Brave New Kitty

All pressure is at bottom a person’s own displaced drive. — Ken Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness

In 12 Step meetings and other self-help gathering places, you often hear the phrase don’t should on yourself. That is to say, don’t listen to that hyperjudgmental inner voice that’s telling you you’re doing something wrong or bad when you’re not. This is sound advice, particularly for those of us with an overdeveloped sense of responsibility that comes from growing up in an invalidating environment.

Even so, I never really liked the phrase. I’ve always thought that it was used far too much as an excuse to exercise narcissistic desires that had little to do with becoming a more whole, more content person. And all too often these narcissistic desires were about ignoring other people’s feelings, which is never good for either end of the interaction. (This is not to say you don’t sometimes hurt people, but if you do, it should be done either inadvertently, or with a great deal of consideration as to why it’s necessary to do so.)

In this past couple of weeks, I’ve found it impossible to write. Moving has consumed all of my mental, physical and emotional energy. It shouldn’t be this way, I kept thinking. I should be able to focus on more than one thing here! It’s just moving! It’s a good thing! What’s the big deal? But every time I thought about writing, I felt like an empty bucket; there was just nothing there. I felt terribly guilty, but I simply couldn’t muster the drive to do anything about it. Then a few days ago, as I was ruminating on how I should be able to write through this life change and I should have more self-discipline and I should be more focused, I had a sort of epiphany about the whole thing. The shoulding wasn’t at all about what I thought it was. It came from an entirely different place, not the hypercritical inner voice of judgment, although that is how I experienced it.

First of all, I realized, some shoulding is good. I should eat healthy food, I should make it to work every day, I should sacrifice some of my wants for the sake of my children. I also should work toward ever-increasing levels of self-love, self-acceptance, self-awareness, and forgiveness. So the act of shoulding in itself isn’t necessarily bad, and to believe that it is is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A strong moral compass requires a fair amount of self-discipline and the willingness to do what you believe to be right even when you would rather not. Sometimes, that inner critic is very right.

But this wasn’t about moral choices because there were no decisions to be made, nothing involved but my own confusion and distress. With that thought, I became aware that I was having a shadow experience. The feeling of pressure, the uncentered anxiety, the sense of emptiness and disconnectedness from myself–all are indications that a part of me I was unaware of was running the show, and the real reason I wasn’t able to write. I remembered reading Ken Wilber’s “Integrating Your Shadow,” a chapter in the book “The Spectrum of Consciousness.” He writes here that if we’re having a shadow experience, excitement will feel like anxiety, and that it always feels like pressure coming from an external source. This is because it–the feeling, that is–is disowned; I am unaware of the feeling I am having or that it is something I myself am doing.

I realized then that I wasn’t so much stressed as excited. Even though I wasn’t fully aware of it, I was enjoying the move on every level, from the physical exertion to the feeling of reorganizing and shedding old belongings, to the mental challenge of organizing and arranging the new place–the beautiful, perfect place I’d been searching for for almost a year, the place that met all of our needs so perfectly and in such style that I am still having trouble believing that such a place actually exists and that I found it.

Why was moving a shadow experience for me? And why did it keep me from writing? Well, I can’t be entirely sure on the first question, but my guess is that I still have trouble allowing good things to happen in my life. Not all good things, but some, and for reasons I don’t understand, living in a beautiful place sets off a lot of triggers for me. That little kid inside me who still feels undeserving didn’t know how to cope with the feeling of upward mobility. Or maybe the general stress of moving coupled with this sense of being undeserving was a double whammy that set off an emotional chain of events I couldn’t deal with–so I disowned them. The reasons it kept me from writing are much simpler: repressing and disowning feelings requires a lot of energy, not leaving room for much else. But the even bigger reason was, as I already stated, that because I was disconnected from my self, I had nothing to write about.

I’m a little bit sad that I missed out on the pleasure of fully enjoying this move. But I’ve reached a place now where I’ve been able to pause, reflect, and enjoy this good thing happening in my life, no questions asked, no waiting for a shoe to drop (well, almost none). And really, what a small price to pay for such a profound awareness! That I can, after all this time and work and growth, still be so distressed about feeling good that I can be seduced by my shadow to avoid it. Oh, I don’t mean to imply that I thought I’d reached a state of mental health beyond such fallibilities; far from it. But I really did think I had too much self-awareness to succumb to such an iron shadow grip on my psyche. So this was a humbling experience, but more importantly, it was a great lesson in shadow awareness: when the shoulding doesn’t involve a moral dilemma, and it isn’t about rationalizing self-indulgence, then it’s probably about shadow.

