Brave New Kitty

The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, or by justifying or rationalizing their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. –Wikipedia

Years ago a therapist told me, “Pay attention to people’s behavior, not their words.” As obvious as this sounds—and even then, it sounded obvious—I had a hard time figuring out how to do it. This was because as a child, I was taught to ignore what I saw and heard in my family.

Both my parents drank. A lot. They had no difficulty telling me they loved me, and they did so regularly. Then they would get drunk—three, sometimes four nights a week—and fight, loudly and profanely, until their alcohol-fueled energy waned and one of them passed out. I’d huddle at the door in my room and listen to every word, barely breathing, as if monitoring them was my sacred responsibility. I learned words no nine year old should know.

They didn’t always fight. Sometimes they were happy drunks. They played records—Creedence Clearwater and Kris Kristofferson. My mother would dance provocatively and sing while my father watched, occasionally groping at her swaying breasts. Because we lived in a rural area, there were no neighbors to complain about the noise, so the music was loud. Louder than the yelling. So loud it was impossible to sleep. Once I gathered my courage, padded out to the kitchen in my little pajamas, and asked my father to turn the music down. He looked me up and down in the harsh overhead light, laughed, and went back to watching my mother, who was also laughing—her only acknowledgement that I was in the room. Of course, I never asked again, and many were the days I had to get up for school with nowhere near an adequate amount of sleep. (It was a miracle from above when I discovered earplugs in my teens.)

I remember thinking he loves me, he said so, so why won’t he turn down the music? By the time I was ten, this happened with both my parents in dozens, maybe even hundreds, of ways: they’d say they loved me, but behave in a not-very-loving way. To make sense of this chronic invalidation in my tender shoot of a mind, I was forced to choose: either believe what my parents said, or believe what they did. As what they did was too awful to contemplate, I chose to believe what they said. Actually, I’m not sure “chose” is the right word, as children aren’t really able to make such choices. Rather, they’re obligated, by their desire to survive, to go with the least threatening option available. This is what I did, and thus began a pattern of cognitive dissonance that I was to carry long into adulthood.

I spent most of my twenties high and jumping from one bad relationship to another. They weren’t all violent; some were just bad matchups. Even though I knew somewhere deep inside that they were wrong for me (I must have, because I never passed a point of no return with any of them), I stuck it out over and over for far longer than necessary. If a guy told me he loved me, I found a way to rationalize anything: that he was overly critical and hyper-jealous, that he cheated, that he hit me, that we had nothing in common but cocaine or rock music, that he was not my intellectual equal, that I didn’t love him. I remember long conversations with girlfriends and long, maudlin diary entries lamenting these relationships, rationalizing either his behavior or mine, putting off yet another inevitable breakup.

By my mid-thirties, I was sober, but my relationship pattern continued. By this time, I’d heard numerous times that behavior, not words, was what mattered, but I still wasn’t able to apply it to my life in any significant way. Then one day, something clicked for me.

I was at work, having a conversation with my supervisor, a chemist, about the objectivity of science. I thought how neat and uncomplicated science was because of these objective standards of measure, and I wondered why it couldn’t be that way in the personal realm. Then I thought, why not? Why can’t it be that way, at least to some degree? There are objective standards of love, respect, and communication that I can use to evaluate relationships.

Well, this was the beginning of a wonderful new adventure for me. With this one little thought, everything changed. I was able to step back and look at all my relationships using objective criteria culled from the disciplines that mattered to me: psychology, philosophy, spirituality. I already possessed most of the knowledge I needed as I’d read extensively in all these fields. All I had to do was learn to apply it to my own life, which is exactly what this one little thought made possible. It was the missing link, the connection I’d been trying to make for as long as I could remember.

So simple, and yet, like most great truths in life, so profound. In retrospect, it seems so obvious that it can be difficult not to feel a bit foolish. But having grown up the way I did, it makes all the sense in the world that I would struggle with this concept. I had to ignore my senses and doubt my internal compass to survive my family. When such doubt blossoms into an adult worldview, unsatisfying relationships and chronic poor decision-making seem inevitable, as these are what best fit with the past and keep the cognitive dissonance to a minimum. How could it have been any other way?

One of the first truths I had to come to terms with was that, by this objective standard of love I was now using (one based on respect, kindness, and support), my parents did not love me. The pain of this was real, but it was overshadowed by the sense of relief that came from, finally and at long last, facing the truth. Surprisingly, I found that I didn’t hate them for it, and my residual anger actually dissipated somewhat. I was able to accept them for the broken, unhappy people they were, and feel compassion for them—and for the little girl who’d lived with them for the first eighteen years of her life. In the emotional realm, I discovered, truth is always, always, always the better way, even though it’s complicated and messy and rarely easy to get at.

People talk about falling in love with potential, and while that was true for me more times than I can count, I think the underlying motivator was the cognitive dissonance of my childhood. I made bad choices because they made the most sense to me. What would I have done with someone whose words matched his behavior? How could I make sense of that? The answer was that I couldn’t, I didn’t know how, and trying made me edgy and uncomfortable. “Nice guy” wasn’t a euphemism for loser; it was a euphemism for behavior that didn’t fit my worldview.

It was a crazy way to go through life, and I’m so glad I had the epiphany I did. I still struggle with cognitive dissonance; I still work at not seeing the world the way I learned to as a child. But it’s far less painful than it once was, and now that I have the tool of objective criteria to evaluate words and behavior, I can usually make decent choices, even if I take a roundabout path to get there.

