When it comes to our inner life, many of us are like newborns fluttering our eyes, trying to fathom a mysterious world that makes no sense to us. Not only is this inner world opaque, but our mind rebels when presented with the startling knowledge that exposes our compulsive participation in the inner conflict producing our unhappiness.
We resist stepping out of our familiar comfort zone, which is the sense of self framed by both our ego and our inner conflict. This “comfort zone,” however, limits us. It keeps us immature psychologically, hamstrung by our mental and emotional identification with our ego. Our ego, as if fighting for its life, resists being displaced by our better or higher self.
When we do take the plunge and peek into our psyche, we see how much of our emotional suffering can be avoided. As one example of how this works, consider the consciousness of people who are chronically envious, thereby overly sensitive to feelings of loss, refusal, and deprivation. In varying degrees, many people burden themselves with a sense of loss and the feeling of missing out on some assets, connections, and benefits.
Envy is a symptom of inner conflict. Here is the conflict: Consciously, envious people want to feel gratified and fulfilled. They want to avoid suffering and any sense of life’s unfairness. Unconsciously, though, they are stirring up unpleasant if not painful feelings of being refused and deprived. They dangle simultaneously between these two opposites: seeking satisfaction and indulging in deprivation. The more envious they feel, the more they are intensifing the feeling of being deprived of some benefit or possession. Their “game” is not to get but to feel they are not getting. Their inner conflict consists of their unconscious mental and emotional oscillation between these two opposites.
Envy dissipates as this inner conflict comes into focus, as the individual sees the compulsive “game” being played out in the psyche.
Envy is one of the seven sins of Christian theology, so it has been pestering the human psyche for a while. When people are particularly sensitive to loss, deprivation, and refusal, they see the glass half-empty rather than half-full because they are choosing unconsciously to suffer in that manner. They are entangled in an inner conflict between the conscious wish to get and feel fulfilled versus the unconscious impulse to feel burdened and to indulge in the sense that they are missing out on something they need to make them feel secure and happy.
Despite the accompanying misery, they choose unwittingly to remain conflicted between their desire for the pleasures of fulfillment and gratitude versus their unresolved attachment to the displeasure of yearning for some important “thing” that feels unattainable.
Envy is just one of the many unpleasant symptoms of inner conflict. Many more are described in my 2022 post, “The Emotional Conflict Behind 50 Mental-Health Symptoms.”
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Why can’t people bring their inner conflict into focus? Our ego rejects the insinuation we would be so foolish as to choose displeasure over pleasure. Widespread resistance to recognizing this contrariness in human nature has over the years led to the abandonment of the deeper revelations of psychoanalysis in favor of superficial cognitive-behavioral approaches to mental-health treatment. Our self-deception is facilitated by our psychological defenses.
Now, here we are, largely unaware of the extent and dynamics of self-defeating inner conflict, experiencing only the consequences as our world descends into greater mayhem.
The vital need here is to understand inner conflict. In the case of envy and its emotional indulgence in deprivation and refusal, the solution requires us to become aware of our folly in not seeing the self-defeat involved in being stuck emotionally between our conscious desire to experience happiness versus our unconscious willingness to indulge painfully in feelings of loss and deprivation. Obviously, there’s a conflict involved here. We can so easily and unwittingly slip into inner conflict, whether over serious or mundane matters of daily life.
People can’t grasp what is true about their inner life. I’m not making the bold claim that what I’m saying here is the Truth. Rather, I’m saying people simply can’t grasp what is true about their inner circumstances, whatever that truth might be. Why can’t they know this truth about their own personal self? I’m suggesting it’s because we are too inwardly conflicted, while simultaneously unwilling to see the existence, dynamics, and compulsivity of that conflict.
Let’s try again to see this in terms of envy. To repeat, envious people want to feel unburdened, fulfilled, and happy, but unconsciously they’re enticed emotionally to “entertain” or indulge in expectations of loss and deprivation. Not only are they expecting these privations, they are also emotionally determined to experience the unresolved conflict that produces their envy. In our psyche, we continue to experience, no matter how unpleasant, whatever is unresolved. Envious people, unaware of this repetition compulsion, recycle negative emotions in their psyche involving refusal, deprivation, and a sense of loss or missing out. Logically, envy would arise as a symptom of this conflicted inner processing. Yet they decline here to expose their unconscious willingness to suffer. They register instead a heightened conscious wish to avoid displeasure, a goal they usually associate with material benefits. The passionate pursuit of wealth is just one example.
