Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 4

The Key to Emotional Self-Regulation

How much choice do we have at any given moment to feel good or okay instead of miserable? Quite a lot, it turns out, when we understand the nature of inner conflict.

We can zero in on a fuller understanding of lingering, painful emotions.

Most of us believe we’re basically good and decent. Yet often we can’t feel such attributes as a reassuring sense of self or as a source of pleasure. Even when we want what’s best for self and others, the emotional benefits of this decency can elude us, washed away in waves of guilt, shame, anxiety, regret, loneliness, and a sense of unworthiness.

Inner conflict is the culprit. Sad to say, most people are not conscious of the dynamics of this conflict. We oppress and punish ourself with inner divisiveness—and then we inflict the misery upon one another at family, community, and national levels. This makes us inept at emotional self-regulation.

Inner conflict is usually experienced as an impenetrable, often painful, hodge-podge of thoughts and feelings. This elusive content, often processed through futile overthinking, churns relentlessly inside us. (A sampling of the prevalence and perversity of inner conflict is found here.) We often attribute the unpleasant symptoms that arise from this conflict to the insensitivity or malice of others or to cruel fate. Or we blame ourself with unwarranted, punishing insinuations.

Inner conflict can sometimes be experienced semi-consciously along these lines: I deserve it—no, I don’t; I look okay, no, I don’t; I’m smart—no, I’m not; or, I’m trying my best—no, I’m not. Sometimes we sense a third-person voice: I deserve it—no, you don’t; I look okay, no, you don’t; I’m smart—no, you’re not; I’m trying my best—no, you’re not. The unpleasant symptoms of such conflict can persist for a lifetime, sometimes becoming increasingly painful.

In large measure, this conflict involves the clash between an aggressive drive and a passive defensiveness. We harbor in our psyche a primitive inner drive, the inner critic or superego, that regularly attacks our integrity and undermines our capacity to connect emotionally with a pleasing sense of goodness. The inner critic is a primitive, instinctive force or drive—a derivative of biological, instinctive aggression—that attacks us at our weakest point. This weak point is inner passivity, the unevolved intelligence that rules the no-man’s-land of the unconscious ego. Our consciousness has not claimed, on our behalf, this back country of the psyche.

In the compulsive defensiveness that arises from inner passivity, we generate lame excuses, irrational fears, and tall tales of victimization. We also experience, as symptoms of both inner passivity and inner conflict, reactive aggression, flailing indecision, and dispiriting procrastination. As mentioned, such behaviors and experiences are often accompanied by unproductive overthinking, which is itself a passivity loop through which we unwittingly generate a helpless sense of self.

Inner passivity is largely an emotional residue of childhood. Young children are inherently passive and fearful; as adults, we haven’t entirely freed ourselves from these old emotional associations. Freud spoke of “the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood” and of adult fear of the authority of the superego. Typically, we process the superego’s aggression and irrationality through the unconscious ego. Yet the unconscious ego is also irrational. Its fear and passivity make it a feeble stand-in for our better self. The defensive, unconscious ego acts as an enabler of the superego, and it partners with the superego in generating inner conflict.

Inner conflict is often experienced and processed through psychological defenses, and the unconscious ego is the mastermind of these defenses. Through these defenses, the unconscious ego protects the conscious ego’s determination to pose as the pillar of our identity, the decider of our sense of self. Our superego, meanwhile, covertly assumes the inner throne, acting as an overlord, while our best self languishes off in the wings.

Lacking sufficient awareness of this inner governance, people are more likely to be tainted by narcissism, thereby defensive, easily offended, self-centered, self-righteous, petty, and prone to self-defeat. Narcissism, stubbornness, and self-righteousness—all armors of psychological resistance—are the conscious ego’s added layer of protection against inner truth.

When we recognize inner passivity and its role in inner conflict, our misery and self-defeat start to make sense. A new intelligence fortifies our capacity for emotional self-regulation. Once the dynamics of inner conflict are exposed, we gradually release our identification with both the moody conscious ego and the instinctive unconscious ego. Essentially, we have been allowing our subordinate, unconscious ego to represent us against our inner critic’s irrational and self-abusive allegations. With insight, we flood that inner conflict with intelligence and rationality. Our heightened awareness neutralizes the intrusive inner critic, the emperor of irrationality. We no longer take seriously the inner critic, the illegitimate master of our personality. We no longer assimilate its punishing reproaches and derision. We don’t allow the unconscious ego to represent us against the inner critic. With this wakefulness, we overthrow the inner critic’s tyranny and establish an inner democracy governed by our best self.

Our success on this inner level depends, too, on our capacity to recognize that the passive side of inner conflict has an instinctive interest in remaining weak and subservient to a sadistic inner critic. I’ve written frequently about the compulsivity of emotional suffering. This claim that we’re unwitting participants in suffering and self-defeat insults our ego, producing much of our unconscious resistance to inner truth.

I’ve referred to this vexation as a deadly flaw of human nature, an obstacle to our evolvement. Occasionally, I’ve also referred to it as non-sexual, unconscious masochism, the tip of the iceberg of sexual masochism. Freud believed that we are afflicted in this manner, though humanity, appalled at the possibility, has generally rejected the idea.

A primitive, gruesome disorder of some kind must be contaminating our psyche. Wouldn’t it take something gross within us to produce the ongoing spectacles of bullying, hatred, greed, corruption, violence, torture, war, and self-destruction? Wouldn’t humanity’s dark side, the inciter of evil and self-destruction, likely have a clinical or psychological identity, an empirical DNA? Isn’t it conceivable this depravity could exist at inner conflict’s main intersection, where the superego’s sadistic aggression encounters the unconscious ego’s masochistic passivity. By itself, masochism is surely too flabby to embody evil’s hideousness. But together, superego versus unconscious ego, a spider-hole of evil capability is glimpsed, a nonsexual sadomasochism, often experienced as the self-abuse of incessant self-criticism, in the murky depths of our psyche.

Certainly, the idea is appalling. Yet consider: Despite the achievements of our species, we remain emotionally bound, through our conflicted psyche, to the animal kingdom’s main primitive dynamics, aggression and passivity, which are primary constituents of sadomasochism. This polarity underlies a primary characteristic of animal nature, the instinct, fate, or choice to dominate or be dominated. History is replete with examples of cults and mass movements where passive, neurotic people have engaged in self-defeating group behavior directed by cruel opportunists and malignant narcissists who are personifications of the superego. Only our species’ refinements, the ground gained by moral heroism, self-discovery, wisdom, and compassion, stand against anarchy and self-damage.

Politically and socially, the best among us still struggle to block the most psychologically unevolved humans from undermining civilization. In our psyche, we also struggle to prevent primitive dynamics from dissolving our emotional and behavioral self-regulation. These inner dynamics have a power of their own. It takes our best astuteness and the conscious humbling of the ego to override the compulsivity of suffering.

Many of us experience stress, anxiety, moodiness, and inner fear because we’re uncertain whether the defensiveness of our passive side will succeed, in its unstable way, in thwarting or neutralizing the scorn, mockery, and self-aggression emanating from our inner critic. The more our psyche’s pockets of inner passivity go undetected and inner conflict remains unconscious, the greater the danger we’ll be beaten down by this primitive self-aggression, becoming mental-health causalities and grist for the world’s unevolved aggressors. The prevalence of this dysfunction sustains the worldwide woe of neurosis.

How can we feel our goodness when we allow our inner critic, agent of our dark side, to attack our integrity and debase our character? How can we feel our essence when we allow inner passivity, a knock-kneed stand-in for our better self, to represent us on this crucial inner level while, symptomatically, we fail to stand up to worldly bullies. How can we protect each other when we aren’t protecting ourself from primitive self-aggression and our identification with inner passivity? Our worst impulses and behaviors are often reactive aggressions, malice directed at each other, that serve unconsciously as psychological defenses that deny and cover up our passive side.

Often, people can’t feel their intrinsic value and the pleasure it yields because they’re undermined by self-aggression and their appetite for self-punishment. The inner critic attacks us with irrational allegations and with claims that our human imperfections deserve self-punishment. Through inner passivity, we not only fail to protect ourselves from this self-abuse but we also lap it up as guilt, shame, moodiness, and depression.

Competence at emotional self-regulation is also undermined by lingering sensitivities to the first hurts of childhood: deprivation, refusal, helplessness, control, rejection, criticism, abandonment, and betrayal. Our unconscious willingness to recycle and replay these first hurts constitute emotional attachments that are, by and large, addictions to suffering. The first hurts usually arise from highly subjective infantile impressions of mistreatment, from the child’s inexperience and instinct to take personally perceived or actual slights or unkindness. Parents are not usually the cause of their children’s inner conflict. Unresolved first hurts can haunt adults in their encounters with daily life. Our lingering sensitivity to one or more of these negative emotions drags us toward the dark side, obstructing connection to our better self and clouding our life with impressions of injustice and oppression.

How can we feel pleasure when we’re especially sensitive to feeling criticized, rejected, and abandoned? How can we feel strong when we’re so ready to feel controlled or helpless? How can we feel good about ourself when we’re “into” feeling deprived, refused, and helpless?

Inner passivity, the inner critic, and psychological defenses are the main ingredients through which we experience and act out the first hurts. These hurts provide the “home field” on which to play the “game” of inner conflict, the game that generates negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. This unconscious game stands between us and the pleasurable knowing of our essence and goodness.

There’s a helpful way to see ourself in the light of this knowledge. Become more aware of how, in moments when pleasure ought to be available, you find yourself experiencing displeasure. You might become aware of initiating negative feelings simply through your imagination. You can imagine being bullied, disrespected, rejected, refused, controlled, criticized, or betrayed. Or you repeatedly conjure up memories of such occurrences. Or you use present-moment experiences to stoke up these disagreeable impressions. Or you mine misery from idle speculations on the future. The allure of suffering has sucked you in. Acquire self-knowledge, sharpen your awareness, and stop suffering needlessly.

People often feel that their dark side is stronger than them. No, it’s not, especially when you understand inner conflict’s basic refrain: Are you going to connect on a feeling level with your better self or are you going to passively, masochistically disconnect? Zero in on this moment of inner choice, and take responsibility for what you chose. When you pick up a stray negative thought or feeling, are you going to weakly “entertain” it, follow it down the rabbit hole, or will you resourcefully decline to do so? As you recognize your (and humanity’s) unconscious willingness to go on experiencing inner conflict and weakness, the intelligence that derives from exposing this inner truth begins to liberate you from needless suffering.

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Use the search function on this website to look up and read more about the first hurts, inner passivity, the inner critic, and inner conflict. Or assimilate vital knowledge from depth psychology by reading my books, available at Amazon .

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Seven Villains in a Sad Love Story

Multitudinous are the grisly details of how infidelity, jealousy, and verbal abuse can violate marital and relationship harmony. Love vaporizes when each partner’s underlying inner conflict is setting the relationship’s terms. Stories of relationship distress are treasure troves for novelists. Yet we can step out of the pages of a woeful narrative by addressing the underlying causes of dying romance.

Recognize the inner villains that undermine love.

The following seven villainous dynamics, all of them related, expose common forms of relationship self-sabotage. The first of these involves the repetition compulsion: People are unconsciously compelled to act out and recreate with each other, in self-defeating ways, their inner conflict and unresolved negative emotions left over from childhood.

An unconscious appetite for taking things the wrong way spills out of us to become conflict with our partner. Unwittingly, we make our partner the source of the hurts and slights we feel, rather than realizing that we are unwittingly using our partner to act out a painful repetition of the unresolved, original hurt.

Put more succinctly, we make our partner a participant in our unconscious compulsion to dramatize the pain and disunity that’s unresolved within us.

Unwittingly and instinctively, our partner tends to participate in the graceless dramatization. Our partner “takes the bait” and gives us—through confrontational, evasive, passive-aggressive, and defensive reactions—more opportunities to foster the negative experience we’re unconsciously willing to replay and recycle. This two-to-tango “hidden game” of opting for the negative experience paves the way for us to recycle unresolved hurts from our own childhood.

Most of us haven’t shaken off the first hurts of childhood, which are lingering sensitivities to feeling deprived, refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and betrayed. These sensitivities are infantile: They arise from our childish tendencies to be highly subjective and self-centered and to take personally, as actual mistreatment, the perceived or actual moods, behaviors, and inattention of parents and siblings.

In troubled relationships, we’re unwittingly recycling these old feelings. We’re prone to feeling offended and hurt by our partner’s attitudes or behaviors because of our own unhealthy sensitivity. The world’s abundance of neurotics is prone to replay or recycle—compulsively and painfully—the first hurts of childhood with a romantic partner, family members, friends, or the world at large. They act out with others what’s unresolved within themselves. Even those of us who aren’t neurotic will have, at times, neurotic reactions. We can still get triggered by others, even by their slightest missteps or when they’re entirely innocent of wrongdoing.

Let’s look now at transference, the second of the seven relationship villains. (It’s similar to the repetition compulsion of the first example.) Through the unconscious process of transference, we’re quick to be subjective rather than objective. We perceive, for instance, that our partner is being refusing, controlling, critical, or rejecting toward us. With transference at play in our psyche, we are, to some degree, unconsciously distorting reality to recycle our own unresolved, painful sensitivities.

As one example, people consciously want to feel independent and autonomous (a good thing), though unconsciously many are sensitive to feeling controlled and restricted (not so good). Consequently, when experiencing their partner, they’re prone to feeling controlled. Unconsciously, they’ll feel controlled even when their partner’s behavior is innocent of the attempt to control. Now they make their negative reaction the fault of their partner. They put themselves on alert to see, in their partner’s behavior, evidence of his or her attempt to take control. But what they take as “evidence” of control is often very scanty or just fabrications of their imagination.

In doing this, they experience negative, emotional symptoms or reactions such as feeling angered, disrespected, or devalued. This reaction covers up (or defends against) any recognition of how they’re unconsciously willing to recycle and replay feeling controlled (or any other of the unresolved first hurts from childhood).

