Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  No matter how much we may value autonomy intellectually, the degree to which we can achieve it is intimately related to the degree of integration among our mind, emotions, and body. Autonomy is more than cerebral. It involves our entire being.

  This principle is clearly evident when we consider the problem of alienation from our needs, feelings, and emotions.

  We live in a psychological age—or at the beginning of one. It is doubtful if at any other time in history there has been so much awareness on the part of so many people that often they do not know what they feel, what they long for, or where they are going. The source of this emotional self-alienation—or, as it might better be described, this unconsciousness—resides in several factors.

  To recapitulate the simplest and most obvious: most parents teach children to repress their feelings and emotions. They teach unconsciousness as a positive value, as one of the costs of being loved, found acceptable, regarded as “grown-up.” Furthermore, emotionally remote and inhibited parents tend to produce emotionally remote and inhibited children, not only through their overt communications but also by their own behavior, which signals to the child what is “proper,” “appropriate,” “socially acceptable.” Parents who accept certain teachings of religion are likely to infect their children with the disastrous notion that there are such things as “evil thoughts” or “evil emotions.” The child may be filled with moral terror of his or her own inner life.

  Let us pause to consider what, precisely, an emotion is. An emotion is both a mental and a physical event. It may be defined as an automatic psychological response, involving both mental and physiological features, to our subconscious appraisal of what we perceive as the beneficial or harmful relationship of some aspect of reality to ourselves. Emotions reflect the perceiver’s value response to different aspects of reality: “for me or against me,” “good for me or harmful,” “to be pursued or to be avoided,” and so forth.*

  To cease to know what we feel is to cease to experience what things mean to us, which is to be cut off from our own context. And it is just this state that most of us, as children, were educated to regard as normal. Let me emphasize that I am speaking here and throughout about feelings and emotions, not about actions. I am not suggesting that we should act on or express everything we feel, not even in our most intimate relationships. We cannot avoid the responsibility of discrimination and judgment. But here we are concerned with the issue of consciousness itself. What are we allowed to be conscious of? What are we forbidden to be conscious of?

  A child is typically encouraged by parents to conclude that emotions are potentially dangerous, that sometimes it is advisable to deny them, that they must be “controlled.” What the effort at such control amounts to practically is that the child learns to disown the emotions and ceases to experience them. Just as emotions are a psychophysical experience, a mental and a physiological state, so the assault on emotions occurs on two levels. On the psychological level, a child deflects awareness, thereby ceasing to recognize or acknowledge undesired feelings. On the physical level, a child inhibits breathing, tenses his or her body, induces muscular tensions, and blocks the free flow of feelings, thereby inducing a partial state of numbness.

  Not only parents but also teachers communicate many messages concerning which feelings and emotions are acceptable and which are not. The child’s peers also contribute to the process of self-estrangement, since children pass on to one another the messages they receive from their elders. It is a child of rare independence who manages to withstand this onslaught. †

  In the process of individuation, the individual encounters obstacles virtually from the beginning of life. In being encouraged to deny certain of his or her feelings, to nullify certain judgments and evaluations, to repudiate certain experiences, the child is taught that certain feelings or emotions are unacceptable; nonetheless they are felt. Eventually, the child arrives at a solution: unconsciousness.

  While self-alienation is clearly encouraged by others, this is by no means the only source of the problem. A child can actively employ the strategy of repression and disowning to defend against any feelings experienced as threatening or overwhelming: pain, fear, anger, sexuality, excitement, and so forth.

  We have already noted that for the majority of children, the early years of life contain many frightening and painful experiences. Perhaps a child has parents who never respond warmly to physical needs; who continually scream at the child or at each other; who deliberately invoke fear and guilt as a means of exercising control; who swing between oversolicitude and callous remoteness; who subject the child to lies and mockery; who are neglectful and indifferent; who continually criticize and rebuke; who overwhelm with bewildering and contradictory injunctions; who present the child with expectations and demands that take no cognizance of the child’s knowledge, needs, or interests; who subject the child to physical violence; or who consistently discourage and oppose efforts at spontaneity and self-assertiveness.

  A child does not have a conceptual knowledge of his or her own needs, nor does the child possess sufficient knowledge to comprehend the behavior of the parents. At times, fear and pain may be experienced as incapacitating, or rage seems terrifying to reveal or express. And so in order to remain able to function, the child decides, wordlessly and helplessly, that the inner world of feelings must be escaped, that contact with emotions is sometimes intolerable. The fear, pain, and anger are not permitted to be experienced, expressed, and thus discharged; they are frozen into the body, barricaded behind walls of muscular and physiological tension. The child inaugurates a pattern of reaction that will tend to recur whenever feelings he or she does not wish to experience threaten to emerge. And just as fear, pain, and anger tend to be blocked, so do sexuality, excitement, and joy—any powerful response that threatens to disrupt equilibrium, bring down parental disapproval, evoke guilt, endanger self-esteem.

