Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 2

Dare We See the Trump in Us?

People are grieving and outraged, fearful and overwhelmed. Another American Revolution is underway, and now the enemy is us. The first revolution got rid of the monarchy; this time we need to dethrone our hidden hankering for subjugation.

Political pandemonium parallels what happens in our psyche.

There exists in our psyche a deficiency of consciousness, a passive nonbeing, that has enabled psychologically primitive people to take over our government.

The main threat to freedom appears to be coming from the Trump Administration, but this mess we’re in goes deeper than that. The pandemonium parallels what happens in our psyche where we have our own chaos, even a stealthy tyranny, that arises from inner conflict. This conflict can enslave us to self-defeating compulsions, self-centered dissatisfaction, needless self-punishment, and gloomy self-doubt. For most of us, the conflict is invisible. We don’t see how we fraternize unconsciously with weakness, misery, and folly.

Many of us (both liberals and conservatives) are neurotic, meaning susceptible to self-pity, self-doubt, and self-criticism. Even the mildest neurosis can undermine the quality of one’s citizenship. We lack power to the degree that we tolerate the tyranny of our inner conflict. This conflict is largely the mental and emotional clash in our psyche between experiences of courage versus fear, right versus wrong, strength versus weakness, pleasure versus displeasure, and rationality versus irrationality.

Inner conflict has us scrambling to justify ourselves while blaming others and the supposed harshness of fate. This conflict drags us down into apathy, moodiness, cynicism, fear, and anger. Here we doubt our worthiness. The resulting mishmash of thoughts and emotions saps energy, sabotages inner peace, and degrades citizenship.

For me, this historic time is both calamitous and favorable. We all understand the calamitous part. Everyone sees the chaos and lawlessness and feels the stress and worry. So, what’s favorable about a world that’s becoming weirdly surrealistic, dangerously divisive, and mindlessly reactive? To be patriots in this clash of rationality versus irrationality, we need to be wiser and stronger, and making this happen is the best thing we can do for ourselves. We need this strength to build a workable world.

We can acquire insight that exposes the dynamics of inner conflict. We start to see, for instance, how passively and defensively we react to our aggressive inner critic. This primitive inner critic is the master of our personality, and through inner weakness we tolerate a sense of inner oppression. Our inner life is a government of sorts, and when we’re neurotic, or distressed by fear and confusion, the government at work in our psyche operates like a mini autocracy that activates irrational fear and blocks us from accessing a deeper sense of freedom.

Still, the current crisis may portend a giant leap forward. A revolution is now happening, and the process will bring out both the worst and the best in people. If we each strive to grow stronger, we can fulfill both a personal and a national destiny. These are not hapless times but heroic times. Consider yourself blessed to be a patriot.

It’s not rifles and cannon we need for this battle, but knowledge and truth. Truth and knowledge can be found in matters both momentous and trivial. We need momentous truth, meaning insights into why we’re so often at odds (or at war) with our own self and each other. Truth starts as we uncover the rubbish that hides our better self.

Destiny is like a flowing river. In this flow, we are destined to get stronger and wiser. That’s exactly what we have been doing. Women and people of color now hold positions of power. We have food-safety inspections and a Clean Water Act. Remember that just seventy or eighty years ago most adults went around puffing on cigarettes and pipes. We were induced by advertising to suck ourselves to death. We’re smarter than that now. That’s progress—that’s how the river flows. But now we’ve hit a stretch of rapids in the river. If we want to stay afloat, we must stop sucking up fear and thrashing in ignorance. One by one, we can grow our humanity. We each get the chance to be our best.

There are many ways to achieve personal growth. The best approaches help us see ourselves more objectively as we step out from behind an unwise egocentric mentality. It’s important also to expose the part in us that is quick to engage in sullen sentiments and petty passions. If we’re going to be true patriots, we need to recognize and overcome this weakness. There’s no better time than right now to do this.

—

In my books, I outline how to become emotionally stronger. Readers can start with any one of these books:

Why We Suffer   The Phantom of the Psyche    Freedom From Self Sabotage

The knowledge in these books reveals our unconscious loitering in the back alleys of inner conflict. This weakness in human nature is common to people of all races and nations. Knowledge of this weakness reveals the self-betrayal in the sad story that claims, “I’m not sufficient in myself to make a difference in the world.”

The knowledge in these books goes far beyond what mainstream psychology is telling you. I expose the many ways we unconsciously stumble into suffering. We haven’t broken free of our appetite for misery, dissension, violence, and war because we are trapped in inner conflict. Expose the mischief in your psyche so it doesn’t crush your spirit and the spirit of America.

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The Emotional Catering Service

I have been laboring over my latest book, and I’m pleased with how the writing communicates the essence of depth psychology. The book needs more touchups, but it will be published soon. It’s my tenth book and, in the thirty-two years since the first was published, I have made steady progress at communicating the concepts and making deep psychological knowledge more assessable to readers.

Discovering buried emotional wounds.

