Or: “I’m ashamed of the fact that I feel I can’t say no to any man who wants to sleep with me. I loathe myself for being that way. Am I supposed to approve of it?”
Or: “I see people I admire—people who are strong, confident, assertive. That’s the way I want to be. Why should I accept being a nonentity?”
We can note here the two fallacies already mentioned: the belief that if we accept who and what we are, we must approve of everything about us, and the belief that if we accept who and what we are, we are indifferent to change or improvement.
Even to criticize our own behavior implies that we are competent to make such judgments, however. And the desire to change, to improve ourselves, implies that we are worthy and deserving of such growth. Some people in psychotherapy struggle with this dilemma in the very fact of their treatment. “Do I deserve to have this much time and money invested in my problems and struggle for happiness?” Without this most primitive level of self-value and self-acceptance, no further evolution is possible to us. But if we understand self-acceptance in this way, it becomes a powerful lever for change—including growth in self-esteem.
I recall a female client who insisted that she could not possibly feel anything but self-loathing, because of her inability to refuse any man’s sexual overtures. I asked her if it was really true that she saw herself as a woman who could not say no. “Yes,” she replied tearfully. I asked her if she was willing to accept that fact. “I hate it!” she replied. I said that since it was true that was how she saw herself, was she willing to accept that truth and acknowledge it? After some initial reluctance she said, “I accept the fact that I see myself as a woman who can’t say no.” When I asked her how saying that made her feel, she replied, “Angry.”
Then I asked her if she could accept the fact that she feels very angry when she acknowledges perceiving herself as a woman who can’t say no. She said indignantly, “I refuse to accept the fact that I am that kind of person!”
I asked her, “Then how can you ever hope to change?”
I guided her through several psychological exercises aimed at facilitating her acceptance of her present state. Essentially they consisted of helping her to experience that this was the way she was right now. After a while, she reported a change of feeling; she gave up the sense of fighting herself; she began relaxing into the feeling that “at this time of my life, this is part of who I am.”
“This is so strange,” she remarked. “Nothing has changed. I still have the problem. But I feel calmer. I’ve stopped shouting at myself. It’s just … a fact about me. I don’t like it, but it’s a fact. I acknowledge it. Not just with words, but, you know, really accepted as true. Nothing has changed, and yet I feel as if I have more self-respect.”
Then she made a significant statement. “And as I begin to accept the reality of what I’ve been doing, how I’ve been living, it seems as if it would be much harder to go on doing it—I mean, to go on doing things of which I disapprove, that are humiliating. Perhaps that’s why I’ve resisted accepting it. As soon as you stop fighting and accept, something begins to happen.”
There is more I will need to say about self-acceptance, but for the moment I will summarize its relation to change and personal evolution as follows: If I can accept that I am who I am, that I feel what I feel, that I have done what I have done—if I can accept it whether I like all of it or not—then I can accept myself. I can accept my shortcomings, my self-doubts, my poor self-esteem. And when I can accept all that, I have put myself on the side of reality rather than attempting to fight reality. I am no longer twisting my consciousness in knots to maintain delusions about my present condition. And so I clear the road for the first steps of strengthening my self-esteem.
*I explore this issue in some depth in The Disowned Self.
5
The Problem of Guilt
The essence of guilt, whether major or minor, is moral self-reproach: I did wrong when it was possible for me to do otherwise. Guilt always carries the implication of choice and responsibility, whether or not we are consciously aware of it.
We have already seen that, for a child, self-blame and guilt can have short-term survival value if they appear to make the child’s world more intelligible and to offer some sense of control over the child’s life. A powerful need to believe that the universe is “just” and that terrible things do not happen to innocent people may carry over into adulthood—for example, when victims of political persecution blame themselves, or are encouraged to do so, rather than confronting the fact that they may be powerless pawns in the hands of irresponsible and evil forces.
Certain contemporary consciousness trainings and alleged spiritual disciplines teach people that they are “responsible for everything that they experience” or that they “create everything that happens to them.” They appeal to the need to feel in control, the need to feel effective. But this viewpoint can lead to the conclusion that a one-year-old baby in a country at war is responsible for the experience of being napalmed. And, appallingly, there are those who do not shrink from this conclusion.
Some years ago I found myself on a panel with a well-known psychologist who insisted that unborn children are responsible for selecting their parents—which led him to the conclusion that a battered infant has chosen parents as torturers. He had no answer to the obvious question, Did the parents have any choice in the matter, or were they totally at the mercy of the unborn child’s will? The point is, if we are not to corrupt the concept of responsibility, we need to keep it within rational bounds.
