Our intelligence triumphs when we bring into focus the self-harming dynamics going on in our psyche. These conflicting dynamics are very much indifferent to our wellbeing. When they remain hidden from us, we may have only a hit-or-miss capacity for healthy self-regulation. (An earlier version of this story appeared on this site in 2020, and it has been one of my most-read posts.)
We all have some degree of emotional weakness, and this weakness involves our tendency to replay and recycle inner conflict. When we do so, we experience the repercussions—distressful symptoms. These include worry, guilt, shame, moodiness, boredom, fear, humiliation, and depression. What’s behind the symptoms? Our psyche operates like an algorithm that triggers old unresolved hurts from childhood. These first hurts are feelings of being deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, abandoned, and betrayed.
When we are struggling emotionally, our psyche is churning up these original hurts and accompanying symptoms in a jumble of inner conflict. We all have some degree of this conflict. In some people, it is intense, and it is experienced repeatedly and compulsively, to the point of being addictive. Through this conflict, we unwittingly become dupes in a “game” of self-punishment. We are passive accomplices in our psyche’s conflicted nature, and it is this passivity that makes our suffering addictive.
The problem starts with self-aggression, which is the primitive psychic energy that flows from our inner critic in the form of unkind and harsh accusations of wrongdoing, foolishness, and failure. These accusations tend to be irrational. The inner critic assails us simply because it is a biological drive of self-aggression. In early childhood, our species’ predatory instinct mutates to form this self-aggression because natural aggression is blocked from fully flowing outward.
Our inner critic, though, is not the main problem. The primary problem is inner weakness, the point at which we absorb this self-aggression from our inner critic and turn it into self-punishment.
We absorb this aggression, these attacks upon our worthiness and integrity, because of the psychological weakness known as inner passivity. This passivity is lodged in our unconscious ego, shrouded from our awareness. Inner passivity operates like an enabler or a codependent in its accommodating and compromising interactions with the inner critic. This is the ignition point of humanity’s inner conflict where, in psychoanalytic terms, the aggressive superego (inner critic) encounters the unconscious ego and its passive, subordinate nature.
As distinctive operating systems, both our inner critic and inner passivity function with their own agendas, largely independently of our conscious mind and indifferent to our wellbeing. Our challenge is to tame these primitive elements, thereby claiming this conflicted territory in the name of higher consciousness and our authentic self.
Inner passivity, which I write about extensively on this website, makes us secret collaborators in our emotional suffering. This passivity produces in us an unconscious receptiveness to the inner critic’s claims that we are flawed, bad, or unworthy. The more that our inner passivity absorbs the inner critic’s attacks upon our goodness and integrity, the more self-punishment we generate. (Again, the punishments include worry, guilt, shame, moodiness, boredom, fear, humiliation, and depression.) The punishments serve as a pound-of-flesh offering to the inner critic in acknowledgement of its (usually irrational) claims against us.
We are unwitting participants in our emotional suffering in the sense that we are passively receptive to the inner critic’s aggression. To put it bluntly, we are prepared to absorb, through inner passivity, the inner critic’s misrepresentations and lies about us and to accept a level of self-punishment that appeases the inner critic. When we are receptive to punishment in this way, we are also more willing to inflict hurt and malice on others.
I don’t think humans are going to become more evolved until we take responsibility for the unruly dynamics of our psyche. In fact, there’s the likelihood we will regress. Up to now, we have been somewhat innocent in our collective self-defeat because the deeper source of self-damage has escaped our awareness. But our resistance to becoming more conscious and thereby more evolved is now threatening civilization itself.
Inner passivity, holed up in our psyche’s unconscious ego, juggles various defensive options in its unsteady effort to neutralize the inner critic. Inner passivity is required by its weak nature to make compromises. It tries to defend us, frequently by blaming others for our misery, but it does so quite ineffectively. These defenses, for one thing, are exercises in self-deception. Our best solution is to discover our authentic self, which we do as we free ourselves from inner conflict.
Inner passivity makes plea deals with the inner critic—without consulting us! It offers up to the inner critic plea-bargains or compromises that say, in effect, that we will accept some suffering in acknowledgement of the inner critic’s accusations against us. This pound-of-flesh offering usually succeeds in getting the inner critic to ease up on its assault on our character and integrity. Often though, our suffering needs to be quite intense to get the inner critic to back off. It’s like the thug who stops kicking his victim after the victim has absorbed “sufficient” pain.
This is key to understanding self-punishment. Psychologists have been puzzled as to why self-harming behaviors of a physical kind seem to help sufferers regulate their negative emotions. At its website, the American Psychological Association says, “If a person is feeling bad, angry, upset, anxious or depressed and lacks a better way to express it, self-injury may fill that role.” The association also notes: “Some people get pleasure from pain because they feel a weight lifted off their shoulders. This is usually what happens when people engage in self-punishment behaviors.” This emotional relief happens, as I have noted, because the inner critic backs off, and its abusive function is temporarily set aside, once a person has experienced “sufficient” punishment.
Guilt, shame, and mild or severe depression are common ways that painful “pounds of flesh” are offered up as appeasement to the inner critic. Guilt is the feeling that one deserves to be punished, based on an unconscious concession such as this: Okay, inner critic, I hear you, you’re right, your attack against me is justified. I’m hearing you. I’m taking you seriously.
Shame is the result of a more serious capitulation to self-aggression. It’s the feeling that punishment has already being inflicted and absorbed. Here’s the inner concession: Okay, inner critic, you can see how much I’m suffering. I’ve taken on plenty of punishment. I’m so ashamed, and I’m feeling horrible. Perhaps now I’ve suffered enough.
