Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 8

Inner Conflict Ripens in the Hothouse of Pandemic

We’re stay-at-home people now, seesawing in this historic upheaval between feeling strong and feeling weak. Many of us don’t trust that we have what it takes to be brave and heroic. As if on a ventilator, we struggle for the oxygen of resilience, unable to feel a solid bottom in the breathless pandemonium.

Seeing how inner conflict sabotages our resilience.

Three huge stressors are colliding: the pandemic, the stay-at-home requirements, and the economic collapse. For many, the emotional needs and physical demands of cooped-up kids are additionally stressful. Pressure builds inside, and many of us begin to react inappropriately, angrily, and viciously. Not surprisingly, police report that domestic violence is dramatically on the rise, including child abuse.

Domestic-abuse perpetrators are the weakest among us, those most disconnected from the ability to be strong and resolute. They’re the ones who crack first. It’s important for all of us, however, to have psychological understanding of the nature of the stress we’re feeling. Otherwise, we’re apt to stumble into various self-defeating behaviors and do things we’ll regret. It’s no time to be our worst enemy.

Strength is felt through a deeper connection to our good and abiding self. However, we might not be able to make that connection without an understanding of the psychological aspects of our weakness. A primary source of emotional weakness is inner conflict. This conflict produces worry, anxiety, passivity, fear, anger, indecision, and bitterness. Acquiring the ability to dispel these negative emotions is a learning process that exposes the dynamics of inner conflict.

A common form of inner conflict entails, on one side, self-doubt and inner defensiveness, and on the other side, self-blame and self-rejection. This conflict is more intense in neurotic people, those among us who are frequently and painfully triggered by the everyday challenges of normal life. The more that people absorb self-blame and self-rejection, the more likely they are to blame, criticize, and reject others. And the more they’ll feel justification in lashing out at others.

These two sides of this inner conflict—the side that defends and the side that blames—each strive to prevail. The conflict features a passive side within us versus a self-aggressive side. People go back and forth in their minds, often unconsciously, feeling—and feeding—this inner conflict mainly through thoughts and feelings that are expressions of (or byproducts of) the underlying conflict. Here are some examples. In such conflict, the self-aggressive side usually prevails, making it more likely that individuals will react with frustration, anger, and abusive behaviors.

Inner conflict is like a psychological virus, one that produces an emotional immune deficiency. Modern mental-health treatments would be more effective if the psychological establishment recognized and understood the nature of this “virus” and began to teach people how to protect themselves from it.

In the conflict between passive defensiveness and belittling self-aggression, each side has its own kinds of expression or experience, arising as thoughts, memories, feelings, and negative emotions. People often have scant idea what they’re dealing with. They have little or no knowledge concerning the underlying psychological dynamics of the conflict. For most people, the distress they’re feeling is, as they experience it, the anticipated suffering of life. They have little sense of how, through depth psychology, they can improve the quality of their experience. Deprived of this knowledge, they’re hindered from overcoming their inner conflict and freeing themselves from its painful symptoms.

One of the conflict’s symptoms is the undermining of emotional strength. Superficial advice on how to feel resilient is not likely to be effective when we’re unwittingly allowing inner conflict to weaken us. How are we weakened? The conflict gives power to the self-aggressive inner critic. Our passive side, when reacting to the inner critic, gives power to this aggressive side by taking seriously its allegations and mockery. The passive side becomes an enabler of the aggressive side. Our authentic self, in contrast, is able to neutralize or deflect as irrational nonsense the insinuations and accusations of the inner critic. The inner critic (superego) is a primitive, irrational drive in the psyche that wants only to assert authority. It cares nothing for our well-being. The more we’re under the thrall of the inner critic and the more we fail to see the nature of inner passivity, the weaker we are in terms of emotional strength and the more alienated we are from our true, essential self.

When our inner critic has too much influence over us, we are inwardly passive. We’re unable to block or defeat our inner critic and establish our good, essential self as our trustworthy inner authority. Our passive side of the conflict does try to represent our interests in the conflict with the inner critic, but this passive side does so ineffectively, in a feeble manner. It uses psychological defenses and inner defensiveness to blunt the inner critic’s attacks. People who are stuck at representing themselves from this passive side are at a great disadvantage. When their conflict is activated, they identify unconsciously with the passive side of it. In doing so, they almost always lose to the self-aggressive side, and they end up feeling bad, shamed, punished, and defeated.

This psychological dynamic is the underlying instigator of domestic abuse, where inner conflict is externalized as family conflict. The similarities between the inner process and the externalized acting-out are striking. Perpetrators of domestic abuse behave violently—with aggression that’s as unwarranted, irrational, and cruel as the inner critic’s—toward those they perceive to be helpless or passive. The victims, meanwhile, absorb the punishment, often passively, as happens in the psyche of people when they’re absorbing self-blame and self-rejection. Domestic abuse is just one example of the ugly face of humanity’s aggressive-versus-passive inner conflict.

There are other variations of inner conflict. A person can put himself in conflict by stubbornly refusing to accept scientific facts, such as the dangers of the virus. Another person interprets compliance to stay-at-home directives as the feeling of being passive and submissive to authority. Someone else craves the normal life that the pandemic has rendered impossible, rather than feeling strength in acceptance of reality. Such conflicts make people emotionally weaker and less intelligent. (Other basic inner conflicts are described here, here, and here.)

As inner conflict is being resolved through knowledge and insight, we establish a connection with our authentic self. Now we’re in touch with a powerful, benevolent inner authority. We feel our value and power more fully than ever. We’re much more likely to react to challenges in wise and healthy ways.

Many people are being resolute and brave in dealing with the coronavirus and economic fallout. Still, they have underlying worry and anxiety, much of which arises from feelings of helplessness. This helplessness entails the sense of being restricted, trapped, powerless, and insignificant. For many, it’s the sense of being not only at the mercy of fate but painfully or agonizingly so. It’s painful because of the sense of being disconnected from one’s strong, better self. This emotional disconnect circles back to inner conflict and the distress of putting oneself at the mercy of one’s harsh inner critic.

Of course, we’re all helpless to some degree as the world’s upheaval plays itself out. Yet on an unconscious level, inner conflict causes people to embellish and accentuate the helpless feeling. I say more here and here about this inner process in which helpless feelings descend into self-abandonment, self-alienation, and the bittersweet allure of victimization.

Inner conflict is no one’s fault. It’s an aspect of human biology. It can be alleviated, as mentioned, by growing self-knowledge. Intensified by the pandemic and economic collapse, inner conflict will be more than many people can handle. A great many are likely to feel rising levels of stress, anxiety, fear, and panic. People tend to react to their unresolved psychological weaknesses, particularly helpless and trapped feelings, by becoming increasingly angry, belligerent, irrational, and violent. These reactions, though self-defeating, create illusions of power, which compensate for the unconscious willingness to spiral into helplessness. If conditions remain precarious in the coming months, I expect we will see rising levels of domestic abuse, along with increasingly damaging political rhetoric and actions. We need a vaccine for the coronavirus, of course, and we also need to vaccinate people with better psychological insight.

Meanwhile, connect with your authentic self and you’ll hold yourself, your family, and the world together.

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Living and Dying with Coronavirus

As Covid-19 prowls the streets and venues of Michigan, my wife Teresa and I are holed up in our house in a quiet neighborhood on the west side of Ann Arbor. We’re safe and healthy and keeping each other good company. She’s been sewing face masks from high-end quilting cotton. They’re durable and multi-colored, each a humble work of art. We’ll be wearing them next time we go, at senior hour, to our grocery store on Stadium Boulevard.

Do nature and human nature need to get in sync?

I had a dream a few weeks ago. A hawk was perched on a nearby tree. It saw me, and its eyes instantly glared with predatory fierceness. Suddenly, it was swooping toward me, talons extended. I ducked, yet felt a sharp nick upon my scalp. I awoke with the sense that nature is powerful and takes no prisoners. With the plague upon us, have our thick skulls been given notice? Does human nature need to get in sync with the natural world?

We’re all solemn about what’s happening. Who could be numb to it? Yet I don’t want to feel overwhelmed—and certainly not fearful. I’m determined not to suffer unnecessarily. Anxiety and fear do no one any good. Whenever an anxious thought arises, I reflect on the courage and compassion of our medical workers and hospital staff. Their bravery displays the essential goodness of humanity. They’re exemplars of our worthiness.

At the grocery store, the workers carry on with steadfast dignity. I see them with more respect than ever. These times must be awakening our discernment, for I also notice how precious each one is. Can they feel this truth in themselves? I hope so.

I bathe myself in the goodness of all essential workers who are now facing danger. A shout-out to the police, firemen, utility workers, and journalists, all steady at their posts. I breathe in their bravery, and doing so helps me support myself emotionally. Isn’t our goodness, more so than government checks, the grace that will save us and help us to recover when the virus goes away?

Teresa and I are cheerful with each other. We’re simultaneously cheerful, solemn, sad, and anxious, two old-timers spinning on our balance beam. Gratitude mingles with sorrow, compassion melds in mourning, acceptance winks at dying. How strong can I be? The fortitude I feel arises, too, from whatever goodness I can connect with in myself. Kind thoughts I have for others enhance inner peace. As we pass on the sidewalks, keeping social distance, my neighbors are more open and friendly than ever.

