Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  The third category of primary emotions to which we are unconsciously attached and which instigate self-sabotage comprises variations of feeling rejected. These include feeling criticized, unloved, abandoned, betrayed, deserted; no longer important, not wanted, unworthy, excluded, neglected, pushed aside, left out; looked down upon, put down, humiliated, insulted, criticized, judged harshly, not understood, unfairly accused, discounted, dismissed, disrespected, not supported, not validated, let down, disappointed, seen as worthless, not liked, condemned, and hated.

  As children, it seemed that we were never loved enough, or in the right way, and that our siblings got more attention or validation. Since we are not objective as children, we can easily feel not loved enough and consequently have resistance to loving ourselves. As adults, many of us don’t see objectively the extent of our self-rejection and our readiness to go through life feeling unvalued and unloved.

  One of the most common forms of sabotage is self-rejection. With the attachment to rejection, we often reject ourselves more harshly than even our worst enemy. We disapprove of ourselves for being imperfect and having flaws, even though being imperfect is entirely human. We also reject and berate ourselves for past mistakes. Sometimes we use our past mistakes and failures to intensify the self-rejection. It can help us to consider that we did some foolish things in our past because, given our issues and awareness at the time, we couldn’t necessarily have done much better.

  If we felt our parents didn’t value us, then we have a hard time valuing ourselves. We can treat ourselves with the same neglect or even contempt that we felt we received from our parents. Sometimes to cope with our unconscious attachment to self-rejection, we compensate by producing a narcissistic mentality.[iii] This is a defense that claims, “I’m not attached to feeling rejected or unworthy; if anything, I am in love with myself.” However, the defense is fragile, and individuals who use it can easily collapse into self-loathing. John believed that in his childhood his parents had rejected him and his creative writing projects. He felt they took him for granted. As an adult, he transferred on to others the expectation that they would reject his writing and that women would reject him as a friend and lover. He felt the universe responded to him as if he didn’t matter at all. So too, he responded with the same indifference to himself, to others, and to his health and long-term well-being. Through it all, he maintained illusions of superiority, sometimes appearing to others as arrogant and aloof. At bottom was his emotional attachment to the feeling that people would overlook him and see him as nobody special.

  To explain to ourselves why we’re feeling rejected or unloved, we might conclude that we are defective and unworthy. We can feel we don’t deserve love or don’t deserve to get good things in life. This is another defense in which we plead guilty to being undeserving. We accept punishment in the form of bad feelings or depression for allegedly being undeserving. This covers up our emotional attachment to feeling unloved, unappreciated, or rejected. Our unconscious defense claims, “I’m not attached to feeling rejected or unloved; the problem is I just don’t deserve to get respect and love.”

  With this attachment, it is obviously difficult for us to act in our best interests and expect others to truly care about us. Let us say you make a mistake at work and are called in by your supervisor to discuss the mistake. You take your supervisor’s criticism personally, as a rejection of who you are and what you have accomplished. It is the old childish absolutes again—“If I am not good, then I am bad.” You feel ashamed, humiliated, and disapproved of (which was how you felt as a child whenever your actions or performance were questioned). That night you binge on ice cream or get drunk. The next day your self-rejection has intensified as you beat yourself up for being “an irresponsible slob.” You criticize yourself for overeating or drinking too much, which masks the real issue of your continuing indulgence in feeling rejected and unloved.

  Here are some indications of an emotional investment in self-rejection:

  -- Obsessing that others see you as ugly, stupid, foolish, or inadequate;

  -- Fearing you will be rejected for expressing how you really feel or think;

  -- Fixating on your alleged faults or frequently reflecting on other people’s alleged faults;

  -- Feeling offended when others disagree with you;

  -- Taking other people’s behaviors and comments personally, as a rejection or belittling of you;

  -- Partaking in risky and promiscuous behaviors;

  -- Feeling a need to be perfect;

  -- Experiencing frequent bouts of jealousy or imagined betrayal;

  -- Overworking to prove yourself worthy;

  -- Envying others, feeling inferior to their success or accomplishments.

