Resolving Distress

A long psycho-analysis generates resentment and bitterness repeatedly. Abreaction prolongs such states of mind because the contents of the catharsis [¹] and the sorrow feature definite and long-standing problems that have now been brought into the open.

Assimilation of Sorrow

It is not just the individual who has to face resentment and bitterness. What happens to the individual also happens to society (or just some sector of society) too. When major political or social change occurs, then society experiences what I call social abreaction. Society goes through a catharsis when the change is progressive and/or liberal. The catharsis continues on into guilt, thus creating a backlash against the progressive or liberal ideas. This is the abreaction of guilt. After the social resentment stage, the abreaction of pride follows, leading to social bitterness. When it is just the single person experiencing abreaction, then the content is usually his own beliefs on some issues of good and evil. When society experiences abreaction, then the content relates to various issues within the overall morality embraced by that society, and it is this morality that determines the beliefs on good and evil.

The intensity of these abreactions depends on the speed of change. As the pace of change increases, so the stresses on the single person and on society as a whole increase in intensity as well. The overall level of anxiety acting on the person and on society increases in tandem. Hence the faster the pace of change, the greater becomes the effects of abreaction, and so the greater becomes the intensities of resentment and bitterness.

The function of abreaction is to bring hidden psychological problems into the open. Abreaction shows up the limited and inadequate beliefs that the person and society have regarding the issues that feature in the abreaction. As these beliefs are worked through during the various stages of the abreaction, and finally assimilated, then the lasting effect is that the person and society have updated their beliefs and made them more relevant to future progress. All this takes time. It may take months for a person to adjust his beliefs when it is just him experiencing abreaction; it may take society decades to adjust its beliefs.

The goal of the individual and of society is to assimilate the new beliefs that are more relevant to the age. The abreactions of guilt and pride [²] are assimilated when two particular attitudes arise, those of forgiveness and acceptance.

Forgiveness dissolves Resentment

Forgiveness is a difficult concept to understand and accept. Despite being a central tenet of Christianity for 2000 years, few people practise it. We have to make a deliberate decision to learn it and it takes a long time to attain. The way to attain it is to look at ourself first. We can make a long list of the mistakes we made in life and of the people we hurt, whether physically or emotionally. When we are emotionally mature enough to accept that we made mistakes, even though perhaps most of them were unintentional, we can begin to accept that hurting another person was also a mistake.

Emotional maturity implies that we can now stop victimising ourself for these mistakes. Mistakes occur when we are in situations that are too stressful for us and we lack the skills to make harmonious responses – so we either under-react or over-react.

We can turn this state of mind around. We can begin to realise that when other people hurt us, it was just a mistake on their part. We can stop blaming ourself and stop blaming other people. Now we can forgive ourself. Once we have done that, then we find it easy to forgive other people. If we focus on doing this the other way around, by learning to forgive others first, then we may not necessarily achieve the goal of forgiving ourself.

For example, suppose that you were emotionally hurt in your childhood by your mother. One day, during your exploration of consciousness, you may understand that she acted from within her own limitations, just as you responded from within your own limitations. When you accept that as a child you could not have done otherwise, so too you will find it easier to accept that your mother was acting within the limitations that were created when she was a child. As a child she could not have done otherwise, and so from this point of view, she is not to blame for her limitations, even though she is now an adult, just as you are not to blame for your limitations now that you are an adult. When you understand this, then you can forgive your mother.

The purpose of forgiveness is to bring to an end any focus on resentment. Resentment ends when we learn to forgive ourself, when we forgive life itself for all our sorrows, and when finally we learn to forgive other people for what they have done to us in the past. Forgiveness of others does not mean that we have to learn to like people who have hurt us. The practicality of forgiving other people is that it prevents their negative impact on us from continuing to influence our lives.

Acceptance dissolves Bitterness

Forgiveness is the transitional stage to attaining the acceptance of life. Forgiveness annuls resentment, whilst acceptance annuls bitterness. Bitterness is resolved when I learn to accept my life, with all its ups and downs, with all its joys and sorrows, with all its successes and failures. I accept life despite not attaining all my ideals. I realise that my present personality has become what it is due to everything that I have experienced. So I reject nothing of my past. Everything is valued, even the most distressful experiences that I have gone through. I no longer need to justify myself or my life or what I did or did not do. Sorrow and distress are just features of a human life, nothing more, neither to be longed for nor avoided.

Acceptance means saying thanks to God for my life, irrespective of what I have achieved or not achieved, or what I have experienced. When a person attains a full acceptance, his mood is always narcissism, since narcissism gives rise to the love of life.

Stages of Sorrow Resolution

Acceptance is never attained fully in one go. There are different stages to attaining it. This is because deep problems have many levels to them, and so as we work through each level we also work through the various stages of accepting those problems. Hence acceptance can be partial or full.

