WHY WE SUFFER

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 Mocking Voice of Inner Resistance

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The best depth psychology is so potent that we instinctively become resistant to assimilating the knowledge. The insight upsets our sense of who we are, and we feel inner resistance because we don’t like, at least initially, that feeling of vulnerability and unsteadiness.

A black sheep plays the role of inner resistance in this teaching story.

This inner resistance is mostly unconscious, yet we can learn to keep it in sight and thereby diminish its power to sabotage us. The resistance has many guises, including defensiveness, denial, and stubbornness. Resistance can also be expressed in the form of mocking or cynical words and thoughts, or as a whinny, sarcastic inner voice.

Sometimes resistance employs humor and wit, along with mockery and sarcasm, to reduce to absurdity the inner reality uncovered by depth psychology. I illustrate this here with a teaching story. Inner resistance is personified in this story as a sassy, skeptical black sheep. For entertainment value, this black sheep is a lively character who injects comic relief into an otherwise serious subject. The story begins:

A young shepherd, who’s taking night classes to become a psychotherapist, approaches his flock to deliver his daily lecture on the secrets of happiness. Accompanied by his sheepdog, he often talks directly to his one black sheep, the wittiest member of the flock. The shepherd, who can be a bit preachy, begins his talk, while the black sheep bleats annoyingly at the dog. [Read more…]

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The Essentials of Empowerment for Enablers and Codependents

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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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The Appeal of Alternative Facts

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Protectors of democracy, look deeper into the unconscious mind if you want to eliminate the alternative facts now contaminating public discourse.

Alternative facts are rampant in our psyche, covering up inner truth.

We need to uncover and understand the inner conflict that makes our psyche a breeding ground for perversions of truth, as well as for personal discontent and national dissension.

The biggest conflict raging in America and the world might be the one taking place in the human psyche between rationality and irrationality. In our psyche, the irrational side is powerful in its own right, in part because we’re markedly prepared, through inner resistance, to cling to our delusions, defenses, and distortions of reality.

Researchers have been showing for decades that reason and evidence are frequently unable to change the minds of everyday people. As journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes in a recent issue of The New Yorker, “any graduate student with a clipboard can demonstrate that reasonable-seeming people are often totally irrational.”

The pervasiveness of irrationality is consistent with the prevalence of neurotic behaviors in the population. Symptoms of this emotional weakness include poor ability to appreciate and respect oneself, difficulty in changing self-defeating behaviors, a compulsion to recycle painful memories, a recurring sense of victimhood, a need to blame others, and resistance to fulfilling one’s potential. [Read more…]

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Are You a Clone of Your Identifications?

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Is that really you, reading these words? Or are you just a body double or stand-in for your authentic self, a clone of the identifications you make with other people? If so, you might want to learn more about how psychological identifications influence your sense of self.

Don’t let identifications block you from your authentic self.

Through the process of identification, we unconsciously assimilate aspects or attributes of other people, and we’re transformed to some degree by what we have absorbed.

This is okay if we’re identifying with the best attributes of others—such as their kindness, compassion, wisdom, and strength—as long as we remain our own person and know our own mind. However, much of the time we unknowingly identify with the flaws or weaknesses of others, especially the ways in which they’re being passive, needy, and disrespecting of themselves.

Not all identifications are about other people. We can also identify with our social and professional standing, with our wealth or poverty, and with our intelligence or the feeling that we are lacking in it. People also identify with their personality, body-image, athleticism, mind, and ego. Such identifications limit our intelligence and our capacity for wisdom and happiness. For this post, I’ll narrow the discussion to the identifications we make concerning other people.

Often the aspects or attributes we assimilate from others consist of negative emotions such as feeling deprived, refused, controlled, rejected, criticized, and unloved. These identifications represent our unconscious determination to hold on to these varieties of pain and suffering. [Read more…]

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Unmasking Fear Itself

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Writing is an art, and I do occasionally like to play around with its styles, forms, devices, and different genres. My intention is to communicate serious matters in a playful, effective manner. Here, with some risk of pedantic overstepping, I lump together fiction, satire, and magic realism. Feel free to laugh at the result.

