Brave New Kitty

It is not only true that if you’re asking, you’re already there (see previous post), it is also true that if people aren’t asking, then they’re not there. They don’t have the insight to understand how their behavior has affected you, nor do they have the willingness to develop such insight. The most profound implication of this is that you mustn’t waste one more moment of your life trying to get such people to hear you, acknowledge wrongdoing, ask your forgiveness, or in any way change the balance of your relationship with them.

This applies to all relationships, but it is most applicable to parents or other caregivers who hurt you when you were a child. Few children have the capability to work through such hurts on their own, so the hurts just kind of get buried and go undealt with (I think the technical term for this is “dissociation”). If the hurts were few, then the pain and its effects on your adult self will be minimal. But if the hurts were many and frequent, if there was a pattern of disregard for your thoughts and feelings and what was important to you, then the pain and its effects on your adult self are likely to be problematic. Some examples of such effects are addiction, depression, numbness, low-self esteem, and troubles in interpersonal relationships. (In other words, all the stuff I write about.)

When people have a lot of unresolved childhood issues with their parents and they are not consciously aware of it (precisely because they dissociated from the unresolvable feelings, which was the best choice at the time), they tend to fall into an unproductive pattern of trying to get the issues resolved. Such attempts at resolution can take many forms:

• Approval-seeking: This is the belief that if you do everything they want you to, be the perfect child, give the perfect gifts, say the perfect things, they will eventually have to change. Not all kindness toward parents means you’re seeking resolution for old hurts, but it can certainly be one indicator, particularly when combined with some of the other thoughts and feelings listed here.
• Power struggles: Trying to manipulate, coerce, or threaten people into changing. For example, my sister thought when she had children, she would finally have an upper hand, a weapon that would make our parents treat her differently. It didn’t work; turned out my parents weren’t all that interested in their grandchildren, and her efforts at manipulation only pushed them further away.
• Basing decisions on what other people think: Another form of approval seeking, but more focused on your own life than on interactions with them. For example, choosing the career they push you toward even if you don’t want it, marrying the kind of person they approve of, having children to gain praise, going to their church, etc.
• Trying to work out the hurts in current relationships (which, depending on how it’s done, can either be very good or very bad): We often hook up with people that allow us the most opportunity to work through unresolved childhood issues. This is common knowledge, I think, and no more needs to be said about it except to watch for it in your own relationship and try to be as productive as you can in doing it.
• Anything else in relation to people who’ve hurt you that leaves you feeling empty, numb, depressed, angry, or otherwise bad about yourself.

The desire for acknowledgement is normal and healthy. It springs from a place of self-love, as does the instinct to try to right wrongs done to you. But as much as you want things to be different, trying to get something from people who aren’t able or willing to give it is futile, pointless, and soul-sapping. As unjust as it may be, you are far better off giving up the struggle and putting that energy toward resolving the unacknowledged hurts on your own. Accepting the situation the way it is, right now, instead of being the way you want it to be, is a good start.

From there, your options are almost limitless. You can use therapy and read books to help you better understand yourself and your particular situation. You can journal, or write letters that you never intend to mail to help sort your feelings out. You can join groups for people with similar issues. You can explore your anger. You can work on forgiveness, acceptance, and letting go. It’s not so much where you start but that you start, because all roads will lead to the same, beautiful discovery: that you, and only you, are ultimately responsible for your own happiness and well-being.

This is a vitally important thing to discover. In accepting your fate, and in dealing with what’s there to deal with because nobody else will do it for you, what you’re really doing is claiming your own power. As important as it can seem to get people to admit how they hurt you, it is exponentially more important to claim your own power. They couldn’t give it back to you anyway, even if they wanted to.

Resolving things on your own end is transformative. It’s honest. It’s healing. It’s an act of love, both for self and others, including the people who’ve hurt you. As such, it’s how you move on, and how you achieve forgiveness; in this situation, in fact, it is the only way to achieve true forgiveness. And paradoxically, if there is anything you can do to get other people to change, it is to stop trying, and shift the focus to yourself. Doing so makes people stand up and take notice. It gets under their skin. In owning your power, you just may help someone else discover theirs.

