The phantom of inner passivity filters our perceptions of reality and distorts our sense of self. It binds us to a second-hand experience of ourself. Inner passivity, which affects men and women equally, is much more than just our difficulty in standing up for our rights. It is complex and mysterious, concealed in our psyche beneath feelings of being helpless, overwhelmed, and indecisive. This unconscious screening system contributes to feelings of being defective or unworthy, and it plays a role in procrastination, failure, and addictive and compulsive behaviors. It is a factor in hundreds of symptoms, including anxiety, fear, anger, and depression. Free of inner passivity, we connect with out creativity, self-expression, and capacity for intimacy. We clear the way for the fulfillment of our courage, integrity, compassion, and love-and for reunion with ourself.

The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Michaelson, Peter

Psychology & Counseling

Infinity Publishing

WHY IS THE RIGHT WING so resistant to progressive politics? Why is the partisan right so righteous, dogmatic, and bullying? And why can't President Bush's supporters handle the truth? In witty and stylish prose, in-depth psychotherapist Peter Michaelson investigates these questions. He also explores the liberal psyche to uncover emotional addictions to feeling victimized and tendencies toward injustice collecting, losing causes, and unresolved passivity. This book reveals inner dynamics in our unconscious mind that mirror the political clash between liberals and conservatives. Here we see these emotional issues with greater clarity than ever, and we are astonished at how they contaminate the liberal-conservative divide and subvert the nation's ideals. The vital new knowledge revealed here can move us and our democracy forward. In this book we learn as much about overcoming our anger, fear, depression, worry, failure, and addictions as we do about reinvigorating our democracy. We also learn about the emotional negativity that is lodged in our psyche, undermining our behaviors, resolve, and responsibilities as citizens. This negativity, much of which operates outside of our awareness, instigates political discord and social dissension. The knowledge presented here can help us become free of our unresolved emotional issues and guide us in our quest for personal happiness and national harmony. ( 230 pages, copyright 2006)

Democracy's Little Self-Help Book

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

AuthorHouse

Inner passivity, a common characteristic of the human psyche, distorts our sense of self and binds us to a second-hand experience of ourselves. This psychological condition, which affects men and women equally, is much more than just our difficulty in standing up for our rights. It is a complex and mysterious aspect of our psyche, concealed beneath our feelings of being helpless, overwhelmed, and indecisive. Inner passivity contributes to feelings of being defective or unworthy, and it is a factor in hundreds of symptoms, including anxiety, fear, anger, addictions, compulsions, and depression. Inner passivity is often experienced as a sense of inertia or as a lack of foresight or vision. It hides out behind the problem and the pain of being indecisive, yet it can also be a factor in hasty decisions. One of its primary emotional symptoms is the feeling of being overwhelmed, while one of its common behavioral symptoms is procrastination. We can experience inner passivity as the sense of having no power, as the feeling of being stuck or unable to move forward in our life, and as an inability to make something happen. It is present in the feeling that we're always playing catch-up or running late, in the impression that life is a losing battle, or in our worrying and emotional preoccupations concerning the uncertainty of life. Inner passivity also is the culprit in our failure to create a vision or a plan for our success, and it can also be an enemy that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Generally, we can say of inner passivity that we allow it to dictate and degrade our everyday experiences. We gain a distinct advantage when we identify inner passivity as a psychological condition or as a stage of our personal development. Once we identify it in this clinical sense, we're able to step back from the limiting, self-defeating symptoms it produces, thereby establishing some conscious separation from our symptoms. Otherwise the symptoms of inner passivity (low self-esteem, for instance) feel so much like our essence, as if they represent who we are or who we think we are. Without separation from our symptoms, the symptoms can define us in our own mind and thereby limit us. Free of inner passivity, we connect with our creativity, self-expression, and capacity for intimacy. We clear the way for the fulfillment of our courage, integrity, compassion, and love--and for reunion with our self.

Independently published

The human mind is hungry for truth and the human spirit is starving for consciousness. This book is a big mouthful of high-protein mental nutrition. People are ready now to acquire the knowledge that puts an end to misery and failure. Psychotherapist Peter Michaelson’s insightful book reveals and explains the human tendency to recycle and replay unresolved negative emotions that produce suffering and self-defeat. Most readers will immediately realize that this deep psychological knowledge is entirely new to them. We are, in a sense, addicted to our suffering. How is that possible? The notion seems preposterous. Unfortunately, it’s true—and this book shows exactly how most adults, in varying degrees, continue unwittingly and compulsively to experience and recycle unresolved emotions. Whatever form your unhappiness takes, the knowledge in Why We Suffer can save you from failure, self-defeat, and misery. Are you depressed? Do you feel confused, overwhelmed, disappointed, angry, and dispirited? Perhaps you’re failing at some of your endeavors and feel you can’t get your intelligence into high gear. Are you lacking in self-regulation? Some of us just feel like we’re stranded on the wrong planet. Why We Suffer makes it possible to see exactly how we produce this suffering. The book brings our psyche into sharp focus, revealing the precise psychological mechanisms at the heart of human dysfunction. This book also disputes the psychological establishment’s contention that emotional suffering is caused mainly by such factors as cultural clashes, human malice, genetic anomalies, and brain biochemistry. The knowledge in Why We Suffer empowers individuals to resolve their suffering by showing precisely how inner conflict operates in our psyche. The content is practical, specific, and scientific, and it popularizes the most powerful knowledge from psychology. The writing is polished and the ideas simplified, and the material, while intellectually stimulating, can be read and understood by a high-school student. The knowledge in this book is based mainly on the work of Edmund Bergler M.D. (1899-1962), a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who wrote 25 books and almost 300 articles published in professional journals. He is largely unknown because the deep knowledge he produced is covered up by our psychological defenses. Bergler’s writing, which is laden with clinical terminology, does put difficult demands on readers. In a sense, Michaelson, a former journalist and science writer, is his translator. He communicates Bergler’s ideas with a skill he has honed over many years of teaching these concepts and writing about them. (Revised and updated, December, 2014.)

Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness

Self-Help

Depth psychology offers us powerful knowledge. Yet this knowledge has to be well-communicated if it’s going to help us. Psyched Up is a work of artful communication that makes profound and vital self-knowledge comprehensible and easy to assimilate. Though we might be smart and well-educated, often all we encounter when we look inward is a fuzzy obscure uncertainty. It can seem we hardly know ourselves. Such lack of insight can significantly limit our ability to flourish. This book zeroes in on the essence of human nature. It explains the deeper dynamics at the heart of emotional and behavioral difficulties. We learn, for instance, why we can quickly become angry, depressed, or discouraged when facing life’s challenges. Why do we fail to be at our best when a stellar effort is needed? Why are we easily hurt and offended by someone’s indifference or inattention? Why do we experience so much of life in a negative rather than in a positive way? These topics and many others are addressed in detail as they apply to specific emotional and behavioral problems, including chronic anger, depression, anxiety, loneliness, codependency, addictions, shame, stress, chronic guilt, feelings of helplessness, excessive worry, and difficulty in fulfilling one’s goals or aspirations. This vital psychological knowledge is also applied to eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, panic attacks, fear of intimacy, marital and relationship strife, cynicism, incompetence, violent impulses, and suicidal thoughts. Above all, this comprehensive 366-page book reveals a new language of self-understanding. Jargon-free, it makes liberating insight available to all. It helps us to be really smart about what’s vitally important to know. The author, Peter Michaelson, is a former journalist and science writer who has been a psychotherapist for 30 years. He applies all his skills as a writer and communicator, and his experience as an effective and successful therapist, to present—with humor, precision, and literary flair—the most beneficial knowledge from the field of psychology.

