Guilt and the Face of Innocence

There are many comforting passages in A Course in Miracles reflecting our inherent holiness as part of God’s Oneness. The truth about us is wholly benign. But, being a course in undoing the negative, there are also many sections dealing with the unseemly aspects of ego identification. The ego is slippery, and its thought system of hatred can evade our ‘ego detector’ because of the ways it cloaks attack.

One of the most potent (and initially hard to face) sections in the Course exposing the ego’s tactics discusses ‘the face of innocence’. In ‘Self Concept Versus Self’, we learn that the ego has us construct a self-concept designed for two purposes: to present a face of innocence; and to place guilt onto others.

The face of innocence relates to an almost saintly self-concept in which we believe we are ‘good within an evil world’. To our mind, we only ever attack in self-defence, and then only after we’ve tried to let things go or remain generous and ‘good’:

‘This aspect can grow angry, for the world is wicked and unable to provide the love and shelter innocence deserves. And so this face is often wet with tears at the injustices the world accords to those who would be generous and good. This aspect never makes the first attack. But every day a hundred little things make small assaults upon its innocence, provoking it to irritation, and at last to open insult and abuse.

The face of innocence the concept of the self so proudly wears can tolerate attack in self-defence, for is it not a well-known fact the world deals harshly with defenceless innocence?’ (T-31.V.2:7-9; 3:1-4; 4:1).

The face of innocence is the part of us ‘acted upon’; the victim of outer forces. We need to make this self-concept to fulfil the second function of being able to label someone else as ‘guilty’:

‘Beneath the face of innocence there is a lesson that the concept of the self was made to teach… The lesson teaches this: “I am the thing you made of me, and as you look on me, you stand condemned because of what I am”’ (T-31.V.5:1,3).

In terms of form, victimisers and victims are a fact within the world. What the Course means by the ‘face of innocence’ is a need to judge and condemn, which also implies a need to remain identified as a suffering victim. The face of innocence, then, relates to a state of mind.

An incident illustrating the difference between being a victim in form and in attitude, occurred when I was a teenager on a bus heading to school. The bus was crowded, standing room only, and so students put their school bags on the racks above the seated passengers. While I was retrieving my bag to get out at my stop, the bus lurched and my bag hit the head of the passenger below. ‘Ouch!’, she exclaimed as she grasped her head with both hands and looked at me accusingly. I apologised profusely but I could see that she was in no mood to let me off the hook. It occurred to me that nothing I said or did would lesson her condemnation, which I found curious since the bag striking her was clearly an accident.

From the perspective of the Course, the passenger’s determination not to ‘absolve’ me was a necessary evil to maintain her face of innocence. Though she suffered pain from the bag hitting her head, she latched onto that suffering to emphasise what I had done to injure her. I had unwittingly provided fuel for the maintenance of her self-concept.

The Course’s discussion of the face of innocence helps us identify when we have chosen against our true self, thereby experiencing guilt and a need to see it in others. I have also found the work of psychoanalyst Karen Horney extremely helpful in identifying patterns of behaviour linked to ego identification. As seen in the following discussion of the ‘self-effacing solution’ described in Neurosis and Human Growth, Horney’s insights are remarkable for their parallels with the Course.

Guilt and the Self-Effacing Solution

Horney proposed that there are three main defensive systems, or ‘solutions’, children adopt for security when feeling ‘lost and alone in a hostile world’. They are the self-effacing/compliant solution, the mastery/aggressive solution, and the detached solution.

Broadly speaking, the self-effacing solution speaks to guilt and the Course’s face of innocence, while the mastery solution is about shame and corresponds to the Course’s discussion of grandiosity which masks a belief in littleness. The mastery type is highly competitive, likes to dominate others, and is the opposite of the self-effacing type.

The detached solution is the idea that we can avoid the difficulties of emotional investment in people and things of the world by withdrawing from meaningful engagement. This is the solution that doesn’t want to be bothered by anyone or anything. We have some inclination towards all of these solutions, but one will dominate, holding us back from embodying our true, authentic self.

The Incredible Shrinking Woman

‘Self-effacement has nothing to do with femininity, nor aggressive arrogance with masculinity. Both are exquisitely neurotic phenomena.’

– Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

While the mastery type has no problem expressing their anger and directing others, the self-effacing person has a need to please and be compliant. They struggle to use their voice.

