Peter Michaelson's Blog

The anxiety around dating—and finding the “right” partner—is a common contributor to unhappiness. The challenge is described in a recent article, “Mating Season,” in The New York Times Magazine. (The online version is titled, The Trouble With Wanting Men.”)

A competition for dominance is a major factor.

The article’s author, Jean Garnett, describes her anguish trying to find a man willing to commit to an intimate relationship. The article says women are increasingly fed up with men, to the point that male reticence or passivity deserves the recently coined psychological term, heterofatalism. That ugly word certainly gives a mean outlook on one’s mating prospects.

Garnett describes leaving her marriage, falling in love, and having an 18-month relationship with a man who “continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit…” From her research and talks with others, she concludes, “It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds.” Men who are superficially nice and sincere seemed unable, she says, to transform their sexual partnerships into intimate relationships.

Garnett struggles for answers to this apparent emotional impotency. She suggests that men may be overwhelmed by the cognitive effects of dating apps that “project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines.” She notes that modern times are so unlike the culture of arranged marriages: Now she and the men in her life must deal with “the anxiety of choice.”

So much inner passivity and inner conflict are involved in all of this, with both men and women. People are hurting from disappointment, disconnection, and indecision. They’re reeling from not knowing their own mind, and from fears of making the wrong choice, not living up to expectations, and being held accountable.

The underlying source of all this misery and self-alienation are inner passivity, inner conflict, and the compulsion to replay and recycle the first hurts of childhood. (These first hurts are feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned). I have written a great deal about this, particularly in my two most recent books. The great tragedy here arises from our considerable resistance to acquiring the knowledge of our unwitting propensity for self-sabotage and needless suffering.

Garnett suggests that much of the dysfunction involves men and women’s competition for dominance. She quotes a psychoanalyst who advocates the need to “recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance.” The solution, the psychoanalyst suggests, involves the acceptance of a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission.

This is a vital point that requires more explanation. We need to recognize and work out our inner passivity, a biological heritage from childhood and a main element in inner conflict and relationship disharmony. This deep passivity in our psyche causes us to be easily triggered. Because of it, we tend to interpret challenging moments with our partner as if we are somehow being forced into a passive corner. This impression, however, is usually a false interpretation. Unconsciously, we go looking for the passive feeling because, as part of inner conflict, it remains unresolved in our psyche.

We can easily experience this unpleasant feeling of submissiveness even when our partner has no intention of being dominant or requiring us to submit.

Garnett says she finds it difficult to grasp the distinction between a surrender that is distinct from submission. Perhaps, she concedes, “I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose.”  She adds, “I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here.” This is a candid acknowledgment on her part. Indeed, we are acting masochistically in our unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle inner conflict and the first hurts of childhood. And that fine distinction between surrender and submission is hard to grasp when we’re lacking knowledge of inner passivity and inner conflict.

Read either one of my most recent books for a full understanding of all of this.

Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025, 240 pages).

Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society (2022, 316 pages).

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I’ve just published my latest book, and it may be my best effort yet in exposing and explaining the hidden dynamics in our psyche that undermine our health and happiness. It’s titled, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly. This is indeed a bold name for a book, but its groundbreaking knowledge merits the title. (It’s here at Amazon.com as a paperback or e-book.)

This is my tenth book that plumbs the depths of our amazing psyche, and it packages all the others in an edifying 240 pages. This writing is hard work. It’s somewhat like writing code. A precision of language is needed to illuminate the pranks and capers of our unconscious mind. Precision is required to expose the unconscious sedition in our psyche that falsifies reality and betrays our conscious aspirations. Each word toils for traction and lurches for lucidity as it spins in our psyche’s turbulent underworld.

It may be the last such book I’ll write. I don’t think I can present this psychological knowledge any more clearly.

Exposed describes in detail how unconsciously—or as I often say, unwittingly—we make choices that plunge us into misery where we tend to wallow in mediocrity and self-pity. Our lack of self-knowledge makes us pushovers who topple into emotional suffering and behavioral self-defeat. Growing self-knowledge brings this weakness into focus. As we see the nature and dynamics of this inner weakness, we acquire the wisdom and strength to break free from needless suffering.

We recognize with new clinical intelligence our propensity for recycling and replaying, in everyday situations, the unresolved hurts that have lingered in our psyche since childhood. These eight hurts are feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. Typically, we are unaware of our readiness to jump into this old, familiar dissonance to jitterbug with the blues.

These eight first hurts are processed through inner conflict that is mostly unconscious. This inner conflict is energized by a primitive inner critic (superego) that batters our defensive, passive unconscious ego. When our growing insight and invigorated intelligence penetrate this unconscious ego’s realm, we recognize the lack of consciousness there that has allowed the superego, an agent of self-aggression, to intrude so insensitively into our mind, stirring up irrationality and self-punishment. Now we see with liberating clarity how we have been allowing ourselves to be spooked, spoofed, and gaslighted by both the aggressive side and the defensive side of inner conflict.

As I say in the book, “We all deal with a major inner conflict between our conscious wish to feel strong, worthy, and lovable versus our unconscious tendency to go on experiencing ourselves as weak, unworthy, and unlovable. This conflict can heat up daily as our inner thoughts, in wearisome futility, debate our faults versus our merits. Even when entangled in such conflict, we seldom bring it into focus. We get personally entangled in the conflict, and we don’t see the conflict objectively as a compulsive inner program that just scoops up unresolved emotional content from our life in order to maintain itself.”

Inner conflict is an irrational, authoritarian system of government operating inside us. When we illuminate the source of our self-ignorance, we liberate ourselves from the tyranny of inner conflict. We also help the world to outgrow cruelty, stupidity and evil. Saving democracy, saving the world, saving ourself, it’s all the same thing—and it all starts in our psyche.

—

Again, the book is available here. Please consider leaving a comment or review.

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It’s time to rest my keyboard for the summer and bask in southern Michigan’s grand flora and fauna. Rabbits bound across my backyard, a cardinal perches on the brass tip of my deck umbrella, and the wild raspberries on the hill will soon be succulent.

Golly, summer’s fun!

Yet it’s hard to ignore the wildfire smoke overhead.

I’ll still be doing sessions with old and new clients, but this break from writing feels like vacation time.

Below are some of the best-read blog posts over the past year:

Our Compulsion to Self-Punish

Our Readiness to Feel Controlled

When in Doubt About Sexual Orientation

Problem Gamblers Are Addicted to Losing

Are You Overly Sensitive to Rejection?

Seven Villains in a Sad Love Story

The Emotional Conflict Behind 50 Mental-Health Symptoms

My latest book is done. I’ll publish it in e-book format sometime this month. Here is a look at the cover.

Don’t forget to spread this knowledge around among your friends and family. The liberating self-knowledge found in this depth psychology is an answer for both our personal disharmony and the world’s grim troubles.

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Happiness oh happiness, be not so arcane, / Let us access your domain and make it our address.

The key to happiness has been discovered, say researchers in psychology. They claim that happiness is secured when we’re able to initiate and maintain trusted relationships and when we’re open and friendly with strangers. This claim is discussed this month in an article in The New York Times Magazine, titled “How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding.”

