We can resolve the inner weaknesses that make loneliness so painful.

More people are living alone than ever. In America, forty percent or more of all households contain a single occupant. Many people happily live alone—but others are tormented by the wail of the Lonesome Blues. That oldie can echo in our ears even when we’re surrounded by friends and family.

Loneliness is a common brand of human suffering. Many believe that loneliness is an inescapable fact of human existence, a curse we’re fated to endure from birth to death. The novelist Thomas Wolfe spoke to this idea: “The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”

Wolfe was famous and admired during his lifetime, which apparently offered little solace or good company for his loneliness. Even “super-famous” Albert Einstein succumbed to the misery. “It is strange to be known so universally and yet to be so lonely,” he candidly commented. Being a rich celebrity doesn’t appear to help: “Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool,” observed the actress Liv Ullmann.

Loneliness appears to have infiltrated if not occupied human nature. Impervious to the exhilarations of fame, wealth, and power, it produces assorted misery, ill health, and increased risk of heart disease. Maybe we can’t exterminate it, but we can see and understand the emotional weaknesses that make loneliness more painful than it would otherwise be. Being human is challenging enough. We don’t have to endure unnecessary suffering.

Most people who suffer with chronic loneliness are entangled in unresolved emotional attachments. Unwittingly, they chose to recycle unresolved emotions from their past. Usually these are associated with feeling unloved, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned.

Although it defies common sense, we go looking for old hurts that are unresolved from our past. We do not do this in order to resolve the hurts. Instead, we do it to relive the hurts. Whatever is unresolved in our psyche produces inner conflict that has a life of its own. The conflict can persist—and often get worse—until the day we die. The conflict behind loneliness is often our wish to feel loved and connected to life versus our unconscious willingness to go on feeling the old familiar abandonment and sense of being unloved.

We can be helpless to stop the suffering and self-defeat produced by the conflict when we don’t clearly enough see the nature of the conflict. Instinctively, we deny the existence of the conflict. Unconsciously, we offer up our loneliness as “proof” that we’re not colluding in our own suffering. Our unconscious defense maintains: “Are you nuts! I don’t want to feel unloved! I’m not clinging to old hurts! Can’t you see, in my loneliness, how desperately I want love and connection in my life!”

Who would have thought that loneliness can be part of a psychological defense? The loneliness defends us from the inner truth we hate to acknowledge because that truth is so amazing and humbling. In other words, we produce loneliness in order to cover up our willingness to experience again and again what’s unresolved in our psyche. The defense is offered up to our superego, the hidden master of our personality, which protests against our indulgence in our suffering. Here’s another rendition of the defense: “How can you suggest that I’m secretly invested in feeling unloved and abandoned! My loneliness proves how much I want to be loved. Look how much I suffer from the feeling of not being loved! Look at how much I hate being alone! Surely that proves that I’m not still clinging to the opposite feeling.”

The individual can make this defense more convincing by feeling more intensely the pain of loneliness. As with most of our psychological defenses, we often have to increase the level of suffering and self-defeat in order for the defense to continue over time to be effective (in the sense of deluding us). This produces (when loneliness or some other symptom such as anger is used as a defense) a stubborn determination to hold on to the misery of it.

Other factors can be at play on the field of loneliness. We can be fearful of not being accepted by others and fearful of being a disappointment to them. This means we’re emotionally attached to feelings of not having value and not being worthy. In a sense, we’re abandoning our own self by not believing in our self. “It’s so lonely when you don’t even know yourself,” an observer once noted. It’s more to the point to say, “It’s so lonely because you don’t know yourself.”

A harsh superego or inner critic, one that mocks and harasses us at the slightest provocation, can also create more feelings of isolation and loneliness. So can our inner passivity, which can paralyze us in a helpless conviction that there’s no escape from loneliness.

A remedy was proposed by Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Laureate who wrote Siddartha, a novel about the spiritual journey of an Indian man at the time of Buddha. Hesse said, “We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.”

Key words in this passage are, “But then our solitude is overcome . . .“ The pain of our solitude is overcome when we’re sincerely interested in escaping this suffering and have the insight to do so. It helps to stay conscious of our resistance to letting go of suffering.

Once we see and begin to undo our attachments to feeling passive, rejected, unloved, and abandoned, we do, as Hesse said, connect with our innermost self and the whole of existence. Loneliness no longer fits across our shoulders. It falls by the wayside, a worn-out cloak that fades in the distance along with the wail of the Lonesome Blues.

Is complexity the road to self-defeat?

Is it possible we’re acting out a Global Strategy for self-defeat, creating a world of such complexity that we’re finally overwhelmed and destroyed by it? The possibility makes sense considering the human capacity for folly and self-defeat.

Science fiction has certainly explored the theme of artificially created life-forms acquiring power over us, either through hostile takeovers (cybernetic revolts) or through our passive corroboration with artificial intelligence.

Instead of losing our autonomy to androids and robots, we’re talking here about being defeated by the complexity of global operating systems such as the ones that govern economics and finance. Such self-defeat may already be upon us. The global economic system is dependent on energy sources that produce global warming. It’s a system that’s contaminated by arcane financial derivatives that make up galaxies of debt. We’re also economically dependent on jobs and profits from the production and proliferation of high-tech weapons, which makes the road to world peace increasingly complicated. Complexity is growing exponentially. As Stephen Hawking says, we have entered “the century of complexity.”

What agency representing our common well-being has the power and resources to oversee and understand, let alone regulate, all the offshoots of this labyrinthine activity? Even in health care, the prescribing of drugs has become a complex calculation and guessing-game involving potential side-effects, contraindications, and questions of efficacy. Is the U.S. government, as a central intelligence constitutionally charged with practicing wise oversight, the last bastion of national and global protection? The U.S. government, however, has been discouraged from prosecuting possible wrongdoers in the 2008 financial collapse because of the complexity involved, which includes political and economic fallout. Such paralysis not only fails to reform the system but can obviously be damaging to the values and morale of society.

We get little guidance from our brightest people. Highly specialized experts are breaking down our knowledge-base into smaller and smaller units. They become experts in tiny slivers of information, and we start to lose focus on the bigger picture. “You can see this retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every academic department across the country,” writes author and activist Chris Hedges.

