Brave New Kitty

We spend much of our lives thinking we can’t do certain things, go certain places, afford certain items, or achieve certain goals. I am here to tell you, none of these are true. We all have the potential within us to have everything we want, be everything we want, and do everything we want. There is no wall.

I first heard this many years ago while listening to a tape someone gave me. It was Marianne Williamson speaking on A Course in Miracles. I didn’t believe it, and it actually made me a little angry. It seemed irresponsible to go around telling people that “there is no wall.” But today, I think I understand what she meant by this, and I believe that she was absolutely correct.

This isn’t to say that if you’re a middle-aged female you could become a pro basketball player. Obviously, physical limitations are real. But whatever your mind can conceive and believe, it can also achieve. Your potential is like a seed inside you, waiting to germinate. And when it does, you will be the perfect garden for it, for it is your potential and yours alone; nobody but you has this perfect “you” potential.

This is true for all of us.

I figured this out in the doing. I started slowly, chipping away at different areas of my self: I got sober (in itself a wall that seems utterly insurmountable when looking at it from the darkness of addiction) and finished college. Suddenly, I was doing work I never thought possible: I was writing for a living. I started meditating, and began to experience states of bliss, connectedness, and acute awareness like I had never known existed. I started working out, and I got fit and toned, something I’d never been able to make myself do before. I was doing things I’d always wanted to do. I was becoming the person I had always wanted to be, but had secretly believed wasn’t really possible. It was not only possible, I discovered, but it was, in many ways, effortless.

A little less than two years after I started writing for a living, I hung out my shingle and went into business for myself. Soon, I was working from home, making my own schedule, with more personal freedom than almost anyone else I knew (at least, among people who had to support themselves). I used to be someone who envied self-employed people, and now I was one. When I told people what I did, I often saw the same look I knew I’d once had: the look of wistful envy, belying their belief that such a thing was not possible for them.

It was around this time that I thought back to that Marianne Williamson tape, and realized it was true: there is no wall. One day during meditation, I had a profound, full body awareness that there is no wall because we are all—not just all living things, but everything—inexorably connected. What we think is a wall is really our own limiting belief system, which, given the chance, will always sell us short. It can’t help it; it’s the part of us that’s forgotten it’s True Nature, our ego, and it doesn’t know any better. It grew up inundated with messages of limitation, fallibility, and practicality, because that’s what all the other egos believe to be the truth. In the physical world, in a physical body, it’s the most logical belief system, that is, if you have not yet discovered any other planes of existence.

But you must not believe it. Believing it makes it real. If you start to believe something else, then that becomes real. I don’t mean this in the sense of magical thinking, that merely by believing something, it becomes real. I mean that, through the tough work of realizing that there is more to you than your body/mind, through meditation and introspection and vigilant self-awareness, you also realize that what you thought were obstacles really are not. Or, rather, that the obstacles are just another facet of yourself, to be understood, integrated, and eventually, transcended.

There is no wall. It’s really true. But don’t take my word for it. Do the experiment for yourself. If you are earnest in your efforts, you will soon know it to be the truth. And one day, you will look back on what you once thought were insurmountable walls, and you will chuckle. You will feel a profound sense of gratitude and lightness of being, and you will say a silent, reverent “thank you” to the Kosmos at large for being one of the lucky ones, even though it was all your own doing, and even though it was all there before you even got started.

Control isn’t always a bad thing. Some things you need to have control over: your finances, your health, your schedule, your career; in general, the rational and pragmatic aspects of your life. But when control extends to personal relationships and your own growth, problems can occur. This is not to say you are powerless over these areas. Certainly, you have the power to choose how you behave, with whom you develop relationships, what areas of growth to focus on, etc. However, if you try to force outcomes with relationships and personal growth, you are destined for disappointment. Doing so can only have negative results.

Personal growth, which includes romantic relationships, means to become more than you currently are, and trying to control that process with an ego that doesn’t understand it is akin to killing it. The ego wants to protect us, to control dangerous situations, to keep us from harm’s way. But it doesn’t understand what’s beyond it, so we must learn to discern what we need to protect ourselves from and what we don’t, and to override, when necessary, the ego’s natural tendency toward controlling unknown situations.

We all know the expression “taking the plunge.” It means, essentially, to embrace the unknown; to leap into adventure, to surrender yourself to forces beyond your control. Usually, it’s spoken of with exhilaration and excitement. When you plunge into a new adventure, whether it is a romantic relationship, undertaking a skill you’ve always wanted to learn, therapy, or anything else that stretches and redefines your identity, you are acting out of courage, in the spirit of growth, with willingness to let go of results and simply make yourself available to the universe for change to occur. It’s a brave thing to do.

