I don’t believe in laziness. Instead, I believe in internal conflict. For me, there’s no perverse trait that makes people avoid necessary work. Instead there are, as Freud taught, various parts of the self, some younger and more primitive, others older and more developed, and these want different things that conflict with each other. I’ve discussed the issue in this blog before, but I want to explore another side of it now.

Perhaps there are tasks you’ve been avoiding, even though you believe they would do you a lot of good—maybe you keep not-doing some prescribed physical therapy, or postponing a consultation with a psychiatrist, or putting off a reckoning with some career decision that keeps knocking at the door. Why aren’t you making the moves you wish you would make?

Well, check whether there’s any hidden rage that might be in the way. Are you more pissed off than you tend to suppose? If you take a look underneath your de facto boycott of what ought to come next, do you find some smoldering archaic anger blocking your progress? Maybe, maybe not—but anger can be hard to recognize in yourself if you disapprove of it, because you want to avoid any self-critical shame that might come from realizing you’re mad without having a rock-solid justification. If your anger is big, irrational, daunting, primal, disproportionate, scary—it may have those characteristics because it’s coming from a primitive part of self that has big feelings, big enough to be overwhelming. That’s why it’s repressed: the rageful child part of you is afraid its own anger would vaporize the world if you were to feel it in full; the more adult parts are ashamed because this same anger is so unreasonable, so savage, so… childlike.

Wounded child parts of self tend to feel that they live in a broken world, a cosmos cracked in half by the injustice of not getting the perfect parents that they needed (and sometimes, not even the good-enough parents). They feel cheated. Their rage is a cry for justice—that is the beautiful aspect of it, which should be respected. The downside is that feeling cheated by life tends to stop us from making necessary improvements. If I am stuck in the bitterness of feeling screwed-over, I may be living inside the misconception that any progress I dare to make would be a betrayal of the wounded child inside me. Adults boycott their own lives, they flounder and self-sabotage and procrastinate, because of a beautiful, bittersweet, tragic loyalty to their own grievances from long, long ago. The unwritten law of such a life is: If I go ahead and start building my own life for myself, it will mean that I approve of all the wrongs that were done to me in the past.

But the inner child is not actually gratified by the adult’s refusal to live a full, open-hearted life. The inner child is simply afraid that such a life would erase forever her claim to some eventual cosmic justice. So the way to get free of this prison-house is deliberately to seek out the inner child, and provide the necessary loving nurturance directly from your adult self, with reassuring words of warmth and dignity and tenderness. Don’t be a tough guy. Stop identifying with your Spartan high standards for a few minutes and give that kid some wholesome generous attention, because somebody has to, and you’re the only one who is in there deep enough to do the job. Remember a time when you were hurt or scared, and your parent either stayed away, or made it worse. Now watch yourself in your mind’s eye, the grownup you’ve become, walking onto the stage set and going straight to the suffering child and holding that child, saying soothing words of commitment and connection and safety. For example: “This stuff that happened was not fair. But I am here now, and I got you. I can’t betray you, because I am you; I’m you all grown up. And I’m with you, and I always will be. I love you.”

Now, watch the kid go to sleep at last, all done crying, inside your heart, where there’s a bed with a night-light and a teddy bear and all the good stuff kids need. Now walk quietly out of the room. Now turn back toward the current moment, your adult life, your present opportunities to build and to repair and to explore.

Action and learning and success are no longer stained with the implication that you have somehow capitulated to a corrupt world-order. You may have thought growth would require more cynicism, a devil’s bargain you persistently refused. It turns out, however, that less cynicism is what did the trick—not getting colder and more jaded (which is what scoffers mean when they yell ‘Grow up!’), but the opposite: giving that furious sulking inner infant your heartfelt affection, without scorn, without shame, without despair. Forward movement is your own prerogative, an exploration of what the environment affords and what your own gifts and experiences can equip you to attempt. You are free to live as best you can, knowing that though you will someday die, you do at least get to find out who you are, and to see what feels worthwhile, by earnest trial-and-error. It is time for that serious form of play we call work.

