4. Deliberate Violation Of Your Own Moral Code

The final step is that in light of your moral code, your knowledge that your moral code is (was) involved in the decision to act or not act, and your knowledge of the likely cost of each alternative; you deliberately choose or chose to violate your own moral code.

Thus actual (also called, authentic) guilt requires this choice to violate your own personal moral code when you could have done elsewise and know (or knew) you could have done elsewise.

Please note here that it is your own personal moral code that is involved; not society's or other people's supposed moral code. For that reason the proper (psychologically proper) value of the emotion of guilt is that it guides you, before the fact, in making correct decisions. Is there a moral issue involved? Do I have a moral code that covers this type of situation? What alternative courses of action do I think are open to me? Given the issue, the code, and the choices; I will do X and not Y because Y would lead to authentic guilt and I recognize that guilt is anti-life, it is corrosive to my being-in-the-world.

5. Overcoming Guilt

The major error that all too many people make is to apply today's moral code to an action that occurred years ago (when the personal moral code was different). That guilt serves no real-world purpose. To combat guilt, re-examine what you did in the context of the time at which you did it. Reconstitute, as best you can, your moral code at that time, your consideration of your moral code at that time, whether you were or were not aware of viable alternatives at that time, and whether you willfully in full light of your knowledge then made a choice which violated the moral code you had at that time.

Let's suppose that all the conditions are met. You have actual guilt. What do you do about it? Nothing! The issue is past, it can not be changed and any guilt you revel in is only a form of psychic masochism. In the older psychological literature it used to be called moral masochism. Guilt is a non-productive emotion. It leads nowhere. It is only destructive. If correction of the issue involves a simple apology, that is a no-cost option. Do it. Other than that simply recognize that you did something which violated your own moral code and resolve in the future to give more weight to your moral code and to making decisions in light of that moral code.

G. Doing The Cognitive Work

We have come to the payoff of all this watching, gathering data and collecting the data in various ways to indicate the presence of character traits that it would benefit you to change.

The method is called "psychological integration" and it consists of four steps. After I present the four steps I will explain why it works and, empirically, what I have observed in its use by myself and others.

1. Step 1: What Am I Doing

This issue arises naturally from the data gathering you, hopefully, have been doing. With enough data observed, recorded on your mental filing cards, and then grouped in various ways to indicate the presence of character traits and/or the use of defense mechanisms; you can now observe behavior which was previously ego-syntonic and recognize it not just as "who I am" but rather as the operation of your character and/or defense mechanisms.

So this first step involves simply being aware of what you are doing. Fine, except here is where the first major misuse of the technique arises.

The tendency is to continually label the same (or like) action with the same word or description. An example: I am getting angry over nothing. That might be true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough a nd will sabotage the whole psychological integration process if you treat it that way.

Instead of treating it always as the same thing; try each time to treat it as something different. It is not "I am getting angry over nothing," it is "I am feeling unappreciated;" "I am feeling unimportant;" "I am feeling like I am a child whose opinions are ignored;" "I am feeling like I am a jackass;" etc. The idea is to try each time to phrase the situation in a different way.

2. Step 2: Why Am I Doing It

Taking each of the restatements of the situation, ask yourself what is it about my psychology that results in this feeling or in this action.

Again this is where misuse arises. Recall the principle that I put into a special note box: all behavior is motivated. Also recall the concept of "over-determined." There is not one reason why you do something, there are several reasons. The "what am I doing" question is an issue of self-exploration. There has to be some reason, in fact several reasons, why I am doing this; now what might some of those reasons be.

Again, I point out that finding the right answer is not the issue.

Your body might give you a signal when you come on the right one or one close to right; but don't count on that. It is NOT the case that simply because you do not get a body reaction that you are then on a wrong path.

The issue is the honesty, integrity, and thoroughness of your investigation that is the most important issue.

One thing that you DO NOT want to do, is come up with the same answer you came up with before. That type of thinking does not correct character pathology, it only rehearses it.

Asking "why am I doing it" is where you speculatively try answer after answer, each time gathering new information. Let me hark back to the branch tree discussion (page 424). A good way to look at this is that each time you are trying to go down a different path of nodes and connections to discover new elements of yourself.

When you find one of the many things about yourself that you think is the most dysfunctional in your life, put the rest on hold for the present and focus on just that one behavior.