What a powerful tool! Being able to recognize this is like having my own personal commentator on my behavior. In Integrating Your Shadow, Wilber says, “The wise individual, then, whenever he feels some sort of pressure, learns to use those feelings as a signal that he has some energy and drive that he is presently unaware of. He learns to translate ‘I feel pressured’ into ‘I have more desire than I know.’ Once he realizes that all feelings of pressure are his own unheeded drive, he can then decide afresh whether to act on his drive, or to postpone acting on his drive. But either way, he finally knows that it is his drive.” This was almost the exact experience I had, and quite validating to read it from an author I have huuuuge respect for. And now I’ve formalized it into a tool of self-awareness, one I can use whenever I’m aware of pressure, of shoulding myeslf when there is no clear reason to be doing so.

I wish I didn’t still struggle so much with good things happening in my life, but I think it better to accept reality and look instead for the possibilities that adversity brings. Otherwise I spend my life trying to escape who I am, shoulding on myself when I could instead be learning about who I am and what makes me tick. The shadow is a powerful force, and I am happy to be a little bit better acquainted with mine.

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.

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.

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.-Andre Gide (1869 – 1951)

Have you heard the old parable about the blind men and the elephant? Each man feels a different part of the elephant and gets a different impression of the animal. The man who takes hold of the trunk thinks it’s a snake. Another who feels its side thinks it’s a wall. Another feels its ear and thinks it’s a fan. Yet another feels its leg and thinks it’s a tree. None of them are completely wrong, but none of them are right, either. Each has gotten an incomplete impression of the animal and formed an opinion based on that.

We are all like the blind men—we fail to see the whole picture. This is not an indictment of the human race; it’s a simple truth that the nature of learning is infinite. It’s impossible to see the whole picture, and the more you know about something, the more you know there is to learn about it.

Nowhere is this truer than with our selves. Self-awareness is like an iceberg poking out of a murky ocean of disowned feelings, repressed thoughts and desires, oblique opinions, and an entire personal history that affects everything we see, think, hear, feel, and do. If the brain had to consciously process all of that every time it took in new information, Homo sapiens would not have survived. Instead, most sensory information gets dealt with on some level below what we’re aware of, going through several filters before it reaches consciousness. It happens in a split second, but it happens. And everything we’re aware of has undergone this filtering before it becomes a thought: In “Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception,” Daniel Goleman states, “…the contents of awareness come to us picked over, sorted through, and pre-packaged. The whole process takes a fraction of a second…This is much to our benefit…consciousness would be far too cluttered were it not reached by a vastly reduced information flow.” (Goleman, 1998, p. 65)

This filtering applies to self-awareness, as well (this is the premise of Goleman’s book). No matter how much I work at self-awareness, I know I’ll never be all the way there. There’s no shame in this, and no reason to feel hopeless about it, either. The subconscious seems designed to provide a bottomless repository for that which we aren’t, or don’t want to be, fully aware of. We seem to require this capacity for repression to deal with the world; any adult struggling to make sense of a painful childhood can tell you this.

And yet, knowing that the human capacity to process information is limited creates a bind. Senses are how we survive in the world. Without awareness, we’d perish, we’d have long ago become extinct. And yet I’m supposed to believe those senses are fallible? How can I do that and have any confidence about my ability to deal with life?

This is, I think, one of the core existential anxieties of being human. It is perhaps the most ubiquitous mistake on the planet to think we know more than we actually do, that everything we see, feel, and think is completely accurate. People find an answer that works for them and think that answer should work for everybody else. When attempts to make others believe the same way turn coercive, myriad forms of human suffering ensue.

Much of this could be avoided by making friends with that vast unconscious repository, that shadow atop which all consciousness perches. But if doing so means admitting limitations in thought and judgment, which it does, then the difficulty involved becomes understandable, and the widespread dogmatism in the world begins to make sense.

People find an answer that works for them and think that answer should work for everybody else. Why is this the case? Why do so many people think it their right, even their life’s mission, to make others believe as they do? I think the elephant analogy explains it, at least somewhat. On some level, we all know we’re the blind men, and what we see is an incomplete picture. But it’s easier to tell ourselves that what we see is the whole truth and our search is over. Like getting fat is easier than getting fit, accepting partial truths is easier than seeking more complete answers. Again, this is not an indictment of the human race; like lions who only hunt when they’re hungry, humans are biologically programmed to take the path of least resistance. And it’s only in the realm of higher consciousness that such an attitude causes problems: physical laziness can be troublesome, but intellectual laziness is likely responsible for most, if not all, of the pain and suffering in the world.