  To varying degrees, then, the child learns to play dead in order to survive. In order to protect self-esteem, the child learns to surrender more and more of the self. The average child becomes an expert at self-sacrifice at the most profound psychological level: the level of mind and spirit, the level of the life-force itself.

  This problem, which originates in childhood, becomes built into the personality, built into an individual’s manner of being and coping with life—becomes what Reich70 calls the “character armor”—so that by the time a person is an adult, the condition of self-alienation feels natural.

  The point is not that the individual loses the ability to experience emotion but that emotion often tends to become muted, diluted, trivialized. Emotional life tends to be distorted; surface feelings defend against and conceal deep feelings, misleading both self and others. Thus, deep pain may be concealed behind surface anger. Anger may be concealed behind a surface indifference that becomes “unconscious” cruelty. A deep longing for love and companionship may be buried beneath a facade of cheerful, happy-go-lucky self-sufficiency. Powerful, denied sexual feelings may emerge disguised as a ruthlessly intolerant asceticism.

  I can recall my often acutely painful teenage feelings of loneliness and of longing for someone with whom I could share my thoughts, interests, and feelings. But by then I had accepted the view that loneliness was a weakness, and longing for human intimacy represented a failure of independence. I clung to self-alienation as a virtue. I convinced myself I did not care. I told myself I had my thoughts and my books and that that was enough—or that it should be, if I were properly self-reliant. I did not begin to understand until my twenties that, had I known, accepted, and experienced from the beginning my desire for human contact and interaction, my emotional development and subsequent relationships would have been more natural and satisfying.

  It is extraordinarily difficult to communicate about emotional self-alienation to a person who has not confronted the issue at the level of personal experience. Many years ago I gave a copy of The Disowned Self to a friend who was one of the most e
motionally repressed persons I knew. After reading it he said to me, “I’m sorry if I disappoint you, but I absolutely cannot relate to this book. In the past, when I’ve heard you lecture on philosophy or theoretical psychology, I think I could follow you completely and very easily. This time, I have no real sense that I understand you.”

  Sometimes, in order to awaken a person to this issue, I will simply ask him or her to become absolutely still, breathe into the abdomen, and be available to any feelings or emotions that may spontaneously begin to arise. Within a few minutes, a person may report feelings of sadness or anxiety or anger that seem to have sprung out of nowhere. Not uncommonly, a person will begin to weep.

  Opening the breathing is generally the first step to opening the feelings.47,70 It creates a condition of stillness, a condition in which we stop running, so that our emotions have a chance to catch up with us, to enter conscious experience.

  This is the reason why meditation can be, among its many other functions, a powerful tool for the releasing of blocked feelings and emotions. Its emphasis on breathing and on stillness leads a novice at meditation often to violent and sometimes to frightening emotional eruptions. Serenity may not occur until later stages of meditative practice. Patricia Carrington writes about this phenomenon in Freedom in Meditation.

  There are any number of processes by which a person can be led to an awareness of the problem of blocked emotions—from the strategies employed by the various body therapists, to guided fantasy, to psychodramatic exercises, to the use of the “awareness continuum” in Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy, to hypnosis, to sentence-completion exercises. I will illustrate some of these procedures in the course of our discussion.

  We cannot adequately understand the problem of emotional repression if we do not appreciate that the average person carries within his or her being the burden of an enormous quantity of unacknowledged and undischarged pain not only pain originating in the present, but pain originating in the early years of life.

  One evening more than a decade and a half ago, discussing this phenomenon with some colleagues, I was challenged by a psychiatrist who felt I was exaggerating the magnitude of the problem in the general population. Since I sensed debate would be futile, I asked him if he would participate in a demonstration. He said he would be glad to but warned me that if I was proposing to explore his childhood I might defeat my purpose, even if my general thesis was correct. He had had an exceptionally happy childhood. His parents, he said, had always been marvelously responsive to his needs. It might be better to ask for another volunteer, as he had no desire to embarrass me. I replied that I would like to work with him; he laughed and invited me to proceed.

  I asked him to do an exercise that I sometimes use with my clients in therapy. He sat back in his chair, relaxed his body, let his arms rest at his sides, and closed his eyes.

  “Now,” I said, “I want you to accept the following situation. You are lying on a bed in a hospital, and you are dying. You are your present age. You are not in physical pain, but you are aware of the fact that in a few hours your life will end. Now, in your imagination, look up and see your mother standing at the side of the bed. Look at her face. There is so much unsaid between you. Feel the presence of all the unsaid between you—all the things you have never told her, all the thoughts and feelings you have never expressed. If ever you would be able to reach your mother, it is now. If ever she would hear you, it is now. Talk to her. Tell her.”

  As I talked, his hands clenched into fists, blood rushed to his face, and one could see around his eyes and forehead the muscular tension that was aimed at suppressing fears. When he spoke, it was in a younger and much more intense voice, one that rose in a moan as he said, “When I spoke to you, why didn’t you ever listen to me? Why didn’t you ever listen?”

