Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 3

Finding in Self the Richness of Being

I suspect we’re all on a treasure hunt. The treasure we’re looking for is our better self, or authentic self, or True Self. Lots of people get waylaid, and they go looking for treasures of lesser importance.

In our searching, higher aspirants look for knowledge, truth, and beauty; lower aspirants seek advantage over others, easy pickings, and flattering attention. Higher aspirants strive to practice generosity and compassion; lower ones opt for revenge and conflict. Higher aspirants establish peace within themselves and among others, while lower ones are mired in both inner conflict and outer conflict.

A major difference between higher and lower aspirants is the degree of inner conflict at play in the psyche.

Really, if we want to be happy, we need to consider the quality of our aspirations. If our aspirations are mainly of lower quality, we’re probably tangled up in inner conflict. This conflict produces fear, self-doubt, and animosity. It causes an emotional disconnect from our better self. The solution is to recognize the inner conflict so we can eliminate the negativity and self-defeating symptoms that it produces.

We begin by seeing inner conflict as inner chaos and emotional weakness. Everyone has a hidden stash of weakness. Be curious about it—be unafraid to look. It’s not a swastika tattooed on your butt. The chaos of inner conflict isn’t you! It’s all clinical and biological, the shenanigans of the unfinished business of human evolution.

Being strong is being willing to learn where you’re weak. Being strong is making the effort to understand the inner dynamics that cause your weakness. Being strong is not blaming yourself for weakness. Being strong is undertaking to resolve your weakness. Being strong is believing you will discover your greatness. That greatness is your destiny, which might simply consist of becoming more generous, more conscious.

What might be your main weakness—or weaknesses? You are likely, as mentioned, to be burdened with some degree of inner conflict. In our psyche, the passive side of inner conflict engages in defensiveness—excuses mostly. Meanwhile, the aggressive side of the conflict is primitive self-aggression flowing from our inner critic (alias, the superego, a super-bully kind of punk).

This aggression wants to tear you down for your alleged foolishness or worthlessness. Don’t buy into superego’s bunk! If you do, you’re being passive to the superego, which pulls rank when it butts in on your considerations.

Superego bullies little ego, which feebly defends. This is inner conflict, and it badly distorts your sense of self. Don’t take this distortion personally.  The emotional and behavioral disturbances spawned by inner conflict are not your essence. Rather, they’re the brood of inner conflict’s copious irrationalities and false impressions of self.

Inner passivity and self-aggression clash like adversaries addicted to the scraps and scrapes of life. Just learn to observe the conflict. This way you see the weakness from a position of strength. Who knows why we’re this way. It’s just the way it is—weird and wonderful. No big deal, providing we’re insightful enough to overcome it.

Our life energy goes either into conflict or into creativity and self-fulfillment. The more conscious we are, the more we can choose the latter.

Another weakness is our emotional susceptibility to the first hurts of childhood. These hurts are old familiar negative emotions in which inner conflict gets entangled. There are eight: deprivation, refusal, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal.

This froth of negativity is all kiddie stuff. Babies and toddlers feel this junk due to their subjectivity, their inexperience and biological self-centeredness. We adults instinctively keep up the game of feeling the old displeasure or pain. This negativity has a certain unconscious sway—it feels so weirdly familiar, as if there’s no other way we could ever be. This is our lack of inner freedom, our sticking point on the spectrum of evolution.

Our weakness here is to be thin-skinned, easily susceptible to getting triggered by one or more of these first hurts from childhood. We find it so hard to stop replaying and recycling the familiar, unresolved pain of these hurts. In this way, we’re still big babies. Impulsively, so many of us unconsciously imagine coming from others these old hurts from childhood that we’re so quick to feel in ourselves (transference).

To understand inner weakness, you begin to see how it is activated and maintained in your psyche. Remember, being strong is seeing where you’re weak. You observe yourself with some maturity (objectively), with the best knowledge of depth psychology.

Be watchful for defensiveness—and over time you’ll very likely be able to assert the ability to say, “No thanks!” to some sneaky indulgence in one or more of the first hurts.

These hurts are needless suffering! Remember, little ego says, “No, no, I don’t have this weakness. This is not true! I don’t suffer for nothing!” But it does, of course. Ego feels the weakness as a kind of inner fear, and it hesitates—often refuses—to accept the hero’s journey into the underworld of your psyche where you seek liberation from suffering and mediocrity.

Now you’re connecting with your better self. When we discover and then realize our self, we don’t, of course, see a concrete “something” representing self. But we know what we’re feeling, and what we’re feeling feels right and true. This is our inner treasure, and we have to recognize it and understand that our connection with it requires a continuing conscious appreciation of its great value.

Knowing about these inner dynamics means we’re giving the dysfunction of inner conflict its required recognition. When we own this dysfunction (become conscious of it and take responsibility for it), we can then eliminate it.

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Sports Fans and Their Discontents

The Superbowl is done for another year. With other sports to watch, fans have plenty of other opportunities to grieve over their favorite team’s losses. That’s the thing—fans who agonize over their team’s defeats are getting into emotional mischief.

Another way to see ourselves more objectively.

I’m not picking on sports—athletic prowess is thrilling to watch. I played for three years on my university’s golf team. Yet being a sports fan has an inherent passive element. You’re the watcher, not the player. It can all be appropriately entertaining, but it still has that passive aspect to it—and it’s important to understand what that means. It’s a great advantage for us to know more about our psychological nature.

Gung-ho fans who are bereft for hours or days after a home team’s defeat (or who even become anxious just musing on the prospect of such defeat) take the loss or prospect of loss deep into themselves. They feel an emptiness, a missing connection, an old weakness with which they unwittingly identify.

Devoted sports fans chase the high that comes with identifying with a winner. The less connected sports fans are to their inner value, the more likely they’ll unconsciously use an identification with their team to boost their sense of self.

Rabid fans feel elated when their team wins because the elation serves as a defense, a way for them to deny that, deep in their psyche, they’re unwittingly ready to indulge emotionally in the sense of loss—and then resonate with that unpleasant feeling deep within themselves. The feeling is familiar—it’s how, to some degree, they know themselves psychologically.

This inner frailty exists in problem gamblers who are emotionally entangled in inner weakness. They identify psychologically with the weakness through recurring feelings of losing, feeling helpless, and feeling stripped of self-regulation.

This weakness is usually unconscious, although its painful symptoms certainly register consciously. It’s a universal weakness, a kind of intrinsic flaw in human nature, a blind spot in our consciousness that produces dysfunction, mediocrity, and myriad troubles. It exists in people who become devoted fans of celebrities. This weakness also applies to alcoholics, drug addicts, and some homeless people.

We’re in much less danger of succumbing to problems such as addictions, anxiety, and clinical depression when we can understand our weakness and keep it in sight. Recognizing the weakness and keeping it in sight means we’re being at our best and showing resolve to become stronger.

The weakness is nothing to be ashamed of, though typically people do experience it shamefully, first when they’re repressing it and, second, when they first begin to address it. But the weakness (the clinical term is inner passivity) is just an aspect of our humanity on the spectrum of evolution. The more we see this weakness objectively, the less shame we feel and the sooner we can overcome it.

For many people, life feels like a game of winners and losers. Haunting their psyche is the prospect of being a loser. (Our inner critic can readily harass us with that allegation, and even people who are doing well can be under an inner attack for not doing better.) When the sports team with which they identify wins, they’re quick to feel the high: “This is what I want, to be a winner,” says the exuberant inner coverup of their weakness. When their team loses, the unconscious claim is, “I don’t identify with being a loser. Look at how bad I feel. I hate it when my team loses.”

Fans can experience the thrill of identifying with a winner, and they can also become excited in passively experiencing the degree to which they feel helpless to affect the outcome of a game. The louder they cheer or yell, the more they can imagine it all makes a difference. The football fan is at the mercy, for instance, of whether a “crucial” third down will succeed or fail. It compares psychologically to the thrill of watching a horror movie, which is basically finding delight in helpless fright, but only when the helplessness comes in manageable fictionalized doses. For horror movies or football games, the thrill is largely in how helplessness can, when posited as entertainment, tingle our libido with a weird, mysterious exuberance and delight.

