Brave New Kitty

And while we’re on the topic of staying present…let’s talk about the “drama queen” phenomenon. We all know people whose lives seem to be in constant chaos, who jump from one crisis to the next, who never seem to have any peace of mind. They fret and complain about everything wrong in their lives, but when offered viable alternatives to the chaos (“break up with the insensitive boyfriend,” “don’t spend as much time with your family,” “stay out of your neighbor’s business,” etc.) their eyes cloud over and they change the subject, and the next time you see them you hear new versions of the same old problems, ad infinitum. Certainly this can be tedious, but if you look below the surface, you can see how such behavior is an effective self-soothing strategy. People do this as a deliberate, albeit unconscious, way to avoid being present with themselves. Maybe not surprisingly, I knew a lot of people like this in 12 Step groups. I’m not picking on sober people, having been one of them; maybe because of the intimate nature of meetings, it was just more noticeable. In any case, there were a lot of people who were able to hang onto sobriety by their fingernails while everything else in their lives continued to fall apart. It took me a long time to figure out why they liked things that way.

Action junkies are a similar phenomenon. You know, people who like to live from one adrenaline rush to the next. They’re always looking for excitement in any form that keeps them conveniently distracted from their inner world. This is not to say that all adventurous people are avoiding being present with themselves. But if a person is focused on activity to the point that they’re restless and agitated without it, then there’s a good chance this is what’s going on.

What do I mean by “being present with yourself,” and why do people avoid it? Being present with yourself means that you’re able to quiet down, be with yourself, listen to your inner voices. That you can spend silent time alone, contemplating, writing, meditating, moodling, and be content. Perhaps most importantly, that when you do this, you can deal with what comes up, no matter what, and not run for the hills.

Why do people run for the hills? Because the inner world is not always pretty. Sometimes it’s rather ugly, sometimes unnerving, sometimes downright terrifying. If you don’t like what you see or don’t know how to deal with what you see, one solution is to avoid looking. This is particularly true for people with traumatic pasts, and why I think so many sober people surround themselves with chaos–the chaos feels better than the fear, anger, and anxiety they can no longer douse with chemicals. Seen in this light, who can blame them?

Distracting yourself from yourself is a difficult thing to un-learn. If you start repressing feelings as a child because they’re too overwhelming to deal with (which is a normal reaction in many circumstances), such repression becomes second nature by the time you’re an adult–part of the backdrop, knee-jerk, normal way of dealing with life–hard to do it differently when you can’t even identify what “it” is!

We all do this to some extent–it is not possible to be human and not have some blind spots. Total self-awareness is an unttainable goal, a continuously moving target, and this is as it should be if we are growing and changing and engaged with life. But there is a vast difference between making an effort to know yourself to the best of your ability and avoiding that process. I am grateful to say that I chose the former, and as scary and painful as it has sometimes been, I haven’t regretted it for a moment, not even when I was going through the worst of it, and not even when I have to think about unpleasant things I’d rather avoid.

12 Step statistics say that less than 10 percent of people who seek sobriety manage to keep it for more than a year. I believe this is because once those deep, repressed feelings start coming up, few people have the resources to stay present with them. I know from personal experience that it can be excruciating. For me, it felt like death–like I would literally die if I allowed myself to stay present with those feelings. Holding my ground was, I believe, one of the bravest things I ever did. I was very, very fortunate to have a good support system by this time, a therapist I trusted (not everybody needs this, but I did), and a natural ability to comfort myself (although I have no idea where that came from). Without such support, people choose avoidance, and again, I can’t blame them in the least.

But what a sad choice! Staying present with scary feelings is the very essence of authenticity. The greatest mythology of the world is metaphor for this “dark night of the soul” experience. The slain dragons and holy grails and tests of mettle–all are depictions of the inner journey, the greatest, scariest, bravest, most exhilarating adventure any of us can ever undertake. Jumping out of a plane literally offers a few minutes of adrenaline thumping excitement, but jumping out of a plane figuratively offers a lifetime of adventure and potential.

Being a drama queen or an action junkie keeps you from being present with yourself and therefore, from your own authenticity. I can think of nothing sadder, because being present with yourself is really all there is. If you can do that, everything else will more or less fall into place, while if you can’t do that, nothing will ever fall into place. You’ll be forever in that place of crisis or distraction, wondering why you’re always guessing at what normal is and why you feel like an observer in your own life.

The unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates

Another bumper sticker sentiment I’ve always kind of liked is “Question Authority.” But as much as I am against blind conformity, I believe blind rebellion is equally bad. If you don’t practice discernment about what you question, it’s difficult to get to the true purpose of questioning authority, which is to arrive at your own set of carefully-thought-through values.

Of course, a bumper sticker can’t contain all that information. Nor is it supposed to–my personal preference for bumper stickers is humor, as any deeper thought is at high risk for misinterpretation. So, because “Question Authority” fits that category–it’s a popular sentiment that is not very well understood–I’m using it as a jumping-off point to take a deeper look at what it’s really about: values.

Awhile back, I wrote a post called The lllusion of Nonconformity that talked about how people want to see themselves as nonconformists without really being nonconformists, because being a true nonconformist means being seen as “different” or “eccentric.” So they dress up in costumes that give the appearance of defying conformity without really taking the risk of doing so. The example I used was middle-classed Harley-Davidson riders, but this phenomenon goes far beyond that. It’s rampant, really, and the reason it’s rampant is that most people haven’t taken on the difficult process of arriving at their own internal values. And when people don’t have strong internal compasses to guide their decision-making process, then they’re ripe for any marketing campaign that appeals to them.

In an absurd irony–ironic mostly because it works!–one of advertising’s most powerful claims is that buying a product can make you unique. If you drink this soda or wear that brand of clothing or drive this type of car, you’re a freedom-embracing individualist. In this way, what is really quite conventional, establishment-supporting behavior is packaged and sold as individuality. Nobody who brandishes a product logo on his body or vehicle considers himself a conformist. And yet, that is exactly what he is.

Much the same irony is true for people who feel that wearing a costume makes them unique. By costume, I mean shocking clothes or hair, tattoos and piercings, or anything other external trappings that affiliate you with any given subculture. Yet there is no real questioning of authority here; there is simply exchanging one kind of conformity for another. Conforming to a subculture is still conforming. Not to say that you can’t have affiliations and be a free-thinking individual, because of course you can. The issue is how strongly you identify with those affiliations. For example, if you think your costume is proof that you’re questioning authority in any meaningful way, then you’re missing the bigger picture about what questioning authority is really about.

The point is, if you don’t think through what it is you’re rebelling against, you end up rebelling against the wrong things or rebelling against nothing at all. Questioning authority is healthy, but it’s only half of the equation. You also have to come up with some meaningful answers. And that’s the hard part.

How do you decide which authority to discount and which not to? On one level this is easy. You have to meet all of your social and financial obligations. You have to obey laws. You have to treat other people with respect. In short, you have to meet all the basic requirements of adulthood and decency. You also have to decide what parts of conventional culture appeal to you. Do you want children? A career? A college education? Nice material possessions? Some conventional measures of success are appealing; that’s probably why they’re conventional measures of success. Liking nice things, for example, is no more a gauge of your internal values than are costumes–once again, it’s about how you identify with those things.

So these are the easy decisions: conform how you must, and conform how you want to. But the rest is up to you! This is where it gets hard, because the answers lie within, and the only way to ferret them out is with a concerted effort to know thyself and to thine own self be true. For it is only by knowing yourself, your wants and needs, what matters to you, what gets your heart thumping, to the very best of your ability, that it is possible to find happiness.

Happiness is an inside job. You won’t find it in movies or sports or any other sort of popular culture–while such things can sometimes get the juices flowing, they are mostly distractions from the real source of happiness: the inner journey. Introspection. Meditation. Paying attention to your strong feelings. Analyzing and distilling thoughts until they become guiding values. And once you have guiding values, and not until, is it possible to be truly happy, happy in the inner-peace, inner-contentment kind of way that everybody is seeking whether they are aware of it or not. And sometimes, rules are just wrong, and questioning them is how social justice progresses. So questioning authority can result in not only your own happiness, but consciousness-raising for the entire planet.