It’s normal now to think of death. How brave would I be gasping for breath, my airways swollen and lungs filled with fluid? Such images from the daily news now haunt us, along with reflections on the shortage of ventilators. I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to go out that way. Perhaps the living Earth can’t breathe either. Too much pollution. The Gaia principle, put forward in the 1970s by the chemist James Lovelock, theorizes that the Earth is a complex, self-regulating system with a hidden intelligence, capable of preserving a homeostatic balance and optimal conditions for all of life. In other words, the Earth has a countervailing immunity to what would destroy it. Guess who the destroyers might be? Tit-for-tat. Nothing else has gotten through to us.

While the Gaia principle was first received with hostility by many scientists, it is now studied, as this Harvard University paper informs, in the discipline of Earth system science. Some of its principles have been adopted in fields like biogeochemistry and systems ecology.

I’m not claiming the Gaia principle is true. It just feels like it could be true. Why? Because it so perfectly humbles human vanity. It makes us mere earthlings—like dogs, cows, and sparrows—who happen to have a bit more brain power. If so, we’re not Americans, Chinese, Russians, and Indians so much as earthlings united by common DNA, deficiencies of immunity, an aversion for truth, and an appetite for conflict. Mere semi-primitive earthlings—what a comedown!

Vanity is a part of us. It’s in the resistance we all unwittingly produce to shield ourselves from the knowledge that reveals the inner dynamics of self-sabotage. This knowledge exposes our psyche’s unconscious willingness to replay and recycle inner conflict with all its negative repercussions and profusions of stupidity. A conglomeration of stupidity has become a collective calamity, a march of folly reaching critical mass. The Earth, adorning a crown of enlightened rule symbolized by a corona-virus, informs us, in terms we finally can understand, of our place as subjects of a system much more profound and elegant than our revered machines, lifestyles, and economies.

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How the Coronavirus Plays with Our Mind

It’s so easy now in the time of coronavirus to feel tense, helpless, and fearful. Yet these emotional states are major stressors. Stress weakens the immune system, so it’s obviously important to be emotionally strong. We can develop this strength by becoming more insightful about psychological dynamics and processes.

Facing the Unknown.

We need to be vigilant, of course, but if we’re acutely fearful of contagion, we could unconsciously be intensifying a feeling of being helpless and powerless. Our emotional imagination will peer into the unknown with biased intent, determined to accentuate in us a painful sense of being at the mercy of fate. Instead of feeling passive and fearful, we can engage with the changing times to be at our most creative and inventive.

We have a tendency, when feeling fearful and helpless, to overthink. Our mind wants to consider all the possibilities of what’s to come. This gives us a sense of having some degree of control and power. Our mind can try to penetrate this unknown, yet it will mostly come up empty-handed. We’ll only be spinning our mental wheels, leaving us feeling overwhelmed.

Overthinking is a coping mechanism, a compensation for an underlying emotional attachment to feeling weak and helpless. It’s easy to feel such helplessness, but doing so will intensify fear and anxiety. When we understand this, we can stop the overthinking, which enables us to stop “feeding” the helpless feeling.

Of course, we’re naturally going to be concerned about others and for loved ones. Yet if you’re acutely anxious about, say, an aged mother or father, you could be identifying with them through the feeling of being at the mercy of fate, agonizingly struck down by the coronavirus. If so, you would be taking this helpless, painful feeling into yourself, which would make your own experience more difficult.

Another emotional process involves projection. To use the above example, you might be projecting your own inner fears onto your parents. You make them the fearful ones and deny the fear in yourself. But this doesn’t eliminate your fear. Instead, your fear is now hidden from your awareness where it can instigate self-defeating emotional and behavioral symptoms. Again, try to recognize any fear you might have and understand its source in your unconscious willingness to accentuate a passive sense of helplessness and vulnerability. Knowledge and inner vigilance protect us from the emotional attachment to feeling helpless.

Because of how we can feel stricken with helplessness, some of us will be on edge, prone to react angrily or belligerently. The need to shelter in place can enhance a sense of feeling trapped. With insight, we can avoid the worst of this emotional distress. By recognizing the pull into this passive feeling, we can see this emotional state as a kind of self-abandonment. Insight enables us to shift away from this weakness. Psychological clarity comes to our rescue. We see a better way to experience ourselves. We can now connect emotionally with our courage and goodness to experience ourselves at our best.

You can say to someone who’s agitated or frantic about the virus: “I think you’re reacting to feeling helpless. We all need to connect with our better self and find emotional support in this way. There’s a place inside us where we’re not helpless, where we can feel our strength and courage. Let’s try to find that place inside us.” You can put this statement in the first-person singular and say it to yourself. Finding emotional support from within enables us to sublimate our nervous energy with practical projects, creative pursuits, or simple amusement.

To my clients and readers, good fortune and safe passage through the coming weeks and months. With inner strength, we can avoid a lot of suffering. An effective approach to feeling inner strength is presented in the articles on this website, as well as in my books. This is the time for us to be at our best and to create an enduring legacy. It’s a time for rebirth and renewal. Best wishes to all.

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Dealing Emotionally With the Coronavirus Threat

This is a brief post wishing good fortune to my clients and readers in dealing with the coronavirus. It’s so easy now to feel tense, helpless, and fearful. Yet these emotional states are major stressors. Stress weakens the immune system, so it’s obviously important to be emotionally strong. We can develop this strength by becoming more insightful about psychological dynamics and processes.

Facing the Unknown.

If you’re fearful of looming hazards, you could unconsciously be intensifying a feeling of being helpless and powerless. Your emotional imagination will peer into the unknown with biased intent, determined to accentuate in you a painful sense of being at the mercy of fate. Instead of feeling passive and fearful, we can engage with the changing times to be at our most creative and inventive.

An effective approach to self-development is presented in the articles on this website, as well as in my books. This is the time for us to be at our best and to create an enduring legacy. It’s a time for rebirth and renewal. Best wishes to all.

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Access the Genius Within

Genius is ours for the taking if we know where to look. Just ask three geniuses: Vladimir Nabokov, Immanuel Kant, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. While these guys were natural-born geniuses, a capacity for genius is available to everyday people.

The capacity for genius is our birthright.

Nabokov, the novelist, said simply, “Genius is finding the invisible link between things.” Okay, so where do we start looking? What important “things” might we want to link up? What about invisible links between the false self and true self? We can each be a genius of self-discovery when we make those links visible. This post, a tribute to the genius in us all, features digital links mapping paths to the true self.

Kant, the philosopher, noted, “Genius is the ability to independently arrive at and understand concepts that would normally have to be taught by another person.” If we want to understand concepts that have high value, depth psychology is the place to start. This knowledge is in the public domain, and people can exercise their own genius and assimilate the concepts without necessarily needing teachers, psychotherapists, or extra cash.

Mozart, the composer, stated, “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.” Again, depth psychology rides to the rescue. It clears out inner conflict and negative emotions, bringing us inexorably to the love of our own self, to deep respect for our goodness and essence. This inner connection sparks our love for others and all of life.

The capacity for genius is our birthright. The word genius means, from its Latin roots, the “attendant spirit present from one’s birth.” The word came to be understood over time as one’s unique disposition and natural or exceptional ability. Our greatest expression of genius, in my view, involves accessing and manifesting what’s powerfully good within ourselves. This personal triumph unfolds as we overcome the chaos in our psyche and thereby harmonize with our self and the world.

Genius of this kind simultaneously disengages with the false self as it liberates the true self. Genius in this sense is obviously not about becoming, say, a chess genius or a genius at playing the stock market. That’s fine and dandy, but we’re talking here about the art of discovering one’s true, authentic self. We’re talking about our personal contribution to the realization of human destiny. I have to say, you’ll greatly enjoy the genius it takes to escape mindlessness, to awaken to your dignity and integrity. You’ll savor the genius that enables you to befriend yourself and to support yourself emotionally. Genius is another word for one’s ability to discover the sublime personal self.

What psychological knowledge facilitates this process? We start by understanding and overcoming the ways in which we’re inwardly conflicted. Inner conflict is the clash in our psyche of opposing (usually unconscious) wishes. This inner disharmony blocks us from accessing a wider range of intelligence and creativity. A common experience of inner conflict involves one’s conscious wish to feel strong and capable versus one’s unconscious willingness to remain entangled in an emotional default position that produces a sense of weakness and futility.

When conflicted in this manner, we find ourselves aspiring consciously to be emotionally strong and mentally focused, yet we’re encountering another part of us, one that floods our sense of self with experiences of being helpless, confused, and overwhelmed. This weakness, what I call inner passivity, has its own perverse power, the ability to pull us into painful, self-defeating thoughts and feelings. In the psychological sense, genius is the ability to develop one’s inner strength so as to counteract the powerful gravitational pull into feeling helpless, trapped, oppressed, out of control, and lacking in self-regulation.

This entanglement in inner weakness is a symptom of emotional attachments. People are typically unaware of their emotional attachments to eight basic negative emotions or experiences. These are: feeling refused, deprived, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. These attachments derive from the fact that we have no choice but to experience, usually in a painful way, whatever inner conflict is unresolved in our psyche. Unresolved inner conflict is simply determined to be experienced. The hard-and-fast rule is: Whatever is unresolved in our psyche is going continue to be experienced, however painful and self-defeating that is, until we awaken to the psychological dynamics of inner conflict.

In other words, an emotional attachment can be understood as a compulsion to feel, often in an intense and prolonged way, one of these eight negative emotions. Here’s an example, illustrated by the attachment to rejection. Due to inner conflict, we swing back and forth between wanting to feel respected and loved versus being willing to resonate with feeling rejected. We unwittingly create situations in which we replay and recycle this negative emotion, thereby producing consequential self-defeating behaviors. We’re emotionally attached to the feeling of being rejected. Sometimes the pain of being rejected defines us to ourselves. We don’t know who we are without that familiar pain, in large measure because it originates out of the self-rejecting animosity we experience from our inner critic. Psychological self-development involves liberating ourselves from the attachment to feeling rejected (as well as the other seven). We can achieve inner freedom as we expose our attachments and recognize the psychological defenses that hide them from our awareness.

