Brave New Kitty

I recently found a blog that I really, really like called Happiness in This World. The author, Dr. Alex Lickerman, writes about complex subjects with keen perception and a gentleness that I can only strive for. A few weeks back, he posted an article called “The True Cause of Cruelty,” which he describes thusly:

It’s called the spirit of abstraction, a term originally coined by Gabriel Marcel in his essay “The Spirit of Abstraction as a Factor Making for War,” and is defined as the practice of conceiving of people as functions rather than as human beings. 

I agree with this idea one thousand percent. When people see others as less human than themselves, almost any form of cruelty, from taunting to enslavement to genocide, is possible. What I find most interesting though, is that only in retrospect are we able to understand this. That is, the inability to take “the other” into account is a function of our level of moral and psychological development. This is why children can be so cruel; they haven’t yet developed empathy. Depending on their upbringing and several other factors, some of them never will.

This is fairly easy to establish by looking at developmental psychology. Piaget theorizes that it is not until what he calls the formal operational stage, age 11-15, that children begin to understand abstract concepts such as love and values. Prior to this stage, they are unable to perceive that other people have the same feelings as they do. Even more interesting are Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. His theory holds that “moral reasoning, the basis for ethical behavior, has…identifiable developmental stages, each more adequate at responding to moral dilemmas than its predecessor” (same link). Kohlberg outlined three main stages of moral development: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. In the pre-conventional stage, a person’s main concern is narcissistic self-interest: How can I avoid punishment? What’s in it for me? There is no thought of the person on the other end of that self-interest. In the conventional stage, a person’s main concern is fitting in, social norms, and gaining approval, with no thought (other than perhaps contempt) of groups beyond his own. It is not until the post-conventional stage that a person develops “universal ethical principles,” which make transcendence of “the spirit of abstraction” possible.

(I want to note here that these are scientific theories of the human development vector, not criticisms of people or personality types. The point is more understanding of and empathy for the spectrum of human behavior, not less.)

Kohlberg’s stages were based on Piaget’s work with children, but—and this is the fascinating part—he applied them to adults. His work indicates that people can reach adulthood without ever becoming post-conventional; some don’t even reach conventional. Here are some examples. Pre-conventional morality includes childhood cruelty (of course), street gangs, and Nazi doctors. Conventional morality abounds, as it is the most commonly attained level of development (thus explaining, perhaps, the amount of violence and cruelty still seen in the world): fundamental religion, nationalism, and generally placing a high value on fitting in and gaining approval. Post-conventional morality includes human rights, capitalism, global justice, atheism, and mysticism.

Certain conventional norms are important because without them, societies would cease to function almost immediately: paying bills and following traffic laws, for example. But when fitting in is a primary concern, empathy takes a back seat to affiliations, and you end up with some very closed-minded belief systems. An American at the conventional level of morality is likely to believe, for example, that American lives are more valuable than Iraqi lives. A fundamentalist Christian is likely to believe that non-Christians are going to burn in hell for eternity, setting the stage for all sorts of demonizing of the other. Despite its necessity for a functioning society, the conventional level is where true believerism is most likely to occur.

Post-conventional morality includes but transcends conventional morality, which includes but transcends pre-conventional morality. Human development is a vector, and all the research indicates that stages can’t be skipped, just as an acorn can’t become a tree without first becoming a sapling. So all people have moments of cruelty, and all people have blind spots to contend with (nobody is ever done growing), but if you’ve reached post-conventional, then your center of gravity is such that it allows you to mostly transcend your baser impulses (and take responsibility when you don’t).

I hope by now I’ve made the case that development is hierarchical, and that “universal ethical principles” constitute a higher level of development than “the spirit of abstraction.” If you agree with this, then it becomes a simple case of doing the math: the higher the level of development, the fewer the number of people who will reach it. This is true whether you are talking about annual earnings, education, physical condition, or ethical principles.

The spirit of abstraction is, almost by definition, a function of pre-conventional and conventional morality. This is why I say that we can only understand the spirit of abstraction in retrospect, once we’ve moved beyond it. Those that are still stuck there are quite literally unable to view things differently. Expecting them to do so is like expecting a kindergartner to solve differential calculus equations.

And herein lies the problem.

As evidenced by the commenters on Alex’s post, it is generally people who’ve reached the post-conventional stage who are interested in reading about post-conventional topics like cruelty and its causes (and most of the other things Alex, and I, write about). But it is those at the pre-conventional and conventional levels who most need to understand these concepts because they are the ones most capable of cruelty (for example), especially cruelty on a large scale! If the world is to become a kinder, gentler place, it is they who must hear the message of post-conventional morality, they who must come to embrace post-conventional values. But how, when their level of development prevents them from caring? If you’re interested in basketball, you aren’t going to suddenly look up horse racing.

