Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 5

Time to Take My Summer Break

Summer’s here, and it’s break time from writing. While I continue to do therapy sessions with clients, my brain is insisting on a three-month rest from its most arduous labor: composing the essays posted at this website.

More than 260 of these articles are available here. They reveal the dynamics of inner conflict that cause most mental, emotional, and behavioral problems. These articles are free and, along with the books on sale here, they instruct readers on how to benefit from the basic principles of depth psychology.

The search function will retrieve articles on any particular problem you might be having (such as depression, guilt, shame, addictions, indecision, intrusive thoughts, self-rejection, resistance, and so on). To further help readers access this abundance of knowledge, here are links to several of the most widely read posts:

The Bittersweet Allure of Feeling Unloved

Are You Overly Sensitive to Rejection?

The Invisible Wall of Psychological Resistance

Our Compulsion to Self-Punish

“Why Am I so Easily Discouraged?”

A Remedy for Feeling Trapped

Breaking Free of Inner Passivity

When in Doubt about Sexual Orientation

Overcoming Incompetence and Its Miseries

The Deeper Issues that Produce Meanness

Free Yourself from Inner Conflict

Greed as a Mental-Health Disorder

When in Doubt About Sexual Orientation

Problem Gamblers Are Addicted to Losing

Reading my books can also help people to study this depth psychology and apply the knowledge to their personal issues. The three most popular book titles are:

Freedom From Self-Sabotage: How to Stop Being Our Own Worst Enemy.

Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness.

Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society.

If you’ve just come across this self-knowledge, any one of these three books is a good place to start reading. I’ll be back with new, insightful posts by late September or early October.

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Haunted by Incessant Wanting

What do you want, and why do you want it? How intense is your wanting? To what degree is your wanting a form of suffering?

These are questions tackled by philosopher-entrepreneur Luke Burgis in his book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2021). Burgis contends you are living a lie if you think your choices are completely autonomous, independent, and self-directed. His book outlines a concept called mimetic theory, which says persistent desire or wanting is due to our susceptibility to the influence and modeling of others.

When wanting becomes a way to suffer.

Burgis’s intention is to make us more conscious of unhealthy behaviors and desires. It would help, however, if he were to go deeper into the psyche.

Mimetic desire, he writes, is formed and generated “through the imitation of what someone else has already desired or is perceived to desire.” (The word mimesis is derived from a Greek word meaning imitation.) Burgis says we use the modeling influence of others to decide what we want for ourselves. “We chose objects due to the influence of a third party, a model or mediator of desire,” he writes. He cites the evidence that infants begin to copy others, often with body and facial expressions, as part of the process of interacting and becoming social.

Of course, it’s true that we often come under the influence of circumstances and others. As I see it, though, this point is of secondary significance. It’s more important for us to understand that the stress and anxiety of chronic wanting is a product of our personal inner conflict more so than a condition caused by others.

It’s a trick of our mind to attribute our behaviors and emotions to outside influences or factors. Bad luck, job loss, lack of opportunity, and the malice of others are often blamed for the self-defeat and negative impressions we generate within ourselves.

Burgis does this, too. He attributes the chronic state of wanting and desire—one of our most “popular” ways of suffering—to outside influences. He’s not seeing clearly enough the unhealthy “game” we play with ourselves. This game involves, in this context, our unwitting willingness to suffer the persistent displeasure of desiring what we don’t have, can’t get, or is unhealthy for us.

The more we experience such displeasure, the more likely we are to be afflicted by cravings and desires and to be entangled in inner conflict. The distress or pain of incessant wanting is the result of an unconscious choice we’re making to hold on to feelings of deprivation, refusal, and inner barrenness. Envy and self-pity are frequently symptoms of this inner conflict.

The unconscious “game” is not to get but instead to suffer the sense of not getting. The wanting, when especially intense, is a coverup for our unconscious choice to remain mired in this inner conflict between desire versus deprivation, refusal, or barrenness. The desired object or behavior is not the prize in itself but instead serves as a contrivance or ruse for experiencing unresolved inner conflict.

Unconsciously, we’re willing to deepen the painful impression of being helpless or powerless to attain what we so adamantly want. Such conflict can haunt us much more than we realize.

Wanting becomes one’s unconsciously chosen way to suffer. The wanting, while compulsive, feels natural. Life can’t be complete, it feels, because something is always missing. We can’t imagine another way of experiencing ourselves except in terms of some vague emptiness, disconnect, or alienation. Fortunately, we can break our compulsion to experience this futile wanting and needless suffering when we become aware of the unconscious dynamics that produce this form of misery.

Cravings and desires are powerful sensations. They act like flame-throwers turning up the heat in the crucible of one’s conflicted psyche. Buddhism is right that much of our suffering is due to the tendency to crave and desire things. Many of our most persistent and troublesome cravings or desires arise organically within us, propelled by inner conflict. We are driven to replay and recycle the unresolved emotional issues that inner conflict compels us to act out.

For instance, a person may want desperately to feel significant and important. But beneath the surface, in the realm of inner conflict, this wanting can be a coverup or compensation for this person’s identification with self as someone who is unworthy and insignificant. People will crave money, power, and fame in order to compensate for this underlying emotional weakness. They may feel desperate to succeed primarily to avoid the pain of underlying self-doubt. This wanting becomes a painful desire that covers up one’s own unwitting participation in the inner conflict between wanting respect versus identifying unconsciously with being undeserving of respect.

When blind to inner conflict, we’re compelled to act it out. We don’t need to imitate others or seek out models to initiate and carry out this process. The driving force is our own compulsion to act out unresolved inner conflict.

Some people who strive to become wealthy can have as a hidden motivation the desire to feel superior to others. They seek value in the form of money to cover up their emotional affinity for doubting their intrinsic value. This kind of wanting covers up an underlying fear of being an insignificant or lesser person. The inner conflict is between consciously wanting to feel good about oneself versus being compelled to process unresolved self-doubt. Driving self-aggrandizement is the entanglement in self-doubt that inner conflict facilitates.

An emotional resonance with self-doubt disturbs, in varying degrees, the psyche of most people. Instinctively, we hide from ourselves this identification with self-doubt, self-alienation, and inner emptiness. We don’t see how readily we succumb to the allure of this identification. The thought of being so blind to this emotional condition offends our ego. Unconsciously, we resist letting go of unresolved hurts and identifications associated with feeling unworthy and insignificant.

One of humanity’s unconscious wishes is to go on nursing unresolved hurts from childhood (the first hurts). We don’t need imitation of others as impetus or guidance to act out this compulsion. Many people feel conflicted, for instance, between consciously wanting to feel loved versus unconsciously being willing or compelled to recycle old hurts associated with being rejected, abandoned, or betrayed.

Unconsciously, we’re driven by inner conflict to suffer, and a never-ending stream of wanting may become our “favorite” way to suffer.

Many people who yearn for excitement or adventure are burdened with an underlying impression that something vital is missing from their life. Chronic boredom is a symptom of this conflict. We are compelled by inner conflict to desire that which we artificially construe to be missing from our life. We unwittingly set our sights on some person or object that we can surreptitiously use to feel conflicted about. It’s pure self-deception.

Some people desperately want romance in their life mainly to stave off their loneliness. Consciously, they desire love, but their unconscious weakness may be to feel helpless to overcome their own passivity and self-alienation. Even if a romantic partner is found, genuine love may be elusive if the lonely person’s wanting is based on self-alienation, because this issue, if unrecognized and unresolved, will carry forward into the new relationship, blocking intimacy and the development of a stable relationship.

Here’s another example of wanting that is self-initiating. Lingering infantile influences in our emotional life can cause us to want, sometimes fanatically, outside reality to validate the disinformation we inwardly churn up to protect our egoistic biases. Such mental-emotional contrivances insist that, “My values are the best ones,” or “Reality is what I say it is,” or “This is the way things should be.” The zany perceptions of QAnon followers offer an example. On the surface, they desperately want reality to validate them, but, unwittingly, they have chosen the path of least resistance. They accept preposterous notions of reality because truth would require that they strive to put their best foot forward rather than sink into disinformation and with it the degradation of their intelligence and even their humanity. Our best effort requires inner growth, while the worst only asks that we show up to act out inner conflict’s antics.

Wanting becomes an unconscious psychological defense. The defense covers up our willingness to indulge emotionally in old hurts that are unresolved from childhood, such as feeling refused or deprived. The defense makes this case on our behalf: I’m not attached to the feeling of being refused love, affection, or recognition. Look at how strongly I want to feel love. Look at how needy I am for recognition. I desire these things so earnestly. This is how we fool ourselves into thinking our desires, our “wantings,” are legitimate, rational pursuits.