Irrationality now envelops them, and it’s likely to be negatively charged. The more we absorb self-generated negative impressions, the more we become disturbers of the peace, in the sense that we spread this negativity around. We often feel entitled to inflict our reactive negativity upon our partner and others, though we do so as part of a cover-up that protects our fragile ego. Our neurosis and its accompanying irrationality induce us to interpret our partner’s words or behavior as insensitive or malicious and thereby the direct cause of our distress or misery.

Even if our partner is indeed being controlling, we will, when aware of our own emotional sensitivity to that impression, become more capable of making the problem amenable to sensible discussion and mutual understanding. When we see clearly our participation in relationship disharmony, we acquire more self-regulation and refrain from overreacting. We see that our partner is not the dispenser of our distress. Without blaming ourself for anything, we start to take responsibility for how easily we can misread situations and stumble unwittingly into pain, anger, and conflict.

The third villain on this list is sensitivity to feeling unsupported. It’s common for adults to feel that, as young children, they didn’t receive sufficient emotional support from their parents. Indeed, many parents are clueless or negligent, yet as adults we can, with insight and determination, avoid continuing to be willing unconsciously to replay and recycle the associated hurts. Our relationship doesn’t have to be a replay of what we experienced in childhood or what we saw our parents experiencing. We can resolve within ourself the conflict between consciously wanting to feel supported emotionally versus unconsciously expecting to be unsupported and thereby chronically on the lookout for “evidence” of being unsupported. When we recognize this inner conflict and keep the self-knowledge in focus, our intelligence will likely, over time, resolve the conflict.

Codependents act out being and feeling unsupported. While they give the appearance of being supporting of their partner, they typically find themselves attached to self-centered people who are too dysfunctional to be supporting of them. The fawning behavior of codependents is a magic gesture, an unconscious, psychological defense that reads, “I’m not looking to feel unsupported. Look at all the support I give my partner. That’s how I want to feel—supported!” This is just one of many ways we deceive ourselves.

Fourth on this list is the problem of injustice collecting. As the term implies, we can be eager collectors and dogged hoarders of the injustices we perceive to have been inflicted upon us. Ensnared in the irrationality that permeates inner conflict, we’re convinced our partner is the source of our negative reactions. With resentment and animosity, we hold our partner responsible, conveniently overlooking our unconscious willingness to experience some rendition of victimization.

Again, the trouble starts in childhood. Some children accept the restrictions imposed on them by parents and take their necessary socialization in stride. Other children, fated to become neurotic, will create the impression that mother and father, through “evidence” of their imperfections, their clumsy application of authority, or simply in their unwillingness to cater to the child, are cruel, refusing, and unjust. The child generates impressions of injustice through self-centered misinterpretations of parental behaviors.

A child can also misinterpret as oppression and injustice the need for parents to be in command of decisions made in the best interests of the child. Later as an adult, a person can interpret in a similar manner a partner’s evenhanded or even well-intentioned words and behaviors—as oppressive or unfair. This person’s oversensitivity makes it difficult if not impossible to be a role model of benevolent authority, thereby undermining his or her children’s capacity to learn appropriate assertiveness and command. Such parents, disconnected from their better self, aren’t accessing a sense of benevolent authority.

The fifth villain of inner discord makes its appearance when one or both partners have a judgmental, critical mentality. Such individuals likely had a parent or sibling who inflicted this mentality on family members. Blaming others, though, is unhelpful: We’re dealing here, at this juncture of evolution, with the flaws of human nature and our stage of consciousness. The compulsion to be critical stems largely from the liberties taken by our primitive inner critic and by our dearth of awareness of inner passivity. A person afflicted with a stern inner critic is inwardly passive to that self-aggression, which is a condition of inner conflict that frequently induces people to impose that punishing, critical mentality on others.

Meanwhile, the partner on the receiving end of the other partner’s critical mentality is likely, as a child, to have identified with the experience of a parent who was passively receptive to inner criticism as well as criticism from others. As an adult, this partner is now likely to continue to endure chronic criticism from the other partner, often reacting passive-aggressively and being moody, even as resentment is building to a breaking point.

A judgmental mentality is often experienced in one’s stubborn annoyance with trifles. This happens when we quickly become irritated by a partner’s particular mannerisms, appearance, or harmless idiosyncrasies. Everyone has their quirks, and we won’t get triggered by them when we’re healthy enough emotionally. The trifle triggers us because it reflects back on us and our own inner conflict. On an inner level, we’re often on the receiving end of mockery and scorn from our inner critic. Sometimes the sense of wrongdoing goes back to childhood themes and circumstances. A partner’s trifling mannerisms or idiosyncrasies trigger in us an emotional association from childhood. We feel once again the criticism or disapproval that was once directed at us—from parents, siblings, or our own inner critic—over what we perceived as a trifling matter. In that moment when we pounce on our partner for the trifle, we’re identifying with our partner’s feelings as the recipient of the disapproval.

At such moments, we can resonate emotionally with how mother or father would or might have disapproved of us for some misstep we considered to be of minor significance. “No,” we say in our unconscious defense, “I don’t want to feel that disapproval. My annoyance at my partner (for the trifle) is proof that I hate that feeling.”

Sixth on the list is the common affliction, fear of intimacy. This anxiety or fear is based on one’s unconscious tendency, due to inner conflict, to anticipate, should greater intimacy occur, the prospect of being controlled, rejected, betrayed, or abandoned. We feel that intimacy makes us more at risk of experiencing these negative emotions in an especially painful manner. We feel, in other words, that the more we allow ourself to love our partner, the greater the danger we will be devastated emotionally by what we unconsciously anticipate from our partner: control, rejection, betrayal, or abandonment (from among the first hurts).

Fear of intimacy derives from our lingering emotional attachment to what we fear consciously (but are unconsciously willing to recycle and endure), namely one or more of the first hurts that remain unresolved in our psyche.

This predicament can be understood in terms of inner conflict. As an example, we want consciously to feel supported and loved, yet unconsciously many of us anticipate, fear, and dwell upon the prospect of being controlled, rejected, betrayed, or abandoned. Back and forth we go between desiring freedom from these hurts (and producing unconscious defenses that attest to that desire) while concurrently and compulsively replaying the hurts through our memories, expectations, and experiences.

Finally, the seventh dynamic or villainy we harbor involves the unconscious tendency of many people to say and do things that leave them feeling more disconnected from one another. In doing this, they are, at a deeper level, acting out the degree and manner in which they each feel disconnected from their own better self.

This dynamic makes it extremely difficult for couples to develop intimacy. Essentially, each partner is lacking intimacy with his or her own self. There’s a gap in consciousness, an emotional disconnect, from one’s better self. Often, people are simply and desperately protecting an ego-ideal. They lack deeper belief and trust in the worthiness of self, and they’re burdened with self-doubt. Inner conflict, in the form of unresolved emotional attachments to the first hurts, is blocking them from accessing their better self, rendering them unable to consistently value the essence of their partner.

Each partner tends to experience much of this disconnection through the other partner, “seeing” the other as unavailable, insensitive, and uncaring. When couples do this with each other, the effect undermines the love for the other and acceptance of the self. The painful impression is that one’s partner is unavailable. Yet again, however, each partner is unconsciously being used by the other as a kind of second self to replay and recycle one’s identification with a flawed, unchangeable sense of self.

In being aware of these seven villains in relationship harmony, a couple can protect each other from needless suffering. Each sees the other with new sympathy, recognizing their common plight in psychological dysfunction and naiveté. Each partner can support the other as together, in testament to their love, they overcome the resistance to exploring their underlying psychology.

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Much more insight on this subject is provided in the three relationship books of Sandra Michaelson (1944-1999).

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The Latest Pandemic: Feeling Overwhelmed

No surprise that people are emotionally challenged by the staggering advances of modern technology, the economy’s abrupt U-turns, and the disruptions of old established ways. We’re future-shock fast-forwarding, hoping the zeitgeist can survive the frenzy.

Inner conflict lurks behind feelings of being overwhelmed.

How are you, dear reader, holding up? Are you feeling confused, anxious, or overwhelmed? Are you slipping into cynicism, hopelessness, or despair? The times are perilous, yet being overwhelmed by events and circumstances derives from an emotional weakness we can learn to overcome.

Many people—perhaps most of us—can feel our emotional resilience buckling at times. It’s a passive feeling, the sense of being impaired, stressed, or exhausted to some degree by life’s difficult moments and challenging circumstances. We find ourselves befuddled, undecided, and acting incompetently, while pulled in all directions.

People struggling emotionally often claim their problems stem from an overwhelming world rather than their own psychological frailty. They’re fooling themselves. Sure, we’re facing climate catastrophe, and people are dealing with money worries, stressful jobs, relationship disharmony, and family dysfunction. Yet it’s inner conflict, a congenital infirmity of human nature, that most often instigates the undermining sense of being overwhelmed.

Just about everyone vacillates between wanting to feel strong while succumbing to feelings of weakness. This happens when we struggle with cravings for sugar, alcohol, or drugs. It happens when we decline to address deteriorating situations at home, in the workplace, or the nation. This weakness can be fatal: It’s at play in our passive reaction to the threats of climate change.

Inner conflict compels us to experience mental and emotional weakness and misery. Monitor your thoughts and feelings to get a sense of this. For instance, if you harbor resentment toward certain people because they’ve apparently done you an injustice, you’re giving them the power to continue to disturb your peace of mind. They’re not your problem. Your problem is your unconscious willingness to go on feeling annoyed or hurt by something they might have done days, weeks, months, or years ago. Here you’re entangled in inner conflict. You want to be strong, yet you’re also enticed to cozy up to lingering self-doubt and feelings of being disrespected, helpless, victimized, and oppressed. Back and forth you go between wanting to feel strong versus generating experiences of feeling weak, defeated, or victimized. Now, you’re knowing and experiencing yourself through inner conflict.

I have many examples here of inner conflict. They’re intended to show the broad scope of such conflict and how it contributes to feeling overwhelmed. Hopefully, these examples are not so plentiful as to, uh, overwhelm readers.

We can easily feel overwhelmed by choices and decisions involving food, diet, exercise, career, relationships, and social or political involvement. Indecision, procrastination, ambivalence, and faltering self-regulation are fraught with inner conflict and the sense of being overwhelmed. When we get caught up in a never-enough-time feeling, or find ourselves rushing to get somewhere, we can be unwittingly intensifying the feeling of being helpless and overwhelmed.

When we’re passive to the processes of our mind—particularly to incessant and negative inner chatter—we can feel overwhelmed by our mind’s “refusal” to come to heel. An anxiety or panic attack—or chronic fearfulness—are other intense feelings of being conflicted, disconnected, and overwhelmed. Some people are overwhelmed by guilt and shame.

Gambling casinos take advantage of this inherent weakness; they want their “patrons” to operate in a passive trance. Authoritarian governments depend, of course, on docile people. Anti-abortion activists are driven in part by an unconscious compulsion to impose a passive acquiescence upon women. Driving this compulsion is their unconscious willingness, as they identify with the plight of tethered women, to resonate deep in their own psyche with compliance and submissiveness.

Minorities and the poor can feel overwhelmed by their exploitation in labor, housing, and financial markets. Their psychological weakness brings out the worst in themselves and in their oppressors. The oppressors can feel compelled to maintain the oppression, with its accompanying sense of superiority, to cover up or deny the inherent weakness and self-doubt at the core of their own inner conflict.

People who gravitate to political extremes of the Left or Right can be using their ideological positions as forms of stubbornness or resistance. Their grievance-filled ideologies are an illusion of power that covers up the weakness built into underlying inner conflict. They adopt their dogma unconsciously, to “protect” them from what their psychological resistance determines to be an overwhelming challenge: becoming less conflicted, thereby wiser and more balanced. Meanwhile, exhibitionistic politicians on the political fringes are swept up in self-importance, which is their unconscious reaction to inner weakness. Determined to pose as strong and forceful, they’re in fact overwhelmed by their own narcissism and rendered stupid by it.

We can feel conflicted and overwhelmed trying to separate truth from falsehood. Many people have latched on to irrational beliefs (e.g., the federal government staged 9/11; the QAnon nonsense) because such beliefs provide them with a stubborn certainty that quells the anxiety arising from their inner-conflict induced failure to emotionally assimilate complexity, chaos, and scary realities.

Participation in wanton mob behavior is fueled by an overwhelming thrill of being on the cutting edge of “righteous” power. The thrill is a defense, a coverup and unhealthy compensation for a passive disconnect from one’s better self. The imposter syndrome is also a symptom of this weak disconnect from self. Such people are likely to be “star-struck” on meeting a celebrity, which is their instantaneous experience of being disconnected and overwhelmed.

Some people speculate in a worrisome way about the future. They’re unwittingly using the future and its uncertainty to feel more anxious and thereby more overwhelmed in the present. Even sensible goal-setting, when accompanied by a conviction that happiness depends on future developments, can be employed unwittingly to feel overwhelmingly helpless to having any influence on the passage of time.

The hidden motivation in many of our activities—involving sports, business, wealth accumulation, social climbing—can be propelled in part by the felt need to create a lifestyle into which we can comfortably frame our existence and quell our anxious interface with the unknown. People choose distractions or zoning-out to the “overwhelming” implications of their existence, adopting a mentality that frames life around safety, vindication, and the illusions spawned by ego-identification.

We can also, in resistance to feeling overwhelmed by the challenge of making friends, hide out in loneliness. Some people are afraid of intimacy because love feels too overwhelming; they fear they’ll lose themselves in the intensity of it. Young adults sometimes continue living with their parents because the outside world feels too overwhelming. Other adults don’t leave their familiar surroundings for more expansive opportunities in urban areas because the idea of doing so feels overwhelming.

As other examples, people become hypochondriacs as a result of being unconsciously prepared to feel, through their physical ailments and discomforts, helpless and passively overwhelmed by the disturbances of their body. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the aftereffect of having been powerfully overwhelmed by an event or series of events.

Feeling oneself to be weak—to a point where it’s experienced as intrinsic to one’s self—stems from the underlying weakness of inner passivity. This weakness, a significant ingredient in inner conflict, is a biological leftover from the many years we lived, as children, in relative helplessness and dependency. The passivity even involves a compulsion within us—a masochistic dalliance with suffering—to linger and become stuck in feelings associated with a lack of resilience, purpose, and direction. In worst cases, people are overwhelmed with the intensity of their self-doubt, self-rejection, and even self-hatred, leading to depression and suicide.

