Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 10

The U.S. Government’s Flawed Intelligence on Clinical Depression

The whole world dwells in the dark when it comes to understanding human nature. Even the largest organization in the world specializing in mental illness, the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), has a huge blind spot.

The full story of emotional weakness is told in Why We Suffer. Order it at the Books link.

This agency of the U.S. government is giving us misleading information about the nature of clinical depression. In its information booklet on depression, the NIMH says, “It [clinical depression] is a real illness. It is not a sign of a person’s weakness or a character flaw.” Clinical depression, however, is a sign of a person’s weakness. In claiming otherwise in this booklet and on its website, the NIMH has rejected 100 years of painstakingly acquired intelligence and knowledge concerning the dynamics of the unconscious mind.

In doing so, the NIMH is also overlooking modern research. Brain imaging has found evidence that depression results from unresolved negative emotions associated with guilt and self-blame.* It’s not our fault that we have these negative emotions. We’re dealing here with what is still primitive and undeveloped in human nature. Nonetheless, these negative emotions do constitute a weakness within us.

Depression is a psychological weakness, a symptom of inner conflict in the unconscious mind or psyche. Just about everyone has some degree of inner conflict, and people with clinical depression are likely to be more conflicted than the average person. Inner conflict produces negative emotions, including self-blame and guilt, that in turn produce depression. Again, this is not anybody’s fault: still, it is a weakness.

When we can’t see where we’re weak or ignorant, we’re unlikely to become smarter or wiser. By assimilating self-knowledge, we’re able to offset these concealed, self-defeating dynamics, just as bugs in a software program can be neutralized.

Inner conflict is not the sole cause of depression. Other factors can contribute to it, including genetics, brain anomalies, poverty, weather, diet, political dysfunction, social corruption, and the lack of connections to friends, values, the natural world, and meaningful work. Nevertheless, inner conflict weakens us when it comes to dealing with these other conditions and challenges.

Most of us, as mentioned, have some degree of inner conflict and its accompanying emotional weakness. We struggle with self-regulation, self-doubt, and unruly negative emotions. Chronic depression is just one among many symptoms of inner conflict. Other symptoms include anxiety, bitterness, indecision, procrastination, boredom, loneliness, cynicism, addictive behaviors, and feelings of helplessness and entrapment. These symptoms, too, often occur in conjunction with chronic depression.

There’s a tendency for people to feel some shame and guilt when confronted by claims or allegations that they’re emotionally weak. This might account for why mental-health professionals are averse to making the claim. Our tendency is to feel we’re being blamed for this weakness. Why is that? Our inner critic—in its irrational and primitive way—does mock and scorn us for whatever such weaknesses we have, producing guilt and shame. This self-aggression or self-blame is all part of inner conflict.

Let’s look more deeply into the dynamics involving inner conflict to see how depression is created within us. (This post expands upon what I wrote in an earlier post, titled, The Hidden Causes of Clinical Depression.)

Through depth psychology, we learn that our psyche is a battleground between inner aggression and inner passivity. When we step back and observe our inner dialogue, we see how it contains both passive and aggressive ideas, attitudes, convictions, daydreams, and passions. Much of our thoughts and feelings, both conscious or unconscious, reflect passive and aggressive inclinations.

Our inner critic harasses us with accusations, sarcasm, mockery, and ridicule. On an inner level, we fight back, usually rather weakly, through the thoughts, feelings, and instinctive defensiveness of inner passivity. We can’t win this battle when we’re identified with our inner passivity: It simply can’t represent us effectively.

The suffering of depression is the pound of flesh we pay, through the passive side of inner conflict, to the aggressive inner critic. Depression is the emotional price we pay when, in our unconscious effort to minimize the threat of our hostile inner critic, we accept the punishment of emotional suffering.

Through inner passivity, we stab ourselves in the back with this compromise: We get the inner critic to back off by conceding that its ill-treatment of us is justified by our supposed flaws and defects. We pay this pound of flesh as, figuratively if not literally, we hang our head in guilt, shame, self-disgust, and even self-hatred, accepting sufficient punishment in demoralized self-debasement to satisfy the inner critic.

Most if not all of this conflict transpires without our conscious awareness of it. This knowledge is not widely accepted because we feel mortified—hugely humbled—in recognizing how uninformed, how ignorant we are, of life-defining dynamics at the heart of our existence. The idea is highly repugnant, on par with the notion that we’re expediting our extinction.

The inner critic is capable of belittling and demoralizing us to the point that we sink into apathy, hopelessness, self-rejection, despair, and depression. The inner critic’s accusations against us are usually negative, unfair, and unjust. The inner critic (the superego in the language of psychoanalysis) is a primitive aspect of our psyche that has usurped some of our biological aggression and turned it into self-aggression. While we might succeed in deflecting some measure of this inner assault, we typically still absorb much of it.

When we’re less conflicted, more in tune with our authentic self, we’re able to protect ourselves from the inner critic. The strongest, healthiest people have disabled the self-aggression, sometimes from an early age in ways that are mysterious and unconscious. When as adults we continue to operate from the passive side, our sense of self simply shifts back and forth, in one stage under the influence of inner passivity and, in the next stage, of our inner critic. Our authentic self is thereby hidden from us.

Many of the symptoms associated with depression are the same as those associated with inner conflict. Depressed people, according to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), are indecisive and feel low self-esteem, diminished interest in activities or pleasure, low energy, and an inability to concentrate. They also feel empty, sad, unworthy, and hopeless, the manual says. These painful feelings also arise from the conflict between inner aggression and inner passivity. Our inner critic assails us with accusations of our unworthiness, and through inner passivity we experience helplessness, hopelessness, shame, and guilt.

Many people have a particularly harsh inner critic, and genetic factors may account for much of this. Such an inner critic is particularly vicious and cruel. Without insight, these individuals presume, at least on an emotional if not mental level, that the harsh criticism or hatred they are feeling are somehow deserved because of their supposed faults and failures. As they absorb this negativity, they become increasingly contaminated emotionally by it. Because of inner passivity, they become less able to protect themselves from self-aggression. They are in danger of descending into self-rejection, self-hatred, and serious depression. Often, a person infused with self-rejection and self-hatred becomes increasingly rejecting and hateful of others.

Some of us, as well, are particularly burdened with large deposits of inner passivity. Our genetics can account for this, and childhood exposure to passive parents, or to fundamentalist or authoritarian systems, doesn’t help. Still, we don’t have to be ongoing victims of genetics or childhood experiences. In many instances, consciousness in the form of psychological astuteness and self-knowledge can trump genetics or at least mitigate the worst influences of genetic factors.

Guilt is commonly associated with depression. Guilt is often irrational, and it has a complex undercurrent. It’s associated with the degree to which an individual, through inner passivity, is unconsciously inclined or willing to soak up or absorb the negative, aggressive energy of the inner critic. Inner passivity involves the willingness and even the determination to experience itself, even when doing so is self-defeating or painful. Guilt is produced as part of one’s defensive effort to deny one’s inner passivity. Because of their inner passivity, some individuals soak up the inner critic’s aggression to the point of becoming congested with negativity, hence “psychologically sick” or depressed.

Many people suffering from depression frequently blame themselves for their failures and troubles. This corresponds with the inner critic’s readiness to blame us for our real or alleged faults and failures. Without any awareness of what they’re doing, some people, on a daily basis, repeat negative mantras (e.g., “What am I doing wrong?” or “I’ve been such a fool”) that are replays of a steady stream of accusatory insinuations from their inner critic.

Our inner passivity, as well, grapples with the venom dished out by the inner critic, although inner passivity often tries to shift the blame to some allegedly “lesser crime,” hoping the inner critic will agree to a plea bargain. Depression is also associated with bodily tension and stress, and such physical symptoms are psychosomatic byproducts of the anxiety produced by inner conflict.

Some experts say that depression arises when we’re unable to fulfill our needs or realize our potential. But why aren’t we fulfilling our needs or realizing our potential? Again, the conflict between inner passivity and the inner critic creates an emotional-mental blockage to creativity, purpose, confidence, and the full range of our intelligence.

Depression can also involve other forms of inner conflict. For instance, some people are inclined to indulge emotionally in feeling unloved and unsupported. Here the conflict consists of the conscious wish to feel strong and loved versus the unconscious willingness to engage in impressions, still unresolved from childhood, of being unloved and weak or helpless.

Relief from depression involves a learning process, and depression sufferers can apply this knowledge to relieve their misery. We learn the dynamics of the conflict (between inner passivity and inner aggression) that produce depression, and we then become insightful enough to see these dynamics at work in our own psyche. This strengthens our intelligence and consciousness. For now, very few psychotherapists, even among psychoanalysts, practice a method that employs this knowledge. Individuals who wish to try this process may have to learn it and apply it on their own. (Read, How to Be Your Own Inner Guide.)

Insight isn’t always necessary to emerge from depression. Many people, through whatever means, “snap out” of it. Some residue of inner strength comes to the rescue and enables them to take control of their life. Sometimes just starting to do physical exercises overcomes the passivity and creates a sense of strength. With the knowledge of inner conflict, however, we improve our chances of escaping depression and avoiding relapses.

The NIMH also says in its booklet: “Most people who experience depression need treatment to get better.” I have a problem here with the word treatment because it implies some form of medication-based intervention. (For those individuals who are satisfied with their medical intervention for depression, don’t let anything I have written here dissuade you from adhering to it.) People can overcome depression with psychotherapy, meditation, yoga, healthy lifestyle changes, new relationships or hobbies, the study of depth psychology, and so on.

The NIMH says clinical depression “is a real illness.” If the agency had said “psychological illness,” I would agree. But the term “real illness” is vague. And what exactly does that word “real” refer to? The statement implies an organic problem rather than an inorganic challenge that requires us to become smarter and more consciousness.

Finally, the NIMH, in the quote from its booklet, says that “[Clinical depression] is not a sign of a person’s weakness or a character flaw” [my italics]. True, depression is not directly indicative of “a character flaw.” Yet it is still the case that a character flaw is usually indicative of inner conflict and emotional weakness. It’s a fine point, yet it’s more evidence, as I see it, that the NIMH, in its attempt to describe the nature of clinical depression, is unclear and erroneous because of unconscious bias against the inconvenient or disconcerting knowledge of depth psychology.

