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Over the years I have performed many acts of commission or omission for which healthy remorse was—or would have been—an appropriate response. I have lied, neglected duties, and been harsh to people. In the wake of such behaviors, I would hope for myself that I’d feel a proportionate degree of regret that would prompt me to be accountable: to rectify matters as much as possible, to restore trust, and to think twice before conducting myself that way again.
This kind of healthy remorse goes hand in hand with self-knowledge, having a moral compass, and prosocial values; we might even call it Nature’s way of bringing us back to our interconnected nature. I doubt any of us woul...
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there is an unhealthy kind of guilt: a chronic conviction that we are innately blameworthy and should expect, or even deserve, punishment or reproach. In this dim light our faults and failings become evidence of our irredeemabl...
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the prospect of others’ disapproval or disappointment triggers the intolerable conviction that we are bad, wrong, inexcusable. Left unchecked, it augurs physical or mental distress,
Most chronic guilt is obsessively single-minded, knowing only one stimulus and exactly one response. The stimulus is that you, child or adult, wish to do something for yourself that may disappoint someone else. This could be a true misdeed, such as stealing or behaving in a way that violates a moral principle; far more often, however, it’s nothing more than a desire to act in accordance with an innate impulse, from asserting your boundaries to expressing a negative feeling to even having that feeling. Making no distinction, guilt hurls at you the same epithet for all of them: selfish.
When a young person’s universe is in turmoil—when things fall apart and the center cannot hold, to channel Yeatsfn2—there are two working theories the child could adopt. One is that her little world is terribly awry and misshapen, her parents incapable or unwilling to love and care. In other words, she is unsafe. The other, which wins out virtually every time, is that she—the child—is flawed.
Thus self-blame, like guilt, is an unflagging protector. Believing that the deficiency is ours gives us at least a modicum of agency and hope: maybe, if we just work hard enough, we can earn the love and care we need.
Self-accusation is the relentless whip that spurs so many perfectionists and high achievers to buckle down, do more, be better.
Realizing that vicious self-loathing, like guilt, first showed up to defend us from greater harm, and realizing, too, just how young this inner dictator is, gives us the chance to now receive it with curiosity, compassion, and even, possibly, with appreciation. Allowing it to exist, neither condoning nor condemning its lectern-pounding invective, relaxes its totalitarian hold.
As we have said, the trauma is not what happened to us, but what happened inside us as a result.
Anyone whose conscious recall is of a happy childhood—a category that may range from innocuous to idyllic—and yet is confronting chronic illness, emotional distress, addiction, or struggles to be authentic, is particularly invited to engage with it: When I felt sad, unhappy, angry, confused, bewildered, lonely, bullied, who did I speak to? Who did I tell? Who could I confide in? Notice your answer, and also your feelings around it.
Contrary to the fond imaginings of some enthusiasts, neither plant-based nor manufactured psychedelic medicines will, on their own, transform health care or human consciousness at large. That will have to await vast-scale social change, not least the broadening of the mainstream medical ideology.
For years I had retained a fixed idea that to heal I’d have to go through some monumental cathartic release, as I’ve seen happen for others, or perhaps travel back in time in some way, to relive or redeem the difficult past. Yes, it can take that form, but not necessarily. Once again, it is not the past that has to change (or can change), only our present relationship to ourselves.
Indigenous traditions are themselves fighting for survival, but they can still offer a salutary, equal complement to Western medicine’s scientific wizardry. They can also be a necessary corrective to the latter’s failure to honor our emotional, social, communal, and spiritual needs.
It’s not a question of romanticizing Native ways, nor of aping Indigenous practices. But we can and must overcome what Wade Davis furiously calls “cultural myopia,” the sense that “other peoples are failed versions of ourselves. Or that they are ancient, vestigial creatures, destined to fade away, quaint and colorful humans who wear feathers. These are living, dynamic people who have something to say.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed,” James Baldwin wrote, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”2
A trauma-informed legal system would not justify or excuse harmful behavior. Rather, it would replace nakedly punitive measures with programs designed to rehabilitate people and not to further traumatize them.
“We tend to reduce people to their behaviors: ‘You’re a murderer, you’re a robber, you’re a thief.’ But we are not our worst behavior. I have had the blessing to see that everyone who is incarcerated has strengths and they have the capability of loving, if only we gave them the opportunity. It’s not just people that need the healing. It’s the system that has to be indicted and transformed.”
Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist, who, describing her autism as her “superpower,” has contributed greatly to her generation’s awareness of climate change. “Many ignorant people still see it as an ‘illness,’ or something negative,” she said on Twitter. “When the haters go after your looks and differences, it means they have nowhere left to go.
Inspired by figures like Thunberg and countless others whose names we may never know, we can revisit our list of the four A’s I laid out in chapter 26 that promote healing—authenticity, agency, anger, and acceptance—and add two more that are required for the pursuit of broad transformational change: activism and advocacy.
I visited Zuccotti Park in New York City, in September 2011, the site of the Occupy Wall Street protests against inequality. Flawed and evanescent as that movement proved to be, I was struck by the enthusiasm, solidarity, and sheer energy of the crowd as they found a collective outlet for forwarding their vision of a just society. Often blocked from being expressed, that latent energy is within us all.
I asked Goldin why she saw her decision to engage in public activism as the best choice she ever made. Her answer speaks to the health rewards of the two added A’s of activism and advocacy. “You need something bigger than yourself,” she replied without hesitation. “For me what’s bigger than myself is other people suffering. And that’s a situation I can help rectify. The politics of this moment are bigger than any individual, the way the world is right now. Trying to find a way to impact that, that’s my power, that’s what I fight about. It helps keep me sober.”
And speaking of crises, there could be no more damning indictment of a system than that its young people, stalked as they are by anxieties about human-made climate change, distrust adults and governments en masse.
Unfettered greed, inauthenticity, and disconnection have driven us to such a dark place that it falls to young people to wake us up to what this toxic culture has perpetrated and ignored for so long.
Many of the greatest crimes have been and continue to be perpetrated by people in leadership positions who are deemed to be the epitome of normal in their respective societies, whether it’s the production of toxic and climate-altering chemicals or, say, the imposition of policies that lead to mass starvation in countries far away.
