Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 7

The Sheepishness of the Psyche: A One-Act Play

With this short play, I’m spoofing the practice of psychotherapy. This playful piece of writing serves as a holiday respite from my usual serious content. The old version of this post, published in 2017, is here . This revised version has a new character, a sheepdog named Siggy.  

A holiday respite from serious stuff.

The setting is a quiet morning on a grassy hillside in sheep country. Tom, a shepherd in his early twenties, approaches his flock, accompanied by Siggy, to deliver his daily lecture on the secrets of happiness. Tom is taking night classes to become a psychotherapist, and he’s using his flock as an audience to practice his coming oral exams. He’s often challenged by an exotic brown sheep, Bearwolf, the flock’s smartest member. Tom, who can be a bit preachy, begins his talk.

Tom – Good morning, dear sheep. Did you all sleep well?

Bearwolf – (Standing at the head of the flock and speaking over the bleating) I had an awful nightmare. Dreamed I was your dog’s lapdog.

Tom — I hope you sheep have retained all the wisdom I imparted yesterday. I’m going to treat you once again to some lovely insights. Let me start by saying that when we’re too passive, we’re usually making unconscious choices that produce sheepishness.

Bearwolf – When I’m unhappy, it’s never my fault. The only choice I make is who to blame. Siggy here is my favorite target. (Glares at Siggy).

Siggy – (Glares back) Just call me a glutton for mutton.

Bearwolf – (Smirks) Mutton sure beats mutt butt.

Tom – Whoa now, you’re both spiraling into negativity. It’s so easy to replay and recycle unresolved negative emotions. We don’t quite know who or what we are without our inner conflict.

Bearwolf – Your dog’s yaps make more sense than you. I’m quite familiar with what I am, and it’s not where your dog’s teeth keep nipping me.

Tom – I’m sorry, Bearwolf, that this is difficult for you. As I’ve said before, I need to practice this presentation for my oral exams.

Bearwolf – I hope your examiners are a herd of yaks. They’ll know yakking when they hear it.

Siggy – Muffle your yap, Bearwolf! Stop spinning wooly tales.

Bearwolf – It’s your big choppers that need to curtail it, hairy nipper!

Siggy – It’s Siggy, not Harry!

Tom – Now, be nice, both of you. Bearwolf, do you realize how tempted you are to go negative. Negative emotions are unresolved from our past. Unwittingly, we snuggle up to them. You yourself recycle these old painful feelings in your everyday life.

Bearwolf – (Shaking his head) Wrong! That doesn’t ring true for me.

Siggy – The ringing noise is the bell on your neck. Quit shaking your head!

Tom – Of course it doesn’t ring true! That’s what I’m saying. We’re highly resistant to seeing this stuff. Fooling ourselves comes naturally. For instance, you might convince yourself that my words are causing you to get annoyed.

Bearwolf – Yes, your words are having that effect on me. Not so much annoyed, though, as a ringing in my ears.

Tom – That’s your resistance. We’re very much resistant to hearing about how we hold on to painful memories and old hurts.

Bearwolf – What I resist is you trying to strip away my wooly security blanket.

Tom – I’m trying to shear away your defenses and resistance. All of us are very reluctant to take responsibility for how we generate negative emotions. We can learn to respond in a healthy way rather than to react negatively.

Bearwolf – Can you get your dog to react less negatively? He’s been hearing you say this all week, and he’s as snappish as ever.

Siggy – Snappish is good to re-butt your wooly yarns.

Tom – Look, Bearwolf, you aren’t seeing the role you play in your own sheepishness. You’re probably saying to yourself, for instance, “I could be my happy self if only I was better looking and had a great body and personality.” Or you might be thinking, “Work is too hard, and I don’t get paid enough.”

Bearwolf – Yes! That’s exactly what I tell myself. All I ever get is grass and clover, and I have to cut it myself. You’ve been fleecing me far too long!

Tom – In our psyche, the rules of common sense don’t apply. Look, you’re probably saying to yourself, “I’m just a good-for-nothing lazy sheep.” But listen, your laziness is just a surface symptom of deeper issues. You have to get down to the roots.

Bearwolf – Roots taste awful, grass tastes good. My taste buds know what’s good for me. My approach is: Go where the grass is greenest.

Siggy – Your approach is basically super … super … supercil … supercilious!

Bearwolf – Dog! Using big words, for you, is way too ambitious.

Tom – Look, Bearwolf, your life would taste better if only you could get at those roots. When you go deeper, you uncover your attachment to negative emotions. Your problem is not, let’s say, with your alleged lack of physical attractiveness but with your determination to experience yourself as sheepish.

Bearwolf – Okay, once in a while I do feel a little unworthy. Your dog here treats me like a nobody. Get him to show me more respect!

Tom – I’ll talk to him. Meanwhile, try to understand that people, or sheep in your case, who are attached to feeling unworthy can overcome that deep sense of unworthiness with good insight. Unfortunately, through their resistance, people often flee from this knowledge.

Bearwolf – Yes, I do feel an urge to flee to where I can’t hear you—or where I won’t be dehumanized by your dog’s anal-fixation.

Tom – We also want to see through our defenses. Look, you probably feel unloved. Your defenses cover up your willingness to indulge in that feeling.

Bearwolf – I get a little moody now and then, no big deal. I also get cravings, usually for crab grass, and my compulsion to chew acts up, too. Look, I’m just a wooly mammal, a brown sheep, that’s just who I am.

Tom – We’ll all become extinct like woolly mammoths if we’re too resistant to inner growth. We have the power right now to overcome limitations imposed by our unresolved issues. The first step is to acquire deeper insight.

Bearwolf – Insight, insight! Look, see my fluttering eyes. They look outward, not inward. Maybe if I had your dog’s beady eyes, I could swivel them inward.

Siggy – Don’t think you can pull my eyes over your wool.

Tom – Sheep have especially thick skulls that are highly resistant to depth psychology. Feeling unworthy is an emotion you keep replaying and recycling. Your parents might have regarded you that way because that’s how they saw themselves.

Bearwolf – Yes, I remember, my parents did feel inferior to cows. But definitely not to dogs, I can tell you that!

Siggy – I’m proud to feel inferior to humans—and excited to be a big tiny-riny-saurus around sheep.

Tom – Suppressed psychological issues are like hungry tyrannosauruses that sneak up and devour us. It’s ironic, for instance, that we get angry at someone who has been critical of us when we’re the first in line to be critical of ourselves. It’s your inner critic that harasses and demeans you.

Bearwolf – The big critic around here is your loose-nut mutt. His growling doesn’t help my self-esteem. Why don’t you preach to him?

Tom – Look, I’m telling this to all of you, my dear flock, because I want you to overcome your sheepishness. Besides, my communication skills are enhanced when I’m able to get through to dumber animals.

Bearwolf – You’ll get lots of practice with your own kind.

Tom – Seeing our attachment to negative emotions is very humbling to our ego. Seeing our inner sheepishness is also how we tame the superego.

Bearwolf – My ego, as egos go, is surprisingly sheepish. It doesn’t slap me down like this depth psychology tries to do.

Siggy – Ego, we go, I go, you go—sometimes I get them mixed up.

Tom – Our unconscious ego slaps us down by denying us access to inner truth. It enables us to fool ourselves into believing that we’re innocent of psychological mischief.

Bearwolf – If once in a while I fool myself, that seems like a good way to do it.

Tom – It is a good way if you want your resistance, denial, and defenses to triumph. Our suffering can become a distant memory when we get down to the roots of how our psyche works.

Bearwolf – For sheep, it’s either black or white or canine. We live on grass and water, and we let roots dig their own grave.

Tom – Bearwolf, you’re right. I am being hard on you. It’s mostly people I need to reach. They tend to be instinctively defensive and resistant at first. Yet humans, after braving the initial shock of depth psychology’s revelations, are often eager to get down to work on this.

Bearwolf – Yes, this humble sheep would love to see humans get down to work, preferably on their hands and knees, chewing on fresh insight, with a dogged superego nipping at their butts.

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Three Self-Defeating Reactions at the Heart of American Disunity

One of president-elect Joe Biden’s priorities is to bring peace to the nation’s warring camps. The task will be easier as more of us begin to understand the deeper psychological dynamics that undermine unity and civility.

When bitterly at odds, we’re allowing our personal psychology to govern our politics.

When bitterly at odds, we’re usually under the influence, at least in part, of our personal psychology. We claim we’re fighting over whose policies and values are better for the nation. But the fight, when bitter, arises largely from our psychology. Emotional and behavioral reactions spring from human nature, distorting our beliefs and perceptions. These reactions, which compel us to make enemies of one another, are poorly understood by the public.

All three of the reactions discussed here involve inner conflict. Inner conflict is a condition we all have in common. It’s the primary source of whatever disharmony we feel within ourselves and toward others. Inner conflict produces malice, irrationality, foolishness, racism, greed, hostility, and unkindness. The degree to which each of us is inwardly conflicted determines the quality of the attitudes, deportment, and temperament that we each bring to the temple of democracy.

As examples of inner conflict, we look for love but harbor self-rejection; or we crave respect but generate self-criticism; or we want to be strong yet are plagued by feelings of weakness. With inner conflict, we swing back and forth, experiencing one polarity, then the other, over and over.

When saturated with inner conflict, we unwittingly contribute to social or political conflict. We don’t know how to live without discord, whether within our self or with people and everyday circumstances. We’re not free people, at least not inwardly so, when plagued by such psychological reactiveness.

The first of the self-defeating reactions involves our tendency to experience negative emotions (fear, anger, defiance) at the possibility of being overpowered and defeated by the beliefs and intentions of domestic opponents. We elevate opponents to the rank of enemies based on the particular dynamics of our inner conflict. Often the enemy is chosen (or an assumed enemy’s threat is blown out of proportion) to accommodate our unconscious compulsion to produce and recycle the passive fearfulness circulating in our psyche.

In other words, our unresolved inner conflict distorts reality. We want to believe our inner fear is justified by external circumstances. Unwittingly, we decline to recognize that we’re falsifying reality to cover up inner fear. In this process, we exaggerate the other’s side’s malice and threat. Feeling threatened or oppressed can easily be self-imposed or self-generated.

The anger we feel toward those we have targeted as enemies feels like power, as if our forceful opposition puts us in a strong position. This is a misleading sense of power, employed unconsciously to cover up our underlying fragility. Again, this reaction is ultimately self-defeating because it arises from a distortion of reality and generates stress and negative emotions.

