Jews sometimes claim that they are the world champions when it comes to guilt. But we Mormons can give them a good run for their money. It comes from this chosen people thing. Your parents and aunts and Sunday school teachers tell you that you are one of the chosen from the time you start to crawl. As one of the chosen, you will be great in this life and blessed in the next. All you have to do is be perfect and save the world. This is where the Mormons have an advantage over the Jews. We not only have to save the world, but also convert it.
Of course, there are many sources of guilt. Not all of them religious. Your parents may have wanted you to be a doctor or a lawyer or a professional athlete or a Nobel prize winning scientist. Your guilt may have more to do with giving up the piano or eating a cheese burger than with getting a little too friendly with your girlfriend in the back seat of the Honda Civic.
In an effort to support us in any field we might choose, my mother used to say, “It doesn’t matter what occupation you choose,” and then the killer, “as long as you are the best in the world at it.” Even without the “best in the world” business, those of us with successful parents or mentors may find ourselves unable or unwilling to stretch far enough to walk in the enormous footsteps.
Take my father. He is known and respected world wide as a solar astronomer. In “Who’s Who”. He is revered and loved as a church leader. He lead the congregation, both organizationally and on the job, in building our local church building. He designed and built our house. He once was quarterback on a football team that beat UCLA. He ran a ski area and was half the ski patrol. He is a master fly fisherman and a skilled and fearless boatman on the white water. He is equally at home reviewing scholarly articles and handling the horses in the wilderness area.
And at 70, I still can’t beat him in racquetball.
My mother is just as bad. She raised five children and looks more like our sister than our mother. In my case, a younger sister. She has entertained and charmed world class scientists, dined in the Kremlin, in the Kruschev era, and traveled the world. She has lead the women’s group in the congregation and helped countless new comers, new mothers, and newly weds. She takes food to the sick and comforts to the sad. She has an enthusiasm, friendliness, and smile that makes instant friends of everyone she meets. She is well-read, musical, and elegant. But you are just as likely to find her on the ski slopes, on the river, or in the wilderness area. She loves to laugh and have fun and is always the life of any party.
And I still can’t beat her at golf.
These are tough acts to follow. Sure, you tell yourself that you are your own person, have your own talents, and your own life. But when you look at the things that they overcame in their lives and all the opportunities you have had in yours, it is a little discouraging. They grew up in the depression of the 30’s, I grew up in the prosperity and optimism of the 50’s. You can’t help but ask yourself, “Given all of the heritage, opportunities, and potential, what could I have been?”
If only I would have worked harder in high school, I could have gone to Harvard. If only I would have stuck with physics I could have been a real scientist. If only I had built up my strength, I could have been a better boatman. Pessimists have a lot of “if only” guilt. It is a large part of what makes up pessimists.
Competing with your parents, siblings, or anyone else, in this way is extremely counter-productive. We spend too much of our lives in meaningless and destructive competitions. Most of the time, it is an apples and oranges competition. We are different people in different situations. Superficial evaluations are often incomplete and misleading. While it is true, that my parents grew up in the depression, my father started on his career in a time of tremendous growth and opportunity. And that football game with UCLA was during the second world war. Which means everyone on UCLA’s team had to be 4F. Dad’s team were all the healthy ones who were in the army. It didn’t hurt that a couple of them were All-Americans.
Different people have different talents, different challenges, and different goals. Life is not about competition and status, it is about contribution and happiness. It is more like gardening than like tennis. Occasionally people attempt to make gardening competitive by judging flowers or vegetables, or even the gardens themselves. But mostly a garden is just something that brings you joy. It is different than your parent’s or your neighbor’s garden, but no one worries about ranking them. It is unfortunate that people have a tendency to try to rank themselves against other people’s lives. Even more unfortunate that people tend to rank each other. And a sign of a fundamental weakness in our culture that we have created the cult of the celebrity.
Sometimes childhood guilt is pretty silly. Once I came home late from a scout camping trip and put my mess kit away dirty. Years later I would still lay in bed at night and worry that my father would come across that dirty mess kit in the garage. But I never did just get up and wash it out. Or even get up and throw it away. I just laid there and felt really guilty.
