Peter Michaelson's Blog

When it comes to our inner life, many of us are like newborns fluttering our eyes, trying to fathom a mysterious world that makes no sense to us. Not only is this inner world opaque, but our mind rebels when presented with the startling knowledge that exposes our compulsive participation in the inner conflict producing our unhappiness.

Understand our secret willingness to suffer.

We resist stepping out of our familiar comfort zone, which is the sense of self framed by both our ego and our inner conflict. This “comfort zone,” however, limits us. It keeps us immature psychologically, hamstrung by our mental and emotional identification with our ego. Our ego, as if fighting for its life, resists being displaced by our better or higher self.

When we do take the plunge and peek into our psyche, we see how much of our emotional suffering can be avoided. As one example of how this works, consider the consciousness of people who are chronically envious, thereby overly sensitive to feelings of loss, refusal, and deprivation. In varying degrees, many people burden themselves with a sense of loss and the feeling of missing out on some assets, connections, and benefits.

Envy is a symptom of inner conflict. Here is the conflict: Consciously, envious people want to feel gratified and fulfilled. They want to avoid suffering and any sense of life’s unfairness. Unconsciously, though, they are stirring up unpleasant if not painful feelings of being refused and deprived. They dangle simultaneously between these two opposites: seeking satisfaction and indulging in deprivation. The more envious they feel, the more they are intensifing the feeling of being deprived of some benefit or possession. Their “game” is not to get but to feel they are not getting. Their inner conflict consists of their unconscious mental and emotional oscillation between these two opposites.

Envy dissipates as this inner conflict comes into focus, as the individual sees the compulsive “game” being played out in the psyche.

Envy is one of the seven sins of Christian theology, so it has been pestering the human psyche for a while. When people are particularly sensitive to loss, deprivation, and refusal, they see the glass half-empty rather than half-full because they are choosing unconsciously to suffer in that manner. They are entangled in an inner conflict between the conscious wish to get and feel fulfilled versus the unconscious impulse to feel burdened and to indulge in the sense that they are missing out on something they need to make them feel secure and happy.

Despite the accompanying misery, they choose unwittingly to remain conflicted between their desire for the pleasures of fulfillment and gratitude versus their unresolved attachment to the displeasure of yearning for some important “thing” that feels unattainable.

Envy is just one of the many unpleasant symptoms of inner conflict. Many more are described in my 2022 post, “The Emotional Conflict Behind 50 Mental-Health Symptoms.”

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Why can’t people bring their inner conflict into focus? Our ego rejects the insinuation we would be so foolish as to choose displeasure over pleasure. Widespread resistance to recognizing this contrariness in human nature has over the years led to the abandonment of the deeper revelations of psychoanalysis in favor of superficial cognitive-behavioral approaches to mental-health treatment. Our self-deception is facilitated by our psychological defenses.

Now, here we are, largely unaware of the extent and dynamics of self-defeating inner conflict, experiencing only the consequences as our world descends into greater mayhem.

The vital need here is to understand inner conflict. In the case of envy and its emotional indulgence in deprivation and refusal, the solution requires us to become aware of our folly in not seeing the self-defeat involved in being stuck emotionally between our conscious desire to experience happiness versus our unconscious willingness to indulge painfully in feelings of loss and deprivation. Obviously, there’s a conflict involved here. We can so easily and unwittingly slip into inner conflict, whether over serious or mundane matters of daily life.

People can’t grasp what is true about their inner life. I’m not making the bold claim that what I’m saying here is the Truth. Rather, I’m saying people simply can’t grasp what is true about their inner circumstances, whatever that truth might be. Why can’t they know this truth about their own personal self? I’m suggesting it’s because we are too inwardly conflicted, while simultaneously unwilling to see the existence, dynamics, and compulsivity of that conflict.

Let’s try again to see this in terms of envy. To repeat, envious people want to feel unburdened, fulfilled, and happy, but unconsciously they’re enticed emotionally to “entertain” or indulge in expectations of loss and deprivation. Not only are they expecting these privations, they are also emotionally determined to experience the unresolved conflict that produces their envy. In our psyche, we continue to experience, no matter how unpleasant, whatever is unresolved. Envious people, unaware of this repetition compulsion, recycle negative emotions in their psyche involving refusal, deprivation, and a sense of loss or missing out. Logically, envy would arise as a symptom of this conflicted inner processing. Yet they decline here to expose their unconscious willingness to suffer. They register instead a heightened conscious wish to avoid displeasure, a goal they usually associate with material benefits. The passionate pursuit of wealth is just one example.

With inner conflict, we “entertain” or accommodate the negative experience, even as we deny doing so through our psychological defenses. In cases of envy, the yearning to get is not only painful but it also serves as an unconscious defense that says in effect, “I’m not interested in feeling deprived—look at how intensely I want to get.” The more conscious we become, the more we expose our defenses and the more capable we become of avoiding the misery and behavioral self-sabotage that our program of inner conflict produces.

Not only are there scores of symptoms such as envy, there are also eight specific negative experiences (the first hurts of childhood) through which inner conflict is processed. These are refusal, deprivation, helplessness, control, rejection, criticism, betrayal, and abandonment. These hurts arise in childhood, largely through subjective, infantile impressions of reality. When adults are neurotic, they experience combinations of these emotional sensitivities. When neurotic, people compulsively replay and recycle variations on the first hurts of childhood.

This is the deadly flaw in human nature, our perverse attraction to the negative side. Sigmund Freud finally saw this flaw late in his life, and its dynamics were later exposed in the 1950s. As I said, humanity remains largely unaware of this proclivity because it’s so insulting to our ego. The more narcissistic our culture becomes, the more we resist being humbled by inner truth. It may be that the robust narcissism that has infiltrated American life is itself a backlash of resistance to vital psychological truth. It’s no coincidence, as I see it, that we have elevated a malignant narcissist to be our leader.

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Returning to the topic of envy, it is appropriate, of course, to desire certain benefits and outcomes. If we want a salary increase or have great ambitions for ourselves, that is natural. It’s all a matter of the degree to which these desires are infected by neurosis and its accompanying misery. With neurosis, a person might desperately want a salary increase because he feels devalued, unworthy, or rejected without it. He might want more respect in order to compensate for inner conflict that induces him to disrespect himself. The more neurotic the individual, the more she suffers when her desperate desires go unfulfilled. Even when such desires are fulfilled, she’ll often just go on to desperately desire something else.

Keep in mind: We tend to be anxious about (or fearful of) the negative experiences we are unconsciously tempted to experience. (Anxiety and fear, for instance, are not just painful symptoms of inner conflict, they also serve as psychological defenses that cover up our passive entanglement in the conflict.) With envy, we’re likely indulging emotionally in the unpleasant feeling that what we want is somehow unattainable. Now we can feel devalued in ourself, as if the inability to attain what we want is evidence of our unworthiness. We might now unwittingly “sneak into” another variation on suffering, a helpless sense of being unable to attain what we desire. When aware of how we process these quandaries as inner conflict, we begin to see how, unwittingly, we have been generating our own misery. Usually all we are aware of is a back and forth of inner dialogue. This inner chatter that we take so seriously is simply spouting the talking points of inner conflict.

Inner conflict is a sinister “game” we play, and we play to lose. By bringing the game into focus, seeing and understanding it, we gradually cease to seek this morbid way to suffer.

Again, understanding inner conflict is the key. The quest to understand this conflict was a main pursuit of classic psychoanalysis. But this quest has largely been abandoned by modern practitioners. At Wikipedia (as of May, 2026), there’s no entry for “inner conflict.” A search on the term points to “internal conflict,” a wording used by academics to avoid psychoanalytic language. Yet this entry under “internal conflict” is itself just a stub of a few hundred words, and it says nothing about what I’m discussing here.

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia entry for “cognitive-behavioral therapy,” which is superficial compared to the depth psychotherapy I practice, is sixty times longer, about 12,000 words. The entry for “cognitive dissonance” is also lengthy, yet cognitive dissonance is just a symptom of inner conflict (a fact not mentioned in that entry.)  The Wiki entry for “psychoanalysis” is equally long, yet it consists largely of the discipline’s history, a discussion of the hodgepodge of competing theories within the discipline, and a listing of options for professional credentialing. The entry for “depth psychology” is less than 1,000 words, and it, too, contains no discussion of inner conflict.

As I see it, this avoidance of the subject of inner conflict is evidence for the veracity of what I’m saying. Human beings are plagued by inner conflict, yet our intelligence is paralyzed by our emotional identification with our superficial ego. The ego can feel like our essence. Consequently, people are instinctively fearful of the experience of having their ego dethroned. I don’t see how humanity can move forward successfully if we persist with our childish resistance to deeper self-knowledge.

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The story of inner conflict’s stranglehold on our psyche is revealed in my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025). Get a copy here.

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How do you get to know yourself, to find yourself, to like or love yourself? You establish a foundation of self-respect and integrity. You ground yourself in your essential goodness, worthiness, and strength.

We can do this by becoming more attuned to the unconscious dynamics—drives, impulses, identifications, and conflicts—that shape our inner life. We need to break new ground in self-understanding, especially now to avoid being weak in the face of the world’s growing disruptions.

In this process, we learn of dynamics in our psyche that are indifferent and even hostile to our wellbeing. Vital self-knowledge strengthens self-regulation and makes us wiser. In this post, I provide ten examples, all interrelated, that illustrate the nature of this self-knowledge. This learning helps us to navigate the byways of life.