Why does “power” sound bad, but “empowerment” sound good? Why is it bad to be powerful, but good to seek power? It has to do with connotation, I believe. “Power” conjures images of the rich and strong, while “empowerment” evokes a more therapeutic association, as in a person coming into a sense of her own strength.

But really, they refer to the same concept. Connotations aside, if you’re seeking empowerment, you’re seeking power. This may seem like a trivial distinction, a foray into pointless semantics, but a lot of self-delusion can hide behind the language a person uses. Thus, a lot of opportunity for empowerment lies in studying language. It’s too big a topic to take on in its entirety, but there is one aspect I’d like to consider here.
An interesting irony lurks in the language of the therapeutic world. Much of what is intended to be empowering language has become the language of victims. This language has become so commonplace, has so infiltrated our culture, that you don’t need to have gone to therapy to use it.

This could be a chicken/egg problem: did the sense of victimization cause the language, or did the language contribute to the sense of victimization rampant in our culture? I don’t know, but either way, understanding this “therapeutic language” could mean the difference between becoming empowered, and remaining a victim.

First of all, for those who disagree that our culture is fraught with a victim mentality, here are a few examples.

Nearly every self-destructive, antisocial, or otherwise unhealthy behavior is now classified as a disease. Alcoholism is the prime example, but now most other compulsive behaviors are considered diseases as well: gambling, shopping, sex, eating, and online gaming, to name a few. If someone gets caught doing something naughty, he can claim to have a disease, check himself into rehab, and be exonerated of all responsibility for his behavior. “It’s not my fault, it’s my disease.” This has even extended to some criminal behavior, such as pedophilia. Now, I am in no way diminishing the fortitude required to overcome compulsive behavior. But when compulsive behavior is viewed as a disease (a view which has no supporting scientific evidence), people see themselves as helpless victims of their biology rather than as free agents capable of making better choices. The fundamental dishonesty of this approach has done far more harm than good to addiction treatment, as evident (I believe) in the dismal recovery rates seen in 12 Step and 12 Step-based programs, but that is another topic.

Or how about our legal system? Remember the woman who won millions from McDonald’s for spilling coffee on herself? (Isn’t coffee supposed to be hot?) Or the ridiculous spectacle of the tobacco company lawsuits, with states and individuals both being rewarded billions and billions of dollars? Are we to believe the tobacco company executives held guns to people’s heads and forced them to smoke? Or that unscrupulous advertising amounts to the same thing?

In these two examples, it seems clear that personal responsibility is on the endangered species list. It’s disturbingly obvious that there is a cultural bias against having a sense of responsibility for your actions. When people see themselves as victims, how can they feel empowered?

This creates a psychological bind, because personal agency (aka empowerment) is an innate human quality (just ask the Founding Fathers). So people feel confused, and they go to therapy to figure out what’s missing from their lives. Many don’t get beyond the antidepressant prescription, which medicalizes the problem, actually exacerbating it; once again, by making people victims of their biology. (But they make people too numb to care, which is the real appeal of these drugs.) However, if they’re tenacious enough to get past the emotional analgesics, the therapist will kindly point out, in various terms, that empowerment is the holy grail they seek, then proceed to help them find it.

The search usually begins in childhood. After a number of sessions, the therapy client discovers that she was abused. She grew up in a dysfunctional family. She was treated inappropriately. It all starts to make sense.

Believe me, I am not making light of childhood trauma. The invalidation is real, and it’s good and right to seek help in coming to terms with it. No, what bothers me is the label that abuse has become, and how this label, along with a few others, has become a fashionable way to categorize, insult, and dismiss other people’s humanity.

Abuse used to mean physical, sexual, or emotional trauma a less powerful person suffered at the hands of a more powerful one. Today, it means almost any behavior that seems mean or causes a person to feel bad: “My boss is abusive” and “That kid is abusing my child” and “David Letterman is so abusive.” A boss may be abusive, but most often, he’s just an asshole who likes to make people feel small. This is not abuse. Why? Because an employee has choices a child does not have. Similarly, bullying is not abuse, nor is David Letterman’s sometimes-abrasive interviewing style. Children share similar levels of power, even if they don’t think they do, and nobody goes on Letterman involuntarily.

By using the word abuse to characterize any behavior that rubs you the wrong way, it loses its original significance. This is why I prefer the term “invalidation” to refer to the general category of childhood trauma. It has no charged connotations, and it hasn’t fallen into widespread misuse like abuse has.

Inappropriate used to mean a social blunder, such as “inappropriate work attire” or “inappropriate dinner conversation.” Today, people use it to mean any behavior they don’t like. “It’s inappropriate to talk to me that way” and “That tone is inappropriate.” There wouldn’t be anything terribly wrong with this except for the therapeutic connotation of the word. You’re not just saying a behavior is out of line, you’re saying there’s something psychologically lacking about the person engaging in it. Unlike abuse, which has lost significance by overuse, inappropriate has gained significance by elevating thoughtlessness (something we are all guilty of at times) to a psychological deficiency. It’s indirect, it’s imprecise, and it’s mean-spirited all at once. Because quite often, there was nothing “inappropriate” about the behavior at all; you just didn’t like it.

When people use these therapeutic terms to bash each other over the head, they might think they’re speaking the language of empowerment, but more often than not, they’re behaving like assertive victims, an early phase of therapy that many get stuck in (but should strive to transcend). Therapeutic language used from this perspective can be as blaming and labeling as hurling an ethnic slur at someone: both are ways to dismiss and dehumanize, and both result in less understanding and connection between people rather than more.