Of course, we feel happy about intimate friendships and being able to connect in a friendly, gracious manner with strangers. Yet this article gives the impression that good relationships are the answer in themselves. I say instead that our happiness derives primarily from our psychological health and secondarily from our relationships. To be happy, we must be relatively free of neurosis and inner conflict.

This is not to douse the benefits of relationships. We need these connections, however imperfect or flawed they might be. Fleets of friends and strangers passing by day and night help us to navigate this weathered world.

For most of us, becoming happy is a learning process. We learn to be happy by discovering how we make ourselves unhappy. We participate more than we realize in making ourselves unhappy. Primitive appetites, energies, drives, and defenses flood our psyche. These dynamics generate misery and self-defeat through hidden processes of inner conflict. When we recognize this disharmony within ourselves, we liberate ourselves from inner conflict with its accompanying suffering.

Inner conflict has us bouncing between feeling good about ourselves versus feeling bad or wrong. Consciously, we want to feel good, but unconsciously we are prepared (if not compelled) to plunge emotionally into feelings of being deprived, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, and betrayed. We feel happy in one moment and miserable in the next because oppositional inner dynamics, especially the strife between the inner critic and inner defensiveness, weaken and bamboozle us. We’re compelled to act out this disharmony with others.

What we “get” from a relationship certainly provides some happiness. Yet the richest happiness arises from the quality of the presence and integrity we give to others and get from others. In healthy relationships, we feel our integrity, and we give to others the best of ourselves from the richness of that integrity. Being at our best, we see the best in others, and we connect with that quality in ourselves and in them. When we’re psychologically healthy, we possess the inner power to align ourselves with goodness, justice, generosity, and inner peace. So, happiness arises first from this inner connection to our better self—and next from the sharing of this better self with others.

Our happiness resides largely in the quality of our relationship with our own self. Unfortunately, we’re highly resistant to seeing how we degrade this relationship through our unconscious collusion in inner conflict. We all have resistance to establishing a new, more evolved relationship with ourself, and it’s important to be conscious of this resistance. Through resistance, people are unwittingly engaged in the cover-up of our unevolved consciousness.

When we liberate ourselves from inner conflict, we discover our inherent value and better self. Now we don’t need others to validate us, to bolster our sense of self. We become grounded in a sense of value because, for one thing, we’re no longer absorbing self-denigration from our inner critic and identifying with the passive, defensive side of inner conflict. With this awareness, the pleasure and happiness we feel from connecting with others spring from within. Pleasure and happiness arise as we experience the strength, integrity, and generosity of our deeper, better self. Happiness also arises from our newfound ability, now that we’re breaking free of inner conflict, to avoid becoming reactive to (triggered by) the quirks and irritants that others might display.

What are these “triggers” that sabotage relationships? When entangled in inner conflict, we are overly sensitive to feeling hurt, and we blame others for depriving, controlling, criticizing, and rejecting us. Yet we ourselves are unconsciously on the lookout for these experiences. We’re often triggered by the slightest evidence that these hurts are being inflicted upon us, even to the point of experiencing these hurts through our imagination and our speculations on the future.

Through relationships, we’re unconsciously willing to recycle and replay these hurts. Doing so produces, through inner conflict, experiences of guilt, shame, moodiness, cynicism, victimization, and oppression. All the while we blame others for what we generate in ourselves. Or we blame ourselves, but for the wrong reasons. Other people dump their unresolved issues on us, and we dump ours on them. Now we are unlikely to make sincere, trustworthy connections with other people because our inner conflict sabotages trust and intimacy.

When we expose the dynamics of inner conflict, we begin to recognize any falseness that might pervade our connections with others. For instance, we might unwittingly be displaying friendliness or charm to cover up our repressed identification with unworthiness. The feeling is, “I have value and I’m significant because this person I am charming is impressed with me.” Our friendliness can now become an unconscious defense that goes like this: “I’m not willing to go on feeling a passive disconnect from my goodness and value. Look at how thrilled I am that this person is so taken with me.” This unconscious double-dealing is a major theme in romantic love.

The above-mentioned article notes that people experience “mood boosts” when they try—on public transit or in a coffee shop, for instance—to connect in a friendly way with strangers. But why? Why do we feel better? The article doesn’t say. The answer is simple: We’re connecting with our better self. We’re giving from an inner abundance that comes from a strong connection to our better self. As we overcome inner conflict, we feel our inner richness, and we’re inspired to share it with others. That produces not just happiness but also joy.

When we reach out to connect with others, we’re also being less passive, less identified with the passive side of inner conflict. Our assertiveness overrides the passive disconnect from self that most of us experience in varying degrees. Often the passive disconnect is itself a main source of unhappiness, particularly in terms of how the passivity creates an inner disconnect and makes us less able to deflect the incoming self-denigration from our aggressive inner critic.

Many people snap out of this inner passivity and function at a higher capacity. But this newfound strength might only be temporary. With deeper insight, inner strength becomes more stable. Lacking insight, inner conflict easily draws us back into weakness and disconnection. In our ensuing unhappiness, we can become desperate to connect with others, sometimes to have them “validate” our indulgence in victimization and self-pity.

In the magazine article, a researcher is quoted saying, “When I do an act of kindness, it makes me feel more connected to the person I’m helping, or just humanity as a whole … I would say that 95 percent of things that are effective in making people happy and that have been shown to be true through happiness interventions are because they make people feel more connected to other people.” Yes, people can feel more connected to others, but what if the connection is being used as a balm for one’s weak sense of self. The comforting effect is felt, but inner growth is missed.

Many of us are troubled by inner conflict that involves the conscious wish to feel connected versus the unconscious compulsion to recycle unresolved feelings of disconnection and victimization that go back to childhood. Our psychological defenses now kick into action to cover up the humbling realization that we identify with inner weakness and easily plunge into emotional convictions of victimization. These defenses can generate bursts of happiness as part of the process of self-deception. “Look at how happy I am to connect with this person,” the defense has us believe. “That proves I want to feel connected, not disconnected.” But feeling disconnected remains the old emotional identification that clings to us like barnacles. Relationships in themselves can’t solve this problem—unless the relationship is with a good psychotherapist.

In relationships, we often create an illusion of connectedness. Many of those with whom we “connect” are prepared to use us mainly for self-validation or as a sounding board. Or we ourselves are using others for such self-serving purposes. Any happiness derived from such superficial connections is going to be fleeting or unstable.

People often unconsciously choose romantic partners for the unhealthy purpose of recreating unresolved emotional issues. People often blindly, passionately “fall in love” with someone who, others can readily see, is psychologically unhealthy. This unhealthy person is actually the “best” candidate with whom to act out and recreate experiences that resurrect all the other person’s unresolved and painful issues. The old hurts are now going to be recycled and replayed. What started off in romantic bliss soon ends in misery, with the participants usually staggering away ignorant of these psychological undercurrents.

Relationships can’t save us from ourselves. Our best relationships might ease our suffering and provide much happiness, but we’re shortchanging the evolved person we can become if we try to make them the mainstay of our happiness.