So don’t waste another moment of time or energy trying to get people to change, or to do for you what you must do for yourself. No, it’s not your bag of shit, but the simple truth is that you’re holding it, anyway. Your power, strength, and greatest potential lie in accepting that so you can then decide what you want to do about it.

I have so many friends who agonize over their less-than-ideal behavior. They scrutinize their errors, shortcomings, and bad moments, and come to the inevitable conclusions that all their “issues” have caused them to fall far short of the ideal in so many areas of their lives. They proffer all sorts of evidence for their beliefs: “I don’t have enough patience with my kid,” “Sometimes I hate my husband,” “I lied to my best friend,” and so on. Well, I have good news for anyone with such worries: If you care enough to worry, then your fears are almost certainly unfounded.

Asking shows self-awareness. It means you are cognizant of yourself and concerned about how you’re perceived by other people. It means you’re sensitive to your own shortcomings and willing to confront them in the interest of becoming a more whole person. It means you care about the people in your life. It means you want to be kind, caring, and loving. And wanting these things means, paradoxically, that you already are these things, because that’s how love works.

Conversely, people who don’t care don’t agonize over their behavior. They are not cognizant of how they come across to other people because they don’t give it a lot of thought. And they aren’t concerned with changing in any way, particularly if it means examining their own shortcomings.

I spent many years being terrified that I was going to be like my parents: angry, depressed alcoholics who seemed to regret every aspect of their lives, including their children, on whom they took out much of their frustration. To my shock and dismay, one day I realized that I was, indeed, very much like my parents: I was depressed, I was angry, and I was an alcoholic. I had run away from these facts for years, dreading the truth I didn’t want to deal with. But when I finally did, you know what? It wasn’t so bad.

I realized that although I had indeed inherited many of their behaviors, there was one major thing that set me apart from them: I was willing to face my shortcomings. And by facing them, I was doing things differently. Yes, I had many of the traits I didn’t want, but being willing to face and embrace them made all the difference. Being willing to take an honest assessment and work with what was there was all that was required to not be a slave to my undesirable traits. That’s all it took.

My parents never questioned themselves, or at least if they did, they never showed it and never reaped any sort of positive change. In fact, like most of us, they became more set in their ways as they got older. Unfortunately, their ways weren’t very conducive to good relationships or a happy life. Oh, there were incidents here and there that shone rays of hope, but every time, it was temporary, and they inevitably lapsed into their old patterns, which we were never allowed to talk about. For as long as I can remember, discussions about my parents’ behavior were off limits; I’m not sure how I knew this, but I knew. We all knew. No discussion. No acknowledgement. No ownership. This remains the case to this day.

But the worst part of this no-talk rule, so common in unhappy families, wasn’t the lack of acknowledgement, as bad as that was, but rather, the lack of apologies. If you look back on your life at all the hurts you’ve suffered (not that this is necessarily a good thing to do), you will find that the greatest ones are those that have gone unresolved. The ones you remember are the ones done by the people you love who refused to acknowledge their wrongdoing. Without acknowledgement and an attempt to make things right, you are left with all the emotional residue of the hurt. This is the legacy of people who don’t own their shortcomings and wrongdoings: they leave you with a bag of shit that should never have been yours to begin with.

Everybody falls short of the ideal. Everybody loses patience with their kids, occasionally hates their spouse, sometimes lies to a friend. Human beings are flawed and fallible, so to expect yourself not to be is unrealistic. What matters isn’t that you make mistakes. Of course you make mistakes! What matters is how you handle them when you do. You don’t need to be perfect, you just need to be honest with yourself and with the people you love. Actually, all you really need to do is make an earnest effort.

If you’re doing that, you’re already where you want to be. Congratulations!

One summer when I was 12 or 13, I got to spend some time on a horse farm. In exchange for doing chores, I was given riding lessons, along with two other girls. The first day, the owner/teacher quizzed us to find out how much we knew. Every question she asked, I knew the answer to. Being shy, I didn’t trumpet all the answers eagerly; I held back and gave the other girls a chance before I said anything. But the other girls didn’t know any of the answers, and after a few rounds of this, the teacher said, “The difference between you two and Kitty is that Kitty reads.”