We were all born innocent and beautiful. Then we had a childhood, in which the people who raised us gave us some combination of three things: love (getting the good stuff), neglect (not getting the good stuff), and abuse (getting the bad stuff). When a kid gets neglect and/or abuse from a parent, the psychological process involved is something like this. The person who is supposed to take care of him with nurturance and protection is giving him pain instead. Why? Because the parent is a bad parent. He or she may be a good person, but too damaged by their own untreated trauma to provide good parenting.  If the child realizes this, he will be forced to see that his parent will never meet his needs for consistent nurturance and protection, since they aren’t capable of it. That’s despair, and no kid can tolerate that, because the younger you are, the more your very survival is at risk if your parent is bad. Babies can actually die from lack of love, even if they get all their physical needs met (food, cleanliness, protection from heat and cold, etc.). The name for that is marasmus, or “failure to thrive.” To avoid such life-threatening despair, the child uses the only available defense, despite the terrible price it will cost him. He keeps the parent good, by taking their badness into himself: he must be the bad one, so that the parent can still—in his mind—remain good.

This defense solves the terrifying problem of being stuck with a bad parent. But it does so at the expense of the child’s self-respect, and he grows up believing that he is bad to the core. After all, only a bad child would get bad treatment from a parent who was fair and just. If the parent is good, and yet she treats him badly, it must be because he himself is bad: he must deserve the bad treatment. Believing this, he grows up with a heart full of toxic shame. Guilt is pain about something you have done, but shame is pain about what you are. Some kids misbehave—lying, stealing, hurting themselves or others, abusing drugs, failing at school, having sex too early and unsafely—in order to verify that they are indeed the bad one. If they are going to get neglect and/or abuse no matter what they do, then doing bad things will at least mean that they really do deserve the pain they get, and that feels less unjust. This story accounts for the fact that, when troubled adolescents do get asked why they behave so badly, they often have no idea.

Such a kid typically hates her parents and appears to be in a battle with them. Her destructive behavior is seen as a means of revenge against the parents, and in a way, that’s just what it is. It can also be a protest against a deeply felt though poorly understood sense of having been wronged. It can also be an effort to attract the parent’s attention so that neglect will be replaced by punishment (since, unlike neglect, punishment at least requires the parent to acknowledge the kid’s existence). And in an environment of authoritarian bullying, parental commands backed by force, and unexplained rules, a kid may become destructive in order to preserve her integrity. I may be a bad person, he thinks, but at least I’m my own person.

Now that you’re an adult, the old defense has worn out its usefulness. It costs far more than it’s worth. When you hear the question—what’s wrong with me?—the answer is nothing, because it’s the wrong question. The right question is, What happened to me?

There are several reasons why being kind to yourself might feel terrifying (at first). It requires admitting that the good parents you yearned for are never coming, because here you are, doing for yourself what they should have done. It reminds you of what you should’ve gotten from the people who were supposed to nurture and protect you. The better you treat yourself, the greater the contrast between what you got and what you now realize you deserved. And if you grew up believing that kindness was weakness, that kind men were feminine, that kind people were naïve and lucky and full of shit, then you have to admit you were wrong.

Feelings of worthlessness/self-hate are messages from a wounded child part of you. Don’t buy into what he says. You know things he does not know. Turn toward him, and in your mind’s eye (your imagination), pick him up and dry those tears and speak to that kid with soothing words of love. Tell your inner lonely little child: I love you… I got you… we’re ok… come with me. Talking to parts of yourself that way is not crazy, it is a survival skill.

When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, use your mind/your intellect/your inner observer. Say, oh, look, part of my mind is attacking me right now… isn’t that interesting. Say to that inner attacker: Oh, you again. Yes, I know what you think. But I know something you don’t know. Say to that inner attacker, Yes, I know you think you’re making some kind of contribution, but aggression is not the kind of help I need right now. When you hear intrusive negative thoughts, connect them with what you know about your history. Oh! This is an echo of other people’s shit that got thrown at me in the past. I do not have to hang onto it.

Your inner attacker is an internalized parent, a copy of the one(s) who gave you some amount of neglect and/or abuse. Your parent(s) may have grown old and harmless by now, but those aged parents aren’t inside you. What is inside you is a figure made of the young, strong, crazy people they were when you were a kid. You can’t get rid of that inner bully or kill him/her off. S/he has a place at the table. But not the head of the table. The inner bully needs a seat in the car, but not the driver’s seat. Get that person into a passenger seat so you can steer your life.

When you start to love yourself, it will soon become clear that the love that you have inside—which is yours to give, when and where you want to—is very high-quality, and it’s going to get even more valuable as you grow. It’s the good stuff. It is worth a lot. You can be a source of the good stuff, giving as well as receiving. When you’re accustomed to feeling like a vacant cave of darkness, a black hole from which not even light can escape, it’s strange to think you might turn into a star that radiates light instead. But it happens.