Sometimes people are fighting not so much to win as to avoid the painful feeling of losing: “If they win, I lose.” Hence, we fight back with anger and hostility to avoid this feeling. Deep in the psyche, however, losing is, for many people, an emotional attachment or unconscious expectation. The feeling of losing triggers distress when people have pronounced doubt, deep in their psyche, about their intrinsic value. People will resort to blaming others and falsifying reality in order to avoid disturbing the fragile self-image that fears inner truth.

In our psyche, we’re tempted to experience the political views or preferences of others as an oppressive force (e.g. playing up the notion of the “war” on Christmas or having LGBTQ or Black Lives Matter values “shoved down our throat”). Irrationally and perversely, people are unconsciously willing to cling stubbornly to their positions because, psychologically, they are unable to liberate themselves from feeling oppressed. Shifting from feeling oppressed to feeling inwardly free is a profound transformation. For many people, it never happens. Inner conflict compels us to experience ourselves and the world through a sense of oppression and alienation.

This reactiveness helps us to understand the “Don’t tell me what to do!” anger and rage that characterizes many of those who refuse to wear face masks during the pandemic. When a rational public-health directive is politicized, it has already, in our psyche, been “emotionalized,” becoming another variable through which we can feel oppressed. Growing awareness of the source of these reactions liberates us from the suffering.

This quickness to react emotionally to feeling controlled arises from inner passivity, a weakness in our psyche. This passivity originates in the helplessness, dependence, and fearfulness of childhood. Growing up is, in part, the quest to become strong and independent and to overcome this passivity and fear. Yet emotional associations with this passivity remain in the adult psyche, as evidenced in the struggle of so many to feel the inner strength required for healthy self-regulation and the assertiveness needed to make one’s way successfully in the world.

As a common reaction to underlying passivity, we flip into an aggressive stance and become stubborn, angry, belligerent, willful, controlling, and defiant. For many people, it’s one or the other extreme—either feel oneself to be passive in a way that’s distressful and painful or else react with over-the-top aggression and the impulse to become controlling or righteous.

This kind of aggression tends to be inappropriate and self-defeating. Nonetheless, it’s often the only sense of aggression that people can muster, given their inner passivity. This unhealthy aggression is acted out in the social and political realm as hostility and scorn for the other side and rejection of its values.

This helps explain the devotion of Donald Trump’s followers. Trump is a genius at falsifying reality, and his followers, by identifying with him, can feel power in defiance of reality. Reality is mocked through illusions of power (or self-defeating expressions of power) such as willfulness, stubbornness, defiance, and bellicosity. This inauthentic power is appealing because it denies one’s identification with (and emotional attachment to) inner passivity and its associations with helplessness and powerlessness.

Trump displays the bluster of bellicosity and indignation to an extreme degree, and his followers are seduced not so much by Trump himself (Sarah Palin evoked the same reactions) but by his aggressive coverup of inner weakness. His followers resonate emotionally and intuitively with this weakness since they harbor it within themselves. Their fervor and bellicosity serve to deny this identification with inner weakness, yet their cultish passivity to Trump, an infantile man, serves as evidence for the underlying truth.

We all have some degree of inner passivity. Left-wingers, for instance, are prone to injustice collecting, which is one of inner passivity’s symptoms. The healthier we are, the more we minimize the influence of inner passivity. People of all political persuasions can circle back and forth between passivity and aggression. For example, left-wingers take a position (let’s say political correctness) and express this viewpoint forcefully, often sanctimoniously. In reaction, right-wingers, in their unconscious passivity, can now feel threatened and oppressed by the fervor and righteousness of the left. These right-wingers now react with their own aggression, perhaps proclaiming more emphatically the sinfulness of abortion, while feeling power and superiority in this righteousness. Now the left, feeling threatened by this fervor, comes back with another proclamation about truth and reality. And on it goes.

Passivity becomes triggered, flairs up as counteracting aggression, as each side feels intimidated by the growing intensity with which the other side reacts. However, when people are psychologically more astute, they clear out thin-skinned reactivity and the negative emotions that arise from inner conflict. They’re more infused with compassion, generosity, fearlessness, and love. These positive attributes, rather than ideology, become their guiding light.

Have inner conflict and the reactiveness of people become more severe? Psychiatrists believe climate change is a threat to mental health. There’s a psychological price for denying or ignoring climate change: It accentuates underlying helplessness and breeds cynicism. Other factors are battering the psyche. To what degree has the amplification of partisan journalism been feeding the dark side of human nature? Also challenging many people—and inflaming their resistance—are the spread of LGBTQ values and the prodding to overcome white fragility and overthrow the caste system ensnaring Blacks. The effects of rapidly advancing technology are confounding in themselves. This can all feel overwhelming, and it may now be instigating widespread irrationality, conspiracy mongering, and claims of fake news.

The second psychological reaction (all three are interrelated) fueling our discord involves our personal sensitivity to feeling devalued and disrespected. We all want to feel we have value, that we are important. Yet in our psyche each of us struggles, in varying degrees, with self-doubt and self-criticism. Many of us also struggle with more painful self-rejection and self-hatred. Humanity’s greatest weakness might be this easily accessible pain associated with doubt about one’s worthiness and, commonly, an aching conviction of one’s unworthiness.

With such inner conflict, many people are compelled to resonate emotionally with feelings of unworthiness. Now they need a target to cover up or deny their unconscious willingness to identify with themselves in this limited, painful way. On the racial front, Blacks and other minorities become such targets, cruelly used as receptacles for the disrespect and devaluation that white people are harboring within themselves.

We want to believe in our goodness and intrinsic value. Yet inner conflict creates the impression we lack value and are gravely flawed. Feeling this underlying self-doubt can be incessant and painful. To protect self-image and shield the ego, we hide from ourselves (through psychological defenses) the degree to which we harbor an emotional readiness to believe the worst about ourselves.

Just about all of us, to some degree, belittle or disrespect ourselves through our inner critic. In many people, the inner critic is brutal, constituting self-condemnation and self-rejection. In such instances, people project self-rejection on to others, seeing them as deserving of rejection. This way, through self-deception facilitated by psychological resistance, they blame and detest others to the same degree that, through the self-rejection and self-hatred emanating from their inner critic, they blame and detest themselves.

In other words, there’s a felt need to reject or belittle the other side (conveniently identified as “different” or alien) in direct proportion to how one is absorbing from one’s own inner critic the feeling of being rejected and belittled.

More insidiously, there also exists a compulsion to reject the other person and then, through identification, sneak into one’s own psyche that feeling of being rejected. Unconscious psychological defenses are activated: “No, I don’t want to resonate with being a lesser person. It’s those others who are unworthy and loathsome. Look at how much I despise them!” People often have to ratchet up their animosity and hatred in order to reinforce this defense.

Each side will project on to the other what is secretly harbored within, namely feelings of being unworthy and undeserving of respect. This deep emotional attachment or addiction to feeling disrespected is a personal identification that can be clung to with masochistic intensity.

In the political and social realm, both the left and the right can take each other’s opposition personally. In these heated debates, many people readily feel they themselves are being devalued. In doing so, they become emotionally reactive. Both sides experience anxiety and generate animosity, refusing to become responsible for their inner reactiveness.

A third psychological reaction involves the manner in which so many people experience themselves through a limited sense of self. America is known for the individualism of its people. Having a strong sense of one’s individual self contributes to one’s confidence and esteem. But this self-assurance needs to be balanced with the reality of how interconnected and interdependent we are.

We’re all born with a pronounced self-centeredness. Obviously, babies haven’t acquired the worldly experience that would facilitate objectivity. Knowing only their own little bodies, they feel as if they’re the center of the universe. They tend to believe that whatever comes their way is self-bestowed. Only gradually over several years do youngsters become aware of other points of view.

Adults can regress and become entangled mentally and emotionally in these infantile perceptions. For instance, in accepting conspiracy theories and disinformation, they feel an old childish defiance and sense of power. Reality is what they say it is. This explains why so many people are prepared to believe an evil global cabal is manipulating us all. The false belief is more evidence for the existence in the human psyche of inner passivity, which itself produces the readiness and willingness to experience helplessness, powerlessness, and victimization.

Self-centeredness lingers in the psyche in a way that limits one’s intelligence. People can easily revert to an infantilism involving entitlement, self-interest, and conceit that crowds out other vital considerations. The feeling arises, “If I want to own an assault weapon, who’s to stop me.” This is the voice of an infantile mentality. In itself, possession of such weapons can express a desperate yearning to feel all-powerful, as compensation for underlying helplessness and powerlessness.

An adult’s identification with the ego is a remnant of the young child’s acute self-centeredness. Many adults, especially those with a narcissistic predisposition, feel their ego protects them from collapsing into a painful sense of insignificance. White supremacy, for instance, is more about protecting a fragile self-image than the blood of whites.

People who are quick to see evil in others aren’t seeing it in themselves or in those with whom they have identified. This see-no-evil mentality relates directly to their unwillingness to look, for the purpose of healing, beyond their ego and its defensiveness into the heart of their own deficiencies and dysfunction.

Clinging to the ego makes us emotionally unstable. It can produce manic swings between grandiosity and self-rejection. Ego-identification impairs the individual from connecting emotionally with (or identifying with) his better self. Entangled emotionally in self-rejection, for instance, a person is likely to experience bitterness and anger toward those he blames for his misery. He’s blaming others to cover up his unconscious willingness to resonate (sometimes masochistically) with feelings of self-rejection.

As mentioned, this unconscious readiness to feel belittled, unsupported, or rejected is a symptom of inner conflict. Many millions of people are experiencing inadequacy and failure. The conflict leaves many people seething with resentment, convinced they’ve been treated unfairly or victimized. Many grievances are valid, yet one’s inner conflict, to the degree it is present, contributes to the misery. Barack Obama insightfully said as much of the rural white working class (during his first campaign for president), and he was hammered by the Right for saying it: “They get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Globalization (along with new technologies and the financialization of U.S. capitalism) has been brutal for American labor, small farmers, and small-town residents. Some workers adapted to these challenges with continuing education, yet the challenges were too much for many. The political system certainly could have been more supportive. American media, as well, might have been more charitable in recognizing the value of working people instead of mindlessly lionizing CEOs, celebrities, and athletes.

