There are other ways we cover up inner passivity with aggressive or angry behavior. For example, a wife who is feeling controlled by her husband retaliates by demeaning his character, a teenager mired in a feeling of worthlessness strikes out with his graffiti to denigrate what others value, and an adolescent who is feeling refused by his parents feels entitled to steal money from them to get what he wants. In all these cases, it appears at first glance that the aggressive behaviors are the primary problem. However, as I said, self-defeating aggression such as this is a pseudo-aggressive reaction to underlying passivity.
Doing nothing when such inertia is inappropriate is also passivity, a distinctive form of self-sabotage. Some people want to imagine that in their passivity they are entirely innocent of any culpability or responsibility for what goes wrong in their lives or in the world. However, doing nothing when action is called for is a choice, conscious or unconscious, to be passive. For instance, in letting others make important decisions for us, we abdicate responsibility and make a choice to allow ourselves to be passively controlled and taken in. In this self-sabotage, we allow ourselves to be led down the garden path to disappointment, failure, or possible disaster.
As another example of this kind of passivity, a TV repairman I had as a client, a happily married man, showed up once at a house where an enticing woman flirted with him as he worked on her TV. Before he could organize his thoughts and feelings, he had come under her spell, feeling enthralled and aroused by her presence. She stayed at his side for thirty minutes, talking to him and handing him tools, while his heart raced and his passions soared. He felt completely at the mercy of however far she was willing to take this encounter, and he came exceedingly close to having sex with her. If the woman had invited him into her bedroom, he told me, he would have been unable to resist. Yet, had this happened, he would be making a decision, however much it was shrouded in his passivity, to be unfaithful to his wife.
The issue here was not so much with sex and betrayal as with power and helplessness. This man grew up with a strong, dominating mother who, even when he was in his mid-teens, insisted on choosing the style of clothes he wore. He had felt very passive toward his mother and, as an adult, took on this feeling in the presence of strong women. He came under the influence of the seductress not because she was necessarily so strong or beautiful but because he was prepared emotionally to allow her to dominate the encounter. So a choice was made, although unconscious, to react passively to her. Had she attempted to have sex with him, his acquiescence would have represented a choice on his part, though he might not know when the choice was made and might later try to assuage any guilt by believing he was innocently seduced.
Our lives are filled with such passivity. A friend calls to ask you out; though you prefer to stay home, you find yourself going along with the request. Your boss asks you to do an assignment; you would have preferred an alternate task, yet you say nothing and do as requested. Even major life events can be experienced passively, such as being swayed to marry a person you are ambivalent about but who others think is perfect for you.
Ask yourself how conscious you have been of making a choice in important situations. Do you find yourself in situations where things are just happening to you, where you never even made a choice not to make a choice? It is through understanding inner passivity at this depth, and recognizing the allure of inner passivity, that we realize what it means to be more conscious and to protect ourselves from self-sabotage.
Inner passivity is often a factor when people have difficulty falling asleep, or falling back to sleep, at night. Here’s an effective technique that can help with this problem: While lying awake, an individual can silently repeat, over and over, a statement that reveals the deep psychological essence of the problem. For sleeplessness that is related to inner passivity, the statement might be, "I'm emotionally attached to the helpless feeling of not being able to fall asleep." We are able to ascertain the correctness of the statement based on the results. Saying it for ten, twenty, thirty minutes usually puts us back to sleep because our unconscious resistance, which avoids knowing and assimilating this awareness, is eager for us to stop doing it. Several nights or several weeks could pass before this technique starts to prove its value. Or it could start to work right away.
Another variation on the problem of sleeplessness could be represented by this statement: “I'm emotionally attached to the helpless feeling of not being able to stop my mind from churning away with all kinds of random thoughts." People could also be kept awake at night as they recycle painful feelings of being unworthy, unloved, rejected, and criticized. They could also be restless because they are absorbing self-criticism from the inner critic. In this latter case, an effective "mantra" could be: "I'm emotionally attached to the helpless feeling of being harassed and tormented by my inner critic."
A technique such as this offers a way to test the truth of the existence of emotional attachments, such as the attachments to inner passivity, inner aggression, guilt, and fear. When we apply the antidote—our growing awareness of how our suffering and self-sabotage are directly related to our indulgence in negative emotions—we can soon begin to feel the benefits in improved peace of mind, health, and happiness.
