Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 2

Are You Addicted to Self-Punishment?

Our intelligence triumphs when we bring into focus the self-harming dynamics going on in our psyche. These conflicting dynamics are very much indifferent to our wellbeing. When they remain hidden from us, we may have only a hit-or-miss capacity for healthy self-regulation. (An earlier version of this story appeared on this site in 2020, and it has been one of my most-read posts.)

Discover the source of your suffering.

We all have some degree of emotional weakness, and this weakness involves our tendency to replay and recycle inner conflict. When we do so, we experience the repercussions—distressful symptoms. These include worry, guilt, shame, moodiness, boredom, fear, humiliation, and depression. What’s behind the symptoms? Our psyche operates like an algorithm that triggers old unresolved hurts from childhood. These first hurts are feelings of being deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and betrayed.

When we are struggling emotionally, our psyche is churning up these original hurts and accompanying symptoms in a jumble of inner conflict. We all have some degree of this conflict. In some people, it is intense, and it is experienced repeatedly and compulsively, to the point of being addictive. Through this conflict, we unwittingly become dupes in a “game” of self-punishment. We are passive accomplices in our psyche’s conflicted nature, and it is this passivity that makes our suffering addictive.

The problem starts with self-aggression, which is the primitive psychic energy that flows from our inner critic in the form of unkind and harsh accusations of wrongdoing, foolishness, and failure. These accusations tend to be irrational. The inner critic assails us simply because it is a biological drive of self-aggression. In early childhood, our species’ predatory instinct mutates to form this self-aggression because natural aggression is blocked from fully flowing outward.

Our inner critic, though, is not the main problem. The primary problem is inner weakness, the point at which we absorb this self-aggression from our inner critic and turn it into self-punishment.

We absorb this aggression, these attacks upon our worthiness and integrity, because of the psychological weakness known as inner passivity. This passivity is lodged in our unconscious ego, shrouded from our awareness. Inner passivity operates like an enabler or a codependent in its accommodating and compromising interactions with the inner critic. This is the ignition point of humanity’s inner conflict where, in psychoanalytic terms, the aggressive superego (inner critic) encounters the unconscious ego and its passive, subordinate nature.

As distinctive operating systems, both our inner critic and inner passivity function with their own agendas, largely independently of our conscious mind and indifferent to our wellbeing. Our challenge is to tame these primitive elements, thereby claiming this conflicted territory in the name of higher consciousness and our authentic self.

Inner passivity, which I write about extensively on this website, makes us secret collaborators in our emotional suffering. This passivity produces in us an unconscious receptiveness to the inner critic’s claims that we are flawed, bad, or unworthy. The more that our inner passivity absorbs the inner critic’s attacks upon our goodness and integrity, the more self-punishment we generate. (Again, the punishments include worry, guilt, shame, moodiness, boredom, fear, humiliation, and depression.) The punishments serve as a pound-of-flesh offering to the inner critic in acknowledgement of its (usually irrational) claims against us.

We are unwitting participants in our emotional suffering in the sense that we are passively receptive to the inner critic’s aggression. To put it bluntly, we are prepared to absorb, through inner passivity, the inner critic’s misrepresentations and lies about us and to accept a level of self-punishment that appeases the inner critic. When we are receptive to punishment in this way, we are also more willing to inflict hurt and malice on others.

I don’t think humans are going to become more evolved until we take responsibility for the unruly dynamics of our psyche. In fact, there’s the likelihood we will regress. Up to now, we have been somewhat innocent in our collective self-defeat because the deeper source of self-damage has escaped our awareness. But our resistance to becoming more conscious and thereby more evolved is now threatening civilization itself.

Inner passivity, holed up in our psyche’s unconscious ego, juggles various defensive options in its unsteady effort to neutralize the inner critic. Inner passivity is required by its weak nature to make compromises. It tries to defend us, frequently by blaming others for our misery, but it does so quite ineffectively. These defenses, for one thing, are exercises in self-deception. Our best solution is to discover our authentic self, which we do as we free ourselves from inner conflict.

Inner passivity makes plea deals with the inner critic—without consulting us! It offers up to the inner critic plea-bargains or compromises that say, in effect, that we will accept some suffering in acknowledgement of the inner critic’s accusations against us. This pound-of-flesh offering usually succeeds in getting the inner critic to ease up on its assault on our character and integrity. Often though, our suffering needs to be quite intense to get the inner critic to back off.  It’s like the thug who stops kicking his victim after the victim has absorbed “sufficient” pain.

This is key to understanding self-punishment. Psychologists have been puzzled as to why self-harming behaviors of a physical kind seem to help sufferers regulate their negative emotions. At its website, the American Psychological Association says, “If a person is feeling bad, angry, upset, anxious or depressed and lacks a better way to express it, self-injury may fill that role.” The association also notes: “Some people get pleasure from pain because they feel a weight lifted off their shoulders. This is usually what happens when people engage in self-punishment behaviors.” This emotional relief happens, as I have noted, because the inner critic backs off, and its abusive function is temporarily set aside, once a person has experienced “sufficient” punishment.

Guilt, shame, and mild or severe depression are common ways that painful “pounds of flesh” are offered up as appeasement to the inner critic. Guilt is the feeling that one deserves to be punished, based on an unconscious concession such as this: Okay, inner critic, I hear you, you’re right, your attack against me is justified. I’m hearing you. I’m taking you seriously.

Shame is the result of a more serious capitulation to self-aggression. It’s the feeling that punishment has already being inflicted and absorbed. Here’s the inner concession: Okay, inner critic, you can see how much I’m suffering. I’ve taken on plenty of punishment. I’m so ashamed, and I’m feeling horrible. Perhaps now I’ve suffered enough.

Often, people feel guilt and shame for minor and even imaginary infractions. The inner critic can be so intimidating that an individual’s guilt or shame is triggered just by passing thoughts or old memories of wrongdoing. Often the amount of guilt and shame experienced far outweighs the degree of a person’s wrongdoing. The inner critic makes felonies our of misdemeanors—or just alleged wrongdoing! A minor misdeed can be milked over years and decades for its suffering potential.

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Depression and suicidal thoughts are also “pounds of flesh.” When self-punishment accumulates in one’s psyche, the effect over time can produce depressive, suicidal thoughts. An unconscious defense arises that tries to deny one’s passive engagement in self-punishment: I don’t want to feel beaten down by my inner critic. I’m not indulging in this self-abuse. Look at how depressed I am. I’m not being receptive to this abuse! I hate it! My depression proves I hate it! (Or, My thoughts of killing myself prove I am not willingly indulging in first hurts or absorbing malice from my inner critic.) These defenses, produced through inner passivity, are cunning self-deceptions conjured up at the deepest levels of the psyche.

Individuals absorb self-punishment from the inner critic because they fail, through inner passivity, to protect themselves from the largely irrational insinuations that build the case for punishment. The passive side of inner conflict can use a real or alleged wrongdoing committed long ago and offer it up for self-punishment. That’s because the individual, through inner passivity, remains willing to continue absorbing allegations of wrongdoing. The individual hasn’t established inner freedom from the inner critic’s oppression. Many people persist in forgiving themselves for some past infraction, but it’s to no avail because, through inner passivity, they remain emotionally addicted to the incoming self-aggression.

As an aspect of one’s unconscious willingness to absorb such punishment, a vague sense can arise that we somehow deserve to be punished. Rationalizations for absorbing the punishment also include, I’m supposed to suffer, and Suffering makes me a better person.

Let’s take a symptom—procrastination—and trace it back to its source in inner conflict and subversive self-punishment. Procrastination is often accompanied by a painful sense of self-admonishment. The inner critic considers procrastination, a common symptom of inner conflict, to be a “crime” worthy of punishment. The crime, as the inner critic sees it, arises from inner passivity’s readiness to indulge in its own sense of weakness. The inner critic berates the individual for passive dawdling, and this person soaks up the abuse, producing guilt or shame. Why do we procrastinate in the first place? Well, of course, we’re not perfect—and we’re going to have our weaknesses. Yet procrastination can be an unconsciously willful acting-out of self-sabotage. In other words, we can use procrastination as the means to replay unresolved inner conflict, first to experience the passivity itself and then, second, to passively experience admonishments from the inner critic. (This appetite for self-punishment also applies to the common self-defeating behavior of chronic indecision.)

The axiom that we are all largely responsible for how we experience life makes perfect sense when we uncover this unconscious willingness to experience self-punishment. An example is the common willingness of multitudes of people to live with a sense of oppression and victimization, a secret willingness to suffer that people often instinctively cover up with chronic complaining and a multitude of other defenses.