—

My books provide the full scoop on how we unwittingly generate unhappiness.

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Were Sigmund Freud around to muse on the man in the White House, how might he analyze the president and the people who support him?

Exposing the deeper nature of conflict.

Theories abound for why Donald Trump twice became president. These include the effects of culture wars, wealth disparity, politically biased news, and political dysfunction. Freud would say, however, that dysfunction in the human psyche is the key consideration. He would contend that a great many of the people who voted for Trump were unconsciously falsifying reality, mainly out of resistance to recognizing and overcoming their neurosis.

To develop this thought, let’s first visit the set of The Apprentice, the television show where Trump, in the decade before first becoming president in 2017, acquired national celebrity. On the show, he played a powerful business executive who judged the worthiness of job-seeking candidates.

The show was a big hit. Viewers loved to see people getting fired by Trump. He was compelling in this role, but not so much because of him personally. In his cold-hearted way, he stirred up in viewers their willingness to take wanton gratification in the downfall of others. The show’s viewers resonated emotionally with the passive helplessness of the job candidates who anxiously and fearfully awaited their fate, as dished out by Trump. Why would TV viewers find this cheerless situation so alluring? The answer is found in our passive relationship to our inner critic.

As Freud asserted, just about everybody has a hidden master in their psyche, called the inner critic or superego. It often operates with calculating cruelty, as Trump did on his TV show. The superego is a primitive drive in our psyche that discharges self-aggression and seeks punishment. It instinctively faults us and judges us unworthy. This self-aggression arises when natural biological aggression, blocked from being expended outward by the child’s physical weakness, turns inward against the child’s weak link, the developing ego. This dynamic usually lingers in adults and creates inner conflict.

The more neurotic an individual, the greater the inner conflict and the more this person experiences the world through dissension, victimhood, misery, and folly.

With inner conflict, the superego attacks and the unconscious ego defends. When active, this inner conflict has us bouncing emotionally back and forth between feelings of weakness versus strength, self-doubt versus self-assurance, and goodness versus wrongdoing in ways that make us moody if not miserable and prone to self-defeat. We get locked into the conflict and fail to acquire the knowledge that would free us.

In this light, let’s consider again what happened on The Apprentice. Dependably, Trump fired someone every week. He humiliated job seekers for presumably being unfit and unworthy. Watching this, viewers resonated emotionally with the job-seeking candidate at the mercy of Trump, just as they resonated unconsciously with the feeling of being at the mercy of their superego.

As an unconscious defense against this weakness, they claimed they identified not with the wretch who was fired but with the arbitrary power displayed by Trump. His cruel power provided them with this defense: “I identify with strength and aggression, not with weakness!” Their gratification in identifying with “strongman” Trump covered up their bittersweet resonance with the victim.

This way the show’s avid viewers could have their cake and eat it, too. Unconsciously, they could thrill to the feel of Trump’s power while passively enjoying the schadenfreude, the harm-joy of other’s pain and humiliation that mirrored the passive double-dealing that neurotic people have with their superego.

Trump is the poster boy for his followers’ refusal to see themselves objectively. This produces loyalty to Trump—or at least to what he represents. He’s a master of self-deception, and his followers take their cues from him. Still, they are loyal not so much to him as to their own egoistic bias, psychological defenses, and bittersweet taste for suffering. Trump is a leader of the widespread refusal to grow psychologically, morally, and spiritually. This resistance to self-development is visible in the widespread opposition to the current “Woke” ethos, the striving to become more conscious and more willing to know reality rather than to falsify it.

Let’s duck back briefly into this deep knowledge. The unconscious ego is largely passive (psychoanalysis has referred to it as the subordinate ego). Its defenses tend to be unstable and ineffective when it engages with the superego. Most people identify with this passive side of inner conflict, while tyrants, criminals, and psychopaths are the Frankenstein monsters of the superego, the aggressive side of inner conflict. The superego’s nature is the cornerstone of fascism, and we need our better self, enlightened by inner truth, to defeat this dark side of us.

Most people, in varying degrees, are unconsciously sensitive to (and fearful of) the superego’s intrusions. The superego is often the source of stress, tension, worry, and anxiety. Under the superego’s thumb, we feel persistently weak in certain contexts. We unwittingly allow life’s challenges to trigger this passive weakness. In daily life, many of us are quick to feel oppressed and dominated by certain people, institutions, and circumstances. Succumbing consistently to cravings and peer pressure are also everyday examples of the ubiquity of the passive side.

Consciously, we dislike feeling controlled or helpless, yet we’re often quick to react to situations, even benign ones, as if we are indeed being controlled and rendered helpless. We’re likely at such times to spin off into anger, self-recrimination, and self-pity. Unconsciously, we often experience feelings of oppression and helplessness in a bittersweet way, and we unwittingly recycle these feelings and indulge in the misery.

The ongoing inner conflict between the passive and aggressive sides in our psyche produces many symptoms, including stress, anxiety, procrastination, indecision, guilt, shame, timidity, and stupidity. (Stupidity arises from how, unconsciously, we scramble to falsify reality, employing psychological defenses that cover up our passive tolerance of the superego’s tyranny.) Meanwhile, most of us aren’t aware of how much we experience the world through inner passivity and fear.

Trump looks for weakness in others. Cunningly and instinctively, he weaponizes the weakness of his followers. He exhorts them to fight—but the real fight, of which he and they are unaware, is the battle to safeguard their idealized ego, even though this sacrifices their better self. They are fighting to deny their deep, unconscious willingness to remain identified with weakness, fear, victimization, and defeat. Their own self-alienation produces alienation with others. National disunity now feels more like the natural order, while anger, indignation, and an emotional affinity for raw power produce illusions of substance and rationality.

The Apprentice was “perfect” for Trump because it sustained his compulsion to focus on the supposed weakness of others and their “justified” humiliation (“Governor” Trudeau, as one of many examples). By fixating on the presumed weakness of others, he projects on to them his profound psychological disconnect from a better self. In this process, he represses his terror of being inconsequential.

Most people can at times feel some measure of unworthiness. Deep in the psyche, many identify with being an unworthy, lesser person, and they instinctively cover up this inner truth. As part of the coverup, they become desperate to feel superior to certain others: “I’m somebody—and you’re nobody!” Trump’s followers make immigrants “contemptible nobodies” who don’t belong here. Making the other “a nobody” hides a person’s repressed identification with being a nobody. We repress a lot of inner fear with doubts about our worthiness.

Trump is a profoundly fearful person, akin in this way to fear-of-his-shadow Joe McCarthy. Through his projections, Trump avoids self-reflection and fights off inner fear. Unconsciously, he greatly fears exposure (especially to himself) of the degree to which he is so psychologically and morally impoverished. This is why he craves attention and looks so often into news cameras during interviews. He needs attention, power, and wealth to compensate for his inner poverty and repressed fear of being a nobody. It’s no coincidence that he generates so much fear in the world. He casts out upon the world what eats away at him from the inside.