On an exciting journey into my psyche I discover Fear Itself.

I awaken one winter morning from a nightmare feeling groggy yet strangely feisty. A masked maniac wielding a sharp pencil had been chasing me down the street. What the heck was I afraid of? I was holding a bigger pencil in my hand, a yellow Dixon 2HB. I could have turned on my pursuer and written him off as an illusion.

Tottering to the bathroom, I decide to look deeper into my apparent cowardice. I resolve to journey into my psyche to visit an old archetype, Fear Itself, that mysterious hobgoblin of my psyche, for a face-to-face showdown. I had to act fast, though, before fear squelched the whole idea.

Downstairs, gulping a second cup of coffee to fuel lift-off, I plop myself in front of my computer, enter a classified code, and zoom off into inner space in my pixelated spaceship. Off I go, dodging black holes of idle speculation, comet storms of negativity, and warning signs about crashing into emptiness. Soon my GPS locates Fear Itself, holed up in a run-down estate perched on a bluff in the badlands of my psyche.

My laptop in hand, I strut right into its parlor. In shifting shadows, this masked fiend, Fear Itself, slithers to the back of the room, then suddenly arises full height in a menacing warrior pose. Sure enough, the creature, shimmering amorphously, resembles the creep who chased me in my nightmare. Its mask smirks contemptuously at me, yet I see no sign of life behind its eye holes. Tufts of red hair flare up frightfully from the creature’s temples, though its baggy cargo shorts lessen the overall menacing effect. [Read more…]

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Fundamentalism and the Psyche

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Religion and psychoanalysis make a volatile mix. Like bleach and ammonia, the combination can leave people gasping in irritation. I’m not interested in activating a burning sensation. I only want to apply some salve to blistering boils of unreason.

Splitting is a psychological term that describes one aspect of fundamentalism.

Are we strong enough emotionally to consider the application of some rationality, or have we become hopelessly defensive and hypersensitive?

As a psychotherapist, I’m here as a healer, not a critic. I see that fundamentalists of different religions are influenced by unconscious psychological characteristics that impede their objectivity. Psychology believes that our awareness, intelligence, and wisdom can all be enhanced through self-knowledge. This post explores some of that knowledge for the purpose of helping us all, not just fundamentalists, move toward the light.

Fundamentalists of different religions also have a big impact as voting blocs in democratic elections, so an exploration of the underlying issues that frame their political outlook is fair game for civil, intelligent discussion. In this post, I mostly narrow my discussion to Christian fundamentalists. (Of course, fundamentalism isn’t restricted solely to religious beliefs. Secularists, too, can be dogmatic, and they sometimes react with anger or malice when their pet theories or cherished beliefs are challenged.)

Writers and thinkers have identified four basic aspects of Christian fundamentalism. These big words—literalism, conversion, evangelism, and apocalypticism—will be whittled down to size. While reading about them, watch for evidence of inner fear and passivity lurking in the background. To begin: [Read more…]

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Ascending to Joy

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Joy is the Mount Everest of human emotions. Can depth psychology, knowing well the slopes and faults and ridges of our psyche, lead us like a powerful Sherpa guide to the heights of such euphoria?

Ascending to the heights of joy.

As if in awe of joy, psychology doesn’t dare say a lot about it. The sublime emotion has spiritual and religious connotations, so it’s a touchy subject for psychology. Mental-health experts can dispense valuable knowledge but we wouldn’t dare take credit for instilling joy. We bow before its mystery and sacredness.

We’re thrilled just to help our clients escape from suffering. We rightfully consider that our intervention has been successful when a client breaks free from emotional pain to find a quiet inner space—a neutral corner of the psyche—from where he or she can begin to flourish.

The best psychology can help people get to the last base camp on the ascent to joy. From there, climbers must proceed by means of their instincts, character, intuition, integrity, courage, willingness to endure hardship, and sense of destiny.

Joy is happiness and meaningfulness and connection and generosity and compassion all rolled into one grand moment. It’s most likely felt when all that is right and good and true about ourselves, and beautiful about life, come gusting into our consciousness. Atop the summit where our colors are unfurled, joy is registered in gratitude and wonder. [Read more…]

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