Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 6

The Deep Knowledge that Liberates the Self

This month I’m publishing the Introduction to my book, Psyched Up: The Deep Knowledge that Liberates the Self. It’s the first of my two books of collected blog posts.

I arranged the order of the posts to make the content flow and the ideas more coherent. There’s some repetition of underlying principles since each blog post needed, at the time of writing, its own full measure of explanation. As I say in the Introduction, the repetition works to our advantage to help us overcome unconscious resistance.

Consider getting a copy of the paperback edition, and then feel free to slash away, with yellow highlight or bright red underlines, the areas of text that speak to you. Learning can be fun and energizing.

To your great benefit, the knowledge will sink in, even if you read it and slash away at its 517 pages for just 10 minutes a day.

Introduction

I’ve always admired investigative journalists. They dig into the underbelly of political and economic life to dredge up the truth about human affairs. They uncover gruesome facts about the shady side of human nature.

Revelations about wrong-doing benefit us all. Truth sets us free because it exposes what’s good and what’s evil, what benefits us and what hurts us, as we navigate individually and collectively along life’s rocky roads.

As a writer, I like to think I operate according to the principles of investigative journalism. I dig up important facts about the shady side of human nature, namely the repressed content of the unconscious mind. I expose humanity’s deepest secrets, the ones we keep from ourselves. My writing has evolved from decades of experience as a psychotherapist, and it’s an extension of my experience as a journalist writing for weekly and daily newspapers from 1966 to 1984.

This knowledge of the dynamics of our inner life empowers our intelligence, frees us from suffering, and raises our consciousness. My “exposés” reveal the extent to which, in our daily affairs, we act unwisely, producing self-defeat and suffering needlessly. As the knowledge of depth psychology is assimilated over time, it sets us free from malaise and misery.

The dirty little secrets uncovered by investigative journalists have their counterpart in the hidden operations and repressed content of the psyche. In fact, our political, economic, and social life is a creation of both our conscious and unconscious minds. We can clearly see the conscious, mental genius in our marvelous creations and undertakings. For the most part, though, we fail to see, or are reluctant to consider, just exactly how our emotional, unconscious side produces self-defeat and threatens our collective wellbeing and survival.

The conflicts and dysfunction that plague the daily life of humanity correlate directly with the inner conflict in our psyche. In large measure, we’ve failed to expose this correlation because it’s so humbling to acknowledge the extent of our willful ignorance and its accompanying self-defeat.

Our inner world can operate as a closed system, like a sealed-off backward country where civility, rationality, and legal protocols are in short supply. Infantile dynamics rule in our psyche. We can, however, learn the characteristics and features of this inner operating system’s irrational turmoil so as not to be defeated by it.

What is it our intelligence is not accessing? In this book, I offer hundreds of valuable insights into our subterranean shenanigans. This writing—my journalistic “scoops”—reveals the shady dealings conducted out of public and private sight in the backwaters of our mind. I’ve gleaned this insight about unconscious dynamics and conflicts from my practice as a psychotherapist, from my own inner work, and from the best knowledge produced by classical psychoanalysis.

Throughout this book, I look critically at mainstream psychology. In doing so, my purpose is to clearly distinguish the methods and solutions of mainstream psychology from what the best of depth psychology has to offer. There’s a vast chasm between these two alternatives. I believe that mainstream psychology is offering mental-health nutrition that’s the equivalent of bland, highly processed, fast food. My readers, in contrast, dine on the wholesome, organic roots of deep self-knowledge.

The most common ways we experience emotional pain are all discussed in these pages. This material explores the unconscious processes by which we produce shame, guilt, anger, depression, loneliness, addiction, conflict, cynicism, worry, anxiety, greed, envy, rejection, fear, failure, passivity, and egotism. Also included in this book are insights into bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, obesity, anorexia, gender issues, racism, suicide, boredom, procrastination, narcissism, insomnia, criminal behavior, and the causes of corruption, violence, and war.

The book’s variety of topics are woven around a central theme. This theme addresses the role we play—unconsciously—in producing our suffering and self-defeat. From topic to topic, I often discuss the same principles. This repetition is required to illustrate how the same basic recurring dynamics in our psyche are able to produce so many varied symptoms and so many different forms of suffering and self-defeat. The repetition is also required because we have significant resistance to assimilating inner truth. The knowledge has to penetrate our thick skulls. I have tried to minimize the repetition so it doesn’t feel like I’m pounding nails into the reader’s head.

Our psyche has, paradoxically, a wondrous unity and a magnificent chaos. In this inner world we find the knowledge most worth attending to. I shine a laser beam on an area of inner turbulence—involving conflicts, defenses, and emotional attachments—that generates much of our behavioral and emotional dysfunction. This knowledge gives us the strength and the insight to break free from the clutch of negative emotions.

Readers will learn why it’s so hard to shake off painful emotions, even when they’re obviously hurting us and holding us back. Insight is provided that explains how we tend to remain identified with old hurts and grievances first experienced in childhood. We learn how, in significant measure, we “know” ourselves (we identify with our self) through both inner conflict and its symptoms. As we begin to understand how we gravitate to painful default positions in our psyche, we’re able to break free of these old ways of “knowing” or experiencing ourselves. These unresolved emotions or psychological default positions include feeling deprived or refused—or helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, or abandoned.

We experienced many of these distressful emotions in childhood, even if we had kind and decent parents. I explain in this book precisely how a wide variety of negative reactions, all symptoms of unresolved inner conflict, arise within us. These painful symptoms or negative reactions are likely to remain unresolved when we can’t see the inner dynamics holding them in place. Unwittingly, we are prone to recreate and recycle familiar, painful emotions deep within ourselves as we experience the events and situations of our everyday life.

Our psyche operates according to its own rules of logic and procedure. These hidden mental and emotional dynamics operate irrationally and counter-intuitively. They defy the laws of logic and protocols of common sense. Normally, when we learn something—about math or science, for instance—we acquire the knowledge through a straightforward cognitive process. When it comes to acquiring self-knowledge, though, the process is quite different. Now we’re required to understand something that, cognitively speaking, defies common sense. For instance, while it does make sense that we want to be happy, we actually, on an inner level, chose to recycle negative emotions, unresolved from childhood, that maintain a state of unhappiness. Because this mysterious impulse to embrace negativity is so contrary to common sense, our collective human intelligence has failed to fathom the paradoxes of unconscious dynamics that govern both our inner world and our experiences of daily life.

While this self-knowledge is a kind of astrophysics of inner space, it’s not rocket science, meaning it’s not that difficult in itself to comprehend. What makes it difficult is our psychological resistance, our stubborn determination to cling to our old familiar identity, even when it’s a source of misery, rather than embrace the new, evolved sense of self we’re destined to become.

I use the term emotional attachments to explain this psychological predicament. An emotional attachment can be understood as an unconscious compulsion to continue to experience a particular negative emotion. Behind these attachments is our unconscious willingness, even determination, to hold on to unresolved, painful emotions. We then unwittingly go looking for ways to re-experience them. Consciously we want to be happy, yet unconsciously we can be willing and determined to experience the unresolved negative emotions that produce unhappiness.

Vast numbers of people have these emotional attachments. The problem, as mentioned, goes largely untreated because it’s not taught or even recognized by the vast majority of mental-health experts.

Emotional attachments constitute a form of inner conflict. We say we want love, for instance, at the same time that we can be emotionally attached to rejection, criticism, or abandonment. We say we want to be free, but then we unconsciously find ways to oppress ourselves. We say we want to get when, unconsciously, we’re into not getting. It’s important to see such inner conflict clearly, and this book makes that possible. We begin to get our head around the paradox that we consciously want love in our life at the same time that we’re compulsively looking to highlight and exacerbate feelings of being unloved.

When I’m writing about emotional attachments, I’m often simultaneously writing about inner conflict. Our attachment to an unresolved negative emotion such as rejection is the nexus of an inner conflict: one minute we reach out for love, the next we’re sniffing around looking for rejection. Back and forth it goes.

In one common conflict, we desire consciously to feel strong, at the same time that we gravitate to a default position within us through which we experience ourselves as weak, helpless, failing, and lacking resilience. In a manner that might be simultaneous, a wish to be strong and a willingness to know ourselves through old, familiar weakness engulf our sense of self. This emotional resonance with inner weakness, which I call inner passivity, is the result of our lingering identification with (or emotional attachment to) the helplessness, dependance, and submissiveness we experienced during the many years of childhood.

Inner passivity produces a hit-and-miss struggle to establish a sense of our own authority, and it sabotages our behavioral and emotional regulation. This inner glitch, which I track throughout this book, is a hurdle in the process of our evolvement. It’s an instigator of numerous painful symptoms, and it impinges to some degree on the health and happiness of just about everyone.

This book also discusses other deep aspects of our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. We enhance our mental clarity through self-knowledge. The quality of our thinking and intelligence is enhanced by the success we have in resolving inner conflict. The quality of our consciousness is also explored. Our growing consciousness is conjoined with our emerging, authentic self. This self, which I discuss in detail, emerges as we’re in the process of letting go of conscious and unconscious negativity. The authentic self is the essence of each of us. Its emergence gives each of us a sense of fulfillment.

This evolving self is home to our highest qualities, and our discovery of it enhances our ability to flourish. As we grow, we also acquire more self-regulation of thoughts, and we free up, for creative purposes, the energy that once we used for resistance and denial. Above all, this book reveals a new language of self-understanding. It makes liberating insight available to all, and it helps us to be really smart about what’s vitally important to know.

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The Four Dimensions of Our Ego

You would think one ego would be enough, especially if it’s notably vain, petty, grasping, and needy. But we appear to have four egos. Or, more likely, four dimensions of one big ego. Either way, becoming more conscious of these dimensions can help us to overcome the irrationality and misery we generate from within.

Knowing our ego structure is vital self-knowledge.

The ego’s four dimensions are largely unconscious. Even the first of these dimensions, the conscious ego, is often a candlelight in the wind. This ego largely permits us to illuminate only what its flickering vanity can tolerate.

Even in its pale glow, though, it still manages to dazzle us with the illusion of self-determination. Our inner fears are abated through the mirage of being incisive observers of reality, players who know the score. Our authentic self, in contrast, is highly resilient: It’s immunized against the fear of life.

The conscious ego produces an unstable identity on which to ground oneself. From its perspective, we inhabit a bag of skin and gaze timidly or gamely outward at the world, fixated on how best to cope with self-doubt, keep ourselves safe, fulfill our desires, and make pleasurable connections. Many people collapse into self-doubt, misery, and self-defeat because their conscious ego, while a protective filter, is nonetheless under the influence of conflict-ridden inner dynamics involving its deeper dimensions.

Obviously, an egocentric person can have plenty of “success” in the world. Yet psychological maturity with its enhanced wisdom, consciousness, and ability to avoid negative emotions and outcomes will likely be lacking.

The second dimension, the unconscious or subordinate ego, harbors its own set of dynamics. It produces emotional and mental impressions of ourselves, as well as behaviors, that consist largely of defensiveness, stubbornness, righteousness, and passivity. This ego, guardian of our irrational fears, is a little genius in its own right, conjuring up, in service to our psyche’s inner conflict, scores of clever defenses intended to repel the third ego, the super-ego. As an advocate for our wellbeing, this second ego is highly undependable.

It’s a dependable enabler, though, of the third dimension, the superego or inner critic, a primitive expression of self-aggression. The superego is a psychological drive that pummels and mocks us with accusations of folly, indecency, weakness, and failure. This drive or function derives from the physical aggression that’s built into our biology. In early childhood, this aggression, unable to release all its driving energy externally, turns against its host, our own self. As adults, we’re still prey to this aggression, experiencing it as self-criticism and self-denigration. As we absorb the aggression (by way of the second ego, the unconscious or subordinate one), we experience guilt, shame, and depression. The third ego is a bully of the second.

The more we absorb the superego’s aggression, the more we also redirect it at others and (with cynicism, bitterness, anger, and violence) at the world in general. Many modern psychologists believe the superego or inner critic is a guiding force, a mostly benign inner conscience. If we believe this, we’ll likely not appreciate or be able to regulate humanity’s inborn capacity for wrongdoing and evil.

The fourth dimension consists of the ego-ideal. This psychic structure is an unconscious mentality that arises from children’s instinct to preserve some vestiges of their profound self-centeredness. Children often say and feel with sincere, grandiose conviction: “I’m going to be president when I grow up,” or “I’m going to be the biggest movie star.” (For me, it was faith in becoming Superman.) These over-optimistic claims remain on record in the adult psyche.