Sometimes adult guilt is almost as silly. For the first few years after I married, I had a real problem being around my father. I was doing OK, but I knew that I could be doing a lot better. If only. I wasn’t measuring up to what I knew I could and should do. Not measuring up to what I expected of myself. And I was sure I was not measuring up to what my father expected of me. I would dread going home and when I got there I would either talk him to death about anything that showed me in a positive light, or withdraw altogether. I am sure I was hard for him to be around.
But I got over it. At least mostly. I still talk a bit too much, once I get started. The first thing that helped me was the realization that my father did not necessarily expect the things out of me that I had projected onto him. It really didn’t break his heart that I was not a scientist. I finally began to realize that he was more concerned that I was happy than that I was famous. I am sure it would have been nice if one of his children could have understood the books he wrote, but he was in a very specialized field, and did not really expect any of us to follow.
The second thing that helped was a little success of my own. Nothing works like success. Not that this probably made much difference to him, but it made a big difference to me. As I began to feel better about myself, my relationship with my father became much easier.
That’s the way with guilt. Part of it is imaginary, self imposed, and misplaced. We need to ask ourselves whether there is a valid basis for this guilt. Have we really sinned against ourselves, our parents and our God? Do they really care about what we have done, or more often, not done. I am sure my father would not have been happy about the mess kit. But I am also sure, that it would never have been as big a deal to him as it was to me. My guilt, if not entirely imaginary, was at least way out of proportion to my crime. That I am not a physicist is a crime against no one. And perhaps even a great blessing to the world of physics. Any guilt I felt there, and still feel twinges of once in a while, is misplaced guilt.
Misplaced guilt wouldn’t be so bad, if there weren’t more than enough real guilt to go around.
Some guilt is all too real. So while you have to be careful not to project your own insecurities on your father or your God, you also have to realize that they do have certain real expectations. My father may not expect me to be an astronomer, but he does expect me to do my best at my work, whatever it is. If I do less, I will disappoint him. If I neglected my family, he would be furious. This is not to say that I have to accept all of my father’s standards as my standards. But it is to say that if you accept the standard, and do not live up to it, the sin is real.
It has at times been fashionable to deal with guilt by changing the standard. This is usually accompanied by attaching some label with a negative connotation to the standard. Capitalist, bourgeois, repressive, Victorian, and middle class are popular choices. We do, however, need to understand and examine our own belief systems. We need to know what we think is right and wrong and why we think this. We need to ask ourselves if we really believe in the rules we have adopted. But this exercise is best performed before we violate these rules. Once we have broken the rules, any re-evaluation is in real danger of degenerating into rationalization and self-justification.
The only way to deal with real guilt is change. This is tough for pessimists. We are not big on change. Particularly changing ourselves. Change takes you outside the comfortable well trodden paths. It may mean leaving the bog for a while. It is usually unpleasant in many ways. But it is usually better than the guilt. Change at least comes to an end at some point. Once you have made the effort and made the change, you can go back to chewing thistles in the bog. But guilt stays with you. Eats at you and gives you indigestion. Day in and day out. So you have to deal with it eventually.
Now at this point, pessimists have another real problem. Once you have made the change, then you need to forget the mistake and get on with life. There are many different value systems. You have to choose the one that you believe in. But all useful value systems provide a way to recover from mistakes. Those of us with a tendency to the gloomy view of life, are prone to believe that our mistakes leave permanent marks. That the rain and mosquitoes and Tigger are a punishment for past sins. That nothing we can do will free us from the guilt, the flaw, and the punishment. That there is some flaw in our character or make up that makes us tainted and defective. That our mistakes come from flaws that are simply part of us and cannot be changed. It is just how we are.
But whether you are a pessimist or not, this is simply not true. Whatever your philosophical view of determinism and freedom, the empirical evidence is overwhelming that people can and do change themselves. Being a pessimist is a valid personality trait, but it is not an excuse. Especially not an excuse for not dealing with guilt and making the changes in our lives that we need to make.
But you will probably just make more mistakes anyway.
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