Brave New Kitty

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. —Eleanor Roosevelt

We’ve all been there: someone says something less than kind and we shift into self-defense mode, only to later regret what we said or ruminate on what we wish we’d said. Next time that happens, we think, I’m going to respond like this! But if we actually get the opportunity to carry out the plan, it often doesn’t feel any better. This is because such a plan is fundamentally reactive, based on hurt feelings and hurt pride, so it fuels the power struggle rather than quelling it: I’m right and you’re wrong. And off to the races you go.

Self-defense is exactly the wrong way to respond to a verbal attack. When someone lobs a verbal grenade at us, we shouldn’t try to defend ourselves, we should try to get out of the way. How do we do that? In a nutshell, by not reacting. And to not react, we have to own our reactivity. Owning it is the first step in doing something about it.

By reactivity, I mean a charged emotional response. This is rarely good under any circumstances, but particularly unhelpful in an altercation. It’s normal to feel bad when people are mean (or even if we just perceive them as being mean). But feeling bad needn’t dictate how we behave. It’s possible to feel bad and maintain emotional control. In fact, maintaining control no matter how we feel is a major factor in eradicating power struggles. It’s also one of the keys to happy relationships.

Signs of reactivity include:

• A history of big emotional reactions
• A tendency to engage with people in ways that don’t feel good (power struggles)
• Having strong physical reactions to confrontations (e.g., trembling, sweating, jaw clenching, heart palpitations, stomach upset)
• Replaying the confrontation in your head long after it’s over.

If you recognize any of these in your behavior, then congratulations: you’ve owned your reactivity. Now you can do something about it!

It can take awhile for new responses to get into our core, to get to a place of truly not feeling reactive in altercations. Fortunately, this isn’t necessary for changing behavior. We can teach ourselves to react differently. A few learned tactics can do wonders for controlling reactivity. Here’s a list of tools that have helped me be less reactive in tense situations:

• Learn to recognize verbal attacks. Most attacks follow certain patterns. For example, there is the globalizing technique: Why do you always…, Why don’t you ever…, Everybody knows that…, Any child could… If said with a certain inflection—as shown by the italics, and which you probably recognize instantly—these are almost always followed by a character indictment. Get to know the verbal attack patterns of the people in your life so you see them coming. This is one of the best ways to prepare yourself and avoid a big emotional reaction. (Note: For more information on verbal attacks, read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, by Suzette Haden Elgin. Great stuff.)
• Decide beforehand, at least in general terms, how you’re going to deal with an attack. This can differ depending on the person. If it’s your boss, you might smile and pretend you didn’t understand her. If it’s your spouse, you might acknowledge, in a calm manner, that the comment hurt your feelings. If it’s your child, you might have to carry through on a threat. The point is to have a plan so you can reduce the chances of falling into reactive mode.
• Never, ever, ever defend yourself. If you remember nothing else, remember this. Don’t defend yourself. Ever, ever, ever. Doing so implies that the attack has a basis, and gives the attacker credibility, which is exactly what he wants. Refusing to defend yourself does the opposite. It destroys all the fun for the attacker and eliminates the possibility that a power struggle will ensue. If you’re at a loss, walking away in silence is preferable to falling into reactivity. Oh, and did I mention to never, ever, ever defend yourself?
• Don’t fight your big feelings or pretend they don’t exist. An ironic thing about feelings is that the more we acknowledge them, the less power they have; when we honor them, they take a proper place in our lives. “Honoring” them means dealing with them on our own terms in a way that feels good. In the case of big emotional reactions, this means knowing the feelings are there and maintaining an exterior calmness anyway. First we get through the situation with dignity, then later we deal with the feelings. This could mean talking them through, journaling, or meditation; whatever works. Just don’t pretend they’re not there, because doing so puts you at risk of what you’re most trying to avoid: blowing up.
• Be patient with yourself. When practicing any new behavior, it’s important to be patient. It takes awhile to get it right, and falling into old patterns is part of learning new ones. When it happens, analyze the circumstances, learn what you can, and move on. And always, always, always forgive yourself.

