Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 9

Breaking the Chains of Self-Imposed Oppression

There are two main forms of oppression, and we’re candidates for unnecessary suffering if we can’t distinguish between them. Oppression when imposed on others is obviously cruel and harmful. Yet there exists another kind of oppression, a torment we unconsciously place on ourselves.

Self-imposed oppression is the freedom we deny ourselves.

Oppression might be impossible to avoid under a dictatorship, yet multitudes of prospering people in democratic societies experience painful feelings of oppression. This self-imposed oppression is the freedom we deny ourselves.

A sense of oppression is associated with feeling trapped, restricted, inhibited, controlled, disrespected, helpless, and imposed upon. It’s common for people to feel oppressed by bosses and work, as well as by customers, clients, and the demands of the rat race.

We can also feel oppressed by corporations or by federal, state, and local governments. Christians can feel oppressed by secularists, and vice-versa. We can feel oppressed by constant cravings, everyday desires, sensible and necessary laws, nagging self-criticism, along with physical ailments, disease, or emotional problems such as moodiness, anxiety, fear, and depression.

Weighing oppressively upon many people are the challenges of keeping up with rapidly advancing technologies, the rough-and-tumble of democracy’s politics, the rush of cultural change, and even the necessary chores of daily life. Some men feel oppressed by feminists, and vice-versa. Husbands can feel controlled by wives, and vice-versa.

It all feels like being strong-armed by an invisible commanding presence. A client of mine described it as “being in the driver’s seat of your life, but only as the chauffer.”

Many people are easily convinced that they’re oppressed by outside forces. Both white supremacists and terrorists are able to convince disaffected young males that they’re being oppressed and need to fight back. Masses of Americans, fed conspiracy theories by certain media, believe they are being oppressed by a malicious deep state in the bowels of the federal government. This is a projection of the deep state of oppression holed up in their own psyche.

There’s a tendency to believe that feelings of oppression are caused solely by the external world around us. For instance, the Wikipedia entry for oppression lists 14 types of oppression (including racial, class, gender, religious, and age)—and yet the entry does not mention self-imposed oppression. That is a significant oversight considering how just about everyone is oppressed, often to an intense degree, by his or her inner critic or superego. We have in our psyche a passive relationship with our inner critic, which is the source of our tendency to embellish feelings of being oppressed by outside forces.

This unconscious relationship with our inner critic is facilitated by inner passivity, which creates a tendency and even willingness to experience ourselves as if we’re at the mercy of situations and events. Because of this psychological condition, we have difficulty assessing accurately the degree to which an external situation is legitimately oppressive. Our worries, anxieties, fears, and feelings of helplessness all contribute to feelings of oppression because we’re unwittingly using the challenges of daily life as a means to feel victimized, passive, and oppressed.

Many people, for instance, are “injustice collectors.” They are prone to see the daily jostle of life in terms of victims and injustice. Injustice happens, for sure, but it can also be used by us for psychological mischief, namely to deepen our own sense of helplessness and victimhood. This self-defeat can occur compulsively when one’s inner conflict remains unrecognized and unresolved. Injustice collectors unwittingly feed their weakness, namely their readiness to feel oppressed by real or imagined injustices or to identify in self-defeating manner with people who are actually or supposedly being oppressed. Hence, they produce emotionally biased interpretations of reality.

We create this irrationality because of the degree to which we are under the influence of conflicting dynamics in our psyche. (Read, “A Chaos Theory of the Mind” and “12 Ways We Fail to See and Experience Reality.”)

Unwittingly, people sometimes create props and situations through which they can stage feelings of being oppressed. One client of mine (I’ll call her Judy) kept “a little spiral notebook” in which she listed her daily chores and duties. “The list is my boss,” she said. “It comes out first thing in the morning. It’s checked over before I have my coffee. Then I have another separate list for work. I’m always looking at it and feeling bad about what I haven’t gotten done.”

Judy suffered from an irrational impression that everything would fall apart if she didn’t have the list. She strove, as she said, “to be in some sense of power.” Describing the feeling, she said, “Somebody has to do this a certain way, things need to be monitored and pushed. I don’t exist if I don’t strain. I’ll collapse into nothingness if I’m not buzzing around in some stress and agitation.”

Judy had clear evidence she was colluding in accentuating the stress level and sense of oppression. She had to leave her house by 8 a.m. for work, and she had plenty of time to prepare for the day when she got up at 6:30 a.m. But she frequently pushed the snooze button on her alarm clock and arose a half-hour late. Then she had to scurry about, feeling “pushed, rushed, squeezed, and under the gun.” That oppressed feeling persisted throughout the day.

“That oppressed feeling,” I told Judy, “is pure inner passivity, particularly in the sense that you are choosing unconsciously to experience oppression in conjunction with a felt inability to rise above it. Feeling passive in this way is an emotional attachment, which means you feel fated to go on living like this. You can break free of this passivity as you come into a deeper recognition of your affinity for it and your identification with it.”

Judy was beginning to understand the underlying dynamics whereby she used her lists to embellish upon feelings of unresolved passivity and disconnect from self. “I can now see the inner defense I’m using to cover up this self-sabotage,” she told me. “It goes like this: ‘I’m not identified with being passive and alienated from myself. Look at how active I am. Look at how much I want to be strong and effective and get things done.’”

Judy was playing in her mind a refrain that is common to many of us: “Oh my, there’s so much I need to do and think about. How can I ever manage to take care of it all!” She was using her tardiness in getting out of bed to accentuate this feeling of being pushed and rushed, thereby intensifying the passive experience. Common symptoms of such self-defeating behavior include feeling overwhelmed, anxious, and even guilt and shame when we begin to flounder under the sense of urgency. When we fail to keep pace, our inner critic can impose the sentence of guilt or shame as punishment for our alleged failure. This keeps us entangled in inner conflict and inner passivity.

Some people believe themselves to be oppressed (trapped, frustrated, helpless) in their relationships. Often, they’re unable to identify what their partner could be doing that would cause them to feel oppressed. Much of the time their partner is not doing anything that could realistically be considered oppressive. The oppressed feeling is being manufactured internally, the dynamics of which are understood by depth psychology.

Political and social relationships are also affected. Political polarization, for instance, can be intensified by our readiness to feel oppression and thereby to feel oppressed by one another. In this way, humans act out the unresolved inner conflict between wanting to feel self-respect versus harboring emotional resonance with feeling that one’s essence and values are being disrespected. Entangled with these dynamics is the psychological resistance we all have to freeing ourselves of inner conflict and negative emotions.

Among mentally ill people, the sense of oppression can reach levels of insanity. A man with malignant paranoia can feel oppressed because he’s not legally free to do harm to certain people who he dislikes. The only way he can lift his sense of oppression is to imagine carrying out a mass killing or perhaps to actually do it.

As mentioned, we can feel oppression directly from our environment and indirectly through the plight of other people. We embellish feelings of oppression by identifying emotionally with people who we perceive to be oppressed. Many kind people are indeed sympathetic and compassionate toward those who, like political prisoners, are indeed oppressed. Yet just as many get into psychological mischief by “sneaking in” emotionally the feeling of oppression as they identify with the oppression that some other person might or might not be feeling. Codependents do this all the time. This produces emotional distress that serves no purpose, along with distorted perceptions.

Case in point: People who accuse others of “microaggressions” (a term that condemns subtle derogatory or hostile intentions toward others, often in reference to minorities) usually haven’t taken into account the possibility that their own neurotic sensitivity to feeling slighted, disrespected, and oppressed is clouding their judgment. Those hurling the term at others are often identifying with real or alleged victims of so-called microaggressions, which means they’re resonating in themselves with emotions associated with oppression and disrespect. They’re sneaking in the side-door to feel through others what is unresolved in themselves. When we’re strong emotionally and have established self-respect, we don’t easily get triggered by the foolish microaggressions of others. When we haven’t established enough self-respect, we’ll likely be on the receiving end of microaggressions from our own inner critic. Accusing others, then, is only covering up what we’re doing to ourselves.

In other words, the unconscious intention of the neurotic person is not to redress an alleged microaggression but instead to repeatedly experience within himself or herself the unresolved feeling of being disrespected, unworthy, or oppressed. When someone blames a “microaggressor” for causing his distress or shame, he’s unconsciously employing a psychological defense to cover up his own emotional resonance with feeling judged in a negative light.

“Fat-shaming” is another term that’s applied with a lack of insight into self-imposed oppression. It’s true that overweight or obese people are often mocked in a way that’s unkind and abusive. But it doesn’t necessarily help to become overly protective of overweight people. If they want to avoid suffering, they have to make some effort to be strong enough emotionally to avoid feeling shamed or oppressed by boorish behavior. Overweight people can be first in line, through their inner critic, to shame themselves. Their unrecognized inner passivity makes them inwardly receptive to scorn and mockery from their inner critic. This means they feel, to some degree, that the scorn or mockery has some validity and that their guilt or shame is thereby appropriate. To cover up their secret willingness to accept punishment in the form of shame and guilt, they claim to hate feeling judged and they become upset or angry at those who are allegedly judging them negatively. This claim serves as an unconscious defense covering up their willingness to passively soak up the feeling of being mocked and scorned, whether from their inner critic or from others.

Evidence for this insight from depth psychology can be seen in many people who, just slightly overweight, believe they’re perceived negatively by others for their physical appearance. Their misperception is based in inner conflict, in this case the dynamic between inner passivity and the inner critic, whereby they are compelled to use the fact of being even slightly overweight as an excuse or a means to perpetuate unresolved inner conflict. They don’t understand the inner struggle taking place, in which they’re trying frantically to minimize the punishment demanded by the harsh inner critic.

When we access the right knowledge in these and other situations, we’re able to acquire a highly developed sense of what is happening. We can now begin to realize our inherent goodness, integrity, and strength, and rescue ourselves from self-imposed oppression.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2618 {
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;
}



Share This:

Jordan Peterson’s Blind Spot

With his lectures, interviews, and YouTube exposure, Jordan Peterson is having a positive influence on many thousands of people. The Canadian psychologist has been described as “the most influential public intellectual” in the Western world. He has, however, become a controversial figure because of attacks on his writings and statements from some social scientists and supporters of political correctness.