Reliance on the Claim to Power
Because of our passivity, we like to generate the impression of having power or being powerful. Early humans believed their sacrifices appeased the gods. They felt the need to do something to protect them, rather than to sit around feeling helpless to whimsical gods, vicious beasts, and capricious expressions of nature. Nowadays, a person might say, “I healed that person through my prayers,” or “His life would have been a mess if I hadn’t come along.” People are always making claims to power. For instance, someone driving a car gets hit from behind and says to himself, “I knew it! It’s my fault! I should have just stayed home today!” He makes this claim as a defense against the dreaded feeling of being helpless to the whims of fate.
Our first claims to power are made at a very young age. As mentioned, a baby’s experience includes a sense of self-centeredness and power (megalomania) along with the reality of complete helplessness. Even as reality factors close in on the child, he or she stubbornly clings to the illusion of power through the feeling that, “Nobody is forcing me; I am making a decision to comply with this request (i.e. Mom’s demands that I not throw my food on the floor) because I choose to do so.” Now the child feels comfortable eating the mashed peas, secure in the belief he has chosen to do so despite their horrid taste. He conveniently overlooks the presence of mom standing nearby ready to spoon the peas down his throat should he pursue last week’s pattern and spit them on the floor.
Another claim to power is exercised through what has been called the repetition compulsion. This involves a compulsion to do to others what we have passively experienced. For instance, adults who were abused as children are at high risk to become abusers of their own children. We repeat actively what we have felt forced to endure passively, thereby mitigating the original offense to our narcissism. In an example from psychoanalysis, a girl who sits in the dentist’s chair, enduring the “agony” of having a tooth drilled, comes home and plays dentist with her little sister, requiring the little sister to passively endure the “treatment.” The big sister repeats her passive experience with the dentist through identification with the passive experience she inflicts on her sister.
The experience of dieting usually involves feelings of being controlled. Being on a diet not only provides an opportunity to feel deprived and refused, but it also leaves many people feeling controlled and “forced to submit” to the requirements of the diet. When people unconsciously adopt this emotional interpretation, they resist the program and rebel against the diet, just as they may have rebelled directly or indirectly against feeling controlled by their parents. They can also resist attending dieting or therapy programs due to their feeling of being “forced to submit” to the organization or the people who run the progra
m. Usually, no one is forcing us—this is how we’re willing to feel.
People who find themselves out of control with their life and behaviors set themselves up for others to take over and try to regulate their behaviors for them. Kathy, for example, was struggling to regulate her life. An anorexic, she starved herself and exhibited outbursts of emotional instability, convincing others that she couldn’t function independently. Eventually, her behavior became so self-destructive that her family stepped in and put her in a psychiatric center. Whereas this woman once depended on her family for regulation, protesting all the while how much she hated that control, she now required a psychiatric center, a form of external control that was even more restrictive. When our issues are not recognized, we’re always in danger of making self-sabotage more harmful and painful.
The childish part of us can be looking to recreate parental authority and intervention, even while a part of us rebels against it. Millions of people set themselves up to be regulated by outside sources, whether that be a parent, a spouse, a health professional, psychics, an ideology, a religion, a group, or some system or program that regulates their behavior or dictates how they should live.
Authoritarian styles of government or religion are based on the strict parent-child model. In such systems, we are expected to obey and learn from someone who is in charge of us, who claims to know what is best for us, and who instructs us in how to live our lives. We can even establish a version of the parent-child model with a democratic government, if we are dependent on the government for financial support or moral direction, or to make us feel safe. Under this model, the government becomes, in an emotional sense, protector of and provider for the citizen, while the citizen, in exchange for security, turns over more of his or her freedom and autonomy than is wise. A democratic system heavily tainted by the strict parent-child model is more likely to engender and to tolerate corruption because of the unconscious passivity of the citizens.
Authoritarian systems will continue to exist as long as people are essentially passive and willing to be led and directed by others in exchange for the security and comfort of external regulation. Emotionally, it’s challenging for us to become our own authority, to begin to think for ourselves, find our own answers, make our own mistakes, and trust in ourselves at this higher level of functioning. So we resist the co-creation model even though it is so liberating.
Society as Our Scapegoat
Often we feel that society is contributing to our conflicts and failures. As a young man, I was convinced that the foibles of parents, bosses, politicians, and bankers, in that order, were to blame for my dissatisfactions in life. My suffering reflected my unconscious determination to feed on feelings of being ignored, neglected, unappreciated, and deprived. My existential misery persisted and drove me to find deeper answers. Real transformation began as I understood the concept of co-creation and our willingness to recycle unresolved negative emotions. I saw that society with its corruption and injustices simply reflected my psychology and evolvement.
