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VIEWPOINT
Several months ago, my husband and I rented the movie "The Spanish Prisoner." It's a complex screenplay by David Mamet, full of his signature dialogue - stark and pithy. One brief conversation was so striking that we stopped the movie and rewound it several times just to write it down. The scene involves two men, one advising the other who thinks his company is cheating him. The adviser says,
"I think you'll find if what you've done is as valuable as you say it is - if they are indebted to . you morally, but not legally-my experience is they will give you nothing. [Pause] And they will begin to act cruelly toward you."
"Why?" asks the other.
"To suppress their guilt."
Willard Gaylin, in his remarkable little book Feelings, suggests that difficult feelings (guilt, anger, envy ahd so on) are signals: encoded messages that say, "Something is wrong! Figure it out! Fast!" We want - we need - to resolve these feelings. The resolution of guilt is forgiveness. (Or we can decide that what we did isn't really our idea of wrong, but that of our parents or the church or society. But that's another story.)
When we do something we believe to be wrong and we don't seek forgiveness, the guilt festers. Left...