So by all means, yes! Question authority! Such questioning is essential to a life well-lived. Even if you decide that conventional society is where you belong, then at least you will have arrived at that conclusion on your own brainpower and embraced it on your own terms. Questioning authority should always be undertaken with the intention of finding your own answers, answers that are better than those offered by external authorities–and answers that go beyond external trappings of rebellion, which mean next to nothing. If you don’t have this end in mind when you undertake a rebellion, then you’ve missed the whole point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s look at each of these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words to make you think, hey?

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.

Sometimes looking back at ourselves can be difficult. Even something as simple as a high school picture can make us cringe with embarrassment. “That hair! Those clothes! Ohhh, what was I thinking??” Sometimes, it’s even worse. Maybe we held beliefs that we’d rather not own as ours; this is the personal history I’m addressing here.

In 2003, Jim and I took a motorcycle trip out to the west coast, and we spent a night with my aunt and uncle in Seattle. I hadn’t seen them in many years, and we reminisced about family late into the night. My aunt brought up something that happened when I was thirteen. Her daughter, my cousin, stayed with my family for a couple of weeks that summer, and apparently, I had turned her on to the lord: I was in my “Jesus saves” period. My aunt brought it up laughingly, but said how annoyed she was that Dena came home with a bible and a love for the lord (neither my aunt nor uncle, like everyone on that side of my family, were at all religious).

When she told this story, Jim looked at me with incredulity. I was mortified. My spiritual beliefs have gone through dozens, if not hundreds, of iterations, since then and could not be further from that now. By the time I was eighteen, I was a devout atheist, reading the work of Ayn Rand, Bertrand Russell, and Friedrich Nietzsche. When I got sober at age 27, I could not stomach the idea of Jesus as Higher Power, and if “as we understood him” had not been added to the higher power steps, I—like many addicts—would not have stuck around. Most of the people I sat in meetings with believed their H.P. was Jesus, but they were tolerant of those that didn’t, unlike the fundamentalists I’d gotten involved with fourteen years earlier. I read my Big Book religiously, but everywhere it said “God,” I crossed it out and wrote in “H.P.” above it. Later, after I’d had a “spiritual awakening” (still early in my sobriety), I crossed out “H.P.” and wrote “God” next to it; I hadn’t returned to fundamentalism, but I knew there was something where I’d so thoroughly believed there was nothing. And even later, I came to realize that it didn’t matter what I called my spirituality; it’s beyond anything I can fully understand, anyway.

My relationship history is another area of my past that I’m not proud of. I had so many boyfriends that I knew were not right for me; I actually seemed to choose men with whom I had no future. Some were cruel, others just not compatible. Either way, I spent many years preferring bad relationships to no relationship at all. In retrospect, this seems unfathomable, and embarrassing, but it’s the naked truth. I finally overcame that impulse somewhere in my mid-thirties, and spent two solid years alone enjoying single life and being happy. It was only when I realized—and accepted—that being alone was preferable to being with someone I was incompatible with that a good relationship became possible. I’m not saying it works that way for everybody, but it certainly worked that way for me.

There are other things I’m not proud of: my drug use, my dishonesty, my self-centeredness, my temper, all of which are the root of several nasty situations in my past. If I think about it, I’m sure I could come up with many more. We all could. Nobody is completely proud of everything in their past.

So when I recently opened my Big Book for the first time in a few years and saw all those crossed out, then rewritten “Gods,” I cringed. I actually had an impulse to throw the book away. But instead of doing that, I paused (a Golden Pause) and took some time to notice what was happening with me.

My first thought was that I was not that person anymore. My spirituality had been sooo undeveloped. I felt embarrassed that I was ever that naïve, that literal, that backward in my beliefs. I was annoyed by all the memories that came to me, of attending different (Christian) churches, of praying to a paternal god-figure, of once having a fundamentalist-Christian sponsor whom I allowed, for awhile, to draw me into non-AA religious activities. I don’t even want to get into my fanatic zeal for the Twelve Steps, which was at least somewhat responsible for my naiveté in other areas.

My first impulse was to destroy all evidence that I was ever that person. I have done this in the past with old photos, old diaries, and the like; in fact, perhaps it was because I’ve done this in the past that this time, I paused to more fully consider the impulse and what it really meant.

What it meant, I realized, was this: I was willing to pretend that a large part of my life had never happened. I was willing to rewrite my personal history so I would never have to acknowledge that I was once ignorant, incomplete, backward, foolish, or any way I did not want to see myself. Essentially, I was willing to disown who I once was. Which means that at some level, I was willing to disown who I am today.

