In the course of exploring this problem in therapy, I find sentence stems such as the following particularly useful: “Mother/Father was always—”; “Mother/Father always seemed to expect—”; “With mother/father I felt—”; “One of the things I wanted from mother/father and didn’t get was—”; “Mother/Father gave me a view of myself as—”; “Mother/Father gave me a view of men as—”; “Mother/Father gave me a view of women as—”; “Mother/ Father gave me a view of love as—”; “Mother/Father gave me a view of sex as—”; “Mother/Father gave me a view of life as—”; “If mother/father thought I was in a happy love relationship—”; “If mother/father saw me achieving something important with my life—”; “One of the unspoken messages I got from mother/father was—”; “When I think of the ways in which mother/father continues to affect my life—.”
When an individual has completed approximately ten endings for each of these sentence stems, profound insights have invariably emerged into consciousness, insights that often have the power to generate change. Now the individual is able to recognize when the voices within are alien. Now the individual is in a position to question and challenge. But since there are always tacit rewards for cooperating with mother’s or father’s philosophy and life scenario, I put the individual in contact with the benefits of his or her complicity. Thus: “The good thing about sharing my mother’s/father’s view of things is—”; “If I were to exercise my independent judgment against mother/father—”; “If I were to live by my own vision of life/love/women/men/sex/success—”; “When I am ready to belong to myself rather than to mother/father—.”
At this point it is generally possible to guide the individual through initial explorations in changing behaviors, in stepping outside of an unnecessarily limiting model of self-in-the-world. The ongoing process of individuation and the ongoing act of self-assertion here become inseparable. We create our self through our choices, our actions, and the risks we are willing to take.
Breaking free of other people’s limiting values, philosophies, and life scenarios obviously includes a good deal more than breaking free of the influence of mother and father. We may need to challenge important aspects of the implicit philosophy of the culture in which we live. We may need to check and confront many of the basic premises that almost everyone takes for granted. This is a subtle and difficult task, because we rarely even know where to begin; the premises that need to be questioned are too much a part of our own thinking. The premises involved may pertain to the ultimate meaning of life, the values by which we are to live, the nature of virtue, the meaning of maleness and femaleness, the nature of knowledge, the ultimate nature of existence itself. To think independently and radically about such issues is not an easy undertaking. We shall deal with at least one example of this challenge when we take up the subject of ethics.
But before we turn to the subject of ethics, there is an issue we need to address in more detail—one of the great barriers to individuation, self-esteem, and the art of being.
Fear of death—the other side of fear of life.
*Detailed instructions for the use of the sentence-completion technique and a wide variety of sentence stems for self-exploration may be found in If You Could Hear What I Cannot Say.
*An excellent introduction to the Jungian concept of male-female subpersonalities may be found in Invisible Partners by John A. Sanford.
*Later I resumed doing individual therapy.
11
Death Anxiety
That we are mortal is one of the givens of our existence. Every one of us, one way or another, must confront the issue of death—our own death and that of the people we care about—but it would be difficult to name any other fact of life so fiercely resisted and denied.
We have an immense repertoire of behaviors through which we deny our powerlessness in the face of death; from seeking symbolic immortality through children, flags, causes, fame, to persuading ourselves that we are indestructible by living recklessly and irresponsibly, to consoling ourselves with the belief that death is an illusion.
Thus far in the book our primary focus has been on fear of life: fear of choice, freedom, responsibility, struggle, uncertainty, pain, and failure. Fear of death is the shadow side of the same terror, and it is relatively less well understood. But if both are left unresolved, we can be caught in limbo between them.67
While the difficulty of accepting and integrating the fact of mortality is doubtless as old as humankind itself, it has often been observed that ours is a culture in which denial of death is exceptionally pervasive. In the past, when most people died in their homes, surrounded by relatives, it was perhaps easier to accept death as a natural event. Now, with more and more people dying in hospitals, essentially alone, essentially quarantined off from the living, death appears all the more mysterious, all the more frightening, all the more remote from our existence. We are less and less prepared to deal with it or to accept it—just at that moment in history when the entire globe lies under the shadow of death as never before.
One day I was discussing our cultures attitude on death and dying with a physician who specializes in the terminally ill. He remarked, “Doctors and nurses are themselves the worst offenders. Their helplessness when confronted with death is appalling. They become callous, insensitive, even cruel—first, because their own fear of death is mobilized, and second, because they feel like failures. We don’t accept death as a natural phenomenon. So very few physicians know how to deal appropriately with dying patients or their families. The place to begin is with the realization that we ourselves are going to die. If we can handle that, we can handle the death of our patients. But fear of death—and denial of death—is probably what drives a lot of people into the profession of medicine in the first place.”