When I say it’s easier to believe partial truths, I mostly mean that it creates the least amount of anxiety, far less than admitting ignorance. And we are biologically programmed to keep anxiety to a minimum. So moving towards intellectual honesty and acceptance of our own limitations is difficult, to say the least. An uphill battle to break free of biological bonds, to transcend evolutionary programming. This is ironic, as intellectual honesty—understanding our own limitations—is how to broaden horizons, gain insight, increase tolerance, make friends with the shadow. It’s an existential bind that has no easy solution.

I have no answers. In fact, I would submit that thus far in human history this has been a largely unsolvable problem. But two things stick out for me: the necessity of tolerance, and the relentless seeking of truth. Just as none of the blind men is completely wrong, neither am I, and neither is anybody else. Each partial picture contains something of value. But equally important is the necessity to acknowledge the incompleteness of all views; doing so is what keeps my eyes open and my head out of the sand, moving in the right direction.

Due to the complexity of human consciousness—my own prejudices, beliefs, blind spots, and insecurities—I will never adhere to this path perfectly. But it’s far better to make the effort than to not make the effort. Alleviating anxiety may be how we survive, but intellectual honesty is how we thrive. Without it, we’re destined to a lifetime of missing the bigger picture, of touching an elephant and thinking it’s a rope, then arguing with those who think it’s a tree, wall, or snake.

Yikes.

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot about feeling disconnected from yourself, but I haven’t actually defined what I mean by “disconnected.” I’d been assuming—and we all know what that does—that the symptoms I list such as depression, resentment, addiction, numbness, etc. are definition enough. But one of the primary symptoms of being disconnected from yourself is lacking the self-awareness to recognize the symptoms. So I’m going to back up a step here and talk about disconnectedness itself.

Although “disconnectedness” is my term, I am far from the first person to recognize it. In The Disowned Self, a classic exploration of this issue first published in 1971, Dr. Nathaniel Branden describes “the process whereby individuals become disconnected from their inner experience.” He defines it as “…the problem of self-alienation—a condition in which the individual is out of contact with his own needs, feelings, emotions, frustrations and longings, so that he is largely oblivious to his actual self and his life is the reflection of an unreal self, of a role he has adopted.” This was one of the first self-help books I read many years ago, and I found it extremely, well, helpful in my quest for self-awareness.

Dr. Branden was also far from the first person to explore the disowned self. Sigmund Freud himself observed several “defense mechanisms” people employed to deal with their anxiety, two of the more commonly known ones being repression and denial. And in one of my favorite books related to this topic, Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm states, “The way to become truly free in an individual sense is to become spontaneous in our self-expression and behavior and respond truthfully to our genuine feelings.” Although the book is not directly about disconnectedness, it treats it as a given, an underlying symptom of an overly conforming culture in which totalitarianism is possible. It’s an amazing book, and I recommend it highly.

In philosophy, alienation is a common theme as well, particularly in industrialized society. In The Lonely Crowd, Reiser, Glazer and Denney talk about the “outer-directed” personality, largely a result of material abundance and consumerism, that bases self-worth on comparison to how others live. They state that “… since the other-directed could only identify themselves through references to others in their communities (and what they earned, owned, consumed, believed in) they inherently were restricted in their ability to know themselves.” The Lonely Crowd also argues that “society dominated by the other-directed faces has profound deficiencies in leadership, individual self-knowledge, and human potential.”

I have long been fascinated with disconnectedness. I am vigilant for it in myself, fully realizing the impossibility of ever completely conquering it. I am also a student of cultural disconnectedness—alienation—a problem compounded, I think, by the advent of the Internet, e-mail, and text messaging. While none of these are responsible for cultural disonnectedness (technology itself being a neutral entity), all have certainly exacerbated the tenuous sense of connection between people. (Note: In many cases, technology has also strengthened human connection, or certainly made that a possibility where it had not existed before. But this is another topic.)

In any case, disconnectedness is a riveting topic, and one important to understand in the quest for healing and wholeness. It’s disturbingly easy to be dishonest with ourselves, and incredibly difficult to be honest. Which is understandable, as our existential pain can be terrifying to confront. But confront it we must, as self-delusion solves nothing and indeed, only compounds the problem. If ever the phrase “knowledge is power” was applicable, it’s here, in the realm of self-awareness.

