In chapter 3, Warren posits the question: “What drives your life?”
He offers 5 common destructive drivers of behavior and decision making: guilt, resentment and anger, fear, materialism, and approval seeking.
I have first-hand knowledge of all of these drives, and still find them vying for power in my mind. I must remain vigilant for signs of their influence in my thoughts or risk falling yet again into their toxic traps. I know how destructive these drives can be, how emotionally torturous… I know how they can make you feel mad, hollow, hopeless and out of control.
Guilt and shame*: There’s feeling bad about having done something wrong (guilt), and there’s shame you carry around as an aspect of your being. The first is normal and healthy, and you can easily do away with it, depending on the degree of the wrongdoing, by fessing up to your mistake and honestly changing your behavior. But carrying around shame as an aspect of your being is another thing entirely.
Growing up, my mother was an abusive alcoholic and drug addict. I lived with her until I was 14, so it was in this environment that I spent my formative years, learned what “love” looked like, and first developed an identity. My mother’s abuse entailed her taking her negative emotions out on me and blaming me for her emotional state. I was her scapegoat. Mom was mad, I was to blame. To add to the dysfunction, her drug use would take her to wild extremes of carefree abandon and despondent anger, so that the same behavior might elicit in her laughter and elation one day, and rage and abusive name-calling the next. I came to understand that I was “bad” when I elicited my mother’s abusive rage, but because her rage was inconsistent and irrational, what constituted “being bad” was never very clear. The result is that I grew up with shame as fundamental aspect of my personality and a driver of my behavior.
Because I felt shame, I felt responsible for others’ feelings and pandered to them, which essentially means I tried to control their emotional states through manipulation. This was unconscious, of course, and had you pointed this out to me, I would have reacted in indignant rage and immediately proclaimed my innocence, because…
Feeling shame also made me feel extremely defensive. Even the smallest hint of an accusation would trigger my defensiveness. This made it easy enough for others to control me because I was compelled to prove my innocence of whatever I had been accused – as long as they remained doubtful (which they always did) of my innocence, I was under their control.
Feeling shame gave me a skewed sense of what was okay in dealing with others and what wasn’t. Disagreeing wasn’t okay. It’s not that I had a problem with conflict, because I didn’t. People who’ve known me long enough know that I can be a serious bitch. I’ve been called stubborn, black and white, and idealistic by those who have had the experience of arguing heatedly with me. What I had a problem with was not finding a solution that was agreeable to all. This gave people another way to control me and was a real problem for me at work because, while I was always trying to bridge disagreements, others were moving right past the disagreement as if it didn’t exist and pursuing the path that I was not on board with. This left me feeling small, disrespected, angry and resentful and never helped me accomplish a single thing.
And, because I felt shame, anything that was wrong was my fault and my responsibility to fix. I butted my nose in where I shouldn’t have and I assumed responsibility for others’ bad behavior in my relationships. This made the relationships uneven and, thus, unstable.
I know what you’re thinking and, yes, guys – I am single and available!
Anger and resentment: I’ve been very angry most of my life, something I picked up from both my parents. I wrote a little bit about my anger with regards to driving here. In my anger, I have vilified others and been terribly unkind not only to people I didn’t especially like or care for (not that that’s okay), but to friends and loved ones as well. I’ve both blown up in anger at people in righteous indignation and turned my anger inward to feed my intense feelings of shame and unworthiness.
Having grown up in an environment where this was the norm, I thought my anger and unkind expressions of it were normal. I thought that was what arguing looked like. I was into my 30’s before I even began to suspect that perhaps my anger was a problem – my problem, and not the problem of those who provoked it.
Fear: A chronic fear of destitution has plagued me my entire adult life and contributed to much of my misery. I grew up poor, and I associated being poor with being a failure. My mother and I got evicted from our apartment when I was 13. When I was 17 and a senior in high school, I sometimes had to buy food and pay bills with the money from my part-time, minimum wage job working at a hot-dog stand in the mall (no, not that hot-dog stand), not to mention buying my own yearbook, prom dress, etc. I was so afraid of turning out poor like my parents – of being seen as a failure – that I joined the army specifically to get away from that. As an adult, I have made choices around education, accepting jobs, keeping jobs, and relationships based on my fear of becoming destitute and homeless.
I also have a chronic fear of other people – mostly a low level suspicion that they’re trying to use me for something or that they’re judging me, but sometimes more extreme. My mother’s drug and alcohol abuse led her to lie, cheat, and steal, even to and from her own daughter. My mother was a tortured soul and I suspect she thought she might find salvation in having a child – that a child might make her get her shit together, feel needed and important, something. So, she was using me even before I was conceived. As a child, she used me for more tangible things: as a dumping ground for all of her shame, as a tool to elicit sympathy – and money – from others, and as a source of money myself by stealing money from me, stealing money from my friends, and by pawning my few possessions of value. So, I grew up being used to being used, and, perhaps because of this, I attracted other users to me even from a very young age. Being poor meant taking the Long Beach city and LA County buses to school, where I attracted much unwanted attention from men 20, 30, 40 years older than me who felt inconceivably entitled to my time, attention and body. Their assumption of ownership over me was mind-boggling in its delusion, and they were mortally offended by my lack of appreciation of, and reciprocation for, their affections. I grew up being used, I grew to expect that others would try to use me, and I simultaneously sought that in my relationships (because that’s what love was to me, after all) and guarded vigilantly against it. Intimacy cannot grow in this environment, and even when in romantic relationships I have felt lonely and alone since adolescence.
