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rotationalsymmetry · 4 years ago

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"tips to slow down when my mind and society tell me im not fast enough" I think this might be my wheelhouse. Context: I have CFS/ME -- an illness that means I can overdo things very easily if I'm not careful, and that taking frequent rests is important when I feel like it or not. But I also tend to have something of a "must be doing things all the time" personality, which makes that hard. (I probably also have ADHD, and a history of my brain trying to kill me.) I'm going to give a few practical suggestions for active rest first, then talk about more general concepts. I personally find that forms of meditation and similar things that give my brain something to "do" work better than less structured meditations -- things like guided visualizations, body scans, progressive muscular relaxation, and yoga nidra. This sort of thing is especially important for people whose thoughts tend to go to unpleasant places when left alone for too long. In general: if it makes you feel actively bad (not just kind of bored) don't keep doing it; meditation actually can make some issues worse some of the time. Many people can't just "do nothing" on command and have it feel good, but we can "do nothing" if we get enough cues that this is a do nothing kind of time. Human beings tend to rely very heavily on social and environmental cues to know when we need to be in get things done mode and when it's time to relax and enjoy ourselves. Environmental cues are things like physical location -- eg, going to a particular park/coffeeshop/library to write, not checking emails or working from home in your bedroom (when that's possible) to make it easier to fall asleep. Going away on vacation or to a club or to a friend's house to relax. Things like sound or music: eg putting on background instrumental music when you want to focus, putting on meditation or yoga music when you want to do that, putting on loud happy music for doing chores or working out. Smells: incense can be used to reinforce a prayerful or meditative mindset, and good food smells encourage appetite. Lighting and other visual aspects of environment (like an uncluttered environment for focusing, decorations for parties and holidays, getting bright sunlight in the morning to wake up, downloading flux on your electronics so you get less blue light after dark.) Tactile cues like opening the window when you're driving to stay awake, or doing work on a firm chair and leisure internetting on a soft couch. Also, time (daily/weekly/yearly routines and holidays.) Specifically for getting better at slowing down, you can work on identifying what cues already say "slow down" to you and give yourself those cues when you want to slow down, you can try to develop "slow down" cues by attaching them to your slow-down time until you form an association, and/or you can give yourself "get it done" cues when it's get it done time, so that the absence of those cues is a signal that iti's no longer "get it done" time. (Um. I'm assuming this question is about how to actually leisure when it's leisure time, not about how to slow down in all aspects of life; sorry if I got that wrong.) Rituals (things you do the same way each time under specific circumstances) can also act as cues: some people who work from home make a point of getting dressed before they start work, or walk around the block as a way make a clear distinction between work and not-work. Religious groups tend to have certain things they do at the start and end of gatherings to get people into the right mental space, especially when they don't have a dedicated space. Having routines and rituals around "this is what I do first thing in the morning, this is what I do right after work, this is what I do at the start of a day off" (if you do work) can make it easier for getting things done time and leisure time to not blur into each other. (Technically I don't have "work" as such but I kind of give myself work anyways. I'm at a point where there's household and personal stuff that needs to get done, most of which I push off onto my husband, and

there's stuff that I think will make my life or other people's lives better but is basically optional. I also seem to have a psychological need to feel like I'm doing things, which does not always line up neatly with what I think needs to actually get done, and certainly doesn't line up well with my chronic illness limitations. Regardless: having blurry lines between "work" time (or times when I think I should be getting stuff done) and leisure time, is really bad for me and as far as I can tell bad for most people. People need time when, even if there's stuff on the to do list that is not yet done, they can just be like "this is not the time to worry about that, this other specific time that is not now is when I'm going to go back to dealing with that." Especially for students, people who are unemployed, and people whose job can eat up every spare minute if they let it. And realistically, "just get everything done first, then you can relax" is often not a viable option.) By social cues I mostly mean not doing things alone. Just like people are more likely to go jogging every day if they have someone they're jogging with, people are also more likely to meditate consistently with a group or at least one partner, and people have an easier time getting into relaxed mode or party mode with other people who are there for the same thing. (Obviously this is more challenging than usual with the pandemic, but it's a thing to consider.) A lot of activities like cooking, singing, drumming, etc are also just more enjoyable when done in a group. One thing is that moving around frequently and pandemic isolation kind of cancel each other out, in that online meetups can address both. You can look for people to connect with who don't live where you are -- for me I've been spending way more time socializing with people from my former city than people in my current one. I find for me -- I think this might be generalizable but I'm not sure -- getting outside (especially for long walks, which I can't really do any more but whatever) is extremely effective in calming my brain down and keeping perspective. The research shows that physical activity is very useful for emotional regulation and stress relief -- not exactly what you were asking about, but it seems related, at least it could help with the self talk. If you get a lot of self doubt ("I should be doing more") or other brain self-sabotage, cognitive behavior therapy tricks can help -- like, writing down the thought, writing down a different way you could look at things, if the second one seems more credible to you you can try talking back to yourself. Specifically with "should" statements, "I would prefer..." is sometimes a very effective substitution. "I would prefer if I was getting more done."