For Further Reading:

The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller

The Forgiving Self, Robert Karen

Healing the Shame That Binds You, John Bradshaw

Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach

Slings and Arrows: Narcissistic Injury and Its Treatment, Jerome David Levin

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

Whatever your age, you are also all the ages you’ve been before. Part of your psyche is an infant, because past selves remain as parts of an increasingly complex self-system. Younger parts of self, with unhealed wounds and unmet needs, can interfere with adult life, until they get the necessary loving care from the most adult parts of self.

Now, without an awareness that the self has parts, we are likely to feel crazy the moment our feelings do not agree with one another. I want to eat the cake, but I also want to be in a caloric deficit. I want to keep playing in the snow, but I also want to go inside and warm up. Knowing it's impossible to do both, I might well feel crazy whenever a pair of incompatible desires assails me. 

Unless, of course, I have an understanding of the self as a dynamic composite, in which case it all makes sense. A more ancient version of this same fact can be found in the distinction between monotheism, and the polytheism it replaced. If there are many Gods, as Plato pointed out in his Euthyphro, their desires can be in conflict with one another. But the God of a monotheist cannot do this, for lack of any opposing competitor. In the work of making sense of a dangerous world, each had its advantages. And it was Plato who first discovered (or at least, first mentioned) the inner child, in the Phaedo. But I digress. Let’s return to the self. 

Think of a moment when your behavior seemed to you to be immature for your age, or otherwise irrational--procrastination, for example. What tasks are you avoiding? Part of you wants to complete these tasks and enjoy the sense of accomplishment and relief that comes from a job well done --but part of you prefers to keep deferring the inevitable. When you catch yourself engaged in this pattern, perhaps you are harsh and punitive with yourself. Perhaps both the avoidance and the punishment feel somewhat alien—-as if you were not quite in charge of either of those inner and outer goings-on.

Where, then, do they come from? Whenever anything just doesn't fit with the present reality, we can ask ourselves what it might fit with from the past. The mind doesn't randomly generate errors, so much as it displaces significant, meaningful things from one context to another, where their meaning is far less evident. 

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for procrastinating is an overwhelmed five or six year-old kid who is genuinely frightened of adult tasks, and concerned that completing them would result in abandonment. That is, if he shows he can take care of himself, nobody will ever take care of him again—so he procrastinates, instead. Or rather, he forces you to procrastinate. The purpose of his boycott is to make sure that he, the inner child, gets the loving attention he needs, as a matter of (what feels like) life and death.

Perhaps the part of self who is responsible for the punitive attack on the procrastinating, needy child is an embarrassed, rageful adolescent. The inner teenager is, after all, disgusted and repulsed by the frank, naive, primitive neediness of the defenseless child. The teenager’s whole existence is about escaping from childhood, parting company with it, and often marshaling a bitter contempt for it in order to bear the terror and loss of saying farewell to childhood forever. This explains the savagery of the “super-ego” when it punishes that lost little kid for the sin of imposing inconvenient delays on the whole (inner) family.

The inner adult, the most adult self, is the part who is best able to nurture, respect, protect, and educate all the younger parts of self whose difficult states of mind sometimes rise to the fore and feel intractable. Instead, your most mature self, the parts of your personality that are most intact and best developed, can be encouraged and equipped by psychotherapy to re-parent the rest yourself. Freud taught long ago that each of us is all the ages we have ever been. Like ancient Rome, the psyche is a many-layered thing, in which deeper levels from long ago persist beneath contemporary layers with more life and less history. Conversely, being young involves more strength and less wisdom, so that the middle-age we so long dreaded becomes a domain of awareness, rather than mere lost youth.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

Loving Self-Acceptance is the Key to Success in All Things 

...Including Addiction Recovery.

Loving-self-acceptance is not a privilege. It is your right as a human being. It is the escape hatch from every prison. What you need—probably—is not discipline, pushing and shoving, and “tough love.” What you need is letting go, surrender, and kindness.

Suppose you're stuck in something (say, addiction, work-inhibition, or depression). Are you afraid that if you have mercy on yourself, you’ll become complacent and resigned, and not accomplish anything? That’s where you are now! Mercy is the way out. The prison door of addiction/depression is closed, yes. But it isn’t locked.

Being kind and gentle to yourself is the beginning of wisdom. It will take you farther forward into a better life than you can currently imagine. Without it, very little good can come. With it, you have a chance—many chances—to build as good a life as the world will allow. And you can’t tell how good that is, until you experiment and try things, day after day, year after year. No matter how bad things get, they can still change. Even when things are good, they can get even better if you’re humble and brave and careful.