Even a noble kind of wanting can be a means to suffer. For example, people can desperately want their country and the world to make headway against climate change. Yet they can begin to feel anxiety and even despair at the lack of progress. If they’re suffering this way, their unconscious intent is no longer for reform and progress. Instead, they’re more interested in recycling and replaying unresolved inner conflict associated with feeling helpless and hopeless. The more they fall into despair, the more acutely they feel helpless, and the more acutely they then suffer from their unfulfilled, desperate wanting.

Burgis warns that mimetic desire could spiral out of control. Our bones “will get picked dry by the winds of mimetic forces without our ever having staked a claim on anything that touches us at the depths of our being.” He says we need a new invention, possibly in education, that helps us to navigate our way forward. My suggestion is that we begin to see ourselves more objectively, as creatures who suffer needlessly because of ignorance of our psyche’s self-defeating inner conflict.

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My New Book: Healing Our Deadly Flaw

We’ve all seen dysfunctional people create disorder in families, communities, and nations. It’s been an especially gruesome sight in recent decades. As a psychotherapist, I understand the roots of the problem. A specific psychological weakness, a flaw in human nature, is largely responsible for family and civic strife, as well as surging mental-health distress, mass delusions, and creeping authoritarianism.

This weakness or flaw is inner conflict, particularly the clash in our psyche between inner passivity and the inner critic. We’re able to escape from emotional suffering and self-defeat when the dynamics of this psychological conflict come into focus.

My latest book exposes these dynamics with new, detailed insightfulness. Published this month, this 315-page book is titled, Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society. It’s now available in paperback or as an e-book through the Books link here or directly at Amazon.com.

The title, Our Deadly Flaw, refers to the pervasiveness of inner conflict in our psyche. It also refers to our unconscious compulsion to painfully recycle that conflict within ourselves as well as in our relationships with others.

My book provides an especially clear explanation of these dynamics. It’s three books in one: a self-help manual, a counter-extremism manifesto, and an inspiration and empowerment for saving our planet.

Our Deadly Flaw provides hundreds of examples of how unrecognized inner conflict damages us both personally and collectively. It’s written plainly enough for teenagers to read, and I do recommend it for young readers.

I believe in the power of this knowledge because of how it has benefited my readers and clients—but most of all for how it has helped me. I was neurotic and fated for failure before I discovered, in the mid-1980s, this depth psychology. I wouldn’t have been able to write any of my books—or even become a psychotherapist—without the strength this knowledge bestowed upon me.

Very few mental-health practitioners are offering this knowledge to their clients. People are largely unaware of how these unconscious forces contribute to their depression, anxiety, loneliness, and other distressful emotions. You’ll understand the point I’m making here by reading the book’s Introduction at the “Look Inside” feature at Amazon.

I’m hoping my readers and clients will make an effort to help circulate this knowledge. It’s important for our own self-development that we find ways to be helpful to others. The more people who assimilate this knowledge, the better their prospects and those of future generations.

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Inner Conflict’s Role in Child Suicide

The mental-health pandemic pummeling young people doesn’t get the headlines Covid does. Even last fall when the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health, warning of “soaring rates” of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, the story faded after a day.

There’s no vaccine for this problem, no good answers either, it seems.

We need to teach young people about inner conflict.

Now there’s growing alarm about a rise in suicide among pre-teens. The New Yorker magazine has a long article on the subject this month, written by Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. In the article, he provides behavioral and personality profiles on several pre-teens who committed suicide.

As I see it, inner conflict is, in large measure, the hidden cause of the children’s despair. Solomon doesn’t directly mention inner conflict in his article, and he gives just the barest attention to a psychoanalytic perspective of the children’s plight. The prevalence of inner conflict in the human psyche is a basic premise of classical psychoanalysis. But the current medical-psychiatric model for treating mental-health disorders has abandoned this approach to understanding human nature.

Solomon wrote an article for The New Yorker, in 2014, that offered a psychological profile of Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old who shot and killed 20 students and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. Based on Solomon’s reporting, I wrote a post back then, titled, “A Deadly Case of Inner Conflict,” which offered reflections on Lanza’s mental state that I thought Solomon was overlooking.

Once again, in his latest article, Solomon is overlooking inner conflict as a source of the problem. I’ll apply psychoanalytic insights here to show that inner conflict is likely the main source of the emotional turmoil afflicting children who are in danger of committing suicide. Solomon describes the personality and behavioral traits of Trevor Matthews, a 12-year-old who died last year after leaping from his apartment building. Trevor was a brilliant student, Solomon writes, “charming, generous, and humane,” who “was frequently disciplined” and could be a bully and turn suddenly violent. He continues:

Many had perceived him [Trevor] as someone who inflicted suffering on others, not seeing that he was suffering intensely himself. But people who respond to others aggressively and act impetuously are at acute risk of suicide, because they respond to themselves with impulsive belligerence, too. Bullying is strongly associated with suicide not only among its victims but also among its perpetrators. Experts speak of childhood depression as having internalizing symptoms (withdrawal, sadness) that are often ignored and externalizing symptoms (aggression, disruptiveness) that are usually punished. Both can be manifestations of the same underlying illness. And Trevor, like many bullies, was also sometimes the victim of bullying. On one occasion, a group of boys held Trevor down and kicked him.

This assessment, while it speaks obliquely to Trevor’s inner conflict, is not sufficiently clear and comprehensive. I’ll restate what Solomon has written above in an effort to offer more insight.

Trevor’s agony was likely the result of an unconscious conflict between two operating systems in his psyche, his inner critic (superego) and his subordinate ego. This subordinate ego is a weakness in the psyche, a kind of inner no-man’s-land that harbors fear, self-doubt, and passivity as its principal aspects. This part of us produces shame, guilt, and depression as it absorbs admonishments and even self-abusive invective that flows from our inner critic.

Conflict of this kind—between inner passivity and self-aggression—is common in neurotics. Even so-called normal people can be battered at times by it. This conflict can be more intense in people suffering with mood or personality disorders or other serious psychiatric disturbances. Many people are able to escape their suffering when they understand their emotional predicament in terms of inner conflict. Instead of being cannon fodder stuck in our psyche’s battle zone, we can, through an understanding of the dynamics of inner conflict, become objective observers of our plight, able to stand back from the inner melee, experiencing a new degree of consciousness that protects us from the fallout of inner strife. It’s a case of becoming stronger and more rational as we begin to see and understand the irrational turmoil that inner conflict, and our psychological ignorance of it, subjects us to. With the best insight, we can make much of the unconscious conscious.

As Solomon notes, children who are bullies and who are the victims of bullying are more at risk of suicide. Both the bullies and the victims are reacting to inner conflict. Bullies are driven to become inappropriately aggressive in order to cover up their inner passivity. In varying degrees, this passivity is a presence in everyone. It’s an emotional leftover from the many years of childhood we spend in stages of helplessness, dependence, and subordination. Unconsciously, however, we’re resistant to recognizing this inner weakness. A bully’s aggression is his reaction to his underlying passivity. His unconscious defense goes like this: “I’m not emotionally aligned with a passive sense of self. I don’t identify with myself in a passive way. Look, I’m the aggressor. I enjoy being the aggressor. That proves I do not, at my deeper core, know myself through a sense of self-doubt and weakness.”

The aggression of bullies is a protection from their inner critic, which will mock them for passive weakness and for their emotional resonance (identification) with it. Bullies instinctively identify with the passivity of the victim. They know what it feels like to be bullied because they’re the target of their own bullying inner critic. They feel driven to adopt a bullying posture to “prove” themselves innocent of passive affinities. The worse the bullying behavior, the more that bullies are acting desperately to hide from themselves an awareness of their passive resonance with the victim and their own passivity.

Many of the victims of bullies muster enough inner strength to survive the bullying and to thrive later in life. But many others are pulled into the passive side of inner conflict, stuck in an inner defenselessness for which their own inner critic viciously mocks them. They, too, are heavily conflicted, prone to depression and suicide. Often the young victims of bullying become bullies of weaker children. Inner conflict compels all of us, much of the time, to experience ourselves, others, and the world in terms of conflict.

—

Inner conflict, with its accompanying tension or stress, is an assault on our mental acuity. When conflicted, we are, in a given moment, representing through inner dialogue the excuses and defensiveness of the passive side of inner conflict, while simultaneously absorbing emotionally the insinuations and accusations of the aggressive side. Energy that would otherwise go to purposeful or creative pursuits is bound up, often painfully, in this conflict. Inner conflict is a primary contributor to a wide-range of painful self-defeating symptoms, including loneliness, incompetence, apathy, and a lack of resilience.

A major polarity in human nature is between wanting consciously to feel strong while being compelled unconsciously to experience various kinds of weakness. An individual’s inner passivity makes him or her an easy target of the primitive, often vicious inner critic. Solomon refers to this, in the indented excerpt above, when he writes, “…they respond to themselves with impulsive belligerence, too.” It is more precise and helpful to say, “They react in a painful and self-defeating manner to the impulsive belligerence that their inner critic inflicts upon them, not realizing how, through their inner passivity and accompanying inner conflict, they unwittingly allow themselves to be a target for this belligerence.”

