3 posts tagged “guilt”

Guilt

This post is dedicated to you. You know who you are, though not many others do. You trust very few with your secret, the terrible, shameful secret that your mother, your father, maybe even your brothers and sisters, are not talking to you, or you've stopped talking to them.

Or perhaps that's not quite the truth, perhaps you do still talk to them, but wish like hell you could find the nerve to sever ties. Because every time you see them, you leave feeling sick and humiliated. They twist your guts up every time, but you keep going back, because you think- hope- it will be different this time. This time, you’ll do or say the one right thing, the one clever thing, that will make them love you or be proud of you, or, at the very least, respect you.  Or maybe the reason you go back each time is because you had it drilled into your head long ago that you have to accept any bad behaviour from them because they are "your family." Possibly your priest told you that, or your rabbi, or even your best friend, who just happens to have a family who treats him/her in a similar way.  

But more likely, it was your parents themselves. Starting from when you were quite young, after they tormented you in some physical or mental way, they told you that you were to blame, you forced them to treat you in an unbearable way, because you were an unbearable child.

And when you got to too old for them to mentally or physically persecute you, (but only because you moved away,) they continued their campaign against you by “gathering armies.” They told your brothers and sisters how reprehensible you are and that it was acceptable, preferable even, for them to dislike you, even hate you. They passed this sentiment on to aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, anyone they could martial to listen to and sympathise with their complaints about you.  Some were happy to join their crusade. Others were skeptical, though nonetheless, they never defended you.

So for a long time, as you grew to adulthood, you believed them, all of them, that you were ‘argumentative,’ or ‘ungrateful,’ or ‘disrespectful,’ or ‘selfish,’ or ‘crazy’ or coldhearted, or ‘too big for your britches,’ or ‘difficult to handle,’ or whatever. Whatever the reason that they reviled you, you knew it was your fault and you tried to 'fix' it .

But, you never could, could you? No matter what you attempted, be it reason or tears, no matter how you begged for acceptance, wanted so much to explain who you were, and how much you loved them, they wouldn’t hear you and you couldn’t earn their love.

So you struggled hard to close yourself off from the pain of it. You swallowed all their contempt, pretending that you didn’t even sense it. You chastised yourself every time you weren’t stoic enough, numb enough, to convince them and yourself that their barbs, their accusations, didn't hit their mark.

You may have even gone out and found others who treated you the same way your family did. Your wife, your husband, a new friend, even a coworker, picked up the signal from you that it was okay to treat you despicably, because your own family had taught you that you deserved to be despised. You provided a great outlet for these people, because you would never react. And that was because you wanted to be too tough to care.

Sometime in your late twenties or early thirties, it all gets to be a little too much, however, when someone steps over even that meagre line of self-respect you’ve allowed yourself. It might be that you get turned down once too often for that promotion you richly deserve, or that your husband’s verbal assaults become physical. Maybe you have child and one day, when you look at her, you see the child you once were.  So you decide to create a better world for your child and you. You seek “help,” another thing your family ridicules you for, as more proof that you’re the problem. They see you need to go ‘get right in the head,' while of course, they don’t.

For a hefty fee, your therapist is sympathetic and points out the obvious - you didn’t deserve to be brutalised because you couldn’t have been all that intolerable when you were in middle school. So, it’s not you, after all. You wasted almost three decades to anxieties and unmerited hurt, but now you can feel better. Now you can say, “it’s not me,” with some conviction, because your therapist told you so. And will keep telling you so, as long as you keep going back and paying to hear it.

Eventually you stop having to go back and hear it, either because you do finally truly believe it, or because your health insurance runs out. You feel much better about yourself. You learn to have productive relationships. You learn to assert yourself, even like yourself. You meet others who like you, too and whom you can like right back.

And yet, there’s always that hole of lingering hurt. You try to fill it. Maybe with food, maybe with exercise, maybe with sex or achievements. But deep down, you know you weren’t really hungry and all your accomplishments still don’t give you what you want -  that primal approval from the ones who mattered first, though not necessarily most, and the complete release from the little guilt devil who still remains tethered to you. He’s much less significant now, but he’s still there. He’ll never completely go away.  And do you know why?

