BAD JELLYDo you live in defense

mechanism land?

-A practical guide to freedom from low self-esteem,

and how to begin living as your innate self.

By Scott Gladstone, M.D.Board Certified Psychiatrist

Copyright 2017 Scott Gladstone, M.D.,All rights reserved.

Published in eBook format by eBookIt.comhttp://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2814-7

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

The purpose of this book is to help you expose and understand the root causes of your "false" mental pain and begin the process of healing.

As a lifetime, board certified psychiatrist, I have had the opportunity to observe the psychological experiences of many people. For the past twenty years, I have treated thousands of patients, from children to adults and everything in between. Based on my observations of these patients and the knowledge I've accumulated over many years of practicing, I've synthesized the theory of bad jelly, and simplified it here for your benefit.

Before this book, people actually thought that the thought processes caused by bad jelly were the truth. Due to the credence given to bad jelly, it's been allowed to have horrible effects on people's lives.

This is the type of book that you can turn to again and again throughout your life as you face new challenges and stresses.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: Exposing & Understanding Bad Jelly

The Components of Personality

Defense Mechanism Land

A Distortion of Reality

A Distorted Self-Concept

Bad Jelly’s Path to Self-Destruction

Part Two: Beyond Bad Jelly: The Innate Self

The Ego Ideal

Self-Preservation

Part 3: Neutralizing the Bad Jelly, Accessing the Innate

Breaking Out of Old Patterns

Vulnerability vs. Immunity

Part Four: Building Immunity

Sample Essay

Epilogue

How to Read This Book

…and I must make my way along this narrow ridge

between the truth and the caricature of it.–Vladimir Nabokov

The purpose of this book is to help you expose and understand the root causes of your “false” mental pain and begin the process of healing. The information I have provided here will allow you to see that your longstanding psychological suffering has not been based on the truth about you, and that just beyond that veil of falsehood is the joyful truth, accessible to anyone who truly wants it.

As a Board Certified Psychiatrist, I have had the opportunity to observe the psychological experiences of many people. For the past twenty years, I have treated thousands of patients, from children to adults and everyone in between. Based on my observations of these patients and the knowledge I’ve accumulated over many years of practicing, I’ve created the theory of Bad Jelly, and I offer it here for your benefit.

Before reading this book, you may have actually believed that the thoughts caused by Bad Jelly were the truth. Due to the credence given to Bad Jelly, it’s been allowed to have horrible effects on people’s lives. Bad Jelly keeps people blind to their true selves and traps them in a painful psychological bondage - all based on past experiences.

By learning about Bad Jelly and how to identify its presence and influence, you will be able to begin distinguishing the thoughts that are based on your true, innate self from those that are based on Bad Jelly. By applying the techniques I’ve developed that neutralize Bad Jelly, you can free yourself from this harmful way of living.

In Part One, you’ll learn all about the definition of Bad Jelly and how to expose it. I’ll familiarize you with the simple but important concepts behind Bad Jelly’s development and operation in your life. You’ll find out about the seven forms of childhood trauma and how they affect your thoughts about yourself and cause certain defense mechanisms to develop as your primary way of thinking. You’ll learn about those specific defense mechanisms at play when Bad Jelly is boss, and you’ll see how Bad Jelly leads to a distorted self-concept and a distorted understanding of reality.

Part Two will focus on the true you, the you that lies underneath the Bad Jelly. This portion will teach you all about your innate self: what it is, how to access it, and why your happiness depends on it.

In Part Three, I’ll teach you techniques that will help you to expose the Bad Jelly and neutralize it. You’ll learn how to access your innate self, and I’ll show you how to cultivate immunity from Bad Jelly and be on guard for instances of vulnerability to Bad Jelly.

In Part Four, I’ll demonstrate some of the methods I frequently use with my patients when they’re stuck in Bad Jelly’s defense mechanism land. These include simple

reminders that can be used on a daily basis, as well as a more involved writing exercise that can be extremely helpful.

This is the type of book that you can turn to again and again throughout your life as you face new challenges and stresses. The process of healing that can be instituted based on the information in this book is one that can be carried onward for the rest of your life. Becoming free from the hold that our Bad Jelly has on our thoughts and our lives is a process that must unfold on a perpetual basis, but it becomes easier and more natural if we continuously put it into practice.

