Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  7) This will never end. That is the child’s feeling that a rainy day will never end. The infant has no sense of the relativity of time, and so the feeling of, say, waiting for the breast or bottle seems like eternity. The child can burst into wails of anguish as he or she interprets the suffering as a permanent condition. For adults, suffering over an emotional crisis such as a relationship breakup is especially severe when it feels as if the pain will never end and love won’t ever come knocking again. Adults also lose the ability to save or wait for benefits in the future when they become preoccupied with missing out in the present.

  8) Never get enough. Children resent sharing and are quick to feel deprived. If Susie’s piece of pie is bigger, Billy feels deprived, even if his pie is not only delicious but also more than enough. A child can fixate on some treat that the parents are withholding. The more the child feels refused, the more the child wants it. All he or she has received in the past counts for nothing. Gratitude is fleeting or seldom experienced.

  Adults hoard their wealth and benefits. At the thought of giving or sharing, they become emotionally preoccupied with how much less they will have. Or their inner fear produces the thought of being destitute and abandoned to a cruel fate. Getting more feels like the way to happiness. Getting less produces anxiety and irrational fears. As more special interest groups spring up to protect their entitlements and benefits, the nation fragments into competing factions.

  9) Bold assertions without facts. Children often believe they only have to say something for it to be true. It feels in their self-centeredness that their points of view require no substantiation. Youngsters believe their own lies because their assertions are so convincing even to themselves.

  Adults also make bold statements without substantiation. A man says, “They’re out to get me, I know it!” Or, “I know she’s doing something bad behind my back!” Though he can provide no evidence, or flimsy evidence at best, he remains convinced that his statement is true. He “just knows.” At other times adults maintain the belief that, “If I can’t remember it, it didn’t happen!” Some adults say, “My childhood has no bearing on the present,” and because they have said it emphatically enough they believe it and close the book on the subject.

  The examples on this list illustrate how childishness persists in our psyche. This lingering childishness blocks objectivity and wisdom, leaving us more in danger of self-sabotage.

  The Shattering Effect of Self-Preoccupation

  Self-preoccupation is an inherent human aspect that we can moderate by observing and acknowledging it. Instead, however, we celebrate it, sometimes through our worship of celebrities. We identify with the celebrity’s importance and aspire to his state of being. As children, we all wanted to be special and to be treated as such. Now as we observe celebrities being treated as special, we swing emotionally between extremes, one minute loving them and identifying with them to tweak old memories of our childish grandiosity and to cover up our resonance with feelings of being unrecognized and unimportant, and the next minute wanting to demote them because we feel inferior under the inner accusation that we are not as good as they are.

  No one is a minor actor in life unless he puts himself in that role. An exemplary person may be satisfied playing the role of a minor actor, taking on a humble job, barely noticed by society, yet dedicated to conducting himself or herself with integrity and dignity. Anonymity only bothers those of us with emotional attachments to feeling insignificant or unworthy.

  Just as we tried in childhood to keep our infantile megalomania intact, we now as adults strive to keep the “I” at the center. This mentality is essentially a claim to power that saves face, denies an underlying attachment to passivity, and avoids recognition of the saboteur within. The more we put the “I” out in front, the more we are blind to the elements of self-sabotage and to our lack of connection to our essential value.

  All this “I” business is our false pride, our buttered-up self-image, comprising our illusion of who we think we are, how we think things are, and how we want them to be, with our own pre-eminence as first priority. Were the doorman of a fancy hotel to embody this attitude, his self-image would be immensely gratified when little children, impressed by his gold-braided costume and decorous manner, mistook him as the hotel’s owner.

  An obvious byproduct of shallow self-centeredness, along with faulty judgment and irrational behavior, is pride. Pride is insidious. It can worm its way into the highest offices in the land as easily as the cardboard home of a derelict whose neurosis may have led him into his predicament. Those in greatest denial of their investment in self-image are often those with the most pride in their humility. “In reality,” Benjamin Franklin wrote in The Autobiography, “there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.” As for humility, he added, “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.”[x] Thus did Franklin take the measure of his pride; considering his greatness, he might have held it to a draw. It is not surprising, given the infantile egocentricity we bring into the world, that long after Franklin’s refreshing candor so many of us exhibit a few cracks of humility only when forced by circumstances to swallow our pride.

  In self-centeredness and narcissism, nothing is held sacred, certainly not nature, not even God who is held under the thrall of what is expected of Him, which is rescue, validation, and redemption—of me.

  Psychiatrist Alexander Lowen noted that narcissism had become much more prevalent in the culture of the late 20th century than it was in the 1940s when he began his practice. He wrote in Narcissism: Denial of the True Self: “When wealth occupies a higher position than wisdom, when notoriety is admired more than dignity, when success is more important than self-respect, the culture overvalues ‘image’ and must be regarded as narcissistic.”[xi]

  Self-centeredness and the more acute problem of narcissism can be transcended. When we do so, we continue to safeguard our interests and rights as individuals, while enjoying the emotional and physical advantages of being united for a common purpose as part of the community and nation. However, national self-sabotage occurs when egos clash in government, corporations, and institutions, fighting over who comes out on top. Unless enough of us stand for truth, justice, wisdom, and humility, the common good is not represented.

