WHY WE SUFFER

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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The Exhausting Race against Time

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It’s easy to feel that we’re the slaves of time, or at the mercy of time, or that time is a force of nature to which we are helpless or powerless. People sometimes see life as a block of time being chipped away, especially when they imagine their dreams of career and relationship fulfillment slipping away.

Racing against time is a way to feel helpless and powerless.

Of course, it’s true we can’t control the passage of time. Still, we’re inwardly conflicted when we turn that reality into a source of anxiety, stress, and frantic busyness.

Racing against time makes sense if you’re trying to save your town from rising flood waters. In many cases, though, people who experience life in a time-urgent way are drowning in emotional hot water.

Psychologists call this “excessive time-urgency” or “hurry sickness.” Unfortunately, mainstream thinking on the subject is simplistic and unhelpful. This simplistic approach is exemplified in this comment from a psychologist:

Excessive time-urgency is a problem in thinking. Everyone has some pressure to get things done. However, if you consider everything is equally urgent, you’re likely to experience stress problems. Rethink your view of time, how you relate to it, and what is really important to you. Place events and tasks in proper perspective.

This advice is unhelpful. First of all, to say that time-urgency is “a problem in thinking” is misleading. The problem is deeper. It arises out of emotional dynamics submerged beneath our conscious thinking. What we need instead of “better thinking” is insight that flushes out the source of the problem. [Read more…]

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The Perils of Past, Present, and Future

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Past, present, and future walk into a bar. Suddenly everyone becomes very tense.

End of joke, in case you didn’t get it.

Really, it’s no laughing matter if you allow past, present, and future to walk into the barroom of your mind to argue, get drunk, and start a fight. You’ll become, needless to say, very tense.

Past, present, and future are “time zones” rich in opportunities to suffer.

Figuratively speaking, that big brawl erupts in our psyche when we’re preoccupied with painful memories from our past, or when we’re misusing the present to wallow in negative impressions, or when we’re anxiously envisioning a future laden with adversity.

We need to keep in mind, of course, that past and future are experienced by us only in the present moment. Writing 1,600 years ago in his Confessions, St. Augustine said, “There are three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things.” Because of inner conflict, however, many of us have a tendency to zoom around in an emotionally induced virtual reality of past and future, usually without any awareness of the detrimental effects of doing so.

The negative considerations and speculations that inner conflict dishes out compel us to chase after misery wherever we can find it. Many of us unwittingly jump into the past or the future—as we construe these “time zones” in our emotional imagination—whenever we get a chance to cozy up to some old hurt, negative emotion, or unresolved inner fear. [Read more…]

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The Essentials of Empowerment for Enablers and Copedendents

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My late wife, Sandra Michaelson, had great insights into the passive side of human nature. She wrote extensively about passivity in her first book, The Emotional Catering Service, a book about codependents and enablers that was published in 1993.

In this book, she illuminates the self-sabotage that’s inherent in humanity’s unconscious affinity for the passive experience and perspective.

The passivity in our psyche is possibly the greatest menace to our personal and collective progress. Yet we have a hard time recognizing this passivity in ourselves. It’s elusive, like a phantom in our psyche. Our challenge is to bring it into focus. We need to see how it blocks us from connecting with our authenticity, intelligence, and power.

The Emotional Catering Service exposes many of the ways in which people are handicapped by their passivity. Both women and men, of course, can be enablers and codependents. Yet Sandra’s book, I believe, can especially help many women to become more self-assured and confident. More than ever, our world needs an upsurge of feminine perspectives and values to counter masculine tendencies that, at their worst, are insensitive, self-centered, and destructive.

I’ve just completed a light editing revision of Sandra’s book, which is now available as an e-book or paperback at Amazon.com. Here is an excerpt: [Read more…]

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Answers to Questions from Readers (Part 5)

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Readers often send me emails with their comments and questions. The seven queries that I respond to here deal primarily with inner passivity. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of inner passivity, you might first read this post. My responses to the queries below are in italics.

Inner passivity is a condition of our psyche that hinders self-development.