The chaos in Trump’s psyche compels him to be an agent of chaos in the world. His inner conflict has him swinging between the passive and aggressive postures in the psyche: He is passively bemused and easily influenced in some situations and vulgar and belligerent in others, mirroring the two poles of inner conflict. Right and wrong become incidental to being at the center of attention and power, all to deny the black hole inside. Meanwhile, loyal insiders who share his disconnect from a better self are there to identify with his power, to spotlight their importance, and to protect him and themselves from awareness of their inner plight.

Democracy is on tilt and mental-health trends are going in the wrong direction. Democracy depends on our collective mental health, yet modern psychology and psychiatry do not show clearly enough the nature of the dysfunction that undermines us from within. If we remain blind to our entanglement in inner conflict and unaware of our passive participation in it, we are more likely to lead ourselves and our world into worsening wretchedness.

—

My books describe the numerous ways we become trapped in inner conflict. They’re available here at Amazon.

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We can more easily understand and access love when we compare it to hate—just as goodness is more fully framed when contrasted with evil.

Love is a big problem for many of us.

Many people not only avoid love but actively hate it. Love is a problem for them. If they go anywhere near it, they experience resistance, fear, and even hatred. They sense danger. They sense that love will require them to experience the death of their precious, rigid individuality, the me-first egotism that feels like their core being.

In their resistance to self-development, they’re loyal to their emotional mainstay, their brazen ego. Hatred of love protects this ego, which has no interest in becoming aware of its own superficiality. Deep knowledge of their psyche would set these people free, but they decline through resistance that’s mostly unconscious to liberate themselves from the ego’s wiles. They cling instead to ego-identification, the little me on their one-peg hat rack. The ego, however, is prone to feeling self-pity and disrespect, and it clings with bittersweet fervor to needless suffering.

Love is a red-hot forge that cremates the ego, incinerates inner conflict, scorches ignorance, and liberates our best self. Not everyone can stand the forge’s heat, and those who refuse to be refined psychologically or spiritually often need to wear protective armor against their self-development. Hatred can feel like a suit of armor that deflects incoming malice—but it also imprisons the wearer in rigid misery because the hatred is trapped in one’s own psyche, body, and emotional life.

Those who evolve and become more loving move beyond the self-centeredness with which infants enter the world. An infant’s consciousness experiences only its own little world, and that world is felt to be at the center of existence—or even the whole of existence. Babies experience parents and objects as extensions of themselves. This profound self-centeredness is moderated over the years, of course, but many people go on experiencing themselves and life through its lingering effects. Giving up this infantile sense of reality is construed emotionally as a form of death, though it’s only the abdication of one’s superficial mindset. If we don’t deepen our awareness, we stay stuck at this primitive, self-absorbed level.

With the thought of becoming more loving, inner fear arises. Loving others and loving life can feel like giving away our “essential” and “intrinsic” ego-based identity. Becoming more loving, it is felt, would mean abandoning the me-first mentality, the little me against the world, that many of us experience as our precious grounding and wobbly essence.

Hatred and cruelty give certain people a feeling of substance, like a force or power they can beam into the world. They are desperate for this illusion of power because, in their egotism and subsequent disconnect from their better self, they are unmoored and weak on deeper levels. This emotional disconnect or passive self-abandonment that they unconsciously hide from themselves is fended off with narcissism and displays of importance and aggression.

A surefire way to cling to an unevolved status quo—to allow resistance to dampen our psychological or moral development—is to scorn and hate love and any displays of it. Mockery of “bleeding hearts” and “tree-huggers” are examples of this scorn. Another example is the animosity directed at diversity and inclusion programs intended to compensate for racism.

Fortunately, most of us are not scornful of the good. But that doesn’t let us off the hook. Most people—whether at the political left, right, or center—harbor some measure of neurosis, which blocks us in varying degrees from being wiser, stronger, and more loving. For the most neurotic among us, some passionate intensity or self-righteous conviction must be dug up to “legitimize” the refusal to examine one’s inner dysfunction. Hatred and cruelty directed outward serve that purpose by making others “deserving” of punishment for being the “cause” of one’s disharmony. The malice and hostility of me-versus-them become the rickety base of the one-peg hat rack.

When “little ego” prevails, our better self or best self becomes a foe to be denied, demeaned, and, if necessary, detested. Our fitful ego seeks to set itself apart as it pleads for validation, excludes others as unworthy, and dislikes or hates imagined foes and inner truth. People hate and fear love in proportion to how rigidly determined they are to cling to a superficial sense of self and a bittersweet willingness to accentuate feelings of victimization and weakness. Misleadingly, they conclude that hatred is a legitimate response to the malice, treachery, and danger of others. Hatred becomes the rationale for misogyny, racism, and fascism.

When people can’t feel unconditional love, they’re inclined, as mentioned, to substitute the resulting emptiness with some ego-satisfying passion. One such passion is hatred, another is cruelty, others are lust for fame, wealth, or power. In his great poem, “The Second Coming,” W.B. Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” One such intensity is the determination to destroy, along with love, the notion or existence of our better self, which is what happens when people undermine democracy, the protective system of government that endeavors to represent what’s best about us. The political attacks on the “Woke” ethos is another example. Here the noble attempt to become more conscious and evolved is mocked and scorned.

Primitive reactive passions often pursue raw power. Possession of raw power stirs up surges of seductive pleasure. Undue gratification in possessing political power hides underlying weakness. As a psychological defense, the pleasure makes this unconscious claim: “I am not an inner weakling who’s disconnected from my better self. Look at how much I enjoy these surges of power. That proves I relate to power, not to weakness.” Raw power, however, is seductive only to those who are inwardly weak. A strong, healthy person has power, but it is practiced wisely and lovingly.

Love is elusive for those of us who refuse to see our bittersweet indulgence in misery. Most of us are mired to some degree in unconscious inner conflict. Unconsciously, we hold on to emotional hurts that are unresolved from our past. We have, in varying intensity, unresolved emotional attachments to feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned (the first hurts of childhood). For some, victimhood and injustice, as experienced through these eight first hurts, are persistent experiences of self. Most of us recycle, in some measure, one or more of these first hurts. Unconsciously, we resist exposing our collusion in generating and experiencing this suffering. The inner conflict through which this suffering is processed is largely hidden from our awareness by our egotism and its misleading psychological defenses. Because of these inner dynamics, we unwittingly impede our capacity to love ourself and others and to maintain and grow democracy.

Love arises as we plunge insightfully into the dynamics of inner conflict, which comprise the many ways we feel at odds with ourself and others. Love grows when we’re dissolving the negativy of inner conflict and discovering our goodness. With inner conflict, we are tumbled and tossed in fretful self-doubt and hateful dissension that disconnects us from others and our better self.

Unconditional love is the desire, inspired emotionally and sincerely, that good should befall all creatures. With such love, we feel goodness arise within our self. With love, the meaning of life comes into focus. With love comes the answer, the freedom, and the truth.

Most of us are not yet sufficiently evolved to maintain this grace or power. But if we’re moving in this direction, all is well. We just need to keep seeing precisely how fear, spite, cynicism, bitterness, cruelty, and hatred are stirred up inside us. We see that taking responsibility for producing this negativity within ourselves is the path to love.