Solomon notes that depression increases the risk of suicide. Both childhood and adult depression are caused in part by the degree to which the inner critic overwhelms the passive side of the psyche (the unconscious or subordinate ego) with self-aggression and self-denigration. This passive side of inner conflict has little choice but to experience guilt, shame, and depression when it fails to block the inner critic’s aggression. When we begin to become conscious of this inner passivity, and then understand the inner critic as a primitive drive that has no business butting into our life, we are able with our intelligence and desire to avoid suffering to infuse our passive side with the presence and consciousness of our better self. When we see our plight as inner conflict, our enhanced consciousness connects with our better self. Now our better self lays claim to the realms of the psyche that inner passivity has been occupying.

Freud identified inner conflict when writing of Thanatos, the death drive, and its opposing psychic force, Eros, the will to thrive. This interpretation of human nature depicts an inherent polarity—the conscious wish to be strong versus the mysterious impulses or even compulsions to experience weakness, inept self-regulation, and self-defeat. Freud was always trying earnestly to bring into better focus the nature of our conflicted psyche, and he did so largely through the concepts of ego, superego, and id.

The New Yorker article notes, “Experts speak of childhood depression as having internalizing symptoms (withdrawal, sadness) that are often ignored and externalizing symptoms (aggression, disruptiveness) that are usually punished. Both can be manifestations of the same underlying illness.” First, it’s not helpful to call depression an illness. Since experts can’t say precisely what that illness is, the public is left with a sense of helplessness. Who’s going to heal this illness? With its medical model, psychiatry has been failing miserably, as Harvard’s Professor Anne Harrington documents in her book, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton, 2019).

When instead we think about the problem in terms of inner conflict, we begin to see how we ourselves can heal our troubled mind. We begin to make the psyche’s dynamics more conscious, at which point our new self-knowledge, along with our intelligence, begins to plot a way forward that leads to enhanced inner strength. Granted, this optimistic prognosis applies to the general population and not necessarily to those individuals with mental-health disorders. Still, I do know from experience that many people diagnosed with mental-health disorders can benefit from this deeper psychological knowledge. They should, at least, be given the opportunity.

Second, withdrawal and sadness, like the external symptoms of aggression and disruptiveness, are indeed manifestations of the same underlying problem—and that problem is inner conflict.  Withdrawal and sadness are emotional symptoms that arise from the passive side of inner conflict (where emotional suffering has its deepest roots), while aggression and disruptiveness are behavioral symptoms that reflect the influence and values of the aggressive side of the conflict.

Without mentioning inner conflict directly, Solomon’s article provides plenty of evidence for its presence. For instance, the article notes that children who spend five or more hours a day online are nearly twice as likely to have suicidal tendencies as those who spend less than an hour. Spending so much time online feeds one’s passive side, especially if the content is mostly trivial or sensational. The deeper the passive experience, the greater the vacuum into which the inner critic will thrust itself. An excess of inner passivity also gives inner conflict free rein to establish itself in the psyche.

Trevor, the boy who jumped from his apartment building, was given to nightmares, the article notes. “He would be screaming in the middle of the night,” his mother said. While sleeping, all of us are more defenseless, more susceptible, to inner conflict. The inner critic doesn’t go to sleep. Its self-aggressive drive stays active. Because we’re asleep, we have less capacity than usual to protect ourselves from its onslaught.

The article mentions the alarmingly high rates of suicide and suicide attempts among LGBTQ youth. Solomon says these high rates reflect “an unaccepting society—and, frequently, an unaccepting family.” This blaming of society and family is unfair and partly untrue. In the West, the LGBTQ community is becoming more accepted than ever, even if some conservative diehards still rail against it. The idea that condemnation, persecution, or even nonacceptance is driving them to suicide makes sense only if they have unstable emotional resilience to begin with. The nonacceptance or condemnation they’re experiencing likely derives mostly from how their inner critic assails them for confusion and self-doubt with respect to their sexual orientation. Inner conflict produces the painful feeling of not knowing one’s own mind or being overly sensitive to the opposing beliefs of others. The realm of sexuality can be another playing field upon which people experience inner conflict. Through no fault of their own, many in the LGBTQ community may be more disconnected emotionally from the self-assurance that heterosexuals can feel. For all these reasons, the high suicide rate among them is likely attributable mostly to inner conflict.

Millions of children are suffering, and so-called experts are floundering in their attempts to rescue them from this misery. Solomon recommends medication, along with Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, as the best treatment options. These approaches have had some remedial benefit. But they’re not a solution to the problem. New, harmful symptoms can arise when the underlying conflict goes unrecognized. The best solution is in knowing and learning essential facts about human nature. Why have the experts not discovered the facts about the basic dynamics of emotional suffering? Isn’t it obvious that some measure of inner conflict is present even in normal, everyday children struggling with wanting versus not getting, who are trying to be good versus bad, strong versus weak, and happy versus sad? Why aren’t we teaching our children the life-saving knowledge that would release them from their misery?

In my opinion, the experts can’t see their own inner conflict. Doing so exposes the folly of ego-identification. Our ego can’t allow itself to be humbled. Inner truth, when realized, demotes the ego and elevates our more evolved, better self. That’s a step too far for those who can’t bring their deepest weakness into focus. It’s the main reason the findings of classical psychoanalysis were abandoned, and why, tragically, psychoanalysis is just a shell of its former self. Too bad, since exposure of inner conflict and our unconscious compulsion to recycle and replay it would help us all to become stronger, more capable of overcoming the world’s many dire threats to progress.

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Putin’s Psyche

Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine, a display of barbaric consciousness, is an example of how inner conflict, the war zone in our psyche, is a force capable of producing a devastating war among nations.

All it takes is one conflicted, politically powerful person—in this case, Russian president Vladimir Putin—to unleash the havoc. By all evidence, he’s very conflicted about Russia’s status in the world. He feels deeply and painfully that his nation has been undermined, beaten down, and humbled by Western powers since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire three decades ago.

Putin has angrily accused the West of encroaching on his borders, but what he really fears are democratic and enlightenment values flooding the minds of eastern Europeans, especially Russians. For him, democracy is a psychological threat to his authoritarian consciousness. Putin himself is a particularly rigid personification of the resistance in the human psyche to the transition from an ego-based, individualistic consciousness to a more holistic one.

Growing psychologically is not what dictators do. If they did, they’d stop being dictators. When we grow psychologically, we create an inner democracy in our psyche where our best self is in charge. From this vantage, authoritarian impulses are experienced as primitive, far beneath our dignity.

Psychologically, Putin is very weak. His vendetta against the West is a symptom of his refusal to let go of the humiliation he has felt about the Soviet Union’s collapse. On the surface, his humiliation appears as lost imperial pride. But beneath the surface, in what is highly neurotic behavior, he’s simply been refusing to let go of his personal suffering. That suffering is not even about the status or plight of Russia. It’s more about his own unconscious willingness to take the sense of humiliation deep into himself and suffer neurotically. His suffering is all about himself, what he’s too weak in a psychological sense to let go of. Now it’s made him a stupid and evil egomaniac.

All peoples have a tendency to identify, in some measure, with their country and it’s standing in the world. Any esteem our country secures is taken by us as validation of our own self. We bask in our country’s glory. It’s even more enticing to identify this way when one’s country has maintained an empire. The Romans, Turks, British, and Russians weren’t happy when their empires collapsed. Ideally, people release their sorrow and get past their grief—providing they’re able to find consoling compensations, perhaps even to identify more with their better self rather than to depend emotionally on the egotistic satisfaction they’ve derived from their country’s alleged supremacy.

Putin’s refusal to evolve has compelled him to blame the West, accusing us of hypocrisy, hostility, and decadence. Obviously, we’re not perfect, but nonetheless his blame still serves as a psychological defense covering up his unwillingness to let go of his painful humiliation. The unconscious defense reads as such: The West is causing my pain and the humiliation of my country. It’s not me. I’m not holding on to a sense of degradation. I’m angry at the West. That proves I don’t want to feel humiliated, weak, or passive. This defense, though, only covers up inner truth.

The war in Ukraine is frequently attributed mainly to Putin’s ethnic-nationalist view of empire. Many scholars have suggested that he’s mainly driven by an instinct to protect the language, culture, and blood of a Slavic heartland from the allegedly corrupting influence of Western values. I believe this gives too much credit to Putin’s ideology, not enough to his psyche.

His psychological conflict is the inner battle between wanting to feel respected while being highly sensitive to feeling disrespected. This means he resonates emotionally with feeling disrespected, which derives from his abandonment of his better self. This is his deadly flaw, his unconscious appetite for this form of suffering. Any decent connection to our better self overrides a mental or emotional disposition to flirt with feeling disrespected. Meanwhile, Putin’s consciousness is so primitive that he believes the West is responsible for the misery he cultivates within himself.

