Our inner critic lashes out at us with any discrepancies found to exist between the grandiose presumptions of our ego-ideal (“I am great; I will do great things”) and the hard-nosed reality of our less-than-glamorous circumstances in the world. We feel guilt, anxiety, and intense dissatisfaction when reminded inwardly that we are not living up to our ego-ideal and its naïve, childish expectations. We may in our hearts be proponents of nonviolence, yet on the psychic battlefield we take a verbal beating, and we are punished emotionally and frequently psychosomatically through the defenses we adopt. Our critic attacks, often quite viciously, and we defend, often quite ineffectively. Our ego-ideal makes us sitting ducks.
My reality as an inconspicuous journalist didn’t correspond with my ego-ideal that clung to childish grandiosity. As punishment for not living up to those illusions, my critic launched a covert verbal assault—"Ha! You thought you were going to be so great! Now it’s obvious you’ll never be good enough and never amount to anything! And that’s what you really want, isn’t it—to feel that who you are and what you have to offer doesn’t matter to anyone and has no value!” I didn’t actually hear those words. But I was absorbing, on an inner level, admonishments to that effect.
It mattered for naught that my ego-ideal was an infantile illusion concocted to cope with fading megalomania. My inner critic was using it as leverage to torment me. For years I suffered intermittently in a self-contained, existential misery, unaware of this covert operation. These problems dissolved once I became aware of this inner dynamic. My understanding of the existence of my inner critic and its self-aggression has become a shield that deflects much of its sting. My self-aggression itself has abated in the process of working out my attachments to self-reproach and self-condemnation. My growing awareness of inner passivity greatly helped in the process.
We see our self-sabotage more clearly when we understand that an inner program of self-criticism and self-rejection can take precedence over success and happiness. In fact, many of us are secretly invested in continuing to fail or to be blocked from creative fulfillment, and to continue to be preoccupied with our inadequacies, so that the program of self-criticism to which we are emotionally attached can proceed indefinitely. All that matters to this impersonal agenda is the continuing operation of the established program of harassment, condemnation, and self-defeat.
Once we understand that the self-aggression emanating from the inner critic consists mostly of “empty words,” or invalid and exaggerated accusations (the slightest actual misdemeanor is proclaimed a felony), we no longer take the words and accusations to heart. On an inner level, we are now able to neutralize or deflect these accusations. Eventually, the accusations themselves become muted. Before long, the inner critic becomes just a pale shadow of its former self.
As we neutralize the negative inner critic, we create peace within ourselves and in the world. In the process of exposing the inner dysfunction, we begin to connect with the legitimate inner authority that is our authentic self.
Before we achieve that inner victory, our self-aggression can feel like a diabolical force, interested only in our suffering and defeat. Another view is to regard it as an energy configuration similar to an electric current that is totally indifferent to its effects. Conceivably, it might also have an evolutionary value, serving as a force that prods us to become more conscious. In other words, self-aggression requires us, through its incessant torment, either to suffer its effects or to establish a consciousness and intelligence that is strong enough to deflect or neutralize it. Animals don’t appear to have an inner agency comparable to the superego, and, sure enough, their intelligence doesn’t evolve as it does in humans.
Breaking the Shackles
You may know people who are in unsatisfactory situations because they don’t believe they deserve better, or friends who lose jobs because they provoke their bosses, or acquaintances who are easily discouraged and quickly give up. Perhaps you’re such a person.
Many of us are capable of considerable achievement and may also be brilliant, but still end up shackled to forms of self-sabotage. Our jobs and our workplace environments represent a replay, with new characters, of the leftover emotional conflicts from our childhood experiences. As young adults, many of us head off into the world of work with fear of failure. Often, as the hidden motivation behind the pursuit of success, we are trying to prove that we are not failures. However, since we unwittingly act out our unresolved issues, self-sabotage kicks in and we soon find ourselves failing in important areas of life.
Fear of failure translates into our expectation of failure, which further translates into the likelihood that failure will be acted out, at least in some aspect of our lives such as career or relationships. The expectation is present within us when, emotionally and unconsciously, we regard ourselves as inadequate, inept, and undeserving. If we are ensnared in these feelings and beliefs about ourselves, we indeed are in danger of becoming a failure (or feeling like one) in our personal lives, our careers, or both.
Your first step to addressing a dismal track record with work or career is to see whether you are blaming others, extenuating circumstances, or yourself. If you are blaming yourself, you are likely doing so for the wrong reasons. For instance, you may think you are having trouble in your career because you are lazy, don’t have a showman’s personality, aren’t smart enough, assertive enough, or focused enough. But nine times out of ten such beliefs are claims to power—all secondary, not primary, problems. You may be a job-hopper, a low risk-taker, a work-shirker, a dead-end jobber, or a get-rich-quick schemer. Underneath all of these surface symptoms are emotional attachments and a secret willingness to play the game of self-sabotage.