Psychological defenses, another important dynamic in our psyche, produce a restriction of intelligence because they cover up our unconsciousness willingness to experience much of life through one or more of these eight emotional attachments. In other words, we’re deluded and rendered foolish by our defenses. They cover up our unwitting participation, our secret willingness, to experience emotional attachments and to embellish their intensity. In a perverse sense, we’re geniuses of self-deception. To see through our defenses is a big boost for intelligence and, of course, for the development of psychological genius.

Inner conflict maintains egotism because it throws us into self-centeredness. Inner conflict produces feelings of victimization and self-pity. We’re self-absorbed, for instance, when troubled by the sense of being a failure or being a disappointment to ourselves and others. We’re entangled emotionally in self-preoccupation when feeling trapped, guilty, angry, shameful, and unworthy. Now it’s all about poor little me and my suffering. Creative energy is drained away in constricted self-absorption and the production of defenses. We’re preoccupied with blaming others. We can’t feel the goodness in others because we can’t feel it in ourselves.

A related human weakness is self-doubt. It’s experienced largely through the sense that we’re lacking in value and goodness. Undermining our sense of worthiness and value is the inner critic, a primitive drive that poses as a voice of authority, the master of our personality. The fact that we allow the inner critic, with its cruelty and irrationality, to get away with its assaults on our character means there’s a part of us that’s passive, weak, and lacking in consciousness. This part, as mentioned, is called inner passivity, and most people, to some degree, identify unconsciously with it. Through inner passivity, we absorb the inner critic’s punishment for our alleged shortcomings, and the absorption of this punishment (often in the form of guilt, shame, fearfulness, depression, and sense of unworthiness) is itself an emotional attachment.

The inner critic attacks, while inner passivity defends. These attacks on our integrity and goodness wear us down because, lacking conscious connection to our true self, we can’t protect ourselves adequately from them. We produce inner defensiveness, which differs from psychological defenses. Inner defensiveness is an inner voice that strives mostly to protect one’s ego. This inner defensiveness shifts into verbal or outward defensiveness, which is the common tendency to offer up excuses and alibis, sometimes angrily, when feeling challenged or confronted by others. Such defensiveness maintains inner conflict (fuels the fire) because it gives credence to the inner critic’s irrational allegations and accusations. When we’ve gained a foothold with our true self, we’re able to neutralize or deflect the inner critic’s aggression, and we no longer feel a need to be inwardly or outwardly defensive.

However, before we’re capable of doing this, our defensiveness, in its weakness and futility, has failed to protect us from offering up a pound of flesh to the inner critic and absorbing its punishment, often as self-blame. We also absorb punishment through the real or imagined disapproval and disappointment of others. The punishment takes the form of guilt and shame, along with anxiety, fear, depression, and self-hatred, accompanied by feelings of being unworthy and unloved. This is us at our weakest, in abdication of our true self, displaying a kind of self-abandonment, absorbing punishment unnecessarily out of sheer psychological ignorance.

Genius arises as growing consciousness that begins to understand one’s suffering as an absorption of emotional punishment that derives from inner conflict. Genius sees with increasing clarity into the nature of inner conflict. Such conflict arises, in particular, between inner passivity and the self-aggression of the inner critic, and conflict is the mainstay of the eight emotional attachments.

There are more basics to comprehend on this magical mystery tour of the psyche. It’s important to have some understanding of the processes involved in transference, projection, identification, the pleasure principle, the perverse thrill of fear, reactive aggression, the visual drive, inhibitions of imagination, ambivalence, sublimations, magical thinking, and resistance. We’re trying to make links (create insights) that expose the precise nature of our suffering, as inner conflict acted out through these psychological dynamics.

Psychological defenses are intwined in all of these dynamics. Seeing into our defenses’ deviousness serves like a grand windowpane illuminating the true self. Here’s another quick example of how emerging genius penetrates this self-delusion. In this example the inner critic, our inner know-it-all, is mocking someone for his emotional attachment to feeling refused [one of the eight emotional attachments]. As part of unconscious inner conflict, the critic is saying, “You really resonate with feeling refused, don’t you! You must really like that feeling. You’re always so quick to feel it.” In our egotism and resistance, we hate to acknowledge the truth of this accusation. Hence, we defend, along these lines: “I don’t want to feel refused! Look at how angry [or upset, sad, depressed] I get when I’m feeling or being refused.” Now the person has to feel anger, often accompanied by reactive aggression and guilt, in order to support this defense. (More examples of these kinds of misleading defenses can be found in many of the posts on this website.)

Another aspect of inner life involves the commanding self. This is a primitive intelligence in our psyche and an aspect of both the false self and the inner critic. This misleading sense of self probably arises as a consequence of our deficiency in establishing sufficient authority in (or solid enough connection to) our true, authentic self. Keep in mind that inner authority is going to be vested somewhere, either irrationally and illegitimately in a primitive part of our psyche or rationally and legitimately through our true self. The commanding self is usually not as cruel and mocking as the inner critic, but it can be even more authoritarian. Generally speaking, the commanding self leaves us feeling overruled, while the inner critic specializes in denouncing us. The commanding self imposes upon our mind its own arbitrary agenda. It produces a sense of oppression and lack of inner freedom. Under its influence, we lack spontaneity. It produces the feeling of being subordinate and not having a mind of our own.

Finally, to allow our genius to arise and flourish, we want to avoid speculating excessively about the future or ruminating about the past. It’s not that we have to try ceaselessly to be in the here-and-now. Trying to be mindful all the time is not necessary. Such undo effort can leave us feeling helpless and frustrated. Simply try to understand what emotional attachments are compelling you to dwell on the past or the future. You could be worried about the future, for instance, because you’re imaging being helpless or overwhelmed to deal with possible future problems, thereby activating in the moment an emotional attachment to feeling helpless. Or you could be nurturing painful memories that enable you in the moment to experience self-criticism, thereby passively soaking up punishment.

Keep in mind, too, that Eros and Thanatos, the love of life versus the appeal of chaos and annihilation, are real aspects of human nature. Thanatos, also known as the death drive or death instinct, is visible in moviegoers who find themselves commiserating with (identifying with) crooks and bad guys hurdling toward self-destruction. More hazardously, it’s also implanted in the psyche of the Armageddon crowd and those who are indifferent to the dangers of climate change. In contrast, the true self, our genius incarnate, is planted in the soil of Eros.

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How Meditation and Depth Psychology Overlap

I have long been interested in meditation, and I practiced it on and off for many years when I was a young man. Meditation held me together through my neurotic shenanigans, until depth psychology crossed my path and cleaned out the worst of my inner discombobulations. I used to be pretty good, too, at standing on my head, though that was mostly a salute to my ego.

Meditation and depth psychology can work together effectively.

The practice of meditation, like the understanding of depth psychology, is a royal road to self-discovery. Meditation obviously has the power to promote wellbeing. It was shown in a Harvard University study to change brain regions linked to memory, a sense of self, and regulation of emotions. As with depth psychology, meditation penetrates the unconscious mind in search of self-knowledge that makes us stronger and wiser.

When meditating successfully, we’re overriding inner weakness. The practice requires decisiveness and resolve: We have to decide to do it, then actually do it. With meditation, we practice the power of intention. The intention is not just to meditate but to feel inner harmony and strength. We’re trying to access the power to calm our mind. In this process, we make the effort to block out random thoughts and considerations or we let them pass through our mind without engaging with them. Our intention is to go inward, create what degree of inner quiet we can, and experience from a witnessing position whatever arises.

Both depth psychology and meditation are effective in helping us to regulate our mind and emotions. Absent inner guidance or oversight, our mind and imagination can jitter around aimlessly, spewing out random reflections and speculations. At such times, our mind and imagination can operate as facilitators or enablers of inner conflict. An unregulated mind frequently produces thoughts and feelings that are negative, painful, deceptive, and self-defeating. With meditation, we’re reaching inward to access the power to keep negative or random thoughts and emotions at bay and to connect with our essential nature. With depth psychology, we’re also looking to connect with our essential nature, mainly by recognizing the inner conflict and other dynamics that block us from being at our best. The intention with both systems is to empower our intelligence, enabling us to recognize primitive, unconscious operations and to exert positive influence upon them.

Depth psychology enables us to illuminate, mentally and emotionally, the specific psychological dynamics involved in mental and emotional disharmony. Those who are unable or unwilling to meditate can, as an alternative, approach their inner life through this psychological knowledge, although this system also requires the courage to topple the inner status quo. In this psychological process, we acquire strength and wisdom by exposing the specific dynamics of inner conflict that have maintained our suffering.

Depth psychology does this, in one important way, by helping us to recognize and understand, both intellectually and emotionally, a primary weakness called inner passivity. This mostly unconscious weakness (read about it here, here, and here) blocks us from bringing our best possibilities and intentions to life’s daily challenges.

It is this weakness—inner passivity—that meditation, at its best, is able to override, at least temporarily. A person who’s meditating successfully bypasses inner passivity and the disconnect it creates from one’s authentic self. The meditator’s single-minded focus (Zen Buddhists call this “one-pointedness of mind”) regulates the mind and thereby calms it. This practice produces the experience of mental and emotional strength, the opposite of the sense of weakness that inner passivity induces.

