Do you see that laughing man over there, seeming to be having the time of his life? Do you notice after a bit that something begins to grate about it? It's rather like the recorded laughter for the "fun house" mannequin, in that while at first it is attracting and contagious, after a bit, it becomes painfully apparent that it is not real. This is the situation of the "Smilin' Jack(ie)" (SJ). They are trying their damnedest to feel and come across as though they are having a wonderful time of it, but it ends up being grating and disturbing in its effects — which only activate more frantic efforts from the "Smiling Jack(ie)".
HOW DID THEY GET THIS WAY?
Their family was so fearful of the world that they took a totally "mentally squinting" approach to everything. That is, they were professional avoiders of reality. Now this doesn't mean they were functionally stupid. Quite the contrary, it took a lot of moxie to be able to systematically avoid the implications, ramifications and indications of what was going down. As might be expected, they were of course "passing it on" from their families from who knows how many generations back.
The fact of the matter is that they were in effect overwhelmed by the demands, stresses, responsibilities and pains of life, and they sought to alleviate the resulting quasi-panic with assiduous efforts to experience fear-incompatible emotions. Now rage is one such possibility, but it tends to greatly increase the very things they were afraid of. So they focus on joy, which, in addition to countering or at least covering fear, brings a lot of "side effects" that are both adaptive and enjoyable. Hence the birth of the "joy-aholic" and unpleasantness-avoidant family culture.
Another aspect of their process is that they are trying to fit in and to be respectable in the community — as a trouble-avoidant strategy, as always. So they place a great premium on "looking good", "doing well" and "making a mark". Achievement is highly important to them as a kind of "insurance policy" of "respect-buffering", so they don't have to deal with the "roughness and riff-raff" of society. However, at the same time, they are afraid of power, positions of responsibility and public notice, so they also have a counter-program to see to it that they don't become TOO successful, which shows up as subtle-self-sabotage and success-avoidance.
Needless to say, the child not only picks up on their fear and the associated "Never point out the Emperor's New Clothes!" messages, they take it as "God's gospel truth" from the "horse's mouth, the Source itself" that the world is a dreadfully dangerous place that one can only "whistle in the dark" to survive. So they trade awareness for escape from fear, at least on the direct experience level. And, of course, they also got the double-message and model of going for success — but not too much, and they therefore act as if they have an "engine-governor" that allows them to go only so far before they put a ceiling on their success, impact and noticeability.
The situation the child faced consisted of frightened and manic-frantic parents doing their level best to avoid being "taken down" by their fear and other desperate emotions. They made it crystal clear to the budding "Smiling Jack(ie)" that they did NOT want to hear anything from or about them that would activate a negative experience. They also demanded that the "Smiling Jack(ie)" make it in the world of achievement while simultaneously requiring that they not get TOO competent, all with the "horrors of hell" hanging out around the corner if the "Smiling Jack(ie)" faltered in any way. And to top it all off, they had to pretend they were having the time of their life while doing all this.
The "Smiling Jack(ie)" could never "blow their cover" lest they loose "Bruce" on themselves and their family, and lest they scare the parents away due to the parent's intense reality-avoidance and cope-ability-anxiety. They were already "dragnetting" for every resource they could pull up and driving themselves to the maximum of their ability to deal with the demands of life as it was. They just couldn't handle the kinds of demands that children perforce (By necessity; by force of circumstance) make. So the "Smiling Jack(ie)" was forced to take up their defense mechanism, and now they have to laugh to avoid wipeout by all their underlying pain.
WHERE ARE THEY COMING FROM?
"What makes Sammy run?" is the question that often comes to mind when encountering an "Smiling Jack(ie)". And the answer is "Bruce at the butt" — a severe abandonment-depression that is potentially lethal in its intensity due to the severe emotional deprivation that resulted from the family's lifestyle. The family was so busy being unreal that they were unavailable to the child at a very deep and damaging level right from the beginning. ("Bruce" was the name they used on the set for the shark in "Jaws").
