Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  Some of us can be ambivalent in our feelings, loving the country and hating the government, in the same way we felt ambivalent toward our parents. Our love-hate emotions from family life are transferred to national life. We don’t know how to be or how to live without having targets—liberals, conservatives, gays, rednecks, bureaucrats, immigrants—upon whom we can transfer, project, and discharge our own negativity.

  Some groups in the United States fear that their own government is their worst enemy. When we react with pseudo-aggression to our attachment to feeling passive, we are more likely to pick the wrong target for our wrath. On the political right wing, fringe groups such as white supremacists and militia members consist of individuals with unresolved inner fears who interpret their lives through the lens of oppression, which is usually an experience of inner passivity more so than an actual case of being oppressed. They “see” in the world the oppression they produce in their emotional imagination. On the political left wing, liberals and progressives are weakened by their readiness to feel victimized by private or corporate interests and to identify with alleged or real victims of alleged or real corporate ruthlessness.

  Typically, militia members interpret the government’s attempts to curb the proliferation of firearms as a form of control and denial of rights. While the rest of us can understand that such controls are intended to strike a balance for the common good, extremists are unconsciously prepared to exacerbate their negative feelings out of all proportion to the situation. With protests of righteous indignation and various expressions of pseudo-aggression, they are covering up or defending against their masochistic attachment to feelings of being controlled and oppressed. Their pseudo-aggressive violent reactions prompt the authorities to control them even more, illustrating how, through unresolved passivity, we create in the world the very thing we say we hate.

  Members of such fringe groups are completely unaware of the degree to which they are in secret pursuit of the feeling of being oppressed. Often they create imaginary oppressors (a socialist government, powerful Jewish bankers, a United Nations-controlled world government) because they are more interested in creating the sought-after feelings of oppression than in differentiating between what is real and what is imaginary. They don’t know how to live or how to experience themselves without their inner fear, which means they have libidinized that fear (turned the fear into an emotional attachment, a hidden bittersweet allure, that they are now compelled to experience repeatedly). Meanwhile, they depend emotionally on their guns to compensate for their psychological entanglement in fear and passivity, while their anger and rage are phony exhibitions of strength and power designed to cover up that emotional entanglement in fear.

  Another extremist group, conspiracy theorists, has claimed that the U.S. government was behind the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These individuals were overwhelmed emotionally by the horrific event and reacted with a sense of helplessness and powerlessness. To deal with their anxiety and fear, they scrambled for safety, in a way that children often do, into the world of fantasy. They developed a “truth” that is entirely fiction. Ultimately, they are handcuffed to that fiction because, like militia members, they have libidinized inner fear. The fiction is a psychological defense that serves to cover up their emotional attachment to fear.

  The defense operates in the following manner. Borrowing from the proposition that knowledge is power, this individual proclaims: "I am not passive and weak. I’m not indulging in my fears. I know what actually happened. I know the truth! I aggressively proclaim the truth!" The defense, coupled with the intensity of their 9/11 obsession, provides a feeling of power. The power, however, is puny indeed, for the cognitive trickery in which they engage bestows enormous power on their alleged enemy, an “evil conglomerate of American agents,” who they claim orchestrated 9/11. In locating these evil forces in their own backyard, conspiracy theorists can feel even greater cause for fear. All of this irrationality is based in emotional weakness, specifically an entanglement in inner passivity and the libidinization of fear that often accompanies it.

  This psychological weakness appears to be creating more fear of crime than is warranted. As mentioned, we believe our inner fears are validated by outer events and external circumstances. The more fearful we are, the more we see external circumstances such as the extent of crime as something that “justifies” our fear. If crime were non-existent or infrequent, we would experience fear in some other way, such as excessive worry about our children, our finances or jobs, national security, or through various phobias. Meanwhile, the gun-manufacturing industry, through its lobbies, persuades us that our fears are legitimate. It attempts to rationalize our fears in order to promote the sale of guns and to legitimize the irrational, national gun fetish, itself an indication of the widespread fear and inner passivity that permeates the psyche.

  We thus are prone to create a paranoid perspective, the world view of the victim mentality. This perspective induces us to create external enemies and fight them on the wrong battlefield. Was such paranoia an element in our fear of communism, and the communists’ fear of us, during the Cold War? Did it contribute to the McCarthy period in the 1950’s and the experience of the Vietnam War? Would we not be winning our conflicts with diplomacy, instead of possibly losing them with war, if we were not so instinctively fearful and so ready to project our self-aggression on to others? To what extent do military spending and the cost of America’s wars contribute to the country’s decline? Isn’t our nation weakened when politicians play on our fears to generate votes?

  When we replay images in our mind of the burning World Trade Center towers, we are indulging in inner passivity. We also are tempted to entertain feelings and scenarios from everyday life in which we see ourselves being neglected, abused, deprived, controlled, annihilated, and otherwise victimized. In covering up our own participation in this self-suffering, we are in danger of reacting in a self-sabotaging manner to the dangers and malice presented by outsiders. When we begin to see how and why we fixate on worst-case scenarios, we start to take responsibility for our beliefs and feelings, and we can escape from the painful fear-based mentality.

