If you are unhappy with your present situation, describe your fantasy of what you would like to be doing. If you could have any job in the world (no matter how unrealistic it may sound) what would that be? Why do you want this kind of career? What will it give you? If, for example, you say you want to help people or want to make money, why is that important to you? Describe your present relationships with your boss and coworkers. What feelings come up for you? Do they relate to similar feelings with parents or spouse? Do you feel controlled, criticized, or disapproved of?
What are the reasons you give yourself for not doing what you want? Ask yourself, “If I attempt to do what I really want, what will happen, or what is stopping me?” Who or what do you blame for your lack of success or confidence?
List any fears you have with respect to your job or desired career.
What are your negative expectations?
Trace each fear back to childhood and come up with a memory that depicts this fear. (It might be from school, home, or both.)
List all the negative things you tell yourself about your skills and strengths. What reasons do you use to account for why you don’t succeed or earn more money?
Talk about what it means to value yourself, to believe in yourself. Where does lack of confidence come from?
Write up an itinerary of all the things you do well. They don’t have to be work related, e.g., you cook well, throw good parties, or are personable, decisive, humorous, organized. (If we don’t value ourselves, we can’t value these everyday strengths. Consequently, we don’t draw upon these resources or don’t include them in our self-assessment. Certainly, our inner critic never gives us any credit for our accomplishments or qualities.)
Imagine yourself successful in some venture, such as sales, an artistic endeavor, community service, and so on.
Describe this success in detail. In other words, list the criteria that determine this success. For example: 1) Do you work for yourself or do you have employees? 2) How much money do you make? Are you aware of a certain limitation with respect to how much money you can comfortably earn? 3) How do other people regard you? Close your eyes. How does success feel? What are the positive aspects? What are the negative aspects? (If you can’t define success specifically, it might not happen. You might have to see it unfolding before you, step-by-step. You might need a blueprint.) Can you allow yourself to feel successful?
What negative thoughts or feelings come up for you when you imagine success? Do you have any fears or negative expectations, such as, “There’s no time for myself; others will depend on me; others will feel abandoned?”
If you’re a woman, are there negative connotations to being a successful woman, such as fear that you would become selfish, hard, or not feminine? Finish the sentence: “Successful women are . . .”
What excuses do you give yourself about not feeling successful? List the ways you sabotage your goals.
What are the negative messages you give yourself about this successful scenario? How do you discount and discourage yourself from getting on with your aspirations?
What are the origins of these negative messages? Who in your past or present are you allowing to discourage you? What were your parents’ messages regarding success? What were their expectations of you? Describe their successes. How did they feel about themselves and their ability to become successful?
How much money do you want? Why did you choose that amount? Is this how you value yourself? How do you feel about your present money situation? Describe your historical relationship to money. What does it mean to you? Describe your parents’ feelings about money and what money meant to them.
Check back through what you have written in this work-history profile. Make a note of all the content that is negative and belittling. Most people don’t realize the extent of their negative attitudes and their negative treatment of themselves. Yet the evidence is all around us in our interactions with others, in the situations of our lives, and in the state of the world. So much of what we experience is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. Be aware that this negativity does not represent any essential truth about us. The negativity is maintained by emotional attachments that have lingered in our psyche beyond the reach of our awareness. The trick now is to see the ways that we have covered up our unconscious determination to hold on to negative feelings and beliefs.
Chapter 7
Mastering Inner Dynamics
Let us delve into the archives of psychological literature to consider the work of Dr. Edmund Bergler, a psychoanalytic psychiatrist and prolific author. We are looking for more understanding of the nature of inner negativity and its capacity to produce self-sabotage.
Bergler gave us a comprehensive framework for understanding our emotions and for learning to regulate them. A Jew, he fled Austria in 1938 to escape the Nazis and he established a private practice in New York City where he died in 1962. In Vienna he had served on the staff of the Psychoanalytic Freud Clinic from 1927 to 1937.
Bergler’s theories, first put forward in the 1930s, are the foundation on which I have written this book and form the basis of my understanding of self-sabotage. He maintained that we are unconsciously attached or addicted to negative emotions. We develop these emotional attachments in childhood and bring them forward into our adult lives. These attachments, unconsciously maintained and recycled in everyday experiences, are the cause of the emotional and behavioral reactions that constitute self-defeat and self-sabotage.
He wrote twenty-five psychology books and 273 published articles. Some of his best-read books include The Writer and Psychoanalysis (based on the analyses of thirty-six writers) and Money and Emotional Conflicts, both published by Doubleday; Divorce Won’t Help, The Basic Neurosis, and Conflict in Marriage, all published by Harper and Brothers; and Tensions Can be Reduced to Nuisances, published by Collier Books. He wrote for professional journals such as The Psychoanalytic Review, Diseases of the Nervous System, Medical Record, Journal of Clinical Psychopathology, Quarterly Review of Psychiatry and Neurology, International Record of Medicine, Western Journal of Surgery, Obstetrics and Gynecology (on frigidity in women), and the Archives of Criminal Psychodynamics. (Ten of his books are in print and available from International Universities Press in Madison, CT.)