Become aware of the compulsion to experience inner fear. A new client of mine had a nighttime dream in which she felt fearful for her adult children. Yet in real life her children were safe and doing well. She acknowledged her fear, and added, “That’s what mothers do—they feel fearful about their children.” This comment was her attempt to rationalize her fear. I told her, “Your fear is not really about your children. Unconsciously, you are using your children as a means to recycle old unresolved fear within yourself. Everyone has some leftover fears from childhood, and these can be difficult to dislodge. If we don’t recognize the nature of this fear, we are fated to keep experiencing it. Unconsciously, you are using your children as a way to recycle your largely irrational inner fear.” We tend to experience in a distressful way whatever is unresolved within.Watch for a fixation on injustice. Many people harp on the unfairness of life. They complain repeatedly or angrily about injustices, sometimes to the point of becoming cynical or even fatalistic. Sometimes they feel real or alleged injustice as it applies to their own circumstances. Other times they identify with the plight of people who they see as victims of injustice. Seeking remedies for injustice is commendable, of course, but many people become chronic complainers who unwittingly intensify their sense of weakness and helplessness through the feeling of being unable to rectify injustices. Or they indulge unconsciously in the powerlessness that they associate with the victims of injustice. Now their perceptions of life and sense of truth become more subjective.Understand the psychological desire for certainty. Religious fundamentalists seek “the comfort” of certainty. Religious wars have been fought throughout history to protect the “truth” of one side’s certainty or to force that certainty on others. Some atheists relish the certainty of their disbelief, while many people on the political Left and Right brandish their version of certainty. Such certainty covers up underlying uncertainty and unresolved inner fear. The certainty is a desperate grasp for self-assurance. When we’re psychologically healthy (not neurotic), our childish, irrational fears dissipate. We now possess the inner strength to accept uncertainty. We now establish a healthy certainty, an emotional foundation in the pleasure of our goodness and integrity.Understand the self-sabotage that arises through ignorance of one’s inner conflict. A major psychological flaw in human nature makes us suckers for grifters. We can see this in the gambling and sports-betting mania sweeping the nation. More and more of YouTube’s ads are for gambling sites. We succumb to the temptation to gamble because we’re prone to recycle and replay, as inner conflict, the sense of being weak versus strong—and bad or foolish versus good and wise. Problem gamblers deceive themselves into believing they are aggressive gamblers out to beat the system, though they’re driven by a compulsion to experience themselves through an inner conflict that accuses them of unworthiness and folly. They act out the conflict, which puts them at the mercy of fate. They set themselves up to be condemned by their harsh inner critic. This is how they encounter their dark side and are defeated by it. Self-sabotage is also widespread as people, unable to expose the dark side in themselves, vote for unscrupulous, self-seeking politicians.Recognize the source of shame. A masculinity crisis is rampant among boys and young men. They can easily feel shameful when they’re failing to manifest assertiveness and power. Gone are the distinct roles experienced by previous generations, when male and female tasks, duties, and expectations were more clear-cut. Both men and women must become stronger to deal with this new orientation. We’re prone, for instance, to feel mesmerized and overwhelmed by digital technology’s instantaneous stimuli, even though much of it is trivial and misleading. We all must grow more insightful in order to recognize and overcome the inner passivity (a leftover weakness and defensiveness from childhood) that lingers in our psyche and produces guilt and shame when our inner critic alleges that we’re being weak and foolish.Become aware of the compulsion to experience disappointment. Many of us are quick to feel disappointed in others. We focus on the imperfections of others, and we think we’re being objective when we feel this disappointment. But often the feeling arises because we had parents who we felt were disappointed in us. Or we might have resonated emotionally with parents who were disappointed in themselves and each other. A sense of disappointment lingers in us, and we tend to hide from our awareness our willingness to know ourself (identify with ourself) through this negative impression. This sense of inadequacy is a passive feeling, a disconnect from our better self. When we identify unconsciously with it, we easily get “hit up” with an unpleasant or painful self-doubt. But we hide from our awareness our affinity for this negative feeling by projecting the feeling onto others. We make them the source of our feeling of disappointment. We see them (or our environment) as disappointing rather than recognize our willingness to resonate emotionally with that negative feeling. Be aware of your willingness to experience helplessness. Indecision and procrastination result from our unconscious willingness to experience ourselves through inner weakness. As mentioned, a major inner conflict is the conscious wish to feel strong versus the unconscious expectation of knowing oneself through weakness, self-doubt, and lack of self-regulation. People with addictions, cravings, and persistent desires are entangled emotionally in this helplessness. Through envy, people can desire intensely what they are unlikely to get. They want what they feel they are helpless to attain. Again, the inner conflict here is between the conscious wish to get and to feel strong versus the unconscious temptation to feel weak and helpless. Many people never break free from the misery of such inner conflict because they have no sense of its dynamics at play in their psyche.See the passivity in digital streaming. We’re in danger of being overwhelmed by the power of digital technology as we react passively to it. When we study a subject, read an article or book, or listen to a podcast, we’re actively in pursuit of meaning, and we involve our intelligence to make sense of our experience. Not so with much of digital streaming, which can feed us as if we’re babies. When we stream digital content for hours on platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, we opt for the cheap thrills or amusement of a virtual reality rather than engage in what reality has to offer. Our level of functionality is diminished as we become mindless spectators mesmerized by trite allurements. We allow algorithms to determine our experiences, sense of reality, and even sense of self. We’re bewitched by the “magic” of technology until our passivity becomes an intoxicating mindlessness. We are sucked into this mindless void of passive reactivity, weakening our sense of agency and citizenship.Understand how inner fear threatens democracy. Many people in America are anxious and fearful about the undermining of democracy and the prospect of looming authoritarianism. Of course, it’s appropriate to be concerned. But the more fearful we are, the more likely we are entangled emotionally in feelings of being helpless, overwhelmed, and defeated. Through inner conflict, we anticipate being controlled, overruled, and at the mercy of situations or other people. Through inner conflict, we anticipate the feeling of oppression. Inner conflict is, after all, a battle to escape the tyranny of the inner critic or superego. Inner fear arises, and it serves as a psychological defense that denies our hidden willingness to submit to inner tyranny and thereby experience a curtailment of freedom. We’re talking here about an unconscious willingness to forgo freedom to become, like children, dependent on overseers who tell us what to do, how to behave, what to believe, and even what or who we are. These psychological impairments undermine our better self and the effect of our citizenship.See the dynamics behind impatience. Many feel anxious and stressed by their impatience. They feel forced to submit to the indifferent pace of time or change, or powerless to make things happen. Impatience can arise as our inner critic mocks us for our real or alleged lack of achievement. We might claim at such times that our impatience is “proof” we’re desperate to make progress. Impatience is both a a symptom and a defense: It implies we do want to hurry things along, yet it covers up our willingness to remain conflicted between feelings of strength and being at the mercy of time. Impatience can serve as ploy that denies our receptivity to an inner critic that nags at us because we’re supposedly not getting things done fast enough. As we unconsciously use the “slow pace” of time to replay and recycle our emotional entanglement in a sense of weakness, we produce punishment (guilt and shame) that passively accommodates the inner critic’s claims against us.

In summary, these ten examples of our psyche’s vagaries expose our willingness (or compulsion) to know ourself, to identify with ourself, through inner weakness and inner conflict. Through psychological resistance, we stubbornly hold on to our familiar, limited sense of self because it feels so much like our essence. This unconscious resistance arises largely from our ego, our shadow self, which wants to be felt as our essence.

Be kind to yourself through your transition from inner weakness to inner strength. If you let your inner critic get away with scolding or mocking you for being weak or being too slow in your progress, your inner passivity is enabling your inner critic. We’re challenged here to develop an awakening consciousness that can recognize and then bypass inner passivity’s fear and defensiveness while neutralizing the inner critic’s cruel irrationality.

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The deeper the insight, the more we resist it. Like wild animals reacting to their reflection in a mirror, we are shocked to see an unknown self. Why are we shocked? In the mirror of self-knowledge, we see the extent of our self-deception—plus our unconscious pursuit of suffering.

Inner tyranny’s dynamics elude us.

That’s a shocking thing to say. Instinctively, we deny being so foolish. But hear me out. Consider the perilous state of the world. It’s no coincidence that a supreme narcissist is U.S. president. Our psychological blindness—on the political right, left, and center—precipitated this peril. Yet we go on blaming each other.

Bear with me here as I show how our psychological ignorance is tied directly to political turmoil and social disharmony. Civilization and democracy are being undermined from within, and we’re not seeing clearly enough how we each contribute to this dysfunction. In this post, I first discuss this inner dysfunction before addressing the political fallout.

When burdened with emotional and behavioral issues, we are often told that our brain is having trouble sorting things out and that pharmaceuticals can handle the problem. But our emotional troubles are usually more psychological than biological. Stubbornly, many of us cling to emotional suffering and take that suffering to the grave. We can find consoling dignity and self-righteousness in suffering. Good psychotherapy strips away that false dignity as it exposes the folly of needless suffering.

Most of us experience some degree of inner conflict. This inner conflict, when persistent and unrecognized, produces a widespread mental-health dysfunction known as neurosis. This neurosis, whether mild or severe, infringes on our freedom. We’re restricted by what our neurosis imposes on us. When especially oppressive, neurosis subjects us to inner tyranny. We’re locked into acting against our best interests. Many apparently successful people can be neurotic or have troublesome pockets of neurosis. This dysfunction radiates outward into the family, community, and nation.

We can see the wiles and dynamics of outer tyranny—but inner tyranny’s dynamics elude us. Here is my understanding of this inner world: At any given moment, we can be thinking and acting under the influence of five centers of mental and emotional processing. They are the conscious ego, followed by (2), the passive, defensive, unconscious ego (inner passivity); (3), the aggressive, harsh, punishing superego (inner critic); (4), the covetous, crude id; and (5), our redeeming better or best self. Throughout the day, our consciousness can shift in and out of identifications with all five centers. These centers are experienced as thoughts, impulses, drives, passions, and even voices. Clashes and struggles for dominance, justification, and validation persist among these centers, producing the inner conflict that causes moodiness, misery, depression, and self-defeat.

The first of these centers, our conscious ego, has a certain frailty, and it’s anxious about its place and standing in the world. We tend to be aware of identifying with this conscious ego, but we’re likely unaware of how we can also identify with the next three centers—unconscious ego, superego, and id. We don’t recognize their adverse influence upon us. Through the conscious ego (usually our primary sense of self), we scramble around trying to protect or enhance our self-image. This conscious ego has, at best, only consolations (advice, tips, pats on the back) for emotional discord churning inside. When we’re suffering, our conscious ego and unconscious ego typically feel injured, humiliated, or defeated.

The unconscious ego is a major player, along with the superego, in the inner conflict that plagues humanity. When we identify with the weak, unconscious ego, we have only its fearful and passive defensiveness to protect us from the self-aggressive superego. In this clash of raw aggression versus abject passivity, we can see what is primitive, perverse, and malicious in human nature. As we acquire more awareness of this major inner conflict, our insight enables our better self to emerge and bring peace and wisdom to our psyche and to humanity.

Inner conflict needs content in the form of memories, speculations, and emotional reactions to daily life. This content merges with lingering, unresolved hurts from the past. We carry into adulthood a tendency, even a compulsion, to recycle eight first hurts experienced in childhood (feelings of refusal, deprivation, control, helplessness, criticism, rejection, betrayal, and abandonment). Children are biologically limited in their ability to be objective, and they assume their hurts have genuinely been inflicted upon them. For instance, a boy might feel rejected because he falsely believes that “mommy loves little sister more than me.” As an adult, he can be neurotically invested in feeling rejected.