This was clearly illustrated in a dream I had about a self-effacing person. Standing forlorn at their kitchen sink, they said their doctor told them they had ‘bedsores in the throat’, a wonderful symbolical representation of the need to use their voice. And since it was my dream, I took that message on myself. We could all follow the advice: ‘Find your voice and use it. Use your voice to find it.’

And while the mastery type typically overrates their talents and capacities, feeling proud and triumphant in their achievements, the self-effacing person has a taboo against rating themselves highly. Their solution requires them to shrink so that others may feel good about themselves. In this way, they don’t pose a threat to anyone. They desire only to please and appease because they want to be liked and feel safe.

The shrinking process, says Horney, also ‘entails the “sin” (against oneself) of hiding one’s talent in the earth’. Creativity, for example, would (in Jungian terms) be relegated to the Shadow, the unconscious. Pitfalls of such neglect are described in the following by Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales:

‘People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.’

Because shrinking is part of their solution, the self-effacing person must also put themselves down, especially if they have strayed into the zone of self expansion, through creativity or having their say, for example. ‘I must have sounded stupid. I made a nuisance of myself’, they are apt to reflect.

With the need to subdue themselves the self-effacing person falls prey to self-hate. They will also externalise this, perceiving themselves to be the object of other’s hatred, feeling abused whether that was someone’s intent or not. Says Horney:

‘In a typically self-effacing person, feeling abused is an almost constant undercurrent in his whole attitude toward life. If we wanted to characterise him crudely and glibly in a few words, we would say that he is a person who craves affection and feels abused most of the time. To begin with, as I have mentioned, others often do take advantage of his defencelessness and his overeagerness to help or to sacrifice… Also, due to his shrinking process and all it entails, he often does come out on the short end, without there having been any harmful intent on the part of others…

Probably more poignant than any of these other sources is all the abuse he inflicts upon himself, through self-minimising as well as through self-reproaches, self-contempt, and self-torture — all of which is externalised. The more intense the self-abuse, the less can good external conditions prevail against it… In actual fact he may not have been so unfairly treated as it seems to him; at any rate, behind the feeling is the reality of his self-abuse. The connection between a sudden rise in self-accusations and the subsequent feeling of being abused is not too difficult to observe…’

Horney links the self-effacing person’s need to feel victimised with their terror of wrongdoing. In other words, guilt over their own actions is so threatening to their sense of security (to please and appease, to be liked and protected) that they feel an intense need to portray themselves as a victim. This is something we all do when we adopt the face of innocence after betraying our spiritual Self:

‘In short, his terror of wrongdoing simply compels him to feel himself the victim, even when in actual fact he has been the one who failed others or who, through his implicit demands, has imposed upon them. Because feeling victimised thus becomes a protection against his self-hate [guilt], it is a strategical position, to be defended vigorously. The more vicious the self-accusations, the more frantically must he prove and exaggerate the wrong done to him — and the more deeply he experiences the “wrong.” This need can be so cogent that it makes him inaccessible to help for the time being. For to accept help, or even to admit to himself that help is being offered, would cause the defensive position of his being altogether the victim to collapse. Conversely, it is profitable at any sudden rise in feeling abused to look for a possible increase of guilt-feelings.’

Functional Suffering

While the self-effacing person will experience ‘plain suffering’ because they can’t live out their expansive qualities nor ask for what they want, and are compelled to self-sacrifice, Horney calls the suffering that is used to escape guilt ‘functional suffering’. This type of suffering can also be used in a passive-aggressive way to hurt others:

‘Suffering also is his specific way of expressing vindictiveness. Frequent indeed are the examples where the psychic ailments of one of the marriage partners are used as a deadly weapon against the other, or where they are used to cramp the children by instilling in them feelings of guilt for an independent move.