There are many versions of depth psychology, some of which, in my view, are less effective than others. With the best depth psychology, people find their inner truth through their own intelligence. That truth uncovers the specifics of how and why depression has taken hold of them. This knowledge, once attained, empowers our intelligence and leads us to inner freedom.

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* The original research article, as published on the network of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

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Answers to Questions from Readers (Part 6)

Readers often send me emails with their comments and questions. Here I answer four of them, all dealing with different aspects of inner passivity. My responses are in italics.

We benefit by becoming more conscious of the nature of inner passivity.

I wrote to you some months ago. Since then I’ve bought many of your books and read the new articles you’ve posted. I’ve enjoyed becoming more aware of my internal processes. Yet I can still feel stressed about spending time with relatives I don’t necessarily get on with. I read one of your articles about family gatherings, yet still I have been trying to understand why I feel so angry when I think about seeing my sister who often takes her aggression out on me.

She is touchy and gets frustrated over traffic jams, etc. When she raises her voice at me, it affects my personal harmony and makes me feel disrespected. From reading your books, I understand that I’m attached emotionally to feelings of being powerless and helpless (she is my older sister, and her reactions have always made me feel victimized and unfairly treated). When I think about my responses to her attitude in previous months, I can see that I have reacted inappropriately with aggression and anger. This has made me feel even worse, as I don’t like disharmony.

I have tied to assert my rights and ask her not to talk to me disrespectfully, which has not really worked. She does not see any problems with her attitude and appears to be in denial. Any tips to deal with this? – L.K.

Thanks for getting my books. Glad they’ve been helpful. Try to use your time with your sister as a way to practice applying what you’re learning about depth psychology. See her as an opportunity for you to grow, not as a trial you have to endure. You’re feeling passive and disrespected around her, and your challenge is to see how these negative emotions arise in you.

Your anger at her is an unconscious defense that says, “I’m not looking to feel passive or disrespected. Look at how angry and upset I get at her!” Your anger gives you a taste of aggression, yet it is a reactive, self-defeating kind of aggression. If you act on it, you will feel guilty afterwards because your angry reaction will be an overreaction.

You want to keep seeing and owning the weakness in you that gets triggered by her. Your weakness stems from inner passivity. The passivity causes you to absorb her aggression rather than deflect it. Be patient and loving to yourself as you take note of your passive side.

Watch for your inner critic. It’s prepared to ridicule and mock you for your passivity. As your passivity is dislodged and begins to dissipate, you will experience the ability to relate to your sister in a civil manner that connects you with growing self-assurance. Even if she remains belligerent or hostile, she won’t trigger you and you’ll be pleased at how you maintain your cool. As you see your passivity, you still might make in the near future only a bit a progress, or even what feels like none at all, in terms of getting upset at her. That’s okay, the process of getting stronger and less reactive occurs at its own pace. Be patient and be kind to yourself. Your attempt to apply this awareness is part of a process that builds on itself and can get you in a good place before too long.

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I have a male friend who is being mistreated by his wife. He’s wealthy, well educated, functions well in business, and he appears normal in his life outside his marriage. He admits he’s passive and indecisive in his marriage, but acknowledges he’s not that way in the other areas of his life. He says he tries to negotiate with her but it looks as if he’s unsuccessful in his attempts. He’s been married ten years and every two years or so he gets fed up and leaves for three or four weeks and then comes back and tries again. Marriage counseling hasn’t helped.

I am curious as to what can cause someone to behave normally in most areas of their life and yet be a passive, indecisive person in marriage. Drugs and alcohol are not involved; neither of them drinks or uses. He appears unhappy and yet continues in the relationship. Thoughts? – J.S.

It’s quite common for people to be competent and capable in most areas of their life, yet act out in one particular area in ways that produce a lot of misery. Though we might be rich or famous, we still can’t escape from paying a painful price for an unresolved psychological issue.

Your friend is compelled unconsciously to act out inner passivity, and this acting out is occurring mainly in his marriage. Inner passivity, as you likely know from reading my blog, is an inherent sense of emotional weakness that often involves feeling submissive and victimized. An inner conflict is at play in our psyche: consciously, we want to feel strong, yet unconsciously we keep recycling feelings associated with being weak.

Your friend would be spared much of his suffering if he were to understand, with growing clarity, his inner passivity. He has to bring it into focus and understand his unconscious affinity for this old familiar sense of himself. We all have some degree of emotional weakness in the form of inner passivity. It helps a great deal for us to see, in all possible detail, the inner dynamics that maintain that weakness.

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Sir, I have for years been on and off again in psychotherapy for panic attacks, hypochondria—with both cognitive-behavioral and psychodynamic therapy. I’m not seriously mentally ill, just neurotic. No current addiction to drugs or alcohol.

Your articles on inner passivity really speak to me. My panic symptoms and health anxiety started 15 months into my marriage 20 years ago. After a fight about my hobby with my wife, she berated me for drawing and painting female nudes. My wife can be a sweetheart but also domineering to both me and my son. Therapy has helped me to stand up to her and my marriage has gotten much better. But issues remain. My dreams are frequent and recurring, where I’m feeling trapped or creatures are chasing me, and I’m not able to kill them and I get lost in my surroundings.

I developed an addiction to internet porn in the past ten years or so, specifically cuckold porn, and yes, I identify with the female taking on a group of men, but also the men (aggression?)

I don’t feel I am bisexual but I do fantasize being the woman and being passive in these scenarios. After orgasm, I do feel the same shame and guilt that people get, as you wrote, when they binge on food. Sex with my wife is great but I think my wife picks up on my passivity because she tells me about past lovers during sex. – W.T.

Thanks for writing and sharing this information. Yes, you certainly do have inner passivity in your psyche, and that passivity is libidinized (sexualized). Keep in mind, sexualized pleasure can be extracted through one’s passivity. Playing the game of imagining yourself a cuckold denotes large deposits of inner passivity in your psyche. The pleasure here is perverse, so it’s important that you resist it. Every time you libidinize the passivity in the way you describe above, you will pay a painful price in the following hours and days in terms of guilt, shame, and overall harassment from your inner critic.

Keep reading the content on my website, and try to keep an eye every day on how passivity is intruding into your life. The more you make a conscious effort to notice this passivity, especially in the sense of doing so as a learning process, the more you’re acquiring insight, expressing your determination to overcome it, and growing your consciousness. As you see more clearly the psychological self-damage you’re producing with cuckold fantasies, you’ll be empowered to refrain from producing those fantasies.

Your passivity can affect you in many ways, beyond what you have described. You want to become aware of all of its manifestations. To see the passivity with insight is to exercise inner strength. It means you’re determined to liberate yourself from this psychological liability. As you keep seeing your passivity, you will begin to feel more inner leverage, a growing strength, like secure handholds on a rock climb. This growing connection to inner strength can help you to resist the pull of the passive side. 

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I’m definitely starting to understand the dynamic between inner aggression and inner passivity, and I’m starting to notice when either of them takes hold of me. That being said, there are still moments where I get “taken over” by them and don’t realize it’s happened until it’s too late.

One of those moments happens with playing the piano. I first started learning the piano at about six years old, and playing reached its peak of enjoyment at around ten. After that, it started to feel more of a chore. I stopped lessons altogether at fourteen, and now I play various songs on an electric keyboard to keep the skills functioning. However, whenever someone suggests playing the piano or starting lessons again, I instantly find myself becoming very anxious and overwhelmed. It feels as though I’m being backed into a corner from which there is no escape.

So far, I haven’t been able to figure out why I feel this way. I do of course want to feel enthusiasm and pleasure towards playing the piano and becoming more skilled at it, but I also feel very strong resistance and guilt when thinking about sitting at a piano to play it. Any insight into this issue would be greatly appreciated. – O.N.

You’re able to play the piano with ease when, without outside influence, you yourself make the decision to do so. However, when outside influence is present, namely in the form of a person “pushing” you to play or to take lessons, you immediately interpret the situation emotionally, through unresolved inner passivity. As you say, you feel backed into a corner and overwhelmed. Instead of feeling free to make your own decision, you unconsciously highlight the sense of being coerced. The person’s request activates your inner passivity, which immediately kicks up your resistance.

Your resistance is likely based on a psychological defense that you employ unconsciously. The defense goes something like this: “I’m not looking for the feeling of being under the influence of this person and feeling I have to submit to his will. Look, I hesitate even to play for him or to consider starting lessons again. I do what I want, not what anyone else is wanting me to do.” This defense obviously becomes self-defeating.

Keep reading about inner passivity and watch for how, on a daily basis, it sneaks into your way of seeing and experiencing yourself, others, and the world around you. You will understand, too, that the guilt you feel is due to the degree to which you allow yourself, in an indulgent manner, to become entangled emotionally in inner passivity. Keep seeing this inner weakness with vigilance. You will feel new strength and a determination to grow as you apply this knowledge in a calm determined manner.

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12 Ways We Fail to See or Experience Reality

We humans are capable of acquiring profoundly deep understandings of reality. We’ll likely at some future time have a much deeper intellectual grasp of what are now scientific, metaphysical, and cosmic mysteries.

Our lack of objectivity produces negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors.

Reality is defined more narrowly, however, for the purposes of this article. Here, reality refers to what makes us tick psychologically and what it’s important to know about our mental and emotional operating systems.

This inner reality reveals what is right, proper, and true for our emotional wellbeing. The quality with which we experience ourselves and the world around us depends on how well we appreciate this inner reality. Civilization and the planet are depending on us to understand our inner nature.

To a large degree, people unwittingly experience themselves and the world around them through misperceptions and misinterpretations. This lack of objectivity produces negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. As we uncover these distortions and make them conscious, we empower our intelligence and acquire a growing ability to live in inner peace while fulfilling our aspirations.

Below are twelve common misperceptions of ourselves, others, inner reality, as well as aspects of outer reality. These misperceptions are all interwoven, overlapping with one another.

1) Perceiving the world through too much self-centeredness. We’re all born in a state of self-centeredness. The infant, with no experience of dealing with people and the world, feels self-contained and self-sufficient, despite the obvious total dependence on caregivers. The child’s sense of reality is not only limited, it’s also distorted. A child feels as if he or she is at the center of existence. It takes many years for a child to begin to feel empathy for others.