Often, people feel guilt and shame for minor and even imaginary infractions. The inner critic can be so intimidating that an individual’s guilt or shame is triggered just by passing thoughts or old memories of wrongdoing. Often the amount of guilt and shame experienced far outweighs the degree of a person’s wrongdoing. The inner critic makes felonies our of misdemeanors—or just alleged wrongdoing! A minor misdeed can be milked over years and decades for its suffering potential.
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Depression and suicidal thoughts are also “pounds of flesh.” When self-punishment accumulates in one’s psyche, the effect over time can produce depressive, suicidal thoughts. An unconscious defense arises that tries to deny one’s passive engagement in self-punishment: I don’t want to feel beaten down by my inner critic. I’m not indulging in this self-abuse. Look at how depressed I am. I’m not being receptive to this abuse! I hate it! My depression proves I hate it! (Or, My thoughts of killing myself prove I am not willingly indulging in first hurts or absorbing malice from my inner critic.) These defenses, produced through inner passivity, are cunning self-deceptions conjured up at the deepest levels of the psyche.
Individuals absorb self-punishment from the inner critic because they fail, through inner passivity, to protect themselves from the largely irrational insinuations that build the case for punishment. The passive side of inner conflict can use a real or alleged wrongdoing committed long ago and offer it up for self-punishment. That’s because the individual, through inner passivity, remains willing to continue absorbing allegations of wrongdoing. The individual hasn’t established inner freedom from the inner critic’s oppression. Many people persist in forgiving themselves for some past infraction, but it’s to no avail because, through inner passivity, they remain emotionally addicted to the incoming self-aggression.
As an aspect of one’s unconscious willingness to absorb such punishment, a vague sense can arise that we somehow deserve to be punished. Rationalizations for absorbing the punishment also include, I’m supposed to suffer, and Suffering makes me a better person.
Let’s take a symptom—procrastination—and trace it back to its source in inner conflict and subversive self-punishment. Procrastination is often accompanied by a painful sense of self-admonishment. The inner critic considers procrastination, a common symptom of inner conflict, to be a “crime” worthy of punishment. The crime, as the inner critic sees it, arises from inner passivity’s readiness to indulge in its own sense of weakness. The inner critic berates the individual for passive dawdling, and this person soaks up the abuse, producing guilt or shame. Why do we procrastinate in the first place? Well, of course, we’re not perfect—and we’re going to have our weaknesses. Yet procrastination can be an unconsciously willful acting-out of self-sabotage. In other words, we can use procrastination as the means to replay unresolved inner conflict, first to experience the passivity itself and then, second, to passively experience admonishments from the inner critic. (This appetite for self-punishment also applies to the common self-defeating behavior of chronic indecision.)
The axiom that we are all largely responsible for how we experience life makes perfect sense when we uncover this unconscious willingness to experience self-punishment. An example is the common willingness of multitudes of people to live with a sense of oppression and victimization, a secret willingness to suffer that people often instinctively cover up with chronic complaining and a multitude of other defenses.
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Evidence for the appeal of self-punishment is everywhere. Our most vivid memories are often ones that produce bad feelings about ourselves. Our most intrusive thoughts often cast us in a bad light. Daily we find fault with personal “flaws” of character or intelligence that we believe have undermined our dreams and expectations. We stew in feelings of being disrespected and devalued, debating whether these intimations of unworthiness have validity. Anger, hate, bitterness, and cynicism arise from inner conflict to poison our experiences. We are tempted to want to punish others, to see harm befall them, even as surreptitiously we produce within ourselves a bittersweet facsimile of what that punishment feels like.
Parents who as children were rigorously punished are often compelled to punish their children. In unduly punishing their children or in feeling impulses to do so, these parents are unwittingly using their children as a means through which to identify emotionally with the feeling of being punished. It’s déjà vu all over again, at the kids’ expense.
With some parents, this dynamic is reversed: They hesitate to impose appropriate punishments. They associate being strong and firm with somehow administering inappropriate authority and being overly strict. They are misled by the impression that the exercise of one’s authority, even when benevolent and well-intentioned, is unkind, insensitive, and unduly punishing. (This can be how they experienced, often subjectively, their own parents’ application of authority.) Parents and people in general often punish themselves with self-doubt over their right to be assertive.
Different personality types have their own formulas for producing self-punishment and then covering their tracks. Consider perfectionists. They avoid awareness of their emotional attachment to self-criticism by claiming in their unconscious defense: I’m not looking to feel punished by my inner critic. I’m not interested in feeling criticized! Look at how perfectly I try to do everything. That proves I don’t want to absorb self-criticism. But this is pure self-deception. Perfectionists not only indulge in self-criticism, but they also experience the stress and anxiety of striving to maintain the defense, namely the impossible goal of perfectionism.
Another example of a self-punishing personality is the needy person who claims unconsciously: I don’t want to feel rejected, betrayed, belittled, or abandoned. Look at how eager I am to feel that others see and appreciate my value. But needy people, in their receptivity to their inner critic’s abasement of them, regularly punish themselves for allegedly being insignificant and unworthy. Needy people act out their underlying emotional attachment to rejection and abandonment when others, feeling a growing disrespect for their neediness, disengage from them.
Our affinity for self-punishment reveals an unconscious masochistic streak in human nature. Hidden away in our unconscious mind, the specter of a generalized, nonsexual masochism, an unconscious affinity for suffering, is a primary ingredient in inner conflict and a chief instigator of accompanying anguish and destructiveness. But our delicate, conscious ego resists uncovering the dark side of human nature. Our better self wants this deeper knowledge—while our ego hates it.