Inner conflict, as mentioned, is processed through the conscious ego, unconscious ego, superego, and id. Churning up the eight first hurts from childhood, inner conflict produces guilt, shame, self-doubt, anxiety, self-justifications, regrets, indecision, procrastination, worst-case speculations, and scores more symptoms. Entangled in this emotional mess, we tend to blame the supposed malice of people and the hardships of life for the misery and self-defeat we largely self-generate. Often, we blame ourselves but for wrong reasons, for instance claiming we’re lazy when the deeper problem is inner conflict’s cultivation of self-doubt, self-abandonment, and helplessness.

Initially, it’s shocking to see that we’ve been blundering blindly in this chaos, activating and enduring (recycling and replaying) inner conflict with its consequential suffering. We recycle repeatedly, as inner conflict, the eight unresolved hurts from our past, largely because our conscious and unconscious egos are too weak, too insubstantial, to overcome inner conflict. To overcome it, we need the strength of our better self. (To get a sense of this dysfunction and our unawareness of it, read my 2022 post, “The Emotional Conflict Behind 50 Mental-Health Symptoms.”)

An example of compulsive suffering is the irrational fear—the worry and anxiety—that arises through the unconscious willingness of many of us to feel helplessly and passively at the mercy of life. Here’s the conflict: Consciously, we want to feel strong, but unconsciously we gravitate emotionally to weakness, helplessness, and passivity. Blind to our entanglement in this standoff, our mind churns up dubious rationalizations (such as claiming that others are bad or malicious) to “justify” our fear.

With deep insight into our compulsion to “go negative,” we can move beyond our cherished, “precious” egocentricity, that illusory sense of self that feels so authentic. Instead of identifying with our conscious ego (and unconsciously with our unconscious ego), we begin to identify with our “core self” or “essential self,” where our goodness and value become a felt reality.

When the Psyche Poisons Politics

We all have unconscious identifications. Everyday people tend to identify largely with the unconscious subordinate ego. Yet evil lurks here in this center through the harm we do to ourselves. As we identify with this passive ego, we weaken self-regulation and harm ourselves with addictions, indecision, procrastination, self-pity, and anxiety. The subordinate ego harbors a bittersweet, consoling attachment to cultlike submissiveness, which undermines the powers of citizenship. The loss of democracy through this passivity would be a great evil that we would have inflicted upon ourselves and our descendants.

In a pronounced disconnect from their better self, tyrants, psychopaths, criminals, and bullies capitulate to the superego and identify with its inhuman character. Like the superego, they become ruthless and fraternize with evil. They instinctively spot weakness in others and take advantage of it. The current U.S. president and his lieutenants are governed largely by the values and impulses of this primitive aggressive side of the psyche. They want to control, dominate, and overwhelm, and unconsciously they take their cue from the superego’s ethos of cruelty, aggression, dominance, and irrationality.

Everyday people who are receptive (and thereby passive) to this mentality are allowing the evil of cruel, aggressive irrationality to tear down what is good and wise and to supplant civility with hate. They have libidinized (rendered sweet and bittersweet) their passivity to primitive, self-aggrandizing power, as do cult members whose servility to their leader becomes intoxicating.

We “act out” what is unresolved within us. If American politicians, bewitched by the superego’s ruthlessness, were to establish an authoritarian government, citizens would intensely feel two of the first hurts of childhood—control and helplessness. Should an authoritarian government arise, we would be controlled and weakened. We tend to create (or act out) what our conflicted psyche would have us experience. Two other first hurts, betrayal and abandonment, would also be acted out through self-betrayal and self-abandonment. Were autocrats to prevail, we would be their passive enablers. Our emotional resonance with the first hurts of childhood would be acted out.

Leading the charge for political authoritarianism and exorbitant wealth is the rampant narcissism now flooding the modern psyche. Narcissism, which cozies up to the id, is especially resistant to depth psychology’s revelations. Narcissism is not just vanity—it’s a protective shield against the humiliating realization of one’s collusion in suffering. Narcissism breeds evil because it sacrifices people on the altar of militant denial and vainglorious pretensions. We do evil to ourselves when, in unwitting cowardice, we allow narcissism to censor our collusion in self-defeat.

Narcissism is a desperate compensation for denial of one’s better self. Narcissists seek a consoling, misleading “special status” to cope with their inner poverty, their psychological disconnect from their better self. This disconnect is apparent in the ultra-rich who, craving the “special status” of obscene wealth, are driven by the primitive id to acquire it. These neurotics are emotionally overwhelmed by their narcissism, making them prone to evil self-aggrandization, Epstein-style wickedness, and autocratic yearnings.

We all harbor the dynamics that produce evil. It starts with how we betray our better self by passively allowing the superego to rule our inner life and inflict punishing self-aggression upon us. As we get past the shock of seeing our passive participation in suffering, we acquire a radical honesty about our plight. As we see the folly in narcissism, we are, when sincerely seeking growth, ready to reorganize our perceptions around reality rather than fantasy. We acquire the power to bring inner conflict into focus and be responsible emotionally for how we fare in life.

The mentality now running the U.S. government is a tsunami of resistance to psychological awakening. It’s the “need” to blame others and to use anger and aggression to cover up one’s bittersweet emotional resonance with feeling victimized and defeated. Reactive anger and aggression are illusions of strength erected to protect the ego’s pretensions. Like narcissism, this reactionary behavior serves as unconscious compensation for underlying passivity and fear. Reactive anger and aggression exhibit phony power—as do passive-aggressive behaviors, self-righteous indignation, and militant ignorance. The “power” is employed unconsciously to cover up one’s emotional attachment to feeling passively victimized, painfully unworthy, unjustly disrespected, or abjectly powerless. This misery is the sum of inner conflict and the extent of emotional or psychological disconnection from one’s better self.

The Left can also display reactive aggression (and psychological blind spots) through political correctness, righteous certitude, injustice collecting, identification with victimhood’s passivity, and the pose of intellectual superiority. Real power or healthy aggression solves legitimate problems and fosters harmony, while reactive pseudo-aggression stirs up opposition and arouses bitterness.

Once we see the subversive forces at play in our psyche, it’s much easier to stop indulging in self-pity, unworthiness, and victimhood—or to remain stuck in boredom, apathy, or fatalism. All such suffering is beneath us, we realize, as we escape inner conflict and connect with our better self.

We all have a certain innocence here because our folly operates so unconsciously. But like medieval populations wiped out by plagues or children killed in war, innocence doesn’t protect us from reality. Self-knowledge is not rocket science. We’re plenty smart, but our stubborn, self-defeating resistance and psychological defenses fend off inner truth. Let’s be inspired now to find our better self and enthrone inner democracy.

—

Further understanding of these dynamics is available in my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025), available here at Amazon.

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This post is an excerpt from a psychotherapy session I had with a client. The post provides deep insight into aspects of PAS, and it also serves as an example of how my telephone sessions typically proceed. The name Carol is a pseudonym, and the content here has been edited and condensed.

The agony of alienation.

Peter – Hi Carol.

Carol – Hi Peter, how are you?

P –  I’m good. How has your week been?

C – A bit difficult. This week, every day, multiple times a day, I’ve been really angry and full of hate towards my mother. (Her mother died a year earlier.)

P – Oh.

C – I have felt this before, as you know, and I understand that it has something to do with how my old passive feelings with her get stirred up. But I haven’t been able to release the hatred this week. I believe it’s related to the movie I watched recently—”Mommie Dearest”—about the actress Joan Crawford and her daughter Christina. Have you seen the movie?

P – A long time ago.

C – The movie itself was not, you know, very good. But there were a lot of similarities between our mothers. I made a lot of connections watching it.

P – That sounds important.

C – The problem is that it resulted in … all of these connections resulted in this stronger hatred of my mother (nervous laughter). I’ll give you a couple of examples.

P – Okay.

C – So, is it okay to talk about the movie?

P – Yes, for sure.

C – You’re not going to watch it again, probably. It’s not really all that great of a movie in, like, production value.

P – I see.

C – So, Christina Crawford, Joan Crawford’s daughter, would get lots of presents for her birthday, and Joan, who was her adoptive mother, let her select one present for herself and then make her give the others away after writing thank-you notes for them.

P – Oh, so controlling!

C – When I was six years old, instead of having birthday parties, I had these charity yard sales for the Lord, where I would sell all these things and then give the money to people in need. And it started out like … it was a school for kids with physical handicaps, and I would give the funds to them, and it grew to supporting a bunch of kids in Haiti at an orphanage. This happened every year from the time I was six.

P – It was a one-day event, was it?

C – Yeah – once a year.  In my first year when I was six years old, I earned sixteen dollars. But you know to a six-year-old that was a lot. And then they became these really huge events, so by the time I finished—the last one I did when I was a senior in high school—it was like $7,000 or something.

P – That was a lot!

C – I started organizing them in early January and my birthday is in March. That’s when the sale would be, and leading up to it people would bring me stuff to sell and I would spend so much time organizing it and getting all the work done for it. When I was 13, I was going to spend the summer in Haiti and work in this orphanage where the proceeds from those birthday yard sales were going. And that year my mother told me that God wanted me to use the money from the sale to pay for my plane ticket to Haiti. And so, I did.

P – Do you remember having any feelings about that? Any resentment? Or any sense of unfairness?

C – I didn’t at the time. I didn’t make any connections. I believed that what mom told me was that God did, in fact, want me to do that, so that’s what I did. I guess it was just this week that I started to make those connections that, you know, clearly mom didn’t want to pay for my plane ticket to Haiti, and that’s the reason she said that and yet it was … She was the one who was encouraging me to do this ever since I was six. And I really – I really don’t have any recollections about why I started doing that. Every year on mom’s birthday, I always sent her flowers because somewhere along the line I became convinced that she was the one who did all the work on my birthday, so she should be the one who gets the gifts (nervous laughter). In that movie, Christina Crawford did things like that for her mom, too.

P – I see.

C – In the movie, it was so obvious that Joan was using Christina’s birthday for publicity stunts to make herself look good.

P – Yes.

C – Seeing the movie made me think of my birthdays over the years. I think my mother was doing the same thing. And so, like now I hate my birthdays. I just had one this week. In the past, I couldn’t stand the attention, I hated the gifts, I’m always second guessing everybody’s motivation for even small expressions of birthday greetings. So, this week I guess I saw the connection between all of this, and I’ve been hating her all week (nervous laughter).

P – I see.