The child’s self-centeredness typically diminishes over time, yet most adults still view the world with these infantile leftovers. This lack of psychological development causes us to fret about what we’re getting or not getting, about whether others have good or bad intentions toward us. We experience others through conflict and a sense of being disconnected or isolated, and at times our generosity and gratitude are hollow. Invisible walls are now more likely to close in upon our heart, and we can’t breathe in our greater self. In this fetid air, we indulge, with accompanying self-pity, in feelings of being unappreciated, unworthy, and unloved. We’re unable to feel included in the network of wholeness of which we’re privileged to be part.

2) Perceiving people or groups through projection. Projection is a psychological dynamic that causes people to see and dislike in another person the flaw or flaws they’re declining to see in themselves. Projection is an unconscious psychological defense. The defense creates a distortion, a misreading of what is true and real, to cover up one’s unwillingness to see others objectively for the primary purpose of declining to see oneself objectively. Through our egotism, the curdling of self-centeredness, we avoid such objectivity because we feel slighted, humbled, or shamed by inner truth. Yet we’re unlikely to grow psychologically without seeing the inner dynamics that maintain emotional weakness.

Projection serves as a psychological defense. In one example, the unconscious defense claims: “I’m not the one who’s inclined to feel weak and passive. Look, it’s him. He’s the one with the problem. I’m not looking to resonate with that weakness in myself. I hate the feeling, and I dislike him for being that way.” This distortion of reality causes us to see others in a negative or unfriendly way, creating personality clashes and enemies.

3) Perceiving others through transference. Transference is a psychological dynamic that induces us to see and experience others as if their feelings, behaviors, and intentions toward us are unkind, negative, or malicious. Indeed, sometimes people are antagonistic toward us, but with transference we’re likely to think that’s also true of people who have no foul intentions. Our misinterpretation serves a hidden purpose: It fulfills our unresolved emotional attachment to feelings of being refused, criticized, unloved, controlled, and rejected. For example, a person with a sensitivity toward feeling judged or criticized will have a tendency to experience others as if they are indeed judging and criticizing him, even when that’s not their intention. The person who is sensitive to feeling rejected or unloved will experience others as if they are indeed being rejecting and unloving. And so on. Why is this?

This quirk of human nature begins when we’re young. Children tend to experience their parents and others in highly subjective ways, often through the negative emotions of refusal, control, criticism, rejection, and abandonment. A child, for instance, can feel refused or criticized at the slightest provocation, and then magnify the feeling out of all proportion to reality. Later as an adult, the person can now carry, in his or her psyche, emotional attachments to these unresolved issues. Unconsciously, the person goes looking for these negative emotions, and he or she transfers onto others the expectation that they will be the source of such emotions. Through transference, this person experiences the misleading impression that these negative emotions are being directed back at him or her.

4) Perceiving ourselves and others through inner passivity. Inner passivity causes us to feel self-doubt and to identify with ourselves through a sense of weakness. With this weakness, we might not be able to imagine or achieve our full potential. We feel disconnected from our better self, and thereby we perceive situations as if we’re operating at a disadvantage. With inner passivity, we often can’t imagine or plan a successful way forward. All we imagine or feel is the likelihood of failure. We also experience everyday challenges as if they’re immovable obstacles that will not only confound and overwhelm us but render us subordinate and helpless. A common symptom of inner passivity is fearfulness.

With inner passivity, we don’t necessarily see the smarter, more noble people around us with admiration. That’s because we compare ourselves to them and, in this process, experience ourselves as inferior. We can feel ambivalent about them because of our impression that they cause us to feel inadequate or less than. What’s happening, of course, is that we ourselves are unwittingly using their admirable qualities to activate our unconscious identification with ourselves as a weak, flawed, or even contemptible person. We often prefer to identify with weaker people because they don’t challenge us to grow and become stronger ourselves. In politics, we might vote for the weaker character for this reason, though we convince ourselves we’re making the best choice.

5) Experiencing the world through inner fear. Inner fear is an emotional remnant of childhood, and adults are often not aware of how much inner fear they carry within them. With inner fear, we tend to see dangers and enemies (or potential enemies) everywhere. If we’re acutely fearful (paranoid), the fearfulness becomes intensely painful. People who cling to ideologies or dogmatic beliefs sometimes make use of these mental formulations to quell their inner fears. They see certain other people with a negative bias, as outsiders or aliens who can’t be accepted or trusted. Inner fear makes us self-centered and entangles us in pettiness.

The more intensely we experience the world through inner fear, the more irrational we become and the more we’re in danger of making foolish choices and bad decisions. Inner fear, for instance, contributes to confusion and uncertainty. It causes us to have a vested interest in continuing to misperceive and misinterpret situations, because doing so enables us to maintain our familiar inner status quo, namely our identifications with self-doubt, indecision, and weakness. Holding on to fear is the path of least resistance, and unscrupulous politicians often play on this weakness. We need courage to go face-to-face with our inner weakness. Becoming stronger and wiser involves becoming less fearful.

6) Seeing others and the world through emotional attachments. I have already mentioned emotional attachments (in number 3, the discussion on transference), and they play a role in all the psychological ways we misinterpret reality. Here are some brief examples of them. A jealous person misreads many situations, and his or her misinterpretations arise from an emotional attachment to an unresolved sensitivity from childhood involving feeling rejected, abandoned, or betrayed. Cynical people, as another example, see the world with mockery and scorn, and these distortions stem from their emotional attachment to feeling powerless and helpless to remedy the injustice and malice they chronically complain about.

Emotional attachments, in essence, are the hidden culprit in so many emotional and behavioral problems. They create unconscious identifications that are limited and self-defeating. These attachments can shape our personality. Envious people, for example, are attached to the feeling of what they don’t have. Their envy covers up their emotional attachments to feeling refused, deprived, and unworthy. People are very reluctant to recognize their emotional attachments. For instance, if you were to tell an envious person that he’s emotionally attached to feeling deprived and unworthy, he might look at you in astonishment and then begin to mutter an adamant denial. If you were to tell a chronically angry person that his anger is a cover-up for his emotional attachment to feeling refused (or helpless, rejected, criticized, or unworthy), he would likely give you a dirty look or even lash out at you.

7) Perceiving the world through inner defensiveness. With inner defensiveness, a person is operating in a self-centered manner, instinctively protecting himself or herself from seeing and addressing inner weakness. The instinctive impulse is to protect one’s fragile self-image. Yet this emotional fragility can doom us to a life of missed opportunities. We won’t likely grow and become stronger until, with insight, we recognize where we’re weak. Defensiveness is a form of unconscious resistance. It’s an unconscious determination to avoid addressing one’s areas of inner weakness.

With inner defensiveness, we’re trying to avoid our exposure to any knowledge that threatens our inner status quo. That means we want to be exposed only to “safe” knowledge. We gravitate toward what is safe, and see danger in whatever threatens our self-image and might expose our inner foibles. This can cause us to be drawn into friendship or romance with deeply flawed people who won’t hold us accountable for our own flaws. Even when someone tries sincerely to help us to see our emotional weakness, we deny the problem, claim ourselves to be victims of extenuating circumstances, or turn the “accusation” back on that person. A defensive person is often quick to be judgmental of others and is thereby likely to misinterpret their motives and intentions.

8) Being misled by our psychological defenses. Not only are we challenged by our inner defensiveness but also by psychological defenses. Both our defensiveness and our defenses cover up our participation in “psychological mischief.” They usually operate unconsciously, and they block us from recognizing inner truth. Blaming others is a common psychological defense, and so is anger, as the following example illustrates. A man unconsciously rationalizes: “I’m not inwardly looking to feel rejected and then indulging in it. It’s not my fault I’m miserable. I’m not to blame. I blame Jane [or, I’m angry at Jane]. She’s the one who’s causing me to feel rejected.” This man now perceives Jane with a negative bias, though she might not actually have any intention of being rejecting toward him or have done anything to merit his anger. Whether she has or not, he’s determined to indulge in feeling rejected.

Many varieties of emotional suffering operate as psychological defenses. (See number 2 on this list, the discussion of projection, to read how it serves as a defense.) Indecision, as another example, offers up this defense: “I’m not willing to indulge in feeling self-doubt, uncertainty, and helplessness. The problem is I can’t come to a decision. Look how bad I feel for being so indecisive. I hate feeling indecisive.” Another symptom, depression, offers up defenses along these lines: “I’m not looking to feel criticized and condemned by my inner critic and people at work. I hate being criticized. Look at how depressed I get as a result of all the criticism I’m getting.” Another symptom, acute loneliness, offers this defense: “I’m not interested in indulging in feeling unwanted, unloved, devalued. Look at how lonely I am. I want company so desperately!”

9) Perceiving ourselves as victims of the malice of others. Young children can often feel that everything good comes from within themselves and everything menacing or bad comes from the outside world. This impression of reality lives on in the psyche of many adults, and it’s a factor in self-centeredness, inner fear, and an aversion for the unfamiliar. Victimhood feeds the unconscious appetite for inner passivity, accentuating the feeling of being powerless and helpless in the world. The individual with a victim mentality sees others as likely oppressors rather than potential allies. This person can also feel victimized by people who are supposedly refusing him, or who are critical, controlling, or rejecting of him. He believes that others cause these bad feelings to arise in him, rather than seeing his own participation in generating these negative impressions. As another example, people in the political correctness movement lose their balance and experience victimization when they unwittingly use the disdain or heedlessness of others as a way to feed emotional attachments to feeling rejected and unworthy.

10) Perceiving the world through a judgmental mentality. Our inner critic tends to be compulsively critical. Through compulsive self-criticism, we become our own worst enemy. Because of our inner passivity, we often fail to protect ourselves from the broadsides leveled at us by our inner critic. Because of this inner conflict, we begin to see ourselves with a pronounced unkindness. We begin to feel as if we deserve the verbal abuse that our inner critic levels at us. Now we’re seeing ourselves in a very unfavorable light, which means we’re misperceiving our own self. We’re now likely to begin to see others with the same negative intensity that our inner critic is directing at our weakest point, our inner passivity. Reacting to our inner critic, we become critical and judgmental of others, whether in our mind or with spoken critical words. Just as our inner critic attacks us with the barest of evidence or on the slightest pretext or for no legitimate reason at all, we do the same to others. Of course, we’re now failing to see them objectively. All we’re doing is creating negative impressions of them that are likely to be unjustified.

