WHY WE SUFFER

Underlying Dynamics that Breed Bullies

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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. [Read more…]

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Deliverance from Low-Level Anxiety

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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. [Read more…]

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The Politburo in Your Psyche

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The politburo in our psyche can obliterate our sense of purpose and direction.

A politburo is an unelected body of communist party leaders—an executive committee—that rules with a totalitarian mindset in a one-party state. Fortunately, there are not many politburos left (according to Wikipedia, China has one, along with North Korea, Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba). Unfortunately, every day throughout the world a lot of executive committees, private and public, are making secret self-serving decisions that display a politburo mentality.

We probably can’t liberate ourselves from this self-defeating mentality until we expose the politburo in our own psyche. This inner politburo is indifferent to our well-being. Its influence over our thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, and actions leads to much suffering and self-defeat. Fear, tension, and anxiety are byproducts of the strained compromises worked out by this dysfunctional inner management that, like a political politburo, signifies the unfinished state of our evolution.

The politburo in our psyche consists of the ego, the id, and the superego, which are agencies in our psyche first identified by Sigmund Freud. Before proceeding to reference Freud, however, I first need to say something about his reputation and our society’s resistance to his work. He wasn’t right about everything, of course. Yet many of his detractors have exhibited an intense preoccupation with discrediting him, comparable to how Charles Darwin was and still is vilified in some circles. People instinctively have an aversion to depth psychology because, through our defense mechanisms, we protect our ego and self-image from inconvenient truth. There’s a price to pay, however. [Read more…]

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The Overlooked Factor in Criminal Behavior

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One way to suffer greatly is to break the law and go to jail. More than two million people are incarcerated in the United States, so there’s a lot of suffering going on behind bars and in the hearts of caring families. Our society is addressing the problem rather ineptly because we don’t understand the single most important cause of juvenile delinquency and adult criminality.

Criminals have a better chance of rehabilitation if they learn important facts about their psyche


Numerous competing theories—including biological, sociological, psychological, and political—are proposed for the cause of criminal behavior. Little consensus is established among the experts. Supporters of each theory barricade themselves and their doctrines against all comers.

These different schools agree on one point, though. They all identify as a decisive factor the criminal’s devotion to aggressive behavior and the discharge of aggressive acts. However, none of these schools have identified this aggression with sufficient clarity. Criminal aggression springs out of a condition in the human psyche that in psychoanalysis has been called “inner passivity.” Criminals are extremely passive and weak in the sense that, much of the time, they are not accessing the powers of self-regulation and integrity. They are failing to act wisely or appropriately on their own behalf.

Knowledge of inner passivity is important because it can help many criminals become rehabilitated. To some degree, all of us have this psychological condition in our psyche.  While inner passivity rises to the level of a psychological disorder in criminals, it can cause much suffering and self-defeat among the rest of us. [Read more…]

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The Hidden Cause of Clinical Depression

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Psychological insight fends off depression

Crippling confusion governs our treatment approach to the mental-health epidemic of clinical depression. Typically, sufferers who ask what causes their depression are told it’s a mysterious and complex brain disorder.

This answer does a grave disservice to millions of suffering Americans. So-called experts have dragged depression sufferers into a limbo of ignorance, dependency, and escalating misery. Meanwhile, with no cure in sight, the percentage of Americans taking anti-depressants has grown by 400 percent in the last 23 years.

Many factors can contribute to depression, including social circumstances, environment, diet, exercise, genetics, and seasonal weather effects. The problem is that a major cause of depression—the inner conflict described below—is almost completely overlooked by the prevailing medical-model treatment approaches. Wikipedia has an 18,000-word entry under “Major depressive disorder” (clinical depression), and only about one percent of that content (180 words) approaches the psychological heart of the problem—and even that is couched in vague terminology.

Through depth psychology, we learn that our psyche is a battleground between inner aggression (as represented by the inner critic or superego) and inner passivity (as represented by our self-doubt and subordinate ego). Much of our thoughts and feelings, whether conscious or unconscious, are reflective of one or the other of the points of view of these opposing factions in our psyche. [Read more…]

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Welcome Aboard the Voyage of Self-Discovery

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Embarking on the voyage of self-discovery

Centuries ago, explorers launched the Age of Discovery. Now it’s time to launch the Age of Self-Discovery. Our vessel is in need of favorable winds. Storm clouds of worldwide calamity are gathering on the horizon.

Global warming and nuclear weapons proliferation are two thunderheads of approaching destruction. Humanity’s response to these dangers has amounted to “the social psychosis of denial,” as one social reformer calls it. Psychologists have other names—learned helplessness, normalcy bias, and motivated blindness—for our tendency to deny approaching or existing danger.