Practicing the art of self-discovery.

Peterson is a liberal-minded professor who, with humor as well as considerable writing and speaking skills, blends psychology, philosophy, religion, history, politics, fairy tales, and mythology to persuade people to take responsibility for their lives, to believe in their value and goodness, and to trust in themselves.

In addition to teaching at the University of Toronto, Peterson has maintained a psychotherapy practice that offers what appears to be an eclectic approach to treatment. He’s a master of the pep talk and an advocate for what he calls “genuine conversation” with his clinical clients. “You have to scour your psyche,” he writes in his international bestseller, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Penguin Random House, 2018). “You have to clean that damned thing up.”

I contend, however, that Peterson would be wise to pull out more heavy-duty scouring pads because he’s not getting to the deeper layers of the psyche. He writes a great deal about the polarity of order and chaos, as these “elements” apply to inner life. Chaos is “unexplored territory” or “the domain of ignorance,” he writes, while order is the known “explored territory.” Yet there exists a more fundamental polarity that relates directly to his subject matter. This is the polarity in both human nature and the animal kingdom involving passivity and aggression.

12 Rules for Life is infused with descriptions of passive and aggressive behaviors related to lobsters, chickens, songbirds, the dominance hierarchy, tyrannical oppression, demonic forces, relationship power dynamics, sexual assaults, and the burdens of “Being.” Other topics in Peterson’s book include aggressive children, physical disciplining of children, passive parents who coddle children, fear of speaking truth, and the appropriateness of challenging authority. Yet Peterson doesn’t frame these passive and aggressive themes with sufficient coherence.

The passivity-aggression polarity is a primary component of inner conflict, which depth psychology has always claimed exists within us. The aggressive side of the conflict assails and condemns us, while the passive side tries, ineffectively and weakly, to defend our integrity and lessen the punishment. How does this conflict arise in the first place? Natural aggression is part of our instinctual or biological life. Underlying our aggression, Peterson writes, “are ancient biological circuits.” Our distant ancestors were aggressive hunters, and now we have to continue to be somewhat aggressive or at least assertive to hold our own in the world. In early childhood, however, some measure of this biological aggression is turned inward against our own self. This self-aggression develops when some of the child’s considerable biological aggression is blocked from flowing outward into the environment due to the child’s weak musculature, parental decrees, and social norms or requirements. Self-aggression, which can be moderated and even disarmed by our growing consciousness, possesses little in the way of human sensitivity or values. As primitive self-aggression, it functions as an inner critic (a superego, inner prosecutor, or hidden master of the personality), and it attacks our integrity and sense of self with scorn, mockery, and general harassment. Because of our emotional weakness (or lack of consciousness), we fail to protect ourselves from it.

Our inner critic barges into our emotional life and succeeds in punishing us with guilt, shame, anxiety, and depression. It lays a nasty trip on us with accusations of wrongdoing, even for minor or imaginary transgressions or simply for our human imperfections. Many people don’t even know when this is happening to them. All they feel is self-doubt, anxiety, and misery.

Peterson does mention “a critical internal voice and spirit” that “condemns our mediocre efforts.” But he quickly plays down its influence: “If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavours—or your life, or life itself—perhaps you should stop listening.” He fails to see, however, the very significant reason for why we cannot easily stop listening. Within our psyche is an unrecognized enabler of the critical voice. We can stop listening to that voice once we dislodge its enabler.

Many people know about the inner critic. But people are truly blind to its partner in crime, this enabler of self-criticism that I call inner passivity. This is our psyche’s deeper “domain of ignorance,” to use Peterson’s description of chaos. Because this part of us is unconscious (Peterson’s “unexplored territory”), human beings aren’t accessing the emotional strength and spirit (analogous to Peterson’s “Being”) that would enable us to deflect or neutralize the belittling, cruel irrationality that our inner critic imposes upon us. When we do manage to instill our intelligence with the best psychological knowledge, we begin to disentangle ourselves from inner passivity. At this point, our enhanced consciousness merges with our prized “Being,” the authentic self that Peterson wisely highlights as our true essence and foundation in the world.

Research scholar Russell H. Davis notes in his book, Freud’s Concept of Passivity (International Universities Press, 1993) that 239 occurrences of the three words passivity, passively, and passive are contained in Freud’s writings. Unfortunately, Freud never produced an overall theory of passivity that might have been incorporated into general psychology. He did, however, identify activity-passivity as one of the three primary polarities governing the psyche, along with the polarities of pleasure-displeasure and ego-outside world. According to Davis, our passivity is largely repressed and finds expression only indirectly through neurotic symptoms. Instead of recognizing this passivity (largely the residue in the adult psyche of the infant’s and child’s emotional experiences of helplessness), we possess a defensive instinct that prompts us to deny that we’re under the influence of inner passivity. Peterson himself makes reference to the defensive instinct when he mentions “willful blindness,” describing it as “the refusal to know something that could be known.”

Almost all experts in psychology have a blind spot concerning the existence and dynamics of inner passivity. Peterson tries to close in on it through its symptoms, but, despite a valiant effort, he’s not able to bring it into focus as a clinical entity. Using material from his book, I now attempt to give evidence for the existence of inner passivity as a clinical entity and to give some indication of the trouble it instigates in the psyche of a great many people. (Much more information is provided in my book, The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity.)

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson has a 12-page section (pp. 267-278) titled, “What Do We See When We Don’t Know What We’re Looking At?” While this section attempts to describe the nature of chaos, Peterson has produced in these pages a remarkably apt portrayal of the torments that inner passivity inflicts upon us. Since he’s unable to identify this source, he has indeed chosen an apt heading for the section. The content in the section—packed with questions, maybes, what ifs, and “the fog of uncertainty” that does not lift—induces a morbid sense of insecurity and helplessness. This writing is the prose equivalent of The Second Coming by Yeats (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”), a poem which Peterson quotes in full toward the end of the section. His prescription, in part, is to speak “carefully and precisely.” If we do so, he writes, “we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place …”

Earlier in his book (p. 24), he also writes: “The forces of tyranny expand inexorably to fill the space made available for their existence. People who refuse to muster appropriately self-protective territorial responses are laid open to exploitation as much as those who genuinely can’t stand up for their own rights because of a more essential inability or a true imbalance in power.” [My italics]

With these words, Peterson is describing a situation in the outer world, but his words (apparently unbeknownst to him) also describe the nature of the passivity-aggression polarity. This statement above captures the essence of how our inner critic prevails tyrannically over weak inner passivity. The above italicized words, however, hardly begin to bring inner passivity into focus. When instead we reveal inner passivity as a clinical entity, we now understand it as a primitive intelligence operating according to its own rules as it bumbles timidly and ineffectively in the face of the inner critic. Inner passivity, the terra incognita of our psyche, does have a weak voice as well as an intelligence capable of producing our psychological defenses. It also produces the instinct or impulse that makes us inwardly and outwardly defensive. Inner passivity has many of the properties that classical psychoanalysis attributed to the unconscious ego. When we do bring it into focus, we’re able figuratively to turn on the lights in what was a darkened room to see and deal from a position of growing strength with our adversarial inner critic.

Elsewhere (p. 211), Peterson writes: “Consider a person who insists that everything is right in her life. She avoids conflict, and smiles, and does what she is asked to do. She finds a niche and hides in it. She does not question authority or put her own ideas forward, and does not complain when mistreated … But a secret unrest gnaws at her heart. She is still suffering, because life is suffering … there is nothing of value in her existence to counter-balance life’s troubles.”

Peterson leaves this anonymous lady, who is plagued by inner passivity, in the lurch. There’s no more mention of her. He has no remedy for her. He leaves her stuck in an emotional, existential predicament. The remedy, as he apparently believes, is “genuine conversation,” the dialogue he has with his clients. Obviously, he wants more than just having psychotherapist and client sympathetic to each other’s enduring misery. An alternative approach is to teach the principles of depth psychology, as the psychotherapist explores with clients the ways in which these principles might apply to them.

The best psychotherapy teaches clients about the psyche’s operating system and its conflicting dynamics, at the same time that it helps clients apply what they’re learning to their own individual mental, emotional, and behavioral experiences. Clients become aware of their strong inclination to identify emotionally with inner passivity. The therapy is not so much a treatment process as it is a learning process. (Here are some of its basic principles.) Clients are able with this method to decide for themselves what is true and what is not true about their inner life, based on progress in overcoming self-defeating symptoms. We need truth to connect to Being. The most reliable truth for us individually is what we come to realize about ourselves while exploring our psyche at its deepest reaches. This effort produces sublime truth, the knowledge that shows exactly what has been blocking us from realizing our profound goodness, worthiness, and potential.

Peterson provides several examples of how he listens carefully to his clients. He does truly care for them, and he has research showing the benefits of his approach. However, the observed benefits might be superficial. By borrowing on the emotional support or ego-strength of the therapist, clients are often able to drop one or more of their disagreeable symptoms. However, they can do this without resolving the underlying conflict, dysfunction, or neurosis. While one or more of their symptoms might become less problematic, new ones will inevitably arise when conflict at the source remains intact.

Peterson makes this statement (p. 216): “Depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, like cancer, all involve biological factors beyond the individual’s immediate control.” This statement can easily be taken to mean that depression is beyond the individual’s control. But we do have control with respect to depression when we access our emotional strength. (Peterson has had bouts of clinical depression, and I wish him well in overcoming that.)

His statement above and his repetitive insistence that “life is suffering” play up a sense of helplessness. People often chose unconsciously to experience themselves as helpless victims of some real or allegedly oppressive force in order to avoid the effort, often of heroic measure, needed to muster inner strength. When Peterson plays up the helplessness factor, his words could be used by some to validate their cynicism or nihilism. Yes, biological factors as well as diet can be significant influences in clinical depression. Also important though is the degree to which depression is the emotional price we pay when, due to inner passivity, we accept from our inner critic the punishment of emotional suffering for our real or alleged mistakes, shortcomings, failures, and even our supposed unworthiness. We give ourselves a better chance of overcoming depression by understanding inner passivity and inner conflict and applying the knowledge to daily life.