Just getting people curious about different values might be a beginning. But that alone is an incredibly difficult dilemma because the very nature of such shortsightedness makes a person uncurious. People in industrialized countries like the US have every opportunity to learn post-conventional values, but even here less than half the population reaches this level. Ignorance might not be bliss, but in most cases, it also doesn’t pave the way for illumination.

How great would it be if the people who really needed to understand the meaning of “universal ethical principles” cared enough to find out? This does happen, but nobody really understands the mechanism. It seems to be a spontaneous, mysterious blend of life experience and an “aha” moment that can’t be quantified, much less duplicated: some have such a moment and transcend, some have it and dig deeper into their existing beliefs. And there is no real understanding of why.

I don’t have an answer, but I know the solution lies in making the cruel-minded somehow interested in becoming less cruel; in getting uncurious people to become curious about their beliefs; in gently urging settled people away from their comfort zone. And this extends to people at all levels, because development seems to be infinite, with no limitations of breadth, depth, or scope. We are all capable of continuous growth and improvement. What most puzzles me is, why isn’t everybody interested in this growth? Because, really, what could possibly be a greater adventure?

I don’t have the answers, and I don’t think anybody else does, either—yet. But I know if and we find them, then wow: the world truly will become a kinder, gentler place.

Years ago, I was at an AA meeting where a guy was going on and on about how perfect his life was now that he was sober. His wife was perfect, his job was perfect, his friends were perfect, god was smiling down on him in every way. From my dark funk of emotional pain, which started in year two of my sobriety and didn’t ease until year eight or so, I said to him, “This too shall pass.” I got a couple of dry snickers from the old timers who knew what I was talking about, a few blank looks from the new timers who didn’t, and a slew of angry criticism from the fellow who was sharing, which I probably deserved.

I didn’t need to rain on his parade like that, and to this day I feel bad about it. People don’t get to AA because things are going well in their lives. They get there because they run out of other options. So when they experience that sense of euphoria that comes from maintaining a period of sobriety after years of not being able to get through a day without a buzz, well, they’re entitled to enjoy it a little. After all, if they’re earnest about their personal growth, it might be all they’ll get for awhile.

This is because there’s a real paradox in personal growth. The search almost always starts out with wanting to feel better, but the impulse to feel better won’t get us where we want to go. In fact, it will hold us back, because if we’re too concerned about it, we’ll avoid some of the necessary work. So eventually, if we want to continue growing, we have to find more sophisticated motivations than wanting to feel better.

Like most on this journey, I figured this out the hard way. I spent my teens and twenties frantically trying to feel better, chasing higher highs and distracting myself with chaotic relationships. When all that went nowhere, I got sober. This felt much better for a while. Long enough, thank god, to put together a new set of tools to deal with my emotional pain. When the bad feelings inevitably started to surface, I talked them through with my therapist, went to meetings, worked my Steps, called my sponsor. All of this helped, but the feelings didn’t go away. I’d get through one layer only to find another one underneath, and another, and another. I remember thinking, “this is why I got high in the first place, to not feel these feelings.” And, “I can understand now why people relapse. I can understand why people commit suicide.” I didn’t seriously contemplate either of these options, but the darkness was so awful, and the urge to feel better was so powerful, I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I decided to go on antidepressants.

I hated them. After about two months, I wasn’t feeling any better, and the side effects were awful. When I went to the psychiatrist for my second appointment, he told me all of this was normal and wrote me out another prescription. The next day, when I went to take the pill, something in me just couldn’t do it. I felt like I was lifting a bottle to my lips. A voice inside me said, you need to feel those feelings, not run away from them. I put the pills away. Somehow I intuited that if I wanted to get past those feelings—all the grief, shame, and rage boiling inside me—I had to endure them. I had to let them come to the surface until they stopped coming. Much as I dreaded the prospect, I knew it was my only real option.

I think I discovered a great truth that day: Facing emotional pain is the only real way to feel better.

One popular criticism hurled at 12 Step groups is that they’re “just another crutch.” While this may sometimes be true, I think it says more about human nature than it does about the 12 Steps. Unless we’re facing what’s inside of us to face, everything has the potential to be “just another crutch.” Wanting to feel better is a base impulse, probably all tied up with the survival instinct. Like other base impulses, it takes effort and awareness to transcend. All paths can lead to truth or further deception, liberation or chains; it’s all in a person’s attitude.

Here’s the question to ask yourself: Do I want to feel better no matter what, or do I want to truly heal? If you want to heal, then, like an operation to remove a tumor, there will be some pain involved. If you don’t accept this, you will spend your life chasing distractions and temporary fixes, seeking a comfort that doesn’t exist. You may remain an addict or relapse into addiction; you may become a true believer in anything that provides a soothing distraction; or you may change all the surfaces of your life yet still feel dark and empty inside. If you have deep reserves of residual grief and pain—which all of us do, in varying degrees—then your only choices are to face them honestly, or distract yourself from doing so.