We teach people how to treat us. This may sound like a “blame the victim” mentality, like I’m saying that if people treat us disrespectfully, it’s our fault. That’s not it. But if power struggles are a recurring pattern, there’s a reason, and we need to understand what our part in that is if we want to change it. Owning our emotional reactivity is a powerful tool in that pursuit.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I like to watch Cops. My SO, Jim, got me into it. He’s fascinated with police work, and watching the show always leads to interesting conversations about things like state authority and where the limits of personal freedom begin and end (casual conversation for us). One of the things I really like about the show is seeing how cops handle altercations. At the beginning of an interaction they’re polite, giving people the opportunity to comply freely. But if a person resists, the cops shift into force mode, doing whatever needs to be done to subdue aggression and keep themselves and civilians, including the perpetrator, safe.

This zero tolerance policy for aggression makes power struggles a non-issue. Verbal coercion will rarely get a person out of a bad situation, and if he tries to use force, he ends up handcuffed, tazed, shackled, or worse. In this regard, I think many of us could take a lesson from the cops.

No, I’m not saying we should react to aggression with violence even if we could (although if violence is used against us, we do need to protect ourselves). But the principle governing cops’ response is sound: they use an appropriate level of force to stay in control of a situation. They have good boundaries about aggression.

In a personal context, power struggles aren’t so straightforward. They are usually much more subtle, with multiple layers of subtexts and long, complex histories. The intimate nature of the relationship makes the stakes high. Nevertheless, the principle is the same: if everyone had cop boundaries about disrespectful treatment, power struggles would be a thing of the past.

But, you may argue, cops have real authority. They have the power of the state behind them. They have formal training. They have guns. Yes. All true. And they need all of that power to protect innocent people from criminals. (Whether that power is ever abused is another issue.) The good news is most of us rarely need that kind of power in day-to-day life. All we need is a clear understanding of our own boundaries—what we will and will not tolerate—and a sense of authority over our own behavior.

If you have chronic power struggles in your life, it might be because people know that if they challenge you or threaten to withhold affection, kindness, or something else important to you, it will work. You’ll give in, and they’ll get what they want. Or, if you repeatedly threaten consequences that you don’t follow through on, you teach people that your threats are meaningless. Nobody will take you seriously.

The solution is simple: set boundaries. For example:

• Say “no” and mean it.
• Don’t threaten anything you’re unwilling to carry out.
• When a person challenges you, respectfully refuse to engage. Walk away.
• Don’t react to threats and insults except to say “stop.”

Setting boundaries is simple in theory, but can be difficult to execute. Ironically, or maybe not so much, power struggles stem from a sense of powerlessness. People who don’t set good boundaries are usually afraid that if they do, their loved ones will stop loving them. The real irony is that if people withhold love when you don’t do what they want, then they weren’t very loving to begin with. Are those really the kind of people we want in our inner circle? Isn’t being alone preferable to conditional love dependent on letting people treat us like doormats?

It’s important to know the answer to these questions. This knowledge can mean the difference between having mediocre relationships and having the kinds of relationships you really want.

Sadly, people do go away sometimes. After a lifetime of disrespectful treatment, I finally set a boundary with my sister, and it resulted in the worst case scenario: she refused to acknowledge the boundary, I refused to give in, and it was pretty much the end of the relationship. As sad as that is, and as much as I miss my sister, it’s the right thing. It took me a long time to get healthy enough and brave enough to say “enough.” Disrespectful treatment is soul sapping. Tolerating it is not only unhealthy on a personal level, it’s bad for the planet. It perpetuates all the wrong things. It’s like saying “I don’t matter,” and “Unkindness is no big deal.” But you do matter, and unkindness is a huge deal. The hugest, in fact. If people go away when you set boundaries, you’re probably better off without them in your life. And get over the belief that you’re being mean: giving a person the opportunity to stop playing games and have a relationship based on honesty and mutual respect is the kindest thing you can do for her.

