Yes and the critical question in my mind is what explains it and how is it to be recognized and countered by those who have it or have it to lesser extremes. I believe that life in an altered reality is a pain avoidance mechanism employed by those who suffer, the degree of employment, the result of the degree of pain being avoided. I call this the fear of feeling what we have hidden from ourselves what we actually but thus unconsciously feel. The objective then, is not to become conscious of what we actually feel, the reason for a lack of critical self-observation. The observation that we universally avoid making is that we were controlled by our parents and by society via threat that to not behave in whatever the prescription of proper behavior is we will be thought of as disobedient, evil, worthless, shameful, you name it.
It is the fear that we are those things and will be made to feel it again that we are, that keeps us faithful to whatever morality we were taught is proper and respectful, while having none of the impulses that propel us to express those desires except by suppressing them, that causes us to live like time bombs, in a constant state of temptation to re-experience whatever desires we had to suppress aggravated by the fear that we will. We become duplicitous and turned against ourselves, fakes and pretenders.
And we do these things, had to do them to survive as children. We would have died, did die emotionally, to survive physically. No child can survive open ended constant suffering. What we were told is evil is driven underground to the unconscious where it can endlessly be triggered by anything we experience day to day.
We have become unconscious self hating machines with various degrees and various things that trigger our disease.
The only way out of this bind that I can see is to become aware of what we feel. The more accepting of the fact that we feel worthless we have, the less reality to that we will count as actually real and not just something we were told to feel. The more we understand that what we think is real is really a delusion we had to buy into, the easier it will be to change. We need that which supports real feelings of self worth, not false bravado of the ego. We need to understand that the love you take is equal to the love we make, because God, what that really means, is within us, simply buried under a ton of shit.