Sophisticated urbanites might wisely have been more respectful of their country cousins. Yet to what degree did rural folk play up emotionally the feeling of being mocked or disrespected? Feeling mocked and scorned can be a feature of their relationship with themselves. Rather than address this, they in turn mock and discredit urbanites, experts, and intellectuals.

The degree to which actual failure is entangled in unresolved inner conflict makes it all more painful and complicated. For one thing, the psychological factor throws individuals into naked self-centeredness or rigid egotism, a regression to childishness. This weakens the connection to one’s better self, and it impedes one’s ability to generate more initiative and to feel more open, generous, and kindly toward others.

Of course, prosperous, sophisticated people are not exempt from ego-identification and its accompanying self-defeating reactions. Many of them are desperate for status, fame, wealth, and power to prop up their ego. The ego requires self-aggrandizement, the admiration of others, or at least some measure of accomplishment in order to maintain itself without undue suffering. If one’s better self has not been cultivated and strengthened, the ego, when it regularly wavers or collapses, plunges the individual into painful states such as depression, cynicism, bitterness, and rage. The ego gets sucked into inner conflict; the authentic self doesn’t.

While people who identify with their ego can be cunning and superficially successful, they’re unlikely to be compassionate and wise. They’ll continually need to belittle and condemn others and hype their own ego to avoid turning on themselves with disgust.

As we recognize the source of these reactions, we liberate ourselves from inner conflict and rescue our better self from its imprisonment in ignorance. We rescue the nation, too, from its time in darkness.

—

This article is a revision and expansion of The Psychological Roots of National Disunity , published here in 2012.

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Answers to Questions from Readers (Part 8)

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 answer six of them, mostly related to inner passivity. I’ve done some light editing of the questions, and my responses are in italics.

To fully understand inner passivity, we need to feel its influence within us.

Inner passivity has plagued me from a young age. By applying your concepts with daily journaling, I found myself emerging from inner conflict, and for the first time in my life I’m finding some peace within myself.

Then came the pandemic with its lockdowns, protests, riots, and subsequent madness. Now I find myself gripped with fear and anxiety despite my attempts to unhook from the news. Friends and family seem to be parroting the news without any sense of rational thought. Evidence, facts, and reason seem not to be a priority as radical fringe movements pick up steam.

How can I prevent a backslide into passivity when it truly is the case that our freedoms have been limited and friendships have been disrupted based on politics and misinformation? How can we stay healthy in a post-Covid world?  — W.J.

Congratulations on your success in reducing inner conflict. Even as we’re making progress, however, challenging political and world events can still feel oppressive and disheartening. It’s more important than ever that we look for ways to be resilient. If we’re willing, we can accelerate the pace of our inner growth during this pandemic.

Keep watching for the influence of inner passivity in your daily life. Inner passivity would likely be circulating in your psyche if you’re feeling painfully trapped or restricted by Covid lockdowns. Also inducing anxiety and fear are climate change worries, the turmoil of partisan politics, and widespread irrationality and distrust. Some people feel overwhelmed and helpless simply in following the news. We can unwittingly engage with the world in ways that amplify feelings of being disconnected from others and from ourselves. This produces a passive feeling, a painful sense of being unable to make progress or to support oneself emotionally.

Friends and family members probably aren’t around like they used to be. You can make up the difference by doing more to be your own best friend. Ask yourself what you’re feeling and what you need. Go looking inward for your authentic self. This is about believing in yourself and preparing to spring into a higher level of competence and achievement when the pandemic is over.

Start enjoying yourself with a new hobby, interest, or learning project. Keep journaling. Visualize a successful career path and itemize what you need in order to fulfill it. This planning and preparation can give you a sense of purpose and generate all the inner strength you need. You must also avoid self-pity.

—

I find your articles on how the unconscious mind works to be very interesting, especially with regards to inner passivity. However, I can’t find any peer-reviewed literature that mentions anything about inner passivity. That being said, would you mind sending me a source or two about inner passivity? – P.T.

Inner passivity is mentioned frequently in the writings of classical psychoanalysis. For whatever reasons, it did not become a term that prominently entered the discipline’s nomenclature. Sigmund Freud had some insight into it, as expressed especially in his later writings, but he never produced a framework for understanding it. I’ve made an effort over the past three decades to bring the term into better focus.

The peer-review for psychological literature is largely an academic process. The academic approach, however, is not the best means for understanding inner passivity . Discovering the reality of inner passivity is an individual accomplishment. While inner passivity can be studied intellectually, it can only be tested for relevance or truth one person at a time. The individual looks for inner truth because that’s where healing begins.

Inner passivity is recognized on a personal feeling level, as a feature of one’s own inner processes, meaning, and truth. To really fathom it, we each need to encounter it organically, observing its influence within our own psyche.

I’m inviting people to find out for themselves whether the knowledge about inner passivity, as I present it, begins to resolve their emotional and behavioral problems. Thousands of people are finding that it is the key knowledge that had been eluding them.

A more widely used term, “learned helplessness,” has features in common with inner passivity. The term, “learned helplessness,” is employed to explain a type of behavior, whereas inner passivity, while it relates to emotions and behaviors associated with helplessness, more expansively refers to an operating system in our psyche that undermines us. Inner passivity is a blind spot in our consciousness and a major obstacle to our evolvement. Even people who on the surface are strong and successful have deposits of it.

What I emphasize in my use of the term is the degree to which people compulsively recycle and replay experiences, memories, and fantasies that induce the passive feeling. I also highlight how inner passivity is a major component of inner conflict, particularly in how it caters to our inner critic and in how it enlists our psychological defenses to blind us to inner truth.

Inner passivity, as mentioned, has its own unconscious operating system, a kind of primitive intelligence. The psychological defenses it churns out are often weak and ineffective. It also serves as an entry point in our psyche for the acceptance of punishment (largely in the form of guilt, shame, and depression) from the aggressive inner critic. This unconscious willingness to accept punishment from one’s inner critic, a defining feature of inner passivity, is a primary way in which humans experience emotional suffering.

—

I am a physiotherapist living in Asia. I have traveled to many countries and tried all kinds of therapy, but the way to mental health can still be so elusive! I come from a very dysfunctional family and have had to fight my way out of the trenches of mental-health issues.

I interpret my dreams, and I’ve had a reoccurring dream for some years. I long to go somewhere, in a car or a train, but the way is always blocked or delayed, and I never reach my destination. I know that’s my psyche telling me something is not right in my life. In one of your books, you mentioned that you were stuck yourself. How did you overcome such difficulty? What do you recommend I do? – A.W.

Your recurring dream is a passivity dream. The dream is revealing the still unrecognized or unresolved passivity in your psyche. It’s a good dream in the sense of telling you something important. The dream is trying to make you more conscious of your passive side. If you don’t see the passivity clearly enough, you’ll remain entangled in it. 

In this dream, try to imagine what the blocks or delays might represent in your life. Can you feel how you are blocking yourself? It could occur through procrastination or indecision. It could also be that you are striving too hard in some manner, spinning your wheels figuratively speaking, thereby unwittingly generating and recycling the passive feeling. If so, relax more, but be persistent in assimilating the deeper knowledge. This empowers your intelligence and heightens your consciousness, liberating you from inner conflict.

—

I’ve browsed your work on and off over the last few years whenever I’ve encountered a particularly tough time managing my intrusive thoughts and perfectionism. I suffer from intrusive thoughts that make me wonder if I could harm someone I love, or an innocent child, all while rationally knowing I would never act on such thoughts.

I’ve been trying in vain for years to rationalize my thoughts away, saying to myself, for instance. “These are just intrusive thoughts,” and “I would never do that.” Yet I can still feel like a monster for even having these thoughts, and it terrifies me that these thoughts come on their own. It’s not something I can consciously control, they just enter my mind and then I’m terrified that they’ve entered. It produces shame, guilt, and confusion.

How am I supposed to feel like a good and responsible person if my mind automatically generates these intrusive thoughts without my conscious control? I almost feel like I don’t deserve happiness because I have dealt with this issue for so long.

Can you please provide some insight as to how I can deal with this in a productive way? I suspect your answer will be along the lines of, “I am emotionally attached to the feeling of self-condemnation and self-criticism.” But even so, will accepting this remedy get rid of the intrusive thoughts or simply shine a different light on the issue? – K.P.

As you mentioned, it appears that you’re emotionally attached to the feeling of self-condemnation and self-punishment. Another way to see it, however, is to recognize that you are experiencing the compulsion to punish yourself for having thoughts of harming others. As you said, “I feel like a monster for even having these thoughts …”

This might be the unconscious self-defeating “game” you’re playing: First you unwittingly initiate the intrusive thoughts, then you allow yourself to be badgered by the negative insinuations in those thoughts, then you condemn yourself for passively allowing the self-abusive thoughts to overwhelm you, then you absorb punishment for being so receptive to these dreadful thoughts. At some point, the cycle begins all over again.

The punishment takes the form, as you said, of “shame, guilt, and confusion.” In this sense, the thoughts are not directly the problem. The main problem is your inner conflict, which is producing the unpleasant thoughts. The conflict consists of your wish to feel emotionally strong versus your expectation of being overwhelmed by inner weakness.

The intrusive thoughts are a symptom of your unresolved inner conflict. The conflict produces a compulsion to absorb self-punishment. This dynamic reveals the streak of unconscious masochism that’s embedded in inner passivity.

You’ve been trying, as you say, “to rationalize my thoughts away.” But in doing this you’re putting the focus on the thoughts and failing to see the source of those thoughts. Try to understand that it’s not directly about the “bad” intrusive thoughts. Instead, understand that the source of the problem is your unconscious determination to replay and to recycle an inner conflict between self-condemnation and inner passivity. As I said, this generates intrusive thoughts and causes you to absorb self-punishment.

If you see the conflict clearly enough, your psychological defenses will no longer be able to deceive you. They’ll cease to function. You’ll also be able to stop your inner and outer defensiveness, which is the more overt or superficial expression of psychological defenses. Now you’ll no longer get entangled in a defensive, passive way with your inner critic. You’ll stop “feeding” the intrusive thoughts with inner and outer defensiveness. You’ll be able to watch the intrusive thoughts (if they’re even operative at this point) from a position of knowing detachment, as a witness to them, seeing them objectively as a symptom of inner conflict.

Try to sense the underlying basis of your situation, namely that, through inner passivity and its accompanying inner conflict, you’re unconsciously compelled to feel helpless and defensive, disconnected from your authentic self, as you’re flooded by intrusive thoughts.