When we grow up with conditional love or no love at all, these can be hard issues to work out; as I said, difficult to execute. This is because almost all the affection we received was conditional on our being compliant in some form or other. But just as cops have the authority of the state, you have authority over your life. You have authority over the people you let in. You get to decide what your boundaries are. You get to tell other people how you want to be treated. Your only obligation is to treat others with the same kindness and respect that you want for yourself. Understanding the significance of this is the beginning of the end of power struggles in your life.

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character. –Isabelle Eberhardt

The things we learn as children can be so subtle that we aren’t aware how they influence our adult lives. If we grew up in a supportive family, that’s not a bad thing. But if we grew up in less-than-ideal circumstances, this “family pull” can be devastating, especially if we resist it or deny its existence, both of which are common ways of dealing with it.

The story of my oldest sister is a great example of resisting, or what I once heard called middle finger energy. Jo left home at fifteen, when I was eight. She jumped out her bedroom window one Saturday afternoon and never looked back. She contacted my parents a few times over the years, at first to ask for money (which my father always refused), then later to tell them how fucked up they were or to ask if I could visit her; my father always refused that, too. Other than these short phone conversations and a few letters, we didn’t see or hear from her for almost thirty years.

Jo kept in sporadic contact with my grandmother, so we knew the outlines of her life: she married, she had several children, she lived on a farm about three hours away. I was so young when she left that, even though her absence was a big festering wound in the family side, Jo the actual person faded away for me. I grew up without her and when I reached adulthood, I rarely thought about her.

In my mid-thirties, I began supplementing talk therapy with bodywork such as massage, rolfing, qigong, and kinesiology. (In my experience, the physical residue of trauma is absolutely valid and needs to be addressed.) One healer told me I needed to contact Jo because this relationship was a vast, hanging end in my life. The timing of this directive was uncanny (or extrasensory, depending on how you interpret these healers’ intuitions): I’d recently learned that Jo’s husband had died. He was a generation older than her, so it wasn’t a huge surprise. But now that she was alone, it was a good time to reconnect. So I wrote to her, and a couple of weeks later, we saw each other for the first time in decades.

There is no delicate way to convey what I found. Jo’s situation was awful. She’d married a man not only much older, he was also an antisocial, misogynistic alcoholic. And judging by her daughters’ symptoms (eating disorders, cutting, drug use, failing grades, overt sexuality), he was likely a pedophile, too.

Jo was Dick’s second wife, but the first one hadn’t left. They all lived together in the same dirt-floored shack—no plumbing, no heat—and they all slept together in the same big bed. Both women had several children by this man; Jo had seven. Dick had never worked to support this huge family. He collected social security and sent his older wife—a college graduate—to work if they needed money. He’d sold his wives on this philosophy of squalor by convincing them that everything about conventional society was evil. Dick’s entire worldview was based on middle finger energy, and it meshed with Jo’s perfectly.

When I tell people about Jo, their first thought is that she got involved in a religious cult. That is not the case. Religion would have been a step up. The house was void of any sense of spirituality, of any aspirations beyond surviving from moment to moment. It was stark, bleak, and dirty. The garden was choked in weeds, the livestock were haggard. Everything stunk and had a coating of filth. Flies buzzed everywhere. It was the dwelling of people completely shut down and depressed, utterly shut off from any higher sense of truth or even any interest in such a thing.

It all made me sad beyond description.

The most startling thing of all, though, was how much Jo was like my mother. She had the same posture, the same inflections in her voice, the same thousand-yard stare when she thought nobody was looking. She treated her kids with the same hostile passivity, she had the same childlike energy, and she’d married the same kind of man. She hadn’t seen my mother in more than thirty years, and not being like her was one of the driving forces behind running away at fifteen, so it was shocking to witness this. I know if I’d told her how much she reminded me of our mother, she not only wouldn’t have believed me, she would have been terribly offended. Neither of us wanted to be like our parents, and we’d both expended a lot of energy, albeit in very different ways, not to be.