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Evidence for the appeal of self-punishment is everywhere. Our most vivid memories are often ones that produce bad feelings about ourselves. Our most intrusive thoughts often cast us in a bad light. Daily we find fault with personal “flaws” of character or intelligence that we believe have undermined our dreams and expectations. We stew in feelings of being disrespected and devalued, debating whether these intimations of unworthiness have validity. Anger, hate, bitterness, and cynicism arise from inner conflict to poison our experiences. We are tempted to want to punish others, to see harm befall them, even as surreptitiously we produce within ourselves a bittersweet facsimile of what that punishment feels like.

Parents who as children were rigorously punished are often compelled to punish their children. In unduly punishing their children or in feeling impulses to do so, these parents are unwittingly using their children as a means through which to identify emotionally with the feeling of being punished. It’s déjà vu all over again, at the kids’ expense.

With some parents, this dynamic is reversed: They hesitate to impose appropriate punishments. They associate being strong and firm with somehow administering inappropriate authority and being overly strict. They are misled by the impression that the exercise of one’s authority, even when benevolent and well-intentioned, is unkind, insensitive, and unduly punishing. (This can be how they experienced, often subjectively, their own parents’ application of authority.) Parents and people in general often punish themselves with self-doubt over their right to be assertive.

Different personality types have their own formulas for producing self-punishment and then covering their tracks. Consider perfectionists. They avoid awareness of their emotional attachment to self-criticism by claiming in their unconscious defense: I’m not looking to feel punished by my inner critic. I’m not interested in feeling criticized! Look at how perfectly I try to do everything. That proves I don’t want to absorb self-criticism. But this is pure self-deception. Perfectionists not only indulge in self-criticism, but they also experience the stress and anxiety of striving to maintain the defense, namely the impossible goal of perfectionism.

Another example of a self-punishing personality is the needy person who claims unconsciously: I don’t want to feel rejected, betrayed, belittled, or abandoned. Look at how eager I am to feel that others see and appreciate my value. But needy people, in their receptivity to their inner critic’s abasement of them, regularly punish themselves for allegedly being insignificant and unworthy. Needy people act out their underlying emotional attachment to rejection and abandonment when others, feeling a growing disrespect for their neediness, disengage from them.

Our affinity for self-punishment reveals an unconscious masochistic streak in human nature. Hidden away in our unconscious mind, the specter of a generalized, nonsexual masochism, an unconscious affinity for suffering, is a primary ingredient in inner conflict and a chief instigator of accompanying anguish and destructiveness. But our delicate, conscious ego resists uncovering the dark side of human nature. Our better self wants this deeper knowledge—while our ego hates it.

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A Hidden Cause of Loneliness

A loneliness epidemic is hurting America and much of the world. It’s probably going to get worse because one of its main causes is not being addressed or even recognized.

Loneliness is mostly a symptom of inner conflict.

The epidemic of loneliness is often attributed to unprecedented social and technological changes over the last century or two. These changes, including the mass movement of people from small communities to big cities, have overwhelmed us mentally and emotionally. We have lost many of the tried-and-true associations that provided a sense of belonging.

Old institutions and traditions are tottering, while new processes and procedures seem to change by the day. Artificial intelligence, as one example, is swooping in to challenge not only how we work but how we think about ourselves. One expert claims that AI “has the power to induce in us a type of self-forgetting—a selective amnesia that loosens our grip on our own human agency and clouds our self-knowledge.”

Change is accelerating, calamity is looming, and people are crumbling with future shock. We need to be emotionally strong, and being mired in loneliness doesn’t help.

In the many books and reports that address loneliness, vital knowledge concerning our inner life is overlooked. This knowledge exposes the inner conflict in our psyche between consciously wanting to feel strong versus unconsciously and compulsively being drawn into a sense of weakness. This conflict undermines our emotional strength, making us vulnerable to the symptom of loneliness.

Keep in mind that people often experience chronic loneliness even when other people are available to connect with. The problem then is not solely about connecting with others; rather, it’s about connecting with one’s stronger, better self.

In other words, chronic loneliness, to a significant degree, is a symptom of how people are compelled to feel disconnected from their better self. The pain of feeling disconnected from others is a direct result of the deep, unrecognized disconnection from one’s better self. This idea of being disconnected from one’s better self is a vague concept for many people. I try here, as this post proceeds, to bring this into focus.

Loneliness can be a legitimate problem in its own right, of course, yet the influence upon it of neurosis and inner conflict also needs its own transparency.

There are two kinds of emotional disconnection, one from an inner self and the other from other people and the outer world. Both are experienced through the unconscious compulsion to recycle, by way of inner conflict, old unresolved emotions such as self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-abandonment. If we’re prone to self-criticism, for instance, we are likely to be compulsively critical of others and society in general, there more disconnected.

Mired in inner conflict, the chronically lonely individual is blocked from connecting, in a stable manner, with inner strength. Clearing inner conflict out of our psyche is a process of refinement in which we connect with the goodness and value inherent in our better self. As the negativity generated by inner conflict is neutralized, the deeper knowing of the self is felt as inner truth and goodness, which is pleasurable to connect with. Loneliness evaporates as we deepen our connection to our self.

In this process, we begin to recognize in our psyche the manner in which self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-abandonment arise out of inner conflict. It’s easier now to see the mechanisms or dynamics of one’s inner conflict, which greatly helps to overcome it.

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This deeper perspective on loneliness is almost never mentioned in books and articles on the subject. The New York Times Magazine had a cover story on loneliness several months ago, and the article focused on the idea that society was not meeting the emotional needs of people. There was only a meager passing nod to inner weakness. This is the closest the article got to the core of the matter:

Many subjects [in a loneliness survey] cited a lack of “meaningful” connection as the primary culprit. This was true whether or not human companionship was available to them. Physical proximity wasn’t always the issue. Emotional proximity usually was. Consider the young mother who frets that her existence has been reduced to caring for her baby, or the respondent who complains that his or her “partner is only interested in the phone.” A third subject admits to having plenty of family around but to being undervalued by them. “Am surrounded,” a fourth writes, by people “who only are present in my life because am useful.”

Why are the people quoted here feeling lonely when they’re surrounded by others? The article offers no explanation, but depth psychology does: They are feeling lonely because they’re not aware of the inner conflict between the wish to feel loved versus the compulsion to feel criticized, rejected, or abandoned. They don’t recognize how this conflict plunges them into the distress of feeling disconnected from their better self.

Why aren’t people recognizing this? We haven’t appreciated the degree to which our psyche remains unevolved. This oversight is catching up with us as technology spurts ahead and our past folly races up from behind. We’re reeling in the helpless, passive sense of not knowing what to do or how to connect. Reactions to this feeling of being overwhelmed include false righteousness, animosity, and blaming.

We need to be emotionally strong, of course, but we’re caught in a deep sense of weakness, helplessness, and disconnection. This weakness arises from the dynamics of inner conflict, and this conflict can be understood and overcome. But our psyche’s inner workings are initially upsetting to see, largely because, in exposing the depths of our obliviousness, the knowledge insults our ego. We’re not stupid but we’re plenty resistant to knowing facts that undermine the assumed centrality of our ego.

Our ego feels precious, as if it’s our essence. We identify with our ego. Our ego often takes charge of our mind. Through our ego, we experience the illusion that we know all that we need to know about our inner life. Ego-identified, we can’t see beyond the ego. Our ego will accept suffering and defeat to protect itself, and loneliness is one of its ways we bear the burden.

Ego is everywhere. We have a conscious ego that feels like our mind. Both mind and ego can feel like our essence. We also have a defensive unconscious ego that tussles passively with our inner critic, our superego. All this ego is smothering our better self, our true essence.

Our ego blocks us from realizing that, unconsciously, we gravitate toward suffering. As classical psychoanalysis discovered, we have unconscious emotional attachments to unresolved negative emotions first experienced in childhood. These first hurts of childhood comprise refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal. These hurts, when unresolved, continue to be experienced unpleasantly by us. Through inner conflict, we remain prone as adults to repeatedly become entangled into these eight first hurts. This inner unrest alienates us from our better self. The first hurts most associated with loneliness are criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal. When chronically lonely, we’re entangled, mostly unconsciously, in these hurts.

Adamantly and unconsciously, we refuse to see the dynamics of inner conflict and to recognize the artificial self-centeredness that arises from it. We don’t recognize our willingness to engage with the first hurts and indulge in them because of our resistance, our unconscious refusal to disidentify from our ego and to understand its cunning self-deception. One such self-deception (a psychological defense registered unconsciously) is to claim: “I’m not looking to replay and recycle the old familiar pains of rejection and abandonment. Look at how much I suffer with loneliness.”

Our suffering is largely a result of what we don’t know about the workings of our psyche and emotional life, particularly inner conflict, psychological defenses, and the repetition compulsion. Our success in overcoming self-defeat and suffering is a matter of growing our intelligence, meaning in this context greater self-knowledge.