They "Smiling Jack(ie)" therefore feels fundamentally unlovable in a dangerous and uncaring world, and they are overwhelmed by it all. They feel no inherent capacity for self-sufficiency or cope-ability, and they can't handle awareness of challenges and complexities. Their parents demanded way too much in the way of self-sufficiency and coping capability, not to mention never "blowing the cover" on any realities of their situation. Their love-line was the tool they used to control and impose their patterns on the "Smiling Jack(ie)", and the result is the "manic" depression-avoidance and fearful drivenness pattern. And of course, the "Smiling Jack(ie)" royally shut down and sat on any and all forms of conscious awareness.
"Smiling Jack(ie)s" are so competence-anxious, inadequate-feeling and worthless-paranoid that they must have continuous joy-significance hits and no negative awarenesses at all times. They are therefore intense joy-seekers who are pollyannishly denying, "party-timers", hilarity seeking, thrill seeking, "table-hopping", and safety-starved and risk-avoidant. They are also very family-dependent and they are a friendship-freak of the first magnitude.
Yet at the same time, they are able to function reasonably adequately due to all the achievement-induction. They do over-react with defensiveness or depression when stressed, but that activates their frantic-manic process, and they quickly return to the "smiling Jack(ie)" pattern. They are depression-deflecting to the max, and they do all they can to keep "Bruce" at bay.
Nevertheless, they can't help having the feeling that they are living beyond their means and stealing from Peter to pay Paul in a frantic dance macabre. At base, they feel that they are pulling a gigantic scam, and that they are faking it to make it, and that there is really nobody home inside. They do the "Last Tango in Paris" trip in which they create their own little "ostrich" world to keep both "Bruce" and "the wolves" at bay. They use denial as their primary defense as an almost conscious decision not to know.
Underneath all the compulsive laughter and smiling of the "Smiling Jack(ie)" is a humongous resentment-rage that arises from the severe abandonment-depression, along with the enormous amount of fear that they have inherited from their family and from their terror of "Bruce". It makes for extremely sly, subtle and "sticky wicket" passive-aggressive assaults on the environment continuously. Of course, all their "honest reactions" of this sort are "totally justified" and out of range of any form of awareness, accountability or correction with regard to their true nature and impact.
HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?
The "Smiling Jack(ie)" can't cope with the aftermath of the perfectionistic performance demands coupled with the self-sabotage "internal governor" requirement, and they also can't handle the enormous "contagion fear" generated by their family's whole world orientation and life-style. So they systematically shut off awareness, run their fear off at the muscle and the mouth, "har-de-har-har" self-reassure, and compulsively socialize in a "table-hopping" manner in a sad settle-for bucket-filling "keeping those cards and letters coming in" process — a kind of "safety in numbers" strategy. Their experience is that they neither deserve nor earn their love and their survival, so they shut their eyes and look the other way as they try to have the "time of their life".
They are into studied oblivion as a lifestyle. They do an "Always leave them laughing" — "laugh-aholic" chronic cheerfulness number that masks a mounting build-up of despair, fear and rage that precipitate stress-producing disorders and disasters. They are denial-dominated feeling-suppressors who are driven by an intensely uneasy energy that makes them compulsively active and vocal. They are real talkaholics about all manner of trivia, and they are experts at putting out much ado about nothing.
They have a profound underlying generalized dread learned from the family, as well as arising from "Bruce" and their "Incredible Hulk" experience of their subconscious rage at their whole situation. Their experience is that the world is a very dangerous, uncaring and hurtful place that allows no real joy and that precipitates continuous despair. They also feel completely outclassed and overwhelmed by the requirements of life, and they are intensely enraged by that. All of this creates a never-ending anxiety that drives them up the wall. They are not infrequently very prematurely grey or even white-haired from all the free-floating anxiety they are suppressing.