Control is the opposite of taking the plunge. When you stay within the confines of what you can control, you make adventure impossible. With no adventure comes no growth. With no growth, life is safe, but it is also flat, empty, and dull. Control in this sense is the opposite of brave; it’s cowardly.

This is especially true for personal relationships. If you try to force people to do as you want them to, the outcome is disastrous. All the wonderful rewards of a loving relationship—caring, tenderness, respect, spontaneity—are impossible to achieve in a controlled environment. Your loved ones might do what you want, but what do you gain? There is an impenetrable wall there, a wall of expectations and obligations, that can come down only by relaxing your grip and letting people do as they please. The corny old cliché “If you love something set it free” is really true. Not only is it true, it’s essential, if you really want love to blossom into its full potential.

Wanting to control the outcome of scary adventures is understandable. Nobody enjoys feeling vulnerable and afraid, at least not outside of movies theaters, amusement parks and the like. But the more we let fear guide and control our lives, the more we are shutting ourselves off from opportunities to reach our highest potential. It is not possible to approach adventures without fear. The goal is not to eradicate fear from our lives, or to wait for it to pass. Rather, the goal is to accept the fear, embrace it and honor it, listen to it and love it, and do what we want anyway. An amazing thing starts to happen when we stay present with our fear and do what we want anyway: we become confident. And this happens whether or not we get the outcome we wanted, because we learn that, even more amazingly, the outcome is not important; it’s going through the process that matters. And this is true no matter how badly you want something to work out a certain way. Getting what you want is not transformative; staying with the process is.

You must be willing to be scared in order to grow; you must be willing to accept any outcome if you want to achieve your higher potential, and you must understand that trying to control your fear of the unknown is only going to hinder your ability to move past it. Armed with this knowledge, and the willingness to act on it, there is very little you can’t achieve.

“I’m the best compared to nobody” is a totally shame-free attitude. This means you live by your own standards of what’s important, your own chosen values. What other people are doing is fine, but it doesn’t really have any effect on your choices. You care about what those close to you think, but it doesn’t alter your fundamental sense of who you are. It sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

To explain what I mean by “shame-free,” I first have to talk about shame. Shame is the belief that you’re inherently flawed and somehow bad in a way that other people aren’t. It is not an emotion, like guilt, that can serve a useful purpose in letting you know when you’re out of line. Shame is a belief system, and it is a devastatingly inaccurate one. No one is inherently flawed or bad; that just isn’t how the universe works. Yet shame tells us we are.

People who grow up in invalidating environments tend to be shameful adults. An invalidating environment is one in which a child’s emotional needs go largely unmet. I don’t like the term abuse because that implies a specific type of treatment such as verbal, physical, or sexual assaults. While these are certainly invalidating in the most extreme way, they are not the only ways to invalidate. This is a very important idea. I often hear people say some version of “my childhood was fine and my parents were great” when it’s obvious that they’re struggling with deeply-rooted, unresolved issues. People think if there wasn’t overt abuse, they had good parenting. The truth is, children need lots of attention and support and encouragement to grow into shame-free, emotionally healthy adults. Most parents are simply not able to give children enough of these things, often because they didn’t get enough of them themselves as children and are unaware that a problem exists. These are not bad people, and my intent is not to accuse the world at large of bad parenting. It’s just a sad fact of life that most of us grow up without adequate emotional support, and if we want to become fully functioning adults, we have to deal with this difficult truth.

Not meeting his emotional needs sends a message to a child that he isn’t important. The child, lacking skills to objectively examine this message, tends to accept it and believe he is not important. This is how shame is born. The more this happens, the more we tend to believe we lack worth and must be flawed in some major way. As with other skills in our toolbox, shame is a survival mechanism. It allows us to accept the unacceptable. Without the shame mechanism, children would have no way to deal with their unmet needs, and shame thus becomes an internalized belief system. Unfortunately, when it’s no longer needed, it’s very hard to break free of. The grief and negative self-image that must be acknowledged in order to do so is often too overwhelming. It’s an understandable defense mechanism, but one that hinders emotional growth greatly.