11) Seeing the world in terms of boredom. The world is an incredibly rich mosaic of people, animals, nature, art, technology, and so much more. It doesn’t deserve to be yawned at. Boredom, however, doesn’t care about all this richness. Instead, a psychological obstinacy prevails, an unconscious willingness to go through life feeling disappointed with oneself and with what life has to offer. A person’s parents might have adopted this approach to life, making it more likely that a son or daughter will adopt the same mentality. An adult can also, in ongoing unconscious resentment toward his parents, maintain a stubborn defiance, a determination to hold parents accountable for their real or alleged lack of support, negative outlook, or closed-mindedness. In such a case, the indictment of the parents would read: “My boredom shows how little you had to offer me. I’m just seeing the world the way you saw me and the way you saw the world, as if we’re all good for nothing.” Of course, this stubborn determination to refrain from experiencing healthy pleasure from the richness of life is self-defeating.

12) Seeing the world through negative peeping. This odd term, negative peeping, describes our largely unconscious determination to use our eyes and imagination to see or to visualize events and situations in such a way as to feed our attachment to one or more unresolved negative emotions. A fellow would be peeping if he were watching his girlfriend closely to see whether she gets excited in the presence of certain men—which would excite his emotional attachment to feeling unworthy or rejected. Peeping operates very much like transference (see number 3), with the added component of being a function of the visual drive. Negative peeping doesn’t have to involve the misinterpretation of a situation. Negative peepers might accurately see that someone is, say, intentionally ignoring them. But they will ramp up the sense of injury or injustice, fixating on the feeling of being overlooked or disrespected in order to resonate with their own emotional attachment to feeling unworthy or insignificant. Evidence for the truth of this is the fact that they will “see” that they’re being overlooked, and feel the hurt of it, even when others are innocently going about their business and have no intention of treating them in that manner.

When we understand these twelve ways that we misperceive reality, we begin to understand a macabre aspect of human nature—our unconscious willingness to continue to suffer with the unresolved issues and conflicts in our psyche. With this knowledge, our intelligence is now empowered to create a new and improved way of being.

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Is Ambivalence a Hidden Factor in Much of Human Misery?

Ambivalence is one of our more perplexing psychological ailments. The source of this paradoxical mental-emotional state lies submerged in our psyche, almost as unfathomable as those bizarre deep-sea creatures that underwater cameras have discovered.

Ambivalence is a psychological state that can create much misery.

Ambivalence is the misery we feel when we have conflicting feelings—love and hate, for instance—that we experience simultaneously toward a person, group, object, institution, idea, or action. Ambivalence constitutes an excess of conflicting thoughts. It’s a tortured state of mind that involves failing to reach a coherent point of view on a subject one feels strongly about.

This psychological impasse contains elements of indecision, cynicism, confusion, and mixed feelings. But ambivalence has its own special psychological configuration. Under its influence, a person hovers in pronounced self-doubt, unable to feel or even to imagine a genuine or authentic self capable of assuming inner authority. This person is unable to feel or connect with the part of himself or herself that’s reasonably confident of knowing and acting upon one’s best interests. This state of self-alienation, of “not knowing one’s mind,” is one of many symptoms associated with inner passivity.

How widespread is the problem of ambivalence? Its collective effect could be contaminating many social and political issues. Ambivalence would likely be at play in people who hate the government while claiming to be patriots who love their country. Ambivalence is conceivably a factor with people who believe they’re decent and good while also convinced they’re wretched sinners. Also under its influence are people who understand the need to have police forces yet personally detest representatives of that authority. So too for those who denounce “forbidden” sexual attitudes and behaviors while in their imagination experience a compulsive allure for them. The ambivalence in these examples can be painfully acute.

Here are three more situations where it arises: when loving and feeling sharply negative toward a spouse or partner; when cherishing and resenting motherhood or fatherhood; and when thinking of oneself as a caring person while cheering the misery of certain others.

We can sometimes see ambivalence more clearly by understanding what it’s not. It’s not ambiguity, which is the feeling that can arise in viewing an optical illusion or, say, contemplating the Mona Lisa. Nor is ambivalence necessarily indecision or mixed feelings, both of which, when processed rationally rather than through unresolved inner conflict, have no particular misery associated with them.

A person with ambivalence can feel painful self-estrangement and confusion. One client, a former teacher in her early thirties, found herself frequently agonizing, through inner dialogue, whether she had made a wrong decision in leaving teaching for another job. She would find herself dwelling on how much she loved the kids, then a moment later shudder at the memory of teaching’s exhausting demands and how she felt it was not her true calling.

“No, I don’t like teaching,” she would say to herself. “Oh, but I do love the kids.” And then: “Maybe it’s right, I do love teaching.” And then: “No, I don’t, I don’t.” Soon she would snap out of this confusion, becoming adamant: “I do love the kids, I do!” Yet she would quickly collapse back into feeling confused and helplessness, often after going through this litany of pros and cons with other people, particularly with her husband and parents.

“I’m driven by a sense of urgency,” she said, “cycling in and out of self-doubt, with a pit in my stomach because I can’t figure it out. It’s all exhausting and it runs deep. I feel like a hound dog chasing a scent, only to suddenly smash into a brick wall.”

Some of her ambivalence centered on the question of where, professionally, she might make the biggest impact. She described her thoughts and feelings: “I taunt myself, saying I would have the biggest impact teaching kids in the classroom. Yet mentally I know that the whole idea of where the bigger impact will be made is debatable. Yet I can still feel wrong for choosing my new career, even though it involves helping adults. The recurring thought is that I’m selfish and not doing what’s good for society, making a mistake, and so on.”

Ambivalent people often look for “allies” with whom to share their ambivalence. By “enlisting” another person to share their confusion, they’re able to lessen the inner guilt they feel for chronically experiencing situations as if they’re being pushed into a passive corner. “See, others feel this way, too,” their inner defense claims. They also tend to seize on the offhand comments of others to feed their ambivalence.

As mentioned, ambivalence is its own brand of inner passivity. Inner passivity is a universal human vexation involving an unconsciousness willingness and even determination to identify with a weak sense of self. Through inner passivity, and then symptomatically through ambivalence, people experience an unpleasant if not painful disconnect from self. This disconnect is a familiar emotional default position that represents their unconscious willingness to identify with themselves through self-doubt and self-alienation.

They often feel unsupported emotionally by others, yet in their ambivalence they’re failing emotionally to support themselves. For instance, they frequently undermine their trust in a decision they have already made. Sometimes, as well, their experience is felt as an urgent need to resolve their state of confusion. However, this urgency can be, in itself, a psychological defense, a means whereby they deny their underlying intent to remain in a state of emotional uncertainty. The defense claims: “I don’t want to remain stuck in this old, familiar uncertainty. Look at how urgently I want to resolve this!”

A key factor in ambivalence is the stress placed on the pronoun “I”. The individual says to himself, “I doubt whether I should do this or that. Or, I haven’t decided yet.” Or, “I have changed my mind!” This person is making a claim to power, a claim that serves as a compensation for the underlying passivity. The claim is often ironic because the conflict usually has been decided—unknown to the individual, of course—in favor of continuing ambivalence and passivity, based on resistance to giving up inner conflict.

One person expressed his ambivalence in these words: “I feel a need to process this. I need to understand this better. It’s not clear how things have to be worked out. Am I locking into the right frequency here, am I on the right path? I need to find out what these feelings mean for me. Am I being true to myself? The problem is, I can’t get in touch with my feelings. What do I really feel?”

The emphasis on the pronoun “I” denotes a phony battle, or the semblance of a fight, against the individual’s underlying identification with the deposits of passivity in his or her psyche. The ambivalent person’s felt need to put forward this claim to power serves as a desperate attempt to deal with what are likely larger than normal deposits of inner passivity. Of course, the entire process of saving face by making this claim to power is self-defeating because of the emotional pain that’s experienced and because of behavioral consequences that often include poor decision-making.

As another example, an ambivalent person can feel strongly conflicted in the hours following an encounter with other people. One feeling is, “I messed up. I looked bad, I said the wrong things.” The other feeling, simultaneously experienced, expresses the opposite point of view: “I did fine. What I said was good. People were impressed.” An inner debate of this kind is also common among people who are emotionally attached to feeling a disappointment to themselves and others.

Essentially, ambivalence operates as a psychological defense. Ambivalent people are claiming unconsciously in their defense that they are neither inappropriately aggressive nor shamefully passive. They feel caught in the middle of these two choices (both of which are vetoed by their inner critic) that remain in their emotional memory from childhood when they oscillated between passivity and rebellion. The defense reads: “I am neither passive nor aggressive. I hold the middle ground. I have yet to make up my mind.” Again, emphasis is placed on the pronoun “I”, which creates a face-saving illusion of power. These individuals also are likely to feel a distressing urgency because the defense is based on the pretense that rational, sincere consideration of one’s dilemma is taking place.

The most famous words in English literature—Hamlet’s statement, “To be or not to be”—express ambivalence. The fame of this question attests to humanity’s powerful resonance with ambivalence. On the surface, the words refer to Hamlet’s thoughts on committing suicide, yet a deeper meaning is inherent: Should we humans take the high road and learn to live alert and highly conscious (to be) or do we take the low road and submit to a wrath of negative emotions and a passive disconnect from our better self (not to be). A person who is conscious of this vital choice and the high stakes involved, while simultaneously declining to take the high road, is likely to experience painful ambivalence.

For people on the low road, their encounters with career failure, ill health, addictions, homelessness, and even suicide might signify the ravages of an ambivalence toward one’s own self.

A deeper understanding of ambivalence, once assimilated, becomes self-knowledge that empowers our intelligence. This in turn guides us away from the inner conflict and inner passivity that produce ambivalence, toward greater self-trust and connection with our authentic self.

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Inner Conflict is the Source of Cognitive Distortion

So much of human thinking is irrational. This kind of messed-up thinking, often referred to as cognitive distortion, perceives reality in ways that are misleading or flawed, if not completely wrong, false, or stupid. (Examples follow below and more are found here.)

Our messed-up thinking produces irrational feelings and behaviors.

Irrationality floods our mind in the first years of life, so its staying power shouldn’t surprise us. The young child has to deal with pronounced self-centeredness, aggression, passivity, and baby fears. The child’s mental and emotional life is also confounded by the trauma of weaning, ambivalence, moral reproach, the threat of punishment, toilet training, the limits of brain power, the inability to frame situations on the basis of experience, the ups and downs of what is pleasant and unpleasant, and various other demands of necessary socialization.

In addition, a child soon starts to experience guilt and shame, along with a litany of what’s forbidden to see, exhibit, feel, and talk about. Much of this mental and emotional disorder remains in the adult psyche in the form of inner conflict and cognitive distortion.