3. Step 3: What Is Valid

Don't jump to step three. It will always be there. First get as much data about yourself as you possibly can. Recall that change without exploration of underlying cognitive errors only leads to symptom substitution.

What is valid follows from steps one and two. I am doing ZZZ and the reasons why are AAA, BBB, CCC, and DDD. Now, the question is, stepping outside my AAA, BBB, CCC, and DDD; what is the logically valid or socially approved way to act? This, in effect, returns us to the discussion of the action approach (page 449) and the observation that to make changes in oneself, one has to experiment with new behaviors.

So here you say, Well I am doing ZZZ but logically, when I think it through on its own merits (without my AAA, BBB, CCC, and DDD errors) likely the right thing to do would be HHH.

4. Step 4: Do It

This is the easy one, now do HHH.

Oops, well maybe not the easy one. This violation of your own character will possibly produce anxiety or frustration or even shame or guilt. No problem. That is simply more data.

Let's see. I did HHH and afterward I felt really awkward and out of place. Why? What is it in my psychology that resulted in my reacting with that feeling?

Footnote 119. Just a minor reminder. Emotions are not singular. There are usually about six emotions present at any one moment.

The body work lets you get to this degree of emotional sensitivity and ability to undertake an honest exploration of yourself, but ability is only a prerequisite; it is not the doing. That is up to you and whether you really care about clearing out the cobwebs of youth.

5. Why It Works

What this technique is doing is cognitively reprogramming you own unconscious. By your exploration you are forcing your unconscious to traverse not one familiar set of nodes and paths, but a whole set of them and at the end of each pathway you are adding new data to the redintegration (the gestalt).

The technique is powerful, it works, but it is slow and arduous work and depends totally on the integrity with which you undertake it.

6. Observations on Psychological Integration

There is a strange outcome to this process. I have no explanation as to why this happens; it is just observation, absent theory.

When you are working on one particular behavior, you will find that it takes about six weeks to change it. The change will occur organically. That is, you have been doing it way ZZZ and working on it when suddenly you find, looking back, that the last time you did not do ZZZ you did HHH. It was not that you were imposing HHH on yourself, it was just automatically the way you reacted.

But, for unknown reasons, the old ZZZ will return about four weeks later. You will be aware of the regression, you will notice almost immediately that you have fallen back into an old pattern.

No problem. Simply start again watching for ZZZ, tracing it back to "why did I do it" (thus traversing ever new nodes and paths) and after a few eruptions ZZZ will disappear and HHH will be there in its place.

But, you are not through yet. About four months later (I have no explanation for the four weeks or the four months), ZZZ will pop up again. Do a little of 'what am I doing' and 'why am I doing it'; and it will disappear rapidly, to be replaced by HHH.

I suppose the old ZZZ could still return. I have never seen it happen, but it could. But, then, you know what to do with it.

H. Table Of Coping Mechanisms

Because of the emphasis placed on coping mechanisms in this book, the following is supplied for those readers not familiar with the range of these mechanisms. The material is drawn from a host of sources. Reasonably, not all authors agree on the age of appearance of any given coping mechanism or on its exact mode of operation. This compilation is intended to provide a quick guide and can not replace serious literature study. These tables were prepared by the author and are used by him in understanding his patients. The tables draw on both object relations theory and on Freud.

Since the table of coping mechanisms uses Freudian terms like oral-aggressive and oedipal, it has to start with another short table that assigns ages to each of these stages. In the table that follows here, before the table of the coping mechanisms, I list both the traditional Freudian assigned ages and the ages that I prefer and use.

Table 2: Table Of Ages

Footnote 120. We have known for nearly 50 years from the work of Harlow with surrogate mothers with monkeys (subsequently verified from another perspective by Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980)) that Freud's postulation (in conformity to many other thinkers of the time) of an oral stage is wrong. Also we have been unable to verify Freud's anal stage and it, too, is likely wrong. The concept of an Oedipal/ Electra conflict is likely correct (Brown, 1991).

Table 3: List Of Coping Mechanisms

Table 3: List Of Coping Mechanisms (continued)

Failure Of Coping Mechanisms

1. regression

2. estrangement

  a. depersonalization

  b. derealization

3. psychotic break

4. acting out

5. psychogenic illness

6. neurosis