To become emotionally strong, we might need to understand the inner dynamics of emotional weakness. There’s no need to feel bad about having a weakness. A man who aspires, for instance, to become a good tennis player is simply being sensible when he takes steps to overcome a weak backhand.
It’s more complicated, though, with emotional or psychological weakness. When this kind of weakness is identified, we can be quick to feel that it reveals something inherently bad or wrong about us. People are then resistant to going deeper to expose the nature of this weak spot. We settle instead for superficial behavioral or cognitive “remedies.” We resist exploring our unconscious mind, our psyche.
Looking deeper into ourselves, we discover our readiness to indulge in old familiar hurts from our past. If we are, say, notably sensitive to rejection or criticism, we are unconsciously prepared to plunge painfully into those feelings. This is an aspect of our dark side, this unconscious willingness of ours to make suffering our secret passion.
Let’s look at one common emotional weakness, a persistent sensitivity to rejection. This weakness involves a hidden aspect of ourselves that is prepared to resonate in a bittersweet way with feeling rejected. We decline or refuse through psychological defenses to recognize a lingering emotional attachment to feeling rejected.
With this weakness, we can feel the hurt of rejection just by imagining that someone is rejecting us. We are also likely to act out (to behave unwisely and reactively) in ways that prompt people to reject us.
Through unconscious resistance to seeing ourselves objectively, we don’t want to consider the degree to which we are willing to indulge in the hurt. We don’t want to see how we cozy up to feeling rejected by others. We don’t want to see our emotional attachment to feeling rejected and with it our affinity for self-rejection and our participation in self-defeat.
When notably sensitive to rejection, we are compelled to feel deep within ourselves the rejection we feel coming at us from others. What tends to hurt most in that moment is the extent to which, in feeling the hurt so deeply, we are basically rejecting our own self. We are rejecting, discounting, and disrespecting our own self. Unwittingly, we soak up this discredited sense of self that feels so much like the essence of who we are. It’s as if we don’t quite know who we are without this dose of self-rejection.
When we are strong instead of weak, we don’t take the rejection of others personally. We don’t feel self-rejection. We go about our business doing right by ourselves and others.
From where comes our willingness to suffer the hurt of rejection? As children, we are especially sensitive to impressions of rejection. Sometimes actual rejection occurs, but much of the time the child experiences the hurt through highly subjective, misleading impressions. As children, we process our interactions with others through infantile self-centeredness, so we’re lacking objectivity. We can feel, even with kind parents, that “Mommy loves little sister more than me.” Most everything is taken personally, with a readiness to feel hurt and helpless. This emotional sensitivity tends to linger in adults. Whatever is unresolved in our emotional life is going to continue, at times, to be felt by us, even when painful.
We unwittingly maintain an inner conflict concerning the hurt of rejection. Consciously, we want to feel loved, not rejected. Unconsciously though, we are inclined or tempted, as a compulsion, to go on replaying and recycling impressions of rejection through old memories and daily life experiences.
Loath to recognize this weakness, we produce unconscious psychological defenses (such as anger and blaming) that cover up our indulgence in the hurt. When blaming others, we get upset at them in our misleading conviction that they are the problem. Or we might blame our own self, but for the wrong reasons, for instance, claiming that our foolish behavior caused the rejection or that our lack of personality is a turn-off. We decline to see our unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle the old hurts of rejection so familiar from your past.
You might be inclined to tell yourself that your sensitivity to rejection is a result of childhood trauma, that your parents or siblings were truly cruel. Nevertheless, if you are feeling painfully rejected, you are still likely refusing to become conscious of the passive part in you that is tempted—in a weak, self-pitying way—to countenance and maintain that old familiar hurt.
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Let’s look at another form of emotional weakness, a persistent sensitivity to criticism. Through inner conflict, we allow our inner critic to load us up with self-criticism. Now we’re inwardly disconnected from our better self and more susceptible to feeling the hurt of criticism. We absorb the feeling of criticism from others, sometimes even when their words are not intended as criticism. In addition, we’re more likely to be judgmental and critical of others.
As we become more conscious of how we enable this weakness, we begin to see the misleading nature of our defenses. We see, for instance, that the anger we might have at someone who appears to be critical of us is a defense that covers up our weakness. Instinctively, we protect our ego from the humbling awareness that we are willing to replay and recycle the feeling of being criticized. Our frail ego clings to life by using the irrationality of misplaced anger as an illusion of strength.
As we become aware of doing this, we begin to take responsibility for our weakness, largely because our new, deeper awareness strengthens us. This is how we get stronger—by seeing and understanding the weakness and keeping the insight in focus.
Again, it defies common sense that we would replay and recycle negative emotions. Yet the realm of our psyche is an inner cosmos of persistent irrationality. It operates at times well beyond the constraints of common sense. With insight, we bring rationality (reason, order, wisdom) to what is otherwise so frequently irrational and inherently negative.