Overcoming cognitive distortion is the primary aim of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is America’s leading product in the mental-health marketplace. Yet CBT’s methodology just skims the surface. Depth psychology, in contrast, penetrates into the source of this distortion. This article offers readers a chance to understand cognitive distortion from the different points of view of these two methodologies.

Cognitive distortion is present in many painful emotional conditions and self-defeating behaviors. It contaminates the thinking of people who are cynical, envious, jealous, shy, stubborn, indecisive, hateful, bitter, lazy, hypochondriacal, chronically bored, apathetic, mediocre, and shame and guilt-ridden. It also occurs in addictive personalities, as well as the lonely, the fearful, and the depressed. These psychological problems have their roots in unconscious inner conflict, which is recognized and addressed by depth psychology. When inner conflict is resolved, cognitive function is more rational, and people won’t be so encumbered by emotional and behavioral problems.

Depth psychology addresses cognitive distortion as a symptom of the mental and emotional conflict that permeates the human psyche. CBT sees only one side of this inner conflict. It recognizes the conscious side which states the obvious, for instance, “I want to flourish and feel good about myself, and I am aligned with that goal.” CBT doesn’t confront the other side of the conflict, the unconscious part, that harbors a primitive obstinance and perversity that contaminates our emotional intelligence.

This other side, which expresses both a stubborn resistance and an appetite for suffering that is baked mysteriously into human nature, is not interested in self-development. This resistant side expresses itself, usually unconsciously, with assertions along these lines: “I’m not going to let go of the old, familiar sense of myself, even if that involves continuing self-doubt, fear, guilt, and shame. It is who I am. This is my fate.”

We become more astute and stronger emotionally when our mental and emotional intelligence becomes aware of this psychological perversity (perversity is used clinically, not morally). CBT does recognize that many of our cognitive distortions are unfairly self-abasing. The therapy encourages people to think better of themselves. It advocates using rational evidence and argument, in silent dialogue, to refute distorted thoughts and wear them down over time. But a process of inner dialogue already occurs, ineffectively and to no good purpose, in our conflicted psyche. As depth psychology recognizes, our inner critic makes insinuations and accusations against us and a weak, passive voice inside us tries to defend us with counter-arguments. This passive voice (I call it inner passivity) represents our best interests very poorly. The conflict between this passive side and our inner critic produces cognitive distortions, often in the form of thoughts that serve as unconscious psychological defenses. These defenses are often faulty rationalizations for why our suffering is supposedly necessary.

In one example, CBT cites as cognitive distortion the tendency of some people to catastrophize. Such people can believe an inconvenience or an uncomfortable situation is, in fact, a worst-case scenario. Along with their flawed thinking, they typically also become stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed. Again, CBT advocates as a treatment the use of rational evidence to “prove” the situation is not as bad as the individual believes.

The problem goes deeper, however. Underlying the tendency to catastrophize is an emotional attachment to inner passivity. This means the individual is unconsciously willing and even compelled to experience the event or situation in terms of being helpless and overwhelmed to deal with the challenge of it. The individual feels he or she won’t rise to the occasion and instead will be overwhelmed and defeated. This unpleasant and often painful feeling is a kind of emotional addiction. The deep passivity, functioning as an emotional default position, literally compels the individual to experience this inner weakness. If this aspect of the psyche remains unconscious and is not exposed clinically, it will likely continue to be a powerful negative influence in the person’s life.

People who are chronically angry believe irrationally that their anger is justified. Depth psychology, however, teaches that the anger is usually covering up some unresolved weakness or sensitivity in themselves. Angry people often believe they’re being unjustly deprived, refused, controlled, criticized, rejected, or betrayed. Their perceptions of such injustice or mistreatment are often distortions of reality. They can feel controlled, for instance, not necessarily because someone is actually controlling them or trying to control them but because being passive or submissive is inwardly their emotional default position. Their anger is a defense covering up this weakness: “I’m not willing to feel controlled—Look at how much I hate the feeling and how angry I get at those who try to control me!”

They might interpret someone innocently asking a favor as an expression of control or domination. They are triggered by their inner passivity (a common ingredient in inner conflict), which misreads or misinterprets reality, often in a way that accentuates the feeling of being at the mercy of, or beholding or submissive to, the influence or power of certain individuals or groups.

Inner passivity, which permeates the human psyche, is itself a cognitive distortion. Inner passivity, according to depth psychology, produces our defensiveness, which is a psychological maneuver, often used unconsciously or instinctively, intended to mislead us. Whether expressed inwardly to ourselves or outwardly to others, defensiveness is a ploy used to protect us in a variety of ways, often from inner fear associated with challenges to our fragile sense of self.

Inner passivity is difficult to recognize because doing so is offensive to our ego-based self-perception. In our psyche, we constantly try to cover up our inner passivity, which itself is the means through which we allow our inner critic to present itself illegitimately to us as the master of our personality. Humanity is largely ignorant of this primary conflict. How many people acknowledge to themselves, even once in a while, that they’re not masters of their own house, though Freud informed us of this fact more than 100 years ago. In refusing mentally and emotionally to accept this, we remain, as one example, too unintelligent and proud to really care about the dangers that climate change poses for future generations.

In general, we want to strive to see the bigger picture when trying to make sense of our thoughts and emotions. We can be misleading ourselves when we pay heed exclusively to the specific content in a typical cognitive distortion. What does this mean?

A person would be emotionally and mentally entangled in a cognitive distortion when, for example, he or she focused on and became upset about a single critical comment in a workplace meeting that otherwise went well. An individual who is tormenting himself or herself in this way is typically preoccupied emotionally and mentally with the specific details of that workplace meeting, replaying the situation over and over in their mind. CBT would have this individual come up with various evidence and arguments concerning what happened for the purpose of overriding the person’s negative self-assessment and bolstering a sense of worthiness and value. But the actual workplace event, in itself, is incidental. The individual is unconsciously using this event as a prop, as a means to replay and recycle unresolved inner conflict. It’s as if the inner conflict itself goes looking for convenient situations (any port will do) for the purpose of being activated or triggered and producing unconscious mischief.

With that in mind, what might the inner conflict be in this particular case? Consciously, the individual wants to be appreciated, valued, and even praised. Unconsciously, however, this person is emotionally attached to feeling criticized. This means he or she resonates with feeling criticized because that sensitivity is unresolved from the past and now functions as an emotional addiction, which corresponds to a willingness or even a wish to suffer. This individual, defying all common sense, is willing to embellish or intensify—unconsciously, in a given situation—the pain of feeling criticized.

This emotional weakness, which produces cognitive distortion, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts originating in childhood. The psychological condition involves self-criticism, a sensitivity to criticism from others, and a tendency to be critical of others. This all produces not only cognitive distortions but an emotional bias toward perceiving a given situation more objectively.

Some people might never come to terms with this depth psychology. In such cases, there can be benefit in trying, in the CBT method, to talk rationally over the top of inner conflict. Yet people ought to be given the chance, at least, to see deeper into their unhappiness and self-defeating behaviors. Self-knowledge arises from our effort to see ourselves more deeply, and this knowledge empowers our intelligence and strengthens self-regulation of emotions and behaviors.

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A Psychological Hindrance to National Unity

Psychology issues are the heavy artillery and heavy armor on the battlefield of our dissension. A variety of these issues are besieging national unity. Civil conflict reflects the extent of widespread neurosis and ignorance of depth psychology. The psyche of citizens is being poisoned by divisive political propaganda that poses as news and informed comment.

Many Americans are immobilized and bewildered by feelings of uncanniness.

We tend, as well, to be highly resistant to deeper truth about ourselves. Rich or poor, liberal or conservative, we staunchly protect our egotism and tribal identifications. We resort to blaming others to cover up our injustice collecting, our largely unconscious readiness to feel victimized and disrespected, and our quickness to become negative, reactive, and cynical.

In this post, I address another psychological factor in civil unrest, the manner in which people unconsciously maintain and even embrace a sense of uncanniness concerning themselves and the world around them. (The word uncanny is a psychological term found here at Wikipedia.)

Uncanniness has a long history in personal and world affairs. People who resisted the scientific discovery that the Earth was round instead of flat experienced a sense of uncanniness. People who resisted the scientific discovery that humans have evolved from primates experienced uncanniness. Even those who, at the time of these discoveries, accepted these truths intellectually would likely have felt some uncanniness in their delayed reaction to accepting them emotionally.

From the time of childhood, humans try to avoid the challenge of dealing with reality. Stubbornness, defiance, and temper tantrums are expressions of a child’s resistance to reality. Children usually experience uncanniness when they first hear what is required of their mother and father to produce babies. Uncanniness softens the blow of having one’s illusions shattered, thereby temporarily lessening inner fearfulness. A serious problem arises when uncanniness persists and the individual is unwilling, at an unconscious level, to break through into what is real and true. That’s when irrationality, paranoia, and conspiracy theories flourish.

At the best of times, life can be confounding. We humans struggle mightily to make sense of it. Most of us eventually adopt belief systems, including ones that are irrational or lead us into self-defeat, in order to quell inner fear, which itself is a lingering effect of childhood helplessness and irrationality. The personality we adopt is also, in part, an accommodation to inner fear and inner conflict.

Rapid social and technological changes stir up this inner fear. Too much change in too short a time is going to overwhelm us, Alvin and Heidi Toffler warned in “Future Shock,” their 1970 bestselling book. Nonetheless, we can, when brave or insightful, become less fearful, assimilate these changes, and live in peace and harmony.

It’s important now to be more aware of our unrecognized inner fears. In America, we built a vast nuclear arsenal to deal with perceived threats, but inner fear was a factor in the building of that arsenal. Nuclear weapons gave us the illusion of safety, but other countries soon built their own. The world has been living for more than seven decades with the uncanny prospect of nuclear annihilation. If we had been more evolved, more psychologically astute, we could have, through diplomacy backed by genuine sincerity and even love, avoided this danger. The world is now living with a new uncanniness, the growing possibility that our world will be radically altered if not destroyed by climate change.

As mentioned, uncanniness has its own allure, an ignorance-is-bliss effect. The allure of the uncanny is also emotionally thrilling, which accounts for why people read mysteries, thrillers, and horror stories and watch scary movies. Inner fear can be tantalizing and manageable when we absorb it in just the “right” dose, and the feeling of uncanniness, in moderate doses, enables us to do this. But moderation is missing at President Trump’s political rallies where the people present are inebriated on irrationality.

