WHY WE SUFFER

Are You Living Your True Story?

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Everyone needs a story, as the saying goes. The best kind of story provides us with meaning and purpose, and it reflects values and beliefs to which we subscribe. Ideally, it tells us right from wrong, explains our suffering, and guides us going forward. Such stories, which go back in history to ancient creation myths, are cornerstones of our humanity.

The best kind of story provides us with meaning and purpose.

Many of us, in order to flourish, need to change our story. Some stories that people adopt (or are unconsciously burdened with) do their existence and intelligence a great disservice. “I am a worthless nobody and a loser” is a story that many people follow. Some people believe, as another common story, that they are the helpless victims of what is (or what they subjectively perceive to be) injustice and malice. Such stories develop out of our inner conflict, and invariably they produce self-defeat and self-sabotage.

Keep in mind that terrorists and criminals, along with greedy and self-aggrandizing people, operate according to stories that feel real and true to them. Sometimes the stories most fervently subscribed to are rationalizations for being cold-hearted and close-minded. We obviously don’t want to be acting out a story that incorporates a lack of belief or trust in oneself, is borrowed from others, or has been contaminated by unresolved emotional issues.

We can have more than one story at a time, a personal story, for instance, as well as a story that frames our worldview. It’s normal that our story would borrow heavily from parents and culture, even as we’re struggling to forge a unique, personal story. [Read more…]

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Another Visual Portrayal of Our Psyche’s Dynamics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Get to Know Your Psyche’s Operating Systems

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

Separate operating systems in our psyche can distort our objectivity.

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

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

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

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

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Illustrating the Characters Who Mess With Our Mind

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A visual image can help us recognize the main players in our psyche.

I’ve been slowing down my writing production over the past year, as my mind and psyche shift away from the mental side into more intuitive and contemplative states. For many years I’ve been “drawing” portraits of the psyche in the language of depth psychology—with words, phrases, theory, examples, and explanations.

As I write, I try to express my words artfully, but here I’ve also added artwork that illustrates some of the dynamics of inner conflict and human dysfunction. (The illustration I’ve done here is a bit washed out–the original looks better.)

This artwork still needs text to explain what is portrayed, and this post provides that information. The image (click to enlarge) has eleven characters and symbols. It is missing a background: my artistic ability is awaiting further development.

Seven of these images represent troublesome parts of our psyche. For whimsy’s sake, call them the Seven Dworks. They’re like renegade operating systems, totally out of harmony with one another and with our better self. The four other depictions represent what is good, creative, and great about us. I’ll say a tiny bit about each of these—and save the best for last.

Let’s start with the gruesome figure at bottom right. It represents our nasty, primitive inner critic, the seat of self-aggression. It (it’s certainly not a he or she) is wearing a crown because it assumes to be our rightful voice of authority, although its power is irrational, illegitimate, and downright abusive. [Read more…]

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How to Love Yourself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Don’t Let Inner Passivity Undermine Democracy

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

Democracy depends on your efforts to grow psychologically.

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

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

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

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

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

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Connecting With Our Best Self

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Our emotional wellbeing is usually related to the degree to which we’re connected to (or disconnected from) our best self. We can support and enhance our personal mental health by seeing our emotional and behavioral problems in the light of connection and disconnection.

It’s time to stop knowing yourself in a second-hand way.

This post is not about acute cases of disconnection such as depersonalization or dissociation. Instead, it’s about a milder but more common variety, namely the generalized disconnect from one’s best self that many people experience as a normal human condition, as if this is how life is meant to be.

A majority of people are sorely lacking in terms of understanding (or even knowing the existence of) unconscious dynamics in their psyche. These dynamics, usually in the form of inner conflict, largely contribute to this disconnection from one’s best self, and the disconnection is often experienced painfully as dissatisfaction, emptiness, apathy, negativity, and general unhappiness.

People who are disconnected tend to know themselves through aspects of life that are secondary to their best self. For instance, they identify with their mind or with their ego, or with their material assets, personality, gender, nationality, physical appearance, line of work, race, religion, power and influence, or sexuality. These identifications, when emotionally embraced for validation and orientation, are too limited. People usually have little understanding of how much their perceptions and intelligence are influenced and limited by these identifications. [Read more…]

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The Deeper Roots of Social Unrest

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People are clashing angrily these days over abortion, gay marriage, gun control, immigration, economic injustice, policing practices, and health care. These are all issues we need to talk about, yet preferably not with malice and hatred. The negative emotionalism we’re seeing in others and often experiencing in ourselves happens largely because of conflict that’s unresolved in the human psyche.

Social unrest arises largely from inner conflict that we fail to understand or acknowledge.

The hostile split in the United States between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, secularists and religious, and urban and rural is not really about who’s right and who’s wrong. The discord is primarily a result of inner conflict, and most people are largely ignorant of the dynamics of this conflict and how it degrades their lives on a personal level and contributes to social disharmony.

Our inner conflict is the slop we bring to the communal table. The conflict creates inner turmoil in our emotional life, causing negative emotions such as feeling devalued, unworthy, helpless, or disrespected. Yet our first instinct is to blame others for what we’re unconsciously generating within ourselves.

Examples abound of how the personal dysfunction of everyday people infiltrates society. For instance, a person who feels a desperate need to succeed is likely unaware of a possible deeper motivation, namely unconscious self-doubt, a sense of unworthiness, and even self-loathing. This individual, whose inner conflict could produce acute self-centeredness and perhaps narcissism, would likely be indifferent to the existence and needs of others. He might also be quite hostile toward others, mirroring his inner relationship with himself. [Read more…]

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The Las Vegas Killer’s Hidden Motive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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My Latest Book is Now Available

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My latest book has just been published at Amazon. The e-book is available here and the paperback here.

It’s titled: Who’s Afraid of Inner Truth: Dispatches from Our Psyche’s War Zone, and it’s a collection of the last three years of posts that have been published at this website.

New material has been added to this book that hasn’t appeared on the website. These posts or dispatches are also arranged in a new order or sequence, one that communicates the ideas and knowledge more effectively.

If you get the book (only $4.97 for the e-book), consider leaving a comment (review) at the Amazon site to help to bring it to the attention of the many readers it can benefit.

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