We know that the worst aspects of society and culture can indeed impede our personal progress. But we also contribute to the state of the society. Both are true. We can’t say one causes the other. For instance, the media produce violent and low-brow movies and television, just the kinds of entertainment that fascinates us most. Nothing is imposed upon us without our willingness to accept it. We’re the ones who live on the surface of ourselves and are thus eager consumers of all sorts of false promises and superficial values. Some individuals want to believe that society’s rules and regulations block self-expression. But we conform when culture tells us to wear certain styles, look a prescribed way, and believe in consumer values. We soak up the negativity that is spewed out by many TV and radio pundits. The bottom line is that we give our consent, through our own ignorance and passivity, to these models of who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to think.
I believe that we passively tolerate corruption in Washington and on Wall Street because we tolerate (we don’t strive to eradicate) the corruption (our collusion with the negative) within ourselves. Many undemocratic practices have taken hold in different corners of government, bureaucracy, and business. These are representations of the corners in our own psyche that we have not accessed and have not liberated from self-defeating tendencies. Meanwhile, we can be tempted to use the existence of whatever authoritarian structures we have co-created as rationalizations for our passivity: “I’m not passive and self-negating,” the passive individual defends, “I’m simply standing here in the pecking order doing what’s expected of me.”
If we see the extent of our passivity and refuse to act, we suffer guilt for being passive. If we resolve to act, we have to mobilize our inner forces and generate all our courage and will to move us through resistance into new birth and growth. Often we prefer to pretend we don’t know what’s going on. Or we blame culture or society rather than face ourselves. But this avoidance of self-responsibility is risky and likely to entail much emotional suffering, especially in the form of discontent, loss of self-regulation, and self-sabotage.
Self-responsible people don’t fight society. They observe it, participate in what is satisfying, and ignore or reform what is out of balance. They see that others use convictions of being oppressed or unjustly treated as excuses to suffer. They do not idolize individuals or bow to ideologies. They listen to figures of authority and weigh the words against their own opinions. If they act on their own authority and discover they have miscalculated, they are able to accept and assimilate the consequences of their actions. They can neutralize the ruthless inner critic that is always ready to hold them accountable.
The cause-and-effect perception, as it applies to human emotions, is like a jail cell in which we have locked ourselves. Here we are captive to our own passivity. We may conform or we may rebel, but we always feel as if we are being restrained and oppressed by forces and elements outside ourselves. In contrast, the new perspective of co-creation frees us from the clutches of fate and guides us toward our destiny. This understanding provides us with essential and powerful insight about how we are accountable for the ways we falter and sabotage ourselves.
Chapter 5
Victims of Ourselves
The victim mentality described in this chapter is shared by all humanity and accounts for much human misery and self-sabotage. This mentality is a kind of emotional bondage that blocks fulfillment of our potential and represents an abdication of sovereignty over our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Much has been said and written about this mentality and its negative impact on individuals and society. In this chapter, we look deeper into the tendency to take on victim feelings, and we see more clearly the connection between the victim mentality and self-sabotage.
How do we account for the great contradictions that bedevil our lives? We strive to be positive but are enmeshed in the negative. We want to be in charge of our experiences but are puppets of our conditioning, compulsions, and secret agendas. We dream of happiness, yet unwittingly we surrender to the authoritarian inner critic and the tyranny it imposes. We say we love democracy, yet feel ourselves, in passive bewilderment, losing our grip on it. The victim mentality is an ingredient in all these contradictions.
These contradictions have their origin in childhood when, as babies and adolescents, we misinterpreted our experiences in such a way as to feel refused, controlled, and rejected, even when that wasn’t our parents’ intent. As adults, we unconsciously retain emotional memories of those experiences. When the memories remain unconscious, we are blocked from knowing ourselves in greater depth. Often, we don’t know what we are experiencing other than some vague sense of contentment, unhappiness, or numbness. We may be riddled with self-doubt, self-criticism, and self-rejection, and we may not be able to free ourselves from this morass because we experience ourselves through too much uncertainty and confusion, involving superficial impressions, borrowed beliefs, and a wide range of defenses.
The quality of our consciousness is a foundation of our existence. Yet parents may not really know what their children are conscious of, and what they are experiencing or feeling. Adults often don’t even have a sense of the voids in their own consciousness. Parents may think they know what their children are experiencing, but what they “know” is often only their own projections and identifications. A husband who is thoughtful and considerate may, despite his kindness, still not know just how his wife of forty years is experiencing herself. Deep pain is felt by marriage partners when each is unable to communicate his and her experience to themselves and to each other. Deep pain is felt by children when parents are unable to affirm or validate them.
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