To feel strong instead of weak, the trick again is to see and understand the weakness. If, for instance, you are chronically procrastinating (a symptom), your weakness is your willingness to identify with yourself through familiar, unresolved feelings of helplessness. With insight, you recognize that the sense of self that arises from procrastination is the same as the feeling of being entangled in the misery of helplessness. You connect the symptom to the source. You recognize that you are emotionally clinging to a helpless sense of being unable to engage productively with life and its challenges.
Now you see the problem with clinical awareness. If, for example, you are feeling physically ill, a medical doctor diagnoses the problem and prescribes the remedy. It’s the same with a psychological problem. The right diagnosis, the correct analysis, exposes the blind spot in your awareness. The resulting self-knowledge becomes your power to heal yourself. Your new awareness develops inner strength.
Tolerating inner weakness is the path of least resistance. The weakness can feel intrinsic to your sense of self. When procrastinating, you are choosing to know yourself through this weakness. Seeing this, you bring the weak spot into focus, which itself is an act of strength.
Suffering is circulated in our emotional life through the first hurts, which are eight negative emotions first experienced in childhood. They consist of rejection and criticism (already discussed), as well as refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, betrayal, and abandonment. When we’re emotionally weak, we’re more likely to experience these hurts. Then, through psychological reactions or defenses (such as anger, blaming, and self-pity), we decline to recognize how, unwittingly, we are indulging in the hurts and making things worse for ourselves.
Back and forth we go in the throes of inner conflict, disliking the hurt, fearing experiences of it, yet unconsciously compelled to replay and recycle the displeasure. Most people are not bringing this self-defeating process into focus.
The first hurts are processed inside us as inner conflict. The most common symptoms of this conflict are feelings of being discounted, disrespected, disconnected, and offended. Other symptoms are chronic anger, loneliness, indecision, and depression. There are scores of symptoms, including procrastination, cynicism, self-abuse, hatred, bitterness, greed, and various addictions.
We start the healing by identifying a symptom. Misogyny, as an example, is a symptom, and it’s usually accompanied by irrational dislike of women, if not outright hostility. A misogynist is likely to be attached emotionally to rejection and criticism, especially self-criticism and self-rejection. He suffers from the emotional poison of dislike and hostility. Yet he’s willing to circulate this poison within himself because he is desperate to cover up his inner weakness, his passive susceptibility to self-criticism and self-rejection. His hostility, as an unconscious defense, claims that he is aggressive, not passive. In rejecting women, he is also feeling self-rejection deep within.
In childhood, he might have felt criticized and rejected by his mother. Now, the more he sees women being appreciated and honored, the more he unconsciously cozies up to old hurts within himself. He dips into feeling unworthy and discounted. His inner conflict flares up, registered at best only semi-consciously, and his inner critic becomes cruelly mocking and outrageously irrational: “Look at you in all your worthlessness—inferior now even to women. They are surpassing you with their success.” Hostility toward women flares up, and he deceives himself into believing he is being aggressive rather than, in fact, passively stewing in self-criticism or self-rejection.
Hence, misogyny arises from inner weakness. A misogynist can become a stronger, better person if he’s willing and able to take responsibility for his weakness by acknowledging (1) his attachment to self-criticism and self-rejection, and (2) his consequential determination to use women as scapegoats for his own weakness.
A man’s antipathy toward women can have other triggers. All boys feel some passivity in encounters with their mother. That old impulse to feel passive still lingers in adults, and it can easily be set off in men when they encounter strong women. A misogynist’s reactive hostility and aggressive impulses are designed to deny and cover up his passivity, the weakness he most dreads to see in himself.
A misogynist can escape this limiting behavior by recognizing the inner conflict and taking responsibility for it: Consciously, he knows he wants to feel valued and strong but unconsciously he has been inclined to continue to know himself as devalued and weak, which is his old familiar sense of self. Again, we get strong by exposing the weakness.
We overcome such weakness through self-knowledge, through awareness of what constitutes the weakness. If we can understand the weakness and are able to keep it in sight, we’re likely to overcome it. We learn the knack of tracing the symptom back to the source. The biggest obstacle is our resistance.
Insight includes the ability to see how our inner critic is always ready to pounce on us with accusations, often irrational, that we are weak, flawed, and unworthy. We see the passive side of the conflict, the deep core of our weakness that takes the inner critic seriously, becomes defensive, and fails to represent our best interests.
Our emotional strength is vested in our better self (or best self or authentic self). This is the vantage point from where we can observe the psyche’s conflicted dynamics. Our better self arises through self-knowledge to bring order, harmony, and strength to inner life and worldly experiences.
