The 2 Stages of It's my Fault

2 things happen when I realize something is my fault. One feels bad and one feels good.

They aren’t mutually exclusive, and one usually happens before the other. Like stages in the evolution of feeling bad. And then good. It's a graduated reaction. 

Before I tell you what they are, I should explain what I mean by “fault.” It’s a strong word, a word we are taught to fear. And, like fear, its one of the "F" words. Fault, fear, failure...you can probably think of some others.
Failure, much like fault, is taught to us as a nasty, personally wounding word. We always picture it as if it were drawn with a big red pen across the “How I Spent my Summer Vacation,” essay of our lives. If I fail, if I am at fault, if I am afraid, then I have a huge problem. That’s my emotional takeaway. 

But the problem with this line of reasoning is that I do fail, I am often at fault, and I am afraid. Quite a lot. There are many problems in my life that involve my decisions, my choices, my insecurities. I contribute frequently to my own suffering. It’s not pleasant to admit it, but it is important.

And.....it's actually a good thing.

Because of these two stages.

Suspense building statement here.......and........go:

The first stage is Pain.

The second is Power.

                When I realize that I am playing a role in my own problems, I always feel Pain first. It stings to realize that my suffering is partially of my own doing. Take anger as an example. If I am frustrated with a family member, a friend, or just some random stranger (probably while driving) I enjoy the regular human feelings of defensiveness and blame. Who doesn’t? These are popcorn feelings. I know they aren't good for me but I love sitting down with a punch-bowl sized bucket of them, drenched in butter. For those of you who prefer allegory to metaphor, lets make the butter justification and the salt.....hmmmm....indignation.

                Eventually those feelings cool down and I realize my role in the problem. I realize:

                “Holy cow, I was yelling at the kids because I had a bad day.”

                “Oh, I snapped at her when she just asked a question.”

                “Maybe I cut him off…”

                Or whatever. Feel free to fill in your own version of these epiphany moments.

And it hurts! I don't want to minimize the discomfort of this stage. It causes guilt, shame, sorrow, and other insightful emotions. These are all nasty green leafy feelings. They’re probably good for me, but I choke through the serving on my plate only because somebody once told me that I should.

This stage, I have found, can last a long time. In fact, we can often stall in this stage. We can move into it, build a home there, and spend all of our time in emotional pain. Sometimes this even causes a relapse backwards to the blame and defensiveness that felt so much better. Denying the realization of our own involvement becomes our salve.

Or we can move to stage 2.

I call the next stage Power. If I can stomach the healthy, but distasteful, feeling of the Pain stage, I get to feeling better when I realize this all important truth: if I am at fault, that means I have the power to change things.

If I play a role in my suffering, and I now have realized it, then I can change what I am doing to perpetuate that role. If I yell at my kids because I had a bad day, then I can prepare myself before I walk in the house the next time I had a bad day. If I get mad at other drivers for not doing what I want, regardless of whether I am in the right or not, I can practice questioning my reaction next time, something like:

“Do I really have the right of way, or am I just driving like a jackass?”

Think about this second stage, and how freeing it can be. If I am getting mad at my wife because of something I am bringing to the table, then I can work on letting go of it even if she doesn’t change anything she is doing! All of a sudden I go from being a powerless victim of circumstance to a stalwart captain of my destiny.

I think the appeal of regression to defensiveness often beckons to me to forget the famous quote by Charles Swindoll:

“Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”

It’s so easy to forget that nobody guaranteed me a path free from thorns and brambles. In fact, there is a lot of reason to believe in the opposite; that life will in fact be quite difficult, requiring me to secure every step through struggle. When I remember that these two stages exist it makes me stop searching for someone to blame. My struggle, still often replete with pain, somehow becomes less daunting. Instead of filling with despair I fill with hope, and await the transition from one stage to the next. 

Anxious much?