We are likely to deny reality to the degree that we are in denial of important aspects of our human nature. As David Brooks of The New York Times puts it: “. . . the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.”

If we deny our own nature, how can we expect to save Nature? If we don’t care to know ourselves, we won’t care enough about saving our planet.

If we stop denying our nature, what will we discover about ourselves? Depth psychology contends that inner aggression and inner passivity are two dominant influences in our psyche that shape our personality and perceptions. I believe that our better nature, our courageous self, is entangled in the conflict between inner aggression (the superego or inner critic) and inner passivity (the unconscious or subordinate ego). We haven’t broken out of social psychosis because our humanity is trapped in this inner conflict. [Read more…]

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Neither a Procrastinator Nor a Dawdler Be

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Procrastination produces both emotional anguish and self-damaging inactionProcrastination is such a maddening trait that literary scribes have bestowed upon it an abundance of witty attention. William Shakespeare weighed in more than once, as in Henry VI, “Defer no time; delays have dangerous ends.” Here’s a list of 180 procrastination quotes, but reading them might be, well, to dawdle.

Procrastination produces both emotional anguish and self-damaging inaction. Interestingly, the main culprit in procrastination is largely unrecognized. Depth psychology, however, can penetrate our psyche to expose this culprit.

Before identifying the problem, here’s some background. We harbor in our psyche what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious ego. As the term obviously indicates, this part of our ego is unconscious. We also have a conscious ego that is plenty troublesome. This conscious ego is a pale shadow of our authentic self, and it tends to be thin-skinned and ridiculously petty. But our unconscious ego is even more of a nuisance. Its main effect is to render us passive, so that in certain situations we can quickly feel overwhelmed, helpless, confused, indecisive, and apathetic. Procrastination arises as a behavioral consequence of these negative emotions.

Our challenge is to become more conscious of this part of our psyche. We can start by giving it a name: inner passivity. In our psyche, the primary conflict is between inner aggression (as represented by our inner critic or superego) and inner passivity (as represented by our unconscious ego). These two conflicting aspects of our psyche are always butting heads, frequently producing inner voices or feelings that we repeat in our mind as if the words or feelings are our own. [Read more…]

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The Dreary Distress of Boredom

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Boredom is easily avoided once we discover the inner processes that produce it

Yawn. Nothing interesting going on today. Day after day, the same old thing, going around in a daze, inwardly dead. Life used to be more fun. Why is the world so dull? Why am I bored so much of the time?

Hey, it’s natural enough to be bored or restless when waiting two hours in a doctor’s office or at a garage getting your car repaired. The problem arises when we’re feeling bored every day. So it’s clinical or chronic boredom that we want to avoid. A whole range of painful symptoms—from drug addiction to compulsive gambling to poor performance at work and school—are associated with chronic boredom.

Some people believe that boredom is normal. In Boredom: A Lively History (Yale University Press, 2011) Prof. Peter Toohey concludes his book by writing that, “Boredom is a normal, useful, and incredibly common part of human experience. That many of us suffer it should be no cause for embarrassment. Boredom simply deserves respect for the, well, boring experience that it is.”

Toohey, a professor of classics, is wrong to say that boredom—a negative emotion akin to a toothache—is normal and useful. Boredom is a bummer, a form of unnecessary suffering when, in its chronic form, it’s a significant part of one’s daily experience. Toohey’s book touches on superficial psychological ideas concerning boredom, but he doesn’t explore (or even mention) depth psychology where the remedy can be found. [Read more…]

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The Tyrant that Rules Our Inner Life

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Our inner critic has its intrusive, rough fingers all over our psyche

Much suffering is produced through our relationship with our inner critic. This part of our psyche is also called the superego or self-aggression. It’s an authoritarian aspect or agency in our psyche that holds us accountable for any real or imagined shortcomings or failures. The inner critic is an offshoot of the natural aggression that humans have needed in order to survive in the world.

Not only does it hold us accountable, our inner critic harasses and torments us for our slightest shortcomings or misdemeanors. It is a rogue operator in our psyche that is mostly negative. It attacks us mercilessly for not living up to some unrealistic ideal of who or what we are supposed to be.

This inner tyrant has been called “the hidden master of the personality.”

It can feel to us that our inner critic is our moral conscience, as if it is an inner authority that we are supposed to trust and be passive to. But it is mostly negative and can’t be trusted. When we grow psychologically, we are able to shift inner authority over to our authentic self. It is this self that we can trust to represent our best interests and to be the true representative of our essence, integrity, and goodness. [Read more…]

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