I can’t begin to say how sad this made me feel. Is my self-love still so tentative, even after all these years of effort and progress, that it’s that easy to deny myself? To turn a cold shoulder to the rawest, most tender aspects of who I was and in some ways still am?

I put the book back on the shelf. I made the decision then and there to never throw away anything with that much personal history in it, even if that history isn’t always my best side.

Personal history, no matter how crazy or embarrassing, is something to embrace, even to cherish. Every single event, opinion, belief, path, person, mistake, and circumstance in my life has brought me to where I am today. If I like where that is, which I do, then I shouldn’t have a problem with my history. In fact, I should be grateful for it, proud of it, and feel good about it, because if it had been different, who knows where I’d be? Change one thing and you may change everything.

Even if you don’t like where you are right now, your history is uniquely yours, and ought be embraced. Whatever mistakes you made, whatever regrets you have, all are fodder for a better future. If we can’t learn from our mistakes, we might as well all call it quits right now. No, we must learn to claim our history as the vital, integral, necessary part of us that it is. For me, this is an attempt to do that: not only do I know, now all of you do, too. As scary as that is, it feels pretty good.

It isn’t always easy to claim our histories, especially when a history is as messy, fractured and unpretty as mine is. But I think it’s necessary if you want peace and serenity in your life, not to mention a chance at a better future. Agonizing over a less than ideal past is a pointless waste of energy that could be much better spent on more productive pursuits.

I still struggle with accepting some of my past, but since the day I made the decision to keep the book, it’s been easier; something shifted for the better. That experience helped me reach a new level of acceptance and even pride about who I used to be. I realized that all the layers mean, more than anything, how much I have grown and how much I continue to grow. And that is a life well spent, and certainly, nothing for which to be ashamed.

Being present for other people can be scary. If you’re like me, you probably fret about if you’re any good at it. You might secretly believe you don’t much to offer, don’t have anything profound or even helpful to say, or aren’t very good at being comforting and supportive. Sometimes, you may even get annoyed thinking about the other things you could be doing. Put it all together, and you might decide it’s easier to just keep yourself out of intimate entanglements. But while it may be easier, it is infinitely less rewarding.

It’s true there is a responsibility involved in personal relationships. That responsibility involves being vulnerable, and that vulnerability causes anxiety. The anxiety is what makes connecting in a meaningful way— sharing intimate pieces of ourselves and listening to others share theirs—a burden.

From the outside, it might look like other people don’t get anxious, but they do. Extroverts are often people who’ve learned that if they’re the life of the party, they won’t be expected to have any heart-to-heart type conversations. They’ve created a camouflage that makes them appear as if they’ve mastered connecting, but if you observe them carefully, what you will probably see is that they have lots of acquaintances, but few, if any, close friends. Sometimes even their most intimate relationship, their marriage, is not a terribly deep connection. By keeping themselves always talking and always interacting, they cleverly avoid anxiety-provoking intimacy.

The introverts among us also often look more poised and self-assured about their relationships than they really are. Since introverts tend to be reserved, it can be difficult to know what they’re really thinking or feeling. Sometimes this is because they’re careful who they share themselves with, but often it’s because they don’t share themselves with anybody. Their cool facade hides quaking insides that they would never dare to reveal. They, too, might have primarily superficial connections, and for the same reasons as the boisterous extrovert.

The truth is, everybody has anxiety around connecting. The reason is simple: connections are vital to a satisfying life. The higher the quality of your connections, the richer, happier, and more fulfilling your time on this planet will be. No one is exempt from this desire. Real connections are what we all want. We want to be seen and heard and understood for who we really are, and we want to experience the joy of validating another person in the same way. So it would make sense that there’s a lot at stake, and that we would have anxiety about it.

It’s actually about more than relationships, though. Connection is the main component of spirituality. Most often spirituality is characterized by having a relationship with a higher power of some sort, but it’s really just about understanding the connected nature of everybody and everything in the Universe. Knowing that we’re part of something greater than ourselves is essential to our sense of well-being. We yearn for it and move toward it instinctively, or feel there’s something terribly wrong with us if we don’t.

Thus, feeling connected is one of the most basic components of humanity, consciousness, and existence.