In growing our consciousness, we recognize a major inner conflict, the one between our conscious wish to feel emotionally strong, worthy, and lovable versus our unconscious willingness to go on experiencing ourselves as weak, unworthy, and unlovable. This conflict can heat up daily as the competing sides—defensive unconscious ego versus harsh inner critic—engage in unsettling argumentation concerning our merits. Even when entangled in this conflict, we’re often oblivious to it.

If we don’t understand the processes in our psyche through which everyday variations of inner conflict are experienced, we are likely to remain stuck in the conflict and limited in our range of capability.

As we begin to recognize the tyranny of inner conflict, our inner critic relinquishes its centrality and sense of authority. Our unconscious ego, meanwhile, is shunted aside, while our better self or best self steps in to assume command. To connect with this more evolved self is to connect with what is good and strong. Greatly aiding this process is our growing recognition of how our psyche’s passivity, with all its disconnections from our essence, has tolerated inner conflict. This conflict has enabled our menacing inner critic, the superego, to isolate us from pleasurable connections to what is good in us and beautiful in others.

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The Impulse to Destroy Democracy

I remember, decades ago, hearing my sociology professor express anxiety about the fragility of American democracy. What is she talking about, I thought to myself, scoffing at her worries. American democracy was as solid as the granite faces on Mount Rushmore.

Inwardly, we block the full sense of freedom.

I later looked it up. The four presidents are carved from a granite called pegmatite, which is weaker and more susceptible to cracking than the area’s surrounding granite.

Here we are, the big election looming, and our democracy is in danger of fracturing into rubble if autocratic-minded Donald Trump is elected. Do those who support him not value democracy?

Voting for Trump is, I believe, an act of destructiveness, and I explain further along exactly why this is so.

At our best, we have a feel for democracy that relates directly to how we feel about ourselves. When our best self oversees our inner life, we establish an inner democracy and with it a pleasing sense of inner freedom. Now we understand the value—the imperative!—of democracy: We can feel its richness from within—and we don’t take it for granted.

It’s no surprise democracy is on tilt: Mental health trends are going in the wrong direction. Democracy depends on our collective mental health, yet modern psychology and psychiatry are not showing clearly enough the nature of the dysfunction that undermines our personal relationship with our self. Basically, we resist exposing the dynamics of our inner conflict, that disturbance in the human psyche that produces misery and self-defeat.

We’re limited in our capacity to feel the greatness of democracy and our capacity to preserve it because inner conflict imposes a tyranny upon us. It curbs our inner freedom and our powers of self-regulation. It makes us weak and defensive in the face of our imposing inner critic (superego). Through the passive side of inner conflict, we cede power to the superego. Through our unconscious passivity, we are enablers of the superego. We allow it to tyrannize us.

In denial of this inner weakness, people are prone to react with misplaced anger, hostility, and aggression. This phony, reactive strength covers up our inner weakness, but it sabotages democracy which requires trust, decency, and friendliness.

Humanity’s emotional disconnect from inner freedom is a theme in Erich Fromm’s 1941 classic, Escape From Freedom. Fromm claimed that destructiveness is emotionally alluring to many people because it absolves them in an illusionary way of the sense of having failed to meet the challenges of flourishing in a free society. Fromm’s book, published in the UK in 1942 as Fear of Freedom, has not been fully appreciated, probably because of humanity’s unconscious resistance to its central idea. Fromm said many of us harbor too much self-doubt to be comfortable with the sense of freedom that a thriving democracy requires of us.

We are resistant to exploring the full dimensions of this self-doubt because doing so reveals, to our ego’s dismay, our undercover participation in self-defeat and our compulsion to recycle familiar, unresolved hurts from childhood (the first hurts). Inwardly conflicted people can easily feel resentment toward others who are living happily and freely. Backsliders want to hold everyone back, though again they won’t admit this. They react, mostly unconsciously, to the sense that denying the goodness and value of others will ease their guilt and shame at having shortchanged themselves by failing to connect psychologically with their better self.

Lacking this connection, an individual experiences painful, sometimes agonizing, self-alienation. With self-alienation comes the compulsion to feel disconnected from others. Now, national disunity feels more like the natural order. People who are neurotic can be pulled deeper into self-alienation. Relief from the misery can feel impossible through growth and renewal, hence alternatives are unconsciously chosen: cynicism, nihilism, militant ignorance, and an impulse to destructiveness.

In disparaging or destroying the good in the world, people are extending outward their inward destruction of their better self.

Inner conflict can produce the impression that we’re in a losing battle to know our worthiness and goodness. Trapped in inner conflict, we are more likely to be living below our potential. We’re more likely to be incompetent, stupid, even evil. We are compelled to inflict upon the world the negativity that our inner conflict produces within us.

Our main conflict, I believe, pits the inner passivity in our unconscious ego against the self-aggression in our superego. People typically identify with the passive side of inner conflict, which means they are inwardly defensive and passively reactive to their aggressive, largely irrational, and frequently tyrannical superego. In this weakness, they are disconnected from their better self and thereby lack the harmony of inner democracy.

—

With inner conflict comes the tendency to destroy what is good, whether a long-time marriage, a flourishing company, or a world-class democracy. When we decline to connect psychologically with our better self, we hate to see others making progress. Now it’s more likely that people will act or vote against progress, though they will deny this intent, even to themselves.

Many of us experience inner conflict between wanting to be free versus feeling constrained or trapped, between wanting to feel strong versus holding on to feeling helpless. Consciously, we certainly want to feel free and strong and to enjoy that feeling. Yet unconsciously, we can be unwittingly indulging in unpleasant—even agonizing—impressions of weakness, inadequacy, and wrongdoing.

Resolving inner conflict is like solving a puzzle—but most people don’t even know the puzzle exists or they can’t bring it into focus.

An impoverished sense of self is a leftover from the many subjective impressions we experienced as children. It is hard to make our own luck in the world when we harbor unresolved self-doubt, helplessness, unworthiness, self-pity, and victimization. Ideally, we grow out of this weakness and connect with value, truth, and strength.

To cope with inner weakness, many of us desperately seek wealth, fame, and power, which offer us the illusion of being more substantial. This self-doubt explains racism, misogyny, class-pride, nationalism—we get to feel superior to others to cover our emotional entanglement in self-doubt. Behind an anxious desire to be accepted lurks the agony of feeling disconnected from a sense of worthiness.

Fromm writes, the “destructive impulses are a passion within a person, and they always succeed in finding some object.” If an outside object is not available, one’s own self “easily becomes the object.” Now self-rejection and self-hatred (which become rejection and hatred of others) come into play, along with the willingness to abandon personal integrity and honor.

Denying this inner weakness, people often claim, as a defense, that they really want to be strong. Now they might identify with an apparent strongman who, like them, is also hiding a stash of inner weakness.

Fromm writes that destructiveness is the outcome of an unlived life. “It would seem,” he wrote, “that the amount of destructiveness to be found in individuals is proportionate to the amount to which expansiveness of life is curtailed.”

Inner conflict curtails expansiveness. A foremost inner conflict is our conscious wish to be strong and resolute versus our unconscious readiness to know and feel ourselves as flawed or weak. People can get stuck in this conflict because the conflict itself—our inner defensiveness versus the self-criticism we level against ourselves for the “crime” of being flawed or weak—is resistant to being resolved. Feelings of weakness—experienced as entanglements in helplessness, criticism, rejection, and abandonment—are emotional attachments that people unwittingly recycle and replay by way of defensive and incriminating inner voices (sometimes registered consciously, sometimes not).

I believe the biggest attachment of all, the greatest compulsion, is to go on knowing oneself through inner conflict. This means, if true, that many of us are, in some degree, inwardly enslaved. How can we love democracy if we can’t feel fully free? To love democracy and to grow democracy, it’s vital to feel democracy’s essential value within us. That value is the goodness intrinsic to our individual and collective existence.

To know how democracy dies is to know how democracy thrives. Democracy thrives when we understand, individually and collectively, the psychological weaknesses that undermine us. We are lower than we realize on the spectrum of consciousness, and the courage to see what we resist knowing about ourselves becomes the intelligence that moves us forward.

The stronger we are in terms of emotional resilience and mental health, the freer we are. We become increasingly free from worry, fear, anxiety, depression and other disturbances of inner life. Now, able to live harmoniously within, we are more capable of maintaining and growing social harmony and political freedom, which are inherently democratic.

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We Get Stronger by Seeing Our Weakness

To become emotionally strong, we might need to understand the inner dynamics of emotional weakness. There’s no need to feel bad about having a weakness. A man who aspires, for instance, to become a good tennis player is simply being sensible when he takes steps to overcome a weak backhand.

We can make strength, not weakness, our inner default position.

It’s more complicated, though, with emotional or psychological weakness. When this kind of weakness is identified, we can be quick to feel that it reveals something inherently bad or wrong about us. People are then resistant to going deeper to expose the nature of this weak spot. We settle instead for superficial behavioral or cognitive “remedies.” We resist exploring our unconscious mind, our psyche.

