Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [14]
Still, a life without mental traps is not a life without suffering. Having failed to avert an injury, we feel the pain. And the pain of others hurts us empathetically. The survival of the individual and the social group depends on these mechanisms. But no purpose is served by supplementing the pain of injury with the self-inflicted pain of reversion. When we’re laid up with a broken leg, we’re uncomfortable enough without plaguing ourselves with thoughts of what we might have done to avoid the accident. It’s done.
Guilt is the trap of reverting to a moral failure; shame is a very similar reversion to a failure to uphold an image of ourselves. We feel guilty for having caused a child to suffer; we feel shame at being thought of as a person who has caused a child to suffer. Needless to say, these activities are no more helpful than any other form of reversion. The deed is done. Perhaps we should take greater care to avoid such lapses in the future—or perhaps we should change our moral principles or our self-concept. But going on and on about what was done and why we shouldn’t have done it is a waste of time.
Guilt and shame are the most troublesome of all reversions, just as worry is the most troublesome fixation. There’s a curious difference in our attitudes toward guilt on the one hand, and shame and worry on the other. As we’ve seen, it’s common knowledge that worrying is a trap. It’s also become increasingly rare to find propagandists for the value of shame. But guilt still has its fervent spokespersons.
The ancient apology for guilt is that it serves as a deterrent against committing the same offense again. Presumably, guilt works like the pain of touching a fire. Once we’ve been burned, we won’t so readily stick our finger in the flame again. By the same token, the fear of guilt is supposed to motivate us to avoid improper conduct. But this analogy breaks down at a crucial juncture. Pain follows upon touching fire by itself, independently of our volition. Guilt, however, is something that we do to ourselves. The aversive feelings associated with guilt are created and sustained by our own intentional guilty thoughts. If we didn’t keep our offense in mind, the feelings would cease to exist. The pain of guilt is therefore more like the pain of a self-inflicted slap in the face than the burn of a fire. We choose to do it. But then how can the fear of guilt be a motive for avoiding improper conduct? If the only reason for abstaining from an immoral practice were to escape a self-inflicted slap, we would not abstain from it. We would simply choose not to slap ourselves. And if our only motive for abstinence were the fear of guilt, we would choose not to make ourselves guilty. The fear of guilt can’t be made to account for the fact that we make ourselves feel guilty, any more than reckless driving can be explained by the fear of accidents.
There’s an apparent counterexample to the principle that guilt is a product of our own thinking. In cases of severe depression, people sometimes feel guilty without being able to say what they’ve done wrong. They know only that they’ve been unworthy. This empty guilt is an exact counterpart in the past to empty fixation in the future. In empty fixation, we wait impatiently for a future glory that we can’t even name. In empty guilt, we revert to an unspecifiable past shortcoming. But even here the guilt is sustained by our thoughts. We can’t say what we’ve done wrong, but we think that we must have done something wrong. Or we entertain general ideas of our unworthiness. If we didn’t think these unspecific thoughts,