Peter Michaelson's Blog, page 9

The Joy of Militant Ignorance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.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 #backforunical2625 {
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:

Answers to Questions From Readers (Part 7)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.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 #backforunical2620 {
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:

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: