Excerpt from
The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself From Inner Passivity
(Prospect Books. 242 pages) 

from Chapter 1

The Prevalence of Passivity

Each of us is under the influence of inner passivity. The presence in the psyche of this emotional element limits the flow of our creativity, hinders our self-expression, and impedes the development of intimacy with others. It interferes with our attempts to connect with and to express our higher values of courage, integrity, compassion, and love.

In these pages we plunge into the depths of our psyches to discover our inner passivity and other startling truths about human nature, particularly knowledge concerning the manner in which we all hold on to negative emotions and create our own misery and defeat.

The passivity I am referring to is much more than the experience of being weak, shy, and timid. This book goes far beyond a discussion of wimps and weaklings. Neither is it about the introverted personality type--an extrovert can be just as passive in the sense I am discussing in this book.

Inner passivity is almost invisible in the psyche and can be best approached and identified through its symptoms. Like subliminal advertising or carbon monoxide, it influences us strongly even as we are oblivious to its presence. It is a subtle phenomenon and a complicated psychic condition that is a problem for both men and women.

This passivity is an inner determination to replay and re-experience unresolved feelings that go back to our childhood. In various situations in the present we feel refused, deprived, controlled, overwhelmed, helpless, and discounted. In childhood we interpreted some of the actions of our parents and siblings through these same feelings. Now as adults, we color the evidence in a given experience, creating the impression that we are indeed being unduly deprived, refused, overwhelmed, and made helpless and ineffective, when in fact the problem is our own inner determination to feel this way.

Our inner passivity plays tricks on us and presents us with challenging conundrums. In one aspect of passivity, for instance, what we most desperately feel we want is often what we are emotionally attached to not getting. We will hurt ourselves and others, sometimes tragically, trying to get what we are attached to not having. Or we will urgently feel the need for a sense of control and power, and act out inappropriately, in order to cover up our readiness to experience some situation in a passive manner.

We have enormous resistance to seeing this phantom component within ourself. Inwardly it is very offensive to consider the implications of it. We either ignore altogether the suggestion of our passivity, conveniently forgetting that it was ever proposed, or we become indignant or angry at the insinuation that inner passivity is a psychological screening system (or RDF--Reality Distortion Field--as one teenage client of mine called it) through which we experience others, the world, and ourself. We prefer to be accused of being cruel, controlling, rejecting, selfish, greedy, or angry rather than being passive.

Passivity takes conventional thinking, or common sense, and throws it for a loop. Four important attributes of passivity, elaborated upon throughout this book, are listed here to illustrate its nature and influence. These themes reveal the dramatic mental and emotional shift (a true paradigm shift) that absorption of this knowledge and the transformation it implies demand of us.

1. Passivity, not aggression, is the root cause of anger and violence. Unhealthy, reactive aggression is a symptom of passivity, a means through which passivity is covered up, denied, or defended against. Passivity triggers violence when we overreact to an alleged provocation to "prove" (as a defense) that we are not passive--that we will not be pushed around and disrespected. So inappropriate aggression is both a symptom of passivity and a defense against realization of it. Our hostility covers up a deep inner resonance with the feeling of being weak, helpless, overwhelmed, and somehow victimized, feelings that linger in our psyche from childhood. We much prefer to attribute our violence to external provocations such as injustice or oppression, or to blame it on our problem controlling our anger, rather than see the roots of it in our passivity. (Terrorists, for instance, have a great deal of inner passivity, as I explain in Chapter 4.)

2. Influences such as television and other compelling visual and electronic technologies do not cause passivity. Rather, it is our passivity that causes us to come so much under the influence of inactive forms of entertainment, as well as advertising and propaganda. Under the influence of mass entertainment, we embrace a second-hand experience of life. Visual technologies combined with cunningly crafted marketing and advertising impair our creativity, undermine our imaginative powers, and make our passivity more of a problem for us. What we are seeing and finding ugly in the couch-potato set is the stranglehold of our own passivity.