Problem gamblers also put themselves at the mercy of circumstances. Those who put big money on the outcome of sports events or poker games have inner conflict between winning and losing. It’s not a vice to be a casual gambler, of course. But chronic gamblers are prepared to absorb, masochistically, serious punishment from their inner critic for gambling away their assets. They “act out” in the world the experience of being a loser because that’s the allegation they hold against themselves in the underworld of their psyche. They chase the illusion and the high of easy money because monetary value feels to them to possess great value, particularly when compared to the little sense of value they’re accessing within themselves.

This inner weakness is more visible in another “sport”—bullfighting. This spectacle depends for its popularity on the human tendency to identify with being a lesser being, a lesser creature, an unworthy nobody. It’s a primitive mentality that “gets off” on watching a beautiful bull being slowly stabbed to death by a human’s acrobatic capers. Onlooking fans relish the spectacle of “human supremacy” subduing the “lesser” creature, especially a fearsome bull, because the illusion of supremacy serves as a defense, in its morbid pleasure, that covers up the individual’s unconscious willingness to continue to harbor inner weakness and self-doubt.

This same mentality induces big-game hunters to experience pleasure in their power to kill. This mentality is also, gruesomely, a factor in the psychosis of mass killers as they act out their murderous “power.” Mass killers don’t feel the value in others because they are so bereft of the sense of it in themselves.

Intrinsic value exists in everyone. We just need to discover it, which happens as we’re clearing inner conflict from our psyche.

The weaker the sense of self, the greater the risk of being moody, depressed, cynical, angry, mediocre, or disengaged. We are born into the world in a helpless state, and this sense of weakness and helplessness lingers in the psyche of adults. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it is something important to be conscious of. Keeping that weakness in sight is the royal road to overcoming it.

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Two Terrible Voices in Your Head

Back in the old days, my inner voices could have drowned out a rock concert. Things quieted down when I became more insightful about inner conflict and the operating modes of the two primary conflicting voices.

Two clashing voices harass humankind.

One of the voices is critical of oneself, while the other is more doubtful and defensive. The former is the voice of our inner critic and the latter the voice of our inner passivity. Together the voices, each with its own operating procedures, can usurp our sense of self and plunge us into misery if we’re lacking in self-knowledge.

Of these two voices, it’s the passive one (or, more accurately, the passive feeling behind the voice) that presents us with the deeper problem. The other voice, the self-aggressive one, is only able to harass us to the degree that our inner passivity allows the self-abuse to occur.

To overcome this inner passivity, we begin by seeing it in a clinical sense, as a weakness or flaw in our psychological makeup.  Without this self-knowledge, our passivity is experienced by us as a weakness that can’t be accessed or understood. The weakness then feels intrinsic to us, as if it’s just who we are and how we function.

Let’s start with an example that shows how these two main components of inner conflict, self-aggression and inner passivity, arise as clashing voices that we experience, either consciously or unconsciously, when we’re moody, worried, anxious, fearful, or depressed. A client of mine was struggling in her freelance writing career and having difficulty promoting and marketing her skills. Procrastination was getting the best of her, and for several months she had not taken steps to find writing assignments from regional and national publications.

She received occasional calls for her work from editors, and she performed these assignments well. But the amount of work was insufficient for her to support herself.

She told me she had for months been awakening in the morning, thinking to herself, Oh God, what will I do today! This voice of inner passivity set the tone for her day. Typically, she shuffled around all day without direction or purpose. By the end of the day, her inner critic was attacking her fiercely: You blew the whole day! You have nothing to show for yourself! You certainly ought to be ashamed.

She did indeed feel ashamed, even as her voice of inner passivity mumbled excuses and offered defenses that failed to mollify her inner critic. She had been stuck in this inner conflict for months.

Some mornings, her expectation of the coming day differed slightly. When she had chores in need of attention, her thinking, again in a passive and frantic mode, expressed this sentiment: Oh, my goodness! I have so much to do today. Where will I start! How will I ever get it all done! Feelings of being overwhelmed and helpless would sweep over her, along with anxiety and fear. Deeper still was her readiness to experience herself in this passive, helpless manner. The more passive she was, the more abusive her inner critic became.

There’s a Catch-22 involved here. Though people will claim consciously that they want to be free of inner conflict, we can nonetheless be unconsciously willing to continue knowing and experiencing ourselves through the underlying passivity, all the while being unwittingly receptive to the self-punishment that’s being inflicted by the inner critic. This is the hidden power at the heart of inner conflict, the bittersweet allure of knowing ourselves through the old familiar pain (often guilt and shame) that can feel so intrinsic to who we are.

We attain a new deeper sense of freedom as we discover how, through our inner passivity, we have been enabling our primitive, irrational inner critic to oppress us. This deepening freedom is acquired as we become more conscious of the existence of inner passivity and its reactive, compulsive nature. We start seeing as an anomaly what we had once assumed was normal. For example, the client above had a distinctive body-language motion that reflected her passivity. Whenever she considered a challenging course of action, she stiffened and threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. She had been doing this motion for years without understanding or even considering its significance. Her underlying inner passivity produced the gesture compulsively. When she realized this, she had a new insight into the existence and influence of her passivity. As she gradually stopped making this gesture in the ensuing months, she was overriding her inner passivity and replacing it with a new connection to (and consciousness of) her essential self.

The following inner voices or feelings can express inner passivity, especially when combined with worry and self-doubt: What am I going to do next? I promise to do it tomorrow. What If I fail? Nobody appreciates or understands me. How come nothing ever works for me? What am I going to say to him?

A religious person might reveal a sense of helplessness or futility through repeated expressions such as, If God wills it, or Only God knows. If we are considering becoming, say, politically involved, that voice, fearful of repercussions, might say, to this effect: You can get in a lot of trouble. Let other people take the risk. One less voice is not going to matter.

The voice of inner passivity often sounds warnings to us, insisting, for instance, that we are in danger of being betrayed, cheated, or physically harmed. This voice claims it can be trusted and that it is revealing to us a harsh but necessary truth: That girlfriend can’t be trusted, or That friend is going to knife you in the back. Of course, an intuitive voice can sometimes represent our best interests, yet when under the influence of inner conflict, we often won’t listen to it or know which voice to trust.

Both voices (of inner passivity and self-aggression) claim to represent truth and have our best interests at heart. The voice of the inner critic, particularly, presents itself as an expert voice. “It feels like a core voice,” one client said, “and that’s why I give it so much credence when I sense it.” The more we give credence to that voice, however, the more we are giving power to a primitive, irrational force in our psyche.

While inner aggression easily usurps the role of a benevolent conscience, the voice of inner passivity is likely to be our tempter: Oh, go ahead and have another drink, or, It won’t hurt to stay in bed and miss work today, or, Do it, she’ll never have to know you were unfaithful. Cravings, weariness, and intense desires are often psychosomatic expressions of inner passivity.

Sometimes inner aggression and inner passivity use the same words, so the tone of those words becomes a clue to the source. Consider the statement, You never do anything right. If heard or felt as an accusation, then self-aggression is the source. If heard or felt in a softer tone, with a sense of futility or self-pity, then inner passivity is talking. It’s important to know the difference because precision about inner dynamics speeds up the clearing-out process.

The two terrible voices in our head are instruments of our own oppression and misery. Without our conscious intervention to alleviate the conflict, they contribute to irrationality, mediocrity, and stupidity—along with our social, political, and economic dysfunction.

Conventional wisdom fails to understand this. Columnist David Brooks wrote this week that “the growing bureaucratization of American life” is a major contributor to social unrest. Brooks claims Trumpian populism is a reaction, in part, to oppressive bureaucrats. This is a superficial assessment of the problem. If indeed bureaucrats are becoming increasingly oppressive, the source is the human psyche where we tolerate oppression through our inner conflict and then spread the oppression outward into the world around us.

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Why People Support Donald Trump

I watched MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show this past Monday, and I was frustrated. She’s brilliant and patriotic, but like journalists everywhere she tends to see people and world events somewhat superficially. I’ll explain why.

The chaos of the neurotic psyche contaminates our democracy.

Ms. Maddow was bemoaning the fact that so many people are tolerating Donald Trump’s recent eruption of particularly incendiary language. Despite his fascist terminology, they’re not prepared to abandon him.

She asked repeatedly why it is that Trump is using the terminology Hitler employed during the 1930s, especially in references to immigrants and bloodlines. Trump resorts to such language because it works, she kept saying. People are susceptible to it.

As I watched her show, I asked myself, “Okay, right, but why does it work? Tell us why it works!” Rachel, bless her, didn’t even begin to address my question. She didn’t do so because the assertions of depth psychology, which has the answers, are not generally accepted, or officially sanctioned.