More importantly, however, and getting back to the main point, therapeutic labeling is a way to avoid responsibility. It’s a way people deny agency and hold others accountable for what’s going on with them. Labeling somebody abusive or inappropriate exonerates you from speaking your truth. It’s subtle, because these terms actually sound helpful (that is, empowering and relationship-building). But if you’re using therapeutic language in a dismissive or blaming way, you’re engaging in the exact opposite of empowerment or connecting.

If you don’t want to be a victim, don’t use the language of a victim. Be direct. Take ownership for your wants, feelings, opinions, and beliefs. Instead of “You’re being abusive,” say “Stop talking to me that way. I don’t like it.” Instead of, “It’s inappropriate to use that tone with me,” say “I don’t like your tone, please stop using it.” Instead of, “My therapist said it’s not okay for you to say things like that,” say, “I don’t like what you’re saying.”

Direct, I-focused language is the language of empowerment. Learn to make the distinction between true abuse, true inappropriateness, and what simply annoys you. Take responsibility for yourself, stop holding others accountable for your own internal struggles, and feel your sense of personal power soar. Or, if you prefer, your sense of empowerment; either word works.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.  ~Ambrose Redmoon

There is often an expectation when we start working on ourselves that we are going to eventually become brand new people, with none of the problems, pain, and struggles of our old identity. All the things we don’t like about ourselves, all the personality traits that make us feel less-than, unlovable, or hard to be around; we think these will all go away at some future point when we become “cured” and life will open its gates and “really” begin for us.

This is not what growth is about.

Years ago I heard someone say, “The old tapes haven’t stopped playing, I just don’t listen to them anymore.” This was an epiphany moment for me. Although not consciously aware of it, I realized I had been expecting my “old tapes,” all that negative self-talk running amok in my head, to stop playing some miraculous day when I finally “got healthy.” This belief was not only wrong, it was counterproductive to real growth. In trying to eradicate what was a deeply ingrained part of me, I was fighting upstream, pointlessly expending a lot of psychic and emotional energy, all the while missing the real point and the real work.

It’s only natural, I suppose, for a person to think getting rid of their negativity and character defects is the goal of personal growth. After all, those things are the reason we were attracted to the self-improvement world in the first place. We wanted to feel better, we wanted to be free of the demons that plagued us so relentlessly. Of course we want all that ikky stuff to go away. Who wouldn’t?

But a sounder approach is to shift focus from banishing what you don’t like about yourself to learning to be more positive. How do you do this? Well, one way is to immerse yourself in positive thinking. After my epiphany, I realized that if I didn’t want to be bound by my old tapes, I was going to have to create new ones. So I began reading books about how to be positive, how to be productive, how to be successful, how to do creative visualization. (This is different, I discovered, than reading about your issues.) I bought an inspirational desk calendar, and I taped the thoughts that resonated with me in places where I would read them every day: my bathroom mirror and walls, my desk at work, on my refrigerator. I bought cassette tapes (this was before cars had CD players) and listened almost exclusively to motivational, spiritual, and inspirational speakers; I went a long period without listening to music or the radio at all. And speaking of music, I realized that a lot of the music I listened to was angry, so I found new, more peaceful music to listen to. I made a conscious effort not to voice negative thoughts and opinions, to catch negative thoughts before they played themselves out, and to spend less time with the more cynical of my friends. I paid more attention to people I had considered Pollyanna-ish. I worked at being kinder and more tolerant.

This was all incredibly difficult at first. It felt dishonest, artificial, awkward, foreign, and fakey. But as foreign as the idea of optimism was to me, I intuitively knew it was important, and the idea of actively, consciously creating “new tapes” made sense. I kept at it, and slowly but surely, negativity ceased to always be my automatic response to the stimuli in my environment.  Sure it was still there, but it was gradually losing its power over my psyche, shrinking down to a more proper size, making room for new ideas and possibilities.

As important as this was—and it was really important!—something else happened through this process that was even more important: radical self-acceptance. In the process of teaching myself to be more positive, I discovered that not only are the old tapes part of who I am, they are a good and necessary part of who I am. They had served me well in my life, saving me in an impossible childhood situation. And when put in a more realistic perspective, they would (and do) continue to serve me well.

The truth is, all the internal obstacles I’ve had to navigate are just as responsible for my being who I am as my positive traits. Probably even more so. Adversity helped me become strong. Pain helped me become sensitive. Feeling different helped me become tolerant. Even my character defects are positives in disguise: resentment saps my energy, but anger is where my power lies when I need it. Feeling inferior erodes my self-confidence, but recognizing things I can work on keeps me open to change. And fear can be one of the most debilitating feelings in the world, but it can also keep me from making potentially dangerous or stupid decisions. Paradoxically, all of my shadow aspects are potential forms of power, strength, and energy.

The idea is that we don’t want to eradicate the things we don’t like about ourselves, we want to integrate them in a more positive form.  Eradication doesn’t work anyway; we’re largely stuck with who we are. At some point I realized that I would be carrying around my childhood grief for the rest of my life; that it, and all the “defects” that went along with it, were part of me. Rather than feeling discouraged about this, though, I felt strangely hopeful, like I’d come to terms with a basic truth. Finally, I could quit fighting the upstream current and flow with the Stream of Life.

Just as courage is not the absence of fear, growth is not the absence of negativity. Sometimes those old tapes may go away entirely, but if we wait around for that to happen, there’s a good chance we’ll miss out on living our lives.

One way to get comfortable with your power is to put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable, then watch yourself survive them. (I wrote about this here.) I spent last week playing poker in Las Vegas, and there isn’t much that makes me more anxious than that. The combination of the crowds (which I hate), the testosterone (poker is mostly a man’s world), greed (the predominant zeitgeist in any casino), aggression (part of any good poker players’ repertoire), and having to think on my feet in the midst of it all was enough to give me heart palpitations (literally). But it was as exhilarating as it was exhausting, and it was a great experience in owning my own power.

