Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  This inner dynamic is so paradoxical, so challenging for us to assimilate, that it bears repeating: the young killer’s macho posturing and false bravado (phony or pseudo-aggression) are marshaled in extreme degree to defend against his unconscious willingness to indulge in feeling devalued, put down, criticized, disrespected, and condemned. The more masochistic the individual, meaning the more he absorbs the insult and resonates inwardly with it, the more extreme his pseudo-aggressive reaction is likely to be. The shooter’s violent act represents how ignorant (unknowing) he is of his attachment to feeling disrespected, how much he resonates emotionally with the insult or buys into the “truth” of it, and how determined he is to remain ignorant of his masochistic participation in the experience. On the surface of his awareness he wants respect, which satisfies his ego, but unconsciously he is drawn to and entangled in disrespect.

  Like guns, money can also be used to uphold self-respect. The more an individual is accused by his inner critic of being a loser, the more that evidence of his financial worth neutralizes the accusation and provides inner relief. Hence, money becomes disproportionately important as a means of establishing one’s value. One commentator has written, “The worship of money is so intense that kids nickname themselves ‘Money,’ talk incessantly about ‘loot,’ and refer to stealing as ‘getting paid.’’’[xxvii]

  A nineteen-year-old from Iowa, a member of a youth gang who murdered a seventeen-year-old girl, told police, “Money will get you power. Power and money are everything.”[xxviii] His statement reflects the degree to which the youth felt powerless, insignificant, and having no value in his own right.

  The same principles apply to Wall Street bankers, whose moral turpitude and possible criminality have produced enormous national sabotage. If ruthless bankers were to track their greed back to its source, they would discover a dark emptiness within their psyche. Here they are entangled in feelings of loss, deprivation, not getting, missing out, helplessness, having no value, and fear of death. Pawns of repressed conflicts, they strive after money in compulsive service to their unconscious defenses. Their main defense is to convince themselves they are superior individuals, "masters of the universe" whose superiority is evident through the money they make and the impact their decisions have in the world. These individuals sacrifice us—our well-being and prosperity—to cover up their affinity for the hollow life.

  More than anything, we need to find ways to help people resolve their attachment to feeling unworthy. The degree of mass suffering involving self-doubt, self-rejection, and self-hatred is unspeakable. People need to understand that often the emotional addiction is experienced only indirectly and unconsciously. The masochism surfaces indirectly, through symptoms such as greed, arrogance, recklessness, apathy, addictions, and depression. With more awareness, we acquire separation from the painful sense of unworthiness that permeates our emotional life. The awareness lets us know that our feeling of being unworthy or insignificant is not an essential truth about our existence.

  Insecure people, entangled in feeling unworthy, create misery all around. Some bureaucrats dream up unnecessary rules and regulations and add to the avalanche of paperwork because they feel the need to be important. Journalists dramatize situations out of proportion to the facts because it makes them feel more significant to initiate or to be part of a big story. Some parents, who in their low self-esteem are easily threatened and offended, overreact and punish their children for being honest about their thoughts and feelings. These individuals have emotional attachments to feelings of being seen as less than, unimportant, unworthy, or a disappointment.

  Racism is also a symptom of the attachment to feeling unworthy. More specifically, it is an emotional problem produced by the racist’s unconscious use of feelings of superiority and hatred as defenses covering up his entanglement in self-hatred and sense of inferiority. Racists look down on others because doing so makes them feel better about themselves. The feeling is, “At least I’m not as worthless as that person.” The more they unconsciously denigrate themselves, the more they are compelled to denigrate others. (This same inner process applies to people who are chronically judgmental, except that with racists the degree of negativity and self-sabotage is likely to be more acute.) On the surface, it appears that hatred is the problem faced by racists. But their hatred is secondary. Their deeper problem is their entanglement in feelings of being unworthy. They feel hatred as a defense in order to cover up their identification with the “worthlessness” of the people they target: “I’m not identifying with that person’s worthlessness. Can’t you see how much I hate who he is and what he represents!”

  In protecting self-image, racists typically refuse to consider that they are entangled in worthlessness. Nonetheless, through inner passivity, they are tortured by their inner critic that reminds them incessantly of their readiness to indulge in feeling worthless.

  Racists are under a compulsion to make others experience what in their childhood they passively endured (feeling rejected, hated, or not valued), or what they assimilated from their parents’ emotional manner of interpreting life. They are compelled to make certain that other individuals or groups feel what they felt (and what they continue to feel)—unwanted and worthless. Because they have so little awareness of their emotional nature, they feel perfectly justified in their dislike or hatred of others, and uses as “evidence” for feeling this way any supposed flaws or defects they can find in their selected targets.

  Racists also have other emotional issues. They often feel those to whom they direct their malice are depriving or controlling them. They may feel deprived when a person of another skin color or nationality has a better job, or victimized or controlled when the target of their malice has advantage or authority over them. Any sense of being oppressed by their adversaries can makes racists even more righteous in their hatred.

