Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 11

Are You Living Your True Story?

Everyone needs a story, as the saying goes. The best kind of story provides us with meaning and purpose, and it reflects values and beliefs to which we subscribe. Ideally, it tells us right from wrong, explains our suffering, and guides us going forward. Such stories, which go back in history to ancient creation myths, are cornerstones of our humanity.

The best kind of story provides us with meaning and purpose.

Many of us, in order to flourish, need to change our story. Some stories that people adopt (or are unconsciously burdened with) do their existence and intelligence a great disservice. “I am a worthless nobody and a loser” is a story that many people follow. Some people believe, as another common story, that they are the helpless victims of what is (or what they subjectively perceive to be) injustice and malice. Such stories develop out of our inner conflict, and invariably they produce self-defeat and self-sabotage.

Keep in mind that terrorists and criminals, along with greedy and self-aggrandizing people, operate according to stories that feel real and true to them. Sometimes the stories most fervently subscribed to are rationalizations for being cold-hearted and close-minded. We obviously don’t want to be acting out a story that incorporates a lack of belief or trust in oneself, is borrowed from others, or has been contaminated by unresolved emotional issues.

We can have more than one story at a time, a personal story, for instance, as well as a story that frames our worldview. It’s normal that our story would borrow heavily from parents and culture, even as we’re struggling to forge a unique, personal story.

History, science, politics, literature, and religion provide us with stories, as do the deeds and inspiration of friends, leaders, mentors, and teachers. A lot of influences bear down upon us as we construct a story that resonates with our time, place, and sense of self.

A good or true story, one that keeps faith with our potential, is obviously the best kind. How can we acquire or develop a story that we trust to be good and true? A personal story, if it’s to do justice to our humanity, usually needs to be aligned with inner truth. A test for the integrity and truth of one’s story is measured by how, as it unfolds, a person is liberated from inner conflict and negative emotions, thereby becoming more at peace with himself and others. What else could we trust to be true but a growing wisdom that is successfully lifting us out of misery and self-defeat?

Self-knowledge enables people to change their stories for the better. As an example of how this works, let’s look at a person who, deep within, resonates with feeling unworthy and unimportant. This individual, let’s call him Larry, is intelligent and holds a good job. Yet he’s anxious and distressed much of the time, and he’s aware of being highly sensitive to how he’s seen and regarded by others. Larry is thrilled to receive praise or even flattery, yet frequently he feels overlooked and unappreciated, which quickly brings up angry or critical feelings toward others. He is also chronically unhappy, plagued by a brooding sense of not living up to his potential.

Larry is living a false story. It doesn’t reflect the truth that, in his essence, he’s as worthy as any other person. It’s also a story his father lived, and it goes back generations.

Driven by this unhappiness, Larry seeks out psychological understanding of his predicament. He learns that he’s entangled in emotional conflict. While consciously he wants to be appreciated and to value himself, unconsciously he’s prepared to feel and know himself through negative emotions associated with feeling unworthy, weak, and unimportant. He’s also conflicted in another way: His unconscious identification with himself as being unworthy means that, in his psyche, he doesn’t possess the inner power to ward off his inner critic that assails him on a daily basis for his self-doubt and lack of confidence.

Larry learns that his anger at those who apparently treat him with indifference or disrespect covers up his emotional resonance with feeling himself to be unworthy or unimportant. This cover-up, the psychological defense, reads: “I’m not looking to feel unworthy or unimportant—Look at how angry (or critical) I get at those people who treat me that way.” (It’s very important to understand how we try to cover up, through psychological defenses, an awareness of our unconscious willingness to experience ourselves in negative ways.) As Larry sees his inner conflict more clearly, he begins to realize the underlying issue has little to do with others and instead is centered on his own tendency and even readiness to plunge into feeling unworthy or unimportant. He sees how he has been making a choice, albeit an unconscious one, to play up or embellish within himself these feelings of being unworthy.  Now, with this growing insight, he begins to take ownership of (or take responsibility for) this dynamic in his psyche that has been inducing him to identify with being a lesser person.

This insight empowers his intelligence. Now, when triggered emotionally, he’s able to recognize his own participation in stirring up feelings of unworthiness. Larry realizes he has been choosing unconsciously to interpret various events and situations through feelings of being unworthy and unimportant, as if such negative emotions truly revealed his essence. His emotional identification with this irrationality had been overriding his common sense. He now realizes his anger at (or criticism of) those who allegedly see him in this negative light has been covering up his readiness to feel this way about himself. With this awareness, he begins to clear out his emotional attachment to feeling unworthy and unimportant. Soon, Larry is able to connect with his goodness and value, a connection that protects him from taking personally the real or perceived insensitivity or indifference of others.

A True Story for Us All

While individually we want to be in possession of a true story, we also need, as a human family, a true story that guides us all collectively. Such a story could originate from new insight—an epiphany concerning human nature—that awakens us to deeper self-realization. The knowledge is available and has been extracted here, at this website, from psychoanalytic literature. It reveals a critically important common denominator among the people of all races and nations. This knowledge, for starters, shatters the common story to which so many subscribe, that “I’m in too much pain and suffering, and infused with too much self-doubt, to do much good in the world.”

This knowledge about human nature can help to heal social and political dissension. The knowledge enables us to see the source of such dissension—along with anger, addictions, depression, and violence—in ourselves. Our new story now incorporates an awareness of the unconscious forces that have induced us to operate unwisely, incompetently, and foolishly—even to be our own worst enemy.

As the details of this unconscious functioning come into focus, we see precisely how we have been failing to connect with our better self. We now can begin to see, as we acquire this self-knowledge, how psychological dynamics have actively alienated us from our better self and from each other.

I write about this knowledge in my books and here on my website. In brief, human nature, as it manifests in our psyche, is inflicted with considerable conflict. The clearer each of us sees the specific dynamics of this conflict as it pertains to our personal life, the more quickly we are liberated from misery and suffering. The main aspects of this inner conflict are described here.

Another level of functioning in our psyche concerns our unconscious compulsion to act out (replay or recycle) the hurt of several unresolved negative emotions (other than feeling unworthy). Much of the time, we operate as if addicted to certain negative emotions. That process of emotional recycling, described here, produces a long list of painful symptoms (such as indecision, procrastination, worry, anger, bitterness, shame, guilt, loneliness, failure, addictions, and compulsions.)

With this knowledge, we realize we have been compulsively making unconscious choices to indulge in negative emotions and even to seek out or create situations in which we can experience and recycle these emotions. In recognizing this, we fortify our intelligence and strengthen inner resolve to avoid making self-defeating choices.

The most important psychological conflict is perhaps the one between the inner critic and inner passivity. The nature of this conflict is described here. This conflict is a main cause of anxiety, indecision, fear, low self-esteem, addictions, depression, and suicide. It is largely responsible not just for the cruelty and violence we act out against one another, but for cruel self-abuse such as chronic self-criticism, self-rejection, self-alienation, and self-hatred. With self-knowledge, we root out the negativity and self-doubt that inner conflict has been generating. When we clear up inner conflict, we discover our goodness and value. Our personal story, in all its richness, is now based on inner truth.

This knowledge from depth psychology is the story of human nature. It discloses our common humanity, while it exposes the lack of evolvement involved in being egotistical. We’re humbled and empowered as we come into acceptance of inner truth. With this knowledge, our map of the psyche is now more accurately outlined and our intelligence is greatly enhanced. For each of us, our personal story is more likely to be good and true when we access inner truth.

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Another Visual Portrayal of Our Psyche’s Dynamics

Our body, mind, and psyche are fundamentals of our existence. Our body is visible to us and our mind is at our disposal. But our psyche tends to hide in the mist of our unconscious, like the hint of a person lurking in the background of a dream.

This image depicts our unconscious tendency to gravitate toward unresolved negative emotions.

When we don’t know basic facts about our psyche, we find it harder to connect with our deeper, better self. We’re then at the mercy of inner turmoil when our psyche is conflicted, as it is to some degree in just about everyone.

The psyche is the repository of forces, dynamics, and conflicts—largely unconscious—that influence and even determine our personality, behaviors, thought processes, and prospects for success and happiness. Misery and self-defeat arise from any dysfunction occurring in our psyche. Knowing more about our psyche is obviously important.

Our psyche becomes apparent and accessible to us—not visually but as a new awakening of our intelligence—when we learn and see how the principles of depth psychology apply to us personally.