I didn’t do it for that reason; I did it because my S.O. and I both love the game, and we wanted to take a poker vacation. Poker is a complex, psychological, highly challenging game, easy to play but frustratingly difficult to play well. We’ve spent a few years studying Texas Holdem, reading books, participating in online forums, learning from expert players, and in general working to become good. But we are primarily online players, and my experience with live poker has been minimal. I knew myself well enough to know that I would have the issues I did with live games, so I had psychologically prepared myself: I expected to feel anxious and intimidated, so I decided to just be present with it and see what happened. Guess what? I survived! Actually, I thrived.

Because it is such a deceptively simple game, and because luck is a big factor in the short-term, poker attracts many unskilled players who think they know what they’re doing, but don’t. As in most human endeavors, a lot of poker players tend to settle on a view of the game that fits their comfort zone and ignore the aspects that don’t rather than undertake the critical thinking process and years of study necessary to become truly skilled. Many of these unskilled players are way too passive, afraid to put their money in. But some of them are overly aggressive males, crude and arrogant and greedy—everything about men that’s intimidated me for as long as I can remember. Sometimes just a gesture, or the tone in their voice when they talk to the waitress, is enough to set my insides quaking or my jaw tight with silent rage. So the opportunity to beat these fellows on their own playing field is alluring indeed.

A man sat down next to me in a $1.00/2.00 no limit game. He was the epitome of the arrogant, bullying male. He was loud and abrasive, rude to the waitresses and the dealers. He sparkled and clinked with gaudy jewelry; his shirt was unbuttoned too far down. He immediately started running over the passive game—that is, raising every hand and generally intimidating the rest of the players into folding. Whenever anybody called one of his raises, he’d say, “good luck,” then make a huge bet that he knew wouldn’t be called. He started telling people how to play, what they were doing wrong, how they should play more like him. He thought he had everybody pegged, and he had me pegged as a typical, too-passive female who would crumple in the face of aggression. That’s probably because I did—until I got a hand.

I looked down to ace, jack offsuit, the best hand I’d gotten since the guy had sat down. He raised, and I called. Everybody else folded. The flop came jack, seven, three, a beautiful board for my hand. He bet, and I called. The turn brought a deuce, another great card for me. He bet again. This time, I raised. He instantly said, “I’m all in,” in the mistaken assumption that I did not have the guts to call him with my whole stack. But I did, instantly. It was too late for him to intimidate me (all the money was in), but he continued to try, flashing his hand at me to gauge my reaction: a pocket pair of eights. I looked at them and said, “good luck,” turning his own insincerity back at him.

My hand held up, and I raked in a four hundred dollar pot. Just as satisfying, the brute was finally silenced, and the whole table was shocked to see a quiet, polite female stand up to this bully with nothing but top pair.

It was absolutely the right play though, against that guy. Poker is situational, and you have to be able to adjust your game to the circumstances at hand. I could have been behind, but against an overly aggressive player not skilled enough to vary his game, the odds are—and poker is, more than anything else, a game of odds—that my top pair is winning. If you aren’t willing to put your money in in a situation like that, you probably don’t belong at a poker table.

I can hardly describe the feeling of exhilaration, potency, and power that I got from taking that guy’s money. But I was alarmed to discover this. I felt guilty, like I’d done something wrong. Did this make me like the bullies of the world? Did this make me, gulp, like my father?

After some deliberation, I decided the answers to these questions are “no.” There is a big difference between glee about beating somebody equal to or stronger than you and glee about beating somebody smaller and weaker than you. Because I still, in many ways, have power fused with cruelty, it can be hard for me to differentiate this, particularly when I am in the unfamiliar position of being the one with the power. But I felt no such glee from beating nice people out of their money, male or female. In fact, if I liked people, I played soft against them—not betting or raising to extract the most money with my big hands—which is the opposite side of the same problem: being uncomfortable with my power made me not want to use it too “harshly.” This is as bad as gloating over a big win. Worse, in fact, because it denies people the free agency to be doing what they want: if they’re there, they are fully aware that they could lose their money. That choice is none of my business, and it’s disrespectful to act as though it is. The point is, both extremes provide insight into my power issues.

I am not a bully, but I do think there is an element of bullying to the glee I felt. I think any power can be corruptible, and I think it’s smart to be wary of what power can do to you. There is a part of me that wants to squash those misogynistic bullies like bugs. After a lifetime of being intimidated by men like that, it would be easy to act on the impulse to be cruel to them when in a position to do so. So it’s important to be aware of that impulse, and refrain from acting on it. Cosmic justice does not mean making others suffer deliberately, no matter who they are.

It’s easy for someone like me, so wary of power to begin with, to avoid it in order to avoid feeling uncomfortable. But that is not a good solution, because a good relationship with personal power is essential to getting the things you want out of life. I didn’t get into poker to deal with my power issues, but this has been a surprising fringe benefit. My poker could be something else entirely for other people (and should be if they aren’t serious students of the game), but I found gold in taking on an activity outside my comfort zone and watching my confidence grow.

Democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except for everything else. – Seen on a bumper sticker.

I don’t talk much about politics (mostly because it’s just not a very interesting topic), but I want to make a brief observation about power and political beliefs because I’ve noticed an interesting correlation. People with disowned power issues tend to see capitalism as an evil system of self-serving greed, and they tend to see socialism as a kinder, gentler form of rule.