Hello. I’ve just read and re-read your article, Defensiveness for Dummies. I recognize that I’m very defensive, and this defensiveness has led to problems in many of my relationships.

After reading the article, I remain confused about the relationship between defensiveness and inner conflict. In particular, I don’t follow you when you say that aggressive defensiveness is a form of inner passivity. I understand defensiveness and aggression as very active, not passive; they are action rather than inaction. Indeed, I sometimes struggle in your articles to understand your use of passive, though I sometimes think I am understanding. How does passivity defend? Thanks! – L.B.

I’ll try to help you understand. Keep in mind that inner passivity is a challenging concept, and it can take a while for it to come into focus in our mind and then within us at a deeper level. We can recognize inner passivity through a variety of symptoms, one of which is chronic defensiveness. Such defensiveness is a passive feeling associated with self-doubt. Usually all you’re doing with defensiveness is reacting to your own insecurity. You feel that someone is holding you accountable and that you’re obligated to defend yourself. In being defensive, you’re reacting to a gut feeling of being wrong, flawed, or bad. [Read more…]

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Feeling Like a Fraud or an Imposter?

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The imposter syndrome is based on an unconscious disconnect from self.

The imposter syndrome is based on an unconscious disconnect from self.

As a young actor in the 1960s, Michael Caine was sitting across from Frank Sinatra in a private plane on a flight to Las Vegas when, overwhelmed by the moment, he suddenly became tongue-tied and speechless.

Sinatra said, “Mikey, what’s up? You scared of flying?”

Caine, who was dating Sinatra’s daughter, admitted he was feeling overwhelmed by the conviction that he didn’t belong in the famous singer’s presence. Sinatra told him he knew the feeling and had experienced it himself many years earlier in the company of the Academy-Award winning actor Ronald Colman.

“You see, that’s how it is,” Caine remarked decades later in a documentary about his life, “we all come from nothing and nobody.”

The young Caine was experiencing a feeling called imposter syndrome (also referred to as imposter phenomenon or fraud syndrome). It describes the experience of high-achieving individuals who find it difficult to internalize their accomplishments and connect with their worthiness. Studies have found, as well, that 70 percent of all people, not just high-achievers, feel like imposters at one time or another. [Read more…]

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Cognitive Therapy’s Flawed Premise

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Psychology needs to shine light on the source of distress and dysfunction.

Psychology needs to shine light on the source of distress and dysfunction.

People struggling to realize their potential or find inner peace often turn to psychotherapy. Yet they find themselves wandering without much guidance through a marketplace of mental-health offerings and claims, lacking the knowledge to distinguish good therapy from bad. More than 150 different psychotherapies are offered in the United States.

In this post, I present some insights concerning cognitive behavioral psychotherapy (CBT), which has become one of the most available forms of treatment. My intention here, as well, is to show important distinctions between CBT and the depth psychology that I practice, particularly as these distinctions apply to clinical depression. This post is twice the length I usually write, and it gets a bit “technical,” so be prepared for some heavy-lifting.

Cognitive therapy, which attempts to address “distorted thinking” by replacing it with rational thinking, originated more than 50 years ago. By the 1980’s, it was merged with the techniques of behavioral therapy to become CBT. This therapy now is widely offered, perhaps in part because it’s a simple, straightforward method for psychotherapists to learn and practice. It offers, as well, a limited, controlled expenditure for insurance companies. I look upon it as the fast food of mental health.

Cognitive therapy originated out of the work of Dr. Aaron Beck, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who became convinced in the late 1950’s that depression was not being effectively treated by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts believed that depression was caused by anger or hostility toward the self (self-aggression). Unfortunately, these practitioners were insufficiently effective in their treatment of depression because they were addressing only the aggressive side, not the passive side, of the primary inner conflict that produces the malady. [Read more…]

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Collapsing into Helplessness

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A sense of helplessness. when emotionally embellished, makes things more difficult for us.

A sense of helplessness, when emotionally embellished, makes things a lot more difficult for us.