With this understanding, you can step out of the conflict and disengage from the thoughts. It can take some time for this understanding to completely stop the thoughts. But you ought to be able to get a sense early on whether it is of benefit. If so, be persistent in applying the knowledge to your everyday experiences.

—

This morning a lady I am communicating with on a dating site suggested that I’m on the autism spectrum. I did an online test and it says I’m likely to be on the upper end of the spectrum. It makes sense to me, yet I also fit the passive description. How do I distinguish? I don’t know what to make of this. – B.D.

A specialist in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can test you for this. The disorder typically has behavioral symptoms of a passive nature. It’s possible that you tested positive on the online test because it picked up passive traits in the answers or statements you provided. In any case, whether or not the results are accurate, you want to be fully accepting of yourself, as you do your best to live a satisfying life.

Since you have been reading about inner passivity, you might want to keep an eye on it in your daily experiences, observing how awareness of it might help you shift toward more self-assurance. This can be part of your path to inner growth.

—

A student of mine who is ten years old has been diagnosed with depression and insomnia. It occurred to me that a few sessions might help her, but I wonder if a phone call would work for someone so young? –C.E.

I hesitate to work with children, especially over the phone. It might be that this student’s insomnia and depression are due, at least in part, to her being too hard on herself (due to an active inner critic to which she might be feeling passive and defenseless). A parent or teacher could ask her, as a starting point, if she thinks she’s being too hard on herself with expectations, demands, rejection, or criticism. (She might initially dismiss the idea, or need time to think about it.)

If she says it might be true that she’s hard on herself, she could benefit from a gentle talk about the existence in many people of a mean, demanding inner voice, one that is sometimes conveyed almost audibly but more often is just felt or sensed. This inner voice can be quite bullying and belittling. A parent could tell this adolescent that the voice does not represent her best interests, that it is a primitive part of the human mind. She can be encouraged to refrain from taking it seriously and engaging defensively with it.

A parent might ask this girl on a regular basis whether she thinks the voice or feeling has been bothering her, and then reaffirm the girl’s capacity to be stronger than this voice or feeling. The girl can be advised to believe in a center, a stronghold, within her that represents her goodness and value, and told that she possesses a core essence or authentic self that radiates her kindness, loving nature, self-trust, and strength. She might also be told that the human story has involved facing this sort of self-doubt and inner weakness and being inspired to rise above it.

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Our Compulsion to Self-Punish

For many of us, a steady stream of emotional self-punishment can feel as natural as breathing. The process of punishing oneself can operate so subtly that people don’t detect its pernicious nature.

Self-punishment can feel as natural as breathing.

This is not a discussion of physical self-injury or self-harm such as skin cutting, skin burning, or hair pulling. Such self-punishment (discussed in a previous post) is the more visible expression of self-abuse. Emotional self-abuse, in contrast, is a much more widespread problem, one that, in varying degrees, plagues all humanity.

This emotional self-punishment occurs regularly among everyday people, including the brightest and most outwardly successful among us. Even the mildest neurosis produces this pattern of inner abuse. It accounts for why people so often feel wrong or bad about themselves.

Many people think it’s normal to suffer like this. Or that there’s nothing they can do about it. Not so! The problem can be overcome with psychological insight.

This problem starts with self-aggression, which is the primitive psychic energy that flows from our inner critic in the form of unkind and harsh accusations of wrongdoing, foolishness, and failure. However, this is more than simply a self-blame problem. Nor is our inner critic even the main culprit. The primary problem is our unconscious tendency to absorb this self-aggression from our inner critic and turn it into self-punishment.

This unconscious tendency, even willingness, to absorb the inner critic’s aggression is a primary psychological flaw of human nature. This flaw, a blind spot in our consciousness, is what I call inner passivity. Shrouded from our awareness, inner passivity operates like an enabler or a codependent in its accommodating and compromising interactions with the inner critic.

Inner passivity, which I write about extensively on this website, makes us secret collaborators in our emotional suffering. This passivity produces in us an unconscious receptiveness to the inner critic’s claims that we’re flawed, bad, or unworthy. The more that our inner passivity absorbs the inner critic’s attacks upon our goodness and integrity, the more self-punishment we experience. The punishments are varied, and include guilt, shame, worry, humiliation, tension, anxiety, fear, and depression.

We’re creators of our emotional suffering in the sense that, unconsciously, we’re passive recipients of the inner critic’s aggression. To put it bluntly, we are prepared to absorb, through inner passivity, the inner critic’s misrepresentations and lies about us and to accept a level of self-punishment that appeases the inner critic. When we’re receptive to punishment in this way, we’re also more willing to inflict it on others.

If we want to be more evolved (as human survival likely requires), we’re obliged to take responsibility for the unruly dynamics of our psyche. Up to now, we’ve been somewhat innocent in our collective self-defeat because the deeper source of self-damage has escaped our awareness. But our resistance to becoming more conscious and evolved is now threatening civilization itself.

Throughout this post, I give examples of the unconscious psychological defenses we employ to rationalize our acceptance of self-punishment. I’ve written extensively about the many symptoms of inner conflict, and in this article I’m trying for a fresh perspective on our psyche’s underlying dynamics.

As I said, the process of generating self-punishment begins with our inner critic. This is the primitive drive in our psyche that produces self-aggressive thoughts and feelings. On the receiving end of this aggression is inner passivity, which harbors self-doubt and defensiveness. This passive part, bombarded by self-aggression, juggles various defensive options that manage the degree of punishment we experience. The inner conflict between inner passivity and the inner critic is likely the principal tectonic plate of the psyche, where our emotional life is most unstable.

As distinctive operating systems, our inner critic and inner passivity each function with their own agendas, largely independently of our conscious mind and indifferent to our wellbeing. Our challenge is to tame these primitive elements, thereby claiming this conflicted territory in the name of higher consciousness and our authentic self.

Inner passivity, in its struggle to accommodate the formidable inner critic, is required by its weak nature to make compromises. It tries to defend us, but it does so quite ineffectively. Our best counterforce to the inner critic is our authentic self, which we discover and cultivate as, through self-knowledge, we free ourselves from inner conflict.

Inner passivity (certainly without consulting us!) makes plea deals with the inner critic. It offers up to the inner critic “a pound of flesh,” in the form of emotional self-punishment. The pound-of-flesh offering usually succeeds in getting the inner critic to ease up on its assault on our character and integrity. It’s like the bully who stops kicking his victim after inflicting “sufficient” pain.

This is key to understanding self-punishment. Psychologists have been puzzled as to why self-harming behaviors of a physical kind seem to help sufferers regulate their negative emotions. At its website, the American Psychological Association says, “If a person is feeling bad, angry, upset, anxious or depressed and lacks a better way to express it, self-injury may fill that role.” The association also notes: “Some people get pleasure from pain because they feel a weight lifted off their shoulders. This is usually what happens when people engage in self-punishment behaviors.” This emotional relief happens, as I’ve noted, because the inner critic backs off, and its abusive function is temporarily set aside, once a person has experienced “sufficient” punishment.

Guilt, shame, and mild or severe depression are common ways that painful “pounds of flesh” are offered up as appeasement to the inner critic. Guilt is the feeling that one deserves to be punished, based on an unconscious concession such as this: “Okay, inner critic, I hear you, you’re right, your attack against me is justified. I’m hearing you. I’m taking you seriously.”

Shame is the result of a more serious capitulation to self-aggression. It’s the feeling that punishment has already being inflicted and absorbed. Here’s the inner concession: “Okay, inner critic, you can see how much I’m suffering. I’ve taken on plenty of punishment. I’m so ashamed, and I’m feeling horrible. Perhaps now I’ve suffered enough.”

Often, people feel guilt and shame for minor and even imaginary infractions. The inner critic can be so intimidating that an individual’s guilt or shame is often triggered by just implications of wrongdoing in the form of passing thoughts or memories. Sometimes the offense is imaginary (a faint wish, for instance, to see harm befall someone) rather than real.

Often guilt and shame are experienced as ongoing distress and misery that far outweighs the hurt or damage involved in a person’s wrongdoing. Guilt and shame can be tied to a minor misdeed committed long ago. A misdeed can be milked over years and decades for its suffering potential. Sometimes the “crime” is not even an actual misdemeanor, as with survivor’s guilt when individuals, in irrational fault-finding, conjure up false conjectures of personal responsibility, along with guilt and shame, for harm they’ve supposedly done to others.

Depression and suicidal thoughts are also “pounds of flesh.” When self-punishment accumulates in one’s psyche, the effect over time is to become dispirited and depressed. A psychological defense arises that tries to deny one’s unconscious willingness to experience this sort of self-punishment: “I don’t want to feel beaten down by my inner critic. I’m not indulging in this self-abuse. Look at how depressed I am. I’m not being receptive to this abuse! I hate it! My depression proves I hate it!”

Suicidal thoughts sometimes arise out of this conflict. These thoughts provide the individual with an unconscious psychological defense: “I’m not willing to passively absorb belittling allegations and accusations from my inner critic. I’m not emotionally attached to this abuse. I want it to end! I’m even thinking about ending it all by terminating my life.”

Individuals absorb self-punishment from the inner critic because they fail, through inner passivity, to protect themselves from the largely irrational insinuations that build the case for punishment. Even self-forgiveness for a supposed crime committed long ago fails as an antidote when a person is willing, through inner passivity, to absorb allegations of wrongdoing and turn it into self-punishment. Many people go on endlessly, day after day, forgiving themselves to no avail for some infraction from their distant past.

As an aspect of one’s unconscious willingness to absorb such punishment, a vague sense can arise that we somehow deserve to be punished. Rationalizations for absorbing the punishment also include, “I’m supposed to suffer” and “Suffering will make me a better person.”

Procrastination, a common symptom of inner conflict, can be understood as a “crime” that justifies self-punishment. Typically, procrastination produces a painful sense of self-disapproval. The inner critic berates the individual for his passive dawdling, and this person soaks up the abuse, producing guilt or shame. Why does the person procrastinate in the first place? Unconsciously, he’s using procrastination as the means to replay his unresolved inner conflict and to experience the inner denunciations that, through inner passivity, he allows to continue to haunt his inner life. (This dynamic also applies to the common self-defeating behavior of chronic indecision.)

The axiom that we’re all largely responsible for how we experience life makes perfect sense when we uncover this unconscious willingness to experience self-punishment. A good example is the common willingness of multitudes of people to live with a sense of oppression, a neurotic symptom described in detail here.