Here’s a defense that oozes with self-sabotage. The adult who feels he has been a disappointment to his parents often acts out what is called a negative pseudo-moral connotation. This is a defense through which, unconsciously, the person abdicates responsibility for his life and weakens his self-regulation. The negative pseudo-moral connotation, in its bitter sarcasm, goes like this: “You see, Mom and Dad, I’ve become a failure, just as you expected. But I’m not responsible for what’s happening to me. I’m only being what you expected, what you thought I’d be, what you really wanted me to be!”
The adult who uses the negative pseudo-moral connotation as a defense is likely to pass an emotional curse along to his children, for he will see and hate in his children the disappointment and sense of failure that he hates in himself. His children will assimilate the same feelings of disappointment because, when all remains unconscious, we typically absorb coming at us from our parents what they soaked up from their parents.
Such an acute rendition of victimization shows how important it is for us to clear out leftover feelings toward parents and resolve misinterpretations of their intentions, actions, and influence. In large part, our leftover feelings are due to our own propensity in childhood to take on negative impressions of their role in our life. We need to acknowledge our attachment to these negative feelings and impressions, and see how they create self-sabotage. Whether our parents were culpable or not is no longer the issue. What matters now is our attachment to whatever negative emotions and impressions we have absorbed from childhood and how determined we are to recycle these in our life. When we are adamant about blaming our parents, we are stubbornly choosing to suffer.
The following example—concerning a client of mine, a lawyer named Robert—illustrates some ways that we are influenced by our parents, and it shows how we can overcome any ill effects. Robert came out of law school with all the apparent ingredients to rise to the top in his profession. He had posted high grades, was intelligent and articulate, and appeared to be motivated to excel. Although Robert worked hard, the law firm he had started three years earlier was almost bankrupt.
Depressed, in a panic, and convinced he was a hopeless failure, he began to explore with me the subtle emotional issues that were sabotaging him. Although Robert knew intellectua
lly he had good potential, deep down he felt inadequate. He didn’t really believe in himself. At business functions or social events, he observed himself being awkward and shy. He sensed that others saw him as defective and even unworthy.
We explored his passivity and lack of confidence. Robert was letting people take advantage of him; he had failed to establish boundaries, he was catering to his clients in ways that left him feeling bad about himself; and he was making careless mistakes regarding their cases.
“Maybe I’m just too nice,” he suggested.
“You are a good person,” I replied, “but you have some emotional quirks that we’ll expose and help you overcome.”
His claim that he was “too nice” is itself a defense. With it, he was able to deflect inner criticism for his failures. Criticism and rejection were familiar feelings from Robert’s childhood. As an adult, he tended repeatedly to experience and even to provoke these negative feelings from others. Because he wasn’t performing adequately in his work, his wife had to step in to compensate for what he didn’t earn. In her eyes, he didn’t meet his responsibilities, prompting her to be critical of him. Robert’s partner felt the same way and had made plans to leave the firm.
If the ingredients of his self-sabotage remained unconscious, Robert would likely continue to act out being a failure, the pathetic object of disapproval and reproach. His emotional problems can be understood in the context of his childhood, as is true for us all. His father, an accountant, hadn’t felt fulfilled in his career. Robert’s mother had a strong personality and held the family together. But his father went from job to job, feeling like a failure and suffering with self-rejection. Those feelings were reinforced by Robert’s mother who didn’t respect her husband and nagged at him for not promoting himself and being more successful.
Robert felt abandoned emotionally by his father who seldom praised or encouraged him. His mother, meanwhile, pushed Robert to be perfect, as if she wanted him to make up for his father’s weakness. Robert went off to law school, anxious to please his mother, but unconsciously identifying with his father and emotionally aligned with his father’s inner passivity and feelings of self-rejection and self-disapproval. These conflicts compelled him to act out an agenda in which he replayed with others the emotional attachments that lingered from his childhood.
As Robert gained insight into what had previously been unconscious, he began to understand the nature of his passivity and self-rejection. The primary understanding involved his growing awareness that he was unconsciously attached to feeling rejected and disapproved of. For one thing, he was compulsively rejecting and disapproving of himself. When he came to therapy, the lawyer in him needed proof that these emotional attachments were the culprits. The proof consisted of his growing awareness of the many ways that, on a daily basis, he provoked rejection and disapproval from his clients. In his practice, he had repeatedly made poor choices and decisions that annoyed or disappointed his clients. He knew from the times when he was at his best that he could conduct himself with grace, poise, and efficiency. So his bumbling and stumbling at other times, particularly with clients who were likely to be less forgiving or patient, could only be the result of his unconscious determination to provoke disapproval, criticism, and rejection.
Robert was particularly worried that a female client was unhappy with him. He had made a few minor mistakes in this person’s paperwork. These had been corrected before any harm was done, but he had overreacted emotionally to his errors, brooding for days, drinking more than usual, and lying awake at night with visions of his client gossiping about his faults and failures. His brooding was the means by which he recycled those negative feelings.