Looking deeper into ourselves, we discover our readiness to indulge in old familiar hurts from our past. If we are, say, notably sensitive to rejection or criticism, we are unconsciously prepared to plunge painfully into those feelings. This is an aspect of our dark side, this unconscious willingness of ours to make suffering our secret passion.

Let’s look at one common emotional weakness, a persistent sensitivity to rejection. This weakness involves a hidden aspect of ourselves that is prepared to resonate in a bittersweet way with feeling rejected. We decline or refuse through psychological defenses to recognize a lingering emotional attachment to feeling rejected.

With this weakness, we can feel the hurt of rejection just by imagining that someone is rejecting us. We are also likely to act out (to behave unwisely and reactively) in ways that prompt people to reject us.

Through unconscious resistance to seeing ourselves objectively, we don’t want to consider the degree to which we are willing to indulge in the hurt. We don’t want to see how we cozy up to feeling rejected by others. We don’t want to see our emotional attachment to feeling rejected and with it our affinity for self-rejection and our participation in self-defeat.

When notably sensitive to rejection, we are compelled to feel deep within ourselves the rejection we feel coming at us from others. What tends to hurt most in that moment is the extent to which, in feeling the hurt so deeply, we are basically rejecting our own self. We are rejecting, discounting, and disrespecting our own self. Unwittingly, we soak up this discredited sense of self that feels so much like the essence of who we are. It’s as if we don’t quite know who we are without this dose of self-rejection.

When we are strong instead of weak, we don’t take the rejection of others personally. We don’t feel self-rejection. We go about our business doing right by ourselves and others.

From where comes our willingness to suffer the hurt of rejection? As children, we are especially sensitive to impressions of rejection. Sometimes actual rejection occurs, but much of the time the child experiences the hurt through highly subjective, misleading impressions. As children, we process our interactions with others through infantile self-centeredness, so we’re lacking objectivity. We can feel, even with kind parents, that “Mommy loves little sister more than me.” Most everything is taken personally, with a readiness to feel hurt and helpless. This emotional sensitivity tends to linger in adults. Whatever is unresolved in our emotional life is going to continue, at times, to be felt by us, even when painful.

We unwittingly maintain an inner conflict concerning the hurt of rejection. Consciously, we want to feel loved, not rejected. Unconsciously though, we are inclined or tempted, as a compulsion, to go on replaying and recycling impressions of rejection through old memories and daily life experiences.

Loath to recognize this weakness, we produce unconscious psychological defenses (such as anger and blaming) that cover up our indulgence in the hurt. When blaming others, we get upset at them in our misleading conviction that they are the problem. Or we might blame our own self, but for the wrong reasons, for instance, claiming that our foolish behavior caused the rejection or that our lack of personality is a turn-off. We decline to see our unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle the old hurts of rejection so familiar from your past.

You might be inclined to tell yourself that your sensitivity to rejection is a result of childhood trauma, that your parents or siblings were truly cruel. Nevertheless, if you are feeling painfully rejected, you are still likely refusing to become conscious of the passive part in you that is tempted—in a weak, self-pitying way—to countenance and maintain that old familiar hurt.

—

Let’s look at another form of emotional weakness, a persistent sensitivity to criticism. Through inner conflict, we allow our inner critic to load us up with self-criticism. Now we’re inwardly disconnected from our better self and more susceptible to feeling the hurt of criticism. We absorb the feeling of criticism from others, sometimes even when their words are not intended as criticism. In addition, we’re more likely to be judgmental and critical of others.

As we become more conscious of how we enable this weakness, we begin to see the misleading nature of our defenses. We see, for instance, that the anger we might have at someone who appears to be critical of us is a defense that covers up our weakness. Instinctively, we protect our ego from the humbling awareness that we are willing to replay and recycle the feeling of being criticized. Our frail ego clings to life by using the irrationality of misplaced anger as an illusion of strength.

As we become aware of doing this, we begin to take responsibility for our weakness, largely because our new, deeper awareness strengthens us. This is how we get stronger—by seeing and understanding the weakness and keeping the insight in focus.

Again, it defies common sense that we would replay and recycle negative emotions. Yet the realm of our psyche is an inner cosmos of persistent irrationality. It operates at times well beyond the constraints of common sense. With insight, we bring rationality (reason, order, wisdom) to what is otherwise so frequently irrational and inherently negative.

To feel strong instead of weak, the trick again is to see and understand the weakness. If, for instance, you are chronically procrastinating (a symptom), your weakness is your willingness to identify with yourself through familiar, unresolved feelings of helplessness. With insight, you recognize that the sense of self that arises from procrastination is the same as the feeling of being entangled in the misery of helplessness. You connect the symptom to the source. You recognize that you are emotionally clinging to a helpless sense of being unable to engage productively with life and its challenges.

Now you see the problem with clinical awareness. If, for example, you are feeling physically ill, a medical doctor diagnoses the problem and prescribes the remedy. It’s the same with a psychological problem. The right diagnosis, the correct analysis, exposes the blind spot in your awareness. The resulting self-knowledge becomes your power to heal yourself. Your new awareness develops inner strength.

Tolerating inner weakness is the path of least resistance. The weakness can feel intrinsic to your sense of self. When procrastinating, you are choosing to know yourself through this weakness. Seeing this, you bring the weak spot into focus, which itself is an act of strength.

Suffering is circulated in our emotional life through the first hurts, which are eight negative emotions first experienced in childhood. They consist of rejection and criticism (already discussed), as well as refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, betrayal, and abandonment. When we’re emotionally weak, we’re more likely to experience these hurts. Then, through psychological reactions or defenses (such as anger, blaming, and self-pity), we decline to recognize how, unwittingly, we are indulging in the hurts and making things worse for ourselves.

Back and forth we go in the throes of inner conflict, disliking the hurt, fearing experiences of it, yet unconsciously compelled to replay and recycle the displeasure. Most people are not bringing this self-defeating process into focus.

The first hurts are processed inside us as inner conflict. The most common symptoms of this conflict are feelings of being discounted, disrespected, disconnected, and offended. Other symptoms are chronic anger, loneliness, indecision, and depression. There are scores of symptoms, including procrastination, cynicism, self-abuse, hatred, bitterness, greed, and various addictions.

We start the healing by identifying a symptom. Misogyny, as an example, is a symptom, and it’s usually accompanied by irrational dislike of women, if not outright hostility. A misogynist is likely to be attached emotionally to rejection and criticism, especially self-criticism and self-rejection. He suffers from the emotional poison of dislike and hostility. Yet he’s willing to circulate this poison within himself because he is desperate to cover up his inner weakness, his passive susceptibility to self-criticism and self-rejection. His hostility, as an unconscious defense, claims that he is aggressive, not passive. In rejecting women, he is also feeling self-rejection deep within.

In childhood, he might have felt criticized and rejected by his mother. Now, the more he sees women being appreciated and honored, the more he unconsciously cozies up to old hurts within himself. He dips into feeling unworthy and discounted. His inner conflict flares up, registered at best only semi-consciously, and his inner critic becomes cruelly mocking and outrageously irrational: “Look at you in all your worthlessness—inferior now even to women. They are surpassing you with their success.” Hostility toward women flares up, and he deceives himself into believing he is being aggressive rather than, in fact, passively stewing in self-criticism or self-rejection.

Hence, misogyny arises from inner weakness. A misogynist can become a stronger, better person if he’s willing and able to take responsibility for his weakness by acknowledging (1) his attachment to self-criticism and self-rejection, and (2) his consequential determination to use women as scapegoats for his own weakness.

A man’s antipathy toward women can have other triggers. All boys feel some passivity in encounters with their mother. That old impulse to feel passive still lingers in adults, and it can easily be set off in men when they encounter strong women. A misogynist’s reactive hostility and aggressive impulses are designed to deny and cover up his passivity, the weakness he most dreads to see in himself.

A misogynist can escape this limiting behavior by recognizing the inner conflict and taking responsibility for it: Consciously, he knows he wants to feel valued and strong but unconsciously he has been inclined to continue to know himself as devalued and weak, which is his old familiar sense of self. Again, we get strong by exposing the weakness.

We overcome such weakness through self-knowledge, through awareness of what constitutes the weakness. If we can understand the weakness and are able to keep it in sight, we’re likely to overcome it. We learn the knack of tracing the symptom back to the source. The biggest obstacle is our resistance.

Insight includes the ability to see how our inner critic is always ready to pounce on us with accusations, often irrational, that we are weak, flawed, and unworthy. We see the passive side of the conflict, the deep core of our weakness that takes the inner critic seriously, becomes defensive, and fails to represent our best interests.

Our emotional strength is vested in our better self (or best self or authentic self). This is the vantage point from where we can observe the psyche’s conflicted dynamics. Our better self arises through self-knowledge to bring order, harmony, and strength to inner life and worldly experiences.

