Fear & Resentment II

15 June 2022

Last week, this blog ended with an incomplete discussion.  This week, we look at using M. Scott Peck’s transcendence of the difficulty of life as a way to make life less painful. 

Pain and resentment—as drivers of addictive behaviours—were also examined.  One of the key takeaways from last week’s blog was the unoriginal observation that both disciplined lives and escapist lives require effort.  The effort of a disciplined life is well known: getting out of a warm winter bed to begin an unwelcome but necessary exercise routine to keep fit for the trials ahead.  The effort of an escapist life is entirely different.

Per last week’s blog, fear and resentment fuel maladaptive behaviours.  Maladaptive behaviours are those poorly suited to a well-spirited life of healthful practices.  If you fail to muster the discipline to sustain some level of healthful practices, you fail to flourish. For example, if you consistently refuse to leave that warm winter bed, and don’t exercise later in the day, a few things happen.  First, you will lose bone and muscle mass not to mention strength and body conditioning.  Second, you will feel poorly about yourself for not doing what your own values dictate.  Third, you may begin to resent those people who do get out of warm winter beds to do cold, hard workouts.  Fourth, that resentment can become lowered self-esteem increasing your tendency to think ill of yourself.  That lowered self-esteem may cause you to decline opportunities for work, socializing, or hobbies.  That refusal to engage with opportunity can become fear of life, about which you feel deeply resentful.  This is the choice: do the cold hard workout or enter the spin cycle of fear and resentment. 

Alternately, flourishing—the word—comes from the Latin for flower florērē (Morris, 1975, p. 505) and is focused on blooming.  Blooming is the end or climax toward which flowers aim.  Human beings, per Aristotle, Rogers, Maslow, and Erickson, aim toward self-actualization.  To be self-actualized is to be as fully, consistently, and honestly yourself as it is possible for you to be.  Like any other state of human being, it is inconsistently achieved (and manifested), but is nonetheless the apex of human existence. 

To move toward that apex, simply do the opposite actions to those described two paragraphs earlier i.e, go to the gym, eat moderately, practice optimism and some very different things start to happen. First, you realize how bloody hard it is to stay in shape which lends you a bit of self-compassion for the effort you’re putting in and for those just beginning fitness work.  Secondly, you have endorphins floating around every time you do a workout.  Those endorphins are known to produce a feeling of euphoria, make sleep easier, increase your self-regard, fight depression and anxiety, and make you more stress resistant (Bruce, 2022).  But that still doesn’t tell us how self-actualization and Peck’s transcendence are reconciled and related. 

If getting out of a warm winter bed to begin a necessary exercise routine is an example of a self-disciplined life, what is the corollary example of an escapist life?  And how can an escapist life be redirected toward self-actualization and transcendence? 

If we use addictive behaviours as our example, that addictive behaviour may have begun as a temporary release from some type of physical or psychological pain.  For the first while, the use of an addictive behaviour may have seemed the best thing that ever happened to the person in pain.  I have heard many people in recovery describe the feeling they had the first time they got drunk or stoned at a high school dance.  They got to the dance, sober, feeling like undesirable, unattractive “losers,” got high for the first time, and left the dance feeling like the most attractive person in the room, not to mention the best dancer.  The most touching aspect of these recollections is that most people say that they felt “normal” for the first time.  Of course, that conception of normalcy assumes that “normal” people feel consistently attractive, competent, and desirable—something my experience and education tell me is not the case.

Following the trajectory of the person with pain, the addictive behaviour which once lifted that person’s spirit, too soon becomes a necessary crutch without which, nothing gets done.  Yet what is getting done, is delivered from within a perceptual framework of illusions.  For example, I need alcohol, cocaine...to function.  I am not good enough.  I am the only one who feels this way.

Some observed stages of addiction consist of the honeymoon phase, entrapment, denial, intermittent realizations of addiction, duress, precontemplation, contemplation, action (Chalykoff, 2022 after Prochaska, & DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992). So, what happens within that trapped soul to foster liberation?

Again, I am relying more on attendance at perhaps 100 open AA meetings than I am on theory.  I have always had respect for the expressions that come out of the twelve-step tradition and believe one of those captures the essence of hitting bottom: I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.  There is, in that phrasing, a deep and distasteful frustration with a soul and a life that keep spinning out of control in an entirely predictable, yet self-induced, downward dance of cause and effect.  That is, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  It’s deadening.

Sometimes people make a phone call.  And then some big-hearted, successful 12-stepper will drag her carcass out of bed in the middle of the night, get in a car, and go to that phone caller’s aid.  Sometimes the path upward and outward is effective, more often than we know, and a person learns—for the first time—what it takes to construct a successful life.  And guess what?  A good part of that learning is avoiding the traps of fear and resentment.

As Maté (2018) stated (in last week’s blog) these two demons (fear and resentment) feed one another.  To starve fear is to face fear head on.  To transcend fear is to know that that starvation must become a habit.  That is, rather than turning away from the pain of loss, humiliation, and setbacks, we need to learn how to deal.  In more contemporary terms, we must lean into the pain and experience it—without wallowing or ruminating.  It is habitualizing the expectation of more feared situations—and the habitualized and mentally tough response to those situations—that fosters transcendence.  (There is a series of blogs on Resilience-The Bounce-Back Virtue in May-June 2020, on this website.)

Let’s look at this one final way.  In his inspiring poem, If (Kipling, 1943) wrote, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two impostors just the same;...” and he fulfills the reward for the “if you can” condition by promising that everything on Earth will be yours.  I believe, per Kipling (1943) and Peck (1978), that triumph and disaster are, like ALL Earthly things, temporary conditions in the course of life.  Kipling’s promise of inheriting all that the Earth offers is legitimate in that he means the successful transcender will understand life on life’s terms.  We’re here such a short time, and there is so much to do. And doing it is so much more comfortable once pain, suffering, and loss are accepted as necessary and useful means of learning. Peck (1978, p. 15) said that once we see the truth that life is difficult, we transcend it; literally, “...from Latin, transcendere, ‘to climb over’” (Morris, 1975, p. 1362). 

This is what Maslow, Peck, Kipling and many others had in common: a successful life is a life of facing obstacles—and the pain associated with those obstacles—directly.  By awakening each morning to the reality that triumph and disaster are temporary situations, always in motion, the day’s events become entirely acceptable: I can deal with this because...this too shall pass.

Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References

Bruce, D. F. (2022, April 1).  Exercise and Depression.  Web MD https://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/exercise-depression

Chalykoff, D. R. (2022, 26 January). The Brain Disease Model of Addiction.  (Unpublished).

Kipling, R. (1943). If— Poetry Foundation.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---

Maté, G. (2018). In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Vintage Canada.

Morris, W. (Ed.) (1975). The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of The English Language.  American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.

Peck, M. S. (1978). The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth.  Simon & Schuster.

Prochaska, J. O., DiClemente, C. C., & Norcross, J. C. (1992). In Search of How People Change. Applications to Addictive Behaviors. The American psychologist, 47(9), 1102–1114. https://doi.org/10.1037//0003-066x.47.9.1102