Which was true. I loved horses, and I devoured as many books about them as I could get my hands on. I couldn’t learn enough and I couldn’t learn it fast enough. I read every horse story in the school library. I saved up my money and my mother would take me to the book store, where I would carefully choose the most useful books that fit my budget. I still have most of that library today, even though I haven’t ridden in many years.

If I’m interested in something, I educate myself about it. And while there were many interests in between, the next one that I was as voracious about as horses was personal growth. Once I realized that it was actually possible to like yourself and that there were definite ways to go about figuring out how, I set down that path with a vengeance. Of course, I was an adult by that time, and had many more options than just the school library and the local book store. So in addition to books–although there were a lot of them, too–I started therapy. And because my therapist suggested it, I started journaling. Then, when my therapist suggested I may have chemical dependency issues, I got myself tested and, sure enough, landed in a treatment program; this led to a long career of 12 Step meetings. I began meditating. I saw body workers–massage therapists, rolfers, cranial sacral practitioners, chiropractors, kinesiologists, and a few others that couldn’t be officially categorized. I participated in seminars and retreats. I went to conventions. I had several daily meditation books which I faithfully read and, as mentioned in another post, I had turned my bathroom into a shrine of healing and self-love. Everybody I spent time with was somehow connected to the recovery world. In short, all of my free time was spent thinking about, reading about, talking about, or practicing some aspect of healing, spirituality, or personal growth. And this was the case for about 10 years.

I think all the work paid off. It wasn’t like knowing all the answers to questions about horses, of course, because personal growth is an exponentially more complex topic. But I did figure out a lot of stuff and fit together a lot of the puzzle pieces in an amazingly short time. Other people in my 12 Step groups working on issues similar to mine had many more years of sobriety than I did; other women in my therapy groups seemed stuck on certain issues because they were reluctant to fully embrace the healing process. For them, healing was a once-a-week session that didn’t have a lot of connection to the other parts of their lives. Not me. I flew through all the basics and got right down to the painful stuff within less than two years of beginning the process. You know; shame, anger, self-esteem, the truth about my childhood and my parents, all the really fun stuff that we all get to if we stay at it long enough.

To me, it wasn’t a question of facing the unfaceable or accepting the unacceptable. To me, the only thing that mattered was making the most of my short time on this planet, and I knew that meant doing this work; that if I wanted to feel good about myself and be happy, I had to figure out the things that were in the way of that, all the things that were in the way of that. Of course, now I know that such complete knowledge is not possible, but it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is embracing the process to the best of your ability.

I used to marvel at friends who did not seem to have the same relish as I did for healing and growth. We went to the same meetings and the same groups, we talked about the same painful issues; why weren’t they more interested in getting to the bottom of it all, in uncovering the truth buried under all the lies, half-truths, and misconceptions? How could they ignore this stuff the rest of the week? How could they not want to get better? How could they be so casual about it?

The answer, of course, is fear, plain and simple. In undertaking this work, there is always a sense of dread at what you might uncover about yourself, your relationship, the family you want so desperately to love and be loved by…there is always a fear, too deep and dark to voice aloud, that what you find will be very, very, very bad. So avoidance, although not my tactic (in this area, anyway–I am very good at avoidance in many other areas of my life), is an absolutely understandable way of approaching this most frightening of endeavors.

I have compassion for that, I truly do. I understand avoidance better than most people, and fear, too. But these are our lives we’re talking about, the only ones we get. And I promise you, I guarantee you, there isn’t anything you might uncover that could possibly be scarier than the alternative, which is not uncovering it at all. I can think of nothing worse than not knowing the truth about yourself, of staying stuck in that awful quagmire when freedom and happiness is just a few years and a bit of effort away.

In doing this work of self-discovery, it is so important to leave no stone unturned. You may not be able to devote as much time to it as I did, but if you’re earnest about the effort, attacking the issues on as many fronts as possible, you’ll be rewarded in ways you aren’t yet capable of imagining.