Other evidence shows the extent of this underhanded self-abuse. Our most vivid memories are often ones that produce bad feelings about ourselves. Our most intrusive thoughts often cast us in a bad light. Daily we find fault with personal “flaws” of character or intelligence that we believe have undermined our dreams and expectations. We stew in feelings of being disrespected and devalued, as we soak up painful intimations that such insinuations have validity. Anger, hate, bitterness, and cynicism poison our experiences and inflict unnecessary suffering and self-punishment upon us. We’re tempted to want to punish others, to see harm befall them, even as surreptitiously we produce within ourselves a bittersweet facsimile of what that punishment would feel like.

Often parents who as children were rigorously punished can feel a compulsion to be critical and scolding toward their children. In doing this to their children, they’re unwittingly using their children as a way to identify emotionally with the feeling of being punished. It’s déjà vu all over again, at the kids’ expense.

Parents sometimes associate being strong and firm with their children as somehow administering inappropriate authority and thereby being punishing. The misleading impression is that the exercise of one’s authority, even when well-intentioned, is somehow unkind, insensitive, and punishing toward others. Parents (and people in general) often punish themselves with self-doubt over their right to be assertive.

Different personality types have their own formulas for producing self-punishment and covering their tracks. Consider perfectionists. They avoid awareness of their emotional attachment to self-abuse by claiming in their unconscious defense: “I’m not looking to feel punished by my inner critic. I’m not interested in feeling criticized! Look at how perfectly I try to do everything. That proves I don’t want to absorb self-criticism.”

Our underlying willingness to absorb punishment is obviously self-defeating. With perfectionists, they not only experience the punishment of self-criticism but also the stress and anxiety of striving to maintain the impossible goal of perfectionism.

Another example of a self-punishing personality is the needy person who claims unconsciously: “I don’t want to feel rejected, betrayed, and belittled. I’m not looking to punish myself for believing in my unworthiness. I want to feel connected. Look at how eager I am to find recognition and support from others.” The needy person, though, acts out his underlying emotional attachment: Others reject and abandon him out of their growing disrespect for him.

Our affinity for self-punishment reveals an unconscious masochistic streak in human nature. Hidden away in our unconscious mind, the specter of masochism is a primary ingredient in inner passivity and a chief instigator of humanity’s anguish and destructiveness.

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Ego and Self Do Battle for the Soul of America

The refusal of millions to wear face masks in the heat of our pandemic is another deadly skirmish in the battle for the soul of America. This spurning of face masks reveals important details about human nature.

Is your better self trapped behind ego-identification?

This unsafe behavior by so many of President Trump’s supporters provides a vital clue to his appeal and why his political movement is ultimately self-defeating. (Please bear in mind that my intention here is to be analytical, not critical.)

At a deep level, Trump’s appeal is based in psychological resistance to the process of becoming more conscious and better connected to one’s authentic self. This resistance, mostly unconscious, has a powerful influence upon us all. (Read more about resistance here, here, and here.)

People who avoid pursuing their individual betterment are more likely to resist or sabotage social progress. This resistance is centered in the human ego, which is the mental and emotional operating system for a great many people. The ego can become a rigid identification, meaning it is believed to be one’s authentic self when we refuse the call to self-development.

The core allegiance of face-mask repudiators is not to Trump but to the mentality he represents, which is resistance to inner growth and adherence to the ego and its superficial reckonings. The rigid ego takes over the mind, falsifying reality.

MAGA is really saying that we can go backwards, regress psychologically, and still be great. Trump and his supporters are rallying around the flag of militant self-ignorance. Coded from the dark side, his “philosophy” says, “There’s no need to address our self-ignorance. The ego is everything we need.” His supporters identify with his flamboyant ego, which denies the inner life and the benefits of self-knowledge. “If Trump can be great while taking the low road,” the feeling goes, “so can I.”

In his everyday shenanigans, Trump displays the values of the undiffused ego: attention-seeking, stubbornness, magical thinking, self-deception, self-aggrandizement, hostility to truth-tellers, compulsive scheming, and malice toward opponents and outsiders. His rigid ego, itself a kind of face mask, hides behind a charming persona while protecting his brain from incoming rationality.

People who identify with their ego are entangled in the illusion of separation, alienation, and divisiveness. According to this mentality, science (think Galileo, Darwin, Freud, James Hansen, Anthony Fauci) must be denounced when it contradicts the assumption that ego knows best.

People who have refused, whether consciously or unconsciously, to grow psychologically and develop their humanity typically have more resistance and more ego-identification. Both these traits keep intact white supremacy, white fragility, and income inequality. It is some consolation, as I see it, to recognize that Trump and the GOP are unwittingly serving a psychological role: they’re acting out the resistance that occurs in everyone’s psyche. The resistance we each feel to our psychological growth has, at the national level, its social-political counterpart in the MAGA movement. When people understand this, they can feel less anxiety about Trump’s presidency. With patience and equanimity, we focus our energy on gaining personal insight and strength while building alliances. We would not falter even if Trump were to remain president in the coming years.

We all have an ego, yet people who are growing and evolving are breaking away from their identification with it and aligning themselves with their authentic self. The Black Lives Matter movement is a struggle to honor the true, authentic self. As well, laws that give civilians access to assault weapons are influenced by an emotional undercurrent that gives precedence to individual ego-satisfaction (translated as “personal rights”) over the wise sense of restraint and balance that the self, our secular soul, is able to access.

In the abortion debate, too, the pro-choice side represents the desire and determination to trust the wisdom of one’s own self, versus being restricted by arbitrary authorities with suspicious motivations that they don’t recognize in themselves, or even faintly realize are driving their beliefs.

Anti-mask agitators don’t want to change or to accept change, yet the pandemic represents a shocking level of change. They fear that masks require them to cover up their individuality and to become sensitive to the wellbeing of others, which is antithetical to the ego. When people decline to wear masks at a Trump rally, they’re not only being scornful of science, they’re also mocking their better self. This unconscious brandishing of the ego as one’s essential identity is resistance on steroids.

Trump’s presidency rests on the corruption of the people, in the sense of exploiting human nature’s resistance to striving for excellence. He doesn’t ask anything of people other than to go on maintaining and fomenting their grievances. I’m not saying all of Trump’s supporters are neurotic in this way. Like the coronavirus, neurosis doesn’t discriminate. Also displaying neurosis, of course, are liberals, progressives, independents, moderates, and libertarians.

Why is the ego so strong? Classical psychoanalysts claimed that infants and babies are in the grip of megalomania. This condition creates the illusion of being at the center of existence and the source of all that happens. It does make sense that an infant, in complete lack of worldly experience, might be under the impression that its own existence is at the center of everything. Children do, of course, become increasingly attuned to reality. Yet it takes several years before they’re even aware that surrounding events occur beyond their own causation.

The ego is a remnant of this megalomania, and even sophisticated people remain under the influence of its infantile associations. The ego keeps trying to put itself at the center. Consider that most of humanity, until rescued by science, once believed that the earth and its people were at the center of the universe. Later, the ego was shocked and upset to be informed that we were descendants of lower animals. Egocentrism still rules, often in a passive form as self-pitying victimization: “The world’s against me and out to get me.”

It can feel like death to let go of the ego, yet letting go, when correctly managed, is a process of death to the old, rebirth to the new. The new sense of self beyond the ego liberates us from cravings, resentments, bitterness, loneliness, self-rejection, and other negative emotions.

The ego is both conscious and unconscious. As mentioned, the conscious ego functions as a mental and emotional operating system and as our sense of who we are. We also have an unconscious ego. It can be recognized as inner passivity, a part of our psyche through which we experience weakness, self-doubt, defensiveness, and an appetite for self-punishment. Like the inner critic, this passive aspect mostly operates outside of our awareness. People who are most egocentric will tend to have the largest deposits of inner passivity. We can see this in narcissists who fail to feel or appreciate the value of others. Narcissism is a psychological compensation for one’s inability, due to various factors including inner passivity, to connect emotionally with one’s intrinsic value and authentic self.

The ego often serves as a last-stand refuge from underlying humiliation. Author and columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes that Trump’s appeal is based largely on the “the politics of humiliation.” Trump was elected, Friedman writes, not because of his policies but because many people are “attracted to his attitude—his willingness and evident delight in skewering the people they hate and who they feel look down on them.”

Yes, they are attracted to his attitude, or, more accurately, his “successful” management of his blatant dysfunction. The problem, though, goes deeper. For one thing, many people have, through inner conflict, an unconscious readiness to feel looked down upon. Hatred is a byproduct of this inner conflict, and that hatred is projected onto others. In supporting Trump, people unwittingly use projection as a psychological defense to cover up how their humiliation is generated through inner conflict, mostly as self-criticism, self-rejection, and even self-hatred.

Most people are ensnared in some degree of inner conflict. A common inner conflict occurs between inner passivity and the harsh inner critic. A person’s inner critic frequently accuses him or her of being a loser or failure. The accusation is usually experienced through one’s random or nagging thoughts and feelings. “Look at you,” the inner critic might imply, as one example, “all those people of color in the news are doing much better than you. And there’s nothing you can do about it! What kind of loser are you!”

As a defense against this accusation, people tend to blame others. Or they blame themselves, but for the wrong reasons. We’re all compelled to hurl at others the same degree of mockery and belittlement that we absorb from our inner critic. This dynamic of extending to others what is inwardly being absorbed serves as an unconscious defense that goes like this: “They’re the bad people, the unworthy ones, not me! I’m not passively absorbing disapproval and condemnation from my inner critic. If anything, I’m the aggressor. I’m the one who condemns them. They’re the unworthy ones, not me.” This cunning self-deception, an aspect of resistance, keeps the ego intact, though awash in negativity.

Trump is quick to identify certain people, even fallen soldiers, as losers. It’s all projection: he “sees” in others a mirror-image of the hopeless loser he has repressed in his psychic depths. Many such individuals use drugs and alcohol for their (temporary) ego boost, while Trump gets his kicks from attention, acclaim, power, wealth, and projections. This keeps his ego intact, yet it can’t protect him from outbursts of rage.

The ego itself, when rigid and undiffused, is something of a loser, a thin-skinned shadow of our true self. Identifying with it produces a resonance with weakness, not strength. The ego is super-sensitive, and it can’t stop clinging to fresh or ancient hurts and grievances.