—

My books provide deep knowledge that helps us to overcome this mischief in our psyche.

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I’ve finally gotten around to writing a glossary of terms for my books and the articles on this site. This glossary appears in the Appendix of my latest book, which is scheduled for publication by this summer or sooner. Eighteen terms are listed here, all common English words, that explain as simply as possible the basic principles and dynamics of depth psychology. Reading this glossary should bring new clarity to one’s personal issues and help to resolve them.

Learning the terminology.

Psyche — The psyche is an operating center of our emotional and mental life. The psyche consists of our unconscious mind, and it is both the leading edge of human progress and the seat of chaos where progress is blocked. With insightful access to our psyche, we become more capable of achieving self-actualization. The psyche contains processes and channels of energy that shape our personality, conjure our thoughts, manage our emotions, drive our behaviors, liberate or block our creativity and intelligence, and govern our ethical and moral awareness.

Inner conflict — Inner conflict exists, in varying degrees, in the psyche of most people. It generates a wide range of unpleasant and painful experiences and outcomes. The dynamics of the conflict are usually unconscious, but people consciously experience their disagreeable symptoms. These symptoms include anger, defensiveness, cynicism, apathy, jealousy, envy, bitterness, and self-pity. The main inner conflict is between the conscious wish to feel strong versus the unconscious readiness to feel refused, helpless, criticized, rejected, abandoned, or betrayed. Inner conflict disconnects us emotionally and mentally from an appreciation of what is good and right about us. It also puts us in danger of underperforming and failing to reach our potential.

Inner critic (superego) — This energetic drive in the psyche is a main dynamic in inner conflict. The inner critic is a drive of self-aggression that develops biologically in early childhood when instinctive aggression, blocked from fully expressing itself into the environment, turns against the child’s vulnerable sense of being. The inner critic is compulsively mocking, rejecting, critical, and sometimes hateful, and it consistently alleges that we deserve to be punished for wrongdoing or unworthiness. It is a command center that expresses a crude, primitive sense of authority, however irrational and arbitrary that might be.

Inner passivity — This center of primitive intelligence in our psyche is another key player in inner conflict. Lodged in the unconscious ego, inner passivity resists the pronouncements and judgments of the inner critic, but it does so ineffectively and defensively, with excuses and blaming of others among its defenses. Inner passivity is a weak link and blind spot in our consciousness, and it is a primary reason that inner conflict exists within us. Inner passivity gives license to the inner critic and thereby to inner conflict. This passivity often causes us to experience ourselves as weak and fearful. It uses psychological defenses to protect itself from the inner critic, but these defenses are a problem for us because they tend to be irrational and self-defeating. This passivity fails to protect us adequately from the inner critic’s trumped-up charges or overblown decrees.

Unconscious ego — This is the underside of the conscious ego. Our unconscious ego is likely the weakest point in our psyche, the place where our consciousness has the least penetration. Nevertheless, the unconscious ego has an ingenious intelligence: It produces clever, misleading defenses that can deceive our mind, conscious ego, and superego. Inner passivity hides out in the unconscious ego, and it is difficult at these depths to clearly differentiate the two.

First hurts of childhood — These eight hurts are emotional sensitivities to feeling refused, deprived, helpless, controlled, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. First experienced in early childhood, the first hurts are carried forward into the emotional life of adults to be compulsively recycled and replayed in the context of daily life. Processed through inner conflict, these hurts are core emotions we are unconsciously tempted to replay and recycle. They can originate as actual hurts inflicted by parents’ ignorance or stupidity, but often the hurts arise as infantile misinterpretations derived from immature subjectivity. The hurts are the emotional content that fuels inner conflict. When these hurts are experienced in interactions with others, they are simultaneously being experienced deep within oneself.

Nonsexual masochism — This flaw in human nature consists of the compulsion to recycle and replay the first hurts of childhood, leading to behavioral reactions in daily life that precipitate painful, hurtful outcomes. A masochistic compulsion to repeatedly experience what is unresolved psychologically, particularly the first hurts of childhood, is deeply repressed in our psyche. This masochism is a psychological potency that binds to inner conflict, largely in the distressful back-and-forth defenses of inner passivity and attacks of the inner critic. The existence and extent of nonsexual masochism in the human psyche, identified in classical psychoanalysis, is the dark secret that modern psychology has failed to expose.

Psychological defenses — Psychological defenses are unconsciously formulated rationalizations—arising as words, beliefs, actions, and attitudes—that we unwittingly employ to protect both our egocentricity and our unconscious, masochistic willingness to continue recycling the first hurts of childhood. The most common defenses are misguided rationalizations and reactions such as blaming, complaining, excuses, denial, hostility, stubbornness, self-righteousness, and willful ignorance. Psychological defenses can be quite elaborate and ingenious. They consist of the various ways we lie to ourselves. They are instruments of resistance to liberating ourselves from inner conflict.

Defensiveness — Defensiveness is a primitive variation on psychological defenses. It consists of the weak and passive impulse to come up with words or thoughts that deny weakness or wrongdoing or any suggestion of weakness or wrongdoing on our part. People are often unaware of the extent of their defensiveness. If aware, they often feel unable to change the behavior. Defensiveness is an instinctively passive reaction on the part of both the conscious and unconscious egos.

Conscious ego — For most people, the conscious ego floods the sense of self to become our primary sense of self. It is, however, is a second-rate stand-in for our better or best self. We tend to identify with our conscious ego; the more we do so, the weaker we are psychologically. The more we depend on our ego for a sense of self, the more exposed we are to its frailty and the less expansive we are. Our conscious ego spends much of its time fretting about our place and standing in the world, persistently contrasting itself to others.

Mind — Our mind is, ideally, a powerful faculty for reasoning and for producing rationality. However, it can be highly susceptible to the irrationality stirred up by inner conflict. The mind, in partnership with our conscious ego, can become an agent and spokesperson for our aggressive inner critic and our lamenting inner passivity. Our mind, churning with reactions to inner conflict, supplies “good reasons” for being, say, critical of others or angry at them. It also processes our whiny, self-pitying, defensive reactions, reflecting inner passivity’s participation in inner conflict. Our mind also repeats and “affirms” our conscious ego’s perceptions of reality. Much of the time our mind also serves up, through conflicted inner dialogue, the inner critic’s admonishments. In this way, our mind can be very passive to our psyche.

Sublimation — This is the process whereby inner conflict is alleviated or overcome, if only temporarily, when an individual creates some interesting, useful, or excellent product as a reaction to the chaos of inner conflict. Sublimation is, short of a cure for neurosis, a limited success in overcoming the misery of inner conflict. The energy to achieve sublimation often arises out of some measure of healthy aggression and belief in self. However, sublimation can also arise from one’s narcissistic defiance and spite against a sense of weakness, defeat, or an oppressive inner critic. When the underlying inner conflict remains unresolved, sublimations may dry up (as in writer’s or artist’s block) and be unavailable to the sufferer.