In the course of therapy, clients readily disclose their fear of life. There is no need to go searching for evidence of such a fear; it announces itself constantly. Fear of death is far subtler, less obvious, more indirect in its manifestations. Death anxiety is rarely raised as an explicit problem.
One day, while waiting for the members of a particular group, I found myself wondering about the prevalence of this problem in my own practice. When the group was assembled, I said, “Today we’re going to begin a little differently, and I prefer not to explain what this is about. I’ll suggest a sentence stem, the person on my immediate left will begin, then we’ll rotate around the room, each person repeating my stem and putting on his or her ending. After a while I’ll introduce another stem and we’ll continue. We’ll talk about what it all means later.”
As I announced the first stem, “At the thought that I’m going to die someday—,” everyone’s breathing suddenly seemed to stop. Muscles tensed, eyes shifted nervously; all smiles and relaxation instantly vanished.
At the thought that I’m going to die someday—
I am terrified.
I don’t want to think about it.
I wonder what’s the point of living.
I can’t stand it.
I wonder how long I’ve got.
What am I doing with my life?
I want to crawl into a shell.
I’m upset.
I don’t believe it.
I hope I can accomplish something first.
I hope it won’t be painful.
Not me, never.
I’m going to live until at least 150.
Maybe medical science will come up with an answer.
I don’t care, I believe in reincarnation.
I just won’t think about it.
I hate it.
I feel angry.
I feel betrayed.
Why me?
It’s not fair.
I wonder who will remember me.
I hope it won’t be soon.
This is the worst sentence stem you’ve ever come up with.
By this time, two or three people in the group were crying. Some were moving about restlessly in their chairs. The atmosphe
re was filled with anxiety and depression—and anger.
When a child first learns about death—
She wonders if daddy is going to die, too.
She’s frightened when her parents go out at night.
He tells himself grandpa is sleeping.
He runs out to play.
He wonders if he will be left alone.
He wonders if it’s cold in the ground, and he feels scared.
He wonders why mummy left him.
He tries to understand, and he can’t.
He laughs and pretends it’s a game.
She asks a lot of questions that make grown-ups uncomfortable.
He wonders what it feels like.
He asks his parents when he is going to die.
He says he’s never going to die.
He decides to stay young forever.
She tells herself only married people with children die.
She wants to run and hide.
He tells himself that if you’re in heaven you’re not really dead.
She tells herself if she’s really good it won’t happen.
He hides his fear.
He pretends he doesn’t understand.
He knows it will never happen to him.
She hangs on to mummy.
She hopes other people will die in her place.
He wishes mummy and daddy would live forever so everything would be all right.
This stem had been inspired by some research challenging the conventional wisdom that young children were largely oblivious to the phenomenon of death.1,95 I chose the impersonal form, rather than “When I first learned about death—,” in order to build a measure of safety into the exploration. I hoped that my clients might respond more openly, and they did. It was interesting to observe that the men and women in the group were expressing thoughts and feelings they obviously had never put forth before, evidencing considerable agitation and disorientation, while simultaneously, at a deeper level, there was an odd lack of surprise, as if none of this were really new, as if they had always known it.
If talking about death weren’t such a taboo—
Maybe the subject wouldn’t be so frightening.
My parents wouldn’t have had to be so dishonest with me when grandpa died.
I might be able to look at the subject.
People could talk about dying instead of “sleeping” or “passing away.”
Death wouldn’t seem so supernatural.
We could all make peace with it.
I think I’d live differently.
I wouldn’t waste so much time.
I could be more honest.
Death might not be so terrible, somehow.
We could find a better way to live.
I wouldn’t keep postponing things.
I’d wonder if we could stand it.
I’d live more in the moment.
Just talking this way lets me feel calmer.
If I felt free to talk about my fear of death—
I think I would talk for a long time.
It would be a great relief.
We’d find out we all have the same fears.
I would feel less lonely.
It would feel like a burden lifted off my shoulders.
The lump in my chest might melt.
I wouldn’t feel this terror.
I’d appreciate my life today more.
I’d let my children know how much I love them.
I wouldn’t keep myself so busy.
I’d read more.
I’d play more.
I’d know no one has all the time in the world.
I wouldn’t worry so much about my image.
I’d do what I thought was right, whether others agree with me or not.
I’d appreciate all the wonderful things I have.
I could feel how much I love life.
My fear would go away.
I know it would be better than keeping silent.