Obviously, the authoritarian mindset prizes political power. Trump was prepared to destroy American democracy to avoid relinquishing such power. Why is this craving for power so compelling? The craving is a false flag, an unconscious psychological defense through which an individual yearns for political power to cover up inner weakness. The weakness is a decrepit state of consciousness through which an individual is unable to connect with a better self that secures the feeling of power and worthiness from within. The weakness derives from inner conflict, namely a person’s inner struggle to fend off the inner critic’s accusations that, at deeper levels in the psyche, he is identified with being a non-entity, a nobody, a loser. Hence, a desperation can arise for worldly power to cover up the neurotic, sometimes psychotic, state of being. In Putin’s case, his attack on Ukraine is an acting-out of his neurotic (if not psychotic) need to deny his emotional identification with this impoverished sense of self.

As a dictator, the stakes are raised for Putin. He needs to feel supreme or grandiose to suppress his sensitivity to feeling disrespected. Grandiosity is a frequently coveted emotion. Billionaires love to feel it. Dictators and white supremacists, too. The creepiest politicians in Washington and greediest players on Wall Street summon this hallucination. Putin is just another villain in the tragedy of human lunacy. He is slaughtering innocents in Ukraine to make Russia great again and ease his own pain. It’s pure evil when people do great harm to others (take note, American oligarchs!) out of cowardly determination to protect their own ego.

Flooded with inner conflict, Putin is bound to experience his world in terms of conflict. All of us tend to see the world subjectively to the degree that we are inwardly conflicted. Perhaps the most painful inner conflict is the one between needing to feel supreme to cover up an unconscious emotional identification with the sense of being a deplorable loser. Putin feels he needs to pose convincingly as a great man; otherwise, he likely senses he would collapse emotionally into nothingness, especially if his dream of a geopolitical resurrection went unrealized.

(My analysis here gives Putin credit for having a shred of humanity. Instead, he simply may have become, over two decades of sycophantic coddling and wealth engorgement, a complete and hopeless malignant psychopath, a monster of a man.)

Putin doesn’t operate in a vacuum. What about the Russian people? Are they also steeped in inner conflict? Did they unwittingly contribute to the invasion of Ukraine? They have allowed corrupt opportunists, headed by Putin, to take over their country and rob it of much of its wealth. Many of them, it would seem, must have been tormented by painful inner conflict about this highjacking of their country.

Did they not feel helplessly passive and cowardly paralyzed? Looking at their circumstances from an American perspective, the conflict is apparent. Individually, wouldn’t they want to stand for truth, decency, and freedom? They must have wanted to feel good and strong. Yet they’ve been threatened with imprisonment for speaking out. It would seem the only way they could avoid feeling conflicted about the kleptocratic takeover of their country—and now the slaughter in Ukraine—is to behave like sheep, which for humans is obviously a pathetic state of consciousness.

Is it the case that dictator Putin is acting brutishly, yet predictably, through the absolute power that the passivity of the Russian people has bestowed upon him? Is he only being as excessively aggressive as they are deplorably passive? Of course, Russian people must have some weariness with their long, hard history. I don’t want to blame them—only encourage them.

As we go about our daily business, people of all nations can at times feel some degree of inner conflict between the wish to be strong versus the propensity to become emotionally entangled in a sense of weakness and helplessness. We all know what it’s like to feel brave versus fearful, decisive versus indecisive, inspired versus disappointed. Many of Russia’s citizens do want to feel strong and free—yet they’re obviously fearful of challenging their totalitarian overlords. They may wish to be better informed about the Putin regime’s corruption and lawlessness, but perhaps they’re afraid this knowledge will only spawn guilt for their failure to become engaged citizens or reformers.

From the American perspective, people determine the quality of their government according to the degree of freedom they feel from within. The American Revolution succeeded because the people’s righteous aggression overthrew a passive allegiance to despotism.

Many Russians have protested against the war and many more have fled the country. Putin’s evil regime arrests and jails protesters, oppressing the country’s best people. That’s a rendition of what happens in the human psyche. The best of who we are is oppressed by our inner critic, while the weakest part of us, inner passivity, absorbs the punishment as guilt, shame, and fear.

If Russians don’t liberate themselves from their oppressive regime, they’ll suffer even more through an increasing loss of dignity, self-respect, better living conditions, and perhaps, too, what’s worst of all, the dissolution of the “Russian soul,” the people’s spirit, that Dostoyevsky extolled.

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Putin’s Self-Deception

The Russian invasion of Ukraine offers an example of how inner conflict, the war zone in our psyche, is a driving force capable of producing devastating warfare among nations.

Let’s look at one individual psyche—Russian president Vladimir Putin’s—and put him on the psychoanalytic couch. From all the evidence, he’s very conflicted about Russia’s status in the world. He feels deeply and painfully that his nation has been undermined, beaten down, and humbled by Western powers since the collapse of the Soviet Union’s eastern European empire three decades ago.

Putin has angrily accused the West of encroaching on his borders, but what he really fears are democratic and enlightenment values flooding the minds of eastern Europeans, especially Russians. For him, democracy is a psychological threat to his primitive consciousness, which is an authoritarian mentality that extols raw power. Putin himself is a particularly rigid personification of the resistance in the human psyche to the transition from an ego-based, individualistic consciousness to a more holistic one.

In a rendition of militant ignorance, Putin declines to grow psychologically. Becoming wise is not what dictators do. If they did, they’d stop being dictators. When we grow psychologically, we create an inner democracy in our psyche where our best self is in charge. From this vantage, authoritarian impulses are experienced as primitive, far beneath our dignity.

Putin’s vendetta against the West is a symptom of his refusal to let go of the humiliation he has felt about the Soviet Union’s collapse. On the surface, his humiliation appears as lost imperial pride. But beneath the surface, in what is highly neurotic behavior, he’s simply been refusing to let go of his personal suffering.

His suffering is not even about the status or plight of Russia. It’s more about his own unconscious willingness to take the sense of humiliation deep into himself and suffer neurotically. He very likely believes his anguish is about Russia’s humiliation. But that’s a reflection of how unconscious he is. His suffering is all about himself, what he’s too weak to let go of. He knows nothing of this: His self-deception is breathtaking. His many years possessing absolute power, while surrounded by sycophants, has made him vain, stupid, and evil.

All peoples have a tendency to identify, in some measure, with their country and it’s standing in the world. Any esteem our country secures is taken by us as validation of our own self. We bask in our country’s glory. It’s even more enticing to identify this way when one’s country has maintained an empire. The Romans, Turks, British, and Russians weren’t happy when their empires collapsed. Ideally, people release their sorrow and get past their grief—providing they’re able to find consoling compensations, perhaps even to identify more with their better self rather than to depend emotionally on the egotistic satisfaction they’ve derived from their country’s alleged supremacy.

Putin’s refusal to evolve has compelled him to blame the West, accusing us of hypocrisy, hostility, and decadence. Obviously, we’re not perfect, but nonetheless his blame still serves as a psychological defense covering up his unwillingness to let go of his painful humiliation. The unconscious defense reads as such: “The West is causing my pain and the pain of my people. It’s not me. I’m not holding on to a sense of degradation. I’m angry at the West. That proves I don’t want to feel humiliated.”

The war in Ukraine is frequently attributed mainly to Putin’s ethnic-nationalist view of empire. Many scholars have suggested that he’s mainly driven by an instinct to protect the language, culture, and blood of a Slavic heartland from the allegedly corrupting influence of Western values. I believe this gives too much credit to Putin’s ideology, not enough to his psychology.

The psychological conflict is also between wanting to feel respected while being highly sensitive to feeling disrespected. The stakes are raised until respect needs a sense of supremacy to suppress the sensitivity to feeling disrespected. Supremacy is a frequently coveted emotion, even if it’s all illusion. Billionaires love to feel it. Dictators and white supremacists, too. The creepiest politicians in Washington and greediest players on Wall Street summon this hallucination. Putin is just another villain in the tragedy of human lunacy, slaughtering innocents in Ukraine to make Russia great again and ease his own pain. He’s another top dog trying to avoid the crushing humiliation of facing himself and acknowledging the lowly cur that he unconsciously identifies with. Flooded with such inner conflict, he’s bound to experience his world in terms of conflict. It’s the worst kind of inner conflict, the one between needing to feel supreme to cover up an unconscious emotional identification with the sense of being a deplorable loser.

That’s the kind of desperation inner conflict can produce, the willingness to commit the vilest acts of evil, the willingness to destroy democracies and incapacitate if not murder the best people, in order to avoid looking into the core of one’s own psychological constitution to expose the dynamics that churn up self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, and even self-hatred.