  When we take responsibility for our fears, we are more likely to act against oppression in an effective way, rather than to go on colluding in the feeling of being victims of it. Where the streets and neighborhoods have been taken back from drug dealers and other criminals, it has often been citizens, not the police, who made it happen. Coming together in a common purpose, these neighbors became responsible for overcoming their fears and halting the deterioration of their communities. Real safety abides on the other side of our paranoia and fear, where illusions have fallen away and we have come home to our self. Much of the time, as we discover, our fears are greatly overplayed and our helplessness is just a mirage.

  The Social Impact of Feeling Insignificant

  Inner passivity makes us feel disconnected from ourselves. It makes it hard to feel our value. The feeling that we are nobody special, that we are losers more than winners, is an emotional undercurrent that greatly influences us personally, socially, and politically. Feelings of being powerless and insignificant may be more onerous and challenging than ever before. We live in an age of emotional deregulation in which people don’t feel as needed as they once did. Modern technology can make us feel obsolete in the workplace. Our labors seem less crucial, less valued, as semi-skilled, skilled, and professional workers are being fired and laid off as the financial and economic crisis deepens. For the most part, we accept our deteriorating conditions rather passively.

  For many of us, it’s all or nothing: either we are somebody special or we are nobody. Because our psychological understanding is shallow, we are frantic to justify our existence, defend our identity, enhance our self-image, and proclaim our worth. At times we are haunted by feelings of uselessness and experience the hurt of allegedly being nobody special. Many of us can in an instant resonate emotionally with
a conviction of our unworthiness, even as intellectually we justify or defend our value. It’s likely that many men and women seek political office out of an emotional need to infuse themselves with a sense of value and to establish their worthiness or superiority. With this hidden motivation, they are less likely to be capable of honest and effective service.

  Meanwhile, the media play up the exploits of the rich and famous, the culture’s “heroes,” providing us with daily opportunities to compare ourselves unfavorably to others. We glorify winners and celebrities as a defense. Here’s how the defense works: We secretly identify with celebrities and with their apparent feeling of being superior or “number one,” which boosts our self-image and “proves” that we are not secretly enmeshed in feeling insignificant. While we identify with such winners and get a boost on what we imagine they feel, we can, in our next breath, condemn losers to ignominy—as with disgraced politicians, athletes, and celebrities—thereby denying and covering up our emotional alignment with how it feels to be a loser.

  Marketing and advertising work so effectively at selling us an illusion of happiness because we are desperate to escape the clutches of self-made misery. Advertising promises us that materialism can boost our self-esteem. The media mesmerize us with sensual values—success, celebrity, self-aggrandizement, and the bizarre—while the advertising and marketing industries dangle the carrot of consumerism and the supposed joys of affluence. In our search for validation through materialistic gratification, many of us think of ourselves as consumers rather than citizens. The word consumer implies entitlement, a condition of getting or not getting. The consumer mentality makes a virtue of our preoccupation with materialistic satisfaction and dissatisfaction. So do politicians coveting re-election, who claim we deserve in the here-and-now all the favors and entitlements that can be charged to future generations. Meanwhile, the word citizen, with its connotation of responsibility and community involvement, languishes in our distant past. It would be refreshing, yet sound archaic, for us to be addressed by a politician as, “Fellow Citizens.”

  It appears now that our emphasis on superficial values is catching up with us. The past three or four decades saw a growing extravaganza of self-absorption that has emphasized selfishness, economic success, “doing your thing,” and looking good. We seem more confused, uncertain, and lost than ever. The one value we can commonly esteem is that of money.

  The entitlement mentality, a leftover from early childhood when gratitude never occurred to us, is another symptom of inner passivity. The entitlement mentality is kept alive and well by modern marketing, and the revival of self-gratification has apparently taken a toll on tenderness and love. If adults are so much under these psychological influences, imagine what it means for children. Like adults, they become fascinated with the objects of the technological revolution and can be stupefied by the media merchandising that accompanies it. Often, they see their father-figures being reduced to absurdity: Many TV commercials cast men as bumbling, passive nitwits, too foolish to know the obvious benefits of the featured product.

  We want things given to us without effort on our part because it all seems so accessible, and we feel like such losers without these trappings of value. We are bombarded with allegations of our unworthiness—ultimately and most painfully from our inner critic—if we don’t adopt and acquire the values that, on the surface, make us look good. Because so many of us have not developed a mature, healthy sense of self, we buy up all the glitter and glamour. We can end up feeling more miserable when the objects and accolades we have managed to acquire don’t fulfill the promised happiness.