C – So, the situations are similar. My mother was celebrated locally for her generosity. But she would often have emotional breakdowns, “health events” I called them, when she couldn’t deal with me. I would go to stay with my grandparents, and I enjoyed them a lot.

P – That was a consolation, I’m sure.

C – Yeah. So, I guess I’m like … so I guess I’d like to know how my hatred is related to all of this.

P – Clearly your mother had frequently been insensitive and unkind to you [Carol had provided numerous examples of this unkindness in previous sessions]. When you feel this hatred for your mother, some current situation or event might be triggering these negative emotions. I know you said the movie was a trigger for your feelings, and I imagine your birthday was too.

C – Yeah, thinking about my birthday this week, I made the connection that my mom used my birthday for her to look more godly or pious or whatever.

P – Did you ever make that trip to Haiti?

C – I did, yes – I spent the summer of my 13th. I was there for the summer.

P – The whole summer?

C – yes – when I was 13.

P – Just the one time?

C – Yes, just the one summer.

P – How did it happen that you stopped doing the birthday events? You said your senior year was the last one.

C – It was my senior year in high school so I just couldn’t do it when I went to college

P – Yes, of course.

C – So I knew my senior year that this was going to be my last one. Like when I sent them money that year, I said this was going to be my last one.

P – Was that a relief for you?

C – Yes, they had gotten to be such huge and incredibly time-consuming events. I mean, at the time, I still considered myself to be a Christian and thought that – you know – that was what I was supposed to be doing. But the work on the sales was too much … I was glad not to have all that responsibility.

P – Yes, sure.

C – Faye Dunaway played Joan Crawford. I thought Faye made a parody of Crawford. She kind of did the overacting thing. And Christina, of course, wrote the book about it all. I’m planning to listen to an audio of the book.

P – Let me say what I think is involved here on a deep level. It appears that you get particularly hateful with your mother when you are reminded of the ways she took advantage of you, how she manipulated you and used you for her own purposes. The “Mommie Dearest” movie brings back all these old memories and feelings. It’s likely you now resonate emotionally with the degree to which you were innocent and naïve back then, and just unaware about what was happening. You were understandably passive at that age, and that played into all your mother’s tendencies to impose her agenda.

Now, when these old memories arise, your repressed passivity becomes activated, which then causes you distress. It’s the sense of not knowing what was going on, the sense of your innocence, the sense of victimization, of being manipulated and used for your mother’s purposes. As you remember your vulnerability, you process it through your current lingering passivity, which then brings all the hurt and sense of victimization into the present moment. Now hatred arises toward her. Your hatred provides you with the feeling that you have some force or aggression on your side, that you can strike back at her. This sense of force compensates for the old childish passivity that still resonates within you.

So, to avoid acknowledging your entanglement in that old passive sense of self, you generate hatred toward your mother as a compensating sense of aggression. Of course, you’re not acting out the aggression, it just stews inside you. With people in general, this kind of aggression, this feeling of hatred, often isn’t discharged. It just sits painfully inside us.

C – I hear you.

P – You can feel the degree to which your mother wasn’t there for you emotionally. You feel disconnected emotionally from her, abandoned and unloved, but this feeling also produces an emotional disconnection from your stronger, better self. The more you might feel disconnected emotionally from your mother, the more you can unwittingly be generating an emotional disconnection from your better self. With this hatred toward your mother, you’re not quite seeing how, unconsciously, you are using hatred to deny or cover up your willingness to replay and recycle the passive sense of having been so manipulated and used by her. Of course, you were entirely innocent in that passivity, but nonetheless you are still going to feel the hurt of it if you don’t liberate yourself from it. Now you cover up this deeper understanding when, through hatred, you make her out to be cruel villain and the cause of your distress. In other words, you’re hiding from yourself your unconscious willingness to go on feeling mistreated and dominated by her. What I’m saying here is for you to reflect upon, to decide for yourself what is true. Now, in the movie and the book, was Christina blaming her mother, alleging that her mother was the source of all her troubles?

C – Well, she wasn’t really blaming. She kept saying over and over how much she loved her mother. Joan would get sick and not be able to go to an awards ceremony, and Christina would go for her and accept the award and say how much she loved her mother. This was when Christina was an adult. There were also times in the movie when Joan literally tried to kill Christina—choke her and be physically abusive. But I guess there was a time when there was some revenge. Christina and her brother, Christopher, were about the same age and both adopted. They were really close and grew up in the same room and they had a similar experience of Joan Crawford, who then wrote them out of her will and told them they knew why—though they didn’t know why. It was after that that Christina wrote her book.

P – It’s clear that Christina had resentment towards her mother. That resentment is understandable, but Christina would make it all the more painful for herself if she brooded on the sense of being victimized by her mother. Christina would then be generating within herself that unpleasant passive feeling of being submissive and having been victimized. Again, a child’s submission to an adult is biologically to be expected, but when the passivity continues to be recycled when that person becomes an adult, reactions such as resentment, alienation, and hatred are the lingering, painful price to be paid.

All of this mirrors the relationship you had with your mother. What would it feel like if you were just neutral about your mother when you remember those yard sales? Can you see yourself getting to a place where you just felt more neutral? In other words, you want to become strong enough that memories of your mother no longer have the power to generate hatred. The hatred hurts you, not her. How intense were your hateful feelings this past week?

C – I watched the movie last Thursday, six days ago. The feelings popped up when I wasn’t busy doing something else. So, whenever I was driving, I would get that way or whenever I went walking, I would conjure up those feelings.

P – Let me give you some thoughts to reflect upon and repeat to yourself when you catch yourself feeling this hatred. Of course, if you are thinking about your mother in a neutral way, that’s fine. But when bringing up hateful feelings, you can try saying to yourself, “Look what I’m doing here, I’m stirring up passive feelings. I’m indulging in the passive feeling of being so much under my mother’s influence. I’m replaying the feeling of having been submissive to her. And now, as I feel this hate, I’m covering up my willingness to recycle a deep, vulnerable, passive sense of self.”

As you process this insight, try saying to yourself, “Ah, that’s what I’m doing, I’m sneaking into that old passive feeling. And my hatred serves as a psychological defense to cover up my willingness to cozy up to that old, familiar, passive sense of self.”

If you see this clearly, and you hold onto this realization, the hatred should begin to dissipate, at least for the moment. It could soon come back again, but you would recognize once more the part of you that is unconsciously willing to sneak back into that old pain, which is ultimately the weak, passive sense of self to which you remain emotionally attached. Remember, emotional strength gives you the ability to avoid needless suffering. So many people have stubbornly carried this kind of pain to the grave.

C – Well, I couldn’t get there this week. It’s likely that my birthday and seeing the movie made it all more intense.

P – Yes, for sure. I hope now that you make notes of what we’ve said here. Carry the notes around with you in the coming days and weeks, and make a point of reading the content a few times a day. We all have resistance to letting go of our old hurts and identifications. Unconsciously, we readily decline to take in the knowledge that exposes what’s going on in our psyche. So many of us are highly prone to remaining conflicted between wanting to feel strong while, simultaneously, being determined to remain loyal to a weak, limited sense of self. We go back and forth in inner conflict, one minute feeling strong and the next minute feeling painfully entangled in weakness and passivity. We’re likely now to conjure up old, painful memories associated with this weakness.

Was your father always passive with your mother back then … when you were younger, as he was later?

C – My father worked all the time and I’m sure he did so in order to avoid being around her. He would come home and go smoke his pipe and read his paper and not be present.

P – You had no model for someone standing up to her. So, you were in a vulnerable position. But you can change all this. You can become very strong by freeing yourself from the lingering sense of having been so much at her mercy.

C – Clearly, it would have been great if I could have seen Christina’s birthday party situation and then made that connection to my situation without beginning to feel that hatred toward my mom. It’s interesting to me that I hadn’t made that connection before now, the realization that my mother was clearly manipulating my birthday situation to her own ends.

P – In her mind, she probably felt she was making a good Christian of you and being a good mother. She was casting herself in a good light. She was probably in denial, too, that she was using you to look good in the eyes of others.

C – Right, like telling me that God wanted me to use the money to pay for my plane ticket to go to Haiti. She did that as a way to avoid having to pay for it herself.

P – She would have convinced herself she was being kind. Even when she poisoned your horse [backstory from previous sessions], she might have felt like she was doing the best thing for you.

C – I’m sure she did. I have to keep that in mind.

P – That’s more reason for you not to get hung up on the idea that she was treating you maliciously. The more you get hung up on that idea, the more you deepen your own sense of passivity and victimhood. She was trapped in her own dysfunction. Her behavior toward you was a consequence of how entangled she was in her own inner conflict.

C – And that conflict was what?

P – She had no idea of the likely inner conflict, which was wanting on a conscious level to be good, to look good, to be a loving person. But at an unconscious level she was likely filled with self-doubt about her value and thereby trapped in a place of self-abandonment. She might have been emotionally entangled in self-rejection and self-loathing. Instinctively, she would treat you the way she felt about herself. Very likely she was completely unconscious of this. She was manifesting the harmful symptoms of her underlying failure to feel her own goodness and value. But, of course, as a child you took it all personally.

C – As a child, it’s so hard to see a parent with this clarity.

P – Yes, for sure. Now, whenever you’re hating her, you are descending to her level. As you feel the hate, you resonate inwardly with a dark, painful sense of yourself. The more you hate her, the more you disconnect from yourself and can’t feel your goodness. The more you do feel goodness in yourself, the less interested you are in hating her or giving her so much room in your head.

C – It’s probably better if I don’t listen to Christina Crawford’s book.

P – Listening to it could certainly trigger more unpleasant feelings. If Christina, in writing the book, had seen more deeply her own lingering issues or trigger-points with her mother and acknowledged them, then reading the book or listening to it could be worthwhile. But otherwise, the book wouldn’t have value for you. You want now to get past the hatred by recognizing how you can use memories of your mother to recycle—and thereby unconsciously indulge in—your unresolved willingness to rekindle the feeling of being at her mercy. Hatred of others only serves our own misery. It means we’re not connecting with our intrinsic goodness and value.

—

For deeper understanding of these concepts, go here to Amazon to order my highly rated latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025).

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This month I’m posting an excerpt from LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships, by my late wife, Sandra Michaelson. If I knew of a better book on relationships than this one, I would honestly tell you.