In large measure, political and social dysfunction originates through inner conflict in our psyche. Trump appeals to neurotic people who are afflicted with inner conflict. He can appear charismatic to those who have a weak connection to their better self. They are deeply and emotionally impressed that, despite his compromised character, he has what appears to them a powerful sense of self. They see Trump steamroll over personal self-doubt and any sense of inadequacy or failure. They experience this brazenness as personal power, and when they align emotionally with it through allegiance to Trump, they’re able to absolve themselves temporarily of the self-punishment their own inner conflict generates.

Before saying more about this deep concept, let’s consider the nature of inner conflict. This conflict involves a tendency to experience doubt concerning one’s essential worthiness. Often, inner conflict involves not just self-criticism, but also self-mockery, self-condemnation, and even self-hatred.

Of course, this is not solely a problem on the Right. Liberals and progressives can also experience troublesome inner conflict, as I describe further on.

Here’s a one-paragraph clinical synopsis of the heart of the problem, after which this essay is easier to understand. The main expression of inner conflict occurs in our psyche between the subordinate, unconscious ego and the superego or inner critic. The superego is primitive and authoritarian. It tends to function as the unconscious master of the personality. It directs aggression toward our unconscious ego, which strives with mixed success, through a variety of defenses, to keep this aggression at bay. This conflict was addressed in much of Freud’s writings.

The superego lays a heavy trip on neurotics. They become desperate to defend themselves from the superego’s attacks on their weaknesses and foibles. Their largely unconscious defenses claim they’re innocent of wrongdoing. Their failures in life, neurotics claim, are largely due to the malice of unsavory people or adverse circumstances beyond their control.

So, neurotics are desperate to blame others for their disappointing circumstances or for why they feel so bad about themselves. Almost any target can serve this purpose. Absurd irrationalities are employed, if necessary, in the process. In righteously or aggressively blaming others, they can get their punishing superego to pause temporarily from blaming them. Often people adopt crude aggressive behaviors toward others to convince their superego that the fault lies with others.

Trump becomes for his followers a psychological “savior.” He “saves” them from having to take responsibility for their life circumstances. He blames whomever for his followers’ misfortunes. He sees his followers as righteous. Trump, the great denier of objectivity, legitimizes their denial and irrationality. His people, he says, suffer innocently from the crimes of the elite. His “powers” of retribution will slay the enemy.

If they identify with him, they have powerful ammunition to get the superego off their back. Their unconscious defense, their desperate claim, now is, “I am powerful, I identify with power. I’m not an inner weakling.” Any risks to democracy in supporting him are secondary to neutralizing self-recrimination. Trump uses them and they unwittingly use him in their escapism from personal responsibility and resistance to inner growth.

Trump is the poster boy for the refusal to look inward to see oneself objectively. His people are “inspired” to follow his example. Trump apparently has no connection to a better self. He connects to a pompous, idealized, vacuous self through money, fame, power, and attention. These worldly “blessings” are the malignant narcissist’s backbone. His followers are loyal not so much to Trump as to an infantile, self-preoccupied, egotistic perspective, the opposite of how one’s better self sees the world.

The most neurotic, the most conflicted, of Trump’s followers are consciously or unconsciously disposed to having their own inner chaos expressed in the world around them. Those who are most angry, bitter, cynical, and fatalistic are tempted to support Trump because he’s most likely to fulfill their malign spirit of revenge and retribution.

Despite this, people have, in a psychological sense, a claim to innocence in acting out their folly. The world is uninformed and ignorant of these inner dynamics, including the elites in politics, business, and science. Everyone would have access to this knowledge if it were taught in schools or even universities. People would have the chance to test or know its benefits for themselves if the psychological establishment hadn’t naively, foolishly abandoned depth psychology in favor of superficial cognitive-behavioral approaches to treating mental health. It was all in keeping with the fatuity of consumerism.

Not all neurotic people support Trump, of course. Many liberals and progressives are neurotic. Among their many psychological blind spots, they’re prone to identify compulsively with victims. This is not pure compassion but instead an unconscious readiness, induced by their unrecognized inner passivity, to identify with—or resonate emotionally with—a victim’s real or alleged weakness. That passivity lingers from the extended experience of infantile and childhood helplessness. Keep in mind that we replay and recycle whatever is unresolved within us, even when doing so is painful and self-defeating.

The Left and Right battle mainly across a psychological divide, and that divide is played out socially, economically, and politically. We’re in this mess because we’re so resistant to escaping the myopia of our ego. Our ego is highly resistant to acquiring the humbling realization of inner conflict’s influence upon us. In this context, we lack free will. Our mind is passive to our psyche, and we become passive to our mind and ego. We might be technical wizards but we’re psychological dummies. Yet all this inner conflict (a prime instigator of disunity, violence, and wars) can be overcome as our intelligence penetrates the vital inner frontier.

Neurosis exists on a spectrum, and almost everyone is somewhere on that spectrum. As classical psychoanalysis claimed, inner conflict is a primary disturbance contributing to neurosis. A few basic examples of inner conflict include: the wish to feel loved versus the expectation of being rejected; the wish to be strong versus the susceptibility to feeling and acting weak; the wish to get versus the expectation of being deprived or refused; the wish to be seen as special and competent versus the anticipation of being seen as a loser. (Read this 2022 post of mine for a fuller sense of how inner conflict contaminates our mind.)

People go back and forth in painful inner disputation trying to ease the agony of this primitive mental-emotional system. It’s time now to liberate ourselves from this glitch in human nature. We can do so with our consciousness rather than, as in neuroscience, with our technology.

What could be a greater tragedy than Trump getting back into the White House through our needless ignorance. And what about us bringing artificial intelligence into the world when our own intelligence is stripped of self-knowledge.

—

This knowledge is available free on this website. More than 270 articles are posted here that weave together the elements of unconscious functioning. I have made it comprehensible—and accessible to all. It’s a portrayal of our noble humanity struggling to evolve. It’s essential knowledge that can raise humanity to a new level of wisdom. Eleven books on this subject, written by me and my late wife, can also be ordered from the Books link above.

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The Vital Knowledge We Disown

Many of us are somewhere on a neurosis spectrum where our emotional and behavioral self-regulation is rendered unstable by inner conflict, misleading defenses, and lingering attachments to unresolved negative emotions.

Deep in our unconscious mind is a hidden dysfunction responsible for much of our displeasure and misery. This dysfunction, a flaw in human nature, weakens our inner governance, and thwarts our ability to act wisely, with foresight, integrity, and moral courage.

I’ve written extensively on this subject, and I keep trying in my writing to make this depth psychology as comprehensible as possible. However, the knowledge, when accessed at the deepest reaches of our psyche, strikes us as absurd. This knowledge is what we most hate to see in ourselves. In our unconscious resistance, we find it almost unbelievable. Here I am once again, trying to explain what we’re determined not to know.  The knowledge I present here is taken from classical psychoanalysis. It was discovered by Sigmund Freud and later developed clinically by the Neo-Freudian, Edmund Bergler.

Let’s slowly work our way down to these depths, starting with consideration of the repetition compulsion, a dynamic force involved in inner conflict. The repetition compulsion is largely an unconscious tendency to repeat or recycle, through inner conflict, various negative emotions and their accompanying self-defeat, that remain unresolved within us. From depth psychology’s perspective, two primary components of the compulsion are inner passivity and the inner critic. When not mindful of these two components, especially when emotionally challenged, we are prone to repeatedly experience inner conflict. The conflict involves inner passivity (the defensive nature of our unconscious subordinate ego) clashing with the inner critic (a biological drive that inflicts upon us aggressive disrespect).

The compulsion to experience inner conflict is generated by unresolved emotions first experienced in childhood. Inner passivity and inner conflict are actively involved in how people can be sensitive, often painfully, to one or more of these first hurts (feeling deprived, refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned). As adults, most of us are compelled, to some degree or other, to continue experiencing, through inner conflict, one or more of the first hurts in the context of daily life. Our sensitivity to these hurts constitutes a deadly flaw that produces needless suffering.

Here’s an example of inner conflict: Consciously, we want to feel accepted, supported, and loved, but unconsciously many of us are anticipating feelings or experiences of being rejected (one of the first hurts). The repetition compulsion, in this context, involves an unwitting entrapment in the conflict between wanting love versus entertaining feelings and expectations of being unloved. Such conflicts apply to all eight of the first hurts. This dysfunction helps us to understand why, in the English language, far more words express negative emotions than positive ones.