When I went to see Jo, my mother was the last person I expected to find. I remembered her as fiercely independent and wildly creative. But these wonderful traits weren’t enough to save her from the family pull, from the powerful undertow that, ultimately, none of us can ever fully escape.

I had to come to terms with the fact that we are all in some ways like our parents. It is impossible not to be. Family legacy starts while we’re still in the womb; it’s so deep and ancient there is no way to avoid it. Trying to is like trying to change our skin color, our scent, or our nationality.

No, I’m afraid our heredity is unavoidable. The best we can do is honestly come to terms with it. Jo was on the right track with getting away from our abusive parents. But because she was so young and so needy, she never got a chance to really find herself. She hooked up with an abusive man who promised to take care of her and ended up eerily like our mother. The circumstances were different, but the dynamics were exactly the same.

Rebellion against immorality is a good thing, but staying in that place will keep you stuck, stuck, stuck. If your actions are defined by the system you’re fighting, you are still entrenched in that system. Eventually, you have to find your own way, step away from the struggle, free yourself of the bonds of the past. If you are aware of its power and aware of your relationship with it, the family pull can be as neutral, or even as positive, as you choose to make it.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. –Edmund Burke

I’m still thinking about Alice Miller’s essay on Hitler, on how his whole, horrible thing was his way of dealing with his childhood trauma (my words). Miller also states elsewhere that “Any person who abuses his children has himself been severely traumatized in his childhood in some form or another.”

As someone who grew up on the wrong end of abuse, I’ve thought long and hard about this issue. I always wondered how my father could rant about his own abusive father (one of his favorite phrases, repeated in many a drunken stupor, was “I’ll piss on his grave!”) and then treat his children exactly the same way. How could someone be so completely out of touch with himself?

Miller’s work shed light on the mystery. People are cruel to others as a way to cope with their trauma.

To those of us who took another path, this can seem unfathomable, but it actually makes perfect sense. The abusers and the abused are two sides of the same coin. They are the yin and yang of childhood trauma. Each has disowned their trauma, but in very different ways, and like two pieces of a puzzle, they complete each other.

In dealing with trauma, there seems to be two basic paths: the internal and the external. Those who internalize trauma take too much responsibility for other people’s behavior; they tend to be depressed, shameful, guilt-ridden, and feel chronically bad about themselves. Those who externalize trauma do the opposite. They blame other people for their problems and feel perfectly justified in letting loved ones know how stupid, weak, or otherwise lacking they are. When an internalizer hooks up with an externalizer, it can feel like a match made in heaven because they’re both unconsciously seeking that disowned part of themselves, and each finds some version of it, however skewed, in the other. Sadly, such a partnership keeps both people stuck in a place of chronic reactivity, living out the impulse to ignore the trauma that got them there.

Actually, we are all a bit of both. Internalizers can sometimes be volatile and blaming, and externalizers can get depressed and shameful (the former being much more common). But people do tend toward one set of coping skills and stick with them. More women internalize and more men externalize, but this is not an absolute.

As awful as it feels to be on the internalizing end of the spectrum, it’s far better than externalizing because it’s much harder for externalizers to work past their trauma. This is because they cope with it by identifying with the abuser. In externalizing dissociation, people really believe their problems are “out there;” they really see themselves as victims of a cruel and thoughtless world. Also, they like the sense of power, illusory though it may be, that comes with placing blame. They seek out people they can dominate because that’s where their comfort zone is. And in their oblivion, they carry on the family legacy, doing to their children what was done to them.

As distasteful as this behavior is, it’s also sad and empty. With little incentive to change, they stay in that awful place void of introspection, never really knowing themselves, pushing away every opportunity to question what’s really going on. This is how Hitler came to be, and this is how my father came to be. It seems an awful comparison, but the mechanism is the same, differing only in scale.

Externalizers usually have to lose everything to even consider changing. The patterns and relationships they build around themselves need to be stripped away until they have nowhere to look but inward. For example, the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are based on a person “hitting bottom” because only then is he willing to face his addiction honestly. This is a distinctly externalized view of personal change, and for people who blame themselves too much, it is a less-then-helpful approach.