  It was obvious that this man had been speaking sincerely when he had referred to his childhood as a happy one, but in repressing his early pain, he was disowning certain of his own legitimate needs, disowning important feelings, therefore disowning a part of himself. The consequence for him as an adult was not only an emotional impairment but also a thinking impairment. His distorted judgments necessarily would affect his present effectiveness in human relationships.

  It is productive to do this exercise with both parents, and you can also adapt it to an encounter with any important person in your life. You can do the whole exercise in reverse as well, imagining that the other person is dying.

  When the exercise is done as I have described, with mother, father, or any other important person entering the hospital room—or with the roles reversed and the other person on the deathbed—the emotion tapped into more often than any other is disowned pain, often combined with anger. Reconnecting with and experiencing disowned pain enables us to gain a new perspective on old experiences. It allows us the possibility of integrating that which previously had been driven underground and sealed off from conscious awareness. The past thus begins to lose its hold over the present.

  Otherwise, we remain prisoners of that which we do not confront.

  Jerry entered therapy because, he said, he was unable to fall in love. “I’ve never cared deeply for anyone,” he explained, “and that feels wrong. Something inside me seems numb or dead. It is as if other people have something I’m lacking.”

  In an early session we began to explore the problem, using sentence completion.

  If I were to fall in love—

  It couldn’t happen.

  I’d be frightened.

  I’d be overwhelmed.

  I wouldn’t know what to do.

  I’d feel helpless.

  Love to me is—

  Death.

  Loss.

  Abandonment.

  Unspeakable pain.

  It ends in loneliness.

  Being unprotected.

  Being vulnerable.

  Losing.

  I learned never to love when—

  My little sister died.

  No one would explain what was happening.

  Father told me not to cry.

  Father told me I must be strong for mother.

  No one ever talked to me about it.

  I saw mother and father at the dinner table talking to each other like zombies.

  I wanted to scream but couldn’t.

  Jerry was now weeping. Several moments passed before it was possible for him to continue. Then:

  If I had been allowed to mourn my sisters death—

  I wouldn’t still carry this dead weight inside of me.

  I wouldn’t hate my father.

  I could feel.

  I would have cried for a long time.

  I would feel whole today.

  I wouldn’t be so afraid.

  Love wouldn’t mean pain.

  I could have let go.

  I could have gotten on with my life.

  I wouldn’t still be waiting to say good-bye to her.

  I wouldn’t feel so dead myself.

  I wouldn’t be so afraid that if I loved someone, they’d leave me.

  The sentence-completion work had to stop at this point because of the depth of his sobbing.

  Over the next several sessions, our work was concerned chiefly with facilitating the mourning process. We did a series of different exercises to allow him to experience the loss fully. I also encouraged him to visit his sister’s grave, to spend some time talking to her, and to say good-bye.

  At a subsequent session, his first words were, “I feel as if I’ve been asleep for twenty-five years. And three days ago, at the cemetery, I finally woke up.”

  No amount of “thinking” about his relationships with women as an adult could possibly be effective so long as he remained unaware of a disowned pain that, never having been assimilated, had arrested and distorted his development in ways that inevitably contaminated the higher levels of consciousness—specifically, the level of adult thinking about interpersonal relationships and the arena of emotions in general.
<
br />   Whenever there is loss, at any age, there is a psychological need for mourning, a period during which we allow ourselves to feel our pain, reflecting on what is gone from our life and how we are affected by the absence. This is an essential step in the healing process. We may need to mourn a death, a divorce, the breakup of a love affair, the loss of a friend, the failure of a career aspiration, the defeat of a dream.

  To face our painful emotions—to allow them to be felt, to acknowledge them, to listen to the messages they contain, and perhaps to describe in words what we are feeling—requires courage and honesty; it is not an exercise in self-pity. To say, “Right now I am feeling forlorn, miserable, hopeless” is not self-pity; to say, “My situation is hopeless” is (usually) self-pity. In the first instance, we are describing a feeling; in the second, we are making a statement of alleged fact. This is a distinction of the highest importance.

  Descriptions of feelings, however painful, can be therapeutic; statements of alleged facts about the cruelty of life or the futility of struggle, motivated solely by our painful emotions of the moment, are often self-destructive. In the first case, we try for awareness; in the second, we make no effort to deal with our suffering or understand it.

  Unfortunately, few of us were educated in this distinction, and few of us appreciate its importance to our lives—not only with regard to the mourning process but with regard to any painful experience we may need to confront in order to transcend it. We cannot liberate ourselves from that which we have never experienced; we cannot leave a place we have never been.

  Fritz Perls coined the expression unfinished business to describe unresolved life experiences that distort and subvert our responses in the present. Unfinished business represents a blockage of the maturational process. It is through the repression of feeling that such blockage chiefly occurs. That is why opening the feelings is a central goal in so many of the newer therapies.