Meditation does not typically identify inner passivity in a clinical sense. Meditation can override inner passivity in the moment, but it doesn’t offer its practitioners the specific psychological knowledge that illuminates the clinical structure of inner passivity. Meditators would benefit more, I believe, if they possessed this psychological understanding of the existence and dynamics of inner passivity. The clinical understanding helps greatly to undermine the psychological structure of this emotional weakness, which then enables us to break our unconscious identification with it.

Depth psychology identifies the aspects of our psyche in which inner passivity thrives. I approach inner passivity and try to expose it through psychological dynamics such as emotional attachments, inner conflict, instinctive defensiveness, psychological defenses, difficulty supporting oneself emotionally, fear of change, identification with victims, inability to sublimate, perverse and bittersweet satisfaction in varieties of displeasure, self-criticism and self-abandonment, and guilt and shame. The method involves a learning process, the study of our inner weakness, that empowers our intelligence to lead us away from this inner weakness and its accompanying suffering.

Inner passivity is centered in our unconscious ego, home to a delicate, fragile self-image. The more that inner passivity circulates in our psyche, the more we’re likely to be belittled, mocked, and abused by our inner critic. At its worst, inner passivity is an instigator of violence, war, and criminality. Inner passivity induces us to believe that we’re being held back, victimized, or defeated by circumstances or powers—including our own lack of purpose or vision—that we can feel powerless to overcome.

Like depth psychology, meditation does recognize the unconscious mind or psyche, and it identifies much of our suffering as a product of unconscious forces. Meditation based on Buddhist principles recognizes “the forces of the kilesas,” which are torments of the mind. Included among them are sensual indulgence, discontent, cravings, sloth, fear, doubt, conceit, ingratitude, and malice. Depth psychology, in its more detailed approach, regards these unhealthy torments as symptoms of inner conflict. The kilesas are neurotic byproducts of deep inner conflict involving unresolved emotional attachments to refusal, deprivation, helplessness, control, rejection, criticism, and abandonment. Depth psychology zeroes in on exactly how we unwittingly participate in, indulge in, and resonate with these negative emotions. This deep knowledge is able to liberate us from such negativity.

As depth psychology teaches, an individual doesn’t have to actually be refused, controlled, and so on to get triggered and begin to experience these negative emotions. The individual experiences the emotions and their accompanying misery just by imagining being refused, controlled, etc. Or this person will unwittingly misinterpret a situation in order to generate feelings of being refused, controlled, etc. It’s amazing how quick are to produce these negative impressions and emotions. Of course, we don’t acknowledge doing this. We cover up our participation in generating such misery with denial, willful ignorance, and a variety of psychological defenses. (Here’s information on how this occurs.)

Meditative approaches to self-development speak of the illusions we perpetuate, while depth psychology gets into the nitty-gritty of what illusions are and how they arise. Depth psychology sees illusions as forms of self-deception, as resistance, denial, and psychological defenses. Consider a person who frequently feels emotionally drained and energetically depleted. Physical and medical examinations have been unable to account for this individual’s plight. He’s likely entangled emotionally in a sense of weakness involving feelings of being overwhelmed by life’s challenges, as well as by a lack of purpose and a futile sense of spinning his wheels. Inner passivity, a prime component of inner conflict, is likely involved, operating as a subtle emotional attachment and identification. This person has no idea of his identification with this specific weakness. Meditation, while it would temporarily override this passivity, wouldn’t necessarily provide him with the deeper insight that exposes and overcomes this emotional attachment.

This person’s unconscious psychological defense, presented to the inner critic which accuses the person of harboring and indulging inner weakness, might go like this: “I’m not embellishing emotionally upon a sense of inner weakness and a passive outlook on life. I’m not looking to suffer in the throes of inner conflict. Look, I’m feeling drained with life, with my job, and I hate this feeling. I want out. I hate feeling drained and depleted.” The individual offers up this defense to the inner critic. This defense can “work” at getting the inner critic to back off, at least temporarily, as long as the individual buys into his illusions (his deceptive defenses) and as long as he suffers sufficiently with painful feelings of being drained, depleted, and depressed.

Even one’s interest in meditating can be used as a psychological defense. The unconscious defense claims, “I’m not embellishing feelings of inner weakness and a passive outlook on life. I’m not indulging in passivity. I’m going to start meditating, thereby proving how determined I am to feel stronger and better!” A person employing such a defense is likely to produce only half-hearted and short-lived attempts at meditation.

Both fear and resistance stand in the way of inner progress. Meditators bravely face the sense of emptiness or nothingness encountered in their practice. Depth psychology requires us to face a related fear, namely our resistance to relinquishing the inner status quo in order to bring about psychological renewal. Both systems help us to break free of limited identifications, such as with race, nation, status, possessions, mind, body, and sexuality. The impressions both systems produce of being stripped emotionally of all identifications are typically feared and avoided. The depth psychology I practice strips us of repressed emotional identifications involving feelings of helplessness, self-alienation, unworthiness, guilt, and shame. People cling to such painful identifications, in part, out of fear of losing their “precious” sense of who they are.

Meditators recognize the limitations of the ego (another common identification), as do people engaged in depth psychology. Depth psychology strives in particular to help us recognize the unconscious subordinate ego, the seat of inner passivity, and to help us overcome our identification with it. In both systems, people endeavor to connect with their authentic self. Advocates for meditation say the practice can lead eventually beyond the self, to realization of union with a spiritual source, while the depth psychology I practice, careful to preserve its secular roots, cedes the spiritual realm to others.

Meditating need not feel like a struggle. Ideally, the practice involves waiting patiently for whatever experience arises. Struggling to concentrate and focus can produce a persistent helpless sensation. Just as one relaxes into meditation, this is also the ideal approach with depth psychology. We don’t want to be struggling mentally to understand the psychological knowledge. It’s knowledge that can easily baffle the mind. It’s best assimilated through the holistic intelligence of mind, feelings, body, and intuition. We expose ourselves to the knowledge and trust this intelligence to assimilate it. Over time, as we maintain this intention and practice, our intelligence produces vital insights, like software upgrades that flow into our computer.

Whether meditating or studying depth psychology, we strive to recognize inner weakness. As one example, difficulty in meditating can be caused by inner passivity. Meditators can become aware of inner passivity in those moments to determine if it’s preventing them from bringing forth their best intention and effort. Recognizing this passivity is essential to overcoming it.

Meditation and depth psychology agree: We can tame our negative emotions, and the reward for doing so is immense. In our personal realm, we’re either creators of a laudable life or we’re brokers of a sorry fate. We’re primary agents of what inner peace we experience, and we’re co-creators with life as to how generous, loving, and fulfilled we become. What matters is that we discover this and proceed accordingly. Certainly, the two, meditation and depth psychology, can work together effectively.

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Guilt: A Favorite Way to Suffer

Is guilt our favorite way to suffer? I think it is. Shame, fear, and anxiety might be more intense as torments go, but guilt (life’s “fitful fever”—Shakespeare) is the emotional hotspot that flares up most frequently in the backwoods of human nature.

Enjoy that guilt-free feeling.

And it doesn’t take much to feel the heat. “When I get asked a favor,” one client told me, “any reluctance on my part is laden with guilt.” Guilt ignites so easily it ought to be bundled with smoke alarms.

Here’s how a writer in The Guardian newspaper expressed her familiarity with guilt:

Already today I feel guilty about having said the wrong thing to a friend. Then I felt guilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing I’d said. Plus, I haven’t called my mother yet today: guilty. And I really should have organized something special for my husband’s birthday: guilty. I have the wrong kind of food to my child: guilty. I’ve been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty… Nor am I feeling good about feeling bad.

Guilt of this mundane, everyday variety arises due to unconscious conflict in our psyche between the inner critic and inner passivity. The inner critic’s “job” is to criticize (no surprise), and inner passivity’s “job” is to defend. The inner dynamic here is unequivocal: The more our inner critic’s criticism penetrates into our emotional life, the more guilt we feel. The more insightful we are, the more we’re able to block the inner critic from spewing its irrational nonsense and the freer we are of guilt.

Let’s analyze the first few sentences from the indented paragraph above. To illustrate here the nature of inner conflict, I’ll give a voice to the inner critic (IC) and to inner passivity (IP). These voices are unlikely to be heard by us in our head. Instead, they’re usually unbidden thoughts that swarm our mind. Sometimes they’re experienced more as feelings or impressions than as thoughts. People usually aren’t aware that these inner voices or thoughts represent inner conflict. We’re more likely to experience them as aspects of normal reflection. (People with serious mental illness can sometimes hear inner conflict as distinct voices.) Though these voices or thoughts are fictionalized in the following paragraph as an explicatory device, they represent accurately how inner conflict plays out in our psyche. Here we go:

Guilt is expressed: Already today I feel guilty about having said the wrong thing to a friend. Giving rise to this guilt is, first, the accusing voice of the IC: That wasn’t nice what you said to your friend. You obviously hurt his feelings. Now the passive, defensive voice of IP replies: I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings. I do wish I hadn’t said that. The voice of IC responds: How could you have been so thoughtless and foolish. He must be very upset. The voice of IP replies: Oh yes, it’s true. It was foolish. But I didn’t mean to be hurtful. What’s the matter with me? I’ve got to be more thoughtful.

And on and on this conflicted dialogue goes, back and forth in twists and turns of accusation and defensiveness, sometimes for hours, sometimes (depending on one’s state of mental health) for days. As readers can see, guilt-tripping oneself is sport for the psychologically naïve. Guilt is the feeling that we have done something wrong and deserve to be punished. Rationally, though, we don’t usually deserve to be punished hour after hour for an honest mistake, innocent oversight, or thoughtless moment. It ought to be enough that, on recognizing our mistake (which sometimes is not even real but just imagined), we can resolve to do better next time. Throwing guilt into the mix makes everything messier.

