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Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety
Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions
By Peter R. Breggin Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2014 Peter R. Breggin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61614-721-1
CHAPTER 1
THE MOST VIOLENT AND MOST LOVING CREATURE ON EARTH
A life-changing birth occurred on the planet about 190 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Beneath their pounding feet, huddled close to the ground, the first tiny shrewlike creature brought forth an infant and began suckling her young. Her body was no larger than a child's pinkie, but this furry little mammal embodied a huge leap in biological evolution that would eventually result in our remarkable human capacities for emotional intimacy and social life—and for emotional suffering.
That early ancestor of ours was a pioneer in intimate relationships. As the original mammalian mother, she was the first to participate in the most remarkable and life-sustaining relationship ever created—nursing a helpless, dependent infant toward eventual independence and maturity. Birds, for example, may sit on their offspring to keep them warm, fuss over them to keep them clean, chirp at them to stimulate receptivity for food, and nourish them with regurgitated food. Much more intimate, this new mammalian relationship involved the mother manufacturing nourishment and feeding it to her offspring directly from her own body in the closest possible physical proximity for an extended period. This put into motion a new branch of biological evolution that would eventually lead to our unique craving to relate to each other despite the uncertainty and emotional pain that our relationships so often cause.
All that began with a finger-sized animal nursing its young? Yes, all that and more, including the capacity for painful emotions that is implanted in every human being. That relationship brought about an emotional closeness never before known on Earth, a closeness that would culminate in human nature and human relationships. It would eventually expand beyond cooperation and empathy within the family and come to include our moral and spiritual values.
SO VIOLENT AND YET SO LOVING
From fossil records nearly half a million years old, we know that our ancestors were able to band together in small groups to attack ancient elephants many times the size of the modern version of this great animal. Like us, our ancestors were relatively thin-skinned and thin-skulled. They lacked fangs, claws, tusks, or hooves with which to tear apart or bash in their prey. They could not rip jugular arteries and crush bones with their jaws, nor could they sprint with the speed of a cheetah. Yet these physically puny creatures attacked behemoths with pointed sticks—a feat that must have required ferocity and tenacity unmatched in the animal kingdom.
Assaulting great beasts in small hunting parties also required cooperation and subtle communication. It demanded self-sacrifice and courageous commitment to each other and to the survival of family and clan. Meanwhile, women, children, and the infirm back home had to defend themselves from predators and marauders. Then, as now, adults of both genders readily gave their lives to serve the community, once again confirming our enormous innate capacities for both aggression and love.
Our ancestors had the capacity to cooperate in unleashing violence on giant prey. That exemplifies what every child brought into the world at that prehistoric time—and what every child continues to bring into the modern world. Since long before we evolved into Homo sapiens, every humanlike and human child has been born with enormously conflicted capacities for close-knit social relationships and for incredible aggression.
Built-in aggression in combination with built-in social cooperation was necessary for hunting and for defending ourselves and our families from predatory animals. There is also compelling evidence that, much like today, we were warriors against our own kind, but necessarily on a smaller scale. Our capacity for aggression may explain why Homo sapiens became the only group from among many humanlike relatives to survive the evolutionary process.
We humans have always been both predator and prey. We have hunted other creatures, and other creatures have hunted us. Our capacity for aggression gave us prehistoric advantages as both predator and prey. As predator, our ability to unleash violence enabled us to slay giant animals for meat and to defeat human and animal competitors for scarce resources, such as large game and territories in which to gather food and find shelter. As prey, our aggressiveness enabled us to defend our families and ourselves from animal predators and other humans.
No other social creature is as violent as we are. No other violent creature is as social as we are. This innate and seemingly impossible conflict continues to affect the lives of every one of us.
BEING SO SOCIAL HAS ITS HAZARDS
We evolved biologically as social creatures with innate urges to be cooperative, empathic, and loving. This knowledge has become commonplace in more recent social and biological sciences, while empathy is increasingly seen as the central healing aspect of psychotherapy.