This book of Sandra’s, one of three she wrote, helps readers understand that our resistance to feeling loved in a relationship is commonly, unconsciously, and irrationally associated with the sense of being placed in a submissive, passive position. This 390-page book (available here) also examines our tendency to repeat painful experiences with our partner that arise from unresolved hurts from childhood. These hurts, which include feelings of being refused, deprived, controlled, criticized, rejected, and abandoned, can be felt and acted out in our adult life even when we had decent, kind parents.

LoveSmart also explores in depth our tendency to chose partners unwisely, the compulsion to control, why women fear independence, compulsive defensiveness, the need to have one’s point of view validated, the causes and perils of codependency, the struggle to feel one’s authority, sexual fantasies and what they mean, fear of confrontation, and the sabotaging effects of self-centeredness.

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Excerpt from LoveSmart:

Though we claim we want love and struggle for it, most of us unconsciously are terrified of it. We sabotage our prospects for getting love or for keeping what love we have. For example, people repeatedly set themselves up with inappropriate partners. A typical inappropriate partner is a substance abuser, someone who lives far away, is married to another person, or is emotionally unavailable, egotistical, or corrupt in some manner.

With such a partner, a loveless relationship is inevitable. Real love is also sabotaged when a man or woman dismisses a genuine, caring person because that person is allegedly unexciting or sexually inadequate. Nice, caring partners do not provide the exciting though painful emotional dramas that many are addicted to. I have seen individuals divorce their partner after the partner has made positive changes.

“For years I pursued my husband for love and affection,” one woman told me. “He was so cold and distant. Then he went to a growth workshop and came back totally different. He was open, loving, and far more responsive to me. I have to tell you that it really frightened me. I backed off the relationship. We haven’t had sex in over a year.”

This woman’s parents had been emotionally distant. She said she had never felt wanted, that her mother especially regarded her as a burden. “When my husband began to show his love for me,” she said, “I realized that I wasn’t used to being loved. It made me feel weird inside. It just went against everything I’d ever experienced. So I’d make up some excuse or talk about dumb things to discourage him from getting close to me.”

Positive changes in our partner force us to consider whether we really do want love. To get it, we have to discard our emotional investment in neglect and hurt. The elimination of our partner’s opposition causes us to fall back on ourselves and come to terms with the lack of love for ourselves.

Carl and Rena had been married for twenty years. Both said their relationship was dead. Here’s how Rena explained their situation: “We’ve always lived through the kids or our work. That was the connection that held us together. I don’t know what we’re going to do with each other when all our kids leave home. We rarely communicate our personal feelings about each other. I know we both have a problem opening up our hearts to each other.”

Rena explored the origins of her fear of expressing her love more openly. “I felt that if I loved my father that would affirm his self-centeredness and affirm that he was okay, when I felt thoroughly disappointed in him. The only way I could hold on to my own identity was to not love, not respond to him, and not let him see how I was affected by him. Dad often gave hugs when he was drunk. I felt repelled by his love, as if he was exposing some perverse need with me. I had to give in to my father, keep my mouth shut about his behaviors and listen patiently to his self-centered prattle. Dad related to us kids through work. He gave us endless chores and, of course, we were to stand by to help him do things around the house. There was no other relationship with him. There was no interest in my opinions, needs, or feelings. Everything centered on him and what we could do for him.”

Rena became an emotional support for her mother, compensating for father’s neglect. Being loved by her mother meant sharing mutual pain. “The more independent and happy I would become,” Rena observed, “the less I would receive from her. If I was needy or having problems, Mom was right there ready to help. But I felt I had to be in a reduced or helpless position to get love.”

Rena grew up associating love with suffering and loss of pride. It felt that love meant being a resource for the satisfaction of other people’s needs. Like so many of us, she had never had the experience of simply being loved for who she was. Consequently, love terrified her. It was alien to her, a mode of expression that seemed out of reach.

Her husband, Carl, meanwhile, was intimidated by her. He saw her as strong and assertive, and took his cues from her behavior. For example, he wouldn’t approach her if he saw her in a bad mood. Things had to be just right before he would initiate anything. Carl didn’t want to make waves; he submerged himself for fear of being rejected or seen as inadequate. His mother had been strong and intimidating. She had run the household, insisting that none of her children had the right to complain or talk back. Carl kept his feelings to himself, burying them under endless chores and duties. Like Rena, he felt that loving his mother meant submission to her control, giving in to her agenda. If he loved, he believed he would lose himself in her domination.

Many of us associate love with giving up something of ourselves because our feelings of love are contaminated by our childhood experience. Although many of us know and feel that our parents loved us as best they could, we also feel that their love was conditional, based on our compliance and performance. Parts of us were denied or repressed, while only so-called appropriate behaviors were accepted and appreciated. No society has ever accepted a child in his totality and most likely never will. To accept a child totally is impossible. So, repression necessarily exists and everyone has to face at some point the parts he or she has repressed.

Feeling that we are wrong as we are, we start putting ourselves down, even hating ourselves. If you hate yourself, how can you imagine anyone loving you? Deep inside you believe that no one is going to love you. Even if someone tries, you can’t believe him. Something must be wrong with him if he loves you. So you find ways to prove that he doesn’t love you. And you relax only when you find the proof.

As we grow older, those repressed, denied parts of ourselves reassert themselves into our consciousness and we try to force them back down again. We become afraid to encounter ourselves because we will have to encounter everything we’ve denied. Relationships are intense and they bring to the surface those old, denied parts of ourselves. We perform some fancy footwork to avoid getting too close and too involved. The problem is that we can only become whole by exposing and then accommodating or assimilating our repressed or denied aspects.

To love sincerely means you are at peace with yourself. You have come to terms with the denied parts of your being. This is much different from narcissistic self-love which involves a preoccupation with an image rather than true substance. Narcissistic self-love is a compensation for feeling unworthy or inferior.

Genuine self-love means that you do not need anyone to say to you, “You’re wonderful, you’re important to me.” You do not need anyone to acknowledge your greatness or proclaim your skills and talents. Your meaning or purpose doesn’t come from others. You do not go around like a beggar looking for validation. This is a way of being with yourself, of loving and accepting yourself as you are, whether you are alone or in a relationship with another.

Love doesn’t mean something you give or do for others. Love is the quality of your being. When you drop the need to be needed, you feel grateful to be loved; but if love isn’t there, you do not complain. You can be happy with or without acknowledgment or appreciation. That’s because you have learned to live with yourself and be happy with yourself. Now your relationship becomes a sacred happening.

Think of it. Have any of you ever felt reverence for your partner? Are you able to feel reverence for yourself and the divine in your heart? When you connect with the divine nature that is your authentic self, you see the divine in your partner and in all life forms. A new doorway has been opened for you.

—

LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships is available here.

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I have been hesitant to do much with artificial intelligence. Certainly, I haven’t used it as an aid in the composition of my posts or books. I didn’t want even the possibility that a machine would be doing the thinking for me on the vital subject of mental health.

The AI summary emphasizes the role of inner conflict.

We all understand the hazards of creating machines that could become more astute and powerful than us. Many people, disconnected from their better self, tend to become subordinate to strong forces or individuals. Heaven help us if this tendency prevails with artificial intelligence.

I was curious, though, about AI’s understanding of depth psychology, and I wondered whether it had taken note of my work. I asked Google’s basic AI function to provide a synopsis of “psychotherapist Peter Michaelson’s understanding of depth psychology.” I was pleased with the results. Some of the wording in the AI content is a bit clumsy, but the essence of my posts and books is quite accurately presented.

This AI version of this deep knowledge might have value for many readers. The AI presentation itself might make the knowledge more accessible to some people. As well, readers who want to understand how depth psychology, as I present it, pertains to their own experiences and issues can ask AI for help. You can enter the symptoms you are dealing with as you ask AI how underlying psychological insights, as I present them, serve as remedy and healing.

This post consists mostly of AI’s answers to my questions. If any of you have uncertainty about the answers you get, let me know by email and I’ll try to provide more clarity. Here we go:

. . . Michaelson’s understanding of depth psychology centers on the idea that human suffering is primarily caused by unresolved inner conflicts and unconscious emotional attachments, a perspective he has refined over decades of practice and outlined in numerous books and on his website WhyWeSuffer.com. His approach aims to render complex depth psychology concepts into easily understood, practical self-help information, focusing on bringing these unconscious dynamics into conscious awareness to achieve inner freedom and personal fulfillment.

The Core of Suffering: Unresolved Inner Conflict and Emotional Attachments

The foundational principle of Michaelson’s approach is that individuals unconsciously choose to experience painful, negative emotions because they are emotionally attached to these familiar feelings, often stemming from childhood experiences. The psyche, in its totality, remains bound to these patterns, which generate chronic unhappiness, even when conscious desires point toward joy and fulfillment. This “deadly flaw,” as he calls it in one of his books, involves a perpetual inner conflict between our conscious aspirations (e.g., the wish to be loved and respected) and the unconscious expectation and readiness to feel negative assessments (e.g., being criticized, rejected, or abandoned).

This central conflict manifests in a wide array of symptoms, including:

Low self-esteemAddictions and compulsionsIndecision and procrastinationAnxiety and depressionSelf-sabotage and failure

These symptoms act as surface-level expressions of the deeper, hidden emotional attachments and inner conflicts, which the individual is often completely unaware of without focused insight.

The Role of Inner Passivity and the Inner Critic

Two key components in Michaelson’s framework are “inner passivity” and the “inner critic.”

Inner passivity refers to an aspect of the unconscious mind that filters perceptions of reality, creating a distorted sense of self and binding the individual to a second-hand, unauthentic experience of life. This dynamic manifests as feelings of helplessness, being overwhelmed, and indecisiveness, which ultimately serve to maintain the status quo of suffering by resisting change and self-knowledge.The inner critic is a voice that constantly criticizes the self, which is then defended against by inner passivity, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of internal strife. The individual becomes emotionally attached to these patterns of self-criticism and inner defensiveness, making change difficult without acquiring deeper awareness.

The Path to Healing: Insight and Conscious Choice

Michaelson emphasizes that while we are “wired” for both negative and positive emotions, we have the power to change our attachments to the former. The primary intervention point is acquiring insight—seeing these inner conflicts and emotional attachments clearly.

The process involves:

Becoming aware of the specific emotional attachments (e.g., to rejection, criticism, deprivation) that drive symptomatic behavior.Tracing surface symptoms back to these underlying emotions to identify the true source of distress.Making a conscious choice to break free from these patterns, which involves challenging the allure of “self-pity’s wily lies” and resisting the urge to recycle painful past emotions.Sustaining effort to patiently and kindly support the self through the struggle of breaking free, a process that can lead to self-respect and connection with one’s authentic “better self”.

