Archive for March, 2010
The Can’t or Won’t Yardstick
Being unable to do something means a person is physically or mentally incapable, that it is beyond his power. For example, I am unable to ever become an Olympic figure skater. I lack the training, I probably lack the inherent talent, and I am too old. I can’t do it; it is beyond me in every way. Likewise, a person with Down’s Syndrome will probably never become a physicist or philosopher (or an Olympic figure skater, for that matter). Such a person simply has too many limitations, both mental and physical, to pursue such goals. This is not a judgment; it is, sadly, a statement of the reality of Down’s Syndrome (although I would love to be proved wrong about this!). A short person will probably never play professional basketball. A person raised in an African tribal culture is unlikely to ever go to college. An Inuit will probably never visit the rain forest. And on and on. Real limitations exist, and most of the time, they are fairly easy to see.
Being unwilling to do something is a different thing altogether. A person is able, it is within his power, but for whatever reason, he chooses not to. I am fully capable of losing weight, for example, but am unwilling to take the steps required to do so. (Yes, it’s harder than it would have been ten years ago, but far from impossible.) Most people who grow up in middle class families are able to go to college, but not all of them choose to. And all personal habits, whether good or bad, fall into the category of choice. In the case of being unwilling, limitations do not exist beyond a person’s own choice to do or not do something. Nothing stands in the way beyond a person’s own preference, regardless of how he characterizes it.
The distinction may seem obvious, but in the messy, complicated realm of the human psyche, it often is not. People say “I can’t” all the time when they mean “I won’t,” as in, “I can’t quit smoking,” “I can’t quit drinking,” “I can’t stop beating my wife.” None of these statements are literally true. People do, in fact, stop engaging in compulsive behavior all the time. Whether they seek professional help, learn to exercise their willpower, or simply outgrow bad habits, people can and do learn to refrain from doing things that make them (or others) feel bad. Saying they can’t is little more than an excuse to not make the effort and avoid responsibility.
In a behavioral context, won’t is far more likely than can’t. In fact, it is almost universally true that when people claim they can’t, they mean that they won’t. And much of the time it works, because most of us don’t give it enough thought to tell the difference. To complicate matters further, of those who do give it serious thought, many have concluded that bad behavior is a can’t; a disease which people have no control over. Addiction is, of course, the shining example of the diseasing of bad behavior. Addicts are not to blame, say the treatment and medical industries, they are the victims of their biology. This mentality, which became commonplace after the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous in the 1930s, has crept into nearly every area of human habit today. There is a 12 Step program and a treatment center for almost every form of compulsive behavior. The can’t mentality permeates our language and is so embedded in our culture that people rarely question it anymore.
But question it we should. While such an attitude might be helpful initially in easing the remorse of people who’ve made some bad decisions, it is both illogical and, ultimately, limiting. Illogical, because even as a person is told “it’s not your fault,” he is told that he alone can make the effort to change, and all the help he receives merely teaches him how to help himself. When that help takes hold on the mental, emotional, and spiritual planes, a person is often able to transform permanently. But there is no hypodermic needle in the world that can cause such a transformation to occur. The person alone must embrace it if it is to work. Despite all language to the contrary, change can only come about by choice, by a psychological shift from “won’t do” to “will do.”
Furthermore, applying can’t to won’t situations imposes long-term limitations far more harmful than any initial help it may provide by removing personal agency where personal agency is key. When there is no sense of responsibility for one’s choices, it is a short trip to placing blame for all of your troubles on external sources: your parents, society, and every traumatic event that has befallen you in your lifetime. Doing so keeps you stuck because you believe that the answers, just as the initial problem, lie somewhere in the external world, and they don’t. Because your reasoning is muddy, you can’t fully own the issues that caused the problem in the first place, and without doing so, you will in some sense remain tied to them. 12 Step programs offer the perfect example of this: people who get sober this way truly believe that they have to go to meetings for the rest of their lives or they will succumb to the wiles of addiction. Granted, it may be a better habit to go to meetings for the rest of your life, but it’s still a form of being stuck that limits upward mobility–and it’s a lie. Can’t applied to won’t situations results in as much of a quagmire as the initial behavior, and will keep a person just as stuck. It is fundamentally dishonest thinking, based in poor reasoning and sloppy language, and this is no way to overcome obstacles in life, much less achieve goals or fulfill dreams.