A deep menace hovers over this question of how we appear to be creating unmanageable complexity. All of us, not just the managers of our social and economic operating systems, contribute to the self-defeat. We all possess a psyche that’s familiar and comfortable with feeling passive. We can, for instance, quickly become passive to any new technology, meaning we become enthralled or enchanted with it to the point that the new systems or devices intrude to a pronounced extent into our consciousness in a manner that is potentially self-defeating. This behavior is identified in the book, iDisover: Understanding Our Obsession with Technology and Overcoming its Hold on Us (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2012). Ideally, we want to keep such objects or systems in perspective. They’re just curiosities, delights, and tools to ease our way along destiny’s path, the pursuit of evolving consciousness. We need to know that egotism, narcissism, and a sense of entitlement encourage us to create operating systems that mirror our grandiose self-image.

In Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril (Walker and Company, New York, 2011), Margaret Heffernan ponders the perils of complexity:

As I’ve watched BP [British Petroleum] wrestle with its operational issues, I’ve begun to wonder whether we now have organizations that are simply too complex to manage. There’s a whole army of complexity consultants who seem to revel in the sheer difficulty we have created for ourselves. After John Browne left BP and the company sat down to try to analyze what had gone so horribly wrong, a kind of intellectual hubris that, incredible as it may seem, saw the ability to manage internal complexity as a source of competitive advantage. This is Daedalus gone mad. Instead of worshipping complexity, we need to challenge it.

BP is not the only company in love with complexity, Heffernan writes. “Many organizations view their own impenetrability as a feat of fantastic intellectual curiosity. In reality, it’s a huge cause of blindness and explains why, when such companies get into trouble, they can’t find their way out of it.”

Such complexity produces an impression of being overwhelmed. This feeling of being overwhelmed is a painful symptom of unresolved emotional associations from childhood of being helpless and at the mercy of the world around us. We’re induced to replay and recycle this old feeling because our emotional attachment to it (and identification with it) remains unconscious and unresolved. An axiom of depth psychology holds that we act out whatever is unresolved within us, however painful and self-defeating. To some degree, then, we would be unconsciously tempted to produce that effect of feeling overwhelmed.

As long as we’re managing “to ride the wave” of a complex system, we can feel intoxication and grandiosity. We’re identifying with the alleged magnificence of the complex system. Our inner weakness, particularly inner passivity and its accompanying self-doubt, makes the intoxication so appealing. This arrangement is unstable. Since we act out what’s unresolved, we’re fated to dip back into a state of helplessness that produces fear, panic, and painful self-defeat.

Self-knowledge is the best compass to navigate our way forward. With self-knowledge, we understand that the quality of our consciousness far surpasses in satisfaction and value the playthings of the world. Just as an intelligence agency needs good information from its sources, we need the scoop on the underworld of our psyche.

Forgiveness can be misused.

Many health experts claim that we need to embrace forgiveness if we want to let go of anger, resentment, and thoughts of revenge after someone we care about has hurt us.

Phooey! We don’t have to forgive them at all. Our peace of mind isn’t about forgiving others. It’s about seeing how, in our emotional reactions to the behaviors of others, we’re likely to be replaying our own unresolved issues and stumbling unnecessarily into suffering.

A party to this psychological jabber, the highly regarded Mayo Clinic, a medical institute known for its research and education on health matters, has on its website a misleading article written by its own staff, titled “Forgiveness: Letting go of grudges and bitterness,” that reads in part:

Nearly everyone has been hurt by the actions or words of another. Perhaps your mother criticized your parenting skills, your colleague sabotaged a project or your partner had an affair. These wounds can leave you with lasting feelings of anger, bitterness or even vengeance — but if you don’t practice forgiveness, you might be the one who pays most dearly. By embracing forgiveness, you can also embrace peace, hope, gratitude and joy.

This shallow advice says that letting go of grudges and bitterness depends on forgiveness. Forgiveness is sometimes appropriate, of course, especially when we have been gravely victimized. Yet as a remedy for conflict, it can easily be misused and misunderstood. To understand the bogus nature of the Mayo Clinic’s advice, let’s take a close look at each of the three examples from the institute’s posting.

1) Your mother criticized your parenting skills. Such criticism would only hurt you or make you angry if you yourself were sensitive to the feeling of being criticized. Otherwise, you would calmly consider whether your mother’s observation had any merit, or you would dismiss her words as an expression of her petulant nature and not take them personally.

Perhaps your mother has always been a critical person. That would likely indicate that, as a child, you absorbed criticism from her, or else you identified with others in the family who were criticized by her. This means you would have an unresolved conflict regarding criticism: You hate the feeling of it, yet you remain emotionally attached to the experience of it. Now, when mother criticizes your parenting skills, you get “hit up” once again with that old unresolved feeling of being criticized. You’re the one, however, who “takes a hit” on the feeling. To cover up your unconscious participation or collusion in this suffering, you feel offended by your mother and get angry at her. All along, you might have unconsciously provoked her in order to replay this old dynamic between the two of you. Forgiving her at some point might work as a painkiller to get you over the hump of this one incident—but it doesn’t do anything at all to resolve your sensitivity to feeling criticized by her or by others.

Before moving on to the second example, it’s important to note that the Mayo Clinic’s posting does say at one point far down in the text: “Move away from your role as victim and release the control and power the offending person and situation have had in your life.” This bit of advice comes too late. It’s basically just a footnote that’s provided long after the emphasis on forgiveness has been established. This passing comment is also too sketchy. It’s just advice; it doesn’t provide self-knowledge. It’s not helpful because we likely can’t release “the control and power of the offending person and situation” when we don’t see or understand how, unconsciously, we’re using the alleged offense to replay one of our unresolved ways of suffering.

2) Your colleague sabotaged a project. If you feel bitter or offended by your colleague’s sabotage, you must be taking it personally or it has cost you dearly in some way. To think that forgiveness of him is an option, you either feel that malice was intended in your colleague’s behavior or you’re possibly indulging in some sense of loss (for instance, of prestige or money) brought about by the wreckage of the project.

In other words, you could be holding a grudge as part of a cover-up of your unconscious determination to replay old unresolved feelings of being betrayed or victimized or your own unconscious expectations of failure. This raises the question of whether you might have chosen a partner who’s prone to sabotage. You might say you had no reason to suspect such a possibility, but chances are you ignored many warning signs. That means, rather than being bitter, you have some soul-searching to do in order not to repeat your own possible inclination toward self-defeat.