Uncanniness might feel good in a perverse sort of way, yet it tends to be paralyzing. It’s the passive feeling that the individual is only an insignificant witness to an unfolding spectacle and has no responsibility for the outcome of events. Eventual self-defeat in such passivity (for instance, climate change unchecked) is discounted because the individual’s first priority, through the haze of uncanniness, is to minimize, though not address, inner fear.

Psychological self-development always takes effort, and it often takes courage, too. It’s easier to remain obtuse, with one’s intelligence dulled as it hides out behind denial and psychological defenses. In fact, uncanniness in itself operates as a psychological defense. The defense goes like this: “I’m not afraid. I’m not passively and fearfully overwhelmed by these changing times. Look, everything is unreal. There’s nothing real to be afraid of. It’s all just crazy! What can anyone do?”

When an individual adopts this defense, he or she is inwardly desperate to maintain it. The irrationality of the defense is then embraced for the purpose of suppressing inner truth concerning one’s emotional resonance with inner fear and one’s unwillingness to confront and deal with that fear. This makes uncanniness psychologically alluring, a defensive weapon for those who refuse to grow psychologically.

President Trump echoes this psychological inner state when he appends to many of his statements the term, “Who knows.” He’s not really asking a question. Instead, he’s proclaiming a meme for a post-truth era, to the effect, “Nobody knows!” Hence, the implication: “Nobody knows the truth, and that’s just the way it is.” People are invited to live under Trump’s protection in a Neverland world of illusionary safety. Millions have accepted his invitation to believe that Obama was born in Africa, the media carelessly and maliciously produce fake news, and climate change is a Chinese hoax. The uncanniness of such claims corresponds with the uncanniness his followers readily embrace. Trump is one of them because, psychologically, he lets them off the hook. Like him, they decline to grow psychologically.

The passionate attacks on the media show how some people, in the throes of uncanniness, don’t want truth. Truth is the enemy of those who embrace uncanniness as a psychological defense against inner fear and as an evasion of our human responsibility to become smarter and wiser.

Many people will never become conscious of their deep, frozen fears. Unfortunately, it means they’ll continue to project their fears outward onto others or circumstances, making it feel to them that their fears are based entirely on real external threats. Hence a defense: “I’m not weak and afraid of being defeated or overwhelmed by outside malice. Look at how I want action building a wall on the southern border. Look at how much I love my guns which empower me.” Regulation of guns is felt as disempowerment, a feeling with which many fearful individuals unconsciously identify, while simultaneously denying and repressing doing so.

The extent of psychological weakness in the human psyche is also tragically displayed in the opioid crisis and other addictive behaviors. A sense of futility is easily adopted as a result of this lack of emotional resilience. Meanwhile, we all have to endure the uncanniness of repeated mass killings by domestic terrorists using assault weapons—and then observe paralyzed politicians failing to respond appropriately.

Another psychological defense adopted by those who embrace uncanniness involves thoughts, feelings, and acts of violent aggression and hatred. Psychological defenses can be highly self-destructive. Hatred and violent aggression are experienced and then employed as an unconscious defense, to this effect: “I’m not helplessly at the mercy of changing times. I’m not passively overwhelmed by all the chaos taking place in my life and the world. Look, I’m angry and feeling aggressive. I’m feeling hateful toward those who are upsetting my sense of how things are supposed to be. I’m even thinking of how I can hurt them or destroy them.” The negative, emotional intensity with which defenses are employed often has to be escalated in order for the defense to continue to be effective as a cover-up for refusal to address underlying psychological weakness.

Trump stokes anger and rage from his followers because this irrationality, itself a cover-up for emotional weakness and self-alienation, is the enemy of truth. His business career has involved hiding from truth in the shadows of corruption. Having Trump as president has produced uncanniness in many good citizens of all political persuasions. We mustn’t be paralyzed by the uncanny effect.

Reality is the raw material with which the conflicted psyche stakes out its version of truth. When emotionally entangled in uncanniness, the individual is making an inner choice to ignore reality by adopting titillating mindlessness and living in a sanctuary of passivity, for the purpose of evading the challenge of becoming a mature, evolved human being.

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A Technique for Overcoming Insomnia

If you’re plagued by insomnia or taking too long to fall asleep, you’ll find plenty of advice online. Yet a third of U.S. adults report not getting enough sleep, so that advice might not be helping much.

No–it’s not counting sheep!

I have a technique to offer the sleep-deprived, and it’s not one I’ve seen mentioned on the internet as a way to fall asleep. This is the second technique or practice that I’ve published for this purpose. The first was described at this website several years ago, in a post titled, Taming the “Little Monsters” of Insomnia.

The “Little Monsters” technique involves recognition of the role that inner passivity plays in insomnia. When inner passivity is activated in the psyche, people can lie awake unable to sleep because they’re entangled emotionally in feeling helpless, which produces anxiety and stress. This helplessness often arises from the feeling of being unable to tame the worrisome, self-critical, or catastrophic thinking running amok in one’s mind. The technique involves acquiring self-knowledge, namely deeper awareness of one’s unconscious self-defeating readiness to resonate emotionally with feelings of helplessness and self-doubt.

The second technique is based on the loving-kindness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism and also found in ancient Hinduism and Jainism texts. Here’s how it works: When lying awake unable to sleep, begin to reflect upon other people in your life. Pick a person from among your family members, friends, work associates, or someone struggling with disease, finances, or other hardships. Begin to feel that you care about that person and that you’re sending that person your kindest thoughts and feelings.

If you are unable to do this, try instead to feel soft kindness toward yourself. Penetrate as deeply as you can into your sense of being. Feel that you care about who you are. Feel that who you are has standing in the world and that your existence is important. This is your effort to connect with yourself and support yourself emotionally.

Be conscious that you likely have, within yourself, emotional associations and identifications concerning self-doubt, self-criticism, and even self-rejection. These negative affinities do have some power, yet try to feel you won’t let yourself be defeated by this emotional, irrational self-alienation. Try to connect with some deep, ultimate belief in yourself.

As you’re lying in bed, do this caring for yourself and others. Do the caring for half a minute or more for a person you have selected, then go on to choose others. You can use words, repeated silently, that wish them safety, health, happiness, and joy. Soon you might be able to “feel into” the feelings of others.

People who practice this are free to believe or not in the possibility that some benefit or good fortune is transmitted from the sender to the receiver. That possibility is, for the purposes of this article, a secondary concern. Your main purpose in doing the practice is to help you fall asleep. Nonetheless, you do need to feel some genuine kindness for the practice to work. Why is that?

The kindness you generate within bypasses your mind and puts your attention deeper into a sense of who you are, your core being. Now you’re able to quiet your mind and, ideally, connect harmoniously with yourself. This is a huge improvement over feeling disconnected and consumed by feelings of helplessness. The kindness or empathy you produce releases you from self-centeredness and petty speculations and considerations. In short, it takes you out of your mental or conflicted self and puts you in tune with your best self and into the feel of kindness and generosity.

The practice also takes you out of inner passivity. You’re no longer lying helplessly in bed trying to fall asleep. You now can more easily determine the quality of your experience. Though the practice is an activity, it’s such a mild, inwardly peaceful activity that in no way does it impede you from falling asleep.

When we’re caring about someone, whether in our mind or heart, the caring is happening inside of us. It’s a good, positive feeling that manifests what is best in us. What a contrast with feeling angry or vindictive! What a release from worry and fear!

This caring for another person is a measure of our sincerity, integrity, and goodness. When doing this practice, you try to feel that you’re giving the best of yourself to that other person. The capacity to do this is a measure of one’s psychological health. Those unable to do it at all will know at least the direction in which they need to grow.

In addition to helplessness, people can be entangled in other negative emotions when they’re lying down unable to sleep. They might be weighed down with considerations concerning loss, refusal, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment, based on what they’re experiencing in daily life. These negative emotions, when churning inside us, are toxic and not conducive to full and restful sleep. Practicing the technique of caring for oneself and others frees us not only from helplessness but also from these other negative emotions. The caring is positive and it overrides the negative.

During the practice, the feeling of caring and kindness can deepen to become compassion and love. Ideally, we want to deepen our capacity to be caring and loving. The world desperately needs more people whose caring and love extends beyond their immediate family and tribal identifications. A 2010 University of Michigan study found that college students were 40 percent less empathetic than 30 years earlier. Perhaps this practice can have value in more than one way.

Sometimes people drift off to sleep while doing the practice. Other times they find that the practice has calmed them down after five or ten minutes of doing it, and they can then stop because they’ve induced a relaxed state that facilitates falling asleep.

Some people might have considerable difficulty doing this practice. If so, don’t stress out about it. Just try again the following night. If you can do it only for a few seconds, that can be very significant. The capacity to do it can grow over time.

Various schools of energy healing—including therapeutic touch, Reiki, and qigong—believe healing energy can be channeled from one person to another. However, scientific consensus cites evidence that the practice of transmitting good wishes and healing energy to others has no discernable benefit. I don’t concern myself here about what might be true in this regard. I have my own evidence that the practice described above works as an aid to falling asleep, and this is why I’ve recommended it.

It is appropriate to feel the practice has value in addition to helping with sleep. Someone is being honored—by you—for their very existence. We have all wanted to feel this recognition from the time we were children. The practice helps us to connect with our own self and feel united rather than divided.

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Liberals Need More Psychological Insight

Liberals and progressives will benefit from acquiring deeper psychological knowledge to bring to the political fray. As a psychotherapist, I see plenty of blind spots in my fellow liberals.

Liberals become stronger by studying their weaknesses.

I have, incidentally, sympathy and respect for conservative points of view. Actually, political designations, as I see it, are overrated when it comes to understanding or resolving personal or national issues. These designations have limited value because they don’t, in themselves, penetrate all that deeply into what is real and true. Both liberals and conservatives lack insight into human nature.

What we need is for everybody to smarten up, and an excellent way for us to achieve this involves understanding depth psychology. I address liberals in this article, yet much of what’s written here also applies to conservatives.

Many of us liberals are injustice-collectors, meaning that we’re unconsciously determined to experience matters of justice through our unresolved readiness to feel maligned or unfairly treated, either personally or through identification with others. Injustice collectors embellish, within themselves, feelings of being mistreated, oppressed, disrespected, or rendered powerless.

