WHY WE SUFFER

Is Ambivalence a Hidden Factor in Much of Human Misery?

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Ambivalence is one of our more perplexing psychological ailments. The source of this paradoxical mental-emotional state lies submerged in our psyche, almost as unfathomable as those bizarre deep-sea creatures that underwater cameras have discovered.

Ambivalence is a psychological state that can create much misery.

Ambivalence is the misery we feel when we have conflicting feelings—love and hate, for instance—that we experience simultaneously toward a person, group, object, institution, idea, or action. Ambivalence constitutes an excess of conflicting thoughts. It’s a tortured state of mind that involves failing to reach a coherent point of view on a subject one feels strongly about.

This psychological impasse contains elements of indecision, cynicism, confusion, and mixed feelings. But ambivalence has its own special psychological configuration. Under its influence, a person hovers in pronounced self-doubt, unable to feel or even to imagine a genuine or authentic self capable of assuming inner authority. This person is unable to feel or connect with the part of himself or herself that’s reasonably confident of knowing and acting upon one’s best interests. This state of self-alienation, of “not knowing one’s mind,” is one of many symptoms associated with inner passivity.

How widespread is the problem of ambivalence? Its collective effect could be contaminating many social and political issues. Ambivalence would likely be at play in people who hate the government while claiming to be patriots who love their country. Ambivalence is conceivably a factor with people who believe they’re decent and good while also convinced they’re wretched sinners. Also under its influence are people who understand the need to have police forces yet personally detest representatives of that authority. So too for those who denounce “forbidden” sexual attitudes and behaviors while in their imagination experience a compulsive allure for them. The ambivalence in these examples can be painfully acute. [Read more…]

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Inner Conflict is the Source of Cognitive Distortion

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So much of human thinking is irrational. This kind of messed-up thinking, often referred to as cognitive distortion, perceives reality in ways that are misleading or flawed, if not completely wrong, false, or stupid. (Examples follow below and more are found here.)

Our messed-up thinking produces irrational feelings and behaviors.

Irrationality floods our mind in the first years of life, so its staying power shouldn’t surprise us. The young child has to deal with pronounced self-centeredness, aggression, passivity, and baby fears. The child’s mental and emotional life is also confounded by the trauma of weaning, ambivalence, moral reproach, the threat of punishment, toilet training, the limits of brain power, the inability to frame situations on the basis of experience, the ups and downs of what is pleasant and unpleasant, and various other demands of necessary socialization.

In addition, a child soon starts to experience guilt and shame, along with a litany of what’s forbidden to see, exhibit, feel, and talk about. Much of this mental and emotional disorder remains in the adult psyche in the form of inner conflict and cognitive distortion.

Overcoming cognitive distortion is the primary aim of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is America’s leading product in the mental-health marketplace. Yet CBT’s methodology just skims the surface. Depth psychology, in contrast, penetrates into the source of this distortion. This article offers readers a chance to understand cognitive distortion from the different points of view of these two methodologies. [Read more…]

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A Technique for Overcoming Insomnia

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If you’re plagued by insomnia or taking too long to fall asleep, you’ll find plenty of advice online. Yet a third of U.S. adults report not getting enough sleep, so that advice might not be helping much.

No–it’s not counting sheep!

I have a technique to offer the sleep-deprived, and it’s not one I’ve seen mentioned on the internet as a way to fall asleep. This is the second technique or practice that I’ve published for this purpose. The first was described at this website several years ago, in a post titled, Taming the “Little Monsters” of Insomnia.

The “Little Monsters” technique involves recognition of the role that inner passivity plays in insomnia. When inner passivity is activated in the psyche, people can lie awake unable to sleep because they’re entangled emotionally in feeling helpless, which produces anxiety and stress. This helplessness often arises from the feeling of being unable to tame the worrisome, self-critical, or catastrophic thinking running amok in one’s mind. The technique involves acquiring self-knowledge, namely deeper awareness of one’s unconscious self-defeating readiness to resonate emotionally with feelings of helplessness and self-doubt.

The second technique is based on the loving-kindness meditation, which is derived from Buddhism and also found in ancient Hinduism and Jainism texts. Here’s how it works: When lying awake unable to sleep, begin to reflect upon other people in your life. Pick a person from among your family members, friends, work associates, or someone struggling with disease, finances, or other hardships. Begin to feel that you care about that person and that you’re sending that person your kindest thoughts and feelings. [Read more…]

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Notes to Psychotherapists on Addressing Inner Passivity

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Inner passivity and inner conflict cause a split in our sense of being.

Earlier this month I received an email from a young psychotherapist, in practice for just a few years, who was struggling to understand how, despite his best efforts, a client of his had committed suicide. He wrote, in part:

I recently experienced a therapist’s worst nightmare and lost a client to suicide. I’ve struggled to make sense of it as he exhibited almost none of the traditional warning signs. One thing I do remember about him is that he was very inwardly passive. Your writings have given me the clearest picture of his internal world, one of a harsh critic and a passive recipient. Nothing in my training even remotely addresses the passivity that I now think was a big part of his suffering. I look forward to reading more of your work and using it to help more people in the future.

