Will You Sing Your Song Before You Die?
by Barry Michels
This recording comes from Defeat Your Inner Enemy Now, a webinar with Barry Michels from March 2020.
Fear, self-hatred, pessimism, avoidance—these are all psychological symptoms. What traditional psychology would do with a symptom is explore the cause of each one, and it would be different for each one of you. We would go back to your childhood, your relationships with your mom and dad, etc.
We take a completely different approach. We see the commonality in all of these symptoms, because each symptom serves the same function—to be an obstacle to you. It holds you back from the satisfying meaningful life that you could be living.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
In broader terms, you could say that the symptom is actually designed to destroy your future, or at least attack your future. It doesn't have to succeed, but it is designed in a negative way to destroy your future, which leads to a kind of an amazing conclusion: Every single one of us is infected with the same self-sabotaging force.
If you think about it, it's a really brilliant force, because it's able to morph into whatever form is most effective in stopping you. So for one of you, it might be lack of motivation. For me, it's addiction to cute cat videos on YouTube. For someone else, it's fear of failure. For another person, it's fear of success.
What I'm trying to get you to appreciate is that the enemy is cunning, baffling, and very powerful. It gets the best of us most of the time. And that's why, as the poet says, most people live lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with their song unsung. We want you to sing your song before you die. That's the whole point of The Tools.
PART X
This is not a new idea. For most of human history, we have believed in an evil force that tempts you away from the true path. It's been called many different names: Satan, Lucifer, Ahriman, Mephistopheles.
Modern writers have written about this force, too. C.S. Lewis, the author of the Narnia Chronicles wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters, which is a series of letters from an elder devil to his young apprentice. His apprentice is trying to capture the soul of a young man in pre-war Britain, and it is a brilliant and extremely entertaining book. It was one of the most helpful guides that I had to Part X when Phil Stutz introduced me to the notion. I recommend it highly.
C.S. Lewis was a Christian, but Sigmund Freud, on the other end of the theological spectrum, was an atheist. And yet he still believed in this self-sabotaging force. It is little known, but at the end of Sigmund Freud's career, he completely disavowed his psychoanalytic theories. Because they didn't work, his patients kept returning, reverting back to their old bad habits. And so the last theory that he came up with, which unfortunately was rejected by the psychoanalytic community, was that there was a force inside of every human being getting them to repeat their most self defeating patterns. And he called it the Death Instinct. This was his version of Part X.
It is little known, but at the end of Sigmund Freud's career, he completely disavowed his psychoanalytic theories. Because they didn't work, his patients kept returning, reverting back to their old bad habits.
The problem with both C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud was that they didn't give us any instructions on how to fight the force. My reaction to both was, “It's good to know, but what the hell do I do?!” Freud, in fact, was such a pessimistic personality that he didn't believe that this force could be fought. He saw the Death Instinct as an absolute limitation on human potential.
We could not more vehemently disagree with that. Part X is a challenge to your potential, not an absolute limitation to it. We have found that just by struggling with Part X, whether you win or lose any one struggle—and you will lose struggles—but just by struggling with it, your whole life begins to expand, because you get to know the enemy, and you can cut them off at the pass.