By transforming this inner knowledge into practical action and acquiring self-knowledge, suffering can become a distant memory, leading to greater inner freedom, creativity, and the capacity for genuine intimacy and love. Michaelson’s approach is designed to guide individuals toward this “inner truth,” an ongoing journey of self-discovery and growth.

This framework is applied not just to individual well-being but also to understanding societal dysfunctions, such as political power grabs or climate-change inaction, suggesting that collective behaviors are also driven by these same underlying psychological forces. . .

Next, I asked AI for a synopsis of the main points in my 2025 book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly. (Note there is some overlap with what is said above.)

Core Argument

The central premise of Exposed is that individuals, through an internal process of inner conflict, unconsciously choose misery and wallow in self-pity, even when consciously desiring success and happiness. This is due to powerful emotional attachments to past suffering that originated in childhood.

Key Concepts

The Eight Primary Hurts: Michaelson identifies eight core unresolved negative emotions from childhood that drive adult misery: feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned. We become emotionally “addicted” to re-experiencing these painful states throughout our lives.Inner Conflict: These emotional attachments create a major inner conflict between our conscious wish to be strong, worthy, and loved, versus the unconscious tendency to perpetuate feelings of weakness, unworthiness, and being unlovable. This conflict involves a primitive “inner critic” (superego) that attacks the defensive, passive unconscious ego, creating a constant internal struggle.Inner Passivity: This [centered in the unconscious ego] is a crucial, often-overlooked component of the psyche that makes individuals feel overwhelmed, helpless, and indecisive. Inner passivity is the weakness that prevents people from caring for, protecting, or valuing themselves, making them susceptible to stress and self-sabotage. It operates as a psychological defense mechanism, creating a distorted reality to avoid painful self-knowledge.Psychological Resistance: The book describes how people resist acquiring the very knowledge that could free them from suffering. This resistance is an inner battle between the wish to know the truth about the self and the wish to remain in a state of willful ignorance, as this knowledge initially insults the ego’s assumed centrality.

Path to Resolution

Exposed is not merely a description of pathology; it is intended as a practical guide to liberation. Michaelson asserts that acquiring specific self-knowledge is the key to breaking free from these self-defeating patterns.

Insight and Awareness: By recognizing the precise nature of one’s emotional attachments and inner conflicts, individuals gain the wisdom and strength to disengage from the compulsion to recycle past hurts.Conscious Choice: The process involves making a conscious choice to abandon the “sweetest misery” of self-pity and build inner strength and self-respect.Authentic Self: The ultimate goal is to move beyond ego-identification to connect with the authentic, “better self,” leading to greater inner freedom, creativity, and the capacity for genuine intimacy.

By shedding light on these hidden dynamics, Exposed aims to empower readers to overcome personal misery and contribute to a more functional society, suggesting that collective folly arises from these same underlying psychological weaknesses.

I next asked AI why it’s so hard for people to recognize their inner conflict.

According to Michaelson, it is difficult for people to recognize their inner conflict due to powerful, unconscious psychological dynamics, primarily psychological resistance and the strength of their ego identification. These mechanisms work to keep painful, self-defeating patterns out of conscious awareness, even as they cause chronic misery.

Key reasons why this recognition is so hard include:

Insult to the Ego: Acknowledging deep inner conflicts and the extent to which one is unconsciously driven by them is a profound blow to the ego, which identifies with being conscious, rational, and in control. People resist self-knowledge that undermines their self-image as masters of their own lives. Carl Jung noted this human tendency as a “fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous”.The Unconscious Nature of the Conflict: The inner conflict operates largely within the unconscious mind, involving a primitive inner critic and a passive unconscious ego. Because these dynamics are not readily accessible to conscious awareness, people remain oblivious to the true source of their distress. They only experience the surface symptoms (anxiety, depression, self-sabotage), not the underlying cause.Emotional Attachments to Suffering: Paradoxically, people develop emotional attachments to familiar negative feelings and the “sweet misery” of self-pity, often stemming from unresolved childhood hurts (e.g., feeling rejected or helpless). This attachment creates a hidden “loyalty to the old, conflicted self” and an internal resistance to change and a new, healthier identity.Inner Passivity as a Blind Spot: A key component is “inner passivity,” an aspect of the psyche that is a “weak link” in consciousness. This passivity filters reality and makes individuals feel overwhelmed and helpless, further preventing them from actively seeking or acknowledging the truth about their inner workings.Defense Mechanisms: The psyche employs various defense mechanisms, such as denial, rationalization, and projection, to protect the conscious mind from the painful feelings and thoughts associated with the inner conflict. These defenses distort perception, making it difficult to see the problem clearly or own one’s participation in the suffering.Lack of Specific Knowledge: Michaelson argues that this type of deep psychological knowledge is largely new to most people, and without a clear theoretical framework (the “key”) to understand these hidden dynamics, they simply do not know what to look for or how to interpret their own feelings and behaviors.

In essence, the difficulty in recognizing inner conflict stems from a powerful, self-perpetuating system of psychological denial and the allure of maintaining a familiar (if miserable) status quo rather than facing unsettling inner truths.

AI asked at this point, “Which specific defense mechanism would you like to explore further to better understand this resistance?” I replied, “The defense of ‘taking blame for the lesser crime’.”

In Michaelson’s depth psychology, the defense of “taking the blame for the lesser crime” is a subtle and powerful maneuver of the unconscious mind to avoid acknowledging a deeper, more painful underlying psychological issue, typically inner passivity or the emotional attachment to past suffering. By accepting blame for a relatively minor character flaw or symptom (the “lesser crime”), the individual protects their ego from the “greater crime” of their unwitting participation and collusion in their own unhappiness.

This defense mechanism operates as follows:

Pleading Guilty to the Symptom: A person might consciously acknowledge being foolish, stubborn, lazy, selfish, or indecisive. These are the “lesser crimes” or symptoms of a deeper problem.Avoiding the Core Issue: By focusing all the guilt and self-criticism on the symptom, the individual diverts attention from the true, underlying psychological source of misery, which is often an emotional attachment to feeling helpless, rejected, or deprived.The Illusion of Control: Accepting blame for a flaw can provide an illusion of control—”I am lazy, but I can fix that by trying harder”—which is less threatening than acknowledging a fundamental inner passivity that makes one feel powerless and overwhelmed by life.Managing the Inner Critic: The defense is also a way to manage the “inner critic” (superego). The individual makes a “guilty plea” to a lesser charge, and in return, the inner critic accepts this punishment (in the form of guilt, shame, or anxiety), allowing the person to continue functioning without facing the full force of their guilt or shame for their deeper inner weakness.Maintaining Self-Deception: The ultimate function is self-deception, which preserves the ego’s sense of integrity and autonomy, even though that autonomy is an illusion and the person remains trapped in a cycle of suffering.

For example, a person might focus intently on feeling guilty about a mistake they made at work (“I’m so stupid for making that error”—the “lesser crime”), rather than confronting the deeper, more painful reality that they are emotionally attached to being criticized and feeling fundamentally unworthy (the “greater crime”).

AI is tapping into all my books and posts. This vital knowledge, what I claim to be the deep truth about human nature, is free for everyone. I hope though that readers will still buy my books—writers like to make a little money for all their hard work, and my income goes to supporting and expanding this knowledge. The books are here on Amazon.

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Power grabs are ransacking America’s best traditions and virtues, and psychological forces are driving this behavior. Those in power grab for more power to compensate for how overwhelmed they feel as the world’s growing dangers and complexity worsen. Everyday people are also feeling overwhelmed, and this hidden weakness can be our downfall.

Recognize your hidden passivity.

This emotional weakness sparks reactive anger, as well as apathy, fatalism, and the pursuit of idle distractions and self-centered interests. We’re not seeing how national and world dysfunction and chaos arise from our lack of psychological insight.

Our political and business leaders are overwhelmed, and their self-serving frenzy is a psychological reaction to this weakness. Technology companies are jockeying to become richer and more dominant. Aggressive land grabs and water grabs are underway to provide for the demands of data processing. The stock market’s recent exuberance is a Wall Street power-and-money grab. Computing power chasing wealth and political power surges from sea to sea, gearing up to disempower labor, violate privacy, and undermine freedom.

Congress fails to regulate this because so many of its members are themselves egotistic power-seekers. They identify with the power- grabbers, not with the people.

Self-serving people can defeat us if our hidden weakness, the unseen passivity that’s baked into our inner conflict, goes unnoticed and unaddressed. The chaos and dysfunction reflect the degree to which neurosis, in the form of inner conflict, is the great plague upon the nation and the world.

While neurotics suffer with much needless misery and self-defeat, they still can manage to wend their way through life and have decent lives. But over past decades, our struggle to manage our emotional temperament has been challenged in new ways. Technology has produced weapons of mass destruction and deadly climate hazards. The internet has laid the world at our doorstep, which for many overextends their mind and leaves them feeling helpless to process it all. Television and social media have shoved hot-tempered, clashing ideologies in our face, upending our cultural and religious norms. Wealthy celebrities, athletes, and business leaders are paraded before us, leaving us gasping for a sense of our own value. We’re having to contend emotionally with terrorism, superbugs, overwhelming debt, and inflation. Change has been happening too quickly for many of us to assimilate emotionally. People feel more overwhelmed, even as we’re doomscrolling, and the underlying passivity involved here goes unnoticed.

Feeling overwhelmed arises from inner conflict, a psychological disharmony that often operates unconsciously. In large part, the conflict pits inner self-doubt and unconscious passivity against our harsh inner critic. Because of this conflict, we’re more susceptible to negative emotions and self-defeating behaviors. Anger and resentment, for instance, are now more readily triggered. Our aggressive inner critic can now attack us with allegations such as, “What’s the matter with you, you fool! Everyone is doing better than you!” Inner conflict is activated, and we become engaged in defensive-aggressive inner dialogue that can operate unconsciously.

Once self-aggression is activated, it can quickly direct itself outward as projections—as aggressive, angry thoughts and impulses toward others. We start to blame others, often with increasing hostility, in our passive readiness to feel like victims. The intensity of our hostility mirrors the degree to which we have abandoned our better self. The outwardly directed aggression now feels like power, which serves as a consolation for the underlying passivity associated with emotional weakness and self-abandonment. The more people feel helpless, the more they can be desperate to feel power, even illusions of it. They’re more likely to be abusive with their reactive expressions of power or forcefulness. They’re also more likely to be fearful, run off and buy guns, or be swayed by TV “news” that tells them they’re justified in their fear and anger.