They are desperately involved in a frantic activity-addict pattern in which they have to be constantly on the move and filling their experience with stimulation and if possible, exhilaration. They are a first class excitement-seeker, stimulation-addict, fun-freak and total avoidance expert. They do a "manic-panic" activity output to "drag-net" in sufficient praise-able performances to keep "Bruce" at bay. They desperately try to find humor in everything and to avoid significance like the plague. They are always on the go — gabbing and yukking it up all the way. It's all a pseudo-joy ride, however, and bottom line they know it — which only makes them run all the faster and "mental squint" all the harder.
They are also inveterate socializers who are constantly trivia-talking and significance-squashing in a "banal retentive" pattern. In addition, they have the compulsive habit of choosing as their associates equally reality-avoiding and trivia-talking cronies. They are heavily into the "Lot's wife" pattern of "Don't look back (or down or in or into) or you'll turn into a pillar of salt!" attitude and pattern. They are also into "running it off at the muscle and the mouth" pain-avoidance process. They have "being chased by some infernal internal monster dreams and experiences", as they do anything to avoid "grim reality", which they experience as the "grim reaper". Female "Smiling Jack(ie)s" are intensely pollyannish, yet transparently tearful at the inner core. They have a real loose body until you get to the spine, which is super-rigid, like a puppet where only the extremities move.
Unfortunately, the "Smiling Jack(ie)" has the nasty habit of defeating themselves with their compulsive awareness-avoidant reality-deflecting and their "banal retentive" significance-avoidant phoniness and "BSing" boringness. The fact is that they are rather egregiously socially incompetent, a fact which greatly feeds "Bruce", the abandonment-depression. They therefore get more and more manic-frantic, and there is never any peace for them or for their surrounds.
Ultimately, it is almost inevitable that it will all catch up with them in a calamitous catastrophe brought about by their reality-avoidance or by a precipitous collapse of their physical and/or emotional body from all the stress they put themselves through. They are in effect "having a good time as they go out", as there is no other alternative as far as they can tell. As a result, "Smiling Jack(ie)s" not infrequently end up "accidentally" or "suddenly" dying, reflecting their underlying self-hatred that they have been desperately running from all along.
HOW CAN THEY BE HELPED?
Intervention with the "Smiling Jack(ie)" is rather difficult because of their intense reliance on denial as a defense against reality. Probably the best approach is to put them into a loving and supportive reality-nose-rubbing context such as a group of kindred spirits like a 12-step situation for their particular problem. They need to be made to love awareness because awareness heals and then deals with reality in a winning way. They need the positive peer pressure orchestrated by therapists to move them along the road to awareness and to release them from their fear treadmill by degrees.
They also need dream and guided imagination work to help them dig up their "inner demons" in a manageable format so they can work on and with them to turn them back into the allies they were before all the shit hit the fan for them. In addition, they need "tiny target" interventions where their therapist and they pick a pragmatically trivial but profoundly central and significant mini-change and experience-experiment to move them into "trying it so they'll like it" because the childhood war is over.
In addition, they need carefully calibrated, timed and packaged feed-back on their BS-slinging, their social impact, and their people-selection, and the ramifications of all that. They also need training in respect-inducing, real fun-producing, power-enhancing, love-eliciting and purpose-manifesting. They have been running scared for so long that they never slowed down enough to learn how to live life effectively.
WHAT IS THEIR PURPOSE?
In their desperate attempts not to be eaten by "Bruce", they have become masterful "artful dodgers". But in the process, they had to know at some level what they were dodging, and therein lies their "gift in the garbage". They have a great deal of subtle pragmatic wisdom to share. And they have the extremely well oiled social interface machinery with which to present it in a non-threatening and often highly entertaining manner.
They therefore become a reality-accepting and truth-promulgating enthusiastic life-, love- and people-enjoyer and connection-maker for larger projects and purposes. They become a "nerve center net-worker", so to speak. Yet at the same time, they make absolutely wonderful hosts and hostesses who in their skillful sociability can spread the good word with no one being the slightest bit the wiser as to what or who hit them.
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