How does comparison function as a manifestation of shame? When we are “in our shame,” i.e., feeling inferior and flawed, we compare ourselves to others. We’ve created a hierarchy in our minds to constantly remind ourselves of our place in the world. We see others’ success (more accurately, their perceived success), as a way to affirm our lower standing and inherent badness. Regardless of what we’re comparing—our bodies, our looks, our incomes, our popularity, our abilities—we always fall short. Unless, that is, we compare with the specific intention of feeling superior, which is the flip side of this hierarchy. Some friends of mine used to play a game called, “I’m glad I’m not that guy.” It’s pretty much what it sounds like. When they would see other men—they’re both men—who looked hard up or miserable, they’d point or nod and say, “I’m glad I’m not that guy,” then have a good laugh. It could be anybody: a homeless street person, a man with an overweight wife, someone in a wheelchair, etc. The point was to compare themselves with someone to whom they clearly felt superior; the unconscious motivation was to alleviate their shame.

My mother had a version of this game too. I remember many occasions when she compared herself or me to a stranger she was observing: “My butt isn’t as big as hers” or “You’re a lot prettier than that little girl.” Needless to say, I grew up with a lot of shame issues about my body and believed that self-worth was inexorably tied to one’s personal appearance.

Whether your intent is to affirm your lower or your superior standing in the hierarchy, you are acting out of shame when you do this. The need to compare yourself indicates a self-image based on external standards rather than internal values. Furthermore, the external standards don’t really exist; they are an interpretation based on the faulty belief system that there is a scale by which all people must be measured. Hierarchies do exist, and it is important to acknowledge and understand them. For example, there are physical hierarchies (atoms-molecules-cells-organisms), organizational hierarchies (private-corporal-lieutenant-captain-general), and value hierarchies (goodness and love are better than contempt and hatred). But there is no hierarchy for inherent worth. We are all valuable, we all have inherent worth, we are all creative beings with infinite potential. True, some of us are more actualized than others. But this is not about having more inherent worth. Ironically, shame, the very thing that causes us to compare ourselves with others, is also the thing that holds us back from reaching high levels of achievement. When we’re too focused on our standing (i.e., external standards), we lose sight of what’s really important: figuring out who we really are and what we really want.

There are many other manifestations of shame besides comparison (rage, perfectionism, and control, to name a few), but comparison to others in a self-worth hierarchy is a clear indication of shame issues. If you find yourself doing this, consider exploring shame further. Left unresolved, shame makes for a stagnant existence, one that never really gets out of first gear. It’s essential to educate yourself and get help—exposing shame to safe people is the most expeditious way to break free of it.

For further reading, I recommend two wonderful books: Shame: The Power of Caring by Gershen Kaufman, and Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw. These books take very different approaches to the topic, the former being an academic study and the latter being a self-help approach, but both quite good reading on the topic of shame.

“I’m the best compared to nobody” is a freeing, exhilarating, energizing, empowering place to be, recognizing your inherent value while respecting everyone else’s. It’s well worth all the work that might be necessary to get there.

There is a tremendous difference between accepting an apology and truly forgiving somebody. It’s like the difference between a map and the territory the map covers. If you accept an apology but feel hollow about it, you still have unresolved issues, and you have not truly forgiven. Not because you’re a bad person (as we are brought up to think), but because it is not possible to truly forgive when an issue remains unresolved.

The truth is, when someone hurts us, we stay angry until we deal with it. Again, not because we’re bad people. Anger is a natural, normal, healthy response to getting hurt. It’s the emotional equivalent of self-defense. This is why children who grow up with abuse become angry adults (or have its disowned equivalent, hostility): it’s the normal, correct response to being treated badly. That this anger can be unhealthy and cause a lot of problems is a given; nevertheless, it’s rooted in the innate impulse to care for one’s self.

Whatever the situation, we need to acknowledge this anger and pay attention to it, because what it’s trying to tell us is important: something is unresolved, and we have some work to do. There is no need to have a judgment about your anger; it’s merely a signal that something needs to be addressed. (Which, incidentally, is the purpose of all of our emotions. John Bradshaw defined emotions as “tools to know when we’re fulfilling our needs.”) Sometimes, acknowledging anger can be difficult; you may not identify your hurt feelings as anger, or you may not wish to see yourself as being angry. If you don’t want to call it anger, that’s okay, but if you have unresolved issues with someone you’re close to, or used to be close to, you have some work to do if you want to be at peace about it.