Our thin and tender skin was probably not an accident in our evolutionary development—a flaw or glitch in natural selection that makes us vulnerable to injury and disease. Our skin enables us to be profoundly nurtured in childhood through intimate physical contact and to be further strengthened in adulthood by additional intimate physical contact in our affectionate relationships. When nursing our young or making love, we are skin-to-skin—as physically close as we can get.
Some researchers have concluded that our sensitivity to touch plays a key role in our ability to feel empathy. Evolution has packaged us with a highly sensitive, tender film of skin in order for us to be vulnerable to each other, to desire touching from each other, and to enhance our ability to communicate empathy and love.
Without the capacity for love and empathy built into our brains and bodies, even into our skin, we could not have survived in prehistoric times. Having neither fur nor hide to protect us, and lacking horns, claws, or huge canines with which to fight, we developed strength in numbers, which requires that we bond together to understand and meet each other's needs.
As human beings who evolved with two conflicting inborn tendencies—one for closeness and love, the other for willfulness and violence—we faced the necessity of controlling our violent reactivity in order to live in close-knit families and clans. Living in a cave or in a small array of huts, or sleeping beside each other around a campfire, we had the strong desire to share life with one another and, especially when frustrated, to tear each other apart.
If biological evolution and natural selection had not found a counterbalance to restrain or inhibit extreme self-assertion and aggression within the family and clan, we would not be here today. Our inherent aggressive tendencies would have wrecked our most intimate and important relationships, as they still can do in modern life. We would not have been able to raise our children without many of them being sexually assaulted or beaten by other children and adults, as still too often happens today. We would not have been able to live in extended families and clans without turning on each other as murderously as we turn on strangers or people who look different. Without inbred restraints on our willfulness and aggression, we would have perished like so many of nature's "mistakes."
In primitive societies, individuals who were more innately inhibited by guilt, shame, and anxiety more easily avoided destructive interactions in their close relationships. Through biological evolution, the inhibition induced by these emotions favored these individuals' survival and the survival of their mates and children. This, in turn, gave them an advantage in passing on their genes to their offspring. Genetic lines with an innate capacity for these inhibitory emotions flourished in competition with their rivals.
As some families and societies developed larger numbers of individuals biologically primed for guilt, shame, and anxiety, they gained survival and procreation advantages over families and societies without these inhibitions. Most or all human beings in every culture developed the capacity to experience powerful inhibitor emotions that dampened or controlled their willfulness and aggression in personal conflicts. Guilt, shame, and anxiety preserved and promoted the human race despite its volatile and conflicting combination of sociability and violence.
BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION AND NATURAL SELECTION RESULT IN NEGATIVE LEGACY EMOTIONS
In order for us to manage our willfulness and aggression within the closeness of our families and small communities, evolution endowed us with powerful inhibitory feelings as built-in defenses against our potential for self-assertiveness and even violence in close personal and familial relationships. I use the term negative legacy emotions to designate this new theory about the evolutionary function of guilt, shame, and anxiety. These emotions are negative because they are suppressive and because they have many harmful consequences. They are legacy emotions built into our brains and bodies, then triggered and shaped during childhood and adolescence. As adults, we experience these emotions as an inheritance of emotional "baggage," burdens that seem at times alien and at other times natural to us. They are leftovers from humanity's evolutionary past that no longer serve adaptive functions. In this concept of negative legacy emotions, we will find an answer to why we humans inevitably suffer psychologically or emotionally in ways and degrees unlike any other creature on Earth.
Nature built guilt, shame, and anxiety into the fabric of our brains, minds, and family life as suppressors of our self-assertion and aggression, especially in our closer affiliations. Biological evolution by means of natural selection made it inevitable that when experiencing emotional or physical intimacy and love, we would also tend to react with powerful emotional inhibitions on our self-assertiveness and aggression.