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Suffering for Nothing–And the Pain is Free

I am taking a break from writing and plan to return with new articles by early fall. Meanwhile, I’m still offering psychotherapy sessions. There’s plenty here to read. More than 280 articles, written over the past 13 years, are available here on a variety of psychological topics. My depth psychology books, written and published over the past 30 years, can also be ordered here.

My writing plunges into the psychological dynamics that produce unhappiness, failure, and self-defeat. I expose the psychological blind spots that sabotage us. This deep self-knowledge explains how we unwittingly participate in generating unhappiness and self-defeat. Don’t suffer for nothing.

Readers can use the search function to find articles of interest to them. As well, here are links to some of the popular articles on this site:

Our Compulsion to Self-Punish | WhyWeSuffer.com

The Invisible Wall of Psychological Resistance | WhyWeSuffer.com

When in Doubt about Sexual Orientation | WhyWeSuffer.com

Seven Villains in a Sad Love Story | WhyWeSuffer.com

Breaking the Chains of Self-Imposed Oppression | WhyWeSuffer.com

Stubbornness: The Guts to Fight Reality | WhyWeSuffer.com

“Why Am I so Easily Discouraged?” | WhyWeSuffer.com

Our Readiness to Feel Controlled | WhyWeSuffer.com

Problem Gamblers are Addicted to Losing | WhyWeSuffer.com

Two Terrible Voices in Your Head | WhyWeSuffer.com

 

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The Warmonger in Our Psyche

Humanity’s appetite for war arises from our psyche’s inner war. War is just one of the bitter fruits of our refusal to recognize and overcome the persistent disharmony that churns within us.

The war trail leads from our psyche.

War is a byproduct of the inner conflict that generates neurosis, and neurosis is a worldwide contagion. Inner conflict produces inner weakness, especially folly, stupidity, and a lack of self-regulation (“The march of folly,” as historian Barbara Tuchman put it).

I am presenting here a theory on the primary cause of war. What I write is a bit complex in places, though it’s not rocket science. We resist acquiring deep self-knowledge because we find it disorienting. Yet with concentration, readers can find here a pathway to overcoming our worst instincts.

A recent book, Why War (W.W. Norton, 2024), by historian Richard Overy, notes the absence of any consensus on the singular cause of war, adding, “the effort to construct a monocausal explanation for war is futile.” I disagree. The primary cause of war is staring us in the face.

Overy notes that Freud didn’t develop a general psychological theory on the cause of war, except to relate it somewhat vaguely to a “death drive.” This death drive, as I understand it, is a compulsion to engage in self-defeat and self-damage. The drive is a particularly insidious variant of inner conflict. Inner conflict causes us to become our worst enemy. It also prompts us to target certain others and make enemies of them.

Inner conflict generates negativity, hostility, stupidity, and malice within us, and this psychological dark matter radiates outward toward others as distrust, incivility, hostility, and impulses for revenge. At a tipping point, these projections escalate into violence and war. I’ll now say more about inner conflict, gradually tracking its footprints to the doorstep of war.

Inner conflict has two main opposing forces, the aggressive superego   (inner critic) and inner passivity (a defensive reactivity in our unconscious ego). Many of us sense the critical superego within, yet we have little sense of its partner-in crime, inner passivity. Understanding the source of war requires our recognition of this passivity that lurks in our psyche as an enabler of the superego.

Inner passivity is largely a primitive, reactive intelligence, located in the unconscious ego, that defends our ego-ideal and reconciles our suffering. It is the operating system of self-doubt, the voice of our defensiveness, and the “mastermind” behind our psychological defenses.  Typically, we don’t recognize this independent operating system in our psyche because we usually identify with it as our essential self, even though it obscures our best self.

Through inner passivity, we activate inner conflict. Inner passivity predisposes us to give credence and authority to our irrational, aggressive superego, thereby facilitating inner conflict. If not for this passive side, we would dismiss the superego as biased, irrational, primitive—unworthy of being taken seriously. In failing to do this, we fail to secure peace within ourselves and, by extension, peace in the world.

Through inner passivity, we unwittingly allow our superego to assail us with accusations, mockery, and scorn. More than just the source of self-criticism and self-mockery, the superego can become the instigator of self-condemnation and self-hatred. The intensity of inner conflict and neurosis depends on the degree to which inner passivity accommodates such self-abuse. Anxiety, shame, guilt, moodiness, and depression are experiences that arise from our accommodation of the superego’s judgments against us. As we become conscious of how, through inner passivity, we ingest these judgments, we are more able to liberate ourselves from inner conflict and its self-defeating emotions (e.g., hatred) and behaviors (e.g., war).

Another ingredient in our psyche (and in the war machine) is irrational inner fear. Such fear is strongly felt in childhood, and it lingers in the adult psyche, often as worry, stress, and anxiety. This semi-conscious fear is intensified when the passive side of inner conflict feels threatened by superego aggression. The passive side fearfully anticipates punishment (guilt, shame, depression) through its weak, defensive plea-bargaining with the superego. As inner conflict intensifies inner fear, we are more likely to react aggressively toward “enemies” we have chosen (often arbitrarily) to blame for causing our distress.

In our psyche, there’s a hidden perversity at play. Inner passivity appears, in part, to consist of an unconscious willingness to experience fear as an enticing, bittersweet thrill or gratification. Evidence for this quirk of human nature can be seen in the allure of violent movies, murder mysteries, horror shows, scary park rides, daredevil antics, gun and crime fixations, and—perhaps too—the spellbound voyeurism in climate-change destruction. We can also experience frightening, alarmist news, whether true or fake, as thrilling entertainment. In other words, fear is infected with a macabre enchantment.

We tend to be completely unaware of our unconscious fascination or fixation with fear, even as we “entertain” the fear on an inner level in inner conflict’s back-and-forth of accusations and defenses. We replay and recycle the superego’s allegations and mockery that we are weak, cowardly, undeserving, unworthy, and insignificant. To deny our secret dalliance with this inner fear (and its kinship with inner passivity), we tend to blame others, often aggressively, for our consequential suffering. Rather than see our misery as our own creation, we claim: “They cause me to feel this way!” We blame others although, in neurosis, we ourselves are concocting (replaying, and recycling) the old, subjective, negative impressions of being hurt and disrespected by others. Yet blaming others is necessarily accompanied by aggressive feelings (resentment, anger, and hatred) toward them. This misguided sense of reality can, in collective myopia, lead to war.

The level of our enmity toward others often needs to escalate to maintain the coverup. (The coverup, again, is our denial of our secret willingness to resonate with inner passivity, with its accompanying inner fear, as we unwittingly soak up abuse from the superego.) Sometimes the escalation of the coverup leads to murderous hatred, which is the process that drives domestic killers.

(To be clear, we often do blame ourselves instead of others—but for wrong reasons, for symptoms rather than underlying causes. A person might claim, “The problem is I’m too lazy!” The individual then experiences self-punishment for laziness, while overlooking inner passivity and inner conflict as the deep causes of one’s procrastination, indecision, ambivalence, and lack of purpose. The self-punishment absorbed for so-called laziness can itself produce self-loathing, which then can become loathing of others.)

So, people tend to believe—and, through their unconscious defenses, want to believe—that their worries and distress are caused by others. In reality, this distress arises from inner conflict and from one’s compulsion to replay with others the unresolved hurts left over from childhood (the first hurts). We possess an infantile readiness to feel that the self is good, the outsider is bad or dangerous. Hair-trigger resentment toward allegedly threatening others is a defensive coverup. The coverup, the unconscious defense, is processed along these lines: “I’m not the source of my angst and fear. Those others are the cause of it! Look at how much I resent them.” The resentment helps protect one’s ego: “I’m innocent, they’re guilty.”

Reactive hostility is experienced as one’s legitimate right (although the less neurotic among us will feel some guilt for it). This aggression, this coverup of inner passivity, contributes to civil and international unrest as well as to war.

Examples from Politics and Life

Psychologically weak people are susceptible to being ruled by the superego’s Frankenstein monster, the strongman or dictator. Submission to the dictator is the path of least resistance for those who, inwardly weak, submit to their superego’s illegitimate authority. The deep sense is, Who would I be without this weakness?

Inner passivity can make politically powerful individuals more dangerous and destructive. I have psychoanalyzed thousands of people, and I offer here an analysis of the psyche of Russian President Putin. Based on his biography, appearance, and actions, he appears to be highly neurotic. His emotional “intelligence” tells him that he’s being passive if he’s not being aggressive—there’s no middle way. Overwhelmed by his wealth and power, his ego has gone rogue. Now he knows only primitive power. He lacks the inner strength to shed his and Russia’s archaic paranoia. This paranoia, despite having some historical rationale, is now mostly rooted in passivity and inner conflict. Putin can’t embrace freedom because he’s a slave to his psyche’s disorder. His conflicted self requires that he experience himself and his world through brutality, victimization, and oppression.