When we understand inner passivity, we stop being defensive and cease to make compromises with the inner critic or superego. I do not like that Peterson recommends we try to compromise with our “critical internal voice.” Compromise is exactly what inner passivity tries to do in its encounters with the inner critic, but such compromise is often a bad bargain that gives the inner critic much leeway to punish us. (See “The Inner Critic is a Primitive Brute Force.”) Inner passivity can also inflict misery upon us without necessarily having the inner critic involved.

When overcoming inner passivity, we can begin to feel and express power without having to become agitated or angry. Peterson rightfully says (p. 23) that healthy aggression is appropriate “to push back against oppression, speak truth, and motivate resolute movement forward in times of strife, uncertainty and danger.” However, he also writes (p. 23) that “those who are only or merely compassionate and self-sacrificing (and naïve and exploitable) cannot call forth the genuinely righteous and appropriately self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves.” But anger is not necessary to defend oneself. And we ought not to tell passive people to use anger as a remedy: They’ll just flip back and forth between anger and passivity.

It’s common for people to express reactive, over-the-top anger. When they’re too inwardly passive, this kind of anger might be the only form of power they have access to. Yet this over-the-top anger becomes self-defeating. While it might in the moment feel gratifying, it typically leaves an emotional hangover of guilt or shame. True power has access to healthy aggression, yet it doesn’t need to be fueled by anger. This is understood by people who are recognizing and addressing their inner passivity.

Inner passivity makes us sensitive to the notion of being oppressed. Inner passivity prompts us to give our power away to real or imagined oppressors and to create the emotional impression that we’re at the mercy of someone or something. A person can become emotionally biased in this way, causing him or her, for instance, to exacerbate the impression of political correctness as an oppressive force. When this happens, the person’s unconscious defense might be, among other possibilities: “I’m not overly sensitive to the feeling of being oppressed. Oppression really is happening. Those ideologues are true oppressors. It’s all real. I’m not passive, I’m aggressive, and I’m going to aggressively oppose them.”

Peterson deserves credit for challenging the excesses of political correctness and the claims of injustice collectors and victimhood plaintiffs. In our debates on such subjects, we’ll be wiser, more civil, and have more fun as we quell the chaos of our amazing psyche.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2612 {
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;
}



Share This:

Learning to See Ourselves Objectively

In one of his great poems, Robert Burns generously recognized wee Mousie, “earth-born companion, an’ fellow-mortal!” In another poem, he wrote (as rendered in modern English), “Oh would some Power the gift give us / to see ourselves as others see us!”

We can acquire new insight into inner passivity.

Yes, that would indeed provide us with enlightening and in many cases humbling and even shocking new perceptions of ourselves. For best transparency, however, we would still need to factor in the degree to which others see us subjectively, with their own biases and projections.

To become wise and free of inner conflict, we do need to see ourselves nakedly, in all our strengths and weaknesses. Yet psychological dynamics that are largely unconscious—such as resistance, denial, regression, defensiveness, egotism, and fear—block us from deeper insight. Seeing examples of our inner blindness can help us to understand and overcome the problem.

I have an example, a famous stage play, to show just how blind we are to our inner life and how little we know of unconscious forces at play in our psyche. This play, Waiting for Godot, is a classic example of how humankind is largely under the influence of inner passivity, which is a vitally significant aspect of our inner life that is largely hidden from our awareness. The protagonists (along with the villains) in many great plays, films, and novels are steeped in inner passivity, and Godot is perhaps the most flagrant example of it.

Inner passivity is a psychological weakness, a kind of software program in our psyche that limits our evolvement. It’s the poster child for self-sabotage, the coach potato of noble aspirations, and the missing link in really understanding human nature. This feature of our psyche represents the ways in which we’re still infantile, and it’s a major hindrance to moral, psychological, and social development.

Inner passivity steamrolls over us in Waiting for Godot, first produced in 1953. A poll by the British Royal National Theatre called it “the most significant English language play of the 20th Century.” Goodreads lists it number four in the top 100 stage plays. BuzzFeed lists it number 29 in “32 Plays You Have to Read Before You Die.” Entertainment Weekly listed it number seven in “50 Greatest Plays of the Past 100 Years.”

Waiting for Godot features two main characters, tramps in bowler hats who sit or stand by a tree on a country road, waiting impatiently for Godot, an unknown character who never shows up. From the start, with the first four words of the play, passivity leaps to the fore when the character Estragon says bleakly, as he struggles unsuccessfully to take off his boot, “Nothing to be done.” The other main character, Vladimir, immediately concurs. The dialog between them is endlessly morose, despairing, disjointed, confused, fatalistic, cynical, self-pitying, and defeatist. Waiting hopelessly with a vague expectation of being saved, they’re paralyzed with indecision, bewildered by misunderstandings, and plagued by suicidal impulses. Three secondary characters also reek of passivity.

My only interest in writing critically about the play is to discuss its unrecognized psychological dimensions. Waiting for Godot: A tragicomedy in two acts is the full title of the play, yet there’s little that’s tragic and nothing heartedly funny. What could possibly make it captivating?

The characters’ intense displays of helplessness, victimization, despair, and failure incite in members of the audience, in ways silent and subtle, their own struggles with inner weakness and self-doubt. The psyche’s path of least resistance leads through dark emotional resonance with the dregs of inner life. The tramps leave the indelible impression that they’re highly unlikely to ever see, or ever be willing to consider, what is required to overcome their passivity. Theater-goers unwittingly identify with the tramps’ passivity and their resistance to self-knowledge.

The play ends with Vladimir saying, “Well? Shall we go?” Estragon replies, “Yes, let’s go.” Then they stay paralyzed in place as the curtain falls. If anything, the play is a parody of inner passivity. Seen as parody and condensed into a five-minute Saturday Night Live skit, it might be good for a few laughs. When we don’t view the play with sufficient discernment, however, we allow it to exploit our psychological ignorance and emotional weakness, leaving an unpleasant emotional hangover.

Why is the play rated so highly? When skillfully performed, it’s dramatically captivating. We can easily reverberate emotionally with the plight of its pathetic characters. When viewing this play, theater-goers who are psychologically naïve become gawkers of human depravity. They’re co-conspirators in a hidden plot, conjured unconsciously by the playwright, to indulge vicariously in the spectacle of debased humanity. Schadenfreude descends creepily from playhouse rafters as members of the audience, naturally wanting pleasure from the play, can only titillate their libido in a perverse manner. The audience’s titters of laughter arise as relief in their apparent superiority and from smug glee in the misery of others.

The play’s cathartic or intrinsic value is minimal. As I see it, viewers of the play experience only two small consolations: “Thank God I don’t suffer like them!” and “Thank Heavens I haven’t sunk to that level of existence.” This perversity is more subtle than going to a cockfight and taking pleasure as the creatures tear each other apart—yet the psychological dynamics are comparable.

Some writers claim the play probes the human condition and requires us to face unpleasant truths as we stare into the abyss. Yes, the characters do stare into the abyss, and likely (to grant them a consciousness the play apparently denies them) they’re painfully aware of their frailty. Yet the dialogue is devoid of any glimmer of insight concerning that frailty and how it might be overcome. Suffering has no value or benefit unless it leads to self-development. Characters in a play don’t have to become heroes to give value to the performance. But what intrinsic value can a play (or film or novel) claim to possess when the protagonists fail to show some glint of growth, decency, or self-awareness? All that’s left is a cautionary tale of human folly that a newspaper report can provide in fewer words.

Some have called the play “theater of the absurd.” Yet reducing vital matters to absurdity is one of the passive defenses employed by our unconscious ego to thwart the inner critic. The defense reads: “I’m not willing to feel passive in the face of life’s challenges. Look, life is all absurd anyway. How can anyone be powerful in the face of all this absurdity!” Existentialist writers and Woody Allen’s films—with their themes of alienation, helplessness, confusion, indecision, and nothingness—have sustained this defense. This means these writers want their audiences and readers to “buy into” (or be fooled by) what serves as the writers’ own defenses and substandard means of coping, rather than to recognize deeper truth or value.

A literary work is a sublimation of a playwright or author’s inner life. The writing itself frequently serves unwittingly as a safety-valve for unconscious issues and conflicts. Some sublimations are better than others at disguising the writers’ underlying issues. In the process of sublimating, some writers fail to disguise the psychological warps and twists from which their art emerges. Sublimations that are well disguised can achieve higher creative purity, and they usually have a better chance of being genuine works of art.

Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote the play, and I don’t want to rummage around in his psyche, except to say that his play would be, logically, the product of a clinically depressed person. Most people and most authors of literary work have to contend with inner conflict. Emotional weakness in the form of inner passivity is always an ingredient of inner conflict, and the playwright or author of literary work cannot entirely escape (like the rest of us going about our daily affairs) the self-limiting spinoffs of inner conflict.

To be generous, let’s consider that Waiting for Godot deserves comparison to George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. These prophetic novels portray the dangers of passive regression in human populations. Yet if Godot is intended to portray modern perils, its fatalism is too heavy-handed to merit our acclaim or even our attention. Its main value, when psychoanalyzed, is to show us how, through the critical acclaim bestowed upon it and the naiveté with which it is viewed, we resonate so profoundly and so unconsciously with inner passivity.

Inner passivity emerges from behind the scenes as an underlying theme in the drama, comedy, and melodrama of a large amount of literature. We tend to resonate emotionally with this passivity when we see or read expressions of it. Yet when we don’t see it clearly enough, with intellectual acuity, we acquire little or no conscious or unconscious benefit from plays, films, or books in which it festers as an undercurrent.

Inner passivity is baked into our psyche in a way that makes it difficult to detect. It feels innate. Like excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we can’t separate it out from what feels normal or natural. We fail to see inner passivity in the clinical sense, in the way, for instance, many people are conscious of its partner in crime, the inner critic. In our emotional life, we struggle—in feelings, thoughts, and behaviors—with the symptoms of this passivity, which include guilt, shame, regrets, bitterness, anger, incompetence, and depression.

When we’re more insightful, we can process our exposure to passive themes and passive people in ways that induce us to be stronger.