The uptick in adolescent and teenage sadness is understandable in this context. Studies of young people show a significant correlation between time spent on social media and mood disorders. Social media introduce vast new dimensions, complexities, and modes of existence into the lives of the young as they struggle to know and orient themselves. Feeling like voyeurs, not actors, in the drama of life, their consciousness is overwhelmed. As their world becomes more virtual, less real, they feel control slipping away, along with self-regulation. This doesn’t mean social media is dangerous in itself. It means, instead, that we need to teach young people the basics of inner conflict to help us all become stronger emotionally.

Some students feel overwhelmed by the breadth of the knowledge they’re required to learn. They easily slip into painful, self-defeating procrastination. Through inner passivity, they’re inclined to experience their studies through self-doubt and weakness. When stronger and less passive, they’re able to accumulate the knowledge enjoyably, bit by bit, day by day, with the self-assurance of success.

Sometimes the overwhelmed feeling is a product of self-oppression, when individuals, through inner passivity, allow their inner critic to assume a domineering stance that holds them accountable and obliges them to answer to its arbitrary, despotic authority. You feel like the pawn of inner directives.

Ignorance of our psyche’s inner dynamics is dangerous. Artificial intelligence, which some are calling humanity’s greatest invention, is poised to intrude forcefully into our ways of doing things. Will we be overwhelmed by the uncanniness of this technology and induced into more passivity, or will our intelligence, discernment, and wisdom keep us ahead of the game? A.I. development is driven, in part, by the profit motive and egotistic fervor. Has our psychological know-nothingism and hidden masochism embraced capitalism’s animal spirits for the secret purpose of overwhelming ourselves to death?

Greater wisdom is accessed through psychological self-knowledge, especially in regards to the existence and dynamics of inner conflict and its main components: inner passivity, the inner critic, psychological defenses, and neurotic sensitivities to the first hurts of childhood (feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned.) The means to liberate ourselves from this psychological mayhem is laid out coherently in the articles on this website and in my books.

It might help to make a list of the experiences that feel overwhelming to you. Look at the list and try to feel the part of you that gives each item its power to overwhelm you. Recognize that the passive feeling is a repressed, limited identification that operates upon us like an emotional addiction. This awareness can help you feel more in charge of your daily experiences. The passive feeling is a psychological anomaly, not some hard-wired aspect of you. With this self-knowledge, your intelligence can override inner passivity, zap the inner critic, and eradicate inner conflict.

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Here’s an earlier post on this subject I wrote on this website almost 11 years ago.

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The Blindness of the Species

The surging mental-health distress among children and adults attests to the urgency of demystifying the human psyche. We blind ourselves—through a false self, naïve ego-ideal, and vainglorious self-image—to the inner dynamics in our psyche. We are not recognizing how we become our own worst enemy.

Can we see what we don’t want to see?

An article on our children’s mental health, published last year on the Atlantic magazine’s website, begins with these chilling words: “The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis.” Titled, “Why American Teens Are So Sad,” the article cites findings that 44 percent of American high-school students report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 26 percent in 2009.

The Atlantic has a deserved reputation for quality journalism; even so, it fails in this important article to acknowledge or consider the deeper aspects of psychological dysfunction. This lack of awareness is pandemic. The article’s shallowness is the blindness of the species.

Four forces are driving the mental-health crisis, says the article: (1) social-media use, (2) a sociality decline, (3) a stressful world, and (4) modern parenting strategies. Yes, these four forces do affect young people, yet the greater influence, as I argue here, is unrecognized inner conflict, which goes unmentioned in the article.

Discussing the first of these forces, the effect of social-media use, the Atlantic article says that adolescents and teenagers, girls in particular, “are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd.” They feel compelled to log on to websites such as Instagram even though the content makes them feel worse. Social media “seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity.” Hence, social media fuel anxiety, the article deduces, and make it harder for young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.

This is all true, but it’s simplistic and not particularly helpful. Long before Instagram, young people have had to deal with a conflicted sense of self. Every young person is challenged with complicated inner conflicts that are both biologically and psychologically rooted. These include wanting to be brave but resonating emotionally with feeling fearful, wanting to be strong but resonating with feeling weak, wanting to be safe but persistently feeling endangered, wanting to be attractive but feeling ugly, wanting to be loved but feeling unloved, wanting pleasure but mysteriously feeling much displeasure, wanting freedom but feeling oppressed, wanting certain objects but feeling refused, and wanting to be morally right but feeling rebelliously wrong.

These inner conflicts are driven by the unconscious propensity to continue to experience within us whatever issues are emotionally unresolved. Lacking awareness of these conflicts and their emotional and cognitive effects, young people are likely to experience negative emotions, self-doubt, incessant inner chatter, and intellectual impairment. A social medium such as Instagram is only making imperative our need to become more conscious.

Young people are sensitive to being judged because, like adults, they can harbor self-doubt and absorb self-criticism. A person can be highly self-critical, an emotional state driven by one’s inner critic. The inner critic is a primitive, instinctive drive, derived from biological aggression, that has turned inward against the self. To the psychologically naïve, these inner attacks against one’s integrity and character can feel legitimate or normal, as if the person is indeed deserving of such fault-finding and inner punishment. This punishment is often experienced as guilt, shame, self-pity, sadness, and depression.

In other words, the lack of self-regard experienced by both young people and adults is largely a measure of the degree to which people passively soak up irrational allegations from their inner critic. Unwittingly, we become pin-cushions for self-punishment. Hence, the deeper question becomes: Why do human beings allow themselves to be targets of the inner critic’s self-aggression?

We’re not seeing two key weaknesses or flaws in our psyche. While we often recognize the inner critic, we’re largely ignorant of the existence and nature of inner passivity and inner conflict. Inner passivity is the sensibility of our unconscious ego, and the unconscious ego is the target of the inner critic. Through inner passivity, our best interests are represented weakly and inadequately. With more consciousness, we can overcome our resistance and upgrade this unevolved aspect of human nature.

Humanity’s primary inner conflict—between the inner critic’s aggressiveness and inner passivity’s weakness and defensiveness—is persistently played out in our psyche. With neurosis, the conflict becomes painfully intense. Hundreds of distressful emotional and behavioral symptoms arise from this flaw in human nature.

The inner critic is a drive, a primitive, aggressive force of nature, while inner passivity is the defensive mentality of our unconscious, subordinate ego. When insight is lacking, an unremitting inner polarity of aggression versus passivity compels us to experience negative emotions—particularly refusal, deprival, helplessness, criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment—as our inner conflict is being irrationally arbitrated beyond our awareness.

Young people using social media are convinced consciously that they’re looking for acceptance and respect. Unconsciously, however, they’re playing the hurtful game of looking for clues or evidence that they’re not being accepted and respected. In this sense, social media and smartphones can serve as powerful mediums that facilitate their unconscious compulsion to act out inner conflict such as wanting respect while resonating emotionally with feeling disrespected.

Social media and smartphones don’t cause the problem. They’re just efficient tools with which to experience and act out inner conflict. As people expose inner conflict, they develop an insightful intelligence that prevents much suffering.

Online, young people can be highly sensitive to any implications that they’re being ignored or disrespected. Unconsciously, though, they’re apt to go looking for such “evidence.” As they readily react to perceived slights, they can feel (mixed in often with anger or self-pity) the hurt of feeling disliked, abandoned, betrayed, or unworthy. They’re not seeing that their psyche works in such a way as to thwart the tenets of common sense and to pursue unconsciously the intensification of inner conflict with its accompanying negative emotions.

—

The decline of sociality is the second of the four forces mentioned in the Atlantic article. In this telling, the pandemic is taken into account, and sadness and depression are seen as symptoms of social isolation. The article says that “more aloneness (including from heavy smartphone use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might have combined to push up sadness among teenagers who need sociality to protect them from the pressures of a stressful world.”

Again, this assessment is too shallow. Yes, sociality is important, yet just as important is our own psychological ability to meet the emotional challenge of living in a stressful world. (Climate change alone will be making life more stressful.) Indeed, the Covid pandemic challenged our emotional resilience and, in many cases, brought on a heavy sadness. Of course, loneliness is going to be experienced during a pandemic lockdown. Yet many of us wouldn’t experience aloneness with such misery if we were more aware of the primitive forces in our psyche that disconnect us emotionally from our better self. Can this depth psychology be taught to teenagers? Absolutely!

This disconnect from one’s better self is a form of self-abandonment, and abandonment is an emotional sensitivity going back to childhood. That’s when the notion that our parents might ever leave or abandon us could produce the overwhelming dread of helplessness. This dread, enmeshed in our sense of self, lingers in our psyche. The conflict is: “Can I feel strong or will I collapse into helplessness?” The greatest pain of loneliness is probably the disconnect from self with its underlying self-abandonment.

People can feel lonely and isolated even in normal times. Acute loneliness can arise out of the inner conflict between wanting to feel connected and loved versus being inclined unconsciously to indulge in unresolved emotional memories of feeling rejected, abandoned, and unloved. The more we feel disconnected from our better self, the more we disconnect from others, and the lonelier we feel.

Again, this all speaks to inner conflict and inner passivity. In acute loneliness, we’re exacerbating what we can so easily feel in ourselves: the disconnection and alienation induced by inner conflict. At this point, unhealthy symptoms arise, including sadness, apathy, boredom, loneliness, guilt, shame, cynicism, procrastination, and self-criticism.

As the inner critic presides tyrannically over our inner life, and inner passivity enables this arrangement, teenagers more easily feel separation from self and others. The solution here is to see their plight in terms of inner conflict. They can learn to recognize their inner critic and inner passivity and sense their dueling voices. In terms of consciousness, they move from the dark into the light. The feeling is, Now that I recognize this inner dynamic, I realize I don’t have to be at its mercy. I can be stronger than this self-harming unconscious programming.

—

Our stressful world is the third of the four forces identified in the Atlantic article. Certainly, with climate change, war in Europe, and nuclear-weapons proliferation, our world has become more unstable and dangerous. “We cannot rule out the possibility,” the article says, “that teens are sad about the world, not only because the world contains sadness, but also because young people have 24/7 access to sites that are constantly telling them they should be depressed about it.”

Websites that tell young people they “should be depressed” about the world are framing inner experience from the passive side of the psyche. The producers of such websites are unconsciously trying to drag their visitors down to their level of passivity, with its undercurrents of cynicism, helplessness, and despair. Yes, if we are too passive on an inner level, we’ll feel very much at the mercy of flailing political leaders and grim world events. Falling into helplessness further enables worst-case outcomes.

Though the news of the world is grim, it’s important we stay strong, which includes the ability to stay informed without being overwhelmed by all the bad news. When we’re not inwardly weakened by unrecognized inner conflict, we can appreciate the seriousness of the world’s plight at the same time that we raise or sublimate our energy into activities or reforms that have us enjoying the sense of being alive and functioning at our best.

For young people, a likely source of stress and sadness is the spectacle of their parents and other adults failing not only to grapple with climate change but declining to register it as a bigger concern than, say, the price of gasoline. As many young people must perceive it, their role models have collapsed into morbid passivity. Without insight, they’re in danger of following their parents into this paralysis.

—

The fourth force identified by the Atlantic concerns parenting strategies. The article claims that higher income parents, in particular, are putting too much stress on their children to prepare for college. The implication is that parents are displacing their own anxiety onto their kids.

The article also notes that children now are less likely to get summer jobs and do chores, conceivably making them less able to tolerate discomfort and more likely to feel incompetent. A parent is more likely to protect children from challenging situations, the article also says, making them “more likely to experience severe anxiety as teenagers.”

Where does this parental anxiety come from? Parents are oblivious to the source of it. In large measure, anxiety is a byproduct of inner conflict. As one example, the experience is: “Will I be strong and succeed, or will I be weak and fail.” With inner conflict, the prospect of failure becomes an emotional siren-call—and anxiety intensifies. Then, through projection, parents believe wrongly that the anxiety they feel arises from their “legitimate” concern about the presumed weakness in their children. The parents fixate on the prospect of failure and experience their children through their own self-doubt. Obliviously, they’re dumping their own garbage onto their children.

They feel compelled to cater to (or be critical of) the weakness they see or imagine in their children, thereby maintaining that weakness within themselves and making it more likely their children will inherit it from them. Where is the parent training that explains and reforms this dysfunction?

Even with anxious parents, many teenagers can handle the challenge of being encouraged to excel. Their inner conflict is less intense, enabling them to tap into the pleasure and power of learning and engaging. Other young people are more conflicted, and the “severe anxiety” they experience is likely to be felt through a variety of circumstances, not just from parental pressure to excel at school.

Accommodative parents are reluctant to practice a stronger style of parenting, one in which they trust in the benevolence of their authority. In childhood, many of them experienced their parents’ authority subjectively, as rigid, arbitrary, and oppressive. Now, as parents, they’re unable to exercise a wise, benevolent authority because they’re not reconciling authority with benevolence. Their own passivity makes benign power unavailable to them. Contentious negotiation or reactive anger are all they might feel in the way of authority. They’re emotionally blocked from exercising authority because they imagine it will be experienced by their children as somehow inappropriate or even abusive.

When the light of depth psychology dissolves our blindness, we can cultivate strength in ourselves and in our children. The best self-knowledge makes this reform more likely.

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Why Americans Are So Wretchedly Divided

Our emotional weak link, the inner conflict lurking covertly in our psyche, turns us against ourself and each other. We create enemies of fellow citizens to the degree that we’re inwardly conflicted.

With inner conflict, we needlessly create enemies.

Whether liberal or conservative, the political and cultural viewpoints we embrace, when spitefully expressed, are largely emotional reactions to inner conflict in one’s psyche.

Unfortunately, people are largely blind to this inner dysfunction and its operating principles. As a result, we’re easily swamped by the negative and self-defeating reactions that arise from this inner turmoil. Now, with the rise of modern complexity and dysfunction adding to the mix, decency and civility are collapsing.

