Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 5

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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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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