Psyched Up: The Deep Knowledge that Liberates the Self

Hidden dynamics and conflicts in our psyche are the enforcers of low self-esteem. When we acquire real clarity concerning these dynamics, we’re on your way to a whole new improved sense of self. This book provides a wide-ranging, comprehensive understanding of low self-esteem. Unlike typical books on the subject, this one delves into our unconscious mind to illuminate the deep sources of emotional and behavioral problems. This depth psychology reveals and explains the inner dynamics that produce insecurity, fear, anxiety, indecision, dissension, depression, and self-defeating behaviors, all of which are associated with low self-esteem. To overcome low self-esteem, we acquire a growing awareness of how our self-defeating beliefs, attitudes, and impulses originate and how they are maintained. This insight, provided in this book through careful explanations and dozens of clinical cases, is the key to mental and emotional health. This book also highlights the importance of the visual drive and the emotional imagination. The unconscious misuse of our visual nature and our imagination is a major contributor to low self-esteem. One of the best ways to enhance self-esteem is through an understanding of how we unwittingly misuse our vision and imagination to produce negative impressions and to revive old issues and hurts. The author, Peter Michaelson, has been a psychotherapist for thirty years. Before that, he was a science and health writer for daily newspapers. Combining his experience and writing skills, he has simplified vital concepts from depth psychology for the purpose of making this important knowledge available to all readers. You will likely see yourself in the pages of this book, as you learn easy-to-understand psychological applications for breaking free from the shackles of low self-esteem.

See Your Way to Self-Esteem: Healing Your Psyche through Depth Psychology

Parenting & Relationships

Genes and brain chemistry are factors in addictions and compulsions—but so are negative emotions. Everyone has unresolved negative emotions from the past, and for some of us these emotions are very problematic. Unwittingly, addictive and compulsive individuals replay and recycle familiar, painful emotions through the events and situations of everyday life. These unresolved emotions—which include feeling refused, deprived, helpless, criticized, rejected, and abandoned—all originate in childhood. These emotions create an effect known as secret attachments. These attachments are revealed and explained in this new, revised 2015 edition of Secret Attachments, first published in 1993. Unconscious or secret attachments derive from the fact that whatever is unresolved in one’s emotional life is simply going to continue to be experienced, even when painful or self-defeating. Unless explored and understood, these secret attachments (the term is synonymous with "emotional attachments") will go on producing inner conflict, suffering, and self-defeat. Varieties of negativity are produced in the psyche of most people, causing varying degrees of dysfunction or neurosis. An addictive or compulsive person is often more challenged by negative emotions than are other people. With knowledge of the principles of depth psychology, individuals can access much of this inner content, especially the content that governs self-regulation. Attachments to unresolved negative emotions are hidden from our awareness, hence the word “secret.” In other words, secret attachments exist in our unconscious mind, yet our psychological defenses operate in such a way as to keep these attachments a secret from our conscious awareness. Modern science has established, of course, that much of the mental and emotional processing going on within us operates at an unconscious level. These attachments create powerful negative effects that include the weakening of our capacity for self-regulation. We can overcome the disrupting influence in our psyche of these attachments, and thereby enhance our capacity for self-regulation, when we see our inner dynamics clearly enough. This book provides more than 100 specific examples, taken from the author’s psychotherapy practice, of exactly how this all happens. Once one's attachments have been identified, the individual now becomes aware, through the monitoring of daily experiences, just how determined he or she has been to continue to replay and recycle them. People now clearly see how the attachments have been pushing them into various kinds of self-defeating and self-destructive behaviors. We can say, in fact, that addicts have a hidden or secret addiction to those negative emotions that are unresolved in their psyche. Because of the attachments, addictive personalities are compelled to go looking for the old hurt, and a price they pay for doing so is the loss of self-regulation. The inner knowledge concerning this collusion in our suffering is, in itself, not that difficult to understand. The hard part is overriding our resistance to acquiring the self-knowledge. In a sense, addicts don’t quite know who they are without these secret attachments. People haven’t been able to live free of them. Secret attachments constitute what seems like an essential part of one’s sense of self, although one’s identification with them is largely at an unconscious level. The negativity is experienced over and over, especially when a person is triggered by life’s challenging moments. Readers will see that the same basic psychological principles and dynamics apply through a wide range of addictions and compulsions. In other words, the same basic underlying dynamics can produce an alcoholic or a compulsive overeater, a drug addict or a self-defeating gambler.

