#moralistic

Being less compulsive. Space out responsibilities and try to avoid planning things back to back. This will help you face your actual priorities.

Avoid being self-pitying, self-deprecating, or hypercritical of yourself when learning from your mistakes.

Don't project your thoughts & feelings onto others. Try to avoid assuming that others are judging you or that you are being judged. If and when you get anxious, taking the time to get factual & grounded information will help eliminate any worry and assumptive thinking.

Learn to ask for and receive pleasure. It's okay to have wants and desires. Put your ego aside and take as much time as you need to articulate what you want. Be communicative not passive.

Work to improve your cultural sensitivity and cultural intelligence. Seeing the value of other's beliefs, attitudes, & perspectives outside your own can improve your empathy and understanding of others. Learn to accept that others opinions are just as valid as yours even if they do not directly support, compliment, or agree with yours.

Question the difference between "what should be done" and "what is desirable".

Acknowledge angry emotions such as frustrations with others whom are "getting away with it". Take time to unpack cognitive dissonance and recognize that what they "get away with" is desirable. Are you judging others or are you judging yourself for desiring the easy but, 'immoral' and preferred action?

It's okay to fantasize about your Shadow self. Allow yourself to fantasize about the things you desire even if they don't agree with your "ideal self".

Internal war, external war

We can frame the psyche as an inner war between two forces. The achiever, superegoic, moralistic, impatient, fueled by external demands and social conditioning (“you should, you must, you have to”). The preserver, id-like, resistant, passive, self-protective, refusing impossible demands through sabotage and inertia. It’s a dramatization of the Freudian internal economy which is the conflict between the superego (command), ego (mediator), and id (drive).

What’s called third force in many modern reinterpretations of therapy itself is often nothing more than the ego masquerading as a reconciling intelligence. This is the classic self-reflexive trap of modern therapy to imagine that one can understand drives into submission. But the drives don’t need understanding. They’re automatic, metabolic processes. What happens instead is that the psyche invents a story in which understanding is its method of remaining intact.

Ego stages itself as a neutral mediator, a wise inner therapist holding space between the achiever (superego) and the preserver (id). But structurally, that’s still part of the same machinery. The ego trying to survive by becoming the arbiter of its own conflict. It hypnotizes both sides through language saying, “I understand you both, let’s make peace” but the real power dynamic remains. The system hasn’t transcended itself; it’s just refined its internal control strategy.

In truth, there is a reconciling process, but it’s not egoic, not verbal, not even psychological. It’s physiological, homeostatic. The body-mind finding equilibrium through energy regulation and prediction error minimization. This reconciling force is not a person inside you but the automatic feedback correction of the system itself.