Guilted Cage

Posted by fxckfeelings on December 15, 2011

Feeling you’ve made a mistake is usually an instinctive reflex that has nothing to do with sober judgment and/or actual responsibility and a lot to do with guilt. You feel you’ve made a mistake when things turn out badly, or your efforts fail, or you’re still in pain, so you feel obliged to give yourself a good kick…which usually makes things worse. It’s not that we’re incapable of examining blame and responsibility rationally, it’s that self-flagellation gets rid of guilt faster than self-reflection keeps us from accepting a guilty verdict.
–Dr. Lastname

I have been struggling with performance anxiety for years. It was particularly difficult during university, where I saw three psychologists, including a campus counselor, who, while supportive, weren’t helpful. It got much better though when I was able to take control of a treatment group I was facilitating, where I could design the program and run it the way I wanted to. I enjoyed being the therapist who helps others, and the experience gave me confidence. Still, the anxiety has not been extinguished in all situations—when teaching and presenting at conferences, the anxiety in these two areas is just as high as it was previously. I have been managing this for a long time and I do not feel motivated to continue to place myself in situations where my anxiety is raised again so high that I experience nausea, stomach pains, dry mouth, etc., not to mention the exhaustion I feel after the anxious-provoking event has finished. I do have some mild/moderate social anxiety—I don’t like socializing in big groups unless I know the people, and this prevents me from making new social contacts and networking for my profession. I am well versed in exposure therapies and ACT and have used these to get me to the point I am at now, and I continue to use them. However, I don’t think my anxiety will ever improve beyond where it is now and I am too exhausted to continue to try. I guess I’m stuck and don’t know if I should try to find a specialist to help me to continue to force myself to network, push myself to present at conferences, and become an academic psychologist or move into working as a clinical psychologist in a private practice, where I would work more on my own and I would be happier and more relaxed but also know that I am avoiding the events that are anxiety-provoking.

Maybe being in the mental health business makes you feel more responsible for controlling symptoms of anxiety and becoming a role model for good mental health. It’s ironic, given that most people in our field are the worst role models for mental health. If we were totally sane, we’d just go into dermatology and rake it in.

If you are driven to perfection, it’s causing you to forget that certain symptoms, like anxiety, tend to be incurable, and that, if you’ve reached the point where you can’t make them better, it’s because you’ve done an amazing job of managing them and pushing yourself to the limit of what you can bear.

That you’ve pushed yourself so hard during a long educational process may have caused you to become academically institutionalized, i.e., to rate your progress by where you stand in the institution (not the other, less fun kind).

You’ve become the very model of an up and coming academic psychologist, but now that the institutional phase of your life is no longer a requirement, you have a wider array of options and no easy reference points. You don’t have to present papers or schmooze colleagues if you don’t want to; that’s not avoidance, unless presenting papers and schmoozing colleagues are part of the life you want to lead going forward.

You know what they call the PhD who came in last in his class? Doctor. Sure, it’s a nasty MD joke, but the fact remains that your degree sets you free, offering you many different career options and you’re now familiar with most of them. Ask yourself how much money you need and then rate your options according to how well they pay, and how much you might enjoy them. Then, when you consider the amount of anxiety each will require you to bear, you’ll know whether it’s worth it.

Remember, like its first cousin, depression, anxiety causes your brain to focus on helplessness and failure rather than achievement and courage. It will tell you that treatment has failed and that you’re a failure if you don’t act normal, but wisdom tells you that you’ve already accomplished your biggest academic goals, in spite of great obstacles, and reached the point where you can finally put your own spin on life.

Be proud of what you’ve done, and don’t mistake anxiety and fatigue for discouragement; they’re challenging you to recognize what you don’t enjoy doing, and there’s no shame in choosing the career path of least (torturous) resistance.

It’s up to you, however, to decide what’s meaningful enough to be worth the pain. If you can maintain a practice despite your own struggles, you’ll be a role model, with or without symptoms (or an MD).

STATEMENT:
“I feel like I’ve failed to conquer my anxiety, but in reality I’ve done everything I set out to do, other than get rid of my symptoms. Now I’m in good position to decide what I want to do next and confident that I can bear whatever unavoidable anxiety goes with that choice.”

Whenever I screw up at work, it causes a chain reaction of even more fuck-ups until fate mercifully intervenes. The most recent incident started when I miscalculated the logistics of a project and ended up forcing another department to work overtime to make up for it. The department head was understanding, but I was so pissed off at myself that I actually couldn’t sleep at night, and that made me late enough for work to miss at least one really important meeting, so now I’m of course thinking that this time I won’t get lucky and will actually lose my job. There’s got to be a way to fix this myself.

It’s certainly unpleasant to make mistakes (that make mistakes that make mistakes), but don’t lynch yourself before you conduct a proper trial. It’s possible that your pain is torturing you to confess to crimes you didn’t commit, just because confession makes you feel better and provides a cheap sort of redemption.

You don’t need a judge and jury to conduct a proper trial on your own conduct, just rules that you believe in (i.e., that you’d apply to a friend) and an ability to review your behavior.

You’d expect a friend to take reasonable precautions to avoid making the same mistake twice; your standards, after all, are for his conduct to be good enough, not perfect. So you wouldn’t assume his miscalculation, the overtime, or his missed meeting were easily avoidable unless he hadn’t followed procedures that he should have known about. At least, those are the rules I think you’d use, but you be the judge. It’s your trial.

Then ask yourself what you should do if the verdict from your trial is “not so bad” but your heart still proclaims you a loser who should embroider a scarlet L in your shirts. That’s when you have to give yourself some good coaching and dismiss your heart’s request for an appeal.

Remind yourself that challenging projects always expose you to the unforeseen and congratulate yourself for taking responsibility and working hard, and give credit to your boss and co-workers. Apologize, but only once.

Be aware that frustration and humiliation, like anxiety (see above), make you think of the should-haves and could-haves without regard to actual, reasonable responsibility. They trigger a lynch mob in your head, but you’re not just the law, but order, and justice will overcome.

STATEMENT:
“I feel frantic when things go wrong and I’m sure I could have or should have prevented it, but I’m also capable of deciding what my real responsibilities should be and standing by that decision.”