Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 8

A Toxic Inner Process Afflicts Humanity

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

Toxic comparing is a self-defeating process.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Don’t Let America Betray Herself

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

Feel within yourself the value and dignity of democracy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2631 {
border-bottom: 0;
background-image:url('https://whywesuffer.com/wp-content/pl...
width:30px;
height:30px;
}

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

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

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

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



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