no, listen, when I say I want to integrate more specific solarpunk stuff in my life, i don’t mean to ask for yet again new “aesthetic” clothes that now you have to buy or make to show your support of the movement (screw that i’m consuming enough as it is), or more posts about impossible house goals, or whatever, I’m asking you what my options to build a portable and eco friendly phone charger are, im asking you viable tiny-appartment edible plants growing tricks on a budget, im asking tips to slow down when my mind and society tell me im not fast enough, i don’t need more rich art nouveau amateurs aesthetics or pristine but cold venus project, okay, i know i should joins associations where I am tho i’m constantly on the move, thanks for that, just, you know, can we get a bit more practical ??? how do I hack my temporary flat into going off the grid for the time i’m here

#emotional regulation #mental health #slowing down tips #work #I don't know what this turned into #long post #by the way herbs work well in small apartments #apparently mint is virtually unkillable which is nice #parsley is good but cilantro will bolt fast in warm weather #like high seventies warm #suicidal ideation mention #one thing to keep in mind about food #is cost is often at least approximately an indicator of how resource intensive a thing is to grow/raise/make #asparagus and almonds are expensive because they're resource intensive #potatoes and oranges and spinach are cheap because they're easy to grow and don't take that much water etc #I think I'm not entirely sure of the latter set of examples #obviously this gets complicated with fast food etc #but in general fries are cheap because potatoes are cheap and fast food burgers are cheap because there's not much meat in them #granted also there's exploitation of labor etc #but in general low budget food is green food and low budget housing is green housing #and low budget transportation is green transportation #there is a tendency to think of green stuff as being more expensive #this is classist misdirection in general more expensive stuff is worse for the environment

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pinksweatergettingbetter · 7 years ago

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warning, the following has mainly snarky (and possibly furious) opinions on Spirit of Justice. Reader discretion is advised.

alright. part two, here we go

“she’s safe”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me”

the words ‘maya’ and ‘safe’ do not go together in phoenix’s dictionary

...Phoenix’s phone has caller ID??

ooh a phone vocal-blip. cute

ok fuck you how is the Benefactor keeping tabs on them?? Did Atishon use his One Phone Call to report to headquarters or something???

“I admit, I didn’t see that coming”

well spoilers guys I know who the benefactor is, and they have to be pretty fucking stupid not to know that a spirit medium is needed for this.

“its your friendly neighbourhood dragon”

no dhurke, youre not cool enough to be spiderman.

“you cant lay a hand on maya fey, and i mean literally”

>foreboding

[sighs deeply]

guys. just. fucking call edgeworth. he’s chief prosecutor of america and his sister is part of INTERPOL. call edgeworth and just. fix the fucking problem. right now.

“No time to explain”

ggghhghghhghghgh

...oh. there’s edgeworth

...............now watch him be completely fucking useless

.......ARE YOU KIDDING ME

PHOENIX /DID/ CALL EDGEWORTH THE MOMENT MAYA WAS KIDNAPPED AND HE STILL WENT THROUGH HIS FUCKING “DUHHH BETTER DEFEND THIS OBVIOUS CRIMINAL” SHIT??

oh edgeworth. you and your chartered planes.

whenever he does that i like to imagine he hired MJN air.

Edgeworth...

A) Why are you letting Dhurke be involved? Just cut him out, send Franziska and Lang in with a team of guys and kick the shit out of the enemy

B) You don’t need to conceal someone on a charter jet. You chartered it. You can do whatever the fuck you want with it. Besides, Dhurke got into the country p easily, he can get out the same way.

C) Dhurke is a criminal. Depending on what he’s done as a rebel, he could be as guilty in your country as his home country. Why are you acting like he’s innocent? Aren't you kind of by-the-book?

oh yeah and despite the fact that they’ve updated Phoenix’s sprite, Miles still looks like a frozen plank of wood. Thanks :\

Apollo: Sorry Trucy, guess you have to hold all the unnecessary evidence and hold down the fort and be LEFT BEHIND FOR A CHANGE AAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

oh. this is a really nice garden.

the drama theme is kinda harshing the mellow tho

o hai rayfa

um. what the fuck. that mask must make it pretty difficult to do shit pal

Garan, whilst ordering her henchmen online: drama queen or king preferred

UR DIARRHOEA, GAH-RAHN

cool theme, love the use of the royal “we”.

