Freedom From Self-Sabotage
Page 20
Feeling shame, embarrassment, bad, or worthless is the result of a claim-to-power defense. (Example: “I cause people, through my faults, to look negatively upon me.”) The defense, in this case, is employed to cover up the attachment from childhood to feeling criticized, looked down on, or seen as bad.
2) Write down your most common method of putting yourself down. Compare this with parental messages you received in childhood.
3) Describe some situations where you worry about how others see you. How do you imagine others see you? Compare with how you see yourself. Can you get a sense of how you are attached to the feeling of being seen in a negative light? Connect these feelings and expectations with how your parents saw you.
4) Answer the following: “If I allow myself to open up and express my genuine feelings, to express who I am, I expect others to . . .” Where in the past do these feelings come from? Were you able to be open and expressive with your parents? How would your parents react if you were honest and open with them?
5) Make a list of the various ways that you judge and evaluate others. What are some of your common judgments of others? Is that how you judge and evaluate yourself? Being judgmental of others is a defense covering up our attachment to the feeling of being judged. Also, in being judgmental, we identify with the one being judged, thus indirectly immersing ourselves in those negative feelings.
6) Try to become conscious of the major inner conflict between the inner critic (the superego or self-aggression) and inner passivity (as represented by the unconscious ego). If you are inwardly feeling harassed, pressured, and criticized, you are allowing your inner critic to have too much influence or say in the affairs of your life. Your inner critic will constantly undermine your sense of value if your inner passivity allows it to do so. You are also undermining your sense of value when you allow your inner passivity to be the spokesperson that speaks for you in its dealings with your inner critic. Like your inner critic, your inner passivity is an inner representative in your psyche that, to your detriment, presumes to know what’s best for you.
Chapter 9
Epilogue
When I lived in New Mexico, I frequently drove over to Los Alamos from Santa Fe. There I liked to visit the Mesa Public Library, one of the best public libraries in the state. I would sit in the lounge area soaking up the sweeping vista of the Jemez Mountains, the volcanic range a dozen miles west of the Rio Grande. A few hundred yards away is the house in which Julius Robert Oppenheimer lived in the 1940’s when he and his team of scientists built the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
The atom in the 20th Century was better understood than the human psyche. Discoveries such as atomic power excite our egotism while knowledge of the psyche threatens it. I remember seeing in a magazine a 1950’s photograph that showed three men posing in front of the controls of a just-activated nuclear-power reactor. One of three gazed upon the controls with a radiantly triumphant expression, his face in a luminous glow, his eyes lit up with kilowatts of pride. How intoxicating it is to create and control such power! It is a hallmark of self-sabotage that we get excited about something that has the potential to destroy us and are indifferent or even hostile to what is in our best interest.
We know a lot about nuclear reactions but not as much about human reactions. But it is human reactions—in ourselves, the family, the community, the nation, and the world—that are demoralizing, sabotaging, and killing us.
Carl Jung wrote a short book, published in 1957 and titled The Undiscovered Self, in which he pleaded for humankind to appreciate the vital importance of understanding the unconscious mind. Avoidance of self-destructiveness, Jung wrote, requires not mass movements for good or idealistic pleas for reason but a deep understanding that recognizes the existence of good and evil within us. In his view, the unconscious has been ignored “out of downright resistance to the mere possibility of there being a second psychic authority besides the ego. It seems a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy can be doubted.”[xxx] A lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil, he wrote. Underestimation of the psychological factor, he added, “is likely to take a bitter revenge.”[xxxi]
We need more self-awareness from our politicians. They possess a level of insight that is completely inadequate to the demands of their jobs. Bickering partisans on both the Left and the Right want to believe that the (alleged) stupidity and malice of the other side are valid reasons for their negative feelings. Many a partisan will denounce the claim made by psychoanalysis that his or her negative feelings are self-induced and stubbornly maintained. Unrelenting partisanship and overheated rhetoric serve as defenses that cover up each individual’s own refusal to answer the call of human destiny, which is the realization of the oneness of humanity through a deep knowing of one’s self.
As long as we blame the other side for our negative feelings, we can avoid taking, as mythologist Joseph Campbell put it, the hero’s journey through the dark underworld of the psyche. Meanwhile, the more stubbornly we cling to our ego, the more fiercely we end up battling what we experience as the arrogant, infuriating egos of others. Our ego, that pale stand-in for our authentic self, is our main obstacle to taking responsibility or “owning” our own negativity. Our ego, which many of us libidinize into the self-love of narcissism, feels reduced and humbled by revelations of how little we know about our psyche and how “programmed” we are to produce our own suffering.
