Why Are Decisions So Difficult?
Decision as Choice
When an individual fully experiences a desire, they are faced with making a decision, or a choice. A decision is the bridge between desire and action (here, “action” is used in a therapeutic sense, not just as physical energy—a small movement or even refraining from a habitual action can be a significant therapeutic act). To make a decision means to take on an internal commitment to a course of action. If no action follows, I believe there is no real decision—only a flirtation with the idea of deciding, a kind of failed decision. Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot is a monument to the unfulfilled decision. The characters think, plan, hesitate, and intend, but never decide. The play ends with this sequence:
- Vladimir: Shall we go?
- Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
- [Stage direction:] They do not move.
What Makes Decisions So Hard?
“Shall we go? Yes, let’s go. They do not move.” What happens in the gap between intention and the binding resolve to act? Why is it so extraordinarily difficult for many people to make decisions? When I think about my current patients, I realize that almost every one of them is struggling with some kind of decision. Some are concerned with specific life choices: what to do about important relationships, whether to stay married or separate, whether to return to school, or whether to try to have a child. Others say they know what they need to do—quit drinking or smoking, lose weight, try dating, or seek closer relationships—but can’t bring themselves to do it, in other words, to commit. Still others say they know what’s wrong with them—being workaholics, too arrogant, or too uncaring—but don’t know how to decide to change, and so, in essence, take no responsibility in therapy.
All these unmade decisions are associated with something extremely painful. When I reflect on my patients and try to analyze the meaning (and threat) that decisions hold for them, I am struck by the variety of answers. Decisions are difficult for many reasons—some obvious, some unconscious, and some, as we’ll see, rooted in the deepest layers of our being.
The Excluding Effect of Alternatives
In John Gardner’s novel Grendel, the protagonist seeks out an old priest to learn the secrets of life. The sage says, “The basic evil is that Time is perpetual exclusion, and to live in reality is to exclude.” He sums up his thoughts with two simple but terrifying judgments, four devastating words: “Things fade, alternatives exclude.” I see the priest’s message as a profound intuitive truth. “Things fade”—this is the theme of the first section of this book, and the excluding effect of alternatives is one of the fundamental reasons why decisions are hard.
For every “yes,” there must be a “no.” Choosing one thing always means rejecting something else. As one therapist told an indecisive patient: “Decisions are expensive—they cost you everything else.” Every decision inevitably involves renunciation. We have to give up possibilities, often ones that will never come again.
Decisions are painful because they mean limiting possibilities, and the greater the limitation, the closer we come to death. Heidegger even defined death as “the impossibility of further possibility.” The reality of a set boundary undermines one of our main ways of coping with existential anxiety—the illusion of specialness, the belief that while others may be subject to limitations, we are free, unique, and not bound by natural law.
Of course, we can avoid the pain of renunciation by avoiding awareness of our decisions. Velis beautifully expresses this with a metaphor: a decision is a crossroads, and renunciation is the road not taken. “Some people can move forward without worrying that they’re moving blindly, believing they’re on the main road and all intersections are just side roads. But to move forward with awareness and imagination is to remember the crossroads you’ll never see again. Some people sit at the crossroads, choosing neither road because they can’t choose both, nurturing the illusion that if they wait long enough, both paths will merge and both will be possible. Maturity and courage are largely the ability to make such renunciations, and wisdom is, to a great extent, the ability to find paths that require as few renunciations as possible.”
The person “sitting at the crossroads, choosing neither road because they can’t choose both” is a perfect image of someone unable to give up possibilities. Ancient philosophical metaphors reflect the same dilemma: Aristotle’s story of the hungry dog unable to choose between two equally appealing portions of food, or the famous problem of Buridan’s ass, the poor animal dying of hunger between two equally fragrant piles of hay. In each case, the living being perishes if it refuses to reject possibilities; salvation lies in trusting desire and taking what is within reach.
Such metaphors reflect the clinical situation of patients who suffer from paralysis of the will not only because they can’t say “yes,” but also because they can’t say “no.” On an unconscious level, they refuse to accept the existential consequences of renunciation.
Decision as a Boundary Experience
To fully realize one’s existential situation is to be aware of self-creation. To recognize the fact of self-constitution, the absence of absolute external reference points, and the arbitrary assignment of meaning to the world by ourselves is to realize the groundlessness beneath us.
Making a decision plunges us into this awareness—if we don’t resist it. A decision, especially an irreversible one, is a boundary situation, just like the awareness of “my death.” Both act as catalysts for shifting from an everyday to an “ontological” mode of being, in which we remember our existence. As Heidegger teaches, such a catalyst and shift are ultimately beneficial and prerequisites for authentic existence, but they can also provoke anxiety. If we are unprepared, we find ways to repress decisions, just as we repress thoughts of death.
An important decision not only exposes us to the anxiety of groundlessness but also threatens our defenses against death anxiety. By confronting us with the limitation of possibilities, a decision challenges our myth of personal specialness. And to the extent that a decision forces us to accept personal responsibility and existential isolation, it threatens our belief in the existence of a final savior.
Making a fundamental decision also confronts each of us with existential isolation. A decision is an act performed alone, and it is our own act; no one can decide for us. For many people, making a decision is very painful, and as will be discussed below, they try to avoid it by forcing or persuading others to decide for them.
Decision and Guilt
Some individuals find decisions difficult because of guilt, which, as Rank emphasized, can completely paralyze the will. The will is born in a shroud of guilt; it arises, Rank said, initially as counter-will. The child’s impulses are opposed by the adult world, and the child’s will first awakens to withstand this opposition. If a child is unlucky enough to have parents who try to suppress every impulsive expression, their will becomes burdened with heavy guilt, as every decision is experienced as bad and forbidden. Such a person cannot decide because they feel they have no right to decide.
Masochistic personalities—people trapped in symbiotic relationships with a parent—have particular difficulty with guilt and decision-making. Ester Menaker suggested that each of these patients had a parent who essentially said, “You must not be yourself; you cannot be yourself; you need my presence to exist.” As they develop, such individuals experience any free expression of choice as forbidden, since it represents a violation of the parental command. In adulthood, important decisions cause dysphoria, stemming both from fear of separation and from guilt over committing a crime against the dominant other.
Existential guilt goes beyond traditional guilt, which is regret over a real or imagined crime against another. Existential guilt, as defined in chapter 6, is caused by a person’s crime against themselves; it is rooted in regret, the awareness of an unlived life and unused inner possibilities. Existential guilt can also be a powerful factor blocking decisions: a fundamental decision to change forces a person to reflect on waste—on how they sacrificed so much of their unique life. Responsibility is a double-edged sword: accepting responsibility for our life situation and deciding to change implies that we alone are responsible for the past wreckage of our lives and could have changed long ago.
The case of Bonnie, a forty-eight-year-old woman briefly discussed in chapter 4, illustrates some of these issues. For many years, Bonnie suffered from Buerger’s disease, a disorder that blocks small blood vessels in the limbs. There is strong evidence that nicotine is extremely harmful in Buerger’s disease: smoking accelerates the disease and usually leads to the rapid amputation of one or two limbs. Bonnie always smoked and could not—or would not—stop. Various hypnotic and behavioral methods failed, and it seemed she was unable—or unwilling—to decide to quit. She felt her smoking habit was destroying her life in many ways. She was married to a rather ruthless, authoritarian man who, ten years earlier, had left Bonnie because of her poor physical health. He loved outdoor activities and decided he’d be better off with a partner who could share them. The fact that Bonnie herself was the cause of her own physical disability due to her “disgusting habit” (as she put it), and her weak will, made the problem much worse. Eventually, her husband gave Bonnie an ultimatum: “Choose—smoking or marriage.” When she continued to smoke, he left her.
When Bonnie and I explored why it was so hard for her to decide to quit smoking, one important theme was her realization that if she quit now, it would mean she could have quit earlier. This realization had far-reaching consequences. Bonnie had always seen herself as a victim: of Buerger’s disease, her habit, her cruel, insensitive husband. But if it turned out that her fate had always been under her control, she would have to face the fact that she was fully responsible for her illness, her failed marriage, and the collapse (as she put it) of her adult life. The decision to change would mean accepting existential guilt—the guilt of having wronged herself. In therapy, Bonnie needed help to understand what it meant to decide something for herself, not based on someone else’s wishes: her husband’s, her parents’, or her therapist’s. She had to take on the guilt (and the resulting depression) of having blocked her own growth. Realizing her responsibility for her own future, she also had to accept the crushing responsibility for her past actions. The best—and perhaps only—way to deal with guilt (whether for harming another or oneself) is through atonement. We cannot will the past away. We can atone for the past only by changing the future.