Your colleague’s sabotage likely arises from his or her own unresolved issues regarding failure, unconscious passivity, and being seen as a disappointment to others. When such emotional weaknesses are unconscious and unresolved, all of us can be compelled to act out in a way that produces self-defeat. If you were to respond appropriately to your partner’s sabotage, you might, rather than indulging in the hurt done to you, be concerned about his or her entanglement in self-defeat.

The situation, if confronted honestly and bravely, can become a valuable learning experience for all, not something you have to bring yourself to forgive.

3) Your partner had an affair. This is the most complicated of the three examples and, indeed, some forgiveness may be called for. (The more grievous the offense, and the more our own innocence is undeniable, the more that forgiveness is an appropriate option.) Nonetheless, if you’re interested in the best possible outcome for you and your partner, you need to examine your role in his or her infidelity. Usually before infidelity happens, an intimate relationship has begun to careen off course. Each individual is party to the growing divide.

Let’s look at your possible role. Were you taking your partner for granted? Were you lacking in the ability to affirm your love? Is betrayal or abandonment a theme in your live? Are you afraid of intimacy? Were you passive or codependent in the relationship? Did you overlook your partner’s past history of disloyalty? Are you more negative and more difficult to live with than you realize? What you might have to struggle with, more so than whether to forgive your partner, is self-forgiveness as your inner critic assails you for being a foolish dupe of your partner’s disloyalty.

Clearly, the act of forgiveness is misused when we use it to identify unfairly the other person as the prime culprit, conveniently covering up our own dysfunctional participation in the contentious situation.

The Mayo Clinic is only one of many providers of third-rate psychological knowledge. What we might need to forgive are our “experts” in mental health who have been providing us with such poor fare.

What knowledge helps us to evolve?

Growing our consciousness is the most direct path out of suffering and self-defeat. Yet a lot of people believe that human nature, like the Ten Commandments, is set in stone. They say one’s human nature is a granite-like formation that resists appeals to virtue and reason, thereby preventing us from evolving beyond our often self-centered, ignorant, or foolish ways.

Our level of consciousness is likely to remain stationary only when we fail to explore our deeper dimensions. When we understand our psychological self, we become wiser, smarter, and happier.  Without this self-knowledge, we fall under the influence of inner dynamics that produce suffering and self-defeat.

We’re smart, yet we’re not necessarily sufficiently conscious. We’re able to build complex technological systems—yet the toxic byproducts might be ruining our planet. Our advanced weaponry can also destroy life on earth if our primitive emotions and aggressive instincts prevail. Our consciousness is not keeping up with our cleverness. So what does it mean to be more evolved?

A higher consciousness is ultimately associated with the quality of our self-knowledge. We learn what is precise and true about our unconscious mind, even though we might initially be appalled at what we’re discovering.

This is the conundrum: To become more conscious, we have to learn what we don’t want to know, and we have to recognize what we don’t want to see. In essence, we expose from the depths of our psyche our compulsive participation in suffering and self-defeat.

What does this mean? Let’s look at examples from everyday life. For instance, how many jealous people know (or want to know) that they’re strongly tempted to indulge in the unresolved negative emotions of rejection and betrayal? How many compulsive gamblers know that they’re unconsciously addicted to the feeling of losing? How many envious people are aware that they’re emotionally attached to the feeling of being deprived? How many greedy people know their greed covers up their entanglement in feelings of having little intrinsic value? How many angry people are conscious of the fact that they use their anger to cover up their emotional indulgence in some sense of being victimized, oppressed, or insulted? How many fearful people know that their fear is usually not based on reality factors in their environment, but instead is based on their lingering emotional memories of childhood helplessness and powerlessness? How many addictive personalities can see that their emotional attachment to unresolved inner passivity is stonewalling self-regulation? This list could go on and on.

People tend not to be conscious of their inner conflicts and how these conflicts produce suffering and self-sabotage. The jealous person wants love but expects betrayal—sure enough, she provokes her partner into betraying her. A compulsive gambler wants to win but expects to lose—soon he’s mortgaging his house to pay his gambling debts. The envious person wants to get some cherished object, yet inwardly circulates the pain of not having it—and often she chooses an object that’s beyond reach. A greedy person wants riches in order to feel more important, substantial, and valuable—yet the riches produce a deeper emptiness. An angry person demands justice, not knowing that her anger is a defense covering up her willingness to suffer with a sense of injustice. A fearful person buys a gun for personal protection—and now his inner fear just shifts on to other targets such as the prospects of economic collapse, terrorist attacks, or Armageddon.

Without sufficient consciousness, we’re tricked by our illusions. Such illusions are often produced by our psychological defenses. For instance, someone might believe that his donations to charity are based on his goodness and compassion when, in this case, the charitable gestures arise from his unconscious mind, based on his desire (as a defense) to look good to himself and others in order to maintain his idealized self-image. Underneath this self-image lurks someone who doubts his intrinsic value. His denial and ignorance of this state of affairs deprive him of wisdom and true compassion.

The public’s comprehension of how inner defenses shape our life is quite abysmal. Our species is stumbling down a blind alley, and more of us are needed to penetrate the barriers of self-deception. This article at PsychCentral.com, “15 Common Defense Mechanisms,” reveals the many ways that we produce illusions of reality. A person whose consciousness is evolving can identify which of these defenses he or she has been employing in everyday life. The resulting insight produces a growing intelligence that aids us in navigating and regulating our complex world.

This improved intelligence enables us to focus on what’s truly important and real, and to avoid faulty conclusions. Evolved consciousness dissolves the numbness, illusions, and inner conflict that impede our humanity, freeing us to become the creators of our destiny. It gives us wisdom, compassion, and direction. We’re no longer so fearful of change or of death. We’re more appreciative of our life and all life, including the life of our descendents. (A search of the internet reveals how little thought and affection are given to still-to-be-conceived humanity).

With higher consciousness, we see our vital contribution to the state of the world. We take personal responsibility for what’s not working. The feeling is, “I have to become wiser and stronger in myself in order to do something about the corruption that’s undermining my country’s institutions.” We can comprehend the essentials of that corruption. More evolved, we’re no longer so protective of personal advantages and egotism because our new consciousness informs us that our wellbeing is intimately connected to the wellbeing of all. We connect with the will and the power to do our best. At this point, what philosophers call “determinism” in human affairs becomes “free will.”

