Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  People who are unaware of this and other defenses fail to see their contribution to their self-sabotage and unhappiness. They are in a weak position to regulate feelings and behaviors. They are prone to react to the perceived injustices through anger, withholding, lack of cooperation, hostility, and by initiating or provoking the breakup of their relationships.

  6) Claim to power. This defense involves blaming ourselves for the wrong reasons. It is explained in Chapter 3.

  7) Assorted Tricks. Other common defenses include reducing to absurdity a comment or truth that challenges us emotionally; finding contradictions, even when they are inconsequential, to denigrate what we hear; using authority figures to contradict what we don’t want to hear; evading an issue by minimizing our mistakes, failures, or crimes; slandering or denigrating those who challenge us emotionally; changing the subject; the magic gesture through which we give to others what we secretly feel they or the world withholds from us (example in Chapter 3); cause-and-effect thinking (examples in Chapter 4). Defenses can also revolve around such experiences or behaviors as wishful thinking, sublimation, avoidance, blocking, withdrawal, rigidity, cravings, overcompensation, escapism, compulsions, fixations, and repression.

  8) Resistance. Our resistance is an element in all the above defenses, but it is worth mentioning separately to isolate it and help us to recognize it. Much of our resistance is completely unconscious. A man gets tired, for instance, and falls asleep just before he is scheduled to go for couples counseling with his wife. An unemployed man who is feeling sorry for himself delays calling about a free career-counseling opportunity. A woman is continually fifteen minutes late for her therapy sessions.

  Resistance includes our pride, stubbornness, refusal to see through our defenses, refusal to consider what may be true about us, and refusal to learn or to give value to the importance of insight. It also includes our difficulty in feeling good about ourselves and our accomplishments and talents. The primary factor causing resistance may be our fear, through the process of inner growth, of losing our identity, however limited and painful that sense of self is. Healthy inner growth, from even a painful sense of self, can feel like a kind of death.

  I once counseled a man in his sixties who had made millions of dollars in business and was estranged from his two sons. His stubborn need for control had driven them away. I wanted to show him that he had put his sons in a no-win situation by his manner of relating to them, and that his self-centeredness and need for control were byproducts of how he had experienced life with his own father. But his resistance was monumental. He wouldn’t consider this possibility and he became defensive. He was determined to go on believing in the unworthiness of his sons. To do otherwise felt to him like an invalidation of his whole life. His self-image got in the way. Acknowledging his misunderstandings would shatter that image. So he sacrificed his sons to protect his ego.

  Such is our resistance to seeing our collusion in pain and defeat that even those mental-health professionals who see the extent of our self-defeat are reluctant to lay it on the couch. One psychiatrist, when asked why he didn’t confront his patients with this knowledge, said, “It adds insult to injury to tell someone who is suffering, ‘You’re bringing this on yourself.’”

  It sounds as if he is saying, “We must be careful not to offend anyone with allegations of his self-sabotage. It’s better to suffer than to face up to such unpleasant facts.” Sure, the truth offends our pride and thus it is uncomfortable. But facing the truth of our unwitting participation in self-sabotage is like lancing an infection: the initial offense to pride is soon replaced by healing. Besides, if we don’t face the truth, we are likely to face greater suffering and self-defeat down the road.

  Many psychological systems don’t acknowledge our substantial resistance to inner progress. Historically, we have seen powerful resistance line up against reformers when they tried to end slavery, institute women’s vote, enhance civil rights, and protect the environment. This opposition can be vicious and cruel, yet it is only a reflection of our inner determination to block our own progress, our own self-actualization. Reactionaries, those most threatened by forward progress, represent a part in all of us that prefers to stay with what is old and familiar, even if it is not working adequately anymore. Most of us only know ourselves through our identity, the accumulation of our experiences, beliefs, and sensations that comprises our limited or false self. It feels as if this is us, and to upgrade it is to lose everything we’re familiar with, even the pain. Limited as this identity may be, we can prefer maintaining it to facing the unknown and going through the void in what is, symbolically, a death-and-rebirth process of transformation.

  We want to think and see in new ways. It is a bit like learning to see the 3D computer-generated illusions produced in the Magic Eye books from the 1990s. We can start by understanding that the most effective way to become positive, to learn self-responsibility and eliminate self-sabotage, is to see clearly into our emotional weakness. Invariably, this weakness involves our entanglement in what is negative. The whole inner balance of power shifts in our favor when we see into the self-defeating relationship we have with ourselves that maintains our negative beliefs and feelings. Then good feelings and wise choices come of their own accord once we have addressed the negative.

  What could be more of a conundrum, a paradox, a challenge for human ingenuity, and a prank on our pride than a condition in which we consciously aspire to win, to get, to be free and loved, while beneath our awareness we are emotionally invested in losing, not getting, and in feeling oppressed and unloved? Erich Fromm, writing about human nature in his book The Heart of Man, said we must arrive at the conclusion “that the nature or essence of man is not a specific substance, like good or evil, but a contradiction which is rooted in the very conditions of human existence.”[vi]

  Another problem in assimilating knowledge such as this is our unwillingness to struggle for understanding. We want so much for things to be simple. Understanding our attachment to negative emotions requires some mental gymnastics, as well as assimilation of the knowledge on a feeling level. It is a process that compares with the challenge of learning a new language.