More than that, succumbing to the urge to feel better is a never-ending cycle. Even if you work through your residual emotional pain, there will always be something new to feel sad about, to feel anxious about, to be afraid of. Thus, transcending the impulse to feel better seems to be the best way to live peacefully with the chaos, uncertainty, and anxiety called life. There are no easy answers and no easy ways out. Truth, sought earnestly, is ultimately the only real analgesic.

Transcending the impulse to feel better no matter what is hard. I think I got lucky in having the awareness I did, when I did. I could have gone on indefinitely avoiding my emotional pain. Many, many, many people do. It’s an alluring prospect, to say the least, one of the easiest imaginable places to stay stuck. After all, what could possibly be wrong with wanting to feel better? Absolutely nothing, unless we have to distract ourselves—from truth, from uncomfortable feelings, from messy, complex issues that we’d rather not deal with but will keep us stuck if we don’t—in order to do so.

Not too long ago, I ran into that fellow from the AA meeting in a local card room. He wasn’t angry at me anymore; he also wasn’t feeling so on top of the world as he had been the last time I’d seen him. I could see in his eyes, his closed off body language, his sense of resignation, that sure enough, he’d hit some hard times. I was so happy to see this, not because it meant I was right, but because it meant that he’d stayed the course long enough to find his way into his pain, and that he was dealing with it honestly even though he wasn’t happy about it. Without exchanging a single word about that day in the meeting, I knew he remembered, I knew he understood now what I’d been talking about, and I knew that, even though I’d been a bit out of line that day, I’d helped him persevere when the bad stuff started surfacing. I knew he got it: that truth is ultimately the only thing that can make you feel better.

And once you figure that out, there’s no limit to how good you can feel.

Just one more thought about envy, and then I’ll be done with it.
One really great thing about 12 Step meetings is the emphasis placed on gratitude. Feeling sorry for yourself? Make a gratitude list. Feeling resentful about something? Make a gratitude list. Miss out on something you really wanted? Make a gratitude list. Feeling hopeless and depressed, like giving up? Make a gratitude list. In other words, when things aren’t going how you want them to go, focus on what you do have instead of what you don’t. It’s the fastest way out of that dark place and back into a positive state of mind.

It really works. And it occurred to me that gratitude is the opposite of envy.

I dislike the concept of gratitude as practiced in most 12 Step meetings, though, because it implies an object; that there is some Cosmic Being to whom I’m supposed to be grateful, which is just silly. I can’t get behind the idea that a cosmic parental figure guides the slings and arrows of my life while letting infants die of starvation on other continents (for example). So I want to be clear that by gratitude, I do not mean thanks to a higher power.

I also don’t mean that gratitude should be directed solely at myself, that I’ve done it all on my own power, because that’s just as delusional. Nor is it about karma, or some other straw the human ego grasps at in its desire to believe in cosmic justice. However we get where we do in life is, I think, a complex mix of fate and determinism, perhaps beyond our ability to ever fully comprehend. (But well worth pondering!) What I do matters, but so do a lot of other factors.

Gratitude, then, is a general attitude of thanks directed at no one and nothing in particular. Now that I’ve got that clear, how does it relate to envy?

Well, when you focus on the things you have rather than the things you don’t have, envy is not possible. Gratitude is like a balloon that fills your mind and heart. Once you get into that buoyant place, that “attitude of gratitude,” there is no room for negativity. Envy just vaporizes away, as do other negative emotions that plague a bothered mind.

In a very real sense, gratitude is the foundation for a healthy relationship with life in general, with the universe at large. From it flows all other positive emotions: hope, generosity, forgiveness, love. Here’s why: forgiveness is hard. Hope is hard. Even love—the unselfish, brotherly kind—can be hard. But gratitude is easy. Just focus on what’s good in your life, and all those other positive emotions have soil in which to flower.

And there is a lot to focus on that is good. Here are some things I’m grateful for: My health. My writing. The roof over my head. My friends. My relationship. My mind. My functioning body. All the material possessions that make life comfortable. Good food. Good music. Good movies. Good smells. Art. Rain. Nature. Poker. Humor. Sleep. How far I’ve come. How willing I am to go further. The people who’ve helped me along my path (in every capacity). The people I’ve helped. I even feel grateful for adversities, because they’ve made me stronger, smarter, more aware. This includes my upbringing, which was so instrumental in the good qualities I have, like my sensitivity, my earnestness, and my desire to seek truth and be the best person I can be. I have so many things to be grateful for, I can’t name them all. It would be like trying to count all the hairs on my head. Maybe it isn’t all exactly what I want, but the gratitude is real nevertheless. Otherwise, I stay in a small, dark world of negatives instead of the bright, abundant world of infinite possibility.