This concept of inner progress isn’t naïve idealism. We very likely have to grow our consciousness to save ourselves from irreparable destruction. Right now, we’re not able to unite with clear resolve because our lack of evolvement makes us too fearful, hostile, and self-centered. Opponents of the idea of evolved consciousness have followed the path of least resistance regarding their self-development. Their shallow consciousness makes them too fearful to give up outdated concepts and orientations, and it prevents them from connecting emotionally with the awesome value of future generations.

Evolved consciousness unequivocally informs us that we profit emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually when our life and work are aligned with the common good. Albert Einstein a century ago ushered in a new consciousness of physical space. Now we need to acquire a new consciousness of inner space to help us journey onward successfully.

Knowing the source of anger is important.

A new TV sitcom starring Charlie Sheen, who plays the role of an irascible anger-management therapist, is coming our way this summer. The show, which will be seen internationally, will apparently get its comedic effect from the hot-headed Sheen’s portrayal of a man of wisdom and propriety. I hope he doesn’t make a mockery of psychotherapy. Dare we hope that Sheen’s character will dispense some valuable insights into the nature of anger? That would help millions of sufferers worldwide who don’t understand that chronic anger is a defense covering up deeper issues.

Anger is often a laughing matter on TV, though less so in real life. In chronic form, it can escalate into debilitating misery. That’s when we feel it on a regular basis, in a self-defeating manner, toward an individual, group, or situation that we perceive as unjust or oppressive. Anger can also be produced through past memories and future expectations. Often we hold the anger in, and that of course is unhealthy for our mind and body.

We can also feel recurring anger toward ourselves, allegedly on the grounds that we’re a worthless fool or hopeless failure for lapses in judgment and missed opportunities.

Unfortunately, information from the media and from experts on anger management seldom reveals how anger is often used as a psychological defense. Experts usually overlook this important knowledge, offering up instead tips and advice on relaxation techniques, revised thinking, improved communication skills, use of humor, and changing one’s setting or environment. Even the American Psychological Association’s website entry on anger management says nothing about how anger serves as a defense.

To help us understand how we use anger as a defense, we can ask and answer a series of questions. Question: Why do we experience chronic anger and hold on to it? Answer: Because our anger serves as a defense against deeper awareness of our collusion in our suffering. Q: What is a defense? A: A psychological defense is an inner process, typically unconscious, that hides certain vital facts from our consciousness. Q: Is anger always a defense? A: No, sometimes anger is appropriate, depending on the situation. Much of the time, though, anger is inappropriate and unnecessary. Q: What is it exactly that we’re trying to hide from our awareness? A: We don’t want to see our unconscious collusion in the experience of our unresolved negative emotions. Q: What unresolved negative emotions are we talking about? A: Most of us, to different degrees in various situations, are unconsciously willing to indulge in feeling refused, deprived, controlled, rejected, criticized, abandoned, and betrayed. These unresolved negative emotions are first experienced in childhood. Often these emotions arise in children as subjective impressions of what’s happening to them, meaning the impressions are not necessarily based on reality factors. Q: Why don’t we want to see our collusion or indulgence in these emotions? A: Because this fact of human nature is so startling, shocking, and humbling. Our ego and our self-image refuse to consider that we are creatures of such flawed inner processing. Hence, our anger serves as an emphatic denial of our secret willingness to indulge in unresolved negative emotions. Our anger blames someone or something else for the distress we’re feeling. Or, if the anger is directed at ourself, we typically blame ourself unfairly or wrongly. Q: Can these old emotions be resolved or healed? A: Yes. We become more intelligent and conscious as we see how our defenses work. Once we stop being fooled by our defenses, it’s easier to let go of our suffering. Anger, by the way, is just one of many different defenses.

Let’s look at an example of how we use anger as a defense. James and Julie, married for ten years, are heading for divorce. They’ve grown increasingly angry with each other, and that anger now spills out almost every day. They’re both convinced their anger is justified by the other’s failure to be supportive, attentive, and appreciative.

However, the feeling of not being supported and appreciated is familiar to both of them from their childhoods. They both had parents who they felt had failed to acknowledge their value and appreciate them for their own sake. Yet these negative impressions are repressed and largely unconscious. Both James and Julie now have decent relations with their parents. Yet the old hurts, based in part on subjective impressions from childhood, are unresolved in their psyche. That means the feelings will pop up or reoccur at the slightest provocation, often in situations that are being misinterpreted by one or the other. This justifies Benjamin Franklin’s observation that, “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.”

Often over the years, James and Julie did express love for one another. Yet the old inner conflict always reasserted itself. Frequently when one of them was being affectionate, the other could easily feel that the effort wasn’t good enough, that something was still missing. They each remained emotionally attached to that old painful feeling. Deep down, the feeling of being unworthy or undeserving is part of their identity. They didn’t break clear of this emotional attachment because they never became aware of their unconscious willingness or compulsion to continue to experience the old hurt.

Since they can’t see their entanglement in the unresolved pain, they react blindly to it. They react by blaming the other for causing the hurt, at the same time that they instinctively deny an inner admonition (from the superego) that they are party to their own sorrows. The defense goes: “No, I’m not interested in continuing to feel that old hurt of being unappreciated! Look at how angry I am at her (him) for causing me to feel this way.” The angrier they get at each other, the more emphatically they cover up their own individual determination to replay the old unresolved hurt. Another perspective on this dynamic can be found in a quote attributed to Buddha: “In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.”

Along with anger, other self-defeating forms of suffering can be both consequences of our unresolved negative emotions as well defenses against realization of our attachment to these unresolved emotions. These forms of suffering include greed, envy, loneliness, compulsive gambling, drug and alcohol addiction, shame, guilt, worry, anxiety, depression, boredom, fear, sadness, and apathy. It’s enormously insightful to see how these emotions and behaviors are used as defenses.

Could Charlie Sheen possibly get some of this knowledge into a comedy show on TV? It could be done, bit by bit, week after week. He sees his comeback, he says, as a way of apologizing to America for last year’s meltdown. Passing along great insight would sweeten the apology.

Integrity is as American as Abraham Lincoln.