It’s not that Putin would necessarily see evil by looking inward. Rather, he would discover inner truth, the degree to which he’s emotionally identified with a puny sense of self. He was easily crushed emotionally by the Soviet Union’s demise because he was likely neurotic to begin with. His KGB background certainly doesn’t speak to his character. His psychological state has declined over time because, emotionally, the human psyche usually can’t handle the absolute power of being a dictator. The ego goes berserk.

Putin can’t stop strutting around foolishly and pompously. The only way to maintain the facade, it feels to him as reality closes in from all sides, is to become more supreme. To him, that means restoring the Russian empire at whatever cost in blood and destruction. His inner conflict is also his conscious wish to feel great, like another Peter the Great, versus that unconscious yet haunting feeling of collapsing emotionally into nothingness were his dream of a geopolitical resurrection to remain unrealized.

He has become the lowest of the low, on a par with a madman gunning down people in a shopping mall. All those bullets flying in Ukraine are ricocheting back on the Russian soul. The people there have to do more than just duck.

So, what about them? The Russian people also must be steeped in inner conflict. If so, would that conflict also have contributed to the invasion of Ukraine? The Russian people have allowed corrupt opportunists, headed by Putin, to take over their country and rob it of much of its wealth. Many of them, it would seem, must have been tormented by painful inner conflict about this highjacking of their country.

Did they not feel helplessly passive and cowardly paralyzed? Looking at their circumstances from an American perspective, the conflict is apparent. Wouldn’t they yearn to be the kind of person who stood for truth, decency, and freedom? As individuals, they must have wanted to feel good and strong. Yet they’ve been threatened with imprisonment for speaking out. It would seem the only way they could avoid feeling conflicted about the kleptocratic takeover of their country—and now the slaughter in Ukraine—is to behave like sheep, which for humans is obviously a pathetic state of consciousness.

Is it the case that dictator Putin is acting brutishly, yet predictably, through the absolute power that the passivity of the Russian people has bestowed upon him? Is he only being as excessively aggressive as they are deplorably passive? Of course, Russian people must have some weariness with their long, hard history. I don’t want to blame them—only encourage them. Perhaps they need more courage than the rest of us can imagine.

As we go about our daily business, people of all nations can at times feel some degree of inner conflict between the wish to be strong versus the propensity to become emotionally entangled in a sense of weakness and helplessness. We all know what it’s like to feel brave versus fearful, decisive versus indecisive, inspired versus disappointed. Many of Russia’s citizens do want to feel strong and free—yet they’re obviously fearful of challenging their totalitarian overlords. They may wish to be better informed about the Putin regime’s corruption and lawlessness, but perhaps they’re afraid this knowledge will only spawn guilt for their failure to become engaged citizens or reformers.

From the American perspective, people determine the quality of their government according to the degree of freedom they feel from within. The American Revolution succeeded because the people’s righteous aggression overthrew a passive allegiance to despotism.

Many Russians have protested against the war and many more have fled the country. Putin’s evil regime arrests and jails protesters, oppressing the country’s best people. That’s a rendition of what happens in the human psyche. The best of who we are is oppressed by our inner critic, while the weakest part of us, inner passivity, absorbs the punishment as guilt, shame, and fear.

If Russians don’t liberate themselves from their oppressive regime, they’ll suffer even more through an increasing loss of dignity, self-respect, better living conditions, and perhaps, too, what’s worst of all, the dissolution of the “Russian soul,” the people’s spirit, that Dostoyevsky extolled.

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The Flaw Wars that Sabotage Relationships

This post is an excerpt from my late wife Sandra Michaelson’s book, LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships. The book exposes how we unconsciously resist recognition of our own barriers to being more loving, while choosing instead to blame our partner or others for our misery.

Often, we adjust and adapt our emotional lives around our partner’s frailties. We set up a grievance-file on our emotional hard drive that’s filled with our partner’s past, present, and anticipated weaknesses and transgressions.

Running away from love for all the wrong reasons.

We conclude that if our partner’s flaws didn’t exist, we would be happy. Keep in mind that we are always making the mistake of holding our partner responsible for how he “makes” us feel. If he changes his behavior, we assume we won’t have to continue feeling bad. But making our wellbeing dependent on someone else’s attitudes or behaviors is one of the major reasons we are unhappy. For one thing, we are highly ineffective in inspiring reform in our partner when we make our happiness dependent on his or her compliance. In fact, when we act from this insecure, self-centered intent, we are more likely to bring out the worst in our partner.

A preoccupation with our partner’s flaws or weaknesses serves many purposes, particularly our willingness to indulge in feeling disappointed in our partner. I wrote in the Introduction about my dismay when in the mid-1980s I first discovered this emotional attachment in myself. The knowledge of it, and my willingness to observe this attachment on a daily basis, became one of the cornerstones of my inner liberation.

As long as we see our partner as imperfect or flawed, we set ourselves up to feel we are getting nothing of value from him. It is like a child who would rather go hungry than eat a meal not entirely to her liking. Hence, we overlook the good in our partner and what he has to offer. Our grievance-file gives us an opportunity to feel deprived by our partner’s faults, as if his faults existed solely to starve us emotionally and make our lives miserable. In other words, harping on your partner’s faults provides you with the justification you secretly seek in order to hold on to feeling hurt, disappointed, and deprived.

Storing grievance-files also serve the purpose of discounting and devaluing our partner so we can feel superior, compensating for our tendency to feel incompetent and inferior. Often, we waste much energy arguing over who is more flawed and whose flaws are more damaging.

Such files also create distance from your partner and are used to avoid the unfamiliar, uncomfortable feeling of being close and intimate. Jenny, for instance, tended to pick the worst time to focus on Don’s weaknesses. Just as he was prepared to make love, she wanted to discuss the supposedly ineffective way he had handled a salesperson at their furniture store. Not surprisingly, their chance for passion and love fizzled out.

Confronting your partner with his flaws rarely results in a positive response. Your partner most likely will resist even more determinedly any reforms you may be trying to institute. Your partner is more likely to respond positively to your needs when she feels good about herself and not when she’s just received a critical evaluation from you.

That doesn’t mean we should never register a complaint. It means that when we have a gripe, we should first examine why our partner’s behavior is bothering us so much. What feelings are being triggered by the behavior? Could it be that we are emotionally attached to these feelings and thereby ready unconsciously to replay and recycle them in daily life?

Consider how you may be emotionally contributing to the situation. If you sincerely believe your partner needs to consider something he has overlooked, it is far more productive to explain to him how you feel about his behavior or how you are interpreting what is happening. Politely and specifically discuss with your partner what he or she can do to make things easier for you.

To make matters more challenging, we often imagine that other people look at our partner and see his or her faults the same way we do. We may imagine that others are rejecting of our partner for these alleged faults. When we believe others see our partner as irresponsible, inadequate, or not attractive enough, we identify with our partner who represents a reflection of our own tendency to see ourselves as inadequate.

The way you see your partner is the same way you see yourself and expect others to see you. For instance, if you see your partner as mediocre or boring, that is probably how you regard yourself. And vice-versa: if you regard yourself as boring or mediocre, that is likely how you see your partner or imagine how others see your partner. This is another reason we go on campaigns to reform our partner. If he changes (so the logic goes), we will feel better about ourselves because he will make us look good. We want our partner to do what we won’t do for ourselves and what we cannot allow ourselves to be.

There are several patterns or defenses that serve as vehicles for gathering material for our grievance-file. These include, in particular, projection, transference, seeing our partner through our parents’ eyes, and other forms of blaming. I have already mentioned these defenses, and in this chapter I strive to explain in more detail how they work. Remember, if we are fooled by our defenses, we will keep repeating old painful patterns.

The Problem of Projection

It surprises us to discover that the character flaws we hate so much in our partner are often the flaws we are loathe to see in ourselves. It is easy to point out our partner’s defects while blinding ourselves to our own. The process of externalizing our unconscious feelings and judgments about ourselves and others is called projection.

When we project emotionally on to our partner, we will, say, accuse our partner of infidelity when that is exactly the temptation we have been toying with. We will complain about our partner’s lack of assertiveness as we are denying the same lack in ourselves. We will imagine our partner is angry with us when the real problem is the anger we ourselves are harboring towards him. We will become exasperated with our partner’s fears and doubts, mainly because they may be mirroring our own.

What you hate in your partner is likely what you hate (without knowing it) in yourself. Judgments we make about someone else can be saying something essential about how we judge ourselves. Understanding projection may be vital to the understanding of why you suffer so much with respect to your partner’s flaws.

Here’s an example of projection. Lloyd frequently told his wife, Tina, “You let people walk all over you; you never stand up to anyone or state what you want.” However, Tina just as often accused Lloyd of the same trait. Both were projecting their own passivity on to the other. I had each write out a list of examples of their passive behaviors and the ways they submitted to others. I also had them discuss the origins of their passivity in their childhood relationships with their parents. Lloyd and Tina became more understanding and supportive of each other when each was able to see and acknowledge his and her own passive traits.