Since this therapist is interested in applying this psychological knowledge in his practice, I can offer a few points to assist him and other therapists. My regular readers, meanwhile, can benefit from understanding more about inner passivity and the therapeutic relationship from the therapist’s point of view.

The individual in danger of committing suicide is likely to be inwardly weak and disconnected from self, unable to support himself or herself emotionally. (See an earlier post on the subject.) This weakness is a symptom of inner passivity, which I describe in my books and articles. Inner passivity operates as an enabler of our inner critic, and it’s a major factor in many kinds of dysfunction, including depression, anxiety, and addictions.

As my clients start seeing and understanding their inner passivity, they’re able to recognize it as a clinical condition and a universal peculiarity of human nature. With growing insight, they begin to see and feel the powerful influence of the passive side as they also shift away from their unconscious identification with it. As a benefit of this recognition, they start to detach emotionally from false impressions of themselves (such as impressions of being unworthy or a hopeless failure) that their symptoms have misled them into believing. In this process, their best self emerges from under the weight of painful and self-defeating symptoms. [Read more…]

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Another Visual Portrayal of Our Psyche’s Dynamics

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Our body, mind, and psyche are fundamentals of our existence. Our body is visible to us and our mind is at our disposal. But our psyche tends to hide in the mist of our unconscious, like the hint of a person lurking in the background of a dream.

This image depicts our unconscious tendency to gravitate toward unresolved negative emotions.

When we don’t know basic facts about our psyche, we find it harder to connect with our deeper, better self. We’re then at the mercy of inner turmoil when our psyche is conflicted, as it is to some degree in just about everyone.

The psyche is the repository of forces, dynamics, and conflicts—largely unconscious—that influence and even determine our personality, behaviors, thought processes, and prospects for success and happiness. Misery and self-defeat arise from any dysfunction occurring in our psyche. Knowing more about our psyche is obviously important.

Our psyche becomes apparent and accessible to us—not visually but as a new awakening of our intelligence—when we learn and see how the principles of depth psychology apply to us personally.

Learning about the psyche is challenging because we can’t put it under a microscope and study all its aspects. What exactly is it anyway? We can’t even say whether our psyche is an entity within us, an energy field swirling around us, or some other mysterious configuration.

In this post, I’m presenting an illustration that depicts a major operating system of our psyche. This illustration (drawn and colored by me in my folksy style) depicts our unconscious tendency to become entangled in unresolved negative emotions. (Click to enlarge image.) I recently published another visual portrayal of the psyche (in a post titled, Illustrating the Characters Who Mess with Our Mind), along with a written explanation of what is portrayed. My latest artwork, published here with this post, provides another overview of how our psyche works. Over the years I’ve written extensively about all of these dynamics, and I’m hoping that this visual portrayal and the one published earlier will help readers make sense of depth psychology. [Read more…]

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Get to Know Your Psyche’s Operating Systems

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People tend unconsciously to falsify reality. We’re usually not aware of how and why our sense of reality is distorted, which is an impediment to our intelligence.

Separate operating systems in our psyche can distort our objectivity.

What’s causing this distortion of reality? At play in our psyche, with distinct and separate “operating systems,” are the inner critic, ego, id, psychological defenses, inner passivity, and resistance. Not only do these systems tend to operate outside our awareness, they’re also at odds with one another as they churn up inner conflict, negative emotions, and self-defeating behaviors. I have illustrated and described them here as aspects or “characters” of our psyche.

As we grow psychologically, a dominant and healthy inner operating system arises from our solid connection to (and embrace of) our authentic self.

For this article, I focus on the operating system known as inner passivity. It’s the least well-known and perhaps the most problematic of these inner systems. This passivity, which affects almost everyone, is a mental-emotional state of mind through which we stumble into suffering and self-defeat. Humankind has not yet begun to appreciate this aspect of our human nature.

We are in the throes of this passivity when we interpret situations and challenges through feelings of being overwhelmed, helpless, indecisive, trapped, constrained, restricted, controlled, held accountable, required to submit, and otherwise victimized. [Read more…]

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How to Love Yourself

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A lot of people struggle with the challenge of trying not only to feel good about themselves but, more urgently, trying to avoid feeling bad or really bad about themselves.

Being a loving person is our birthright. But we still have to make it happen.

When individuals understand the primary psychological dynamics that produce self-doubt, self-criticism, self-rejection, and even self-hatred, they can escape from these negative feelings and begin to appreciate themselves in an accepting and loving way.

Being a loving person is our birthright. This ability comes naturally when we clean house, meaning when we identify and resolve the inner conflicts that produce negative emotions.

You can get to love by looking at the inner dynamics that cause you to dislike yourself. Feeling bad about oneself usually arises from an inner conflict involving feelings of being unworthy, unimportant, and deserving of disrespect. What exactly is the conflict? Consciously, we want to feel good about ourselves but many of us still resonate emotionally with (or identify with) the feeling that being disrespected and unworthy is somehow true to the essence of who we are.