The perpetrators of the world aren’t so mysterious. They’re hurting just like the rest of us, but in need of a different sort of compassion; a tough-love sort of compassion. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. True. But I would add this: When you truly take care of yourself, you end up caring for the whole planet.

You are on a thousand-mile journey. Some way into it, you encounter a river too wide and wild to swim. You must build a raft to cross it. You’ve never built a raft before, and it takes you several weeks. With nothing but your own ingenuity to work with, you build a craft seaworthy enough to bring you safely to the other side of the raging river. When you reach the far shore, what do you do with the raft? It’s much too big and heavy to carry. With some sadness, you know you must leave it behind.

In the world of personal growth, this is often not how it’s done. We tend to carry the raft with us; that is, we tend to think the first thing that gives us an “aha” experience is going to work for every problem we have for the rest of our lives. (I’ve referred to this as true believerism in recent posts.) Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to fit everything into that mindset. If it’s a drug, we get high to feel better. If it’s the 12 Steps, we go to meetings, call our sponsor, and work the steps to feel better. If it’s a fundamentalist religion, we pray to feel better. If it’s Buddhism, we meditate to feel better. If it’s rational thought, we read books and analyze a situation until we understand it to feel better. And so forth, ad infinitum—the blank can be filled with almost anything.

I’m certainly not saying these are all equal. Drug use is certainly not on a par with rational thought in the quest for wholeness, for example, and getting all hung up on the crucifixion (sorry, couldn’t resist) has more in common with believing in Santa Claus than it does with a spiritual journey. What I am saying is that people get stuck at different levels, and it’s really important to pay attention to that if you want to get yourself un-stuck and continue to grow.

This is much easier said than done. If you’re an addict, sure, you probably know you’re stuck. But if you’re a member of a 12 Step group, you might think you’ve un-stuck yourself. Yes, sobriety is a better way to cope with emotional problems than addiction, probably the best path you’ve found thus far, but that doesn’t mean it holds all the answers. I guarantee it does not. If you think you’ve found all the answers, or worse, the answer, then you most certainly have not.

We oughtn’t mistake the map for the journey. And all doctrines, philosophies, religions, theories, and ideologies are maps. They are meant to help us along the road, point the way, light the path. They are not the journey.

Let me repeat: they are not the journey. This is what Sheldon Kopp meant by “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” His point was that the path to wholeness is ultimately an internal one. There are many tools and teachers to help us along the way, and we can and ought to make use of them. But in the final analysis, the journey can only be taken alone, inwardly, with no one to hold our hand and nothing to rely on but our own good judgment, earnestness, and self-awareness. To the extent that we understand this is the extent to which we’ll be able to stay on a path of ever increasing self-awareness and ever more sophisticated models of truth.

Just as a map of Utah is not Utah, a belief is not the truth. It is only an approximation of truth, a model, and some models are better than others. Being human means we are inherently fallible, and no one has everything figured out; not the wisest sage, not the smartest scientist, nobody. Although, just as those who exercise tend to be healthier than those who do not, those who commit themselves to understanding the “true nature of things” generally have a closer approximation of truth than those who do not, at least in their chosen areas of interest.

We ought always be willing to trade in our models of truth for better ones. “Better” means—by as objective a measure as possible—more honest, more rational, more inclusive, kinder. Compassion for all people on the planet is better than compassion only for Americans, for example. A spirituality that encourages skepticism is better than one that claims Absolute Truth. A belief system based on honesty is better than one based on relief of anxiety. It’s much easier to proclaim than to actually do, but if we can get to a point of perpetual open-mindedness, of truth-seeking without a net, then we will be well on the way to where we truly, from the place deepest inside ourselves, long to be.

So build the raft and feel good about it, and trust it to get you to the other side. But don’t carry it with you. Everything you learned from building the raft is in your head, and next time you need one, you’ll build a better one.

