redefinition of their relationship might kill the parent(s). And they might indeed have to live with the parent(s)' actual death. But there is no choice in the matter, because if this isn't done, the hostile-dependent downspout will ultimately result in the death of both the individual and the parents in all likelihood.
Finally, they need training in all the various skills and capacities that were prevented or distorted by their pathological programming. This can only take place after the primary "freeing process" has occurred. Otherwise, they would simply repeat the destiny-derailment process again. This "post-training" can be run by the individual themselves in a manner guided by pragmatics.
This whole process is one of self-liberation, in effect. Their pattern is run by "delusional conclusions" installed before they could know better. Now the task is to let the Truth set them free . . .
More at index.php
More information: email: Narayan-Singh@dbs2000ad.com
Books, Face Reading and More Information.