Projection enables us to avoid facing our own self-doubt, self-negation, and emotional liabilities. Lacking insight, these shortcomings remain a part of us regardless of how valid our accusations may be toward our partner. Focusing on the flaws of our partner gives us a wonderful opportunity to deny our own ongoing self-condemnation and to divert our attention from our lack of self-appreciation. This doesn’t mean our partner is innocent of the flaws we see in him; it simply means we are blind to the truth of our emotional situation as we externalize (project) our unconscious feelings and judgments toward ourselves on to others. Without being aware of it, all of us are in a continual process of projecting what we feel and think on to others.

Not only do we project our character flaws, we also project our value system. Sometimes we do not consider the possibility that others may not share our same value system or interests. Have you noticed that we often give as presents what we want or what we value? We give what is important to us, what we like, and if the other person doesn’t seem to appreciate it or respond in kind, we can feel hurt …

It’s quite natural that what might be important to you is not necessarily important to your partner. Still, many of us take it personally and feel rejected or invalidated when our partner doesn’t seem to appreciate or share our values or interests. To nourish affection and harmony, it is vital to learn about our partner’s values and interests without trying to change them to fit our own. Differences are just that, differences, and not a judgment or an evaluation of you and what you believe in.

Much of what we perceive in the world, including our partner, is subject to emotional or irrational interpretations resulting from unresolved inner conflicts and past conditioning. We see what we want to see and deny what is unpleasant to us. Consequently, our interpretations often take precedence over the facts of a situation, as we see our problems or issues in ways that validate our own perspectives and mirror our feelings toward ourselves …

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Can You Be Your Own Therapist?

This is a new version of a blog I posted on this website in 2014. It goes into more detail about the process of freeing ourselves from emotional and behavioral problems. This revised version will appear in the Appendix of my latest book, which I expect to publish by April.

Nourishing our psyche with self-knowledge.

Readers who are suffering from misery and self-defeating behaviors would do well to be seeing a psychologist, psychotherapist, or mental-health counselor. People can benefit greatly having a compassionate professional, whose own mental health is strong and stable, help guide them through the perils of mental, emotional, and behavioral struggles. Individuals with a diagnosable mental disorder should definitely be under the care of a psychotherapist or psychiatrist or both.

Professionals practicing depth psychology are in the minority, and very few of them address inner conflict as presented in my books. However, people who want to learn and apply this knowledge can attempt to do so on their own. This self-help approach involves learning basic principles, while practicing inner watchfulness to see how the knowledge applies on a personal level. The basics of this approach involve a three-step process.

In the first step, people begin to distinguish between painful, damaging symptoms and the underlying source of these symptoms. The symptoms consist of recurring negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. A wide range of symptoms are involved, and they include anger, worry, anxiety, stress, depression, loneliness, self-pity, boredom, insomnia, cynicism, addictive behaviors, chronic patterns of failure, feelings of being overwhelmed and trapped, and psychosomatic ills.

These symptoms have a deeper source that arises mainly from inner conflict. This conflict involves the compulsive, usually unconscious replaying and recycling of the eight first hurts (feeling deprived, refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and betrayed). When triggered by one or more of these first hurts, unpleasant, often painful, and self-defeating symptoms arise. Inner conflict also involves, as well, persistent and frequent unconscious clashes between inner passivity and the inner critic.

People discover for themselves, in the second step, which of the first hurts they’re most reactive or sensitive to. This can often be done by reflecting back on childhood to determine for oneself which of the hurts was most frequently or painfully experienced. This is not about blaming parents or siblings for emotional injury. It’s about recognizing the unresolved hurts and consequential unhealthy patterns that we as adults are still compelled and unconsciously willing to keep replaying with ourselves, other people, and life itself. (Exercises provided in the Appendix of my book, Freedom from Self-Sabotage: How to Stop Being Our Own Worst Enemy, can help pinpoint the unresolved hurts to which we are most susceptible.)

Everyone has, as well, some degree of inner passivity. We can now begin, in inner watchfulness, to try our best to identify those times and places when we sense the influence of inner passivity. The more we recognize this influence, the more conscious we become and the quicker we heal.

In our mind and emotions, we often unconsciously pick up on threads of thought or feeling that arise from memories or impressions associated with inner passivity, the inner critic, or the first hurts. This is a critical moment in our inner life. Are we going to follow this thread or not? If we do follow it, hours and days of misery might ensue. This thread of negative memory, consideration, and speculation is a pathway into needless suffering. This is the moment when, if we’re practicing inner vigilance or mindfulness, we can quickly identify the thread and recognize it as an invitation to suffer. With inner vigilance, we come to our rescue and refrain from following the thread into the dark side. Protecting ourselves at these moments is an excellent example of being more conscious. We’re making conscious the moment when, in the past, we would have chosen unconsciously to follow the thread of negativity—and suffer accordingly.

The third step involves understanding psychological defenses. We use a variety of psychological defenses (unconscious expressions of our refusal to recognize inner truth) to cover up our readiness to feel these old attachments in various new contexts.

Anger is one of the most common defenses. As an example, someone who is attached to feeling rejected, criticized, or controlled becomes triggered, and he or she might get angry at the person who’s doing (or who appears to be doing) the rejecting, criticizing, or controlling. The unconscious defense contends: I’m not looking for the feeling of rejection (or criticism or control). Look at how angry I get at him for rejecting (or criticizing or controlling) me. Self-pity also serves as a defense: I’m not looking for rejection (or criticism or control). Look at how bad I feel, how much it hurts, when I am rejected (criticized or controlled). Notice in these two examples how the painful symptoms are also simultaneously being employed unconsciously as defenses.

Blaming others is another of the most common defenses. The defense contends: I’m not receptive to feeling rejected. I’m not looking for that feeling. Rejection is imposed upon me by others. I blame them for what I’m feeling. They’re the cause of the rejection I’m feeling. My disgust or anger at them is proof I don’t want to be rejected.

There are hundreds of ways we use defenses to cover up inner truth. You need some understanding of your defenses if you want to make progress in this method of depth psychology. It is a tricky business exposing the chicanery of self-deception when you don’t have a skilled therapist to assist you. Again, it can be done, especially if the instructions are clear enough. When we keep reflecting on this knowledge, insights are generated. The insights become new consciousness that overcomes misery and self-defeat.

Now, understanding this three-step process, you can better identify inner conflict as you work through an emotional attachment. Here are more details of how the process can unfold in step two:

Describe a situation in which you became upset. Did you feel that someone refused you, or tried to control you, reject you, or criticize you? Get beneath your surface symptoms such as anger or self-pity (or other symptoms listed in paragraph three of this section). Try to recognize the deeper hurt that you’re taking on and reacting to. This is your emotional attachment.

Let’s say you suspect that you’re reacting to the feeling of being criticized (one of the first hurts). Produce memories from your past in which you felt criticized. Was your mother or father critical of you? Were they critical of each other, and did either or both of them appear to have been self-critical? Did they disapprove of you? Did you feel you were a disappointment to them?

Where else in your life have you experienced feelings of being criticized? Did it happen in your relationships or at work? Think about and write down the different ways you have felt hurt by the criticism (or what you took for criticism) of others.

Ask yourself, “Am I a critical person?” “Do others experience me as being critical?” “Am I critical of myself?” The more we’re sensitive to feeling criticized, the more likely we’re self-critical as well as critical of others. Whenever you’re having painful, critical feelings toward others or yourself, recognize that your impulse to be critical comes from how you resonate with criticism, meaning how you’re emotionally attached to the feeling of it.  We take on the feeling whether we’re on the receiving end of the criticism or whether we’re dishing it out.

Look closely at your past relationships. Have you had a tendency to become involved with critical people? Have you felt hurt and passive when criticized, or have you lashed out in a tit-for-tat manner with criticism of your own? Have there been times when you might have provoked others, through careless mistakes or insensitive oversight, to be critical of you? Did they experience you being critical of them?

Are you something of a perfectionist? This would mean that you try desperately to do things perfectly, likely out of fear of being criticized by others or by your inner critic. We usually have some fear of whatever we’re attached to. The fear can be employed as part of one’s defense: I’m not looking to feel criticized. Look at how perfectly I try to do things. Look at how much I try to avoid being criticized, and how fearful I am that it might happen.