Nothing could be further from the truth, but the roots of the belief are rational. Marx’s original vision grew out of his observations of the 19th century working class. If the government owned the means of production and distributed the wealth equally among all citizens, he reasoned, it would eradicate worker exploitation. More to my point, it would level the unequal balance of power in a society, which is appealing to those of us who don’t have power (the poor) and those of us who are uncomfortable with it (the abused).

It’s a positive sentiment: people should take care of each other. As I said, rational: taking care of each other is a more enlightened worldview than taking care of only yourself: by being mindful of others, and of the planet, and being foresightful about the world’s future generations, we recognize the interrelatedness and connectedness of everything. We see ourselves as part of the Greater Whole rather than as alone and isolated in our own dermal prison. Taking care of each other is good and right and necessary and important. It indicates a more sophisticated worldview, a transcendence of our baser human traits.

But government coercion is not the way to accomplish such transcendence. It is, in fact, the very opposite of transcendence, being simply another form of shortsightedness. When the government owns the means of production and has the power to redistribute wealth, individual incentive is quashed. This is wrong on every level that matters. A person must be able to benefit from the fruits of her own labor. Otherwise, there is no reason or motivation to accomplish anything. The United States is the wealthiest country in the world because it is the freest country in the world. Its entire raison d’etre is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For such endeavors to succeed, people must be free to own their own capital, whether it be a corn field or a factory. It is the promise of freedom that brings immigrants to our shores in droves. On a deeper level, it is humankind’s innate impulse to be self-governing. Yes, we are all part of something bigger, but only through unfettered freedom do we best become aware of that truth. Coercion of any sort only serves to obfuscate it: what good is “helping” other people when it isn’t our choice to do so? You can’t legislate morality. The attempt to do so is an oxymoron, and only deters people from coming to that decision of their own free will.

Of course there is corruption in a capitalist system; there is corruption in all political systems. I would submit that corruption in a socialist system is even worse. In most, if not all, socialist systems there is a black market in which, if you pay enough (there’s that greed again!), you can bypass the bureaucracy and go to the head of the line. And as there is little incentive for excellence, all goods and services achieve a level of acceptable mediocrity. This is why wealthy people in Canada (and elsewhere) come to the US for medical services. (And if and when socialized medicine finally becomes a reality in the US, going to the doctor will be like going to the DMV—but that is another topic). A less free, more regulated society is the problem, not the solution.

Once again, it’s important to make the distinction between power and the abuse of power. Power in and of itself is not evil, and that includes economic power. Many of the same 19th century industrialists who exploited workers and manipulated the market also set up foundations and funded many programs to aid those same people. And the pursuit of happiness, whether it be wealth or intellectual excellence, almost always results in a higher standard of living for all of a country’s citizens. It’s a messy, complex problem: how do you differentiate between greed and achievement? How do you allow for achievement to flourish and simultaneously choke out greed? I don’t have an answer, but I know it is absolutely not to squelch incentive in the effort to squelch greed.

Greed is part of human nature and thus inherent in all political systems, all human endeavors. It may even be biological, dating to a time when we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from. We can’t avoid it; we can only rise above it through self-awareness and a thoughtful approach to life. And the greatest potential to develop thoughtfulness lies in a society in which we are free to pursue our own happiness in the best way we see fit. This means capitalism—a political system that allows private ownership. It’s good and right to want a more level playing field and to stand against corruption and exploitation. But never, ever, ever at the expense of individual incentive.

A system of political and economic freedom most closely matches humankind’s inherent, instinctive, indelible striving for self-actualization. This is not to say some regulations aren’t necessary, because of course they are. But seeing capitalism as greed-based and evil is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Greed will always be around, but if we don’t make the distinction between power and the abuse of it, freedom might not be.

All evil is potentially vitality in need of transformation. –Sheldon Kopp

Sometimes I wonder how different my childhood might have been if my father had had a son. Maybe a son would have stood up to him; a son might have stepped in and tried to protect his mother and sisters from my father’s tyranny. He may not have succeeded, but at least I would have had a positive model of power. As it was, I grew up terrified of men and terrified of power, thinking that all men were self-serving and cruel and all power meant something bad would happen to me and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t know I thought this way; it was only in retrospect, after I’d worked through some of these issues and emerged on the other side of them, that I realized this was my default worldview. But because of that worldview, I got repeatedly involved in codependent relationships with abusive or otherwise emotionally distant men, and out of fear of becoming like my father, I held myself back in myriad ways I’m only now beginning to understand.

I think disowning our power is a common way for children to deal with tyrannical, controlling, or otherwise power-abusing parents. From a child’s point of view, it all feels terrifying. So any kind of power becomes associated with cruelty, and any kind of power becomes a bad thing. This is unfortunate, because as long as we see power as a bad thing, we’ll never be fully comfortable with our own power, and this holds us back from getting the things we want in life.

Also unfortunate is the sad truth that bad models for power are ubiquitous. This makes sense, as people who seek power tend to be the same kind of people who abuse power, and power seekers run the world. (See the previous post for a discussion about this.) The book A People’s History of the United States is basically an account of how the wealthy and strong have taken advantage of the poor and weak throughout this nation’s history. This tendency has not abated, and it probably never will, human nature being what it is (that is, the capacity for kindness is harder to develop, and therefore rarer, than the capacity for self-interest). But there are good models of power in the world, and I think it’s important to acknowledge them. It’s the beginning of making the distinction between power and the abuse of power, and thus, the beginning of owning your own power in a positive way.

