Freedom From Self-Sabotage

by Peter Michaelson

  Remember always, your hidden emotional attachments are what you are most reluctant to see.

  Exercise 2: Do something you have never done before. Make a plan and follow it.

  Get up and do whatever you have been delaying. Postpone an action you would prefer to do immediately. Do something worthwhile that places you outside your comfort zone. Refrain from saying something you are tempted to say.

  What do you believe you can’t do that you would like to do? Select a reasonable goal you always believed you couldn’t attain. Write out the steps that would be required to achieve that goal.

  For example, suppose you wanted to be a public speaker, or at least able to speak competently in public, but feel that your fears prevent you. Steps would include learning more about your fears. Are you attached to being seen in a negative light? Where does that come from? Was your mother or father fearful in this way? Get books on public speaking. Enroll in speech classes. Ask friends to listen to your talks on different subjects. Make it happen.

  List of Maxims

  Here’s a list of maxims that can help us to face life’s challenges with less resistance and self-sabotage. Maxims don’t always help because they don’t penetrate into our resistance, denial, and determination to suffer. Nonetheless, they can be of value.

  * Life is often unfair, and it provides a steady diet of annoyances and obstacles. We won’t always be completely successful, even when we try our best. It is our job to neutralize problems internally and regard them as challenges that enable us to develop more personal strength.

  * Accept the fact there will be disappointments in your life. We all have problems and let-downs. Learn to accept them with grace. Ideally, we are able to accept even the hardships of life with grace and dignity.

  * Watch out for the secret willingness to indulge in disappointment. Don’t be surprised by an unfavorable turn of events or feel that life is against you. A sure way to cultivate disappointment is to expect too much. Don’t expect others to cater to you and provide for your needs. Life isn’t intended to conform to your expectations or wishes. Accept the weaknesses of others without being judgmental or feeling let down.

  * Cultivate a sense of proportion. A wise person makes the distinction between a pinprick and a dangerous wound. Keep in mind that you are not always deliberately victimized by someone else’s disagreeable action. Watch the tendency to maximize the potential worry or suffering of minor annoyances.

  * Don’t personalize fate. The seemingly aggressive actions of those around you aren’t necessarily meant to attack you personally. Recognize that other people have their own perceptions and their own problems. Be curious and open to their feelings and beliefs. Accept differences in others without taking it personally.

  * Believe in yourself and your convictions, even if they go against the grain. A strong person doesn’t need others to agree and validate his or her opinions. We don’t have to be right or perfect all the time. We have to be comfortable with limitations we might not be able to change. You want to be able to admit when you’re wrong or when you don’t know the answer.

  * Don’t do for others what they can do for themselves. A healthy person doesn’t feel compelled to rescue or save others. He or she understands that others sometimes have to work hard and struggle in order to fulfill themselves.

  * Begin to distinguish when and how the problems in your life are self-created and self-maintained.

  * No one is to blame for your emotional disturbances. All your emotional reactions originate in you, although they are often triggered by others or events. It is primarily our emotional interpretations of situations and events that cause our suffering.

  Taking Responsibility

  Here are more thoughts, questions, and maxims that can help us avoid self-sabotage and experience the pleasure of our health and integrity.

  1) Regulate your health and well-being. How well do you eat? Make room in your life for exercise, play, hobbies, and experiences of nature. Are you able to regulate your eating and drinking habits? Do you rely on drugs to get by?

  2) Regulate your emotional health. Learn to take responsibility for your emotional reactions, behaviors, or negative attachments. Don’t blame your feelings and behaviors on others, or depend on others to make you feel good about yourself. Do you expect that others will rescue you or take care of you? Are you able and willing to earn your own living rather than depend on handouts? Do you make excuses or rationalizations for your dependency?

  3) Help your children learn regulation. Become more observant of your children’s emotional well-being and happiness. Participate in their lives and allow them to express who they are. Don’t try in a rigid, controlling manner to make them conform to your values and lifestyle. Make sure they are taught to respect the feelings of others and to value all life.

  Do you allow them to make their own decisions and to express their own opinions, even if they are different from yours? Do you do for them what they can do for themselves? Do you try to rescue them and make their lives free of pain or struggle? Disappointments are inevitable. Honor their feelings, respect their experiences of life.

  4) Care for the environment and future generations. Take concrete responsibility for preserving the environment, whether in your own house, yard, community, or planet. Look into how you can make your house and activities more pollution-proof. Take the same attitude about the environment that you would at a campground. You are using that space for a temporary period. Leave that space as you found it, or clean or beautify it, so that others will have the benefit of seeing and using it. Treat your animals and all animals with respect, just as you yourself would want to be treated. Ask yourself how your actions will affect future generations of your family and all humanity.