Learning about the psyche is challenging because we can’t put it under a microscope and study all its aspects. What exactly is it anyway? We can’t even say whether our psyche is an entity within us, an energy field swirling around us, or some other mysterious configuration.

In this post, I’m presenting an illustration that depicts a major operating system of our psyche. This illustration (drawn and colored by me in my folksy style) depicts our unconscious tendency to become entangled in unresolved negative emotions. (Click to enlarge image.) I recently published another visual portrayal of the psyche (in a post titled, Illustrating the Characters Who Mess with Our Mind), along with a written explanation of what is portrayed. My latest artwork, published here with this post, provides another overview of how our psyche works. Over the years I’ve written extensively about all of these dynamics, and I’m hoping that this visual portrayal and the one published earlier will help readers make sense of depth psychology.

This latest “map” is titled, “The Allure of Unresolved Negative Emotions.” It portrays at its center a female figure, representing humankind, in anguish over her compulsion to experience (and to suffer with) various negative emotions that are unresolved in her psyche. The young person coming up behind her informs us, in all her innocence, that these negative emotions and our attachment to them emerge from our past, from human nature itself, and that no one is to blame for what is, above all, a testament to humanity’s unfinished state of evolvement.

The turtle flailing helplessly on its back in the upper-right corner represents the negative emotion of helplessness, as well as our unconscious attachment to that emotional state. This negative emotion is one of the primary symptoms of inner passivity and it contributes to a wide range of self-defeating behaviors. (Read more about helplessness and inner passivity here and here.)

Moving counter-clockwise, the stop sign symbolizes the negative emotion of refusal. From an early age, children can be very sensitive, as parents know, to feeling refused. A child wailing in a toy store or in the candy aisle at the supermarket is vigorously protesting against the feeling of being refused. As adults, we can still resonate with feeling refused, even in situations where refusal is not an actual intention or even a reality. When we resonate emotionally with an old association such as refusal, we’re likely to get triggered and thereby be in emotional and behavioral jeopardy. (This post deals with the emotional attachment to refusal.)

To the left is an image of a broken wine bottle, symbolizing our psyche’s readiness to seize emotionally upon the feeling of loss. All of us have occasions to feel loss, but our psyche is often prepared, when we’re not inwardly observant and informed, to embellish the feeling of loss and to compel us to indulge emotionally in that feeling. Doing this is obviously unpleasant if not painful. (Read more here about how our psyche embellishes feelings of loss.)

Next, the rendition of Gollum from “The Lord of the Rings” symbolizes the negative emotion of powerlessness. This negative emotion is somewhat similar to that of helplessness, as depicted in the turtle image. One difference is that the individual attached to powerlessness is more likely to constantly crave power and to seek to control others, while the person entangled in helplessness, while sometimes craving power and pursuing it inappropriately, is more likely to act out by being chronically weak and helpless in various situations. Gollum frantically pursues the ring of power as a reaction to (and compensation for) his emotional entanglement in feelings of powerlessness. (More here.)

The next image, of an ostrich with its head buried in the sand, signifies abandonment. Our psyche is instinctively sensitive to the feeling of abandonment. The inner passivity lodged from childhood in our psyche contributes to this feeling. The prospect of abandonment is horrifying to little children, and these emotional associations linger in adults. The ostrich has its head in the sand because abandonment, as an emotional issue for adults, is most commonly experienced as self-abandonment. This is felt, for instance, when we’re not present to support ourselves emotionally through difficult times. Knowing ourselves through self-doubt, self-alienation, and a painful disconnect is a common default identity. (Read about it here and here.)

In the next image, a woodsman is fending off a ravenous wolf. The wolf signifies rejection and the image itself symbolizes self-rejection. Though consciously we want to respect and love ourselves, we unconsciously become entangled in old emotional associations having to do with feeling rejected. People can be overly sensitive to feeling rejected, and they can create that painful impression in relationships even when rejection is not actually intended or occurring. The problem largely stems from self-rejection, experienced primarily by way of the inner critic that is often harsh, cruel, and demeaning. (More here.)

The beetle in the thorn bush, in the next image, represents self-criticism. The originator of self-criticism is, of course, the inner critic. Our inner passivity also contributes to the problem in allowing our inner critic to get away with its unwarranted intrusions into our emotional and mental life. Just as we can be rejecting of ourselves, we can also be critical of ourselves. The scale of negativity intensifies as follows: self-criticism, self-rejection, self-condemnation, self-hatred. Someone who is attached emotionally to feeling self-criticism will, at the same time, be inclined to be compulsively critical of others. (More here and here.)

Next is a highway exit sign, with “Missing Out” as a term to denote our psyche’s readiness to experience deprivation. This negative emotion—the painful impression that one is missing out on some goal, reward, or benefit—is very common. Even prosperous people get entangled in its painful clutches. When we’re disconnected from our authentic self and frantically pursuing material benefits and overvaluing non-essentials, we’re bound to feel we’re missing out on something important. This negative feeling haunts us as our psyche clings to it, and we become increasingly unhappy. (Read more here.)

The final image shows a man stabbed in the back, with a shadowy figure lurking above him. The image represents betrayal as well as self-betrayal. An individual can easily feel betrayed through the behavior of others—again, even when betrayal is not intended. Our psyche can eagerly embellish a sense of betrayal when inner conflict, in the form of unconsciously expecting and looking for betrayal, prevails. More profound and even more painful, though, is self-betrayal, which opens a whole field of consideration involving self-defeat and self-sabotage. (Read more here.)

I have not discussed anywhere in this illustration and post the negative emotions of anger, hatred, bitterness, jealousy, envy, cynicism, loneliness, hopelessness, apathy, boredom, and depression. That’s because these negative emotions, along with various behavioral problems, are simply symptoms of the primary negative emotions that are discussed above. It’s important to understand that anger, as one example, is a symptom of one’s unconscious willingness to indulge emotionally in helplessness (or refusal, loss, powerlessness, self-abandonment, rejection, criticism, deprivation, and betrayal.) The anger is a cover-up, a defense. The unconscious defense proclaims: “I don’t want to feel helpless (or whatever). Look at how angry I am at those people who want to restrict me, hold me down, or oppress me.” Or, ”Look at how angry I am at myself for helplessly procrastinating and being indecisive.” (Read about how our defenses work here.)

The dynamics outlined by this portrayal of the psyche, along with its accompanying text, operate like a software program that runs our emotional life. Obviously, the program needs to be updated, which our intelligence is quite capable of doing. To help make sense of how the two illustrations (this one and the first one published earlier) relate to one another, the first can be regarded, metaphorically, as depicting the hardware of the psyche, while the second, in this post, portrays not the hardware but the software running the emotional life of our psyche. The hardware-software analogy is not entirely accurate because the aspects or characters depicted in the first illustration are not hard-wired or inalterably embedded. They do themselves become modified for the better as our self-development progresses. Still, I believe the analogy provides a helpful perspective for understanding how the two illustrations can be viewed as a whole.

Finally, a person struggling with emotional or behavioral problems will typically be attached to three or four of these primary negative emotions depicted in the latest illustration. When we identify these emotions in ourselves, we’re able to observe going forward our readiness, willingness, and even unwitting eagerness to experience them. We can now take responsibility for what had previous been operating compulsively at an unconscious level. Our intelligence is empowered, as well as our will to flourish as we start to see clearly the unconscious “mischief” that was getting us in trouble.

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Get to Know Your Psyche’s Operating Systems

People tend unconsciously to falsify reality. We’re usually not aware of how and why our sense of reality is distorted, which is an impediment to our intelligence.

Separate operating systems in our psyche can distort our objectivity.

What’s causing this distortion of reality? At play in our psyche, with distinct and separate “operating systems,” are the inner critic, ego, id, psychological defenses, inner passivity, and resistance. Not only do these systems tend to operate outside our awareness, they’re also at odds with one another as they churn up inner conflict, negative emotions, and self-defeating behaviors. I have illustrated and described them here as aspects or “characters” of our psyche.

As we grow psychologically, a dominant and healthy inner operating system arises from our solid connection to (and embrace of) our authentic self.

For this article, I focus on the operating system known as inner passivity. It’s the least well-known and perhaps the most problematic of these inner systems. This passivity, which affects almost everyone, is a mental-emotional state of mind through which we stumble into suffering and self-defeat. Humankind has not yet begun to appreciate this aspect of our human nature.

We are in the throes of this passivity when we interpret situations and challenges through feelings of being overwhelmed, helpless, indecisive, trapped, constrained, restricted, controlled, held accountable, required to submit, and otherwise victimized.

