Guilt and self condemnation

I often work with patients who have endured some sort of trauma and who have blamed themselves for these events.  In most cases, it would be obvious to any outside observer that my patient is not at fault for what happened.  In fact, many of my patients have been told on multiple occasions and by many people that they are not to blame.  Still, they continue to blame and then condemn themselves.  The most common example of this is sexual assault.  Patients often blame themselves for not screaming louder, fighting harder, or somehow resisting more vehemently.  Or they insist that they "should have known" the person was a rapist and stayed away from him. 

Then there are the patients I encounter whose actions did play some sort of role in the outcome of their traumatic experiences.  I have never had a case like this that was completely cut and dry, i.e., the patient's actions were the direct cause of a negative outcome.  Keep in mind that most of my patients are military service members.  So an example of this type of situation might be as follows: A patient is in charge of some team or unit of service members.  He plans some sort of mission or decides upon a particular course of action, which his team or unit then implements.  Someone in the team/unit gets hurt or killed during the mission.  The patient blames himself because he planned the mission and selected the people who participated in it.  Of course, the patient did not plant the bomb or fire the gun that killed his teammate.  Still, he feels responsible.

Self blame inevitably causes suffering.  A person's thoughts are often consumed by their traumatic experience/experiences.  They replay the event in their minds over and over again in an effort to identify what they could have done differently that would have led to a different outcome.  They initially condemn their actions but over time end up condemning themselves.  Often they begin to hate themselves.  As self-loathing grows, they withdraw socially and isolate themselves from others.  They frequently become depressed.

Self-blame also keeps a person stuck.  When a person blames himself for some traumatic event, everything about the event becomes frozen in time.  The person's memories of and feelings associated with the experience are stored in their mind and body in their original form.  When the person attempts to process the event he ends up condemning himself.  It doesn't take long before he decides to stop trying to process the event.  He tries to bury the emotions and memories.  This is, of course, impossible.  At some point, the emotions and memories rise to the surface (e.g., when the person sees something that reminds him of the event), as intense and as vivid as they were on the day the traumatic event occurred.  Most people respond by redoubling their efforts to suppress the thoughts and emotions, which may work in the short term but will eventually fail.  And thus a self-defeating cycle emerges.

If self-blame has such obvious negative consequences then why do it?  While the costs of self-blame are many, it also provides a certain benefit; it enables a person to maintain a sense of control.  If I accept that something bad happened that was completely beyond my ability to prevent or control then I must accept that something terrible could happen again at any minute and there is nothing I can do about it.  This is, of course, technically true.  It is, however, quite scary.  How do we live in a world where we cannot keep ourselves safe? 

If, however, something terrible happens and I blame myself for it then I can prevent the bad thing from happening again by changing my behavior in some way.  In other words, if it's my fault then I can fix it (or keep it from happening again).  I am in control.  Blaming myself allows me to maintain the illusion that I have control over my environment and that I can prevent bad things from happening to me (and am therefore able to keep myself safe). 

In future posts I will talk about ways to move past self blame...

Fear of happiness

I'm always looking to explore new ideas and new concepts.  That's the beautiful thing about the internet; you can go online with only a vague topic of interest in mind and come away having identified a whole list of related ideas you've never been exposed to.  Recently I read an article that talked about the fear of happiness.  Initially, it seemed like an oxymoron to me.  "Aren't we all striving to be happy?" I thought.  The pursuit of happiness is the driving force behind almost everything we do.  We want to be successful because we equate success with happiness.  We want to have children because we equate family with happiness.  We want to help others because we want to live a good life; we want to  live a good life because doing good things makes us happy.

The more I thought about it though the more it made sense to me.  On the surface most of us desire and seek happiness.  The fear of happiness is rarely a conscious thing.  (There is an exception to this.  Apparently, there are people who suffer from cherophobia, an irrational fear of merriment, gaiety, or joyfulness).  People who fear happiness typically do so on a subconscious level.  Things never seem to go their way and they aren't happy but if you ask them they will tell you that they want to be happy.

It seems to me that a person who fears happiness does not actually fear the feeling of being happy (with the exception of a cherophobe).  Rather, that person fears what happiness will bring with it.  For some, happiness brings with it a fear of losing the things in life that have brought about that happiness (or a general fear of losing the feeling of happiness, for whatever reason).

For some, happiness comes with increased responsibility and expectations from others.  For example, suppose a person is unhappy doing a mundane job that requires no thought or skill and offers no challenge.  That person might hesitate to apply for a job that would be more challenging and more fulfilling.  The person lacks confidence and fears failure.  Yes, he would be happier in this new job, but he would always be worried about measuring up and would be fearful about making mistakes.  Perhaps his worries and fears would consume him so much that he would become more unhappy than he was at the boring job.

Others may fear that happiness will breed laziness.  They worry that if they allow themselves to be happy where they are then they will never live up to their full potential.  They will become complacent and will lose their drive to do all they can do and to be all they can be.  These people will tell you they want to be happy but they keep setting the bar for what will make them happy higher and higher; it will always be just beyond reach.

So what do you do if your subconscious fears sabotage your efforts at happiness?  What do you do if you have achieved the goals to which you aspired but are still not content?  Start by asking yourself what you are afraid of.  Of course your conscious desire is to be happy.  However, you should not assume that having the conscious desire to be happy means that you cannot have another, subconscious desire (or fear) that is in complete conflict with your conscious desire.  They can and frequently do coexist.  (For more on this, see Eva Pierrakos' lecture No. 45 at www.pathwork.org/lectures/unedited/045.pdf).  Once you identify what it is that you fear you simply observe the fear and any other emotions or thoughts that accompany it.  Do not try to force the fear away; your attempts would be futile and would cause more harm than anything else.  It is simply not possible to force a feeling away at will.  You might believe you have forced it away because it seems to be gone but all you've really done is covered it up.  Now you are unaware of the fear, which means it is free to come and go as it pleases without scrutiny.  If instead you observe the fear (and all that comes with it) without judgment, over time you will find that it diminishes on its own.