Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotions
Language: English
Pages: 317
ISBN: 1616141492
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With the first unified theory of guilt, shame, and anxiety, this pioneering psychiatrist and critic of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs examines the causes and effects of psychological and emotional suffering from the perspective of biological evolution, child development, and mature adult decision-making. Drawing on evolution, neuroscience, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Breggin analyzes what he calls our negative legacy emotions—the painful emotional heritage that encumbers all human beings. The author marshals evidence that we evolved as the most violent and yet most empathic creatures on Earth. Evolution dealt with this species-threatening conflict between our violence and our close-knit social life by building guilt, shame, and anxiety into our genes. These inhibiting emotions were needed prehistorically to control our self-assertiveness and aggression within intimate family and clan relationships.
Dr. Breggin shows how guilt, shame, and anxiety eventually became self-defeating and demoralizing legacies from our primitive past that no longer play any useful or positive role in mature adult life. He then guides the reader through the Three Steps to Emotional Freedom, starting with how to identify negative legacy emotions and then how to reject their control over us. Finally, he describes how to triumph over and transcend guilt, shame, and anxiety on the way to greater emotional freedom and a more rational, loving, and productive life.
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about the dangers of psychiatric drugs and helped to push the FDA to upgrade the seriousness of its warnings about adverse drug effects for dozens of medications. As a medical expert in legal cases, Dr. Breggin has unprecedented and unique knowledge about how the pharmaceutical industry too often commits fraud in researching and marketing psychiatric drugs. He frequently participates in criminal, product liability, and malpractice cases. He has been the psychiatric expert in landmark psychiatric
Greene, Joshua. Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: Penguin, 2013. Haaken, Janice, and Paula Reavey, eds. Memory Matters. London: Routledge, 2010. Hales, Robert, Stuart Yudofsky, and Glen Gabbard. Textbook of Psychiatry, 5th ed. New York: American Psychiatric Publishers, 2008. Hare, Brian, and Vanessa Woods. The Genius of Dogs. New York: Dutton, 2013. Hart, Joshua. “Toward an Integrative Theory of Psychological Defense.” Perspectives on Psychological
painful, self-defeating emotions. Tell your negative emotions, “I will not be paralyzed by you. I will not let you misdirect me. I refuse to be controlled or compelled by you.” Guilt, shame, and anxiety behave like unwanted houseguests who repeatedly come back until we start saying no to them. They are like friends who have grown accustomed to taking advantage of us. They are emotional bullies who feel entitled to intimidate us. They are like children given no limits. They push us harder and
people think of you • Worrying that people don't treat you with enough respect • Feeling taken advantage of • Wishing you could have had the last word • Keeping your thoughts and feelings to yourself to avoid embarrassment • Not wanting to seem stupid or inappropriate • Being concerned about failing rather than about doing something bad • Being a perfectionist • Feeling left out, different, or like an outsider • Being distrustful or suspicious • Avoiding being the center of attention •
giving to them. When we love, it is not a sacrifice to share or to give to our loved ones because their happiness brings us happiness. For this reason, love is the ultimate source of conflict resolution.1 When we love, we place another person's interests at least on par with our own, and, therefore, we look out for his or her interests at least as much as or more than our own. For this reason, love erases conflict. In practical and yet spiritual terms, when we look at others with love, it