Inner passivity also causes us to succumb weakly to cravings; to be cynical or bitter concerning defeats and failures; to fail to represent ourselves effectively in social situations or in fulfilling our aspirations; to be riddled with self-doubt; to chronically feel unsupported and unappreciated; to feel at the mercy of fate; and to allow our inner critic to disparage and belittle us. The list goes on.

People are obviously not as passive as sheep. Even the most passive among us have, of course, much more consciousness and brain power. But just as sheep are unaware of their passive nature, we humans are likewise unaware of how passively we experience ourselves and much of what transpires around us.

People are usually not even aware of the existence in their psyche of inner passivity, though it profoundly contaminates our thinking and limits our ability to act in our best interests. Once we grasp a mental understanding of it, we still have to become aware on an experiential level of the degree to which we are under its influence.

One client said in a note to me: “I continue to find it difficult to feel and identify when I’m experiencing inner passivity. I know, on an intellectual level, that I experience it. The patterns of my adult life clearly attest to its existence: ongoing feelings of indecision about what to do or where to go; constant procrastination with important projects; a chronic pattern of starting projects (and wishing to use my full potential) and yet never following through.”

Yes, even as we start to consider and study inner passivity, our intelligence still struggles to bring its existence into focus as an entity with its own operating system. We have trouble, for one thing, separating our sense of self from the symptoms (as listed at the beginning of this article) that this passivity generates. The symptoms give our inner critic fuel to disparage and condemn us, and we become passive to our inner critic, blindly entangled in the conflict between our aggressive critic and our defensive passivity.

Our defenses (another inner operating system) adamantly cover up this passivity. The common unconscious defense is to claim: “I’m not passive—if anything, I’m aggressive.” This reactive aggression, however, is often inappropriate and self-defeating. An individual might also defend by saying: “I’m not passive: Look at how angry I get when someone tries to control me.” This angry reaction is often negative and self-defeating.

We’re fooled by these defenses, and inner passivity is shrouded over. As we proceed under its influence, we’re likely to feel we’re just being who we are, as if everything is either normal or what we’re fated to experience, in the way it’s normal for sheep to be passive.

As it is for sheep, our passivity is largely biologically rooted. Yet we have knowledge and consciousness on our side, if we can overcome our resistance to accessing it. Human passivity might have been acceptable before we became capable technologically of destroying the world, but now this flaw in human nature has become very problematic. As a blind spot in dealing with reality, it makes us dangerously dysfunctional, likely to be overwhelmed by the cultural, political, and social upheavals being produced by accelerating technology and climate change.

Often inner passivity is influencing us in ways that are quite subtle, so seeing it requires insight. That insight is more than just a mental connection—it’s also an intuitive realization, a synergy of memories and experiences, a jolt of consciousness. At some point, to see this passivity is to marvel at the fact that we were previously so oblivious of it.

Some examples follow that can guide readers in tracking their own passivity. One reader, noting her growing awareness of her passive side, asked me, “Do you think it’s possible to completely heal and break free from inner passivity? I’m dealing with this in therapy right now, and it seems almost as if I have to eliminate inner demons associated with codependency to awaken my authentic self. I know inner passivity is easy to fall back on, but I’m wondering if it’s possible to 100 percent break free and not turn back?”

I wrote a note back to her, saying: “You asked if it’s possible to 100 percent break free of inner passivity and not turn back? You want to consider why you’re asking this question in the first place. The question itself arises from a passive place inside you.

“It is likely,” I wrote, “that you’re asking this question because to ponder it enables you to indulge in, or flirt with, the helpless feeling that you might never be able to free yourself from inner passivity. Otherwise, why ask the question? Who knows whether you’ll achieve 100 percent elimination of it. That’s not important. What’s important is that you get started doing your best to recognize and address it.”

I added: “Understanding that your question arises out of inner passivity is an important insight for you: You can now see one of the ways in which you experience yourself and life through inner passivity. You see how you frame things in a passive way, a way that leads you to doubt yourself and distrust the future. Seeing and exposing inner passivity in all its subtle variations is an act of power and determination that leads you toward inner freedom. Keep reading about it. Be vigilant every day to observe how it creeps into your thoughts and feelings.”

Another visitor to my website commented: “Since I can remember I was creatively active in writing, painting or sculpting. I have a wide range of interests I researched and spent time reading up on. A few years ago, I started to feel like none of my artistic endeavors have any use or meaning anymore. I do have the energy and inspiration, but as soon as I start to act upon it, I am overcome by a sense of meaninglessness. It feels useless and without any contribution to society, it feels selfish.”

He added: “I am aware this is some form of excuse, but I can’t shake the feeling and enter the creative flow as I used to. Even if I am brimming with creative inspiration or curiosity to research my interests, I am holding myself back and literally just hope the day finishes up quickly so I don’t have any time to engage with these activities. I hope there are some things that I can become aware of, in order to find a way out of this conflict.”

In reply, I told him: “It is common, as an aspect of human nature, for people to experience themselves in a passive way. Even when we’re skilled and talented, or have great potential, we can find ourselves, as you described it, unable to connect with a capacity to turn this potential into action and achievement.

“What you want to do at such moments is take the focus off the actual objective (in your case, artistic fulfillment and achievement) and instead focus your attention and growing understanding on the underlying passive feeling. You would likely have this same passive feeling if you were striving for some other goal, other than being an artist.”

I added: “This feeling of helplessness and weakness operates like an emotional addiction. It’s called inner passivity, and it contaminates, in varying degrees, the human psyche. It’s a default position within you, a leftover emotional association from the long years you spent during childhood in relative states of helplessness and dependency. You have to outgrow, through psychological knowledge, what is basically an impairment caused by human biology. A sheep can’t overcome the passivity of its biology, but we humans, to a considerable extent, can do so.

“To see the passivity within you, and to feel it and understand it when you’re in the throes of feeling stuck or unmotivated, is an act of power. It means that you’re expressing determination in that moment to overcome it. Otherwise, you would be in denial—you would not want to see, with such clinical awareness, the nature of this passivity. When you strive for self-understanding and make every effort to see the passivity as a clinical problem that you can remedy, you’re declining to go on suffering needlessly. You’re saying NO to the temptation to be pulled into this weakness, self-doubt, and disconnect from self.”

In another situation, a client was telling me his thoughts about rekindling his relationship with an ex-girlfriend. But he hedged as he spoke, going back and forth for several minutes about whether he would or he wouldn’t start seeing her again.

“Do you see what’s likely happening right now,” I said. “You’re probably looking for me to push you in one direction or another. As we know from your past, you’ve been passive to people who try to exert influence over you. You’re flirting emotionally right now with the passive feeling of having me influence you one way or the other.

“Then you can feel passive to my influence. Were I to take the bait and tell you what I thought you should do, you might passively accede to what I say or you might passively-aggressively resist what I recommended. Either way, your unconscious game is to feel passive to my influence. Realizing this helps you to understand how inner passivity, as an unconscious operating system within you, permeates your way of thinking and feeling.

“If I were to give you advice, pushing you in one direction or the other, it would not address your underlying passivity. I don’t give advice. Instead I help you acquire self-knowledge and insight, so you can make your own wise decisions about how best to live your life. That capacity arises within as you overcome the influence of inner passivity.”

Some people feel that the effort involved in self-development is overwhelmingly monumental. They feel they just don’t have what it takes to succeed. This negative feeling is, of course, just another way to experience inner passivity. Do you see how that passive feeling sneaks in wherever it can? With clinical knowledge of inner passivity, we become a detective in our own psyche, an observer of what had previously been shrouded in unconscious darkness. Our consciousness is enhanced. Now we proceed with a sense of purpose and direction, accompanied by feelings that we’re doing our best—all much more pleasant than being passive.

—

Peter Michaelson is the author of The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity.

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Illustrating the Characters Who Mess With Our Mind

A visual image can help us recognize the main players in our psyche.

I’ve been slowing down my writing production over the past year, as my mind and psyche shift away from the mental side into more intuitive and contemplative states. For many years I’ve been “drawing” portraits of the psyche in the language of depth psychology—with words, phrases, theory, examples, and explanations.

As I write, I try to express my words artfully, but here I’ve also added artwork that illustrates some of the dynamics of inner conflict and human dysfunction. (The illustration I’ve done here is a bit washed out–the original looks better.)

This artwork still needs text to explain what is portrayed, and this post provides that information. The image (click to enlarge) has eleven characters and symbols. It is missing a background: my artistic ability is awaiting further development.