When feeling inner discord, we can find the deep explanation for the unpleasantness. We try to recognize which of the first hurts we’re reacting to. We also want to be conscious of whether we’re being passive to the inner critic and absorbing punishment from it. Once we recognize what negative emotion (from the first hurts) is triggering us, we expose the fact that we have been making a choice (albeit an unconscious one) to slip into an experience of that emotion. This is important—we benefit greatly by taking “ownership” of the fact that, unwittingly, we are choosing to become entangled in that negative emotion. We know from past experiences how painful it is to be caught in the throes of that emotion. Our improved consciousness—the sum of our new knowledge, growing intelligence, perceptiveness, and good intentions—is now able to help us “back out” of that emotional attachment or, better still, refrain from following the original thread leading into its web of negative considerations. Recognizing the psychological danger, we can say, “No thanks, I’m going to do my best to block out any thoughts or feelings dealing with this unpleasant emotion.” Soon you develop a new “muscle,” an inner vigilance, that keeps you alert to whenever the emotional attachment wants to reassert itself.

It might be helpful, at this point, to ask yourself, “Do I feel that I have the power to possess this knowledge? Or do I feel it’s beyond my grasp?” Clients have described getting “brain fog” when trying to penetrate intellectually into this higher knowledge. Our resistance to learning it can become stronger the deeper we go.

We know our self-development is proceeding favorably when we experience a Eureka moment, a flash of inner truth. One client kept expressing a sense of hopelessness about ever being able to establish a loving relationship. He believed his sense of hopelessness concerning romance and marriage was a rational assessment of his dire prospects. Suddenly flooded with insight, he saw that his hopelessness was a result of his choice, in those moments of greatest anguish, to experience himself helplessly, through the sense that he didn’t have what it took to find a loving partner. His hopelessness, he realized, was pure inner passivity. He had been allowing his inner critic to torment him with accusations that he was, in matters of romance, a loser. His preoccupation with romance and marriage were just the ropes with which he bound himself to inner conflict. In that moment, he saw the receptivity of his inner passivity to the flagellation of self-punishment. This was a critical realization in his process of liberating himself from the scourge of inner conflict and his attachment to helplessness.

Another client, a business executive, had been ruminating painfully for years on whether he should be involved in “a more dynamic business” where he would presumably fulfill his dreams and aspirations. On his way to work one day, he had a jaw-dropping realization: His unconscious intention was not to clearly see his way forward but instead to remain stuck in confusion, self-doubt, and disappointment. He was emotionally attached to feeling criticized as an underperformer. Without deeper awareness, he was likely to act out that fate. He would not likely have become aware of this inner conflict (the back and forth in his mind of self-criticism and inner defensiveness) without having explored depth psychology.

Many people can achieve insight and inner freedom without personal therapy, but they have to want to uncover inner truth and be willing to put in the effort. The effort, though, can be mostly pleasurable, even something like a hobby, a way to live with a new sense of richness. Pleasure arises, too, from knowing we’re doing our best to make something of our life.

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The Difference Between Learned Helplessness and Inner Passivity

My readers know how ardently I put the focus on inner passivity. It is, I contend, the primary mischief-maker of the psyche, the largely unconscious part of us that keeps us from being at our best.

We want to avoid spiraling into helplessness.

Inner passivity, a primary component of inner conflict, is the straw house into which our wolfish inner critic barges. This passive side, though bland and banal in some respects, is largely the starting point or instigator of inner conflict. Its straw-house nature is an open-door invitation to the inner critic’s aggressive instincts.

The straw house is our weakness, our deficiency of consciousness, our failure to prevent inner conflict. When we muster the determination to bring inner passivity into focus, we begin to act bravely. Our heroic gathering of the necessary self-knowledge is the giant leap forward that overcomes inner passivity’s sabotaging effects.

To help readers acquire this knowledge, I approach inner passivity from numerous angles. In my blog posts and books, I usually work backwards, identifying inner passivity’s many unpleasant symptoms and tracing them back to the source. This post offers another perspective, an understanding of the difference between inner passivity and learned helplessness.

Inner passivity is a more expansive understanding of human weakness than is denoted by learned helplessness, which is a term many psychologists use to understand inherent emotional weakness. This term is actually a misnomer. It was first introduced five decades ago by psychologists who believed that people who were unable to thrive and flourish had learned this ineptitude from parents and caretakers. The idea was that helplessness was learned through the child’s encounters with neglect, manipulation, over-protective parents, control, or abuse.

Following new research, psychologists corrected this idea several years ago. They now have acknowledged (as depth psychology knew all along) that the sense of helplessness is innate or biological.

They still claim, however, that this helplessness is “the brain’s default state,” whereas I say instead that this helplessness is a psychological problem amenable to psychological solutions, and that any brain involvement is not, for practical purposes, relevant. (The term learned helplessness has been retained by mainstream psychologists, which is bound to confuse people.)

Learned helplessness accurately proposes that affected people are influenced, in a self-defeating way, by an innate sense of helplessness. These individuals are deficient in their response to challenges, threats, or just everyday situations. They’re plagued with a chronic sense of being unable to muster from within themselves the required strength or resilience to overcome self-defeating habits or behaviors or even just to meet daily challenges without stress or anxiety. They feel unable to rise to the occasion to make good things happen. With challenging tasks or projects, they frequently give up. Feeling unable to influence events for the better, they act weakly, in accordance with their perception that strength eludes them.

As a description of an emotional condition, the term learned helplessness, as now understood, accurately assesses how things stand for many people. But as an answer to the problem of emotional or mental weakness, it seems static or unhelpful, leaving individuals with no meaningful insight to help them out of this stuck place.

Depth psychology has a more comprehensive perspective. The depth psychology I practice understands this weakness in terms of inner conflict and the existence in our psyche of inner passivity. This understanding exposes hidden dynamics in the psyche, which in turn enhances our intelligence and our ability to access and fix the problem. The knowledge that exposes inner conflict and inner passivity provides a comprehensive teaching and learning methodology. This knowledge can be learned from my books, beginning with Freedom from Self-Sabotage: How to Stop Being Our Own Worst Enemy. This self-knowledge itself becomes a source of strength. It improves one’s resilience, creativity, and foresight. The self-knowledge, combined with the will to flourish, enables us to liberate ourselves from both helpless passivity and, in less severe dysfunction, a state of limited potential.

The thoughts, feelings, and impressions that inner conflict generates within us frequently involve the wish to feel strong versus an underlying identification with weakness. The conflict can be conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious, and it’s felt or expressed in terms such as: “I don’t know how I’ll ever find the strength to do that challenging work,” or “I want to act with strength but all I feel is weak,” or “I just don’t know what to do.” Other times, the weakness is entirely unconscious, and the individual simply endures the unpleasantness or misery of mediocrity or failure.

The solution lies in understanding inner conflict. This conflict frequently consists of a passive side (inner passivity) and an aggressive side (inner critic) that engage in mostly unconscious and contentious dialogue about the pros and cons of an endless variety of subject matters. The passive side of inner conflict is a mental and emotional operating system in our psyche (inner passivity) that produces self-doubt, along with conscious and unconscious defensiveness. (Our aggressive side is also its own distinct operating system.) This passive side is an important part of our psyche. When people identify with inner passivity, they unconsciously become—in their thoughts, feelings, and words—a representative or spokesperson for this passive aspect within themselves. They filter life through a passive bias. Again, for the great majority, their awareness seldom ever penetrates into the significance, extent, or dynamics of this limitation.

At this point, depth psychology helps us get to the root cause of this inner weakness. It’s all about seeing the inner dynamics that produce self-doubt, a sense of failure, and lack of self-respect. We apply the knowledge of these inner dynamics to our daily experiences. We see the problem clinically instead of being entangled emotionally in some vague, painful predicament. As we apply the knowledge to our personal circumstances, it becomes self-knowledge, revitalized intelligence, and growing consciousness.

Presented in a nutshell, the key method of treatment involves (1) learning the basic features of inner passivity and inner conflict as they apply to oneself, and (2) developing a daily mindfulness whereby we become increasingly attentive to how we’re making choices and generating thoughts and feelings that are biased by inner passivity, inner conflict, and psychological defenses.

Upon studying the basic principles, people can now see or catch themselves, in given situations, in the act of adopting a passive stance or feeling or in employing a misleading defense. A person now acquires enough insight to begin taking responsibility for unwittingly succumbing to passive impulses or inappropriate aggression that produce stress and self-defeat.

The regular practice of this attentiveness or inner watchfulness is itself an expression of significant strength, an indication of one’s determination to become stronger and function at a high level of achievement. Watch out, however, for inner resistance that can surreptitiously undermine our intentions or willingness to process psychological mindfulness on a daily basis.

New insight, accessed and processed in a consistent manner, begins to override the passive default position in our psyche. It’s as if we’re creating a new improved inner software. Over time, the passivity is dislodged, and inner conflict is undone, as people feel themselves shift to a more neutral or assertive approach to life experiences. They have more discernment, equanimity, and power.

Becoming more assertive is just one benefit. What also brings as much pleasure is becoming less reactive, thereby avoiding the unnecessary emotional anguish of inner conflict. Now we’re certainly more capable of standing up firmly, without hostility or self-righteousness, for what we know to be right and true.