To address the problem, we must understand inner conflict and see it operating in ourself. Here is the essence of five basic inner conflicts: (1) while we do want consciously to feel our value, we can be determined unconsciously to recycle and replay old emotional impressions of being unworthy; (2) though consciously wanting to feel emotionally strong, we can have unresolved attachments to memories and impressions of being weak, needy, and fearful; (3) while wanting to feel our goodness, we can be convinced emotionally of our wrongdoing or sinfulness; (4) though wanting to feel free, we can be determined emotionally to experience ourselves through impressions of being controlled and oppressed; (5) while yearning for success, we can unconsciously be resonating with feeling like a failure.

Each of these five examples reveals the underlying emotional weakness that characterizes inner conflict: An unconscious, psychological tendency to identify with a weak, passive sense of self. This inner passivity is an emotional residue of childhood; it is not, in any way, our fault. The more we’re encumbered by it, though, the more likely we are to be at our weakest or worst.

At our weakest, we unconsciously go looking for impressions of being victimized, oppressed, and disrespected—and then strike back with self-righteous indignation. We create these misleading impressions of victimization and oppression either as they relate directly to us or through our identification with what we see or imagine others are experiencing.

Human beings have slowly, over many millennia, become more conscious. As rationality advanced, our psyche became less primitive and reactive. In this process, the world’s democracies have become the frontlines for our evolving intelligence and wisdom. Yet still, we’re just moving along a spectrum of self-development that stretches into the far unknown.

Many adults are neurotic, which means they have insufficiently broken free from the irrationalities, fears, magical thinking, and emotional sensitivities of childhood. Even so-called normal people can be challenged by inner turmoil, resulting in bouts of moodiness, selfishness, impatience, boredom, greed, and incompetence.

With neurosis, many people slip into a self-pitying victim mode rather than embark on the brave road of taking responsibility for the quality of their experience. We can’t count on the world to support or value us. Such an approach is too passive. It’s better to learn to value ourself and, despite the injustices we’re likely to encounter, manifest this value in our engagement with the world.

There are, of course, people who have truly been oppressed and victimized. Yet even so, the rule still applies: Becoming stronger within oneself by recognizing and overcoming the elements of inner conflict produces, over time, inner freedom and social progress.

The challenge of inner conflict is huge just in itself. Now, however, modern life is on our doorstep with its unsettling, overwhelming effects. This new upheaval puts great strain on our conflicted psyche, leading to greater irrationality, negativity, cynicism, blaming, selfishness, tribalism, and overall dissension.

Not only do we have a pandemic to integrate emotionally, we also have the impacts of domestic and world terrorism, sex and gender reframing, social media disinformation, the flood of human migration, the spectacle of accelerating species extinctions, the question of what to teach our children, the imperative for racial equality, growing wealth disparity, a tense abortion standoff, political ineptitude, and grievance-filled slants on news and commentary.

The probable number-one emotional disrupter is climate change. Many of us who aren’t stone-cold deniers are experiencing, to some degree, a helpless morbidity in the face of climate catastrophe, especially as we observe our leaders’ ineptitude. This underlying helplessness is often largely repressed, which means the sense of impotence and hopelessness can weigh even more heavily upon us. Some people regress emotionally, becoming childlike in their passivity. Or they become guilt-ridden, cynical, and fatalistic, which are more symptoms of underlying passivity. Or they react to their sense of helplessness with misplaced anger, bitterness, and malice.

The second most significant disrupter of emotional stability might be the pervasiveness of grievance-filled news and commentary. A U.S. government fairness doctrine, abandoned in 1987, had required broadcasters to present differing viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance. Following abandonment of the doctrine, broadcasters quickly found mass audiences in hate-filled content that targeted rival ideologies and values. This sinister perspective, broadcast to millions of naïve listeners, is emotionally appealing to them because it “justifies” blaming others for their own psychological weakness. Persuaded by skilled, angry influencers, people are prepared to believe the worst about others, just as they do about themselves through their unconscious ego’s passive receptivity to the self-aggression of their inner critic (superego).

It’s understandable now that many are feeling disconnected, disempowered, and overwhelmed. The timeworn political slogan, “Make America Great Again” served as a reminder of decades past when the psyche supposedly felt more protected by traditions, custom, and a slower pace of change. Now, with all the hurly-burly, the failure to recognize and deal with our inner weakness makes us especially impressionable, more indifferent to truth, more disposed to tribal loyalty, populist frenzy, and conspiracy theories.

As these disruptions weigh upon us, many people can unconsciously deny or cover up their inner weakness by producing visualizations or fantasies in which they’re reacting forcefully or violently. Usually, these impulses of reactive aggression are contained, meaning limited to one’s thoughts and imagination. Even when contained, however, these negative emotions tempt people to vote in elections with spiteful or nihilistic intent, or to identify with the most irrational, bellicose politicians, or to be unwilling to make their best effort in workplace and social interactions.

Often, this reactive aggression is expressed verbally in chronic complaining, but it can also emerge as abusive and violent behavior. Even when contained within oneself, it contaminates one’s personality, contributing, for instance, to the indifference, loneliness, and self-pity that downgrade the quality of one’s life.

The anger, scorn, and bitterness we extend to others serve as psychological defenses that cover up and deny our entanglement in inner conflict. Instinctively, we inflict belligerent fault-finding on others to cover up our unconscious allegiance to a limited, conflicted sense of self. In targeting others, we’re acting out an unwillingness to reveal, especially to ourself, the repressed impressions of self-doubt, inadequacy, and weakness with which, deep down, we emotionally resonate and identify.

Racism, bigotry, and misogyny—all toxic to national aspirations—are products of inner conflict. These attitudes and behaviors arise among people who, because of inner conflict, are unable to recognize and appreciate their intrinsic value. While consciously they may want to feel good and worthy, they’re compelled unconsciously to resonate emotionally with self-criticism, self-rejection, and a sense of unworthiness. Through an unconscious process called projection, they attribute this sense of unworthiness to others, thereby denying inner truth.

Their unconscious self-deception adamantly claims, “They’re the unworthy ones, not me!” They sacrifice others as scapegoats upon whom they can project their own deep identification with unworthiness, all the while perversely taking on needless suffering through their hidden, vicarious identification with those they are insulting or degrading.

What’s the remedy for such folly? We need to make conscious, as much as possible, the conflicted dynamics of our emotional life. These dynamics tend to be self-damaging when our conscious oversight is lacking. We can recognize and resolve inner conflict by noting, objectively and perceptively, the content of our mind. This self-reflection includes recognition of the self-deceptions produced by our unconscious defenses.

As a passive reaction to modern life, feeling overwhelmed produces a variety of negative reactions within us. We can, for instance, experience a lot of anger, in part because chronic anger, as reactive aggression, is the only “strength” that our passivity and self-doubt allow us to feel. Such anger, as mentioned, is a psychological defense (employed unconsciously to protect our identification with our ego) that covers up our stubborn allegiance to a superficial, unevolved sense of self.

Chronic anger also covers up, as a defense, an unconscious readiness to feel overlooked and disrespected. With inner conflict, we’re likely to resonate emotionally with feeling disrespected because we’re kissing cousins to a despised disowned part of us. To protect an ego-ideal, we are determined to repress this weakness and hide it from ourselves. However, when our ego-ideal goes unchallenged by deep self-knowledge, narcissism arises and with it a host of ways we become insensitive and hostile to others.

Chronic anger directed at others or at the world in general is a misleading, self-defeating form of aggression. This misleading aggression can feel intoxicatingly powerful, righteous, and gratifying. This gratification heightens the conviction that we’re being strong, not weak. Again, the inner weakness we’re covering up is our unconscious readiness to experience ourselves, repeatedly and compulsively, as unworthy, insignificant, helpless, and overwhelmed.

The crisis of homeless is, in part, a consequence of the many people who, overwhelmed by modern life, have collapsed into helplessness. As another example, the conspiracy theories that arose following 9/11, notably the contention that the U.S. government was behind the attacks, were embraced by people who, psychologically overwhelmed by the event, collapsed into irrationality. The “truth” they stubbornly embraced felt reassuring, grounded in reality. Being “in the know” produced their illusion of power.

Stubborn, angry self-righteousness is a mentality common to both conservatives and liberals. This mentality covers up our fragile ego’s fear of being wrong, insignificant, or powerless. The most belligerently aggressive among us are likely to be militantly resistant to psychological insight. They shun opportunities to look inward to examine the source of their misery or belligerence. Their belligerence merges with self-righteousness, and they cling to a belief or set of beliefs not for truth’s sake but because the fervor of their beliefs feels, as a convincing denial of inner weakness, so gratifying and true. It’s all a protection-racket designed instinctively to make their ego, both the conscious and unconscious elements of it, impervious to higher truth.

Another unhealthy reaction to inner conflict is the childish sense of entitlement (“I’m not unworthy—I deserve whatever I want”), which provides a multitude of opportunities to feel indignant about allegedly being unjustly treated. In the United States, lax gun laws likely feed this sense of entitlement. Neurotic individuals can feel entitled, through their legal ownership of assault weapons, to shoot to kill because their perceptions of malice or danger are assumed to be objective. Even if law-abiding, they can, in their imagination, be seeing people as targets.

Many people become narcissistic as a compensation for how poorly they connect emotionally or psychologically with their essential value. This passive disconnection from their better self makes them insensitive or indifferent to others. They’ll also be more receptive to disinformation from outside sources, just as, on the inside, they’re overwhelmed by the irrational jumble of inner conflict.

Our inner critic, an enemy of our integrity and instigator of inner conflict, is highly irrational and aggressive. When we’re inwardly passive, it inundates us with scorn and mockery. If we’re too disconnected from our better self, we’re at our inner critic’s mercy. This emotional disconnection means there’s no one “home” to protect us from the inner critic’s enforcement of its primitive will and judgment. This passive disconnect weakens us, making us more likely to feel overwhelmed by life’s challenges and prey to disinformation.

People can often sense an inner form of oppression, though usually obscurely. They might know they have an inner critic, but they’re not likely to know the dynamics of inner passivity and inner conflict. Through their lack of self-understanding, they instinctively attribute this sense of oppression to the malice of others. Or unwittingly they become agents of their inner critic, submitting themselves to self-criticism, self-rejection, and even self-hatred. If they’re especially inwardly passive in the sense of being disconnected from their better self, they can adopt the inner critic’s values and become bullying and cruel. In whatever manner this plays out, the common spinoffs are bitterness and anger.

Inner conflict is a condition long engrained in human nature. The genesis story of Adam and Eve, an iconic depiction of the inner conflict between right and wrong and good and evil, is testament to humanity’s longstanding sense of inner discord. We’re conscious enough now to bring this all into focus. Healing our inner conflict is a learning process. With insights from depth psychology, we can speed up the process.

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Are You Passive to Your Mind?

Many of us identify with our mind. It can feel as if our conscious mind (the function that processes thought, memory, and imagination) is the center of our being, even our essential self. When we experience ourself this way, our consciousness is restricted and we’re at the mercy of inner conflict.

Who’s the boss? You or your mind?

Given free rein, our conscious mind can quickly begin to dwell on regretful memories, dire speculations, and desperate defensiveness—all accompanied by anxious inner chatter. Old memories bring up unpleasant reminders of folly and failure, while speculations on the present and future produce impressions of being refused, controlled, rejected, and victimized.

Much of the time, our conscious mind is reactive to our psyche. At an unconscious level in our psyche, inner conflict produces mental and emotional discord, including irrationality, defensiveness, self-blame, and self-punishment. Our conscious mind can quickly become the chorus for this inner disharmony, producing haunting recitals of worry, anxiety, guilt, shame, and frustration. What the psyche composes, our conscious mind replays and regurgitates.

In other words, we are prone to being passive to our mind, while simultaneously our mind is passive to our psyche. As we strut around believing we’re in charge of our mind and its contents, we’re like animals unable to fathom the depths of their unknowing.

Ideally, we want to feel the ability to regulate our mind so that it serves our best interests. We can do this by becoming more insightful about our psyche’s inner conflict. People can be conflicted in thousands of ways. For instance, we can intensely desire, with painful longing, what we’re unlikely to acquire. We can also intensely want respect, though we’re swamped with memories and expectations of disrespect. We want to be loved and have friends, yet we often fearfully expect to be unloved and rejected. We want to feel free, but can be quick to feel oppressed. Our conscious mind then becomes preoccupied with considerations and calculations concerning our standing in the world, the measure of our safety, our objects of desire, our friends and enemies, and the distress of not getting.

At such times, we’re passively allowing our mind to churn up random, distressful speculations—and thereby, in a sense, take possession of us. Why would we allow this to happen?

We’re not seeing or understanding inner conflict. This conflict consists largely of the clash between our psyche’s passive side (inner passivity) and its aggressive side (the inner critic). Inner passivity is an aspect of our unconscious ego that blocks us from knowing and appreciating our best self. People find it challenging to wrap their head around the existence in their psyche of inner passivity. Because our intelligence and consciousness haven’t assimilated these deeper aspects of human nature, the passive part of us acts instinctively, according to its own primitive nature. Fortunately, we can bring the existence of this passivity into focus in many ways, including recognition of how, to our detriment, we are often passive to our mind. (To learn more about inner passivity, enter the term in this website’s search function for an abundance of articles.)

Inner passivity is an especially weak part of our ego, and it generates, through its cunning yet primitive intelligence, our psychological defenses. Inner passivity is providing the mental and emotional content when we’re being defensive in our thoughts or words or when we’re feeling and expressing guilt, shame, anxiety, and self-pity. Inner passivity often arises as an inner voice, one ready to claim our individual efforts won’t make any difference in the world. This passivity can also be experienced in our visualizations, sensory awareness, and physical ailments.

Inner passivity’s most obvious symptoms are indecision, procrastination, guilt, shame, and moodiness. We’re enmeshed in this passivity when we agonize, “Oh, what should I do now?” Inner passivity is present when we lament, “I try to do right but nothing works.” It fuels our emotions when we feel at the mercy of (or oppressed by) the demands and antics of others, or their real or imagined malice.