A YOUNGSTER WHITTLING A SPEAR
Imagine a boy living fifty thousand years ago, with a brain already as fully evolved, complex, and subtle as ours. As he whittles a stick while sitting around the campfire with his family, he happily imagines how he will someday be like his father, who fiercely and bravely hunts great beasts to bring home huge chunks of savory meat. Nursed and nurtured by his mother and raised in an extended family and perhaps a clan, the boy is very social and loves his family, including his sometimes-annoying little brother. Yet, as he looks at his little brother across the flickering fire, the impulse crosses his mind to practice his hunting skills on him.
With his stick now whittled to a point, the boy imagines creeping close to his little brother to spring upon him with his weapon. At the instant he gets ready to hurl his hunting spear, he notices his father looking at him. He cannot quite read his father's expression, but a dreadful feeling overcomes him. A reflexive emotional paralysis prevents him from carrying out his urge to turn his brother into prey. He does not understand the emotion, and later on, he will not remember feeling it, but it stops him dead in his tracks. Negative legacy emotions of guilt, shame, or anxiety, or a mixture of them, paralyze him. These inhibitory emotions were built into the boy biologically. Otherwise, early humans, especially children, would have been much less able to modify their self-assertive and aggressive drives to conform to the necessities of living in close contact within the family, clan, or tribe.
Depending on the boy's circumstances and experiences in his family, his dread that his father would retaliate against or even kill him could have triggered the primitive emotions that stopped him from assaulting his little brother. This paralyzing feeling would probably be experienced as a mixture of guilt and anxiety. As an alternative, he may have remembered how much his father and mother adored his little brother and then imagined how they would reject or abandon him for harming him. His anticipation of rejection and abandonment would probably have triggered shame, and anxiety in him.
From a more positive perspective, the boy with the spear is old enough to feel emotionally attached and empathic toward his younger brother, and this, too, could have helped to inhibit his violent actions. However, empathy would not have the same stunning, paralyzing impact as guilt, shame, and anxiety.
Could simple fear of the consequences have stopped the boy from assaulting his little brother? Could he have realized that his dad might retaliate, making the boy afraid to harm his brother in front of him? If simple fear were at work, there would be no built-in inhibition. When his father is not around, the boy might not feel so constrained. He could then harm his brother, and, with sufficient guile, he might make it look like someone else did it. A child who learned to respond in such a fashion would become what psychiatry used to label a psychopath or sociopath and now diagnoses with antisocial personality disorder. Evolution built into us something much more socially effective in the form of negative legacy emotions that we carry with us all the time.
In the future, when the boy considers asserting himself in an aggressive fashion in the family, he will reexperience these feelings in the fabric of brain, body, and mind as painful emotions over which he has no power. They will seem like emotional reflexes or reactions wholly beyond his control. He will probably feel them without any memory of the event by the campfire or of earlier events that stimulated and channeled these emotional reactions. Like most people today who feel demoralized by their emotions, he will have little or no idea what is really happening to him.
Although abusive treatment by parents will amplify these painful emotions in children, children themselves are biologically primed to feel them in their daily lives. Self-suppressive legacy emotions will be triggered in children and teenagers during routine conflicts in the home, potentially crushing their self-assertive and aggressive impulses. Although these feelings seem to arise in childhood and adolescence, biological evolution originally embedded them in us.
WHAT IS AN EMOTION?
An emotion as used in this book is more than a feeling. Guilt, shame, and anxiety are emotional experiences that combine feelings, thoughts, and judgments or values and that drive us toward inhibiting ourselves or making choices that we did not initially wish to make. When we say to ourselves, "I should feel guilty when I do something selfish," we are naming a feeling. We are also connecting the feeling of guilt to thoughts about how we should and should not behave. We are further making a judgment or asserting a value that it is bad and selfish to do what we are contemplating. Ultimately, this combination of feelings, thoughts, and judgments is likely to lead to a choice, such as "I won't be selfish" or "I won't think selfish thoughts." This can lead to a specific decision, such not as to grab candy from another child or, more positively, to share candy with another child.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety by Peter R. Breggin. Copyright © 2014 Peter R. Breggin. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books.
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