Why is the repetition compulsion so powerful? Here we approach the brutal reality we’re loathe to accept. The instigator of inner conflict and our continuing sensitivity to the first hurts derives from a repressed, non-sexual masochistic instinct that arises from the oral stage of childhood development, the first 18 months of life. This masochistic instinct, identified 100 years ago by Freud, develops out of the infant’s biologically based megalomania, which is an extreme self-centeredness experienced by babies—who are, of course, totally lacking in worldly experience—to imagine or know of existence outside themselves.

Babies feel in a primitive manner that their experiences, pleasant or unpleasant, are what they have wished for: Whatever happens is what I wish to happen. This notion protects megalomania, a primitive sense of existence and agency in what is otherwise the baby’s exceedingly helpless state. The megalomania is fortified by another irrational conviction, employed instinctively by the baby’s libido (pleasure principle) to make sense of what might be experienced as unpleasant: If this experience is what I want, it must be what I like. Many of the baby’s experiences can be unpleasant—being cleaned, diapered, dressed, and waiting to be fed. Yet the baby, to protect megalomania, manages through libido to make these experiences agreeable on the “understanding” they are allegedly self-given, self-bestowed.

Later, as an adult, an individual can continue to generate bittersweet affinities for negative experiences, accompanied consciously or unconsciously by the rationalizing notion, This is who I am, this is how I know myself, this is how it is. A degree of libido-induced gratification, combined with stubborn self-righteousness, arises through this self-imposed disinformation.

In other words, the masochistic streak in human nature, a biological flaw, arises from the infant’s primitive self-centeredness (megalomania, the conviction of being at the center of all that exists). The masochism persists in the adult psyche, where recurring experiences of inner conflict and the first hurts fuel self-pity and a wide range of emotional and behavioral dysfunctions.

The more neurotic we are as adults, the more sensitive we are to one or more of these first hurts and the more prone we are to becoming emotionally enmeshed in them. We’re still producing, as we did as babies, a perverse pleasure-in-displeasure as we unwittingly protect the last traces of megalomania—our egotism’s conceit and our resistance to accepting a more humble, objective sense of self.

As mentioned, the displeasure or suffering is experienced in conjunction with inner conflict. Inner conflict includes inner passivity’s defensiveness and its resort to a wide variety of misleading psychological defenses. Inner conflict arises because inner passivity’s weak nature and masochistic disposition makes itself a target of self-aggression from the inner critic. The inner critic attacks our integrity and mocks us for inner weakness, especially for our unconscious ego’s passive willingness to recycle the first hurts masochistically. This accords with Freud’s finding that the inner critic (superego) is a primitive intelligence or drive, a biological function for the release of aggression, that disperses some of its energy against the nearest or weakest target—one’s own receptive unconscious ego.

Our challenge is to become aware of this congenital weakness. Inner conflict, we become aware, is energized by our unconscious, masochistic willingness to replay and recycle whatever is unresolved (the repetition compulsion). Self-pity (experienced often as a sorrowful conviction of one’s innocent victimhood) is usually the first painful symptom to arise from this hidden dynamic. Other primary symptoms are indecision, anxiety, confusion, mediocrity, depression, procrastination, and flawed judgment.

Consider how much passivity is involved in those who seek to feel helpless and controlled (two of the first hurts) in sexual masochism. Sexual masochism is the surface eruption of libido’s power to produce perverse gratification from otherwise painful experiences. With much greater subtlety in everyday life, we unconsciously produce an alluring, bittersweet indulgence in the first hurts, though the conscious pleasure here is minimal. Evidence for this dysfunction is seen in humanity’s penchant for feeling victimized (or identifying with victims), then covering up the hidden indulgence with the psychological defenses of resentment, bitterness, anger, passive-aggressive reactions, righteous protests, or violence.

The passive, defensive side of inner conflict is typically preoccupied with fending off, with limited success, the inner critic’s aggression and mockery concerning the person’s passive, masochistic entanglement in the first hurts. The inner critic is attuned to the nature of our inner weakness and uses this instinctive awareness to its advantage in fulfillment of its own agenda. It mocks and punishes us for being entangled masochistically in one or more of the first hurts. The passive side of the conflict often accepts some degree of punishment—typically guilt, shame, anxiety, moodiness—as a pound of flesh offering to the inner critic to get it to back off.

People benefit greatly when, through deepening recognition of this aggressive-passive inner dynamic, they’re able to replace their inner passivity with healthy assertiveness and aggression, which is experienced on an inner level as the power to neutralize the inner critic and trust one’s better self for guidance and a sense of truth. This ability to displace inner passivity with a strong, more conscious sense of self occurs largely automatically over time, as long as we’re recognizing and tracking our inner passivity.

Here’s one example of the insight we acquire in the process: Even when we’re absorbing aggression from the inner critic, we often find it difficult at such times to recognize this inner assault. We can detect it, however, by tracking our thoughts and recognizing their defensiveness over some issue or situation in our life. We can then backtrack to understand why we’re being defensive. Typically, our inner critic has been attacking us for some (often just minor or alleged) wrongdoing, usually something that occurred in the preceding hours or days. We now bring into focus these illegitimate intrusions from the inner critic. This enables us to neutralize these intrusions by exposing their irrationality and cruelty and thereby not taking them seriously. Insights such as this constitute a growing body of vital self-knowledge.

Inner Passivity’s Prime Role

Our lingering sensitivity to the first hurts derives largely from inner passivity, where the masochism lurks. The primary psychological weakness here is inner passivity’s receptivity to the inner critic’s aggression. Often, this involves the tendency to accept unchallenged the inner critic’s condemnation and punishment. The first hurts all present unconscious opportunities to engage in the miseries of unconscious masochism and to take the hurts deep inside oneself to be freshly experienced, even with memories decades old.

The hurts are usually triggered by events in the world around us through transference and projection. Through the powerful allure of masochism, adults then passively take the hurt deep into their own emotional life and unsteady sense of self to be painfully recycled and replayed.

A person under the influence of masochistically contaminated inner passivity (with its accompanying inner conflict and menacing inner critic) will have some deficiency of self-regulation and a tendency to be easily triggered. Inherent in inner passivity is some experience of weakness, particularly in being willing to absorb the inner critic’s aggression and unconsciously fearful of it. People are resistant to seeing and appreciating the existence and influence of inner passivity, so our willingness to try to see it (and keep it in sight) represents us being at our best. People usually do best by trying to understand and perceive their passivity through a deeper feeling sense of it rather than strictly intellectually. Keeping an informed eye, in a consistent manner, on inner passivity’s many influences upon us, we eventually begin to liberate ourselves from it.

One of civilization’s great liabilities is the widespread masochistic willingness of people to linger emotionally and cognitively in the sense of helplessness and unworthiness. People go back and forth in inner conflict, stuck emotionally and mentally in naïve, unhelpful considerations of their psychological predicament. Often the conflict involves one’s determination to establish that he or she is strong and aggressive, thereby denying or repressing one’s identification with the passive side of the conflict. Self-defeating, reactive aggression is often produced through this conflict. For instance, people will identify with reactive, aggressive political leaders, finding gratification in mimicking the politicians’ aggressiveness while denying or covering up their own underlying passivity. People can feel fully righteous in these reactions, though underlying guilt and shame often accompany this unhealthy acting-out.

An emotional entanglement in any one of the eight first hurts creates some degree of passive disconnection from one’s better self. A sensitivity to feeling criticized, for instance, involves the experience of resonating emotionally with being criticized. Often, the hurt arises from the slightest implication of criticism or from criticism that is simply imagined. This illustrates how disconnected an individual can be from a better, stronger sense of self. It’s also evidence for the likelihood the person’s suffering is masochistically fortified.

This disconnection from a better self involves a deep, often repressed lack of self-assurance and the sense, in certain circumstances, of lacking inner strength, being easily overwhelmed, unable to see or develop a successful path forward, unable to make meaningful connections with others, being easily discouraged, and unable to complete worthy projects.

It’s up to individuals to determine which of the eight first hurts are involved in their emotional suffering. Having a psychotherapist helps, but few therapists work at this deep level. The more precise the self-knowledge or significant the insight, the sooner the masochistic affinity for that form of suffering can be overcome.