James E. Holmes’s spiral notebook helps us understand his descent into madness. Holmes, a neuroscience graduate student who killed 12 people in a 2012 mass murder spree in a Colorado movie theater, had covered page after page of his notebook with the single handwritten word Why?

In repeatedly writing Why? in his notebook (illustrated here), Holmes was desperately asking a question he couldn’t answer. Evidence suggests he was asking imponderable questions such as why do we exist, why does life exist, why should we matter in the great scheme of things. (His notebook brimmed with what his defense lawyers called “a whole lot of crazy”—delusions about death, human worth, and “negative infinity.”) Anyone who struggles relentlessly to come up with definitive answers to such questions faces the prospect of feeling painfully, profoundly helpless. (That’s why religions encourage people to deal with such questions on the basis of faith.)

Psychologically, we can make sense of what happened to Holmes. We can see clearly what he was doing to himself in the lead-up to his shooting spree. In a process of mental and emotional breakdown, he was falling into the passive side of his psyche and spiraling into a painful sense of utter helplessness. In doing so, the danger existed that he would flip to the other side and become manically aggressive.

This existence of inner passivity is not peculiar just to people with mental illness. We all have a passive side of our psyche, and it can lead us into emotional weakness and self-doubt, thereby creating serious behavioral difficulties. We benefit greatly by seeing and understanding this part of us. In the case of Holmes, meanwhile, we are able to study the role that this passivity plays in the development of mental illness. [Read more…]

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Answers to Questions from Readers (Part 4)

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The road to inner freedom.

The path to inner freedom.

Readers often send me emails with their comments and questions. Here I answer three of them, edited to remove identifying details. My responses are in italics.

My life has been a struggle for many years. The negative emotions I experienced (mostly being viciously manipulated and disrespected by relatives and other people) are still present.

I always had the impression (even before reading your articles) that I was somehow choosing to be involved in those negative emotions and experiences. However, I did not have the proper understanding of the inner dynamics of this process. Certainly it is very difficult to accept the notion that I’m making inner choices in order to experience those bad emotions: this is extremely humiliating. I mean, it really is humiliating to recognize that I am choosing to hurt myself over and over again in this manner. What do you think about this? –DK

You are feeling what most people feel when presented with this knowledge. It’s very common to feel humiliated or offended when we first consider the possibility that we’re choosing unconsciously and repeatedly to indulge in certain negative emotions.

We experience this sense of humiliation mainly because our conscious ego is so offended at the revelations of this depth psychology. Our conscious ego, which operates rather like an old software program, is of course just one aspect of our total self. Yet a great many people identify with their ego and experience so much of their life through it. We can feel as if we are our ego. Absorbing depth psychology means, however, that we get access to some of the hidden operations, enabling a bigger self to emerge. Even though this benefits us greatly, we still experience resistance to the process. [Read more…]

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Breaking Free of Inner Passivity

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Inner passivity keeps us locked up in misery and self-defeat.

Inner passivity keeps us locked up in misery and self-defeat.

Inner passivity is an unconscious realm of our psyche that’s very much “in our face” emotionally. I write a great deal about inner passivity, and I keep trying to bring this psychological aspect into better focus.

My readers keep asking me how, exactly, can they eliminate inner passivity from their emotional life. “Okay, I can see that it’s a problem for me,” they say. “Now how do I get rid of it?”

This message from a reader in Australia is typical of this feedback:

The symptoms you describe in your book, The Phantom of the Psyche, were almost a carbon copy of what I’ve suffered from my whole life. I loved the book, yet I’m still not sure what to do in daily life at a more practical level. The exercises in the book make sense but they seem a tad trivial when juxtaposed with the scope of the problem. Perhaps I’m asking too much of your book and that psychotherapy is really the only way to change things. Any thoughts on this would be great.

Good psychotherapy can certainly bring inner passivity and its symptoms more quickly into focus. Yet very few psychotherapists are going to address inner passivity directly. Here, in this longer than usual post, I offer some further direction for doing this on one’s own. [Read more…]

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