The One is not just Summit (omega) and not just Source (alpha), but it is Suchness- The timeless and ever-present Ground which is equally and fully present in and as every single being, high or low, ascending or descending, effluxing or refluxing.– Ken Wilber

This above all, to thine own self be true. — Shakespeare

Back in July, I did a post about a movie preview I saw for Eat, Pray, Love. In it, I talked about how repulsed I was by the idea that a story could portray romantic love as more important or fulfilling than the spiritual journey. A commenter, Barbara, kindly told me I was wrong about the book, that it was really great, and asked me to suspend judgment until I’d read it. I promised her I would do so, and now, seven months later, I have finally finished the book, seen the movie, and feel ready to share my thoughts about Eat, Pray, Love and its author, Elizabeth Gilbert.

First of all, I must thank Barbara for her comment and for letting me know she thought the book was worth reading: thank you, Barbara, for encouraging me to read one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. One of the reasons it took me so long to finish was that because I loved it so much, I didn’t want the experience to be over. I loved, loved, loved this book. I relished it, I related to it, I was moved by it, almost beyond what words can capture.

I was surprised by my many parallels with the author, Elizabeth Gilbert. One is her love for travel. She is a far braver and more adventurous person than me, having been all over the world many times over; this is something I still mostly aspire to, but I certainly share the love (and I know lots of other people do, too, so this one isn’t terribly weighty, I know). Then there is the writing. Again, she has been working at it harder and longer than I have; I came to it in mid-life as a third or fourth profession (depending on how you count) and having no commercial success with it at all (unless you count user manuals and instruction booklets). And then there is her struggle with depression (me too!). And her path with men and relationships was superficially different than mine, but internally we struggled with so many of the same issues: wanting to be consumed, fighting being consumed, grasping for autonomy and not knowing how to hang onto in while in a relationship; and while all of that is also a fairly common experience for women, Elizabeth and I went through different iterations of it until that final, life-changing broken heart that made us both say, enough. I don’t want to do this anymore–and then, after such a profound surrender, calmly finding the person we wanted to spend our lives with, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Therapy, soul-searching, struggles with medication, falling apart on the bathroom floor, hearing yourself say that things would be okay; this all happened to me (much of it more than once).

But the part of the book that really resonated with me was her spiritual quest. I have not been to an ashram in India (and I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to ever go). But meditation has been a big part of my life, so many of the experiences she wrote about I have also had: how very hard it is to quiet the mind, for example, and the feelings of anxiety and even hopelessness that the effort can bring about. And the kundalini energy racing through your body, waking up everything in an indescribable way. And that nondual awareness that pops in and out with blissful frustration (which is what she’s talking about when she says that god is not an external entity, that god is within her). I have had all of these experiences, all of these awarenesses.

This brings me to what I really want to say about this book, what I found so amazing and so incredibly wonderful, comforting, and honest about it. Throughout her story, Ms. Gilbert describes her travels as a search for balance. She is seeking to restore her badly broken life to some sort of homeostasis in which she can find peace and a sense of wholeness (or even Wholeness, if she gets lucky). In Italy, she eats and plays, immersing herself in pleasure for its own sake (and what guts for doing this!). In India, she goes to the other extreme, immersing herself in the excruciating discipline of the Great Inner Journey. Her mission in Bali is less clear, even to herself, but it turns out to be the fulcrum point where she is, at last, restored to the balance she is so ardently seeking. By now, she has largely come to terms with the painful issues that propelled her on this journey, so she is ready–but not sure for what. She still meditates daily and also spends time with a spiritual teacher, from whom she learns many more spiritual ideas. But she also indulges in what the Christians would call “pleasures of the flesh.” Not just sex, but wine, food, and parties, and all the lighthearted fun that people who go to Bali should indulge in. And she discovers somewhere along the way that she is radiantly content. She has found her balance, and amazingly enough, it lies somewhere between these seemingly separate, seemingly opposing, aspects of herself. That she finds the love of her life is not, as the movie portrayed it, the high point and best possible outcome of her year on the road. Rather, it is a logical result of having created joy and balance for herself: she didn’t find love so much as she made herself available for it.