Chronic self-doubt is another common symptom of inner passivity. It’s also a direct sense of being passive. Chronic self-doubt is experienced both consciously and unconsciously. It’s often a symptom of how, through inner conflict, people passively allow their inner critic to get away with mocking and demeaning them, thereby raising the degree of one’s self-doubt. Self-doubt, when more intense and painful, can be understood as self-alienation, which describes the disconnection of people who passively betray their better self and become enablers of the primitive, negative inner critic, masochistically attached to it while living in acute, repressed fear of it. Such people readily become supporters of authoritarian leaders because, in being disconnected from their better self, they can’t feel the values that a higher sense of self shares with democracy. They also feel rescued personally from their inner critic’s self-aggression and their subsequent self-doubt (and even self-loathing) through their surrender of their will to an authoritarian politician or cult leader, who represents their inner critic.

Self-doubt refers here to the difficulties people can have accessing their strengths and feeling their value. This self-doubt has its origins in inner passivity and in the degree to which, during inner conflict, the passive side serves as an enabler of the inner critic and allows the inner critic to get away with its abusive antics. These processes are mechanistic in a sense, though not hard-wired. The more we acquire the correct self-knowledge (inner truth), the sooner we’ll stop taking the on-ramp into the stream of inner passivity.

Another player in the psyche, the id, is a primitive instinct concerned with the satisfaction of drives (for sex, power, aggression, survival, self-aggrandizement, destruction). I don’t say much in my writings about this aspect of the psyche because its role in inner conflict, as I see it, is secondary to what I have described in this essay. The primitive id is a biological inheritance we can subdue through our progress in resolving inner conflict. The id is “civilized” as we acquire greater self-regulation and become more conscious. When we succumb to the id’s impulses, our inner critic will condemn the weakness. Still, recognizing and overcoming inner passivity—with its deadly masochistic allure—is the most important step because it directly liberates our authentic self.

In my writings, I have usually avoided reference to the heavy-duty word “masochism.” I have instead used euphemisms that I believe slip more easily past my readers’ and clients’ resistance. These euphemisms include references to the repetition compulsion, or emotional or secret attachments, or a “deadly flaw,” or the unconscious willingness or determination to replay and recycle unresolved negative emotions. I often say we “cozy up” to unresolved negative emotions, or indulge in them, or unwittingly “get into mischief” with unconscious choices we make to “go negative.” Often, I simply stress the idea that inner passivity, as an unconscious identification, is powerfully alluring as a limited, self-defeating experience of self. Sometimes though I just come out and say it—the ugly M word—and listen for the thundering silence that follows.

—

Peter Michaelson’s latest book, Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society (2022), is available here.

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Climate Anxiety and the Psyche

It’s appropriate, of course, to take seriously the dangers climate change poses and to feel some grief about the crisis. But when this grief or sorrow turns into anxiety, it is likely to be the result of emotional weakness that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with climate change itself.

Sorrow okay, anxiety not so good.

This fact, however, is apparently not being recognized by the new branch of mental-health treatment that’s now responding to climate anxiety (eco-anxiety). This branch has now produced an online climate-aware therapist directory.

Many therapists say that climate anxiety is challenging and transforming the practice of psychotherapy. An article this week in The New York Times Magazine discusses the healing approach that “climate-aware” therapists are taking. It’s apparent to me these therapists have blind spots.

According to the magazine article, many therapists don’t plan to “fix” a client’s problem or respond to a pathology. Instead, they plan to give “their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them.”

I can assure my readers, it’s not necessary for people “to sit with painful feelings.” And “running away from them” is not, in any case, typically what people in states of anxiety are able to do. They wouldn’t be going to a therapist if they could “instantly” run from such misery.

The magazine article acknowledges that anxiety, hopelessness, depression, and anger have long histories that involve conditions other than climate change. The author notes that people “bring their own issues and patterns to the particularities of the climate crisis: hypervigilant doom-scrolling if they have control issues, perhaps, or falling into despondency if they have a tendency toward depression.”

However, nothing more is said in this article on what “issues and patterns” might possibly be at play in the emotional life of these individuals. Nothing is said about how such issues or patterns might conceivably relate to the emotional challenge of dealing with climate change. Further on in this post, I address these deeper issues.

The article says these eco-therapists focus “on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.” But this therapeutic approach is not unique to eco-anxiety. This approach is commonly taken to help those who are struggling with a wide range of emotional or behavioral issues. There’s nothing in the article about therapeutic methodologies that are unique to the climate crisis.

One psychotherapist quoted in the article said some clients wanted to vent their “’sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal’ at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.” The therapist indicated she was sympathetic to this anger. Of course, it’s appropriate to be disgusted with the failure of the authorities to address the problem. But people can get stuck in a passive anger that produces both needless suffering and a futile response to the climate crisis. The more that people feel helpless, the more they’ll act out being helpless, which compounds their misery. The more they express so-called “righteous anger,” the more they can unwittingly be using this “aggression” as a cover up (an unconscious psychological defense) for their emotional entanglement in underlying passivity and helplessness.

Clients often burst out in expressions of anger and betrayal at many targets—parents, friends, romantic partners, corporations, politicians, and so on—over matters having nothing to do with climate change. These outbursts, especially when they fail to reform situations, are often reactions to underlying passivity and to an unconscious willingness to go on feeling weak and victimized.

Some sufferers from eco-anxiety are neurotic. If they weren’t feeling anxious about climate change, they’d be feeling anxious about something else—money, wars and violence, nuclear weapons, pandemics, health issues, or their careers. Climate change has become for them a convenient external target onto which they project their psyche’s penchant for feeling helpless and for needless suffering.

The therapists mentioned in the magazine article appear to be troubled by countertransference, meaning they emotionally resonate with the weakness exuded by a client. This can make them emotional enablers of the client’s dysfunction. It’s an appropriate reaction, of course, to be greatly concerned by climate change. This concern helps us, at the very least, to lessen our personal carbon footprint. But therapists must guard against identifying with (being emotionally drawn into) the weakness displayed by their clients. Discussions and comments in the magazine article suggest some therapists feel a particular receptiveness to a client’s sense of helplessness because of their own distress or anxiety about the climate crisis.

The article also noted that some therapists believe climate change to be an event of such magnitude, affecting both therapist and client, that therapists are entitled to cross the boundary that restrains them from bringing their own emotional issues into the therapy room. Therapists thereby become self-disclosing, believing wrongly that this kind of personal sharing is helpful to their clients.

These boundary-crossings do the client a grave disservice. They validate the emotional weakness of the client. When an individual becomes anxious and depressed over a particular issue or problem, that person is sliding into emotional weakness. That weakness is not likely to be appropriate. The danger now is that the slide will continue, resulting in more suffering, failure, and self-defeat. Good therapy addresses the weakness, understands the underlying dynamics of it, and strengthens the client’s connection to a best self.

Individuals can develop a stronger connection to their best self in a variety of ways. One big danger for them is that their weakness will be validated by others, even by therapists whose own resilience is shaky, who claim that the weakness is appropriate to the seriousness or trauma of the situation. Instead of teaching clients how their weakness originates within them, this approach coddles them with nothing but consolations and shared suffering.

The deeper, more effective approach to overcoming eco-anxiety recognizes inner conflict in the human psyche. This conflict, often mostly unconscious, weakens people and undermines their resilience. The conflict occurs in clashes between the inner critic and the passive ego, in the context of polarities found in human nature: strength versus weakness, pleasure versus displeasure, passivity versus aggression, connection versus disconnection, and ego versus both inner world and outer world.

This inner conflict also takes place as people replay and recycle, as emotional attachments, the first hurts of childhood (feeling refused, deprived, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned.) The details of how this happens are described in my books and in posts on this website.

We all have an inner critic that is capable of cruelly mocking one’s sense of self. On an inner level in the psyche, the inner critic can punish us for alleged flaws or unworthiness if we allow it to get away with this self-abuse. This dynamic reflects one of the polarities mentioned above—aggression versus passivity. The aggressive inner critic (or superego) gets away with harassing the passive subordinate ego (what classical psychoanalysis calls inner passivity). This leaves the individual feeling emotionally weak, and often the individual identifies with that weakness. The weakness is then felt in the individual’s experiences in the world, even becoming the centerpiece of one’s sense of self. (It’s this same weakness that drives gun mania in America and underlies in part the victimhood ethos of identity politics.)

