Morality Mortality

Morality is a set of rules usually given to us by our family or family experience. Religious values, sexual mores, prejudices are taken from modelling of significant carers all give us our moral compass to direct us on how we lead our lives. We can either accept what we were taught about morality or reject it to try and create another way of living. Katy Perry raised by parent pastors in a deeply religious family might be an example of this!?
Morality Mortality

Freud took the view that religion was a self-deception to protect us from our loneliness and fear. In this theory presumably the freer you are from loneliness and fear the less you need religion? Whatever your morality Freud believed it was fuelled by deep unconscious traumas hidden in our psyche which we are unaware of. Hurts that we have repressed fuel our morality. At the same time our morality keeps these hurts hidden and protected.
Our morality keeps us from the pain we suffered from hurst at the time they happened.
Morality Mortality

Our sense of mortality is always under threat but becomes more threatened the older we get. Death of parents, family, or friends can bring our morality into sharp relief whatever our age. Pain from bereavement brings us into an unwelcome part of ourselves: the pain area. The pain and hurt of bereavement exposes other pain and hurts that our morality before has hidden. If this is the first time the person has fully experienced the full force of their present and historical pain the person can strongly react. Relationships end, houses and flats are sold, dreams are attempted to be fulfilled.
Ongoing work on the self can mitigate bereavement into a crisis that can be managed – just!
Morality Mortality

Does mortality affect morality? Bereavement entails a re-adjustment of rules and values that we live by.
This re-adjustment can consolidate our rules and values: or challenge them and make a change.
How far we know ourselves and how our morality has been formed is important.
Knowledge of the self and how we get to be who we are makes us more prepared for a crisis. A constant re-examining of our morality makes small adjustments to our morality. The person who has done little work on themselves and enters into a crisis has to make big adjustments. This can be a shock themselves and others around them.
Mortality Morality

All rights reserved
Disclaimer: This weblog is the view of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2014