I haven’t had to deal with terrible misfortune in my life yet (and I’m grateful for that, too), so I can’t speak from experience, but I believe it’s possible to feel gratitude even in the most awful situations. I’ve seen people who do, and it is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever witnessed. The book Grace and Grit is about a woman in her 30’s who achieves self-actualization through her struggle with terminal cancer. So not only is it possible to be grateful through life’s most painful experiences, it is an opportunity we will all eventually have, in one way or another. And this is why I say that gratitude is the best possible outlook. It will prepare you for anything, or at least allow you to make a healthy adjustment to anything life throws at you.

It’s so simple, it’s hard to believe how powerful it is. But gratitude is really one of the easiest ways to find your way into a positive attitude. It allows you to be happy for other people’s success and good fortune, and even to experience it, oddly enough, as somehow your own. In this way, gratitude brings us closer to our True Nature, to that sense of oneness and connectedness that underlies everything.

Which is the closest to cosmic justice we’re probably ever going to get.  

Here’s another thing about envy. As I said, envy is not restricted to those of us who had an invalidating childhood, but there is one aspect of such a childhood which, I suspect, really tweaks the envy up for us: the constant presence of the lose/lose mentality.
Whenever anything went wrong in my family, my parents’ first reaction was never to solve the problem, unless that reaction was necessitated by emergency. No, in my family, the first reaction was always to figure out whose fault it was so they could place blame accordingly. Fault had to be owned. Mistakes had to be punished. On the rare occasions that the blame landed so squarely on my father that he couldn’t figure out a way to scapegoat somebody else, the issue was simply not discussed anymore. These were some of the few times yelling was replaced by silence, a silence the rest of us enjoyed very much, and not just for its own sake.

Conversely, whenever something went right, the agency for it was rarely acknowledged. Or if it was, it was done so in a backhanded way, as if the right-doing were purely accidental, a blip in the natural order of things, and we would soon be back to our mistake-making ways.

The point being, there was no way to win in my family, and every way to lose.

When I was first thinking about this, I was going to write about the win/lose bind in my family; that if somebody won, somebody else had to lose. But it was really lose/lose, because even when you “won,” it usually meant little more than the absence of punishment. You could think of my father as being the chronic “winner” of the family as he had all the power, but he was so miserable most of the time, I can’t really see his position as a winner. He viewed life as one big grind, the only respite from which was alcohol-induced oblivion. No winning view there.

So really, it was lose/lose.

In this environment, a child is going to learn to envy. Success, achievement, and happiness are going to be foreign, mysterious, intimidating entities. That’s how it was for me and my sisters, anyway. Not only did we have no clue how to attain them, we were shamed for trying. So when we saw other girls with things we wanted, we defaulted to the lowest-common-denominator reaction: envy. We had to; it was all we knew. We compared, we fell short, and, not having the tools to think about it differently, we were stuck there.

It’s been an uphill climb ever since to think differently about envy and success. I doubt if my parents intended this—in the crudest of ways, they were doing the best they could, and I think my father just wanted to prepare us for the unavoidable disappointment that life was going to bring—but that’s pretty much how it turned out. I have to make a conscious effort to think differently now about success and achievement, to not compare and fall short, to not feel powerless about success, and to be happy—not envious—for other people when they get something they want, especially if it’s something I want for myself.

This last one, being happy for people who get things I want, has probably been hardest for me. (Man, is that painful to admit!) I still tend to default to scarcity, to believing that if other people win, then I must lose. That if other people are successful, there’s less success to go around.

Intellectually, I know the exact opposite is true. I know that other people’s success is good for me. Success, achievement, and happiness raise the positive energy of the planet and therefore I benefit, as does everyone else. Success is like love: infinite. The more there is, the more there is available. It may not appear that way, particularly if somebody gets a specific thing I wanted (a job promotion, for example). But the principle that positive energy breeds more positive energy, that prosperity results in more prosperity, that the pie just keeps getting bigger, I believe is a metaphysical truth. I’ve experienced the sense of true abundance, and there is no doubt in my mind that this is the case.

I just have a hard time living there on a regular basis. I haven’t finished that eighteen-inch journey yet.

I don’t mean to get all new age here, but I think an attitude of generosity is critical to personal development. Indulging in envy closes us off from positive energy, makes us unavailable to the good stuff that’s out there, isolates us in a dark world of scarcity and shame. And that is one tragic way to go through life.

The goal is not to eradicate envy, as that is not possible (at least not for me). Rather, the goal is to not give it a lot of power. To transcend it, if you will. Because not only is it possible for envy to co-exist with generosity and happiness, it is an inevitable aspect of any person who strives to better herself. Being simultaneously envious of and happy for other people’s success and accepting that about oneself is, I think, an indication of a mature, realistic outlook on life.

Also, a truly win/win outlook. Good for you, good for them, good for the planet. I don’t live there yet, but I’m tryin’.