Like Estragon and Vladimir, are we now standing around in lurid self-doubt, faithlessly existing, initiating nothing, as our world teeters on the abyss? We appear to be in a state of psychological regression, meaning that we’re sliding backwards—being distracted, disengaged, and often cynical—unable to maintain healthy democracies, a vibrant planet, or to accept Nature on her terms.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by climate change, resource depletion, species extinction, terrorism, partisan hostility, mass shootings, collapsing infrastructure, a faltering health-care system, growing mental-health dysfunction, radical wealth disparity, violations of privacy, malicious misinformation, rapidly changing social norms, fears of being deposed economically, and an immigration fiasco. Overwhelmed by these challenges, lots of us are cowering in our shattered world like wee Mousie.

When we’re not passive, this global mess of ours is the stage on which we seek adventure and the expression of our worthiness and power. Psychologically and spiritually, everything is in place for us to become more conscious. We can now bring our passive side into focus, empowering our intelligence and spirit with this self-knowledge. Resistance will collapse as we wrestle rationality, truth, wisdom, and power from the conflicting forces churning in our awesome psyche.

—

Read Peter Michaelson’s The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourselves from Inner Passivity, available here.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2604 {
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;
}



Share This:

Some of the Best Mental-Health Information is Available Here

More than 225 articles on mental-health topics can be read here for free. For now, I’m taking a break from writing and will resume sometime in the fall. I’m still doing psychotherapy sessions for anyone who would like to experience the depth psychology described on this website. Keep reading the posts and consider getting some of my books. This powerful knowledge can dramatically improve your life.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2566 {
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;
}



Share This:

When Food is Used to Feed Inner Conflict

Food is not always used, as we know, for healthy nourishment. Often it serves an ulterior motive, as a way for us to sneak into psychological mischief and indulge our emotional appetite for unresolved inner conflict.

Learn how food is misused for the purpose of recycling unresolved psychological issues.

When people struggle with overeating and weight gain, they usually believe their problem is with the food itself. They obsess or fixate on food. But food is only the meat and potatoes of their unresolved emotional issues.

In other words, food is being used to replay unresolved issues. In the foreground, in one’s face for that matter, is the unconscious compulsion to act out unresolved inner conflict. The primary conflict in the psyche is the conscious wish to feel strong and capable of self-regulation versus the unconscious willingness to experience oneself through familiar emotions associated with weakness, self-criticism, and shame. We can overcome this conflict by understanding the unhealthy psychological ingredients we bring to the table.

Food is just one of many external means by which people get into emotional trouble. We can make mischief with alcohol, money, drugs, possessions, work performance, family, friends, neighbors, and bosses. A basic principle governs all such misadventure, namely that the struggles in our life, our misery and failures, are direct offshoots of inner conflict. This conflict drives us compulsively to produce misery and self-defeat in our encounters with the world around us.

With inner conflict, we compulsively seek and create situations or circumstances through which we can feel the conflict. Food, alcohol, money, or people serve as staging-grounds on which to act out such conflict. The emotional price for this acting-out includes stress, self-doubt, guilt, shame, anxiety, and self-recrimination. Costs in behavioral self-defeat—involving incompetence, foolishness, and failure—must also be paid.

For this article, let’s stick to food and how it can serve as a prop or accomplice in our misery and dysfunctional behavior. What is going on inside us that creates such misery with something that ought to be providing pure pleasure, energy, and health? How does it happen that food gets all mashed in with inner conflict and misery?

First, some preliminary thoughts before getting to the heart of inner conflict. Many people, for starters, eat with too little attention to the process, meaning they don’t get enough second-by-second or minute-by-minute satisfaction and pleasure from their food. We don’t want to gulp down our food the way a dog does. Dogs aren’t conscious enough to register all the pleasure that’s available by eating food more slowly, more deliberately. A little goes a long way when we eat in a conscious manner.

Just as dysfunctional parents are less able to nurture their children, we can be deficient at nurturing ourselves through healthy food preparation and consumption. When we’re inwardly conflicted, we’re less connected to our authentic self and less able to be supportive and nurturing of that self. We experience more self-doubt, self-alienation, and self-abandonment.

The food doesn’t have to be scrumptious to be thoroughly enjoyed. Ideally, we eat for health as much as for taste. When we eat for health, more pleasures can be experienced other than simply from taste. A quiet, stable, enduring pleasure is available in the strength of self-regulation because it connects us intimately with our best self. We support ourselves emotionally by eating well. We’re taking care of our body and its needs as an act of self-caring. In functioning at our best in this manner, we reap the emotional benefit of living up to our potential.

Often people crave food even when they’re not particularly hungry. They’re trying to compensate for an inner emptiness. Cravings for food can arise from the emotional impression that something vital is missing. That missing something is psychological. The hunger is emotional. It arises because of one’s disconnect from self, as if one’s own emotional self is starving for recognition, appreciation, significance, and a feeling of value.

Many people fail to generate a healthy emotional connection with their existence in the world. They’re desperate to feel substantial because they otherwise feel a painful emptiness. They’re usually blind to the degree to which they’re identified with themselves through this emptiness or disconnect. The painful feeling is, in effect, an emotional attachment or even an emotional addiction. A psychological defense blocks people from becoming aware of this unhealthy emotional attachment. The defense is registered unconsciously: “I’m not willing to go on experiencing myself through this painful feeling of emptiness or unworthiness. Look at how I give to myself with all this food. I want to feel full and fulfilled, not empty and disconnected.”

Food also becomes a substitute for connection because it is associated from childhood with the impression of being loved and supported. The more a person feels unloved, the more the consumption of food is used as a means of coping. Consciously, people want to feel love and support, but unconsciously they can be aligned emotionally with feeling unloved and unsupported, a conflict that remains unresolved within them. These adults then have difficulty producing a foundation of emotional support (and thereby successful self-regulation) within themselves. Their inner critic produces self-rejection and self-criticism while their inner passivity produces self-doubt, both of which serve to undermine them.

The unconscious dynamics and issues involved in inner conflict produce inner weakness. Many people become fixated on food and eat in a compulsive manner in order to continue to feel what is unresolved, namely an emotional identification with a familiar weak sense of self. The more they lack self-regulation with food, the more they continue to live through a sense of weakness and failure.

The human psyche is burdened with passive congestion. This passive aspect of human nature is a key influence in our failure to self-regulate. This weak state of nonbeing is called inner passivity, and it’s a handicap to our humanity, a hindrance to our self-development. Inner passivity is a dead-zone in our psyche, a part of us that has no interest in, or connection with, our wellbeing. When we don’t recognize or understand it, we’re more likely to fall under its influence, even to identify with it. Inner passivity repeatedly pulls us into its own orbit, leaving us cognitively and emotionally impaired in the face of cravings, desires, and other challenges.

Our psyche’s battle royal consists of conflict between inner passivity and the inner critic. The inner critic attacks, inner passivity defends. When people are struggling with the regulation of food, this conflict can intensify. How so? Cravings for food are often activated psychosomatically in such a way that the cravings serve the purpose of intensifying inner passivity. Keep in mind that whatever is unresolved emotionally or psychologically will be experienced compulsively. Psychologically, the real craving is for the familiar, old, unresolved sense of weakness. When the individual submits to the cravings for food, he or she is also submitting to the compulsion to experience inner passivity. The misuse of food feeds this inner weakness.

Now the inner critic pounces. It mocks and condemns the individual for his or her weakness and passivity concerning overeating, unhealthy eating, and weight gain. The inner critic also condemns “forbidden” behaviors such as binge-eating, snacking, eating prohibited foods, eating at prohibited times, or the acting-out associated with bulimia and anorexia. The nature of the inner critic is to attack the integrity and worthiness of the individual whenever an opportunity presents itself. Through inner passivity, we fail to protect ourselves from these attacks.

Now the game is on. And the game is to suffer the ravages of unresolved inner conflict. The primitive chaos in our psyche takes its pound of flesh in the agonizing back-and-forth of inner accusations and defensiveness. Again, the inner critic attacks, inner passivity defends. Inner passivity, however, is an incompetent defender. It compromises with the inner critic in such a way that we end up accepting considerable punishment in the form of guilt, shame, remorse, anguish, and depression for alleged crimes with respect to food or other props.

The inner games can be insidious. For instance, individuals who anguish over their weight-loss failures often engage in ongoing weight-loss battles not to lose weight, as they consciously think, but to experience themselves trapped in endless conflict, as weak failures continually on the receiving end of scorn and mockery from their inner critic. What has been especially difficult for us to fathom is the fact that, through inner conflict, we are so compulsively driven to repeatedly feel weakness, self-doubt, and punishment.

The antidote is deeper consciousness. This entails the self-knowledge that fortifies our intelligence and connects us with our authentic self, helping us neutralize inner conflict along with the effects of both inner passivity and the inner critic.

Science has fully informed us that people who have trouble regulating their bad moods are more likely to have persistent eating disorders. Unfortunately, science and mainstream psychology are not teaching the public the true source of eating problems and disorders. This following comment from The Atlantic magazine illustrates the present blindness:

Both eating and emotion are such regular, consistent parts of our lives that it’s inevitable they would get tangled up together. Unfortunately, though research has illuminated some interesting possibilities as to how they relate to one another, the knot is still very much intact and it’s hard to see where one ends and the other begins.

Through depth psychology, however, it is not hard to see where one ends and the other begins. The solution is to recognize inner conflict and, in particular, the psychological operating systems involving inner passivity, the inner critic, and unconscious defenses. We see exactly how eating and emotions are related when we begin to appreciate how the best psychological insight elevates our consciousness and strengthens self-regulation.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2561 {
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;
}



Share This:

How You Can Save the World

I cringe at the thought of being cursed by future generations for seriously if not fatally degrading our planet. My hope is they’ll just call me stupid and refrain from searing a big X—a token of eternal shame—upon any trace of my existence.

Boost your bravery by feeling more deeply what future generations will face.

My instinct is to defend myself, saying “I cared, I worried, I recycled, and over the past nine years I’ve driven my 2010 four-cylinder Toyota Rav4 just 4,500 miles a year, only a third of the national average.”