I could relax into living.
I would wonder why we’re all so busy pretending.
I would feel freer.
I would stop thinking about death.
I could forgive my parents for dying.
I would enjoy nature more.
I would feel as if I had been released from prison.
One of the ways I keep myself from dying is—
I refuse to grow up.
I keep busy.
I have a lot of people needing me.
I never fall in love.
I never commit to anything.
I have children.
I take a lot of crazy chances to prove I’m indestructible.
I tell myself that if I refuse to accept death, I won’t die.
I make money.
I postpone my most important goals.
I hang out with young people.
I chase women.
I got a facelift.
I surround myself with things.
I never decide on a career.
I don’t enjoy anything.
I read books on life extension.
I fantasize that medical science will find a way to keep us alive forever.
I keep looking for new vitamins to take.
I tell myself death is only a state of mind and can’t happen without your consent.
I refuse to live.
I don’t participate.
I keep telling myself my life hasn’t really begun yet.
I try to be helpful to everyone.
I pray.
I keep putting things off.
I don’t have orgasms during sex—only grown-ups can have orgasms.
I let people hurt me in little ways, so nothing really bad can happen to me
I study Buddhism.
I’m always in the middle of something very important that isn’t finished yet.
I keep a lot of people indebted to me.
I numb myself.
I just don’t think about it.
Subsequently, I was to repeat exercises of this kind with other therapy groups and with students in my seminars across the country. The results were always essentially the same; the completions listed above were the ones that kept recurring, in one form or another.
Glancing back over these completions, we can isolate some especially significant themes. First, it seems readily apparent that many human beings experience an underlying terror of death that they hardly ever discuss or even apprehend at a conscious level. Second, the problem of death is already a reality for children, and the process of building defenses against it begins very early. Third, the denial of death is deeply entrenched and is sustained by a wide variety of maneuvers aimed at symbolic immortality. Fourth, many of these maneuvers clearly obstruct the normal process of development and individuation. Some harmful maneuvers include clinging to a child’s state of consciousness (“I refuse to grow up”), avoiding commitment either to a person or to an occupation (“So long as I do not enter the game, the clock has not begun to tick”), compulsive sexuality (“See how alive I am?”), keeping frenetically busy (“If I run fast enough, death can’t catch me”), leaving major tasks undone (“I cannot possibly be taken away before my work is completed”), excessive preoccupation with material acquisitions (“Surrounded as I am by the insignia of power, death would not dare enter”), placing relationships with others above personal development (“If enough people need and are dependent on me, how can I possibly die?”), and taking irresponsible and dangerous risks (“See how invulnerable I am?”).
I want to comment on one other theme reflected in the above sentence completions. Sometimes, when parents die, a child (of any age) feels rage. Often this is interpreted as anger at being abandoned, or as resentment over the fact that unfinished business with parents must now remain unfinished forever. Doubtless such explanations are generally true. But another factor is sometimes operative. So long as my parents are alive, I cannot die, since children do not die before their parents. My parents are thus th
e guarantors of my immortality. How dare they betray me by dying?
And there is another side to this betrayal. Parents may resist their children’s growing up, because they are then pushed closer to the end of their own life. Death anxiety in parents can be transmitted to a child. The child picks up the message: To grow up is to kill my mother/father. I keep my parents alive by remaining forever a child. And I keep myself alive by the same means, since my parents must die before I do.
We can better appreciate the relationship of death anxiety to the challenges of individuation if we realize that implicit in everything I have been saying thus far is the ultimate defense against death: the refusal to live. If I do not come into existence, I cannot go out of existence. If I do not emerge as a separate entity, there is no one for death to touch. If I remain forever undeveloped and unactualized, if I keep life always ahead of me, then death recedes into the infinite distance.
To exist has its etymological roots in a Greek word meaning “to stand out” or “to stand forth.” All growth, biological and psychological, entails a process of differentiation—from the womb, from my body, from my family, from my most recent stage of development. In differentiation there is already death—the death of my previous stage of development. So it is differentiation that makes me vulnerable to annihilation. If I refuse to emerge, I am safe.95
Thus I can refuse to individuate, refuse to evolve—and wait. I lose myself in my children, my work, my religion, my cause, my homes and automobiles, my guru, while I wait for a miracle, wait for a rescuer, wait for the universe to take pity on me, wait for some unimaginable solution that will confirm my uniqueness and guarantee my immortality.
I tell myself I do not believe in death—that what we call “death” is merely the process by which a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly—and I learn to call this strategy “gaining a spiritual perspective.”
Honoring the Self Page 22