(Woundedness and True Believerism)

The sad truth is that people who grew up in families where their emotional needs went unmet are more susceptible to true believerism than the general population. This makes sense intuitively. People operating from a place of deficit are obvious targets for every predator, charlatan, and absolute-truth peddler who has something to gain by their conversion. This is why runaway girls end up as prostitutes and addicts, and this is why fundamentalist religious groups seek out people who are “looking for answers.” (Here’s an outrageously blatant example of this!) This is why Alcoholics Anonymous doctrine states that every person must “hit bottom” before he can get sober: he is most likely to adhere to “the program” if he has lost all other resources.

I think it’s a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs thing: emotionally wounded people never learned that their safety needs were important (or even that they existed). And until they figure this out, they can’t fully move past this stage of development. This double whammy keeps them stuck in a vicious cycle, looking for love in all the wrong places. (And to complicate matters, most are unaware that they don’t feel safe; it’s like a language they never learned to speak.)

The biggest reason for this is that when we grow up in an emotionally invalidating environment—or worse, a sadistic one—we reach adulthood with a hole in our hearts. The more emotionally wounded a person is, the bigger place feeling better will take in her life. She doesn’t know why she’s so needy; she just knows that she feels driven to fill that love-sized hole in her heart. Relationships. Drugs. Religion. Children. Career. The deficiency is like a vacuum that sucks in anything and everything that makes her feel better, or at least distracts her from feeling bad.

Emotionally wounded people also tend to be poor judges of character. To survive a crazy environment, we have to learn to ignore our internal compass. We have to tell ourselves a story that fits reality so we can make sense of the abuse. We have to believe it’s normal for daddy to be violent, or for mommy to pass out on the living room floor.

Then when we grow to adulthood, we have that story running around in our heads, and it largely determines the people we choose to trust. We tend to be drawn to people like our parents, ignoring signs of poor character or even seeing them as positives (“I can fix him/rescue her”). Being out of touch with our internal compass makes us prime targets for users, abusers, and anyone promising something that sounds too good to be true. If you’ve ever wondered why you or someone you know keeps getting involved with toxic people or situations, look to the past first. That’s where you’ll find the answers.

In a similar vein, emotionally wounded people tend to tolerate disrespectful treatment. If you learn to think it normal for daddy to swear at and hit mommy, there’s a good chance you’re going to end up in the same kinds of relationships. I have a friend, “Tanya,” whom I know from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The stories she told me about her family made me grateful for the “milder” abuse I grew up with. Almost every time we talked, she had a new story of some horrible treatment she’d suffered at the hands of her mother (who she was still in daily contact with), her ex-husband, fellow AAers, potential new boyfriends, therapists, coworkers, strangers in grocery stores, even her daughter’s teachers. With horror I watched her befriend the sickest and most depraved men at our AA meeting—pedophiles and stalkers, no exaggeration—and then watched her change her phone number, quit going to the meeting, quit answering her door, and eventually get restraining orders (yes, more than once).

Tanya is the most obvious example I’ve ever seen of how this pattern of disrespect plays out in our lives. In a way beyond her conscious awareness she sought it out, even though she hated it and was able to clearly articulate that. When your earliest model for kindness was bad or nonexistent, you learn that it’s okay for people to treat you badly. This opens you up to all sorts of awful possibilities as an adult, only one of which is true believerism.

Another result of the love-sized hole is an overly developed need for approval. Emotionally wounded children need positive attention like a person in the desert needs water. We long to be told we’re good and important; we yearn to feel valued, respected, and loved. This makes us prey for anyone who has anything to gain by manipulating that need. Tell us we’re worthy and we’ll by loyal, no matter how you treat us.

When we grow up with a deficit of the basic decencies that every human being instinctively requires to thrive, it’s logical that that instinct would drive us to balance the ledger. How can it be any other way? Love, approval, and emotional support are a biological necessity, essential to survival. These needs operate below the level of awareness, compelling us to fill them with any means available. And when our judgment—our internal compass—is off kilter, we can believe in almost anything that promises relief from the biologically, psychologically, and spiritually unacceptable belief that we are in some way lacking. We seek out something to believe in with an urgency not seen in other people.