What would my descendants, inheritors of the wreckage of 80 or 800 years hence, likely say about this sort of defense? “It’s pathetic,” I imagine them decreeing. “Your defense is all about you! You’re trying to look innocent in your own eyes. Your feelings for us are superficial. You don’t understand that our suffering is your fate, too. We’re all in this together—your death will not save you. Our relationship transcends time and place, past and future. Your eternity passes through our pain.”

Well, damn, did I just channel those words? Here I am writing this down, spooked at the thought it’s true. Will my spirit be obliged to hang around for millennia to observe and feel what my descendants are enduring? Please sweep this thought away in a Texas tornado!

Should I just plead ignorance? I’m no expert on spiritual matters, and my alleged fellowship with future beings and this notion of being sandblasted alongside them in a Florida mega-storm seems like one of those mystical puzzlers.

Okay, I’m reflecting on it, and I concede that a spiritual connection to future generations is plausible. Many of us—me, as well—believe that we have spiritual connections to loved ones, alive or deceased. I anticipate being reunited with deceased parents, a spouse, relatives, and dear souls who have shared my life. I don’t want my sweet memories of others to become wisps of nothingness. Emotionally, I’m bound to my ancestors and contemporaries, so it makes sense that future generations will be bound to me—in love or in scorn.

If some spiritual connection to future humanity is indeed reality, then how do I feel it, how do I know it? I try to have compassion for myself and others—and often do. Why can’t I have more sensitivity for future generations? That would certainly make me more proactive in pressing for climate action. How can I bring urgency, compassion, intelligence, and power to the task?

With this in mind, I’ve been reading a copy of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2019). The author, David Wallace-Wells, is a writer and editor at New York magazine. His book, tells the story of our emerging planetary nightmare, with its cascading chaos, perverse complexity, and unrelenting feedback loops. Our plight, as you know, involves dying oceans, melting glaciers, droughts, wildfires, deforestations, torrential rains, floods, crop losses, heat deaths, destabilizing mental health, wildlife extinctions, unbreathable air, and economic collapse. This book is beautifully written and, while grim, avoids succumbing to hopelessness and fatalism.

I’m urging people to read the book, especially the first half. Doing so will test your emotional strength, your ability to avoid being overwhelmed or terrorized, and your credentials as a bona fide human being. As you read it, you’ll be able to monitor within yourself any feelings associated with resistance, denial, fear, or any unwillingness to activate your heroic potential. The resolve that arises from reading the book reveals the quality of one’s goodness and the depth of one’s humanity. It can inspire us to be greater than we previously imagined possible.

Wallace-Wells, the author, says as much nearly halfway through the book (p. 138): “If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader.” You might by then be shell-shocked, too. Watch for the tendency, as you read it, for your mind to zone out from the bombardment of jolting feedback loops—a stupefying catalog of mutually reinforcing disorder and disintegration—that chronicles our collapsing systems.

Any one of the book’s 12 chapters, the author notes, contains “enough horror to induce a panic attack …” He also writes that the extent of environmental degradation depends on the political response to the crisis. Yes, politics is certainly at play. But I think it’s also helpful to say that the outcome depends on the psychological response to this global emergency. Let me now explain.

On my website, I’ve written previously about climate change. I claimed that people are not so much in denial as they are blocked, through inner resistance, from mobilizing their better self. I wrote that when we accept the momentous truth of climate change, we either have to respond appropriately with behaviors that address the issue or else we sink into a self-limiting condition that involves guilt, passivity, fearfulness, cynicism, and despair. Our greatest fear is in letting go of the old limited sense of self with which we identify. Why is this?

It feels that in order to become wise and powerful, we lose our precious sense of being who we are. We feel a risk of becoming a stranger to ourselves. Indeed, psychological or spiritual growth induces resistance, and the process can feel like self-abandonment. However, the process only really involves casting aside familiar associations and identifications of the self-limiting or negative variety.

Yes, feeling too small, as if we can’t possibly be even bit actors on the world stage, is one aspect of the problem. We aren’t getting our head around the idea of being a powerful self who stands fearlessly for truth, virtue, and rational action. Even if we conceive of being such a person, we don’t see a way to make it happen. That’s largely because our inner conflict—primarily the battle between our inner critic and our inner passivity—keeps us tied in emotional knots. When we study this conflict as it pertains to us personally, we’re able to escape the self-sabotage arising from conflict and to fulfill our potential.

The other problem is our difficulty feeling emotional connection to succeeding generations. We can feel connection to our family circle and our tribal or national group. We can feel emotional stirrings for people who are starving or homeless. But such feelings tend to evaporate the further out we try to push them. Many of us can barely feel compassion for flood victims in Oklahoma or Arkansas, let alone posterity’s faceless multitudes.

I understand this. Even when thinking of a loved one, alive or dead, I need to single out the memory of her and visualize her before I can appreciate her intrinsic value and beautiful distinctiveness. We’ve all had such moments of connection, and we know how rich they are.

To connect emotionally with future multitudes involves awakening the best in ourselves. Doing so, we’re acting on our own behalf as much as for others. We want to experience the flowering of our humanity. This present moment in time, on the apex of climate disaster, provides an opportunity for us to grow, as if the future is now moving backward to help us in the present.

We can start by putting aside our self-centeredness, enlisting our imagination, opening our heart, sensing a future collective or individual mind, and wanting to connect across time. It’s not as if we’re trying to teleport our presence or connect telepathically. No, we’re just trying to activate our humanity. I’m a better person for trying to empathize in this way.

Rather than be passive, I want robust feelings to power good intentions. Now my consciousness is more sensitive to our dire circumstances, and I’m more aligned with making sacrifices that reduce our carbon footprint.

I have endeavored over many years to grow psychologically, and over time my capacity to appreciate the profound richness of life has deepened. Wave after wave of this richness can crash upon us when psyche is cleansed of negativity. As we sense this richness, we begin to understand or appreciate what would be lost—all the life that would wither—if climate change were to worsen beyond redemption.

We can get a sense of this loss if we’re not afraid to feel it. I, for one, will take in all I can of this awareness. The purpose is not to grieve or to feel hopeless. I want to know whatever I can manage of truth and reality because doing so will make me stronger. It won’t crush me. I can handle it. Connected in this way to reality, I’m inspired to do more to heal our planet.

—

Dear readers, consider sharing this story on social media. We need to feel connected and inspired. Thank you.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2554 {
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;
}



Share This:

The Inner Critic is a Primitive Brute Force

The inner critic is a brute force, a totalitarian tyrant, lurking in the human psyche. It’s a primitive part of us that operates with the mentality of a psychopath. It harbors a capacity for evil.

Yet many mental-health practitioners tell their clients the inner critic can be subdued or neutralized by making concessions to it, compromising with it, and even befriending it.

We must subdue the inner critic, not befriend it.

No, do not cozy up to the inner critic. Doing so diminishes us. We must tame it, render it powerless, not compromise with it or befriend it.

The best approach is to befriend our authentic self, not our inner critic. Our authentic self is, in the language of depth psychology, our secular soul, the throne of goodness, wisdom, and power. We want our consciousness to unite with our authentic self. Its values are the opposite of the inner critic’s. How is compromise possible when values are diametrically opposed?

The inner critic, known in psychoanalysis as the superego, is a formidable inner foe, a true enemy within. We can’t suppress it through willpower. We can, however, undermine and defeat it with correct self-knowledge.

In my past writing, I’ve called the inner critic a bully and a villain. Now I want to be more emphatic about its vile nature. Compromising with the inner critic is, at best, trying to compromise with inflexible irrationality. At worst, it’s messing with aggressive depravity.

Sigmund Freud become aware of the full cruelty of the inner critic or superego, though only late in his life. He wrote at one point in The Problem of Anxiety, published in 1936 three years before his death, that, “The motive force behind all later symptom formation is here clearly the ego’s fear of its superego. The hostility of the superego is the danger situation which the ego must avoid.” A few years earlier, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud mentions the superego’s alignment with “the harshness and severity of the parents, their preventive and punitive function, while their loving care is not taken up and continued by it.” Unfortunately, modern psychology heedlessly overlooks these words.

Unwittingly, we’re all guilty to some extent of collaborating with the inner critic. Our inner defensiveness and psychological defenses scramble with limited success to help us wiggle out from under the inner critic’s tyranny. Those mental-health practitioners who advocate compromising with the inner critic are unwittingly promoting a dynamic that, in the unconscious mind, people already employ in a manner that hinders self-development.

Despite our conscious or unconscious attempts at compromise, the inner critic still operates as a punishing force. It seeks to function as the master of the personality. To the inner critic, our compromises and concessions are simply expressions of weakness that it uses against us.

On an inner level, some people unwittingly identify with the inner critic, which is a form of befriending it. Doing so, they adopt the inner critic’s values and become its agents or surrogates. Now they’re in danger of becoming stone-hearted, aggressively stupid, and enemies of civility. At this point, they have no interest in developing the personal integrity required by members of civilized society and democratic nations.

A recommendation to befriend the critic was advocated in the magazine, Psychology Today, in its cover story in the April, 2019 issue titled, “Silence Your Inner Critic.” The article recognizes the inner critic as a “derogatory taskmaster,” yet the article claims the inner critic, in its taskmaster role, drives people to excel by honing in on their faults and weaknesses.

The article quotes a psychologist at length who says, in part: “The challenge is to see the critic as a protector that is on our side, looking out for our interests, even if it’s often misguided. If it’s making us feel that we’re not good enough, it’s only because it is trying to prevent us from the ego blow of not being good enough. We can learn to thank the critic for trying so hard to protect us—and then ask for it to step back.”

Asking the inner critic “to step back” is like wagging your finger at Smaug or Lurtz in The Lord of the Rings. The inner critic carries the biggest black banner in any procession of inner demons. We need more grounding in our authentic self, our secular soul, in order to defeat and dethrone the inner critic.

It has no intention of protecting us from the so-called “ego blow of not being good enough.” The very opposite occurs. Our inner critic trashes us with allegations of not being good enough, or being worthless nobodies. Often the basis for these allegations are flat-out distortions of reality or simplistic misrepresentations of our normal everyday imperfections. Meanwhile, a large amount of what otherwise would be our life-affirming energy is used up in our attempts to ward off the cruel self-aggression streaming from the inner critic.