Consciously, he wants to feel the strength and pleasure his wealth and political power ought to provide him. Yet his suffering is unavoidable, given his unconscious determination to feel threatened and diminished by the power of the West and by its values. He is compelled to deny to his people the freedom that inwardly he denies himself.

Putin has compensated for his inner conflict and inner passivity with illusions of grandeur, a lust for absolute power, and a willingness to unleash murderous aggression. In his adamant refusal to acknowledge his passive side and overcome it, he has likely identified with his superego, which means that the malice of his superego, like the perversity of his autocratic rule, now goes unchecked. Here arises evil, and it is facilitated by those who have not become self-actualized.

For many, war is experienced as rousing excitement. The excitement serves as “proof” of strength and vigor: “This is what I like, this aggression, this bloodlust,” the unconscious defense contends: “It proves I am not an inner weakling.” The mania that accompanies this aggressive reactivity is the “joy” of sugar-coated passivity.

The underlying passivity that incites toxic aggression finds entertainment in displays of aggression. Passivity thrills to violence. For example, the compulsive viewing of violent video games is pure passivity. Inner passivity causes teenagers and young adults to experience video games and social media addictively. Hostile aggression (anger and hate) flares up everywhere on social media and in politics. The aggressive push to ban books or speakers, with its gleeful self-righteousness, arises from the passive, irrational fear of being unduly influenced by them. The stupidest aggression comes from the most passive, neurotic people, the ones who are most disconnected from their best self.

Inner passivity is also the culprit as adults become overwhelmed and turn cynical or fatalistic in the face of climate change. Indeed, much of our indifference and inaction on climate change is likely induced by inner passivity’s tendency to trigger feelings of helplessness. One reaction is to embrace stubborn denial of our folly (militant ignorance) as an illusion of strength.

Men especially associate signs or insinuations of their passivity with shame and humiliation. More so than with women, the superego of men is mocking of underlying passivity. The common male defense is to become aggressive at all costs. For instance, men who are failing in life because of their inner weakness are more likely to be domestic abusers of women and children.

We are all participants in the conflict between human nature’s goodness and its capacity for evil. We all feel the conflict in some arenas of life between consciously wanting to be strong versus unconsciously expecting to fail or be defeated. We vote for leaders we psychologically resonate with, those more likely either to avoid war or stumble into it. When our better self is ascendent and dissolving inner conflict, we establish an inner democracy where wise inner authority prevails, where inner chaos becomes inner peace.

Inner conflict exists, of course, in people of all political stripes. A college degree is not immunity to inner conflict. Understanding this can help us all to congregate sympathetically around our common plight.

Biological-Psychological Considerations

Both the aggressive and passive polarities in our psyche are of biological origin. The superego’s existence and primitiveness derive from our predatory, survival instinct. In childhood, biologically sourced aggression is turned inward against the unconscious ego. As Freud noted, a child, despite temper tantrums and other protests, is unable to expend all this considerable energy outward. This primitive drive attacks the weak point where the child’s struggle to formulate a sense of self is in flux. In the psyche, a link between the aggressive drive and the passive identification is established, rooted in the developing superego as a center of self-aggression and facilitated as inner conflict by the passive side.

This passive side, too, has biological origins. It exists as a lingering effect of childhood years spent in helplessness and dependency. Passivity is a primary experience of childhood, and infantile aggression (such as defiance and temper tantrums) is a reaction to it. We might consider war as infantile aggression, rationalized through adult ignorance and conducted with malice and cunning.

Human nature is indeed dealing with some biological hardwiring. When we were primitive predators, war was perhaps instinctively, genetically driven (“war is in our genes,” as many experts claim). Now, though, it’s more helpful to recognize that war is bred through our ignorance of our psyche’s dynamics. Inspired awareness can undo faulty wiring.

Still, our resistance and defenses are so rigid that we will go to war—or destroy democracy—to avoid exposing this weakness in ourselves. Loyalty to the inner status quo, however conflicted and painful, is more stubborn than religious dogmatism. Even loyalty to one’s rigid, like-minded group is mainly loyalty to one’s own resistance to inner truth.

Again, the defense of crude aggression is felt as a righteous, rousing glory when “successfully” used to cover up inner passivity. Hostile bluster and bullying aggression flood the psyche as self-validation, glory, and self-righteous adventurism, washing away rationality and self-doubt.

Now people can feel a “legitimate righteousness” in being cruel, power-hungry, self-aggrandizing, violent, and war crazy. They can become, like tornado-chasers, thrill-seekers at the spectacle of destruction. They take perverse satisfaction in the mayhem happening to others because they identify with the fear, helplessness, and victimization of those others. This means they unconsciously excite these base emotions within themselves and are swept into fevered irrationality. This is the death drive in action.

Meanwhile, warmongers are seduced deeper into aggressive postures as the passivity of others enables their worst instincts. Warmongers identify with the corrupt mentality and primitive values of the superego. In wicked glee (another libidinization of passivity), they embrace the dark side. The dark side takes the elements of inner conflict—passivity, aggression, fear, blaming, and perverse gratification—to assault fellow human beings. This, too, is what Freud meant by the death drive.

These insights from depth psychology, when assimilated, recast our sense of who we are. The prospect of such a dramatic change in one’s sense of self mortifies the conscious ego. We infuse our resistance with zealous intensity, while in our shadow many politicians serve unwittingly as agents of resistance.

We decline to be reborn into a new graciousness in fear of letting go of our familiar sense of self. We embrace irrationality, violence, and war to protect our precious ego, to spare it being demoted by inner truth. The answer is to make our psyche the new frontier, to understand our psyche as both the chalice and the blast furnace of our evolution.

—

Peter Michaelson’s latest book, at Amazon, is titled, Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society.

 

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Still Working on Next Post

I was planning to sign off this month and take my summer break from posting articles. But I got inspired by the subject of war, and I’m now working on a longer post—“The Warmonger in Our Psyche.” I plan to publish it here next week or the week after. It’s my theory on the primary cause of war.

Here’s the opening paragraph: Humanity’s appetite for war mirrors our psyche’s compulsion to engage in inner war. War is just one of the bitter fruits of our refusal to recognize and overcome the persistent disharmony that churns within us.

It’s one of my longer posts, and it needed more work. Stay tuned.

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Armed with Stubbornness, the Weak Go on the Warpath

A mulish stubbornness bedevils the social-political divide in America, intensifying the rancor that individuals and groups direct at each other.

Stubbornness worsens America’s social-political divide.

In its ugliest expression, stubbornness is a symptom of unrecognized psychological issues. These issues include ego-based reactivity, injustice collecting, and power and submission, all of which I discuss further on.

Rabid stubbornness is widespread because so many of us are prepared to believe our suffering is caused by the malice of others. In believing this, we stubbornly refuse to look objectively at ourselves. We decline to see that our anger, spite, cynicism, and righteousness—our emotional entanglements in the negative side of life—arise from our own inner conflict and neurosis.

The inner weakness that spawns stubbornness is generated by inner conflict. This conflict produces many different deficits of character and self-regulation, of which stubbornness is just one. Lacking insight, a conflicted person tends to experience stubbornness as defiance, as an illusion of strength. This illusion covers up one’s psychological-emotional identification with weakness, passivity, and self-doubt. The stubbornness blocks open-mindedness and access to self-knowledge, particularly to the knowledge of how we unwittingly and compulsively generate conflict within ourselves and with others.

Some people believe their stubbornness is loyalty to a sound, true principle. But when we are indeed aligned with justice, truth, and love, we are more likely to be wise and resolute rather than stubborn. Stubbornness is generally about being obstinate or obstructive. It consorts with the likelihood of self-defeat. It’s a reaction to underlying weakness, as when a problem gambler obstinately resists seeking help for his addiction or when a person, knowing he has hurt someone, refuses to apologize.

Our challenge is to become conscious of the underlying psychological issues and dynamics that induce stubbornness. If we can make these issues conscious and keep them in focus, we have a good chance of letting go of needless suffering. Here are some insights into three different psychological issues involving stubbornness.

The first issue involves our ego and our instinct to protect it. Our ego is an inner processing center that serves as our basic sense of self as we emerge from childhood. Healthy self-development over the years involves transcending the ego, at least in part, to know ourself and others graciously and the wider world more gratefully and wisely. Many people stubbornly resist making headway in this process. They won’t release their egotism because doing so feels like death to their familiar sense of being. This renders them more susceptible to self-doubt and inner conflict.

The most egotistic tend to experience humiliation when called upon to acknowledge mistakes or simply to make a gracious concession. Identified with their ego, they are emotionally reactive, feeling, for instance: “If I’m wrong, I’m lacking in value. If that person is right, she’s better than me. She’ll have triumphed over me.”

