The Superbowl is done for another year. With other sports to watch, fans have plenty of other opportunities to grieve over their favorite team’s losses. That’s the thing—fans who agonize over their team’s defeats are getting into emotional mischief.
I’m not picking on sports—athletic prowess is thrilling to watch. I played for three years on my university’s golf team. Yet being a sports fan has an inherent passive element. You’re the watcher, not the player. It can all be appropriately entertaining, but it still has that passive aspect to it—and it’s important to understand what that means. It’s a great advantage for us to know more about our psychological nature.
Gung-ho fans who are bereft for hours or days after a home team’s defeat (or who even become anxious just musing on the prospect of such defeat) take the loss or prospect of loss deep into themselves. They feel an emptiness, a missing connection, an old weakness with which they unwittingly identify.
Devoted sports fans chase the high that comes with identifying with a winner. The less connected sports fans are to their inner value, the more likely they’ll unconsciously use an identification with their team to boost their sense of self.
Rabid fans feel elated when their team wins because the elation serves as a defense, a way for them to deny that, deep in their psyche, they’re unwittingly ready to indulge emotionally in the sense of loss—and then resonate with that unpleasant feeling deep within themselves. The feeling is familiar—it’s how, to some degree, they know themselves psychologically.
This inner frailty exists in problem gamblers who are emotionally entangled in inner weakness. They identify psychologically with the weakness through recurring feelings of losing, feeling helpless, and feeling stripped of self-regulation.
This weakness is usually unconscious, although its painful symptoms certainly register consciously. It’s a universal weakness, a kind of intrinsic flaw in human nature, a blind spot in our consciousness that produces dysfunction, mediocrity, and myriad troubles. It exists in people who become devoted fans of celebrities. This weakness also applies to alcoholics, drug addicts, and some homeless people.
We’re in much less danger of succumbing to problems such as addictions, anxiety, and clinical depression when we can understand our weakness and keep it in sight. Recognizing the weakness and keeping it in sight means we’re being at our best and showing resolve to become stronger.
The weakness is nothing to be ashamed of, though typically people do experience it shamefully, first when they’re repressing it and, second, when they first begin to address it. But the weakness (the clinical term is inner passivity) is just an aspect of our humanity on the spectrum of evolution. The more we see this weakness objectively, the less shame we feel and the sooner we can overcome it.
For many people, life feels like a game of winners and losers. Haunting their psyche is the prospect of being a loser. (Our inner critic can readily harass us with that allegation, and even people who are doing well can be under an inner attack for not doing better.) When the sports team with which they identify wins, they’re quick to feel the high: “This is what I want, to be a winner,” says the exuberant inner coverup of their weakness. When their team loses, the unconscious claim is, “I don’t identify with being a loser. Look at how bad I feel. I hate it when my team loses.”
Fans can experience the thrill of identifying with a winner, and they can also become excited in passively experiencing the degree to which they feel helpless to affect the outcome of a game. The louder they cheer or yell, the more they can imagine it all makes a difference. The football fan is at the mercy, for instance, of whether a “crucial” third down will succeed or fail. It compares psychologically to the thrill of watching a horror movie, which is basically finding delight in helpless fright, but only when the helplessness comes in manageable fictionalized doses. For horror movies or football games, the thrill is largely in how helplessness can, when posited as entertainment, tingle our libido with a weird, mysterious exuberance and delight.
Problem gamblers also put themselves at the mercy of circumstances. Those who put big money on the outcome of sports events or poker games have inner conflict between winning and losing. It’s not a vice to be a casual gambler, of course. But chronic gamblers are prepared to absorb, masochistically, serious punishment from their inner critic for gambling away their assets. They “act out” in the world the experience of being a loser because that’s the allegation they hold against themselves in the underworld of their psyche. They chase the illusion and the high of easy money because monetary value feels to them to possess great value, particularly when compared to the little sense of value they’re accessing within themselves.
This inner weakness is more visible in another “sport”—bullfighting. This spectacle depends for its popularity on the human tendency to identify with being a lesser being, a lesser creature, an unworthy nobody. It’s a primitive mentality that “gets off” on watching a beautiful bull being slowly stabbed to death by a human’s acrobatic capers. Onlooking fans relish the spectacle of “human supremacy” subduing the “lesser” creature, especially a fearsome bull, because the illusion of supremacy serves as a defense, in its morbid pleasure, that covers up the individual’s unconscious willingness to continue to harbor inner weakness and self-doubt.
This same mentality induces big-game hunters to experience pleasure in their power to kill. This mentality is also, gruesomely, a factor in the psychosis of mass killers as they act out their murderous “power.” Mass killers don’t feel the value in others because they are so bereft of the sense of it in themselves.
Intrinsic value exists in everyone. We just need to discover it, which happens as we’re clearing inner conflict from our psyche.
The weaker the sense of self, the greater the risk of being moody, depressed, cynical, angry, mediocre, or disengaged. We are born into the world in a helpless state, and this sense of weakness and helplessness lingers in the psyche of adults. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it is something important to be conscious of. Keeping that weakness in sight is the royal road to overcoming it.