  Hidden elements in our relationship with work are also factors in our national decline. For some of us, work, when we can get it, has become important for self-image and status rather than for personal fulfillment and the satisfaction of contributing to society’s well-being. We get wrapped up in our careers in a way that generates more anxiety than pleasure, while giving our work more value than our families. Many people work for self-gratification and exclude from their lives the pleasure available from being of service to others. I have counseled many individuals who don’t want the burden and responsibility of raising a family because their own childhood was so unpleasant and because a family would interfere with a career that they feel represents their best chance to fulfill themselves and to prove their value. They feel that children and even spouses take away their chance to stand out in their own right. In turning away from the higher values of love and family, they sabotage their chance for a fuller, richer life.

  The problem of feeling insignificant or unworthy is a common among young people. It may be most evident among members of youth gangs. Gang members give each other a sense of respect and recognition that they may be missing in their home lives and fail to muster on their own. They find respect from others for their strength, bravado, and violent powers. Weaker gang members take comfort in feeling accepted by powerful peers who take them into the fold. Being desperate for respect and feeling blocked from socially acceptable achievements of it, they define respect in terms of risk and bravado, and so they risk violence, prison, and death in search of it. The resulting self-sabotage is of secondary concern to them, while the felt need to escape from a painful identity and establish a sense of power and value are primary.

  A gang member is aware of how much he wants respect, yet inwardly he is contaminated by his attachment to disrespect. In self-sabotage, he is aligned with experiencing disapproval, neglect, and condemnation from others and (through his inner critic) from himself. His passive predicament hinders him from conducting himself in a positive manner. Teaching young people the principles of self-sabotage can help reduce a great deal of suffering and ease the expense of maintaining the nation’s immense prison population.[xxv]

  The following example illustrates an approach that can be used to teach vital inner dynamics to young people. A gang member, standing on a street corner with a gun in his pocket, pulls the gun and shoots and kills a boy who has just walked up and insulted him. Obviously, the shooter felt disrespected. Yet the shooting is a punishment that far outweighs the provocation. The shooter has reacted very aggressively, and it appears that his aggression is the problem. True, the act of aggression produced the killing. But where did the aggression come from? The aggression is, in fact, pseudo-aggression. It is a defense (of an extreme sort) designed to cover up the degree to which, on an inner level, the insulting words directed at the shooter resonated with how he secretly feels about himself. The shooter is emotionally attached to the feeling of being disrespected, which is the kind of reproach and scorn he hears or feels coming at him from his inner critic and possibly from one or both of his parents. He may also have identified with a parent who suffers from self-condemnation and a profound sense of unworthiness. He may have experienced his parents being disrespectful of each other or of others.

  He can’t silence his inner critic (though suicide is often the result of an attempt to do just that), but he can shoot the boy who taunts him. In doing so, he tries to prove (as a defense) that he hates being scorned and disrespected. His instinct at this point is to defend, however aggressively and self-destructively, against any awareness of his own readiness to absorb the insult and indulge masochistically in it.

  Gang members’ preoccupation with respect and disrespect was described In The Atlantic Monthly by social scientist Elijah Anderson. He wrote that the rules of street code “provide a framework for negotiating respect. The person whose very appearance—including his clothing, demeanor, and way of moving—deters transgressions feels that he possesses . . . a measure of respect. With the right amount of respect, for instance, he can avoid ‘being bothered’ in public. If he is bothered, not only may he be in physical danger but he has been disgraced or ‘dissed’ (disrespected). Many of the forms that dissing can take might seem petty to middle-class people (maintaining eye contact for too long, for example), but to those invested in the street code, these actions become serious in
dications of the other person’s intentions.”[xxvi]

  In the course of his day, the young shooter defends against inner accusations of his unworthiness by thinking or feeling, “I’m doing the best I can.” Or he may say to himself, “Life is too hard; my parents are too mean,” or “Nobody understands me or supports me,” or “It’s true, I’m worthless and no good, and I don’t give a damn!” Along comes a bully who mocks him just like his sarcastic parent or mocking inner voice. It’s payoff time. The shooter’s immediate response is to cover up his attachment to feeling disrespected (and his willingness to “take a hit” on that feeling), by protesting through his unconscious defenses: “I’m not looking for that feeling of being “dissed.” Look how angry I become when someone says I’m no good. I want respect and I’d better get it!”

  He could certainly resort to his fists to cover up his resonance with the insult. But a gun demands more respect, though it makes the self-sabotage more severe. The gun is his defense against expected allusions to his unworthiness, and he is willing to shoot dead the person who says out loud what the shooter runs from, or tries to defend against, inside himself—his emotional attachment to feeling disrespected and unworthy.

  Because the shooter’s own sense of value is so diminished, the life of the other is of little significance and thus the consequence of pulling the trigger doesn’t register until it is too late. His aggressive response illustrates the universal resistance to facing inner truth. When an insult is on target, meaning it corresponds directly with what a person feels coming at him from his inner critic, the hurt and the sense of being offended are especially acute. The need to cover up one’s emotional resonance with the insult is paramount in order to protect self-image and the ego.