Not every child who grows up with deficient emotional support becomes a true believer or an addict. Many are able to deal with their trauma in healthier ways. But even those who find healthier outlets are still largely motivated by deficit. For example, they don’t pursue a career simply because they want to; it’s all tied up with that impulse to feel better about themselves, to prove themselves “worthy.” As long as the trauma goes unaddressed, every decision a person makes is in some way related to it, whether it be an attempt to heal it, deny it, or bring it to the surface. Such a psyche may not succumb to true believerism, but it is certainly ripe for it.

When we succumb to facile answers to quell inner pain and anxiety, we never really get out of the starting gate. We can never reach our full potential. I’m not saying we have to figure everything out in order get unstuck and move forward with our lives; if that were true, nobody would ever get anywhere. But there seems to be a tipping point at which the load becomes manageable. A point at which, if we do the work necessary to get the poison out of our system and begin to heal, that we can lead mostly normal lives. The allure of true believerism might never go away, but if we earnestly move toward honesty and self-awareness, we’ll be much less inclined to give in to it, no matter what our inner state.

Last week, I watched a Nova episode called Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, about a school district whose board members tried to force the science teachers to read a disclaimer about evolution that said, basically, that it was “only one theory.” The teachers refused, the board members insisted, and angry parents sued, claiming a constitutional violation of the separation of church and state.

The story is fascinating on many levels, but I’m most interested in the Intelligent Design (ID) school board members behind the disclaimer. In a related incident, they surreptitiously removed and burned a “Darwinian” painting done by a student in the school, then publicly denied doing it. And the school received an “anonymous” case of biology textbooks that the ID board members had lobbied for unsuccessfully. Their unapologetic heavy-handedness was far reaching, with perhaps the most telling example discovered by a court researcher. She found undeniable evidence that the term “creationism” had been replaced—cut and pasted—with the term “intelligent design” in documents written in the 1980s to explain creationism (the belief that God created the world in seven days). The rest of the text was unchanged.

This means that the ID people knew their stance was not scientific. They renamed a religious belief and presented it as a viable scientific theory, hoping to foist it on a public gullible enough to buy it. Their larger purpose, proudly proclaimed by Philip Johnson, the “father of Intelligent Design,” was to undermine “Darwinism” and its evil spawn, materialism, which he says has been eroding our moral fabric for decades. (And which I happen to agree with, incidentally, but for radically different reasons.)

This is a terrific example of True Believerism, a term first used by Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. Hoffer’s focus was political, but I think the term can be applied much more widely than that. I define True Believerism as a form of intellectual reductionism evident by strongly held, irrational beliefs and the tendency to ignore contradictory evidence. Often, true believers think that the end they want justifies any means, as in the example above: the Creationists are so certain they’re right that they have no qualms about lying, even in court, to achieve the outcome they desire.

True Believerism happens all the time, at all levels of education and psychological development, and every one of us is susceptible to its allure. Almost anything in the realm of human consciousness can evoke strong, irrational beliefs if they benefit the believer in some way. My theory is that true believerism provides relief for existential anxiety: anxiety about death, loneliness, and meaning. These are life’s most difficult problems, so it is not surprising that facile answers and a denial of deeper layers have a certain appeal.

Fundamentalist religion is one obvious example. Evangelical Christianity and militant Islam both fall into this category, as well as any other belief system that reduces spirituality to a formulaic absolute and requires belief in dogmatic doctrine.  The benefits of such reductionism are obvious: fear of death is alleviated, and all questions about life’s mystery are definitively explained. (Never mind the wide variation in those “definitive” explanations!)

Politics is also rife with true believers, and not just Nazi Germany. Two-party democratic systems practically demand the demonizing of the other side, regardless of any accuracy or truth to be found there. The benefit? Well, loyalty built on emotion is easier to come by, and usually more effective than that built on reason. And as with reductionist anything, the necessity for critical thinking is greatly diminished.