“what about those guards over there”

“ohh, just prepared to fuck shit u–– iii mean help you haha.”

yeahhh... I'm not buying her super calm “my husband is a kidnapper” attitude.

UIGSFILGFLIS DHURKE YOU FUCKING MORON

god he’s such a useless piece of shit. unless he’s trying to get taken so that he can be taken to... idk, wherever Maya is held in some sort of Gambit, he’s a real moron for just up and outing himself like that.

BAAAAARBED HEAD. YOU HAVE SOME SPLAAAAAAAAININ TO DOOOO

man why do they even give us other options if we can’t use them???

“Dhurke... I sure hope he’s alright”

hey apollo wanna hear a secret

i dont

Phoenix externally: Patience, Apollo, patience.

Phoenix internally: we are so screwed at any moment the queen could be all “OFF WITH YOUR HEAD” and i’ll never see trucy or maya again jesus holy mother buddha help me

i love that Garananana is kinda just chilling with them. You got more important shit to do, queenie. like being evil

also open your goddamn mouth once in a while, sheesh

Apollo: I hope no one gets hurt

The entire series of ace attorney as a whole: oh honey

wait ... INGA HAD A RATTAIL?!

ohhh yesss listen to those punches

why couldn’t they have animated it too ;w;

phew. im glad Maya’s ok.

yeesh... poor Rayfa.

i love that even apollo’s like “fuck dad, you didn't kill him, did you?????”

its a beautiful contrast to how adamant he was about Trucy not killing Manov.

um, soundtrack, now is not the time for Grand Revival. I know Edgeworth is on screen but the shit he’s saying is far, far from uplifting.

“it seems prosecutor sahdmadhi has grown quite fond of her”

nooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

“they’ve almost become a team of sorts”

ok so mark Ema down on the list of AJ characters who will never be seen again after this game.

fuck man i’d even take Klema over this

can you imagine if they'd split up Apollo/Phoenix Edgeworth/Athena instead

i really wonder how Athena and Edgeworth would interact. Athena’s spunky enough to be a bit like Kay I suppose, so maybe similar to that.

again, Kooraheen’s detention centre theme is really quite pretty

too bad i have to look at Dhurke’s face while listening to it

...a tasty... hash house

oh apollo’s up for that

well tbh if i was him i could use some hash after all this shit

yEAH YOU TELL’IM APOLLO

SMARTEN THAT BASTARD UP

god apollo he’s not worth it. i’d say leave the fucker to his fate but i guess it is important to find the real killer... sigh

apparently queen Amara liked insensitive fuckbags with masculinity issues

oh well. to each their own.

>:( don’t compare Dhurke’s story to Phoenix’s, Apollo

“you ran?! but why?!!”

oh i dunno, athena, maybe the fucking death penalty?????

hang the fuck on

are you telling me that Dhurke started making trips to his shitty abandoned law office via sewer... while Apollo was still with him?!

Like what fucking reason would he have to drag him down there?! The place is an archive/resistance base, but Apollo and Sadmad lived in the mountains as children; why the fuck would he take his /kids/ into town at the risk of having them all arrested at once?!

WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM, DHURKE

that orb better be a fucking laser or some shit cause I'm really tired of hearing about it

oh......... hi sadmad..................... what a pleasure to see you........... again................

just as fucking pleasant as ever

i love that Dhurke is like “what happened to fighting the man, son??”

like even if he is a double agent he can’t very well just be like “psst I'm still on your side!!!!” in front of the fucking guard

i hate that dhurke’s face is so placid during this too.

“Son, why did you betray me? Also how was the sports game?”

“The Nahyuta you knew exists no more”

yeah sure sadblackworth, whatever you say

oh well that was abrupt

meh, onwards to the tomb

“No, that’s the holy mother. She’s the one who brought spirit channeling to Khura’in”

oh so you mean Ami Fey.

oh ema... i’ll miss you while youre off being Sadmad’s lapdog

“You mean His Ephemeral Holiness?”

Yes, Ema, fight it!!! Fight it!!!!!!

“But when he manages a smile and compliments my work, it’s hard to say no.”