I taught him a technique for eliminating the stress and anxiety. When we are caught in an emotional predicament like Robert’s, we need to focus on the insight that exposes the self-sabotage beneath the surface.
To do that, we make an effort to assimilate the insightful knowledge (or correct analysis) by repeating it regularly to ourselves until we really know the truth of it. I encouraged Robert to do this. For him the insight was: “This feeling of disapproval must be what I want. This is how I see myself. I disapprove of myself in so many ways, just like I felt it in childhood, remembering how it was for my dad, identifying with what he was feeling about himself, about mom’s attitude to him, and how he was viewed by his colleagues. I’m emotionally attached to these negative feelings of disapproval and criticism, and this familiar pain from my past is what I’m still willing to go on feeling.”
It wasn’t what he consciously wanted to feel, of course. But it was what he unconsciously wanted to feel. In therapy, an individual is trying to make conscious what has been unconscious. Because of resistance, we can be quite thick-skulled when we are attempting to acquire self-knowledge and learn the hidden facts about self-sabotage. That’s why frequent repetition of the correct analysis is so helpful. Assimilating self-knowledge is a brave and noble accomplishment that empowers our intelligence. As one adage puts it, knowledge is power. From the psychological point of view, self-knowledge is the greatest power.
“It helps to know,” I also told Robert, “that your inner critic will attack you with the very same words of criticism and disapproval that your mother directed at your father and that your father felt toward himself. Be attentive and you will observe how you feel defensive much of the time. Watch how you defend yourself. Observe these inner processes as a witness, and try to feel the irrationality of both the inner accusations and your own compulsion to be defensive. Don’t let yourself be caught in the middle of that primitive operating system.”
I added, “Whenever you expose the negative way you regard and treat yourself, and understand your attachment to that feeling, you can begin to moderate and diminish the inner attack.” Through this technique, Robert realized more deeply the extent of his secret willingness to disapprove of himself and to imagine others disapproving of him. In observing his reactions, he began to catch himself defending himself. These defensive thoughts of his (“I’m trying my best; I’m under a lot of stress; I wish I was more attentive”) were in themselves evidence that he was under an inner attack for his alleged inadequacies.
“You don’t have to answer to this inner prosecutor,” I told him again. “The inner critic’s allegations are most often completely unfair to you and often false. Yet you react as if you’re being legitimately accused of felonies. You want to keep an eye on this harsh inner critic and understand its game of deceit. Otherwise, you’ll instinctively get caught up in defending yourself and thereby maintaining the inner conflict. You will also ‘unconsciously on purpose’ commit acts of self-sabotage so that the inner conflict can be maintained and even intensified.”
“It’s true,” he told me once, “I must be attached to rejection and disapproval. It’s the only explanation to account for those emotions being such themes in my life. It’s the only explanation I can think of. I know it’s more powerful than just a bad habit. Bad habits I can break. This is more insidious and also more subtle. Some part of me is determined to subject myself to these negative feelings. It’s kind of scary and it’s hard to believe. It’s incredible, actually! But as I accept this, I have never felt in a stronger position to turn my life around.”
He did become stronger, others responded favorably to him, and he saved his law practice and his marriage.
Through the process of transference, Robert had expected others to be rejecting and disapproving of him. Transference, as mentioned, is our unconscious compulsion to experience repeatedly the emotional memories from our past through present situations and relationships. Transference is a common cause of personality clashes, marital discord, and conflicts with family members, supervisors, clients, and coworkers. For instance, bosses often become father figures, meaning that the emotional issues that existed between an individual and his or her father (such as feelings of being criticized or rejected) are transferred on to a boss. Now the boss is the one viewed as being cri
tical and rejecting. Of course, bosses and coworkers can also become “mother figures,” and now the unresolved issues and accompanying emotions that transpired between a mother and her child are repeated years later by the grown adult in his or her relations with bosses and others.
As mentioned, we are inclined to dismiss this concept of transference, preferring instead to believe that the negative feelings and reactions we experience are caused by the insensitivity or malice of others or the hardships of life. This belief that others or difficult circumstances are to blame for our problems maintains feelings of being helpless and victimized, or it leads to inappropriate retaliation and aggression. Once transference is understood and recognized, we are able to see more clearly how we sabotage ourselves.
Our Passivity Works Overtime
Many of us never advance in our personal lives or careers because we feel controlled and dominated by supervisors, bosses, and coworkers. The requirement of work in itself is often felt as offensive. Work was first introduced to us as a duty, a concept that contradicts the childish notion that “I can do whatever I want.” Americans spend billions on lottery tickets in the dream of winning and thereby doing nothing for the rest of their lives. The workplace has become hell to millions of us because we ourselves experience it emotionally as a place where we are being deprived, drained, restricted, controlled, disrespected, and otherwise oppressed.
Freedom From Self-Sabotage Page 13
