Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  People with a victim “mindset” can become paranoiac and unduly fearful of crime or, if their imagination is more unconventional, obsessed about the dangers of satanic cults and the threats of alien abductions. Alleged victims of such cults and abductions describe feeling controlled, passive, helpless, overwhelmed, violated, and terrorized. Individuals who are unconsciously attached to these feelings are determined to find explanations or “facts” in the environment that account for these feelings. Some conspiracy buffs, for instance, believe that the government is plotting ways to enslave the population. When they find such an explanation, or when they concoct something that for them is believable, they have what they need to maintain and even to intensify their passive victim perspective. In these circumstances, the “facts” are subjective impressions that they use to buttress their attachments to negative emotions.

  Individuals who report being abducted by aliens say they were overpowered, overwhelmed, and forced to submit to painful probing. This probing evokes feelings of helplessness, physical violation, and rape. This conviction of having been abducted is likely induced by unconscious elaboration on what they experienced as infants and children in the course of normal handling, lifting, and changing of diapers. In the throes of infantile subjectivity, we can experience our mother, father, and other caretakers as if they are powerful, controlling aliens. Emotions and reactions dealing with the feeling of submitting passively to the parents’ will—as well as to parents’ touch, rules, regulations, criticism, reprimands, and spankings—can continue, in various degrees, to be mysteriously and profoundly experienced as a sense of passivity and victimization.

  (Further understanding of the profound passivity in the human psyche is available through the Wikipedia entries on the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Stanley Milgram Experiment.)

  It is helpful to look at these alleged abductions in symbolic terms, as representing a form of collective repressed memory of infantile passivity now transferred on to “aliens.” As we imagine what aliens might be like, we unconsciously experience them from the vulnerable, passive position we had with our parents. Consciously, we may remember our parents as warm and nurturing, but unconsciously we have resistance to feeling that they helped us and supported our independent development. Why? As babies, we felt acted upon, controlled, and manipulated by normal parenting procedures and we remain emotionally attached to such passive feelings. If we had insensitive parents, our problem with this negative feeling can be more problematic.

  Some of us believe that our adult emotional problems stem from having been physically abused or sexually victimized as children. Physical and sexual abuses certainly do exist, and perhaps are more widespread than we care to believe. I have worked with several men and women for whom the memories of incest are clear and precise, and who did indeed experience incest. I have also seen clients who, without clear memory of it, referred frequently to suspicions of having been sexually abused, and who defined their struggles and failures in those terms.

  Controversy has arisen concerning the validity of repressed memories of alleged incest and ritual abuse. Some psychotherapists have encouraged their clients to consider the possibility that actual physical or sexual abuse occurred and that the memories have been repressed. These experts don’t take into account the tendency of children to embellish upon feelings of being helpless, dominated, and rejected, nor do they recognize our willingness as adults to perpetuate this manner of experiencing life.

  Claire, a thirty-year-old office worker, believed she had been sexually abused as a child. As an adult, she had serious relationship problems, a long-standing eating disorder, and bouts of depression accompanied by suicidal fantasies. She exhibited sensitivity to criticism and isolated herself to avoid feeling controlled and overwhelmed. I used art therapy to help her access her feelings. She drew a series of pictures in which she was tied to a table and raped by a group of hooded men in long robes. She believed these pictures were evidence she had been subjected to some form of incestuous or ritualistic childhood abuse. But after studying the details of her emotional relationship with her parents, I concluded that these scenes or so-called memories were symbolic, like dream images.

  These pictures represented Claire’s unconscious attachment to feelings of being controlled, helpless, and at the mercy of powerful male figures. Claire believed that if she opened up her heart to men and revealed honest feelings, they would reject her, condemn her, and even destroy her. In one picture, she drew a hooded man extracting a heart from the breast of a female child. The picture depicted her emotional perception of her own predicament, that her parents would, as she put it, “cut out her heart” if she dared oppose them in any way. The picture might also represent how she lost her own self—her essence, her heart—in the process of accommodating the emotional needs of her parents.

  Claire described her father as controlling and suffocating. He overwhelmed her with emotional neediness and, at the same time, demanded that she perform in the world according to his own perfectionist standards. Her mother was passive and nurturing, yet also critical and controlling in her attempts to help Claire deal with emotional upset.

  As mentioned, children often misinterpret their parents’ behaviors, mistaking support or help as control or an indication the parents see them as inept. As well, many individuals come into the world with a weak emotional structure (just as some of us are less adept physically or intellectually) and fail to accommodate or neutralize the emotional challenges of childhood. This predisposes them to feel even more helpless and vulnerable as they experience normal parenting procedures.

  It’s a human tendency to see reality through a passive perspective, rather than to be objective. We can be quite determined to distort the facts. When I first began to work as a therapist, I often took at face value my client’s description of the “facts.” In subsequent sessions with the friends or spouses of these individuals, I began to hear completely different versions of events. Now I understand that each individual has his own unique “take” on what he sees and experiences. Each individual’s perception is influenced by past conditioning and determined by subjective impressions and emotional attachments. A person often sees and experiences his relationship from the opposite pole of his partner, from the point of view of how he or she is being maligned, opposed, or oppressed, with the true facts of the situation obscured somewhere in the middle, out of sight of the participants.

  In working with clients who believe they were victims of incest, I am sympathetic to their version of reality as I show how, through their suspicions of abuse, underlying passivity can be smuggled in, producing self-defeat in the present. After exploring with them the various memories of childhood, and understanding their emotional conflicts in the present, I have suspected that many of them were looking for ways to account for their emotional problems. They were willing to perpetuate their attachment to being victims and feeling passive.

  To believe oneself a victim of sexual abuse when it never happened can absolve a person of responsibility for his or her negative feelings and life failures. Even if such abuse did occur, one can still sabotage oneself by recycling the memories of helplessness and betrayal to feed one’s emotional attachments and to contribute to one’s difficulty in forging a satisfactory life. Such an individual remains emotionally weak, stuck in a passive victim role in which autonomous development and self-regulation are hampered.

  This understanding of self-sabotage applies to bad parenting in general. Bad parenting can certainly influences us profoundly. However, the human tendency to avoid dealing with one’s emotional issues and to neglect our personal development means that we are often eager to blame parents for our personal dysfunction. The human tendency to misinterpret situations and react negatively to our experiences is a universal problem. Violence, anger, phobias, depression, and paranoia are a few symptoms of our tendency to elaborate emotionally and irrationally on our experiences.

  In more subtle ways, most of us have se
lf-defeating reactions to circumstances and events which trigger our attachments. A couple might fight for days, for instance, because the man misunderstood his wife’s comment and felt offended by it. An employee feels criticized by the mildest attempt of a supervisor to improve his performance. The disappearance of a five-dollar item bothers someone inordinately because he is so quick to feel loss.

  As I mentioned, couples can describe arguments or conflicts between them from completely different perspectives. Typically, each partner embellishes on the feeling of being victimized by the other and each insists that his or her version is correct. Some people in relationships are eager to elicit support from friends or therapists to validate their sense of victimization.

  This is why we’re so attached to our version of the truth. The “truth” we embrace allows us to maintain our conviction of being innocently victimized and absolves us from taking responsibility for our own behaviors, feelings, and hidden motives. We are able to protect our self-image. To see objectively, however, is to see that we are “into” feeling neglected, undervalued, unappreciated, gypped, and abandoned. When we refuse to see our emotional investment in maintaining negative emotions, we feel more helpless, depressed, unable to regulate, and susceptible to sabotage.

  Once again to consider domestic-violence situations, the abuser usually feels some guilt and remorse after the fact, but he is quick to find justifications for his behavior on the claim that he, in fact, is the true victim. A wife abuser, for instance, is typically an angry injustice-collector, convinced that life treats him unfairly and that others are out to take advantage of him. He believes wholeheartedly in the reality of his victimization, and that belief is a catalyst, a form of entitlement, for his abusive behavior toward others. Criminals often feel entitled to the proceeds of robbery and theft as a compensation for the neglect they experienced in childhood. They are very passive individuals who see themselves as victims of a cold, cruel world that opposes them. Their anger and violence are expressions of pseudo-aggression, direct by-products of their inner passivity.

  In my hometown several years ago, a forty-nine-year-old male history teacher, caught with a naked fourteen-year-old female student in his van, said later, “If I do anything with a kid, it’s out of compassion and caring.” That statement tells us that, in his mind, the true victimization—that of the student—is either incidental or irrelevant. He is preoccupied with being the victim, in this case of a system that doesn’t understand his brand of love.

  We create our own self-defeating experiences and then feel victimized by them. Generally, people who are plagued by a victim mentality are experiencing the consequences of seeing the world from a self-centered perspective, through their attachments to the three categories of primary emotions—refusal, control, and rejection (described in Chapter 2).

  The political correctness movement that surfaced in the 1980’s is influenced by the victim mentality. Teachers and professors have been reprimanded and sometimes fired for saying things, typically of a sexual or racial nature, that have offended others. Sometimes the remarks are indeed foolish and insulting, though not necessarily cause for dismissal. Yet many of those who complain, those supporters and sympathizers of the political correctness movement, are not handling well, for emotional reasons, the challenge of having free speech.

  A certain family dynamic can account for one’s sensitivity to insulting language. In such families, the truth about each other’s feelings either was not allowed or, at best, was incidental to the demand for validation and obedience. Children were taught to be careful about what they said. They were required to validate Dad’s and Mom’s self-image and worldviews. They were expected to say “the right thing” (whatever pleases) and stifle “the wrong thing” (whatever had the potential to offend). Their own truth, what they felt and perceived through their own experience, was dismissed as inappropriate or wrong. As children of easily offended parents, they grew up to be easily offended themselves. They tend to take all words and comments personally, and to identify with those who they imagine might be offended. They become like their parents, casting reproof on anyone who is free to say what they weren’t free to say. They sacrifice what may be true in order to play it safe with people’s feelings.

  There’ll always be jerks and yahoos around to say stupid things. When we’re strong emotionally, we’re not offended by the ignorant or malicious remarks of others. As an appropriate response, we might take them to task and challenge their stupidity, even though we’re not personally triggered by them. We also might just laugh at their stupidity. Feeling offended, in contrast, can be a negative reaction on our part that is related to our unresolved issues.