Philosophers and ploughmen, each must know his part, to sow a new mentality closer to the heart—Rush

You don’t need to hail from an invalidating childhood to experience envy. But it can’t help, either. My parents constantly compared themselves and their kids to other people. “You’re smarter than so-and so,” “You’re prettier than so-and-so,” “I’m not as heavy as she is,” “I don’t drink anywhere near as much as that guy,” and so on. Such comparisons were tattooed on my brain. I didn’t learn until years later, in therapy, that this is a symptom of shame. My parents did this because they felt so inferior to, so inherently less-than, other people—the result of their own invalidating childhoods. Inferiority, and therefore envy, was probably part of my default outlook before I could speak. So while I think envy is part of the human condition, it’s tweaked up a notch or two for those of us who didn’t get the most supportive start in life.
I struggle with envy. I wish I didn’t, but I do. I wish I were younger. I wish I were thinner. I wish I were prettier. I wish I were smarter. I wish I were more successful. I wish I were less envious. Even when I’m happy for someone, I sometimes feel envious of their success. Those twinges seem to be a force beyond my control. I’m not proud of it, but I’ve also decided envy is nothing to be horribly ashamed of, either. Like competitiveness and fear, I think it’s part of our biological makeup, something we’re born with. The best we can do is accept it, examine it, and learn what it has to teach us. In so doing, there is a possibility of rising above it.

One idea I came up with is that envy is a sort of projection. Not precisely, because it’s not unconscious—I know I’m experiencing it. But it is a way to externalize feelings of inferiority. Whatever the object of my envy is doesn’t really matter, because it’s only a catalyst; it only triggers an already-existing inadequacy, it doesn’t create it. For example, if I feel envious when I see a woman who’s in really good physical shape, it’s because I feel inadequate that I’m not. But I felt that way before I saw her; it just didn’t happen to be in the forefront of my awareness until that moment.

If I focus on the object of the envy or try to brush the envy away with some rationalization, I miss a golden opportunity to know myself a little better. How do I feel inferior? Why do I feel inferior? It may seem obvious at first, but I don’t think it is. In this example, there’s the social pressure to be thin and beautiful (and young), but for me, I realized, it goes much deeper. My inferiority goes all the way back to childhood, to my father’s adolescent obsession with female breasts and my mother’s hyper-concern that her children be attractive; to their chronic compare-and-fall-short mentality that I could never overcome. If I let myself really sink into those feelings of inferiority, I find a sense of utter unworthiness and despair. I will never please my parents; nothing is ever good enough. And I feel an ancient sense of hopelessness that I suspect may have been at the root of my addictions.

The Buddhists (and many other keen observers of human nature) believe that fear—and therefore, I submit, envy—is an inexorable component of consciousness, an outcome of the sense of separateness we inherit at birth. If this is true, and I know it is, then my parents were merely passing on their versions of this fear, which, unluckily for their children, were quite awful ones. But they hardly had a corner on the market. Perhaps our entire cultural focus on superficial achievement, youth, beauty, and money is a vast macrocosm of this human condition, a manifestation of our collective sense of inadequacy.

A giant case of missing the point entirely.

What is the point? Well, there are probably a few of them. But what’s coming to mind now is that one crucial aspect of mental health (or serenity, inner peace, confidence, whatever you wish to label it) might be to find better motivators than fear, inadequacy and envy. The happiest people are those with a strong internal compass. They’ve found a path to success based on a very introspective, very personal standard of meaning. This path may or may not bring the external trappings that other people measure them by, but whether or not they do is irrelevant. Such trappings are only side benefits, outcomes of a passion for life and a solid connection to well-reasoned, critically-arrived-at values.

Inner-directed people haven’t eradicated envy, as that isn’t possible (except, perhaps, in the case of enlightenment). They just don’t give it a lot of power. They’ve found something better, something infinitely more satisfying, something “closer to the heart.” I would submit that such a path may not be the “meaning of life,” but it is what gives life meaning: The degree to which we’re able to rise above our baser emotions and impulses is the degree to which we find contentment. And when we find contentment, envy becomes a non-issue, as do other externalized measures of success.

I often find myself fluctuating between my base emotions—envy, fear, greed, inadequacy— and following my bliss. I routinely have moments of both profound inadequacy and profound contentment. And while my feelings of inadequacy might be tweaked up a bit more than those of people who didn’t have a childhood like mine, those inadequacies also motivated me to look more deeply into these issues than other people might. And for that, I am grateful, which is sort of the whole point.

There is a huge difference between being angry at someone and being angry with someone. Being angry at someone creates distance; being angry with someone is an opportunity for intimacy.