...nuts.

wait what do you mean the defendant is someone you know

you met Dhurke like once a day ago

aw apollo took the locked-room-mystery words right out of my mouth. i love him so. why are they going to take him away?

alrihgt back to this shit after like a 3 month hiatus or something

i love how chill everyone is talking about Maya’s kidnapping

“oh yeah he brought her here to the tomb so nobody would see. sensible thing to do. oh also maya almost died but i guess that’s nbd”

casually opens a tomb

casually opens the sarcophagus hangings

casually tries to open the sarcophagus when told there’s a mummy inside

apollo, you're contracting douche-itis from everyone else. this old family of yours is a bad influence.

...we’re gonna yeet this sarcophagus arent we

i love that Amara’s just kinda. depicted standing there as she’s burned to death. i mean i guess theyre trying to preserve her beauty and dignity in death but it also makes her look like an idiot who didnt try to escape the flames.

ooh i like that last one though

pff thats a pretty well-equipped corpse line

“Where’d the other three bullets go?”

“Maybe Dhurke ate them?”

if he did they'd better have a VERY good explanation

“the poor guy”

EMA

HE WAS HOLDING MAYA HOSTAGE

“the cuffs of justice”

love it

“just one of those traditions people do and they dont know the reason why”

“like rolling up your sleeves?”

“or your psychology, if we’re going there” HE FUCKING WENT THERE

OOOOOOOOOOO I LOVE YOU APOLLO

“he said grape juice has something in it that helps you relax”

are we going into grape juice lore here

"Really? ...Um, are you sure he was talking about regular, plain old grape juice?”

Yes, actually, Athena. It’s canonical that it is /actual off-the-vine welsh’s good ol’ sippy cup grape juice/. It’s not a metaphor or a censoring for kids, it’s just juice.

Of course, this is written by the DDSOJ staff. And considering the intense, dark n�� gritty action makeover the series got, I wouldn’t put it past them to retcon the juice into the... “fermented variety”. thanks Athena.

Yayyy not only do they write shitty dads, but they have to retroactively en-shitten Phoenix as an alcoholic father. Gosh, I sure do love these guys.

(obviously this isn’t a dig at anyone who head canons gj as wine, there’s a difference between head canons and malicious retconning.)

hmm interesting mechanic for this chair. i guess since you can’t stuff it in your inventory you cant do the ‘look all over’ thing. but on the other hand, they REALLY wanted to impress you with that hidden blood.

Ema: [performs a blood test in 2 seconds] I didn’t get a match!

Well probably not in that time, babe

i have to commend them on the little cutscene though that was nice.

again, i guess Amara really liked emotionally stunted fuckwads

the devil horns are a bit much, though.

oh damn.

thats a nice ass pendant

...oh thats blood

well, it sets off the pink and gold quite nicely. and its a butterfly... seems like something Dahlia would wear

“speak of the devil...”

speak of the devil indeed. hiiiiiii sadmad... its been a while.

oh ok he didnt say anything

also i find it funny that apollos like “Wait!! wait!! damnit, after him!”

and then you just. go back into the talk menu with Ema. bit of a moment killer, there.

“why does everything have to be so difficult with you?”

cause hes a prosecutor, apollo. thats just how it is on this bitch of an earth

“the law is the law. placing personal feelings above it is beyond reprieve”

ah but placing religion above it is totally fine. gotcha yuts

“And the winner is... prosecutor Sahdmadi!”

helpful, athena

“it’s like he’s trying to cover something up with his pretty words!”

oh did you mean the inevitable reveal that he's actually a good guy and we have to forgive him for being a shitwad?

oh wow. that joke post about sadmad developing generalized anxiety was actually based on a legit thing that happened

is it ok if i hate him even more for it? i mean how did he figure it out? he didn’t let apollo use it in court so where would he have gained the knowledge? unless he knows about Thalassa’s abilities...

...also, how /is/ he doing this? the way Perceive works isn’t just “i can sense that you’re uncomfortable”, it’s that people who can use it have extremely good eye-sight and see tiny little movements in other people. If they’re smart about it, they can tell that the movements mean the enemy is lying. Apollo just happens to get tense when he notices this, most likely because he’s kind of straining his eyes.

But then again that brings up the fact that his power would act up CONSTANTLY, either because EVERYBODY FIDGETS, or Apollo himself could just be stressed and making the bracelet squeeze on its own.

So thanks, SOJ. Not content with ruining Apollo’s canon, you’ve also got to ruin his cool lawyer power. Gosh, you’re just the gift that keeps on giving, aren’t you?

“Powerless in the face of the Holy Mother’s blessings”

SOJ team is now nicknamed the Holy Mother. Or possibly the Unholy Mother.

“Looks like your power won’t work against Sadmadhi. Guess we’ll have to try something else.”

“Yeah, let’s ask Dhurke...”