Our assimilation of the knowledge of inner conflict (especially in terms of how we’re passive to our inner critic and willing to recycle the first hurts) runs up against psychological resistance. It’s as if the subject is taboo—and indeed it is. Humans are still operating in a highly egotistical manner (a second-hand way of accessing reality and one’s essential worthiness, and one of the polarities mentioned above). Our ego is insulted by deeper knowledge concerning the extent of our entrapment in inner conflict. Our egotism convinces us we know who we are, that we know what is important to know about our inner life. Our ego does not want to become aware of the startling degree to which we are not conscious. Self-knowledge undermines the ego’s preferred centrality. Through our ego, we resist being humbled by knowledge that reveals our psychological ignorance.

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Abandonment, Self-Abandonment, and Democracy

If we were just a bit less selfish, we would be more inspired to work on our self-development for the sake of others. Self-development benefits us personally, of course, yet it also serves democracy, unity, and progress.

Our inner conflict and emotional issues weigh heavily on democracy.

Put another way, we can ask, “How do my unresolved emotional issues contribute to national disunity and a lower quality of citizenship?” We all have pockets of emotional conflict, so this is a question all of us can ask and address.

There are so many ways that psychological naïveté hurts us. Consider, for example, having a particular sensitivity to feeling abandoned. Many of us have felt abandoned at times by friends and loved ones. It’s so easy in many situations to feel isolated, lonely, disconnected, and abandoned.

Abandonment is one of the eight first hurts of childhood. The others are feeling refused, deprived, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, and betrayed. Adults remain emotionally susceptible to these hurts. Often, the hurts are mostly self-inflicted as fabrications of one’s speculations and imagination. People who are neurotic or even just mildly neurotic can easily become emotionally entangled in these negative ways of experiencing themselves and the world.

The problem can be resolved when we acquire more insight into the inner dynamics of this weakness. People frequently have no clue to the ways we unconsciously foment unhappiness and self-defeat. This psychological ignorance is perhaps our greatest menace, surpassing even climate change as a danger because this ignorance is a prime driver of the folly, insensitivity, and passivity that foster climate havoc.

When we’re particularly susceptible to feeling abandoned, we will generate within ourselves some level of self-abandonment. Now we’ll feel more passive. We’ll lack inner strength and emotional resilience. This weakness degrades our capacity to flourish personally and to be a robust representative of democratic values. A sense of self-devaluation also frequently accompanies self-abandonment.

Individuals who are emotionally strong do not fear abandonment because they have inner strength to fall back on. This solid connection with self and trust in one’s goodness and value produce a pleasing self-assurance. One’s inner life now functions like a democracy rather than an authoritarian system ruled by a harsh inner critic, the superego.

Sensitivity to abandonment merges with fear of abandonment, meaning an unpleasant anticipation of painful aloneness is anticipated. People can be emotionally attached to feeling abandoned, which means the susceptibility to such misery operates somewhat like an emotional addiction. If this inner bittersweet hankering for the old familiar feeling of abandonment is not recognized, an individual is unlikely to overcome a painful sensitivity to the feeling.

Emotional attachments are present and problematic in all eight first hurts of childhood (mentioned above). An attachment to the feeling of abandonment is indicated when a person is struggling with loneliness, helplessness, homesickness, homelessness, convictions of being undeserving and bad, feelings of neglect, low resilience, and acute distress on hearing about lost pets or children.

Sensitivity to abandonment is often felt acutely by adults who, as children, experienced some version of it such as the death of a parent, the separation of parents, or the physical abandonment of a parent. But people can have this sensitivity simply because the condition is intrinsic to our humanity. We are, after all, both connected to each other and very much alone.

A painful sense of abandonment, as an emotional attachment, is basically the result of a covert willingness or compulsion to recycle what is unresolved in our psyche, namely our weak susceptibility to feeling isolated and alone. The unconscious willingness to go down this rabbit hole makes it more difficult for us to embrace our responsibility as citizens because the emotional weakness degrades our intelligence and resilience. As we feel the abandonment deep within, the weakness makes us inept representatives of our country’s best ideals. As we abandon ourselves, we will also tend to abandon whatever else is intrinsically precious, namely a capacity to love and a capacity to maintain a democracy. Heavy use of drugs or alcohol is a particular painful abandonment of self, as well as a forfeiture of responsibility for the common good.

With this weakness, we won’t be able to pass along an abiding belief in self to our children, which means we aren’t bequeathing to them a convincing enough appreciation of our freedom and value. Often the best we do is identify with a glossy image of our country just as, through inner defensiveness, we strive to maintain a rosy self-image that denies our emotional dalliance with the weakening effects of old, unresolved negative emotions and attachments.

How can we be effective citizens, as well as good parents, when this unresolved issue of abandonment creates self-absorption and encourages our temptations or vices? Just as we can’t feel our own virtue under such circumstances, we have a hard time recognizing and relating to virtue and decency in politicians. We’ll vote for political candidates who operate at our level of psychological dysfunction.

Many of us felt at least somewhat abandoned in our childhood. Even when parents are present and attentive, our feeling of abandonment can develop from an underlying identification, an intrinsic self-doubt, that goes back generations, even into a primal, existential condition of humanity: Who I am and what I think or have to say is of little or doubtful value. Because we’re so subjective and sensitive as children, we can feel this way from an early age, and then unwittingly carry the feeling as a basic, unconscious identification into our adult years.

As we harbor a consciousness that accommodates self-abandonment, we tend to identify with ourself in terms of that limitation. This unevolved condition, even when we’re unable to articulate it, feels true to who we feel we are. As adults, we don’t appreciate to what degree this limited sense of self is a corruption of the person we’re capable of being.

The feeling dilutes our sense of self as citizens. We won’t appreciate, for instance, that our capacity to protect democracy depends on the quality of the relationship we have with ourself. Democracy might not even have for us any particular sense of value. To be strong keepers of our nation’s highest values, we have to feel, within ourself, a great benefit or blessing simply in the reality of our personal existence.

What do we need to know to work out an issue such as sensitivity to abandonment and fear of abandonment? Our fear of it means we’re highly sensitive to actual or possible experiences of it. We’ll even play in our imagination with fantasies of abandonment, thereby being induced to feel the distress or pain of it even at those moments when no one is abandoning us or is likely to do so.

Actual abandonment in childhood or later can certainly be traumatic, but the insight into how we unconsciously are choosing as adults to replay and recycle the feeling of it, even though that choice can be somewhat compulsive, can help us enormously to become emotionally stronger. We learn to catch ourselves up to mischief, seeking thoughts, feelings, or experiences that bear on the theme of abandonment. This insight brings into focus our unwitting participation in suffering. This new intelligence makes us stronger and wiser.

An old, lingering attachment to abandonment raises the likelihood that abandonment in some form will indeed be acted out. We can feel and provoke abandonment through our worry or fear, our constant need for reassurance, and our transference of our worst expectations onto another person. The other person, it is important to understand, is often tempted unconsciously to participate in this acting-out. He or she may be induced unconsciously—through our words, emotions, and behavior—to “give” to us what we are anticipating, namely abandonment, even though doing so is painful and self-defeating for all concerned.

Indeed, one way to act out feeling or being abandoned is to weaken our democracy. Our government will then turn around and, through incompetence or lack of resources, leave us feeling even more abandoned. Weakening our democracy is an example of how we act out variations of the self-harm to which we’re emotionally attached.

Fear of being abandoned represents one price we pay in suffering for this attachment, yet it also serves as an unconscious defense that goes like this: I’m not looking for that old unresolved feeling of abandonment—Can’t you see how much I worry or fear that it could happen (or is happening)!

Again, though paradoxical, this fear is an indication that we are very much attached to the feeling (and even the prospect) of abandonment. The more fearful we are, the stronger the attachment, and the more likely we are to imagine an experience of abandonment or secretly be awaiting a chance to act one out. This occurs frequently in romantic relationships.

We can experience abandonment—and, emotionally and unconsciously, provoke experiences of it—even when consciously we very much want to deepen our relationship to a loved one and live happily with that person. We transfer this expectation of abandonment to the people in our life—to a spouse, partner, friend, or children—and live through the fear that we are being (or soon will be) abandoned.

As mentioned, abandonment is just one of the eight first hurts of childhood. All these hurts are attachments that we are covertly willing to indulge in and they all contribute to the undermining of democracy. Once we see our unwitting participation in indulging in these negative emotions, we see how, moving forward, we can liberate ourselves from them.

