Love and Emotional Power

An unfortunate misconception about emotions is that the most painful ones are punishments. Sometimes we blame ourselves: “I shouldn’t have done that!” Sometimes we blame loved ones: “You shouldn’t have done that!”

Far from punishments, painful emotions (sadness, guilt, shame, fear, anxiety) serve a dual purpose. They motivate behaviors that promote well-being and inhibit behaviors that would impair well-being. Love relationships deteriorate when natural sadness, guilt, and anxiety are suppressed. They can become dangerous with avoidance of shame; suppressed shame typically stimulates anger and aggression.

The primary function of guilt is to strengthen social and attachment bonds. Guilt inhibits impulsive behavior that would hurt my wife's feelings. If I override the inhibition and violate my values by hurting my wife’s feelings, the guilt I experience motivates some act of atonement and attempt at reconciliation. But if I blame her for my guilt (she’s making me feel bad) I’ll get angry or resentful and will likely hurt her more by devaluing or rejecting her.

Similarly, guilt inhibits illegal behavior, such as cheating on taxes. Although rationalizing that the tax laws are unfair may reduce (not eliminate) guilt, it increases shame (dread of exposure), when I think of being audited.

In contrast, the pain of guilt vanishes completely when we act on the motivation, for example, showing kindness and compassion to one’s spouse and honestly paying taxes. Truly powerful people treat their spouses well and pay their taxes.

The Law of Emotional Ownership

We have no power over what we don’t own.

Where are your emotions, in you or in your environment? It's not a trick question but one that we should ask ourselves regularly. We behave as if the environment controls our emotions, when it only triggers them, and then only if we’re predisposed to triggers. Ownership enables emotion regulation. Emotions have a natural thermostat that regulates their comfort level by lowering or raising intensity. Failure to own them forfeits the power of the thermostat. Instead of regulating emotions internally so we can act in our best interests, we try to keep the environment from stimulating the emotions. That’s like the thermostat of an air conditioner trying to regulate the temperature of the house by blowing cool air all around its exterior.

Emotional Powerlessness

The sense of powerlessness begins with blame. Blame renders us powerless over pain by impairing its self-correcting motivation. If I were mugged on the way home tonight, the mugger would clearly be to blame for my injuries. But I must accept responsibility to heal them. The more I blame the mugger (beyond taking legal steps to see that society is protected from anti-social behavior), the more powerless over the healing process I remain. We see this clearly in resentful people who resist healing, as if it would somehow exonerate their offender. A depressed teenage client once told me that he could not — must not — get better, for that would let his abusive father off the hook. He wanted his suffering to be a monument to his father’s crimes.

I once treated a young woman shortly after her husband left her and filed for divorce. By her own admission, he left to escape her constant blaming and ill-will. She didn’t know why she found fault with everything he did. He was a good person and didn’t deserve it, but she felt that she couldn’t control the urge to criticize and devalue him over the smallest of lapses, like forgetting to wipe the kitchen counter up to her standards.

The law of blame is that it flows to the closest person, no matter where it originates. She had been anxious and deeply depressed for six years about a sexual encounter that occurred during her first year of college. She had gotten very drunk at a party, met a boy, and had sex with him in the bathroom, with people wandering in and out. She awakened on the floor of the bathroom the next morning, feeling acute shame for the public violation of her own moral standards. Her shame could have motivated self-compassion and improved self-care. In that case the unhappy incident could have been a wake-up call, a growth experience. After all, the human brain is a trial-and-error organism programmed to learn from mistakes. Toddlers cannot learn to walk without falling. Distances are accurately judged by the accumulative corrections of mistaken estimates. Adults learn good judgment, not, alas, from their parents’ mistakes, but from their own indiscretions.

Regarding her shame as punishment, my young client sought to reduce her pain through blame. She blamed the university, which should have protected students from drinking and casual sex. The boy, who was also drunk, should have known that she would not have agreed to have sex with him were she sober. With the help of a campus advocacy group, she filed rape charges and sued the college along with the boy’s family. The criminal charge was dismissed, due to several witnesses who testified to her willing initiation of the sexual encounter. The civil suits went forward on the grounds that her drunken state impaired her ability to consent. The legal argument proved self-defeating, owing to the boy’s own drunken state. If she was too impaired to consent, he was too impaired to see that her consent was invalidated by her impaired state.

When she came to me, some four years after the dismissal of her lawsuits, she felt that her depression was caused by the “system’s invalidation of her wrongs.” Once she accepted that her shame on the morning after the sexual encounter was not punishment but motivation to heal and improve her life, she recovered. However, her recovery was temporarily delayed, due to a torrent of blaming the social advocacy group for “prodding” her to bring charges and file lawsuits. Once we worked through that, she was fully recovered and able to reconcile with her husband.

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To enjoy love and emotional growth, we must decide whether we want to heal and improve or blame. Shame motivates us to heal, improve, and correct any bad thing that happens to us; blame makes the bad things that happen to us about us, a part of our identity. We cannot blame and heal at the same time.

Legal and political action need not and should not conflict with personal healing and improvement. If my client believed that an injustice had occurred, she could have pursued the lawsuits and campaigned against the disturbing epidemic of college alcohol abuse. But she would have done so, not out of personal revenge or quest for external validation, both of which render her powerless over her own emotions. With her sense of self no longer at stake in the lawsuits, her spirit would have soared on her efforts to correct social injustice for the betterment of the community at large. Whatever she decided to do, she would have felt empowered by acting on the motivation of her pain to heal and improve.