When power is a shadow aspect, that is, when you’ve disowned your power to cope with power-abusing parents, you’re likely to have an uneven relationship with power that can manifest itself in all sorts of interesting ways. You might feel threatened by authority figures and by dynamic people in general. You might hold yourself back from success because it feels synonymous with power and you don’t want to be “that kind of person.” Because you’re uncomfortable with anger (as it is a manifestation of personal power), you might express it in unhealthy ways such as rage, hostility, or manipulation, and feel horribly shameful afterwards. You might deny being angry at all because it is so unacceptable to you to have that potent emotion. And because we are inevitably drawn to those disowned aspects of ourselves (in an unconscious effort to re-integrate them), you might have a pattern of getting into relationships with an unequal balance of power.

At least, these are some of the issues I’ve had.

But power, in and of itself, is not evil. Let me repeat that: power is not evil. Rather, it is the abuse of power that causes all the problems. And it is important, as abused children who have a poor relationship with power, to differentiate these two things. Because not only is power not evil, it is good, right and essential. It is indelible; it is our birthright. And when we disown it to survive an abusive childhood, we disown a large chunk of who we are.

What is healthy power? Self-preservation. Setting boundaries. Righteous anger. Protecting those weaker than us from bullies. Speaking our truth. Confidence. Determination. Achievement. Perseverance. Belief in our own inherent worth. Belief in the inherent worth of others. Respect. Tolerance. Kindness. Being comfortable in our own skin. There are as many good models for power as there are bad ones; they’re just a little harder to see. But once you start looking for them, you’ll see them everywhere. Most importantly, you’ll see them in yourself.

Owning our power is essential if we are to feel complete. It is the source from which all other growth stems; it is the key to wholeness and happiness. It took me a long time to figure this out, and I am only just beginning to feel comfortable with it. I may never have a relationship with my own power that I take for granted; I may never have the confidence of people encouraged as children to embrace their power. But knowing it’s there is a huge step forward from not knowing, and I see that as a good beginning.

Is there something you want to change about yourself but are continually stymied in doing so? For example, maybe you want to quit smoking or overeating, but haven’t had the willpower to break the habit. Each time you try, you find yourself giving in to powerful cravings and, afterward, feeling remorseful or ashamed. You’re probably blocked by something below your level of conscious awareness. Such blocks can cause a great deal of anguish, but they don’t need to. With some critical thinking and honest acknowledgement, you can completely change how you view your “bad” habits. In so doing, you can empower yourself to do what you really want and free yourself from feeling bad forever.

A few years back, I was talking with a friend about her messy apartment. She was agonizing over why it never stayed clean and beating herself up for not being a better housekeeper. “I really love cleaning,” she told me. “I don’t understand why my apartment is so messy all the time.”

“You mean, you really love having a clean apartment,” I said.

“No, I mean I really love to clean,” she answered.

“But if you loved to clean,” I said, “You’d have a clean apartment.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, genuinely puzzled.

“I mean, there’s a difference between wanting to have a clean apartment and wanting to clean. You want to have a clean apartment, but you don’t want to clean.”

“But I do want to clean! I really like cleaning!” Her tone was defensive, but I stuck to my guns.

“No you don’t, honey. If you liked to clean, you’d have a clean apartment. Wanting a clean apartment is not the same as wanting to clean.”

Silence ensued for a few moments, and through it I could almost hear the gears grinding on the other end of the phone. “Oh my god,” she finally said. “You’re so right.”

I later realized I’d discovered a powerful truth about human nature, one that has since helped me in my ongoing quest for ever deeper levels of self-awareness. I call it the Means/End Dichotomy.

The Means/End Dichotomy is the distinction between wanting something and being willing to do what’s necessary to get it. For example, you want a clean house, but you don’t want to clean. You want to lose weight, but you don’t want to diet and exercise. You want to be a non-smoker, but you don’t want to quit smoking. It may seem obvious that wanting and doing are different things, but looking at them separately can be extremely helpful. Doing so can eliminate all sorts of muddy thinking that gets in the way of seeing the root source of a problem. It helps you:

• Understand your motivations
• Be honest with yourself about what you really want
• Acknowledge that agency for your actions lies only with you.

Let’s look at each of these.

Understand Your Motivations
If you’ve set a goal that you just can’t seem to accomplish, it’s probably because you don’t want it as badly as you think you do. For example, you’ve tried several times and just can’t seem to quit smoking. You have several compelling and rational reasons to quit. You see yourself as a rational person, so you know you should quit. Yet you’ve tried many methods, and all of them have failed. Why? Are you too weak, too lazy, too depressed? No.

You’ve failed because you don’t understand your motivation (or lack thereof) very well. The truth is that you want to smoke more than you want to quit. Period. So the motivation is just not there. You know you should want to quit. But there is a world of difference between wanting to do something and doing it. It’s like the difference between admiring an Olympic athlete and being one.

If it’s true that you don’t really want to quit, then why do you believe that you do want to quit? It has to do with your self-image, which, in this regard, is inaccurate. You believe yourself to be a health-conscious, rational adult. You think that being health-conscious is important, and people you admire are health-conscious, and it’s also the popular cultural view nowadays. Therefore, you want to see yourself as a health-conscious person who is actively working on quitting an unhealthy habit. If you told yourself, “Well, I guess I just enjoy cigarettes too much to quit,” you would have to see yourself very differently, as someone who isn’t terribly health conscious, isn’t like people you admire in this regard, and goes against the cultural smoking trends. Ouch.

Don’t underestimate the difficulty involved in facing up to an inaccurate self-image. It can be quite painful to see yourself as you really are rather than how you want to be. It’s one of the most difficult things you’ll ever have to do. Yet do it you must, and many times over, if you want to grow.