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Our Readiness to Feel Controlled

This post is an excerpt from LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships, by my late wife, Sandra Michaelson. The excerpt is taken from the section of her book that deals with control issues. People can be highly sensitive to feeling controlled even when their partner is not interested in being (or trying to be) controlling. We can feel annoyance or anger simply in imagining that someone is trying to control us.

Our sensitivity to feeling controlled indicates an underlying willingness to take on that feeling.

It’s the inner passivity we carry in our psyche that makes us so sensitive to feeling controlled. The more insight we have into this aspect of our psychological nature, the sooner we can clear away this emotional sensitivity.

As you’re reading the following excerpt, try to understand how the inappropriateness of the behaviors described below relate back to one’s own emotional readiness to feel controlled. Feeling controlled is one of the eight first hurts of early childhood. As adults, these hurts can linger in our psyche as emotional attachments. If we want to liberate ourselves from needless suffering, we need to recognize our readiness to keep replaying and recycling these hurts.

Excerpt from LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships:

We can easily feel controlled by our partners because we unconsciously re-enact with them the emotional memories of our parent-child dynamic. As children, didn’t we feel we had to serve our parents, give up what we wanted, and go along with their rules? The goal as adults is to understand our unconscious attachment to feeling dominated and to observe both how we control our partner and the ways we passively allow him or her to dominate us.

Controlling behaviors can be subtle, with the controlling element well-hidden or disguised. They can range from mild and occasional to abusive and frequent. In fact, control-and-power issues are often at the root of domestic violence. For instance, as inhibitions fall away under the influence of alcohol or drugs, people become more controlling and abusive, or more passive and submissive, starkly revealing their negative attitude toward themselves, which are projected on to those around them.

The TV remote-control is a symbol of power in relationships. Men, in particular, seem to need to control this “clicker,” which symbolizes, on an emotional level, control of their domain.  Should a wife or girlfriend try to take possession of it, a man is apt to react like a baby whose bottle has just been yanked from his mouth. Once again, as in childhood, he feels himself at the mercy of the mother-female. Female possession of the remote-control compares emotionally to mother’s possession and control of the breast or bottle. He feels powerless, forced to accept whatever TV program his wife desires. He’s no longer King of the Couch.

Those who battle over this instrument may want to reflect on the following questions: “How does it feel when I’m in possession of it? How does it feel when my partner is in possession of it?” If you feel stripped of power without it, perhaps you may be applying this emotional interpretation to other areas of your life.

The following is a list of common controlling behaviors I’ve seen in relationships. As you read each one, consider how you may express these behaviors, keeping in mind that it is easier to see these behaviors in someone other than yourself.

* You assume responsibility for everything because you feel your partner won’t. You can’t trust him or her to do things the way you want. This belief justifies your desire to take over and control the relationship.

* Taking over the conversation and interrupting your partner. Not listening to him. Feeling he has nothing important to say. Only talking about subjects you are interested in.

* Making it known to your partner that you are not pleased to hear disagreement or critical feedback. If she does criticize you, switching the focus and hammering at her for her past and present flaws. Making it her fault that you are not functioning well. Telling her she’s too sensitive and takes things too personally.

* Being center stage, craving the attention. Controlling the conversation by bringing up subjects you want to talk about and not letting him make his contribution.

* Winning at all costs. Insisting that your facts or feelings are right. Making her agree with your version of reality. If she insists on her version, you insist in turn that her interpretation is wrong. Bringing out a list of facts and statistics to support your view.

* Arguing over minor things—he’s five minutes late, his sock has a hole, the mustard is lost in the refrigerator—so you can assert your dominance and prove you are right.

* Being unpredictable. One minute praising your partner for how wonderful she is, the next scolding her for being lazy and unreliable. Your partner never knows what to expect, which keeps her off balance and in your control.

* Creating the impression that you have no problems. Acting like an authority. Feeling you are better than your partner. Acting as though you do not need anything from anyone. Problems are his fault. He needs help, not you.

* Making success the most important thing in your life. Nothing else in life, including your spouse, kids, or vacations, comes close. Using your competence as a weapon and a way to exercise power over your partner. Never letting down your guard or showing vulnerability.

* Making your partner feel guilty by accusing her of pressuring you and making you comply with her wishes. Making her feel selfish for asserting herself. Accusing her of making you feel awful and ruining your day when she expresses her independent views or desires. Laying on the ultimate guilt trip: “After all the great things I’ve done for you, you rarely do anything for me. You don’t care about my feelings or needs.” Reciting all the wonderful things you’ve done for her over the years.

* Talking in a loud voice with an angry edge when you want your way or when you want him to do something for you. Or drilling him incessantly with your “brilliant” arguments and hammering at him so he will wear down and submit. Badgering him relentlessly until he becomes exhausted. If that doesn’t work, yelling, screaming, and calling him horrible names. Blowing things out of proportion and scaring the wits out of your partner.

* Organizing and accounting for every minute. Everything has to be done perfectly, in the right order, in the right place, as determined by you. Planning other people’s lives to the wire and insisting that everything go according to plan. If the plan fails, throwing a scary temper tantrum.

* Preaching at your partner with a paternalistic attitude. Regarding your spouse and children as emotionally handicapped. Rescuing your partner from his bad habits. Being confrontational: “Why didn’t you do this the way I told you to!” Making sure she accounts for her behavior. Giving suggestions to improve her choices or behaviors. Making sly jests or puns poking at her inadequacies.

* Spying on your partner. Going through his personal correspondence and writings. Daily scrutinizing your partner and his behaviors. Asking questions such as, “Who did you just talk to? What were you talking about? Why do you want to be with that person?” You believe these questions are for his own good.

* Holding the purse strings. Giving her money or rescuing her financially so you have even more leverage to control her: “Look, I’m supporting you and giving you everything you need. Now, what about some respect and consideration for what I want!”

* Using sexuality to assert your dominance. Resorting to sexual power and excitement to subdue your partner. This fulfills temporarily your need for potency and power.

* Complaining incessantly about how bad you have it and how the world is deteriorating. Scowling and snarling when you express how you feel. The message: do not come close or you will get bitten.

* Ignoring your partner and giving him the cold-shoulder for days. Punishing him with silence.

* Indicating directly or through insinuation what clothes you want him to wear, how to style his hair, how to act when out with others, what to say in certain contexts, and so on. Giving him ongoing instructions on how you want him to be or how he should behave. Putting down any independent action as wrong or inappropriate: “That shirt you bought is just plain ugly.”

* Invalidating her feelings by saying, “You really don’t mean that. I know it’s just because you’re upset or your hormones are acting up.”

* No matter what you do wrong, blaming it on your partner. No matter what the mistake, making someone else responsible.  For instance, if you break a glass, say, “Who put that glass there in the first place?”

* Threatening divorce, having an affair, or cutting him out of your will every time he acts independently. Unreasonable or coercive demands are more likely to create opposition in your partner, causing him to rebel and resist you.

The behaviors listed above not only ensure your partner’s resistance and resentment but also sabotage intimacy, respect, and love. Your partner may give in but at the cost of losing respect and love for you. He may comply but only to keep you from becoming more belligerent. This is not a true exchange of love.

—

LoveSmart is available as a paperback or e-book here.

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The Personal Opinions of Alfred Woke

The poem below, which I wrote this summer, is my attempt to use art and humor to communicate deeper principles of depth psychology.

Poetry and other forms of art can often radiate an inner light that, emotionally and intuitively, informs and inspires us. A sense of truth is transmitted on “a higher level,” beyond the mental realms of everyday cognition.

Writing this thoughtful poem was a pleasant summer break from the heavy lifting of my usual meaty prose. My essays and books elaborate, of course, on all the themes and ideas covered in the poem. If you happen to like it, please consider bumping it along through social media.

The Personal Opinions of Alfred Woke
 
Good people, I’ve gathered you all here to speak
On matters that, in psyche’s words, edify mystique.
I, Alfred Woke, now instruct you on how to live
In a way you’ll refreshingly find quite provocative.
Today we visit the battleground of truth and falsity,
Rising here on the Capitol steps to incite civility.
But I notice you’re restless: you look all aquiver—
Is Faux News now churning your poor brain to liver?

Golly, so many of you, as I’m taken to surmise,
Are wanting, apparently, to be tantalized with lies.
But as a pure “opinionist,” I’ll ride out any gripes
Rather than cede the facts to your political stripes.
To be judicious, my opinions, raw and uninvited,
Insult you all—yet only for being near-sighted.