Seven of these images represent troublesome parts of our psyche. For whimsy’s sake, call them the Seven Dworks. They’re like renegade operating systems, totally out of harmony with one another and with our better self. The four other depictions represent what is good, creative, and great about us. I’ll say a tiny bit about each of these—and save the best for last.

Let’s start with the gruesome figure at bottom right. It represents our nasty, primitive inner critic, the seat of self-aggression. It (it’s certainly not a he or she) is wearing a crown because it assumes to be our rightful voice of authority, although its power is irrational, illegitimate, and downright abusive.

To the left of it is a deformed human figure that depicts inner passivity. This weak aspect of ourselves is a defensive, anxious enabler of the inner critic. In its conflicted dynamic with our inner critic, inner passivity represents our best interests very badly. Recognizing our inner passivity is so important in overcoming our suffering. We have to bring more consciousness to the ways this particular influence affects how we experience ourselves and the world. (I could also have drawn this character as a phantom, as per my book, The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself From Inner Passivity.)

Directly above inner passivity, floating around in our inner space, is an image representing the ego. Many people, to some degree or other, identify with their ego. Though it’s just an illusion of our real self, many spend their lifetime fiercely feeding it flimsy validations and anxiously safeguarding it.

Above the ego, the character with the cubic head stands for our unconscious resistance. This stubborn blockhead refuses to accept or integrate the knowledge that leads to self-development. The hammer represents inner resistance’s willingness to endure self-sabotage in preference to considering liberating knowledge. (In future depictions, I might give it a raised left fist of obstinate defiance, once I become a better drawer of hands.)

Over on the other side of this artwork, directly above the inner critic, is the id, the psyche’s ravenous brute. The id manifests most strongly in people who are grasping, self-aggrandizing, filled with desire, and tortured by what they feel they’re not getting. Rambunctious capitalism that assails Mother Nature is a derivative of the frenzied id.

Above, with its hat askew, is the trickster, representing our psychological defenses. In fact, our defenses mostly arise out of inner passivity (lower left). However, inner passivity represents much more than our defensiveness, so I thought it would be helpful for the purposes of this portrayal of the psyche to have a special character, a trickster, serving as the symbol for how we inwardly fool ourselves and cover up inner truth through our defense system.

Knocking the trickster’s hat askew and fleeing the scene is the rogue rat of the psyche, the negativity that arises from inner conflict and contaminates our emotional life. As we’re doing inner work, this negativity diminishes. As we’re reaching our potential, negativity is banished from our inner life, no longer able to poison our daily experiences with anger, shame, guilt, moodiness, depression, indecision, cynicism, loneliness, cravings, and so on.

We don’t want to regard these seven characters from our psyche as horrible or wicked. We don’t want to start a fight with any of these parts. We just want to expose them, keep an eye on them, realize their primitive nature, and understand their underlying agendas and conflict. As we achieve inner progress, they’ll be integrated and sublimated. Under cover of our ignorance, however, these aspects all want to be experienced. They’re eager to flare up, and they’ll seize any opportunity, any situation or event from our daily life, to make their presence felt.

Let’s now look at the more favorable aspects of the psyche. At the center of the drawing is a lamp, with a small flame burning inside. The lamp and the flame represent our latent self. We all have the flame of potential self-actualization burning inside of us.

As the flame begins to flare more brightly, a small figure, our emerging self—inspired perhaps by courage, honesty, and kindness—arises from the lamp. This fledgling self is reaching for a key, a symbol for the deeper knowledge that reveals the nature of our psyche and how it operates. The key is vitally important. If the dynamics of our psyche operate in secret beyond our awareness, we’ll find it more difficult to emerge from suffering. The knowledge of depth psychology, symbolized by this key, can be found in the posts on this website and in my books.

The final figure, rising above the key, is a griffin. This creature of fable is symbolic of the sun. Among the Greeks, it symbolized strength and vigilance. It’s also a symbol of resurrection and divine human nature. The griffin represents our actualized self, and here it’s heralding the establishment and flourishing of our best nature and the victory of self-realization.

Knowledge is power, and self-knowledge, our awareness of inner dynamics, is empowerment of the self. Specific knowledge concerning each of the characters I’ve portrayed here is described in detail in my writings (except that I don’t specifically mention a trickster in my discussions of the defense system).

If you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions, let me know. I might be able to incorporate what you have to say in future illustrations.

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How to Love Yourself

A lot of people struggle with the challenge of trying not only to feel good about themselves but, more urgently, trying to avoid feeling bad or really bad about themselves.

Being a loving person is our birthright. But we still have to make it happen.

When individuals understand the primary psychological dynamics that produce self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, and even self-hatred, they can escape from these negative feelings and begin to appreciate themselves in an accepting and loving way.

Being a loving person is our birthright. This ability comes naturally when we clean house, meaning when we identify and resolve the inner conflicts that produce negative emotions.

You can get to love by looking at the inner dynamics that cause you to dislike yourself. Feeling bad about oneself usually arises from an inner conflict involving feelings of being unworthy, unimportant, and deserving of disrespect. What exactly is the conflict? Consciously, we want to feel good about ourselves but many of us still resonate emotionally with (or identify with) the feeling that being disrespected and unworthy is somehow true to the essence of who we are.

Why is this? When we’re feeling bad about ourselves on a daily basis, the most likely culprit producing these bad feelings is self-aggression. This self-aggression is a byproduct of the natural biologically endowed aggression that human beings have required in order to survive. Our ancient ancestors were very aggressive as hunters and defenders of their territory. This aggression has been modified and tempered by civilization. Religious principles have at times helped to contain this aggression, as have legal systems, educational achievement, social and cultural norms, and the threat of punishment and imprisonment. Yet our innate aggression still exists as part of our biology, and we can obviously see evidence for it in the extent of domestic and international dissension and strife.

Keep in mind that healthy aggression can produce much pleasure, as in competitive sports, in striving to excel, and in expressing our voice effectively in the world. But a flaw in our emotional nature causes some of this aggression to be directed against us personally. Inwardly, we unwittingly absorb accusations of alleged unworthiness and weakness from our inner critic (also known as the superego). These accusations are irrational and often cruel and abusive. Because we don’t see these inner dynamics clearly enough, we fail to protect ourselves from the intrusions and abuse instigated by our inner critic.

We become our inner critic to ourself, meaning it feels as if our frequent belittling and devaluing thoughts and feelings originate in our mind as a legitimate self-evaluation. One key insight: Our inner critic has no business butting into our life and holding us accountable for what we’re doing or thinking. (The inner critic is not our conscience, the natural authority that tries to guide us wisely.) Because we lack vital self-knowledge, our inner critic gets away with being abusive and demeaning.

The inner critic is a primitive aggression that has no sensitivity to our wellbeing. But only you or I, through inner awareness, can protect ourselves from its intrusions. We can neutralize or deflect self-aggression as we expose its irrationality and stand up on an inner level to its authoritarian, cruel, and tyrannical character.

On the other side of this inner conflict is inner passivity. Sometimes people are aware of their self-aggression, but they seldom see or understand their inner passivity. Through inner passivity, we become enablers of the self-aggression. We fail to deflect or neutralize the self-aggression because our inner passivity blocks us from awareness of our capacity to do so. Inner passivity even blocks us from seeing the inner critic as an unwarranted inner bully. Inner passivity is like a foggy area in the no-man’s-land of our psyche. To our still evolving consciousness, it’s terra incognito. But as we become aware of this inner passivity and its operating procedures, we begin to know and realize the existence of new reservoirs of inner strength.

Consciously, we certainly do want to feel good about ourselves. Unconsciously, however, we’re so used to being on the receiving end of self-aggression and its disparaging thoughts and feelings that this inner predicament feels natural to us, as if this is who we are and how things are supposed to be.

As a result, being in conflict, however painful that is, all feels natural somehow. We become the embodiment of this primitive configuration in our psyche. We have no idea how it could be different or better for us.

This all means, basically, that we’re attached emotionally to being on the receiving end of accusations and allegations of our alleged wrongdoing and inadequacy. It means that we’re attached to feeling ourselves at the mercy of this aggression. It also means that we resonate emotionally with feeling that others see us as if we are indeed unworthy and deserving of disrespect.

