Freedom From Self-Sabotage by Peter Michaelson

Author:Peter Michaelson [Michaelson, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-12-23T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Sabotage in the Workplace

When I worked as a journalist years ago, inner accusations of my faults and shortcomings reverberated down my pipes, into my organs, and rattled my bones. My experience of myself was too murky, too ambiguous, and so I wasn’t conscious of the inner passivity that made me a target of my inner critic’s accusations. I just felt anxious and fearful, defective and unworthy. I felt a lot better when I produced good stories and thereby “proved” my value to my coworkers and myself.

As part of my plight, I was suffering from writer’s block. This painful symptom ties up much of a writer’s creative energy and intelligence in the production of inner defenses. In my case, I was draining my vitality through my unconscious attempts to neutralize accusations and harassment from my inner critic. This left me in a passive state, lacking in drive, purpose, and vision. When my creativity stalled, along with the flow of “headline” ideas and stories, my unconscious ego faltered in its attempts to defend me from my inner critic’s attacks. This knocked my anxiety off the charts, and I worried unnecessarily about being fired. Sometimes I became depressed and apathetic and fell into deep slumps that boosted my misery average and lowered my work performance.

Clearly I was at war with myself—and apparently on the losing side. I understood this conflict and began to resolve it after getting some answers about the nature of the psyche.

We can be particularly vulnerable to inner critic attacks because we carry in our psyche an ego-ideal. This is an unconscious self-concept that derives from the acute self-centeredness with which we are born. Children are speaking under the influence of their ego-ideal when they boast about or think about the great accomplishments they will achieve in the future: “I’m going to be president when I grow up,” or “I’m going to be the greatest artist in the world.” Freud discovered the existence of the ego-ideal, and in 1914 he wrote that what a person “projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.”[xix] While acute self-centeredness or megalomania fades as the child ages, the child still maintains remnants of grandiosity in the ego-ideal. This ego-ideal can become a serious liability for adults. That’s because our inner critic torments us for not living up to the illusions of our ego-ideal.

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.