  People in psychotherapy sometimes take their therapist’s comments or analysis as criticism. They then beat themselves up with disapproval and self-rejection, recreating the non-acceptance they felt from their parents. This is why addiction-treatment methods or systems based on the “disease concept,” the idea that genes or biochemistry cause addictions and other dysfunctional behaviors, are so eagerly embraced. The disease concept absolves us of blame. An alcoholic, for instance, can now provide this inner defense: “It’s a physical disease, which means it’s not my fault. I can’t help being an alcoholic. I’m not so bad after all.”

  This defense can ease anxiety but it doesn’t uncover or disturb our emotional attachments to such feelings as refusal, control, rejection, and criticism that are buried at the core of addictions.[iv] It doesn’t cure self-doubt, self-rejection, and self-criticism. Self-regulation won’t flower from rationalizations or soothing consolations. It comes from taking responsibility for our collusion in self-defeat, in a manner which illuminates the battle within us to either succumb to our negative attachments or to manifest our highest good.

  The Hidden Source of Negativity

  Many people scoff at the notion that we create the circumstances that maintain and reinforce our negative emotions. Yet why aren’t we happily pursuing a life of prosperity and fulfillment? We are smart people. We know what is good for us and what isn’t. Yet some “bad thing” is happening that we have not been able to figure out. Why is the national prosperity that Americans have created collapsing around us? We simply have not been ready to see our inner saboteur in all its power and antagonistic design. That’s why we have been unable to answer the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” This tardiness in facing the facts of our inner life compares with our unwillingness until recent decades to address the extent of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse in the family or the abuse of children by some priests in the Catholic Church.

  Okay, you say, maybe it is true that we are active saboteurs, recreating ways to suffer and to fail. But how could we possibly become attached to such suffering and failure? An answer was provided by Edmund Bergler, the psychoanalytic psychiatrist whose writing is discussed more fully in Chapter 7. His explanation, while logical, strikes us as incredible. The findings of classical psychoanalysis, on which Bergler’s theories are based, have often overshot the limits of what our species is willing to believe about itself. If perchance Bergler was right in his explanation for how we became attached to negative emotions, he has uncovered breathtaking knowledge from the heart of human nature. Even if this explanation were flawed or completely wrong, that error would not undermine or negate this book’s primary thesis—that unconscious attachments to negative emotions in the human psyche are sabotaging us and our world. In other words, the fact that these attachments exist does not require that we are certain about their origins.

  In his explanation of the origins, Bergler traced our attachment to negative emotions to the extreme self-centeredness with which we are all born. Psychoanalysis has called this condition infantile megalomania. All we know at birth is our own body and our sensations. In our mind, nothing exists outside of ourselves. This sense of “oneness” with reality leads the baby to feel that everything that happen
s to him or her has been wished for. If a rattle appears in baby’s hand, that is what baby wanted to happen. In his or her primitive consciousness, a baby deduces: “Everything that happens to me is what I want.”

  In other words, the baby’s primitive deduction or sense of reality is based on feelings such as, “This is what I know,” “This is the way things are,” “This is what I can expect,” and “This is how it should be.”

  So how does a baby begin to explain unpleasant feelings of being refused and deprived? Baby is hungry but the breast or bottle isn’t present. Mommy is running around taking care of other kids or putting supper on the table for the family. Baby doesn’t understand or care about her need to attend to others, nor does baby understand the relativity of time. If it takes mommy five minutes to get to baby, baby can experience that time period as an eternity of being deprived.

  Baby, in a primitive sense of omnipotence, forms the impression of having wished for the experience of not getting the breast or bottle: “It happens— therefore I wished it. Since it’s what I wished for, it is therefore what I want.” This emotional accommodation supports baby’s illusion of “oneness” and omnipotence, of being a magical wizard at the center of existence.