People refuse to see their emotional resonance with these painful feelings because of their resistance to being humbled by recognition of this stubborn perversity in human nature. Instead, they insist they want to be admired and respected. Their psychological defense goes like this: “I feel so good when I’m liked and admired by others. I love it. That proves I want to be admired, not disrespected!” This defense covers up a person’s inner truth, namely the existence of an emotional attachment to feeling disrespected and unworthy, even as we try to live so as to be admired. Also impeding inner progress is fear of change and resistance to breaking one’s identification with the inner status quo.

At this point, a person can employ another unconscious psychological defense that claims, “No, I don’t want to be disrespected or devalued! Look at how upset and angry I get at those who do it to me! That proves I’m not looking for the feeling.” Fooled by this defense, we’re going to have a hard time maintaining that loving feeling.

We can sometimes feel bad about ourself even without much intrusion from our inner critic. This can happen simply because our inner passivity, all by itself, has us stuck in indecision, procrastination, recurring failure, worry, confusion, apathy, cynicism, and helplessness. Our inner critic, though, is always eager to butt in with its bitter mockery, kicking us when we’re down.

We become more loving by becoming stronger on an inner level. This happens as we go inward to eliminate the negative thoughts and feelings that churn around in our emotional life. To some degree, everyone has unconscious attachments to certain negative emotions that were initially experienced in childhood and which remain unresolved in the adult psyche. The post, How to Be Your Own Inner Guide, will help readers understand these unpleasant and often painful emotions and learn how to overcome them.

The main inner conflict in the human psyche is between self-aggression and inner passivity. It produces the effect of wanting to feel strong while identifying with feeling weak and helpless. The conflict means we consciously want respect while unconsciously anticipating disrespect. Other variations on this main conflict include: wanting to be loved but expecting to be rejected; wanting to feel fully satisfied yet looking for the feeling of being deprived; wanting to get but prepared to feel refused; wanting to be decisive but identifying with feeling indecisive; wanting to be in control but expecting to be controlled; and wanting to feel connected to self but prepared and even determined to feel disconnected, betrayed, and abandoned.

As we see the dynamics of inner conflict, we expose our blind spots. This empowers our intelligence, strengthens our rationality, and establishes a solid inner foundation on which we can fully respect and love the creature we are.

We live in a world where truth and reality are being challenged by many forces and developments. Inner truth is the foundation of wise discernment that guides us forward. When we explore our psyche, we can heal inner conflict, establish greater harmony and integrity, and uncover the inner truth that liberates our best loving self.

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Don’t Let Inner Passivity Undermine Democracy

Most people, including mental-health professionals, are unaware of how strongly we know ourselves and identify with ourselves through a condition of non-being known as inner passivity.

Democracy depends on your efforts to grow psychologically.

This mental and emotional identity is a widespread psychological condition that’s largely unconscious. We aren’t aware of how much it causes us to feel self-doubt, to question our value, and to disconnect from our best self. In this way, inner passivity undermines the qualities that a democracy requires of its people.

Inner passivity blocks us from accessing our integrity, dignity, courage, compassion, moral intelligence, and love. As we begin to see and understand our inner passivity, we become aware of vital knowledge concerning inner conflict and psychological dysfunction.

Our democracy needs the deeper knowledge that exposes this passivity. As we grow into a recognition of our inner passivity, we begin to understand the psychological undercurrents of ongoing conflict in our own psyche and in the dynamics of society and politics.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, perhaps the mainstream media’s deepest thinker, wrote this week about the requirements of democratic citizenship, saying “The demands of democracy are clear—the elevation and transformation of your very self. If you are not transformed, you are just skating by.”

Through inner passivity, we find ourselves unable to stand up to (or represent ourselves effectively against) our inner critic, which is a primitive, authoritarian aspect of our psyche that harasses us, puts us on the defensive, and curtails inner freedom. We’re less conscious as human beings when we haven’t exposed this inner conflict and made efforts to resolve it.

Democracy is sustained by the higher consciousness of a significant percentage of a population. When people are less conscious, they’re unwittingly content to be ruled, rather than to cherish the integrity and satisfaction of being capable of being one’s own ruler, meaning in particular the ability to self-regulate, avoid negative states of mind, and fulfill relationship and civic responsibilities.

Even more so, people who are unaware and unevolved are willing, unconsciously, to live according to an inner template, which is to resonate with oneself and know oneself through the passivity inherent in their subordinate relationship with their inner critic. Hence, being ruled politically by authoritarians, rather than being one’s own ruler, feels like the natural order.

It is natural to have deposits of inner passivity in our psyche. We grew up engulfed in passivity. As children, we were dependent on our parents or guardians and at their mercy. A child’s passive experiences include submission to rules and requirements involving toilet training and other socializations. Up to and including teenage years, a young person is held accountable, usually appropriately so, to the authority of parents and other adults. This passivity lingers in the adult psyche, and it creates a largely unconscious emotional veneer that we unwittingly apply to various daily experiences. Much of our sense of victimhood or failure, as well as our passive-aggressive tendencies, anger, and self-sabotage, are byproducts of this underlying passivity.

Because of inner passivity, many people create a sense of oppression that is psychologically based rather than reality based. This sense of oppression arises from the manner in which our inner critic (self-aggression) harasses us, even at times overwhelming us with self-condemnation because, through inner passivity, we weakly represent our value and integrity. This dynamic between self-aggression and inner passivity is likely the primary conflict in the human psyche.

Because of inner passivity, people on both the political left and right can feel as if they’re having to submit to the other side when compromise is required to move forward with sensible procedures and laws. Emotionally and irrationally, compromise and accommodation are associated with submission and being on the losing side.

Because of their inner passivity, many politicians lust after power and use it for self-aggrandizement. They also can find perverse pleasure in holding power over others, which means they have less interest in negotiating because compromise detracts from the thrill of wielding that decisive power. Many struggles in Washington are as much about the raw exercise of power as about progress or reform.

Raw power is important to many of the politicians who, through inner passivity, identify with their ego rather than their authentic self. The ego is eager, even desperate, for experiences of self-aggrandizement.

Many citizens, meanwhile, are passive to power figures or celebrities. These citizens tend to come under the influence of a “power figure” in unconscious ways that detract from their own integrity and substance. Inner passivity and the accompanying disconnect from self contribute to this unhealthy reaction.

Voters who are inwardly passive are likely to be “turned on” or seduced by a politician’s personality and charisma, thus inclined to vote emotionally, thereby less able to discern a charming scoundrel from a less-flashy person of substance.

Inner passivity is often “libidinized” or sexualized. We need to be conscious of how unconsciously tempting it is to play the passive role and subtly eroticize that passivity. The extreme of inner passivity known as sexual masochism is the tip of the iceberg for what’s going on deeper in our unconscious mind. Primitive aggression, dominance, and submission are the underlying emotional currents identified in the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is behavior that’s fueled by the power of passive and aggressive emotional alignments to arouse our erogenous zones, though these alignments are also at play in healthy love-making.

Inner passivity contributes to ignorance and the failure to learn what is important to know about ourselves and the world. People are less able to discern fake news from what is true and real. When we begin to break free from the clutches of inner passivity, we access our inner truth. This inner truth becomes the foundation for a strong presence in the world. Inner truth greatly helps us to discern and to challenge folly, subterfuge, manipulation, and abuse of power.

Inner passivity serves as the command center for our psychological defenses, and hence it’s a primary contributor to self-deception, resistance, and denial. Inner passivity also contributes to mediocrity and stupidity.

Feeling helpless about climate change and other accelerating changes is also a passive reaction to the challenges of modern life. These challenges are formidable, for sure, yet with inner passivity our tendency is to deny the reality of what is happening—to climate, for instance—because inconvenient truths, when they threaten an individual’s egotistic paradigm, are experienced as too overwhelming for cognitive assimilation.

Such denial also serves the psyche’s interest in maintaining the inner status quo and in accentuating and indulging the passive propensity.

Fearfulness arises out of inner passivity. The passivity creates the impression that we will not be able to be at our best, or rise to the occasion, in the face of challenge or danger. The more we’re fearful, the more easily we can be terrorized. We’ll exaggerate actual menace, and even go looking for the fearful (passive) feeling by tuning in to alarmists in the media. We’ll be more likely to vote emotionally (for the politician who stokes our fears, for instance) than rationally.

Racism is fueled by inner passivity. The passivity cuts the individual off from an intrinsic connection with his or her authentic self, thus creating self-doubt and inner emptiness, which in turn compels some individuals to strive as compensation to feel superior to others. When one feels disconnected from self, it’s more difficult to feel connected to others.