Ideally, we regulate our mind. We decide how best to use it, and when to rest it. We’re can’t do this perfectly, of course. Distractions come at us from all directions. We’re bound to be passive to our mind at times, but our awareness of this passivity and its deportment in our psyche can help us greatly in regulating our mind, even when it’s agitated. This understanding is the first step in overcoming the weakness.

We can test for ourselves the fact that our mind is meant to be experienced as an attribute of our humanity, a function at our disposal, and not the core of our being. Take a moment, focus on your breathing, follow your breaths, and keep your attention on your breathing. You’ll notice that your mind has gone silent. Focused on your breathing, your mind is silent—yet you’re conscious, even more conscious than before. You can still hear, smell, see, and feel. But if you allow your mind to intrude with chosen or unbidden content, you’ll lose your attention on your breathing. This is all evidence our essential self extends beyond the content of our conscious mind.

People who meditate are trying to quiet their mind, improve self-regulation, and bring forth their better self. They’re trying to feel the power (thereby overriding inner passivity) to quiet their mind and connect with their essential self. Meditation is the practice of being attentive, with some discernment, to the present moment. The practice is intended to achieve mental and emotional self-regulation. Still, many meditators, to their disadvantage, are unaware of the depth psychology that exposes the dynamics in their psyche of inner conflict and its two principal antagonists, inner passivity and the inner critic.

Failure to regulate our mind can be painful and self-defeating. One of my clients expressed his plight this way:

My mind is always churning, coming up with new thoughts, or old thoughts, and new and old ideas. It’s like a motor I can’t turn off. I know I overthink, and soon I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’m always wondering, what’s right and what’s wrong about this or that. I’m especially plagued with the thought, ‘Why am I not doing what I really want to be doing?’ Then again, I’m not even sure what I want to be doing. I know this is all tied in to my high blood pressure.

I told him, “You are expressing here the side-effects of inner passivity. As a consequence of this passivity, you forfeit oversight or regulation of your conscious mind. Consequently, you can’t feel the better self within you that would rein in or regulate your mind. Your mind, while subordinate to the antics of your psyche, becomes a commanding part of you. Unconsciously, you become an enabler of your mind’s free-for-all antics when you identify with it, which gives it more power and renders you more passive. Feeling overwhelmed, as you say, is a symptom of inner passivity. As your mind spins off with all its speculations and considerations, you feel your inner passivity more acutely and more painfully. This inner weakness also makes it easier for your inner critic to come barging in with abusive insinuations concerning your character and behaviors.

“The solution here,” I went on, “is to recognize your psyche’s underlying inner conflict. You recognize the irrationality and unwarranted hostility of the inner critic, while also becoming conscious of your inner passivity through which you fail to block or neutralize your abusive inner critic. The goal here is to realize that, through inner passivity, you absorb punishment from your inner critic as you identify with yourself through impressions of unworthiness, failure, wrongdoing, and weakness. As you recognize this, you’re more able to use your mind as an executor of your best interests rather than enduring its intrusions and irrationality.”

Inner passivity can be understood as a primitive intelligence or consciousness, an operating system in our psyche, one that’s determined to exist in its own right. It’s a mysterious configuration within us, a leftover from childhood helplessness, that has no interest in being dislodged or eradicated. For one thing, it harbors our psychological defenses and resistance. Through inner passivity, we can even take bittersweet, self-pitying consolation—a masochistic gratification—in the punishment the inner critic inflicts upon us.

Our conscious mind is the go-between when we become our own worst enemy. It becomes an agent and spokesperson for both our aggressive inner critic and lamenting inner passivity. Our mind dispenses self-criticism as well as supposed reasons for being critical of others. It also offers up whiny, self-pitying, defensive reactions, reflecting inner passivity’s participation in our inner conflict.

Unresolved conflict in our psyche, particularly the primary conflict between inner passivity and our inner critic, is going to be experienced compulsively by many of us, even when it’s highly unpleasant or self-defeating. Until self-knowledge comes to our rescue, we’re likely to remain captive, to some degree, to troublesome inner conflict.

A recurring thought or intention can be helpful. Repeated regularly, the intention is, “Don’t be passive to my mind.” This is a soft intention, non-forcing, a gentle reminder. It alerts our better self, prompting it to be vigilant and well-informed about these deeper dynamics. It calls out to a strength in us, a belief in a self that can take charge of our experience. This intention is more effective when used alongside one’s fuller understanding of the existence and dynamics of the troublesome trio—inner critic, inner passivity, and inner conflict. With this self-knowledge, we’re more able to alert ourself when being passive to our mind, thereby enabling a stronger sense of self to emerge from within.

In a democracy, people have legal protections against subjugation and oppression. But psychological bondage to one’s mind and psyche is an invisible oppression against which the law is powerless. Only we ourselves, through self-knowledge, can prevent this swindle of our (inner) freedom.

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What Freud Knew That We Still Hate to See

The world’s mental-health dysfunction derives largely from psychological ignorance, and right now we’re waist deep in the big muddy.

Why do you think so many 21st Century people are still hateful, violent, and murderous—or so depressed and despairing. Why are so many of us unwilling to protect our planet or save democracy?

We’re more like first cousins to trolls than seekers of a better self—and I’ll tell you why. Our psychological naïveté, our ignorance involving primitive, self-damaging dynamics in our psyche, has us trapped in a personal, self-centered identity that frequently dispossesses us of generosity, compassion, and the higher reaches of human intelligence.

What aren’t we understanding about ourselves? Our psychological shallowness can be recognized on two levels. The first level is revealed in two excellent books, Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Harvard University Press, 2022), by Andrew Scull, and Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton, 2019), by Anne Harrington. Both these books tell the horror story of a mental-health establishment that has, despite its initial hopes and promises, failed in determining and addressing the causes of our suffering and self-defeat.

Both books chronicle a collective process over the last four decades whereby vanity, greed, and stupidity contributed to the failure to significantly advance psychological knowledge and treatment. This professional infertility is well documented: Desperate Remedies has 86 pages of endnotes and Mind Fixers has 68.

Neither of these books, however, discusses the second, deeper level of our obtuseness. To see deeper, let’s go back 100 years. Sigmund Freud, then in his sixties, stumbled upon what he considered a strange idea. He was becoming aware of how one aspect of the psyche, the superego, presided in an authoritative, aggressive, and cruel manner over a passive part of the psyche, the subordinate, unconscious ego. Later, in his seventies, he wrote of this inner conflict in his famous book, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):

The fear of this critical agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the whole relationship), the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-ego; it is a portion, that is to say, of the instinct toward internal destruction present in the ego, employed for forming an erotic attachment to the super-ego.

For sure, that’s a mouthful. It means, essentially, that a passive aspect in our psyche is ready and willing to cozy up to, and indulge in, feelings of being oppressed, victimized, disrespected, and punished by our superego (inner critic). In other words, we are, when neurotic, prepared to feel subordinate to a harsh inner critic and willing to absorb punishment from it.

This deadly flaw (or basic disorder) contributes to neurosis, a malady that’s more widespread than we care to admit, Even the best among us have occasional neurotic flings. Neurosis, a byproduct of our psyche’s chaos and conflict, is a disease of our intelligence and an appetite for needless suffering. It’s a form of slavery that curtails our ability to live free of emotional suffering. Neurosis is also a form of stupidity, an inciter of blaming, an enforcer of ill-will, and a booster of narcissism.

Neurosis originates biologically when, as Freud noted, our specie’s aggressive instinct is unable to expend itself fully into the environment. Even a child’s temper tantrums can’t shake off all this aggression. Biological aggression is redirected against the child’s unconscious ego, giving rise to the formation of the superego (inner critic). The biology of human nature fosters inner conflict and with it a compulsion to produce and absorb self-punishment.

Can this be true that we are pin cushions for inner abuse? Is this the Achilles’ Heel of the human race? Here we are, desperately in need of a new paradigm. Could this be it? (This essay, along with this previous one and my latest book, makes a compelling case that nonsexual masochism instigates our personal and collective dysfunction.)

This is a disconcerting concept, and I’m trying here to make it emotionally and mentally digestible. Freud struggled to bring this idea into focus, and he initially formulated it, somewhat vaguely, in terms of a primitive death drive, Thanatos, that engages in a conflicting manner with Eros, the will to thrive. Doesn’t this concept ring true given our history as conflicted creatures who manage both to destroy worlds and to elevate civilizations?

In his biography, Freud: A Life for Our Time, historian Peter Gay referenced Freud’s struggle to comprehend the possibility that the human race harbored a fateful inner conflict, on the scale of death overpowering life, saturated in nonsexual masochism:

Freud seemed a little uncertain in 1920 whether he really believed in the awesome picture of combat he had sketched, but he gradually committed himself to this dualism with all the energy at his command. … “At the beginning,” he later recalled, “I advocated the views here put forward only tentatively, but in the course of time they have acquired such a power over me that I can no longer think differently.” In 1924, in his paper “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” he employed the scheme quite casually, as though there were nothing controversial about it, and he retained it unaltered for the rest of his life. … Yet, though he was convinced of his stern vision, he was not invariably dogmatic about it. (Freud: A Life for Our Time, W.W. Norton, 1988. Pp 401-02.)

Psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler (1899-1962) followed up on Freud’s discovery, writing many books and articles that elaborated clinically on the subject. He offered an extensive thesis on the dynamics and symptoms of what he called psychic masochism. My understanding of psychoanalysis is based directly on Bergler’s findings, and I was a client for many years of a Berglerian analyst. An overview of Bergler’s work is provided in my book, Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness (Amazon, 2015). He wrote in The Superego (Grune & Stratton, 1952), that, “At best, fifty percent of man’s psychic energy is unproductively expended in his attempts to ward off the constant avalanche of torture flowing from the superego.” This waste of energy, he believed, accounted for much of the world’s folly and stupidity. He added, “Man’s inhumanity to man is equaled only by man’s inhumanity to himself.”

Bergler exposed the nature and dynamics of the irrationality that carries over from childhood to burden the adult psyche. He claimed that unconscious nonsexual masochism, experienced often as bittersweet self-pity, is essentially a psychological defense. The defense arises from the unconscious ego, which strives to cover up its masochistic receptivity to the self-aggression. The defense largely consists of a claim (made unconsciously, though with “evidence” that registers consciously) to the effect that, “As the victim of the malice of others, my suffering is legitimate.” For this defense to work, however, suffering associated with the “malice” of others must be endured unremittingly.

Other times, in continuing self-deception, the claim (defense) is rationalized in this unconscious way: “Yes, I am at fault. I accept guilt and shame for my lapses or misconduct, though others and bad luck have failed me, too.” Again, one’s mind generates much “evidence” for why one’s emotional suffering is a legitimate reaction to events and situations in the external sphere. Bergler coined the term injustice collecting to signify the degree to which neurotics use real or alleged mistreatment or neglect for masochistic purposes. (Sometimes neurotics do blame themselves entirely—but usually for the wrong reasons, namely for reasons that are themselves defenses covering up the deeper basic disorder.)

All this insight runs counter to the prevailing paradigm, which blames much of an individual’s misery on the greed, folly, and cruelty of others, and on the deviltry of fate. This impulse to blame is a continuance of an infantile mentality that blames displeasure or suffering on malign, outer influences. Even mother at one point becomes “bad mother,” an impression produced by the child’s projection on to her of the child’s own aggressive instincts. A child’s acutely self-centered mentality, reinforced by instinctive baby fears, determines that the bad (experienced initially as a sense of deprival, refusal, and control) comes from outside, while the good comes from within. Adult neurotics project their disowned “bad” (their sense of wrongness, guilt, and shame that arise from self-damaging inner conflict and masochistic attachments) on to those “bad” others in the world around them.

Young children experience an inner conflict between their wish to retain pleasant illusions of self-centeredness (megalomania) and magical powers (omnipotence) versus their growing recognition of the extent of their helplessness and dependence. They are biased in favor of the irrationality that supports “evidence” of their special place at the center of their world. According to Bergler, the unpleasantness of this conflict is mitigated through a narcissistic pretense, namely the child’s assumption that any inner sense of emotional or physical displeasure is willingly self-bestowed. Such displeasure, the child deduces in a primitive and instinctive manner, is what the child has decreed and therefore willingly accepts.

Again, this misleading sense of reality is based on the “understanding” that the good comes from within, the bad from outside. This irrationality manages to corrupt the pleasure principle. The child’s displeasure is libidinized, thereby experienced as a pleasing triumph of narcissistic righteousness, along the lines of “What I experience is what I have wished for.” This conception can later be amended by adults as, “What I feel to be true is true.” (This is the wellspring of QAnon absurdities.)

There seems to be, Bergler wrote in The Superego, “a universal human tendency to accept the painful, provided narcissistic safeguards are installed.” We can see this, as one example, in those people who, painfully convinced they are sinners, find consolation in the “fact” they are made in God’s image.

A young child also feels narcissistic gratification in not being powerless to the primary “violator” of that narcissism, the mother figure. In primitive, emotional reckoning, the child claims: “She does not punish me. Through my actions, I make her punish me.” Self-punishment now merges with masochistic self-satisfaction. This is a highly passive “solution” to protecting one’s narcissism, one that later haunts many of us with unregulated thoughts and emotions through which we identify with the passive, weak, and victim side of inner conflict.

In his book, The Basic Neurosis (Grune & Stratton, 1949), Bergler wrote that psychic masochism is “an insatiable unconscious craving for self-damage.” In his magnum opus, Principles of Self-Damage (1959), he stated in the Foreword: “Personally, I accept Freud’s concept of life and death instincts simply because it clarifies for me one of the most amazing phenomena in human beings: the ease with which aggression is turned inward. This ‘boomerang-tendency’ is the prerequisite to masochization of the total personality.” Bergler said psychic masochism is “the basic neurosis,” the title of one of his books.

None of his 27 books are currently in print and their availability is limited in the used-book market. Four of his titles deal directly with homosexuality, which he discussed as a symptom of neurosis, an error on his part which now makes the task of championing his work more onerous.