The solution is to stifle our bullying inner critic. It instinctively lays bad trips on us, using as a pretext some real or alleged transgression or failure of ours. Yet the deeper problem is not so much the inner critic. Rather, it’s the fact we let the inner critic get away with its bullying aggression. The inner critic is a psychological drive or instinct of pure self-aggression. We ought to be insightful and smart enough to keep this primitive energy from flooding our mental and emotional life. Its relationship to us is primordial and authoritarian. Its assessment of us can be stripped to seven words: We’re bad and need to be punished.

We can be helpless to stop the inner voices when inner conflict between our aggressive and passive sides operates unconsciously. Meditation can block the voices, but often only temporarily. Often the voices subside only after we have accepted or endured enough punishment in the form of guilt or shame, thereby finally putting the voices and underlying conflict to rest. But the voices and conflict soon arise again, perhaps in a new context.

From the indented paragraph above, let’s look at the next sentence. Guilt is again acknowledged: Then I felt guilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing I’d said. Accusing voice of IC: Now you’re making it worse. What’s the matter with you! Can you even imagine what he’s thinking of you! Defensive voice of IP: What could I say to him at this point? I’m so embarrassed. Maybe tomorrow I’ll give him a call. Voice of IC responds: Tomorrow is a long time away. You ought to be ashamed of letting him go so long without an apology from you. Voice of IP replies: I wonder what he’s thinking right now. Is he disgusted with me? Does he think I’m no real friend at all? I’m not sure what to do.

I could go on, sentence by sentence, through the remainder of that paragraph above. But I would only be repeating ad nauseum the same two conflicting voices spouting their shifting contentiousness. You get the point: The inner critic attacks and inner passivity defends. When we’re insightful or more conscious, we can stop the conflict from arising in the first place. If it still arises, we can now at least more quickly curtail it.

What if you really have been unkind or rude to a friend? Social faux pas are committed by the best of us. When we’re insightful, we don’t torture ourselves with guilt about it. We know when we have done something unkind, foolish, or inept without having to feel guilty about it. Our intelligence and goodness produce a rational sensibility that doesn’t need guilt’s unreliable guidance.

Sure, if we’ve blurted out a particularly barbed insult it’s probably best to apologize. Sometimes we can make up for a lack of good manners by showing up the next morning with coffee and doughnuts. If our friend mentions the incident and asks for an explanation or apology, we can acknowledge our inappropriateness without cringing in guilt: You’re right, Henry, I blurted those words out thoughtlessly. A mean streak sneaks up on me sometimes, especially after my third beer. I do apologize. I value you very much as a friend. No sweat, no guilt, no hangdog cringe.

When inner conflict is resolved, we’re guided by a sense of inner freedom rather than guilt. Because we no longer tolerate belittling attacks from our inner critic, we can support ourselves emotionally, easing the discomfort of having acted unwisely by knowing that, in our goodness and integrity, our unkind or rude behavior was out of character and does not represent something bad about us. We cut ourselves some slack: Okay, once in a while I get cranky and snap at people. I’m not, I’m happy to say, perfect. However, if we’re repeatedly or chronically cranky, we’d do well to remedy this by investigating its source.

There’s a school of thought that claims guilt is okay, that it helps us recognize any failure to live up to our values and standards. This theory claims that guilt, at its best, alerts us to mistakes and guides us in rectifying them. Psychopaths, it’s also noted, are notorious for having no guilt at all. I still say we’re guided best not by guilt but by our intelligence and goodness. True, many people might still need guilt as a red flag for inappropriate behavior, but they ought not to allow the guilt to sustain self-torture. We do well to eliminate what we can of mundane, everyday guilt. Otherwise, we could be in danger of having the guilt escalate into more serious emotional disturbances. When inner conflict intensifies, which can easily occur when we’re blind to these inner dynamics, our guilt can escalate quickly to become debilitating symptoms such as shame, fear, anxiety, and depression.

Guilt arises in proportion to how much we’re under the influence of inner passivity: A person on deadline who’s procrastinating (procrastination is a symptom of inner passivity) will feel plenty of guilt for the procrastination; a person who’s chronically indecisive (indecision is a symptom of inner passivity) will feel plenty of guilt for the indecisiveness. The pervasiveness of guilt in the human psyche proves, to my mind, the existence of inner passivity as a clinical feature of the psyche. If we weren’t inwardly passive to our inner critic, we wouldn’t allow our inner critic to assail us with unwarranted, flimsy accusations. These accusations claim that we somehow deserve to be punished (by taking on guilt) for even our smallest imperfections and oversights. With better insight and a more conscious connection to our authentic self, we simply decline to accept punishment for the inner critic’s irrational attacks.

Sigmund Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that, “The tension between the harsh super-ego [inner critic] and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment.” This might be the most important sentence Freud ever wrote, though today its implications are largely ignored by mainstream psychology. The “need for punishment” refers, of course, not to a healthy need but to the need to appease the inner critic when an individual, through psychological ignorance, has no other recourse. Freud’s statement includes the phrase, “the ego that is subjected to it.” This refers to our psyche’s unconscious, subordinate ego, the seat of inner passivity. This realm of inner life is what our consciousness must now lay claim to.

Evidence of “a need for punishment” is found in the high incidence of self-injury, especially among young people. The more guilt, the stronger the impulse to self-injure. According to the American Psychological Association, “People who self-harm may carve or cut their skin, burn themselves, bang or punch objects or themselves, embed objects under their skin, or engage in myriad other behaviors that are intended to cause themselves pain but not end their lives.” Inner conflict in which the inner critic overwhelms the passive side of the psyche produces the feeling that punishment is required. Those who self-injure frequently feel a calmness immediately following their self-harming behavior, indicating the inner critic backs off once satisfied that enough punishment has been inflicted.

In conjunction with a need for punishment, guilt, like fear, can be inwardly transmuted to produce a peculiar alluring mania or jolt of excitement. I distinctly remember feeling this when, as a youngster, I stole carrots at night from a neighbor’s garden and when I sneaked off, too young to drive legally, in my dad’s car on early Sunday mornings before the family had awakened. Such misbehavior produces the thrill of being a “bad boy.” The guilt here, according to psychoanalysis, has been libidinized, meaning, in this context, that libido “sugarcoats” the guilt to produce the thrill of being naughty. Adults can experience this thrill when gambling recklessly, overeating or bingeing, watching porn, behaving promiscuously, or giving rein to other id impulses. Certain thoughts can initiate such activity: “I can do whatever I want,” “You only live once,” or “To hell with it, I’ll do it anyway.” In this way, guilt becomes an emotional launching pad to feel, by way of pleasure in risky activity, that one is aggressively outwitting the inner critic. Such comportment is a desperate ploy to feel power, defiance, and adventurism to cover up underlying passivity.

When we recognize the conflict between the inner critic and inner passivity, and understand inner defensiveness and resistance, we’re able to liberate ourselves from guilt.

—

Earlier posts about guilt:

Get Rid of Guilt with Deeper Insight

Prisoners of Guilt

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Understanding the Psyche of Boys

Boys are being bad, again. They’re displaying “a stunted masculinity,” says the cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic magazine. The article, titled “The Miseducation of the American Boy,” bemoans “the brutal language” of teenagers and young men whose primary values, the article claims, involve dominance, aggression, stoicism, rugged good looks, athleticism, and sexual prowess.

Boys aren’t learning vital facts about human nature.

Indeed, their immaturity is a concern, but let’s not limit the discussion to the miseducation of the American boy. Americans and people throughout the world are being miseducated. We’re not being informed about our psychological nature. We aren’t learning the most pertinent facts about inner conflict in our psyche and how this conflict generates suffering and self-defeat.

This disservice, I believe, is tied to the rapid decline in American’s mental health and the alarming increases in depression and mental health experienced by young Americans. Psychiatry and academic psychology, having undervalued depth psychology, are much to blame for this educational malpractice.

The author of The Atlantic article, Peggy Orenstein, interviewed more than 100 boys and young men, aged 16 to 21, about masculinity, sex, and love. She writes that their sense of masculinity “seems to be contracting,” even “harking back to 1955.” She says the boys express a “stunted masculinity” that overlooks honesty, morality, and leadership skills in favor of an adolescent culture that “fuses hyperrationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence …”

Before I discuss the deeper aspects of this juvenile mentality, here’s more from Orenstein. She does observe that the boys and young men she interviewed, all in college or college-bound, were informed and open-minded. They held “relatively egalitarian” views about girls, had gay and female friends, considered girls to be smart, and were aware of “excesses of masculinity” such as domestic abusers, sexual harassment, and campus rape. Yet the boys, she writes, still considered they had “just one narrow route to successful masculinity.” This “narrow route” required adherence to stoic toughness, combativeness, sexual conquest, and the suppression of feelings.

At one point in her article, Orenstein wonders about the origins of “the brutal language” that young men use to describe sexual contact:

… but why was their language so weaponized. The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power; using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy.

True, their coarse language is not directly about sex. But the language is not directly about power, either. The boys’ “brutal language” is really compensation for the lack of power they feel deep within themselves. The language used by these boys appears to be aggressive, but it’s really a kind of pseudo-aggression, a phony pugnacity that covers up their underlying emotional association with being a frightened, passive self in a world that reveres dynamic masculinity. Boys can easily feel overwhelmed by the challenging of becoming that ideal. Their emotional weakness is inherent to the psyche; it’s not directly the fault of parents, culture, or the boys themselves.