I think most who enter therapy do so with the illusion, at least initially, that a therapist can, or is supposed to, “fix” us. This is not the case, for the simple reason that nobody can fix anybody else. The value of therapy lies not in the advice of a wiser or more capable person but rather, in creating an environment where we learn to hear our own voice, and heed what it tells us. (And any therapist who purports anything else should be avoided like the plague, by the way.)It makes sense that we can only fix ourselves. Everything in our environment must pass through our senses and our intellectual and emotional filters to “get in.” The teachings and advice of others are only valuable (or destructive) to the extent that we allow them to be. The processing of thoughts, and the choice to see or do things differently rests on our shoulders alone. Barring invasive procedures, there is no other way it can be. All of our answers come from within. (On some level, we know this. We’ve all had the experience of feeling centered, connected to ourselves. Well, that’s our inner voice speaking: telling us we can trust ourselves to find our way, do the right thing, take care of ourselves.)

Sadly, this is not the case with children. Children are dependent on their caregivers to form ideas about the world, to learn what to let in and what not to, what constitutes self-care, self-love, truth, power, and the like. If a child’s innate ability to care for herself is threatening to her caregivers, that most valuable of human attributes, the “still, small voice,” gets disowned and repressed, for that is what the child must do to survive in such an environment. The child is in a bind in which she is forced to choose the caregiver’s needs or her own. Choosing self, in the child’s eyes, literally means death. (For more on this, read John Bradshaw’s books, Healing the Shame that Binds You and Homecoming.)

If a child learns to disregard her inner voice, she loses a critical aspect of her ability to care for herself. She struggles to trust herself because her internal guidance is off. And this is why, as adults trying to figure out why we feel so abnormal/depressed/addicted/rageful/disconnected/unlovable, it’s sooo important to listen to ourselves talk—and learn to really hear what we say. The process is not only healing, a way to purge the soul-poison, it also reconnects us to our disowned aspects and provides the answers we so desperately seek.

It’s also important to be heard. The way it seems to work is that we learn to hear ourselves best through the validation of others. By telling our stories in a supportive environment, we are validated, and thus learn to validate ourselves. This is Alice Miller’s idea of the “enlightened witness.” (And it may be unnecessary to add, but I will anyway, that we will never, ever get validation from the caregivers who deprived us of it as children. Looking there for it is a waste of time and energy, and keeps us entrenched in our pain rather than providing a way beyond it.)

Therapy is one way to be heard—in fact, most therapy models are based on “reparenting,” on being the sounding board the person lacked as a child—and probably the most expeditious (assuming you find a decent therapist), but it is not the only way. A supportive significant other is another avenue. So is any creative endeavor, such as writing or painting, that provides cathartic relief and gets the stuff out into the world where it can be examined and processed. The point is to get it out, get it out, get it out—but in a safe way, with safe people. And better by yourself or not at all than with someone you’re unsure about.

While going through this, there is another important aspect to remember: the gold is in the details. When talking about pain, it seems helpful to be as detailed as possible. Not my father was a sadistic bastard, but my father pulled down my pants and beat me in front of my best friend when I was six because I asked her over without getting permission first. I’m not sure why this is important, but I think that the more detailed the stories we tell, the more real our experience becomes, the more truth we uncover. And the more truth we uncover, the more healing can occur.

All of our answers lie within ourselves. They may be buried by pain, ignorance, shame, misunderstanding, and misinterpretation, but they are there. Our task is to trust that they are there and learn to listen to them. They are always right, and they will never let us down.

To thine own self be true. –Shakespeare

We all have, to some extent, skewed perceptions of ourselves that don’t quite agree with reality. Challenging someone’s self-perception can be a dangerous thing to do. Have you ever made what you thought was a harmless or obvious comment, only to have a person turn on you like a rabid dog? If so, it’s likely your comment poked the person in a sensitive area that they weren’t willing or ready to face.

Self-image can be an amazingly fragile thing, and challenging someone’s self-image, even if inadvertently, can be a serious mistake, often resulting in strained or even terminated relationships. There are some things you just don’t say to some people, no matter how sincere your motives. The results will never be good.

Unfortunately, I had to learn this the hard way, which is ironic, considering the family I grew up in. In my family, it was the ultimate taboo to say aloud what was really going on. “Dad is an alcoholic” or “Mom is an alcoholic” were absolutely unspeakable words. I spent my childhood skittering around these truths, and everything that went along with them, like thin ice on a winter lake; you know it’s there, but as long as you avoid it, you’ll survive. Later, when my sister became a fundamentalist Christian (which, by the way, is an extremely common occurrence for children who grow up in shame-based families like ours), this pattern continued: it was unthinkable to verbalize my opinions about her rigid, judgmental beliefs; I knew that to do so would be the end of our relationship (and eventually, it pretty much was).