Bergler also wrote for popular magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Coronet, Charm Magazine, Pocket Book Magazine, and Harper’s Bazaar. Titles of articles he wrote for these publications include: “A Psychoanalyst’s Case for Monogamy,” “A Psychoanalyst Looks at Fashion,” “Reduce Your Tensions to Nuisances,” “The Hoax of the He-Man,” “There’s No Magic in Psychiatry,” and “The Type, ‘Mr. Stuffed Shirt.’”
He was noted for his study of human consciousness in the first eighteen months of life. The most deeply buried memories of our experience as humans, along with many of the most vital psychological dynamics of our development, come from this oral stage, he said. Sigmund Freud had investigated human experience closer to the surface of consciousness, first with the oedipal stage (experienced from ages three to five) and then, to a lesser degree, with the anal stage (experienced from 18 months to three years). Freud never penetrated in any detail into an exploration of the baby’s experience of the oral stage. Of course, as the first “archeologist” at the scene, it is predictable Freud would discover those layers of human development, the anal and oedipal, that are closer to the surface of consciousness.
Using Freud’s intellectual achievement as a foundation, Bergler dove into the mystery of the oral stage. He became convinced that the unconscious dynamics of the oral period constitute the major influence on humankind’s emotional health. He also believed the child’s experience of his external situation—parents, siblings, family members, home life—is not as influential as the biological determinants of inner experience. Bergler said the degree of dysfunction that adults acquire involves the manner in which, as children, they accommodated and processed the biological influences of megalomania, libido (the pleasure prin
ciple), and self-aggression.[xx]
According to Bergler, human nature is greatly influenced by what he called psychic masochism. Psychic masochism should not be confused with perversion masochism, he said. “Perversion masochism . . . is present in merely negligible quantities in the human race,” he wrote in The Revolt of the Middle-Aged Man. In contrast, “psychic masochism, while still largely an unknown disease, is one of the most widespread of human failings. To define it briefly, it is the unconscious wish to defeat one’s conscious aims, and to enjoy that self-constructed defeat.” It is much more comforting, he added, to view oneself as a victim than to admit “that one is an unconscious seeker of defeats, humiliation, and kicks.”[xxi]
Bergler said that psychic masochism was humanity’s greatest secret and greatest curse. Any masochistic pleasure that is experienced unconsciously, he said, is paid for a hundredfold in conscious guilt, envy, anger, anxiety, depression, fear, self-defeat, and other forms of suffering. This masochism consists of unconscious attachments to negative emotions such as refusal, control, and rejection (representing the three categories of primary emotions listed in Chapter 2). Any pleasure or satisfaction from this masochism is very seldom recorded consciously. Occasionally, individuals may be slightly aware that their melancholy holds some allure and that their self-pity and injustice collecting have a bittersweet taste. What other perverse pleasures arise from this dark side? We can enjoy our revenge on others. We often celebrate war and violence (outlets for self-rejection and self-hatred) with manic enthusiasm and righteous exuberance. We can exult in the feeling of power over others. Con-artists and money-chasers feel glee in their victimization of others. The most perverse among us take grim satisfaction in seeing society act out a collective death-wish and doing nothing to stop it. Evil-doers and terrorists exult in mayhem’s “delicious pleasures.”
The term “psychic masochism” was not introduced earlier in this book because many people simply can’t deal with it. People are initially appalled, disgusted, and horrified. Then they are likely to slip into variations of denial, including a trick of memory in which they erase the idea from their mind. The emotional impact might compare with how we would feel were scientists suddenly to present irrefutable evidence that we are less conscious than whales and dolphins. To soften this resistance to the idea of psychic masochism, I have, to this point, used the euphemism, “emotional attachments.” I am hoping that readers, at this point in the book, are more open to this idea, unpleasant though it is. (I use another euphemism, “the deadly flaw,” to mean the same thing in my recent book, Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness.)
Bergler’s interpretation of human nature demotes our conscious ego, which is the psychological agency through which, in large measure, we identify. Alarms go off when self-knowledge is detected by our instinct for avoiding reality. In indignation, the ego feels, “If this knowledge were true, how could ‘I’ possibly not have known!” For the crime of insulting our ego, Bergler has been buried in the ash-heap of intellectual history. He is not on the curriculum of psychoanalytic training schools and he is almost never quoted in discussions of psychology. An inkling of the extent of his writings can be found at his Wikipedia entry.
Bergler’s theory of psychic masochism explains how, despite our best intentions, we are consistently pulled back into the vortex of negative emotions. When we begin to see that the powerful force drawing us into negativity is, in fact, unconscious masochism, we have a shovel instead of a plastic teaspoon to get to the roots of self-sabotage. Knowing it is masochism, and observing ourselves in the act of engaging in it, we can say, “Now I see the game! Now I know what I’m dealing with! My intelligence is strengthened by this self-knowledge. Now I can feel that this isn’t going to get the best of me!”