When we fail to live up to these claims imbedded in the ego-ideal, the superego pounces on the discrepancy between the childish proclamations and our current state of achievement. Even decent successful people, when under attack in this manner, have difficulty feeling their goodness and worthiness. They’re loaded up with regret and guilt because their subordinate ego fails to protect them from their superego’s ridiculous allegations. They absorb punishment from their superego, thanks to the ego-ideal’s pretensions and the subordinate ego’s passivity.

The ego-ideal is a major player in varieties of human folly. It’s through the ego-ideal, I suspect, that many people refuse to accept the reality of human-caused climate crisis: “No way could we ever be so stupid as to inherit this earthly paradise—and then destroy it!” Even when we begin tentatively to explore the idea of being pawns of unconscious dynamics, the four dimensions of the ego protect their own existence with defensiveness, resistance, and an aversion to being humbled by exposure to inner truth.

How did this four-part ego structure and our identification with it come about? Babies and young children are highly inexperienced and subjective, and they experience themselves as if life revolves around them (just as early humans believed earth to be the center of the universe). As mentioned, this egocentric mentality offers some protection from feeling overwhelmed by chaos, complexity, and instinctive fears. In adults, the conscious ego continues to provide a degree of self-assurance, offering the consolation of thinking we know what end is up. Through this ego, we produce belief systems that we feel make sense of the world, thereby moderating our insecurities and fears.

Our destiny, which is to become more evolved, is resisted. The demise of one’s egotism spells danger: It signifies the prospect of collapsing into nothingness, becoming a nonentity. Identified with the ego, we feel we’ll be nothing without it. With behaviors that are largely unconscious reactivity, people engage in deceit, irrationality, and militant ignorance—even violence—to maintain their old, familiar sense of being. White supremacy is an emotionally based adherence to egocentric values.

Throughout its four dimensions, the ego remains overly sensitive to the first hurts of early childhood: feeling deprived, refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. These hurts are sometimes as prevalent and distressful for us as adults as they were in childhood. Our better self, in contrast, transcends these old hurts and fortifies itself with integrity, courage, and resilience.

I go a bit deeper now into the core of the problem. Many people are willing to conjure up negative reactions and emotions (e.g., aggressively blaming others, wishing harm to others, hating others, hating oneself) when doing so serves to cover up or to deny their unconscious willingness to identify with (and emotionally entangle themselves in) the weak, disconnected, childish if not infantile aspect of themselves, their inner passivity. A person’s superego is able to be only as intrusive and condemning as this person, through inner passivity, allows it to be.

The subordinate ego (the second dimension) is the seat of this inner passivity. This ego is so weak that it’s ultimately masochistic. Masochism means, in this sense, being compulsively and emotionally identified with weakness, submissiveness, and a lack of value, despite the misery this entails. Inner passivity describes the essential nature of the subordinate ego, which is to persistently experience weakness in terms of helplessness, paralysis, indecision, procrastination, cynicism, indifference, and hopelessness. An unconscious identification with the subordinate ego and its passivity blocks people from accessing the impulse to act on their behalf with appropriate assertiveness or aggression.

At the level of the conscious ego, this condition produces, often chronically, the displeasures of self-doubt, self-rejection, oppression, depression, and a sense of being insignificant and lacking in value. This experience includes a persistent mental and emotional processing of unpleasant and painful speculations and considerations.

We’re infused with inner passivity and impeded by it according to how much punishment—usually as guilt, shame, or self-loathing—our subordinate ego absorbs from our superego. In other words, much of the misery we experience in daily life derives from the degree to which our subordinate ego processes the aggression from the superego in a defensive, deceitful, and masochistic manner. Our plight is even more dire when our subordinate ego meekly cedes to the superego’s most preposterous accusations.

The superego can even attack us for what we might just imagine in the sense of wrongdoing, let alone for what we’re actually doing or have done. Even on such bogus grounds, our subordinate ego still accepts and absorbs punishment. The cowardice of the subordinate ego is breathtaking. Its spinelessness contaminates our whole sense of being. It’s no surprise that people hate to see this passive part of themselves: It’s us at our worst. This infirmity of human nature exposes the pretentiousness of the ego-ideal and the ignorance of the conscious ego.

Recognizing this flaw, our willingness to remain entangled in inner conflict and absorb self-punishment, is mind-boggling and profoundly humbling. As this flaw becomes conscious, though, the new awareness liberates us from much of our suffering.

The subordinate ego ought not to be bashed unequivocally. Depending on an individual’s emotional health, the subordinate ego can at times exert sufficient strength and flexibility to curtail inner conflict. This ego often manages through its defenses to produce, in the form of sublimation, a limited victory over the superego. Now an individual can function at an optimal level in at least one particular area of achievement, even for extended periods, although painful dysfunction can persist in other areas of this person’s life.

Still, the subordinate ego, in its characteristic passivity, is beholding to the superego, often terrified of it. As another telltale of our ignorance, the subordinate ego doesn’t consult its host—you or me—as to the appropriateness or justice of the defensive bargains it makes with the superego. Its conniving is solely for its own preservation.

Meanwhile, our conscious ego, greatly influenced by these inner dynamics, activates our mind and emotions, leading us in many instances to become unwitting stand-ins or spokespersons for a negative view of life. We can become mindless agents of the dark side, witless promoters of its values, as we regurgitate into our surroundings the hash of negativity that’s generated by the conflict between the passivity of the subordinate ego and the self-aggression of the superego. Ignorant of deeper dynamics, we express a litany of complaints, injustices, grievances, and bitterness, all of which have originated from our own unrecognized inner conflict. The complaining or whiny voice we take on is often the vocalization of the subordinate ego’s own sense of fearfulness, oppression, defensiveness, and suffering.

Sometimes, people become (instead of a voice that parrots the subordinate ego’s values) a clone of the superego, a troll for its prerogatives. They’re more likely to be stone-hearted, malicious, and sadistic. These individuals are likely, as well, to identify with a malignant narcissist or psychopath (or be one themselves) and become an impassioned supporter. When people surrender their will to a political tyrant or cult-leader, they exhibit externally a rendering of how, on an inner level, they have, in unconscious fear and passivity, surrendered their will to their superego and become its surrogate.

This identification with the superego’s values manifests as an authoritarian mentality. The authoritarian’s desire to rule over the weak and dictate the terms of governance derive from his unconscious determination to cover up his identification with inner weakness at the core of his own psyche.

Those identifying instead mostly with the subordinate ego are also prone to becoming blind followers or fervent fans of political, religious, or cultural figures. Decent, kind people among everyday neurotics can easily be pulled into one or the other of these unhealthy identifications.

As we escape staunch ego-identification through these insights, our improved consciousness enables us to connect more steadfastly with our better self. Now we can hold the superego in check. No longer can the superego impose upon us its primitive power-trips, malicious condemnations, and unfair punishments. At the same time, our subordinate ego retreats into a back corner of our psyche, while our conscious ego and ego-ideal give up the ghost. This victory of self-knowledge over the infirmities of the unconscious mind undermines the potency of the ego structure. What emerges is a more evolved person, the authentic self we’re destined to be.

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How to Stop Being Your Own Worst Enemy

More than 250 articles are posted here, revealing the dynamics of inner conflict that cause most behavioral and emotional problems. These articles are free and, along with the books on sale here, they instruct readers on how to apply the basic principles of depth psychology to benefit themselves. I’m starting my summer break from writing, while still taking on new clients in my psychotherapy practice.

Taking a break.

The search function will retrieve articles on any particular mental or emotional problem you might be having (such as depression, guilt, shame, addictions, indecision, intrusive thoughts, self-rejection, and so on). To further help readers access this abundance of knowledge, here are links to 12 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

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Are You Overly Sensitive to Rejection?

When it comes to romance and friendship, many people fear rejection, even when they’re just conjuring it up in their imagination. If we’re frequently anxious about being accepted or loved, we may be emotionally attached to rejection.

Resolving inner conflict overcomes anxiety and fear of rejection.

With this attachment, people operate on hair-trigger expectations of rejection. They’re driven by the compulsion to recycle the unresolved hurt of rejection, as if they’re addicted to the pain. Many people take the problem a step further: Unwittingly, they go looking for experiences of rejection, even as they claim to be its victims.

An emotional attachment to rejection springs out of inner conflict: Consciously, we want love; unconsciously, though, we’re emotionally entangled in expectations of rejection. Inner conflict contaminates relationships, fomenting miseries such as feeling loved versus unloved, worthy versus unworthy, connected versus disconnected, respected versus disrespected, and inwardly free versus controlled.

Dysfunction in relationships can arise, of course, from issues other than rejection. Rejection is just one of eight unpleasant emotions to which we can be attached. These emotions, first encountered in childhood, are refusal, deprivation, helplessness, control, criticism, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal (I call them “the first hurts”). As children, we experience these emotions even with good parenting because of how subjectively we interpret our daily experiences. As adults, these emotions can continue to haunt us, in varying degrees, and they interfere with the quality of relationships.

In this post, I mainly address the rejection issue. Yet what I’m saying here about rejection also applies to emotional attachments involving the other first hurts.

When people are particularly sensitive to feeling rejected by others, they’re transferring outward into the world their emotional entanglement in self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-rejection. The pain of being rejected (or the anxiety of expecting rejection) arises out of self-alienation and the conflicted relationship we have with ourselves. We expect that others will regard us with the same degree of self-denigration we inflict upon ourselves. We’re compelled to feel the same level of disharmony with others that we feel within ourselves.

Self-doubt loiters at the core of our being. Everyone has it, to some degree. Yet many people are afraid to face the problem at its source. They feel, even if just vaguely, that they’ll encounter a truly flawed person at these inner depths, perhaps an imposter or unworthy loser who has been hiding out within them. This impression of self is largely the result of how, through inner passivity, we allow our inner critic to treat us rejectingly, as if we are indeed a lesser person. Having absorbed over many years our inner critic’s imposition of its authority and its denunciation of our self, we struggle to believe emotionally in our goodness and value.

We’re often determined to cover up our doubts, anxieties, and fears. We don’t want to recognize the role these reactive emotions play in our relationships. These emotions are not only distressful in themselves, but we unwittingly use them for purposes of self-deception. Doubts, fears, and anxieties concerning the steadfastness of our relationships can be enlisted to deny our emotional attachment to rejection. Unconsciously, we make a claim such as this: “I’m not looking for or expecting to be rejected. If anything, I’m worried (or anxious or fearful) about the possibility of being rejected.”

Here’s another rendition of classic self-deception, again fabricated unconsciously: “I’m really angry at that person who has rejected me. My anger proves that I’m not looking for the feeling of being rejected. My anger proves how much I hate being rejected.”

Why is our denial so instinctive? It feels offensive to our ego to recognize an emotional attachment. Our ego insists, “I want pleasure, not misery! I’m not such a fool as to amplify my suffering!” Poor ego: To recognize its irrelevance to unconscious forces in the psyche is to feel dethroned.

Our denial of emotional attachments also expresses loyalty to the familiar suffering self we’ve known for so many years. We’re staunchly identified with this old self: “Who could I possibly be other than my familiar self!” This stubborn loyalty to the dysfunctional self is a byproduct of psychological resistance, and it helps to explain why, in national politics, so many people exalt loyalty over civility and truth.

Lacking insight, we’re more likely to sabotage a relationship because we refuse to acknowledge the negative emotion (in this example, rejection) that we ourselves have introduced as an emotional theme into the relationship. It’s now likely we’ll behave in such a way as to induce rejection or, anxious to avoid that expectation, strike first and become the rejecter. (Another compulsive influence here is one’s willingness to identify with the person being rejected, which is a secondhand but still powerful experience of one’s attachment to rejection.)

Being overly sensitive to feeling controlled is the consequence of another emotional attachment. When we fear being controlled or manipulated, and are particularly sensitive to the feeling of it, then that’s exactly what we’re attached to—and it’s likely to be what we chronically experience. Our fear of being controlled stems not only from our expectation of being passive or submissive in a relationship but also from our determination to deny our bittersweet affinity for the submissive role. We can interpret even innocent situations as if we are in fact being controlled or oppressed. This willingness of ours to repeatedly experience this passivity is mainly unconscious, so we need good insight to illuminate the underlying dynamics.

The same principle applies to our willingness to endure and recycle the other first hurts. In relationships, many of us are prone to feeling criticized, betrayed, and abandoned. Attachments to these emotions produce, along with rejection, the common psychological affliction known as fear of intimacy. With deeper self-knowledge, we can avoid this misery and become capable of enjoying deep connection with others and our own self.