Integrity, as American as Abraham Lincoln, has gone missing in the American soul, like Bernie Madoff’s billions. The nation’s future harmony and prosperity may depend on restoring this vital virtue.

We can understand integrity if, through our imagination, we step into the spirit of Lincoln, our secular saint. First, let’s consider what integrity (and the lack of it) means.

The lack of this virtue in American life is like a trillion-dollar campaign contribution to national self-sabotage. Wall Street’s financial follies, as one example, are a study in the art of manifest unscrupulousness. With this fraudulency comes enormous grief and misery.

Corrupt financiers and self-serving politicians must be among the unhappiest people in the world. That’s because integrity is a necessary ingredient in stable, lasting happiness. Integrity is an expression of self-respect. The virtue of integrity develops as we feel our intrinsic goodness and care about our personal honor. Integrity requires that we do the right thing, as Oprah Winfrey says, even when nobody’s going to know whether we did it or not.

We do what’s right for our own sake because our integrity won’t allow us to tarnish that precious feeling of our essential honor and self-respect.

Integrity also accesses inner truth and thereby raises our intelligence. We start to realize that other people have as much value and goodness as we can feel in ourself. When we feel true self-respect, we know that everyone else is entitled to that same sense of inner value. Even criminals get respect, in the sense that we profess an ideal that gives them a fair trial and a chance at rehabilitation.

The Greek words ‘integritas’ and ‘integra’ mean whole. Each of us is part of the whole. We feel this to be true and we act accordingly—with openness, kindness, and generosity. This is the higher meaning of liberty, to live in a society where laws, custom, and civility afford us full respect. The spirit of liberty and the social pact of mutual respect constitute the foundation of American democracy, more so than laws that can be twisted and contorted.

The testimony is overwhelming that Lincoln had a great respect for all of life. Lincoln “had an unusually intense sympathy with the suffering of his fellow creatures,” writes William Lee Miller in Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007).

This sympathy extended also, as is not always the case with animal lovers, to his fellow human beings: to the old Indian who wandered into the camp; the woman whose drunken husband beat her; the farm boy who is going to be shot for falling asleep on sentry duty; the coffle of slaves on the boat in the Ohio, chained together like fish on a line.

Having integrity means being in contact, in a feeling way, with the richness, the pleasure, and the happiness of self-respect and mutual respect. If we don’t have that consciousness, meaning the ability to associate our own well-being with the needs and happiness of others, we descend into the hollowness of egotism, narcissism, entitlement, and individualism.

In his reflections on slavery, writes Miller, Lincoln was constant in his adherence to the idea that the United States “was founded upon the proposition that all men are created equal, as stated in the Declaration of Independence.” In the finest meaning of integrity, all parts of the whole are of equal value. As Lincoln understood, the whole can’t be broken down into lesser values. The whole and the parts are one.

The word integrity applies to a code of moral values. Lincoln, writes Miller, displayed “a distinct quality of tact, generosity, and civility” in his dealings with supporters, opponents, editors, and clients. Lincoln also applied the principles of integrity to his concept of the nation. Throughout the Civil War, Lincoln never wavered in his commitment to the integrity of the Union. In his mind, the Union was unbroken. For Lincoln, the Civil War was a rebellion or insurrection, not a war between two sovereign states.

Now it appears that a corporate structure enabled by extreme right-wing politicians is striving to “break away” from the Union, to separate itself from federal authority by rendering the government weak and toothless and by taking it over. If we can’t feel personal integrity, we won’t be able to register in our own mind this threat to the integrity of the Union.

How do we raise the level of our integrity? We all can be lacking in integrity to the degree that we’re entangled in hostile, negative feelings toward those who don’t see or interpret the world as we do. We need to close the gap between the ideals we profess and the negativity we feel.

In part, the process involves personal insight into our own emotional or psychological weaknesses. Self-knowledge that is assimilated overcomes personal dysfunction. This process enables us to become integrated as we establish an inner union of the contentious dynamics and forces in our psyche. (The knowledge is available in the books and PDF files available at this website.)

Imagine being Lincoln. There’s a lot of power in coolly walking up to a recognized political adversary and being genuinely friendly. Being negative, in contrast, is the path of least resistance, the approach that triggers opposition. (Read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on the importance of “knowing yourself” and winning without fighting.)

Of course, Lincoln was also ruthless in his pursuit of victory. Yet that didn’t tarnish his integrity. In fact, integrity is a quality that helps us to ensure success and victory. With integrity, we have the courage to be true to our beliefs. Integrity won’t tolerate moral failure. That means we avoid being apathetic, passive, or emotionally entangled in the victim mentality. We avoid those psychological pitfalls of inner passivity—willful ignorance, cognitive dissonance, omission bias, and other methods of sidestepping issues and reality.

Integrity enables us to be powerful. We need the power not just to resist bad things but to reform bad things. Yet weak people often associate power with being negative. They can’t feel power unless they’re angry or condemning of others or feeling cynical. If we’re too negative, malice will override our integrity, and we’ll be stuck in inaction, inertia, and the deadlocked status quo.

Fighting reality can get painful.

Stubbornness is, essentially, a determination to fight a losing battle with reality, while accepting as a “reward” for the effort the gift-wrapped deadweight of rigidity and resentment.

My apologies to Frank Sinatra fans, but I believe the theme song or anthem for stubbornness is the old favorite, “My Way.” One stanza stands out:

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew/ When I bit off more than I could chew./ But through it all, when there was doubt,/ I ate it up and spit it out./ I faced it all and I stood tall,/ And did it my way.

Sure—my way or the highway! When we’re smart and wise, we don’t put the emphasis on my way. We’re just pleased and grateful to find a good, sensible, or brave way to travel “each and ev’ry highway.”

Of course, stubbornness can sometimes be a virtue, as when we adhere bravely to a sound principle in the face of opposition. This post, though, is about the self-defeating expression of it.

Stubbornness and denial are two rotten eggs in the same basket. The former tends to be a conscious expression of opposition—as in stubborn denial of global warming—while the latter is likely to refer to an unconscious form of the behavior—as in denial of one’s buried anger toward a parent.

Stubbornness is usually a reaction to underlying emotional issues. If we can make these issues conscious and keep them in focus, we have a good change of letting go of our mulish attitude and the suffering it brings on. Basically, obstinacy is a symptom of three different emotional issues in our psyche.