It’s because you really are guilty.

You are guilty of possessing that one rogue gene from the putrid family pool that gave you a luminous soul and a heart full of compassion.

You are guilty of making the rest of your pitiful family feel envy and resentment that not only were you the only crab who crawled out of their barrel, but you offered others a hand up, too and they didn’t want to take it.

You are guilty of overcoming hardships and rejoicing in your triumphs, while your relatives only see that you have “good” luck, whilst theirs is “bad.” 

And though you may always feel slightly sad that your “good luck” did not extend to who your family is and how they will always see you, that experience helped shape you into the empathetic, productive person you are.

And so, you are guilty, my friend, of being capable of embracing life, drawing others to you with your lure of joy, while your relatives only want to wallow in misery and wait to die. It was a choice they made long ago, that separates you from them and always will. If you can’t fully get over it, sigh deeply, and get used to it.

Then, surround yourself with people like yourself and celebrate the miracle of you, the guilty, wondrous, miracle of you. 

In “My First Blog” I touched briefly on the subject of guilt and I got an interesting response from one of my readers---”Disgruntled” by name, who left the comment, “Oh, boo hoo---you felt guilty.”

Not to be sexist, but I just have a hunch “Disgruntled” is a man and if I’m right, more likely he’s a man over the age of forty.

The reason I think this, is that the male of the species does not feel guilt unless he’s six years old. Before that he’s too busy drinking breast milk, being proud of his potty training successes, feeling in charge of his parents and environment, learning his alphabet and emulating the Ninja Turtles (or their 2007 equivalent,) to feel any guilt.

But around age six, someone---mom or teacher, perhaps, tells him he’s a ’bad boy’ for reasons like breaking a school window with a baseball, or poking the family dog in the eye with a pencil, or some such.

And so he feels GUILT in all its intensity for the first time in his young life. And he decides right then, he doesn’t like the feeling.

So after that, in ever-lessening increments, he loses the tendency, until by the time he’s forty, guilt is a long-forgotten sensation. For example, he might instead feel confusion, annoyance or perhaps even anger that he has upset his wife by forgetting their tenth wedding anniversary or not noticing that her haircolour’s gone from blonde to brunette. But not guilt. ...No way.

Guilt is much more inconvenient than any of those other feelings. Guilt implies self-blame. Guilt requires the self-examination of “What did I do wrong?” which translates into a personal failing of some sort. And no male in his right mind, over the age of forty, would admit to FAILURE of any kind.

George W. Bush is a perfect example. Throughout the entire Iraq fiasco created solely by him, his cohorts and two Congresses now, who are badly in need of advanced geography and anthropology courses (not to mention accounting 101) we have seen him go through all three of the aforementioned emotions. He’s been confused, he’s been annoyed, he’s been angry. But has he felt GUILT translated into SELF-BLAME?

Nope. Not good ol’ George.

Women, on the other hand, make a meal of guilt and here’s my totally unbiased, totally without proof, scientific theory about that:

GUILT is not an emotion. GUILT is actually a secondary hormone, a by- product of ESTROGEN. The more estrogen in the human system, the more GUILT secreted. The less estrogen and the more testosterone in the human system, the less GUILT secreted.

It’s been a long-held supposition that the reason men and women think so differently is because the one sex (male) went out to fight dinosaurs and the other sex (female) stayed behind in the cave, since one of the two had to nurse the children and the female came readily-equipped for the task.

But that’s not correct. Here’s what actually happened:

PREHISTORIC MALE: There’s a Tyrannosaurus Rex stomping about outside the cave, growling. Before it knows we’re in here, let’s take it by surprise and bash it to death with our wooden clubs.

PREHISTORIC FEMALE OF REPRODUCTIVE AGE AND FLOODED WITH ESTROGEN: Wait!---Let’s think about this for a minute…. Are you sure we didn’t do something to make it feel bad? …Maybe it’s jealous because we have a cave and it doesn’t? Maybe he’s just insecure and trying to make up for a bad childhood. What if he’s just sad and not really hungry? What if he’s misunderstood? ….Shouldn’t we try to talk to him first?