Our psyche has a compulsive interest in experiencing inner conflict, and this mostly unconscious inner state initiates our emotional and behavioral difficulties. If we can’t see in ourselves the nature of this conflict, we can be very much at the mercy of how it plays out. In my latest writing endeavor, I even throw in one of my poems at one point to reinforce my prose.

My writing pushes back against our resistance to exposing our deep, unwitting participation in misery and folly. In this new book, I’ve come up with so many examples of inner conflict and its ill-effects that the inner situation I describe becomes almost undeniable. Much of the evidence for the veracity of my contentions consists of connections made between our inner conflict and the many ways that conflict undermines us and the world at large. This new book is the best mirror yet to seeing yourself objectively.

Meanwhile, for this month’s blog I have selected an excerpt from one of my late wife’s three books. (Sandra Michaelson, The Emotional Catering Service: The Quest for Emotional Independence. Amazon, 264 pages).

From Chapter 13

Path to Emotional Independence

No matter how negligent your parents might have been, you still must take responsibility for the fact that, when in misery, you are making choices to react to life with negative expectations. Bad or abusive parenting certainly has a profound effect on the feelings and behaviors of children. But you have the choice as an adult whether to maintain or keep alive your past hurts. Many people use the belief that “my parents ruined my life” to justify their pursuit of failure or deprivation. Holding a grudge against others only hurts you and blocks the possibility of inner peace.

As caterers retrieve past emotional hurts, they experience powerful feelings of sadness concerning the lack of caring and acceptance they believe they experienced in childhood. You might need to grieve consciously over this loss, to the extent it actually occurred. But understand that nothing can change the reality of your past. The key is to shift your focus from what was done to you to deeper understanding of how you now unwittingly deprive yourself and repeat the hurt in the present.

A child’s feelings of being a victim can become more intense or pervasive in the adult. However, until we become more aware, it feels as if there is no choice but to respond emotionally in the same way we reacted as children. We have identified ourselves with feelings of being unloved, denied, and controlled. When we first let go of these feelings, we feel like we lose a sense of who we are. We see change as loss, not gain, and we fear losing ourselves in the process. We do not know how “to be” without being enmeshed in the old patterns.

Some authors and lecturers suggest the solution to health and happiness is in letting go of our resentments and forgiving those who have wronged us. This is not as easy as it sounds. Mentally, we want to forgive, but the emotional part of our psyche has a totally different agenda. It wants to hold onto the gripes and grievances and resists letting them go. This resistance has to be understood and acknowledged.

Forcing forgiveness when it is not really felt emotionally or conjuring up positive images to cover up buried grudges are dead-end detours. Both techniques create inner resistance. It is awareness of the truth of one’s negative feelings and how they play out in our present lives, along with insight and effort, that changes negative patterns.

I had a client who was “trying” to forgive his father. He wrote in a letter to his father, “I forgive you, Dad—for screwing me up.” This statement indicated he still felt himself to have been a victim of his father’s alleged mistreatment. Another client remarked, “I forgave my parents long before I even knew what I was forgiving.” This was faked forgiveness, not genuine forgiveness.

When we understand how we unconsciously hold onto old hurts of feeling unloved, deprived, and somehow victimized, we cease to blame our parents or others for our suffering. Consequently, we feel no need to forgive since there is no grudge. Forgiveness becomes a moot point once we recognize how we perpetuate the role of victim in our life by holding others responsible for our distress.

Rather than forgiveness, I see compassion and understanding as the key elements in transformation. Compassion gives us the ability to see both sides of an emotionally stressful situation. You can now understand the other person’s point of view, though you may still not agree with it. As well, you understand your emotional complicity in your reaction to that person. Now you can access compassion. You are liberating yourself from the past. Instead of being all charged up with negativity, you are able to embrace much better feelings.

To develop compassion, you must learn to listen to yourself and others in a totally new way. Compassion is kin to curiosity. You feel curious about how others feel or see things. You are curious about your own feelings and reactions. You care about the way others feel. You care about yourself and your feelings as well.

Do you really listen to what other people are saying? Do you listen to your partner, your children, to yourself? Do you carefully observe your feelings, fears, and negative thoughts? Or do you get caught up in your own rigid convictions and judgments of how you think things should be?

Ask yourself: “What would you feel if you discovered that your parents really did love you?” Notice any resistance to believing or feeling this. Observe how a part of you wants to see your parents as unloving and deficient. If you feel in conflict with a parent (or anyone), try imagining yourself in their position. Imagine how they would feel or perceive the situation. This ability to see the other person’s perspective diminishes the feeling of being a victim and enhances compassion.

Letting go of being a victim of one’s parents does not mean an individual has to like the parents or condone what they did. It does not mean approving of their behavior or letting the parents get away with mistreatment. It simply means the person is no longer using parents’ misbehavior to justify remaining dissatisfied, angry, helpless—or to justify difficulties or failures in one’s dealings with them or others.

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The Emotional Catering Service is available here.

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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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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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