Their coarse language serves as an unconscious psychological defense that, as one example, goes like this: “I’m not a weakling who’s fearful of being exposed as someone who can’t get to first base with girls or who might even be intimidated by them. Look at how aggressive I am when talking with the guys about girls. My words are confident and self-assured, not passive.”

But the boys are passive, in the sense that the profoundly passive experience of childhood—involving helplessness and dependency—is baked into the human psyche. This passivity (termed inner passivity) is a universal feature of the psyche. Why are the boys afraid of it? Deep down they have, in part, identified with this passivity. It’s enmeshed with their self-doubt, inner fear, challenges concerning self-regulation, repressed memories of childhood helplessness, experiences of mother as the original authority-figure, exposure to paternal weakness, and expectations of what it means to be a man. Becoming aware of the extent of one’s emotional identification with this passivity is a jolt to the system.

Girls have inner passivity, too, but they don’t react to it in the same way as boys. Their passivity is often an aspect of femininity and their feminine traits are, of course, socially accepted.

Orenstein writes that, “Sexual conquest—or perhaps more specifically, bragging about your experiences to other boys—is, arguably the most crucial aspect of toxic masculinity.” She paraphrases a comment from one of the boys: Guys need to prove themselves to their guys … they’re going to be dominating … they’re going to push … because the girl is just there as a means for him to get off and to brag.

It’s not helpful to call this behavior “toxic masculinity” because that phrase offers no insight. It’s more helpful to understand that boys use this “weaponized” language because they’re desperate out of inner fear to assert an impression of power in order to hide from others—and from themselves—their deep identification with inner passivity.

The Atlantic article offers many examples of the boys’ coarse language. One boy noted that “being vegans would make us pussies.” When inner passivity enters the discussion, we can see the source of the boys’ coarse language. The expression fag was used pervasively by the boys Orenstein interviewed. The boys were not likely to use the expression in reference to a specific homosexual. Instead, the word was used to mock an alleged lack of toughness—e.g., a boy acting romantically with a girl.

It’s likely that some boys want to stay clear of the passive implications that they believe are represented in homosexuality. Hence, they use language that denies any affinity with homosexuality. Orenstein referenced a widely used Twitter hashtag, #nohomo, used by straight guys who, when expressing positive or sensitive emotions, wanted to inoculate themselves against insults from other guys. Boys routinely confided to her that they felt shut down emotionally, denied access to emphatic language out of fear of feeling or being emasculated. One gay boy, she noted, changed the way he walked to avoid being targeted as “girly.”

What more does this say about the boys’ psyche? Depth psychology helps us to see the specific nature of emotional weakness. One vital aspect of this weakness is inner passivity. While psychological in nature, this passivity is established biologically and is associated with the subordinate or unconscious ego. Every child spends many years in stages of helplessness and dependency, which is a factor in why inner passivity remains a powerful identification (emotional default point) for adults. At an unconscious level, it is often experienced as an essential aspect of our being. We don’t quite know who we are without it. Once inner passivity is identified and its influence understood, it acquires a clinical distinction that enables us to create intellectual and emotional separation from it.

Inner passivity is always in conflict with our inner critic. Inner passivity allows or enables our inner critic to impose its harsh, irrational dictates upon us. Inwardly, we don’t stand up for ourselves against the inner critic (superego). The inner critic is formed, as Sigmund Freud correctly determined, when a baby’s natural biological aggression overwhelms his or her body to establish a drive consisting of self-aggression. This drive has a primitive intelligence, and it poses as our inner authority. When young children first experience the inner critic or superego bearing down upon them, they have little sense of how it might be an alien or invasive force, let alone how it might be counteracted. As adults, we can have difficultly detecting our inner critic (as opposed to neurotic symptoms it induces) because this self-aggression seems such a normal, natural part of us, even to the point of adopting the style and language of a parent.

In the psyche of boys and young men, the self-aggression takes the form of mockery, sarcasm, self-blame, and denigration. Much of this content can be entirely unconscious. Again, boys feel mostly the symptoms such as tension, self-doubt, anxiety, and fear. In more conflicted cases, boys experience guilt, shame, depression, and suicidal thoughts. The inner critic mocks them for any alleged weaknesses or failures. Their identification with inner passivity means they resonate emotionally with a sense of weakness, exacerbated by inner conflict between their abusive inner critic and their meek, defensive inner passivity. They now adopt coarse, aggressive language, thereby coping with the conflict by creating an illusion of being tough and powerful. Many boys value athletics because, in addition to its pure pleasure as a participant or spectator, sporting aggression and “bro-bonding” disclaim passive associations.

The more we recognize these elements of inner conflict, the quicker our consciousness aligns with our inherent goodness. Awareness of inner passivity, therefore, is tremendously helpful. If boys were taught these inner dynamics, they would be much less compelled to act out pseudo-aggressively. Higher consciousness, in this regard, means the game is up. Boys now are free to align with their better self instead of reacting naively and immaturely to unrecognized passivity. Inner strengthening occurs as previously unconscious content becomes conscious, providing vital knowledge to one’s intelligence.

Here’s a small example of this vital knowledge. As The Atlantic article notes, many boys feel that becoming combative is the proper response to being angry. Yet depth psychology teaches us that being angry is often employed as an unconscious defense covering up helpless and powerless feelings that are directly associated with inner passivity. “I’m not feeling passive or victimized,” the unconscious defense contends, “I’m angry at those who act against me.” The anger feels like aggression, whether a boy acts on it or not. When a boy’s intelligence is made aware of this defense, he realizes that acting on such anger would be pointless and self-defeating. A boy’s reactive anger dissipates as he assimilates this deeper understanding.

In every instance of inner conflict, passivity is experienced. Consciously, boys want to feel strong and self-possessed. Yet they’re contending simultaneously with a pronounced or even overwhelming sense of emotional weakness. While their inner passivity itself is mostly unconscious, it is experienced, as mentioned, as tension, self-doubt, anxiety, and fear, particularly when boys are reacting defensively to their inner critic’s challenge to their fortitude, worthiness, integrity, and goodness.

Everyone to some degree has inner conflict. The conflict between inner passivity and the inner critic is enmeshed in other conflicts and attachments involving impressions of being deprived, refused, criticized, controlled, rejected, and abandoned. These conflicts—wanting to feel loved, for instance, versus inwardly expecting rejection—all involve a sense of weakness and passivity, especially in the failure to support oneself emotionally, to fend off the inner critic, to understand the dynamics of self-deception, and to express one’s authenticity.

It is true, boys are being miseducated. Yet the psyche has been treated by educators like an incidental, invisible, unknowable fuzzball. Now’s the time to show it some respect.

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The Joy of Militant Ignorance

Human beings are highly resistant to acquiring self-knowledge. Our ego, the turtle shell of our mind, readily embraces willful, even militant, ignorance as self-protection against the humbling reality of how we instigate and then cover-up our participation in self-defeating behaviors.

Militant ignorance is a stubborn, fierce determination to remain ignorant and stuck in psychological darkness. People aren’t finding the courage required for introspection. M. Scott Peck, author of the bestseller, The Road Less Travelled, wrote that militant ignorance was “one of the better definitions” of evil. The refusal to grow psychologically produces the evil we do to ourselves. Our race toward environmental disaster is exhibit number one.

If we irredeemably harm the Earth, we will have committed a great evil. If our democracy doesn’t survive, we’ll likely be taken down by our ignorance of our psychological nature.

What is this psychological knowledge that humanity is so reluctant to assimilate? Through vanity and defensive self-deception, we fail to understand the nature of the inner conflict at the heart of our mental and emotional life. How is this conflict experienced? Consciously, we want to feel strong, yet we’re pulled on a regular basis into agonizing thoughts, feelings, and memories of being weak, helpless, and at the mercy of others. We want to feel loved, yet many of us are steeped in feeling rejected and unloved. We want to feel brave, yet are plagued with fears. We fluctuate between self-respect and self-doubt. We like praise but fear and hate criticism. Many more such examples exist of inner conflict.

Most people aren’t conscious of their psychological entanglement in inner conflict. All they feel are the troublesome symptoms such as worry, fear, regrets, anger, bitterness, guilt, shame, passivity, even self-hatred. Our lack of awareness means we’re psychologically “programmed” to continue experiencing inner conflict, even though its symptoms are painful. Unconsciously, many of us make the choice to suffer rather than to awaken. Unknowingly, we adopt militant ignorance to “protect us” from the humbling reality of how we participate in our suffering and self-defeat. This is the governing principle in the widespread denial of climate change.

The human ego protects the illusion of its preeminence. When unchallenged, our ego becomes a champion of militant ignorance, blocking our consciousness from accessing our authentic self. It’s likely that more people identify with their ego than with their authentic self. The ego’s self-glorification is visible in the inwardly focused, protective white nationalism that many Americans have adopted. Isn’t Trumpism a glorification of Trump’s prodigious ego and an affirmation of the ego’s “rightful” supremacy? Isn’t Trumpism the creed of those who refuse to grow psychologically, be humbled by reality, or “abased” in an ethnic melting-pot? Cult members adore the leader’s ego in return for second-hand affirmation of their own.

The zealous ego “rescues” people from awareness of the dark side of their psyche. It saves them from the base humility of being a know-nothing. The fainthearted who refuse the hero’s journey love to hear they’re doing the right thing. Their survivalist ego subverts reality into a pleasurable illusion of power and entitlement, giving rise to the joy of denial and stubbornness. Everyday people are now bestowed with the “power” to defy and deny reality. When millions of others join in the celebratory defiance, their collective will subverts science, mocks truth, and threatens nonbelievers. “You can strip me to the bone,” the feeling goes, “but you can’t take away my ego.”