As well as being a self-defeating symptom, fear of intimacy also serves as a psychological defense. As such, the fear covers up a person’s underlying emotional attachment. As a defense, the fear is employed to make this claim: “I’m not looking to feel rejected (or controlled, abandoned, or criticized). If anything, I fear the possibility of rejection (or control, abandonment, or criticism). Look at how I’m thinking about backing away from this relationship. I’m refusing to get serious about it.”

An online search for information about fear of intimacy turns up hundreds of articles and scores of books. Much of this self-help literature does a decent job of describing the experiences and characteristics of fugitives from intimacy. But it does a lousy job providing the penetrating insight that exposes the self-defeating shenanigans occurring beneath the surface.

A common explanation says that fear of rejection and fear of engulfment cause people to flee from intimacy. That’s true, but where do these fears come from? Relationship experts are not accessing the deeper source of these fears. They say the fears can be due to a social phobia, an anxiety disorder, or a history of abuse. Yet they’re not telling us precisely what occurs in the psyche of those everyday people who decline to open their heart to a potentially ideal partner or who sabotage an established relationship.

For deeper insight, we have to expose and understand inner conflict. Such insight helps us to see that, while we consciously want intimacy, unconsciously we’re compelled to experience intimacy as if it puts us in greater danger of being controlled, helpless, rejected, betrayed, or abandoned. Though it’s our own inner conflict that triggers these negative emotions, our denial and resistance of this inner truth require that we develop detached, unfriendly, or even bitter feelings toward our partner or friend.

People with fear of intimacy often are lonely. They do earnestly want to find intimacy. On the dark side of their conflict, however, their emotional attachments to rejection, criticism, control, and abandonment cause them to fear intimacy. Loneliness, already inflicting misery in itself, is now enlisted as a defense to cover up one or more emotional attachments: “I’m not looking to feeling rejected (or criticized, controlled, betrayed, or abandoned). I’m feeling very lonely. That’s proof I want to feel connected and loved. I want intimacy, not rejection or abandonment!” It’s important to understand the range of psychological defenses we employ to cover up the dark side of our psyche.

Resolution of the attachment to rejection requires that we assimilate inner truth. Here’s the kind of mantra, repeated regularly, that we can employ to liberate ourselves from the attachment: “I see right now that I’m the one who’s making an unconscious choice to recycle that old hurt of rejection and to indulge in the pain of it. I recognize that I do this compulsively. This process has been unconscious in the past, but now, in making it conscious, I can begin to take responsibility for it. I have been choosing to embellish and accentuate the feeling of rejection. My new consciousness is now becoming more powerful, and it can now override or neutralize my attachment to rejection, setting me free to stop taking personally all hints of rejection.”

Taking ownership of an emotional attachment has a sobering effect that begins to awaken people. A deep sense of freedom follows as we liberate ourselves from an oppressive negative emotion. New awareness enhances our intelligence, liberates us from old pain, and steers us away from acting in self-defeat.

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Evolving Consciousness is the Lifeblood of Mental Health

The New York Times buried the bad news on its science section’s back page, but it really ought to have been bannered across the newspaper’s front page.

Better mental health involves harmony of consciousness.

The headline, as it appeared in the print version earlier this month, reads: “While People Languish, Science Plays the Long Game.” A more appropriate headline would have proclaimed: “People Languish while Science Fiddles in Dead-End Research.”

The article, written by science writer Benedict Carey, speaks to his personal disappointment that the nation’s understanding of mental health made so little progress during his two decades on what was known in the newsroom as “the behavior beat.” He writes: “I had wanted to report on something big,” to be there to chronicle the scientific breakthroughs “that would shake up our understanding of mental health problems.”

The field attracted enormous scientific talent, he notes, and significant discoveries were made in brain-injury cases and the origins of schizophrenia. Yet “the science did little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress.” If anything, he writes, almost “every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went in the wrong direction, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

The article appears to be Carey’s sad swan song. He assesses the mental-health landscape “as I say goodbye to my job, covering psychiatry, psychology, brain biology, and big-data social science …” His departure seems to have inspired his retrospective, as he notes that the mental-health system, “for all its caring professionals, is chaotic and extremely difficult to navigate.” There are few systemwide standards, he adds, and vast and hidden differences in quality of care. “Good luck finding an authoritative guide to navigating the full range of appropriate options.”

Carey’s observations are supported in Harvard Professor Anne Harrington’s book, Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness (W.W. Norton, 2019). She observes how psychiatry’s dependence on neuroscience, brain-imaging, genetics, and psychopharmacology failed over past decades to improve mental health. A new approach is needed, she writes, a broader interpretative approach through which psychiatry would “aim to overcome its persistent reductionist habits and commit to an ongoing dialogue with the … social sciences and even the humanities.”

As I see it, medical and hard-science approaches to understanding human nature operate at a disadvantage. I’m a psychotherapist who has encountered, at deep levels, the consciousness of thousands of people. I believe that mental-health progress depends more on insight into our consciousness than on knowledge of the brain or genetics. Human consciousness is burdened with significant degrees of fear, chaos, and conflict. Each of us is responsible for addressing these dynamics within ourselves. To do well in life, we each have to bring our consciousness into some degree of harmony. Psychiatric medications have had some success doing this, yet the declining mental health of Americans indicates much more is needed.

Thinkers have speculated for millennia on the nature of consciousness, and scholars today are exploring the thesis that mental health is primarily a factor of consciousness. Psychiatrists and neuroscientists have been getting away with overlooking the central role of consciousness because they haven’t seen clearly enough what it is or appreciated how it evolves. For one thing, science can’t observe or explain consciousness in terms of substance or matter.

Consciousness constitutes mysterious, ethereal realms of delicacy, refinement, and intangibility that baffle hard science. Our best understanding of these realms derives from what a social-science approach can describe or qualify of our mental content and emotional experiences, as it observes the magnitudes of pleasure versus displeasure—as well as the desires, impulses, wishes, and behaviors—that arise from this inner content.

Consciousness is the sense we have of ourselves and our surroundings. We all experience it. We recognize it in ourselves and can imagine how others experience it. We feel our consciousness changing or shifting when experiencing joy or sorrow, or when consuming alcohol or drugs or going for a run. Yet people can be quite unconscious in matters of the utmost importance to their wellbeing, particularly concerning the nature of inner conflict and its toxic effects. Through evolving consciousness, we can understand how inner conflict produces malevolence, hatred, and self-defeat. We acquire the strength and wisdom to disengage—mentally, emotionally, and behaviorally—from the negative impulses and biases generated by inner conflict.

Consciousness is an intangible quality that exists on a spectrum, with lucidity and refinement at the upper range. It’s a capacity for reflection and self-reflection that manifests uniquely in each individual. Our consciousness decides, at both conscious and unconscious levels, what content is given prominence and what is denied or repressed. An individual who identifies with ego, body, intellect, profession, family role, gender, nationality, race, social class, or possessions, rather than with the authentic self that evolving consciousness discovers, will likely have less access to mental and emotional self-regulation.

While consciousness manifests uniquely in each of us, it’s also governed by psychological principles, dynamics, or laws that are common to all humanity. At a largely unconscious level, psychological dynamics—involving resistance, repression, transference, projection, passivity, aggression, and masochism—are experienced and processed through inner conflict’s common operating procedures, in ways that often produce more displeasure than pleasure. Evolving consciousness becomes attuned to these inner dynamics and understands how, through them, we create and maintain negative thoughts and feelings.

The degree to which an individual is compulsive, reactionary, or hateful is a measure of consciousness, as is the capacity to act in one’s best interests. Evolving consciousness is reflected in the degree to which an individual has some inkling of, or can acknowledge without self-recrimination and with humility, the scope of his ignorance. Some people, like animals, go through life without being conscious of being conscious. They have higher intelligence than animals, but not a consciousness more in harmony with nature.

Our cleverness is not the same thing as consciousness, just as general knowledge is not the same as wisdom. The mind itself incorporates functions such as verbalization, cognition, sensory discernment, and access to working memory, while evolving or healthy consciousness determines the degree to which these mental processes are pleasurable, rational, discerning, and ethical. The wisdom or foolishness of individual and collective behaviors are all factors of consciousness. Yet fields of study such as political science, economics, sociology, and history have not sufficiently acknowledged or explained how human events, beliefs, policies, and decisions—and especially wars—are shaped less by the commanding power of the few and more by the passivity inherent in the consciousness of the many. Reductionistic perceptions are themselves symptoms of a deficient consciousness.

Consciousness is influenced by trauma, genes, society, culture, and environment. It’s also influenced by the degree to which—mentally, emotionally, and unconsciously—we give undue significance to how these factors might be oppressing or disfavoring us. A lower consciousness is ready and willing to experience itself as passive and at the mercy of these influences. It’s easy to feel victimized by external factors, especially as we give emotionally biased significance to them. Of course, mentalities such as racism and misogyny do produce genuine victims, and these mentalities and their effects are best addressed and mitigated by evolving consciousness.

Consciousness is lacking when we’re emotionally or psychologically disconnected from our best self. The Pulitzer-Prize winning critic, Hilton Als, in his review of a new film about Earnest Hemingway, speaks obliquely to this disconnect from self in reference to the famous author, who committed suicide in 1961: “Part of the sadness at the core of the film ‘Hemingway’ is how much life we see happening to the writer that he doesn’t seem to feel, or doesn’t want to feel, protecting a self he didn’t know, or could not face.”

Hemingway was plagued by clinical depression. Medicine has been especially interested in curing clinical depression, yet medical scientists and doctors have not recognized inner conflict as a primary source of the problem. Through inner conflict, our inner critic (superego) harasses us with accusations, sarcasm, mockery, and ridicule. On an inner level, we fight back, usually rather weakly, through the thoughts, feelings, and instinctive defensiveness of inner passivity. We can’t resolve this inner conflict when we’re identified with inner passivity, the weak unconscious ego that simply can’t represent us effectively. Hence, we absorb the inner critic’s aggression (self-aggression). The cumulative effect of this self-debasement undermines our vitality and spirit, disconnects us from our better self, and leads to depression.

A medical approach to our mental and emotional wellbeing is appropriate in cases involving brain damage, toxins, or drugs, as well as in cases of coma, epilepsy, severe trauma, and psychiatric disorders. Inner conflict, though, is a problem that produces some measure of suffering in most human beings. Inner conflict accounts for the widespread extent of neurosis, which collectively produces social and political dysfunction. The problem is essentially psychological, and even everyday “normal” people can benefit greatly from psychological insight. Acquiring this insight, whether from the best-informed literature or therapy, involves the assimilation of self-knowledge that identifies and untangles inner conflict, thereby elevating consciousness.

Developing consciousness does alleviate, to a significant extent, the symptoms of childhood trauma and unfavorable genetics. Still, having an evolved consciousness doesn’t mean, of course, that all is perfect. For one thing, symptoms such as passivity and fear can persist, clinging stubbornly to the mind and body. Yet evolving consciousness enables us to respect and love ourselves, rather than to berate ourselves for our frailties and fears or linger in guilt and shame for limited abilities, past misdeeds, or unfulfilled ambitions.

People usually benefit by making a conscious connection between what happened in the past in the way of trauma with what’s happening now, says Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of the best-seller, The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (Penguin Books, 2014). “Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside is the first step to recover,” he writes.

Depth psychology is all about understanding “what is going on inside,” and the new consciousness it provides enables individuals to be at peace with lingering symptoms of trauma or genetic anomalies, without accompanying resentment, shame, or hate. This consciousness unblocks our capacity for sublimation, whereby the creative energies that would otherwise get tied up in inner conflict are instead directed into fulfilling pursuits.

I’m concerned now that mental health’s medical-scientific complex will double down on research of limited value instead of helping to produce a consensus on what constitutes essential psychological knowledge. The Biden Administration has committed to expanding medical research, while psychiatry continues to hitch its star to big science. This calls to mind the rueful quip, “Why solve a problem when you can spend billions studying it.”

Harvard’s Dr. Harrington writes that “it would require an act of great professional and ethical courage” to limit the biological approach to mental illness to the most severe disorders, and to recognize, as well, that psychiatry’s current “medical mission” does not apply to most seekers of mental-health services. It is time, she writes, “for us all to learn and to tell better, more honest stories.”