  Now libido, the psychoanalytic term that refers to the pleasure principle, comes into play. Bergler theorized that the baby libidinizes or “sugar-coats” the feeling of being refused, deprived, missing out: “Since it’s happening, I must want the deprival or not getting to happen. Yes, this is what I want. This is what I like.” However, in making this rationalization and protecting the illusion of having such power, baby pays a big price. He or she creates an emotional attachment to feeling refused, deprived, missing out (category one of the primary emotions mentioned earlier in this chapter). Later, from ages two to three, through toilet training and early socialization, baby makes a similar accommodation with feeling controlled and becomes attached to the feelings of being controlled (category two of the primary emotions). From ages three to five, as baby becomes more aware of mother and father as separate identities who have a relationship independent of him or her, baby becomes sensitive to feelings of being rejected and unloved (category three of the primary emotions).

  As baby ages in the early years of life, he or she makes adjustments to accommodate the reality existing beyond self-centeredness. But the attachment to feeling deprived, refused, controlled, rejected, criticized, and otherwise victimized has been cultivated and secured, and it may even increase in intensity into old age.

  In his explanation for how we become attached to negative emotions, Bergler included as a major contributing factor the self-aggression emanating from the superego or inner critic. We are all born with natural aggression, which is a requirement for human survival. Appropriate aggression helps us to make our way in the world. This innate aggression is initially experienced by babies as frustration and anger at having their wishes thwarted (their aggression may feel as substantial to them as it does in adults). Yet, the child’s musculature is too weak to expel all this aggression into the environment. Despite temper tantrums, along with hitting and flailing, the child cannot direct all the aggression outward. As Freud theorized, the aggression becomes a drive turned inward at or toward the self. As the child grows, some of the aggression consolidates to form the superego (or inner critic), and it becomes self-aggression. Bergler theorized that self-aggression, in itself, becomes an emotional attachment. In the child’s frantic attempt to modify the untenable inner situation of being on the receiving end of this aggressive drive, the child enlists libido, the pleasure principle. The child, in collaboration with the inner passivity of the unconscious ego, absorbs, accepts, and “libidinizes” the punishment doled out by the tormenting inner critic.[v]

  Typically, adults experience the superego as an inner conscience. But it is not a true conscience because it is so frequently critical, harsh, and authoritarian. The self-aggression it dispenses is often felt by us as self-criticism and self-rejection, which can intensify to self-condemnation and self-hatred. The more insightful we are, the more we can expose the irrationality in this negative drive or energy. With insight and growth, we neutralize or deflect the unkind, harsh self-aggression. When we are not sufficiently aware, we absorb the self-aggression and it contaminates our intelligence. We start to believe that the consequential bad feelings about ourselves are justified by our faults and weaknesses. Self-esteem is very difficult to acquire when, unconsciously, we are “buying into” the harassment and putdowns of the inner critic. With our attachment to feelings of criticism, disapproval, and self-rejection, we have resistance to seeing self-aggression for what it is—misplaced aggression in the form of random, unwarranted attacks upon our essence.

  The more we evolve through self-knowledge and self-discovery, the more we become immune to self-aggression. We liberate ourselves from the authoritarian superego and replace it with an evolved sense of self. We experience our self or our essence as a center of goodness, compassion, guidance, understanding, and love.

  People sometimes have difficulty directly seeing or feeling their self-aggression. Instead, we simply feel its consequences—anxiety, loneliness, guilt, fear, depression, a sense of alienation, self-doubt, self-rejection, and self-hatred. Often we unconsciously turn the self-aggression outward and project it on to others. Now we become critical, judgmental, angry, and hateful toward them, even toward friends and family members. In doing this, we recreate through them the negative relationship we have with ourselves. Our aggression toward others can be observed and regulated when we realize how, through the superego or inner critic, we are critical and disapproving of ourselves, often for minor or even imagined transgressions. We see that we are only doing to others what we do to ourselves.

