Blaming yourself is not the answer

责怪你自己并不是答案

I had an experience some years ago which taught me something about the ways in which people make a bad situation worse by blaming themselves. One January, I had to officiate at two funerals on successive days for two elderly women in my community. Both had died “full of years,” as the Bible would say; both succumbed to the normal wearing out of the body after a long and full life. Their homes happened to be near each other, so I paid condolence calls on the two families on the same afternoon.

我多年前的一个经历让我知道了人们把事情变得糟糕都会怪罪于他们自己。一月，我要连续两天为我社区两位年老的女士主持葬礼。如圣经所说，她们享尽了天年；在漫长充实的人生里，最终脱离了她们的身体回归天国（最终她们都被穿上了朴素的衣服）。她们的家都挨在一起，所以我在同一个下午拜访了两个家庭，送去我的悼念。

At the first time, the son of the deceased woman said to me, ”if only I had sent my mother to Florida and gotten her out of this cold and snow, she would be alive today. It’s my fault that she died.” At the second home, the son of the other deceased woman said, “if only I hadn’t insisted on my mother’s going to Florida, she would be alive today. That long airplane ride, and the abrupt change of climate, were more than she could take. It’s my fault that she’s dead.”

第一次，已故女士的儿子告诉我，“如果我有带我母亲去佛罗里达，让她远离这冰天雪地，她可能还活着。她的死都怪我。”在第二个家庭，另一位已故女士的儿子告诉我，“如果我没坚决带我母亲去佛罗里达，她可能还活着。飞机的长途跋涉，气候的突变让她难以承受。她的死都怪我。”

When things don’t turn out as we would like them to, it is very tempting to assume that had we done things differently, the story would have had a happier ending. Clergymen know that any time there is a death, the survivors will feel guilty. Because the course of action they took turned out badly, they believe that the opposite course – keeping Mother at home, deferring the operation – would have turned out better. After all, how could it have turned out any worse?

当事情没有按照我们的剧本发展，我们很容易会想到如果我们把事情做得不一样，故事可能会有个不错的结局。牧师们知道只要有人死掉，活着的人都会觉得内疚。因为他们采取这一行动的结果不好，他们就会认为反向行动 – 让他们母亲待在家，推迟日程 – 能够让结果变得更好。毕竟，这真的有变得更糟糕吗？

There seem to be two elements involved in our readiness to feel guilty. The first is our strenuous need to believe that the world makes sense, that there is a cause for every effect and a reason for everything that happens. That leads us to find patterns and connections both where they exist (smoking leads to lung cancer; people who wash their hands have fewer contagious diseases) and where they exist only in our minds (the Red Sox wins every time I wear my lucky sweater; that boy I like talks to me on odd-numbered days, but not on even-numbered ones, except where there has been a holiday to throw the pattern off). How many public and personal superstitions are based on something good or bad having happened right after we did something, and our assuming that the same thing will follow the same pattern every time?

似乎有两种因素让我们很容易感觉内疚。第一是我们认为万物皆有因，每一个影响都有原因，每一件事的发生必然有其理由。这就导致我们尝试寻找他们之间存在的模式和联系（吸烟导致肺癌；勤洗手能减少传染疾病）以及他们为何只存在于我们的想法中（每次我穿上我的幸运毛衣波斯顿红袜队都会赢；我喜欢的男孩子都在奇数天跟我讲话，不是偶数天，除了假期打乱了这个模式之外）。有多少公众和个人迷信是基于事情的好和坏仅仅只是刚好在我们做某些事情发生时，并且我们每一次都预想同样的事情也会跟随这种模式呢？

The second element is the notion that we are the cause of what happens, especially the bad things that happen. It seems to be a short step from believing that every event has a cause to believing that every disaster is our fault. The roots of this feeling may lie in our childhood. Psychologists speak of the infantile myth of omnipotence. A baby comes to think that the world exists to meet his needs, and that he makes everything happened in it. He wakes up in the morning and summons the rest of the world to its tasks. He cries, and someone comes to attend to him. When he is hungry, people feed him, and when he is wet, people change him. Very often, we do not completely outgrow that infantile notion that our wishes cause things to happen. A part of our mind continues to believe that people get sick because we hate them.

第二种因素是事情起因源于我们这一概念，特别是当不好的事情发生的时候。似乎很容易从认为每一件事都有其缘由到认为每一场的灾难都是我们的错。这个感觉的根本可能源于我们的童年生活。心理学家说起了全能的儿童神话。孩子认为世界存在是为了满足他的需要，是他让一切发生的。他早上起床然后聚集世界各地的人去完成任务。他哭的时候，有人会去照顾他。当他饿的时候，有人喂他。当他湿身了，有人给他换衣服。一般的我们不会过分想着这个神童概念表达的我们能够心想事成。我们内心的一部分依旧会认为人们得病是因为我们讨厌他们。

Our parents, in fact, often feed this notion. Not realizing how vulnerable our childhood egos are, they snap at us when they are tired of frustrated for reasons that have nothing to do with us. They bawl us out for being in the way, for leaving toys around or having the television set on too loud, and we in our childhood innocence assume that they are justified and we are the problem. Their anger may pass in a moment, but we continue to bear the scar of feeling at fault, thinking that whenever something goes wrong, we are to blame for it. Years later, should something bad happen to us, feelings from our childhood re-emerge and we instinctively assume that we have messed things up again.

我们的父母，事实上，经常灌输这个观念。没有意识到我们幼年自我的敏感脆弱，当他们厌倦了受挫尽管跟我们一点关系都没有，他们也会厉声训斥我们。他们大声呵斥我们妨碍了他们，因为我们把玩具随地放或者电视机开得太大声，童年天真的我们认为他们是正确的，我们才是有问题的那个。他们过会可能就不生气了，但是我们要继续承受这过错所带来的情感伤痕，认为不管什么事情做错了，我们都应该是被怪罪的那个。多年后，有不好的事情发生在我们身上，孩童时代所感再次涌现，我们本能地认为我们又把事情搞砸了。

It is gratuitous, even cruel, to tell the person who has been hurt, whether by divorce or death or other disaster, “Maybe if you had acted differently, things would not have turned out so badly.” When we say that, all we are really telling them is, “this is your fault for having chosen as you did.” Sometimes marriages fail because people are immature, or because expectations are unrealistic on both sides. Sometimes people died because they have incurable diseases, not because their families turned to the wrong doctor or waited too long to go to the hospital. Sometimes businesses fail because economic conditions or powerful competition dooms them, not because one person in charge made a wrong decision in a crucial moment. If we want to be able to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on living, we have to get over the irrational feeling that every misfortune is our fault, the direct result of our mistakes or misbehavior. We are really not that powerful. Not everything that happens in world is our doing.

“如果你换种方式，事情可能就不会是这样了。”告诉曾经被伤害的人，不管是离婚还是死亡还是其他灾难事件，这是没有根据的，甚至是野蛮的做法。当我们说出口的时候，我们真的是在告诉他们“这都是你的错。”有时候婚姻失败时因为双方还不够成熟，或者因为双方的期待不切实际。有时候人死是因为他们得了不治之症，不是因为他们的家庭给他看错医生或者花了太多的时间赶去医院。有时候生意失败是因为经济环境或者强有力的竞争所造成的，不是因为某个人在重要时刻所作出的某个错误的决定。如果我们真的想让我们的生活步入正轨继续生活下去，我们必须克服这每一个不幸都是我们的错、我们的错误或者不礼貌的直接结果的无理想法。我们没这么厉害，世界上发生的所有事不都是我们干的。

本文的翻译仅代表个人，如有错请指正。