Why do we have this primitive self-aggression in the first place? Our ancestors needed natural, biological aggression to survive. We still need healthy aggression, wisely channeled, to thrive in the modern world. This aggression is considerable, and the healthier we are psychologically the more we can use it productively. Classical psychoanalysis says much of this aggression begins to turn against us by the time we are toddlers because, biologically, we don’t have the musculature required to release it entirely into the world around us.

The Psychology Today article highlights the idea that the inner critic “attacks and undermines you to protect you from the shame of failure.” The article is poorly written at this point, and it doesn’t provide enough context to make sense of this “shame of failure” statement. A bit farther on, the article says (presumably paraphrasing the same psychologist) that “Beating yourself up is a preemptive gambit to inoculate ourselves from external shaming.”  The logic here escapes me. At this point, the article’s attempt to explain these ideas dribbles off incoherently.

Elsewhere in the text, this article supports the idea that self-affirmations, meaning assurances to ourselves that we are good, capable, and worthy, are “a useful offset to self-criticism.” The technique involves seeing evidence in oneself (and attesting to this evidence) that refutes the harsh allegations made by the inner critic. This evidence, the article says, can “revise the negative messages” we hear from our inner critic or we hear or think we hear from people in our life.

However, if we employ this technique, we unwittingly give credence to the inner critic’s allegations. In other words, to use this technique is to give some measure of credibility to the inner critic and its irrationality. The technique is just another variation on inner defensiveness. The technique signifies that we’re taking the inner critic seriously. Doing so, we prolong a back-and-forth inner debate in which the inner critic accuses and, through the voice of inner passivity and defensiveness, we justify and defend our self. This inner debate constitutes inner conflict, and it’s likely to go on endlessly without deeper insight.

There’s a cardinal rule with the inner critic: Don’t be defensive to its allegations. People generally don’t have to be defensive about anything. Sure, if authorities falsely accuse you of robbing a bank, you want to have a good defense. Otherwise, your defensiveness generally signifies that you’re under an inner critic attack and reacting emotionally to its irrational allegations.

Watch yourself through the day for statements of inner defensiveness. When you stop being inwardly (and outwardly) defensive, you are dropping the rope in inner conflict’s tug-of-war. You’re not playing that game anymore.

The inner critic appears at times to be saying true things, and sometimes the things it says are true. It can mock us for being weak and passive when, in fact, we have indeed been weak and passive in some situation. But the punishment we accept (even for our slightest misstep) in the form of guilt, shame, tension, and anxiety often far outweighs the “crime.” We need to understand that the inner critic has no business at all butting into our life.

Even when the critic’s accusations are true, we can, when strong and healthy, refuse to accept any punishment. It’s simply enough that we sincerely acknowledge any missteps on our part, make the intention to do better in the future, and then move on. Sometimes the critic’s accusation functions as a stern conscience, for instance in scolding a person who has committed adultery. Still, the inner critic has no business being a part of a person’s assessment of such a situation. It simply can’t be trusted to be objective or rational.

For instance, consider how the inner critic often intrudes in a situation involving adultery. Even when adulterers have reformed their behavior and been forgiven by their spouse for this offense, they can’t forgive themselves at a deeper level when their inner critic still revisits the offense on a daily basis, exacting more punishment in the form of guilt, shame, and regret. The inner critic uses a person’s adultery for the purpose of ongoing torture, not for the purpose of reforming the individual. Having this ability to torture enables the inner critic to maintain its sweeping abusive power.

Even if there is truth at times in what the inner critic says, it’s still seeking, at best, to pose as our true voice of authority and, at worst, to harass, torment, and punish us, not to educate us as to what is true or what is best for us.

Often times the inner critic makes allegations that we just feel to be true. We’re not sure it’s true, it just feels that way. At this point, we’re in danger of being deceived by our self-doubt. False accusations against us can often feel true because, deep down, we harbor doubt about our goodness and value. We’re quick to feel that we’re flawed, unworthy, and even bad. This negative self-assessment can often be traced to shameful thoughts and feelings going back to childhood, often involving sexual instincts and emotional associations, that are unconscious or barely conscious.

With my clients, I teach the role that inner passivity, the seat of our psychological defenses, plays in facilitating or enabling the inner critic. This passive part of us, unlike the inner critic, doesn’t have a vile nature. It is more like a gravitational force field that pulls us in a passive direction. Yet it’s still a formidable detriment to our psychological progress. When we operate unconsciously under the influence of inner passivity, we find ourselves consciously aligned with the notion that compromising with the inner critic is a normal and correct procedure.

Like the inner critic, inner passivity intrudes into our thoughts and feelings where it proceeds to create worry, fear, anxiety, indecision, mediocrity, and other forms of self-doubt. The major conflict in the human psyche is between the defensiveness of inner passivity and the self-aggression of the inner critic. Inner passivity does try to protect us from the inner critic but it functions like an incompetent defense attorney. Our ultimate protection from the inner critic, as mentioned, is an awakened self.

Awakening to our self is an ultimate life triumph. Getting there involves clearing inner passivity out of our psyche and neutralizing the inner critic. We get ourselves pointed in a direction that produces growing insight and then do our best to enjoy the journey.

Meanwhile, any willingness to compromise with the inner critic or befriend it signifies our unconscious resistance to fulfilling our destiny. We won’t be strong enough to usher in a new consciousness that protects our planet and future generations. Growing insight into human nature is our new frontier, and the wisdom and power that arises from this adventure will enable us to prevail over primitive parts of our psyche.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2548 {
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;
}



Share This:

The Self-Defeat of Passive Morning Thoughts

What do you start to think about upon awakening in the morning? Is there a recurring pattern or theme to your early morning thoughts and reflections?

Those first moments upon awakening are, for a lot of us, unpleasant if not disturbing. That’s when people are evaluating their prospects for the coming hours, and their forecast is decidedly bleak.

It’s important to understand the nature of passive morning thoughts and feelings.

They’re starting off their day with thoughts and feelings of a passive nature: “I really wish I could just stay in bed;” or “I’m tired, and I’ll be dragging myself around all day;” or “Everything is scary and overwhelming,” or “So-and-so is going to ignore me (or bully me) today.”

Morning thoughts are often focused on the workday ahead. People might be full of dread at the prospect of all the work that needs to be done (“I’m overwhelmed with projects and don’t have enough time”). Others are agonizing over looming idleness and a sense of emptiness (“I’ll just be hanging with nothing to do, feeling crummy all day long”).

These thoughts can be wider in scope, involving expectations and worries concerning marriage breakup, losing one’s job, running out of money, and not knowing what to do in life. Frequent morning reflections also involve thoughts and feelings of being a failure or a loser.

Thoughts of this kind are passive, and they set us up to experience our day in a passive way. The coming hours are now more likely to be unpleasant and frustrating, and our actions are more likely to be strained, incompetent, and self-defeating.

At those moments, while lying in bed or getting dressed, we can overcome this pattern by recognizing and understanding the passive nature of these considerations and speculations.

People with recurring passive thoughts believe in those moments that, in taking seriously the content of their thoughts, they’re being reasonable. They believe their anxious reflections are addressing legitimate problems with work, marriage, the boss, fatigue, and so on. This perception is wrong. These topics have little to do with what’s really happening psychologically at such moments.

What is really going on? These individuals are simply determined in that moment to feel passive, weak, and disconnected from their better self. They’re using the circumstances concerning their work, marriage, and whatever else as fodder or props for their unconscious determination to experience themselves in a passive manner.

Now, why would we be so tempted, even compelled, to play that game? We can see the roots of the problem in a growing awareness that itself becomes the remedy. We want to begin in those passive moments to acquire insight to this effect: “Ahh, look at what I’m up to—psychological mischief! This is not really about my work or my marriage. This is me wanting to feel weak and passive right now, in this very moment. This is my emotional attachment to unresolved negative feelings associated with failure, defeat, and inadequacy. This is how—right now in this moment—I’m prepared to identify with myself and to know myself. This shows how tempted I am to know myself through weakness rather than through strength.”

Most people are challenged, in varying degrees, by emotional issues or weakness. The symptoms of this weakness are plentiful, including difficulty with self-regulation, painful self-doubt, intrusive thoughts, and unruly negative emotions. This debility is on display in our addictions, indecision, sadness, loneliness, procrastination, cynicism, depression, feelings of entrapment, and sense of helplessness.

We can overcome emotional weakness through the knowledge of depth psychology and an understanding of inner passivity. As my readers know, much of my writing deals with inner passivity. (Some of my best previous attempts to explain it can be found here, here, and here.) It’s an elusive concept that I call “the phantom of the psyche,” and I’m constantly striving to find new ways to render it visible and understandable.

Inner passivity is a big troublemaker in our psyche, just like the id. At this point, allow me a lighthearted aside: Inner passivity could legitimately merit an acronym, the “ip.” I assure you, with a smiling emoji, that I have no plans to propose adding “ip” to the lexicon or using it in my writing. I’ll say only that, were “ip” to be coined as a new word at some future date, inner passivity might better be identified in popular culture, making its existence and menace more apparent. Wouldn’t it also be fun if we called the inner critic the “ic,” thereby giving this troublesome trio of the psyche—id, ip, and ic—more notoriety and visibility in popular culture?

Awakening in the morning, the tendency to gravitate to the emotional experience of inner passivity can feel as natural as breathing. Inner passivity creates a dullness of consciousness that blocks us from connecting with our better self. Awareness of inner passivity has eluded us, much the way a child born and raised in a polluted city takes dirty air for granted. People can be completely unaware of how, for instance, inner passivity sabotages friendship, romance, and marriage. This self-sabotage happens because, through psychological defenses, we unconsciously deny the existence of our passivity, and then we blame others for the negative reactions our passivity causes us to feel.

We expose our inner passivity and make sense of it cognitively as we become more attuned to its intrusiveness in our daily life. It emerges from the shadows and stands before us in gruesome magnificence. While certainly not pretty, it’s amazingly resplendent for revealing a vital feature of who and what we are. It’s saying, “You’ve got to deal with me, dear earthlings, before you get much farther on your evolutionary journey.”