How does he square with himself the infliction of so much misery on others — he who is anxious not to hurt anybody’s feelings? He may be more or less dimly aware that he is a drag on his environment, but he does not squarely face it because his own suffering exonerates him. To put it briefly: his suffering accuses others and excuses himself! It excuses in his mind everything — his demands, his irritability, his dampening of the spirits of others. Suffering not only assuages his own self-accusation, but also wards off the possible reproaches of others… His suffering entitles him to “understanding.” If others are critical, they are unfeeling. No matter what he does, it should arouse sympathy and the wish to help…’

Functional suffering both punishes and lays guilt upon someone. It’s like ‘dying at the offender’s doorstep’:

‘Finally, going to pieces under the assault of an unfeeling world appears to him as the ultimate triumph. It may take the conspicuous form of “dying at the offender’s doorstep.” … It is a triumph primarily in the person’s mind, and even this may be unconscious. When we uncover it in analysis we find a glorification of weakness and suffering supported by confused half-truths. Suffering per se appears as the proof of nobility. What else can a sensitive person in an ignoble world do but go to pieces!’

As the Course says, even death seems a small price if we can say, ‘Behold me, brother, at your hand I die’ (T-27.I.4:6). In clinging to functional suffering, we are throwing someone under the bus. This is the harshness of the ego thought system. Yet, as the Course reminds us, we are not the ego. We are not our defensive ‘solution’. As Horney points out, there is a part of us that knows something isn’t right, a part that doesn’t want us to ‘go to pieces’:

‘The appeal of doing so naturally is greater in times of distress and can then be conscious. More often in such periods only reactive fears reach consciousness, such as fears of mental, physical, or moral deterioration, of becoming unproductive, of becoming too old for this or that. These fears indicate that the more healthy part of the person wants to have a full life and reacts with apprehension to another part which is bent on going to pieces.’

There’s an important difference between the appeal of going to pieces, and actual dysfunction. The former involves hostility towards others in our day-to-day living, and a need to project guilt onto them. In other words, it relates to functional suffering. The latter may be the result of overwhelm or the surfacing of past trauma, and often involves shame and guilt coming into consciousness, which is both the cause of distress and the requirement for healing.

Culture Club

In relation to functional suffering and the appeal of going to pieces, the ‘more healthy part’ of us is connected to wholeness and can help lift us out of our attachment to suffering, releasing the fear and guilt associated with making a wrong move or saying the wrong thing.

If we’re consumed with a secret belief in our littleness (the mastery type), our healthy aspect will react with apprehension to the part bent on tearing the outer world to pieces. This is the part afraid of insignificance and so is compelled to exert power over the environment and others. Healing would involve releasing the fear of emotional vulnerability, and shame.

Apart from alignment with male and female gender stereotypes, the self-effacing and mastery solutions are influenced by culture on a broader scale. We are, says Horney in The Neurotic Personality of our Time, imbedded in a society that promotes contradictory ideals:

‘The first contradiction to be mentioned is that between competition and success on the one hand, and brotherly love and humility on the other. On the one hand everything is done to spur us toward success, which means that we must be not only assertive but aggressive, able to push others out of the way. On the other hand we are deeply imbued with Christian ideals which declare that it is selfish to want anything for ourselves, that we should be humble, turn the other cheek, be yielding. For this contradiction there are only two solutions within the normal range: to take one of these strivings seriously and discard the other; or to take both seriously with the result that the individual is seriously inhibited in both directions.’

Our solutions keep us lopsided and torn, but they are difficult to release because of the defensive functions they serve and cultural reinforcement. However, with A Course in Miracles, we have an approach that makes use of a Higher Power, undoing the shame and guilt at the absolute foundation of these solutions; the belief in separation from God.

In this, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is in accord when he defines the important role of faith in resolving inner contradictions. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard describes how it isn’t by being virtuous that we align ourselves with our Self, because our ideas of virtue vary. To the self-effacing person, virtue lies in shrinking; to the mastery type it lies in ‘expanding’. But faith is different. Faith takes us beyond concepts to a state of quiet receptivity, of communion with the Holy Spirit. This is why Kierkegaard says ‘the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith’ — sin here being a separation from the Divine, an act of excommunication. The truly ‘good’ act can’t be predetermined, but comes from reflection, meeting each situation anew.

It is only by Grace through faith that we can transcend the opposites. The Holy Spirit can lift us out of our inner contradictions and solutions the moment we are willing to forgive. We no longer hold ourselves to our body as we let go of our masks of innocence and grandiosity in preference for the wholeness of our Self and the naturalness of authenticity. To be in our natural state is to be filled with spirit. We become happy and thus send forth a message, ‘Behold me, brother, at your hand I live’ (T-27.I.10:7).