By looking at your motivations honestly, you are much more able to see the truth behind your actions. You smoke because you want to. You enjoy it. You don’t want to quit, even though you know you should. Accept it. It will make your life much easier. No more wondering why you can’t seem to accomplish this “goal” you’ve set for yourself, and self-flagellation becomes completely optional.

Be Honest with Yourself About What You Really Want
If you accept that the reason you can’t accomplish a goal is because you don’t really want to, then the next step is to be honest with yourself about what you really do want. Let’s continue with the smoking example. You don’t want to quit, but you wish you wanted to quit. Or, maybe you don’t even wish you wanted to quit right now, and that’s just fine, too, even if it bothers you to discover this about yourself. The important thing is that you’ve been honest with yourself, and honesty in any form is better than dishonesty. You have moved forward, empowered yourself, and brought yourself that much closer to accomplishing your goals. It may not seem that way; it may seem that you’ve given up and given in to your impulses. But acknowledging them honestly is always the first step in moving past them. Without such acknowledgement, change is nearly impossible.

The more honest you’re able to be with yourself about what you really want (and everything else), the more at peace you’ll be in the long run, even if such honesty causes short term pain.

Acknowledge That Agency for Your Actions Lies Only With You
There is a lucrative payoff for being dishonest with yourself: you get to keep doing what you secretly want to do, and you get to do it for free, that is, without taking any real ownership for it (“I don’t know why I can’t seem to quit! I try and try, but nothing seems to work!”) Such dishonesty denies agency and makes you a victim. And when you are a victim, as we all know, it is not within your power to change your circumstances. You are stuck, and if you’re very good at framing it, people might even feel sorry for you. Thus, the inaccurate self-image and all that goes with it is a very convenient way to keep doing what we want to do without taking any responsibility for it.

But there is an even more lucrative payoff in being honest and not being a victim, and that is a sense of agency over your own actions, thoughts, and desires. It’s nobody’s fault you smoke or drink or overeat or don’t clean or don’t finish college or aren’t doing what you really want to be doing. Nobody is telling you to do these things but your internal voice. Therefore, once owned and admitted to, you are free to do what you want. Maybe you want to continue with the behavior and maybe you want to change it. Either way, there can be no more dodging the issue.

Owning all of our actions takes courage. It’s a job for adults, requiring a high level of emotional maturity. It can be scary, as it gives us nothing to hide behind and nowhere to escape from difficult decisions and unpleasant situations. And yet, there is a tremendous sense of freedom in it: Thank god it’s all up to me! That means I have the power to do something about it!

If you want to grow, there can be no avoiding personal agency. So embrace it as the wonderful tool it is, and get on with the business of doing what you really want.

My friend didn’t suddenly start cleaning her apartment any more than usual, but she did stop beating herself up about not doing it. She found some peace and self-acceptance in her new, more accurate self-image, and she felt less guilty about doing other things, the things she really wanted to be doing. M. Scott Peck, in his now classic book The Road Less Traveled, said that we spend time doing what we love. Pay attention to how you spend your time. You may find out a lot about yourself.

The Means/End Dichotomy is a great tool for determining how honest we are with ourselves. You don’t have to remember the term, though, just the principle: be honest with yourself about your motivations, and take responsibility for them. Accomplishing your goals depends on it.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.—Reinhold Niebuhr

If you examine the power-seekers of the world—politicians, clergy, celebrities—what you often find is people trying to compensate for feelings of powerlessness by having power over others. Their underlying brokenness becomes evident when sex and drug scandals surface, or when they self-destruct in their relentless pursuit of control (Adolph Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Richard Nixon, and countless televangelists, for example). Not all prominent people are power seekers, but I think many of them are, or at the least, they are a complex mix. A biography I read about John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life, showed that he was motivated by a murky combination of self-service and service to others, and public office offered both a path to change and a path to glory. Judging by the widespread corruption, polished insincerity, and rampant self-aggrandizing to be seen in politics, I think this must be true for the majority of politicians. The best we can hope for in most (but not all) of our elected officials is that the public service side prevails and their hedonism is held to a controllable minimum.

Ditto the clergy.

This might sound pessimistic, but I think it’s simply about understanding human psychology. I am never surprised when scandals surface among these groups of people because such behavior makes sense psychologically. Seeking power over others is a way of dissociating from your own feelings of powerlessness. Inherent in this is a particular lack of self-awareness that results in a poorly developed moral compass and certain predictable behaviors.

Power seekers, as you might expect, excel at power struggles. They deliberately hold positions where they can always win. They use their power to keep themselves safe from attacks. They’ve mastered the art of manipulation and the ability to steer conversations in a desirable direction. To the untrained eye, this might all look like a good thing, but it’s just another way people lie to themselves and avoid the real work. Namely, facing their childhood trauma, owning their anger and grief, and pulling it all together into a cohesive sense of self. Powerful people may have some advantages, but if their power comes from dissociation and denial of their inner world, then they are no better off than anyone else with a similar background. Don’t be fooled by their outsides. And when scandal erupts in the face of one of these people, don’t be surprised by it. In fact, expect it.

Very little real power exists at all. The list of things we have no control over can be disheartening, to say the least. The weather. The government. Our employer. Microorganisms. Other people. Infirmity and death. You can do everything right, and still have tragic results; you can do everything wrong, and land on top of the world. Life is a big bowl of unfairness and injustice. This is a difficult truth to accept, and when you realize the utter futility in the human struggle, paths such as religious fundamentalism or anything else that allows the illusion of security seem like viable choices. Yet if we want to reach any sort of satisfying conclusions, struggle on we must, and if we’re lucky, we find the joy in the struggle itself (for that is really, ultimately, all there is).