The first issue involves our ego and our instinct to protect it and save face. The ego, which is usually stronger in men than in women, creates the feeling that we can’t back down and concede that we’re either wrong about something or else failing to see the whole picture. Our ego, which hates to feel diminished, interprets the act of backing down (and even concessions to reality) as a feeling of losing, being reduced, being humbled, and, hence, being a lesser person. An emotional impression washes over us: “If I’m wrong, I’m lacking in value. If that person is right, she’s better than me. She’ll feel she’s triumphed over me.” Obviously, this thinking is irrational. But much of the time our emotions trump our reason. We forego truth and stubbornly embrace the error of our ways in order to stay in our emotional comfort-zone, even when doing so is painful. Consequently, we start thinking less clearly and can even become stupid in what we believe.

The more pronounced our egotism, the less stable we are emotionally. This means we depend on our ego for our orientation in the world. When our ego is threatened, we can start to feel what we’ve been repressing all along—our underlying self-doubt. When activated, this self-doubt is quite painful and can produce acute anxiety. Self-doubt is essentially an irrational conviction that we’re seriously lacking in value and significance. Our instinct is to avoid this anxious feeling at all costs. So truth becomes secondary to our perceived need to protect the beliefs that in turn protect our ego and ease our anxiety. When we hang on stubbornly to a flawed belief or perception, we’re dependent emotionally on being “right.” Saying “Sorry, I was wrong” feels to our ego like a smack to the jaw. We can’t maintain such bullheadedness without paying a price: Our stubbornness is likely to become increasingly painful.

The second issue involves power and submission. Many of our daily dealings with others involve who is in a dominant position and who will prevail. Of course, we’re inclined to resist when we feel pushed around, controlled, and dominated. However, people with unresolved emotional issues are easily triggered when it comes to feeling controlled. A problem for the weak person is that he or she can feel controlled and dominated even when the other person, the alleged controller, is only being appropriately helpful or legitimately directive. The weak person enlists stubbornness as a way of coping with his or her own weakness. As one observer put it, “Stubbornness is the strength of the weak.” British writer W. Somerset Maugham also got it right: “Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one’s mind.” The feeling is that, “If I’m not stubborn, people will walk all over me.” So stubbornness feels like power to a weak person, but typically it is a self-defeating third-rate kind of power.

Stubbornness can be understood as an illusion of power that covers up the feeling of being overwhelmed and out-gunned by reality. Once an individual emotionally interprets a situation in such a way as to feel controlled, he or she is likely to slip into passive-aggressive resistance. This is a kind of cowardly aggression—a sly, unspoken refusal to cooperate, for instance—but it feels to the weak individual like actual power. Any port in a storm, the saying goes. In feeling forced to comply, passive-aggressive people might say to themselves, “No, I won’t, and you can’t make me!” Often they don’t even register consciously this inner defiance. They seem agreeable on the surface, but their resistance and behaviors soon exhibit the rigidity of passive non-compliance.

The third issue involves our tendency to hold on fiercely to our grudges.  In this version of stubbornness, we refuse to let go of some real or imagined insult or affront to our person. Injustice collectors, for instance, hold on obstinately to the big and small slights they feel have wounded them over the years.  At this point, stubbornness becomes quite simply a determination to suffer. This is why stubborn people are often unable to give a clear reason or explanation for their refusal to budge. I remember one time, probably 25 years ago, being in a snit over some alleged unkindness that I felt my wife Sandra had inflicted upon me. Looking back, I vaguely remember it as some trifle. Anyway, I sat at my desk in a very dark mood, brooding resentfully, determined at the very least to hold this grudge against her all night long and into the following day. Next thing I knew, though, she was sitting down close to me, talking to me in sweet consideration, wondering if we could clear the air. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay resentful. She kept talking patiently, expressing warm feelings toward me, pondering the nature of conflict and unhappiness. Within minutes, my misery began to melt away. In less than ten minutes I was soaking up inner peace and harmony, marveling at how much suffering her kind intervention had spared me.

We need to keep a lid on the id.

Who dares suggest the American dream could be thwarted by an indistinct entity a mere two letters long? The CIA certainly doesn’t have a dossier on it. Yet one ingredient of personal suffering and national self-sabotage is the id. Yes, I know that’s an odd, whimsical word, one that many of us, should it zip across our mind, dismiss as harmless jargon.

Yet psychoanalysis has taken the id very seriously. The discipline defines the id as the primitive, unconscious part of our mind that induces us to pursue self-centered gratification, often at the expense of wise self-regulation. For reasons I’m about to discuss, the id appears to be particularly virulent in the American psyche.

The id is like a virus or bug of the unconscious mind. And it can wreak as much havoc on the national scene as swarms of computer viruses. We have an impressive national-security apparatus in place to block out hackers. But in blindness to the enemy within, nobody’s minding the id.

Civilization and national life are extensions of our consciousness. Despite that direct correlation between the inner and outer world, the media hardly ever talk about the psychological dysfunction of our leaders or write about the mental-emotional components in everyday political and social conflicts. To give them some due, the media are beginning to explore the psychological dynamics of family life and to look deeper into the roots of the 2008 economic crisis.

Any media discussion of the enemy within is usually a reference to domestic terrorists. The inner world of our secret motivations and intentions seems to be taboo. Yet psychological dysfunction is at play in our financial meltdowns, no-win political brinksmanship, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and global warming. One aspect of self-sabotage is our stubborn refusal to speak more openly about these subversive realities.

The id is one such reality, a secret inner saboteur that can be kept in check with more insight and awareness. I referred to the id metaphorically as a bug or virus, but it is more accurately understood as a psychological drive. It compels us to pursue the pleasure principle, often at the expense of restraint, self-regulation, and healthy living. It subscribes to the ideology of self-aggrandizement. Our id is not infused with the consciousness of evolving humanity, so it pursues the base, instinctive forms of pleasure associated with sensation—sex, aggression, power, superiority, and accumulation. It has no affinity for integrity, wisdom, and compassion. Sometimes it’s moderated by our superego and unconscious ego, which are other agencies of our psyche (see “The Politburo in Your Psyche.”) It also answers at times to common sense, social mores, and guilt. Other times the law keeps its most wanton thoughtlessness in check.

Still the mischief it makes in our psyche spills into national life. It incites, for instance, our entitlement mentality, as it denies the need for active acknowledgement of global warming or self-regulation of unrestrained individualism.

