Fear & Resentment

8 June 2022

In a recent SMART Recovery meeting one of the attendees was resisting letting go of sadness and tears.  This blog is about the cost of unacknowledged, unprocessed emotion.

I remember realizing how afraid of my own emotions I had been, for a good part of my life, and becoming excited at a Stratford (Ontario) rendition of Macbeth when, in Act IV, Macduff was unable to take in or feel the loss of his family.  His friend and compatriot, Malcolm exclaimed,

Merciful heaven! / What, man! ne'er pull your hat upon your brows; / Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak / Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.

--Shakespeare, Macbeth (IV.iii.243-246, Clark & Wright, 1939, p. 811).

From that, and decades of practiced suppression, another crack appeared in my emotional armour.  Some twenty years later, I try to let tears fall when they come and, if terribly inconvenient, in the near future.  This seems a natural cycle of tension and release within a human heart and consciousness.  It is probable that the less feeling we release, the more tension we hold.  And as Malcolm warned, the grief that does not speak, breaks the containing heart.  In contemporary terms (contemporary not necessarily being synonymous with greater accuracy), broken hearts look like the still-undefined nervous breakdowns, burnout, or stress-related exhaustion disorder, which don’t appear in DSM-5, our current psychological directory of orthodox ailments.

Given the absence of such ailments in orthodoxy, where do these all too real travails sit in our etiological understandings?  They hover, as preliminary to the ailments we do have listed.  That means that when fear, resentment, or sadness are not healthfully or adaptively processed, we begin to ail.  That beginning is probably no more than a nearly undetectable social and bodily tightness that builds.  As that tightness grows, with increased suppression of sadness or fear, we manifest one of these intermediary conditions.  If this is correct, those intermediary conditions (nervous breakdowns, burnout, or stress-related exhaustion disorder), unless redirected to more adaptive, healthful behaviours, show up as substance use disorders, depression, anxiety…

Gabor Maté (2018, p. 344), in discussing the brain’s area of emotional self-regulation, the pre-frontal cortex, quoted a journal stating, “The way in which a person directs their attention (i.e., mindfully or unmindfully) will affect both the experiential state of the person and the state of his/her brain.”  Maté continued, “Mindful awareness is the key to unlocking the automatic patterns that fetter the addicted brain and mind.”  I will go a step further and hypothesize that most brains, in our time, are nearer the patterns of the addicted than the mindful brain.  If Maté is correct, mental self-management (“emotional self-regulation”) is a critical key to health.  Which is why many modes of therapy and recovery focus on how we process the thoughts and feelings that lead to maladaptive behaviours.

To bring this full circle, we will continue with Maté (ibid):

“The dominant emotions suffusing all addictive behaviour are fear and resentment—an inseparable vaudeville team of unhappiness [!].  One prompts and sets up the other: fear of the way things are and resentment that they are that way; fear of life and resentment that life is as difficult as it is; fear of unpleasant mind-states and resentment that unpleasant moods and thoughts persist; fear that we’ll never feel all right and resentment that we cannot feel the way we want to; fear of the present and the future and resentment that we cannot control destiny.  `Addiction is running from reality,‘ a patient of mine once said `the reality you have that something is stronger.  Something that’s greater than you.  Instead of admitting it and saying that something scares me—this thing scares me, or I don’t know how to do this, or I don’t know how to live—instead of just saying that, you do drugs [or other addictive behaviours].’”

There is so much in that quote.  We’ll examine three points: 1) fear and resentment; 2) the difficulty of life; and 3) survival versus living.  Look at the simple nature of the complaints that lead to maladaptive behaviours: fear of life, fear of unpleasant mind-states, fear of how we feel, fear of our lack of control; the last one pretty much summing up all others.  What is the alternative; the adaptive stance that fosters growth rather than the desire and action toward escape?  Facing the fear, staring it down, assessing your resources, making a plan, and getting on with the monitored plan. 

I know how easy it is to write that list, but I also know how difficult it is to live it.  Notice that the living of virtuous action and the living of escapist action are both difficult.  Both also require action. 

Think of the vector (this blog, 3 June 2020).  In both cases, escaping or forging ahead, the vector requires force and momentum i.e., sustained effort or downward or upward movement.  One can bury oneself more deeply in escapism, by diving deeper into denial or addiction, or one can face the ugly truth and start rebuilding.  As discussed, a few weeks ago (this blog, 11 May 2022), M. Scott Peck (1978, p. 15) said essentially the same thing: “Life is difficult…It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.”

Again, easy to write, hard to live.  How do we actually do this transcending?  We’ll discuss that next week as this blog is already too long.

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

Clark, W. G. & Wright, A. (Eds.) (1939). The complete works of William Shakespeare arranged in their chronological order.  Nelson Doubleday, Inc.

Maté, G. (2018). In the realm of hungry ghosts: close encounters with addiction. Vintage Canada.

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