The failure to do so is a problem I often encounter in my practice. Someone a client loves—a husband, a wife, a child—is killed in an accident, and even though the client knows the thought is irrational, he or she feels, “Somehow I should have prevented it.” Sometimes the guilt is in part fed by regrets over actions taken or not taken while the person was still alive. But in the case of deaths that seem senseless, such as when a person is hit by a careless automobile driver or dies during minor surgery, the survivor may experience an unbearable feeling of being out of control, of being helplessly at the mercy of an event that has no rational significance. In such a case self-blame or self-reproach can ameliorate the anguish, can diminish a sense of impotence. The survivor feels, “If only I had done such and such differently, this terrible accident would not have occurred.” Thus guilt serves the need for efficacy by providing an illusion of efficacy.
Sometimes this same form of unearned guilt follows a divorce or trouble with one’s children. In these situations one feels, “Somehow I should have known how to prevent this, somehow I should have known what to do”—even when one cannot say what one could have done differently, and even when decisive elements quite outside one’s personal control may have been present.
It is not uncommon for such guilts to afflict even persons of fairly healthy self-esteem, temporarily lowering their self-esteem. But when one begins with a lower self-esteem, guilts have a naturally fertile soil in which to grow, thereby worsening an already deficient self-regard.
This is why the protection of self-esteem requires a clear understanding of the limits of volitional responsibility. Where there is no power, there can be no responsibility, and where there is no responsibility, there can be no reasonable self-reproach. Regret, yes; guilt, no.
Where there is neither evasion nor irresponsibility nor conscious breach of integrity, there are no rational grounds for the experience of guilt. There may, naturally, be grounds for pain or regret over errors of judgment. From the point of view of self-esteem, this distinction is of life-and-death importance.
The concept of Original Sin—of guilt where there is no possibility of innocence, no freedom of choice, no alternatives available—is anti-self-esteem by its very nature. It is, therefore, antihuman.
The problem of guilt can take many forms. We shall consider some of the most prevalent.
Perhaps the mildest form of guilt is experienced by those persons who, although th
ey may avoid a great deal of thinking in their lives, about their relationships, work, and their values and goals in general, have not knowingly violated their convictions in any major way, have not attempted to cheat reality and get away with what they regard as the irrational. They may operate at a lower level of consciousness than that of which they are capable, but they are more or less honest within that context.
Those who do act against their moral convictions commonly experience a heavier burden of guilt. But here we must make a major distinction.
There are people who, if they violate their own principles, experience guilt as well as anxiety, but do not, in effect, feel guilty “all the way down.” They are protected by the fact that they have independent standards to sustain and integrity to uphold. A person may feel, “It was unworthy of me to fail my own standards in this matter,” yet still maintain a decent level of self-esteem.
Guilt tends to be more acute and more painful for those whose approach to moral judgments is implicitly authoritarian. There is no healthy core of rational understanding or independent judgment to protect the transgressors from feelings of fundamental worthlessness when they disobey their significant others, Their anxious feelings of guilt are often experienced as fear of the disapproval of those others. Others are perceived as the voice of objective reality calling them to judgment.
In the practice of therapy, so much of the guilt we encounter has to do with the disapproval or condemnation of significant others, such as parents, that it is never advisable to take declarations of guilt at face value. Often, when a person declares, “I feel guilty over such and such,” what the person really means but rarely acknowledges is, “I am afraid that if mother or father knew about what I had done, I would be condemned.” We frequently find that the person does not actually regard the action as wrong. In these circumstances, the solution to the problem of “guilt” lies in the courage to heed the voice of the self—in other words, increased autonomy.
For example, a man professes to feel guilty over masturbation because his parents taught him it was sinful. Sometimes a therapist “solves” the problem by substituting his authority for that of the client’s parents and assuring the man that masturbation is a perfectly acceptable activity. This is the kind of solution one is especially likely to encounter among practitioners whose approach to therapy is heavily didactic. The assumption is that the man’s guilt is caused by his mistaken idea about the morality of masturbation. In my experience I would say that this is the smoke screen problem. It conceals the deeper problem of dependency and fear of self-assertiveness, failure to honor one’s own judgment, which means a failure to honor the self.
Sometimes professions of guilt are a smoke screen for disowned feelings of resentment. I have failed to live up to someone else’s expectations or standards. I am afraid to admit that I am intimidated by those expectations and standards. I am afraid to acknowledge how angry I am over what is expected of me. So instead I tell myself and others that I feel guilty over failing to do what is right, and I do not have to fear that I will communicate my resentment and place my relationship with others in jeopardy.
When an individual with this problem is guided to recognize, experience, and express the resentment, the “guilt” tends to disappear.
In other words, when I become more honest about my own feelings—which is another form of honoring the self—I give up the need to feel “guilty.” And when I do, I am freer to think clearly about values and expectations I may need to challenge.