  Many people have outgrown their racism and are better citizens for it. Still, they have not necessarily resolved the emotional issues described above. Their negativity can still be projected on to others. Their mentality now may be less vile, yet their projections still contribute to national sabotage. Their negativity is being projected when, for instance, they feel malice toward immigrants, gays, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and religious groups.

  Certain kinds of groups or organizations tend to attract passive individuals who are easily influenced and directed by others. The most obvious such groups are cults, whose members practice emotional dependence, the opposite of self-reliance or self-responsibility. They turn their power over to others and live according to the dictates and theories of leaders on to whom they have transferred the power and control they once bestowed on mother and father. Their compensation is to feel special as members of the cult, elevated and redeemed by their association with “higher truth” and a powerful leader. They may also set themselves up as superior to the rest of society. In fortifying this defense against feelings of inferiority, they feel compelled to rescue the rest of us from the error of our ways.

  As mentioned, all of us, in everyday ways, pay a huge price for our emotional entanglement in self-doubt. People who are intellectually capable of becoming professionals or owning and operating a business never take the plunge because they doubt their abilities. Meanwhile, they can be haunted incessantly by self-doubt and self-criticism. Feelings of regret, guilt, and shame for not believing in themselves may follow them to the grave. The nation, in the meantime, is poorer for their failure to live up to their potential.

  Seeing Deeper into National Conflicts

  In political terms, we see ourselves as free people. But we are not as free as we think when self-sabotage is on the rampage. As individuals, it’s hard to find the best way forward when we can’t tell, psychologically speaking, from where we are coming. In order to grow, a person has to understand relevant details of his or her history, just as a nation has to learn from its history by acknowledging and integrating its past mistakes and understanding
the psychological dynamics behind present tensions and conflicts. Usually our personal or national impulse is to cover up the past and our mistakes. In doing so, we are more likely to repeat our mistakes, to flounder in predictable reaction rather than composed response, with pain and self-defeat the more likely consequences.

  I believe an important psychological dynamic is behind America’s current political dysfunction and the self-sabotage being acted out by Republicans and Democrats. It may be that the ideological right wing of the GOP is a manifestation, a political caricature, of the existence and mentality of the inner critic or superego (inner aggression). On the other side of the conflict, Democrats can flounder without purpose or vision because they are infiltrated and contaminated by inner passivity. Hence, political conflict that produces national sabotage becomes a mirror image of the conflict in our psyche between inner passivity and inner aggression.

  This underlying dynamic would help explain the sabotaging effect of partisan dysfunction in Washington and elsewhere. If political dysfunction is arising from this inner source, it would bring out the worst characteristics on each side, heartlessness from Republicans and spinelessness from Democrats. If indeed political dysfunction were based on this inner conflict, it would obviously be self-defeating for it to continue to remain unconscious.

  The extreme right wing expresses many of the characteristics of the superego: irrationality, insensitivity, protection of the status quo, identification with authority, and the desire for power for its own sake. The right wing typically assumes that the weak and poor are at fault for their plight, just the way the superego readily blames us individually for all manner of shortcomings, real or imagined. The superego is stubborn and intransigent. It never admits wrong, never apologizes, and exudes grandiose infallibility. The superego exaggerates the seriousness of personal shortcomings and distorts the facts. It freely administers accusations and punishments, and it renders truth and justice subordinate to power.

  The left wing, in contrast, is entangled in inner passivity. The more extreme the left-wing position, the greater the inner passivity. Democrats regularly act in defensive reaction to the right, rather than from strength, conviction, and vision. They backtrack, compromise compulsively, and strike deals that shortchange their constituents. They mimic the unconscious ego, the defensive part within us that is always trying to placate the superego with inner compromises that frequently fail to take into account the individual’s best interests. Like the unconscious ego, Democrats are more like agents of the status quo than members of a party that fights for reform. In the inner battle between passivity and aggression, the unconscious ego (like Democrats) poses as our defender, but is frequently weak and ineffective.

  If our current political dysfunction does indeed arise from conflict in the psyche, why would the political conflict be more intense at this time in American history? Human evolvement is a mysterious process, and at times we are faced, whether individually or collectively, with the challenge of moving through another phase or stage of the business of growing up. Often it’s when we are feeling the most pain, burden, or disorientation that the need to address our dysfunction finally gets our attention. Not only were we electrified by 9/11 and stunned by the financial collapse of 2008, but we have been, as author Jeffrey St. Clair describes it, “warping under the psychic weight of years of illegal wars, torture, official greed, religious prudishness, government surveillance, unsatisfying Viagra-supplemented sex, bland genetically engineered food, crappy jobs, dismal movies, and infantile, corporatized music—all scrolling by in an infinite montage of annoying Tweets.”[xxix]

  Under these conditions, how can politicians, who are as blind as us to the unconscious dynamics of self-sabotage, be expected to save us from ourselves? The people’s best protection and governance has to come from the grassroots, from the input of those who are becoming more politically and psychologically conscious. This would mirror how, on an inner level, our self, our connection to our goodness and value, is the best representative we each have to protect our personal interests and those of the common good.