I make the left turn immediately before the right turn that takes me into my driveway. My head is buzzing with caffeine and adrenaline. The caffeine I ingested a few hours ago, to stay alert. I’m a lightweight with stimulants, apparently. The adrenaline probably comes from that general wired feeling you get after a long day.

My anxiety is fully active, and comes at me the way it always does. First I notice the small stone chip at the bottom of my windshield, berate myself for not getting it fixed before the winter. This leads to the thought about the broken driver’s side windshield wiper I have not yet taken to the repair shop.

“Thank goodness it’s not snowing tonight,” I tell myself automatically. “What would you do if it were, stupid?”

5 more self-defeating thoughts hit me before I switch off the car.

This is an anxious night for me. I know where it comes from and that I shouldn’t listen to it. I take a few moments to calm down before going in the house. The looming next project in my day, parenting, will bring with it a million anxiety triggers. If I walk in in full anxiety mode I’ll run face first into reminders of my faults as a provider, time-scheduler, spouse, playmate, and homework helper. No one will say anything like that; our family doesn’t work that way. I’ll just be saying these things to myself. And it isn’t fair to my wife and children to take this feeling out on them. I do that often enough to know it doesn't make anything better.

I actively ignore the drive to address each of these problems, knowing this to be a fool’s errand in my current state of mind. The real task at hand is not to kill the dragon. It is to sooth the savage beast. I breathe deeply and just try to focus on calming down, letting everything else go for the moment. Nowadays I have gotten pretty good at reducing anxiety, if I can catch it early. It doesn’t guide my decision making the way it used to.

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I was wondering about anxiety the other day, and about self-doubt. A member of a group therapy session I was facilitating asked me, and another therapist in the room, what the difference was between us and him. He had said something like “I look at successful people like you and wonder how you do it, and why I can’t.” I responded with something therapeutic (hopefully), something focused on his feelings about himself. It was his group after all, not mine. But his question stayed with me, made me wonder about the answer.

Firstly I don’t view him as unsuccessful. Without revealing specifics, he is a young man with high intelligence and a bright future ahead of him. I reject the idea that I am better than him in any iteration.

Secondly, I wonder sometimes how to communicate to people in his shoes the feelings that I cope with myself. I don’t want to unbalance the relationship of therapist and client by focusing too much on my experience. I don’t want to minimize the depth of his suffering by trying to compare my own worsts to his. Who can tell which is worse anyway? And if we could what would be the point?

But I do believe that we all have the holes in our armor. I take some peace from the idea that we all have some days and weeks (or longer) where we doubt and doubt and doubt.

            Anxiety is a brutal obstacle to happiness. Effective as a survival response, it can badly hurt us when we are not really in a life-or-death situation. The ancient panic switch in our brain transforms moments of self-doubt into world ending crises. And the same quick-as-lighting, damn-the-torpedoes racing thoughts that can save us on a battlefield can make us prone to some pretty poor decision making in more typical situations.

            Take my drive home as an example. Realizations of things that simply needed to be done underwent a dramatic transformation to become seemingly logical reasons for psychological self-abuse. That by the way, is a clue that we are in the midst of anxiety: what is actually important becomes suddenly urgent.

            

            Anxiety is tricky as well. It doesn’t play fair. Only in the throes of anxiety can we simultaneously tell ourselves (as I was doing that night) that we should have: a) gotten home earlier, and b) stayed at work to earn more money. Both at the same time! In that moment of racing thoughts I was searching for confirmation of a terrifying foregone conclusion that I suck at this thing called life.  

            Thankfully that night I was able to correctly label my thoughts and calm myself down rather than answer the call to (rather inelegant) action. I have not always been able to do so, and I won’t always be able to in the future. In that way my young client and I are very much alike. I think a lot of us are. Attacks of anxious self-accusation will always come and go. The mission is not to avoid all anxiety. It is simply to identify these times and not allow the anxiety to call the shots in a non-crisis situation. When we do this, we become successful.