Transference —This distortion of reality describes the act or process of seeing and experiencing other people through our willingness to feel that they are seeing us according to how we are prepared to feel about ourselves. For instance, when we chronically subject ourselves to self-criticism and self-rejection, we are likely to transfer on to others the expectation that they also see us critically and rejectingly. We “see” coming from them what we are prepared to feel in ourselves. Transference is one of the many ways we can absorb displeasure.

Projection — This distortion of reality describes the act or process of “seeing” in other people what we unconsciously hide or repress within ourselves. We project on to them and attribute to them the undesirable traits and identifications that we unconsciously disown within ourselves. Projection is a psychological defense that enables us to falsely claim that the problem is with them, not us. Projection causes us to dislike or hate others as we set them up as “the causes” of our self-induced suffering. Essentially, we are willing to hate others and act against them in order to protect our ego.

Displacement — This is a process whereby the distress and misery of inner conflict are compulsively inflicted upon others. For example, the man who feels mistreated and disrespected at work comes home and mistreats and disrespects his wife and children. He then, unconsciously and masochistically, generates within himself another version of his torment by identifying with them as victims of injustice and disrespect.

Neurosis — Neurosis is a widespread condition of humanity, caused by the hurtful effects of inner conflict. Most people are somewhere on a spectrum of neurosis. Neurotics suffer needlessly in the sense they have not integrated the psychological knowledge that would liberate them from inner conflict. Modern psychologists, declining to use the term “neurosis,” have unwittingly normalized everyday experiences of misery and self-defeat. Neurotic people are more prone to experiences of transference, projection, and displacement. They are more likely to be thin-skinned, plagued by self-pity, weak at self-regulation, and operating beneath their potential.

Resistance — Psychological resistance is a passive, unconscious process that inhibits personal growth. It consists often of a repressed fear of letting go of one’s primary identifications, particularly the identification with ego as the central agency or experience of mind and self. Resistance is an inner battle between the wish to know versus the wish to not know. It’s the unconscious expectation and fear of transitioning from an ego-identification to a more evolved sense of self. Resistance is also activated to “protect” the individual from inner truth, particularly the humbling knowledge of how we unconsciously participate in generating misery and self-defeat.

Better self — This self is experienced as the growing realization of our potential. Here we experience the growing benefits of self-actualization. Through our better self, we possess greater capacity to enjoy truth, beauty, and integrity. We maintain equanimity in challenging situations and let go of the hurts of the past. Our better self has escaped from needless misery and folly. Becoming our better self (and perhaps our best self) is likely a requirement for saving civilization, democracy, and our planet.

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People are grieving and outraged, fearful and overwhelmed. Another American Revolution is underway, and now the enemy is us. The first revolution got rid of the monarchy; this time we need to dethrone our hidden hankering for subjugation.

Political pandemonium parallels what happens in our psyche.

There exists in our psyche a deficiency of consciousness, a passive nonbeing, that has enabled psychologically primitive people to take over our government.

The main threat to freedom appears to be coming from the Trump Administration, but this mess we’re in goes deeper than that. The pandemonium parallels what happens in our psyche where we have our own chaos, even a stealthy tyranny, that arises from inner conflict. This conflict can enslave us to self-defeating compulsions, self-centered dissatisfaction, needless self-punishment, and gloomy self-doubt. For most of us, the conflict is invisible. We don’t see how we fraternize unconsciously with weakness, misery, and folly.

Many of us (both liberals and conservatives) are neurotic, meaning susceptible to self-pity, self-doubt, and self-criticism. Even the mildest neurosis can undermine the quality of one’s citizenship. We lack power to the degree that we tolerate the tyranny of our inner conflict. This conflict is largely the mental and emotional clash in our psyche between experiences of courage versus fear, right versus wrong, strength versus weakness, pleasure versus displeasure, and rationality versus irrationality.

Inner conflict has us scrambling to justify ourselves while blaming others and the supposed harshness of fate. This conflict drags us down into apathy, moodiness, cynicism, fear, and anger. Here we doubt our worthiness. The resulting mishmash of thoughts and emotions saps energy, sabotages inner peace, and degrades citizenship.

For me, this historic time is both calamitous and favorable. We all understand the calamitous part. Everyone sees the chaos and lawlessness and feels the stress and worry. So, what’s favorable about a world that’s becoming weirdly surrealistic, dangerously divisive, and mindlessly reactive? To be patriots in this clash of rationality versus irrationality, we need to be wiser and stronger, and making this happen is the best thing we can do for ourselves. We need this strength to build a workable world.

We can acquire insight that exposes the dynamics of inner conflict. We start to see, for instance, how passively and defensively we react to our aggressive inner critic. This primitive inner critic is the master of our personality, and through inner weakness we tolerate a sense of inner oppression. Our inner life is a government of sorts, and when we’re neurotic, or distressed by fear and confusion, the government at work in our psyche operates like a mini autocracy that activates irrational fear and blocks us from accessing a deeper sense of freedom.

Still, the current crisis may portend a giant leap forward. A revolution is now happening, and the process will bring out both the worst and the best in people. If we each strive to grow stronger, we can fulfill both a personal and a national destiny. These are not hapless times but heroic times. Consider yourself blessed to be a patriot.

It’s not rifles and cannon we need for this battle, but knowledge and truth. Truth and knowledge can be found in matters both momentous and trivial. We need momentous truth, meaning insights into why we’re so often at odds (or at war) with our own self and each other. Truth starts as we uncover the rubbish that hides our better self.

Destiny is like a flowing river. In this flow, we are destined to get stronger and wiser. That’s exactly what we have been doing. Women and people of color now hold positions of power. We have food-safety inspections and a Clean Water Act. Remember that just seventy or eighty years ago most adults went around puffing on cigarettes and pipes. We were induced by advertising to suck ourselves to death. We’re smarter than that now. That’s progress—that’s how the river flows. But now we’ve hit a stretch of rapids in the river. If we want to stay afloat, we must stop sucking up fear and thrashing in ignorance. One by one, we can grow our humanity. We each get the chance to be our best.

There are many ways to achieve personal growth. The best approaches help us see ourselves more objectively as we step out from behind an unwise egocentric mentality. It’s important also to expose the part in us that is quick to engage in sullen sentiments and petty passions. If we’re going to be true patriots, we need to recognize and overcome this weakness. There’s no better time than right now to do this.

—

In my books, I outline how to become emotionally stronger. Readers can start with any one of these books:

Why We Suffer   The Phantom of the Psyche    Freedom From Self Sabotage

The knowledge in these books reveals our unconscious loitering in the back alleys of inner conflict. This weakness in human nature is common to people of all races and nations. Knowledge of this weakness reveals the self-betrayal in the sad story that claims, “I’m not sufficient in myself to make a difference in the world.”

The knowledge in these books goes far beyond what mainstream psychology is telling you. I expose the many ways we unconsciously stumble into suffering. We haven’t broken free of our appetite for misery, dissension, violence, and war because we are trapped in inner conflict. Expose the mischief in your psyche so it doesn’t crush your spirit and the spirit of America.

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I have been laboring over my latest book, and I’m pleased with how the writing communicates the essence of depth psychology. The book needs more touchups, but it will be published soon. It’s my tenth book and, in the thirty-two years since the first was published, I have made steady progress at communicating the concepts and making deep psychological knowledge more assessable to readers.