Without denying that there are times when people genuinely do feel guilty because they have not lived up to standards that they themselves respect, an enormous amount of what people call “guilt” proves to be a cover-up for other feelings that have been disowned, as in the above examples. When I suspect the authenticity of the person’s declarations of guilt, sometimes I will ask the client to do completions for the sentence “The good thing about feeling guilty is—.” Here are typical responses:
The good thing about feeling guilty is—
It allows me to remain stuck.
I don’t have to do anything.
People will feel sorry for me.
It proves I’m a moral person.
I don’t have to change.
I can feel superior to other people [who don’t have the integrity to feel guilty].
I can feel sorry for myself.
I can manipulate other people into telling me I am good.
I can make my parents right.
Most of these endings are self-explanatory. The last one may not be, and it is profoundly important.
Let us suppose that when we are young our parents communicate that we are bad, for reasons that may have little or nothing to do with our actual behavior. A “good” child is one who adapts to the parents’ view of things. So if a child wants to be good and is told that he or she is bad, a painful paradox is generated. Thus:
I want to be good.
My parents tell me I’m bad.
A good child does not contradict his or her parents.
So the way to be good is to be bad.
If I were really to be good, that would make me bad, since my parents have told me I am not good, and it is not right to contradict them.
If I am bad, that makes me good, since I am conforming to my parents’ view of things.
On the other hand, if I were to be good, that would make me bad—disobedient and noncompliant.
In other words, if I tie my self-esteem to my parents’ approval and the cost of approval is compliance, then I end up pursuing positive self-esteem by accepting negative self-esteem.
This is one of the most common problems encountered among people in therapy. The solution, in principle, again lies in increasing autonomy, shifting the sources of self-esteem from external signals to internal signals, from the parents’ judgment to the client’s judgment—which means, again, learning to honor the self.
The difficulty many people confront when trying to achieve this shift is the fear of aloneness and self-responsibility. They have never transcended the childhood notion that their relationship to their parents is essential for their survival. Nor have they adequately discovered their own resources in meeting the challenges of life. Consciously or subconsciously, they are still children. Never mind that in reality they may be demonstrably more capable of survival than their parents.
The problem thus described may sound almost embarrassing, which is unfortunate, because to confront it and transcend it is an heroic undertaking—if courage and perseverance are essential criteria of heroism.
We do not transcend by denying or repressing our feelings of dependence, but rather by accepting them, experiencing them, and then stepping beyond them by learning to listen to and respect our internal signals—to think for ourselves—and to be guided by our own conclusions.
From the point of view of protecting self-esteem, it is essential to distinguish between rational guilt and self-damnation.
Rational guilt means an authentic evaluation of some action of mine as wrong, a genuine feeling of regret or remorse, and the determination to exercise a better choice in the future. Self-damnation is a verdict directed at my person as such and contains a contradiction: If I am irredeemably worthless, who is the person who cares enough to pronounce that verdict? Whose is the soul I have offended? If I am the one who is pronouncing the verdict, then I cannot be totally worthless.
Rational guilt is an alarm signal. It would not serve the purposes of our survival and well-being to be devoid of the capacity for self-reproach. Sometimes, in the state of half-focused awareness, we behave blindly, inappropriately, or irresponsibly, and the first signal to reach our conscious attention is an uneasy feeling that pertains to guilt.
But irrational guilt—which subverts the purposes of survival or well-being—is of virtually epidemic proportions. Thus, a person declares: “I feel guilty for desiring my best friend’s wife.”
Implication: Our sexual desires are under our direct
volitional control and should never flow in an inconvenient or inappropriate direction.
Most likely translation: People whose good opinion I care about would condemn me for having such desires.
Or again: “I feel guilty for being so good-looking.”
Implication: My good looks are my reprimand to all those who do not possess them.
Most likely translation: I am afraid of other people’s jealousy or envy.
Or: “I feel guilty for being so intelligent.”
Implication: I was born with a good brain at the expense of all those who do not possess one; furthermore, since everyone chooses to exercise such potential intelligence as he or she is born with, I deserve no credit for what I have done with my endowment.
Most likely translation: I am afraid of the animosity of those who resent intelligence.
Or: “I feel guilty for having been given preferential treatment by my parents over my sisters, because I was an only son.”
Implication: I am morally responsible for the behavior of my parents.
Most likely translation: I feel resentment over the burden and expectations that are the other side of the preferential treatment sons receive.
Or: “I feel guilty because I am human—I was born in sin.”
Implication: It is meaningful to speak of guilt in a context where innocence does not exist. Furthermore, I must accept a concept that does violence to reason and morality because authorities proclaim it.
Most likely translation: Those authorities hold a monopoly on morality and moral judgments; who am I to set my judgment against theirs?
Or: “I feel guilty because my parents never loved me.”
Implication: My parents’ response to me could only have been determined by my own moral character, not by any problems of theirs that might have had nothing to do with me. They must have seen that I was worthless from the very beginning.
Honoring the Self Page 8