It is my sincere hope that your healing will begin here and now, through reading this concise book. I have written it in a way that is accessible to all readers, and it will provide you with everything you need to know about the techniques I use with my patients in a clinical setting. It is the success of my patients which has inspired me to make this treatment available on a larger scale, and I truly hope that you will enjoy the increased quality of life and enriched experiences that they have been allotted through the ideas I share right here.

Part One: Exposing & Understanding Bad Jelly

-What is this “Bad Jelly,” anyway?

“Bad Jelly” is the basic concept I use in therapy with my patients to relieve their emotional pain. I explain it like this: We’re born as an empty jelly donut. During childhood and adolescence, jelly is injected into us based on our experiences, and it functions as our identity through the childhood and adolescent years. Our identity is the basis for all of our ideas about ourselves and other people, as well as our relationships and our perception of the outside world.

This jelly can be healthy and positive, or it can be harmful and destructive. Innate jelly is the g-d given identity that we are born with. It is the good jelly. Ideally, the identity adults live by stems from our innate set of beliefs. Our prime goal for adulthood is to live with an identity entirely consisting of innate jelly.

Bad Jelly is injected when we suffer from traumatic experiences during our childhood. The seven forms of childhood trauma which lead to Bad Jelly are sexual, physical, verbal, emotional, neglect, abandonment, and rejection.

Bad Jelly becomes like a dark cloud hovering overhead. Our true innate identity and potential are replaced in our perceptions by false Bad Jelly, and altered. The conscious mind and its emotional

experiences have been thoroughly commandeered by the influence of Bad Jelly.

Bad Jelly is the cause when we have an inability to feel anything good about ourselves. At its core, it is low self-esteem that is so ingrained in our personality that it causes a whole series of predictable patterns to unfold. It is a force that takes over your thoughts from the inside, and then causes problems for you as it extends its influence to your external life.

Bad Jelly conceals your true innate identity behind a false and harmful one, to the point where you start believing that Bad Jelly is your true identity. Having never known any other identity as an adult, and having been subjected to Bad Jelly’s influence since early childhood, we naturally accept our self-perception as “true", even though we have greatly detoured from our true innate path.

When we are overcome by Bad Jelly, it creates a tough coating over our innate identity and essentially takes over. It saturates our ego entirely, and becomes our "untrue" identity. Our real selves become inaccessible and obscured. Bad Jelly actually makes us believe that the childhood trauma was our fault, or that it happened because of our inherent badness.

To become a mentally healthy adult and to neutralize Bad Jelly, you must learn to differentiate the truth about you from the exposed invalid, vague, and negative self-generalizations caused by Bad Jelly. Bad Jelly is incompatible with one’s functioning

as a mentally healthy adult, a fully mature human being.

The Components of Personality

-The “Id”

The defense mechanisms we develop to deal with childhood trauma actually stem from our instinctive urge for survival and self-preservation.

It is now time for me to discuss the id, ego, and superego, which we need to understand to fully neutralize Bad Jelly.

The id’s very nature is to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and it serves to provide the primitive desire for living.

The id’s five primitive needs are instinctive to humans; they are actually the five reasons why a baby cries. These needs are the need for sleep, the need to satisfy hunger, the need to be held, the need to be relieved of discomfort, and the need to not be medically ill. When a baby cries, at least one of those five reasons is the cause. Keep in mind that these needs are unconscious, and one way or another, a human being will try to meet all five of them. When our survival depends on it, we will satisfy our id at all costs.

-The Superego

The superego is the source of the guilty feelings we experience as the result of doing something that is in opposition to our innate concept of right and wrong. It is like an internal system of checks and balances, constantly weighing our values and beliefs against our actual behaviors and

actions. It is the part of us that gives us the capacity to act in self-sacrificing ways (for example, to risk our lives for the sake of our children), and yet it is also the source of self-punishing tendencies in the event that our actions fall short of our expectations.

This part of the personality is where our conscience is located, and so the superego gives us the capacity to evaluate how our behaviors and actions compare with our beliefs about right and wrong. Our superego is our connection to g-d, and the location of our spiritual longing.

The superego’s natural tendency and occupation is to oppose the id’s constant demands for the fulfillment of base desires. It wants to encourage us to embrace a higher ideal, as the id is susceptible to ung-dly temptation toward its own gratification.