  The relationship between inappropriate behavior and childish self-centeredness is well established in psychological theory. Child researcher Jean Piaget reaffirmed this in The Moral Judgment of the Child when he wrote, “It is only by knowing our individual nature with its limitations as well as its resources that we grow capable of coming out of ourselves and collaborating with other individual natures.”[xii]

  In Insight and Responsibility, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson wrote that a shift in self-awareness “implies a fundamental new ethical orientation of adult man’s relationship to childhood: to his own childhood, now behind and within him; to his own child before him; and to every man’s children around him.”[xiii] Erikson alluded to the futility of studying world history without reference to the influence of childhood, and he believed that the refusal of historians “to consider the historical relevance of human childhood can be due only to that deeper and more universal emotional aversion and repression which Freud himself foresaw.”[xiv] The key to progress, he wrote, is to help each generation face the conflict “between its ethical and rational aims and its infantile fixations.”[xv] The biggest infantile fixation, I believe, is acute self-centeredness or megalomania.

  In the past, humanity’s egotistic nature was more easily held in check in tribes, small towns, and communities. Our ancestors felt more bonded to a group, more accountable to each other, and more susceptible to shame. They couldn’t hide themselves from others, as we can in this anonymous society. We no longer have the extended family or the tribe to help us feel part of something greater than ourselves, to help us open our hearts and awaken compassion. Nature in it
s old splendor helped some of us to ponder the mystery of creation and transcend self-centeredness. Now urban dwellers can barely see the stars, obscured as they are at night by city lights. Under today’s influences, it is as if we live in an age of emotional deregulation: Feel whatever you want—it’s your right to do so, and, if you want it, it must be good.

  Modern freedoms, wealth, and leisure are emotionally challenging to handle. We can feel overwhelmed by the psychological impact of consumerism, marketing, rapid changes in technology, and the immediacy of dire national and world news. Indeed, it seems that many young people are being overwhelmed by this complexity and are sinking into passivity and depression. Meanwhile, consumerism gathers much of its appeal from our desperation to impress others (and ourselves) with the extent of what we have. Our desperation stems from our uncertainty about the value of who we are. Through acquisitions and materialism, we search for ways to validate ourselves, increase our self-importance, and also to distract ourselves, in order to ward off inner feelings of having no significance or value. Yet social complexity can also be prodding us toward higher consciousness.

  The former behavioral restraints of authority and religion are losing their power of intimidation and control. As the boundaries of propriety are breached by movies, television, media, and culture, we can be tempted to abandon our inner restraints of conscience and moral imperative. Many of us are losing our powers of self-regulation with food, alcohol, drugs, and promiscuity. Self-knowledge can come to the rescue. Insight into the psyche’s operating system is enormously helpful in preserving personal integrity and strengthening self-regulation. This insight into our emotional attachments and our old egotistic identity provides inner balance and a surge of vital intelligence.

  The history of nations and empires reveals that great powers crumble and decline from within. These powers may be affected, of course, by outside factors such as shifting alliances and populations, changing ideologies and technologies, and competition. Invariably, however, their declines had much to do with psychological elements such as pride, paranoia, and greed. It appears that leaders and citizens of these states and empires succumbed to dark inner forces that were beyond the reach of their psychological knowledge. Barbara Tuchman outlined some of the history of this self-sabotage in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Her book showed how governments and leaders pursued self-defeating policies because objective and wise assessments were sabotaged by illusions, stubbornness, and pride.[xvi]

  Such self-sabotage need not continue to be humanity’s Achilles’ heel. Though the impact of modern challenges renders us more alone, separated, and frightened, these challenges can be liberating if through them we manage to raise our consciousness.

  We now have the knowledge that sees into the roots of our negative emotions and self-defeating reactions. We also have the internet and social networking to drop this knowledge into the lap of millions of people. What we haven’t had up to now, however, is the determination to enlighten ourselves. Through our investment in self-image, we have preferred to enshrine rather than dethrone our illusions of ourselves. Now, though, the humbling effect of the present world crisis creates an opening for vital knowledge to penetrate.

  Chapter 4

  The Nature of Passivity

  Through social security, national security, and financial security, we have created a society that tries to protect us from fear and fate. When someone slips on a banana peel, he looks around for a person to sue and hobbles to the nearest lawyer to capitalize on his misfortune. We have monetized fate, so that comfort is taken and profits are made in protections such as life and health insurance, hi-tech hospitals, home security systems, private security forces, handguns and assault rifles, lawyers and lawsuits, and the military-industrial complex.

