In our confessional culture, it is socially acceptable—even fashionable—to disclose your sexual predilections, your husband's problem with painkillers, your penchant for high colonics. Our hypertherapeutic society lets it all hang out.
But plenty of feelings remain in the closet. In the privacy of our own heads, we cringe with dread when we meet someone in a wheelchair, wish our aged relatives would hurry up and die, smirk over our friends' bad taste and think babies are ugly and annoying. Meanwhile, we assure ourselves—and one another—that we're really very nice people.
Evolutionary psychology holds that these shameful feelings are hardwired—strategies that led to success on the Pleistocene savanna. If that's so, then why are they so hard to admit to? "Given that these emotions are shaped by natural selection and are innate, or at least pretty deep, why do we expend so much effort in denying them?" asks Dylan Evans, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.
It's a good question. The persistence of forbidden feelings fascinated Freud, and provided the raw material for his controversial theory of repression and the all-powerful unconscious. Both psychoanalysis and Catholic absolution are rooted in the idea that confession can strip taboo thoughts of their crippling power. Whether or not you believe in Freud (or the Virgin Mary), one thing is for sure: Our efforts to banish or explain away these unmentionables can't keep them from roaring back—and making us feel terrible as a result.
Acting on a nasty impulse may be cause for shame. But why feel so guilty about a feeling that remains a mere fancy, harmlessly stashed away in your brain? Evans theorizes that this guilt really stems from the fear of exposure. We're braced for discovery, even though we haven't really done anything. "If you're discovered doing something wrong, and you immediately feel terrible about it, the offense is mitigated," he says. "So you better be ready to display guilt if someone discovers you."
Feelings of shame trigger deeper unrest than the simple fear of being found out does, says psychiatrist Michael Lewis, author of Shame: The Exposed Self. Guilt is a response to bad behavior. Shame, on the other hand, "is so powerful because it's about a defective self," he says. In shame, explains Lewis, the very self is "rotten and no good." That's why intense feelings of shame can actually drive people into shameless behavior, such as jealous rage.
Yet a bit of bad feeling can be good. Emotions like shame or pride can serve as psychic regulators, Lewis says, and a healthy amount of shame may prevent you from impulsively doing something you'd later regret, such as slapping your bratty son. "We don't want to live in a world in which there is no shame or guilt," he says. "We want just enough to help us not do some of the awful things we could do."
So how to cope with the realization that you bitterly resent your successful friends and fantasize about your wife's yoga instructor? According to Lewis, there are three lines of attack: Forget about it over time, confess it or laugh about it. In laughter, he says, "you can move away from yourself and look in, saying: 'Who could believe it! How stupid!'"
With that in mind, Psychology Today presents the following guilt-provoking, squirm-inducing, I'm-such-a-lousy-person thoughts. Just remember: These seven "deadly" sentiments don't consign us to hell or block spiritual progress, as the cardinal sins are said to do. At worst, they remind us that we're not quite as nice as we'd like to believe we are. And at best, they may be able to help us understand the deeper reasons behind our wicked thoughts—and forgive ourselves our own trespasses. Here's to shame in moderation.
Crippling Anxiety "I don't know what to say to her."
We all know that the physically disabled can be every bit as smart, empathetic or, let's face it, annoying as the rest of us. (Those who still cling to the image of the "saintly paralytic" need look no further than Larry Flynt to be dissuaded from that stereotype.) But you wouldn't know any of this from watching normally gregarious adults go to pieces while trying to chat with someone in a wheelchair. Being paraplegic isn't contagious—nor is missing an arm, or being blind, or having a harelip. So why do so many people react with horror when meeting a person with an obvious deformity or disability?
It's a fairly common, fairly embarrassing response. To wit: A continent-wide European poll found that while most people (80 percent) claim that they themselves feel "at ease" around the disabled, more than half believe that "other people" probably aren't so sanguine. Something doesn't compute.
"It's not politically correct to say so, but there are obvious evolutionary reasons why we'd expect an almost instinctual aversion toward people with disfigurement," says Evans. "Our ancestors who didn't have that feeling and continued to mate with people with disfigurements were more likely to have children with disfigurements, making the offspring less likely to survive." Such revulsion is by no means a foolproof strategy for producing healthy children, admits Evans, but over time the aversion might provide a selective advantage.
There's another explanation: Disabled people may simply remind the rest of us of our own physical vulnerability and mortality. Not surprisingly, the aversion may be stronger when the person in question is a stranger. One French study found that subjects who don't know any physically handicapped people are much more likely to react immediately with feelings of fear and disgust. In contrast, those with handicapped relatives rarely register such emotions.
Tags:
adultery,
bad taste,
controversial theory,
dylan evans,
evolutionary psychologist,
fantasy,
good question,
guilt,
penchant,
persistence,
predilections,
raw material,
repression,
savanna,
shame,
taboo,
university of bath,
unmentionables,
virgin mary