Why then, can it be so difficult to connect? Why is it so scary? Why can it feel like such a burden? The reasons are many and varied, from disappointment to a profound sense of inferiority, but they mostly have to do with anxiety, or more accurately, avoiding anxiety. And once again, our childhoods come into play. If you had a loving, supportive family, then your anxiety level around connecting is probably manageable. But if you grew up in an invalidating environment—one in which you weren’t appreciated for who you were, in whatever form that took, from disinterest to overt abuse—then your anxiety level around connecting is probably pretty high. The degree of anxiety is strongly related to the degree of invalidation you endured as a child. It’s only logical: if you felt valued as a child then you would feel confident about connecting, and if you felt un-valued as a child, then you would feel un-confident.

Your degree of anxiety may also have something to do with modeling. If the early relationships modeled to you were not very loving or contained an unequal balance of power, then of course you would have a default negative view of what connection means and what it demands of you. This is particularly true for females, who, in invalidating families, tend to be on the bottom end of power struggles and not learn effective ways to set boundaries and take care of themselves.

If you aren’t happy with the quality of the relationships and connections in your life, you have to ask yourself what’s going on. It might be as simple as being so busy in your own life that you don’t have time to devote to relationships, but that’s far more likely to be an excuse. You have to dig deeper than that. Are you afraid of people not living up to your expectations? (They never do, by the way.) Afraid you don’t know how to “be there” for someone? Afraid of exposure, of looking vulnerable or weak? Afraid of being swallowed up and losing yourself? Or is your sense of inferiority so big it holds you back from making the effort?

Whatever your issues, you should try to work through them, because living in an isolated but safe little box is not living at all. The work is not as difficult as you might think. The challenge is to put yourself out there, outcomes be damned. Accept that sometimes you will get hurt, laughed at, rejected, scorned, spurned, teased, tossed aside, tossed over, and used. Accept these as an inevitable part of life. You aren’t perfect, and neither is anybody else. The best we can do is move towards what we love and hope to meet some fellow travelers along the way. Sometimes these connections develop into something great, deep and lasting.

Usually, however, they don’t. Part of the wisdom we must strive to develop is about having low expectations. A wise woman once told me that a person could count herself lucky if she has one really close friend in a whole lifetime. And if you have more than one, then you are fortunate indeed. If you think you’re doing something wrong because you’re not surrounded by adoring, beautiful people as depicted on television, I have news for you: you’re not. Nor should that be the goal.

What is the goal then? Well, I think the goal is to be present with everyone to the best of our ability. Really listen to what a person is saying; really make an effort to understand how a person is feeling. This doesn’t mean we’ll always form satisfying long-term connections, but it does mean we’ve done our part so that it could happen.

So whether you are the boisterous extrovert or the reserved introvert, always remember your innate desire to connect and try to act accordingly; you’ll never be perfect at it as no one is, but in this case, it’s the effort that matters. Whatever your given nature, use it to build bridges, not walls. Start by learning to tolerate your own vulnerability. When you are able to risk throwing pieces of yourself out into the world, outcomes be damned, you will find the burden of connecting one you can carry with lightness and gratitude.

Have you ever received a well-deserved apology but for some reason felt worse afterwards? Maybe like you did something wrong or were undeserving of it in the first place? If you feel this way after an apology, then it’s likely you got a blanket apology, which is as meaningless as no apology at all, made worse by the fact that by all social contracts, we’re supposed to accept any apology simply because it is offered, no matter how crummy it feels.

A blanket apology is one in which a person says they’re sorry, but doesn’t really own their wrongdoing, so the sorry doesn’t feel sincere. Often, the sorry feels more like “I’m sorry you’re so oversensitive” or “I’m sorry I ever got hooked up with you,” and you end up feeling at fault or second-guessing yourself for wanting an apology in the first place. If an apology is of the blanket variety, you’ll feel more distant, not closer, to the person afterward; this is, of course, the exact opposite of what an apology is supposed to accomplish.

In the 2008 presidential campaign, there was a great example of a blanket apology from John McCain to David Letterman. McCain cancelled an appearance on Letterman’s show at the last minute, saying he had to rush back to Washington for an emergency session of Congress to deal with the financial crisis. Letterman later found out that McCain didn’t rush back to Washington at all; instead, he did an interview with another journalist, went to dinner, and stayed overnight in New York before leaving for Washington in the morning. Essentially, he ditched Letterman for what he thought was a better gig.