With inner conflict, we “entertain” or accommodate the negative experience, even as we deny doing so through our psychological defenses. In cases of envy, the yearning to get is not only painful but it also serves as an unconscious defense that says in effect, “I’m not interested in feeling deprived—look at how intensely I want to get.” The more conscious we become, the more we expose our defenses and the more capable we become of avoiding the misery and behavioral self-sabotage that our program of inner conflict produces.
Not only are there scores of symptoms such as envy, there are also eight specific negative experiences (the first hurts of childhood) through which inner conflict is processed. These are refusal, deprivation, helplessness, control, rejection, criticism, betrayal, and abandonment. These hurts arise in childhood, largely through subjective, infantile impressions of reality. When adults are neurotic, they experience combinations of these emotional sensitivities. When neurotic, people compulsively replay and recycle variations on the first hurts of childhood.
This is the deadly flaw in human nature, our perverse attraction to the negative side. Sigmund Freud finally saw this flaw late in his life, and its dynamics were later exposed in the 1950s. As I said, humanity remains largely unaware of this proclivity because it’s so insulting to our ego. The more narcissistic our culture becomes, the more we resist being humbled by inner truth. It may be that the robust narcissism that has infiltrated American life is itself a backlash of resistance to vital psychological truth. It’s no coincidence, as I see it, that we have elevated a malignant narcissist to be our leader.
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Returning to the topic of envy, it is appropriate, of course, to desire certain benefits and outcomes. If we want a salary increase or have great ambitions for ourselves, that is natural. It’s all a matter of the degree to which these desires are infected by neurosis and its accompanying misery. With neurosis, a person might desperately want a salary increase because he feels devalued, unworthy, or rejected without it. He might want more respect in order to compensate for inner conflict that induces him to disrespect himself. The more neurotic the individual, the more she suffers when her desperate desires go unfulfilled. Even when such desires are fulfilled, she’ll often just go on to desperately desire something else.
Keep in mind: We tend to be anxious about (or fearful of) the negative experiences we are unconsciously tempted to experience. (Anxiety and fear, for instance, are not just painful symptoms of inner conflict, they also serve as psychological defenses that cover up our passive entanglement in the conflict.) With envy, we’re likely indulging emotionally in the unpleasant feeling that what we want is somehow unattainable. Now we can feel devalued in ourself, as if the inability to attain what we want is evidence of our unworthiness. We might now unwittingly “sneak into” another variation on suffering, a helpless sense of being unable to attain what we desire. When aware of how we process these quandaries as inner conflict, we begin to see how, unwittingly, we have been generating our own misery. Usually all we are aware of is a back and forth of inner dialogue. This inner chatter that we take so seriously is simply spouting the talking points of inner conflict.
Inner conflict is a sinister “game” we play, and we play to lose. By bringing the game into focus, seeing and understanding it, we gradually cease to seek this morbid way to suffer.
Again, understanding inner conflict is the key. The quest to understand this conflict was a main pursuit of classic psychoanalysis. But this quest has largely been abandoned by modern practitioners. At Wikipedia (as of May, 2026), there’s no entry for “inner conflict.” A search on the term points to “internal conflict,” a wording used by academics to avoid psychoanalytic language. Yet this entry under “internal conflict” is itself just a stub of a few hundred words, and it says nothing about what I’m discussing here.
Meanwhile, the Wikipedia entry for “cognitive-behavioral therapy,” which is superficial compared to the depth psychotherapy I practice, is sixty times longer, about 12,000 words. The entry for “cognitive dissonance” is also lengthy, yet cognitive dissonance is just a symptom of inner conflict (a fact not mentioned in that entry.) The Wiki entry for “psychoanalysis” is equally long, yet it consists largely of the discipline’s history, a discussion of the hodgepodge of competing theories within the discipline, and a listing of options for professional credentialing. The entry for “depth psychology” is less than 1,000 words, and it, too, contains no discussion of inner conflict.
As I see it, this avoidance of the subject of inner conflict is evidence for the veracity of what I’m saying. Human beings are plagued by inner conflict, yet our intelligence is paralyzed by our emotional identification with our superficial ego. The ego can feel like our essence. Consequently, people are instinctively fearful of the experience of having their ego dethroned. I don’t see how humanity can move forward successfully if we persist with our childish resistance to deeper self-knowledge.
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The story of inner conflict’s stranglehold on our psyche is revealed in my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025). Get a copy here.