The idea that anger could be a path to closeness might sound crazy if you’re uncomfortable with anger, as I was (and still often am). In my family of origin, there was no such thing as being angry with someone; it was all at. Anger was the exclusive property of my father, who expressed it as rage. Yelling, swearing, thrashing volatility that made everyone in the house quake. I dreaded the time of day when he got home from work.
My mother, like many women in relationships with an unequal balance of power, expressed her anger as hostility: burning dinner, “forgetting” to do things my father asked her to do, spending money on things he forbade her to spend money on, making comments she knew would irritate him (yes, even at the risk of starting a fight), and picking at her children because she couldn’t say what she wanted to say to her husband.

With these childhood models, I learned to associate anger with fear and anxiety. To see it differently was unfathomable. Which was sad, because I had a lot of anger corked up inside me, and I had a very uncomfortable relationship with it.

When first presented with the idea of being angry with someone, I couldn’t comprehend it. It was as if the person were speaking a foreign language, gibberish, nonsense. Yet disturbing nonsense, because it shook my core beliefs about anger: that it was bad, wrong, evil, even; a tool to hurt people you’re supposed to love. Something to be deeply, deeply ashamed of if you have it yourself.

Sadly, anger is those things for many of us. But it doesn’t have to be, and indeed, shouldn’t be if we want to fully embrace who we are. Because we all get angry—just like we all get happy, sad, and afraid—and denying that can only be detrimental to a sense of emotional well-being and wholeness.

In order to get to a point of being angry with somebody, I had to start by getting comfortable with anger in general, my own and that of other people. I had to learn to see anger differently, as an indelible part of the human condition, neither good nor bad. Which, I eventually realized, is exactly what it is: like all emotions, anger is a tool to keep me in touch with my wants and needs. A neutral, benign tool with a specific function and purpose. Nothing more, nothing less. All the connotations I had with anger were because of my childhood experiences; a post-traumatic belief that kept me in reactive mode and prevented me from having a rational view.

The sheer realization of this was enough to start shaking it loose. Once I was able to see that my beliefs about anger were skewed and why that was so, I was able to develop a much more neutral relationship with it. And once this was the case, I began to see what that person meant, how anger was an avenue to intimacy.

It’s simple and straightforward, really. Anger is an emotion, and all emotions, when expressed as indications of our wants and needs, are paths to intimacy. Sharing emotions is the bulk of intimacy, what it’s really all about. As such, restricting that sharing to only the positive, non-threatening emotions is a contradiction in terms. You have to be willing to share all your emotions, those you like and those you don’t like, those you’re proud of and those you’re ashamed of. Without the whole emotional picture, intimacy can’t really happen.

I think this is a core cause of unhappy relationships. Many people are unwilling to risk sharing emotions that might make their partner feel angry or threatened. But when people share only the positive, a giant portion of their feelings go unaddressed, so they feel “disconnected” and “distant” from the person they should feel closest to. In his book, The Passionate Marriage, David Schnarch refers to this as gridlock, and holds it responsible for nearly all the unhappiness couples experience with their relationship.

It’s a hard thing to do, share your anger, your dark side, your negativity. So much so that we often have to find excuses that make the other person a “deserving” object of our uncomfortable feelings, then express them accusatively. But this is anger at, not with, and it creates distance, not intimacy, making you feel worse, not better.

Instead, why not own the anger? It’s mine, nobody else’s, and I have it for a reason. It’s a reaction to something going on in my life; nobody’s fault and nor does it need to be. I can do with it as I please—that is, as long as I don’t intentionally hurt another person with it. And herein lies the key to being angry with somebody.

A person may have done something mean or hurtful, and it made me angry. But it’s still my anger, and I can choose how I want to handle it. Maybe if I want this person out of my life, I can yell at him and berate him for what he did, thus creating distance. But if this is not a person I want out of my life, then maybe I could, instead, explain how his behavior made me feel and why. From there, we might have a conversation about such behavior in general, and why it’s a trigger for me, and maybe he’ll see that he never considered it from that angle before, and maybe we’ll talk about how we might handle that situation differently in the future. And we walk away feeling like we both got something we wanted: he heard and acknowledged my anger (which is, I think, all that any of us really want), and I respected him enough to believe that he would do so. And instead of blaming and fighting and tearful apologies without real resolution, we do resolve something, and we grow closer because of it.

Or, maybe I said something hurtful or thoughtless. In a truly intimate relationship, I have to be willing to listen to my partner explain how it made him feel without getting defensive. If I don’t, he’ll stop talking to me about his feelings, and our intimacy will suffer.

It can be a hard thing to accept, that our feelings are ours alone and nobody else is responsible for them. But this is the truth. If you don’t believe me, here’s an experiment to try. Say something to twenty different people; you’ll hear twenty different responses. Some positive, some negative, some big, some small. Or think of a time when somebody said something that would normally make you angry, but for some reason, that time it didn’t. The point is, the reaction lies within the person, always, in every situation. We truly can choose how we respond to events in our lives, regardless of how emotionally charged they might be.