Yeah. Because you obviously don’t have someone with you RIGHT NOW who ALSo has a special power. You dont even have TWO POEPLE with you with a special power. Guess we’d better talk to the man who birthed this shiteater.

“I won against Mr. Wright”

yeah in a completely rigged trial where losing would be the worst option. thats not really something to brag about, you know.

“...doomed to be reborn as something lower than a bug or a vegetable”

you heard it here first folks Sadmad hates sustaining agriculture and the bees.

>Lang’s scrolls and dickfuckery

>Edgeworth’s by-the-bookishness

>Franziska’s catchphrase

>Blackquill’s backstory twist

These were the ingredients chosen to make the perfect prosecutor. But the SOJ writers accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction: BAD WRITING

THUS UNINSPIRED ASSHOLE WAS BORN!

apollo you don’t matter to anyone anymore youre getting the boot. do as your foster pop said when you were a drowning 5 y/o and suck those pussy baby tears back into your skull.

welp thats it for part one of investigation day 2. now (i think) we’re headed over to the delicious pandering of Phoenix and Edgeworth, back together. Will it bring me solace despite being an obvious ratings grab?

good god, i hope so.

till next time.

#sulking over SOJ #im gonna do this; I'm gonna finish it. i swear.]

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trendingnewsb · 7 years ago

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Why do we feel so guilty all the time?

The long read: Food, sex, money, work, family, friends, health, politics: theres nothing we cant feel guilty about, including our own feelings of guilt

I feel guilty about everything. Already today Ive felt guilty about having saidthe wrong thing to a friend. Then Ifeltguilty about avoiding that friend because of the wrong thing Id said. Plus, I havent called my mother yet today: guilty. And I really should have organised something special for my husbands birthday: guilty. I gave the wrong kind of food to my child: guilty. Ive been cutting corners at work lately: guilty. I skipped breakfast: guilty. I snacked instead: double guilty. Im taking up all this space in a world with not enough space in it: guilty, guilty, guilty.

Nor am I feeling good about feeling bad. Not whensophisticated friends never fail toremind me how selfinvolved, self-aggrandising, politically conservative and morally stunted the guilty are. Poor me. Guilty about guilty. Filial guilt, fraternal guilt, spousal guilt, maternal guilt, peer guilt, work guilt, middle-class guilt, whiteguilt, liberal guilt, historical guilt, Jewish guilt: Im guilty of them all.

Thankfully, there are those who say they can save us from guilt. According to the popular motivational speaker Denise Duffield-Thomas, author of Get Rich, Lucky Bitch!, guilt is one of the most common feelings women suffer. Guilty women, lured by guilt into obstructing their own paths to increased wealth, power, prestige and happiness, just cant seem to take advantage of their advantages.

You might feel guilty, Duffield-Thomas writes, for wanting more, or for spending money on yourself, or for taking time out of your busy family life to work on improving yourself. You might feel guilty that other people are poor, thatyour friend is jealous, that there are starving people in theworld. Sure enough, I do feel guilty for those things. So,itis something of a relief to hear that I can be helped thatI can be self-helped. But, for that to happen, what I must first understand is that a) Im worth it, and b) none of these structures of global inequality, predicated on historical injustices, are my fault.

My guilt, in other words, is a sign not of my guilt but of myinnocence even my victimhood. Its only by forgiving myself for the wrongs for which I bear no direct responsibility that I can learn to release my money blocks and live afirstclass life, according to Duffield-Thomas.

Imagine that: a first-class life. This sort of advice, which frames guilt as our most fundamentally inhibiting emotion, takes insights from psychoanalytic and feminist thinking and transforms them into the language of business motivation. The promise is that our guilt can be expiated by making money.

Its an idea that might resonate especially in the German language, where guilt and debt arethe same word, schuld. One thinks, for example, of Max Webers thesis about how the spirit of capitalism conflates our worldly and heavenly riches, on the basis that what you earn in this world also serves as a measure of your spiritual virtue, since it depends on your capacity for hard work, discipline and self-denial.

But what Weber calls salvation anxiety within the Protestant work ethic has the opposite effect to the self-help manuals promise to liberate entrepreneurs from their guilt. For Weber, in fact, the capitalist pursuit of profit does not reduce ones guilt, but actively exacerbates it for, in an economy that admonishes stagnation, there can be no rest forthe wicked.

So, the guilt that blocks and inhibits us also propels us to work, work, work, to become relentlessly productive in the hope that we might by our good works rid ourselves of guilt. Guilt thus renders us productive and unproductive, workaholic and workphobic a conflict that might explain theextreme and even violent lengths to which people sometimes will go, whether by scapegoating others or sacrificing themselves, to be rid of what many people considerthe mostunbearable emotion.

