Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  Psychotherapy entails the pursuit of a great many goals, but a good portion of the work centers around the client’s dealing with the consequences of unmet needs in an earlier stage of his or her development. Indeed, psychotherapy can be conceptualized as a discipline that aims at redressing failures in development. No single task in this effort is more important than liberating the client’s ability to feel.

  A child rarely feels free to express feelings of anger and rage, for example. More often there is the thought “If mother or father knew what I was feeling, I would be killed—or abandoned.” Too often, an internal injunction is laid down: “It is dangerous to express anger.” And years later the adult is still operating on the basis of that injunction, still unable to protest wrongs done against him or her, and the injunction forbidding anger is commonly facilitated by a prohibition against knowing what there might be to be angry about, which of course entails cognitive sabotage. Or again, the anxiety of some children’s early years is too much to bear; it feels utterly incapacitating; it is repressed (perhaps to surface in nightmares). But to be repressed is not to go out of existence. That which is denied by the mind is trapped within the body. Let a therapist work the appropriate muscles in the neck or face or throat or chest or diaphragm or thighs—wherever the block may appear to be located—and the long-denied feelings will erupt. The fear will be experienced, expressed, discharged. The adult will understand and feel organismically why he or she has retreated from so many of the challenges of life, why the avoidance of fear-evoking situations has taken priority over almost all other considerations, why life has had to be so circumscribed and restricted. A new and wider vision of life’s options then becomes available. As feelings are experienced, the mind clears. Autonomy becomes a more realistic possibility.

  As I observed earlier, psychotherapists of different schools have developed numerous techniques and methods aimed specifically at bringing people into touch with themselves and guiding them to experience a meaningful sense of their own identity. Unfortunately, however, just as the ordinary layperson tends to dichotomize thinking and feeling, reason and emotion—often regarding them as antagonists—so do many psychotherapists. The result is that in their enthusiasm to help people become reconnected with their denied selves, psychotherapists sometimes imply or explicitly state that people cannot feel because they think too much.

  Any normal human faculty is susceptible to a perversion of its proper function by a wish to avoid confrontation with some frightening or painful aspect of reality. This applies to thoughts, feelings, and actions.

  In the area of thought, there is the intellectual who discusses his or her personal problems as though they belong to someone else. In a state of total dissociation, this individual does not experience the emotional meaning of anything he or she says or hears; such an individual prefers to talk about psychology in general rather than his or her agony in particular. This person, in the context of his or her personal life, engages in mental activity, not for the purpose of expanding awareness, but for the purpose of avoiding it.

  In the area of feeling, there is the emotionalist who dwells on, say, the emotion of sadness, but refuses to confront the rage beneath it; or who blindly surrenders to anger while refusing to confront the pain that motivates it; or who talks endlessly about emotions as a means of avoiding knowing what he or she feels.

  In the area of action, there is the man or woman who, impatient with thought and scornful of emotions, runs compulsively from one activity to another, dreading to face the question of what these actions are adding up to, what benefits they bring or fail to bring to his or her life—the person who uses action as a means to avoid facing the meaning and significance of action.

  As I have already mentioned and want to stress again, flight from inner experience is by no means confined to feelings and emotions that we characterize as negative. Often we repress and disown our excitement, our enthusiasm, our happiness—perhaps because in the past we have been ridiculed for such feelings, because no one seems to understand or share them, or because experiencing them increases our painful sense of aloneness.

  Avoidance always has its reasons. The organism is trying to protect itself, ensure its well-being, and preserve self-esteem—but in the wrong way.

  Since emotions, negative and positive, express our assessment of the significance of different aspects of reality for ourselves, when we bury feelings and emotion we also bury ourselves. This is what it means to exist in a state of alienation. We rarely know it, but we are lonely for ourselves.

  If we are able to experience our feelings, then in any given situation, we have a choice: to express them or to contain them. Sometimes one option is desirable, sometimes the other. But so long as we are blocked, we do not have that choice.

  To be unable ever to contain our emotions is obviously unhealthy and subversive to effective functioning. But to tell ourselves that we do not wish to let anyone know what we feel, when the truth is that we are blocked and semiunconscious, is to practice self-deception.

  Just as we evolve through interaction with the environment at the level of behavior, so we evolve through interaction at the level of feeling and emotion. If we do not allow ourselves to experience the normal emotions of a child, we impede unobstructed growth into adolescence. If we do not allow ourselves to have the normal emotions of an adolescent, we do not evolve into well-integrated adults.

  Sometimes, when we are older, we fling ourselves into the feelings, emotions, and behavior appropriate to a far earlier stage of development, in an unconscious attempt at self-healing—to give ourselves the childhood or adolescence we never had. Our behavior may bewilder and appall our family and friends who do not understand the nature of the process in which we are engaged. We ourselves are unlikely to understand it. A man of forty-five may find himself carrying on like a teenager. He may feel awkward and embarrassed yet unable to stop. In all likelihood, unless he becomes conscious of his actions and their underlying intention, he will at some point reinstitute inhibition and repression, aborting his own attempt at growth, so that nothing ever gets solved, the pain is never relieved, the joy is never expressed, and he helplessly settles into what he has been taught to call the realism and practicality of middle age.