To serve its purpose, the ego misuses the notion of freedom. Trump supporters say the wearing of masks is a matter of individual rights and freedom. This is a psychological defense based on a pseudo-moral: “Isn’t it good and proper to be free and to make our own personal decisions?” Yes, it’s good, but life is not this black and white and there’s a greater good to consider. Hiding behind this pseudo-moral is psychological mischief, namely the attempt to rationalize as cold facts the ego’s presumptions and to cover up one’s indifference to the wellbeing of others.

Nobody else, with the exception of hangers-on or enablers, gives two hoots about your ego. It means nothing to them. You’ll only generate endless anguish trying to get others to notice it and honor it. Do yourself a favor and get to know your real self. Enjoy the beautiful world out there beyond the ego.

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The Hazards of Inner Conflict

For more than 100 years, psychoanalysis has been trying to explain the hazards and dynamics of inner conflict. Yet people still don’t get it. Unconscious resistance and denial hamper our ability to see ourselves more objectively.

People are not only unaware of the dynamics of inner conflict, we aren’t even recognizing the existence of it within ourselves.

Inner conflict dissipates through awareness of its dynamics.

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

We know that America faces a mental-health crisis. Yet an even greater threat to personal and collective wellbeing involves the degree to which inner conflict induces neurosis in “normal” everyday people, making them more thin-skinned, dull, fearful, passive, and uninspired. The human cost is amplified by inner conflict’s talent for also generating irrationality, stupidity, cruelty, and paranoia.

Over the years, psychoanalysis hasn’t been sufficiently coherent or persistent in exposing the hidden influence of inner conflict. Now, to their shame, many psychoanalysts no longer make inner conflict the centerpiece of their treatment approach.

Here’s the thing, emotional suffering and self-sabotage are directly connected to inner conflict. The following examples can help us understand this connection.

— Consciously, we want to feel strong and resilient, but unconsciously we can easily resonate emotionally with being weak, helpless, and lacking in self-regulation. Passive feelings keep subverting self-confidence. Wanting to feel expressive versus feeling shut down is a common experience of this conflict.

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

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

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

Under the influence of these inner conflicts, we’re doomed to produce neurotic symptoms. It’s as if our brain has been hijacked.

Neurosis occurs on a spectrum that takes into account a person’s resilience, emotional stability, self-regulation, self-centeredness, and character. Like super-spreaders, those on the higher end of the spectrum can contaminate the environment with troublesome attitudes and behaviors involving hatred, bitterness, and rage. Those on the lower range also experience self-limiting symptoms such as being quick to feel overwhelmed, rejected, and helpless.

Neurosis is a worldwide contagion, a killer of intelligence, a pillager of decency, and a producer of negative emotions. Neurotic people are smart enough to build skyscrapers, create financial derivatives, and design new weapons systems. But they’re not conscious enough or evolved enough to avoid the overall incompetence that arises from their narcissism, callousness, hostility, and greed.

Inwardly conflicted, we punish ourselves repeatedly with recurring memories of minor or even imaginary transgressions. We experience everyday challenges as if we’re being deprived, controlled, or disrespected. We’re troubled by jealousy and envy, flooded with guilt and shame, and plagued by procrastination and indecision. We’re easily triggered by perceptions, sometimes just in our imagination, of being refused, manipulated, cheated, or abandoned. These negative emotions produce self-blame, anxiety, fear, and retaliation.

With deeper insight, we can stop this suffering.

Recognition of the significance of inner conflict is initially experienced as an offense to our egotism, a humbling of our self-image: “How could I, in not knowing this, have been so dumb!” To avoid this “humiliation,” we produce a variety of psychological defenses to cover up inner truth, among them blaming others and claiming victimization. The stubborn refusal to address inner conflict drives a compulsion to falsify reality.

Inner conflict often produces an overwhelming sense of helplessness, resentment, and disappointment, giving rise to a feeling that life is too difficult. “I know I’d do better,” we insist to ourselves, “if life wasn’t so hard.” Perceptions such as these can become guiding principles.

This self-deception binds us to a painful, self-centered way of perceiving the world and our place in it. We become insensitive toward others and have difficulty perceiving things from their point of view.

Inner conflict has mysterious origins, and it’s likely more a factor of nature than nurture. The human body, specifically the human genome, is riddled with biological flaws, scientists say. The presence of inner conflict in our emotional life is likely such a flaw.

Conflict abounds: Human nature is challenged by the polarities of good and evil, pleasure and displeasure, and eros and thanatos. Happiness depends on our reconciliation of arrogance and humility, as well as on how well we navigate the conscious wish for freedom versus the compulsion to experience self-imposed oppression. Even a romantic relationship can be immersed in love-hate ambivalence.

Insight heals these conflicts. Take greed, for instance, a symptom of inner conflict. Greedy people yearn to feel satisfied and fulfilled. But they don’t recognize their inner conflict, which is their emotional determination to feel that what they have is never enough. They don’t understand the psychological dynamics producing their inner emptiness, the underlying woe that makes them so materialistic. When unresolved, this conflict (wanting to feel their value versus needing materialistic “proof” of value to cover up their unconscious self-rejection) dooms them to a shallow life plagued by unhappiness.

Inner conflict produces widespread divisiveness. As anger, bitterness, and cynicism arise, we see enemies everywhere. We also see others as either inferior or superior because inner conflict creates the compulsion to judge, to condemn, to envy, and to manipulate. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia are driven by unresolved self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-hatred. Self-haters are usually unaware of their self-hatred. Through projection, they feel instead their hatred of others. This is accompanied by their conviction that others harbor malice toward them.

The inner conflict here is between the wish to feel good about oneself versus the compulsion, powered by the inner critic (superego), to demean and slander one’s own value and achievement. This dynamic, in varying degrees, is a problem for most neurotics, not just haters. Even in everyday personality clashes and family disputes we typically generate the same level of criticism and ill-will toward others that, consciously or unconsciously, our inner critic directs at us by way of thoughts, feelings, and insinuations. This negative reaction is often activated when we unwittingly transfer on to others our determination to experience them in unpleasant ways that parallel our own inner conflict.

Inner conflict can push people to the extremes of the political left and right. As a spinoff of the underlying inner divide, polarized politics can foster sharp division and ill-will even within the same camps. In reaction to inner conflict, extremists are attracted to the fringes where they feel with some intensity their separation from others (a reflection of the disconnect from their better self).

Their political position is one of defiance, reinforced by self-righteous certainty, which together produce the illusion of being superior and powerful. This posturing serves as an unconscious cover-up for how they inwardly and painfully vacillate, again unconsciously, between self-assurance and self-doubt.

This inner dynamic is also at play with conspiracy buffs. They relish the illusion of power produced by “knowing” what others don’t. It’s all a coverup for their underlying disconnect from inner strength. Again, it’s more evidence for how inner conflict degrades mental and emotional functioning.

We hold on to inner conflict because we can’t imagine ourselves without it, even while it infringes on our freedom and happiness. There’s a stubborn loyalty to the old, conflicted self, along with resistance to the new person, the stranger, one might become. As we recognize inner conflict, though, we overcome this resistance and liberate our better self, which gives us the capacity to acknowledge and respect the intrinsic worthiness of others.

Most of us can understand well enough the ethos of class conflict and racial conflict. Yet it might take our recognition and resolution of inner conflict, the deeper source of enmity and division, that finally brings us together. Meanwhile, here’s one last conflict to consider: Do we become informed and more conscious, or do we passively allow our inner critic to remain the master of our personality?

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Inner Conflict: Prime Instigator of Our Dysfunction

For more than 100 years, psychoanalysis has been trying to explain the dynamics of inner conflict. Yet people still don’t get it. Unconscious resistance and denial hamper our ability to see ourselves more objectively.

People are not only unaware of the dynamics of inner conflict, we aren’t even recognizing the existence of it within ourselves.

Inner conflict dissipates through awareness of its dynamics.

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

We know that America faces a mental-health crisis. Yet an even greater threat to personal and collective wellbeing involves the degree to which inner conflict induces neurosis in “normal” everyday people, making them more thin-skinned, dull, fearful, passive, and uninspired. The human cost is amplified by inner conflict’s talent for also generating  irrationality, stupidity, cruelty, and paranoia.

Over the years, psychoanalysis hasn’t been sufficiently coherent or persistent in exposing the hidden influence of inner conflict. Now, to their shame, many psychoanalysts no longer make inner conflict the centerpiece of their treatment approach.

Here’s the thing, emotional suffering and self-sabotage are directly connected to inner conflict. The following examples can help us understand this connection.

— Consciously, we want to feel strong and resilient, but unconsciously we can easily resonate emotionally with being weak, helpless, and lacking in self-regulation. Passive feelings keep subverting self-confidence. Wanting to feel expressive versus feeling shut down is a common experience of this conflict.

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

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

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

Under the influence of these inner conflicts, we’re doomed to produce neurotic symptoms. It’s as if our brain has been hijacked.

Neurosis occurs on a spectrum that takes into account a person’s resilience, emotional stability, self-regulation, self-centeredness, and character. Like super-spreaders, those on the higher end of the spectrum can contaminate the environment with troublesome attitudes and behaviors involving hatred, bitterness, and rage. Those on the lower range also experience self-limiting symptoms such as being quick to feel overwhelmed, rejected, and helpless.

Neurosis is a worldwide contagion, a killer of intelligence, a pillager of decency, and a producer of negative emotions. Neurotic people are smart enough to build skyscrapers, create financial derivatives, and design new weapons systems. But they’re not conscious enough or evolved enough to avoid the overall incompetence that arises from their narcissism, callousness, hostility, and greed.

Inwardly conflicted, we punish ourselves repeatedly with recurring memories of minor or even imaginary transgressions. We experience everyday challenges as if we’re being deprived, controlled, or disrespected. We’re troubled by jealousy and envy, flooded with guilt and shame, and plagued by procrastination and indecision. We’re easily triggered by perceptions, sometimes just in our imagination, of being refused, manipulated, cheated, or abandoned. These negative emotions produce self-blame, anxiety, fear, and retaliation.

With deeper insight, we can stop this suffering.

Recognition of the significance of inner conflict is initially experienced as an offense to our egotism, a humbling of our self-image: “How could I, in not know this, have been so dumb!” To avoid this “humiliation,” we produce a variety of psychological defenses to cover up inner truth, among them blaming others and claiming victimization. The stubborn refusal to address inner conflict drives a compulsion to falsify reality.

Inner conflict often produces an overwhelming sense of helplessness, resentment, and disappointment, giving rise to a feeling that life is too difficult. “I know I’d do better,” we insist to ourselves, “if life wasn’t so hard.” Perceptions such as these can become guiding principles.

This self-deception binds us to a painful, self-centered way of perceiving the world and our place in it. We become insensitive toward others and have difficulty perceiving things from their point of view.

Inner conflict has mysterious origins, and it’s likely more a factor of nature than nurture. The human body, specifically the human genome, is riddled with biological flaws, scientists say. The presence of inner conflict in our emotional life is likely such a flaw.

Conflict abounds: Human nature is challenged by the polarities of good and evil, pleasure and displeasure, and eros and thanatos. Happiness depends on our reconciliation of arrogance and humility, as well as on how well we navigate the conscious wish for freedom versus the compulsion to experience self-imposed oppression. Even a romantic relationship can be immersed in love-hate ambivalence.

Insight heals these conflicts. Take greed, for instance, a symptom of inner conflict. Greedy people yearn to feel satisfied and fulfilled. But they don’t recognize their inner conflict, which is their emotional determination to feel that what they have is never enough. They don’t understand the psychological dynamics producing their inner emptiness, the underlying woe that makes them so materialistic. When unresolved, this conflict (wanting to feel their value versus needing materialistic “proof” of value to cover up their unconscious self-rejection) dooms them to a shallow life plagued by unhappiness.

Inner conflict produces widespread divisiveness. As anger, bitterness, and cynicism arise, we see enemies everywhere. We also see others as either inferior or superior because inner conflict creates the compulsion to judge, to condemn, to envy, and to manipulate. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia are driven by unresolved self-criticism, self-rejection, and self-hatred. Self-haters are usually unaware of their self-hatred. Through projection, they feel instead their hatred of others. This is accompanied by their conviction that others harbor malice toward them.

The inner conflict here is between the wish to feel good about oneself versus the compulsion, powered by the inner critic (superego), to demean and slander one’s own value and achievement. This dynamic, in varying degrees, is a problem for most neurotics, not just haters. Even in everyday personality clashes and family disputes we typically generate the same level of criticism and ill-will toward others that, consciously or unconsciously, our inner critic directs at us by way of thoughts, feelings, and insinuations. This negative reaction is often activated when we unwittingly transfer on to others our determination to experience them in unpleasant ways that parallel our own inner conflict.

Inner conflict can push people to the extremes of the political left and right. As a spinoff of the underlying inner divide, polarized politics can foster sharp division and ill-will even within the same camps. In reaction to inner conflict, extremists are attracted to the fringes where they feel with some intensity their separation from others (a reflection of the disconnect from their better self).

Their political position is one of defiance, reinforced by self-righteous certainty, which together produce the illusion of being superior and powerful. This posturing serves as an unconscious cover-up for how they inwardly and painfully vacillate, again unconsciously, between self-assurance and self-doubt.

This inner dynamic is also at play with conspiracy buffs. They relish the illusion of power produced by “knowing” what others don’t. It’s all a coverup for their underlying disconnect from inner strength. Again, it’s more evidence for how inner conflict degrades mental and emotional functioning.

We hold on to inner conflict because we can’t imagine ourselves without it, even while it infringes on our freedom and happiness. There’s a stubborn loyalty to the old, conflicted self, along with resistance to the new person, the stranger, one might become. As we recognize inner conflict, though, we overcome this resistance and liberate our better self, which gives us the capacity to acknowledge and respect the intrinsic worthiness of others.

Most of us can understand well enough the ethos of class conflict and racial conflict. Yet it might take our recognition and resolution of inner conflict, the deeper source of enmity and division, that finally brings us together. Meanwhile, here’s one last conflict to consider: Do we become informed and more conscious, or do we passively allow our inner critic to remain the master of our personality.

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Some of the Best Mental-Health Knowledge is Available Here

More than 240 reports on the benefits of depth psychology are posted here. I’m taking my summer break from writing, and I’ll resume sometime in the fall. I’m still doing psychotherapy sessions for those who would like to experience the therapeutic approach described on this website.

Keep reading the stories posted here and consider getting some of my books. This knowledge can make us smarter and stronger, helping us to resolve the huge social, health, economic, and political challenges we’re facing.

When we plunge into our psyche to reveal and resolve inner conflict, we liberate our better self from its imprisonment in ignorance. What we do for ourselves in this way we do for all. We rescue the world from its time in darkness.

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A Toxic Inner Process Afflicts Humanity

People who compulsively compare themselves to others are up to psychological mischief, to say nothing of the hurt they inflict on others. Self-defeat is built into this mental and emotional processing. People are making themselves miserable, yet they don’t even begin to realize or understand what they’re doing.

Toxic comparing is a self-defeating process.

The act of comparing ourselves to others frequently produces feelings of being superior or inferior to them. Distinctions are made in terms of physical appearance, athletic ability, intelligence, popularity, and personality. Such comparisons are often painful, producing guilt and shame. Even when feeling superior, people are covering up their emotional identification with those they deem to be inferior. Racists are notorious for comparing themselves to others and feeling superior, while hiding from themselves an awareness of their emotional resonance with feelings of inferiority. The same principle applies to misogynists, xenophobes, and fundamentalists.

Everyday people, in myriad subtle ways, also fall prey to this inner process. Driven by inner conflict, this toxic comparing is like an emotional audit system looping continually in one’s unconscious mind. Not all comparing is unhealthy, of course. We do sometimes compare ourselves to admirable role-models for instruction and inspiration. From childhood, we also compare ourselves to those around us to enhance self-knowledge and our emotional and social intelligence. That’s all well and good, of course.

Toxic comparing, however, serves the unconscious purpose of fostering and maintaining unresolved inner conflict. This conflict comes at a high price because it produces feelings of being refused, deprived, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, and abandoned. Many people resonate with (or experience themselves through) psychological attachments to these unresolved negative emotions. This means that, despite their conscious wishes to be strong and positive, they’re pulled emotionally into dark places. This constitutes inner conflict, and it greatly helps to understand these deeper dynamics.

Consider a person who produces the comparative thought, “If she can do it, why can’t I?” This person could be searching inwardly for genuine, healthy motivation. Depending on the tone and emphasis of his thought, however, he could also be generating shameful self-recrimination for his alleged inability to perform at the same level as the woman to whom he’s comparing himself. He’s stuck in inner conflict, wanting to feel strong yet compelled to feel weak. Psychological insight can free him from this inner conflict.

Like slapping our hand while reaching for a second cookie, we need to catch ourselves in the act of making toxic comparisons. Inner watchfulness enables us to understand how we generate our own misery. People make toxic comparisons mentally, as well as through memories of the past and speculations about the future. We can do it visually, through the occurrences we take in with our eyes. We can do it in our imagination, too. We want to catch ourselves doing this harm to ourselves, in order to understand the compulsion to search our mind, memories, and environment for ways to nurse old hurts, shames, and grievances. This inner vigilance exposes what humanity has always hated to acknowledge, the degree to which we’re psychologically willing to recycle and replay inner conflict and suffer the negative emotions it generates.

When we’re inwardly conflicted, comparing our self to others takes on emotional urgency. If we’re “not superior to the other,” the feeling goes, then we’re in danger of experiencing not just self-doubt but also self-criticism, self-rejection, self-condemnation, and even self-hatred. The conflict produces the sense of either-or, either good or bad. It’s a psychological polarity through which the inner critic dishes out self-reproach while inner passivity fails to protect us from the accusatory self-aggression.

Chronic comparing of oneself to others produces impressions of oneself and others that are misleading, biased, negative, and irrational. We won’t see others or ourselves objectively because we readily falsify reality to cope with inner conflict and to cover it up. A psychological defense, serving as inner denial, is activated, as for example: “I’m not interested in feeling unworthy or a lesser person. I don’t have that weakness. If anything, I enjoy feeling superior. This is what I want, this feeling of being better than others!” This defense, to be effective as self-deception that covers up one’s emotional attachment to self-criticism and self-rejection, requires that we start to feel scorn, even malice, toward those others to whom we feel superior. The defense operates unconsciously until, making it conscious, we can overcome our inner conflict and the self-debasement it produces.

When toxic comparisons produce a feeling of inferiority (in contrast to superiority), the individual, rather than fending off the inner critic’s judgment, is passively accepting it. In doing so, the individual absorbs punishment (guilt, shame, fear, depression) for the alleged “crime,” which is likely to be some infraction the inner critic is blowing out of proportion or even some false accusation.

On the surface of awareness, we can feel that our toxic comparing is rational behavior. Beneath the surface, however, we’re driven by inner conflict that makes it all compulsive. The compulsion is based on this psychological axiom: whatever is emotionally unresolved in our psyche—meaning whatever it is we’re inwardly conflicted about—is going to continue to be experienced by us, even when acutely painful and self-defeating. This inner process generates self-doubt, guilt, shame, self-criticism, self-rejection, depression, loneliness, helplessness, real or imagined failure, and many other symptoms.

As mentioned, comparing comes naturally from an early age. Starting with our parents and siblings, we define and orient ourselves—emotionally, mentally, and physically—according to how they interact with us and how we experience them. Unconsciously and consciously, we’re always comparing ourselves to them. We acquire a sense of who we are from social interactions. We start defining our value according to how others perceive us and treat us.

At this young age, we’re too inexperienced to be objective, so we personalize and misinterpret a lot of our interactions. At some point in our adolescence, we begin to view our peers in terms of who’s more popular, who’s got the best personality, who’s smarter, who’s more beautiful or handsome, who’s the better athlete? We can feel, Is that person better than me? Or, Am I better than he or she? Self-doubt is an instinctive aspect of human nature, felt by everyone, in varying degrees.

When we can’t feel our deeper value and better self, our inner critic certainly won’t either. Inner conflict becomes more intense when our inner critic assails us for real or alleged failures, while we defend ourselves only weakly through our passive unconscious ego (inner passivity). Often, the inner critic only relents after we have absorbed a lot of punishment that we experience as guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression.

When blocked in our personal self-development, we can feel an accompanying sense of disappointment or failure. The resulting psychological stalemate can provide more “evidence” for why our inner critic is “entitled” to assail us for our real or apparent failings and for our supposed unworthiness. Through our inability to see and understand inner passivity, we can’t appreciate our basic innocence: We would very likely be doing much better if we had access to vital self-knowledge. It’s not our fault that humanity is still relatively unevolved. Nonetheless, our inner critic cares naught about our innocence or naivete. Primitive in nature, it takes advantage of our psychological ignorance to pummel us with self-aggression.

