BUDDHISM, EMPTINESS, WHOLENESS, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

 

Western psychotherapy generally regards painful feelings as pathological and tries to reduce them. Buddhism teaches us to learn their positive lessons from them.

In Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart: A Buddhist Perspective on Wholeness, Buddhist and Psychiatrist, Mark Epstein, reveals his struggle against emptiness, which he describes as feelings of inadequacy, disconnection, and as a lack of control. He believes that such feelings should not be regarded as pathological and requiring a cure:

·       Western psychotherapists are trained to understand a report of emptiness as indicative of a deficiency in someone’s emotional upbringing, a defect in character...

According to Epstein, there are definite limits to what therapy can cure:

·       The traditional view of therapy as building up the self simply does not do justice to what we actually seek from the therapeutic process.

Nor does it do justice to who we are. Instead, by accepting our brokenness, we can set it aside and look beyond our broken pieces to relationships characterized by wholeness.

·       As the British child psychotherapist Adam Phillips has written, “It is only when two people forget themselves, in each other’s presence, that they can recognize each other.” (Epstein)

Through self-acceptance, we can begin to regard our brokenness as human, rather than pathological, and achieve wholeness:

·       Our aversion to emptiness is such that we have become expert at explaining it away, distancing ourselves from it, or assigning blame for its existence on the past or on the faults of others. We contaminate it with our personal histories and expect that it will disappear when we have resolved our personal problems. (Epstein)

Epstein reasons that when we recognize and accept our brokenness through meditation, our fears will dissolve:

·       You can never understand what the Buddhists mean if you are so afraid of your personal emptiness. The problem with the Western experience of emptiness was that it was mixed with so much fear.

·       I knew that emptiness (or sunyata), from a Buddhist perspective, was an understanding of one’s true nature, an intuition of the absence of inherent identity in people or in things. It was the core psychological truth of Buddhism.

Epstein explains that human emptiness isn’t really empty. It is filled with an array of suppressed feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, threat, and disconnection. This raises several questions:

·       From where did these feelings come since we seek joy and not threat? And why are these unwanted feelings so persistent?

·       Do Buddhist practices enable us to understand and to accept these feelings as they truly are, or are they a cover for something even deeper?

Self-acceptance is the ideal. It equates with making peace with our struggle to continually suppress these threatening feelings. This peace gives us the calm to see ourselves and life as they truly are. It is also the source of wisdom, because we cannot understand others until we face and understand ourselves, and wisdom enables us to fruitfully manage our lives.

However, self-acceptance is a matter of fully accepting ourselves as we really are. Emptiness is not all that we find. Instead, we are confronted with what is highly threatening.  Nevertheless, our suppressed feelings must be confronted and accepted or they will continue to dominate our lives. Without confronting our dark-side – and it demands to be heard – we will spread blanket over out subconscious, trying to quiet its voice.  But the struggle against its accusations continue. Therefore, we devote our lives trying to prove ourselves and to win acclaim and the approval of others.

The drive to be a significant “somebody” is so powerful that it drove Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, to gun him down after he had obtained his idol’s autograph. He explained

·       “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (George Weaver, The Significant Life, 47)

Why must we continually try to prove that we are somebodies? Because of voices of our “subconscious” are telling us that we are “nobodies,” and even worse.

Others have turned to arson so that they could rescue someone within the burning building. While others have resorted to self-harm, even suicide, to punish themselves for failing to achieve our own standards. More commonly, we reward ourselves when we perform well and deprive ourselves of that milkshake when we fail a test.

Ordinarily, we want to be happy. Why then do we deprive or punish ourselves? It seems that we have an indelible moral script that is directing our lives, which produces our suppressed feelings of guilt, shame, worthiness and even dread of our deserved punishment. From where does this script come?

It is now widely accepted that we are wired to make moral judgments, even to the point of reflexively condemning ourselves with feelings of guilt and shame. These feelings are so powerful that when we hurt someone, we must rationalize our behavior. Generally, we deny, suppress, and cover over these feelings and the threat that they present.

How do we cover over these feelings of moral unworthiness? By convincing ourselves that we are a significant “somebody” or by paying the price of our misdeeds, even by punishing ourselves. We also become control freaks, trying to suppress anything that will not agree with the way we want to see ourselves.

Buddhism teaches us to relinquish control, but, how can we? To be out-of-control means that we cannot suppress everything that threatens to expose us, our fears, inadequacies, and anxieties.

Adam and Eve tried to cover over their initial sin with fig leaves and hid from the presence of God. We have invented many other ways of accomplishing the cover-up with our attainments, notoriety, approval, power, and money. However, we are on the run from the core of our being and avoid any words of criticism, which might tear away our fig-leaf cover to expose the truth.

I do not think that Buddhist practices can ever penetrate to the depth of the problem to lance the puss-filled wound. Instead, we are aware of our inadequacy and insecurity because we are inadequate and insecure.

This is because we had not been designed to be self-sufficient but to be relational. We are aware of our moral deficiencies, because we are morally deficient. We are also aware of our alienation, because we are alienated from ourselves, others, and most of all from the One who has created us.

Buddhism has helped us to accept our feelings of dread as normal and human but has not accurately diagnosed our dread and shame. Therefore, it has not been able to prescribe the appropriate remedy. Consequently, our subconscious drives to prove that we are a “somebody” remain in control. Instead, we must be reconciled with our moral and righteous God, who promises:

·       Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy. Blessed is the one who fears the Lord always, but whoever hardens his heart will fall into calamity. (Proverbs 28:13-14)

We can either continue to struggle to cover up our sins and their residual sense of threat and judgment, or we can confess our sins and be reconciled to both ourselves and to God through His payment for our sins at the Cross.

Consider what happens when we betray a friend. We first feel guilty, but then we try to justify our behavior. In an attempt to alleviate our guilt, we might tell ourselves that the friend had provoked us. However, this doesn’t settle the matter. We continue to obsess about our betrayal. Why? Because our rationalizations have not been able to adequately address our sin and conscience.

Since the problem continues to fester, we then might share it with a friend or therapist, in hope of finding support for our rationalizations. We are then told, “You’re being too hard on yourself. You just have to learn to forgive yourself.” But the guilt continues to fester. We might even try to compensate by doing good for our friend, but this too fails to adequately address the problem. Finally, we are forced to repress it.

Real restoration will only be achieved once we humbly confess our betrayal. This reflects the problem with God. Only after our sins are sincerely confessed can we find reconciliation and wholeness.

This requires psychic surgery. My Savior had to first humble me to see myself and my guilt before He would life me up (Luke 18:14; 14:11). This process was so painful that without the assurances of His love and forgiveness, I could never have survived it, but now I am free from the guilt and shame that had once controlled my life. I can now look back and say as King David had written:

·        It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. The law of your mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver pieces. Psalm 119:71-72

This doesn’t remove our sinful urges but gives us the light to see and to resist them and to be humbled in the process.