One of my teachers, Ken Wilber, writes about what he calls ascending and descending spirituality. Ascending spirituality focuses on an external god and the afterlife; it glorifies the future heaven and eschews the present, tending to see the human mind and body as sinful and dirty. Most forms of Christianity (and other Western religions) are examples of ascending spirituality. The primary idea of ascending spirituality is that God is up there somewhere.

Descending spirituality focuses on the here-and-now. It glorifies life in the present and downplays the significance of what comes after. Most pagan religions are descending, for example, because they find spirituality in nature, often believing that nature is god himself, that the creations are the creator. The primary idea of descending spirituality is that God is inside me and everything else.

Wilber, in his Integral Spirituality (and elsewhere), explains that both of these views are incomplete. To elevate one part of ourselves and ignore or even denigrate another will result in uneven development and skewed ideas about the spiritual path. You need look no further than the Christian idea of sin to see how dark that disowned spiritual shadow can be.

Anyway, without calling it such, Ms. Gilbert embarked on what was essentially the process of uniting her ascending impulses with her descending ones, of melding together her conflicting parts into a cohesive–balanced–whole. This is a rare and amazing undertaking. It is not something highly regarded in the Western world, where religions tend to be highly polarized (and thus highly incomplete). It is something a person can only come to through deep introspection and the arduous effort of breaking free of the conventional expectations of the society in which she lives. From her struggle with divorce and not wanting children to the happiness she achieves by being true to her own desires, this book is all about her dancing to the beat of her own drummer, and the rewards she reaps for doing so; rewards that can be gotten no other way. The romantic love she finds is a merely a manifestation of this process; it is only one of infinite possibilities that open up to us when we seek to love and embrace ourselves completely.

Ms. Gilbert’s story is a profound and important one. It shows us on a deeply personal level what happens when we follow our own path, our own desire, our own inner calling; also, it shows the critical importance of accepting and integrating all aspects of our selves.  I don’t feel too bad about my original post, because it was about the movie, and the movie did not capture the significance of her spiritual journey (I would have been very pleasantly surprised if it had). But as for the book, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.

Affirmations are one of the most powerful ways to create a positive attitude. From good fortune in business to healing from a painful past, everyone who’s had any measure of success has used some form of positive affirmations to achieve their goals. Whatever you want to accomplish, positive affirmations can help.

Affirmations can be as simple as a little mantra (or mantras) you get in the habit of saying to yourself on a regular basis, or as complicated as long, detailed sessions of visualization. You can memorize affirmations, print them out, change them regularly, or use the same one(s) indefinitely; any of these will have a net positive effect. There are no rules to follow and the only way to do it wrong is to not do it.

When I first embarked on my great adventure of self-healing, I embraced the idea of affirmations with great relish; my thoughts were so negative that I was willing to do just about anything to stop those wheels turning–and self-medicating was no longer an option. I wasn’t sure how to get started, though, so I mostly spent a lot of time around other people who’d made some progress dealing with the same issues I was struggling with, and tried to incorporate all the pearls of wisdom they imparted into my life. I wasn’t writing anything down, though, and I had so much good stuff in my head that when I wanted to draw on it, I found I couldn’t sort through all the ideas well enough to pull out anything of much use. Don’t get me wrong; this was a good problem to have, because all that good stuff was sinking in, but it was mostly warm fuzzies that had little sense of personal meaning to me.

One Christmas, a friend of mine gave me a desk calendar of affirmations (actually, it was “affirmations for codependents,” which tells you the kind of stuff I was working on). I didn’t realize it at the time but it was one of the best presents I ever got. I was like a kid in a candy store with that thing, unable to limit myself to one thought per day but reading weeks and months into the future. Some of the affirmations were just sooooo wonderful, I didn’t want to forget them. So I began cutting them out and taping them up around my bathroom mirror. After a few hours, that mirror was framed with so many affirmations that you could no longer see the wall. I saved the rest of the affirmations in a folder, from which I chose new ones from time to time, and let friends choose ones that resonated with them.