Just as psychoanalysts and others didn’t want to hear from Freud on the subject of masochism, they paid no heed following Bergler’s death to his research and writings on the subject. An appreciative obituary appeared in The New York Times (though it did not address the essence of his work), yet now he is rarely cited. No biography has been written. PhD graduates in psychology are unlikely to have heard of him. He did see this coming, predicting that more than a century would pass before the inner reality he and Freud uncovered would become common knowledge. “A very powerful ‘something’ in each of us,” he wrote, “rejects the disagreeable and terrifying fact that there is allure in pleasure in pain, defeat, humiliation.” When considering this possibility in reference to themselves, people often experience brain fog or mild dissociation as part of their instinctive denial and resistance. People also find it embarrassing to discuss this subject.

With neurosis, we remain emotionally attached to the first hurts of childhood—refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment—because these attachments facilitate the inner conflict through which we accommodate unconscious masochism. These first hurts of childhood become masochistic attachments in the first five years of life, as refusal and deprivation in the oral stage (the first 18 months), as helplessness and control in the anal stage (18-36 months), and as criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment in the oedipal stage (36-60 months). As adults, our default reaction is to misinterpret everyday situations so as to recycle and replay these unresolved hurts. Then we cover up this “game” we play with ourselves through reactive defenses and symptoms such as blaming, anger, and self-pity.

The bedrock of the victim mentality is our unconscious willingness to misinterpret reality for the purpose of recycling emotionally the first hurts of childhood, our inner critic’s harassment, and our passive, defensive side’s indulgent self-pity.

Beginning in the 1970s, the principles of psychoanalysis were abandoned by psychiatrists who claimed a more scientific approach was needed. Individually and as a profession, psychoanalysts themselves lost power because they abandoned their discipline’s revolutionary covenant. Through their own psychological resistance, they ignored Freud’s and Bergler’s great finding. They failed to plumb the deeper reaches of their own psyche. Paul E. Stepansky, in Psychoanalysis at the Margins (Other Press, 2009), describes what followed:

As Managing Director of The Analytic Press, I experienced the decomposition of American psychoanalysis firsthand. My authors, all psychoanalysts…often seemed to live in different professional worlds. Their divergences were basic and profound. As representatives of one or another psychoanalytic school of thought, they gathered into small enclaves with like-minded colleagues; offered up their own exemplars of great analysts and great analytic work; defined their own standard literature; published their own journals; hosted their own conferences; trained their own successors…Correspondingly, they expressed, to varying degrees and in various combinations, condescension, irritation, anger, disapproval, and incomprehension of colleagues who inhabited different psychoanalytic worlds…Their disputes, played out at conferences and in the pages of their journals, could and did become personal.

What tragedy! Their own unresolved inner conflict spilled out in ugly fashion upon one another. Through unconscious resistance, they had declined to take the plunge into the deep end of their psyche. There, beneath the masochism, they would have found their better self, their true essence—and with it liberation from tribalism and acrimony.

Our political follies and economic miseries are, in considerable measure, the plagues of neurosis. Democracy is fragile to the degree that political leaders and the general population are neurotic. Neurosis with its unresolved inner conflict makes us the subjects of an authoritarian, emotional-mental system of inner governance. This inner dearth of justice, compassion, and freedom will set the terms for the world order if we don’t wise up.

—

My previous post, “The Hidden Dysfunction Behind 50 Common Symptoms,” provides many examples of inner conflict and the masochistic strain that lurk in the psyche of neurotics as well as everyday people.

My latest book, Our Deadly Flaw: How Inner Conflict Cripples Us and Subverts Society (2022), is available here at Amazon.

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The Emotional Conflict Behind 50 Mental-Health Symptoms

What’s brewing inside us when we’re frequently feeling wrong or bad? How about if we’re feeling lonely, overwhelmed, jealous, anxious, or bitter? Or if we’re having difficulty getting our life in order and functioning at our best?

We can track distressful symptoms back to the source in our psyche.

It’s time to stop blaming others or society at large for our miseries. That doesn’t mean we should blame ourself instead. The answer is to become smarter and more insightful about the unruliness of our conflicted psyche. Our unconscious mind, our psyche, is a cauldron of irrational dynamics in which compulsive, almost instinctive, inner conflict frequently bubbles up as unpleasant, often painful symptoms.

It’s our inner or emotional conflict that produces these symptoms, so it’s really helpful for us to understand the nature of our own personal inner conflict. Readers are likely to be experiencing one or more of the 50 common, self-defeating symptoms mentioned in this post. I provide for each symptom a brief analytical comment that exposes the underlying conflict. You probably know your own symptoms (such as boredom, guilt, indecision, anxiety, self-pity, and codependency), but you might not be aware of the underlying cause of the symptoms. Each symptom, when traced to its source, reveals the hidden dynamics in our psyche that are undermining the quality of our life.

To some degree, we experience ourselves and life through these unpleasant symptoms. In addition to producing misery, the symptoms produce personality characteristics that are often unappealing and self-defeating.

There’s a lot to ponder as each symptom is briefly analyzed. We’re trying to fathom the liberating knowledge of depth psychology as it applies to us personally. Readers will be struck by how unconscious dynamics spit in the face of common sense. The following insights expose the extensive irrationality at the core of human nature. We can see more clearly the awareness that’s needed to make rationality prevail over irrationality.

In reading the following content, note that one’s mind, overwhelmed by this accounting of the vagaries and contrariness of unconscious irrationality, can go numb, almost like a mild dissociation. Watch out for that numbing effect—it’s mostly our ego’s resistance to humbling inner truth. This is forbidden knowledge because it embarrasses, even mortifies, our ego. If the knowledge feels overwhelming, you could stop reading and come back later to continue.

Each symptom in this context is understood to be chronic and persistent. Each analysis of each symptom is understood to represent just one key glimpse into an underlying complexity. Okay, enough preamble, here we go:

FEELING LONELY—wanting to feel connected and loved yet being willing unconsciously to indulge in unresolved emotional memories of feeling rejected, abandoned, and betrayed.

FEELING DEPRESSED—wanting to feel good about oneself, but unconsciously and passively soaking up negative insinuations from the inner critic and allowing it to inflict punishing self-denigration.

FEELING BORED—wanting to feel pleasure in life yet being determined or compelled unconsciously to feel an inner emptiness involving deprivation, refusal, and helplessness.

FEELING TRAPPED—the emotional impression that arises when, consciously, we want to feel free while, at the same time, we’re making an unconscious choice to experience a general or specific situation passively, as if hopelessly or helplessly restricted.

FEELING PRESSURED—consciously wanting to feel relaxed, yet unconsciously using life’s demands and responsibilities to satisfy one’s unconscious, passive willingness to feel burdened or imposed upon.

FEELING OPPRESSED—consciously wanting to feel free, yet not being sufficiently conscious to liberate oneself from the oppressive inner critic.

FEELING OVERWHELMED—wanting to feel strong and centered, but unconsciously allowing inner passivity, especially in challenging life situations, to intrude psychosomatically and emotionally upon us to generate feelings of weakness, confusion, and fear.

FEELING DISRESPECTED—wanting to feel respected by others, but unconsciously identifying with one’s passive side in its conflicted role on the receiving end of the inner critic’s disrespect and self-abuse.

FEELING DEVALUED—wanting to feel valued, yet being first in line, through one’s inner critic and enabling inner passivity, to allow oneself to feel devalued.

FEELING ANGRY—wanting to feel strong and expressive of self, yet being able to muster, because of inner passivity, only reactive, distressful, and self-defeating anger.

BEING JUDGMENTAL—being quick to find fault with others as an unconscious reaction to how one is quick to absorb mockery and scorn from one’s inner critic, thereby to identify with the one being judged.

SHYNESS—wanting to put one’s best foot forward, but lacking confidence or boldness because one’s inner conflict is producing an unconscious readiness to identify with feeling unworthy, socially disabled, or unappealing.

APATHY—wanting the pleasure of being engaged with life versus passively surrendering one’s better self to the inner critic.

ENVY—consciously wanting to enjoy the bounty of life, but unconsciously embellishing want or desire for the unconscious purpose of covering up one’s unresolved willingness to indulge in feeling deprived and refused.

JEALOUSY—wanting a love object versus unconsciously using an alleged love object for the purpose of feeding an emotional willingness to recycle and replay unresolved emotional attachments to rejection and betrayal.

DISCONNECTION—consciously wanting the pleasure of feeling connected to all that is right with self, others, and life, yet unconsciously, under the influence of both an active inner critic and copious inner passivity, succumbing to the displeasure of feeling alienated from one’s better self.

PERFECTIONISM—the felt need to do things perfectly, though the unconscious purpose is to stave off the inner critic’s anticipated condemnation for allegedly making mistakes or being inadequate.

CYNICISM—feeling smug, superior, and incisive as an unconscious means to cover up an insecure self that, undermined by inner conflict, feels powerless to be a force for good or a person of integrity.

WORRY—wanting to feel worry-free, yet being tempted to imagine bad things happening, based on one’s compulsion (unconscious willingness) to reproduce and replay a passive, helpless feeling of being overwhelmed by (or dealing ineptly with) challenge or misfortune.

ANXIETY—a more intense version of the inner dynamics involved in worry, while also involving unconscious anticipation of forthcoming inner critic attacks.

FEARFULNESS—again, more intense—the emotional conviction that humiliation, danger, or malice is lurking, though this displeasure often arises due to one’s emotional entanglement with inner passivity, as when fixated on the prospect of being overwhelmed or defeated in some challenging situation, as happens inwardly when the inner critic overwhelms inner passivity.

REGRET—the passive willingness to absorb the inner critic’s accusations of foolish misjudgment in one’s present or past, and to suffer accordingly for each painful reminder of this implied folly.

DEFIANCE—consciously wanting to feel strong, while also feeling an inner weakness, perhaps an unconscious identification with a sense of unworthiness, for which defiance is a stubborn, face-saving compensation, however self-defeating.

BITTERNESS—wanting the pleasure of inner harmony, but unconsciously feeling compelled to experience a painful hostility that surfaces as unconscious displacement upon others or life in general of the bitter scorn one absorbs from the inner critic.

PROMISCUITY—wanting to feel connected and loved, but experiencing a lingering, unresolved emotional attachment to rejection or abandonment that compels one to settle for a desperate, third-rate experience of love.

COMPULSIVITY—wanting self-regulation while at the same time feeling, through inner passivity, the need to passively submit to authoritative inner directives, however irrational they might be.

AMBIVALENCE—the conflict between intently desiring what one supposedly wants to possess or achieve while conjuring up and embracing allegedly valid reasons for disliking or despising that same person, object, or objective.

INABILITY TO CONCENTRATE—wanting to absorb knowledge or work efficiently versus an unconscious willingness or determination to experience oneself through familiar, unresolved weakness and passivity.

GUILT—the feeling we deserve to be punished, caused by our weak, defensive reaction to the tyranny of the inner critic with its litany of accusations against us.

SHAME—the feeling of punishment—the desolation of self-abasement—that follows our passive acceptance and absorption of the inner critic’s harsh judgments against us.

COMPARING—the unconscious willingness to resonate with self-abasement or the notion that we’re not as good as the next person, even while we’re searching our mind for evidence that we’re better.

COMPLAINING—the act of complaining aggressively about our alleged victimization, to avoid acknowledging our underlying passivity and our inner conflict, both of which induce self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, and a failure to thrive.

INDECISION—consciously wanting to be decisive versus the unconscious willingness (because inner passivity is so seductive to our psyche) to passively experience the sense of not knowing one’s own mind.

LYING—feeling compelled to override a passive feeling of being caught or trapped, based on how, on an inner level, we also use deception and irrationality (psychological defenses) to fend off the inner critic.

STUBBORNESS—the feeling of power in one’s rigidity, defiance, and staunch beliefs, again to override inner passivity with its readiness to react to feelings of being manipulated, controlled, and forced to submit.

NEEDINESS—having an urgent desire to connect or bond with individuals, groups, or beliefs as a reaction to (compensation for) one’s unconscious compulsion and willingness to experience oneself through feelings of abandonment, alienation, and unworthiness.

RIGIDITY—a passive disconnect from self, coupled with fear of the inner critic, that can compel one to feel a need to have one’s body on alert, at attention, ready to react to danger.

UNFRIENDLINESS—an unwillingness to recognize or acknowledge others with generous kindness, derived from one’s entanglement in inner conflict and the accompanying likelihood that one will not appreciate, respect, and love one’s own self.

INCOMPETENCE—self-sabotage that arises through one’s compulsion to put on display (act out) the predicable outcome of being passively receptive to being berated and punished by the inner critic for passivity, folly, and failure.

PROCRASTINATION—consciously wanting to be engaged and responsible, but unconsciously being compelled by inner passivity to feel (and be) disengaged, disconnected, and dispirited, often accompanied by passive-aggressive defiance of the inner critic: “I decide when I’m going to start working.”

LACKING SELF-REGULATION (over impulses and cravings, including addictions)—this expansive symptom is a result of being entangled in the conflict between wanting to feel strong and capable of self-regulation versus being passively compelled to experience a sense of helplessness at protecting one’s best interests. Also contributing to this symptom is inner passivity’s willingness to be on the receiving end of mocking and scolding criticism, rejection, and abuse from the inner critic for real or alleged foolish behaviors.

COMPULSIVE GOODNESS—consciously wanting to be good versus fearing the onslaught from the inner critic for daring to be anything other than what it deems to be good.

CODEPENDENCY—wanting to be strong but being compelled through inner passivity to identify emotionally with the weakness of others and, in self-deception, to frequently assume to play the role of the stronger one.

FATALISM—capitulating passively to the inner critic, usually with silent protestations that one really does want to be stronger.

DESPAIR—similar to fatalism, though likely more painful.

AGGRESSIVE FANTASIES (sexual or otherwise)—pretending through one’s imagination to be aligned with an aggressive stance to life, while identified emotionally with the passive side.

PASSIVE FANTASIES—a capitulation to the passive side, often to libidinize (sugarcoat or eroticize) the passivity through sexual arousal.

SELF-PITY—indulgence in the sense of weakness, victimization, and defeat, often of a bittersweet, masochistic nature.

NEGATIVE INNER DIALOGUE—hearing and engaging in energy-sapping defensive thoughts to counter accusatory voices (often deeper in the unconscious mind), all expressions of the back-and-forth tumult and irrationality of inner conflict.