What conditions have enabled the id to dominate the personality of so many Americans? Centuries ago an aggressive, laissez-faire mercantile culture was transplanted here from England and elsewhere in Europe, and it may have fused with a “take-all-you-can-get” approach to conquering and possessing the limitless wilderness. After the yoke of English oppression was lifted following the Revolutionary War, the jubilant American psyche, ravenous for the perks of manifest destiny, appears to have produced the conqueror and hustler archetypes. These two exuberant sub-personalities swept across the frontier uttering the mantra, “We can now take and have whatever we want.” In the 1790s, as Joyce Appleby describes in “Capitalism and a New Social Order,” the definition of virtue underwent a reversal—from putting public interests above private aspirations to pursuing personal gratification in an opportunistic new world. This ideology, wedded to the American Dream, has since kept at bay attempts to upgrade to a more balanced system of national life, one that produces more happiness than does self-preoccupation.

Even Ivy League colleges, our best centers of learning, have stumbled blindly into the embrace of arrogance and further tipped the inner psychic balance in favor of the id. Andrew Delbanco, director of American studies at Columbia University, writes that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were founded by “stringent Protestants” on the belief that the elite were granted their status through God’s mercy, not through any worthiness of their own. Accordingly, members of the elite were expected to work and live on behalf of others. Now, according to Prof. Delbanco, the elite college culture “encourages smugness and self satisfaction. . .” Deans and presidents greet new students “with congratulations for being the best and brightest ever to walk through the gates.” They are taught, he says, that those who don’t attend an Ivy League or equivalent school are beneath them. What they aren’t taught is basic self-knowledge.

The id thrives on psychological ignorance. Behind our suffering and self-sabotage is an inner world that is terra incognita. Instead of exploring this inner terrain, we cover up or deny that we are, in some measure, creatures whose life journey is a misadventure in the backwoods of our unconscious mind.

Our psychological ignorance is not something for which we are to blame. The inner world is our last frontier, and the time has come to begin to populate it with our presence and our consciousness. We’ll go on producing self-sabotage and suffer greatly if we don’t make a conscious effort to raise our individual and collective awareness. We experience humility when we uncover the mysterious dynamics of our psyche because we expose the blindness of our egotism and the marauding of the id. That humility becomes the foundation of wisdom and inner power.

Self-doubt concerning personal value influences both the bully and the victim.

If we want our society to put a stop to bullying—an excellent goal, of course, one embraced by President Barack Obama, educators, and celebrities—we can help the cause by better understanding the underlying psychological dynamics of bullying and by teaching this knowledge to our kids.

What are these underlying dynamics? The bully—girl or boy, man or woman—appears bold and confident on the surface. But this person is emotionally entangled in substantial self-doubt. All of us grow up with some degree of self-doubt. This feeling can be quite conscious and intense, or it can be repressed and inconspicuous. Our self-doubt produces uncertainty concerning our value, significance, strength, goodness, and worthiness. Even more so, it can produce deep emotional convictions that we are lacking in value, are deeply flawed, and are deserving of disrespect.

Self-doubt is a universal condition. We compensate somewhat for the painfulness of it when others give us recognition, acceptance, praise, and validation. The existence of self-doubt is evident in the human passion for fame, glory, power, and wealth, all of which bestow an illusion of value and superiority. Self-doubt is also evident in bullies who belittle and abuse others in their desperate need to feel superior and more powerful in themselves.

What is the source of our self-doubt? Many thoughtful people, of course, have tackled this age-old question. One answer, I believe, lies in our emotional conviction that somehow our essential, intrinsic self was never fully recognized and appreciated as we were growing up. Unspoken words, addressed to one’s parents, convey the feeling: “You don’t really know who I am.” The feeling is personalized: “If you don’t know who I am, then I’m probably not worth knowing.” These feelings can be present even when we had kind, decent parents.

We also associate our sense of self with our subjective experience of early childhood development. The determination of parents to subject us to the necessary process of child-rearing—highlighted by toilet training and the battles of the “terrible two’s”—can leave us convinced emotionally that some essential part of us was unacceptable, even wrong and bad. Such feelings live in our psyche at a deep, repressed level.

Bullying begins deep down inside of us. Our self-doubt supports the existence of an inner bully—our inner critic or superego—that operates in our psyche. We experience self-doubt most emphatically when our inner critic whispers or even seems to shout in our ear, belittling us and our accomplishments. This voice from our inner critic mocks, harasses, and torments us on the pretext that we somehow deserve to be treated with this disrespect. (Read, “The Tyrant that Rules Our Inner Life.”)

How does our inner critic get away with bullying us? How come we put ourselves at such a disadvantage? It only happens because we’re not sufficiently conscious of these inner dynamics. The human race has simply not been able to come to terms with the fact that we have a fundamental inner battle in our psyche between aggression and passivity. This war between inappropriate aggression (our bullying inner critic) and inner passivity (our defensive unconscious ego) is waged with the ammunition of false accusations, weak defenses, and emotional punishment.

Every psyche has aggressive and passive deposits. Usually, people don’t mind being identified as aggressive, but they invariably hate being identified as passive. So our instinct is to disavow our passivity. Bullies are inherently passive individuals who are often neglected or treated roughly at home. Inwardly, they feel devalued, unworthy, and passive to parents or siblings. At the same time, they may see their parents in the grip of these same painful emotions. Their instinct is to cover up this self-doubt, and they can do so by becoming aggressive with other children who are smaller or more passive. Now, for the moment, self-doubt vanishes. Bullies feel they have the power and are the better person, as they torment the one they have identified as a lesser person.

The aggressive behavior of bullies doesn’t allow them to escape from their emotional entanglement in self-doubt. That’s because, unconsciously, they identify with the victim of their bullying. Emotionally, they “sneak” into the skin of their victim, and through identification with their victim they feel what it’s like to be bullied. The victim typically feels enormous self-doubt. As Lady Gaga, a victim of bullying in her childhood, told The New York Times, “I was so ashamed of who I was.” Victims of bullying can be taught to become stronger emotionally so they feel better about themselves and are less likely to be targets of bullies.