  Inner passivity follows us into all our pursuits and practices, including religion. It is out of inner weakness that many people are preoccupied with the notion of salvation from our “sinful” selves. Armageddon is desired to escape the pain served up by inner conflict. We are bound to be anxious for salvation when, through inner passivity, we are abandoning ourselves to fate. We can also feel sinful when we buy into the inner critic’s allegations of our flaws and unworthiness. As pawns in this dynamic, we act out being “sinners” by being judgmental and condemning of others.

  Inner passivity has been plaguing humanity for a long time. Throughout history, and notably in medieval Europe when paranoia over the devil was at a peak, religious groups have been obsessed by the prospect of being overpowered by evil. It is a replay of that childhood experience of feeling helpless against what we experienced as some antagonistic force that controls us, makes us submit, and even terrorizes us. The devil’s evil, it was perceived, was partly a result of his having a mind of his own. To have a mind of one’s own was to possess the capacity to question God’s word, and thus it was considered bad. Today, many groups and individuals consider independent thought and emotional autonomy to be presumptuous and wrong. The message is, “Stay passive! Don’t dare to challenge authority!” Conveniently, to make the devil image more horrid and their own protection more vital, religious authority “granted” the devil license to seize and punish the willful, the disobedient, and other alleged sinners. Medieval authorities, threatened by displays of autonomy and emotional independence in women and religious innovators, identified them as witches and heretics and sentenced them to death.

  Modern witch hunters have succeeded in banning from American schools authors such as John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Judy Blume, and Mark Twain. Others are altering history and other textbooks to favor and enhance self-image. Such action comes from individuals who weren’t trusted in their youth to make decisions for themselves about how the world works. They were told what to believe, how to act, how to think, and how to be. They were rewarded with approval and affection for being passive. Now they are under an unconscious compulsion to become like their parents and to force their own children, and by extension the community and nation, to accept this authoritarian model of loyalty and submission. It feels like betrayal, loss of face, and even annihilation when their children or other adults adopt opposing beliefs. The great challenge for these individuals is to begin to trust their children and others to make independent choices, even though that freedom was not granted them, and to trust that their children in this new-found openness can teach them something about freedom, self-expression, and creativity.

  Children trigger in us our past childhood parental issues. With our children, we tend to become just like our parents and treat our children in the same manner our parents treated us. Or, convinced (consciously or unconsciously) that our parents did us wrong, we overcompensate and do the opposite of what we felt our parents did to us. Both patterns are out of balance and create problems for us and our children.

  We can expect as normal, and are wise to tolerate, some degree of opposition, lack of cooperation, and difference of opinion from our children. Children need to have something to oppose in order to become strong, develop their creativity, and become mature and independent. Making our children conform totally to our wishes can sabotage their independent functioning. A recent study reported that parents who control their children’s food intake to keep them from gaining weight are likely to wind up with children who don’t know how to stop eating when they have had enough. The more control the parent reported using, the less self-regulation the child developed or displayed. The study encourages mothers to allow their children to be more spontaneous about food, that is, to eat only when hungry and not necessarily finish the food presented to them. Children treated in this manner more naturally regulated their diet.

  Finally,
our passivity has contributed to the self-sabotage that has been running loose in our financial markets. As one example, much of the impetus to rush into making risky investments comes from accusations from our inner critic that we are losers or that we are missing out on easy wealth if we’re not in the game. We feel anxious sitting on the sidelines watching others reap easy pickings, feeling more deprived with every clang of the closing bell.

  Wall Street marketing in recent decades has promoted the idea that we will be helpless in our old age without a few million dollars to retire on. The inner pressure builds until, no longer able to resist, we fling our savings into the market. When we understand the nature of this inner pressure, we’re able to rise above the herd mentality and invest our funds with more awareness of emotional factors. Meanwhile, Wall Street, trading with our funds instead of its own and trading with the understanding that heavy losses will be covered by passive taxpayers, becomes reckless in the pursuit of greater profits.

  When we peer into our future with the hidden intent of feeling fear, loss, destitution, or humiliation, we are more likely to stumble further into self-sabotage. “I’m just trying to protect myself, to take care of myself, by seeing what the future brings,” we say in our defense. But it is more insidious than that. We’re programmed to create the self-defeat we fear the most—of loss, helplessness, aloneness, failure, and destitution—because the fear we feel means we are acting out our emotional attachment to that self-defeat.

  Exercise

  The following exercise can help you recognize your defenses and work through your entanglements with feelings of worthlessness.

  1) Relate a recent or past experience in which you felt disapproved of, shamed, or bad about your performance. Describe in detail how you felt. Talk to your spouse or others about childhood experiences with regard to feeling shamed and disapproved of. See if you can recreate the feelings. The hurt that comes up is what you have remained attached to all these years. Isolate that hurt and sense that you are resistant to releasing it.