happening inside of me?”
Paul Gilbert
"Fears of Compassion"
1:24 min
However, a less commonly recognized fear is the overwhelming sadness that can lie at the heart of
many shame-fearful people. As we “open” to others, we see how shame has isolated us in a deep
feeling of aloneness and separation from others. The experience of “coming home” or “beginning to
feel the possibility of being lovable or part of a network of people” can activate enormous grief and
sadness. Patients can stumble at this point because this sadness can feel overwhelming, out of
control and perplexing. Not uncommonly, then, when some people begin on the compassionate
path they are surprised by the fact that, rather than feeling happier and softer, they can actually
feel sadder and more in touch with loneliness. They do not want to go there, especially when this
sadness is linked to feelings of aloneness. In the histories of these individuals they may tell stories
of how they were criticized, hit or abused by their parents and then sent to their rooms where they
stayed on their own in a high state of distress – no one came to comfort or rescue them. Some
have felt shy as children and that they never really felt they “fitted in” or were part of any social
group or friendship. Compassion can open them to these body-felt memories and they may turn
away from the compassion journey.
Emotional Memory
As indicated above, emotional memory is incredibly important for understanding how any kind of
emotion works, including affiliative and compassion-based emotion. For example, most of us enjoy
holidays and we also enjoy feeling sexually aroused – at certain appropriate times anyway. So
supposing you see something on the television that stimulates your thoughts of holiday or maybe a
little sexual interest. For most of us, activation of these basic systems in our brains is pleasurable.
But suppose you had been raped on holiday (sorry to be so graphic but we need to make this point
clearly). Then those
same television stimuli
would generate a very different pattern in your brain.
Seeing something on television would now actually be quite
traumatic
. This example helps to
illustrate that what would normally be positive emotions can become associated with very
unpleasant, even traumatic experiences. So it is with affiliative stimuli, too; a stimulating system
that is linked to getting close to others and opening to them can actually activate feelings of
trauma.
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