Such stories are not always visible under a microscope. The story of humankind is the saga of evolving consciousness as it unfolded over our long prehistory and the five millennia since written language first appeared. The greatest human creations—the written word, the rule of law, human rights, and the establishment of democracy—are achievements of consciousness, not science. With access to the best psychological knowledge, we can transform an immature and conflicted consciousness, hounded by infantile misreckoning, into robust mental health. This state of being establishes an inner democracy governed by our better self.

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Answers to Questions from Readers (Part 9)

Readers often send me emails with their comments and questions concerning different aspects of depth psychology, inner conflict, and the process of psychotherapy. Here I respond to six of them. I’ve done some editing of the questions, which are in italics. These answers review the basics of what I teach.

I’ve bought several of your books and see that you repeatedly use the term “unresolved emotion or emotions.” But I have been unable to find a definition for that. Is it an emotion to which we have unknowingly attached a benefit, which then drives our unconscious to reexperience it? — J.Y.

Many of us are compelled to keep feeling or experiencing unresolved emotions that, though unpleasant or painful, are unconsciously enticing. Many writers and researchers have noted the human compulsion to experience the negative more so than the positive. When negative emotions cause us daily suffering, they can be understood as emotional attachments or, more bluntly, emotional addictions.

There are eight primary emotional attachments: to feelings of being deprived, refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and betrayed. These emotions are first felt by us as young children (I call them the first hurts).

We can liberate ourselves from emotional attachments once we become more insightful, meaning more conscious of the existence of these attachments and of the dynamics that hold them in place. Becoming more insightful involves, in part, becoming aware of the inner conflict that frames an emotional attachment. As one example, people do not consciously want to feel rejected, yet many of us do experience rejection in a way that’s painful, even when rejection is not intended or when we’re simply suspecting or imagining it. Through deepening insight, we can start taking responsibility for the unconscious choice we’ve been making to resonate with feeling rejected, thereby producing inner conflict.

We would also be recognizing the psychological defenses we unwittingly employ to cover up our attachment to feeling rejected (or to any of the first hurts). Anger and blaming others are such defenses. The defenses make the claim that we’re the victims of the malice of others, thereby covering up, in this example, our emotional attachment to rejection. The defense covers up our unconscious willingness to take personally, and to indulge in, the feeling of being rejected.

In addition to the eight first hurts mentioned above, we might also be emotionally attached to feeling unloved, unsupported, and unworthy. However, I believe these three feelings are largely symptoms or derivatives of the first hurts.

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I have finished two of your books and have also been studying your articles and feeling them penetrate deeper each time. That said, this past week I’ve been experiencing a burst of anxiety and panic, which I feel is coming from me trying to change my inner status quo. It feels as if I’ve internalized fully how I indulge in these passive feelings, and am trying to change because I don’t want to be this way anymore.

Somehow the fear of change generates very strong anxiety or panic, which then forces me to “back down” and stick to what I’m familiar with—my old self that is passive and makes me sabotage my strength and success due to inner conflict. It’s like my identity is threatened and so I get flooded with anxiety to keep me entangled in the old, familiar (yet painful) sense of self.

Are there best practices for making this change from the “old version” of me into this new one without feeling like I am losing my identity and the way I perceive the world? As I try to change, how can I not back down when overwhelmed with this powerful anxiety? Also, is it “normal” to put in so much effort into this? How long does this process typically take once these insights are processed? – J.A.

You have four questions here, and I’ll start with the last one. The process of inner growth is not fixed in time. Growing and changing, becoming smarter and wiser, has no end point. You really don’t want to concern yourself with some supposed final goal. Instead, you benefit most by appreciating your steady effort to care about your self-development, while moving this process along. Each day is its own lifetime, dignified by the value you place on growing your integrity, generosity, resilience, and self-respect.

You asked whether it’s normal to put in so much effort. The effort need not be any more than what’s required to become knowledgeable and skillful at, say, a new hobby. The process involves learning the principles of depth psychology while becoming increasingly insightful as to how these principles apply to you personally. Initially, the biggest stumbling block is unconscious resistance.

You also asked how to avoid backing down when overwhelmed by anxiety. This feeling of being overwhelmed is itself passive. Try to understand that your anxiety is a product of your entanglement in inner passivity, meaning in this context your emotional attachment to feeling helpless and unable to self-regulate. Learn about inner passivity, and you’ll understand inner conflict and be able to come to your rescue to liberate yourself from anxiety and fear.

Finally, you asked about “good practices” for changing without feeling that you’re losing your old identity. The thing is, you will gradually be losing your old identity. Trust me, you’ll greatly prefer the new identity, your connection with your authentic self. One problem is that we cling to the old identity, no matter how painful, out of fear of the unknown. You have to trust life, which is pretty much the same as trusting yourself.

As advice, one “good practice” is to keep a daily journal in which you write down details of the events, situations, or memories that are causing distress. This writing is subject matter through which you process your growing knowledge of depth psychology. This practice brings your suffering and self-defeat into focus. It empowers your intelligence, which in turn helps to liberate you from your emotional attachments and your old painful identity.

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Before I schedule a session to talk to you, I have to ask, how long does it take to be free from my suffering? How many sessions do I have to do? Do you have clients who become free from serious negative issues after one session? What should I expect? – K.L.

I can only offer my clients the knowledge and insight from depth psychology that pertains to their personal issues. They determine through their own inner processes whether this knowledge is helpful. They might be able to make that assessment immediately or it might take several or many sessions. If what I offer is accurate as it pertains to them, then they’re likely to make progress, providing they’re not too resistant.

Even with excellent psychotherapy, the timeframe for which painful symptoms subside varies from person to person. The main thing is to get yourself pointed in a good direction, supported by the best insight. When psychotherapy is effective, the client can enjoy her progress, even if it seems to be on the slow side, because she will begin to notice an easing of her symptoms and she’ll be increasingly confident that she’s doing her best.

—

After reading two of your books, I’m inspired to actually study depth psychology. Would you be so kind as give me information about where to take courses? Or is there any particular institute that in your opinion is good? – J.N.

If you were to study depth psychology and become a psychotherapist, you would be choosing a most worthy profession. However, the university or college you attend to get your required degree would likely only offer behavioral, cognitive, and brain studies. Little or no study would be devoted to the investigation of the psyche and its inner conflict.

Many professors speak disparagingly of depth psychology, considering it unscientific. The psychology departments of universities throughout the world are all basically the same in terms of this more superficial approach. Even depth psychology courses you might be able to enroll in would likely teach content quite different from my approach. Psychoanalytic institutes, as well, have their different “brands” of depth psychology, some of which are quite superficial.

Nonetheless, getting a psychology degree from one of these schools can work out well for you. Learning the full range of psychological thought has value. Once you graduate and become licensed, you then decide what therapeutic approach you are going to adopt. If you were to use my method at that point, you would be doing so because you had experienced its value in your own self-development. Remember, you need to do the inner work. Psychotherapists can only help another person grow psychologically to the extent that they themselves have experienced inner growth.

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I have been obsessing for many years about whether I am gay, even though I have had fulfilling and loving relationships with women. Still, it plagues me whenever I think of committing to my new relationship. When I finally break up with a girlfriend who I’m unable to feel sure about, I become sad and depressed.

Anyway, my last ten years have been filled with self-doubt. It’s unpleasant, and it impedes me in many situations … What’s my question here? Well, how to better identify my passivity, and would activity as opposed to passivity consist in just identifying the thoughts, or should I be taking specific actions that are opposite to what the passivity is suggesting? – L.W.

It’s not about replacing passivity with specific actions. Activity is not the opposite of inner passivity. When you are overcoming inner passivity and inner conflict, you become less reactive. For instance, you’re less (and often much less) moody, cynical, angry, bored, apathetic, confused, lonely, indecisive, or discouraged. This might lead to more activity on your part or to less activity. Either way, what matters is that you’ll be less conflicted, therefore more in harmony with yourself and the world. Specific actions will flow naturally and appropriately—enhanced creativity perhaps—as a result of your psychological growth.

As for passivity, whenever you make the effort to understand and recognize inner passivity and its influence upon you, you’re engaged in healthy activity. Every time you produce insight about what’s happening within you, you’re acting with power. In seeking good insight, you’re choosing strength over weakness and inner freedom over the oppression of inner conflict. In this manner, you establish a wise inner authority and come to know your own mind. No longer will you obsess about sexual identity because you’ll no longer be compelled to experience life’s challenges through inner conflict.

—

I’m currently having some problems studying. My goal is to become a dentist. In the country where I live, you have to pass the entrance exam first … It’s a very hard exam and currently I’m having problems focusing on what I’m trying to learn. I never was a studious person in the past. I actually escaped doing homework and studying whenever I could. My parents forced me to study, but it didn’t really change anything since I never cared about what they said.

Last year, I finally made the decision to study. I dedicated most of my daily time to it, and I enjoyed it. Fast forward to this year, I now have a school counselor. She helps me choose which subjects to study … and she teaches me techniques to do better in tests. The problem is I can’t focus anymore. Whenever I sit to study, there’s strong resistance in my mind against learning. … Studying is not fun anymore, it’s a burden.

Also, there’s stress since my classmates are studying hard as well and I can’t compete with them. Probably my whole future depends on this exam but I’m having a very hard time doing what I must. … Do you have suggestions on how I can enjoy studying like I did last year? – T.E.

I would have to get more personal information from you to know with more assurance what’s going on. However, here’s one possibility. You mentioned that, in the past, your parents forced you to study. It’s possible you are now forcing yourself to study, meaning that you interpret the process of studying emotionally, as something that requires the feeling of being forced.

This emotional misinterpretation is activated by inner passivity. You feel reluctant to study because you’re reacting, through inner passivity, to the misleading impression that studying is being forced upon you. Your psyche doesn’t care whether the feeling of being forced comes from your parents, from your school counselor, or from within you. Your emotional attachment is to the feeling of being forced or controlled, and to cover up or defend against awareness of this passivity you rebel against feeling forced by refusing to learn, which is a passive-aggressive defense. Note that you might have been passive to your school counselor in the choice of what subjects to study.

Your passive-aggressive refusal to study would consist of an oppositional defiance or stubbornness within you that produces an illusion of power. Unconsciously, you employ this illusion of power (defiance or stubbornness) to override the passive feeling of being forced. The illusion, through self-defeating, is preferred by you to the possibility of being humbled by the realization of the underlying reality, which is your identification with, or emotional attachment to, your passive side. When you understand inner passivity, you’ll be able to experience studying with pleasure or at least acceptance instead of with a sense of oppression. Keep reading about inner passivity on my website to more fully understand this.

—

To all my readers, it’s important now that we begin to develop a greater ability to determine what constitutes high-value psychological knowledge. As I keep saying, we have to know ourselves more deeply if we’re going to govern ourselves democratically and become wiser to save the planet.

In my writing and therapy services, I strive to give people a means, through clarity and jargon-free language, to judge for themselves whether the knowledge I present has value for them. I connect a wide range of self-defeating symptoms to basic dynamics of inner conflict. It’s for you to decide whether this knowledge resonates with you. Trust yourself to be capable of knowing what is real and true. Wisdom is your birthright. Your growing consciousness, the refining of your being, is by far your greatest asset.

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Don’t Be Duped by Your Defenses

If there’s one subject that ought to be required in the classroom, it’s the study of how we deceive ourselves. Self-deception occurs largely through unconscious mental activities that are associated with inner conflict.

Our psychological defenses do us a disservice.

It’s as if mischievous imps are cavorting inside us, duping us with cunning ingenuity and spinning reality just to bamboozle us.

The imps are us. We are the operatives in charge of our own befuddlement. We deceive ourselves largely through our psychological defenses. This process of self-deception succeeds in duping us because it operates unconsciously. Spinning reality in this way is one of our “favorite” mental activities, though unfortunately it’s also a major contributor to our misery and self-sabotage.

We instinctively and unconsciously resort to using psychological defenses to protect ourselves from our inner critic, which regularly attacks our integrity and worthiness. Ultimately, though, we give too much power to the inner critic and fail to shield ourselves from it. The inner critic, a primitive instinct impelled by self-aggression, gets away with holding us accountable and punishing us because we passively enable it. When our connection to our authentic self is weak, we unwittingly allow our passive side (inner passivity) to represent us in fending off the inner critic.

This passive side in our psyche manages our psychological defenses, but it does a poor job of protecting us. For one thing, it’s mostly protecting itself, the unconscious ego, and in doing so it resorts desperately to falsehoods and irrationality. It has limited ability to neutralize the inner critic and no interest in making us conscious of the dynamics of our inner conflict.