Self-knowledge cultivates our better self, leading us away from incivility and hatred. Yet how can we succeed when even our brightest contemporary scholars and authors have not understood our collusion in generating negative emotions. Mainstream education is not identifying the source of self-defeating impulses and resistance to inner truth. Case in point: The best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari offers a lesson on psychological ignorance in his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Penguin Random House, New York, 2018). The book attempts to illuminate the core issues facing the world, yet his chapter on ignorance and its harmful effects (lesson number 15) is itself lacking vital knowledge.

Harari accurately observes that “the world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on.” Human rationality, he notes, is undermined by emotional reactions and ill-conceived shortcuts. “The best we can do under such conditions,” he writes, “is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance.”

Yes, it’s true, there’s wisdom in humility. But we can do much better than just acknowledge our ignorance. We can become more aware of the particular knowledge that exposes how we generate suffering and self-defeat. This knowledge has tremendous value for us personally and collectively.

Harari points to groupthink and group loyalty as an explanation for widespread ignorance. Yet what is it about human nature that produces groupthink and group loyalty of the self-defeating kind? I’ll return to Harari’s reasons for human ignorance, but first let’s plunge deeper into the psyche. (Readers might now watch for a sense of their own willful or militant resistance to the following psychological facts.)

At levels that are conscious and unconscious, we are haunted by or fixated on what is psychologically unresolved. We make choices at an unconscious level to indulge in (or flirt with, or entertain, or cozy up to) feelings associated with refusal, deprivation, helplessness, feeling controlled, criticism, rejection, and abandonment. Our dark side consists of our unconscious determination to recycle and replay these experiences as negative emotions. These emotions originate as painful frustration in every child’s polarized experience of biological helplessness versus infantile illusions of power. The inner conflicts that emerge from early childhood continue to be experienced compulsively, even when painful, in the new daily context of adult life. Fortunately, the misery can be overcome once the underlying conflicts are understood.

How do we understand our conflicted psyche? We learn, for instance, that when we’re sensitive to feeling criticized by others or easily hurt by their criticism of us, we’re experiencing our emotional attachment to feeling criticized. Inner conflict magnifies the feeling of being criticized. The problem mainly arises when we’re inwardly passive to our inner critic. Our inner critic mocks and scorns us relentlessly—and we absorb much of this abuse. Consequently, we’re familiar with feeling criticized and belittled on an inner level, though we vigorously deny our emotional resonance with (and willingness to tolerate) the feeling of being criticized or belittled. This means we have an emotional attachment to the painful feeling, even an emotional addiction to it. The criticism touches a nerve deep inside, such that we reverberate emotionally with the feeling of being deservedly exposed and targeted as wrong, flawed, or bad.

Our inner critic claims to represent truth but it’s not objective. We experience our inner critic as the master of our personality, though it’s nothing but a nasty troll, a primitive aggression that in early childhood partially turned inward against ourselves. Meanwhile, our unconscious ego, the center of inner passivity, produces inner defensiveness and serves as an enabler of our inner critic. As we become aware of the inner dynamics, we become more intelligent and thereby stronger on an inner level, able to protect ourselves from the inner critic’s cruelty and irrationality.

Other conflicts exist within us. When we’re prone to feeling rejected by others, we’re entangled in self-rejection, meaning we’re personalizing the rejection, taking it deeply into ourselves. The rejection seems to be shining a light on a dark stain of unworthiness deep within. Rejection from others now merges with self-rejection. At this point, we’re likely to project the feeling of rejection outwards to become a person who’s rejecting of others. However, once we see the inner critic’s rejection of us as an alien intrusion, we can neutralize it, at which point we overcome our sensitivity to feeling rejected by others and we’re also less likely to be rejecting of others.

On another front, we learn to recognize self-abandonment as the primary conflict when we’re feeling acutely lonely, rejected, abandoned, unsupported by others, or disconnected from others. Now we understand that self-abandonment, maintained by a lack of self-understanding, is the source of our misery. As we understand the inner dysfunction, we can make repairs (heal ourselves or resolve the conflict) at that level.

If we’re feeling refused by others or unsupported by others, we can trace it back to our unconscious refusal to appreciate ourselves and to support ourselves emotionally. Both the inner critic and inner passivity, as components of our most troublesome inner conflict, block us from accessing emotional strength and our better self. This conflict is likely to be engaged within us when we take ourselves and others for granted.

Inner conflict is the CEO of the dark side. Our dark side is powerful and determined to be felt. As mentioned, we hate to acknowledge its executive powers. Our ego is highly offended at the thought that oppressive decision-making is occurring inside us without our awareness. We were born out of the darkness of the womb, and now as adults we’re yet to be born from the darkness of the psyche.

Through our psychological defenses, we proclaim that we’re innocent of harboring an attachment to (a perverse willingness to experience) these unresolved negative emotions. For instance, though we’re indulging in feeling rejected, our defenses will say, “I want love, not rejection!” This is how, in self-deceptive ignorance and failure to understand the paradoxical nature of the psyche, we cover up our willingness to intensify feelings of being rejected, refused, criticized, or helpless.

If your psyche could speak to you it might say, as one example: “Hey there pal, you’re still sensitive to feeling unloved because you haven’t outgrown childhood impressions, whether real or imagined, of being rejected and unloved. Well, guess what! That feeling of being rejected or unloved is now an emotional attachment. You unwittingly create that negative emotion, whether in your imagination or in actual daily life. You stumble unwittingly into situations that enable you to continue to experience (or act out) that painful emotion. Doing this creates anguish, makes you self-centered, and limits your ability to love others.”

As another example, your psyche, were it to speak aloud, might say: “Guess what, dear sufferer, you have an affinity for feeling weak, foolish, and unappreciated. You identify with yourself, in significant measure, through feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, loss, helplessness, and general passivity. You make a choice unconsciously to go on living through impressions of yourself at your worst—in your thoughts, memories, and conscious and unconscious negative feelings. Other times, with feelings and thoughts of grandiosity and boasting, you hide from yourself an awareness of this activity. The symptoms of this dysfunction are painful, arising as anger, retaliation, blame, hatred, and violence. The scramble of negative emotions in your psyche produces much guilt and shame.”

With these deeper dynamics in mind, let’s return to Harari’s contention that groupthink and group loyalty are at the core of human ignorance. If so, what is at the core of groupthink and group loyalty?

Fears of being unappreciated, unloved, and unworthy are major factors in groupthink and group loyalty. These fears are first felt when young children see or imagine that their parents are not caring enough or loving enough toward them. However, even good parents cannot necessarily protect a child from developing inner conflict. Mysterious biological processes associated with overcoming childhood irrationality are major factors in adult mental health. Despite being decent people, many adults have difficulty believing in their goodness, integrity, and value, just as they have difficulties with self-regulation.

For solace and comfort, people seek the validation of like-minded people, even when those people are aligned emotionally and mentally with blaming, complaining, and resistance to insight. If the group accepts you, you feel some semblance of connection, support, and love. Now you become loyal to the group not for the primary purpose of caring about or loving its individual members (although you might certainly care deeply for them) but because of your inner weakness, your chronic need for validation, appreciation, and support. You’re declining to make the leap into the unknown where, for solid footing, you need a mind of your own.

When people are attached to feeling unloved, they’re also fearful of being unloved. Fear of being unloved is both a psychological symptom and a defense. As a defense, it covers up one’s emotional attachment to feeling unloved. The unconscious defense offers rationalizations such as: “I’m not looking to feel unloved—look at how much I fear the prospect or reality of it.” Or, “I’m not looking to feel unloved—look at how much I enjoy the comfort, solace, and connection of my chosen group.” In this way, groupthink serves as a psychological defense: “I don’t want to feel disconnected emotionally (from others or from myself). Look how good it feels to be connected to a like-minded group.”

When people are weakened by an inability to support themselves emotionally and to connect with their goodness and value, they need group adhesion to provide a feeling of strength. For instance, flag-waving patriots of the zealous variety can use group loyalty, on the scale of nationalism, to feel connected to group identity and solidarity as compensation for inner weakness.

Ignorance of human nature has produced the evil we do to nature, to others, and to ourselves. It’s probably been our greatest failing. We’re now at a critical point on the spectrum of human evolution. It may be that only one giant leap is needed, powered by the best self-knowledge, to get us from these perilous times to a safer perch along this spectrum.

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Answers to Questions From Readers (Part 7)

Readers often send me emails with their comments and questions. Here I answer five of them, all dealing with different aspects of depth psychology, particularly inner passivity and inner conflict. I have done some light editing of the questions, and my responses are in italics.

I am a young man living in Eastern Europe. The story of my life starts with growing up in a dysfunctional family. My father was a heavy drinker and I was beaten by him since I was four years old. The beatings were pretty harsh for a kid that age.

I was just a scared little kid who couldn’t make sense of the beatings and the screams of my father. When I was six years old, my parents ended up in divorce. In the end, they didn’t split up but since then, they never get along.

I have social anxiety issues. I recognize my inner passivity and my inner critic. I’m being mindful of them, but my social anxiety seems to keep me trapped.

When I talk to a girl I like, I’m getting awkward and pretty tense. I can’t feel comfortable talking to her. When she tries to talk to me, I’m starting to behave weird, in the sense that I’m not being myself. Obviously, she can see that I’m not comfortable but she’s not telling me that. What can I do more to overcome this problem? – K.P.

