Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Pain and Conflict part 1

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

The overall result is that when we begin analysing our feelings and thoughts on sexuality, we may find that some very weird ideas begin to emerge. This is the effect of all the distortion and confusion that social pressures can put us through when we are growing up.

Ultimately, the real sources of conflict in human life are the ways in which the mind works. People are usually non-critical about their mind, and so they react according to the ways that the mind influences them to react. Parents are not aware of the dissonances in their relationships, and hence the child, as it mimics their behaviours and beliefs, grows up with a similar lack of self-awareness. Similarly, the children at school are not aware of their social dissonances, and that is why bullying occurs. What happens to a few sensitive people is that they become aware of such dissonance but do not know what to do about it.

The end result is that a person’s idea of himself has been significantly constructed by these dissonances. Mixed in with these are good values and good ideals. The problem is to sort the good from the bad. The difficulty is that a lot of the bad stuff is mixed up with the bonding the child went through with its parents. This often produces a love-hate relationship to the parents – the child is aware of the love, but it tries to bury the hate in its subconscious mind, or else turn that hate against itself. If we do the latter, then we may develop psychological disorders such as obsessions and excessive perfectionism.

A lot of pain comes from emotions.[¹]. Emotions are based on the positive and negative feelings. These two feelings flow through the mind in an endless cosmic rhythm, flowing up and down like waves on a pond. Hence emotions likewise flow up and down in consciousness. The only thing that varies is their intensity. Hence everyone will feel guilt, resentment, joy, happiness, sadness, etc, all through their lives. Which emotions are important to us, as adults, depends on how we have interpreted our childhood and its distressful episodes. I find resentment and bitterness are the most distressful ones for me, whilst other people feel guilt, jealousy or anger, etc, to be their particular distressful emotions. We cannot eliminate the experience of such emotions, but what we can do is to reduce their intensity as they flow through us, thereby making it much easier to live with them.

Other pain comes from negative beliefs that we have about ourself. What we find when we analyse ourself is that beliefs and desires seem to exist in pairs of opposites. This opposition is most difficult to deal with when it contrasts the conscious mind with the subconscious mind. When this happens, whatever beliefs or desires exists in our conscious mind (the person is aware of them), the opposite beliefs exist in the subconscious mind (the person is not aware of them).

For most people, these opposites pose little problem because there is not much emotional energy attached to them. Whence the subconscious beliefs or desires have little influence. However, once a person begins developing some degree of sensitivity and idealism, the emotional energy increases for those ideas and desires around which his sensitivity and idealism orientate. The difficulty we face is that when our sensitivity increases, it increases for all the mind’s activities, both for the activities we like and for the activities we dislike. When this happens, the subconscious mind increases its influence on the person.

Take the familiar issue of good and evil. The more that a person tries to be good, the more emotional energy he puts into his moral codes. Unfortunately, he also increases the emotional energy attached to his subconscious immoral ideas and desires. There is no way to avoid this, since this is the way that the mind works. Therefore, the more good a person can be, the more bad he can also be, such as despising other people who he considers to be degenerate. The more good a person is, the easier it becomes to fall from grace.

Dreams

More pain comes from any recurring, negative dreams. These may indicate big problems that the child, when it has grown up, will have to resolve. However, such dreams are symbolic; usually they are not meant to be taken literally. For example, a person may dream of being overwhelmed by a giant mud boulder. What is the symbolism of this?  The size of the boulder indicates a big obstacle. What does the mud symbolise?  Mud is usually a sludge, and in a dream may indicate that we have some morally undesirable desires or inclinations. This may be self-hate, or it may be some sexual issue, or it may be an intense sense of guilt. So we tackle such dreams by trying to work out what the dream symbolises.

Dreams of God or demons trying to get us to do bad things are often a form of antithetical thoughts.[²]. For most people, these antithetical thoughts are products of social conditioning. They are distorted forms of parental rules, that is, they are parental rules that the child disliked and which are now distorted by symbolism so that the child (who has now become an adult) does not recognise what they really are.

The subconscious mind will also affect the partnerships of the adult. Two people come together in a partnership because their conscious minds seem to be in harmony. However, if their subconscious minds are not in harmony, then eventually the two people may separate and divorce. If the subconscious minds are not in harmony, then this means that the motivations, deep beliefs and reasons for doing things are not the same in each person. So it will be hard to make a relationship work once the initial appeal fades away. Adult relationships rarely solve childhood difficulties unless the adults have good sources of psychological support. When children are born, then the partnership will get even more difficult. The child has to try and make sense of its relationships with its parents, when even the parents don’t understand the relationship between themselves. The result is confusion in the mind of the child. If the child is insensitive, or thick-skinned, it may possibly grow up with a happy nature, but if the child is sensitive, then it will grow up confused.

There is an interesting sociological factor to consider too. During periods of economic affluence and good working conditions, the severity of distressing psychological factors tends to decrease. Hence the influences from the subconscious mind tend to become less active. Then relationships become more harmonious. Whereas, during periods of hard times and low-paid work, the psychological factors tend to increase in severity and this leads to the subconscious mind becoming more active. The main reason for this rise in severity is that during hard times the general level of hostility in society increases and people tend to seek scapegoats. This hostility in people can be sensed by a person who is psychologically confused, thereby making him or her more unsettled.

Vagueness

The basic problem we have when we are immersed in deep emotional problems is that we are mixing up various issues together. Our mind is a mixture of confusion and vagueness. Confusion means that our ideas have “fuzzy” boundaries, that is, different ideas and beliefs about ourself are overlapping so that we don’t know where one issue ends and the next one begins. Each issue has its own cause. If we remain in a state of vagueness, all that the psychiatrist can do is to give us pills.

Vagueness means that we don’t usually remember much about ourself during our periods of confusion. The main reason for this is that when we are confused, the mind tends to focus on our emotional feelings and responses, rather than on rational ideas. Our anxiety level is high. We think all the time about our fears and problems, and so do not pay much attention to daily routines or what else we do. Hence when the confusion passes, we have little or nothing to remember about that time. The best way to remember what we did in such times is to keep a regular journal of our activities and what we are thinking and experiencing on a day-to-day basis.

Victimisation

As an adult we may have strong feelings that life has victimised us for no apparent reasons. When we look back on our life, then we can see that some negative consequences were brought about by ourself, whilst other negative consequences seem to have happened to us regardless of what we did.

What happens when we feel that we are a victim?  If we know situations in which we have been victimised, then we can deal with it. However, when we cannot pinpoint the source of this feeling, it leads to a deep sense of aimlessness, alienation, purposelessness, and drifting. The feeling that we are a victim intensifies our underlying self-pity, or we escape from that by intensifying our underlying resentments and bitternesses. Either way, our energy is depleted because we use it to lock these negative aspects of ourself into the subconscious mind.

The feeling of victimisation usually has its origin in childhood. It can be thought of as a form of child abuse. Though physical abuse and sexual abuse are fairly common around the world, for many people it is emotional abuse that is most damaging. Emotional abuse can be active, as in the regular ritual of finding fault with whatever the child does; or it can be passive, in that the parents are unable to give the sensitive child enough love for his needs. The lack of enough love can be called emotional neglect. In passive abuse, the parents have “frozen” emotions, that is, they cannot give enough love to the child and the reason for this is that their parents never gave them enough love either. Hence the issue of emotional neglect tends to be one that is handed down from parent to child with each new generation.

One of the effects that victimisation has on us is that it helps to create much of a person’s negative self-image. Once we have become an adult we blame ourself and so develop a hard attitude to ourself. Hence we usually believe that we do not deserve anything good in life since we deserve to be punished for our “sins”. The basis of this hard attitude is usually strong guilt and resentment. This is a fairly common theme in problems of drug dependence, irrespective of whether the drugs are legal, like alcohol and tobacco, or whether they are illegal drugs. The poverty and degradation of our life as an alcoholic or a junkie is the punishment that we are seeking.

How we handle our sense of victimisation leads to two main alternatives. Either we focus mainly on the idea that we deserve what happened to us, whence we eventually engage in a search for a faith that can heal us, so we turn to religion. Or we focus mainly on the idea that we did not deserve what happened to us, so we eventually pursue the theme of injustice, which is likely to lead us into a search for an understanding and explanation of “why me?”

Negative Self-Image

When, as a child, we regularly experience emotional abuse the long-term effect is that we develop a negative self-image. We blame ourself for this state of affairs and become excessively self-critical. Our subconscious mind takes on the role of the critical parent and so we never escape from self-criticism, even when eventually we are old enough to leave home and become independent. Our confidence is eroded as we build up self-hate and guilt for ourself. We end up with low self-esteem.

It is easy to detect this negative view of ourself by considering how we handle praise. Does it embarrass us? Do we try to nullify it (for example, by saying “I don’t really deserve the credit. I just did what anyone else would have done”); or are we comfortable enough just to smile and say “thanks”?  From my 30s onwards I was aware that I could not handle praise well. I could only handle it in five-minute doses. If someone complimented me for longer than five minutes my anxiety level would go sky-high as intense self-hate and guilt stirred in me, arousing the feeling that I didn’t deserve such praise. Then I had to retreat to the washroom in order to calm down. I could only handle emotional warmth from another person for five minutes at-a-time because mother only gave me emotional warmth in five-minute doses!

I list some dysfunctional ways that we may use in order to live with our negative self-image.

a). One way by which we try and avoid feeling any blame for our psychological problems is that we displace such problems onto something else that is easier to handle. For example, if I have a problem with my character (it's not as good as I want it to be), then I displace my anxiety about my character onto my body image. It is easier to worry about my body image than about my character. Then I can punish my body instead of punishing myself.

b). Another way we handle our problems is by thinking that we have both a good self and a bad self. Often, a good self seems to be a conformist self, one that wants to do what other people tell it to do (we feel good when other people are pleased with us). And the bad self is often a rebellious self, one that tries to assert its own mind but feels guilty about doing it (we feel bad because other people are displeased with us).

Alternatively, we may see our bad self as a weak self, and the good self as a strong self. Then the child may try to compensate for being a weakling by trying to cultivate character strength. He may repudiate his weakness. But this is just denial. All that is developed is rigidity in character. Eventually the goal to reach is to accept that weakness is just another aspect to one’s character, no better and no worse than strength. Strength and weakness just give rise to different experiences, that is all. When we can accept this then we become flexible and changeable, and can develop, instead of staying rigid.

c). When we have low self-esteem we often need to reject being blamed for our misfortunes. So we may seek a way to blame others for our unhappiness. The way that the mind works is that we often attract people to us as friends and partners who are complementary to us. The way this works for a person who has a negative self-image is that quite often that person attracts others who are looking for someone to control and manipulate. The result is that some abused persons tend to seek partners who will eventually abuse them. The advantage of this state of affairs is that the abused person has someone to blame for his distress, namely the partner who is abusing him. This way the abused person can deny personal blame for his misfortunes. 

The last period of my working life was as a support worker in hospital psychiatric wards. One in-patient I met had big problems with her self-image. She could not handle feeling good about herself. When we feel good about ourself, we are less likely to blame other people for our troubles. When she started feeling good, she had to do something so she could get back to feeling bad. Then she would do something unpleasant towards a staff member, such as throwing water over him. She would then be restrained and some privileges withdrawn for a time. As she started to feel bad about herself, she could now blame the staff for her bad feelings.

Fortunately, when our self-image changes for the better, we will attract people to us who are different from our past friends and who are more positive. So our relationships will improve.

Analysis brings into view our disposition to be self-critical. Think of the differences between being self-critical and self-analytical. Self-criticism means that we make value judgements about ourself, so when we make mistakes we blame ourself for them. Whereas self-analysis identifies the causes of problems but does not allocate blame for them. If we persevere with analysis for long enough, we find that we can learn to stop blaming ourself. We can stop being self-critical. Then the path is open to eventually forgive ourself and develop a positive self-image. And then we can forgive others who have hurt us in the past.

Being Nice

It is very hard growing up with a dominating mother. The boy is unlikely to develop enough self-confidence. In this situation he may develop an excessive need to please the mother so that she will bolster his weak self-confidence. So the boy grows up having pleased the mother for many years. He tries to be a nice boy. This behaviour can lead to social consequences. The boy, having grown into a man, may feel the need to please other people, especially women. He finds it difficult to say No to any requests or demands. It takes a lot of determination to be firm in saying No. Being nice is fine when people show appreciation for being helped. However, sometimes they take his help for granted: he finds that the women he has pleased end up manipulating him, just like his mother. Then he may get angry with them. Alternatively, he may have intense feelings of anger at himself, for allowing the manipulation to occur. He blames himself. He becomes angry at himself for always being a nice guy. So he may decide not to be a nice guy anymore. His attitudes to society may become hard and non co-operative. 

The problem of being nice and expecting other people to be nice as well is one that I had big difficulties with for many years. Eventually I realised that my emotional need to be nice is basically a way of trying to receive affection from other people. Nowadays I prefer to think of myself as being friendly rather than nice. Another way of viewing this issue is that of co-operation versus competition. When I am being nice, I want to co-operate with people. I don’t like being competitive.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion in the Home page. [1]

[²]. I have an article on Antithetical Thoughts. [2]

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