Once I understood that all my feelings serve a logical purpose, and that attaching a value judgment to them or blaming other people isn’t helpful, I became more able to express them in ways that make me feel good, not bad, and ways that create intimacy, not distance. I still struggle with my childhood legacy, but now I’m usually able to get to the core faster and often avoid the big, messy, ugly parts.

What a concept, that all emotions can be avenues to intimacy! But isn’t it exciting that it’s possible to share our whole selves with another person, not just the pretty parts? And isn’t it just as exciting to see those parts in ourselves without judgment, shame, or the need to deny them?

I sure think so.

When we first meet someone, we love everything about him. Then, six months or a year into the relationship, the euphoria wanes. That thin veneer begins to crack and we start to notice some faults. If we’re lucky, they’re inconsequential, surface scratches that don’t say anything about the person beneath and are entirely tolerable. If we’re not so lucky, the cracks deepen into fissures and we have to make a decision: is this a person I want to spend more of my life with, and if so, how do I come to terms with his faults? This is the point at which we are most susceptible to one of the greatest time- and energy-vortexes in existence: falling in love with potential.I’ve fallen in love with potential more times than I can remember. I’d hook up with someone I had nothing in common with and no possible future with and try to make him be the person I wanted him to be. I can teach him how to be emotionally available…We could kick our addictions together…Once he understands how much I hate his critical comments, he’ll stop making them…I’ll make him love me so much, he’ll never cheat again…I can get him out of his depression…I can, I can, I can.

No. I can’t. I can’t make any of these things happen. People rarely change. And if they do, it won’t be because of anything I did. I had to have this idea pounded into my brain with a ball-peen hammer.

It was only after a particularly bad breakup, and the glorious alone time that resulted, that I realized this. On paper, we looked really good together. He was brilliant, sensitive, thoughtful, willing to talk, willing to listen. But I began to feel that every time we talked, it was him pointing out my faults, and once I apologized for them, he was satisfied and the talk was over. When I wanted to talk about his contributions to a problem, he either clammed up or got accusative. He was masterful at it. I would often feel confused and empty for days afterward, not knowing what hit me. And I’d be angry and irritable, which of course wreaked more havoc, resulting in more conversations in which I had to “own my shortcomings.” This became an awful, escalating pattern from which there was no way out—I know this because I beat my head against the wall trying to find it, trying to make him do it differently; he wouldn’t. When it finally ended, it took me months to figure out how I could miss somebody so much and yet be so relieved to have him out of my life.

If ever there was somebody who had potential, it was this guy. He was interesting and exciting, yet had all the traits of a conscientious, caring, supportive partner. It was like he dangled this potential in front of me like a carrot I chased relentlessly but could never quite reach. Because he was so “perfect” in so many ways, I was hooked deeper than I had ever been. And because of this, I had a lot of fodder to chew on when it was over. What had gone wrong? And why? And why do I keep getting involved with people who aren’t good matches for me? And how can I do things differently if I ever get an opportunity?

This breakup got me to a miraculous point where it became more important to answer those questions than to be in a relationship. Where once I was edgy and anxious until I jumped back on that treadmill, now I was unwilling to invest a single ounce of energy in somebody who didn’t feel right for me—and nobody felt right for me. In two years, I had two dates, both of whom I told within a couple of hours, kindly but directly, that I didn’t want to see again. If I didn’t detect the possibility of a real connection, it just seemed so needlessly exhausting, so pointless, so unnecessary. For the first time in my life, I preferred solitude to that silly dance that I never did very well, anyway.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had inadvertently stumbled onto the whole key to not falling in love with potential: don’t invest time or energy in relationships that aren’t satisfying.

That may sound like an oversimplification, but I don’t think it is. Although, if we’re operating under the influence of a lot of cognitive dissonance from childhood, it can take some time, as it did for me, to figure out the difference between what’s truly satisfying and what isn’t. I spent a lot of time coming up with, and pondering, questions like these:

• Does the relationship make me content and happy? Is it fun? Do we enjoy each other?

• Does it feel like a friendship?

• Can I accept him, faults and all? Can I overlook his faults because his good points outweigh them?

• Am I relaxed, or do I want his approval?

• Do I feel stuck, or do I feel like I’m growing?

• Do I feel a solid connection? Does it feel like a partnership? (Do I know what a partnership feels like?)

• Do we share values and a similar outlook on the world?

• Am I willing to work at this thing, be as present as possible, and have realistic expectations?

It was a long road (here are some more details about it), and mostly a lonely one, but when I was able to answer these questions “yes,” I knew I’d found something real. And until that happened, I found better things to do with my time than chase phantom potential. I probably needed all the experiences I’d had to figure out what I really wanted, so I’m not discounting them, but I’m so glad I was able to move past them. If I hadn’t, I would never have found my jewel, with whom I’ve built a great connection and a great life.

