Self-Care Series: Principals of and Practice against Psychic Masochism

This is the third article in a of a series of blog posts sharing favorite self-care practices aimed to recharge, de-stress, balance work/home energies, and realign priorities.  

Recently a coworker shared a short book with me called Your Achilles Eel by Mike Bundrant.  The book is aimed at introducing readers to the concept of psychic masochism, and to identify and work to correct the parts of our subconscious that enjoy negativity.  It is written in an easy-to-read format from the point of view of psychic masochism as a character itself, and it only took me half a lunch break to read.  The writing or style itself didn’t blow me away, but the concept really did (which I think was the point), and the application to self-care is tremendous.

The very basic theory behind the concept of psychic masochism, from my understanding, is as follows: When we are infants and young children, before we have an understanding that other people caring for us are also people who can’t fix everything or give us everything we want exactly when we want it, we have to deal with feelings of being controlled, deprived, and rejected even if our caregivers are giving the best care possible.  Because we can’t understand the concepts of time, the depth of the existence of others, and why there is good reason sometimes not to get exactly what we want, to deal with the negative feelings of being controlled, deprived, and rejected we actually develop an subconscious attraction to it.  This subconscious attraction continues into our adult life which results in self-sabotage, negative emotions, and bad decisions.

My past self-care posts have been more about relaxation techniques, which is important, but I believe that self-care also includes some more difficult practices, including looking hard at our lives to see what might be askew and what may need work.  While you may or may not believe in the concept of psychic masochism, the truth is that we all have had moments or know people that love to talk about or wallow in their problems to an extreme that goes beyond the goal of finding a solution and becomes more about how the world is out to get them as if they are more favored for unfairness and perceived injustice.  We all sometimes like to pull out balloons and bite into the sickly-sweet cake that is served at pity parties. 

For this post, I want to challenge you to consider how an unconscious desire for negativity might be affecting your life.  What decisions do you make (or not make) that you know you should (or shouldn’t).  What amount of these decisions is based on a lack of self-control, or a real addiction, or simple ignorance, and what amount is based off of a possible unconscious desire to stay in a place where you can return to the comfort of self-pity?  And then, what amount of your lack of self-control, addiction, or ignorance is based off of a possible subconscious desire to feed the attraction to negativity?  I’m not saying that this is the only cause of your problems, but perhaps it could be a contributor.  The first step to stopping the subconscious desire for negativity it to recognize when it might be happening.

I have considered and continue to consider things in my own life that could be self-destructive; things that I know to be negative, but that I continue to come back to again and again as if my life depended on it. The first thing that I thought of was my life-long struggle with nail biting.  I can tell you exactly why it is bad for me: It causes me to get sick more often because all the germs my hands collect go straight into my mouth. It causes physical pain sometimes because I bite too deep into the nail bed or cause hangnails.  It makes my hands look gnarly and nibbled.  It makes me feel guilty that I don’t have self-control enough to just stop the bad habit.  This is disturbing, but even with knowing all of that, I honestly get pleasure from ripping the flesh and nail with my teeth. WHY is that?

You might not be a nail biter.  You might have a tendency to buy things you know you can’t afford, or eat things you know aren’t good for you.  You might decide to spend hours on facebook looking at posts and pictures of others’ lives and feel increasingly worse about your own.  You might decide to stay at home when you are having a bad day instead of going out with a friend who invited you to do something that could actually be fun or positive.  You might have a tendency to spend more time wondering “why” something happened to you instead of focusing on what you can do now to make your life better. The commonality is that these practices are all counter-productive to what might be positive for us, but we continue to do them, and sometimes even WANT to do them.

Mike Budrant’s practical advice in his book to combat this is to be AWARE, HALT what you are doing, and ACT DIFFERENTLY (AHA!). Every time I catch myself nail biting since reading this book, I can’t help but apply my reading to this behavior; I then stop the biting in that conscious moment and I try to do something different with my hands.

It’s not a perfect cure, it doesn’t mean I can’t use other tools to assist me in stopping my bad habit, but it is a practice in self-care. 

I hope you join me!

If you are interested in reading Mike Bundrant’s book Your Achilles Eel yourself, please check it out here: http://inlpcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Your-Achilles-Eel.pdf