While we might understand that this kind of thinking is irrational, inner fear associated with clinging to our ego trumps reason. Instead of bonding with our better self, we stubbornly embrace a sense of righteousness that fortifies our familiar sense of being. The weakness that refuses the call to inner growth remains intact. Now we start thinking less clearly and even regress into stupidity.

The more we identify with our ego, the more emotionally fragile we’re likely to be. Stubbornness becomes a “lifesaver” that keeps afloat our old sense of self. We’re refusing the self-reflection that would bring us face-to-face with our unresolved readiness to feel insignificant, passive, and unworthy. It is, of course, this buried content, our unconscious conflict and irrationality, that blocks our evolution. The healing of our inner conflict requires that we make our way through the darkness, whatever heebie-jeebies that produces, to get to the light on the other side.

Nonetheless, the common instinct is to avoid this inner journey. A stubborn conviction that our problems stem from the malice of others degrades our rationality. (We might also blame ourselves, but for superficial reasons, for personal faults that are but surface symptoms of inner conflict.) Stubborn righteousness guards our misleading beliefs, which in turn protects our ego and reinforces our resistance. Stubbornly, we spurn our destiny.

The second issue involves our tendency to hold on fiercely to our grudges. In this version of stubbornness, we refuse to let go of some real or imagined insults or hurts. Injustice collectors, for instance, hold on obstinately to the big and small hurts they feel others have inflicted on them. At this point, stubbornness reinforces one’s unconscious willingness to replay and recycle old and new hurts. An unwitting compulsion to suffer needlessly prevails. This is why stubborn people often can’t explain their refusal to budge.

I remember once, probably 40 years ago, being in a snit over some alleged unkindness that I felt my wife Sandra had inflicted upon me. My grievance was, as I remember it, over some trifle. Anyway, I sat at my desk in a very dark mood, brooding resentfully, determined at the very least to hold this grudge against her all night long and into the following day. Next thing I knew, though, she was sitting down close to me, talking to me in sweet consideration, wondering if we could clear the air. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay resentful. She kept talking patiently, expressing warm feelings toward me, pondering the nature of conflict and unhappiness. Within minutes, my misery began to melt away. Soon I was soaking up inner peace and harmony, marveling at how much suffering her kind intervention had spared me, marveling also at how stubbornly determined I had been to suffer.

The third issue involves power and submission. Many of our daily dealings with others involve who will prevail and who will submit. Of course, we’re entitled to resist when pushed around, controlled, and dominated. However, many people are easily triggered when it comes to feeling controlled. A weak person can quickly feel controlled or dominated even when an alleged controller is only being appropriately forceful or legitimately directive. Weak people can become stubbornly reactive just imagining being controlled.

They stubbornly insist they are being controlled (or will be controlled), and they react angrily or passive-aggressively. The sense of reality is, “If I’m not stubbornly resistant, people will walk all over me. Stubbornness is my power to resist them.” This so-called power, though, is just an instinctive, defensive cover-up for how one’s inner weakness (arising from inner conflict) cedes to others the power to disturb one’s own equanimity.

Once people are triggered by their own weakness, they often slip into passive-aggressive resistance. This sly aggression, this refusal to cooperate, is often acted out unconsciously. Usually, people are not aware of their resistance, yet they are instinctively and stubbornly induced to act it out. Many people are fired from their jobs because their passive-aggressive reactivity to their boss produced incompetence.

Stubbornness is insidious because people are barely conscious of being under its influence. Even a person’s close-mindedness or defiance is an unconscious resistance, stubbornly maintained. People can seem agreeable on the surface to someone’s forcefulness or to the possible truth of what they are hearing, but their resistance and behaviors soon exhibit non-compliance or stubborn rejection of the obvious. As we begin to learn the psychology of inner conflict and recognize these dynamics in ourselves, we begin to shift away from reactive stubbornness. We become less reactionary, more astute, and more capable in our strength of being perceptive, forceful, civil, and open-minded.

Stubbornness, a symptom of neurosis, goes looking for a fight. The fight can be internal, external—or both. The self-damage inflicted by the fight reflects the degree of light that penetrates our shadow.

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How to Rescue Yourself from Suffering

Trying to access our inner life can feel like entering an underworld of dark, nonsensical obscurity. When we’re in emotional distress, how do we penetrate this darkness? How do we rescue ourselves from suffering and self-defeat?

Inner conflict impedes our enjoyment of life.

Whatever misery or ineptitude we’re experiencing, chances are good we can get relief through the self-knowledge revealed by depth psychology. With this knowledge, we can more easily stop committing sins of harm and abuse against our own self and against each other. This is our secular salvation.

Depth psychology exposes one’s inner conflict. You can quickly start becoming your best self as you recognize the dynamics of inner conflict in your psyche. Once you understand this conflict in yourself, you are engaged in the process of resolving it. To see and understand the conflict is to be intent on resolving it. We begin by observing our daily thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in the light of self-knowledge that exposes the existence and dynamics of inner conflict.

In this post, I give examples of how a new, more conscious attentiveness to one’s experiences brings inner conflict into focus. But first, I say a bit about inner conflict and its main dynamics.

Just about everyone has some degree of inner conflict. Impulses, drives, and desires clash mysteriously inside us. Often, we act completely irrationally. We want pleasure but feel pain, we want safety but feel fear, we want to be wise but often act stupidly. Consciously, we want to be emotionally strong—yet we’re often plagued by self-doubt and weak self-regulation.

Inner conflict can manifest in many ways. I describe 50 examples here. The emotional tussle between wanting to be strong versus feeling stuck in weakness (and mired in its accompanying guilt and shame) is itself an inner conflict that prevails in our emotional life or psyche.

Usually, a person is conscious only of the symptoms of inner conflict rather than the underlying conflict itself. Such symptoms include anger, loneliness, anxiety, indecision, moodiness, depression, cynicism, confusion, self-pity, and mediocrity. These symptoms, when chronic, generate much displeasure, unhappiness, fear, and self-sabotage.

A passive mentality or identification is a major ingredient in inner conflict. Often, people identify with inner passivity, which is a fear-tainted self-doubt at the core of inner conflict. Inner passivity exists on one side of inner conflict, and it contends with an aggressive side, our inner critic. Much of the time, our inner critic (or superego) presides as the master of our inner life, while inner passivity (the weak unconscious ego) reacts as an enabler that tolerates the inner critic’s presumptions and absorbs its abusive attacks.

In reaction to being stuck in this passive sense of self, we’re desperate to feel some compensating strength. Through our conscious ego, we start to manifest corrupted strength in forms such as cynicism, chronic complaining, righteous indignation, defiant stubbornness, irrational assertions, and passive-aggressive behaviors. Our better self eludes us under the weight of having an aggressive side of us—the inner critic—on the attack against our passive side. This passive side is the originator of our psychological defenses.

Many people are determined (though it’s largely unconscious) to go on knowing themselves through the sense of weakness that arises from inner conflict. They’re trapped in this psychological predicament (a sticking point in human evolution) because they don’t understand their personal psychology and are highly resistant to learning it.

People resist looking deeply into their psyche because they feel instinctively that the self-knowledge to be found there will disrupt (if not annihilate) their familiar sense of self. Even when in emotional pain, we’re fearful of letting go of this ego-based sense of self. We hide out behind our conscious ego, which is just a shadow of our better self. Our conscious ego serves as a shield that protects us from frightening doubts about our value and worthiness. Our conscious ego is loath to look beyond itself. When we identify with this ego, we hide inner reality from ourselves. Should we dare go deeper for psychological truth, we fear we’ll be mocked as a phony or loser for having been so ignorant of inner reality.

Indeed, we’re all susceptible to being criticized or mocked for our ignorance and limitations—but this mean-spirited self-criticism arises mainly as inner conflict generated by our unkind and often cruel inner critic, the superego, a primitive, biologically-based self-aggression that is the template for much of the malice, corruption, and violence in the world. Again, this primitive side of our nature can be overcome with self-knowledge.

Inner conflict weakens us emotionally. In compensation, we’re often eager to feel some semblance of power. But the power we settle for is illusory. Consider the followers of a morally corrupt leader. They become followers because, through identification with this person’s alleged power, they can “borrow” that sense of power and feel within themselves—through their impassioned defiance, stubborn irrationality, and group loyalty—a gratifying illusion of power. Their gratification is felt largely through the unconscious claim they make that they are choosing to align themselves with strength. But this claim arises from their unconscious refusal to recognize the elements of their inner weakness and disharmony, along with their psychological disconnection from their better self. Their gratification is also felt through their stubborn conviction that (like their corrupt leader) they don’t need to look objectively at themselves since their anger and contentiousness are, as they see it, legitimate reactions to the malice and folly of their adversaries.