Both the Right and the Left often have intense emotional investments in the correctness of their social and political beliefs. But passion is not a virtue when it covers up negative emotions and makes people stubborn and righteous. Often people adopt political positions for the wrong reasons. For instance, an individual with unresolved issues involving disapproval and criticism instinctively finds external targets on which to project and transfer those negative emotions. This person can be very critical of the policies and beliefs adopted by the other side of the political spectrum simply because he or she is compelled, for its own sake, to be critical and judgmental.
What may be hurting our country more than anything is a thick-skulled mentality that refuses to face the facts. Sad to say, people don't necessarily change their minds when their erroneous assumptions are corrected. A University of Michigan study found that misinformed people, particularly those loyal to their politics, rarely change their minds when exposed to corrected facts in news stories. Instead, they often become more strongly set in their beliefs.[xxxii]
Why are many of us so obtuse? Our identity—our sense of ourselves as individuals and as a group or nationality—is usually based on certain beliefs. Those beliefs can be religious, secular, personal, cultural, and social. Beliefs are not just mental abstractions: They carry a lot of emotional baggage. Many of us experience anxious, inner turmoil when our beliefs are directly challenged by opposing ideas and beliefs (or, even worse, by facts). The emotional impact can be, "Who am I, who will I be, without my beliefs?"
Some individuals can feel a frightening cognitive dissonance, like a lost soul in existential panic, when confronted with facts that do not correspond with their belief system. To avoid this fear, they refuse unconsciously to assimilate the facts into their knowledge base. The healthier we are psychologically, the less likely we are to base our sense of self on a set of beliefs. Instead, we "know" ourselves and are comfortable with ourselves through human virtues such as integrity, honesty, empathy, courage, and a passion for truth. These virtues are not beliefs we hold but assets we embody.
Both the Right and the Left can feel dominated and oppressed by the convictions and values of the other side. These negative feelings arise from psychological weakness more so than from the content of the other side’s policies and principles. People can be unduly sensitive to feeling oppressed because of inner dynamics in our psyche. For one thing, our inner critic or superego intimidates, harasses, and dominates our subordinate or unconscious ego, producing suffering in the form of anxiety, depression, and passivity.
Our best books and movies are infused with the high drama that pits good against evil, whether mythological battles between St. Michael and Lucifer or those in a fictional galaxy between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. We relate so strongly to these heroic myths and stories because they represent our own inner struggles between the part of us that wants to be victorious in life and “the dark side” that opposes our destiny.
As we approach a deeper level of knowing ourselves, we create a foundation for self-acceptance and love. The guiding inspiration in this process is the wish to see and know the truth about our own psychology. The pursuit of psychological truth brings us face to face with inner darkness. (Fear at this level is irrational. We don’t want fear to sabotage us.) At this deeper level, we can resolve our problems. Take chronic anger as an example. Attempts to stop being angry through behavior modification or cognitive techniques won’t clear up the problem. At best, the anger is suppressed, and the inner dynamics that produce the anger will spread to contaminate other areas of one’s life. We need to carry the torch of knowledge into the recesses of our psyche. The anger is an expression of our negativity. We begin to understand how we produce that negativity. The negativity consists of our unconscious willingness to go on replaying and recycling unresolved negative emotions from our past. Anger, then, is often a defense that covers up our willingness to recycle and indulge in negative emotions such as feeling refused, controlled, and rejected. Often we are not actually being refused, controlled, and rejected—we are simply determined to feel that we are. We expose (or make conscious) our emotional attachments to those negative feelings. This approach is a learning process. We empower our intelligence with knowledge that was previously unconscious.
Be present to yourself and observe yourself as you enter into your feelings. You won’t lose yourself. A part of you knows the way back. If shame comes up, just observe it. The shame is not you. If fear comes up, observe it. Be curious about it, find out what it means. The fear is not you. You won’t be annihilated by it. Nor will you be torn asunder by anger, disgust, sadness, loneliness, and hopelessness. Just observe whatever comes up. These negative, painful emotions are not you. Be curious about what you experience and look behind the experience to the source. Where do these negative emotions come from in you and in your past? What is the mechanism whereby you repeat and recycle these painful emotions?
As mentioned, many of us spend our time running from ourselves or distracting ourselves—with daydreaming, mental speculations, substance abuse, various forms of stimulation, material possessions, an unending series of projects, and a thousand trivial pursuits. We also place an undue emphasis on the value of external accomplishments, acquisitions, and goals because we are not feeling the value inherent in ourselves.
We cling to our limited or false self for fear of discovering the truth about ourselves, namely our self-rejection, our masochistic tendencies, our cherished stash of hurts and grievances, and, yes, our resistance to knowing our own pure goodness. Just as we fear this inner truth and run from it, many of us also run from another form of truth, namely the extent of the corruption, greed, hatred, and hubris that has contaminated America’s political and social fabric. Some people who do try to comprehend and to face this national corruption can feel disheartened and overwhelmed by the extent of it. We are tempted to be cynical or apathetic. If we’re brave, we do want to see truth at all levels. But we can’t handle the truth if we are too weak emotionally.