Likewise, pseudo-patriotism (a petty narrow-minded nationalism) arises from an inner hunger, the felt need to identify with something bigger or grander than oneself for the purpose of compensating for how, deep down, a person feels insignificant and unworthy in his or her own skin.

Democracy needs wise, powerful people. Yet many well-intentioned people are afraid of feeling and exercising power because, emotionally, they associate it with something abusive or inappropriate. They might feel themselves to have been victims of the power of others, and they tend to identify with victims. This emotional reaction is, in part, a form of resistance to becoming more powerful, and it’s also an excuse, employed unconsciously, for maintaining an identification with one’s inner passivity.

America’s greatest power is not in guns or money but in awakening to our authentic self. When we establish a relationship with this self, we’re no longer afraid of having and exercising power, first because we no longer identify with the feeling of being victims of it and, second, because we trust ourselves to exercise this power wisely.

Under the weight of inner passivity, democracy itself can become an obscure, remote, or waning ideal, just as the better person we hoped to become seems like a fading vision, a lost cause.

Inner passivity sometimes surfaces with a distinctive voice: And what can I, little me, possibly do to help with national progress? How much of my comfort dare I sacrifice? How brave can I possibly be? Greater involvement and personal growth are too much to ask of me. Better people out there will save the day. I’ll wait it out in the valley of indecision and procrastination, try not to suffer too much, and hope for the best.

Don’t let inner passivity be your inner guide. New learning and insight about your psyche’s inner dynamics, and in particular the recognition of inner passivity, will help you access your value, goodness, and power.

—

Peter Michaelson is the author of The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity. It’s available here at Amazon as a paperback or e-book.

 

 

 

 

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Connecting With Our Best Self

Our emotional wellbeing is usually related to the degree to which we’re connected to (or disconnected from) our best self. We can support and enhance our personal mental health by seeing our emotional and behavioral problems in the light of connection and disconnection.

It’s time to stop knowing yourself in a second-hand way.

This post is not about acute cases of disconnection such as depersonalization or dissociation. Instead, it’s about a milder but more common variety, namely the generalized disconnect from one’s best self that many people experience as a normal human condition, as if this is how life is meant to be.

A majority of people are sorely lacking in terms of understanding (or even knowing the existence of) unconscious dynamics in their psyche. These dynamics, usually in the form of inner conflict, largely contribute to this disconnection from one’s best self, and the disconnection is often experienced painfully as dissatisfaction, emptiness, apathy, negativity, and general unhappiness.

People who are disconnected tend to know themselves through aspects of life that are secondary to their best self. For instance, they identify with their mind or with their ego, or with their material assets, personality, gender, nationality, physical appearance, line of work, race, religion, power and influence, or sexuality. These identifications, when emotionally embraced for validation and orientation, are too limited. People usually have little understanding of how much their perceptions and intelligence are influenced and limited by these identifications.

Some people identify with being a failure or with being a success, or with being good or being bad. They might identify with themselves primarily as victims of some alleged oppression or injustice and see others in terms of friends or foes. They often live under a sense of oppression with no awareness of doing so, let alone of how, psychologically, they cultivate that impression.

Again, all such identifications and perceptions are limitations of our consciousness that overlook the core of our essential nature. Under this influence, we’re disconnecting from (if not rejecting or abandoning) our best self.

We can also be disconnected from our best self when being chronically indecisive or bored, when lacking healthy self-regulation, and when angry, bitter, cynical, and negative much of the time. This disconnect is also behind feelings of being a fraud or imposter, as well as feelings of emptiness and lack of purpose. When more acute, the disconnect is experienced as a psychological state of depersonalization. Read what I’ve written on these subjects here and here.

Many people experience disconnection when they identify as helpless failures. Inwardly, they mock and condemn themselves (through their inner critic) for allegedly being unworthy, for being losers, and for lacking self-regulation and motivation. In desperation, they might resort to alcohol, illicit drugs, and overeating, which can temporarily create a hazy sense of being good, worthy, and connected. However, when the solace of the food and the alcoholic or narcotic effect wear off, these individuals end up feeling, more than ever, a painful disconnect, often involving self-criticism and self-condemnation.

Being disconnected from self results in more indecision, worry, stress, and anxiety because an individual, in failing to access her source of strength, is failing to support herself emotionally. People who painfully feel unsupported by others and who blame others for being unsupportive, are usually failing to support themselves emotionally.

When we’re feeling disconnected from others, loneliness and feelings of abandonment and unworthiness can arise. It’s important to appreciate this direct correlation: Feeling disconnected from others, from life, or from a sense of purpose directly reflects the degree to which we are inwardly feeling disconnected from a sense of our own best self. When acute, the disconnect can become the primary identification: The person knows himself or herself primarily through self-doubt, inner emptiness, and a wounded, conflicted, or false self.

Feeling disconnected from one’s partner (or family or friends) is often a byproduct of how an individual is feeling disconnected from himself. Unconsciously, we get all tangled up emotionally in the feeling of being disconnected because, in being a deep-down identification, we have no choice but to experience it repeatedly. No matter how painful, the disconnect becomes a primary way of knowing and experiencing oneself. It is a universal quirk of human nature to feel, deep in one’s psyche, a lack of value and significance and to behave as if this subjective impression reflects some essential truth about oneself.

Online posts and articles about this problem of feeling disconnected describe the symptoms accurately enough, but they don’t get to the heart of the issue. The posts and articles offer advice on what a person might say or do to alleviate the symptoms, but the information doesn’t offer real insight concerning the unconscious mischief at play in our psyche.

We have to go deeper into our psyche if we want to expose the degree to which we’re determined (or programmed or compelled) to go on feeling and experiencing ourselves in a second-hand way, through old unresolved conflict that creates self-doubt and self-alienation.

Take the example of chronic loneliness. Consciously, the lonely person wants to feel connected and loved. Unconsciously, though, this person is likely to be inwardly conflicted and thereby unable to avoid becoming entangled in the other side of the conflict, which is to activate and experience familiar emotional associations with feeling rejected, abandoned, betrayed, unworthy, and unloved. The temptation to experience this negativity is unconscious, yet it is compelling and emotionally addictive. We can liberate ourselves from this pain as we expose inner conflict that invites us to revisit old hurts, grievances, regrets, losses, and helpless feelings.

When we’re feeling disconnected from friends and loved ones, we need to consider to what degree we’re not only feeling this way because we’re disconnected emotionally from our best self but also because we’re compelled, even driven, to go on experiencing this painful emotional state. We are, in a sense, haunted by old identifications associated with negative emotions.

Feeling disconnected can operate as an emotional attachment. This means that an individual, given an opportunity to feel connected or disconnected in some encounter with others, will unconsciously chose to experience a disconnect. People who are tribal or who create a feeling of separation from others on the basis of religious dogma are motivated unconsciously by their attachment to feeling divided, conflicted, and disconnected. They can erect a defense that goes like this: “I’m not identified with inner conflict and with separation from my best self. On the contrary, the world is to blame. The world is a bad place, and I have to disconnect from it for my own protection.”

Be Conscious of the False Self

We have resistance to becoming more connected to our best self. Psychologically, people have a tendency to deny or disown their best self. This allows them to hang on to the negative states of mind with which they identify, including fear, regrets, bitterness, worries, cynicism, anger, and passivity. Many people know themselves, in large measure, through conscious and unconscious negative memories, associations, and attachments.

Many people also actively work against their best interests. They are simply afraid to grow. They’re too weak (as a result of inner conflict and misleading identifications) to submit to the temporary disorientation that psychological growth requires of us. Unconsciously, many choose substance abuse, wealth accumulation, or indulgent self-gratification for the purpose of disconnecting from the burden (as they experience it) of being responsible for maintaining a moral compass and developing their humanity. They settle for a false self that belittles the gift of life.

The growing wealth divide is under the influence of this process. With chaos and complexity arising throughout the world, the rich might be growing more and more desperate for a sense of security. Because of the disconnect from their best self, the only security they can relate to is based on increasing wealth.

This best, authentic self that we want to connect with (and stay connected with much of the time) is watchful, vigilant, appreciative, non-judgmental, kindly, harmonious, mostly silent, and often moved to wonder. With this connection, we can feel our integrity. We no longer take our consciousness for granted; we treasure it. We have more emotional resonance with nature and with each other when we know our own nature.