When we first hear about inner passivity, we experience it as a hypothesis, a vague mental concept. Over time, as we apply inner watchfulness to our growing knowledge of it, we affirm and reaffirm its existence. Seeing it and understanding it are nine-tenths of the way to inner freedom. We can certainly practice acquiring an appreciation for the existence and power of inner passivity by seeing and acknowledging how easily we can gravitate to it—through passive, negative thoughts and feelings—first thing in the morning and throughout the day and evening.

More inner vigilance, along with this knowledge, serves our best interest. We wouldn’t bother trying to bring inner passivity into focus in our mind, and keeping it in focus, if we weren’t determined to use the knowledge to break free of its influence. While this knowledge and method speed up our self-development, we also have to be patient and realistic. In terms of self-discovery and the fulfillment of our potential, we’re trying to accomplish over the course of many months or a few years what most people never do in a lifetime.

With this awareness, we can stop playing the unconscious game of choosing to experience ourselves through weakness rather than through strength.

Inner passivity’s imperatives have been dictating our experience of self and the world around us. We’re not paragons of awareness, as we would like to believe, so much as humanoids, handicapped by psychological ignorance, staggering circuitously in the backwoods of consciousness. The passive orientation we haven’t recognized in ourselves is a key player in producing our worry, stress, anxiety, guilt, shame, and many other varieties of misery and self-defeat.

Two agencies of our psyche, our inner passivity and inner critic, are often at war with one another. (Yes, I’m repeating myself here from previous writings, yet I would like each post, as much as possible, to stand on its own.) The inner critic attacks, or at least pesters us relentlessly, and inner passivity cowers, defends, and compromises. It’s through inner passivity that we process the critical, mocking, harsh assessments and self-aggression of our inner critic. The problem is that inner passivity defends us badly. Our inner passivity is intimidated by our inner critic, often making deals and compromises with our inner critic that leave us in the lurch. These are usually bad deals that, in exchange for a temporary reprieve from our inner critic, require we pay a hefty price in misery and self-defeating behaviors.

When lying in bed with passive morning thoughts, try processing this knowledge. Doing so will open up new airways of intelligence. You’ll see the self-defeating game you’ve been playing. By acknowledging it, you’ll be able to stop the damaging foreboding.

Life, we now realize, is not so much just happening to us. We’re not simply victims of bad luck, or insensitive people, or malign forces, or our own stubborn self-defeating symptoms. Inner passivity, we realize, is a hidden psychological formation or congestion that has been making everything harder.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2543 {
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;
}



Share This:

Get Rid of Guilt with Deeper Insight (II)

“I have never smuggled anything in my life,” the great novelist John Steinbeck wrote in Travels With Charley. “Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?” Steinbeck’s guilt was irrational because, as he said, he had nothing to hide. So where did his guilt come from?

Guilt is easier to get rid of when we understand its hidden origins.

On approaching a customs barrier, he was aware, of course, that he was going to be dealing with an official vested with government authority. Steinbeck was likely being triggered by emotional impressions that the custom agent was going to view him as a potential smuggler or criminal. The agent had the power to hold him accountable. It appears that Steinbeck was entertaining the prospect of being confronted by a gruff agent who was prepared to intimidate him.

Of course, Steinbeck had a great imagination, and it was easy for him to imagine being a smuggler. To write so convincingly, he had to be able to bring to life the emotional experiences of his fictional characters. Yet most people have a talent for imagining doing bad things and also for imagining bad things happening to them. Feelings of being wrong, bad, and helpless are common to human nature. That stems, in part, from a lingering emotional resonance in our psyche with feelings of being naughty and being helpless. We can remember times as children when we faced the prospect of a scolding or punishment, whether we’d done wrong or not.

As Steinbeck approached a border crossing, he would have started resonating emotionally with the prospect of being exposed as a lawbreaker. At this point, guilt would be aroused in him because he was identifying emotionally with the plight of someone being caught, exposed, and taken into custody. He was experiencing guilt because he was starting to replay familiar passive feelings that are negative in nature. In his mind, the custom agent would soon be looming over him with dark, suspicious eyes. Steinbeck’s guilt was directly associated with his unconscious willingness in that moment to experience himself as a passive creature at the mercy of an authority figure.

Even the healthiest among us can at times slip into these negative considerations. Of course, we want on a conscious level to feel strong, self-assured, and virtuous. Unconsciously, though, we are inclined, through inner passivity, to experience ourselves through weakness, fear, and intimidation. This discrepancy between consciously wanting strength yet flirting emotionally with weakness is an example of inner conflict.

Guilt arises when we make a choice, usually unconsciously, to feed, entertain, or recycle negative considerations. Guilt is produced when we engage with and become entangled in our emotional attachments to unresolved inner conflict. We get triggered by unresolved negative emotions, now operating within us as emotional attachments, having to do with refusal, deprivation, loss, helplessness, criticism, rejection, and abandonment. The guilt arises when we unwittingly engage in self-defeating bittersweet indulgence in these familiar emotional attachments from our past.

As mentioned, it’s likely that Steinbeck felt guilty because he was entertaining the feeling of being at the mercy of an authority figure who would determine whether he was fit to cross the border. A person in this emotional predicament is feeding his unresolved emotional attachment to the feeling of being helpless. In this situation, guilt arises under the cover of a psychological defense that goes like this: “I’m not looking to feel passive and helpless. I’m not looking forward to experiencing myself in this way. Look at how worried and anxious I am about my coming encounter with a customs agent.” However, this defense is unlikely to be convincing to our inner critic. Our inner critic scolds or mocks us for our passivity, and we then feel guilty for harboring, protecting, and indulging this inner weakness.

Our inner critic holds us accountable—through mockery, scorn, and condemnation—for our tendency to indulge in our unresolved negative attachments (again, these attachments involve feeling refused, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, or abandoned). Guilt arises into our conscious awareness because it’s true, most of us at times do indulge in this way. But this is still all happening unconsciously. On a conscious level, we’re failing to understand or even recognize the fact that we are indulging in unresolved negative emotions. Usually we don’t understand why we’re feeling the guilt, other than to pin it on all the wrong things.

A person says, as one example, that his guilt is due to his laziness, when laziness itself is a byproduct or symptom of his emotional indulgence in feeling helpless. The guilt in this case is really due to the underlying emotional affinity for the helpless, passive sense of self. In another example, a person feels guilty for his inappropriate anger, yet his guilt has actually arisen because he has been indulging in feeling rejected, and his inner critic has “called him out” for his emotional attachment to rejection. The defense reads: “No, I’m not looking to feel rejected! Look at how angry I get at those people who reject me!”

We can feel strong guilt through just tiny infractions or small misbehaviors. We can also feel this guilt even when presumed misconduct is happening only in our imagination. We don’t actually have to do the “evil” deed to suffer the penalty. It’s like a great cosmic laugh at our expense. We can feel guilt for our slightest slip-ups, misdemeanors, or idle thoughts. For instance, we know that religious fundamentalists can express intense guilt or feel shameful mortification for their “bad” thoughts. As another example, blushing indicates that the blusher resonates emotionally with the impression that he or she has been “caught red-handed” having forbidden thoughts, shameful intent, or for being a flawed character. As blushers see more clearly the irrationality involved, they break free of the underlying inner conflict, and their blushing is no longer a problem.

We sense that we deserve our guilt because we have allegedly done something wrong. The guilt arises because of our inward defensiveness. On an inner level, we’re fending off our inner critic for its claims, often unfounded or wildly exaggerated, that we’re guilty of some wrongdoing. Our guilt is produced when, deep in our psyche, we absorb negative accusations from our inner critic that are unjust, untrue, or simply make-believe. As mentioned, our inner critic is readily prepared, through inner accusations, to “expose us” for our thoughts as well as for our deeds. Such accusations are based on primitive self-aggression that emanates randomly from our inner critic. We absorb the aggression because, in that moment, we fail on an inner level (ultimately due to a lack of knowledge concerning depth psychology) to protect ourselves from that aggressive irrationality.

Sometimes the misdemeanors we feel guilty about occurred ages ago. One client could still feel guilty because she had gotten angry for a few hours in her mother’s presence during her mother’s long, fatal illness over 30 years ago. The mother was sick for more than three years, and my client had been a conscientious daughter who tried her best to be helpful and ease her mother’s pain. But she still regretted that one-time outburst of anger and frustration. She said she had forgiven herself many times for the outburst, but the painful memory of it, and her guilt for allegedly having been a “bad daughter,” kept coming back.

I told my client, “The only reason you’re still feeling guilty and suffering in this way is because your inner critic is still able to hit you up with negative accusations about that long-ago incident. Those inner accusations of having been a “bad daughter” are unfair and quite irrational. Typically, our inner critic is unforgiving and cruel. It ignores the fact that we can’t be perfect. Even though, as you said, you forgave yourself for your angry outburst a long time ago, that forgiveness means nothing to your inner critic. Your inner critic is still able to weasel its way into your thoughts and to pass judgment on you. Through your inner passivity, you absorb that negative accusation of being a bad daughter, and you become inwardly defensive to it, which means you feel that the accusation has some validity and might even speak to some intrinsic unworthiness within you. Through your inner passivity, however, you’re soaking up that aggression. You choose unconsciously to experience yourself from the position of being intimidated by, and subordinate to, your inner aggression. You now feel guilty for your passivity, meaning for the degree to which you buy into the denunciations contained in that aggression.”

So we absorb aggression and negativity from our inner critic because of our inner passivity. This passivity is an inner weakness, a place inside our psyche that we have not yet claimed (or infused) with sufficient consciousness. The dimensions of this inner passivity, which affects men and women equally and cause all sorts of problems including clinical depression, come clearer to us as we study our psyche and acquire self-knowledge.

People can put themselves in a no-win situation with respect to guilt. Consider a man who, on one particular day, is asked by his wife to leave work early in order to pick up his son at school. He feels guilty about leaving the office early, yet he knows he will also feel guilty if he tells his wife that he can’t do it. The guilt is felt because the man is allowing himself, through inner passivity, to feel trapped in a quandary. Through his passivity, he’s enabling his inner critic to get him coming or going. Absent this passivity, he would make his choice more easily, and then, free of all guilt, he would act accordingly.