Scientism is another form of true believerism. This is the belief that science can, given enough time, provide answers for all of mankind’s problems. (This is different from the scientific method, which is based on skepticism and is the very antithesis of true believerism.) Scientism is subtle and ubiquitous, and its reach is profound, having become sort of the default, lowest-common-denominator view of the modern/postmodern world. Lay people and scientists alike tend to place an overabundance of faith in the powers of science to cure all our ills. Even anti-science people such as the Creationists depend on the fruits of science—print, television, electricity, modern transportation, and the Internet, for example—to get their anti-science message out into the world. What delicious irony!

We all have experiences with true believerism, from Santa Claus and the tooth fairy to any ism you’d care to name. I’m a walking example of addiction true believerism. I was a devout 12 Stepper for almost sixteen years. Although I never really believed in the disease model of addiction, I also did not dare to step beyond it, having bought the “addict for life” rhetoric that guaranteed my rapid slide into oblivion should I choose to drink again. I was soundly indoctrinated. It took me a long time to get past the tremendous anxiety of taking a drink, although I knew rationally there was no scientific basis for the disease model of addiction. It’s been over a year now, and I have had no negative repercussions from drinking whatsoever. Anecdotal, yes. But it still offers powerful evidence that the “personal choice” model is closer to the truth than the “addict for life” model.

True believerism is a scary thing. On a personal level, it’s severely limiting, keeping people quagmired in irrationality and emotionalism that make it impossible to reach their fullest potential; in a very real way, true believerism is the trade-off of security over self-actualization. And it isn’t even real security as such a thing does not exist; it’s the illusion of security. When this becomes a cultural norm, the groupthink that results can produce all manner of “ends justify the means” attempts to coerce other people to see things differently. Perhaps most frightening of all is the immense difficulty of even noticing how we constrain ourselves. Stepping out of any given paradigm, personal, cultural, or both, and seeing its limitations is difficult for the most conscientious of folk. How are we average human beings supposed to do it?

This is a question that’s plagued me for years. It’s easy to say things like humility, an earnest desire to learn, and a rational view of life will get you there. Sure, maybe. These are certainly prerequisites. But there’s more to it. How do we trade in security for growth? Not just once or twice, but continually? How do we learn to live in that place? To value that place? And how do we trust our own judgment enough to discern both the truth and incompleteness of each appealing idea we come across? And how do we develop confidence in ourselves while simultaneously accepting the unvarnished truth of our own fallibility? And can a society made up of fallible human beings who all start out at square one and rarely reach adulthood without some form of scarring—in other words, all societies—ever reach the point of fully valuing truth over true believerism? Is such a thing possible?

I’d like to believe it is, but in the meantime, I can only plug away at my own little corner of the world. I once heard a Buddhist lama say, “the only way to help another person is to become a whole person yourself.” In other words, the only way to alleviate suffering in the world is to alleviate your own. And true believerism is a form of suffering. The security payoff it offers is like a pact with the devil. It looks good at first, but in the long run it destroys you. And if you never realize the nature of your true believerism, you might never understand what went wrong.

If the Intelligent Design people realized the nature of their true believerism, they might also begin to see that evolution is a better model than creationism—more rational, more realistic, more intellectually honest. They might even begin to question the values of a belief that condones dishonesty, misrepresentation, vandalism, and violence. What if we all learned the value of skepticism? What if everybody just made an effort to be as truthful as possible with themselves? It doesn’t seem like a lot to hope for, yet centuries of proof show that it is.

I’d like to end with a thought that expresses the exact opposite of true believerism. It’s from a great little book called What Makes You Not a Buddhist, written by a Tibetan Buddhist monk named Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse. The context is too involved to get into here, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that this man is willing to give up everything he’s based his life on to find a higher form of truth. He writes, “If you still define yourself as a Buddhist, you are not a buddha yet.” (Khyentse, 2007, p. 106)

Words to make you think, hey?

From R.D. Laing:

The range of what we think and do

is limited by what we fail to notice.

And because we fail to notice

that we fail to notice

there is little we can do

to change

until we notice

how failing to notice

shapes or thoughts and deeds.