We can sometimes feel connected to a pleasing sense of self when we’re high on alcohol or drugs, or when we’re excited by social connections, group validation, and the inducements of materialism and consumerism. At such times, we’re likely to be high on the fireworks of sensations and egotism, which are unstable as emotional supports compared with the connection to our best self. Egotism has its ups and downs, and the downs can be frequent and painful, especially when our “precious” ego encounters the indifference or hostility of others. A connection to self, when it has been established, is much more solid and comforting, and it’s the custodian of inner truth.

What else is blocking us from making this connection? Within our psyche, unconscious conflict stirs up feelings of self-doubt, fear, unworthiness, helplessness, and loss. Many people identify emotionally with themselves through a sense of weakness and insignificance. In our psyche, we’re under the influence of inner passivity, which entangles us in helplessness, guilt, and shame. This inner passivity facilitates inner conflict by making us a target of mockery, scorn, and chastisement emanating from our inner critic.

Because of inner conflict, many people seek to avoid connection with their inner self. This self feels to them like a center of hurt, which is associated with guilt, shame, and unworthiness. At this point, they need to begin to understand the basic dynamics that maintain inner conflict, negative emotions, and deep hurt. Depth psychology enables us to expose (make conscious) these inner dynamics, thereby enriching our intelligence and liberating us from what is, we come to realize, unnecessary suffering.

As inner conflict is resolved, our thoughts are better regulated. They’re more sensible, rational, considerate, discerning, generous, and understanding. Now our thoughts know their place, and they no longer bombard us relentlessly. Random thoughts more easily retreat into the background, replaced by heightened presence to the moment and appropriate spontaneity. We’re likely to be more intelligent, creative, and loving.

To become connected to our best self, we usually have to knock on the door of inner growth. We have to go looking for self-knowledge and we have to be prepared to be humbled by what we find.

Depth psychology is a challenging subject but one that is richly rewarding as we become more knowledgeable about it. Try to read at least a little bit on the subject every day. This will activate your mind and get you pointed in a good direction for inner growth, personal fulfillment, and success in the world. After a while, the knowledge becomes part of your intelligence and you’re able to establish a good, harmonious relationship with yourself. Ultimately, you are trying to uncover the strong, gracious, loving self at the core of your being.

A small insight a day keeps darkness away. One client realized that he had missed an opportunity to be at his best when he failed to complement an acquaintance who was volunteering much of her time for an environmental cause. He told me, “I could have just said, ‘Your efforts here are noted and greatly appreciated. Thanks for doing it!’ But the words didn’t occur to me. I was passive at that moment, disconnected from myself.”

To recognize this oversight, this man indeed had to connect to his best self. A spirit of generosity, along with a resolve to identify with his best self, arose within him when he made this connection.

 

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The Deeper Roots of Social Unrest

People are clashing angrily these days over abortion, gay marriage, gun control, immigration, economic injustice, policing practices, and health care. These are all issues we need to talk about, yet preferably not with malice and hatred. The negative emotionalism we’re seeing in others and often experiencing in ourselves happens largely because of conflict that’s unresolved in the human psyche.

Social unrest arises largely from inner conflict that we fail to understand or acknowledge.

The hostile split in the United States between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, secularists and religious, and urban and rural is not really about who’s right and who’s wrong. The discord is primarily a result of inner conflict, and most people are largely ignorant of the dynamics of this conflict and how it degrades their lives on a personal level and contributes to social disharmony.

Our inner conflict is the slop we bring to the communal table. The conflict creates inner turmoil in our emotional life, causing negative emotions such as feeling devalued, unworthy, helpless, or disrespected. Yet our first instinct is to blame others for what we’re unconsciously generating within ourselves.

Examples abound of how the personal dysfunction of everyday people infiltrates society. For instance, a person who feels a desperate need to succeed is likely unaware of a possible deeper motivation, namely unconscious self-doubt, a sense of unworthiness, and even self-loathing. This individual, whose inner conflict could produce acute self-centeredness and perhaps narcissism, would likely be indifferent to the existence and needs of others. He might also be quite hostile toward others, mirroring his inner relationship with himself.

Even the smartest people are failing to see the existence and nature of their inner conflict. Everyone, including the most successful among us, has some degree of inner conflict. Even a person who is trying hard to be good or successful can be driven, in part, by deep unconscious self-doubt concerning his or her value and significance. This person’s conflict might entail the conscious wish to succeed versus the unconscious expectation of failure and defeat.

Social unrest is also heightened by psychologically naïve individuals who feel compelled to devalue and disrespect the ideas and values of anyone who disagrees with them or who is allegedly disrespecting them. Because of inner conflict, they are quick to feel attacked. Also contributing to social unrest are the many people who, feeling insecure concerning their difficulty expressing themselves in an objective manner, employ irrational rhetoric and partisan talking-points that feel true emotionally.

Many people feel that to be open to the views of others is somehow to be overpowered by them and to be required to submit to their perspective. It feels to such people that they can only maintain a sense of self (which, undermined by inner conflict, is already fragile) by being in stubborn opposition to what others supposedly want them to believe.

Inner conflict causes personal, social, and political discourse to be compromised and debased. In my view, our species’ most important intellectual pursuit involves understanding the psychological process whereby we generate negative emotions and self-defeating impulses. However, the psychological and educational establishments, in their failure to understand and teach depth psychology, are not helping everyday people become smarter and wiser about the basics of sound mental health.

Many people are unconsciously ready to be swayed by a negative feeling in preference to a positive insight, especially if the negative impression “validates” their denial, bitterness, cynicism, and anger. Because their inner conflict produces a disconnect from their virtues and emotional strength, many people are anxious to relieve the stress of being unresolved or undecided, and they will take the shoddiest opportunities and buy into the biggest lies to relieve the tension.

Our instinct is to deny our collusion in producing negative emotions. As mentioned, we tend to blame others for the suffering that we’re unconsciously generating within ourselves. To effectively blame others, we have to feel animosity toward them. The more we deny or repress inner conflict, the more animosity we’re likely to feel toward others. More examples of inner conflict are found here.

Many people feel unsupported and abandoned by their political and institutional leaders, and they believe themselves to be justified in their cynicism and bitterness. Yet an underlying factor, and perhaps the primary influence, involves the degree to which they are, through inner conflict, failing to connect with their better self and support themselves emotionally. The abandonment they feel can be largely self-abandonment.

The negativity we’re generating within ourselves is also projected or displaced onto others, whereby we perceive them to be the ones who possess all of this negativity. When we dislike them intensely, we cover up the divide that we’re refusing to see in ourselves. In this process, people are largely unaware of their individual participation in social unrest.

With inner conflict, we automatically experience conflict in our relations with others, as well as in negative thoughts and feelings about ourselves, the world, and our place in it. The more conflicted we are, the more divisive we are.

If the conflict is not recognized or understood, the greater the likelihood that failure or defeat will be acted out in some area of one’s life. Even if such a person, by all appearances, is succeeding in the world, inner conflict can cause the process of achieving this success to be riddled with stress and anxiety or involve flirtation with self-defeat.

With inner conflict, the more we make the other out to be corrupt or evil, the better we can relieve, at least temporarily, the emotional pain we feel within ourselves. When practicing demagoguery, politicians take advantage of this aspect of human nature to gain followers. When people hear political opponents being described in harsh, derogatory language, they’re able, for the moment, to lighten their own inner conflict. They do this by aligning with the accuser’s words, feeling inwardly, “You see how worthless and crooked those other people are. If anyone is corrupt or worthless, it’s them, not me. At least, I’m not as bad as them.” The more an individual uses such defensiveness, the more he evades a true reckoning with himself.

Many people are unconsciously waiting to be persuaded by a negative feeling, especially if the negative impression serves to cover up their great psychological “sin,” namely their unconscious readiness to maintain their inner conflict, to identify with themselves through this conflict, and to refuse to shed any light on the roots of this psychological dysfunction. Under these conditions, negative impressions influence us quicker and more convincingly than insight or truth.

These above examples are only a few of the many expressions of human dysfunction, and they reveal the unfinished business of our conscious evolvement. It’s time to be humble and to recognize that we’re creatures in urgent need of self-knowledge.

The dysfunction might now be producing a more malignant effect because the cultural norms, social institutions, and identifications—religious, economic, family, communal, and ethnic—that have supported us emotionally and physically have been waning and transforming. People who are too conflicted to know and to identify with their better self are disconnected from that better self, and they tend to be desperate for some compensating form of connection. They go searching for connections and identifications wherever they might find them, and they don’t have to go far to swallow a daily media diet of divisive political commentary.

In the past few decades, the commercialization of divisiveness and negativity through a highly partisan mass media has contaminated the human psyche and contributed largely to social unrest. People grow rich promoting both environmental and social degradation.