This weakness originates in our psyche, and it can be recognized in the weak unconscious defensiveness we muster against our inner critic or superego. Because of this inner conflict, we are more easily triggered emotionally when dealing with friends, family members, strangers, corporations, and those who oppose our political and social points of view.

We often get resentful or angry at those who we perceive to be oppressing or mistreating us, but this reaction is often a defense that covers up our unconscious readiness to feel rejected, criticized, or somehow victimized. The anger or resentment covers up the degree to which, through our own self-doubt and inner passivity, we resonate emotionally with feeling marginalized, unworthy, and helpless. This is our “stuff,” our baggage, the emotional or psychological issues we have not yet resolved.

The more we resonate in this unhealthy way, the more we’re in danger of acting out what we’re unconsciously expecting or looking for, namely actual mistreatment, disrespect, and oppression.

We tend to identify with those who we perceive to be victims of injustice. It’s certainly right and proper to care about injustice and to do something about it. But injustice-collectors detour down a dead-end. They contaminate their intelligence with their own unresolved emotional issues. Political correctness, as one example of this, becomes righteous and intolerant under the influence of injustice collecting, thereby widening the political divide. Conservatives, meanwhile, feel oppressed and disrespected by this righteousness.

Some liberals come alive and feel their best when in opposition to people on the right. We feel power in opposing the powerful, but we don’t necessarily know what it means, within ourselves, to really feel powerful. If we’re struggling with self-regulation issues such as overeating, excessive drinking, compulsive spending, indecision, procrastination, and relationship dysfunction, we’re not inwardly familiar with what it means to be powerful. Rather than embracing real power, the best we can do is to defy it or adopt a pretense of it.

Psychologically, we tend to identify with this feeling of lacking power. This personal self-doubt arises from inner passivity, which is an aspect of human nature that thrives in our psyche, determined to be experienced whenever possible. Most people, to some degree or other, live under the influence of a commanding self, a subtle illegitimate inner authority, which is a formulation of inner passivity and the means whereby we give away our power. It’s not the commanding self but our authentic self that we want to know and cherish.

Rather than feeling true compassion for victims, we’re prone to resonate with this inner weakness, which in turn causes us to identify with real or alleged victims of injustice or malice. Identity politics arises from our unconsciousness willingness to identify with, personally or indirectly, the plight of a real or alleged oppressed group or minority. This identification is entangled in the unconscious choice we have made to suffer with our own unresolved issues, though we pretend our concern for alleged victims is solely indicative of our kindness and awareness.

We do feel a semblance of power in defying and mocking the powerful, but this tends to be reactive, passive-aggressive power, a poor substitute for the real thing. Liberals are often uncomfortable with power because it can feel to us that power is somehow inescapably abusive. We make this association because our inner critic, that primitive inner agency that holds us accountable and demeans our efforts, does indeed treat us disrespectfully and abusively, though we unconsciously enable and tolerate this abuse through our unrecognized inner passivity. (Our commanding self, as I understand it, is a symptom of inner passivity, while our inner critic or superego is a force or drive onto itself.)

We need to become conscious, as precisely as possible, of the dynamics of our inner weakness. The remedy is to apply insight to the big or little emotional challenges of everyday life. Here are a few quick examples of liberals engaging the world with a lack of self-assurance or power. A liberal client complained, frequently and chronically, about feeling rushed and never having enough time to handle all his duties, though the deeper problem was his unconscious willingness to embellish the feeling of being oppressed and overwhelmed. Another liberal client’s panic attacks while driving her car stemmed from feelings of being a child trying to do something beyond her ability. Another client, who had a passive relationship with his mother, sought out a similar relationship with an older woman soon after his mother died.

Shopping for clothes, a liberal friend became upset at an aggressive salesperson who hovered at her shoulder. She left the store in a huff and told me later she was still upset about it. “Through your inner passivity, you were unduly influenced by the salesperson’s presence. Emotionally, you made that person’s presence a big deal, and then covered up your role in generating that impression by getting upset at her.”

“I got it,” she blurted with irritation. “Don’t say another word.”

I’m fortunate to have friends—and readers, too—who tolerate my analytic volunteerism.

Bless my liberal and conservative clients who come back for more. One of them had for years been preoccupied with the why of things, especially in the quest to answer tough existential questions. Her passive mother had subscribed to the expectation that, “If only I knew the rules, I’d be okay.” One time my client became distraught because she couldn’t figure out why a dog she’d seen running by the road was running so fast. Anxious about it, she’d mulled over a dozen possibilities, to no avail. Inner fear, an aspect of inner passivity, can be driving her reaction. More to the point, she was obsessing over this question for the unconscious purpose of accentuating a sense of her helplessness. The running dog was her prop to feel and recycle a deep passivity, her inability to make sense of an everyday occurrence.

This growing feminine power on display with the #MeToo Movement is desperately needed. I don’t consider this to be feminism per se, but rather consciousness enhancement for women and men. Depth psychology informs us that humanity still functions, in part, according to certain primitive instincts. One of these instincts prompts people to be aggressive whenever they encounter passivity, in part because the aggressor can be aroused both egotistically and sexually by the victim’s submission or helplessness. Enhanced consciousness overcomes this primitive instinct. Women are doing their part, if not leading the way, in the development of consciousness that is freeing itself from inner passivity.

Much liberal attention is focused anxiously in opposition to the latest Supreme Court nomination. Again, it’s both wise and imperative for citizens to resist political skullduggery. But liberals, through inner passivity, are bestowing an inordinate amount of power on the lawyers who occupy the Supreme Court. This constitutes misuse of the emotional imagination, which is the compulsion, acted out internally, to recycle, through our visual drive, our attachment to unresolved negative emotions. Unwittingly, both liberals and conservatives jump at the chance to feel oppressed. Doing so makes all of us fearful, anxious, and desperate—thereby more likely to proceed unwisely.

Our progress is going to come from our own personal self-development. The nation and the world will be saved by growing consciousness, the knowing in ourselves of what is true and false, right and wrong, and by the power to act accordingly.

Liberals are inclined to express the idea that they form a resistance to the Trump Administration. This is a passive perspective. It’s the Trump Administration that is the resistance, and it is resisting the growth of human consciousness. We all have this resistance in our psyche. Trumpism is, above all, an externalized, collective expression of the strong resistance we each experience when we undertake self-development for the purpose of realizing our potential. Such resistance is dangerous in the sense that it often produces self-defeat, and many fail to flourish and to fulfill themselves. Of course, we must overcome such resistance, starting in our personal life.

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Why We Urgently Need Inner Truth

Is there perhaps one basic insight, one key awareness, that we humans have to learn, and learn quickly, to help us avoid catastrophe from climate change, nuclear weapons, spreading psychosis, and multispecies extinction?

Lacking inner truth, we’re compelled to be enablers of our suffering self.

I recently purchased a book titled A Gap in Nature: Discovering the World’s Extinct Animals, which has on its book jacket an artful rendering of a Dodo bird. When I was a young teenager, I spoke about this bird, this phoenix of Mauritius, at a school speaking contest. I mentioned that human interventions had wiped them out, and apparently my voice’s sorrowful mystification at that point convinced judges (did I guilt-trip them?) to award me first place.

I’m not mystified now as to why we might soon follow the dodo into the void. I understand why the human race is fated to self-destruct. The knowledge is found in depth psychology, which exposes our compulsion to recycle and replay unresolved negative emotions and to suffer the accompanying self-defeat. Are climate change and nuclear weapons just props or means we’ve created to act out this fate?

Our extinction can and must be avoided. We may be fated collectively to self-destruct, yet we’re not destined to do so. We’re destined, I’m sure, to create a world in which we become increasingly peaceful, united, and wise. When we learn, one person at a time, to see ourselves more objectively, with insight into our compulsion to act self-destructively, we acquire the knowledge and wisdom to fulfill our destiny.

The notion that our species is compulsively self-defeating and self-destructive has been explored extensively by psychoanalysts for more than 100 years. (Readers can find summaries of these discussions at Wikipedia, under repetition compulsion and death drive.) Many people desperately don’t want to believe we’re so foolish and obtuse. They can’t deal emotionally with inner truth, which is experienced as highly offensive to our ego and self-image. Even modern psychology denies the fact that hidden dynamics in our psyche make us our own worst enemy, claiming that such a contention blames the “poor” victims of emotional suffering for fostering their own misery.

Nobody is to blame. We don’t usually produce our suffering consciously. Emotional suffering and its accompanying self-defeating behaviors occur because the extensive inner conflict that simmers and often clashes in the psyche of most people operates beneath conscious awareness. Human beings are dodos when it comes to recognizing the various aspects of these inner dynamics.

When forced to acknowledge, say, the daunting mental health crisis, experts blame the problem on deviant genes, irregular brain chemistry, flawed thinking, bad parenting, poor leadership, and the stupidity or malice of others. The conflicted psyche mostly goes unmentioned. Little useful information is revealed in the media or in schools concerning how we ourselves unwittingly maintain and act out unresolved psychological dynamics that generate misery.

I couldn’t see inner conflict in myself for the longest time. Most people have more than one such conflict, and here was one of mine: Consciously, I very much wanted to feel my value, yet deep in my unconscious, at an emotional default position hidden from my awareness, I was strongly identified with myself as a person lacking in value.

Unconsciously, I looked for opportunities to feel this lack of value or respect. I didn’t understand at all my emotional attachment to this feeling. I took personally any slights from others or signs of their indifference. A sucker for suffering, I repeatedly jumped into the frying pan to simmer in the juices of unworthiness.

To cover up (defend against) my hidden willingness to endure this painful negative emotion, I would often blame others and get angry at them for supposedly disrespecting me. How clever of me to hide inner truth from myself! How self-defeating and self-damaging it was to go on deluding myself in this way! I simply didn’t have the self-knowledge that would have brought fuller intelligence to my rescue.

People don’t want to see how emotionally attached they are to various negative emotions, such as feeling unworthy, refused, deprived, helpless, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and unloved. Much of the time, we unconsciously indulge in these emotions. We cozy up to them at every opportunity. As just one example, we unconsciously engage in a psychological process called “negative peeping” whereby we look for situations in daily life that we interpret in such a way as to generate these negative emotions within us.

Parents aren’t to blame for this, though bad parenting can make things worse for us. Inner conflict originates in human nature, as an aspect of our biology, in a process that I describe in many of my books. We simply go on repeating, even when painful, what is unresolved. Sigmund Freud was right to call this dynamic the repetition compulsion. Very rarely now do psychotherapists disclose to their clients the facets of the repetition compulsion and the inner dynamics that generate negative emotions. Psychotherapists cannot help us find our inner truth until they, within themselves, have grappled with and made headway in overcoming this dark side.

It’s important now to distinguish self-sabotage from the underlying emotional attachments that are mentioned in italics two paragraphs above. Inner conflict consists of emotional attachments to those above negative emotions, while self-sabotage is the consequence of our entanglement in (and unconscious willingness to recycle) those negative emotions. Self-sabotage has, of course, a wide variety of manifestations, including anger, hatred, cynicism, greed, apathy, bitterness, regret, hopelessness, unworthiness, disconnection from self, lack of self-regulation, and impressions of being a victim.

As we study this knowledge, we can trace our self-sabotage back to its source. Our intelligence and wisdom are enhanced when we uncover within ourselves the hidden dynamics that have been supporting psychological dysfunction. We also expose the emotional-mental operating systems that have been supporting our defenses, projections, identifications, and transference, all of which have been undermining our intelligence. We manage to uncover and understand the biggest conflict of all, the daily battle between our inner passivity and our inner critic.

Learning all of this doesn’t have to be any harder than becoming adept at a new software program (providing we overlook unconscious resistance). The learning dismantles the primitive inner dynamics and empowers our intelligence. We connect with our authentic self and now have much greater capacity to flourish in life and to embody higher attributes.

We’re trying to raise our consciousness. Higher consciousness involves a growing range of understanding of what is real, true, and important. We might, for instance, understand that consciousness permeates all of life and that, as humans, we stand, in regards to our planet, at the apex of consciousness. Logically, this would make us custodians of the planet, just as we would hope that some sort of transcendent consciousness throughout and beyond our planet functions as custodian of our wellbeing and that of Earth.

Our consciousness can be elevated in a wide variety of ways. Anyone who tries with some success to live with kindness, to become wise, to honor the unity of life, and to resist the appeal of self-aggrandizement is becoming more conscious. Learning inner truth, the underlying facts concerning the operations of our personal psychology, also makes us more conscious.

When we’re inwardly conflicted, just living with kindness can be very difficult. Many well-intentioned people are unable to muster kindness and generosity. When inner conflict is not understood, negative emotions are likely to contaminate our perceptions and cast us into painful self-absorption.

Lacking deeper awareness, we’re compelled to be enablers of our suffering self. Humans have a mandate to become loving creatures, and inner truth expedites the process. Now more than ever our mind must seek inner truth because our spirit and planet are starving for more consciousness.

—

Read Peter’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Inner Truth , at Amazon.com

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Notes to Psychotherapists on Addressing Inner Passivity

Inner passivity and inner conflict cause a split in our sense of being.

Earlier this month I received an email from a young psychotherapist, in practice for just a few years, who was struggling to understand how, despite his best efforts, a client of his had committed suicide. He wrote, in part:

I recently experienced a therapist’s worst nightmare and lost a client to suicide. I’ve struggled to make sense of it as he exhibited almost none of the traditional warning signs. One thing I do remember about him is that he was very inwardly passive. Your writings have given me the clearest picture of his internal world, one of a harsh critic and a passive recipient. Nothing in my training even remotely addresses the passivity that I now think was a big part of his suffering. I look forward to reading more of your work and using it to help more people in the future.

Since this therapist is interested in applying this psychological knowledge in his practice, I can offer a few points to assist him and other therapists. My regular readers, meanwhile, can benefit from understanding more about inner passivity and the therapeutic relationship from the therapist’s point of view.

The individual in danger of committing suicide is likely to be inwardly weak and disconnected from self, unable to support himself or herself emotionally. (See an earlier post on the subject.) This weakness is a symptom of inner passivity, which I describe in my books and articles. Inner passivity operates as an enabler of our inner critic, and it’s a major factor in many kinds of dysfunction, including depression, anxiety, and addictions.

As my clients start seeing and understanding their inner passivity, they’re able to recognize it as a clinical condition and a universal peculiarity of human nature. With growing insight, they begin to see and feel the powerful influence of the passive side as they also shift away from their unconscious identification with it. As a benefit of this recognition, they start to detach emotionally from false impressions of themselves (such as impressions of being unworthy or a hopeless failure) that their symptoms have misled them into believing. In this process, their best self emerges from under the weight of painful and self-defeating symptoms.

Of course, psychotherapy that addresses inner passivity is not guaranteed to prevent suicide. Even the best psychotherapy won’t necessarily result in growth and healing with highly dysfunctional clients who usually need psychiatric interventions.

People seeking psychotherapy are typically healthy enough to benefit from it. Benefits of working deeply in the psyche are soon felt by clients as they acquire important self-knowledge, yet their unpleasant or painful symptoms usually persist, though to a gradually lessening degree. Effective therapy can take many months and sometimes years before clients heal their inner conflict and acquire inner peace. Nonetheless, these people are undergoing a major acceleration in self-development when compared to the many who, declining all psychological help, make little or no progress throughout their lifetime.

Many of the clients of a skilled therapist stay in the therapeutic relationship because they can feel and observe the progress they’re making and because they know the value of what’s being offered. Still, some people can’t or won’t do this deep therapy; they run away from this knowledge. The considerable resistance of these clients induces them to flee to another therapist or to quit therapy. Clients who are more dysfunctional or neurotic have more resistance and typically make slower progress. A therapist can be misled into the feeling of failing such a client, while all along the therapist’s effort might have helped the client to avoid increasing misery and self-sabotage.

A therapist gives every client the opportunity to overcome inner passivity and its accompanying inner conflict. The therapist does this by consistently and patiently presenting clients with evidence, as observed in the trials of their daily life and through dreams and memories, of their inner passivity and inner conflict. The therapist helps clients understand how their painful, self-defeating symptoms arise from inner passivity and inner conflict. In a manner that is largely mysterious, the assimilation of this deep knowledge, along with the effort that clients make in applying the knowledge to their daily life, become the antidote. Growing self-realization empowers clients’ intelligence, enabling them to navigate more astutely going forward as they connect with their best self and establish inner harmony.

Clients sometimes becomes defensive when their inner passivity is identified. Often, they feel as if they’re being judged or criticized when the therapist points out their inner passivity. As a form of resistance, they often tend at this point to deny that they’re passive, and they’ll verbalize as evidence the times when they have been assertive or aggressive (the examples they give are often of reactive and inappropriate aggression).

They react with this defensiveness because, inwardly, they experience defensiveness, usually unconsciously, when their inner critic scolds and mocks them for their inner passivity (and for their emotional attachment to it and identification with it). Therapists have to help clients understand the difference between the therapist identifying the influence of inner passivity in the client’s daily experiences and the inner critic berating an individual’s weakness in its role as inner tormenter and agent of inner conflict. Therapists sometimes have to reassure clients that their intention is not at all to be critical but only to probe for the influence of inner passivity so it can be made conscious and thereby overcome.

It’s the case that inner passivity is difficult to conceptualize. Therapists have to recognize it in themselves in order to convey the reality of it to others. Therapists can get a sense of it by detecting their own inner defensiveness, which is an inner reactivity based on their passive relationship with their inner critic or superego.

The therapist who teaches clients about inner passivity and shows evidence of it is also protecting himself from counter-transference, meaning in this case the therapist’s unconscious temptation (always present to some degree) to resonate with the clients’ sense of helplessness, failure, and unworthiness (again, all symptoms of inner passivity). Clients often try unconsciously to pull the therapist into the pain of their helplessness and failure and thereby have the therapist identify with them as victims. The therapist who does so validates their clients’ passivity rather than exposing it.

When therapists don’t see these deeper dynamics, they’re prone to professional burnout and weariness from the challenges of being a therapist. This reaction is especially likely when providing services to more passive or dysfunctional clients.

A client’s resistance is not a vexing annoyance for therapists once they have cleared out their own inner passivity. This inner freedom enables the therapist to be professionally detached, while operating with patience, compassion, and the courage needed to keep clients attuned to how their psyche’s inner dynamics generate suffering and self-defeat. It’s vitally important for the therapist to know how clients use unconscious defenses to cover up their collusion in the recycling and replaying of inner passivity and unresolved negative emotions. The therapist has to expose these defenses, often to the clients’ chagrin. As mentioned, clients typically have a love-hate relationship with inner truth. (Read, Get to Know Your Psychological Defenses.)

In my opinion, superficial approaches such as cognitive-behavioral therapy have risen to prominence in part because therapists trying to practice depth psychology were so frustrated by their clients’ unconscious resistance. The deeper we work in the psyche, the more resistance our clients are likely to produce within themselves. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is able to avoid triggering the resistance of clients because it doesn’t threaten to expose their deep attachments to unresolved negative emotions and their deep identification with inner passivity. Clients can be taught about resistance, and they can learn to observe it in order to prevent it from defeating their best intentions.

Unfortunately, the existence in our psyche of inner passivity is not being taught in our universities. To teach inner passivity or even acknowledge it, teachers have to be convinced of the truth of its existence. To know that truth, therapists have to access their own inner truth, and depth psychology can help us do this. Inner passivity usually only makes sense when we can see and understand its effects and dynamics within ourselves. Academic psychologists have been especially mentally oriented and, in championing superficial therapies such as behavioral and cognitive, they have inadvertently strengthened their ego rather than allowing themselves to be humbled by recognition of deeper knowledge and the extent of humanity’s blind spots.

This might all sound a bit complicated. But therapists can come into an easy understanding of these deeper dynamics, and acquire the ability to teach them, once they are working through, within themselves, their inner conflicts and their emotional attachments to the passive side. Therapists are, ideally, individuals who also have worked through their attachments to unresolved negative emotions such as refusal, helplessness, control, criticism, abandonment, and rejection. Typically, a therapist can only lead clients to the level of self-development that the therapist has personally attained.

I hope that the young therapist who inspired this post is at peace with himself concerning his client who committed suicide. I don’t believe he needs to think of this person as someone he “lost” to suicide. If at this point he’s burdened by a sense of failure, he might be allowing his inner critic, which can’t be trusted at all to be objective, to continue holding him accountable. It seems that he’s an earnest person devoted to becoming an excellent therapist. He can give value to the life of his former client in his caring, learning, and growing.

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