Understanding and Helping People with Hallucinations Based on the Theory of Negative Legacy Emotions

Abstract

This article applies the new concept of negative legacy emotions to understanding and helping people suffering with psychosis and hallucinations. The theory of negative legacy emotions proposes that guilt, shame, and anxiety result from biological evolution, specifically to inhibit human self-assertion, willfulness, and aggression in personal and family relationships. Because human beings are so violent, the species would have destroyed itself if natural selection had not favored individual humans with inhibitory or restraining emotional reactions in personal relationships. Unfortunately, negative legacy emotions are crude responses that can worsen aggression and fail to provide adequate guidelines for ethical adult living.

Hallucinations share many qualities with guilt, shame, and anxiety, including a seemingly involuntary hold over individuals, making them compliant with them. Painful or disabling hallucinations are driven by guilt, shame, or anxiety. Rather than viewing hallucinations as essentially pathological or abnormal, this article examines them as a natural part of a continuum of the human creative imagination that are especially vulnerable to being overwhelmed by traumatic experiences and the resultant amplification of negative legacy emotions. These insights can help to liberate individuals from their psychotic and hallucinatory experiences to live by more rational and loving approaches.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stanley Krippner, PhD, and Brooks Miner, PhD, were very helpful with encouragement and insights that enhanced my book, Guilt, Shame and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Legacy Emotions (2014) and then this article.

Notes

¹This section is modified from Breggin (1991, pp. 23–24).

²Hypnogogic images are in transition from awake to sleep and hypnopompic images in transition from sleep to awake.

³The authors did not find an association between child neglect and hallucinations or psychosis.

⁴This conception of how negative legacy emotions manage anger and yet can cause anger is elaborated in Breggin (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Peter R. Breggin

Peter R. Breggin, MD. is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and former full-time Consultant with the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) who is widely recognized as “The Conscience of Psychiatry” for his many decades of successful efforts to reform the mental health field. Dr. Breggin has authored more than 45 scientific peer-reviewed articles and more than 20 books, including the bestsellers Toxic Psychiatry and Talking Back to Prozac. He is also the author of Brain-Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry, Second Edition; Medication Madness: The Role of Psychiatric Drugs in Cases of Violence, Suicide and Crime; and Psychiatric Drug Withdrawal: A Guide for Prescribers, Therapists, Patients and Their Families. His most recent book is Guilt, Shame and Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming Negative Emotion. Dr. Breggin's professional web site is www.breggin.com. His nonprofit organization, created and run with his wife Ginger, is the Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy (www.empathictherapy.org). It holds conferences, provides a list of therapy resources, and offers a free e-newsletter. In his weekly radio interview show, “The Dr. Peter Breggin Hour,” he interviews pioneers in the field. The show is live and archived on the Internet at www.prn.fm. He blogs on his own web site as well as on Huffington Post and on Naturalnews.com. His practice is in Ithaca, New York.