Our inner critic uses comparison as a means of directing scorn, mockery, and condemnation against us. The critic often compares us mockingly with people who are supposedly more skilled, intelligent, or beautiful. As a defense, we now scramble to protect and to validate ourselves by comparing ourselves favorably to certain others. Or we absorb punishment in the form of guilt, shame, and depression by meekly conceding to the inner critic’s allegations. We’re blocked at this point from connecting with our intrinsic, authentic self, the unique greatness within us where we feel and know our goodness and integrity, that inner connection that renders moot all toxic comparisons.

As mentioned, the person engaged in toxic comparisons creates an emotionally and mentally biased separation between himself and others. Out of this arises irrationality, dissension, and even hatred. Hatred of others covers up self-hatred. Our inner critic attacks us scornfully but sometimes also hatefully for allegedly being a lesser person or total loser. Inwardly weak, with only our feeble unconscious ego for protection, we’re at the mercy of the inner critic’s irrational cruelty. We absorb the inner abuse, and then we become a surrogate of our inner critic, radiating malice outward at others, ridiculing them as we are inwardly ridiculed. Hatefulness and anger, with their aggressive thoughts and feelings, serve to create an illusion of strength or power, further covering up underlying fear and making toxic comparisons a compulsive, highly-biased behavior.

In protecting self-image and declining to address inner conflict, people compare themselves to others by making themselves innocent and others guilty. Again, we make such toxic comparisons to “validate” our negative reactions, to buttress our defenses, and to protect our ego. We convince ourselves that our self-generated negative emotions are caused by the “bad” that exists in others. The use of this defense by the mentally ill turns them into ticking time-bombs.

When we take our inner life for granted, unresolved negative feelings about ourselves tend to contaminate our perceptions of politics, society, and culture. The remedy is to learn how to connect with our better self—through therapy, self-knowledge, meditation, charity, service, gratitude, spiritual or religious practices, and whatever works. We can discover our intrinsic goodness and become wise and generous. We’re no longer interested in comparing ourselves to others. The goodness we feel in ourselves is what we now know to be the essence of everyone.

Consciousness of our intrinsic worthiness, when we access it, becomes our foundation, the one truth we know for sure. Using toxic comparisons to orient ourselves in the world no longer makes sense.

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Don’t Let America Betray Herself

Is the United States really in danger of succumbing to authoritarianism? The internet and mainstream media abound with fearful speculation. Does the pandemic and economic chaos increase this danger?

Feel within yourself the value and dignity of democracy.

An authoritarian mentality is indeed present among the population. A study from 2011 found that 44 percent of Americans without college degrees approved of the idea of having a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections. This month, Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate and columnist for The New York Times, told us (under the headline, “American Democracy May Be Dying) that we ought to be “terrified” of an authoritarian takeover.

Think of what that would mean for young people and our descendants. The intrinsic value and dignity that democracy bequeaths us would be dumped in favor of enabling cunning usurpers to become our rulers. The moral and spiritual impoverishment would be crushing.

The authoritarian mentality arises from a psychological passivity that impedes the development of one’s integrity, graciousness, and fortitude. At a level that is largely unconscious, authoritarians have refused to acquire integrity and wisdom with its accompanying dignity and generosity. Both authoritarians and their sympathizers seek impunity from the fine print in their humanity, the hallowed call to become better people. They chose ego-aggrandizement and its collaborating ideologies over self-discovery.

Krugman wrote that feeling “terrified” was an appropriate response to the prospect of losing our democracy. Yet to be terrified of this possibility is itself a weakness. Anxiety, fear, and terror foreshadow impending crisis. (Mystery and horror writers employ foreshadowing as a literary device.) Since psychological weakness is a prime feature of tyrants and their supporters, we wouldn’t want to be fighting weakness with our own weakness.

Don’t be terrified. Instead, become smarter, more conscious! I’ve written on this subject before (here and here), and Krugman’s column, arousing my love for democracy, has inspired me to address once again how our cherished form of government is completely dependent on the decency, awareness, and wisdom of its citizens.

Democracy is a great facilitator of the sense of personal value and freedom. At the same time, our system of government requires us to return the favor, meaning we must feel and express our integrity and sense of value to protect and grow enlightened governance. Democracy was enhanced, of course, when blacks, women, labor, immigrants, and others demanded and got respect.

We won’t be able to do our part, though, when lacking inner freedom. Most of us live with some degree of inner oppression, which is a symptom of inner conflict. This oppression is experienced, for starters, as self-doubt, self-blame, self-criticism, guilt, and shame. Especially oppressive is the inner critic (or superego), a primitive part of us that can dominate our personality and serve as master of our unconscious mind. In many of us, the inner critic’s illegitimate rule prevails—and people are unconscious of how their underlying passivity accommodates this authoritarian alignment.

On an inner level, we live in a kind of passive unconsciousness, and this dopiness degrades the world around us. Through passivity, we’ve been allowing the weak to be exploited, the rich to be exalted, and earth to be blighted. I’m not pointing a finger at capitalism, which is itself under the influence of human psychology and our personal and collective talent for self-sabotage. Still, capitalists have always cozied up to authoritarians, and I do believe that vulgar wealth-seekers have been enlisting ruthless power-grabbers as guardians of the dark side of capitalism.

In all this, evil-doers and their victims, sheltered in their illusions and creeds, are barely aware of the extent of the wickedness. The doers are sheathed in narcissism, the victims in passivity.

The ruthlessness is rooted in psychology. The ruthless inner critic (superego) tends to devalue us and to question our right to feel free. People who are unconscious of their passive acceptance of this self-aggressive drive or instinct are more likely to feel, by natural extension, a certain comfort level with authoritarianism. The politics of inner life becomes an acceptable, even preferred, model for national or state government.

The authoritarian mindset has adopted the inner critic’s primitive scruples. One such scruple is the denunciation of freedom, whether on an inner or outer level. The inner critic undermines and attacks attempts to establish one’s wise inner authority. This inner oppression can feel normal or natural, as if there’s no other way to exist. Still, this lack of inner freedom is burdensome. It compels the sympathizers of authoritarianism to perceive as degenerate the free-spirited people who thrive in the culture of democratic privilege and openness. These sympathizers feel that their own sense of oppression, which arises out of unrecognized inner conflict, should prevail for everyone. Their resulting intolerance is predictable: We all find it challenging to be accepting of freedom in others when we can’t feel it in ourselves.

People with an authoritarian mentality can feel an illusion of power through their identification with a supreme leader. They soak up through that leader the supposed grandeur of being supreme and all-powerful. (They overlook the fact such leaders can be chronically fearful, hateful, and paranoid.) It follows that U.S. surrogates for the authoritarian mindset would identify Iran, a country headed by a de facto Supreme Leader, as a primary enemy. Here the psychological phenomenon of projection comes into play: We project onto others, seeing the “evil” in them and becoming hostile to that “evil,” that we refuse to recognize in ourselves.

As we connect with our better self, we feel a solid sense of our benevolent authority. We have rounded the bases and come home to our self. Having political power provides no added pizazz. Were you at this point to acquire political power, you would experience it, mostly likely, as a call to serve others and to honor your integrity.

If we’re terrified of an authoritarian takeover, we’re likely under the influence of inner passivity, a largely unrecognized aspect of the human psyche. Inner passivity produces an unhealthy emotional resonance with feelings of being submissive to a stronger force, whether that force is benevolent or malevolent and whether it is in reality all that strong to begin with. This force is first experienced in childhood when we are biologically helpless and dependent. Rebellion against it occurs during the “terrible twos.” As adults, we experience this force, often subliminally, when our biologically driven self-aggression goes on the offensive against our passive, reactive, and defensive weak side (inner passivity). This passive side of us, which inflates the sense of being oppressed, can be overcome through the knowledge of these inner dynamics.

Under the influence of inner passivity, many liberals are injustice-collectors, meaning that they’re determined to experience everyday situations and occurrences through passive reactions such as feeling oppressed, disrespected, maligned, or unfairly treated. Injustice collectors loudly decry injustices inflicted upon themselves and others while simultaneously embellishing within themselves these feelings of being victimized. They also tend to embellish the negative emotions of helplessness and unworthiness as they identify with the painful impotence and lack of value that they see or imagine are being felt by real or alleged victims. Political correctness is driven as much by appropriate sensitivity as by this unhealthy identification with others as victims of oppression and disrespect. As a result, liberals can easily identify with feeling weak, a shortcoming we shelter in our psyche, instead of seeking the personal power that democracy requires of us.

Those of us aligned with democratic values often have a hidden resistance to feeling more powerful. We can be uncomfortable with power. We might feel or believe, usually unconsciously, that power, as it resides outside ourselves, is a force that’s inherently manipulative or abusive. This emotional association can hark back to childhood when we were (or felt ourselves to have been) subjected to insensitive or arbitrary authority. We can turn our back on acquiring and exercising healthy personal power because we identify, as mentioned, with those who we imagine feel manipulated or mistreated by it. It’s important to become conscious of these kinds of resistance to becoming more powerful. When we access our better self, we’re confident the power we acquire will be used benevolently and wisely.

Confronting authoritarians is like confronting the inner critic. When we recognize our own inner passivity and bring it into focus, we see clearly the illegitimacy of the inner critic. When we see our inner passivity and begin to free ourselves from it, we see more clearly the illegitimacy and irrationality of any force that would presume to undermine democracy. As we absorb this knowledge, each of us can feel a new capacity to be a bulwark against oppression.

We don’t have to do pitched battle with those who are emotionally aligned with authoritarian aims and principles. We just have to go forward picking our battles wisely, being strong in our own person, displaying enlightenment principles in the quality of our being. The enemy will fall back and scatter before us. These principles were put forward 2,500 years ago by Sun Tzu, in his treatise on warfare, The Art of War. He wrote, “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle,” and, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight,” and “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” This all refers to the strength that’s inherent in the quality of our consciousness. As long as violence is avoided, higher consciousness is likely to prevail over consciousness that’s less refined.

Awareness of the influence of both inner passivity and the inner critic, along with an understanding of how they generate inner conflict, exposes the source of the authoritarian mentality. Behavioral dysfunction arises from this inner conflict, as when people are overwhelmed by desires not only for political power but also for wealth, alcohol, drugs, food, sex, and self-aggrandizement. Knowledge of these psychological dynamics is needed as we navigate perilous times.

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