Here I discuss five little-known (though commonly utilized) defenses that engage in conflict with our inner critic and muddy the waters of rationality. First though, to help put our psychological defenses in perspective and explain their operating procedures, I review a few basic defenses. These are chronic blaming, chronic complaining, injustice collecting, and being chronically angry or offended.

Defenses serve to cover up our complicity in our own suffering. Chronic blaming and complaining, for instance, are two defenses we use to cover up the ways in which we contribute to our misery and self-defeat. Most of us, in varying degrees, are emotionally sensitive to feeling deprived, refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. Unconsciously, we replay and recycle these hurts (the first hurts). The more bitterly we blame or complain, the more likely that we’re unconsciously determined to cover up, stir up, and cling to one or more of these first hurts from childhood. Our lingering emotional attachments to these hurts are the bread and butter of inner conflict.

Again, defenses are attempts to refute the inner critic or, failing that, to at least disarm it through negotiation. Our inner critic, operating like an authoritarian prosecutor, accuses us of what, in the authoritarian “legal system” of the psyche, constitutes a major crime. The inner critic’s indictment claims that our unconscious willingness to passively recycle unresolved negative emotions (the first hurts) constitutes a major crime. The prosecution claims that we willingly tolerate, indulge in, or “entertain” one or more of the first hurts. Inner conflict is activated when we begin to defend ourselves against this indictment.

The inner critic, in this instance, is actually correct. It has indeed identified our hidden weakness, our willingness to replay and recycle the first hurts. However, the inner critic uses the knowledge to inflict self-aggressive punishment, which, while over-the-top abusive, is consistent with its primitive, aggressive nature and its tyrannical determination to remain the master of one’s inner life.

And so, on an inner level, we’re constantly on the defensive, intent on protecting ourselves from the inner critic’s abusive advances. As a defense, injustice collecting involves, as the term implies, a process in which we accentuate emotionally the sense of being victims of injustice. This defense claims that we are innocent of all wrongdoing. We claim to be victims—poor little me—of the cold, cruel world. Our sense of victimhood, though, is often due to our unconscious determination to sneak in one or more of the first hurts, for instance feelings of being refused, controlled, rejected, or betrayed.

An injustice might be real or imagined, yet either way the injustice collector is determined to add a painful layer—the emotional embellishment of victimization—to his or her experiences. As examples, this added layer might be the misery one feels as a result of one’s unconscious willingness to experience and then exacerbate feelings of refusal, control, or criticism that arise, as part of everyday life, from challenging situations and encounters with others.

The more doggedly such individuals collect injustices, the more they unconsciously use the injustices as evidence to convince themselves that others (or circumstances in daily life) are responsible for their suffering. This psychological defense serves as their unconscious refusal to acknowledge their own willingness to indulge in one or more of the first hurts.

Being chronically offended or angry can also serve as defenses. Of course, being offended or angry is sometimes an appropriate response to egregious behavior. Even so, with healthy self-regulation we minimize our suffering. We want to be wise about what suffering is unnecessary, meaning we can put a stop to strife with others or to self-defeating acting-out when we recognize its artificial contrivance through our own inner conflict.

Defenses are always backed up by some semblance of rationality. The defense has to make a case for why it is being used or enlisted. For instance, when employing anger as a defense, a typical rationalization for the anger would be, “I’m not resonating with feeling helpless and controlled. Look at how angry I get at those people who make me feel helpless and controlled. My anger at being controlled proves I hate feeling controlled.”

This misleading rationalization, the essence of the defense, really only proves, however, how resistant this person is to acknowledging his or her willingness to resonate emotionally and painfully with feeling helpless or controlled (which are two of the first hurts).

The rationalization succeeds in leading people to believe their own lie. But the lie leaves us in the lurch. We remain entangled in the emotional attachment, meaning we will continue, in this example, to experience anger and to express it self-damagingly in order to cover up our unconscious willingness to feel helpless and controlled.

Defenses bind us rigidly to the lingering misery of the first hurts. What does liberate us, over time, is our growing recognition of both the misleading nature of defenses and the inner complicity in suffering that our defenses (and, in befittingly taking personal responsibility, we ourselves) try to cover up.

Now we come to the five little-know self-deceptions (defenses). These are 1) the pseudo-moral, 2) the magic gesture, 3) pleading guilty to the lesser crime, 4) the claim to power, and 5) negative exhibitionism. These defenses were originally identified by Edmund Bergler, M.D., and he says more about them in his book, Principles of Self-Damage, first published in 1959, as well as in his other writings.)

1) The pseudo-moral defense is a rationalization that presents a moral, ethical, or educational precept or adage for the unconscious purpose of hiding behind it. A greedy person might claim, for instance, that “Saving money is the smart thing to do.” He’s using this adage, however, to cover up the degree to which, in pursuing wealth compulsively, he is engaged in the betrayal or abandonment of his better self.

In another example, a passive husband who declines to confront an unfaithful wife might seize upon the adage that “Tolerance and forgiveness are admirable behaviors.” Here, he could be covering up his taste for submissiveness, along with his unconscious choice to experience helplessness in protecting his integrity. There are hundreds of pseudo-morals, and Bergler has a chapter on the subject in Principles of Self-Damage.

2) The next defense, the magic gesture, takes the form of an extravagant kindness extended to others. The gesture of kindness is an attempt to convince the inner critic that kindness is what one wants directed at oneself. A person unconsciously employs the defense to deny the inner critic’s claim that this person’s real aims involve being on the receiving end of refusal, rejection, or other first hurts.

In other words, the person performing the magic gesture is trying to prove that he or she wants to be treated kindly and lovingly. This gesture of kindness is itself often out of character. It’s extended extravagantly to others in order to make this claim, “This is how I want to be treated, with loving kindness.” Typically, as mentioned, this defense is covering up this individual’s unconscious willingness, through inner conflict, to recycle and replay experiences of unresolved refusal, criticism, rejection, or abandonment (from the first hurts).

3) The next defense is pleading guilty to the lesser crime. The classic example involves a man accused of murder who claims he’s innocent because he was miles away robbing a jewelry store at the time of the murder. He’s willing to accept punishment, but only for the lesser crime.

With this defense, we plead “not guilty” to the more serious charge, but “guilty” of a lesser one. In one example, our inner critic, pointing to our indecision and procrastination, claims the real crime consists of our emotional attachment to feeling helpless and controlled. Again, the inner critic is correct, but it’s scornful mockery and abuse prompts a quick denial from the defensive, passive side of inner conflict. In pleading guilty to the lesser crime, we say: “No, the problem is that I’m indecisive. I’m guilty of being indecisive.” The inner critic might now accept this plea and back off, providing we’re willing to accept sufficient punishment (in forms of guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression) for the lesser crime of indecisiveness.

Using this defense, people unconsciously plead guilty, through inner conflict, to a variety of character flaws, including being foolish, stubborn, angry, lazy, and selfish. But the character flaw is just a symptom. The person is pleading guilty to the symptom, not the underlying cause. Yet even when these guilty pleas feel like a minor victory, we are still surrendering autonomy to the inner critic and declining to acknowledge what’s going on at a deeper level.

4) The next defense, the claim to power, is based on one’s instinctive impulse to claim, again in conflict with the inner critic, that one’s true character is admirably aggressive rather than pathetically passive. “I’m not being passive,” the defense often contends. “Look at how loud and demanding I am.”

With this defense, people make mindless, reactive assertions or commit acts of verbal or behavioral aggression that they unconsciously present as “proof” that they’re not emotionally and passively entangled in unresolved infantile experiences that constitute the first hurts.

Neurotic individuals have only a narrow access to natural or healthy aggression. They operate or function more from the passive side. They’re able to access only counterfeit forms of aggression such as stubbornness, belligerence, defiance, anger, withholding, violence, and an assortment of passive-aggressive behaviors (all of which are themselves defenses).

Stubborn or angry reactions, though self-defeating, are felt by them to be preferable to passive acquiescence. Unfortunately, the inner critic turns the tables again and accuses these reactive individuals of being inappropriately aggressive. This often results in an additional plea of guilty by the passive side, followed by its (our) subsequent acceptance of more guilt and shame.

5) This fifth defense, negative exhibitionism, involves a behavior in which a person publicly displays ineptitude or folly, inducing pity, chagrin, or disgust in onlookers. This defense contains elements of the previously mentioned defenses, pleading guilty to the lesser crime and the claim to power. Negative exhibitionism, however, directly involves the visual drive. This drive is the psychological participant in our faculties of sight and imagination. Unfortunately, we sometimes unconsciously misuse these faculties, and they become involved in inner conflict.

Through the visual drive, people can be particularly sensitive to the feeling of being seen in a negative light. They can then become adepts at seeing others in critical or rejecting ways. Or they become negative peepers, and thus are unconsciously compelled or driven to see and experience aspects of their environment in critical terms or in terms of victimization.

The emotional issues underlying negative exhibitionism can involve attachments (from the first hurts) to feeling helpless, criticized, and rejected. An athlete, actor, or scholar whose performances or endeavors are plagued by mistakes or ineptitude can be reacting to the emotional belief that he or she cannot excel because of underlying unworthiness. Rather than recognizing the source of the sense of unworthiness (an attachment to feeling helpless, criticized, or rejected), the individual makes a claim to power: “Through my ineptitude, I cause the disapproval or disgust of me to happen.” He might then plead guilty to being foolishly inept and feel bad about himself on that basis.

A man who jumped out naked in front of his mother-in-law, as one of my clients once did, was reacting to the feeling that she had been thinking less of him. His negative exhibitionism asserted this claim-to-power: “I am not at your mercy, helpless to your perception of me. I, though my bold naughty behavior, am in charge of how you think about me.”

In trying to understand our defenses, it can help to recognize them as an expression of our passive side. With inner conflict, psychological defenses (the passive side) attempt to neutralize our inner critic (the aggressive side). The passive side (inner passivity) is often overwhelmed by the aggressive inner critic (also known as the superego), which can cruelly harass and condemn us with a litany of our real, alleged, or imaginary transgressions.

We might ask why our defenses are so active in the first place. Why do we instinctively feel a need to falsify reality? What facts or truth are so threatening that we need to cover them up? As mentioned, we instinctively become defensive in the face of our inner critic’s harshness and cruelty. But we also protect an ego-identification. This identification is a delicate sensitivity, an illusionary sense of who we are, that exists largely in our emotional imagination and can be both conscious and unconscious. We’re very protective of this sense of reality. Most of us feel this fragile ego to be the core of our being, and so we instinctively protect it and thereby resist allowing our consciousness to move beyond this limited sense of self and reality.

It’s now time to stop being duped by our defenses. To succeed, we need to expose the mastermind of self-deception, the scammer-in-chief, our conniving inner passivity, which can also be understood as our unconscious ego. This realm of our psyche has not been penetrated or claimed by our consciousness. It lives in fear of our inner critic. It’s where our weak, defensive identifications like to congregate and hide out. It’s time to flood this part of our psyche with self-knowledge.

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The Shocking Secrets of the Psyche

It has been my dream job, descending into the psyche’s inner cosmos, hunting for relics of childhood, signs of inner conflict, and traces of our essence.

Precious self-knowledge is stored in our psyche.

Our psyche is where our consciousness struggles to evolve. At this depth, the psyche is opaque, its ambience dim and dusky. Penlight in hand, I’ll try once again with candid prose to illuminate this hidden realm.

Depth psychology is a broad term that includes many methods and theories. I was lucky enough in 1985 to find a rich vein of it. At that time—in Naples, Florida—I began to see a therapist, Nordic Winch, known locally for working deeply in the psyche. He was a gracious fellow, an off-the-grid, first-rate teacher of classical psychoanalysis.

My weekly sessions with him became excursions into the shocking extent of my ignorance and self-deception. My wife, Sandra, who had a Master’s degree in psychology (Eastern Michigan University, 1971) and a Florida mental-health counseling license, also began doing sessions with Nordic.

We had thought ourselves well-versed in psychology, but the knowledge he presented to us revealed a remarkable new dimension of human nature. Our sessions soon began to perk me up, and I became increasingly adept at self-understanding.

I was enrolled at that time in a graduate program, and two years later I received a Master’s in Psychology and Counseling from Antioch University in Ohio. Soon Sandra and I had a thriving psychotherapy practice in Naples. Our practice offered clients our first rendering of the knowledge and method we would soon be describing in our books.