  For many of us, acquiring new knowledge is seen as too much effort, involving too much loss of time and absence of fun. Consequently, the need for change is resisted and our emotional issues are denied or minimized. Actually, the process of learning and the rewards of progress are a very large source of pleasure.

  We are also reluctant to face ourselves because doing so brings up childhood feelings of fear, guilt, shame, humiliation, abandonment, self-loathing, and self-hatred. As children lacking objectivity, we took so personally every little implication of our wrongdoing. We felt our parents only loved us when we were good and obedient. So we greet our feelings and flaws with the same reservations. Children often lie because they are afraid the truth will reveal them to be bad. Truth is equated with shame and punishment. Adults have the same problem. We don’t want to see the truth because, in this childish, irrational way, it brings up old feelings of shame, guilt, and the irrational conviction of our badness.

  The defects we feel about ourselves do not correspond with objective reality. Nevertheless, the emotional conviction of being defective or unworthy often takes precedence over any external accomplishments that indicate the contrary. We need to expose our deep unconscious readiness to believe the worst about ourselves and to believe that others will affirm these misguided beliefs locked in our emotional structure.

  Chapter 3

  Transcending Our Old Mentality

  Many of us spend our lives preoccupied with self-image. We obsess about our appearance and performance, enhance our attributes out of all proportion, and agonize that others might see our weaknesses. We do things mindful of our impression on others, and we confuse who we are with a fantasy of what we want others to see.

  In this chapter, I show how this identification with our limited sense of self, which is entangled
in egotism and self-centeredness, influences our lives and is a factor in self-sabotage. This limited sense of self is like an old software program. With the world’s pressing problems closing in fast, it urgently needs to be updated. Typically, we are convinced through this old program or mentality that we are in charge of our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. We’re anxious to preserve this illusion because our old sense of self depends on it. Who will we be without it? Yet this limited identity is dangerous, for it renders us blind to self-sabotage and the processes of unnecessary suffering.

  Our investment in this self-image involves an emotional preoccupation with oneself. It produces a perspective from which nothing matters so much as one’s own feelings, sensations, interpretations, pleasures, and reactions. Under its spell, whatever one possesses or achieves is employed for self-aggrandizement—or at least for self-validation—to bolster and maintain the image. From this mentality, the long-range consequences of our actions and the common good are not factored in with our personal schemes and dreams.

  This limited sense of self is very much a part of our ego[vii], that often-unreliable inner transmitter of reality that feels itself distinctly separate from the life around it. Through our ego we are very much concerned with how flawed, good, or important we appear to others. Through our ego we also experience life as if we were a puppet prince or princess, convinced we are in charge of our realm (the life we experience), however pleasant or painful it may be. Often the inner agency that is truly in charge, however, is a Machiavellian Minister of State, otherwise known as the operating system in our psyche that produces unhappiness and self-sabotage. This part of us lurks in the background, governing our realm with sinister schemes, hubris, and guarantees of folly.

  This political metaphor can be extended outward: We see that the world’s political and economic governing classes become self-aggrandizing and destructive when the people lack the awareness and personal power needed to hold them accountable. Power, that elixir of the ego, is abused when people are not conscious enough to hold it in check. This is what happens in our psyche: the superego gets away with its bullying tendencies because our inner passivity, vested in the unconscious ego, cannot hold it in check.[viii] This is why inner passivity needs to be made conscious.

  Inner passivity can be understood as “the Void” in our humanity. It is like a great ocean we must cross on our evolutionary journey. As children, we identified with our parents’ actions, traits, beliefs, feelings, attributes, as well as the society’s conventional wisdom. We were encouraged to rely on outside influences to define and orient ourselves, rather than inner experience and intuitive feelings. In our culture, parents, teachers, and others tell us who and what we are, and we fail to see that in doing so they are projecting on to us their own personal notions of reality. We are defined through testing, IQ, grades, obedience, performance, personality, appearance, status, and so forth, rather than for our substance or our essence.

  Sometimes we feel nothingness inside, a great uncertainty about ourselves that can bring up fear when we think about it. We are stricken with fear when our sense of self is threatened because it feels that, should our self-image evaporate, we will lose touch with what little sense of self we possess. That can produce fear that is comparable to what a child can feel when separated from his or her parents in a shopping mall, though in adults that fear is usually unconscious. We may know intellectually that we are good and accomplished, even as emotionally we are infused with self-doubt. We are sensitive to any implication that we don’t measure up.

  Babies are instinctively fearful, which may be a genetic predisposition to self-protection. Baby fears, which can include fears of being devoured, choked, dropped, crushed, and flushed down the toilet, can be quite irrational. Most adult fears, which can be relatively easily aroused by perceived dangers in the environment, are frequently irrationally based inner fears left over from childhood. These inner fears can produce painful exaggerated fears of crime, terrorism, poverty, accidents, ill health, abandonment, and damnation.

