The surging mental-health distress among children and adults attests to the urgency of demystifying the human psyche. We blind ourselves—through a false self, naïve ego-ideal, and vainglorious self-image—to the inner dynamics in our psyche. We are not recognizing how we become our own worst enemy.
An article on our children’s mental health, published last year on the Atlantic magazine’s website, begins with these chilling words: “The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis.” Titled, “Why American Teens Are So Sad,” the article cites findings that 44 percent of American high-school students report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 26 percent in 2009.
The Atlantic has a deserved reputation for quality journalism; even so, it fails in this important article to acknowledge or consider the deeper aspects of psychological dysfunction. This lack of awareness is pandemic. The article’s shallowness is the blindness of the species.
Four forces are driving the mental-health crisis, says the article: (1) social-media use, (2) a sociality decline, (3) a stressful world, and (4) modern parenting strategies. Yes, these four forces do affect young people, yet the greater influence, as I argue here, is unrecognized inner conflict, which goes unmentioned in the article.
Discussing the first of these forces, the effect of social-media use, the Atlantic article says that adolescents and teenagers, girls in particular, “are uniquely sensitive to the judgment of friends, teachers, and the digital crowd.” They feel compelled to log on to websites such as Instagram even though the content makes them feel worse. Social media “seems to hijack this keen peer sensitivity and drive obsessive thinking about body image and popularity.” Hence, social media fuel anxiety, the article deduces, and make it harder for young people to cope with the pressures of growing up.
This is all true, but it’s simplistic and not particularly helpful. Long before Instagram, young people have had to deal with a conflicted sense of self. Every young person is challenged with complicated inner conflicts that are both biologically and psychologically rooted. These include wanting to be brave but resonating emotionally with feeling fearful, wanting to be strong but resonating with feeling weak, wanting to be safe but persistently feeling endangered, wanting to be attractive but feeling ugly, wanting to be loved but feeling unloved, wanting pleasure but mysteriously feeling much displeasure, wanting freedom but feeling oppressed, wanting certain objects but feeling refused, and wanting to be morally right but feeling rebelliously wrong.
These inner conflicts are driven by the unconscious propensity to continue to experience within us whatever issues are emotionally unresolved. Lacking awareness of these conflicts and their emotional and cognitive effects, young people are likely to experience negative emotions, self-doubt, incessant inner chatter, and intellectual impairment. A social medium such as Instagram is only making imperative our need to become more conscious.
Young people are sensitive to being judged because, like adults, they can harbor self-doubt and absorb self-criticism. A person can be highly self-critical, an emotional state driven by one’s inner critic. The inner critic is a primitive, instinctive drive, derived from biological aggression, that has turned inward against the self. To the psychologically naïve, these inner attacks against one’s integrity and character can feel legitimate or normal, as if the person is indeed deserving of such fault-finding and inner punishment. This punishment is often experienced as guilt, shame, self-pity, sadness, and depression.
In other words, the lack of self-regard experienced by both young people and adults is largely a measure of the degree to which people passively soak up irrational allegations from their inner critic. Unwittingly, we become pin-cushions for self-punishment. Hence, the deeper question becomes: Why do human beings allow themselves to be targets of the inner critic’s self-aggression?
We’re not seeing two key weaknesses or flaws in our psyche. While we often recognize the inner critic, we’re largely ignorant of the existence and nature of inner passivity and inner conflict. Inner passivity is the sensibility of our unconscious ego, and the unconscious ego is the target of the inner critic. Through inner passivity, our best interests are represented weakly and inadequately. With more consciousness, we can overcome our resistance and upgrade this unevolved aspect of human nature.
Humanity’s primary inner conflict—between the inner critic’s aggressiveness and inner passivity’s weakness and defensiveness—is persistently played out in our psyche. With neurosis, the conflict becomes painfully intense. Hundreds of distressful emotional and behavioral symptoms arise from this flaw in human nature.
The inner critic is a drive, a primitive, aggressive force of nature, while inner passivity is the defensive mentality of our unconscious, subordinate ego. When insight is lacking, an unremitting inner polarity of aggression versus passivity compels us to experience negative emotions—particularly refusal, deprival, helplessness, criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment—as our inner conflict is being irrationally arbitrated beyond our awareness.
Young people using social media are convinced consciously that they’re looking for acceptance and respect. Unconsciously, however, they’re playing the hurtful game of looking for clues or evidence that they’re not being accepted and respected. In this sense, social media and smartphones can serve as powerful mediums that facilitate their unconscious compulsion to act out inner conflict such as wanting respect while resonating emotionally with feeling disrespected.
Social media and smartphones don’t cause the problem. They’re just efficient tools with which to experience and act out inner conflict. As people expose inner conflict, they develop an insightful intelligence that prevents much suffering.
Online, young people can be highly sensitive to any implications that they’re being ignored or disrespected. Unconsciously, though, they’re apt to go looking for such “evidence.” As they readily react to perceived slights, they can feel (mixed in often with anger or self-pity) the hurt of feeling disliked, abandoned, betrayed, or unworthy. They’re not seeing that their psyche works in such a way as to thwart the tenets of common sense and to pursue unconsciously the intensification of inner conflict with its accompanying negative emotions.
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The decline of sociality is the second of the four forces mentioned in the Atlantic article. In this telling, the pandemic is taken into account, and sadness and depression are seen as symptoms of social isolation. The article says that “more aloneness (including from heavy smartphone use) and more loneliness (including from school closures) might have combined to push up sadness among teenagers who need sociality to protect them from the pressures of a stressful world.”