People go back and forth in anxious inner dialogue trying to make sense of life and their growing distress. They descend into self-pity, acrimony, and increasing irrationality. Now they are more easily overwhelmed by the pace of change and by their own sense of helplessness.

The psyche of the elites is not necessarily any different than that of regular folk, so these elites, in their own emotional, passive reactions to the world’s growing dangers and complexity, rush off in a frenzy to activate power grabs and consolidate them. Imagine the damage to us all as they increasingly use the power of artificial intelligence to enhance and consolidate this unconsciously driven misbehavior.

The power-grabbers lack a sense of goodness and decency, and they would readily bring us down to their level. They are likely to succeed if we don’t understand our own deeper nature. We all have a certain passive identification within us that lingers from the many years we spent in the passive, relatively helpless experience of childhood. Even as teenagers, we’re still dependent on parental oversight. We don’t magically become fully autonomous and mature when we turn twenty-one. Our struggles as adults—our issues with self-doubt, fear, depression, anxiety, guilt, shame, addictions—all originate from emotional, childish weakness. Again, this weakness is held in place by our inner conflict. The weakness can be recognized and overcome through a deeper appreciation of how our psyche operates through patterns of conflict that can seriously degrade our potential.

Mental health services, themselves overwhelmed with a deluge of competing theories of treatment, are not sufficiently effective. Sadly, the psychological establishment has not been recognizing and teaching the deeper dynamics of inner conflict. There’s no consensus on the essential nature of our dysfunction. No truth has been widely established. All we have are theories and competing methodologies. We are engaged in a global war for truth, even as, through psychological resistance, we keep vital inner truths from ourselves.

The power grab now happening is a reaction to an underlying sense of helplessness, a weakness generated by inner conflict, that leaves us feeling overwhelmed in these especially challenging times. The elite’s power grab is largely reactive aggression—an unconscious, desperate behavior—that tries to override the deep, underlying sense of feeling overwhelmed by the world’s growing complexity. Through depth psychology, we can expose the inner dynamics that produce this weakness.

Momentous changes are happening, and we can manage this emotionally and mentally if we empower ourselves with more psychological insight. We must awaken to our personal power, integrity, and goodness.

—

For a clear and detailed explanation of inner conflict, consider buying a copy of my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025). It’s inexpensive, highly rated at Amazon, and free of AI. It’s the scoop on why we’re at a life-or-death tipping point in human history.

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Our educational system has not really explained why climate change has been addressed so timidly. The mystery of our inaction lies deep within us, and I will try here to offer some insight from depth psychology.

Why is truth being discounted and evaded?

Some people simply deny that climate change is a problem while others accept the reality of it but decline to take steps to reduce their own carbon footprint. In both groups, a disconnect from one’s better self is at play, and it’s that emotional or psychological disconnect that I address here.

When I asked Google for background on the subject, its AI function, Gemini, reported:

Climate change denial stems from psychological barriers like cognitive biases, ideological worldviews, and motivated thinking, which lead individuals to ignore evidence due to a desire to maintain comfort, identity, or political alignments. Factors such as psychological distance (perceiving the issues as far away in time or space), distrust in experts, and economic dependencies also contribute to denial. Overcoming denial involves acknowledging these psychological factors rather than dismissing them, and framing climate action in ways that align with people’s values and identity.

This statement is not sufficiently insightful. Why do people perceive the issues as far away in time or space? Why do they distrust experts? Why do people not care enough about future generations to make sacrifices for them? Why is truth being discounted and evaded? Let’s get to the bottom of this.

Humans have a self-centered nature that can impede our capacity to be wise and loving. I suspect that modern influences have made this self-centeredness more problematic, tipping us and our culture into narcissism with its tendency to ignore what’s true and even to actively evade the truth.

Consumerism, I believe, has had a significant influence upon the expansion of narcissism. Consumerism and its manipulative marketing have catered to the human ego. Consumerism has instilled in us a heightened sense of privilege and entitlement. I remember once in my early twenties when, with bank financing, I was able to buy a cool Chevy Impala. I said to myself, “It’s so amazing that I, with my scanty assets, should be able to possess this amazing machine.” My esteem was boosted artificially.

By the mid-1900s, technology had made it possible to defy the boundaries of nature. We were able to drive effortlessly at 60 miles an hour or fly from continent to continent in mere hours. Just fifty years earlier, such powers had seemed inconceivable. This rapid technological leap affected us psychologically, though that didn’t register consciously.

Also back at mid-century, celebrity worship was becoming more common. Movie and TV stars were being promoted as avatars of humanity. Movie star magazines were huge sellers. These celebrities mesmerized us because we saw in them a grandeur we so much wished to feel in ourselves. Movie screens flashed their faces ten feet high in front of us. Unwittingly, we identified with them and compared our circumstances to theirs, which made us more self-centered.

Now we can also kindle a narcissistic instinct when buying a lottery ticket and imagining ourselves being crowned among the “elite.” People can get this artificial boost in self-esteem by owing an assault weapon or a big gas-guzzling truck. With this mentality, we don’t want to be bothered by the needs of future generations. Our intelligence and rationality are impoverished by artificially induced desires and high-powered possessions.

Psychotherapist Alexander Lowen, author Narcissism: Denial of the True Self (1983), said in that book he was astounded by the degree of narcissism he began to encounter by the 1980s. This contrasted with the common repressed neurosis he had treated three decades earlier. Narcissism denotes an investment in one’s image as opposed to one’s self, Lowen wrote. “Narcissists love their image, not their real self.”

The narcissist (or someone far enough along that spectrum) is an evader of truth, both inner and outer truth. Narcissists shun certain truths, many vital to wellbeing, because those truths expose the poverty of their inner life. Sacrificing comforts for the common good feels to them like a dimming of their self-centered point of view and a risk to their self-serving agenda. They live by the self-aggrandizing slogan, “Get all you can for yourself.” That insular mentality ignores existing and impending climate havoc.

The narcissism feels so precious, like the sum of who we are. We feel much resistance to letting go of it. For old people, it makes it harder to die peacefully.

Narcissism seduces people because they feel comfort or reassurance in the sense of grandiosity. But narcissists are also susceptible to great misery when their grandiosity is not validated by others or even when their existence goes largely unnoticed. They become more desirous of possessions not so much for an object itself but as “evidence” of their significance and worthiness. Now they’re operating out of emotional weakness. They’re dependent on their assets or on attention from others in order to maintain a fragile egocentricity. Having a stable ego is all fine and dandy, providing we understand that our ego is the operating system of a limited, superficial consciousness. For many of us, an ego-centered sense of self is the best we can do, and with it we can live an okay life. But it is still an unreliable director of our best and highest interests.

With narcissism, critical thinking is diminished. When our mental powers are weakened, we’re more likely to be under the influence of echo chambers, groupthink, confirmation bias, propaganda, tribalism, and blatant disinformation. We’re not accessing the maturity and wisdom that comes natural to our better self. To deal effectively with climate change, we must be at our best.

For climate safety, the world likely requires the kind of heroic, focused effort that Americans undertook on the home front during World War II. But the extent of narcissism now makes such sacrifice improbable. It’s no accident we have elected a president who appears to have a narcissistic personality disorder and who adamantly discounts the threat of climate change. Our votes reflect our mentality. While only a small percentage of voters are narcissistic in the extreme, people will still vote for a politician who excites their deposits of that mentality.

I asked Gemini, “Is narcissism a factor in climate change denial?” Gemini replied, “Yes, narcissism, particularly collective narcissism, can be a factor in climate change denial. Research indicates a link between higher levels of national collective narcissism and lower acceptance of climate change.” (In this context, I’m giving AI credit for being accurate in its generalized assessments.)

I also asked, why do people who accept the reality of climate change still refuse to do anything about it? Gemini’s answer, a mishmash of mainstream thinking, spins us helplessly in circles.

People accept climate change but don’t act due to psychological barriers like short-term thinking and abstract threats, practical concerns such as lifestyle sacrifices and perceived futility, and political factors like ideological opposition to policy solutions. Inaction can also stem from misinformation, a lack of clear personal connections to the impacts of climate change, and the belief that technological innovation will solve the problem without major lifestyle changes.

Our understanding improves as we go deeper into the nature of our weakness. Narcissism makes us more prone to feeling overwhelmed, and thereby weaker, because it cuts us off from our better, stronger self. Narcissists, in fact, are overwhelmed by their egocentricity and inner weakness. They’re overwhelmed when, in possession of political power, they begin to take extreme positions. They’re being overwhelmed when falling under the sway of a neurotic, charismatic leader. They become irrational because their narcissism makes them less intelligent. They’re quicker to feel threatened, often simply from what their imagination is concocting. In their weakness, they’re desperate to feel certainty because they’re too weak to deal with uncertainty. Their certainty provides an illusion of power.

Dealing with climate change can legitimately feel like an overwhelming problem since our economic, social, and cultural systems are so dependent on carbon-based energy. Presumably, the challenge can be met successfully if we’re at our best. Salvation from climate havoc probably depends entirely on our psychological and spiritual growth.

Yet here we are, largely unaware of the dynamics of our inner nature. Those of us not plagued with narcissism can still be weakened by hidden inner conflict. With inner conflict, a passive weak side of us becomes entangled in a hidden dynamic with an aggressive, punishing side (the inner critic). Without our insight, inner conflict usually remains active and debilitating. It causes us to be thin-skinned, indecisive, and prone to self-defeat. It produces injustice collecting and self-pity.

I asked Gemini, “Is inner conflict a factor in climate change denial?”

Yes, inner conflict is a significant factor in climate change denial. Psychological research identifies several mechanisms by which internal distress and conflicting values can lead individuals to deny or dismiss the reality of climate change as a coping strategy. This is often a defense against feelings of guilt, fear, and helplessness.

Next, I asked, “Does the general population have a good understanding of inner conflict?” Gemini replied:

Most people have an incomplete, rather than a good, understanding of inner conflict. While they can recognize and describe their own internal struggles on a surface level, they often lack insight into the deeper, unconscious psychological dynamics that drive these conflicts. The general understanding tends to be limited to the conscious experience of indecision or distress, without recognizing the underlying motives and fears.

There you have it. These “underlying motives and fears” account for most of our personal and collective dysfunction. For a clear and detailed explanation of inner conflict, consider buying a copy of my latest book, Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025). It’s inexpensive, highly rated at Amazon, and free of AI. It’s the scoop on why we’re at a life-or-death tipping point in human history.