Why is this? When we’re feeling bad about ourselves on a daily basis, the most likely culprit producing these bad feelings is self-aggression. This self-aggression is a byproduct of the natural biologically endowed aggression that human beings have required in order to survive. Our ancient ancestors were very aggressive as hunters and defenders of their territory. This aggression has been modified and tempered by civilization. Religious principles have at times helped to contain this aggression, as have legal systems, educational achievement, social and cultural norms, and the threat of punishment and imprisonment. Yet our innate aggression still exists as part of our biology, and we can obviously see evidence for it in the extent of domestic and international dissension and strife. [Read more…]

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Don’t Let Inner Passivity Undermine Democracy

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Most people, including mental-health professionals, are unaware of how strongly we know ourselves and identify with ourselves through a condition of non-being known as inner passivity.

Democracy depends on your efforts to grow psychologically.

This mental and emotional identity is a widespread psychological condition that’s largely unconscious. We aren’t aware of how much it causes us to feel self-doubt, to question our value, and to disconnect from our best self. In this way, inner passivity undermines the qualities that a democracy requires of its people.

Inner passivity blocks us from accessing our integrity, dignity, courage, compassion, moral intelligence, and love. As we begin to see and understand our inner passivity, we become aware of vital knowledge concerning inner conflict and psychological dysfunction.

Our democracy needs the deeper knowledge that exposes this passivity. As we grow into a recognition of our inner passivity, we begin to understand the psychological undercurrents of ongoing conflict in our own psyche and in the dynamics of society and politics.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, perhaps the mainstream media’s deepest thinker, wrote this week about the requirements of democratic citizenship, saying “The demands of democracy are clear—the elevation and transformation of your very self. If you are not transformed, you are just skating by.”

Through inner passivity, we find ourselves unable to stand up to (or represent ourselves effectively against) our inner critic, which is a primitive, authoritarian aspect of our psyche that harasses us, puts us on the defensive, and curtails inner freedom. We’re less conscious as human beings when we haven’t exposed this inner conflict and made efforts to resolve it. [Read more…]

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The Las Vegas Killer’s Hidden Motive

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Authorities have been trying unsuccessfully to come up with a motive to explain the massacre carried out by a lone gunman in Las Vegas this week. The killer didn’t appear to be motivated by political, social, or religious views.

Insights into human nature help us to understand the killer’s motive.

The principles of depth psychology reveal a possible motive. This motive, however, would have been unconscious to the killer. He wouldn’t have had any notion of it.

To discover this motive, an analysis of the killer’s psyche is required. Information is needed about his everyday personality, quirks, traits, and behaviors. Some of that information can be found in a report in The New York Times, titled “Stephen Paddock Chased Gambling’s Payouts and Perks,” published four days after the massacre.

For the purposes of psychological analysis, the newspaper’s profile of the 64-year-old killer, Stephen Paddock, is sketchy and incomplete. But the article does provide enough clues for me to make an analysis.

Paddock’s primary motivation, unbeknownst to himself, was to shift or displace his self-hatred, a result of intensifying inner conflict, onto others. Paddock’s evil aggression was facilitated by an accumulation of self-aggression that had built up in his psyche. He was likely being assailed with pure self-rejection and self-hatred that emanated from his inner critic or superego. In his psyche, he was unable to protect himself from this onslaught because of his own passive nature.

This passivity in his psyche, a psychological disconnect from his better self, accounted in large part for why he became an unevolved, degraded person, in the form of a compulsive gambler who spent many hours at a time, over many years, planted in front of a video poker machine in a cold, calculating, almost trance-like state. [Read more…]

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Insight that Conquers Incessant Negative Thinking

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We obviously don’t want our mind to jitter like a hyperactive oscillator, especially when our thoughts are tainted by anger, self-doubt, self-pity, bitterness, and defensiveness. It’s not a happy fate to become a worrywart, nervous wreck, or angry ogre.

Our unconscious mind drives the process of creating incessant negative thoughts.

When we become preoccupied with negative thoughts, our unconscious mind is the dynamo driving the process. In our unconscious, we have unresolved emotions from childhood that involve feeling helpless, deprived, refused, criticized, and rejected. We’re inclined if not compelled to experience ourselves and our place in the world in ways that recycle and replay such unresolved emotions.

Incessant negative thinking accompanies these unresolved emotions. This thinking often constitutes inner dialogue that tries to make sense of what we’re feeling. Often our thoughts are defending us from, or covering up, a conscious recognition of our own unconscious determination or willingness to experience our daily situations and circumstances through these unresolved negative emotions.

Almost everyone has intrusive, disconcerting thoughts at times, and these thoughts are often accompanied by anxiety and fear. Yet people might not realize they’re engaged in incessant negative thinking. Their dire considerations and grim speculations feel to them like normal mental processing. Their mind can be humming a low discordant tune they hardly notice, such as when they constantly feel that something has to be attended to, or when they dwell on some situation that they feel helpless to fix or improve upon, or when they’re preoccupied with the sense that some important benefit is missing from their life.

These are all passive experiences, in the sense that we let this negativity persist with no thought to stopping it or no idea how to stop it. If we don’t recognize our passivity, we’ll go on believing that everything’s normal, that our underlying disquietude is just the way life is and the way we are meant to be. [Read more…]

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