Psychological dynamics such as these apply, too, with mass shooters. In the vast majority of mass shootings and mass murders, the perpetrators are not mentally ill. Studies say mass shooters display, as their common characteristics, social isolation, nihilism, emptiness, anger, and self-hatred. All of these are symptoms of acute inner conflict. Inner conflict, when especially intense, produces self-hatred. In unconscious denial of the true source of one’s misery, the hatred is projected outward, and others are seen misleadingly as the source of the hatred. The psychological resistance induced by our conscious ego makes us loath to come to terms with inner conflict.

In a commonplace example of inner conflict, a chronic resistance to doing daily chores or exercise involves the unconscious temptation to experience oneself through familiar inner weakness and passivity. This failure to perform at one’s best induces the inner critic to mock one’s weakness, triggering defensiveness from the passive side and intensifying inner conflict. Succumbing to inner conflict is the path of least resistance.

Another commonplace conflict involves the struggle of many to regulate their consumption of food or the quality of their diet. Food, diet, and weight issues are often just the symptoms of deep inner conflict. Many people use their emotional struggles with food, diet, and weight as a playing field upon which to experience inner conflict with its accompanying weakness and passivity. In these cases, food or diet have become the pretext or opportunity to recycle inner conflict. People unconsciously use the challenge of healthy dieting as a ploy through which they can recycle and replay their inner conflict, thereby compulsively repeating experiences of unresolved weakness and helplessness.

In this example with food or diet, our inner critic and inner passivity are likely to be involved in a tense standoff. The inner critic harasses and mocks us for our weakness of self-regulation. From the passive side, we take the accusation to heart and try to defend ourselves, perhaps promising to try harder, while taking on guilt and shame about our health or weight. We now become stuck in this inner conflict, experiencing painful, weak self-regulation for months and years as our struggles with food and weight persist.

We want our consciousness to penetrate to the heart of the issue so we can feel a growing ability to stop mindlessly participating in the conflict. Usually, people identify with the passive, defensive side of the conflict. But other times, in situations that are more painful, the person can identify with the accusing, mocking inner critic. This occurs when the inner struggle escalates, the passive side’s defensiveness collapses, and the individual descends into self-condemnation or self-hatred.

We can pull yourself out of the conflict by refusing to participate in inner conflict’s back-and-forth accusations and defensiveness. We can step back and observe the conflict with clinical awareness or watchful detachment, sensing both the inner critic’s attacks and inner passivity’s defensiveness, and then declining to engage in the back and forth. We can observe the conflict without personalizing it. Like a scientist examining a specimen, we can now see our emotional and behavioral issue with clinical acuity. Now we’re liberating ourselves from inner conflict. We can feel strength arise from our insight and our growing ability to refrain from taking our weakness personally. This new perspective and perception are akin to suddenly being able to see the previously unrecognized feature of an optical illusion.

There are many daily situations, other than with food or diet, in which this process of inner watchfulness and understanding can be applied. When, for instance, you’re feeling tormented by a person’s aggression or insensitivity toward you, you can catch yourself in the act of embellishing a sense of being refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, or betrayed. You see your weakness, your willingness to recycle the pain of that unresolved hurt from your past. Again, the way we get strong is by seeing and owning the deep weakness, which is, essentially, our passive willingness to absorb punishment from the inner critic as well as our compulsion to continue to be triggered by our unresolved first hurts from childhood.

We can also assimilate this knowledge by understanding the visual drive. We all have a visual drive, which is the impulse to take in visual impressions to protect ourselves, learn from our environment, and enjoy life. Ideally, the visual drive is a function we regulate for the better. Sometimes, though, that function is taken over by inner conflict and inner passivity. Then we start using our eyes mindlessly, in ways that generate inner conflict and magnify negative impressions.

Say you’re lonely and walking alone in a shopping mall. Your eyes are scanning passers-by to see them having a good time. This negative peeping is your unconscious willingness to deepen your sense of loneliness and intensify your passive disconnection from your better self. Inner conflict can now intensify as your inner critic assails you for being an unworthy loser. If we are more conscious of how we can misuse our visual drive, our collusion in our own suffering comes into focus.

Out of inner weakness, people fail to regulate their mind as well as their visual drive. We want to understand that our mind, like our visual drive, is a function that, ideally, we oversee. We don’t want to give our mind the power to decide what content it’s going to process. If we do, we are being passive to our mind (as our mind itself is being passive to our psyche and the directives of inner conflict). Observing our mind with this understanding deepens us and connects us with strength. Our mind won’t run off and get into mischief, acting as a reflector or enforcer of our psyche’s conflicted directives, when we understand our own psychology.

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My New Book (of Poetry!) Is Versed in Depth Psychology

I’ve just published a book of poetry, and the 50 poems in the collection flow with rhythm and rhyme, all to purge the inner strife that so many people endure. (Two of the poems can be read at the end of this post.)

Since the 1980s, my writing has focused on helping people access the vital knowledge of depth psychology. Last summer, I began the effort to communicate this vital knowledge through poetry. This collection is available here in paperback and as an eBook. It is titled, Versed in Depth Psychology: Poems that Oppose Our Woes. The poetry adds up to almost 14,000 words, and the book also includes two prose essays in the Appendix.

Strong poetry, I believe, is more likely than prose to slip through our mental zone and penetrate emotional and intuitive realms. Poetry packs wonder and mystery into a little package—so much punch in so few words—and the ensuing magic awakens in us a deeper sense of who we are and who we might become.

I am especially hoping to find readers among young people who are struggling with anxiety, depression, and procrastination.

Poetry tries to reach the deeper you. We can shiver in delight and feel a little wiser after reading Frost, Dickinson, Hughes, and Wordsworth. We feel the pleasure of words that bestir in us a resonance with love and truth. It is said that true poetry, above all, inspires awe. Yes, indeed it does, and that awe arises from poetry’s ability to connect us with our deep self.

Writing these poems, I was inspired by pure pleasure as well as a sense of purpose. The process has been a frolic for me, immensely enjoyable. I have been a prose writer since the 1960s—but not a poet. That I was able to write these poems is evidence for the benefits of acquiring deep self-knowledge. The level of creativity I have achieved in past months, at age 79, contrasts sharply with the mediocrity that haunted me from 1966 to 1984 during my years as a journalist. That was before I discovered, in 1985, the rich vein of depth psychology in the writings of classical psychoanalysis.

Two short poems in this collection were written years ago (among the scattering I’ve written), but the remaining 48 were composed in the nine-month span from July, 2023 through March, 2024, during which time I was a practicing psychotherapist and doing other writing. It was a sweet burst of creativity, and I now intend, after taking a break for a few months, to keep writing more poetry.

The book deals with such topics as inner conflict, psychological resistance, knowing truth from falsehood, and evolving consciousness. Many of the poems are instilled with humor. (The book’s offbeat cover image accompanies the third poem in the collection, “Under the Juniper Tree.”)

After reading the poems, please consider passing them along to young people you know. I believe children as young as 14 years can read this content to help them connect with their pure, essential self.

Here are two shorter poems from the collection:

The Bee Lady

On the street, the loving faces of strolling couples
salt my sorrow, for amid them I perceive how
time borrows hopelessness to bid up my fear
of never finding love. Were love to wink,
I might bump into it, not smite my inert face
on idle lovers doting in their pleasure.

In a dream, I came upon a ghost or sprite,
a lady revenant floating casually, adorned
in garden flowers, swarmed—and loved,
I’d swear—by bumblebees. They buzzed around
and through her, so zany, like Zumba dancers
was it, or sassy Salsa prancers. Her cruel words to me
were the cure, though first they were to slay me.

“Are you a love-seeker,” she spoke, “or a seeker
of feeling unloved?” Though softly said, her words
did sting my sleep. The stinging burned all night,
my heart beat at a frightful rate, my mind did
geminate. Before awakening, I saw in a field
my old self being buried. In this field of clover,
bees procured nectar for the yield of honey.
It was the sweet honey of the Self revealed!
Desolation was buried, too, in the sector
of the field where love was being pollinated.

 

The Sweetest Misery

Self-pity (grim reverie that tempts a poet
to be witty) is essentially the opposite of giddy.
Do we giggle or cry aloud to see a soul stuck
in a cloud? Self-pity is the sweetest misery.

It’s the consolation prize for composing
a chanson of chagrin—even from romanticism.
Self-pity is finding a pillory in a black cloud’s
relativity. Self-pity is a wail of make-believe.

It’s a tall tale told furtively to claim we aren’t
secretly indulging in feeling refused, helpless,
rejected. Tellers of tales of travesty,
we snuggle up in self-pity’s wily lies.

In self-pity, we beg the court to extend
our trials so we can further indulge in hurt
and passivity. We trick ourself and others
to flagellate us so we can oblige sad fate.

Asking us nicely to fend off self-pity
is like asking Lucifer to forsake his leer.
Perhaps wit, as whetted in this ditty,
can liberate those so needlessly austere.

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