  5) Care for employees. Treat your employees as human beings, not as automatons to be squeezed dry for your own benefit. Validate their contributions and have concern for their feelings. You don’t have to rescue them, take care of their personal lives, or feel responsible for their happiness. But give constructive, compassionate help rather than criticism. You set the tone. Give each person a chance to feel fulfilled. You will be happier for it.

  6) Respect employers. Don’t expect your employer to act as a parent who dispenses approval or disapproval, or is somehow supposed to rescue you or take care of your personal life. Do your job with pride and integrity—the best you can do. Elevate your job, no matter how menial, by bringing your good intentions and dignity to it. Be open to others and see them as fellow companions on similar adventures. Be a vital part of the human experience through the quality of your participation and your consciousness.

  7) Be a responsible citizen. Don’t tolerate corruption in government or in business, and don’t indulge in feeling victimized by it. Support the most genuine candidates for office, those who you determine are not motivated by self-aggrandizement or naive ideologies. Require them to stick to their word. Give up the notion that the government is a source of entitlement. The government doesn’t exist to rescue you or to make others comply with your views. Give up the attitude that “the government will take care of it.” That’s a carry-over from childhood. If we act as children, we will be treated and regulated as children. Form community support groups to take charge of local concerns rather than wait for others do it.

  Bibliography

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  Bergler, Edmund. Curable and Incurable Neurotics. Liveright, NY. 1961, 1972.

  Bergler, Edmund. Money and Emotional Problems. Doubleday, New York, 1951.

  Bergler, Edmund. Principles of Self-Damage. Philosophical Library, New York, 1959.

  Bergler, Edmund. Selected Papers of Edmund Bergler, MD. 1933-1961. Grune & Stratton, New York, 1969.

  Bergler, Edmund. The Basic Neurosis. Grune & Stratton, New York, 1949.

  Bergler, Edmund. The Revolt of the Middle-Aged Man. Reprinted by International Universities Press, Madison, CT. 1985.

/>   Bergler, Edmund. The Superego. Grune & Stratton Inc. New York, 1952. International Universities Press, Madison, CT 1989.

  Bergler, Edmund. The Writer and Psychoanalysis. Reprinted by International Universities Press, Madison, CT. 1986.

  Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays. Vintage Books. New York.

  Bloom, Sandra A. “American Health Care: They Say There’s a Crisis, But a Crisis of What?” The Journal of Psychohistory. Vol. 21, No.3 Winter 1994. 301-332.

  Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. Doubleday. New York, 1988.

  Coles, Robert. The Moral Life of Children. The Atlantic Monthly Press, Boston. 1988.

  Cooper, Arnold. The Quiet Revolution in American Psychoanalysis: Selected Papers of Arnold M. Cooper. Elizabeth L. Auchincloss, Ed. Brunner-Routledge, Hove and New York, 2005.

  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition—Revised. American Psychiatric Association. Washington, DC. 2000.

  Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” The American Tradition in Literature. Grosset & Dunlap, 1974. 648-649.

  Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, 1963.

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  Fromm, Erich. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. Harper & Row. New York, 1964.

  Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography. The American Tradition in Literature. Grosset & Dunlap. 1974. 139.

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  Greider, William. Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy. Simon & Schuster. New York, 1992.

  Hand, Learned. “The Spirit of Liberty.” Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History. Ed. William Safire. W.W. Norton. New York, 1992. 63.

  Hunt, Morton. The Story of Psychology. Doubleday. New York, 1993.

  Jung, Carl. The Undiscovered Self. New American Library. New York, 1958.

  Lramer, Joel; Alstad, Diana. The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power. Frog, Ltd. Berkeley, CA 1993. (Distributed by North Atlantic Books.)

  Lowen, Alexander. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. Macmillan, New York, 1983.

  Marin, Peter. Freedom and Its Discontents. Steerforth Press. South Royalton, Vermont, 1995.

  Maslow, Abraham H. Toward a Psychology of Being. Van Nostrand Reinhold. New York, 1968.

  Piaget, Jean. The Moral Judgment of the Child. The Free Press, New York, 1965.

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  Endnotes

  * * *

  [i] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfdefeating_personality_disorder.

  [ii] Scientists and behavioral psychologists who insist that addictions are caused by neurological disorders or brain chemistry, rather than mental-health issues, minimize the vital roles played by self-knowledge, unconscious dynamics, and evolving consciousness in determining emotional and behavioral self-regulation. Individuals—scientists included—cannot fully understand the psychological dimensions of addictions and the benefits of the psychological approach without personal exploration of their psyche. Those scientists and superficial psychologists who believe in the disease model of addictions are not truly objective or scientific because they fail to explain exactly why the acquisition of in-depth self-knowledge is, according to them, not a means of self-regulation. For the most past, these scientists do not know what such in-depth self-knowledge, as described in this book, consists of.