The point is, I learned early on that saying what you really think can be devastating. So why then have I so often found myself in the role—almost always inadvertently—of angering people by pointing out an aspect of themselves that they didn’t want to see? I think it’s because of how I grew up. As soon as I figured out there was something horribly awry in my family, which was in my mid-teens, I began searching for answers. Honesty became very important to me. The desire for truth and understanding became the most important things in my life, and I think that somewhere along the way, I began to assume that they were the most important things to everyone who wasn’t like my parents.

But I was wrong.

Do yourself a favor, and commit this truth to memory, as I have done: People don’t want their self-images challenged. There’s a reason people believe what they believe, however accurate or inaccurate, and unless clearly asked for an opinion about those beliefs, none should be offered. I have found that comments I consider mundane have provoked powerfully negative reactions, and offering unsolicited advice about more personal issues, even—or perhaps especially—to people with whom I thought I had intimate relationships, and whom I thought valued my opinion, has had catastrophic results. Regardless of how close you are to a person, if they haven’t asked for your opinion on an issue that doesn’t affect you directly, keep your mouth shut. It’s simply poor boundaries not to, rude and disrespectful. This includes sideways comments that sound humorous but are really meant to poke at somebody because something they said or did annoyed you.

This issue of fragile self-image is something I’ve thought about for a long time (having had a fair amount of experience angering people by sharing a “helpful” opinion they didn’t want to hear), but it’s come up again recently with my changing views about addiction. For some people, it’s critical to see addiction as a disease. They feel threatened by the idea that addiction is a matter of personal choice and personal responsibility. Most of this comes out sideways at me, in the form of indirect comments or hostile humor. I’ve been troubled by this, and have struggled with how to handle it. How candid should I be? Should I try to educate people with statistics and studies, give them lists of books to read, explain my Libertarian and spiritual philosophies? Should I call them on their sideways comments and force them into a direct conversation, or should I pretend, like they do, that they’re only making jokes?

These are difficult issues, but in the end, I realized that people who engage in this behavior are not interested in hearing my reasons for why I think the way I do. When people make sarcastic or dismissive comments, they’re acting out of fear. They suspect on some level that there is a basic truth about themselves or the world that they haven’t dealt with honestly, and it troubles them. And no matter how annoying or offensive I find their behavior, it is not up to me to educate them unless they ask directly. Certainly I have the right to defend myself, and I have the right to say I don’t like how somebody’s treating me. But if I’m able to see the bigger picture and understand that this behavior is based in fear, then I don’t have to take it personally; there’s nothing to defend myself from.

We live in a culture that encourages fragile, inaccurate self-images. The less well we know ourselves, the more money we’ll spend trying to figure out who we are, or at least look like we’re trying. I’m not blaming capitalism; I’m just saying that, due to human nature and the fact that it’s easier to believe you’re thinking critically than to actually do so, the self-image market is huge. From the soda we drink to the car we drive, we’re bombarded with the message that it all says something about who we are. But it doesn’t, and such messaging can only work on people who don’t understand this. Unfortunately, that seems to be a large sector of the populace. The pursuit of an accurate self-image is an uphill battle that in many ways defies cultural norms, and one that many people simply don’t want to engage in or even consider. It’s easier on every level not to bother.

Every level but one, that is, and it is the only one that truly matters: your authenticity. If you don’t have this, then what have you got? Without it, you go through life now knowing what’s important to you, what you really want, your heart’s desire, your passion, your bliss. What would be the point?

I’m grateful I grew up in the family I did, because it instilled in me a powerful drive to know myself and seek truth. I can’t imagine living my life any other way. Nobody’s self-image is entirely accurate; it’s a perfection we must keep reaching toward even though we’ll never quite grasp it. But the reaching is so very, very critical to a satisfying life. There simply is no other way.

We will often find ourselves on both sides of the fragile self-image issue, and how we handle each situation says a lot about how true we are to ourselves. It’s much easier to keep your mouth shut about somebody else’s annoyance than it is to see the reasons for your own. If you find yourself having a big reaction to someone’s comments, look within. That’s where you’ll find the cause, and that’s where you’ll find the solution.

Not too long ago, I watched a Frontline episode about marketing. One expert said that people drive trucks and SUVs because they want to feel a sense of domination. This made sense to me. It’s the only reason I can think of why people who don’t need a truck for utility purposes (henceforth referred to as “city people”) would want to drive vehicles that are hard to park, hard to maneuver, hard to see around, and get terrible gas mileage in this age of expensive gas. Things that don’t make sense on the surface are usually motivated by deep psychological longings. (And this is exactly why advertising works. Shadow motivations are extremely powerful; because we aren’t aware of them, we can’t counter them with logic.)