The nature of that work depends on the nature of the hurt. If it’s a small hurt, the work needed is small; maybe just acknowledging that it’s not quite done for you yet is enough to finish it. If the hurt is big, however, the work will probably be big. You may have to think hard about what you’re resentful of, because it’s not always clear. You may want to journal about it, meditate about it, or talk it through with a third party. In some cases, as with an abused child, it may take years of work to see it through to the end. By “end,” I mean that it feels finished for you. You’re at peace with the situation, you have no more unresolved feelings, you’ve rid yourself of the festering wound, and are able to move on in every sense. You do not tolerate intolerable treatment, or pretend that the hurt never happened (doing so would just put you back in a bad situation and exonerate the person of accountability), but you also have only good will for the person who hurt you. This is true forgiveness.

Notice that in all the things I mentioned, I didn’t say you needed to confront—or even talk to—the person who hurt you. Forgiveness is an internal process, and, although necessary for good relationships, it’s something we do for ourselves because we want to feel free and not be mired in hindrances to our growth. If forgiveness depended on another person’s reaction, we’d be in big trouble. What if they’ve died, or are otherwise unreachable? That would mean the issue is unresolvable. Clearly, that is not the case, and therefore, forgiveness is an inside job, having nothing to do with a person’s response to our desire to forgive him.

You may want to confront a person, and that’s fine, but it isn’t about forgiveness. You may just want to be heard, or let the person know how much he’s hurt you. But be careful not to include such confrontations in the forgiveness process, because they have nothing to do with it. You may think it will help you move on, and it may, but it’s more likely to hinder than help. In the case of long-standing resentments and big hurts, such as those of an abused child, you are not likely to get what you want from the person, and are quite likely to end up feeling worse. So if you want to confront somebody about hurting you, think long and hard about your motives, and keep them separate from your forgiveness work.

Of course, you have people in your life who are willing to hear you and willing to work through issues with you. By all means, if you’ve been hurt or are harboring a resentment against someone in this category, talk about it! Being honest and straightforward about uncomfortable emotions is a wonderful way to increase intimacy. It can be scary to tell someone you’re angry or feel hurt, but if you want a close relationship, it’s absolutely essential. If the person has a negative reaction to such information, and you haven’t been blaming or accusative, then you may question how close you really want to be. Either way, honest sharing of feelings is a win-win: you increase intimacy, or you discover you don’t want to.

So you begin to see how true forgiveness is an amazing process, requiring high levels of personal awareness, maturity, willingness, and effort. Even more amazing is the transformative nature of the forgiveness process. Once you’ve gone through it, you tend to see the entire human race in a more compassionate light, and also to be more circumspect about your own feelings, desires, and motives. These elements make forgiveness an advanced spiritual principle. In fact, Jesus’ dying on the cross is a metaphor for forgiveness; for how excruciating the process is, for how crucial it is, and for how it transforms us, not into martyrs, but into gods. For the process of forgiveness is the process of moving toward the god in our Self and recognizing our own true spiritual nature.

It sounds like a paradox: if you want to grow, you must accept yourself unconditionally. But it isn’t a paradox. It’s a fundamental spiritual principle that makes perfect sense, if you just take a few minutes to reason it through.

First of all, let’s shed the idea that there is a contradiction between self-acceptance and the desire to grow. There is no contradiction whatsoever. If you think there is, you have self-acceptance confused with complacency. Complacency is the lack of desire to grow. Self-acceptance simply means that you accept all aspects of yourself, including those you’re happy with, those you want to change, those critical about wanting to change, etc. You accept all the messy parts of yourself, you accept the complex, often contradictory nature of these parts, and you accept the way you struggle internally to juggle them all. When you start to see your internal world as the giant megaplex that it is, you can see how simplistic it is to view self-acceptance as opposing growth. You may even begin to see how self-acceptance is essential, giving us energy and courage to sift through it all, whether we like what we’re seeing or not.

Following are some principles of self-acceptance that helped me overcome my tendency to be hard on myself. This is by no means an exhaustive list; in fact, if you’re hard on yourself, you need to educate yourself thoroughly and create a plan of action to leave that harshness behind. And you must do it before you do anything else, because your growth depends on it! But first you must believe it’s the right thing to do, so you can commit the proper energy and devotion to the process. If nothing else, I hope this essay helps you with that.