  [iii] Sigmund Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2010. 105. Freud said that narcissism is the result of the ego being infused with libido (the pleasure principle). In other words, the ego is libidinized in order to provide some comfort, solace, or stability for a weak ego.

  [iv] Self-regulation is a factor of emotional strength and emotional health. “Clinicians have long been aware that patients with certain types of psychiatric illnesses—including mood, anxiety and personality disorders—are more likely to become addicts. According to the National Institute of Mental Health’s Epidemiologic Catchment Area Study, patients with mental health problems are nearly three times as likely to have an addictive disorder as those without.” Richard A. Friedman, M.D. “Who Falls to Addiction, and Who Is Unscathed?” The New York Times, Aug. 2, 2011. D1.

  [v] Although I don’t refer to the id in the main text, I want to give it at least this passing mention. The id, as Freud called it, is the seat or reservoir in our psyche of our instinctive aspects, including aggression, megalomania, and libido. In classical psychoanalysis, the superego serves to restrain the primitive id, though not always successfully (the Nazis exemplified unbridled id). Like a referee, the unconscious ego tries to render a peaceful, socially acceptable outcome to the clash between id and superego. Edmund Bergler recognized the role of the id as the repository of aggression, megalomania, and libido, yet he regarded the relationship between the superego and the unconscious ego to be, for the purposes of overcoming self-sabotage, the conflict most in need of illumination.

  [vi] Erich Fromm. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil. Harper and Row, New York, 1964. 120.

  [vii] Typically, people have both a healthy and an unhealthy ego. The unhealthy ego is a remnant of childhood megalomania, through which as adults we can still feel inferior, superior, and isolated from others. The healthy ego is the functioning “I” that manages life adequately and often, in large measure, successfully. In my view, both the healthy and the unhealthy ego are limited identifications. Through psychological growth, we can transcend the ego and become egoless. We also lay claim to the inner landscape in our psyche that has been ruled or at least occupied by the unconscious ego (see following footnote). Now we know ourselves through our authentic self, where the higher attributes such as goodness, wisdom, and integrity are being established. At this point, instead of identifications, we experience an agreeable, often pleasurable, sense of being.

  [viii] Our unconscious ego is the seat of inner passivity. It is the inner agency that devises and manages our defenses, strikes compromises with our inner critic, and covers up the truth of our collusion in misery and self-sabotage.

  [ix] Abraham Maslow. Toward a Psychology of Being. Van Nostrand Reinhold Co. New York, 1968. 200.

  [x] Benjamin Franklin. The Autobiography. Quoted in The American Tradition in Literature. Gosset and Dunlap. 1974. 39.

  [xi] Alexander Lowen, M.D. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. Macmillan Publishing. New York, 1983. ix.

  [xii] Jean Piaget. The Moral Judgment of the Child. The Free Press. New York, 1965. 394.

  [xiii] Erik H. Erikson. Insight and Responsibility. W.W. Norton & Co. New York, 1964. 44.

  [xiv] Insight and Responsibility, 44.

  [xv] Insight and Responsibility, 45.

  [xvi] Barbara W. Tuchman. The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Ballantine Books. New York, 1984.

  [xvii] The best way to understand inner passivity is to begin to see it in ourselves. Jack described in an e-mail an event that had occurred to him the previous week. He was driving home with his wife along a single-lane road through an urban area when a large SUV began to tailgate h
im. For several blocks, the vehicle followed Jack closely, apparently getting more and more impatient. Finally, the driver gunned his motor and roared past Jack. The impatient driver simply ended up behind another car in a long line of cars going up the street. Minutes later, another SUV edged up behind Jack and honked impatiently. “At that point I got really upset,” Jack said. His wife was afraid he was going to stop and get out and scream at the guy or something.

  “Thankfully, the honker did not stay behind me long,” Jack went on. “The street soon opened up from a single lane in each direction to a one-way street with three lanes. Of course, at that point the honker sped off. This episode stayed on my mind until the next morning when two things became clear to me while I was out walking in the early morning: First, as a child I was very meek and, if bullied, never defended myself. My angry reaction to the two bullying drivers was a distinct improvement over cowering in fear. Beneath my anger, I'm sure, was fear—fear of being harmed by the outrageous behavior of these two idiots; Secondly, I realized that if something like this happens again, rather than continuing to drive down the street with a fool endangering me I will signal the person to pass me or something like that.”