MILITANT IGNORANCE—employing stubbornness and defiance (as misleading impressions of righteousness and power) to deny one’s willingness to feel overwhelmed by change, progress, and the challenges of self-development.

—

Can you sense the inner conflict inherent in each of these analytic insights? Can you sense, as well, how the underlying constant or theme of inner conflict is our instinctive, compulsive, or unconsciousness willingness to produce the displeasure inherent in the conflict? In other words, the conflict serves as our means to produce our unconscious appetite for displeasure. Once we see and understand inner conflict in this light, our resulting, enhanced consciousness enables us to drop the rope in this futile tug-of-war.

Again, the analysis I’ve provided here reveals just one glimpse, though a vital one, of the underlying dynamics at play in the conflict. These dynamics afflict so-called normal people as well as neurotics. At issue is the degree to which the conflict is acute and damaging. When the conflict is especially acute (as with more serious mental-health disorders), many people will not be psychologically healthy enough, sufficiently capable of objective introspection, to be able to benefit from this deeper insight.

A core dysfunction behind these 50 symptoms is the passivity vs. self-aggression conflict. Let me briefly describe it here. (I’ve written extensively about it in my books and articles.) In the psyche, inner passivity defends and the inner critic attacks. Symptoms often arise as forms of self-punishment (especially guilt, shame, self-pity, regret, and depression) in reaction to the inner critic’s “successful” infliction of self-abuse.

Emotionally and mentally, we’re all engaged to some degree with the struggle between our passive, defensive side (inner passivity) and our inner aggression (inner critic). Our better self is sidelined when these two opposing sources of irrationality are allowed—through our lack of consciousness—to serve as the managers of our mind and emotions. Inner passivity (lodged in our unconscious ego) is the mastermind behind our largely unconscious psychological defenses, and we identify with this passivity when we express inner defensiveness (in our mind) or outer defensiveness (when speaking to others). The other source of irrationality, our inner critic or superego, is the primitive aggression that poses as the master of our personality, the “decider” of what is right and wrong, and the punisher of our “transgressions.”

Our daily life can be degraded by this main inner conflict between inner passivity’s defensiveness and the inner critic’s self-aggression. This conflict is often the main instigator of unpleasant, painful, and self-defeating emotional and behavioral symptoms.

As our consciousness pierces the veil of superficial awareness, we begin to see how, through our ignorance of the existence and patterns of inner conflict, we have been unwitting originators of our own unhappiness. We see, too, how inner passivity, with its ego-inspired defenses, has made us masters of self-deception.

Inner conflict also consists of the unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle unresolved emotional attachments to the first hurts of childhood. These hurts consist of emotional sensitivity to actual or imagined deprivation, refusal, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment. These unresolved hurts can manifest in adults as a lingering, unconscious impulses—accompanied by defensive and irrational thinking—to interpret everyday life situations through the negative emotions of the first hurts.

As one example of the underlying conflict, consider the first hurt of rejection: Here, typically, an individual consciously wants to feel accepted or loved but unconsciously and compulsively misinterprets certain experiences as rejection. This misinterpretation derives from one’s instinct or compulsion to replay and recycle the unresolved sensitivity to rejection.

These glimpses into the origins of common symptoms reveal what’s really important to know, both about our personal self and human nature in general. Knowledge of our psyche’s deeper dimensions is vital. An unevolved mentality derived from our lack of self-knowledge is degrading the planet, spawning weapons of apocalyptic destructiveness, and provoking group and national hostilities and violence. Self-knowledge is civilization’s compass.

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

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A Novelist’s Quest to Unravel His Madness

William Styron’s little book, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, offers vivid depictions of the suffocating gloom that in 1985 stalked his descent into major depression. He is perhaps remembered as much for this 1990 book describing his meltdown into depression as for his Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and for his later bestseller, Sophie’s Choice.

We can overcome inner conflict as we understand its dynamics.

The memoir is only 84-pages long in its Vintage paperback edition. It’s little more than 15,000 words, the size of a long essay. Yet it became a national bestseller that lightened the stigma surrounding depression and encouraged many to seek psychological help for the disorder.

At one point, Styron’s “veritable howling tempest in the brain,” as he called it, led him to make elaborate plans to commit suicide. He finally entered a psychiatric hospital, and began to recover there during a seven-week stay. He died almost 20 years later, at age 81, of pneumonia.

In Darkness Visible, Styron strives valiantly to uncover and understand the source of his depression. He cites, for instance, influences involving his father and mother. He believes he never experienced a proper catharsis of grief following his mother’s death when he was 13, and he suspects he inherited the gloom and morbidity that had long plagued his father. Yet he also provides, if somewhat obliquely, several intriguing clues for the existence of what I believe to be a major source of all depression: the psyche’s unconscious inner conflict.

Now, 32 years after the publication of this memoir, medical science, psychiatry, and neuroscience still remain uninformed concerning the psychology of inner conflict. These disciplines are unwilling to recognize the ethereal psyche as a center of primitive, oppositional, and energetic dynamics that can stir up clinical depression. The hard science that has seized psychiatry’s high ground and chosen to focus on brain research has failed us in overlooking the psyche’s significance. Depth psychology, in contrast, resolutely contends that depression can be overcome by exposing and understanding the conflict harbored in our psyche.

Of course, factors other than inner conflict can produce depression, and they include genetics, biochemistry, family history, diet, poverty, oppression, and stress. I’m saying that inner conflict belongs on this list, probably in first place. Inner conflict, when severe, produces an appetite for emotional self-punishment, which in turn can produce major depression.

Clearly, it’s in our nature to experience some degree of inner conflict. Sometimes it’s only mildly disconcerting and not the marrow of suffering or self-defeat. Problematic inner conflict is the problem. In his memoir, Styron relates experiences of this serious dysfunction, and I’ll cite his words in making a case for inner conflict’s prime role in generating depression.

In the opening pages of Darkness Visible, Styron writes that he “was floundering helplessly” in his efforts to deal with his depression. “Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred … is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.” He was experiencing this progression even as he flew to Paris in 1985 “in order to accept an award which should have sparklingly restored my ego.”

Before further consideration of Styron’s experiences, let’s review some basics from the depth psychology I practice. Inner conflict involves largely unconscious debate and altercation in our psyche between our inner critic (superego) and inner passivity (the weak nature of our unconscious subordinate ego). The inner critic regularly attacks our character and integrity, and inner passivity produces defensive pleadings and ploys that regularly fail to neutralize the attack. In this process, we can sometimes be aware of a pale semblance of self-protection, an inner defensiveness we conjure up in our mind. We can recognize this defensiveness, as well, in our dialogue with others. This defensiveness is all a reaction to the feeling of being accused. Our inner critic, like a kangaroo court’s prosecutor, can accuse us of all sorts of nonsense. It pesters us incessantly for minor missteps and harasses us with irrational bunk. Through inner passivity, we unwittingly allow this self-abuse to be inflicted.

Often, it’s only through an awakening to the existence of our defensiveness, a process that itself involves recognizing inner passivity, that we can detect an inner critic attack and begin to effectively protect ourselves from it.

The inner critic is a psychological drive, instinct, or energy that has its genesis in humankind’s aggressive instinct for survival. The conventions and restraints of civilization prevent this aggressive drive from running amuck. Ideally, this drive is sublimated into worthy, creative, and pleasurable pursuits. But turmoil in our psyche can block this healthy option, and some measure of our inner critic’s energy is injected into our psychological bloodstream as self-mockery and accusatory scorn. While the inner critic can pose as a legitimate, benign conscience, its primitive constitution calls upon it to dominate our psyche. Our unconscious passivity makes us—in league with the speculations and considerations of our mind—susceptible to this arrangement.

When Styron writes that he “was floundering helplessly,” he’s describing a primary symptom of inner conflict, the largely unconscious experience of being subservient to the inner critic and at its mercy. The passivity and helplessness we experience at this inner level is what we then bring, in the world around us, to our everyday situations and challenges. Styron mentions his “sense of self-hatred” and his “general feeling of worthlessness.” Elsewhere, he mentions the “stifling anxiety” that preceded his bouts with depression. Again, these are all symptoms that derive from the degree to which we absorb self-aggression from our inner critic.

The inner critic dispenses a primitive aggression that can be especially cruel. This superego is the psychological manifestation of the biological aggressiveness that made humankind a ferocious predator. It operates with rigid authority, and it maintains this “authoritarianism” largely through merciless fault-finding directed at our weak, subordinate ego. Its oppressive put-downs can be quite demeaning and hateful. This onslaught becomes semi-conscious when we experience an inner voice that alludes to our foolishness, idiocy, or worthlessness. If we’re too passive, too full of self-doubt, we painfully, unwittingly absorb these misrepresentations of reality. People can feel “stifling anxiety,” to use Styron’s words, in the moments leading up to an episode of depression as they anticipate more of the inner critic’s painful onslaught.

Styron had been a heavy drinker, and he had, as he wrote, “abruptly abandoned whiskey and all other intoxicants” just months before his depression struck. Alcohol and intoxicants can temporarily fortify the ego and neutralize the inner critic, but their overuse is, of course, an unstable, dangerous way to cope with life, let alone inner conflict. Over time, their misuse is likely to render an individual even more passive, more susceptible to inner critic attacks. When Styron abruptly stopped using these substances, both his conscious ego and subordinate unconscious ego no longer had the flimsy “protection” of intoxicants. Now his inner critic met little or no resistance in its assault upon his worthiness and integrity. Meanwhile, the psychiatric medications he had begun taking had not been effective.

Styron alludes to the presence of inner passivity when he writes of “the onset of inertia.” He wonders: Did the abrupt withdrawal from alcohol start the plunge downward?

Or could it be that a vague dissatisfaction with the way in which my work was going—the onset of inertia which has possessed me time and time again during my writing life, and made me crabbed and discontented—had also haunted me more fiercely during that period than ever, somehow magnifying the difficulty with alcohol. Unresolvable questions, perhaps.

No, not unresolvable. The vicissitudes of inner conflict were creeping up on him. Inertia had begun interfering with his productivity. Was he perhaps experiencing procrastination, indecision, or writer’s block? He doesn’t say explicitly. However, “the onset of inertia” would enable his inner critic to pester him (largely registered unconsciously) with allegations of his emotional resonance with an underlying sense of weakness and unworthiness.

Our growing awareness of such inner conflict becomes the remedy. We begin to detect the inner critic, understand its irrationality and primitive function, and thereby neutralize its allegations. We also begin to feel the presence of inner passivity and understand its ploys and reckonings. This new awareness pierces our unconscious mind to expose the dynamics of irrationality. We can see the conflict, for instance, between our conscious wish to be strong versus our unconscious readiness to identify with old emotional associations involving self-doubt and helplessness. In the act of seeing all this, we connect with our better self.

Now we can begin to step outside of inner conflict and liberate ourselves from it. We’re refusing now to identify with the passive side of the conflict. Those who are too resistant, too identified with inner passivity, simply refuse unconsciously to acquire this insight and use it to their advantage.

Instead of identifying with inner passivity, many other people, though inwardly passive, cope with inner conflict by aligning themselves emotionally with the values of their inner critic. Now they’re in danger of becoming insensitive, boorish, cruel, susceptible to authoritarian values, and unwitting defenders of the ego. Their unconscious defense proclaims, I’m not a passive person, disconnected from my better self. My aggressive hostility toward others and their values feels good and righteous.

When through insight our consciousness recognizes the source of random suffering, we see how we can stop the misery. We can also feel a pleasurable connection to our better self and appreciate, too, the self-regulation we’re now capable of practicing. Our will to flourish is inspired by inner truth.

Styron makes another passing allusion to inner conflict when he writes, quite impersonally, “It may require on the part of friends, lovers, family, admirers, an almost religious devotion to persuade the sufferers of life’s worth, which is so often in conflict [italics added] with a sense of their own worthlessness…” The inner critic does indeed demean us, while inner passivity blocks us from accessing and feeling the truth of our intrinsic value.

Styron describes in his memoir the inspiration he felt reading Nobel-Prize laureate Albert Camus’s novel, The Stranger. But Camus, I believe, was deeply under the influence of inner passivity. The Stranger reeks with passive undertones. The novel’s title character, Meursault, is a morose, apathetic fellow, a poster-boy for self-alienation, who never quite knows what he feels or why exactly he shot and killed a man. Languishing in prison under a death sentence, Meursault’s final act of “redemption” is to accept “the benign indifference of the universe” and to take consolation in knowing his execution will end his loneliness.

The themes and characters produced by literary writers of fiction are reflections, in large measure, of what they emotionally resonate with, and how they themselves are conflicted. Styron writes in his memoir that, after reading The Stranger while in his early thirties, he received “a stab of recognition that proceeds from reading the work of a writer who has wedded moral passion to a style of great beauty and whose unblinking vision is capable of frightening the soul to its marrow.” I would suggest it’s not the soul that’s frightened but rather the psyche and its secret stash of inner passivity that reverberates in aroused sympathy whenever its own dark secret finds literary expression.

We’re afraid of inner truth, that identification of ours with inner passivity, our enabling of the inner critic, and our furtive entanglement in inner conflict. Allusions to this deadly flaw of human nature are experienced by us as a stigma, a dishonor, an exposure to forbidden knowledge. It’s the resistance we encounter when self-knowledge comes knocking.

Styron must have had an encounter with the dark side in writing Sophie’s Choice, his 1979 best-seller that won the U.S. National Book Award for fiction. Sophie is a Polish-Catholic survivor of Nazi concentration camps who lives in Brooklyn with her lover, a purported scientific genius who (spoiler alert) turns out to be afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia. Sophie ends up committing suicide with her lover, sometime after revealing to another main character that, on the night she arrived in Auschwitz, she was required to choose which of her two children would die immediately by gassing and which would continue to live at the camp.

In writing this book, Styron would have been required to resonate deeply with Sophie’s horror and helplessness. He had to be willing to put himself through the lengthy, emotional, creative process of chronicling her plight. Only an unconscious resonance with entrapment (experienced vicariously through inner passivity) and cruel oppression (vicariously through the inner critic) would have made possible a convincing rendition of Sophie’s lingering experience of such fiendish abuse. Up to this time, Styron’s brilliance as a novelist had been a successful sublimation of inner conflict. Now, it appears, he was pulled more deeply into the darkness.