1. Accept yourself like you would accept a good friend. You accept all the parts of yourself simply because they’re part of who you are, just like you accept your friends, even though they may have some traits you don’t like very much. You would never think of ending a friendship with someone you care about just because you thought she needed to change a few things, would you? Well, you must extend yourself that same courtesy. Cherish the good parts, accept the bad, and embrace all of it as uniquely you, just as you do your friend.
2. See your “bad” traits in a positive light. Our “bad” traits are what Sheldon Kopp called “potential vitality in need of transformation.” Actually, he said this about evil, but bad traits qualify, too. Every negative trait we have has something to teach us. Usually, it’s some shadow aspect of ourselves and often, the aspect isn’t even a negative; it’s a disowned positive trait we merely experience as a negative. And even if it is a trait we’re not proud of (for example, we’re fearful and discover we’re really angry), it’s still a positive, because our traits are merely attempts at self-care. Only when we’ve taken full stock of them can we get down to the real work. If we deny they’re there, that work can’t happen. The point is, what we think is bad will turn out to be either 1) a disowned positive trait, or 2) an attempt at self-care that turned out to be not so helpful, but only bad in the sense that we didn’t know how to take better care of ourselves. And this is true all the way down the line, no matter how awful or embarrassing the trait may be.
3. Stop judging yourself. Once we learn to see our “bad” traits as adaptations to our circumstances, and the best we were able to do at the time we developed them, we can let go of judgment about them. Judging traits we don’t like about ourselves is like judging a third grader because he can’t solve algebra problems. You simply haven’t learned better tools yet. If you learn to be an impartial observer of yourself, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained. This may sound impossible, but it’s actually fairly simple. When you do something you don’t like, instead of beating yourself up with negative self-talk (“I’m such an idiot!” “I’m so stupid!”), be curious about it. Consciously stop the negative self-talk. Instead, ask yourself, with kindness, “Now, why would I do that?” And listen for the answer. Learn to be a non-judgmental observer of your own behavior, and the payoff will be waterfalls of self-awareness and growth cascading down on you.
4. Allow yourself the luxury of failure. This is perhaps the most important reason of all why self-acceptance is essential for personal growth. Personal growth is a creative endeavor; creating a life worth living is perhaps the most creative endeavor of all. And in order to be creative, you must feel free to fail. Creative energy is terribly hindered by criticism and judgment. If you’re hard on yourself, too focused on performance, or too worried about outcomes, you will not feel free to fail. And if you do not feel free to fail, your creativity will be squelched. And if your creativity is squelched, you’ll be stuck, too fearful to face and deal with your demons or your desires. So, by giving yourself permission to fail, you give yourself the best chance you’ve got at creating the life you want.

Finally, a word of caution. Self-acceptance is an essential trait for growth and creativity, something you must work at and cultivate, but do not confuse it with self-indulgence. Accepting yourself unconditionally doesn’t mean you get to do or say whatever you want, and other people be damned. In fact, it is quite the opposite. If you do or say something hurtful, you must do your best to amend the situation. You can’t feel good about yourself if you don’t. If, as you travel the path of personal growth, you find yourself less tolerant and less kind, you are not practicing self-acceptance; you are practicing unbridled narcissism. Be aware of this; narcissism is taught in many a therapist’s office, and while it may feel good to “speak your mind” to people, if it’s not connected to a deeper awareness about your self, your well-being, and your spiritual journey, then such assertiveness is largely meaningless.

And herein lies the crux of the matter. If you are traveling a spiritual path, self-acceptance becomes inevitable. When you begin to view yourself and the world from a spiritual standpoint, you become unable to see anything, including yourself, as not being exactly as it should be in every moment. And if there is a paradox, it is this: that, as perfect as this moment and everything in it is, you must still strive toward more wholeness, more perfection, and more union with Spirit. If that doesn’t make sense to you, stick around; it will.

Is there something you want to change about yourself but are continually stymied in doing so? For example, 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. I knew I was right.

“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 I could almost hear the gears grinding on the other end of the phone. “Oh my god,” she said. “You’re so right.”

I later realized I’d inadvertently voiced 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 more clearly
• 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 More Clearly
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 haven’t been honest with yourself. The truth is that you want to smoke more than you want to quit. Period. 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. It is perhaps our most powerful tool for personal change.

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 (it’s simplistic, but it illustrates the principle–which can be applied to any such struggle in your life–very well). 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 point is, you’ve chosen honesty over dishonesty, and honesty—in any form—is a higher level of development than dishonesty. You have moved forward, empowered yourself, and brought yourself that much closer to total fulfillment in every way. It’s not just about the issue at hand, although you now have the means to do something about it; it’s about your entire worldview.

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. It’s called denial, and its draw can be very powerful.

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 an advanced 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 and personal power 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. Your personal growth depends on it.