More evidence of our psychic masochism can be seen in the degree to which many of us “buy into” the inner taunts, accusations, and mocking sarcasm that comes at us from the self-aggression of our superego or inner critic. Despite knowing intellectually we are basically good people trying our best, many of us keep feeling bad about ourselves. We are constantly defending against these inner assaults or trying to neutralize them, even when we know intellectually they are unwarranted and invalid. What we have failed to see is our secret determination or willingness to absorb this negative aggression. In this masochistic predicament, we are emotionally addicted to our own aggression. We are also emotionally addicted to our helplessness and self-doubt—our inner passivity—that constitutes the other side of the conflict. Even when, in this bind, we succumb to self-pity, hopelessness, depression, and avoidance, we maintain a vestige of face-saving self-centeredness by feeling that we are, at least, in charge of our own suffering.
In the psychotherapy that I practice, people come into a knowing of this inner situation as they process the knowledge through painful childhood memories, self-depreciating attitudes and behaviors, and the meaning of their defenses, reactions, and patterns of self-defeat. They accept the truth of this inner masochism as they face it head-on and begin to experience positive shifts in their relationship to themselves, others, and the world.
Bergler wrote in the conclusion of Principles of Self-Damage, published in 1959, that the “majority of analysts avoid as unpalatable the fact that psychic masochism is universal; they show even more distaste for the fact behind this fact—the unremitting cruelty of the superego [inner critic]. But science cannot be converted to the program of happy endings adhered to by the slick magazines. Even distasteful facts must be swallowed when their accuracy has been demonstrated.”[xxii]
Freud began to suspect the important influence of masochism. Though he first published his discovery of the superego in 1923, he later became more aware of its cruelty and irrationality. He wrote in 1932 that the superego had chosen only the harshness and severity of our parents, and not their loving side, with which to address us. In Civilization and Its Discontents, a short book published in 1930, Freud wrote that undischarged infantile aggression accumulates in the superego and then is directed back against the individual as self-aggression. He also wrote in a discussion of what he called the death instinct, that:
I know that in sadism and masochism we have always seen before us manifestations of the destructive instinct (directed outwards and inwards), strongly alloyed with eroticism, but I can no longer understand how we can have overlooked the ubiquity of non-erotic aggressiveness and destructiveness and can have failed to give it its due place in our interpretation of life.[xxiii]
As early as 1920 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud began to sense that, contrary to his earlier beliefs, masochism did perhaps contaminate the psyche. He wrote:
Masochism, the turning around of the instinct upon the subject’s own ego, would in that case be a return to an earlier phase of the instinct’s history, a regression. The account that was formerly given of masochism requires emendation as being too sweeping in one respect: there might be such a thing as primary masochism—a possibility which I had contested at that time.[xxiv]
Freud’s observations on the central role of masochism weren’t followed up by other researchers (other than Bergler), and in fact his thoughts on the subject were attributed by many to a waning of his intellectual powers in old age.
If Bergler and Freud are right, as I believe, this may be the deepest, darkest, most liberating knowledge concerning human nature. It certainly explains why the lack of self-regulation and its self-defeating consequences are so agonizingly persistent in our personal lives and in the world. It affects all our relationships. How can we, for instance, feel close to others when we harbor expectations of being seen by them as defective or inadequate? How can we feel close to ourselves when we are attached to doubt, disapproval, and criticism? How can we be receptive to love when we harbor a secret program for feeling deprived, neglected, abandoned, and unloved? How can we make peace in the world when we maintain a powerful program for conflict within ourselves? It may also be that, thro
ugh the death instinct as Freud called it, we are programmed for collective self-destruction, as attested by our living-on-the-brink experiences with nuclear weapons, global warming, and terrorists.
It’s likely that humanity can achieve a dramatic renewal if we can discover the truth about human nature. Since the beginning of the human potential movement, many of us have engaged in a personal odyssey to become more aware of the meaning of our behaviors and feelings. We’ve had successes and failures. Despite persistent efforts, some individuals feel frustrated by their lack of progress and refer in quiet despair to “the limitations of awareness.” Even the most educated and progressive among us are still riddled with issues and conflicts concerning self-doubt, self-rejection, and hopelessness.
Many of us feel that, “I know what my problem is, but I still can’t seem to change my feelings and behaviors to get beyond it.” I contend, however, that people don’t know what their problem is if they are unaware of the nature of resistance, the clever stratagems of our defenses, our appetite for the masochistic experience of ourselves and life, and the self-aggression and inner passivity underlying it all. Obviously, our masochism—and especially our defenses against this scourge—can be quite subtle and difficult to identify. But nonetheless this knowledge, I believe, represents a new psychological “technology,” an instrument for the 21st Century to move through our resistance into growth, transformation, and world peace.
Let us look again at self-sabotage. The following few examples of masochism and self-sabotage have been simplified to help our understanding. Perfectionists hate to be criticized. They try to do everything perfectly. But consider how harshly they criticize themselves or how persistently they imagine others criticizing them for doing some little thing wrong. Their secret wish is to feel criticized, which is the feeling they absorb from their inner critic. A person with this secret wish is a candidate to become a perfectionist and suffer the agonies of this impossible calling, along with the recurring experience, from within or outside himself, of feeling criticized.
Freedom From Self-Sabotage Page 15