Yes, praise be to you all—and I’m not being snide;
My couplets contemplate the secrets that we hide.
It’s with this discussion on thwarting equivoques
That we promulgate, in good faith, Left-Right civics.
Still, the conjectures of my opinions are deep,
Buried in the canyonlands of your REM sleep.

As I decline to be partisan or to root for slime,
I vote to cool you down with less effusive rhyme.
So saying, Faux News fabrications easily beset you
Since you, darlings, are weavers of self-deception:
You cherish the yarns your defenses yearn to spin.

Faux News is contagious; it maddens Right and Left;
Its pseudo-indignation leaves common sense bereft.
But all of us decline unwittingly to expose lies that
Reveal our negative bias, our deeply buried scat.
Reflecting on self-knowledge, we’re disposed to find
Liberals and Conservatives in a common bind.
Whatever your politics, you all can use the creed
Of psyche’s insight as democracy’s sacred seed.

Faux News says, ‘You have reason to be miffed;
Those swine disrespect you—you’re being grifted!”
I say contrarily, you’re indeed being disrespected—
But by your inner strife. You are daily selected
For abuse by a grody troll, a grumpy generalissimo,
A villifier of virtue, the sly swine, Master Superego.
Its attacks upon you are treacheries, like a coup:
If you’re not home inwardly, it gets the best of you.
Denying a codependence with superego’s vile disdain,
You displace its inner attacks upon the outer plane.

This superego antihero arouses shame and guilt
As it inflicts self-punishment, while you (to the hilt,
Faux innocent) unwittingly soak up its reproof
For allegedly being a flawed, unworthy goof.
This troll, too, sparks inner fear as it spurs
Your prime essence with wicked, offhand slurs.
Thereby, as you’re harshly debased by one pretext,
Defensive conscious ego inflates you with the next,
Which is why, my dears, you swing in mood, feeling
Right-wrong, shameful-proud, delighted vs. vexed.

Inviting indignation, you turn on your TV set,
Sating all the outrage an appetite can whet.
Bloated with disinformation, sleazy inner conflict
Makes psyche flatulent, yearning to be pricked.
Your protective ignorance disputes facts that
Even drunkenly, at happy hour, truth still backs.
Now the whine of resistance—your stubborn edge—
Leaves lucidity dim-witted, writhing on the ledge.

II

If only you could recognize the passivity in you—
It’s an unsuspected identity: psychic crazy glue.
Liberals and conservatives, not scenting its vapors,
Enabled rogue capitalists to conduct corrupt capers.
You jilted, too, the Bill of Rights, thieved it of thunder,
Abandoned it on native shores for pirates to plunder.
See how you all identify with real or alleged victims—
Acting piously, you say, on faith, charity, and whims—
Yet, secretly, often to cozy up in your nightie and crib,
To helplessness, passivity, and defensive glib.

Please, give me a few seconds of breathing space,
As you confer to demur this evidentiary disgrace.
Yet we’re not all ignominious, of course, but lacking
The good sense to seek the best knowledge, to ping
Our consciousness. In not shooting down nonsense,
We’ve been haunting the future in the past tense.

I’m not saying our miseries are all due to inner strife:
Indeed, the selfishness of others can capsize our life.
Our elites are often fatuous, greedy, cruel, and dumb:
Snubbed psyche makes stupidity a sure rule of thumb.
Cemented in conceit, elites are predisposed to feel
Fixated, rigid, unyielding, congested, and unreal.
You, one percenter, forfeit chasing crass ambition!
Enrich yourself instead through psychic transition.

We deem self-knowledge mostly irritants to abhor,
A tick or two pondering the pores at our backdoor.
Our emotions, crimped by passive self-oppression,
Hiss: “Don’t tread on me!” Mindlessly, we question
(As bumptious baboons governed by inner decree)
Principles, facts, and morals that anchor reality.
Blaming, we appraise the outer world as malicious,
Making spite we direct at others purely delicious.
How convenient! Now we can ignore the clamor
Between superego and passive inner stammer,
Even though it’s an abandonment of self to allow
Inner conflict to be executor of our know-how.

Will we ever realize that psychic astigmatisms
Sliver society into sharp shards, sorry isms,
(Yes, especially you, pandemic of narcissism),
That are the cutting edge of our spiked schisms.

Inwardly and outwardly, we hasten to lunacy,
Confusion, lies—all the spew in an importunacy
Of juvenile entitlement—frantic not to deal
With the child in us. Can you hear the squeal
Of your conscience rewriting tomorrow’s memoirs
When our heirs indict us clawing at their scars.
Daily tempests fail to douse wildfires of myopia
When escapees into denial are eyeless in dystopia.

Gosh, you’re all serene now, or is it a swoon?
Please, just blink! Nod! Escape your cocoon!
For sure, I’m not blaming you, each a sweet spirit
Still wheezin’, I grant you—and I’m glad to hear it.
Our refusal still to understand depth psychology
Is an innocent balk. No, an ego-enforced decree!
When was ego crowned? Not among the tribes
When Mother Earth and Father Sky were guides.
Did early civilization’s new complexities give chiefs
A power-lust spurting still in politicians’ briefs?

III

Because of not knowing our unknowns, we permit
The chaos clamoring inside. Who are we without it?
This disorder seals our exit from the womb of self,
Where psyche’s agitators squander inner wealth:
Superego, mocker of soul, the aggressive troll
That grips so commandingly its illegitimate role;
Id, presumptuous kid, primitive instinct that
Desires all it sees like an infantile aristocrat;
Unconscious ego, seat of sorrow, inner passivity,
Where yes and no crusade in dueling adversity.

These three intelligences manage as a triumvirate
To outwit our conscious ego, the self’s half-wit
That, ineptly representing us, is sorely unfit.

All together, they conjoin in one big IT.
Fearing change, we protect this holy snit;
We share its pain, this whirlwind with its imps,
Since our naiveté still dangles with the chimps.
IT not only torments us personally, but its tricks
Commix when, in incognito, it taints our politics.

How can you scale heights to become an authentic
Self when grandiose IT wants you for a bootlick.
How can we honor Gaia’s dignity when, in its coup,
Pandemonium IT annuls our dignity, even evicts you.
Inner chaos sentences us to lifetime captivity
When self-knowing overlooks unconscious passivity.

Democratic governments are our collective glory,
Capitols of assembly that parse the human story.
We’re the apex of cells that arose from scum
And begat the beat of lucidity upon a wood drum.
Our spirit gave the collective a way to evolve,
Forming assemblies of unity we sin to dissolve.

Now, should my offhand opinions agree with yours,
We can perhaps now, crucially, all foresee cures
For being mavens of malice and self-saboteurs.

—

Peter Michaelson’s depth psychology books skillfully explain the unconscious dynamics that cause misery and failure. Self-knowledge is the best antidote for emotional and behavioral healing. See a selection of Peter’s books available here .

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Zap the Blues with Deep Self-Knowledge

It’s time I take my summer break from writing, though I’ll still be providing psychotherapy sessions. In the meantime, there’s plenty here to read. About 270 free articles, written over the past 12 years, are available on a variety of psychological topics. My depth psychology books, written and published over the past 30 years, can also be ordered here.

At this site, I plunge into the psychological dynamics that produce unhappiness, failure, and self-defeat. I expose the psychological blind spots that sabotage us. Reading this content, however, is emotionally challenging. The deepest self-knowledge exposes how we unwittingly participate in generating unhappiness and self-defeat. The details of our psyche’s inner conflict are humbling to consider, though richly rewarding to learn and assimilate.

This self-knowledge upends our whole sense of self. Through psychological resistance, though, we cling to a familiar, limited, and often painful sense of self. This resistance often flares up when we’re reading the content presented here. Don’t let your resistance get the best of you.

I urge readers to make a brave effort to read and consider this challenging content. It addresses what we’re well advised to learn. No knowledge is more important and liberating than the revelations of how inner conflict can sabotage us. Believe in your destiny to discover what is true.

Start making sense of why you’re feeling anxious and depressed. Why aren’t you letting go of old hurts, regrets, and injustices? Why are you feeling so deprived, refused, helpless, criticized, and rejected? Believe in a life beyond these miseries. Check for yourself whether the best knowledge and solutions lie here.

Assimilating this knowledge can take as little as ten minutes a day of reading. You just have to stick with it. Use the search function on the right to find the emotional and behavioral topics that pertain directly to you.

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