Dealing with Guilt, and Building Patience

Outcomes:

• Gain mature insight into your qualities and capabilities, good and bad.
• Understand how to manage internal conflict.

Now that we are near the end of the first Sābr cycle, take this chance to refresh and review.

It has been an intense past few weeks. Your mind will already be contemplating the many things you have done, the many highs and lows, the difficulties and insights, and it has commenced its journey of reclaiming its health again. There will have been moments of doubt, pain ad failure alongside moments of triumph and optimism. It's a lot. So take these couple of days to sleep and eat well, and do these exercises with ease and pleasure.

Many people confide that they have strong morality on the inside, meaning that they know what's right and wrong, and they would like to believe that they can stick to their principles, but in practice this is not so easy for them to live by.

Having strong morals isn't the problems as such, but there is a kind of pressure we face to live within them. This pressure can feel oppressive in itself. Some addicts are, if anything, more morally principled than the rest of us. They find it extremely hard to tolerate if they have failed in some way, or if someone else betrays them. It must be very uncomfortable to live like that, knowing that their actions are so far from their intentions. The result is that they have an unstable, confused sense of who they really are. The same thing is reported by their loved ones, also confused and frustrated by this picture.

The problem is called ‘cognitive dissonance’. It means ‘thoughts that are not in harmony’. It stresses the mind to be like this. In response, the brain edits or forgets events to help the person seem more consistent. Addicts have this problem to a greater extreme. Their life story is often littered with missing parts, edited moments and contradictions., all done in order to try to have a positive, consistent self-image. This can often result in a lot of lying, both to oneself and others.

Guilt and regret

Some addicts are soulless and sociopathic. They don't feel guilt or regret, or remorse for anything they have done, ever. They use drugs to fuel their deep and primitive wish to feel something, anything, because their emotional repertoire is very narrow. They only feel irritation at their own unwanted feelings, and anger at how they are inconvenienced by having to abide by rules of civility and morality. It's unlikely that any such addicts will ever want to reform, and even less likely that they will see any of this course as useful. So you're not one of those.

You're a normal person of conscience. Your conscience, if anything, is heavier than most. If you make emotionally led decisions, you find yourself steeped in guilt and inconsistencies in your life because your actions don't match up to your noble intentions. The weight of guilt is difficult to bear when you keep repeating the error, so you may feel a deep sense of helplessness.

Guilt is different from regret, and we must understand the difference. Guilt is from the Ego. Guilt looks backwards in time. It is a painful self-accusation attached to a fantasy that you could have done something different. In fact, it gets stuck in the past, almost insisting that time be turned back so you can put things right. It is, of course, unrealistic and irrational, and it is involuntary: it is difficult to control.

Regret is from the Center. It looks forwards. It is an acceptance that you did something wrong, attached to a process of reflection where you think about how to avoid or minimise repeating the error if a similar situation arises again. It is voluntary, and positive, and almost pleasant to have a sense of regret because it feels like a reassurance that you have a hope and a plan to improve.

Guilt can be dealt with by accepting that you did something wrong, and then moving the thought forward to a place of truth: you cannot change the past, and neither can you predict the future, but you can plan to do things better in future.

Are addicts more morally bound than other people?

Maybe. There are genetic studies which show that addicts feel the both the pleasure of winning, and the pain of losing, more intensely than other people. This rollercoaster ride sucks them in and hijacks their attention. Then the inevitable happens: the world is unfair, and disappointing, they betray someone or someone betrays them, and they cannot contain their pain. The addiction then offers escape, but it also comes at a heavy price: they become everything that they hated in the first place.

Some of them go on to lie to themselves about what they did or didn’t do, as a means of feeling less broken. The lies draw them further away from who they really are, towards a fantasy of who they want to be. Lies can be very convincing or charming in this way, but when people have to face the truth at some point, they seem totally lost. They could have spent many months, even years, in this state, and they emerge from it as if they awoke from a dream. Their self knowledge is poor, and their life story incomprehensible. People around them are tired and disillusioned with them.

How to Rediscover Patience

Patience comes from cultivating a more forgiving, insistently worthy view of oneself and the world. You don't gain patience by seeking approval from others, or by taking any drug. It comes from inside you- from your Center. As such, real patience is invariably both truthful and helpful. It says that you, and others, are deeply imperfect but that is not a mistake so much as the design. We are all capable of being forgiven, if we choose to seek it for ourselves, or if we wish to do it for others who wronged us. We don't need fixing, so much as we need to re-discover tghat we always had wholesome, constructive qualities alongside our vices. In fact, a lot of those positive qualities are related to the vices. Ask any addict how much they stick to the things that they are determined to do: they are often very obsessive and put in more effort than other people.

Try believing that you are worthy, that you are a person of great value just as you are, regardless of what you have done or not done, good or bad. A delicate peace starts to descend. Reason and wisdom can return. You find it easier to live and control your actions in this state of mind. This is patience. It is better than tolerance because it is free from that sense of brewing, bubbling anger inside.

Patience is not so much about fighting the oppressive problem or thought. Patience is about persisting through unpleasant things and distracting the mind with more pleasant things. Negative thoughts are accepted and allowed to stay. It is not a fight so much as a mental declaration of peace in the face of pain. You were always patient inside, but you simply needed a way to access it!

Some of us find it easier to access patience than others, just by virtue of genetics or circumstance and so on, but we all have vast reserves of it inside. It is found by detaching from the immediate emotions and considering the higher purposes, greater meanings, and smaller joys that are available for us all to appreciate.

You are both the driver and the passenger in your life. Patience allows you to be with your tensions for longer, giving them time to pass through. You stop taking too many shortcuts, and your life regains direction and purpose. You don’t panic or leave your plans when the ground gets harder. Self respect grows when we you have the patience to put up with difficult situations, where rewards are not immediate.

Remember:

I am vulnerable, and prone to mistakes. But...

I believe things will be OK.