  Our Defenses Cover Up Our Attachments

  Without insight, we remain blind to our attachments, even to the most painful ones—our attachments to the dominating force of self-aggression and the helplessness of inner passivity. Our defenses, enlisted to cover up our attachments, prevent us from seeing how we soak up the self-aggression or indulge in the passivity. We must remember that, in this unconscious reckoning, our defenses are governed by a prime directive from the heart of human resistance. This directive stipulates that our collusion in suffering and self-sabotage be kept secret, especially from ourselves.

  What are some of the defenses behind which we hide crucial self-understanding? Several are described here, in simplified form.

  1) Blaming others and blaming life. Even as we secretly cultivate feelings of being victimized and hold ourselves back because of our own unconscious attachments, we look outward beyond ourselves to pin our misery on someone or something. This defense, which includes rationalizations and excuses, is explained in numerous contexts throughout the book.

  2) Covering up identification. If your parents judged and criticized your performance, you will likely be a judge and critic of other people’s performances, even as you continue to be sensitive to feeling judged yourself. However, as you are being critical of someone for, say, being a failure, you are entangled in your own attachment to self-criticism. This happens through your identification with how you imagine the other feels in being judged and criticized. To cover up this identification, you convince yourself that your negative feelings toward the recipient of your criticism are validated by his or her deficiencies and behaviors. The defense goes like this: “I’m not looking to feel criticized—I’m the one who’s doing the criticizing; I don’t want to identify with what he’s feeling in being criticized—his misconduct justifies my criticism.”

  3) Unconscious denial. A writer feels that his wife spends too much money on clothes and groceries. He grumbles at her, but doesn’t communicate directly to her about his underlying feelings, nor does he attempt to resolve those feelings within himself. However, he begins to experience writer’s block. He feels tired even before he sits at his computer. Words that once tumbled profusely from his mind now dribble out like a slow o
il leak. Because he is secretly indulging in feeling drained by his wife, the feeling has spread to his writing. His attachment to feeling drained by his wife’s expenditures now contaminates his creative output. He faces the prospect his income will dry up if his writing deteriorates and output declines, leaving him to feel even more drained in supporting her. He starts drinking more, oblivious to his underlying attachment.

  4) Hiding behind projection. In projection, we accuse (verbally or silently) others of the faults we are guilty of ourselves. For example, you say to someone (or think it to yourself), “You’re not trustworthy” or “You’re lazy.” Yet these are the very accusations that come at you from your inner critic. You absorb these accusations through inner passivity, but then (because the process is unconscious) you are compelled to cast similar accusations and criticism at others. While you’re doing so, your inner critic is telling you, “You’re just like that lazy fellow, aren’t you? You’re worthless and untrustworthy yourself.” We reply in defense, “No, I’m not like him! Look, I hate what he represents! I want nothing to do with someone like that.”

  As another example, a woman is passive with her boyfriend, allowing him to influence her unduly and dictate how she manages her life. Meanwhile, she gets angry at her mother who she says is too easy-going with the family dog, allowing the animal to run roughshod through the house. The daughter is projecting her own passivity with her boyfriend on to her mother. She hates what she sees in her mother, while denying or covering up her own entanglement in passivity. By projecting in this way, she covers up her attachment to feeling controlled and pushed around.

  To test whether you are using this defense, think of the major flaws you see in those closest to you and reflect on whether those flaws also apply to you.

  5) Dismissal of negative transference. Negative transference is the unconscious compulsion to experience current events and relationships in a manner that revives emotional hurts from our past. For example, you might consistently feel that you don’t get anything of value from your spouse when the main problem is your transference of this expectation on to him or her. You make this transference because you carry an emotional attachment from childhood to the feeling that your mother or father, or both, never gave you anything of value. Now, as an adult, you are compelled to recycle this negative emotion through your interaction with your spouse (or life in general). In dismissing (or defending against) the fact of your attachment to this negative emotion, you believe yourself to be the victim of a cold, cruel world that overlooks your existence. Or you accept punishment in the form of low self-esteem for the belief that you are unworthy and do not deserve anything better.