What is the potency of guilt? With its inflationary logic, guiltlooks, if anything, to have accumulated over time. Although we tend to blame religion for condemning man tolife as a sinner, the guilt that may once have attached tospecific vices vices for which religious communities couldprescribe appropriate penance now seems, in a more secular era, to surface in relation to just about anything: food, sex, money, work, unemployment, leisure, health, fitness, politics, family, friends, colleagues, strangers, entertainment, travel, the environment, you name it.

Equally, whoever has been tempted to suppose that rituals of public humiliation area macabre relic of the medieval past clearly hasnt been paying much attention to our life online. You cant expect to get away for long on social media without someone pointing an accusatory finger at you. Yet its hard to imagine that the presiding spirit of our age, the envious and resentful troll, would have such easy pickings if he could not already sense awhiff of guilt-susceptibility emanating from his prey.

It wasnt meant to be like this. The great crusaders of modernity were supposed to uproot our guilt. The subject ofcountless high-minded critiques, guilt was accused by modern thinkers of sapping the life out of us and causing ourpsychological deterioration. It was said to make us weak(Nietzsche), neurotic (Freud), inauthentic (Sartre).

In thelatter part of the 20th century, various critical theories gained academic credibility, particularly within the humanities. These were theories that sought to show whether with reference to class relations, race relations, gender relations how we are all cogs in a larger system ofpower. We may play our parts in regimes of oppression, but we are also at the mercy of forces larger than us.

But this raises questions about personal responsibility: if its true that our particular situation is underpinned by a complex network of social and economic relations, how can any individual really claim to bein control or entirely responsible for her own life? Viewed in such an impersonal light, guilt can seem an unhelpful hangover fromless selfaware times.

As a teacher of critical theory, I know how crucial and revelatory its insights can be. But Ive occasionally also suspected that our desire for systematic and structural formsof explanation may be fuelled by our anxiety at the prospect of discovering were on the wrong side of history.When wielded indelicately, explanatory theories can offer their adherents afoolproof system for knowing exactly what view to hold, with impunity, about pretty much everything as if one could take out an insurance policy to be sure of always being right. Often, too, thats as far as such criticism takes you into a right-thinking that doesnt necessarily organise itself into right-acting.

The notion that our intellectual frameworks might be as much a reaction to our guilt as a remedy for it might sound familiar to a religious person. In the biblical story, after all, man falls when hes tempted by fruit from the tree of knowledge. Its knowledge that leads him out of the Gardenof Eden into an exile that has yet to end. His guilt isaconstant, nagging reminder that he has taken this wrongturn.

Illustration: A Richard Allen

Yet even within that source we see how mans guilt can bedeceptive as slippery and seductive as the serpent who led him astray. For if man has sinned by tasting of knowledge, the guilt that punishes him repeats his crime: with all its finger-wagging and tenor of I told you so, guilt itself comes over as awfully knowing. It keeps us, as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has written, in thrall to that boring and repetitive voice inside our head that endlessly corrects, criticises, censors, judges and finds fault with us, but never brings usany news about ourselves. In our feelings of guilt, we seemalready to have the measure of who it is we are and whatit is were capable of.

Could that be the reason for our guilt? Not our lack of knowledge but rather our presumption of it? Our desperate need to be sure of ourselves, even when what we think of ourselves is that were worthless, useless, the pits? When we feel guilty we at least have the comfort of being certain ofsomething of knowing, finally, the right way to feel, whichis bad.

This may be why were addicted to crime dramas: they satisfy our wish for certainty, no matter how grim that certainty is. At the beginning of a detective story, were conscious of a crime, but we dont know who did it. By the end of the story, ithas been discovered which culprit is guilty: case closed. Thus guilt, inits popular rendering, is what converts our ignorance intoknowledge.

For a psychoanalyst, however, feelings of guilt dont necessarily have any connection tobeing guiltyin the eyes of the law.Our feelings of guilt may be a confession, but they usually precede the accusation of any crime the details ofwhich not even the guilty person can be sure.

So, while the stories we prefer may be the ones that uncover guilt, its equally possible that our own guilt is a cover story forsomething else.

Although the fall is originally a biblical story, forget religion for a moment. One can just as well recount a more recent and assuredly secular story of the fall of man. Its a story that has had countless narrators, perhaps none finer or more emphatic than the German Jewish postwar critic Theodor Adorno. Writing in the wake of the Holocaust, Adorno argued famously that whoever survives in a world that could produce Auschwitz is guilty, at least insofar as theyre still party to the same civilisation that created the conditions for Auschwitz.

