The Experience of Emptiness

The emotion of remorse is one of the most painful emotions the human being has to bear. So terrible is it that it will frequently block the pathway to growth. What is the feeling of remorse? It is a complex emotion, comprised of sadness, regret, anguish, loss and despair. In many ways it is similar to the “existential guilt” of Sartre (1956) and Camus (1965). It is often preceded, in the therapeutic process, by what I have come to call the “terrible moment.” The moment is a “realization” in the sense that Bion (1977) uses the word, that is in the sense that there is the distinct feeling in the therapist that a “wild thought” that has been wandering the forests of the unconscious has just entered the realm of the conscious. The “terrible moment,” when it is related to the emotion of remorse takes the form of the therapist having a realization, often sudden, that may take the form of, “and it has always been that way,” or, “all your life you have been depressed and felt unwanted,” or “you have always felt unwilling to make contact with other people for fear they will engulf you” and so on. The individual has a terrible recognition of some self-sabotaging behavior, or of some psychic pain that has crippled them or hampered their progress or that they have had to live with for long periods of time. These realizations are connected with choices that have been made that have lead sometimes to disastrous consequences. The anguish of these realizations is exquisite. If the therapist has them first, and on many occasions, of course, the therapist for reasons of countertransference will resist being open to these realizations, then she is in the dilemma of whether or how to share them with the client, for to do so is to uncover psychic pain that has previously been kept under wraps.

Once the material has been shared with the client or if the client comes to the realization himself or herself...then they have their own “terrible moment” There is the exceedingly complex experience of psychic pain. On the one hand, there is the remembering of the trauma, be it acute or cumulative and on the other hand, and this is the focus here, there is the terrible feeling of remorse...that the trauma contributed to a “life unlived.” One of my favorite therapists used to say, “An unexamined life is not worth living, but an unlived life is not worth examining.” A corollary of this argument would be that an unlived life is not worth living, and here we arrive at the element of deep despair in the feeling of remorse. “I have not lived.” Add to this the feeling of existential guilt,” I have committed the crime of not living,” and a feeling of despair, “and I shall never live.”

Clients and therapist alike wish to avoid painful feelings like these. Therapists may feel like they are causing unnecessary pain to clients and thus not uncover feelings of remorse, or even try to talk the client out of their remorse with hopeful and uplifting comments. If this is done the client is left alone with their remorse and with the self-hatred and despair that are part of it. Perhaps the patterns of self-defeating behavior or depression and despair persist. Perhaps both the client and the therapist see the client as resisting or as a chronic case...a “help-rejecting complainer” and no forward movement occurs. My belief is that only by opening up the complex of the feeling of remorse can forward movement be made.