In summary, we feel guilt as a form of punishment. (Punishment is also absorbed in the form of shame, worry, and depression.) We accept this punishment because we have already absorbed emotionally, from our inner critic, allegations of wrongdoing. Picture the child who, even when innocent, so easily feels reprimanded or scolded. Our inner critic is now the scold, and, through inner passivity, we’re the child. When we understand this, we can objectively observe this inner dynamic from the standpoint of enhanced awareness. This enables us to occupy, with self-knowledge and consciousness, the area in our psyche that has been harboring inner passivity.

In doing so, we claim that inner territory in the name of our new consciousness and a new sense of self. Now, instead of absorbing aggression from the inner critic, we’re able to deflect or neutralize it. We can now laugh in the face of this inner aggression, if it even now arises, because we see it as irrational and ridiculous. As a result, we experience neither guilt nor depression.

As we get stronger and eliminate our unconscious passivity, we successfully shut down our inner critic and live guilt-free and in greater harmony.

—

This article is a revision of an earlier post, “Get Rid of Guilt with Deeper Insight,” as it appeared in my book, Psyched Up: The Deep Knowledge that Liberates the Self.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2540 {
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;
}



Share This:

Discover Sublimation, the Agent of Success

You can change your life for the better by understanding sublimation and making it work for you.

As a psychological term, the word sublimation refers to the act of transmuting self-defeating impulses into behaviors that are personally and emotionally rewarding and likely to be socially beneficial.

Power up with sublimation.

Simple basic examples of sublimation include: a person with violent impulses becomes a competitive athlete; a person with a compulsive need for control and order becomes successful in business; a woman with extra-marital desires produces an oil painting when her husband is out of town; and a person with a wish to overeat becomes a gourmet cook.

With the right knowledge, we can help ourselves to achieve sublimation, which is basically the benefit of connecting with one’s full potential by escaping inner conflict. Everyone has some degree of inner conflict. It produces unhappiness and causes us to underperform. Inner conflict not only impedes normal everyday people from attaining self-fulfillment, it also produces pain and self-defeat.

Sublimation takes place in our psyche through a process in which our urges, sex drive, passive and aggressive instincts, and defenses are (permanently or temporarily) moderated and resolved. Often this process is unconscious. It happens naturally with some people, while for others it doesn’t occur to any appreciable degree. With deeper self-knowledge, we can help to ensure that sublimation does take place, and we can also speed up the process.

Some sublimations are momentary experiences, such as doing chores instead of stewing in angry emotions. However, the term usually refers to a more stable transition, such as the process of establishing a rewarding career. Not all sublimations are stable, however. Some endure only a few weeks or months before a person collapses back into paralyzing inner conflict. Other sublimations might last for years before some degree of regression occurs.

Again, insight into the inner process, with its hidden psychological dynamics, is likely to improve one’s chances of establishing a stable sublimation.

Successful sublimations involve the pursuit of pleasure and the capacity to mobilize healthy aggression. Sublimation is maintained in part by the considerable pleasure that arises from experiencing and exhibiting one’s capability, worthiness, and power in the world. Sublimation usually requires an inner process in which our harsh, demeaning inner critic is neutralized or outwitted. One of sublimation’s greatest satisfactions arises from our success in outmaneuvering our inner critic in this manner.

People striving for self-fulfillment can be subjected to a kind of double whammy of resistance. They have to liberate themselves at least somewhat from the clutches of both their inner critic and their inner passivity.

Inner passivity produces impressions of how a fulfilling future is likely to be unattainable. These impressions can consist of feelings of indifference, laziness, hopelessness, ineptitude, and being overwhelmed. Through inner passivity, we also come under the influence of indecision and procrastination, and we can become mired in our complaints, excuses, and cynicism.

In many cases, inner passivity prevents people from even getting to first base. It blocks them from setting goals or from imagining successful outcomes that are within their reach. In this emotional predicament, they feel or believe they simply don’t have what it takes to perform at a higher level.

Sometimes people manage to get to first base by coming up with sound ideas that represent viable aspirations and goals. Now, though, another agency of our psyche, our inner critic, becomes a hindrance. Our inner critic pounces mockingly or sarcastically on our ideas, proclaiming them to be flawed, impractical, or even stupid. If we’re not strong enough on an inner level, meaning that through inner passivity we fail to deflect our inner critic’s mockery and scorn, we’re in danger of stalling out at this stage.

Should we manage to get to second base by producing a worthy effort that shows potential, our inner critic can intrude again, denouncing the effort as insufficient, inept, or stupidly inadequate. We will stall out at this level if we again fail to muster enough healthy inner aggression to override the inner critic. We create this aggression through the process of recognizing our inner passivity and establishing a growing connection to our authentic self.

Both inner passivity and the inner critic produce impressions or outlooks in us that reflect their primitive, unevolved nature. These impressions are sometimes experienced as inner background voices or as discouraging thoughts or mocking words that we say silently to ourselves. They play into our lingering fears, as well as shame, guilt, and self-doubt.

When we recognize these inner dynamics with an objective or clinical understanding, we’re able to rescue ourselves from the emotional impression being created by inner conflict, namely that there is something intrinsically wrong, flawed, inadequate, or unworthy about us. As we separate or disentangle from the conflict, we begin to connect with all that is good and worthy about who we are. Again, the power comes to us as our intelligence learns what had previously been unconscious. Our intelligence, now aware of the nature of the conflict between our passive and aggressive sides, guides us out of psychological darkness into the light of our goodness and our greatness.

The inner conflict between inner passivity and the inner critic’s self-aggression is the main saboteur of sublimation. As we recognize this, particularly as it pertains to our own psyche, we become aware that the real starting point to overcome the problem involves tackling inner passivity and lessening its influence. With unresolved inner passivity, it’s very difficult to generate the healthy aggression we need to achieve our birthright, which is to flourish and be at our best. With inner passivity, it’s difficult to feel the power that surges at the heart of our being.

In other words, we need to develop a stronger connection with our authentic self in order to push back on the inner critic and carve out an inner space that gives us the freedom to maneuver and to allow our intelligence to flourish. If people fail to recognize and understand inner passivity, they’ll likely fail to overcome its influence. The danger, then, is that they’ll fail to muster the healthy inner aggression that governs motivation and the pursuit of pleasure.

The failure to achieve a good or decent life is often the consequence of erecting within the psyche only weak neurotic substitutes for sublimation. In such cases, the individual’s unconscious ego, the seat of inner passivity, fails to represent this person adequately in the face of the inner critic’s self-aggression. Inner passivity and the inner critic combine to limit the individual’s “range of motion” in the world. As one example, the psyche of the criminal is highly infused with inner passivity; consequently, sublimation does not occur and a human life falls far short of its potential.

As mentioned, some people who do sublimate their inner conflict create sublimations that are unstable. They find themselves collapsing or regressing back into mental and emotional conflict and its accompanying self-defeat. Within their psyche, they have been pulled back to the passive identification, and they become entangled emotionally and mentally in self-doubt and other negative emotions associated with helplessness, refusal, abandonment, rejection, and criticism. At one point, they mustered sufficient aggression to effectively represent their best interests, but now, back under the influence of inner passivity, whatever aggression they feel is likely infused with anger, cynicism, and even self-hatred.

A civilized society, especially a democracy upheld by free-spirited people, is itself a sublimation that has arisen from barbarism, tribalism, nationalism, and authoritarianism. Democracy is a triumph over the id, the primitive drive that grasps for self-satisfaction at any cost, that would have us resort exclusively to self-centered, self-aggrandizing, and ruthless behaviors.

It’s likely that civilization rests on only a thin layer of sublimation. Like lava beneath the surface, the inner conflict and emotional turmoil in our psyche constitute the dark underbelly of human nature. Under sizable strain, we could revert to a highly emotional, irrational regression. Such strains are likely to be experienced in coming years from the effects of climate change, resource depletion, and human migrations. To weather this, the achievement of stable sublimations will help people maintain strong connections to their civility, kindness, courage and integrity.

The understanding of sublimation presented here derives from classical psychoanalysis. Readers can study this depth psychology through my books and posts, and begin to apply the knowledge to their personal issues to see for themselves whether it is helpful.

Sublimation is linked to improving mental health. People seeking psychotherapy need to know that the field of psychology is highly fractured. Hundreds of different treatment systems are offered in the mental-health marketplace. Psychologist and author Frank Tallis recently wrote that “Psychotherapy is a notoriously divided discipline.” The history of psychotherapy, he writes, “is one of internecine strife, schisms, secession and intellectual hostility.” So how do you know what to believe?

You need to become your own authority on what is right for you. If you reflect on what I’ve written, many of you will be able to determine for yourself whether this knowledge has value for you. To make this work, you need to have some patience. This method of self-development is a learning process, and as our intellectual understanding grows it takes time for our negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors to fall by the wayside. Read the content on this website every day for at least ten minutes or so, and give it time to work. More than 200 articles are available here for free.

If you don’t follow what I have to offer, find another system of self-development. Many of them are very helpful. Do persist because failure to achieve your birthright, your fulfillment as a paragon of humanity and consciousness, will be your biggest regret. This achievement will also be the gift that keeps on giving to future generations.

.huge-it-share-buttons {
border:0px solid #0FB5D6;
border-radius:5px;
background:#3BD8FF;
text-align:left; }

#huge-it-share-buttons-top {margin-bottom:0px;}
#huge-it-share-buttons-bottom {margin-top:0px;}

.huge-it-share-buttons h3 {
font-size:25px ;
font-family:Arial,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,sans-serif;
color:#666666;

display:block; line-height:25px ;

text-align:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul {
float:left; }

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li {
margin-left:3px;
margin-right:3px;
padding:0px;
border:0px ridge #E6354C;
border-radius:11px;
background-color:#14CC9B;
}

.huge-it-share-buttons ul li #backforunical2514 {
border-bottom: 0;
background-image:url('http://www.whywesuffer.com/wp-content...
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;
}



Share This: