Back in the old days, my inner voices could have drowned out a rock concert. Things quieted down when I became more insightful about inner conflict and the operating modes of the two primary conflicting voices.
One of the voices is critical of oneself, while the other is more doubtful and defensive. The former is the voice of our inner critic and the latter the voice of our inner passivity. Together the voices, each with its own operating procedures, can usurp our sense of self and plunge us into misery if we’re lacking in self-knowledge.
Of these two voices, it’s the passive one (or, more accurately, the passive feeling behind the voice) that presents us with the deeper problem. The other voice, the self-aggressive one, is only able to harass us to the degree that our inner passivity allows the self-abuse to occur.
To overcome this inner passivity, we begin by seeing it in a clinical sense, as a weakness or flaw in our psychological makeup. Without this self-knowledge, our passivity is experienced by us as a weakness that can’t be accessed or understood. The weakness then feels intrinsic to us, as if it’s just who we are and how we function.
Let’s start with an example that shows how these two main components of inner conflict, self-aggression and inner passivity, arise as clashing voices that we experience, either consciously or unconsciously, when we’re moody, worried, anxious, fearful, or depressed. A client of mine was struggling in her freelance writing career and having difficulty promoting and marketing her skills. Procrastination was getting the best of her, and for several months she had not taken steps to find writing assignments from regional and national publications.
She received occasional calls for her work from editors, and she performed these assignments well. But the amount of work was insufficient for her to support herself.
She told me she had for months been awakening in the morning, thinking to herself, Oh God, what will I do today! This voice of inner passivity set the tone for her day. Typically, she shuffled around all day without direction or purpose. By the end of the day, her inner critic was attacking her fiercely: You blew the whole day! You have nothing to show for yourself! You certainly ought to be ashamed.
She did indeed feel ashamed, even as her voice of inner passivity mumbled excuses and offered defenses that failed to mollify her inner critic. She had been stuck in this inner conflict for months.
Some mornings, her expectation of the coming day differed slightly. When she had chores in need of attention, her thinking, again in a passive and frantic mode, expressed this sentiment: Oh, my goodness! I have so much to do today. Where will I start! How will I ever get it all done! Feelings of being overwhelmed and helpless would sweep over her, along with anxiety and fear. Deeper still was her readiness to experience herself in this passive, helpless manner. The more passive she was, the more abusive her inner critic became.
There’s a Catch-22 involved here. Though people will claim consciously that they want to be free of inner conflict, we can nonetheless be unconsciously willing to continue knowing and experiencing ourselves through the underlying passivity, all the while being unwittingly receptive to the self-punishment that’s being inflicted by the inner critic. This is the hidden power at the heart of inner conflict, the bittersweet allure of knowing ourselves through the old familiar pain (often guilt and shame) that can feel so intrinsic to who we are.
We attain a new deeper sense of freedom as we discover how, through our inner passivity, we have been enabling our primitive, irrational inner critic to oppress us. This deepening freedom is acquired as we become more conscious of the existence of inner passivity and its reactive, compulsive nature. We start seeing as an anomaly what we had once assumed was normal. For example, the client above had a distinctive body-language motion that reflected her passivity. Whenever she considered a challenging course of action, she stiffened and threw up her hands in a gesture of surrender. She had been doing this motion for years without understanding or even considering its significance. Her underlying inner passivity produced the gesture compulsively. When she realized this, she had a new insight into the existence and influence of her passivity. As she gradually stopped making this gesture in the ensuing months, she was overriding her inner passivity and replacing it with a new connection to (and consciousness of) her essential self.
The following inner voices or feelings can express inner passivity, especially when combined with worry and self-doubt: What am I going to do next? I promise to do it tomorrow. What If I fail? Nobody appreciates or understands me. How come nothing ever works for me? What am I going to say to him?
A religious person might reveal a sense of helplessness or futility through repeated expressions such as, If God wills it, or Only God knows. If we are considering becoming, say, politically involved, that voice, fearful of repercussions, might say, to this effect: You can get in a lot of trouble. Let other people take the risk. One less voice is not going to matter.
The voice of inner passivity often sounds warnings to us, insisting, for instance, that we are in danger of being betrayed, cheated, or physically harmed. This voice claims it can be trusted and that it is revealing to us a harsh but necessary truth: That girlfriend can’t be trusted, or That friend is going to knife you in the back. Of course, an intuitive voice can sometimes represent our best interests, yet when under the influence of inner conflict, we often won’t listen to it or know which voice to trust.
Both voices (of inner passivity and self-aggression) claim to represent truth and have our best interests at heart. The voice of the inner critic, particularly, presents itself as an expert voice. “It feels like a core voice,” one client said, “and that’s why I give it so much credence when I sense it.” The more we give credence to that voice, however, the more we are giving power to a primitive, irrational force in our psyche.
While inner aggression easily usurps the role of a benevolent conscience, the voice of inner passivity is likely to be our tempter: Oh, go ahead and have another drink, or, It won’t hurt to stay in bed and miss work today, or, Do it, she’ll never have to know you were unfaithful. Cravings, weariness, and intense desires are often psychosomatic expressions of inner passivity.
Sometimes inner aggression and inner passivity use the same words, so the tone of those words becomes a clue to the source. Consider the statement, You never do anything right. If heard or felt as an accusation, then self-aggression is the source. If heard or felt in a softer tone, with a sense of futility or self-pity, then inner passivity is talking. It’s important to know the difference because precision about inner dynamics speeds up the clearing-out process.
The two terrible voices in our head are instruments of our own oppression and misery. Without our conscious intervention to alleviate the conflict, they contribute to irrationality, mediocrity, and stupidity—along with our social, political, and economic dysfunction.
Conventional wisdom fails to understand this. Columnist David Brooks wrote this week that “the growing bureaucratization of American life” is a major contributor to social unrest. Brooks claims Trumpian populism is a reaction, in part, to oppressive bureaucrats. This is a superficial assessment of the problem. If indeed bureaucrats are becoming increasingly oppressive, the source is the human psyche where we tolerate oppression through our inner conflict and then spread the oppression outward into the world around us.