That bathroom mirror became a sort of shrine to my healing and growth. In addition to the desk calendar affirmations, I began taping up my own positive thoughts, and ideas from other people that felt right for me (yes, I’d begun writing things down by this time). I also photocopied pages from daily meditation books and even sometimes comic strips that had special meaning for me. Each morning, I would read all those positive thoughts as I got ready for work, and it was a terrific way to start the day. Usually one idea would jump out at me, and I would make a point to remember and repeat it to myself throughout the day; to my own amazement, I began to trust the fact that it always seemed to be exactly what I needed.

I should also say that I’m glad I lived alone, because I don’t know if I could have subjected someone else to such a personal display; my shame threshold was very low and I doubt I’d have risked being misunderstood…but I’d like to think I would have done a similar thing, although perhaps in a more private place. That said, for all the people who ever used that bathroom, men and women alike, comments were overwhelmingly positive, and I never got more than a bit of gentle ribbing, and never for the affirmations themselves, but rather, for my tendency to go overboard with things I felt strongly about.

As I grew and changed, so did my affirmations. They got deeper and more personal as I got better at pinpointing my sources of negativity and ferreting them out. I could feel myself slipping away from the Dark Side and being carried along, up and up and up, to heights I could not have possibly imagined from the place where I began. Positive affirmations weren’t the only reason for this, but they certainly had an influence on the process.

Negativity is an incredibly hard thing to overcome. I’m not sure it’s possible to ever shed yourself of it completely. I’ve gotten away from doing affirmations in recent years, I think because I’ve associated them with that early period where I just needed so desperately to feel better. But I’ve come to realize that affirmations are, or should be, an ongoing practice in the war against negativity. I must immerse myself in positivity: positive thoughts, positive energy, positive people, positive imagery, positive music, positive everything. If I want to continue with that upward mobility, I must submerge my thoughts in the positive, inundate them, drown them, until there is no more room where the negative can take hold. I must also catch my negative thoughts and say, “Thank you, you’ve served your purpose, but I don’t need you anymore.” And I must do these things every day, to the best of my ability, until the negativity no longer has power over me or for the rest of my life, whichever comes first.

I think there’s an affirmation or two in there somewhere.

PS–Here’s a link to a site of affirmations. Check it out!

From Wikipedia:
Fear mongering (or scaremongering) is the use of fear to influence the opinions and actions of others towards some specific end. The feared object or subject is sometimes exaggerated, and the pattern of fear mongering is usually one of repetition, in order to continuously reinforce the intended effects of this tactic, sometimes in the form of a vicious circle.

I saw a disturbing ad on TV the other night. It was a hospital scene, with a doctor telling a concerned family, “He’s not responding to the medication anymore. I don’t think he’s going to wake up.” The wife and children began to weep, and the scene switched to another family being told the same news by a different doctor. Then another, then fade to black, with a voice-over about how many people die from smoking in Minnesota each year.

At first I thought the ad was a joke. I sat waiting for a punchline that didn’t come. When I realized it was another anti-tobacco public service message, I got pretty angry: more fear mongering. Yet another attempt by another institution to intimidate me into seeing the world how they think I should. Sigh.

Fear mongering is nothing new. It’s been around at least since someone first used language to influence other people’s behavior, and probably before that. You would think that with all the access we have to information now, the ease with which we can discern fact from fiction (or at least get alternative points of view), fear mongering would have lost its power to persuade. Instead, the opposite seems to be true: fear mongering is more popular than ever. You can see it almost anywhere you look for it. But look for it you must, because fear mongering is so much a part of our cultural background that we barely notice it anymore, at least not without making an effort to do so. I think it is important to make such an effort, because being motivated by fear is neither a dignified nor a rational way to go through life.

When most people think of fear mongering, they probably think of politics. Indeed, when I googled “fear mongering,” most of the hits that came back were political sites, all berating each other for fear mongering–all using the same rhetoric and the same tactics! Campaigning is probably the weariest form of political fear-inciting: “If my opponent is elected, his policies will destroy the economy;” “My opponent’s record clearly shows that he doesn’t care about creating jobs;” and so forth. Such statements are not-so-subtle threats that if you vote for the wrong candidate, you could lose your job and the country could fall apart. Intimidation tactics like these, and their underlying lack of substance, often make me wonder how anybody can take partisan politics seriously.

