A mulish stubbornness bedevils the social-political divide in America, intensifying the rancor that individuals and groups direct at each other.
In its ugliest expression, stubbornness is a symptom of unrecognized psychological issues. These issues include ego-based reactivity, injustice collecting, and power and submission, all of which I discuss further on.
Rabid stubbornness is widespread because so many of us are prepared to believe our suffering is caused by the malice of others. In believing this, we stubbornly refuse to look objectively at ourselves. We decline to see that our anger, spite, cynicism, and righteousness—our emotional entanglements in the negative side of life—arise from our own inner conflict and neurosis.
The inner weakness that spawns stubbornness is generated by inner conflict. This conflict produces many different deficits of character and self-regulation, of which stubbornness is just one. Lacking insight, a conflicted person tends to experience stubbornness as defiance, as an illusion of strength. This illusion covers up one’s psychological-emotional identification with weakness, passivity, and self-doubt. The stubbornness blocks open-mindedness and access to self-knowledge, particularly to the knowledge of how we unwittingly and compulsively generate conflict within ourselves and with others.
Some people believe their stubbornness is loyalty to a sound, true principle. But when we are indeed aligned with justice, truth, and love, we are more likely to be wise and resolute rather than stubborn. Stubbornness is generally about being obstinate or obstructive. It consorts with the likelihood of self-defeat. It’s a reaction to underlying weakness, as when a problem gambler obstinately resists seeking help for his addiction or when a person, knowing he has hurt someone, refuses to apologize.
Our challenge is to become conscious of the underlying psychological issues and dynamics that induce stubbornness. If we can make these issues conscious and keep them in focus, we have a good chance of letting go of needless suffering. Here are some insights into three different psychological issues involving stubbornness.
The first issue involves our ego and our instinct to protect it. Our ego is an inner processing center that serves as our basic sense of self as we emerge from childhood. Healthy self-development over the years involves transcending the ego, at least in part, to know ourself and others graciously and the wider world more gratefully and wisely. Many people stubbornly resist making headway in this process. They won’t release their egotism because doing so feels like death to their familiar sense of being. This renders them more susceptible to self-doubt and inner conflict.
The most egotistic tend to experience humiliation when called upon to acknowledge mistakes or simply to make a gracious concession. Identified with their ego, they are emotionally reactive, feeling, for instance: “If I’m wrong, I’m lacking in value. If that person is right, she’s better than me. She’ll have triumphed over me.”
While we might understand that this kind of thinking is irrational, inner fear associated with clinging to our ego trumps reason. Instead of bonding with our better self, we stubbornly embrace a sense of righteousness that fortifies our familiar sense of being. The weakness that refuses the call to inner growth remains intact. Now we start thinking less clearly and even regress into stupidity.
The more we identify with our ego, the more emotionally fragile we’re likely to be. Stubbornness becomes a “lifesaver” that keeps afloat our old sense of self. We’re refusing the self-reflection that would bring us face-to-face with our unresolved readiness to feel insignificant, passive, and unworthy. It is, of course, this buried content, our unconscious conflict and irrationality, that blocks our evolution. The healing of our inner conflict requires that we make our way through the darkness, whatever heebie-jeebies that produces, to get to the light on the other side.
Nonetheless, the common instinct is to avoid this inner journey. A stubborn conviction that our problems stem from the malice of others degrades our rationality. (We might also blame ourselves, but for superficial reasons, for personal faults that are but surface symptoms of inner conflict.) Stubborn righteousness guards our misleading beliefs, which in turn protects our ego and reinforces our resistance. Stubbornly, we spurn our destiny.
The second issue involves our tendency to hold on fiercely to our grudges. In this version of stubbornness, we refuse to let go of some real or imagined insults or hurts. Injustice collectors, for instance, hold on obstinately to the big and small hurts they feel others have inflicted on them. At this point, stubbornness reinforces one’s unconscious willingness to replay and recycle old and new hurts. An unwitting compulsion to suffer needlessly prevails. This is why stubborn people often can’t explain their refusal to budge.
I remember once, probably 40 years ago, being in a snit over some alleged unkindness that I felt my wife Sandra had inflicted upon me. My grievance was, as I remember it, over some trifle. Anyway, I sat at my desk in a very dark mood, brooding resentfully, determined at the very least to hold this grudge against her all night long and into the following day. Next thing I knew, though, she was sitting down close to me, talking to me in sweet consideration, wondering if we could clear the air. I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay resentful. She kept talking patiently, expressing warm feelings toward me, pondering the nature of conflict and unhappiness. Within minutes, my misery began to melt away. Soon I was soaking up inner peace and harmony, marveling at how much suffering her kind intervention had spared me, marveling also at how stubbornly determined I had been to suffer.
The third issue involves power and submission. Many of our daily dealings with others involve who will prevail and who will submit. Of course, we’re entitled to resist when pushed around, controlled, and dominated. However, many people are easily triggered when it comes to feeling controlled. A weak person can quickly feel controlled or dominated even when an alleged controller is only being appropriately forceful or legitimately directive. Weak people can become stubbornly reactive just imagining being controlled.
They stubbornly insist they are being controlled (or will be controlled), and they react angrily or passive-aggressively. The sense of reality is, “If I’m not stubbornly resistant, people will walk all over me. Stubbornness is my power to resist them.” This so-called power, though, is just an instinctive, defensive cover-up for how one’s inner weakness (arising from inner conflict) cedes to others the power to disturb one’s own equanimity.
Once people are triggered by their own weakness, they often slip into passive-aggressive resistance. This sly aggression, this refusal to cooperate, is often acted out unconsciously. Usually, people are not aware of their resistance, yet they are instinctively and stubbornly induced to act it out. Many people are fired from their jobs because their passive-aggressive reactivity to their boss produced incompetence.
Stubbornness is insidious because people are barely conscious of being under its influence. Even a person’s close-mindedness or defiance is an unconscious resistance, stubbornly maintained. People can seem agreeable on the surface to someone’s forcefulness or to the possible truth of what they are hearing, but their resistance and behaviors soon exhibit non-compliance or stubborn rejection of the obvious. As we begin to learn the psychology of inner conflict and recognize these dynamics in ourselves, we begin to shift away from reactive stubbornness. We become less reactionary, more astute, and more capable in our strength of being perceptive, forceful, civil, and open-minded.
Stubbornness, a symptom of neurosis, goes looking for a fight. The fight can be internal, external—or both. The self-damage inflicted by the fight reflects the degree of light that penetrates our shadow.