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It makes sense to me that the world is in such a mess. I see the problem as the cumulative effect of all the neurosis that plagues humankind. My books and articles have tried to expose the nature of this neurosis, which basically consists of varieties of inner conflict and our unconscious determination to experience this conflict along with its negative reverberations.

Growing our awareness.

We are so resistant to seeing this conflict in ourselves because, through our ego identification, we hate to acknowledge the extent to which we are unaware of these important dynamics and so foolish as to allow this self-defeat and needless suffering to occur. Carl Jung expressed this human predicament in these words: “Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous.”

The “true religion” in this quotation refers to our ego identification, which is monotheistic in our adherence to it, and which bestows upon us a dualistic, self-centered consciousness. The “fanatical denial” Jung mentions is our resistance, our refusal to acknowledge the degree to which we are not masters in our own house but very much under the influence of unconscious dynamics that shape our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.

I have a gripe with Jung because, as I see it, he didn’t grapple as vigorously as Freud with the dark side of the psyche. Jung certainly acknowledged the unconscious mind, saying for instance: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” and “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” True, but these aphorisms are not sufficient in themselves. I think Jung was simply baffled by the unconscious, aware of its importance but feeling it to be unfathomable, perhaps as a reflection of how he struggled with mixed results to uncover his own inner dynamics. In his book The Undiscovered Self (1957), he did however warn us that, with humanity’s state of awareness, too many of us would not even recognize evil when it covertly arose up around us and threatened our lives.

It was a New York City psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler, who plunged into the psyche and got into the nuts and bolts of inner conflict’s shenanigans. He discovered in human nature our unconscious willingness, even determination, to experience ourselves and our lives through inner conflict. Holding this conflict in place, said Bergler, is a covert condition he called psychic or unconscious masochism. Basically, this predicament consists of our conscious desire to feel good versus our unconscious willingness to go on experiencing unresolved emotions that produce misery and self-defeat. Through unconscious resistance, we are loathe to acknowledge in ourselves the self-damaging aspects of this condition. In collectively acting this out, we keep the world in a state of peril.

The remainder of this post consists of excerpts from one of Bergler’s books, The Superego  (Grune & Stratton, New York, 1952). These excerpts show his determination to expose our dark side, despite our resistance to the knowledge.

In this first excerpt, Bergler rejects the common claim that we can be innocent victims of emotional trauma. Trauma can certainly happen, of course, but its effect can largely be determined by a person’s preexisting strength or weakness.

The idea, frequently met with, that some one experience is responsible for a neurosis is an attempt at simplification. If one examines such a supposedly “traumatic experience” through the microscope of analysis, one finds that thousands of little incidents have preceded it. Furthermore, a so-called “traumatic experience” is often only the culmination of these preceding incidents, and equally often real “experiences” have been misconstrued to suit unconscious fantasies.

A proof that traumatic experiences are not in themselves responsible for neurosis is the fact that often siblings, exposed to the same shock, react differently. In some cases, one sibling becomes neurotic, the other does not; in some cases, the two develop different neuroses; in still other cases, the “trauma” does not register because the neurosis is already established.

Moreover, the child may himself unconsciously provoke some psychic trauma, or misinterpret so-called real facts to fit into the child’s specific neurotic situation.

The decisive factor seems to be the elaboration of inner and outer facts by the unconscious ego. A neurotic mother may be equally disagreeable to each of her two sons; when they are grown, one will correct the experience by marrying a kind and loving woman, the other perpetuates the experience by choosing to marry a shrew who will soundly mistreat him.

Unwittingly, people can be willing to use real or imagined trauma as a defense, as the “reason” they are failing to fulfill themselves in life. In the next excerpt, Bergler points out the perils of such self-ignorance.

People indulge in many forms of self-delusion; one of the most dangerous is the mistaken belief that they can better their lot by giving up situations, positions or professions they “dislike.” No doubt, external circumstances may be unfavorable, and change beneficial, but these externals hardly affect inner conflicts, and by and large they are used as hitching posts for alibis or provocations. A neurotically querulous person will be querulous in any occupation; a neurotically incompetent person will remain a bungler, no matter how often he changes his position; a neurotic injustice collector will be “mistreated” here, there, and everywhere. Confusing reasons with results, however, people go right on changing their external settings, even when the decisive difficulty is internal.

This situation becomes especially tragic in the late fifties and early sixties. With a minimum of financial security, some people “retire”—from their troubles, they believe—by giving up work. What they fail to see is that the specific amount of masochistic self- damage which they unconsciously crave, and which previously they deposited in the difficulties of their external occupations, is deprived of its accustomed source by their retirement. Of course, they believe that getting rid of the “disturbing” profession guarantees contentment. Once more, reasons are confounded with results, and self-torture is but accentuated. Instead of inner peace, the effect of retirement is increased self-torture. In short, ignorance of the existence of the inner “torture machine” does not serve as a certificate of exemption…

This is undoubtably a better pill to swallow. People do not know that psychic masochism is part of their daily menu, and unchangeable without psychiatric [psychotherapeutic] help. Hence, they struggle against their destiny, fighting a shadow! This is a real human tragedy, and it is made even more poignant by the fact that neurosis is the progressive disease.

At one point, Bergler gives a definition of neurosis:

A simple yardstick for recognizing neurosis is a lack of ability to work (sublimation), to love (tenderly, and with normal potency retained), to have normal social contacts and interests, and to enjoy one’s hobbies. As long as there is relative contentment on that quadrangular score, there is no reason to become alarmed.

A lot of neurotic people would claim, as derived from the self-deception built into their neurosis, that they possess these abilities. I would add to Bergler’s definition the abilities to know and choose truth over falsehood, true strength over pseudo-aggression, authenticity over hypocrisy, and self-love over egotism. Unfortunately, the worst neurotics will lay claim to these abilities, too.

In this next excerpt (from the book’s Foreword), Bergler says more about resistance and our reluctance to come to terms with unconscious dynamics.

It is a typical emotional reaction to shy away from unconsoling facts, which is the reason most people prefer to ignore the established and highly uncomfortable fact that every human being harbors his worst enemy—an ogre self-created, to boot—within himself. To get an approximate idea of the “benevolence” of inner conscience [superego], one has only to imagine the terms of the relationship between a dictator—any dictator!—and an inmate of one of his concentration and extermination camps….

Once one accepts the fact that self-aggression recoils against the ego, accumulating in the superego, another incapable result must be added: the long maturation period of the human child, renders his aggression inexpressible; since it is inexpressible, it must turn against a child’s ego, for drives are like rivers—if the flow in all directions forward is impeded, the river must reverse its flow. Thus, every child starts life with a negative balance, with the dice heavily loaded against his chances at the “happiness-machine,” heavily loaded in favor of the “misery-machine” (Mark Twain). Inner conscience, the beneficiary of this rebounding aggression, does not ask, as the ancient gods did, for human sacrifice; as substitutes, it modestly accepts “conscience money” and human suffering….

Inner conscience is the master of the personality. The unconscious ego, in order to survive, must satisfy inner conscience by creating its double sentinel of alibis. We live by, and through, these twin alibis. Man’s precarious balance, dangling on the shoestring of twin alibis, is constantly endangered. At best, fifty percent of man’s psychic energy is unproductive expended in his attempts to ward off the constant avalanche of torture flowing from the superego. Man’s inhumanity to man is equaled only by man’s inhumanity to himself.

—

In my books, I present a comprehensive understanding of our psyche’s self-defeating dynamics. Go to my author’s page at Amazon to see a list of these books.

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The anxiety around dating—and finding the “right” partner—is a common contributor to unhappiness. The challenge is described in a recent article, “Mating Season,” in The New York Times Magazine. (The online version is titled, The Trouble With Wanting Men.”)

A competition for dominance is a major factor.

The article’s author, Jean Garnett, describes her anguish trying to find a man willing to commit to an intimate relationship. The article says women are increasingly fed up with men, to the point that male reticence or passivity deserves the recently coined psychological term, heterofatalism. That ugly word certainly gives a mean outlook on one’s mating prospects.

Garnett describes leaving her marriage, falling in love, and having an 18-month relationship with a man who “continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit…” From her research and talks with others, she concludes, “It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds.” Men who are superficially nice and sincere seemed unable, she says, to transform their sexual partnerships into intimate relationships.

Garnett struggles for answers to this apparent emotional impotency. She suggests that men may be overwhelmed by the cognitive effects of dating apps that “project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines.” She notes that modern times are so unlike the culture of arranged marriages: Now she and the men in her life must deal with “the anxiety of choice.”

So much inner passivity and inner conflict are involved in all of this, with both men and women. People are hurting from disappointment, disconnection, and indecision. They’re reeling from not knowing their own mind, and from fears of making the wrong choice, not living up to expectations, and being held accountable.

The underlying source of all this misery and self-alienation are inner passivity, inner conflict, and the compulsion to replay and recycle the first hurts of childhood. (These first hurts are feeling deprived, refused, controlled, helpless, criticized, rejected, betrayed, and abandoned). I have written a great deal about this, particularly in my two most recent books. The great tragedy here arises from our considerable resistance to acquiring the knowledge of our unwitting propensity for self-sabotage and needless suffering.

Garnett suggests that much of the dysfunction involves men and women’s competition for dominance. She quotes a psychoanalyst who advocates the need to “recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance.” The solution, the psychoanalyst suggests, involves the acceptance of a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission.

This is a vital point that requires more explanation. We need to recognize and work out our inner passivity, a biological heritage from childhood and a main element in inner conflict and relationship disharmony. This deep passivity in our psyche causes us to be easily triggered. Because of it, we tend to interpret challenging moments with our partner as if we are somehow being forced into a passive corner. This impression, however, is usually a false interpretation. Unconsciously, we go looking for the passive feeling because, as part of inner conflict, it remains unresolved in our psyche.

We can easily experience this unpleasant feeling of submissiveness even when our partner has no intention of being dominant or requiring us to submit.

Garnett says she finds it difficult to grasp the distinction between a surrender that is distinct from submission. Perhaps, she concedes, “I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose.”  She adds, “I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here.” This is a candid acknowledgment on her part. Indeed, we are acting masochistically in our unconscious compulsion to replay and recycle inner conflict and the first hurts of childhood. And that fine distinction between surrender and submission is hard to grasp when we’re lacking knowledge of inner passivity and inner conflict.

Read either one of my most recent books for a full understanding of all of this.

Exposed: The Psychological Source of Misery and Folly (2025, 240 pages).

Our Deadly Flaw: Healing the Inner Conflict that Cripples Us and Subverts Society (2022, 316 pages).

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