WHY WE SUFFER

Say Goodbye to Your Regrets

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We can resist letting go of our regrets.

We can be very resistant to letting go of our regrets.

“I don’t think I can every let go of my regrets,” a new client sadly remarked. She was saying, indirectly, that she didn’t know how to live without her grief, sorrow, and self-recrimination.

Regrets are precious to the dark side of our psyche. They’re used, as well, by our psychological defenses, as I explain further along.

Sure, we might say we want to be free of all regrets. Deep in our psyche, nonetheless, we cling quite stubbornly or perversely to them.

Who in their right mind, we wonder, would want to be the stooped-over bearer of old regrets? The extra tonnage on our emotional life obviously produces unhappiness. Yet many millions of people carry this burden to the grave. This suffering is completely unnecessary. All that’s needed to drop this heavy load is the right self-knowledge.

“Never look back, unless you’re planning to go that way,” Henry David Thoreau famously said. Unfortunately, a lot of people do plan to go that way—or, more accurately, are compelled to go that way—in search of their favorite varieties of suffering, thanks to hidden dynamics in their unconscious mind. [Read more…]

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The Core of Being

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We obviously become happier and more peaceful as we grow in wisdom and moral sensibility. How is the educational system helping people to do this? Some of the smartest educators say that they don’t know how to do it, even as a growing percentage of students show signs of deteriorating mental health.

What do we need to know to access our core?

What we need to know to find our core.

The self-knowledge of depth psychology is our best insurance against self-sabotaging conduct that threatens our personal aspirations and degrades the quality of human life. Yet the most prestigious educational institutions in the United States have no particular training or learning processes in place to facilitate such evolvement.

William Deresiewicz, a Yale professor from 1998 to 2008, is quoted in an article in The New Republic saying that, “Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

Deresiewicz has published a new book, Excellent Sheep: The Misdirection of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, in which he argues that elite colleges, along with private and affluent high schools, have come under the influence of a commercial and technologically accentuated ethos that cultivates narcissism and personal aggrandizement. [Read more…]

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Four Steps to Stifle Our Inner Critic

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We all have an active inner critic. It’s a force of human nature that I can, in whimsical moments, visualize as the leader of an outlaw trio that includes the gun-slinging desperado, Yosemite Sam, and his fellow Looney Tunes cartoon character, the ferocious, dim-witted Tasmanian Devil.

Our inner critic is harsh, cruel, and a big fat liar.

Our inner critic is a cruel callous bully, as well as a big fat liar.

There’s nothing comic or funny, however, about having an active inner critic. It might be more accurately depicted as the leader of a trio that includes Darth Vader and Lord Voldemort. It produces much of humanity’s anxiety, fear, and depression. The inner critic can operate inside us like a cruel aggressive tyrant whose intent is to rule our life. Subduing or taming it could be the most heroic thing we ever do.

That process can be accomplished in four steps. First, we must become aware of our inner critic. A lot of people don’t even know they have one, though they might be suffering acutely from its influence. We want to notice how and when it intrudes into our life. Second, we begin to understand that our inner critic is a big fat liar. Third, we start to realize how we tend to be passive to it, how we let it get away with harassing, belittling, and punishing us. Fourth, we learn how to stand up to it. Our stronger sense of self and growing inner authority begin to subdue it. Here’s how we can make this happen:

Step One – Our inner critic dishes out self-aggression. We all have aggressive energy, and ideally we learn to channel it in creative, constructive ways. But we have to be emotionally strong and healthy to keep our aggressive energy from becoming a negative force, both in terms of how we relate to others and in terms of how, on an inner level, we relate to ourselves.  

When our inner critic is acting up and intruding into our mental and emotional life, we want to try to realize that this is occurring. People often don’t experience the inner critic in any conscious way. The stream of negativity that emanates from it can do much of its mischief entirely at an unconscious level. [Read more…]

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The Common Ingredient in Human Misery

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Inner passivity determines, in varying degrees, our happiness and vitality.

What do binging, hypochondria, and hoarding have in common? On the surface they appear to be unrelated. Yet all three of these behaviors have the same source in our psyche.

That source—inner passivity—is an unconscious sense of identity situated in our psyche that determines, in varying degrees, our happiness and vitality. I make the case in many of the posts at this website that inner passivity contributes to a wide range of dysfunction, including depression, addictions, compulsions, phobias, cynicism, obesity, procrastination, anxiety disorders, criminal behaviors, and so on. Now I’m adding the three above-mentioned symptoms to the list.

Before I get into that discussion, some background is helpful. As I’ve been saying, the clash in our psyche between inner aggression and inner passivity is a main cause of our unhappiness and suffering. This claim is based on clinical findings from classical psychoanalysis that have been ignored by modern practitioners.

Fortunately, one side of this clash between inner aggression and inner passivity does get some recognition from mainstream psychology. [Read more…]

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Stop Smoking through Psychological Insight

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Insight can crush the craving

I started smoking cigarettes when I was 17 years old. Luckily, I stopped within six years. I had become one of the “nicotine slaves” Willie Nelson sings about in his anti-smoking song, “Smoke Smoke Smoke that Cigarette,” who at the Golden Gate make St. Peter wait while they puff another cigarette.

I know now that smoking is a psychological addiction as much as a physical one. I started because I thought it was cool and would give me status among my peers. So low self-esteem—a psychological issue—got me started. We can also have psychological reasons why we can’t stop.

Deep psychological insight reveals a fascinating aspect of the smoking problem.  The nicotine in cigarettes does indeed create a strong physical addiction, yet a psychological addiction coexists along with the physical one. Insight into this psychological component can also help people to stop drinking, smoking marijuana, and taking hard drugs.

Smokers often appear to enjoy their addiction, and many of them claim the activity gives them considerable satisfaction But the satisfaction is somewhat of an illusion. What possible satisfaction is available from engaging in an activity that typically produces less pleasure as the risks and symptoms of ill health increase?  The satisfaction is at best second-rate if not third-rate. [Read more…]

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The Tyrant that Rules Our Inner Life

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Our inner critic has its intrusive, rough fingers all over our psyche

Much suffering is produced through our relationship with our inner critic. This part of our psyche is also called the superego or self-aggression. It’s an authoritarian aspect or agency in our psyche that holds us accountable for any real or imagined shortcomings or failures. The inner critic is an offshoot of the natural aggression that humans have needed in order to survive in the world.

Not only does it hold us accountable, our inner critic harasses and torments us for our slightest shortcomings or misdemeanors. It is a rogue operator in our psyche that is mostly negative. It attacks us mercilessly for not living up to some unrealistic ideal of who or what we are supposed to be.

This inner tyrant has been called “the hidden master of the personality.”

It can feel to us that our inner critic is our moral conscience, as if it is an inner authority that we are supposed to trust and be passive to. But it is mostly negative and can’t be trusted. When we grow psychologically, we are able to shift inner authority over to our authentic self. It is this self that we can trust to represent our best interests and to be the true representative of our essence, integrity, and goodness. [Read more…]

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