I have previously presented overviews of this knowledge, always trying to make it more intelligible. I’m at my keyboard again, telling people what they unconsciously do not want to read, hear, or think about. What sorcerous phraseology or cunning lexicon can puncture our ironclad bubble? And what sublime weave of meager words can make the invisible visible? The facts that emerge from our depths are indeed shocking, and I’ll do my best to make them coherent and palatable. Anyway, here are the basics of this depth psychology. Digested slowly, this knowledge reconfigures who we think we are.

The psyche is a cauldron of irrationality. Most of us, in varying degrees, find ourselves entangled at times in negative emotions associated with feeling 1) deprived, 2) refused, 3) helpless, 4) controlled, 5) criticized, 6) rejected, 7) abandoned, and 8) betrayed. (In this essay I repeat this list of primary emotions several times. To avoid redundancy, I’ll subsequently refer to them as the first hurts.)

Children encounter some of these first hurts, in measures slight to severe, by the time they’re six years old. These hurtful impressions are often of a subjective nature, based on how children perceive they’re being treated by parents, siblings, and others. Children are easily afflicted by the first hurts because of their insecurities, fears, limited understanding, and instinct to personalize interactions with others. Complicating matters, children can become convinced they’re on the receiving end of malice, based on how they experience shaming, reproaches, and punishments. Of course, parents who are unkind or negligent can certainly make things worse for the child.

Children are simply too inexperienced and undeveloped to process their world rationally. Even many adults are unable to think and behave rationally much of the time. It’s important to understand the nature of a child’s irrationality in order to understand our adult self. Young children tend to experience necessary socialization as infringements on their sense of privilege, as attempts to control them and defy their wishes. During the terrible twos, for instance, they typically protest loudly against attempts at socialization and toilet training. They interpret situations in terms of being refused and controlled. Malice and danger, they feel, exist in abundance outside themselves, while what is good is self-given.

At the heart of a young child’s consciousness is a primitive grandiosity known as megalomania. All the infant knows is his or her little body and sensations. Infants and babies operate under the illusion that they are at the center of existence. All that exists, they construe, springs forth from themselves. The child’s acute self-centeredness distorts the intentions of parents and misinterprets their behaviors.

This illusion of megalomania has a primitive appeal, a gratifying enchantment of the kind a medieval king or queen might have savored. The illusion is biologically based, serving perhaps to strengthen the survival instinct, while offering emotional compensation for the child’s prolonged helplessness. (The child’s consciousness, classical psychoanalysis contends, includes a mix of the illusions of both megalomania and omnipotence.)

In the first years of life, children are emotionally invested in preserving this sense of enchantment. Megalomania induces young children to believe that whatever is happening to them is what they have decreed or wished for. Of course, some of their experiences are unpleasant (e.g., waiting hungrily for mother to show up with milk or feeling infringed upon with diapering or clothing). Under the impression that all that is good is self-given, they presume in their primitive reckoning that any unpleasantness must be what they have chosen. This megalomania-induced assessment is processed in the child’s consciousness to this effect: “If this displeasure is happening, it must be wanted. Therefore, it must be good.”

Now the child’s megalomania enlists libido, the drive or desire for pleasure, to turn what would normally be an unpleasant experience into a megalomania-protecting satisfaction or gratification. Libido is a powerful instinctual energy or force, easily capable of turning displeasure into pleasure, as is apparent in adults who engage in sexual masochism. Again, the child’s irrationality, having enlisted libido, proceeds in this vein: “Because it’s happening, it’s what is wanted. If it’s what is wanted, it must be good. Yes, it does feel acceptable. This is what is wanted.”

This primitive emotional reasoning foreshadows the adult’s susceptibility to irrationality: Young children are highly subjective, and many adults are relatively easily swept up in fundamentalism, conspiracy theories, and crackpot notions. When rejecting facts and reality, adults can experience a primitive gratification in “knowing” what is true, thereby activating (as they once did as young children) a consoling sense of power or certainty: “Reality is what I say it is, or what I say it should be!” The childhood illusion becomes the adult delusion, secured by anal stubbornness.

To repeat, when babies and toddlers falsify reality, they can continue to feel the gratification and pleasure associated with the illusion of megalomania. When we see the residues of megalomania in the adult psyche, we’re able to understand—in the political sphere, for example—why an authoritarian figure can find popular support. (I make political and social observations in this essay to show the carryover of infantile traits into adult thinking and behavior. These examples from modern life also provide evidence for the veracity of what’s said here about the psyche.)

The authoritarian offers his followers and supporters, through himself, the opportunity to identify with him and his claim to power, thereby enabling followers to savor the glory of being emotionally associated with a “superior” being who does “what I damn well please.” This bombast resurrects within followers, through the remains of their own megalomania and omnipotence, the old infantile thrills and gratifications associated with the defiance of reality.

As an allegedly all-powerful figure, the authoritarian presumably protects his followers, as well, from the malice that is felt to be rampant outside themselves and their circle. Again, this mirrors the infantile compulsion to see the good as self-generated and malice as an external threat.

Loyalty to the authoritarian as a presumed superior man or woman can generate an electrifying uncanniness and exuberant grandiosity that overrides one’s self-interest and rationality. This psychological reaction is also the underlying dynamic in any cult: The greater the loyalty, the greater the identification with the supreme leader, the greater the old thrill of megalomania.

The consciousness of such followers is entangled in passivity and disconnected from their better self. This passivity, however, triggers an impulse to act aggressively, as it does with a two-year-old. Because of their disconnect from their better self, the reactionary behaviors of such adults are often the only sense of power or self-assurance they can muster. Reactive aggression and stubborn defiance, rather than healthy self-regulation and self-possession, become their instinctive expressions of power.

Young children are able for several years to extend the life of megalomania until, with reluctance, they largely abandon its most irrational features in the face of overwhelming reality. Still, megalomania’s residues linger as egotism and narcissism in many adults. This self-centeredness is certainly apparent in those who value wealth and power (as instruments of grandiosity and omnipotence) over the common good. Self-centeredness is a factor, too, in everyday people who lack empathy, generosity, and open-mindedness.

Having enlisted libido in one category of experience, young children proceed to enlist it in another. They first turned unpleasant physical sensations into gratifying experiences, and next they proceed to enlist libido to repeat the process, this time with emotional experiences. Unconsciously, they enlist the pleasure function, whether in the brain or psyche, to sugarcoat (libidinize) feelings associated with real or perceived refusal, helplessness, criticism, rejection, and so on (the first hurts). For instance, a child experiences grim satisfaction in the sense of power associated with feeling that, “I, through my naughty behavior, cause Mommy and Daddy to refuse me.” This claim to power denies or covers up the child’s underlying helplessness and passivity.

Baby fears, especially fears of being unloved and helpless, can be processed through libidinization, which then makes irrational fear more difficult to dislodge in adults. The lingering effects of libidinized fear can be observed, for example, in the chilling pleasures adults experience from horror stories and book and movie thrillers, as well as in the manner in which guns are fetishized as a necessary protection from alleged danger.

We become hooked from a young age on the first hurts. Our enlisting of libido to turn displeasure into pleasure means that experiences of refusal, deprivation, helplessness (the first hurts) become emotional attachments. As adults, we remain sensitive to these emotions and easily become entangled in them. The worldwide plague of neurosis is underpinned by these emotional attachments. It’s no stretch to say the first hurts become emotional addictions.

When people become more conscious of where their attention goes, they can recognize the powerful pull of negative emotions. Inner conflicts can now be observed. On one side of such conflict, we desire to feel fulfilled and self-satisfied. On the other side, we can sense being drawn to, if not fixated upon, impressions of being deprived, refused, helpless, (the first hurts).

Inner conflict largely consists of our conscious desire to be free of painful emotions versus our unconscious readiness and willingness, through emotional attachments, to replay and recycle the unresolved first hurts. Meanwhile, our psychological defenses operate on a hair-trigger, primed to deny and coverup our unconscious willingness to indulge in one or more of these first hurts.

Now we arrive head on at one of the shocking secrets of our psyche: the existence within us of unconscious masochism. I usually avoid this cringeworthy term, preferring instead to write of our unconscious attachments to the unresolved first hurts or to our compulsion to self-punish. People have a strong aversion, the psychological equivalent of a gag reflex, to acceptance of the possibility that such unconscious masochism is active within us. There’s plenty of evidence, though, for its existence. For starters, there’s the persistence of the first hurts which frequently haunt people throughout their life, often becoming more painful over time.

Neurotics are entangled in these negative emotions in a manner that is ultimately masochistic. To a chronic degree, they make unconscious choices to indulge in, and even to provoke, experiences of these first hurts. They then experience the following consequences of this masochistically-saturated inner conflict: self-pity, regrets, grievances, anger, cynicism, indecision, blaming, loneliness, along with convictions of failure, weakness, unworthiness, and many other hurts and indulgences. They become distorters of reality and chroniclers of victimhood—blaming others, collecting injustices, and complaining of mistreatment.

Self-defeat and self-sabotage are driven by the compulsive power of masochism. Its intensity is readily apparent in sexual masochism. A masochistic allure is certainly a factor in the thrill of certain sexual fantasies and in some sexual role-playing. Pure masochism is perhaps the main instigator of the wars, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and environmental degradation that portend the existence of a death drive and threaten our head-first plunge into extinction.

Neurosis exists on a spectrum, and most of us are somewhere on it. Through self-knowledge we can understand our inner conflict and the allure of our negative side. Self-knowledge and inner watchfulness fortify our intelligence. We develop an attunement to inner talk, recurring feelings, and tension and stress in the body that reveal the presence of inner conflict. Each person is challenged to recognize the specific negative emotions (among the first hurts) that he or she is compelled to act out. Insight and mindfulness become the cure.

These revelations from depth psychology, while welcomed on one level for the ability to relieve suffering, do expose, to our initial chagrin, the conceits of our ego. The ego pridefully assumes to be fully informed about our inner life. On first hearing about unconscious masochism, the ego shudders and exclaims to itself, “How come I don’t know this!” This reaction is very humbling. Now our resistance to the knowledge flares up, producing a stubborn loyalty to our old suffering self. The thought now is, “This can’t be true! Me, a seeker of suffering! Forget about it!” We tend to shun our inner depths, particularly any intimations of unconscious masochism.

Sigmund Freud alluded to underlying masochism in a few papers and with his discussions of the repetition compulsion, the death drive, and our penchant for “crying over spilt milk.” The repetition compulsion usually concerns negative experiences, often involving an impulse to inflict upon others, despite what misery that entails, what one has passively endured. Recognizing this compulsion and taking responsibility for it involves dethroning our ego. We are stubborn creatures, resistant to inner progress, practitioners of ego-fundamentalism and protectors of an ego-ideal, who believe in the supremacy of common sense, our innate capacity to discern reality, and our superiority over other animals.

Being told in 2021 that we’re pawns of a primitive condition, a blockage in our evolvement comprised of unconscious masochism, is equivalent to the shock in 1860 of hearing, by way of Darwin’s “heresy,” that we’re descendants of primitive animals. Our instinct is to retreat into resistance and denial.

Depth psychology is the art of seeing into the nature of our being. It helps us to see that we largely co-create—with chance, nature, and the laws of science—our experiences and achievements. Acquiring this perceptiveness means we have to let go of our ego and its precious victim mentality.

Back in Florida

In south Florida in the 1980s, Sandra and I had initially felt resistance to this psychological knowledge. When told by our therapist that we were emotionally attached to feeling rejected, helpless, and criticized, we had absolutely hated to hear it. However, we soon accepted this knowledge as being true because, as we applied it to our daily experiences, we became stronger and less reactive. We experienced benefits far beyond what other methods had provided.

Sandra needed a respite from the heavy workload of our Florida practice, so we moved in 1993 to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we had several times visited on vacation. We started up another practice and kept writing. Three more of our books came out in 1999.

All our books were self-published. During the 1990s, I had two literary agents in New York City, one after the other, trying to find a publisher for my third book. The content and writing were good enough, the agents agreed, but the implications about humanity’s unconscious appetite for suffering were too gruesome for modern tastes.

Sandra died of breast cancer, in 1999, one week after her last two titles came back from the printer. She had been diagnosed two years earlier, yet she kept talking to clients and writing until the last few months. With a shaky hand, she signed a few copies of her last two titles. I can’t imagine going through the stages of death with more dignity and grace than she did. She was far ahead of me in her kindness, generosity, and consciousness.

We had worked closely together, discussing our projects and helping each other with the writing. I wasn’t sure I could keep it up without her. I went back to her gravesite the day after her funeral. There in the loose earth lay a ballpoint pen, a black and silver Paper Mate. The pen now sits on the base of my computer monitor, still able to release little scratches of ink.