Again, this assessment is too shallow. Yes, sociality is important, yet just as important is our own psychological ability to meet the emotional challenge of living in a stressful world. (Climate change alone will be making life more stressful.) Indeed, the Covid pandemic challenged our emotional resilience and, in many cases, brought on a heavy sadness. Of course, loneliness is going to be experienced during a pandemic lockdown. Yet many of us wouldn’t experience aloneness with such misery if we were more aware of the primitive forces in our psyche that disconnect us emotionally from our better self. Can this depth psychology be taught to teenagers? Absolutely!
This disconnect from one’s better self is a form of self-abandonment, and abandonment is an emotional sensitivity going back to childhood. That’s when the notion that our parents might ever leave or abandon us could produce the overwhelming dread of helplessness. This dread, enmeshed in our sense of self, lingers in our psyche. The conflict is: “Can I feel strong or will I collapse into helplessness?” The greatest pain of loneliness is probably the disconnect from self with its underlying self-abandonment.
People can feel lonely and isolated even in normal times. Acute loneliness can arise out of the inner conflict between wanting to feel connected and loved versus being inclined unconsciously to indulge in unresolved emotional memories of feeling rejected, abandoned, and unloved. The more we feel disconnected from our better self, the more we disconnect from others, and the lonelier we feel.
Again, this all speaks to inner conflict and inner passivity. In acute loneliness, we’re exacerbating what we can so easily feel in ourselves: the disconnection and alienation induced by inner conflict. At this point, unhealthy symptoms arise, including sadness, apathy, boredom, loneliness, guilt, shame, cynicism, procrastination, and self-criticism.
As the inner critic presides tyrannically over our inner life, and inner passivity enables this arrangement, teenagers more easily feel separation from self and others. The solution here is to see their plight in terms of inner conflict. They can learn to recognize their inner critic and inner passivity and sense their dueling voices. In terms of consciousness, they move from the dark into the light. The feeling is, Now that I recognize this inner dynamic, I realize I don’t have to be at its mercy. I can be stronger than this self-harming unconscious programming.
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Our stressful world is the third of the four forces identified in the Atlantic article. Certainly, with climate change, war in Europe, and nuclear-weapons proliferation, our world has become more unstable and dangerous. “We cannot rule out the possibility,” the article says, “that teens are sad about the world, not only because the world contains sadness, but also because young people have 24/7 access to sites that are constantly telling them they should be depressed about it.”
Websites that tell young people they “should be depressed” about the world are framing inner experience from the passive side of the psyche. The producers of such websites are unconsciously trying to drag their visitors down to their level of passivity, with its undercurrents of cynicism, helplessness, and despair. Yes, if we are too passive on an inner level, we’ll feel very much at the mercy of flailing political leaders and grim world events. Falling into helplessness further enables worst-case outcomes.
Though the news of the world is grim, it’s important we stay strong, which includes the ability to stay informed without being overwhelmed by all the bad news. When we’re not inwardly weakened by unrecognized inner conflict, we can appreciate the seriousness of the world’s plight at the same time that we raise or sublimate our energy into activities or reforms that have us enjoying the sense of being alive and functioning at our best.
For young people, a likely source of stress and sadness is the spectacle of their parents and other adults failing not only to grapple with climate change but declining to register it as a bigger concern than, say, the price of gasoline. As many young people must perceive it, their role models have collapsed into morbid passivity. Without insight, they’re in danger of following their parents into this paralysis.
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The fourth force identified by the Atlantic concerns parenting strategies. The article claims that higher income parents, in particular, are putting too much stress on their children to prepare for college. The implication is that parents are displacing their own anxiety onto their kids.
The article also notes that children now are less likely to get summer jobs and do chores, conceivably making them less able to tolerate discomfort and more likely to feel incompetent. A parent is more likely to protect children from challenging situations, the article also says, making them “more likely to experience severe anxiety as teenagers.”
Where does this parental anxiety come from? Parents are oblivious to the source of it. In large measure, anxiety is a byproduct of inner conflict. As one example, the experience is: “Will I be strong and succeed, or will I be weak and fail.” With inner conflict, the prospect of failure becomes an emotional siren-call—and anxiety intensifies. Then, through projection, parents believe wrongly that the anxiety they feel arises from their “legitimate” concern about the presumed weakness in their children. The parents fixate on the prospect of failure and experience their children through their own self-doubt. Obliviously, they’re dumping their own garbage onto their children.
They feel compelled to cater to (or be critical of) the weakness they see or imagine in their children, thereby maintaining that weakness within themselves and making it more likely their children will inherit it from them. Where is the parent training that explains and reforms this dysfunction?
Even with anxious parents, many teenagers can handle the challenge of being encouraged to excel. Their inner conflict is less intense, enabling them to tap into the pleasure and power of learning and engaging. Other young people are more conflicted, and the “severe anxiety” they experience is likely to be felt through a variety of circumstances, not just from parental pressure to excel at school.
Accommodative parents are reluctant to practice a stronger style of parenting, one in which they trust in the benevolence of their authority. In childhood, many of them experienced their parents’ authority subjectively, as rigid, arbitrary, and oppressive. Now, as parents, they’re unable to exercise a wise, benevolent authority because they’re not reconciling authority with benevolence. Their own passivity makes benign power unavailable to them. Contentious negotiation or reactive anger are all they might feel in the way of authority. When they try to exercise effective, appropriate authority, they feel conflicted and guilty. They’re emotionally blocked from exercising strong authority because they imagine it will be experienced by their children as somehow unkind or even abusive.
When the light of depth psychology dissolves our blindness, we can cultivate strength in ourselves and in our children. The best self-knowledge makes this reform more likely.