Inother words, guilt is our unassailable historical condition. Its our contract as modern people. As such, says Adorno, we all have a shared responsibility after Auschwitz to be vigilant,lest we collapse once more into the ways of thinking, believing and behaving that brought down this guilty verdict upon us. To make sense after Auschwitz is to risk complicity with its barbarism.

For Adorno too, then, our knowledge renders us guilty, rather than keeping us safe. For a modern mind, this could well seem shocking. That said, perhaps the more surprising feature of Adornos representation of guilt is the idea expressed in his question whether after Auschwitz you cango on living especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there couldhave been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of himwho was spared.

For Adorno, the guilt of Auschwitz belongs to all of western civilisation, but its a guilt he assumed would be felt most keenly by one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed the Jewish survivor of the second world war.

Adorno, who had left Europe for New York in early 1938, was probably attesting to his own sense of guilt. Yet his insight is one we alsoget from psychologists who worked with concentration camp survivors after the war; they found that feelings of guiltaccompanied by shame, self-condemnatory tendencies and self-accusations are experienced by the victims of the persecution and apparently much less (if at all) bythe perpetrators of it.

What can it mean if victims feel guilty and perpetrators areguilt-free? Are objective guilt (being guilty) and subjective guilt (feeling guilty) completely at odds with each other?

In the years after the war, the concept of survival guilt tended to be viewed as the byproduct of the victims identification with their aggressor. The survivor who may subsequently find it hard to forgive herself because others have diedin her place why am I still here when they are not? may also feel guilty because of what she was forced to collude withfor the sake of her survival. This need not imply any incriminating action on her part; her guilt may simply be anunconscious way of registering her past preference that others suffer instead of her.

On this basis, then, it may be possible to think of survivors guilt as a special case of the guilt we all bear when, aware or unaware, were glad when others, rather than ourselves, suffer. Obviously, thats not a pleasant feeling, but neither is ita hard one to understand. Still, there remains something deeply uncomfortable about accepting that survivors of the worst atrocities should feel any guilt for their own survival. Instead, shouldnt we be trying to save the survivor from her (in our view) mistaken feelings of guilt andthus establish, without smirch or quibble, her absolute innocence?

This understandable impulse, according to the intellectual historian Ruth Leys, saw the figure of the survivor emerge in the period after the second world war, alongside a shift in focus from the victims feelings of guilt toward an insistence on the victims innocence. This transformation, Leys argues, involved replacing the concept of guilt with its close cousin, shame.

The difference is crucial. The victim who feels guilt evidently has an inner life, with intentions and desires while the victim who feels shame seems to have had it bestowed from outside. The victims of trauma consequently appear to be the objects rather than the subjects ofhistory.

Shame, then, tells us something about what one is, not what one does or would like to do. And so the effect of this well-intentioned shift in emphasis may have been to rob the survivor of agency.

It may be tempting to assume that survival guilt is an extraordinary case, given the abject powerlessness of the victims of such traumas. But, as we will see, attempts to deny the validity of the guilt of others often have the similar effect of denying their intentions as well. Consider the case of liberal guilt, the guilt we all love to hate.

Liberal guilt has become a shorthand for describing those who feel keenly a lack of social, political and economic justice, but are not the ones who suffer thebrunt of it. According to the cultural critic Julie Ellison, it first took hold in the US in the 1990s, on the back of a post-cold-war fragmentation of theleft, and a loss of faith in the utopian politics of collective action that had characterised an earlier generation of radicals. The liberal who feels guilty has given up on the collective and recognises herself to be acting out of self-interest. Her guilt is thus a sign of the gap between what she feels for the others suffering and what she will do actively to alleviate it which isnot, it turns out, a great deal.

As such, her guilt incites much hostility in others, not least in the person who feels himself the object of the liberals guilt. This person, AKA the victim, understands only too well how seldom the pity he elicits in the guilty liberal is likely to lead toany significant structural or political changes for him.

Rather, the only power to be redirected his way is not political power, but the moral or affective power to make those more fortunate than he is feel even more guilty about the privileges they are nonetheless not inclined to give up.

But just how in control of her feelings is the guilty liberal? Not very, thinks Ellison. Since feelings arent easily confected, her guilt tends to assail her unbidden, rendering her highly performative, exhibitionist, even hysterical. In her guilt, she experiences a loss of control, although she remains conscious at all times of an audience, before whom she feels she must show how spectacularly sorry she is. Her guilt, then, is her way of acting out, marking a disturbance in the liberal who doesnt know herself quite as well as her guilt would haveher think.