3. Addictions to certain substances are, at a deeper level, addictions to passivity. The addiction is not so much to tobacco, alcohol, or drugs as it is to the experience of passivity, meaning the feeling of being under the influence of a craving or desire that feels more powerful than one's ability to resist it--even more powerful than one's own self. Although certain characteristics of our genes and biochemistry can make us more prone to addictions, having an addiction is nonetheless primarily the acting out of an emotional weakness. It is very important to avoid believing that we are victims of our genes or biochemistry, for this belief will render us even more helpless and passive. When we shake off passivity, our inner powers lead us to a healthy self-regulation.

4. Passivity can hinder us from connecting with our inner resources, such as courage, integrity, purpose, and perseverance. We lack trust and belief in ourself and fail to support ourself at critical times. We limit ourself and remain fearful and self-preoccupied, unable to access our higher capacities of creativity, self-regulation, trust, humility, compassion, and understanding. Because of the insight gained in the process of overcoming passivity, we act more appropriately and true to our humanity rather than defensive, willful, and inflexible. The absence of inner passivity provides access to our own authority, where we discover that our truth is aligned with universal goodwill.

The best way to access our inner passivity and to see it in action is to examine, as this book does, some of the thousands of symptoms and reactions we have to it. The book also investigates the inner operation and mechanisms of passivity to make it more visible and more accessible for the purposes of dislodging and eliminating it, thus strengthening ourself. Whatever is undiscovered or unresolved in our psyche determines how we will experience ourselves, and we are compelled to act out the hidden dynamics that have not been fully realized and incorporated into our conscious intelligence, even when doing so is self-defeating and painful.

The experience of passivity is imprinted on our psyche through our protracted childhood helplessness. It takes on a life of its own, contributing to our limited and often painful impression of who and what we are. We experience passivity in thousands of different ways, and anyone who wants to eliminate it has to see and understand his or her own unique formulation of it.

Passivity can be present and entrenched in people who outwardly appear to be the strongest and most capable. A person who is powerful in one context can be passive in another. A formidable political leader or the CEO of a large corporation, for instance, who has his colleagues spellbound by his power, may be passive with his wife or children or mother, a condition that is hidden from the public and even from the individual's own awareness. A career-climber may run roughshod over his competitors not so much because he is ambitious but because he experiences himself passively when he is not being ruthless and aggressive. So a symptom of passivity can be the appearance of an inappropriate or unbalanced power, in reality a pseudo-power, the exercise of which is a reaction to underlying passivity. This kind of "power" serves as a defense against realization of one's passivity, and invariably it is inappropriate, if not egotistical and offensive, rather than wisely dispensed. In such cases, the individual's unconscious defensive mechanism is saying, for instance, "I'm not passive--look at the power I have and look at all the people who respect me for it."

Similarly, a person who is unable to achieve happiness in relationships may associate the feeling of falling in love or surrendering to another in sexual union, or in the give-and-take of everyday interactions, with submission and passivity. Thus, in defense, this person resists or avoids such experiences, withdraws and holds resentment, or becomes angry and critical. Though this person may be desperate for intimacy, invariably he or she sabotages it. We fear intimacy because it feels too much like being absorbed and taken over by our partner. But in reality surrender as expressed in a healthy relationship is a letting go of our passivity and ego, and a sign of trust in life, our partner, and ourself.

Our reactions to passivity are usually self-defeating, some more so than others. For instance, an overweight person finishing off a bag of cookies may say, as he musters up the feeling that he is acting through his own power and volition, "No one is going to tell me what I can and can't eat. I'll eat what I want, when I want." Thus, he feels powerful, but at the heart of the matter is his passivity, made visible through his submission to his craving for food and the self-destructive consequences of overeating.

Through passivity, we do not act; rather we react. Through passivity, we feel nothing when it is appropriate to feel something, or we feel a strong emotion when the situation we are experiencing doesn't call for such a response. A passive reaction can also consist of doing something that is inappropriate while not recognizing what is appropriate.

Passivity is often experienced as a sense of inertia, as having no power, being stuck, unable to move forward in one's life or powerless to make something positive happen. It is the condition of accepting one's fate rather than believing in and creating one's destiny. As one person put it, "It is the feeling that things happen to me rather than me choosing." It is also the condition of believing in oneself and one's destiny but not being able to fulfill it. Another person told me, "Sometimes I feel I'm all dressed up, ready to go, but my shoes are tied together."