I have been laboring over my latest book, and I’m pleased with how the writing communicates the essence of depth psychology. The book needs more touchups, but it will be published soon. It’s my tenth book and, in the thirty-two years since the first was published, I have made steady progress at communicating the concepts and making deep psychological knowledge more assessable to readers.

Our psyche has a compulsive interest in experiencing inner conflict, and this mostly unconscious inner state initiates our emotional and behavioral difficulties. If we can’t see in ourselves the nature of this conflict, we can be very much at the mercy of how it plays out. In my latest writing endeavor, I even throw in one of my poems at one point to reinforce my prose.
My writing pushes back against our resistance to exposing our deep, unwitting participation in misery and folly. In this new book, I’ve come up with so many examples of inner conflict and its ill-effects that the inner situation I describe becomes almost undeniable. Much of the evidence for the veracity of my contentions consists of connections made between our inner conflict and the many ways that conflict undermines us and the world at large. This new book is the best mirror yet to seeing yourself objectively.
Meanwhile, for this month’s blog I have selected an excerpt from one of my late wife’s three books. (Sandra Michaelson, The Emotional Catering Service: The Quest for Emotional Independence. Amazon, 264 pages).
From Chapter 13
Path to Emotional Independence
No matter how negligent your parents might have been, you still must take responsibility for the fact that, when in misery, you are making choices to react to life with negative expectations. Bad or abusive parenting certainly has a profound effect on the feelings and behaviors of children. But you have the choice as an adult whether to maintain or keep alive your past hurts. Many people use the belief that “my parents ruined my life” to justify their pursuit of failure or deprivation. Holding a grudge against others only hurts you and blocks the possibility of inner peace.
As caterers retrieve past emotional hurts, they experience powerful feelings of sadness concerning the lack of caring and acceptance they believe they experienced in childhood. You might need to grieve consciously over this loss, to the extent it actually occurred. But understand that nothing can change the reality of your past. The key is to shift your focus from what was done to you to deeper understanding of how you now unwittingly deprive yourself and repeat the hurt in the present.
A child’s feelings of being a victim can become more intense or pervasive in the adult. However, until we become more aware, it feels as if there is no choice but to respond emotionally in the same way we reacted as children. We have identified ourselves with feelings of being unloved, denied, and controlled. When we first let go of these feelings, we feel like we lose a sense of who we are. We see change as loss, not gain, and we fear losing ourselves in the process. We do not know how “to be” without being enmeshed in the old patterns.
Some authors and lecturers suggest the solution to health and happiness is in letting go of our resentments and forgiving those who have wronged us. This is not as easy as it sounds. Mentally, we want to forgive, but the emotional part of our psyche has a totally different agenda. It wants to hold onto the gripes and grievances and resists letting them go. This resistance has to be understood and acknowledged.
Forcing forgiveness when it is not really felt emotionally or conjuring up positive images to cover up buried grudges are dead-end detours. Both techniques create inner resistance. It is awareness of the truth of one’s negative feelings and how they play out in our present lives, along with insight and effort, that changes negative patterns.
I had a client who was “trying” to forgive his father. He wrote in a letter to his father, “I forgive you, Dad—for screwing me up.” This statement indicated he still felt himself to have been a victim of his father’s alleged mistreatment. Another client remarked, “I forgave my parents long before I even knew what I was forgiving.” This was faked forgiveness, not genuine forgiveness.
When we understand how we unconsciously hold onto old hurts of feeling unloved, deprived, and somehow victimized, we cease to blame our parents or others for our suffering. Consequently, we feel no need to forgive since there is no grudge. Forgiveness becomes a moot point once we recognize how we perpetuate the role of victim in our life by holding others responsible for our distress.
Rather than forgiveness, I see compassion and understanding as the key elements in transformation. Compassion gives us the ability to see both sides of an emotionally stressful situation. You can now understand the other person’s point of view, though you may still not agree with it. As well, you understand your emotional complicity in your reaction to that person. Now you can access compassion. You are liberating yourself from the past. Instead of being all charged up with negativity, you are able to embrace much better feelings.
To develop compassion, you must learn to listen to yourself and others in a totally new way. Compassion is kin to curiosity. You feel curious about how others feel or see things. You are curious about your own feelings and reactions. You care about the way others feel. You care about yourself and your feelings as well.
Do you really listen to what other people are saying? Do you listen to your partner, your children, to yourself? Do you carefully observe your feelings, fears, and negative thoughts? Or do you get caught up in your own rigid convictions and judgments of how you think things should be?
Ask yourself: “What would you feel if you discovered that your parents really did love you?” Notice any resistance to believing or feeling this. Observe how a part of you wants to see your parents as unloving and deficient. If you feel in conflict with a parent (or anyone), try imagining yourself in their position. Imagine how they would feel or perceive the situation. This ability to see the other person’s perspective diminishes the feeling of being a victim and enhances compassion.
Letting go of being a victim of one’s parents does not mean an individual has to like the parents or condone what they did. It does not mean approving of their behavior or letting the parents get away with mistreatment. It simply means the person is no longer using parents’ misbehavior to justify remaining dissatisfied, angry, helpless—or to justify difficulties or failures in one’s dealings with them or others.
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The Emotional Catering Service is available here.