Even a good relationship is work. A lot of work. But the work should feel like a team effort. Not like a power struggle, with one of you trying to make the other do or be something different than they want to do or be, or give something they’re unwilling to give. If the work feels like that, like gears grinding and nothing ever moving, then that’s probably because it isn’t. You have to seriously consider if that’s how you want to spend your time.

By the way, these principles also apply to non-significant-other relationships. Time is too valuable to spend it trying to gain approval from critical parents, siblings, friends, coworkers, or anyone else you can’t seem to establish a satisfying connection with. You don’t necessarily have to cut people out of your life, but you can certainly stop expending time and emotional energy trying to get them to notice you, like you, or be kind to you. There are plenty of people in the world who appreciate you just the way you are. Spend time with them. Or, if you’re in an interim period, go help people less fortunate than yourself. Give up on the others. Just give up! My life got infinitely better when I figured this out.

In getting emotional needs met, the only thing that matters is how someone is today, right now, at this moment. Potential only counts for talent and physics, and projects are for Sunday afternoons.

On no other front have the American people been so subjected to so relentless a state pressure against their Constitutional rights than on the issue of the right to drugs; and on no other front have the American people yielded their rights to encroachments by the federal government so readily, so willingly, and indeed so eagerly as on this one. - Thomas Szasz, Our Right to Drugs

Once in an AA meeting, I heard someone describe his problem alcohol use by saying, “I lost my drinking privileges.” It’s a clever way of saying “I wasn’t responsible enough to use drugs and stay out of trouble, so I had to quit.” That made sense to me, so I stole it. I’d “lost my privileges” many times over doing stupid, irresponsible things. I drove routinely under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, and also while on LSD, ecstasy, uppers, downers, cocaine, and various combinations of each. I went to work high; I bought and did drugs from strangers; I don’t even want to get into my sexual escapades. So by the time I’d heard this phrase, after being court-ordered to attend drug treatment and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for a DUI, it certainly fit. Even when I was forehead-deep in 12 Step, disease-concept dogma (which I was for almost sixteen years), addiction made a lot more sense to me when framed in terms of personal agency. Do I have a disease? Eh; maybe. Did I lose my privileges through irresponsible behavior? Absolutely.
I think the “war on drugs” has entirely the wrong focus. Drug use is not the enemy. Drug use is almost as old as the frontal lobe itself. It’s natural and normal to seek altered states of consciousness. It’s spoken of in the bible. Children do it when they spin themselves dizzy. Certain tribes use hallucinogens in their religious ceremonies, much like certain Christian sects use wine. All of these instances describe an altered state, yet none requires a war or is remotely unhealthy or abnormal.

It is only when drugs—and by drugs, I mean any mood-altering substance, including alcohol and prescribed drugs such as antidepressants—are used irresponsibly that they become a problem. It is only when people use poor judgment and make bad choices that they lose their drug privileges.

So drugs aren’t the enemy, lack of personal responsibility is the “enemy,” although I dislike framing it in such demonizing terms and prefer to state the problem as “if people are immature, then so is their drug use.”

My story is an illustration of this. When I became responsible enough to use drugs responsibly, they were no longer a problem for me. Today I can have a glass of wine with dinner, a cocktail or two with friends, or a cold beer on a hot afternoon, with no repercussions whatsoever. I don’t drive drunk. I don’t lose control. I don’t enjoy the feeling of losing control, to such a degree that it’s difficult to remember a time when I did. When I grew up, so did my drug use. And I am not the exception. I am normal, a straightforward example of emotional maturation, despite what the disease-model proponents would have us believe.

This is not to say addiction is imaginary; my story is a clear illustration of that point as well. I had serious emotional issues, and the only tool I had to deal with them was self-medication. It’s a sad, vicious circle: young adults with emotional problems discover drugs, but as long as they use drugs to feel better, they never deal with the underlying emotional issues, which keeps them using drugs even in the face of remorse and self-loathing. This cycle can continue until a person has a “hitting bottom” experience, usually trouble with their health, family, job, or the law, that forces them to change. If through this experience they are able to address their underlying issues, then there is the possibility of real maturation and thus a permanent victory over addiction. If not, the drug use is likely to continue.

Focusing on drugs in the realm of emotional problems is like focusing on the tracks in a train wreck. It’s certainly easier, but it accomplishes next to nothing. The dismal, utter failure of this approach can be seen everywhere you look. Addiction and depression are both epidemic in scope (and they go hand in glove, by the way), drug crime is rampant, and government involvement in what should be a private choice, a blatant infringement of personal freedom, goes completely unaddressed. Meanwhile, nobody wants to see drug use, or any other choice that mature adults are capable of making wisely, as a privilege we earn, although that is exactly what it is.

As long as drugs remain demonized, the real issue, emotional maturity, will continue to be ignored, and people will have to achieve that state in spite of our culture rather than because of it. I find this a sad state of affairs indeed.