Partial acceptance goes in tandem with a sense of pessimism. The stages of acceptance that the person attains are limited by either fear or by hatred.

When full acceptance is attained, the person becomes an optimist. Optimism enables a person to see the disasters in his life as being merely various challenges that he has had to face. He is no longer dominated by fear and hatred.

a). Indifference
The lowest level of partial acceptance becomes based on over-riding fear, and turns into indifference. Indifference is the rationalisation of defeat. The person becomes a pessimist and accepts his place in life since he is too crushed to attempt to change it. He adopts an attitude of I don’t care to all the problems facing society.

b). Stoicism
An intermediate form of partial acceptance occurs when fear is reduced and sadness becomes the dominant background mood. Stoicism is now the predominant attitude. A sense of resignation is the way that the person handles conflict and he no longer blames anyone for their badness.

c). Detachment
The highest level of partial acceptance is detachment, based on pride in the mode of hatred. The person may feel world-weary and intensely desire solitude. The purpose of detachment is to remove any kind of valuation from experience – when an experience has no value for us, then it cannot affect us.
In formulating my method of detachment, I borrowed a feature of Buddhist mindfulness. Mindfulness is used in Buddhist meditation to neutralise the influence of desires and emotions. The person watches his states of mind instead of responding to them by either evaluating them or acting on them. The standard way of formulating mindfulness in a concise manner is:

In the seeing, only the seen.
In the hearing, only the heard.
In the touching, only the touch.
In the smelling, only the smell.
In the tasting, only the taste.

d). Full Acceptance
Finally, perhaps, the person may attain a full acceptance of life. Fear and hatred disappear or else are so reduced in intensity that they no longer have an important impact on him. The function of the previous stages has been to reduce naiveté, desires for power and desires to manipulate other people. He has now reached the point where he can feel that life is a wonderful adventure. He feels that it is an honour and joy to live a life on planet Earth. It is no longer necessary to desire enlightenment. Enlightenment does not end anything since it is nothing more than the continuation of his spiritual journey on the next level of his evolution. All that is necessary is to feel comfortable with his higher self contact.

As an ascending sequence of attainments, these steps are:
5. Full acceptance
4. Detachment
3. Forgiveness
2. Resignation
1. Indifference

A full acceptance is always tied to the intensity of sorrow that the person has faced and overcome. If fate propels him into deeper and more intense levels of distress, then he may lose the acceptance of life and have to work at re-attaining it at his new, deeper experience of reality. In my view, the ultimate aim of a human life is to find a constant source of joy in life.

A Note on Detachment and Mindfulness

In the early years of my psycho-analysis I focused on exploring emotion. I was often in a dilemma. The limitation of mindfulness is that it does not lead to the identification of particular states of mind like emotions, and so does not lead to the identification of any sequences of emotional flow, and so does not lead to the understanding of how the subconscious mind works.

I needed to understand emotions and their function in the subconscious mind. The only way to do this is to allow oneself to become immersed in negative states and use empirical awareness to find out and analyse how these negative states effect oneself, how they arise, and how they disappear. Only a limited knowledge of the subconscious mind can be gleaned by remaining a detached observer of it. Hence I only used detachment when the psychological stress on me was temporarily too great to allow analysis.

[¹]. To understand catharsis, see article 3 of Abreaction, on the Home page. [1]

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.

Ian Heath
London, UK

If you want to contact me, use the address at the bottom of the Home page.

Also, since there are numerous articles on this site, please include the title of the article if you want me to clarify or discuss particular issues.

It may be a few days before I can respond to correspondence.

.	The Concept of Blame One way of looking at the unpleasant effects of abreaction is through the concept of blame. When I feel resentment, I hate myself because my social and moral limitations diminish my self-image, and I blame other people for causing me distress. When I feel bitterness, I hate other people, and I blame myself for being too weak to face up to and overcome my limitations – I could not live up to my noble ideals. To resolve these issues we need to understand ourself better and change our ideals. When we get distressed, it is difficult to think well and in a balanced way. So normally we fall back on our ideals as our way of getting through the distress. In order to get through future episodes of distress, we need to upgrade our ideals – then we can do something different when distress occurs. Therefore, if we feel resentment towards society, we need to upgrade our understanding of society and why it creates problems for us. Then when other people upset us, we can accept why they do it, and so feel less resentment than before. And when I feel bitterness towards myself, then by having a more realistic understanding of why I failed, I can accept myself more readily in future episodes of distress and so feel less bitterness. Distress cannot be avoided, but we can learn to moderate our intensities of resentment and bitterness.
Sub - Headings
Assimilation of Sorrow
Forgiveness dissolves Resentment
Acceptance dissolves Bitterness
Stages of Sorrow Resolution
A Note on Detachment and Mindfulness
References