In all this noble striving called life, there is really only one thing we do have control over, and that is our own behavior. I think this is tremendous good news, because it means that we can give up trying to do anything other than live this life to the best of our ability. Accepting this down to our bones means giving up all the petty machinations that distract us from what really matters: finding real power.

What is real power? In simple terms, real power is being comfortable in your own skin.

If everybody were comfortable in their own skin, power struggles would be only one of many things to fall by the wayside of human history. Aggression, control, and manipulation would all be rare because people would feel little need to seek power over others. When you’re comfortable with who you are, such efforts seem silly and pointless.

I know that sounds simplistic. But becoming comfortable in your own skin is a complicated, difficult, often painful process. I think the technical term for what I’m talking about is self-actualization, and it encompasses everything I write about on this blog.

Tremendous courage is required to go inward, to deal with core issues of fear, alienation, and insecurity until they lose their hold. But it’s so important. Once you have the courage to face your demons, other courage kind of comes naturally. The world and other people don’t seem so scary anymore. When you’re solid in who you are, rejection still hurts, but it loses its power to devastate; you remain intact. You gain a sense that you can make it through anything. This builds on itself, and you find you have the courage to pursue your bliss. It’s an upward spiral that can only be good for everybody and everything.

If you’ve ever wanted more power over other people, think again: you’re looking for fulfillment in the wrong place. Any form of power based on controlling others is ultimately unsatisfying because it’s an illusion, a distraction from the inner journey, which is the only journey that matters. The only real power possible is power over your own behavior. This power will bring your whole self to fruition in a way that makes power struggles, as well as other forms of diversion, a non-issue.

It takes two to have a power struggle, and few of us are helpless victims in this. If it’s a dance we’ve learned to take part in, then sometimes we lead. If we want to improve the quality of our relationships, we need to look beyond our reactivity. We need to look at how we instigate power struggles, as well.

Power struggles between adults begin when people are indirect or dishonest about what they want. They would rather manipulate someone into giving them something than simply ask for it or have a conversation about it.

This happens for a number of reasons. One is an unwillingness to risk rejection. If we can manipulate a person into giving us what we want, we never have to risk rejection by asking outright. If a woman wants her husband to take her out to dinner on her birthday but wants it to be “his idea,” she tries to plant seeds, as in, “Thelma’s husband took her to Manny’s for their anniversary. Isn’t that romantic?” If that doesn’t work, she may get more aggressive, as in, “Any husband who loves his wife wouldn’t let her cook on her birthday!” If the manipulation is successful, she gets what she wants. If not, well, she made an effort without ever actually putting herself out there.

Another reason people instigate power struggles is the belief that it isn’t okay to ask for what you want. If you grew up being shamed when you wanted something (“Don’t be so forward!”), then you’re going to have trouble being direct about it as an adult. In some families, and even in some cultures, asking for what you want is considered rude. While this may be true to an extent about material things, it is utterly inapplicable to feelings and relationships. If you have this particular stoicism about your emotional wants and needs, intimacy will be difficult to attain.

Yet another reason for power struggles is a desire for emotional distance. Manipulating, cajoling, or otherwise creating a power struggle instead of simply asking for what you want automatically creates an emotional barrier. It is fundamentally dishonest in nature, and thus the antithesis of intimacy. Again, if we grew up with shame and ridicule, we can struggle all our lives to let down those walls and get close to someone (and that’s if we’re lucky enough to find someone we want to get close to). Shrouding ourselves in an emotional cushion is as natural and involuntary as breathing. If you have a tendency to keep people emotionally at bay in this manner, intimacy will, once again, be difficult to attain.

The common denominator is that these are all risk aversion techniques; they minimize the possibility of emotional exposure. Herein lies the allure of the power struggle. People opt for a less straightforward method when the alternative means coming face-to-face with rejection or other painful emotions. It can feel like a win-win—avoiding sensitive issues and allowing the other person to do the same—but it’s really a lose-lose because nobody gets what they really want and no issues ever get resolved. People can remain in this dance for entire marriages, even entire lifetimes, intuiting that something’s missing, but not knowing what or what to do about it. Sad indeed.

So, what is it we really want? Appreciation, respect, and connectedness. Rarely are power struggles about the topic at hand. They are almost always about these underlying concerns. In the example above, the wife doesn’t really care if her husband takes her to diner. Her real concern is that he still loves and appreciates her.

We all want to feel loved and appreciated, to be respected, and to feel connected to the people in our lives. But many of us are afraid to have the direct conversations necessary to attain these things. When we’re afraid to do that, power struggles are how these issues play out: the combination of risk aversion and desire make them pretty much inevitable. And sadly, it’s the people closest to us who we keep most at bay. Which makes sense, as these are the people in whom we’ve made the greatest emotional investment, and these are the people who have the greatest power to hurt us. But what a tragic way to interact with those we want to feel connected to most.

Working through deep-rooted issues of intimacy and fear of rejection can take awhile, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue engaging in power struggles in the meantime. We can learn to recognize how our insecurities push us to behave in ways that don’t feel good, and we can stop. We may not have the courage to be direct right away, but we can make other choices. Silence, for one. Or kindness. Or nothing at all, if we don’t know what else to do. Anything is preferable to indirectness and manipulation of the people we love.

It takes courage to be direct about your feelings. It takes commitment and a willingness to dig deep and deal with what you find. But it’s important if you want to eradicate power struggles in your life and connect with people in ways that feel good. This is where true power lies.