Discovering buried emotional wounds.

Our psyche has a compulsive interest in experiencing inner conflict, and this mostly unconscious inner state initiates our emotional and behavioral difficulties. If we can’t see in ourselves the nature of this conflict, we can be very much at the mercy of how it plays out. In my latest writing endeavor, I even throw in one of my poems at one point to reinforce my prose.

My writing pushes back against our resistance to exposing our deep, unwitting participation in misery and folly. In this new book, I’ve come up with so many examples of inner conflict and its ill-effects that the inner situation I describe becomes almost undeniable. Much of the evidence for the veracity of my contentions consists of connections made between our inner conflict and the many ways that conflict undermines us and the world at large. This new book is the best mirror yet to seeing yourself objectively.

Meanwhile, for this month’s blog I have selected an excerpt from one of my late wife’s three books. (Sandra Michaelson, The Emotional Catering Service: The Quest for Emotional Independence. Amazon, 264 pages).

From Chapter 13

Path to Emotional Independence

No matter how negligent your parents might have been, you still must take responsibility for the fact that, when in misery, you are making choices to react to life with negative expectations. Bad or abusive parenting certainly has a profound effect on the feelings and behaviors of children. But you have the choice as an adult whether to maintain or keep alive your past hurts. Many people use the belief that “my parents ruined my life” to justify their pursuit of failure or deprivation. Holding a grudge against others only hurts you and blocks the possibility of inner peace.

As caterers retrieve past emotional hurts, they experience powerful feelings of sadness concerning the lack of caring and acceptance they believe they experienced in childhood. You might need to grieve consciously over this loss, to the extent it actually occurred. But understand that nothing can change the reality of your past. The key is to shift your focus from what was done to you to deeper understanding of how you now unwittingly deprive yourself and repeat the hurt in the present.

A child’s feelings of being a victim can become more intense or pervasive in the adult. However, until we become more aware, it feels as if there is no choice but to respond emotionally in the same way we reacted as children. We have identified ourselves with feelings of being unloved, denied, and controlled. When we first let go of these feelings, we feel like we lose a sense of who we are. We see change as loss, not gain, and we fear losing ourselves in the process. We do not know how “to be” without being enmeshed in the old patterns.

Some authors and lecturers suggest the solution to health and happiness is in letting go of our resentments and forgiving those who have wronged us. This is not as easy as it sounds. Mentally, we want to forgive, but the emotional part of our psyche has a totally different agenda. It wants to hold onto the gripes and grievances and resists letting them go. This resistance has to be understood and acknowledged.

Forcing forgiveness when it is not really felt emotionally or conjuring up positive images to cover up buried grudges are dead-end detours. Both techniques create inner resistance. It is awareness of the truth of one’s negative feelings and how they play out in our present lives, along with insight and effort, that changes negative patterns.

I had a client who was “trying” to forgive his father. He wrote in a letter to his father, “I forgive you, Dad—for screwing me up.” This statement indicated he still felt himself to have been a victim of his father’s alleged mistreatment. Another client remarked, “I forgave my parents long before I even knew what I was forgiving.” This was faked forgiveness, not genuine forgiveness.

When we understand how we unconsciously hold onto old hurts of feeling unloved, deprived, and somehow victimized, we cease to blame our parents or others for our suffering. Consequently, we feel no need to forgive since there is no grudge. Forgiveness becomes a moot point once we recognize how we perpetuate the role of victim in our life by holding others responsible for our distress.

Rather than forgiveness, I see compassion and understanding as the key elements in transformation. Compassion gives us the ability to see both sides of an emotionally stressful situation. You can now understand the other person’s point of view, though you may still not agree with it. As well, you understand your emotional complicity in your reaction to that person. Now you can access compassion. You are liberating yourself from the past. Instead of being all charged up with negativity, you are able to embrace much better feelings.

To develop compassion, you must learn to listen to yourself and others in a totally new way. Compassion is kin to curiosity. You feel curious about how others feel or see things. You are curious about your own feelings and reactions. You care about the way others feel. You care about yourself and your feelings as well.

Do you really listen to what other people are saying? Do you listen to your partner, your children, to yourself? Do you carefully observe your feelings, fears, and negative thoughts? Or do you get caught up in your own rigid convictions and judgments of how you think things should be?

Ask yourself: “What would you feel if you discovered that your parents really did love you?” Notice any resistance to believing or feeling this. Observe how a part of you wants to see your parents as unloving and deficient. If you feel in conflict with a parent (or anyone), try imagining yourself in their position. Imagine how they would feel or perceive the situation. This ability to see the other person’s perspective diminishes the feeling of being a victim and enhances compassion.

Letting go of being a victim of one’s parents does not mean an individual has to like the parents or condone what they did. It does not mean approving of their behavior or letting the parents get away with mistreatment. It simply means the person is no longer using parents’ misbehavior to justify remaining dissatisfied, angry, helpless—or to justify difficulties or failures in one’s dealings with them or others.

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The Emotional Catering Service is available here.

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Our intelligence triumphs when we bring into focus the self-harming dynamics going on in our psyche. These conflicting dynamics are very much indifferent to our wellbeing. When they remain hidden from us, we may have only a hit-or-miss capacity for healthy self-regulation. (An earlier version of this story appeared on this site in 2020, and it has been one of my most-read posts.)

Discover the source of your suffering.

We all have some degree of emotional weakness, and this weakness involves our tendency to replay and recycle inner conflict. When we do so, we experience the repercussions—distressful symptoms. These include worry, guilt, shame, moodiness, boredom, fear, humiliation, and depression. What’s behind the symptoms? Our psyche operates like an algorithm that triggers old unresolved hurts from childhood. These first hurts are feelings of being deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and betrayed.

When we are struggling emotionally, our psyche is churning up these original hurts and accompanying symptoms in a jumble of inner conflict. We all have some degree of this conflict. In some people, it is intense, and it is experienced repeatedly and compulsively, to the point of being addictive. Through this conflict, we unwittingly become dupes in a “game” of self-punishment. We are passive accomplices in our psyche’s conflicted nature, and it is this passivity that makes our suffering addictive.

The problem starts with self-aggression, which is the primitive psychic energy that flows from our inner critic in the form of unkind and harsh accusations of wrongdoing, foolishness, and failure. These accusations tend to be irrational. The inner critic assails us simply because it is a biological drive of self-aggression. In early childhood, our species’ predatory instinct mutates to form this self-aggression because natural aggression is blocked from fully flowing outward.

Our inner critic, though, is not the main problem. The primary problem is inner weakness, the point at which we absorb this self-aggression from our inner critic and turn it into self-punishment.

We absorb this aggression, these attacks upon our worthiness and integrity, because of the psychological weakness known as inner passivity. This passivity is lodged in our unconscious ego, shrouded from our awareness. Inner passivity operates like an enabler or a codependent in its accommodating and compromising interactions with the inner critic. This is the ignition point of humanity’s inner conflict where, in psychoanalytic terms, the aggressive superego (inner critic) encounters the unconscious ego and its passive, subordinate nature.