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The Sad Sordidness of Inner Conflict

After four years of writing, I’m close to completing my latest book. This month’s post is an excerpt from it. The book, still untitled, shows how inner conflict is a primary influence affecting social, political, and economic dysfunction. In general, people have not understood or acknowledged this vital connection between our own personal psychological issues and the collective dysfunction that plagues communities and nations.

With inner conflict, the “yes” and “no” keep tormenting us.

This following excerpt is from the start of Chapter 2. Any readers who spot problems with grammar, reasoning, flow or other aspects of syntax please let me know. If a book title pops into your head, I’m all ears! I anticipate being done by March.

(I was recently interviewed by Dr. Jean Latting, Professor Emerita at the University of Houston. The video is here.)

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The Sad Sordidness of Inner Conflict

In one of his great poems, the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote (as rendered in modern English), “Oh would some Power the gift to give us / to see ourselves as others see us!” Yes, that would indeed provide us with enlightening and in many cases humbling and even shocking new perceptions of ourselves.

To become free of inner conflict, we need to see ourselves in all our strengths and weaknesses. Yet the psychological dynamics that make up inner conflict are largely unconscious. Seeing examples of this inner blindness can help us to understand why we’re not only blocked from seeing ourselves realistically, but we’re also disinclined to do so.

For more than 100 years, psychoanalysis has been trying to explain the hazards and dynamics of inner conflict. Yet people still don’t get it. Unconscious resistance and denial hamper our ability to see ourselves more objectively. People are not only unaware of the dynamics of inner conflict, most of us, including many mental-health professionals, aren’t even recognizing the existence of it within ourselves.

Unresolved inner conflict is a prime instigator of egotism, defensiveness, passivity, incessant desires, hostility, and violence. This inner discord, when unrecognized, renders us unwitting self-saboteurs who blindly foment personal misery and impair human progress.

We know that America faces a mental-health crisis. And much has been written on the erosion of mental health in the modern world. Contributing to this threat to personal and collective wellbeing is inner conflict, which induces neurotic symptoms in “normal” everyday people, making them more thin-skinned, dull, fearful, passive, and uninspired. The human cost is amplified by inner conflict’s talent for also generating irrationality, stupidity, cruelty, and paranoia. Democracy itself is at stake. Inner conflict is a kind of inner anarchy that involves illegitimate authority, cowering passivity, and arbitrary rules and punishments. In comparison, our resolution of inner conflict establishes an inner governance where rationality and goodwill prevail. With this inner democracy, law and order reign and the best of who we are is in charge.

How do we resolve inner conflict? For starters, exposing it makes us more conscious. We recognize what we haven’t wanted to see and we learn what we haven’t wanted to know. In essence, we begin to see how inner conflict produces a compulsive participation in suffering and self-defeat. Inner conflict is the underlying basis for these distressful inconsistencies from everyday life:

How many jealous people know (or want to know) that they’re strongly tempted to indulge in the unresolved negative emotions of rejection and betrayal?How many compulsive gamblers know they’re unconsciously addicted to the feeling of losing?How many envious people are aware that they’re emotionally attached to feeling deprived or refused?How many greedy people know their greed covers up their unconscious identification with themselves as lacking in intrinsic value?How many bitter and angry people are conscious of the fact that these negative emotions serve, much of the time, to cover up their indulgence in some sense of being victimized, oppressed, trapped, refused, or disrespected?How many fearful people know that their fear derives from their unconscious willingness to curry lingering emotional associations of childhood helplessness and powerlessness?How many addictive personalities can see that their out-of-control behavior is, to a significant degree, the result of an unconscious attachment (a compulsion to recycle and replay leftover emotional associations from childhood) to the feeling of being helpless or powerless?

People frequently dangle ambivalently between a strong-to-vague impression of a true or noble self who’s awaiting discovery within us versus a “false self” that’s drawn to the riotous excitement of risky or naughty misbehavior. Here’s the thing, self-defeat or self-sabotage are directly connected to inner conflict. These additional examples of inner conflict can help us understand this connection.

— Consciously, we want to feel strong and resilient, but unconsciously we can easily resonate emotionally with being weak, helpless, and lacking in self-regulation. In our psyche, misery abounds as this passive side of inner conflict accepts the punishment doled out by our inner critic.

— Consciously, we want to be respected, yet unconsciously we’re often bombarded by our inner critic’s harsh disrespect. This conflict makes us thin-skinned, sensitive to feeling disrespected, and prone to taking things personally. We’re often first in line to disrespect ourselves.

— Consciously, we want to feel our value and worthiness, yet unconsciously we compulsively undermine our sense of worth with persistent feelings of being insignificant, unworthy, and defective. This conflict often features intrusive and defeatist memories, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs with which we continue to punish ourselves.

— Consciously, we want to feel loved, yet unconsciously we’re prepared to indulge in feelings of being rejected, abandoned, and betrayed. Self-pity arises, along with the lament, “Nobody loves me, nobody cares.” Fear of intimacy often arises because the possibility of abiding love is associated with the prospect of rejection, betrayal, and control.

Can you see now why we hate to acknowledge inner conflict? Recognizing and understanding it, especially as it applies to one’s own psyche, shatters our self-image. The knowledge exposes the extent of our unwitting participation with the dark side. Our ego structure, with its conscious and unconscious defenses, “protects us” from recognizing inner conflict’s recurring self-damage. Instinctively, our conscious ego refuses to be humbled by realization of this inner folly—and we go along mindlessly with the program. Of course, this ego structure with which we identify is not protecting our best interests at all, but only its self-image and ego-ideal. Because of our ego-identification, inner truth registers as a narcissistic insult.

Let’s look at more examples of how personal inner conflicts contaminate the national scene. Consciously, people want to feel worthy and significant, but many are racists or white supremacists whose noxious beliefs and perceptions serve to deny or cover up their own repressed emotional associations with being unworthy, inferior, and defective. When they judge others maliciously, they’re doing to others what their own inner critic does to them. Even as they actively target others with their racism, they are still identifying unconsciously with the targets of their racism. They’re feeling deep within themselves what it’s like to be marginalized. They make this identification because, due to their inner critic’s self-denigration, they’re familiar with the feeling of being on the receiving end of contempt. Such identifications compound the problem, serving as a feedback loop that stimulates inner conflict and persistently fuels unpleasant supremacist sentiments. Meanwhile, millions of passive bystanders resonate with white supremacy and vote accordingly because their own inner dynamics nod to the beat.

Other times, racism derives directly from inner fear. Irrational fears left over from childhood still haunt the adult psyche. An individual feels the fear unconsciously, semi-consciously, or psychosomatically, and the fear is displaced onto the concept of being overwhelmed or displaced by people of color as if they represent a threatening alien intrusion. The inner conflict here involves the conscious desire to be a strong, mature person versus the recurring, tormenting, unresolved fearfulness that induces irrationality along with feelings of weakness and helplessness.

Dictators, along with many democratic politicians and citizens, are also plagued with inner conflict, one that produces lust for power, fame, and wealth. They prize power and attention because their psyche evaluates these attainments as indicators of personal supremacy. For them, it’s black and white: Either be supreme or else suffer the pangs of feeling empty and insignificant. Just as our inner critic, the faux dictator in our psyche, is dethroned by our growing awareness, so too will be—we dare to decree—dictators and unfit politicians. These psychological misfits are too conflicted and thereby too needy for the ego-gratification that their so-called power brings.

We haven’t accepted emotionally our lack of evolvement, a lack that’s been apparent in the denial of our delicate relationship with this planet. We easily become enthralled with technology, culture, and personalities, in no small measure because, however modest our circumstances, we plant ourselves on a feedback loop that swings impressive human achievement back upon ourselves as personal honor, validation, and grounds for preening individualism. This is not a display of quality consciousness but a measure of how inner conflict seizes on vanity to cover up self-doubt.

Meanwhile, our conscious ego, with which so many of us identify, much prefers the inner status quo, however lacking, over inner growth. When this all begins to sink in, when we finally start to get it, our ego’s first inkling of its obliviousness to the extent of its ignorance produces a jolt of incredulity. As we, through our ego’s frame of reference, realize the extent of our lack of self-knowledge, we’re stunned by a mortifying sense of humiliation. Gradually, as if going through stages of grief, we come into acceptance of inner truth. Fortunately, we’re soon delighted to experience how the detailed knowledge of our unconscious collusion in suffering begins to erode the restrictions on our intelligence, as it diminishes the painful symptoms of inner conflict.

Recognizing our psychological naiveté, we can save face a bit by appreciating that we’re basically innocent, being where we just happen to be on the evolutionary spectrum. Still, innocence might not protect us from annihilation, just as it hasn’t protected so many other earth-bound species that have fallen by the wayside.

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