The idea of guilt as aninhibiting emotion corroborates the common critique of liberal guilt: that, for all the suffering it produces, it fails completely to motivate the guilty subject tobring about meaningful political change.

But what if the liberals guilt actually has another purpose, to allow the liberal respite from the thing she may (unconsciously) feel even worse about: the lack of a fixed identity that tells her who she is, what her responsibilities are and where these come to an end.

If anything can be said to characterise the notoriously woolly liberal, guilt may be it. Liberal guilt suggests a certain class (middle), race (white) and geopolitical (developed world) situation. As such, despite the torment it brings to those who suffer it, it might, paradoxically (and, again, unconsciously), be reassuring for someone whose real neurosis is that she feels her identity is so mobile and shiftingthat she can never quite be surewhere she stands.

If this is what chiefly concerns her, then one might envisage her guilt as a feeling that tells her who she is, by virtue of telling her who she is failing to be for others. Who is the liberal? She who suffers on account of those who suffer morethan she. (I know whereof I speak.)

This may suggest why, in recent years, there has been mounting criticism of the liberals sensibilities. To her critics, the liberal really is guilty. Shes guilty of a) secretly resenting victims for how their sufferings make her feel, b) drawing attention away from them and back towards her, c) having theaudacity to make an exhibition out of her self-lacerations and d) doing practically nothing to challenge the status quo.

For critics of the guilty liberal, in other words, feeling guiltyis part of the problem, rather than the solution. And yetthis criticism is itself subject to the same accusation. Giventhat criticising someone for feeling guilty is only going to make them feel guiltier, guilt has, asweve seen, proved atricky opponent one that its various modern combatants have yetto defeat.

Once again, therefore, in the case of liberal guilt, we encounter a feeling so devilishly slippery that it repeats the problem in the course of confessing it. Because there is, of course, aform of guilt that does not inspire us to act, but prevents us from acting. This type of guilt takes the uncertainty of our relations with others (and our responsibility for others) and turns them into an object of certainty and knowledge.

But since the object in this case is our own self, we can see how liberal guilt, too, mutates guilt into a version of shame.Shame, infact, could well be a more accurate appellation for what motivates the guilty liberal in her public and private self-condemnations.

However, before we declare the liberal guilty as charged as in guilty of the wrong kind of guilt its worth reminding ourselves of the survival guilt that has likewise been viewed by many as guilt of the wrong kind. For as we observed in that case, in seeking to save the victim from her guilt, the victim becomes deprived of the very thing that might distinguish herfrom the objectifying aggression that has assailed her: asense of her own intentions and wishes, however aggressive, perverse or thwarted these might be.

For this reason, then, its vital to preserve the notion of survivors guilt (and, despite obvious differences, liberal guilt) as that which could yet return to the survivor (or the liberal) apower of agency such as must be absolutely necessary if sheis to have a future that isnt bound, by the resolving or absolving of her guilt, to repeat the past ad infinitum.

If religion often gets the blame for framing man as sinner, thesecular effort to release man from his guilt hasnt offered much relief. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that subjective innocence belongs to a bygone age, the age of the tragic hero. Oedipus, for example, is someone whose objective guilt (parricide, incest) is matched by the subjective innocence of the man who acts before he knows. Today, however, says Agamben, we find the opposing situation: modern man is objectively innocent (for he has not, like Oedipus, murdered with his own hands), but subjectively guilty (he knows that his comforts and securities have been paid for by someone, somewhere, probably in blood).

By falsely promising a tabula rasa bound to his historical and intellectual emancipation, modernity may not only have failed to obliterate mans subjective guilt, but may even have exacerbated it. For what many a modern man is guilty of is less his actions than his addiction to a version of knowledge that seems to have inhibited his capacity for action. As such, the religious assignation of man as sinner a fallen, abject, endlessly compromised, but also active, effective andchangeable creature begins to look comforting bycomparison.

Such a view also shares much in common with a certain psychoanalytic conception of guilt as a blocked form of aggression or anger toward those we need and love (God, parents, guardians, whomever we depend on for our own survival). But if guilt is the feeling that typically blocks all other (buried, repressed, unconscious) feelings, that is not initself areason to block feelings of guilt. Feelings, after all, are what you must be prepared to feel if they are to move you,or if you are to feel something else.

Main illustration by A Richard Allen

Adapted from Feeling Jewish (A Book for Just About Anyone) by Devorah Baum, which will be published by Yale University Press on 19 October at 18.99. To buy it for 16.15, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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