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

Inner passivity, which I write about extensively on this website, makes us secret collaborators in our emotional suffering. This passivity produces in us an unconscious receptiveness to the inner critic’s claims that we are flawed, bad, or unworthy. The more that our inner passivity absorbs the inner critic’s attacks upon our goodness and integrity, the more self-punishment we generate. (Again, the punishments include worry, guilt, shame, moodiness, boredom, fear, humiliation, and depression.) The punishments serve as a pound-of-flesh offering to the inner critic in acknowledgement of its (usually irrational) claims against us.

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

I don’t think humans are going to become more evolved until we take responsibility for the unruly dynamics of our psyche. In fact, there’s the likelihood we will regress. Up to now, we have been somewhat innocent in our collective self-defeat because the deeper source of self-damage has escaped our awareness. But our resistance to becoming more conscious and thereby more evolved is now threatening civilization itself.

Inner passivity, holed up in our psyche’s unconscious ego, juggles various defensive options in its unsteady effort to neutralize the inner critic. Inner passivity is required by its weak nature to make compromises. It tries to defend us, frequently by blaming others for our misery, but it does so quite ineffectively. These defenses, for one thing, are exercises in self-deception. Our best solution is to discover our authentic self, which we do as we free ourselves from inner conflict.

Inner passivity makes plea deals with the inner critic—without consulting us! It offers up to the inner critic plea-bargains or compromises that say, in effect, that we will accept some suffering in acknowledgement of the inner critic’s accusations against us. This pound-of-flesh offering usually succeeds in getting the inner critic to ease up on its assault on our character and integrity. Often though, our suffering needs to be quite intense to get the inner critic to back off.  It’s like the thug who stops kicking his victim after the victim has absorbed “sufficient” pain.

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

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

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

Often, people feel guilt and shame for minor and even imaginary infractions. The inner critic can be so intimidating that an individual’s guilt or shame is triggered just by passing thoughts or old memories of wrongdoing. Often the amount of guilt and shame experienced far outweighs the degree of a person’s wrongdoing. The inner critic makes felonies our of misdemeanors—or just alleged wrongdoing! A minor misdeed can be milked over years and decades for its suffering potential.

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Depression and suicidal thoughts are also “pounds of flesh.” When self-punishment accumulates in one’s psyche, the effect over time can produce depressive, suicidal thoughts. An unconscious defense arises that tries to deny one’s passive engagement in self-punishment: I don’t want to feel beaten down by my inner critic. I’m not indulging in this self-abuse. Look at how depressed I am. I’m not being receptive to this abuse! I hate it! My depression proves I hate it! (Or, My thoughts of killing myself prove I am not willingly indulging in first hurts or absorbing malice from my inner critic.) These defenses, produced through inner passivity, are cunning self-deceptions conjured up at the deepest levels of the psyche.

Individuals absorb self-punishment from the inner critic because they fail, through inner passivity, to protect themselves from the largely irrational insinuations that build the case for punishment. The passive side of inner conflict can use a real or alleged wrongdoing committed long ago and offer it up for self-punishment. That’s because the individual, through inner passivity, remains willing to continue absorbing allegations of wrongdoing. The individual hasn’t established inner freedom from the inner critic’s oppression. Many people persist in forgiving themselves for some past infraction, but it’s to no avail because, through inner passivity, they remain emotionally addicted to the incoming self-aggression.

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

Let’s take a symptom—procrastination—and trace it back to its source in inner conflict and subversive self-punishment. Procrastination is often accompanied by a painful sense of self-admonishment. The inner critic considers procrastination, a common symptom of inner conflict, to be a “crime” worthy of punishment. The crime, as the inner critic sees it, arises from inner passivity’s readiness to indulge in its own sense of weakness. The inner critic berates the individual for passive dawdling, and this person soaks up the abuse, producing guilt or shame. Why do we procrastinate in the first place? Well, of course, we’re not perfect—and we’re going to have our weaknesses. Yet procrastination can be an unconsciously willful acting-out of self-sabotage. In other words, we can use procrastination as the means to replay unresolved inner conflict, first to experience the passivity itself and then, second, to passively experience admonishments from the inner critic. (This appetite for self-punishment also applies to the common self-defeating behavior of chronic indecision.)

The axiom that we are all largely responsible for how we experience life makes perfect sense when we uncover this unconscious willingness to experience self-punishment. An example is the common willingness of multitudes of people to live with a sense of oppression and victimization, a secret willingness to suffer that people often instinctively cover up with chronic complaining and a multitude of other defenses.

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Evidence for the appeal of self-punishment is everywhere. Our most vivid memories are often ones that produce bad feelings about ourselves. Our most intrusive thoughts often cast us in a bad light. Daily we find fault with personal “flaws” of character or intelligence that we believe have undermined our dreams and expectations. We stew in feelings of being disrespected and devalued, debating whether these intimations of unworthiness have validity. Anger, hate, bitterness, and cynicism arise from inner conflict to poison our experiences. We are tempted to want to punish others, to see harm befall them, even as surreptitiously we produce within ourselves a bittersweet facsimile of what that punishment feels like.

Parents who as children were rigorously punished are often compelled to punish their children. In unduly punishing their children or in feeling impulses to do so, these parents are unwittingly using their children as a means through which to identify emotionally with the feeling of being punished. It’s déjà vu all over again, at the kids’ expense.

With some parents, this dynamic is reversed: They hesitate to impose appropriate punishments. They associate being strong and firm with somehow administering inappropriate authority and being overly strict. They are misled by the impression that the exercise of one’s authority, even when benevolent and well-intentioned, is unkind, insensitive, and unduly punishing. (This can be how they experienced, often subjectively, their own parents’ application of authority.) Parents and people in general often punish themselves with self-doubt over their right to be assertive.

Different personality types have their own formulas for producing self-punishment and then covering their tracks. Consider perfectionists. They avoid awareness of their emotional attachment to self-criticism by claiming in their unconscious defense: I’m not looking to feel punished by my inner critic. I’m not interested in feeling criticized! Look at how perfectly I try to do everything. That proves I don’t want to absorb self-criticism. But this is pure self-deception. Perfectionists not only indulge in self-criticism, but they also experience the stress and anxiety of striving to maintain the defense, namely the impossible goal of perfectionism.

Another example of a self-punishing personality is the needy person who claims unconsciously: I don’t want to feel rejected, betrayed, belittled, or abandoned. Look at how eager I am to feel that others see and appreciate my value. But needy people, in their receptivity to their inner critic’s abasement of them, regularly punish themselves for allegedly being insignificant and unworthy. Needy people act out their underlying emotional attachment to rejection and abandonment when others, feeling a growing disrespect for their neediness, disengage from them.

Our affinity for self-punishment reveals an unconscious masochistic streak in human nature. Hidden away in our unconscious mind, the specter of a generalized, nonsexual masochism, an unconscious affinity for suffering, is a primary ingredient in inner conflict and a chief instigator of accompanying anguish and destructiveness. But our delicate, conscious ego resists uncovering the dark side of human nature. Our better self wants this deeper knowledge—while our ego hates it.

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