Our superego is the voice of reason that sits on one shoulder with a halo over it, suggesting in a whisper what might be the best course for our actions to follow. On the other shoulder is the id, arguing with the superego while clutching a pitchfork. There you are in the middle, feeling pulled in two directions at the same time. When the two of them are constantly bickering and trying to win the battle for your attention and eventual submission, you can’t seem to ever find any peace or relaxation.

The superego is representative of our ability to censor our behaviors and actions so that they will conform to society’s standards of what is acceptable. Without a

superego, a person would behave like a sociopath: without remorse or guilt.

-The Ego

Situated firmly between the id and the superego is the ego, which serves as a sort of go-between or bridge between the two other personality components. The ego’s job is to balance the messages it receives from the id, which tell it to seek reckless abandonment through sensory pleasure, and the messages it receives from the superego, which urge it to transcend itself and become the ego ideal.

The healthy innate ego is the most reality-based facet of our personality. It is practical, knows right and wrong, good and bad, and cause and effect. In other words, the ego recognizes that behaviors have consequences. The ego is also the location of our rational thought processes of mental reasoning and problem solving. When we are presented with a choice to make and we have to evaluate our options, the ego is the part of us that performs the evaluation.

The Three Marshmallows

You can think of the personality as a stack of three marshmallows, with one on top of the other: the bottom marshmallow is the id, the middle is the ego, and the top marshmallow is the superego. The ego is in the center, squished between the id and the

superego, and communicating with both of them.

Now, let’s add Bad Jelly to the stack of marshmallows. Bad Jelly is injected at the level of the ego—the middle marshmallow—where our identities are formed and located. As it gets more and more enmeshed in the middle marshmallow, the Bad Jelly starts to leak downward from the ego, making us more likely to fall victim to the id’s unhealthy and self-destructive temptations. Bad Jelly does its harm in the middle marshmallow.

Bad Jelly mixes in with your innate identity, or ego, and causes the “dark cloud” effect to become your perceived reality. Bad Jelly, injected in childhood or adolescence, replaces your innate jelly and serves as your "false" identity. When you are running on Bad Jelly, it is as if your eyes, ears, and perceptual mind are run by the people who injected the jelly into you when you were younger.

Because our interactions with the external world and the people in it are colored by our self-esteem, low self-esteem sets us up to have a negative evaluation of our everyday life. Low self-esteem is essentially the defense mechanism of devaluation of self, and is not based on the truth about you.

Although low self-esteem is completely false, it’s a very big deal because it is all-encompassing. It feels very real, and seems to be the almighty truth. This low self-esteem stands in the way of our healing, and until your Bad Jelly is totally neutralized, you will not be able to heal from your emotional pain.

Scott Gladstone, M.D. is presently in private practice in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii practicing Transcultural and General Psychiatry. He is a graduate of Howard University College of Medicine, did his psychiatric residency at Los Angeles County - USC Medical Center, and is Lifetime Board Certified in Psychiatry.

Dr. Gladstone is an expert in treating a wide variety of patients from private patients, to medically indigent patients, and prison inmate patients. Dr. Gladstone has been seen on TV, on radio talk shows, and public speaking regarding psychiatry to the general public as well as to peers. Dr. Gladstone can be written to at www.drgladstone.com.

What is this "bad jelly," anyway?

Bad Belly is the basic concept behind the technique I use in teaching my patients to relieve their emotional pain. Think of it like this: we're born as an empty jelly donut. During childhood, bad jelly is often injected into us, and saturates our identity through our childhood and adolescent years.

Bad Belly is caused by our tendency to have negative fantasies and defense mechanisms regarding traumatic circumstances of various natures and intensities during childhood and adolescence.

Bad Belly is the dark cloud hovering overhead. It takes over your thoughts from the inside, and then causes problems for you as it extends its influence in your life.

The discrediting inner thoughts you have toward others are likely to be associated with bad jelly. Low self-esteem is not real–it is a defense mechanism in action. Although self-esteem is a completely artificial construct, it's a very big deal because it is all-encompassing. Until bad jelly is neutralized, you will not be able to heal.

The good news is that we don't have to live this way, and there are steps we can take to recognize and neutralize the effects of bad jelly in our lives.