Going inside is central to activities with the potential to increase presence, awareness, and emotional health, such as meditation and psychotherapy. Buddha spent many thousands of hours meditating to explore the inner workings of his own mind, find the causes of human suffering, and the ways to cure it. Freud, another pioneer, used free association, dream analysis, and psychodynamic therapy to reveal the inner workings of his patients’ minds and of his own. Today psychotherapists use many different approaches to help clients enter, observe, and explore their psyches. Some of the more recent ones include mindfulness, Internal Family Systems which facilitates communication between the client and her parts, and psychedelic-assisted therapy in which the mind reveals and heals itself during an epic journey with highly unusual sights, symbols, and sounds that evoke awe.
Freud coined the term resistance to refer to the tendency of his patients to avoid going inside, increasing self-awareness, and garnering precious insights into the causes of their suffering and the reasons they behaved in maladaptive ways. Why would any patient resist insight? Freud reasoned the patient subconsciously feared feeling psychic pain, embarrassment or shame if the truth came out. In the Internal Family Systems model there are parts called protectors that block the client from access to her wounded inner child. Although protectors mean to spare the hurt inner child from fresh pain, they inadvertently block or delay healing of the emotional system.
Might there be other, cultural factors involved in why people resist going inside? Stigma and ignorance play a part. To spend time inside oneself is considered selfish and antisocial. Society’s view of normal contains the expectation that people should pay lots of attention to news, social media, entertainment, sports, and so forth. After all this is what people talk about. To retreat from this world to go inside is seen as weird, even harmful, and as an arrogant judgment that our culture has less to offer. Refusal to join mass culture begets criticism and exclusion. However, when you think back to all the ascetics, monks, nuns, and other spiritualists who choose to spend their time going in, one can quickly see that these people benefited immensely. They were the ones using breath work, meditation, and other means to cultivate inner peace while enlarging consciousness. In dealing with my own clients I frequently, but not always, see the fear of going inside gradually dissolve and become replaced by interest, curiosity, and new, valuable learning. My take on the fear of going inside is that it’s not always the product of inner resistance, but can be related to cultural factors which it may be appropriate to explore.