  As to what a person should do in such circumstances, it is obviously far preferable to permit the mind free play in fantasy, to avoid self-condemnation and self-censorship, and to search for realistic, nondestructive opportunities to satisfy pent-up longing, if and to the extent that this is possible, than it is to seek escape in repression and unconsciousness.

  Sometimes we may have longings and fantasies that we have no way of fulfilling. It may simply be too late to do so, or to fulfill them may clash with other important values. Undeniably, we sometimes need to make hard choices.

  But often people dismiss their longings, telling themselves that fulfillment is impossible, when in fact nothing stands in the way except the rigidity of their own thinking or their fear of family or social disapproval. If we do not learn to listen to ourselves, to respect our inner signals, if we are too quick to assume self-sacrifice as a necessity, we miss opportunities for growth and enrichment.

  Sometimes that which we label as childish longings are nothing of the kind; we call them that only because we have learned to call any personal longing “childish” if its sole purpose is our own pleasure.

  At the age of fifty-three, a physician who had had to work hard ever since he was a small boy shocked his wife by announcing that he wanted to close his practice for a year—“Perhaps longer; who knows?”—and take a trip around the world. The more his family opposed him, the more flippant, jocular, and defiant he became—almost to the point of being manic.

  He had read one of my books and decided to consult me. “What do you think?” he asked. I answered, “I think that a man of fifty-three is competent to know what he wants to do with his life.”

  This seemed to disorient him; evidently he had expected another lec
ture on his responsibilities.

  “Should I take my wife with me?” he asked.

  “Sure. If she wants to. If she can get into the spirit of it. Otherwise, no.”

  When he saw that someone took him seriously, accepted and respected his feelings, he became calm. He needed to take himself seriously, the part of him that had never lived.

  When his wife came to see me, she said, “But I don’t want to take a trip around the world!”

  “Well, then, I guess you won’t go.”

  “But if I let him go without me, how do I know he’ll ever come back to me?”

  “Well, then, I guess you have to make a choice.”

  “But I want our life to go on as before!”

  “You mean, what you want matters and what your husband wants doesn’t?”

  “But he’s behaving like a child!”

  “You mean, grown men aren’t supposed to have fun? Personally, I think that it’s wonderful for grown men to have fun, and I also think it’s wonderful for grown women to have fun. And I especially think it’s wonderful when they find a way to have fun together. But I am talking about fun, not self-sacrifice—not for either one of them.”

  As they are still traveling, I do not know the outcome of the story.

  Feelings are often the first form in which we become aware that something is wrong with our life. We need thought in order to know what to do, but feelings often alert us to the existence of a problem. If our response to feelings that seem to challenge our ordinary routine is to ignore or repress them, then we condemn ourselves to living mechanically, at a level of consciousness, or unconsciousness, that forbids authenticity or autonomy.

  In the area of our personal life, if we cannot feel deeply, it is very difficult to think clearly. This is contrary to the notion that thinking and feeling are opposed functions and that each entails the denial of the other.

  We can avoid perceptions and thoughts, just as we can avoid feelings and emotions. A child, for instance, may observe behaviors in parents that are terrifying—mother is a liar, father is a brute, and so forth—and the child can twist consciousness to deny this, to forget it, to wipe out an awareness that seems to make daily existence intolerable.

  A grown daughter may suddenly grasp, “Mother does not want me to be happily married; she is jealous,” or a grown son may suddenly grasp, “Father does not want me to rise higher in life than he did”—and the next moment brings the reprimand “What a terrible, ridiculous thing to think!”

  A student in college, listening to a lecture, may have the flash “What this professor is saying is nonsense,” and the next moment the fearful thought “Who am I to know?” buries the insight.

  A woman may be happily married, in love with her husband, proud of her children, fulfilled in her own work, and yet one day be troubled by the thought “There’s something more. What have I missed? What is there that still feels unsatisfied?” Committed to the belief “I have everything I could possibly want,” she reproaches herself for her foolishness.

  In the middle of a speech, a politician may suddenly think, “What I am now telling my constituents—the position I have been representing all my adult life—is ridiculous.” The next moment, the thought is gone.

  We may have been raised in a particular religion, philosophy, or belief system that we have accepted for many years. Then, one day, something within us begins to challenge it. We find ourselves wondering, “How do I know any of this is true?” Or we find ourselves thinking, “This makes no sense to me.” But we are afraid—afraid that our thinking may alienate us from the people to whom we have been close for so many years. So we alienate ourselves from ourselves.

  Sometimes the thoughts and feelings we repress are those beckoning us toward a higher level of development. Just as we may disown our depths of terror or rage, so we may disown our glimpses of the heights of peace or ecstasy waiting for us at the next level of growth. As we disown the child within us, so we disown the sage—the wisest part of us, the most daring, the most intelligent, the most intuitive about our ultimate needs.