I have also feared love. I have feared that I am not worthy of love, I have feared that love is not meant for me, and so I have simultaneously pursued what I thought was love while watching for its inevitable failure and strangling the life from any young shoots of love in the process.
Materialism: Materialism is the one driver listed here that perhaps has not had much influence in my life. I’ve bought nice things, and I’ve enjoyed shopping sprees, but I’ve not found much identity in these things. My fear of destitution far exceeded my love of material possessions and kept any bent toward “shopping therapy” to a financially responsible minimum.
Approval-seeking: Growing up learning that I was responsible for others’ emotional states translated directly into approval-seeking in all areas of my life. Because my identity was defined by how I “made others feel,” I looked to others to tell me whether I was right, wrong, good, bad, liked, worthy, etc. In interpersonal relationships, as a general rule, the more confident a person seemed and the less they seemed to care what others thought of them – especially if they didn’t seem to care what I thought of them – the more influence they had over me, the more needy I was for their consideration, approval, and favor.
*I would like to make one comment on guilt and shame. Guilt and shame are related, and Warren uses them somewhat interchangeably here, but they are not the same thing. You experience guilt when you do something “wrong” – that is to say, when you go against yourself. I’m not talking morals here, I’m talking about whether your behavior accords with your deepest beliefs and values. When it does, it doesn’t matter whether anyone else says your behavior is wrong, you won’t feel guilty. When it does not, it doesn’t matter how normal or acceptable your behavior is to society, you will still feel guilty.
Shame, on the other hand, is not a result of doing bad, but but of feeling bad or inadequate at our core. Some believe (and I agree) that shame does not come from ourselves, but is a burden foisted upon us by another. The idea is that one must be made to feel bad or inadequate in essence, that this feeling does not spontaneously emerge of its own accord. Your shame is not your shame – it is shame that was given you by someone else and which you now carry around as your own.
Most of our shame is passed on to us by our families, especially our parents, but also by our societies and cultures. Shame is also something we pretend doesn’t exist because none of us want to feel shame or for others to see us as shameful (which we think they would if we admitted to feeling shame). So, how do we manage our shame if we refuse to acknowledge its existence? We make other people responsible for it. If we look at my example with my mother, my mother’s behavior was clearly driven by her own shame. She felt ashamed of who she was, so she numbed her pain with drugs and alcohol. She felt ashamed of her drug and alcohol abuse, but admitting to herself her own responsibility in the matter was too painful for her to bear, and so she made me responsible instead. In this way, she avoided dealing with her shame and passed it on to me, and I began to carry it around as if it was my own.
But, if my shame is not mine but my mother’s which I now carry around, then where did my mother’s shame come from? Why, from her own parents, society and culture. I bring this up because I want to make it clear that I do not write about my mother here to vilify or shame her or make her out to be a bad person or to curry your sympathy on account of her. I write about my mother to tell my story. I can hardly write about the shame I carry around without also sharing where it came from. I do not blame or hate my mother for her behavior, for just as the shame I have carried around is not mine, neither is it hers. Neither is it her parents’, neither is it theirs’… Knowing that my mother was burdened by a shame that was not hers allows me to have more compassion toward her and to empathize with her predicament. She dealt with it the best way she knew how and the way she was taught in her own family – by seeking escape in worldly things. I can hardly criticize her for this for I did the same thing – she sought escape in alcohol, drugs, anger and blame, while I sought escape in education, money, anger, blame, and approval-seeking.
This is how abuse is passed down from generation to generation. I have a dear friend who was sexually abused by both her father and her older brother from a very young age. In discussing this with her once, I mentioned that her father must have abused her brother as well – that sexual abuse is not a normal behavior and must be learned, that he must have learned it from her father. Her father expressed his shame, and foisted it onto his children, by sexually abusing them (likely he was the victim of sexual abuse himself). And her brother learned to abuse her in the same fashion. This is an extreme example of “growing up to be exactly like your father/mother,” but you can see the point I’m making – we learn to abuse others because we are ourselves abused. And the cause of all of this is shame.
Unless you are extremely pure and accepting of all aspects of yourself, we all carry around some amount of shame and we all deal with it by trying to escape it and/or foisting it onto others. Instead of vilifying those who have foisted their shame on us and abused us, let’s instead have compassion for them that they were once victims of the same crime and focus our attention on the ways in which we perpetrate the same crime against others. We can each do more to end the cycle of shame and abuse by focusing on our own perpetrations, however minor they may seem, than by judging against others for theirs.
TL;DR: No tl;dr for virtual book club posts.