  Stepping outside the victim mentality also involves seeing the role of negative messages (and what we interpreted as negative messages) delivered long ago by our parents. One moment we felt ourselves being validated, appreciated, and loved by our parents, and the next moment it seemed that we couldn’t do anything right. Such typical messages include, “You’re not as smart as you think; just consider yourself lucky to get by; I’m about ready to give up on you; no one cares what you think; I can’t trust you to do anything right.” These messages don’t always have to be spoken; they can be implied in the attitudes, expressions, and body language of parents. We absorb these messages and later, as adults, we can be inundated, through the voice of our inner critic, with merciless badgering that mimics these parental messages.

  All of us have a tendency to pick up on the negative, while the positive is taken for granted. These negative impressions of being inadequate and defective sometimes leave the deepest imprints on our psyche. We may love our parents and feel how much they support us and wish us well, while nonetheless their worst features and messages live on in the cruel and sarcastic admonishments we direct at ourselves. From that place within ourselves we are bombarded with verbal attacks not only for our alleged misbehaviors but also against our very substance and essence. This self-aggression we absorb from the inner critic or superego is perhaps the worst form of self-victimization. This inner dynamic becomes the model or basis for how tyrants rise to power and terrorize passive populations. Even in democracies, many individuals are looking for authority figures to be passive to.

  The negative messages of parents are not accurate assessments of their children, but represent instead the parents’ projections of their own self-doubt, as well as their own affinity for feeling criticism and even self-hatred. Unable to screen out the distortions contained in these attacks, children weave these parental messages into direct assaults on themselves, resulting in passivity and a victim mentality. It is so important for parents to gain insight into their own insecurities to avoid the unconscious temptation to criticize and harass their children the way they themselves were harassed by their parents and continue to be harassed by their inner critic.

  We understand better our self-sabotage when we correlate our current difficulties with the emotional sensitivities of our childhood. Many people ask, “Why study my childhood? The past is past, and has no relevance for me now.” This is pure and simple denial. Even worse, this stubborn refusal to consider the power of the unconscious is a form of stupidity. Such willful ignorance causes so much personal suffering and is hazardous to the future of the human race.

  The unconscious mind doesn’t distinguish between new experiences and emotional memories from the past. We draw on a stockpile of past experiences—and the emotional interpretations we gave to those experiences—to evaluate each new situation. So we react to present reality through past experiences and beliefs. This is one of the most elementary principles of psychology, and to deny it is as foolish as insisting that the world is flat.

  Becoming self-responsible and acquiring self-mastery is a learning process that involves moving away from childish beliefs and feelings into adult maturity and wisdom. It means learning and understanding the motivations and intent behind our feelings and behaviors. Inner freedom is the state in which we see realit
y outside the beggar-slave-orphan mentality, as co-creation and mutual interaction, involving our participation in shaping events. It involves learning how to avoid personalizing reality in order to see it as refusing us, constraining us, or freezing us out.

  When this knowledge and consciousness are assimilated, we achieve a fundamental reformation of character, a realignment of purpose, a renaissance of values, and unification with our authentic self.

  Chapter 6

  Sabotage in the Workplace

  When I worked as a journalist years ago, inner accusations of my faults and shortcomings reverberated down my pipes, into my organs, and rattled my bones. My experience of myself was too murky, too ambiguous, and so I wasn’t conscious of the inner passivity that made me a target of my inner critic’s accusations. I just felt anxious and fearful, defective and unworthy. I felt a lot better when I produced good stories and thereby “proved” my value to my coworkers and myself.

  As part of my plight, I was suffering from writer’s block. This painful symptom ties up much of a writer’s creative energy and intelligence in the production of inner defenses. In my case, I was draining my vitality through my unconscious attempts to neutralize accusations and harassment from my inner critic. This left me in a passive state, lacking in drive, purpose, and vision. When my creativity stalled, along with the flow of “headline” ideas and stories, my unconscious ego faltered in its attempts to defend me from my inner critic’s attacks. This knocked my anxiety off the charts, and I worried unnecessarily about being fired. Sometimes I became depressed and apathetic and fell into deep slumps that boosted my misery average and lowered my work performance.

  Clearly I was at war with myself—and apparently on the losing side. I understood this conflict and began to resolve it after getting some answers about the nature of the psyche.

  We can be particularly vulnerable to inner critic attacks because we carry in our psyche an ego-ideal. This is an unconscious self-concept that derives from the acute self-centeredness with which we are born. Children are speaking under the influence of their ego-ideal when they boast about or think about the great accomplishments they will achieve in the future: “I’m going to be president when I grow up,” or “I’m going to be the greatest artist in the world.” Freud discovered the existence of the ego-ideal, and in 1914 he wrote that what a person “projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.”[xix] While acute self-centeredness or megalomania fades as the child ages, the child still maintains remnants of grandiosity in the ego-ideal. This ego-ideal can become a serious liability for adults. That’s because our inner critic torments us for not living up to the illusions of our ego-ideal.