Some bullies can’t resist the sadistic gratification they feel. The sadist, like the bully, appears to get this perverse gratification by feeling power and superiority over the victim. However, the perverse pleasure is ultimately of a masochistic nature. It is produced, as mentioned, mainly through the aggressor’s identification with the helplessness and worthlessness that the victim is presumed to be feeling. Bullies who are taught that their impulses to mistreat others are based on their unconscious wish to identify with the alleged inferiority or helplessness of their victims will begin to think twice before acting out.

Bullying is a psychological defense. It attempts to cover up the bully’s identification with the victim’s passivity and sense of having little value. “Look, I am the aggressor,” the bully’s defense maintains: “I am the one who is superior. This is what I want and this is what I like—to feel superior to this worthless weakling and more powerful.”

This makes their bullying a compulsive behavior. All of us can be quite compulsive when it comes to using various self-defeating behaviors to cover up what we don’t understand (and don’t want to acknowledge) about ourselves. Hundreds of various self-defeating behaviors are used by people to cover up our unresolved emotional attachments to feeling deprived, refused, controlled, rejected, criticized, betrayed, abandoned, and disrespected.

Bullying is essentially an instinctive acting out of the conflict in our psyche between aggression and passivity. Bullying also serves as a psychological defense that covers up the bully’s emotional attachment to feeling self-doubt in the forms of passivity and lack of value. With consciousness or self-knowledge, we are able to resolve this inner conflict, which then nullifies the instinct to act out being a bully or to feel deserving of being bullied.

We can trace anxiety back to its source in our psyche.

Many people suffer from low-level anxiety, which produces, as one sufferer said, “a frequent feeling of dread, a sense that I’m not up to the challenges that face me, a fear that I won’t make it, that everything will crumble.”

I had this distress and tension in my mind and body for many years, starting in my early teens. The feeling ebbed and flowed through my twenties and thirties, and often it was painfully intense, particularly when I felt blocked in my efforts to be creative. I tried one “expert’s” advice, but it didn’t help: “Don’t worry about the future: Take each day one anxiety-attack at a time.”

Kidding aside, I now live for the most part in a state of considerable inner peacefulness. Though my anxiety lingered on until I was in my forties, more than twenty years ago, depth psychology provided me with insight into the source of this anxiety and relief from it.

An undercurrent of tension and stress can occur for no apparent reason. Sufferers often can’t pinpoint a cause. Some scientists believe the problem is a dysfunctional amygdala gland in the brain, which they say needs to be “reset”. This small gland behind our brow is a kind of processing center for our emotions. It can become overstimulated, producing anxiety from non-threatening everyday events. I believe, however, that our amygdala is only reacting to unresolved emotional issues in our psyche. In my view, these emotional disturbances or inner conflicts cause the overstimulation in our amygdala.

Often people try to combat low-level anxiety with positive thoughts. They apply logic and rational thinking to convince themselves that their anxieties, worries, and fears are ill-founded and that everything will work out fine. Sometimes this approach is helpful. Still, rational and positive thinking are often no match for the powerful irrational forces that can be churning in our psyche.

Let’s try to trace the anxiety back to its source in our psyche. Here we find a primary conflict in our psyche between inner aggression (represented by our inner critic or superego) and inner passivity (represented by our unconscious ego.) Details of this inner conflict are described in earlier posts, including “Panic Attacks Arise from Within Our Psyche,” and I won’t repeat them here. The main point is that inner passivity and inner aggression, which are distinct operating systems in our psyche, clash when they become activated, drawing us into some experience of distress, anxiety, or suffering. (Read also, “The Politburo in Your Psyche.”)

The clash of inner aggression and inner passivity produce painful symptoms such as fear, worry, anxiety, insomnia, depression, muscle tension, nervousness, irritability, and lack of concentration. Anxiety is just one of the many symptoms (including addictions and compulsions) that are produced by this inner conflict.

Anxiety sufferers frequently look for some cause in the world around them to account for their anxiety. Frequently, they blame others (a spouse, boss, or friend) who they claim is neglecting or mistreating them. Or they place the blame on, say, their working conditions or problems with where they live. As a consequence, they are likely to begin to react negatively to the one who is being blamed, or they will dislike more intensely the conditions of their life. Such misguided reactions begin to produce self-defeat and self-sabotage.

We have a chance to lessen and even to liberate ourselves from chronic low-grade anxiety with this following technique or practice:

Stop for a few minutes when you feel the anxiety (when it is possible throughout the day to do so.) Close your eyes, and try to connect with yourself. This can be difficult to do if your mind is churning and you’re unable to calm it down. A churning mind, in itself, denotes some inner passivity, some weakness on your part in regulating your mind and stopping it from gallivanting out of control, producing random, often negative and pointless thoughts and feelings. (Some meditation practice might be necessary.)

Do your best, in any case, to connect with what seems like a center within yourself. This is, in fact, your consciousness, which is quite different from your mind. The quality of your consciousness is a measure of the intimacy you have with your own self. It is a measure of your sense of goodness, value, and inner peacefulness.

From this state of consciousness, try to understand that your distress or anxiety is a symptom of the clash between your inner aggression and inner passivity. You may be able to detect inner voices that represent the thoughts or feelings being expressed by your inner aggression and your inner passivity. (Many examples of the inner dialogue that occurs between these two parts of our psyche are provided in my books, Freedom From Self-Sabotage and Why We Suffer.)

In this practice, you want to try to bring some focus to your inner passivity. Even when your inner aggression is criticizing or harassing you, it’s still your inner passivity that allows this psychological abuse to occur.

Again, try to sense that behind your anxiety lurks inner passivity, that readiness to feel overwhelmed, to experience self-doubt, to question yourself, and to anticipate your failure or collapse. You have tumbled into this inner weakness because it is an emotional default position. It’s familiar to you. In fact, you don’t quite know who you are without it. You hold on to it (or you’re unconsciously drawn to it) because, painful though it is, it’s part of your identity.

Now, of course, you know that consciously you want to let go of it. Imagine that, in the process of seeing your inner passivity with such clarity, you are acknowledging how familiar it is to you and how resistant you have been to claiming, through the extension of your consciousness, this no-man’s land in your psyche.

Just quietly see your inner passivity. Seeing it is an act of power, an expression of consciousness. In seeing it, you are infusing this inner space with your consciousness. Now the anxiety falls away because your consciousness is your connection to the truth of your great value and inner strength. Do this repeatedly, and monitor whether or not it is easing your anxiety.