PREHISTORIC MALE (AFTER STARING AT PREHISTORIC FEMALE IN DISBELIEF FOR A FEW MOMENTS) Look---I’ll go by myself. Why don’t you just stay here and feed the kids?

I know this to be true, because by the time the human female has reached the age of 50 and she’s been drained of most of her estrogen, her breasts devoid of milk, her womb empty of child and her upper lip covered with hair, you know what? She feels a lot less guilt.

In fact, the thought of running out of the cave, reason and empathy out before her and wooden club poised at the ready, sounds like a damn fine idea.

I just realized today that it is approximately five years since I returned to the US after having lived in Greece for more than seven years. Gosh, these five years have just zipped by. When the weather warms up like it has, I still miss sitting by the Greek sea, sipping retsina with my friends and eating a feta cheese and tomato salad. I keep saying I will get back there one of these days, but so far, I haven’t done it. At least I can still keep up with my people there via email and cheap internet phone and every once in a while one pops in to send a kid to college here or sell the old property that belonged to the family, or what have you. So it’s not like we’ve lost touch. Still, so much has happened in the past five years, that I think I can be forgiven for not getting back as of yet.

Let’s see---well, there was the divorce itself that precipitated the move back. Then there was the sale of the business over there. Then there was the subsequent remarriage. Then there was the anxiety over the divorce, remarriage and business sale. Would I get out of Greece without having to leave my son behind with his father? Did my son really want to come back to the States with me and not stay in Greece with his father? Were my business partner and I happy with the terms of the business sale? Was I making a ridiculously optimistic mistake in getting married again? Did I know if my judgment in personal matters had improved any?

And apart from the anxiety over the divorce and the move and the sale and the remarriage, there was the guilt. Make that GUILT. I was dripping with it. Would my 14-year-old son adjust to all the changes I had forced on him? (We moved back home, but not exactly ‘home‘---we went to the west coast instead of the east where he’d been born, because after living in Greece’s sublime climate, I knew I just couldn’t abide a New York winter.) So we had the absent dad, the new state, the new school, the new step-dad and stepbrothers. There was the English language for him to contend with, as opposed to the Greek one. And I went from being a working mom to a stay-at-home-and-write mom. Every time he had any kind of issue, great or small, my whole body effused with shame---had I destroyed this kid or what? Said kid could really sense that GUILT, too and like the smart kid he is, he used it and used it good. He got at least a year’s free pass just on my self-reproach.

Gee---you’d think with all the anxiety and guilt, I wouldn’t have gained weight in those first two years back. I thought anxiety and guilt made one jittery and therefore gaunt. But, no. Because, you see, despite the anxiety and guilt there was HAPPINESS and love with my new fellow and love and happiness to me means cooking great meals and heavenly desserts and sipping wine by the fireplace we were lucky enough to have in our new flat. So the first two years back in the States, we had nerves, guilt and weight gain. But we also had joy. For the first time in my life, if I’m honest. I discovered in those first two years back, that the distinction between a happy marriage and an unhappy one, is like the distinction between a federal prison sentence that permits traveling privileges with a monitor strapped to your ankle and the exhilaration of complete exoneration. Much to my astonishment, it was---so far, fingers crossed---that different.

Until the car accident. My new husband lost a son, a boy I was just getting to know. But I won’t write about that today. It took us a while to get back on track, yet we’re managing. There is still happiness, but it’s mitigated now with the complete understanding of what sadness and despair truly is.

Now here we are three years later. I’ve spent the last four years writing, writing, writing. And being disgusted with George Bush, the Iraq war, the Patriot Acts and the Military Commissions Act. And being a wife, mother, stepmother, friend and enjoying every minute of those. And going to the gym, whipping myself back into shape and not enjoying that quite so much. But if I’ve learned anything at 51 years of age, it’s that if you have health, life still holds so many wonderful possibilities.

So, there you have it. My first blog. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. Still---be warned---they won’t all be like this one. Going forward, reading my blogs will not be for the fainthearted. Stay tuned.