I think many city people who drive trucks are trying to claim some feeling of control over their lives. Many different personalities fall into this category. There’s the angry young man who feels a sense of powerlessness over his destiny. There’s the lesbian woman wanting others to see her as tougher than she really feels, and the twenty-something girl who wants people to think she’s tough. There’s the middle-aged man who wants others to see him as having arrived—he’s probably driving an Escalade, Navigator, or Porsche Cayenne. There’s the thirty-something mother who lives in the suburbs and quietly wishes she had never gotten pregnant or married. There’s the trendy urbanite—could be either sex—who puts looking cool above all else. There’s the suburbanite dad—probably married to the thirty-something mother—who insists his SUV is a practical vehicle given his number of children and dogs, but wants to retch at the idea of driving a minivan.

This is not a new or revolutionary observation. It’s just another take on Mid-life Crisis Man driving a Corvette (have you ever noticed it’s always middle-aged men driving Corvettes?), or Small Penis Man driving a huge four wheel drive truck, (domination/compensation again) or really, anyone wanting to make a statement about their personality with the vehicle they drive. The most interesting thing about this is that the statement a person wants to make is usually the opposite of their true personality. The people with the greatest sense of powerlessness, loneliness, or fear have the most need to project the opposite impression.

Interestingly, the lack of self-awareness never goes the other way. People don’t drive econoboxes because they want to see themselves as thrifty, or minivans because they want to see themselves as practical. The error is always on the side of glamour, power, prestige, sexiness, adventurousness, and all the other bold character traits that we wish we had and want other people to think we have. Nobody buys a Corolla because they think they look cool in it.

But back to the truck/domination theory. I find this interesting because of the sheer volume of trucks and SUVs on the road. Their appeal seems to cross all age, gender, and ethnic lines. At any random stoplight in the Twin Cities metro area, the ratio of trucks/SUVs to cars averages around one to one. This means there are as many people buying trucks as there are buying cars, which is mind-boggling when you consider that the ratio of people who actually need trucks, even for recreational purposes like hauling snowmobiles or jet skis, is less than ten percent of the urban population. It also means that people are voluntarily opting for big, gas-guzzling, impractical vehicles over smaller, more economical, more practical ones. Does this mean there are that many people who want to feel dominant?

Yes, I think this is exactly what it means. Driving is a microcosm of a culture, and this trend toward big vehicles is another aspect of it. Seen this way, trucks make perfect sense for any number of reasons. People frequently feel a sense of helplessness in an increasingly technologically complex society. Or, maybe vehicular dominance is a statement about self-absorption and a dying sense of community (an “every man for himself” sort of mentality). There is also the American obsession with wealth, power, and importance (which, advertisers would have us believe, can be ours if only we’re willing to go into enough debt). There are so many reasons for people to feel insecure and powerless in modern society that what seems completely irrational at first glance quickly becomes perfectly logical. There are a lot of people trying to feel control over their lives by what and how they drive.

Car manufacturers figured out decades ago that people associate cars with self image, and they’ve been perfecting their marketing along these lines ever since. Selling glamour. And for the most part, we’ve bought it. It’s a small segment of the population indeed who see their vehicle as a means of transportation and not as an extension of their personality. You’d think consumers would be savvier then ever in this age of instant information and worldwide audience via the Internet, but we’re not. I think it’s because we want to believe that easing our anxiety, whatever it may be, is as easy as spending the right amount of money.

The thing is, it’s not. The vehicle you drive (or the clothes you wear, or the house you live in, or any other material purchase) isn’t going to make you strong or powerful or rich. And whether or not it causes strangers to see you as any of those things doesn’t matter one slim little bit in your own life. The trappings of power and control do not make it so. All they make you is inauthentic. And more, not less, out of touch with yourself.

If you drive a truck and don’t need to, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re compensating for a sense of powerless in your own life. But there’s a good chance you are.

Just something to think about.

My therapist used to tell me, “Feelings are never wrong.” He would usually say this in response to my discussing some big emotional reaction that I was feeling shameful about. For a long time, I didn’t understand the statement at all. I thought it was just a platitude to help me feel better, and I rarely let it sink in, because I knew my feelings were wrong. If they weren’t wrong, then they wouldn’t cause me all the trouble they did. Right?

Wrong. After a lot of work, I finally understood what he meant, and that it was my beliefs that were wrong, not my feelings, no matter how big, messy, or embarrassing they might be. This was a significant factor in my ability to love and forgive myself in the way I deserve—that is, in the way we all deserve.

