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I want you to think of something that you’re not, some quality that you don’t like. Because of the difficulty of talking about negations, it is helpful to use a little bit of content, so I’m going to use “cruelty” as an example, but you can use any other quality or attribute that you don’t like, if you prefer. If you say to yourself, “I’m not cruel,” how do you represent this internally? Take a few minutes to experience what it is like for you to define a quality in yourself by what you are not.
It can help to contrast your experience of the same quality defined positively and negatively. What is the difference between your experience of “I’m not cruel” compared with “I’m kind”? What is your database like for “not cruel”? How do you respond to it, and what impact will this response tend to have on your behavior?...
I’d like to gather several examples of how you experience a negatively defined (and negatively-valued), quality. To preserve your privacy, I suggest that whatever disliked quality you chose to experience, you talk about it using the word “cruel,” as a kind of code word for it.
Bill: I felt awful. When I tried to think of “not cruel,” all I could come up with was times when I was cruel. Then I had to push that away and do the right thing.
Fred: I see the word “cruel” much more boldly and clearly than the word “kind.” The database of cruel is what you would expect—lots of examples of people being mean, and enjoying someone else’s suffering. I don’t like seeing all those images, and I want to pull back from them.
Rene: I see images of other people being cruel, but I stay dissociated. I usually step into my images, because even if I don’t want to actually do something, I want to have a sense of what it would be like. So I begin to step in, and then a voice says, “No,” and I back away from it. Then I feel kind of apathetic and bored, because I don’t know what to do.
Lois: I do much the same as Rene, but when I step in, I feel scared, and then I think, “Well, if I’m not that, what am I?”
Al: I see indistinct, almost stick figure images, of someone being cruel, and then I have a feeling of recoiling, and curling up, wanting to defend myself.
Although each of you has noticed somewhat different aspects of the experience, those are all pretty similar. Words are clumsy things, and often people find creative ways to understand them. Did any of you do something different?
Ann: I made images of a number of times when I could have been cruel, but wasn’t.
Sally: As soon as you said, “not cruel,” I immediately went to seeing the opposite—being kind.
OK, you each did something a little different, but you both saw the opposite of being cruel. You did something that is different from what most people do, and in this case it’s a very good choice, for reasons that will become clear as we explore this further.
However, right now I want you to make images of being cruel, and then negate them in some way, so that you can experience what that is like. When you know how others experience this, then when someone describes themselves with negation, it will be a lot easier for you to get rapport, and help them learn how to do something more useful.
Bill: I sort of flipped the words in my mind, and made images of all the things that don’t fit the definition of being cruel—which is a lot of different things! My mind got pretty crowded with all that stuff.
“Not cruel” can mean very different things to different people. It can either mean “kindness,” or it can mean all the things in the world that aren’t cruel. It’s easy to fall into thinking in digital “either/or” categories, completely ignoring the fact that there are a lot of things or events in the world that are neither kind nor cruel—the carpet on the floor, for instance.
Whenever you hear someone say or presuppose an either/or category like, “You’re either with us or against us,” or “either I have to do everything my wife wants, or get a divorce,” that is an indication of a very limited world view that could use some finer discrimination, and exploration of all the possibilities in the middle zone between the two extremes of the “either/or.”
Now I want you all to take this negation to the extreme. What would your life be like if not just one of your qualities, but all your qualities were described as negations? Take a minute or two to experience what it is like for you to imagine that whenever you think of yourself, it is always in terms of what you’re not. All your qualities are experienced in this way. What is that like? ...
Sam: It’s very dark; I feel very alone and scared, separate and powerless, hemmed in by all these things that I don’t like.
Ann: I have a tendency to feel like doing what is in all those images, and then I pull back from doing it. I feel as if I am all those awful things, but at the same time I wouldn’t want to think that.
Alice: I’m very aware of seeing all these things around me that I don’t like, and I’m pulling back from all of it. All my attention is directed to all this unpleasant stuff around me.
Yes, it’s definitely an experience of going away from unpleasantness, with no possibility to go toward anything. With no positive options to go toward, you naturally feel very limited and stuck.
Imagine that your home was entirely decorated with images of things that you don’t like—and that you never left home—and you will have an idea of what this is like. Some people collect unpleasant experiences—grievances, guilts, regrets, disasters, ugliness of all kinds, and then live surrounded by them in their minds. Most people who come for therapy do much the same, at least with a problem situation. They are so aware of what they don’t want, that they don’t have much attention left for what they do want.
Lois: I can’t see any distinctions. I have this sense of emptiness in my belly and chest, of not knowing anything about who I am, only who I’m not.
Yes, by focusing on the negation, there is no way to think about who you are, and there are no positive criteria for making distinctions. You can even take negation a step further and say, “I’m not the kind of person who—” The phrase “kind of person” describes a category of people, which separates the person even further from the negated behavior.
Or someone could say, “I’m not dishonest.” Since “dishonest” is already a negation, they are negating a negation! In Spanish, that’s easy to process, because multiple negations always produce a negation. But in English, each negation flips the one before it, so you have to go through some mental gymnastics to figure out whether the meaning is positive or negative. There may be some interesting and useful consequences of these variations, but the main point I want to make is that when someone defines themselves by negation, that gives them nothing positive to identify with.
Since the kinds of images that we make in regard to ourselves will tend to generate the behavior that is in the images, what kinds of responses would likely be generated by negated images?
Fred: I’d tend to notice cruelty, and all these other things everywhere in the world, and probably miss all the positive stuff. I’d also feel superior to all those people around me who are doing all these terrible things.
Yes, there is an implicit comparison between myself and others. Other people do these awful things, and I don’t, so I can feel superior to them. And that comparison and superiority will also result in my feeling very separate from them, different and alone.
Rich: Since I feel an awful emptiness inside because I don’t know who I am, I’m preoccupied with what others think of me, as a way of having some sense of who I am.
If you lived your whole life like this, what would a psychiatrist call it?
Fred: “Paranoid” is the word that comes to my mind. Imagining and noticing bad things all around you, being scared and vigilant, ideas of self-importance and superiority, feeling alone and threatened, and fighting back.
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