However, we can handle it when we establish our authentic self. This happens on a feeling, intuitive level, when our intelligence is engaged and we have access to the best psychological knowledge. It’s on this feeling level, rather than on a mental level, that we distill self-awareness to produce the personal power that leads through the debris of negative emotions and self-sabotage to the truth of our goodness and value.
Individuals often have intense feelings when, in the following exercise or technique, they begin to connect with their self. In this process, a person imagines a dialogue between the self and the personality. The dialogue can be initiated with one of the following questions posed by the self.
How are you feeling right now? How do you feel about me? Why don’t you want to know me? Why are you afraid of me? Why do you push me away? Why do you belittle me?
A dialogue might proceed in this way:
Self: Why don’t you love me?
Personality: Because you’re worthless. I’m disgusted by you.
Self: Why?
Personality: Because you’re inadequate. You can’t do anything right. You fail at everything you try to do.
Self: Where do those feelings come from?
Personality: Well, that’s how I felt my parents regarded me. I’ve been over this a hundred times. I’m sick of it all!
Self: Please tell me again what happened.
Personality: Well, they discouraged me from going to college, telling me it would be a waste of time. They were never really interested in my academic studies. Every time I did something, my father found fault with it, telling me, “Can’t you do anything right? What’s your problem?”
Self: As you know, this means that you are doing to yourself what your parents did to you. How does it feel to put yourself down like that?
Personality: I feel valueless, worthless, that my life doesn’t make a difference. I’m unwanted and unloved.
Self: I know it feels that way. But you are loved. I love you. Try to believe in yourself. I am always here for you.
The feelings can deepen as we continue this inner dialogue, and they can initially be painful. The deeper we can feel ourselves, and be honest with what we are feeling, the more we can extricate ourselves from our self-doubt and self-rejection.
As you dialogue, try to feel whatever comes up, whether sadness, anger, despair, hopelessness, longing, compassion, or love. Can you feel compassion for that part of yourself that is crying out for recognition and union? Can you see how you, yourself, refuse to nurture and support yourself? You get tangled up defending yourself against your inner critic, all the while absorbing the negative aggression from that part of your psyche.
The questions can be even more personal and effective when, in inner dialogue, we address ourselves by name: Sally, how come you don’t like me? Bill, why do you hate me? Jack, why don’t you believe in me? Why don’t you trust me, Deborah? Why don’t you want me, Jean? Why don’t you value me, George? Such intimacy with one’s self can initially feel strange and even frightening.
Other questions include: Why won’t you help me? Why do you feel undeserving? How do you see me? Why are you afraid to get close to me? Why don’t you take care of me? Why don’t you love me?
A person might have his self say to him at a difficult moment in his day, “How are you feeling, (person’s name)? It’s a tough situation right now, isn’t it? I think you’re handling it very well. Do you know why you lost your patience a moment ago? You’re doing the best you can and I support you fully.” This communication, a gentle inner talking to one’s self, certainly contrasts with our inner critic’s penchant to be mocking, demeaning, and vicious toward us.
Cultivating a relationship with one’s self is like planting a seed and providing it with the water and nutrients it needs to grow. It takes time before the plant breaks ground and we can see that our labors are be
aring fruit. Initially, in dialoguing with the self or in trying to feel the self, we may experience that not much is happening. The process takes time. Continue the dialoguing. Tell yourself how important it is for you to begin to make this contact. Feel how much you want this contact to happen.
You can understand this process of establishing a new relationship with yourself by imagining you are the wise, loving mother or father that you wanted and yearned for as a young child. You regard your inner child with love and speak to him or her with sensitivity and respect. You love your inner child regardless of how inept or frail he or she might be. You cherish your inner child’s very being. Can you begin to feel how you could establish that kind of relationship with yourself?
Most of us feel that our parents were not sufficiently sensitive to us and did not fully appreciate our unique being. Often they saw us simply as extensions of themselves. Consequently, we are not sensitive to and appreciative of our own self. Now we can be that wise parent to our own unique being. We can transform the impoverished relationship within ourselves by speaking and relating to ourselves in a nurturing and supporting manner.
As we enter this process, we begin to experience more sensitivity for ourselves, and we are particularly compassionate to ourselves for the pain and hurt we have experienced. Increasingly, we understand that our misconceptions, inappropriateness, and passivity were predictable outcomes based on our limited understanding at that time. In other words, it wasn’t our fault. Self-forgiveness develops as we understand that our past reactions were the only option we had, based on our conditioning and awareness. Similarly, forgiveness of others results when we understand how their conditioning, self-centeredness, and lack of understanding have them locked in a limited behavioral and emotional range. As we embrace ourselves in a new way, we integrate fully the rejected parts of ourselves.