I did carry on, this time with new insight. I described how this insight came to me in the Introduction of my following book, published in 2002. (I have produced a new edition of this book and others in recent years.) The insight followed an accident. In early 2000, I toppled backwards while ice skating and fell on my hands, badly straining my wrists. They took six months to recover full strength. For two weeks following the accident, I was besieged with recurring dreams of pathetic, passive people standing around in misery and disengagement. I had been, relatively speaking, rendered physically weak and helpless, so it was no surprise to be having such dreams. They were exposing deposits of inner passivity still active in my psyche. Reflecting on these dreams, I began to understand more fully the significance of inner passivity as a singular player in our psyche. (Some of my more recent writing on this universal aspect of human nature can be found here, here, here, and here.)

Inner passivity, I realized then, presented a new and improved way to communicate to clients and readers the essentials of depth psychology. This passivity is a major participant in inner conflict, especially in its role as the primitive “intelligence” behind our psychological defenses. The concept of inner passivity can also be helpful as a means to sense and access, mentally and emotionally, the existence and experience of unconscious masochism. Inner passivity can be detected, strongly or subtly, in our chronic replaying and recycling of the first hurts.

Understanding inner passivity and appreciating its influence can be achieved by sensing it as a presence in one’s mind, feelings, and body. Inner passivity’s favorite sentiment is, “What’s the point?” Its primary lament is, “Why didn’t I think to do that?” Its most common behaviors include indecision and procrastination. Its most common experiences involve feeling disengaged, overwhelmed, disconnected, and directionless. Under the influence of inner passivity, people will “spin their wheels” over some particular issue or challenge, or feel oppressed and overwhelmed by everyday life, all for the unconscious purpose of recycling the helpless, passive feeling. On this website and in my books, I have shown correlations between inner passivity and a hundred or more distressful symptoms and forms of self-defeat.

The term “inner passivity” is found in classical psychoanalysis, sometimes in reference to the unconscious or subordinate ego, and my writing has been giving it new perspective. In its elusiveness, inner passivity is the phantom of the psyche, as the title of my 2002 book denotes. The phantom, channeling Darth Vader, extends an open invitation to “come over to the passive side.” Inner passivity can usurp our mind, all while enabling and accommodating our harsh inner critic.

The inner critic is a primitive force or energy of self-aggression operating in the psyche. Its assessments of us (especially “You idiot!” and “You fool!”) are not to be trusted. Our challenge is to neutralize its aggression and establish our own healthy or natural aggression. Healthy aggression is marked by an ability to advocate for oneself, and it’s grounded in a trust in our integrity and compassion. The inner critic’s primitive aggression, along with the previously discussed megalomania and libido, are the trio of inborn drives that can wreak havoc when we’re blind to our psyche’s dynamics.

Our inner critic instinctively treats us with disrespect, sees us in a negative light, and directs malice our way. It is the source, through the psychological dynamic of transference, for our feeling of being treated with malice by others or for our impression of being seen by others in a negative light. Our inner critic is also the “inspiration” for our tendency to see others in a negative light or for our willingness to direct malice and hatred toward them.

When we see others judgmentally, we can detect through inner mindfulness a smug, masochistic gratification lurking in our emotional background. At such times, we are identifying with those we project our disdain upon, thereby unwittingly taking this pain deeply into ourselves and recycling the hurt of self-abandonment or self-alienation. This produces inner guilt and shame, as it disconnects us from our better self in a way that is passively masochistic.

As we explore our psyche, we recognize our masochistic willingness to feel ourselves to be weak, passive, and defensive in our relationship with our hard-nosed inner critic (superego). The inner critic’s self-aggression is, at its worst, an authoritarian, even fascist, force within us. Our inner critic attacks our integrity, and we, through inner passivity, libidinize our receptiveness to this self-abuse.

We also libidinize the guilt and shame that we unwittingly produce through our passive acceptance of punishment from the inner critic. This accounts for why guilt and shame are so difficult to expunge from our emotional life. Unconscious masochism, in addition to its perverse nature, serves (rather shockingly, I would say) as a psychological defense—an especially self-defeating one—intended to ward off the self-aggression of the inner critic. Our unwitting use of a defense that libidinizes self-aggression serves as a passive way to reduce to absurdity the inner critic and the trips it lays on us: The inner critic supposedly cannot effectively punish us when we’re able to libidinize the punishment.

Yet the protection we reap from this defense is minimal. As a countermeasure, the defense is porous and feeble. The belittlement and punishment doled out by the inner critic still accumulate in our psyche, contributing to mood disorders, clinical depression, money troubles, and a wide range of emotional reactions and self-defeating behaviors.

As well, the masochistic gratification this defense offers is slight, especially compared with the overall self-damage that accrues as this inner conflict persists. Despite the self-defeat, the defense, as an expression of our perverse stubbornness, is a success in preserving the remnants of childhood megalomania. People trapped in such inner conflict tend, very much, to be self-centered and stubbornly defensive.

Our basic self-doubt—our sense of being wrong, bad, a failure or disappointment—is due to both the inner critic itself and to the libidinization, through the ploys of inner passivity, of the inner critic’s aggression. This is the primary inner conflict in the human psyche, the one between self-aggression and inner passivity.

This inner conflict, when unresolved, sacrifices our better self to the authoritarian prerogatives of the inner critic. This weakening of self, along with an accompanying semi-conscious gratification, is a widespread phenomenon that can be observed, as just one example, in the moments when bittersweet self-pity is eroticized through the lamentations of country music and the blues.

Inner passivity is also in play, this time with acute suffering, in incidents of bullying and domestic abuse, when one person’s unconscious passivity triggers a reactive, unhealthy aggression from another unaware person. The driving force on the aggressor’s part is his secret willingness to identify with the passivity of the victim, an identification that resonates masochistically with his own passivity but which he unconsciously denies and covers up through his aggression: “I don’t want to identify with his or her passivity. I want to be aggressive. That’s what feels good and righteous—being aggressive!” As mentioned, employing abusive behavior is a common coverup for one’s own passive side.

The writings of Edmund Bergler M.D. (1899-1962), a Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, have been for me a major source of psychological knowledge. Despite being a prolific author (27 books, some of them published by New York City’s leading publishers, along with hundreds of articles in medical and psychiatric journals), Bergler has disappeared from the pages and citations of modern psychology. He’s almost never mentioned, not even in encyclopedias of psychoanalysis, not even as someone accused of getting it all wrong.

An appreciative obituary did appear in The New York Times, yet present-day PhD graduates in psychology are unlikely to have heard of him. He coined the term “writer’s block” and wrote that humanity’s basis neurosis consisted of “psychic masochism.” Since Bergler’s work is central to my writing, I need to make one disclaimer. He made the mistake, common to psychiatrists of his era, of categorizing homosexuality as neurotic. He ought to have acceded to Freud who wrote that homosexuality “cannot be classified as an illness.”

Nevertheless, the bulk of Bergler’s writing deals with the psychological challenges that confront all humanity. His current anonymity reflects what our own resistance succeeds in doing: When challenged to consider the essence of our dark side, the very black soul of it, we run for cover. Yet we cannot reasonably deny that a darkness haunts the psyche, perhaps an innate masochism that cozies up to evil. Is evil not apparent in humanity’s passive acquiescence to a nihilistic mentality that’s been desecrating our planet? Wouldn’t evil get a lot of its traction from psychological ignorance and resistance?

Depth psychology attacks and scatters the darkness within. It liberates us from our attachment to the negative emotions that pull us in the direction of evil. This knowledge from depth psychology, should it gain traction, would inspire a rebirth of rationality. Reason and courage are braced and bolstered by inner truth, which in turn empowers us to resurrect our authentic self and to become enlightened stewards of the sanctity of life.

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The Undercover Enabler of Habitual Oversleeping

Habitual oversleeping is another of the many behavioral afflictions that depth psychology addresses. This behavioral problem is the byproduct of underlying psychological issues that can be hazardous to one’s career, relationships, and emotional health.

The knowledge that exposes the unconscious weakness plaguing our psyche.

Online searches for answers and solutions to habitual oversleeping provide mostly superficial advice or tips, not consequential knowledge. Offering tips such as get a pet, brighten up the room, or turn on some music are like telling an engineering student that elementary arithmetic is all she’ll ever need.

So, let’s tax our brains and expose the psychological mischief that habitual oversleeping entails. This knowledge is humbling, and it stretches the mind a bit. But I promise it won’t otherwise hurt.

A woman plagued by chronic oversleeping wrote to me to say that, as she lies in bed in the morning, she often can’t get back to sleep. “Rather, I lie there trying to go back to sleep. Whether I do sleep or don’t, it adds up to a lot of failure first thing, coloring the rest of my day.”

The key word in this woman’s comment, which she herself italicized, is trying. The harder someone tries unsuccessfully to achieve something, the greater the likelihood that he or she will begin to feel weak and helpless. A sense of helplessness is further deepened when, through one’s resistance to allowing energy and physical strength to stir in the body, the stimulus to rise from bed is impaired.

People can, while sluggishly lying in bed, also conjure up thoughts or visualizations of the challenges and difficulties the coming day might offer. This produces feelings of being overwhelmed by these impending obligations and challenges. Additionally, people who frequently oversleep can experience a deep emptiness, a draining of all motivation and a conviction that the coming day has nothing to offer.

Why are people so susceptible to feeling weak or helpless in this way?

Chronic oversleeping is not due directly to laziness. Nor is it a character weakness. Instead, it’s a psychological problem. A reader suggested calling it oversleeping passivity syndrome (OPS). People plagued by this syndrome need to overcome the effect of inner passivity and inner conflict. The challenge here is to understand what these psychological terms mean.

Inner passivity is an unconscious operating system in our psyche, a center of instinctive reactions, that oversees our psychological defenses. It’s the domicile of our self-doubt, and it operates like an undercover troll, without regard to our best interests. Our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors can be largely influenced—and sabotaged—by this unrecognized part of us.

In large measure, we react and behave in the world according to how much we identify with inner passivity. As we acquire more awareness of inner passivity as a clinical configuration within us, we begin to recognize how tempted or inclined we are to gravitate, on a regular basis, to this familiar, passive, defensive sense of self.

If we don’t understand inner passivity, we won’t understand inner conflict. Inner passivity is in regular conflict with our inner critic, taking on a defensive stance with this critical part. Inner conflict frequently features inner passivity operating defensively as it tries, often ineffectively, to deflect the harshness of our inner critic. The primary function of inner passivity, as a primitive intelligence, is to produce our unconscious psychological defenses, many of which are shrewd and inventive. Yet these defenses are, of course, mostly self-defeating in terms of how they produce irrationality, impair higher intelligence, and prolong suffering.

The habit of oversleeping fuels inner conflict. People who oversleep often come under attack from their inner critic, which accuses them of laziness, unworthiness, and a willingness to indulge in inner passivity. Now the habit of oversleeping becomes more distressful. Not only is oversleeping a problem in itself, but the sluggish sleeper is now inwardly condemned for the passivity that’s involved in the unhealthy behavior. At this point, oversleeping becomes not just a behavioral problem but a painful inner conflict involving guilt, shame, and depression.

The woman who wrote to me about her oversleeping referenced this aspect of the problem. She wrote: “I’m well aware that when I oversleep … I wake up feeling horrid. The worst effect is my mood, which is irritable, but I also feel both shaky and lethargic … I’ve discovered that multiple days of sleeping in leads to depression!”

Such depression is the cumulative effect of passively absorbing self-abuse—as criticism, mockery, scorn, and ridicule—from the inner critic. Because the habit of oversleeping involves so much inner passivity, a kind of emotional vacuum is created within us that enables the inner critic to come marching in, assailing us with abusive allegations of our supposed weakness and unworthiness. Because we tend to identify unconsciously with inner passivity, we are, as a result, unable to protect ourselves adequately from the inner critic’s abuse. In terms of consciousness, nobody’s home to protect us.

Inner passivity produces defensive thoughts and rationalizations. As it applies to chronic oversleeping, the following defensive thoughts are common: “You deserve to sleep;” or “If you feel tired, just go back to sleep;” or “It feels so cozy, why shouldn’t I enjoy this sense of oblivion.” At this point, the inner critic is likely to interject, employing belittling accusations that often register only unconsciously, along the lines of: “Look at you, wasting your life away, being a useless, no-good failure!”