“Feelings are never wrong” is really pretty simple (as simple as it sounds, I suppose). We can lie in our heads, but not in our feelings. Like guileless children, feelings are innocent and reliable indicators of what’s going on with us, and it’s important to pay attention to them, because they always have something to tell us.

We might not like our feelings. Or we might not want to deal with them. We might have learned early in life that our feelings are to be “toughed out” or ignored. Maybe we’re afraid of succumbing to them because we were shamed for our big feelings as children and don’t want to relive that as adults (it was awful enough the first time around).

But our feelings are the essence of who we are. More than any other aspect, they define us. If we deny them, we diminish ourselves. It’s like cutting off a limb and pretending we’re whole, then wondering why we aren’t better swimmers.

Being out of touch with your feelings is pretty much a recipe for a miserable life, whether you’re a stoic, repressed Protestant or a hot-tempered drama queen who dumps her disowned anxiety on the most convenient victim. However unacknowledged feelings manifest themselves, they are always an indication that we do not love, accept, and honor ourselves as we are. There is perhaps nothing sadder.

This is not to say that feelings should control our behavior. It’s not okay to always act how our feelings dictate, to “let it all hang out,” just because they’re there to hang out. Paradoxically, when people do this, it’s usually because they are out of touch with their feelings, and not the other way around. Being emotionally out of control is strong evidence that a person’s shadow has taken over, and that she is probably unaware of what’s behind the feeling motivating the behavior.

I realize this might sound like I’m saying that feelings are, indeed, wrong at times, but that’s not what this means at all. All feelings happen for a valid reason. If the feeling seems bigger than the situation calls for, we tend to dismiss it as wrong. But it’s not wrong. In fact, these are the feelings that have the most to teach us. These are the feelings to really pay attention to if you want to discover what’s going on in the deep dark recesses of your shadow.

(Note: I don’t use the term “overreaction” in the above paragraph because I believe it is pejorative: a big reaction requires self-discipline, so as not to dump it on the person at the other end, but it also requires gentleness and a willingness to look more deeply into the underlying causes of the behavior. Calling a big feeling an “overreaction” often leads us to chastise ourselves [or others] and write it off to having a bad day or something equally unrelated. When we do this, we forfeit the opportunity to dig deeper into who we really are.)

Why do our big reactions have so much to teach us? Because they’re almost always an indication of unfinished business from our past. Usually, they’re rooted in fear, and they’re very old, and they’ve probably been causing problems—or really, different versions of the same problem—for our whole life. Getting to the bottom of them is the only way to heal, and healing from our old wounds is necessary to becoming whole; self-actualization is not possible without doing so.

So the next time you find yourself having a big reaction that doesn’t fit the situation, try to step away from it and assess what’s going on. You may need to own the reaction and apologize, but after taking care of this, go inward and try to find the source. Here are some things to consider:

• What was the exact feeling? (Fear, grief, or anger)
• What did this incident remind me of?
• When did I feel this way earlier in my life? What was I able to do about it then?
• What can I do about it now?

You may be able to come up with a specific incident or two that are often indicative of a pattern that occurred throughout your childhood; probably a painful one that you would rather not remember (which is why you repressed it in the first place). For example, I have a friend who, when he was five years old, committed some minor indiscretion, like having a messy room, and his mother told him she was going to leave him because of it. She proceeded to pull out a suitcase and start packing, ignoring him as he cried and tugged at her arm, begging her not to go. She left the house with a full suitcase before she finally capitulated and he knew she wasn’t really going to leave. But the thought of her leaving terrified him, particularly since he thought it was his fault. Because of this (and probably more importantly, a general pattern of emotional distance by his mother), he has abandonment issues to this day.

Being able to identify this incident and own how painful it was for him was key to working through it. While he may always have some form of abandonment issues, an awareness of their origins makes it possible to act and react with an appropriate amount of emotion, own his big feelings as his own, and not make others responsible for them. The resulting self-awareness has vastly improved his capacity for honesty and intimacy. Had he not dealt with this issue, he would most likely have had a lifetime of unsatisfying relationships, either because he was too shut down to risk closeness, or because he continually held others accountable for his big feelings, eventually driving them away.

Recognizing and working through issues doesn’t always mean total resolution. Sometimes our wounds stay with us for a lifetime in some form or other. And that’s just fine, because our wounds often make us more sensitive, more compassionate, and more empathetic people. While working through them is not fun, I wouldn’t trade the work for anything. It’s some of the most rewarding and self-affirming growth work we can do, and the payoff is huge: greater self-awareness always leads us to greater self-love, greater ability to love others, better relationships, and better understanding of the world at large.