Styron writes in his memoir: “I began to see clearly how depression had clung close to the outer edges of my life for many years.”

Suicide had been a persistent theme in my books—three of my major characters killed themselves. In rereading, for the first time in years, sequences from my novels—passages where my heroines have lurched down pathways toward doom—I was stunned to perceive how accurately I had created the landscape of depression in the minds of these young women, describing with what could only be instinct, out of a subconscious already roiled by disturbances of mood, the psychic imbalance [italics added] that led them to destruction. Thus depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for decades.

Styron also mentions a psychological element he considers to be particularly pertinent: “the concept of loss.” He writes: “Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin.” He mentions the loss of his mother, as well as the losses of self-esteem, self-reliance, and emotional resilience. The latter loss had left him acutely fearful of being alone. He writes: “Being alone in the house, even for a moment, caused me exquisite panic and trepidation.” Here he’s describing a condition of being lost to himself in terrifying self-abandonment. Describing his preparations to commit suicide, he senses himself as “a wraithlike observer” and dispassionate “solitary actor.” Dissociation of varying severity is often one of the symptoms of inner passivity and inner conflict.

It’s true, loss is a primary experience of depression. However, it’s not, as Styron suggests, the origin or source of depression. The origin resides in inner conflict, our psyche’s disunity and sometimes civil war. Inner conflict is the source of self-alienation, self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-hatred. The loss that Styron felt so acutely, as he clearly implied, was the loss of the sense of a stable, resilient self. He quotes Dante: In the middle of the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood / For I had lost the right path. Yes, Styron had lost the path home to himself. He wasn’t there for himself. He was, at this point, disconnected emotionally and psychologically from his better self and from a workable ego-identity. It appears that his unconscious, subordinate ego was overwhelmed by his inner critic, while his conscious ego crashed from the loss of the familiar coping mechanisms of alcohol and writing.

With inner conflict we’re torn between wanting to be our best self versus being identified with the delicate, pain-prone ego that jitters about in our psyche. Do we know our own mind or are we identified with the hijacked mind that does the psyche’s bidding. Do we garner the insight that resolves inner conflict or do we remain ignorant of it, thereby at the mercy of the psyche’s turmoil and its capacity for mischief, suffering, and evil. As Joseph Campbell defined it, we go through this dark side—on the hero’s journey through a treacherous underworld—to find and resurrect the self.

Concluding his memoir, Styron mentions Ingmar Bergman’s film, Through a Glass Darkly, in which a woman experiencing psychotic depression has an hallucination of a monstrous spider attempting to violate her sexually. Styron, noting that Bergman “suffered cruelly from depression,” mentions the spider in the context of humankind’s struggle “to give proper expression to the desolation of melancholia.”

A literary writer’s “proper expression” is often, of course, in symbolism. The spider is a suitable symbol for the desolation of depression—and also for the inner critic. The menacing inner critic is plenty creepy. It can sneak in upon us, venomously, soundlessly, unseen. We anticipate being violated by it, and we can quickly feel helpless to fend it off. The sexual connotation (the spider violating a helpless woman) might refer to what Freud warned us about, our psyche’s willingness to absorb and libidinize (sugarcoat masochistically) the superego’s incoming aggression. This supposition was incorporated into Freud’s Eros-versus-Thanatos and pleasure-versus-displeasure theories of inner conflict, which inform us that our entanglement with the dark side is compulsive and perhaps masochistic. Psychologically, the noble savage is us.

Why did Styron recover during his seven-week stay in the hospital? Even with an everyday neurosis that evades depression, the inner critic has a tendency to back off—once we have suffered enough with guilt and shame. Styron observes that the hospital “where I had found refuge was a kinder, gentler madhouse than the one I’d left.” He alludes to an “ultimate capitulation” to his situation, a begrudging acceptance of his helplessness that perhaps fended off his inner critic (as happens with members of Alcoholics Anonymous).

He might also have been able to displace some of his self-aggression onto “an odious smug young shrink, with a spade-shaped dark beard” who during group therapy sessions “was alternately condescending and bullying…” Styron also experienced ongoing “humiliated rage” at “a delirious young woman with a fixed, indefatigable smile” who conducted art therapy classes and who he later became fond of, “in spite of myself.” Was Styron casting off upon others some of the harsh criticism that his inner critic inflicted upon him? People with a particularly harsh (worse than average) inner critic tend to be judgmental and scornful of others.

In his memoir, Styron refers to depression as a disease, with the implication it’s more a medical problem than a psychological disorder. I imagine he was conflicted between adopting, in his mind, a psychological versus a medical interpretation of his agony. Using the disease concept to explain major depression, alcoholism, and other addictions appeals to our largely unconscious psychological defenses. It enables us to deflect the inner critic’s allegations that we’re passive, weak-willed, and unworthy: I’m not to blame for my plight. I’m simply an innocent victim of my disease.

It’s a feat of integrity and courage to begin to explore our psyche, breach our ego-identification, and recognize the rowdiness and perversity of inner conflict. With literary prowess and an honest man’s search for understanding, Styron gave it his best shot. How honest now can we be in facing our hidden madness, a probable contributor to all the world’s dysfunction?

—

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

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When Inner Growth Feels Impossibly Difficult

Some of us feel hopelessly bogged down, swallowed up daily in a mire of inertia and misery. We agonize in a sense of inadequacy and smallness, just tolerating whatever happens to us. This grim emotional infirmity is described by a reader who sent me this email:

Finding your path to inner growth.

I found your website a few years ago and I sometimes read the articles there. I’m experiencing many of the sufferings you talk about, especially deep feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. Even if I read and understand, nothing changes. I keep on feeling depressed, drinking, and suffering. My mind is scattered all over the place. It is hard for me to pay attention to anything more than a few minutes because chronic boredom gets in and I always find myself distracted, watching videos, movies, eating, drinking, and playing video games. I’m a master of unconsciously distracting myself.

I feel my whole life is an unconscious hell. I honestly lost hope that my reality will ever be changed because I’m living this way for more than a decade now. I call it slow self-destruction. Deep inside I scream for help and freedom but I’m such an enemy to myself. My question is, can an outside person really help me? Or does it all depend on myself and my nonexistent willingness?

This person noted in his email, “Even if I read and understand, nothing changes.” But does he really understand?  We can think we understand when we don’t. With complex issues, the process of understanding deepens from superficial to profound. I’ll try in this post to provide a deeper understanding of “nonexistent willingness,” the self-descriptive phrase my reader employs at the end of his email.

Certainly, some people are markedly hampered by emotional issues—and not necessarily because they have a mental-health disorder. Rather, they’re bogged down, in varying degrees, by inner passivity and inner conflict. Deeper understanding can help them find purpose and motivation.

So, how to proceed? First, as a basic necessity for inner growth, you have to choose some course of study, contemplation, or action—and then give it your best shot. The worst thing is to drift along, mindlessly and passively, putting yourself at the mercy of a sorry fate.

Some people identify strongly with a weak sense of self. Consciously, they want to be strong, but unconsciously they’re making a choice to remain emotionally attached to this passive sense of self. The challenge is to feel the passivity and then to begin to recognize and understand one’s emotional attachment to the feeling. People have to feel their unconscious identification with passivity in order to fully understand what they’re dealing with.

We are trying here to see inner passivity in the clinical sense, as an aspect of human nature, not something deserving of guilt or shame. This weakness is not our fault. It’s a weak link in human nature. It helps when we recognize the inner conflict here between wanting to feel strong versus being identified, emotionally and unconsciously, with weakness and helplessness. We’re trying here to feel and understand the unconscious allure of knowing ourself through the old, familiar sense of weakness. How can we bring the weakness and our unconscious affinity for it into better focus?

Consider self-pity, an obvious expression of weakness. Become aware of any self-pity you might be feeling. Self-pity is often associated with feeling oneself to be a victim of others or life in general. Feeling self-pity means that, unconsciously, you’re passively indulging in a sense of victimization and weakness. If you’re feeling the pull of this “self-defeatism” and you honestly acknowledge it, you might sense a bittersweet loyalty to your old suffering self. This is not a loyalty to take to the grave.

Recognize self-pity as the abandonment of self. You’re abandoning all honor and self-respect. You’re unconsciously “milking” a sense of weakness, finding bittersweet consolation in it. This understanding is a lot different from blaming others or bad luck for one’s miserable feelings and lack of motivation. Ideally now, you take responsibility for this weakness, at the same time that you feel the courage to expose it. Feeling the stark reality of your identification with weakness is an act of courage. It means you are at your best, at your strongest, in that moment.

It’s important that we recognize and appreciate our inner resistance to liberating our better self. Even if what you mostly know is a suffering self, you can be highly resistant to letting go of this old, familiar identification. Consciously, you do want a new, improved sense of self but, unconsciously, the old sense of self fights for its survival. Inner growth can feel as if you’re letting a mysterious stranger into your house, someone who plans to take over the place. One part of you wants to accept him, another part to boot him out.

As a psychological phenomenon, resistance must be respected, yet it’s still like refusing to reach out for a life preserver when you’re drowning.

Despite resistance, most everyone has some ability to shift from weakness to strength. If we want to feel emotionally stronger, we can very likely make it happen. If the effort feels impossible, we’re likely not bringing two conflicting parts of our psyche—inner passivity and the inner critic—sufficiently into focus. We’re not being attentive enough to, or mindful enough of, these two troublesome elements of our inner life. The knowledge of what they are and how they operate is available here at this website and in my books. The degree of our willingness to learn psychological self-knowledge, along with our steady attentiveness to this knowledge, are measures of how serious we are about achieving inner growth and escaping from needless suffering.

In hopelessness and self-pity, many sufferers fail to access the sense of their ultimate significance and value. If you can’t feel your value, you can’t feel the value of others and the value of life. In this limited consciousness, all that’s left is the desperate search for validation. This tends to produce an “I’m-great, I’m-not-great” inner skirmish that can mutate as self-centeredness and hair-trigger reactivity. The answer here is to understand more deeply how our inner critic attacks us through our passive side to tear down our belief and trust in self.

Make notes as you read, read them over every day. Keep a journal. You have to apply yourself in some process of self-development. Otherwise, you’re just fooling yourself in believing you’re really serious about growing.

If you’re looking to depth psychology for understanding, you want to be able to recognize your emotional and behavioral symptoms and understand the underlying dynamics that produce your symptoms. (Again, the basic knowledge is available in any one of my books.) Being jealous, envious, depressed, cynical, and indecisive are symptoms. Being self-critical is also a symptom. Chronic self-criticism arises from inner conflict in the psyche. Here the abusive inner critic overwhelms the passive, defensive side. The self-criticism we daily experience as negative thoughts is a derivative of how we allow our inner critic to mock and berate us on an inner level.

We’re being strong, developing our inner fortitude, as we consistently enable our intelligence to expose these underlying dynamics. Before long, we can feel that we’re making some headway in directing any self-criticism (which is usually unfair and irrational in the first place) to just pass through us—in one ear and out the other—rather than to linger in our psyche as inner conflict and stir up trouble.

It’s important to present yourself with clear choices. For instance, Do I eat this unhealthy food or not? Do I get this work done or not? Do I exercise or not? Many people passively act on impulses without first checking in with themselves to either authorize or to bar the impulse. When it comes to taking action or not, make it a conscious choice. Yes or no—chose one of the other. Take personal responsibility for making a choice, even if it’s an unwise choice! If you make an unwise choice driven by a desire or craving, at least you’ve avoided passively allowing self-defeating behavior to just happen mindlessly.

In the following hours or days, you’re once again going to present yourself with a choice, yes or no, with respect to the options that daily life presents. Once again you give yourself the chance to make a better choice. If once again you make the unwise choice, so be it. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow you might make the better choice. In this daily practice, you continually give your better self the chance to represent you. If you persist in this practice and make a sincere effort to choose wisely, you’re endeavoring to replace passivity with strength, and you’ll likely soon be making healthier choices.

Sometimes we’re choosing unconsciously to suffer. This unconscious perversity, a kind of psychic masochism, is probably the most challenging consideration for us to reflect on. The notion can feel like an accusatory assessment of our plight. Just mentioning it can seem like blaming the victim. But if we want to get stronger, we have to zero in on our weakness. What is the deadly flaw in human nature? Why is humanity on the cusp of self-destruction? I assure you that we’re highly resistant to seeing ourselves in all our naked obstinacy. We’re too vain, and our ego is too fragile, to be eager to identify the fatal weakness—inner passivity, tainted by unconscious masochism—at the core of human nature.

Our awareness of this weakness, as vital self-knowledge that’s emotionally assimilated, can become the psychological remedy. In practicing what I’m teaching here, the email writer above would, when in the throes of his “slow self-destruction” and “nonexistent willingness,” recognize the passive feeling in which he’s wallowing as his own willingness, even determination, to experience displeasure and weakness. Will he surrender to the weakness or come to his rescue? It’s his life and his choice.

A clinical awareness of inner passivity and inner conflict can provide him with the strength to revitalize himself. The knowledge will reveal the dynamics of his inner conflict. At the same time, he can begin to feel that his better self is more powerful than his compulsion to wallow in the bittersweet embrace of self-abandonment and emotional degeneration.

As a technique, he might acknowledge his psychological predicament with irony yet insight along these lines: “Wow, I must really like this feeling of being helpless and powerless. This is where I go, this is where I hang out, deep in this feeling. I know it’s perverse and irrational, but unconsciously I must really like it because I certainly keep coming back to it.” This is his acknowledgement of the deep, self-defeating irrationality at the heart of his psyche, the conscious wish to feel pleasure versus the unconscious willingness, driven by unrecognized inner conflict, to bask in weakness and suffering.

He asked me in his email, “Can an outside person really help me? Or does it all depend on myself and my nonexistent willingness?” Yes, an outside person can help him, especially a good psychotherapist. Ultimately though, his psychological progress does depend on him and his capacity to override his passive side, as he acquires the inner truth about his emotional plight and applies this self-knowledge in his life.

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