  Certainly the positive force we are often most prone to disown is our intelligence. We fear the turbulence that too much awareness can generate. Of all our attachments, the one we cling to most tenaciously is the one that binds us to the present level of development, the one that says, “Stop. Go no further.” I often find myself speculating about the millions of times new ideas die stillborn, new possibilities are left unexplored, creative and spiritual yearnings are ignored or repressed, either because we are afraid of the unknown into which we may be drawn or simply because we have become accustomed to tuning out unfamiliar inner signals. Creativity and psychological-spiritual growth have this in common: both require times of aloneness, of silence, of meditation or contemplation, so that inner signals can be heard and allowed to reach explicit awareness, so that the subconscious can become conscious, the bodily become mental, the disowned become owned, so that the life-force can continue propelling us toward higher levels of self-actualization.

  For many people, estrangement from others feels more frightening than estrangement from self. Not uncommonly a person will enter therapy complaining of an excessive preoccupation with gaining the approval and avoiding the disapproval of other people. Telling such individuals that the opinions of others needn’t matter all that much or that they must learn to think for themselves is rarely therapeutic.

  What I sometimes do is give sentence-completion work beginning with such stems as “If I were willing to be more honest about my needs and wants—”; “If I were willing to be more honest about expressing my emotions—”; “If I were willing to be more straightforward about expressing my thoughts and opinions—.” Almost invariably the client will spontaneously produce endings such as “I wouldn’t be so preoccupied with other people’s reactions”; “I wouldn’t always be so busy trying to get people to like me”; “I wouldn’t care so much what others think”; “I’d belong to myself”; “I’d have more self-respect”; “I’d be my own person”; “I’d feel like a tremendous weight had been lifted”; “I’d realize how foolishly I’ve been living my life”; “I’d be free.”

  Understanding arrived at in this manner tends to be not merely cognitive but also emotional, organismic as well as intellectual, an insight of the whole being and not merely of the cerebral cortex. Any such process that facilitates reowning disowned elements of the personality provides a foundation for the growth of autonomy.

  The essence of the disowning process is that the self is at war with the self—or, more precisely, that the ego sets inappropriate boundaries concerning where self ends and the not-self begins. The correction of this process is the central subject of the following chapter.

  *Partly as a response to this split, there have developed any number of innovative body therapies that aim, in different ways, at reintegration. Some of the most outstanding include the Alexander technique, the revolutionary work of Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen’s Bioenergetics, Ida Rolf’s Structural Integration, Charles Kelley’s Radix program, the body work of Stanley Keleman, the discoveries of Moshe Feldenkrais. An excellent introduction to this subject may be found in Listening to the Body by Robert Masters and Jean Houston.

  *For a detailed discussion of the psychology of emotion, see The Disowned Self.

  †While there have been many areas of disagreement concerning various aspects of Wilhelm Reich’s work, one of his great achievements was to make us aware that the repression of emotions is not merely an intellectual act but is ultimately achieved at a bodily level. Interrupted breathing lowers the amount of oxygen available to the organism and diminishes its capacity to feel. By repeatedly tensing the various muscles that would ordinarily be mobilized were the emotions to be allowed free expression, we make our muscular contractions chronic, part of our structure, and thus our body becomes more and more “armored.” The essence of growth, in Reich’s view, is the process of dissolving our psychological and physical armo
ring, thus becoming a more free and open human being.68,69,70

  10

  The Art of Being

  The art of being is the art of knowing ourselves, of accepting and existing in harmony with ourselves, and of living out, in action, the highest possibilities of our nature. It includes three basic concepts: self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-assertion.

  Self-awareness, in this context, concerns our ongoing needs, desires, emotions, values, aspirations, capabilities, mental states, and behavior. As we continually extend the boundaries of what we experience as the self, we encompass more and more of what we had previously overlooked or repressed. Self-awareness is not obsessive. Cultivating access to the self does not mean taking our mental or emotional temperature every ten minutes or dissociating ourselves from our own life.

  Perhaps the single most important step in moving toward self-awareness is the realization that such a goal is necessary and desirable, after a lifetime of being taught to respond to the signals of others.

  With self-acceptance comes our willingness to experience rather than to disown whatever may be the facts of our being at a particular moment. This carries no implication that feelings are always to have the last word on what we do. I may not be in the mood to work today; I can acknowledge my feelings, experience them, accept them—and then proceed to work. I will work with a clearer mind, because I have not begun the day with self-deception. Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversary relationship to myself.

  Self-assertion brings us further into reality as we express our inner life in words and actions. Self-assertion means that I honor my own needs, that I honor my own judgment, as I honor my own values, as I recognize that a successful life requires that I translate my self into action. It does not mean that only I exist or have needs or rights. Sometimes I may defer to others, giving their feelings priority, or recognizing that their rights in a particular situation may supersede my own. When I do, I am practicing, not self-sacrifice, but objectivity.