Advertising also uses fear to evoke big emotional reactions from people, particularly fear about personal safety (auto ads, tire ads, insurance ads, etc.), health (vitamin ads, medication ads, and recently, “organic” products), and parenting (how many diseases and tragedies can befall your children–and pets too!–that you must guard against). Advertising can also evoke more subtle fears, such as fear of not being physically attractive, fear of not being liked, and fear of not fitting in. Public service announcements, such as the aforementioned one about tobacco, fall into a unique advertising category of their own, because this is the government trying to modify people’s behavior with fear, which I find particularly offensive. And then there’s the original fear monger, that mother of all fear mongers, which is, of course, mainstream religion. With its promise of eternal suffering if you don’t follow the rules, being “God-fearing” has kept people in line for thousands of years, and is still effective today.

From the church and the government using fear to implement social control to parents using it to control their children, fear mongering has always been a popular motivator. I suppose this is because it works. It elicits a strong emotional response–which means people have taken the message to heart–often followed by some action, even if that action is just to voice an opinion (Have you heard the good news?). But just because something works doesn’t mean it’s okay.

It isn’t that the fear mongering message is wrong. Often, it is not. Smoking is an unhealthy habit, for example. And if I have smelly armpits, my social life may suffer. And the well-being of the economy matters to my own well-being, at least to some degree. But graphic images and implied threats about what will happen if I don’t tow some externally imposed line are the lowest form of cause and effect. They appeal to our anxiety and rely on knee-jerk reactivity rather than on our ability to arrive at decisions using the power of our own critical thinking. I find this repugnant.

Fear is part of life. It is a normal and healthy response to certain situations, evoking the fight-or-flight, survival response that prompts us to defend ourselves or seek safety. But if we examine it honestly, we will see that fear extends far beyond survival. Buddhism’s First Noble Truth is that we are all suffering. We all cling too much to what we perceive as good and try too hard to avoid what we perceive as bad. This suffering is basically fear: Fear of not belonging, of not getting what we want, of not measuring up, of being alone, of being unloved or unlovable; of death. This is powerful stuff, and it understandably has a hold over us. And unless we actively seek to eradicate the power that fear has over our lives–the Buddhists call this enlightenment–we are, for all intents and purposes, fear-based beings. Unless we make a conscious effort to do it differently, fear is how we react to the problems and complexities of life.

Fear thrives in the absence of critical thinking. In fact, fear may be the very antithesis of critical thinking. Looking at Buddhism again, the meaning of being enlightened or awakened is simply to see things clearly, to understand the true nature of things. The Buddha discovered that if you fully understand the true nature of everything, fear goes away. Which makes sense; we don’t have to become fully enlightened to know that the better we understand things, the less afraid we are. Knowledge is power in just about every situation; to the Buddhists, this includes even sickness and death.

Anyway, fear mongering depends on the absence of critical thinking to sell whatever it’s selling, and this is why it’s so reprehensible. It encourages an instinctive, non-rational, child-like, unsophisticated approach to the world and to problem-solving. No matter how earnest or serious the subject matter may be, fear mongering is always part of the problem, and never part of the solution.

Being fearful is easy; it is akin to being overweight, lazy, ignorant–all the base states of human nature before we attempt to develop ourselves. So like any achievement, overcoming fear is hard. And we all have enough of it on our own without being bombarded by people trying to hawk products, get votes, or coerce us into a certain belief system. When we have to work so hard to free our selves of fear and reactivity and to live on the basis of self-empowerment and rational choice, it is an insult to be treated as though fear is a perfectly normal and moral way to motivate people. It is not.

We should be aware of fear mongering tactics–and if you start to look, you will see them everywhere, maybe even in some of your own behaviors–so we can minimize the effects they have on us, and we should reject fear mongering as a viable form of persuasion. Any attempt to scare, shock, or otherwise frighten you into submission should be treated as an affront to your dignity, and given the indifference it so richly deserves.