  So why are we so enamored of security? As mentioned, we all have leftover fears from childhood of being abandoned, starved, unloved, and helpless. A human child spends a longer time in relative stages of helplessness than any other creature. Babies have limited mobility and cannot communicate effectively. Most animals leave the nest or lair after several months or a year or two, but a human being requires sixteen to eighteen or more years of parental support before being mature and independent enough to thrive independently. This long maturation is required for the development of the sophisticated human brain and nervous system. Thus traits and fears associated with dependency have a long time in which to become imprinted in the psyche, contributing to the extent in which we are fixated emotionally on past stages of our development.

  Of course, children have to be trained in the social graces, and they do need the presence of authority to guide and protect them. Nonetheless, even children who have decent parents can feel unhappy about having to submit to the will of someone else. They can interpret many childhood experiences through feelings of being denied and deprived, controlled and dominated. They are told what they can and cannot do, and their attempts to act independently are often met with disapproval and punishment. They are rewarded for controlling their emotions and impulses, and they win approval for obeying without protest.

  As adults, many of us continue to feel controlled by others, by our jobs, by time and the demands of modern life, and even by the simple requirements of everyday life. We feel helpless in certain contexts—helpless to influence institutions or government, to improve our circumstances in life, to overcome disease or ill health, to break habits and refrain from certain behaviors, and to control our anger and excessive consumption of food, drugs, and alcohol.

  Our struggle for autonomy can be compounded when, as children, we are expected to adopt without question the prevailing views of parents and society rather than being taught how to develop and trust our own counsel. Later, as adults, we may find ourselves swinging back and forth between undue compliance with authority or in rebellion against it. Or we may find ourselves trying in frustration to control others and make life conform to our will, which serves as a defense against our attachment to feeling controlled.

  Either way, we come under the spell of authority figures or controlling influences and remain mired in feelings of helplessness and inner passivity. This term, inner passivity, encompasses self-sabotage, in the sense that it incorporates our unconscious temptation or willingness to live through a limited sense of self, thereby denying ourselves access to higher levels of intelligence, self-regulation, and emotional strength. To repeat, the many forms of self-sabotage plaguing us and society are symptoms of unresolved negative emotions (one being our attachment to inner passivity) in our psyche.[xvii]

  An aspect of our passivity is the cause-and-effect point of view that children develop to explain how the world works and which lingers on in adults. A child experiences himself at the mercy of external events and agents that the child believes make him feel the way he does. In other words, something happens and there is a direct effect: “Mom yells at me and I feel hurt; my brother kicks the cat and I get blamed; I go potty on the floor and Mommy gets mad; I say something bad and I get punished.” Children attempt to offset the passive, powerless sense that they must accept what happens to them by believing they cause things to happen. (This is an elaboration on the claim-to-power defense mentioned earlier.) This is their “solution” for the inner conflict between cherished megalomania and the terrible feeling of complete helplessness. A child believes, for instance, “I caused Mom to reject and punish me because I was being bad”; “Mom is depressed because I didn’t clean my room”; “Mom and Dad are fighting because I was bad.”

  While such cause-and-effect thinking is a compensation for feeling helpless, it ultimately works against us because it creates yet another way that we find ourselves at the mercy of situations and others. Cause and effect is part of our natural resistance to taking on responsibility and claiming our power. An individual may say, “If only you would change, I wouldn’t feel this way,” or “High unemployment is responsible for my career problems,” or “I could have succeeded if she hadn’t blo
cked my promotion,” or “It’s impossible to lose weight with all those food commercials on TV.”

  We frequently say, “He caused me to feel this way.” For the most part, no one causes you to feel a certain way. You are the one who takes on those feelings based on your own issues. It’s true that others can trigger those feelings in you, but the feelings are already there inside you, ready at the slightest provocation to jump up and be experienced. When a person says something that you feel is offensive or provocative, observe your reaction. Say to yourself, “Look how I’m feeling angry (sad, offended, disgusted) after hearing what Joe said. Where does that come from in me?”

  While physical actions usually cause a predictable physical effect (throw a stone in the air, for instance, and it always comes down), interpersonal actions do not have to cause a predictable effect. If someone yells at you, you don’t necessarily have to feel fearful or angry. Your reaction depends on your emotional strength, how you assimilate the experience, and your ability to understand your issues.

  New Understanding of Our Experiences

  Escape from the passivity of cause-and-effect thinking involves seeing how we co-create and interact with the life we experience. Our awareness of co-creation involves our insight into our emotional interaction with objective reality. If we don’t understand co-creation, our reality is contaminated by our emotional reaction. Thus our view of ourselves, others, and our world around us is too subjective. We can’t get at the psychological truth that can help us to avoid self-sabotage. We stumble along the path of least resistance, accept the accompanying suffering and self-defeat, pleased we don’t have to abandon our defenses and illusions. (The concept of co-creation is another way to understand the idea of self-responsibility, first mentioned in Chapter 1.)