  This fear, like guilt and shame, can itself be libidinized or sugar-coated, which means that we now are compelled to recycle and recreate the unresolved emotion of fear in various ways in our daily experiences. The appeal of violent and horror movies depends on the secret pleasure associated with fear. Here the inner weakness is experienced vicariously and, for the most part, harmlessly. However, the emotional attachment to fear is exceedingly harmful when Americans, so otherwise evolved and intelligent, establish a militarized national security that undermines democratic institutions and pushes the country toward insolvency. Our break-the-bank investment in weaponry as a national defense is, perversely, more of a psychological defense. That defense, which exposes the underlying tenacity of self-sabotage, is presented along these lines: “Not true that I am emotionally attached to fear. I hate being afraid. That’s why I have weapons. That’s why I love the military. They make me feel safe, which is what I want.”

  In our scramble to cover up inner fear, we have also produced an extravagance of personal weaponry that makes domestic massacres a more frequent occurrence. Terrorism, as well, would not be such a national preoccupation—threatening our civil liberties, our humanity (as we tolerate torture and discount civilian casualties), our reputation as a sensible manager of foreign policy, and our financial resources—if we were not so desperate to cover up our emotional readiness to reverberate inwardly at the prospect of being terrorized. Through self-image, we claim something quite to the contrary, that we are noble and necessary protectors of freedom and democracy.

  When self-image is threatened by truth, we can also feel exposed and condemned in a way that brings up shame. As children, we would have considered as shameful any challenge to our parents’ view of reality. To some degree, we harbor impressions, often quite subjective, that our parents saw us in a negative light. Thus, we feel that to see into the core of ourselves is to discover what is shameful and bad. At that core are ambivalent feelings concerning our sexuality. We also have repressed, forbidden, hateful feelings regarding our parents. To keep that repression in place, our curiosity shifted to the external world, while the unconscious memory of the prohibitions against “self-examination” remained in place.

  When we are aware of our investment in preserving an idealized self-image, our self-centeredness begins to ebb. Our investment in self-image is toxic when it is mostly unconscious. Then we are missing the deeper awareness that keeps our egotism in check, allowing a shallow, subjective counsel, like teenage self-preoccupation, to rule our actions and pursuits. We become oblivious to the impact of our actions on others and on the environment. The more we try to feel substantial and worthy to cover up the insecurity of not knowing our authentic selves, the more we elevate the ego. We can feel this limited sense of self to be precious, as happens on the political front with those people who proclaim the sanctity of individualism, and who are determined to gratify and protect it.

  When we dwell on our desires, complaints, and shallow self-interest, we are thinking about “me”, about what “I” want, what “I’m” getting or not getting, how “I’m” being held back or somehow oppressed. We focus on “me”—how “I” look, how wonderful “I” am, or how flawed and inadequate “I” am. We are preoccupied with “my” concerns, perspectives, opinions and desires.

  This emotional investment in self-image is a symptom of self-doubt. We feel self-doubt because we are not accessing our true value and goodness. Too much unresolved negativity is churning in our psyche. We end up feeling separate from one another, blocked from compassion and love, and deprived of a sense of higher purpose and direction. In being preoccupied with self-image, we are focused on immediate gratification, and how the world deprives us, validates us, or opposes us. We feel frustrated because the world doesn’t conform to how we think it should be, which is how we felt as children.

  The process of dissolving self-image is humbling. It produces wisdom. It enables us to feel that we a
re part of something much greater than our own selves. We begin to establish more harmony and partnership with community and nature.

  Being egotistical or self-centered doesn’t necessarily carry a moral connotation. It doesn’t mean we are “bad.” This egotism of ours isn’t so much an indication of a lack of character as it is a lack of consciousness. Self-centeredness is an aspect of our human nature, a legacy of the powerful egocentric mentality or megalomania with which we come into the world. Like the aggressive drive or instinct, humankind apparently has needed this “me-first” instinct as a survival-of-the-fittest requirement in a hostile and indifferent environment. The megalomania may also be a survival instinct that lifts a child’s spirits and helps him or her deal emotionally with the reality of a prolonged childhood period of relative helplessness.

  Our consciousness retains these primitive elements when as adults we don’t temper these inner forces. Self-centeredness can assume the garbs of vanity, greed, snobbery, and narcissism, all the while masked by its opposite—pseudo-generosity. For example, the emotional and behavioral condition known as codependency appears on the surface to be based on one’s concern for others. Codependents, who are notorious self-saboteurs and acutely self-centered, can appear virtuous and altruistic as they try to rescue and rehabilitate others. In their toleration of inappropriate or abusive behaviors, codependents are secretly motivated by an unconscious need to return again and again to feelings of being deprived, refused, neglected, and disappointed, which is what they feel when others don’t respond to their “generous” overtures. It’s also how they feel in their own relationship with themselves. They often become bitter in feeling that their “generosity” is not reciprocated. Their defense or cover-up avows: “I am kind and generous. Look how much I give to others. If only everyone were as thoughtful and sensitive as me. If only others would treat me with the same kindness.” They maintain a self-image of being truly generous, while floundering in self-centeredness and self-sabotage.