Through inner passivity, we absorb this assault on our character. Doing so produces—in addition to guilt, shame, and depression—a “poor-little-me” or an “I-don’t-matter” sense of self. Our inner critic, when given license by inner passivity to assault us, can induce in us an impoverished, fearful, and damaged sense of self. Because of how compulsively we experience inner passivity, a looping effect can occur in which habitual oversleeping feeds the inner critic and enables it to become increasingly persistent or abusive.

As mentioned, we frequently identify with ourselves through inner passivity and with its inherent self-doubt. In facing life, all of us are constantly entangled in a weakness-strength polarity. One minute we’re feeling strong and capable, the next we’re feeling weak and doubtful. Because of inner passivity, our encounters with weakness and self-doubt become more frequent, more onerous, and more likely to produce failure or self-defeat.

When people with an oversleeping habit are lying in bed trying to fall back to sleep, they’re entangled emotionally in inner passivity. They know they should get up, yet they’re overcome by a powerful compliance with the feeling of surrender. They can feel this weakness acutely, like a mouse wrapped in a hawk’s talons or a person held hostage. A willingness to experience ongoing helplessness or powerlessness can become not only the path of least resistance but also a compulsion to indulge in that weakness.

When this occurs, passive helplessness has become an emotional attachment, meaning an unresolved weakness in the psyche that a person is unconsciously compelled to replay and recycle. The compulsion derives, too, from the lingering emotional associations left over from childhood when youngsters experience so much helplessness and submission.

An emotional attachment operates on this principle: Whatever is unresolved in our psyche is going to be repeatedly experienced, behaviorally and emotionally, as dysfunction (or neurosis) in daily situations and occurrences.

Chronic oversleeping can also serve as psychological resistance, meaning that we unwittingly use the behavior as a way to resist growing stronger, as a way to remain loyal to our familiar, passive self. Habitual oversleeping can now become the unconsciously chosen “preferred” or “favorite” way through which to replay and recycle inner passivity and inner conflict. Oversleeping has now become a painful “game” people play with themselves.

People often deal with oversleeping by getting a dog. They might now feel sufficiently motivated to arise from bed to walk the dog. While this can put a stop to oversleeping, it likely only does an end-run around inner passivity and inner conflict. If these psychological issues are not dealt with, they will produce other self-defeating symptoms, among them indecision, procrastination, ambivalence, poor decision-making, insomnia, cynicism, and negative thinking.

People often feel they have to struggle or fight within ourselves to overcome inner passivity. Not so. We just have to be relatively persistent in being aware of it. Each time we can feel ourselves in the throes of inner passivity, and become aware and watchful of our emotional attachment to the feeling, we’re acting with some measure of inner strength.

We’re simply attentive to the influence of inner passivity, while trusting that this inner watchfulness will have the effect, over time, of lessening its influence upon us. What does this watchfulness entail? A person with the habit of oversleeping can become insightful and stronger by thinking to himself something to this effect while lying awake in bed: “Look at how, right now, I’m under the influence of inner passivity. Some part of me, for some baffling reason, is choosing to indulge in this passive feeling. I can feel how forcefully this attachment or identification imposes itself upon me. Yet I really do want to become free of this oppressive effect. I don’t want to be defeated by inner passivity. As I realize what I’m dealing with, I sense how my consciousness can become more powerful than my identification with inner passivity.”

The act of becoming aware in this way, especially in the moments when inner passivity is acting up, means we sincerely want to grow stronger. If we weren’t determined to grow stronger, we wouldn’t bother with this effort to be more insightful. Instead, we would just passively remain ignorant, accepting of superficial tips, not even wanting to know what we’re really dealing with.

Being able to get up in a timely way every morning doesn’t mean we are free of inner passivity. We can still be afflicted with passive morning thoughts. We might lie in bed for several minutes stewing in self-defeating thoughts, then continue with this line of thinking after we’ve arisen. Or we might bounce out of bed only to have inner passivity impede us in other ways throughout the day. (Here’s an earlier post on passive morning thoughts.)

Another group of people, those who stay up very late at night and resist going to bed at a sensible hour, are also likely to be allowing inner passivity to undermine self-regulation and dictate their behavior. Such behavior is eliminated over time (along with the many other self-defeating symptoms of inner passivity) with the same self-knowledge that applies to chronic oversleeping.

We begin to identify with our best self as we recognize inner passivity and resolve inner conflict. Our best self pops us out of bed in the morning, ready to encounter the day.

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Understanding the Assault on the U.S. Capitol

Donald Trump instigated the assault last week on the U.S. Capitol. Yet he’s now on the way out of office and no longer a prime worry. More pressing is the need to understand and address the convoluted inner life of the members of his mob. Understanding is vital because traces of their villainy circulate in the psyche of us all.

Our best hope resides in a new spurt of psychological self-awareness.

The assault last week sprang out of the inner weakness of the individual assailants. This means the invasion was, in large measure, an act of reactive aggression, not legitimate aggression or authentic power. The riotous behavior constitutes “false” or “phony” aggression. The attackers, as well, are representatives of those among us who most stubbornly refuse to engage in self-reflection and self-development. Let me unpack that.

The inner weakness is obvious. The degree to which members of the mob were under Trump’s spell, were blind to his pathology, believed his lies, and carried out his corrupt wishes is evidence in itself of how passive and weak they are in the psychological sense. This weakness is a prime blockage to connecting with one’s better self.

The participants in the attack were a diverse group, and included white evangelicals, militia members, white supremacists, and everyday people. Despite this diversity, they exhibit a common psychological trait, a willingness to become aggressive and violent to deny and override—unconsciously—their underlying weakness.

Our challenge is to understand the nature of this weakness. The weakness involves the degree to which people, largely through neurosis, are emotionally entangled in fearfulness, passivity, victimhood, self-doubt, unworthiness, and helplessness. The phony or false aggression displayed at the Capitol is a direct reaction to this underlying weakness.

This weakness is an aspect of the inner conflict that plagues the human psyche. It’s what we urgently need to more fully understand to quicken the advancement of human evolution.

With this underlying weakness, one’s access to authentic power is limited, meaning that integrity, rationality, coherence, and healthy self-regulation are lacking. Weak people can, however, easily access an illusion of power, namely false or phony aggression. This self-defeating aggression is expressed as anger, violence, cynicism, blaming, stubborn refusal to be rational, fervent promotion of alternative facts, and the invention of enemies.

Let’s start by considering the mentality of the white Christian evangelicals who constituted a large faction of the attacking mob. Having religious beliefs is perfectly healthy and appropriate. But because of inner fear and other weakness, insecure individuals can misuse religion to prop up their fragile sense of self. Religious beliefs, when clung to with the fervor of dogmatic certainty, provide temporary fear-reducing benefits. Like a life-preserver, the sense of certainty buoys the fragile ego and avoids the perils of soul-searching. This ploy, however, doesn’t resolve inner fear but further represses it.

The more repressed the inner fear, the more unwittingly and anxiously people keep it hidden. In becoming fanatical or dogmatic, they protect themselves from the beliefs of others, or even from established facts, which might challenge their beliefs and release repressed inner fear.

Now they begin to process much of their cognitive functioning through dogma. They surrender their autonomy and cognitive powers in exchange for the security of conformity. Instead of “a mind of their own,” they embrace the mind of the group or an authority figure, thereby segregating themselves from those outside their cluster. Those with different beliefs become outsiders, if not enemies. In the process, one’s inner self is rejected and abandoned in order to please arbitrary authority, just as many children, in passivity and fear, abandon their inner self to accommodate authoritarian parents.

Many people struggle with inner fear, as well as emotional impressions of powerlessness and unworthiness. These negative emotions can spin off to include cynicism, bitterness, and nihilism. Belittling perceptions of oneself and negative outlooks on life in general are likely to be associated with childhood failures in educational achievement, the lingering effects of painful disharmony in one’s family of origin, and a present-time absence of motivation or purpose. Such difficult experiences leave a lingering sense of frailty and inadequacy.

The accompanying self-doubt disconnects people from both a sense of emotional wellbeing and their better self. Their sense of inner weakness becomes an emotional identification. However, they don’t consciously register this identification. If anything, they’re unconsciously compelled to deny any emotional affinity with it. As mentioned, displays of aggression, however self-damaging, serve as a way to deny one’s emotional entanglement in this passive sense of self.

White supremacists and militia members were also among the Capitol’s marauders. White supremacists are plagued by doubt about their essential value. The prospect of being assimilated into the races of humanity, or sharing status and power with people of color, fills them with the dread of losing their precious sense of white superiority, which itself is an identification used unconsciously to cope with their emotional and cognitive deep-down disconnect from their better self. Their deepest identification, to which they cling, is the feeling of not mattering. They, too, will resort to false or phony aggression (verbal or physical) as a way to deny emphatically their unconscious identification with this passive self-doubt.

Militia members are drawn to symbols of military might. Their “Don’t-tread-on-me” stance is all a coverup for the authoritarianism (the harsh rule of their superego or inner critic) that plagues their inner life and accuses them of being passive participants in the affairs of the world, if not outright losers. Being armed helps them to fantasize shooting their way out of an oppressive trap of government overreach, a trap they’ve concocted through their own unresolved inner conflict. Take away the gun and they feel stripped of power.

Together, evangelicals, supremacists, and militants crave feelings of power, importance, and aggression in order to cover up their emotional entanglement in weakness and unworthiness. (It’s one reason why, in recent decades, the Religious Right became so involved in politics.) They’re desperate for some sense of power to cope with the underlying helplessness they feel in the face of social and cultural upheaval. Troubling for them is an underlying sense of being passively overwhelmed by the turmoil. Conspiracy theories now become appealing. Believing in such theories gives them a sense of “being in the know,” possessing certainty, and being special—thereby having power.

In daily work experiences and relationships, individuals can easily feel conflicted between having power and being powerless. Being trapped in a low-paying job or having to deal with a ruthless boss can induce feelings of powerlessness. Lording it over one’s wife and kids can feel like power. When we’re inwardly weak, life is, in large measure, about being beaten down by others, beating down others, and beating down ourselves through our inner critic.

Because people lie so much to themselves (unconsciously, through psychological defenses such as blaming and projection), they become entangled in lies. Their defenses work overtime to falsify inner reality and prop up alternative facts. Self-deception then proceeds to contaminate their perceptions of the world around them.

This mash of lies produces an emotional logic that serves largely to protect the fragile ego-ideal and to shield a person from the challenge of self-reflection.

Trump, champion of the Capitol’s marauders, is a role model for denial. He appears to have no capacity for self-reflection. He vigorously denies truth. He blames others. He is anal in his stubbornness and defiant in his posturing, all desperate ways to feel a semblance of power. Without his ego and his political power, he fears collapsing into nothingness.

His followers are not so much loyal to him as they are to his psychological weaknesses, with which they identify. Their highest loyalty is to their own denial of reality, surfacing as willful or militant ignorance and resistance to self-knowledge. Trump’s political power, combined with his instinctive abhorrence of truth, grants them permission to pursue one of their favorite psychological coverups—their spurious, belligerent claim to being true patriots.

I’m not picking solely on the Right. Some on the Left can be highly dysfunctional as well. It’s not about political affiliation. It’s about neurosis and to what degree the population is neurotic. What is the collective effect of this neurosis, and how is this blockage in our evolution to be remedied? Neurosis arises from a lack of self-knowledge, and it’s a major contributor to stupidity and mediocrity. While neurosis is not, for individuals, as debilitating as a mental-health disorder, its collective impact poses a grave danger to democracy.

Inner fear, an accessory of neurosis, thrives on one’s refusal to fulfill one’s moral obligation to grow and become more conscious. When we don’t grow in ourselves—become wiser, braver, and more astute—we increasingly become a target for our inner critic. Our inner critic assails us for our real or apparent failings and for our passivity, and we in turn blame others for our plight. This inner dynamic occurs unconsciously, yet we can make it conscious and muster the strength of our better self to neutralize the inner critic.

Everyday people are besieged by rapid cultural and demographic changes. Many media outlets have operated as commercial predators, lambasting everyday people with disinformation and divisive language, intensifying inner and outer conflict. The world is also convulsing in future shock. The stronger we are emotionally, and the smarter we are psychologically, the better we can navigate through it.

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height:30px;
}

.front-shares-count {
position: absolute;
text-align: center;
display: block;
}

.shares_size20 .front-shares-count {
font-size: 10px;
top: 10px;
width: 20px;
}

.shares_size30 .front-shares-count {
font-size: 11px;
top: 15px;
width: 30px;
}

.shares_size40 .front-shares-count {
font-size: 12px;
top: 21px;
width: 40px;
}



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