Still, we’re very likely at some point to triumph if we can assimilate the knowledge of depth psychology. The lessening of inner conflict and its resulting negativity is humanity’s sublime labor, and depth psychology is a vital tool for this undertaking. It’s our best security against environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, and social unrest because the process of inner growth makes us much wiser.

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The Las Vegas Killer’s Hidden Motive

Authorities have been trying unsuccessfully to come up with a motive to explain the massacre carried out by a lone gunman in Las Vegas this week. The killer didn’t appear to be motivated by political, social, or religious views.

Insights into human nature help us to understand the killer’s motive.

The principles of depth psychology reveal a possible motive. This motive, however, would have been unconscious to the killer. He wouldn’t have had any notion of it.

To discover this motive, an analysis of the killer’s psyche is required. Information is needed about his everyday personality, quirks, traits, and behaviors. Some of that information can be found in a report in The New York Times, titled “Stephen Paddock Chased Gambling’s Payouts and Perks,” published four days after the massacre.

For the purposes of psychological analysis, the newspaper’s profile of the 64-year-old killer, Stephen Paddock, is sketchy and incomplete. But the article does provide enough clues for me to make an analysis.

Paddock’s primary motivation, unbeknownst to himself, was to shift or displace his self-hatred, a result of intensifying inner conflict, onto others. Paddock’s evil aggression was facilitated by an accumulation of self-aggression that had built up in his psyche. He was likely being assailed with pure self-rejection and self-hatred that emanated from his inner critic or superego. In his psyche, he was unable to protect himself from this onslaught because of his own passive nature.

This passivity in his psyche, a psychological disconnect from his better self, accounted in large part for why he became an unevolved, degraded person, in the form of a compulsive gambler who spent many hours at a time, over many years, planted in front of a video poker machine in a cold, calculating, almost trance-like state.

Many people gamble compulsively at these kinds of machines, and they do not, of course, become killers as a result. People who play home video games for hours on end remain law-abiding, though they can in the process plunge into inner passivity, often with some degree of disconnection from self, if not dissociation or depersonalization, that can undermine their ability to flourish in the world. In Paddock’s case, other factors would have been at play, including possibly a genetic effect from his criminal father that predisposed the son to psychopathic tendencies and more intense inner conflict than the average person experiences. News reports say another of Paddock’s brothers, Bruce, was involved in criminal behaviors. Criminals as a group are heavily inflicted with inner passivity.

Despite possible genetic influences, depth psychology informs us that the destructive aggression that Paddock displayed would still be, in some measure, an extreme reaction to his underlying passivity and inner conflict. (Paddock’s girlfriend spoke of his moaning and crying out in bed, an indication he was experiencing intense inner conflict and anxiety. Authorities say he was taking the anti-anxiety drug Valium.) Because of that passivity, he failed inwardly to protect himself from the cruel onslaught of his inner critic’s self-aggression. I’ll say more about how this works.

First, consider that even when a mass killer’s motive is identified as political or religious, the psychological dynamics described here can be the starting point for the hatred and violence. Extremist beliefs often just serve as a “cover story” to account for immense hatred that’s being produced internally in the individual’s own psyche. Mental illness, as well, can be, in large measure, an intensification or worsening of inner dynamics that are universal to human nature.

We can start by understanding the nature of the passivity that had congested in Paddock’s psyche. This passivity is present, in varying degrees, in everyone’s psyche. I call it inner passivity, and I’ve written extensively about it at this website. One of my books, The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself From Inner Passivity, deals with this topic in detail. This passivity is a major component of the human psyche, and it is responsible for much of the indecision, procrastination, confusion, defensiveness, loneliness, anxiety, fearfulness, compulsions, addictions, self-doubt, and violence that plague humanity.

Inner passivity exists within our psyche largely as a biological impediment or flaw, a leftover from the many years of childhood that are experienced by us through helplessness, dependency, and lack of autonomy. Inner passivity is also an aspect of our psychological immaturity and our lack of evolvement and consciousness. We have a difficult time seeing it clearly or objectively because we feel (to the degree that it’s even noticed by us) that it is a normal condition, just part and parcel of who we are.

We can begin to free ourselves from inner passivity’s many self-defeating symptoms and the limitations it imposes upon us by bringing it into focus, understanding it as a clinical entity, and seeing how it intrudes into our daily life.

In our psyche, inner passivity operates as something of an enabler of the self-aggression dispensed by our primitive inner critic or superego. This self-aggression, as Sigmund Freud famously noted, is a biological force, an imperfection in human nature, a corruption of the innate aggression that predatory human beings needed over millennia to survive. Our passive side cowers before our inner critic’s misleading accusations and scornful condemnation, and this inner weakness gives credence or legitimacy to these accusations, even when they’re entirely irrational. Inner passivity often tries to defend us from the inner critic, but it usually does so quite ineffectively.

The primary conflict in the human psyche is the one that takes place between inner passivity and the aggressive inner critic. The more neurotic we are, the more intense this inner conflict between our passive and aggressive sides.

Inner passivity often produces, as a compensation for its weakening effect, a desire to feel powerful and in control. One authority quoted in the Times article said, “Video poker is the crack cocaine of gambling.” Eric Paddock, the killer’s youngest brother, said Paddock, an expert who had played video poker for 25 years, required only a few seconds of time to play each hand, often for $100 or more per hand. Ten or more hands could be played in a minute. He gambled as he lived, his brother said, methodically, systematically, always weighing the odds. He was cautious and liked to plan ahead.

Paddock was likely chasing “the high” that comes from having the power to beat the machine and make large sums of money in a matter of minutes. This “high” of feeling powerful and in control is craved to compensate for (and to cover up or defend against) the passive person’s emotional resonance with and identification with the passive side of his inner conflict.

According to the Times article, Paddock always wanted to be in control and didn’t like leaving things to chance. He was a solitary person not known for friendliness. When he played, his body was mostly still, with only his hands moving.

Depth psychology tells us that a person who is rigid and who feels the need to be in control is likely to lack self-regulation in critical ways, meaning he is prone to being out of control in ways that can be self-defeating and self-destructive. Such a person expects that if he’s not rigidly in control, he’ll instead be controlled in some manner by someone or some situation. For this individual, it’s either control or be controlled. He feels the need to prove he wants to be in control and have power in order to cover up his inner dysfunction—his expectation of being controlled, or being out of control, and his emotional identification with that unpleasant sense of self. Inner passivity creates in him irrationality in the form of a propensity to interpret everyday situations as if he really were being controlled. Much of his resulting behavior is an attempt to cover up awareness of how, in this manner, he is his own worst enemy. This emotional and behavioral problem is a direct result of inner passivity.

Paddock had ample mental prowess. “He was a math guy,” his brother Eric said. “He could tell you off the top of his head what the odds were down to a tenth of a percent on whatever machine he was playing. He studied it like it was a Ph.D. thing. It was not silly gambling. It was work.” To be successful, he calculated the probabilities when betting, avoiding acting on hunches or emotion. He did it in a way that was mechanical and computer-like, apparently insensitive to human connections and considerations.

Many of us are very smart intellectually, yet we can be complete dunces when it comes to understanding ourselves and our motivations. We are then somewhat at the mercy of powerful negative emotions and irrational beliefs, arising out of inner conflict, that cause us to suffer and to act out in self-destructive ways.

Paddock was an anomaly, an outlier, yet he was still governed by forces that are universal in the human psyche. Why did he cross the threshold into evil? We all have the capacity for evil, and we can stumble into it when we’re disconnected from our authentic self and unable thereby to appreciate the sanctity of life and of others. Our inner critic operates in a primitive manner, capable of evil in itself for how mercilessly it can assail its host—the self-centered sleep-walking creature we often are when ignorant of our psyche’s hidden dynamics.

When our inner critic is active, it pummels us with scorn, mockery, and condemnation. In some individuals, the self-aggression accumulates as self-rejection and self-hatred, often producing clinical depression and other disorders. We tend to absorb this self-hatred to the degree that our inner passivity fails to protect us from it. As we absorb it, we become increasingly disconnected from self and indifferent or hateful toward others.

The answer is to appreciate how unevolved we are, how much we have to learn, in order that we might overcome egotistic resistance to pursue the deeper knowledge that humbles us as it frees us from our dark side.

Much is still unknown about why Paddock snapped and became an evil monster. Nonetheless, it’s highly likely the unconscious dynamics described here were propelling him in that direction.

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