Seek to Make Amends
Most of us are aware of the ninth step of recovery programs: to make amends to those whom we have harmed, where doing so would not produce further harm. Again, this sounds simple and is clearly the right thing to do, when we can. But is it so simple?
The easy part, as it is not easy, is to come to an awareness of how our narcissism, our self-interest, our selfishness, our ignorance, or our unconsciousness has brought harm to others. This difficulty certainly applies to members of groups, such as nations, institutional organizations, and political, social, and economic movements that overtly or indirectly have brought harm to others. Those of us cast by fate into so-called first-world nations have long lived on the back of the disadvantaged. Upon whose back have our comforts, our clothing, our shoes, our products, our lifestyle come? Whose continued exploitation will our lives demand? These are not easy questions, and if we dare answer them, what then? Do we harden the heart one more time, find the ready rationalization, and distract ourselves as before? And how do we make amends to generations of indigenous peoples, whose civilizations were destroyed in the name of our “progress”? How do we compensate ethnic groups suppressed and oppressed by the juggernaut of history that privileges one group at the cost of another? Making amends must start, then, with a greater awareness of the sins of our ancestors, how we have been privileged by those injustices, and how that injustice is perpetuated by unconsciousness, indifference, rationalized self-interest, and sheer momentum to this present day.
Making amends to those whom we have personally hurt, through our actions or inactions, is also difficult, for it requires us to become conscious first of all. In Swamplands of the Soul, I examined three levels of guilt: contextual guilt, direct guilt, and inauthentic guilt. Contextual guilt is described in the paragraph above. No nation has come to power without oppressing some of its citizens, no economic system represents a level playing field, and no exceptionalism is free of rationalized injustices. Those who argue otherwise are morally obtuse or overtly evil, for much evil arises from such indifferent worship of self-interest.
There is, of course, the guilt that arises from an honest reckoning with ourselves, the face we have to confront every morning in the mirror as we brush our teeth — direct guilt. There is no adult on the planet from whom a long line of consequences does not trail. Sometimes those consequences are brought to consciousness by someone telling us how we have hurt them, neglected them, ignored them, imposed our needs upon them, and so on. Such an accounting can bring a crippling guilt, understandable perhaps, but serving no one, certainly not the ones injured already.
Again, where possible, recompense may be redemptive, restorative; however, life seldom allows us a second chance at these matters. And many have spent their days trying to work off smudged karma they believe they have accumulated in thoughtless hours. Sometimes this legitimate accountability may be compensated in symbolic ways through the enactment of compensatory acts. Such enactment, however, must come consciously lest the person be ensnared in the foul nets of compulsivity one more time. It does matter whether we serve something redemptive or something demonic. And it matters even more that we discern the origins of whatever we do and whether doing so serves something healing in us or something that binds us in new ways to the disabling past.
The incapacity to feel this sort of honest guilt marks either the narcissist, who is too weak to take on the burden of his or her choices, or the sociopath, in whom the capacity for relatedness shut down many years before. For most of us, the pragmatic question always remains, What does my honest guilt make me do or keep me from doing?
The third form of guilt, inauthentic guilt, rises from a misnomer: we are not guilty; we are anxious. Most of us learned early that enacting who we are was not particularly welcome, was even risky, so we learned to split from our own nature and did so long enough to lose contact with it. In each of us there is a protective monitor. When a natural impulse arises, a spontaneous motive or act, some old, archaic warning system is also alerted and shuts it down. So, people who perfectly understand that the power to say yes or no to a moment constitutes the essential freedom and dignity of every soul will also say, “And I feel guilty when I say no.” Why are we guilty? Guilty of what? The legitimacy of our own nature? Why have we learned to ally so strongly against ourselves? I am describing an internal protective system whose roots are in our archaic past, whose purpose is to take care of us, but which undermines our truth, our integrity, our adulthood. This protection we may label guilt, but it is really about anxiety management.
With each of these “swampland” encounters, there is a task, the identification of which, and the engagement with which, can lead to enlargement. When, for example, we feel guilty, we can submit the feeling state to a simple test. Is it harm I have brought to another, whether intended or not? Or is it some form of inner split, in which I ally against my own reality in service to fitting in or avoiding retribution of one kind or another, and therefore continuously undermining the possibility of this moment with the protective programs of the past?
If we find the third guilt, the protective mechanism in its familiar play, then renewed intentionality is demanded. In the end, we can address these self-imposed constrictions in only one way: counterphobic behavior. That’s right: we have to do what we are afraid of. Everything that this guilt is protecting must be experienced. Only then, when the old anxiety washes over us and then recedes, can we stand there as ourselves. Only when we can go through this wave of anxiety, and find that it does not destroy, defeat, deter, or divert us, can we learn to be free of it.
For all the amends we owe this broken world, for all the recompense we owe others, we also owe ourselves permission to be who we really are, finally, before we are no longer here. We have to make amends to our soul for all the moments of complicity, cowardice, and co-optation that were once protective but now sour the soul and render it bitter.