Secret Attachments: Exposing the Roots of Addictions & Compulsions

Mental Health

Self-sabotage has been called the enemy within, the shadow, and the inner saboteur. It has been referred to in clinical manuals as Self-Defeating Personality Disorder. It comes in many guises, stalking us in the forms of self-doubt, low self-esteem, worry, anxiety, fear, depression, guilt, and addictive behaviors. At its worst, it constitutes not just self-defeat but self-destruction and self-hatred. It refers to a mysterious configuration in our psyche that hides inside us and toils against our best interests. If we don't succeed in identifying and eliminating this sinister part, we can never be truly free. This book reveals the unconscious dynamics in our psyche that limit our potential. Readers are privy to the "Big Secret" about human nature, which is our unconscious readiness to recycle and replay unresolved, negative emotions from our past. You will learn why this knowledge has not been assimilated by the public, and why even mental-health professionals are not conversant with it. The book includes scores of insights, solutions, and exercises to move the learning process quickly forward.

Freedom From Self-Sabotage: How to Stop Being Our Own Worst Enemy

Religion & Spirituality

The 74 short articles in this book are dispatches or reports from our psyche’s underworld. Here you’ll learn what makes you tick. If you want to escape from misery and self-defeat, here’s the depth psychology, in the simplest possible language, that can set you on the path to happiness and success. The author, Peter Michaelson, has taken the best knowledge from depth psychology and made it simple enough that lay readers can relate to on a personal level. Michaelson worked for almost twenty years as a journalist for daily newspapers before becoming a psychotherapist in the 1980’s. Since then, his writing and investigative skills helped him to penetrate and describe the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the human psyche and the frailties of human nature. Our psyche is a war zone of inner conflict, where primitive forces and instincts involving aggression, passivity, egotism, resistance, defenses, libido, and irrationality clash with their conflicting agendas. Just about everyone is a casualty, to some degree, of this inner conflict. Most people are innocent victims of this unconscious process, in the sense of being so uninformed of the psychic forces that keep us trapped in ignorance, stuck in a limited range of functioning, and fated to act out unnecessary suffering. This book offers a method of depth psychology that is highly effective in strengthening and empowering us. This method serves as a remedy for everyday people because, above all, it makes us self-sufficient: It enables us to overcome our inner malaise and lack of progress without the need or cost of experts. With this knowledge, many of us don’t need to have our own psychotherapist, although having a good therapist is certainly a boon that can speed up the process of self-development. Depth psychology dislodges the irrationality and chaos that breed in our psyche. The self-knowledge empowers us. With it, our intelligence is greatly enhanced. We take what’s been unconscious and make it conscious. Now that we understand the old programming that’s been running our emotional life, our intelligence updates the program and gets us functioning at our highest potential.

Who's Afraid of Inner Truth?: Dispatches from Our Psyche's War Zone

See Your Way to Self Esteem

Prospect Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michaelson, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Michaelson, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Michaelson, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity

Democracy's Little Self-Help Book

The Phantom of the Psyche: Freeing Ourself from Inner Passivity

Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness

Psyched Up: The Deep Knowledge that Liberates the Self

See Your Way to Self-Esteem: Healing Your Psyche through Depth Psychology

Secret Attachments: Exposing the Roots of Addictions & Compulsions

Freedom From Self-Sabotage: How to Stop Being Our Own Worst Enemy

Who's Afraid of Inner Truth?: Dispatches from Our Psyche's War Zone

See Your Way to Self Esteem