We must learn to recognize our feelings for what they are and why they’re there. If we don’t, they control us, and self-awareness remains forever out of reach.

Many people have asked me this question over the years. I always answer an immediate “Yes, of course you deserve to be loved.” I know this is a correct answer, because we all deserve to be loved. But I’ve always sensed it was somehow irrelevant. A dear friend asked me this again recently, and I got to thinking more deeply about the question. I don’t think she liked my answer very much because it goes against the fairy tale that most people want to believe about romantic love. But I think it was a good one, and I’ll share it with you here.

First of all, I realized why the question niggled at me. Asking if you deserve love is like asking if you deserve to be born into a free society, or if you deserve the same opportunities as everybody else, or if all peoples of the world should be treated equally. The answer is always going to be “Of course.” It’s also going to mean very little, or help you figure anything out about why you’re asking the question.

What people might really mean by “Do I deserve to be loved?” could be “Please reassure me that I’m lovable,” or “Do you think I’m attractive?” or “Do you think I’ve done the work necessary to have a healthy love relationship in my life?” “Of course” is a good solid response in all cases, but only because they are all givens. Of course you’re lovable, of course you’re attractive, of course you’ve done the work. I can say this because I see people at all levels of development in romantic relationships. So even at this deeper level, the question means very little. Why?

Because it’s the wrong question. And asking it means you’re not thinking about romantic love very clearly.

The main reason it’s the wrong question is because it assumes no agency. It says you view love as something that happens to you. When you’re thin enough, pretty enough, or emotionally healthy enough, an external entity drops magically out of the sky and it’s going to make you live happily ever after.

That’s not how it works.

Romantic love is not a reward for doing well. It is not a destination, an end point, or an indication that you’ve arrived at some apex in your growth. True, the healthier both people are—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and even physically—the more likely the love relationship will blossom into its fullest potential. Whether that happens or not, though, has nothing to do with being deserving.

Rather, romantic love is a journey. It’s one of the greatest adventures we can have on our march toward wholeness. It is, like everything else that happens in a lifetime, an opportunity for growth. A romantic love relationship jars us out of our narcissism, throws us into frightening, exhilarating, unknown territory, and demands a kind of work and dedication like nothing else. To become half of a true partnership, to devote your self to its care and nurturing, to consider another person’s needs and desires as you consider your own, is to literally become part of something greater than yourself. In so doing, you confront your fears, insecurities, self-absorption, anxiety, stubbornness, and nearly every other shadow aspect you were hoping to avoid dealing with. Not only is romantic love an opportunity for growth, it is one of the most powerful ones imaginable. As Joseph Campbell says in the Power of Myth (the episode on romantic love), “it’s an ordeal.”

That has been my experience. While there is nothing more satisfying than being with somebody with whom you’ve built a true partnership, the actual building of the partnership is indeed an ordeal. It requires unflinching honesty, difficult conversations, truckloads of patience and forgiveness, and massive amounts of vulnerability and open mindedness. Since very few of us have enough of these qualities going in, we have to learn them in the doing. This is what the great romantic adventure is all about.

You need a lot of willingness because the issues that surface in a love partnership are usually the issues we are least willing to confront. Your worst defects of character will haunt the relationship until you face them and do something about them. If this isn’t a stellar opportunity for growth, then I don’t know what is. And just as our growth in other areas is infinite, so it is in our romantic lives. The partnership is boundless, and thus it never stops providing fodder for your growth. It will ebb and flow, change directions, and take on new dimensions, but it will never stop being a vehicle of personal development. This is the challenge and the fun of it.

So if you go into love with the attitude that it’s something that happens instead of something you do, you’re going to miss the real opportunity it presents. You’re going to think that when things get tough, it means that it “wasn’t meant to be.” Or that if you’re selfish and angry at times, you “aren’t ready.” Or that if you don’t both want exactly the same things all the time that it’s doomed. Or a thousand other little deaths that can happen when you think love is a result and not a journey; a noun and not a verb. But if you’re both willing, kind, and fundamentally honest, and you want to be together, none of those other things matter. The only thing that matters is whether or not you’re willing to grow in the way that a romantic partnership demands of you.

The right question, then, is not “do I deserve love?” but rather, “Am I willing to do the work that building a partnership requires?” Love is a verb. Framing it like this restores agency and makes the relationship your choice and your responsibility. Assuming you have hooked up with another person also willing to do the work, then you’re off to a good start on the greatest adventure of your life.