Created October 29, 2021
What do those words mean?
The underlying precept is that, even under rare conditions of constant parental attention, life still tends to wound us.
Incidents in which we underperformed abound.
No matter what good we do, somehow, we have a tendency to never forgive ourselves for those times we caused our own eternal shame.
What is it that makes us take the side of the accuser against ourselves?
Conscience.
Freud classified Conscience as a societally-induced phenomenon. “SuperEgo” is the name he gave it.
What I call “The Me That Was Born”, Freud calls the “id”.
What I call “the Robot”, Freud calls the “ego”.
What I call conscience, Freud calls the “SuperEgo”.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud intuits deep causal connections between societal change and inner acculturation conditioning, and he calls out the ultimate interference of newer mental/emotional aspects with the original experiencer.
That idea of inner structure where three different centers of power exist has implications that have never been fully explored by later science. The Human Effectiveness Institute has brought this back to light.
If you are beating yourself up on a subconscious level, you are raising huge frictional resistance against your achieving peak experiences.
Try this mind experiment. Take Freud literally for a moment and see if you can actually experience that there are at least those three points of view within YOU.
The YOU that has always been there taking it all in.
The YOU that is your own press agent and protector.
The YOU that is constantly critiquing your performance after the fact and even during action. And especially before action. Just always critiquing you, putting you down, ya got nuthin.
Coming from someone who knows you better than yourself, because it IS yourself, you are strongly affected by it.
It is wounding.
Therefore, you repress it.
That makes it subconscious. The dwelling ground of the suppressed.
But it is your drumbeat. Every breath you take, every step you make. Constantly bringing down your estimate of yourself.
The only way to battle this internal demon is to call upon facts. Your noblest deeds. Your tendency to learn over time, albeit slowly.
You cannot continue to filibuster. You must agree to talk with yourself about the most internally divisive issues that undermine the collective YOU.
Don’t wait for the government to make psychiatric treatment free for everyone. Do it yourself.
One way or the other, don’t get caught in the trap of stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time. You have to be on your own side. Otherwise, you’re just going to spin your wheels and get stuck in the mud.
You do have to forgive yourself. Whatever incidents still cause you to beat yourself up, write the list down, and don’t lose it.
One at a time, when you feel like it and life lets you, just deeply relive the one on the list you feel like attacking at that moment. Give it a whole day or three days or a week, however long it takes, until you totally realize what decisions you made later in life that you made better, because you had been taught that painful lesson at that time.
When you’ve gone through the entire list, you will feel initially drained. When you recover from the strong cathartic, you will be wonderful and feel every bit of it.
Best to all,
Bill