Letterman was incensed. For weeks, he attacked McCain on his show, building the drama and tension in that way he does so well. Finally, just a few days before the election, McCain came on the show to talk about what happened and presumably to apologize. His apology? “I screwed up.”

He said it laughingly, shrugging like a naughty little boy who didn’t take the whole thing very seriously. I thought it was disrespectful, and I was disappointed that Letterman seemed to accept it in stride and not challenge McCain for a deeper, more meaningful account of what had happened and why. But after Obama won the election, Letterman brought the incident up again briefly, saying, “That’s what happens when you mess with me” or something to that effect. Which I’d like to believe was his way of saying McCain’s offer of “I screwed up” wasn’t good enough and didn’t begin to address his bad behavior or how it affected the person on the other end of it.

Most often, blanket apologies come from family members or other people we’re close to. I’ve had this experience numerous times with my siblings, and once or twice with my parents, and it took me a long time to figure out why I felt so empty when I got what I’d wanted for so long. I just assumed there was something wrong with me. Was I still too resentful, or too distrusting, or too unwilling to believe this person was sincere?

I was none of those things. The truth was, the person wasn’t sincere, and the apology offered was a cursory one, with very little awareness about where I fit in to the picture or what the true purpose of the apology was. Usually these apologies came after I forced them into a corner, defending myself against attacks in a way they didn’t expect and weren’t used to dealing with (after a lot of personal development work on my part). If I hadn’t defended myself, the apologies would probably have never come at all, so I suppose it makes sense that they were given grudgingly, and without sincerity.

But that isn’t always the case. In another instance, a sober friend made an amends to me while doing her 9th Step that went as follows: She invited me to lunch and said, “I need to make an amends to you.” This came as a shock. I said, “What for?” She said, “I’ve judged you, and I’m sorry.” I said, “Judged me about what?” And she replied, “My sponsor said I don’t have to tell you that. Just that I’m sorry.” I tried a few more times to get her to tell me what she was talking about, but she refused. I left the lunch feeling empty and hurt, and it was the beginning of the end of our relationship; I found I just didn’t want to be around her anymore.

This time, the apologizer was acting on her own authority, but the apology was nevertheless empty and meaningless to the person she’d hurt (in fact, there was no hurt until the amends). I’ve often wondered since that day if the apology was actually meant to create distance between us, since she could not have devised a more effective way to do that. Once again, at the time I thought I’d done something wrong to expect an explanation, but I know now that without the willingness to discuss the issues involved, such an apology (or amends) isn’t going to serve the relationship’s well being whatsoever.

In all of these cases is the defining trait of the blanket apology: the apology was more for the apologizer than the apologizee. They were either forced by circumstances into giving an apology or did so without understanding the underlying purpose of an apology (or an amends), which is, essentially, to let the person know that they’re important and that you sincerely desire to have a good relationship with them. Usually, a person’s narcissism is behind a self-serving apology. They see themselves as a person big enough to apologize, but really aren’t, and this comes through loud and clear. We need only pay attention to it and decide accordingly how we want to deal with it.

If you get a blanket apology from someone, one that doesn’t really address the significant issue in a way meaningful to you, it doesn’t really count, and you don’t have to accept it. You can ask for more. You don’t have to be confrontational about it. You can politely say you want to understand clearly what the person is saying and ask for more information or details. If they’re sincere, they’ll take another run at it; sometimes people just aren’t good at these things. But if they’re not, they’ll get annoyed, blaming you or acting appalled at your lack of graciousness. Either way, you’ve taken care of yourself, and you’ve gotten a much more focused picture of what your relationship with the person is, and what direction it’s moving in.

When you apologize or make amends for some wrongdoing, it’s important to be specific and sincere. Own your part clearly and be as detailed as possible. Let the person know that your intentions are to improve your relationship and become closer. And if these aren’t your intentions, then don’t apologize. You haven’t worked through your feelings yet, and the apology won’t be sincere.

If you want to have good relationships with people, it’s important to have good apology skills. Don’t take the John McCain route. Give people your respect, and they’ll respond in kind.