WHY WE SUFFER

Occupy the Psyche

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Achieving progress is an inner and outer process.

The Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) is searching for insight, wisdom, and a sense of direction. These resources are available to us when we turn inward to occupy our psyche.

In the absence of psychological insight, each of us to some degree is divided from within. Also divided from within is the OWS movement itself, as Rolling Stone magazine reports in its June issue (“The Battle for the Soul of Occupy”). The reform movement has a neurotic undercurrent that could limit its success.

The struggle for progress is both an inner and an outer process. As history has repeatedly shown, people create new frontiers of political freedom as their sense of freedom develops from within. When we approach the struggle for more inner freedom, we try to penetrate our resistance, defenses, illusions, egotism, and the tyranny of the inner critic, all of which can prevent us from being in charge of our own life.

Agitating and brainstorming, OWS reformers are searching for keys to open doors to more freedom and justice. One key unlocks the mystery of our psyche to reveal powerful forces of self-sabotage. [Read more…]

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Underlying Dynamics that Breed Bullies

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Self-doubt concerning personal value influences both the bully and the victim.

If we want our society to put a stop to bullying—an excellent goal, of course, one embraced by President Barack Obama, educators, and celebrities—we can help the cause by better understanding the underlying psychological dynamics of bullying and by teaching this knowledge to our kids.

What are these underlying dynamics? The bully—girl or boy, man or woman—appears bold and confident on the surface. But this person is emotionally entangled in substantial self-doubt. All of us grow up with some degree of self-doubt. This feeling can be quite conscious and intense, or it can be repressed and inconspicuous. Our self-doubt produces uncertainty concerning our value, significance, strength, goodness, and worthiness. Even more so, it can produce deep emotional convictions that we are lacking in value, are deeply flawed, and are deserving of disrespect.

Self-doubt is a universal condition. We compensate somewhat for the painfulness of it when others give us recognition, acceptance, praise, and validation. The existence of self-doubt is evident in the human passion for fame, glory, power, and wealth, all of which bestow an illusion of value and superiority. Self-doubt is also evident in bullies who belittle and abuse others in their desperate need to feel superior and more powerful in themselves. [Read more…]

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Four Favorite Ways to Suffer

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Knowing these four ways we suffer helps us to avoid them.

If you’re looking for attention, try wearing a T-shirt with this question embossed across the chest in bold type—Who Will I be Without my Suffering? These words have a thunderous effect on an unconscious level. That’s because we often experience ourself and identify with ourself most profoundly through our suffering.

We all need to make sense of our world and find our place in it. We look for orientation through our beliefs, ego, athletic ability, intelligence, skills, character, body image, personality, sum of knowledge, and possessions. Underneath these external values, though, we can also experience and know ourselves in hidden recesses of our psyche as victims of injustice and malice, as failures or phonies, or as individuals who are insignificant and unworthy.

We have, in particular, four favorite ways to suffer. We can engorge ourselves at the trough of human misery through feelings of deprivation, helplessness, rejection, and criticism. Chances are good that when we’re miserable, we’re entangled in one or more of these negative emotions. Symptoms such as anger, anxiety, fear, procrastination, and depression often have their roots in these four opportunities to suffer.

With a little insight, we can check in with ourselves to determine pretty accurately whether we’ve tumbled into one of these four pits of pain. We can get ourselves out with self-awareness and insight. Most of the time, people in the pits find it hard to escape because they resist seeing their own role in their predicament.

If you’re living a life of relative abundance, yet still feel anxious that something is missing in your life, you’re likely entangled in the first of the four, the negative emotion of deprivation. This means that you are unconsciously determined to see and experience the glass as half-empty. This propensity to see and experience our life through negative impressions is a quirk of human nature. It’s as if we have an emotional addiction to various forms of negativity. We often are unaware of how easily we can slip over to the negative side and stay there, even as we complain about how unpleasant it all is. [Read more…]

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Neither a Procrastinator Nor a Dawdler Be

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Procrastination produces both emotional anguish and self-damaging inactionProcrastination is such a maddening trait that literary scribes have bestowed upon it an abundance of witty attention. William Shakespeare weighed in more than once, as in Henry VI, “Defer no time; delays have dangerous ends.” Here’s a list of 180 procrastination quotes, but reading them might be, well, to dawdle.

Procrastination produces both emotional anguish and self-damaging inaction. Interestingly, the main culprit in procrastination is largely unrecognized. Depth psychology, however, can penetrate our psyche to expose this culprit.

Before identifying the problem, here’s some background. We harbor in our psyche what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious ego. As the term obviously indicates, this part of our ego is unconscious. We also have a conscious ego that is plenty troublesome. This conscious ego is a pale shadow of our authentic self, and it tends to be thin-skinned and ridiculously petty. But our unconscious ego is even more of a nuisance. Its main effect is to render us passive, so that in certain situations we can quickly feel overwhelmed, helpless, confused, indecisive, and apathetic. Procrastination arises as a behavioral consequence of these negative emotions.

Our challenge is to become more conscious of this part of our psyche. We can start by giving it a name: inner passivity. In our psyche, the primary conflict is between inner aggression (as represented by our inner critic or superego) and inner passivity (as represented by our unconscious ego). These two conflicting aspects of our psyche are always butting heads, frequently producing inner voices or feelings that we repeat in our mind as if the words or feelings are our own. [Read more…]

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