Thanks for writing. You must have felt your father’s hatred when he was beating you. You took it personally, which is what children do. That means you would likely have felt you somehow deserved the punishment. Yet in beating you he was doing to you what he felt about himself.

It appears that, unconsciously and compulsively, through his own psychological weakness, your father tortured himself with self-hatred. He then turned on you and tortured you with angry punishment. In his emotional weakness, he was driven to do to you (his son who he would have felt was a part of himself) what he felt he himself deserved as a supposedly angry loser.

Now you too are dealing with self-rejection and perhaps some self-hatred, which are unresolved emotional attachments that you can liberate yourself from. You get awkward and tense around women you like because you anticipate that they will judge you as unworthy and no good, which deep down you feel is somehow true about you.

Because of your inner passivity, which produces self-doubt and a disconnect from self, you remain stuck in this emotional, irrational state of consciousness. You felt unworthy, helpless, and no good when you were beaten by your father. Deep inside, you are still emotionally attached to (and identified with) those negative emotions. It’s now up to you to liberate yourself from that false impression that your father’s abuse produced. It’s very likely you can succeed.

I encourage you to keep reading the content on my website, and perhaps to get one or more of my books. Depth psychology is a challenging subject but one that is richly rewarding as we become more knowledgeable about it. Try to read at least a little bit on the subject every day. This will activate your mind and get you pointed in a good direction for inner growth, personal fulfillment, and success in the world. After a while, the knowledge becomes part of your intelligence and you are able to establish a good, harmonious relationship with yourself. Ultimately, of course, you are trying to establish a firm connection to the loving and confident self at the core of your being.

—

A friend of mine is a social worker. She mentioned to me how she wants to do therapy, perhaps for folks with mental illness. She stated how she thinks people like this need to be taught social skills. She also said some people just need medication (which I disagree with).

I passionately shared my personal experience of the dangers of psychiatric medications and how addictive they are. I could see she was thinking a little bit, but she was like, “Yea, some people just need pills.” I did agree that some people probably needed to resort to pills (though I don’t think I expressed this as clearly as I would have liked).

There were so many other things she said that were just complete and utter garbage. I was so dumbfounded I didn’t even address some of them, partly because it likely would have been a waste of breath.

I woke up the next morning and was still hot about it. Especially because my very own friend wants to help people with mental illness and thinks they need pills and social skills. I sent her a text with links to alternative approaches, said it was near and dear to my heart. I’m still upset and I wonder if I could have handled this differently? I get such intense reactions to people, especially around this topic. – W.L.

It’s fine to be passionate in discussions like this, but keep in mind the more heated you get, the greater the chance you will fail to be convincing. When you represent your position in such discussions, you probably want to do it mainly for your own satisfaction, not to convince the other person. It’s often good practice to be emotionally detached as to whether the other person is open to what you’re saying. That way you’re not at the mercy of whether or not she has been positively influenced by what you say. The challenge is to refrain from getting triggered, while expressing yourself in a way that does credit to you.

You wrote “especially because my very own friend …” That means you’re personalizing something here, perhaps feeling powerless or helpless to persuade even a close friend. The more you feel powerless, the more likely you are to get triggered and react emotionally. Your emotional intensity feels like power, and that covers up your underlying sense of helplessness. In other words, getting riled up like this covers up your unresolved tendency to experience these kinds of situations through a sense of weakness or helplessness (you mentioned that you hadn’t expressed yourself clearly during the discussion).

Your friend is likely to be helpful to many people, and pharmaceuticals can be the best option available to people who don’t have access to good psychotherapy, or who won’t do the therapy even if they do have access. It seems, as well, that many people have to try psychiatric medications to see for themselves whether this option is helpful or not.

—

I have been reading articles on your website for a year now, and have read your book The Phantom of the Psyche. Things are suddenly starting to get clearer and understandable in my mind regarding inner passivity.

When I was eight my parents divorced, my mother left to live in another city, and I stayed with my father. She didn’t really abandon me, just moved to another city. But the thing is, I didn’t experience it like that. I felt betrayed, abandoned, and really, really angry with her.

I stopped answering her calls but my father made me talk to her, which just amplified my hatred toward her. I knew rationally that she loved me, but I didn’t want to accept that love.

Since then I have been looking for love everywhere. Since I wasn’t good with girls, I got rejected a lot. I still have a hard time accepting love, though deep inside I am dying for it. I want it, but I feel I am really sabotaging myself. I want love, but more than that I don’t want it, unconsciously. I am 27 years old and it feels that part of me is still a child searching for love that he never got. – J.U.

It is quite predictable, given your circumstances, that you interpreted the situation with your parents’ divorce as if you were being rejected by your mother. Many children would feel rejected in such a situation. It’s important now, though, for you to understand that you have an emotional attachment to the feeling of being rejected. This attachment will cause you to keep reproducing situations with women in which rejection happens, whether you’re being rejected or you’re the one doing the rejection.

Keep up your effort to understand the psychological dynamics that make you sensitive to this feeling. It means that deep within you there is some self-rejection going on. That’s why it’s hard for you to feel love or to create a loving relationship. The more you understand this, the sooner you can free yourself from this predicament.

A person who’s strong emotionally is not be desperate for love from others. Most important to emotionally healthy people is the love they feel for others, and for themselves. Healthy people value love but they are not desperate for it because they already embody love in themselves. I hope that is helpful.

—

As I read your articles, I am seeing things that I was unaware of. A new, previously unconscious world is revealing itself to me. Let me ask you about this issue. As far back as I can remember, I feel it’s been my job to be responsible for the thoughts, feelings and actions of others.

Even if it’s just a stranger walking across the street, I feel responsible for whatever he or she is doing, which is irrational. I feel like I have a responsibility to control their actions, feeling and thoughts, somehow not respecting their free will. I think I learned to behave this way because my father was very abusive to me when I was very young. I felt that everything he did was because of me, because I did something bad.

Later in life, I perceived that I have to try to control others in order for them not to abuse me, or not to reject me. Since controlling others is hard to do, I feel every day the powerlessness of succeeding at this. I also often feel extreme shame, and my self-respect and self-confidence are fragile. So, what are your thoughts about this and what should I be doing instead? – J.O.

Yes, as a child, you would have felt helpless and powerless against the abuse of your father. This sense of helplessness now permeates your psyche, and you feel the effect of it in daily life. As a result, you will be inclined, as compensation, to try to feel some semblance of power. Unfortunately, this semblance of power is likely to be an illusion. For instance, passive people sometimes get angry at others because the anger feels like power, even though it is usually inappropriate and self-defeating. Anger is the only way they can generate the feeling of power. Other times, people produce an illusion of power mostly through their imagination.

That’s what you are doing. In feeling that you have control over the actions and feelings of strangers, you produce, in your imagination, an illusion of power. This is a psychological defense, an unconscious maneuver to cover up your emotional attachment to feeling passive. The defense goes like this: “I’m not emotionally attached to feeling powerless and helpless. I want to feel power. I can even feel power over strangers. This is who I am, someone with power!”

Of course, you will be troubled by the irrationality that the defense produces. If you don’t understand the deeper dynamics, you will be compelled to keep producing this defense and continue to be mired emotionally in the disturbing irrationality of it.

The shame you feel at different times arises largely from how, through inner passivity, you absorb punishment from your inner critic for allegedly having faults and being unworthy. The challenge is to begin to recognize inner passivity in yourself so you can begin to shift away from your unconscious identification with it. As you get stronger, you’ll no longer accept punishment from your inner critic, at which point the shame will disappear.

—

I’m wondering if a grasp of the dynamics of depth psychology is a lifelong learning thing, or is it achievable in a shorter time frame? Not for achievement as such, but for reduced suffering and for the ability to be more productive and joyful.

There are a couple of blocks I notice: first, what about behaviors of ours that cause significant or lasting harm to others (that we feel guilt for and are guilty of), where the inner critic is right to chastise us?

Second, real social injustices by corrupt governments are dismantling democracy and imposing draconian rules that shut out voices of dissension while punishing the poor and weak. This is happening in Western societies where we were raised with leaders of some integrity and governments that respected democratic processes with its checks and balances. Our inner passivity brings us despair, victimhood, submission, while the inner critic beats us up for doing so. If you have time to answer, much appreciated. – R.W.

Our progress overall can be a life-long process, yet we can start to grasp the principles of depth psychology relatively quickly and have them start working for us within weeks or months of beginning the learning process.

On your first point, we often play up or embellish upon the idea that we have caused harm to others. This produces a feeling or illusion of power that is really a cover-up for our underlying passivity. Usually, in giving credence to the idea that we have hurt others, we are also giving ammunition to our inner critic to punish us, which through our inner passivity we are quick to accept. This is a way in which we unwittingly maintain inner conflict between inner passivity and self-aggression.

Sometimes, of course, we do hurt others, but this hurt might be something they were bound to experience one way or another because of their own self-damaging tendencies. Usually, the hurt we do to others is innocent in the sense we wouldn’t do it if we were more conscious. Don’t fret about the past. Make yourself more conscious now so that you don’t hurt others in the future.

On your other point, we can have an unconscious tendency to use the political forces of resistance and regression as a way to experience our own passivity. In other words, we use a challenging external situation to sneak in our passivity and thereby experience political challenges as if they can’t be overcome or as if we don’t have what it takes to be a force for good.

Many of us have a tendency to identify with the poor and weak in a way that can be unhealthy, meaning we use the poor and weak as props to experience our own inner weakness and lack of confidence and assertiveness. We want to become attuned to how, in subtle, unconscious ways, we experience these self-defeating tendencies. The best way to impart strength and value to others is to feel these qualities in ourselves.

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