This irrational bias toward can’t has created a culture of victims. When somebody can sue McDonald’s for spilling coffee on herself (and, horrifyingly, win), when people can sue tobacco companies for a completely voluntary habit, when the media can blame corn syrup for the obesity problems in our country and get away with it, there is something terribly, terribly wrong. The can’t mentality has spun wildly out of control and is operating at a level beyond all logic and reason. You need only look around you and pay just a bit of attention to the language people use to see the evidence of this. Once you start applying the Can’t or Won’t Yardstick, you will see and hear this confusion everywhere, from the most mundane of conversations to the evening news.
This is not to say that overcoming bad habits is easy. It is not. I in no way mean to imply that people need to just buck up an do it, already. I understand that our pasts and our trauma and our pain are all part of the choices we make, and that these are difficult things to address. I understand that habits born out of the desire to self-soothe, self-medicate, and just feel better are extremely difficult to overcome, that people in this spot are often struggling with depression, low self-esteem, and lack of knowledge about how to do things differently. Nevertheless, to call compulsive behavior a disease, to say that people aren’t capable of change, is disrespectful to the most basic elements of humanity: our power of thought and our power of choice. To disregard these as if they aren’t important is to disregard our humanity itself. It denies the very aspects that enable us to become stronger, wiser, more capable agents of personal choice, the qualities that most allow us to forge our own destinies. The short-term gains of seeing compulsive behavior as a can’t is far outshadowed by the long-term effects of doing so. Once again, you need only look around you for the evidence.
There is great allure in believing that you are not to blame for the behavior you don’t like, and in believing that others are not to blame for theirs; there is a tremendous relief about not having to make messy moral judgments and difficult decisions. But avoiding judgment and decision only puts off dealing with our problems, because one way or another, we are all accountable. Most of all, we are accountable to ourselves. If we get this part right, everything else will fall into place. If we get it wrong, few things will.
Clarify in your mind the distinction between can’t and won’t, between having agency and being powerless, and learn to apply the yardstick in your life. Once understood, it’s a simple principle that will help you gauge the sincerity of people’s words and actions–none more important than your own.
Passive-Aggressiveness: Not a “Disorder”
Wikipedia defines passive-aggressive behavior as “passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to following through with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations. It is a personality trait marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and passive, usually disavowed resistance in interpersonal or occupational situations.” It lists these signs of passive-aggressive behavior:
- Ambiguity or speaking cryptically: a means of engendering a feeling of insecurity in others
- Chronically being late and forgetting things: another way to exert control or to punish.
- Fear of competition
- Fear of dependency
- Fear of intimacy as a means to act out anger: The passive aggressive often cannot trust. Because of this, they guard themselves against becoming intimately attached to someone.
- Making chaotic situations
- Making excuses for non-performance in work teams
- Sulking
- Victimization response: instead of recognizing one’s own weaknesses, tendency to blame others for own failures.
I was going to write about how to recognize and deal with passive-aggressive behavior, but then I noticed that every web site I looked at characterized passive-aggressive behavior as a “personality disorder,” or at least framed the behavior in either/or terms: that you either are passive-aggressive, or have to learn how to deal with someone who is passive-aggressive. One site went so far as to say that “there is no known cure for this disorder yet, and although there is counseling and medication available, it will be with them for life” (italics mine). Wikipedia made a distinction between a passive-aggressive personality trait and a passive-aggressive personality disorder, but it was more a case of using different terms vaguely than of making a clear distinction.
Psychology sites are likely just as confusing because of the APA’s agenda to classify all “undesirable” behavior as a disease–but I can’t say for sure because none had prominent positions in my search results. (I searched for “passive-aggresive,” “passive-aggressive behavior,” and “how to deal with passive-aggressive behavior.”)
I think this means that an average person who searches the Internet for information about passive-aggressive behavior is likely to get a lot of incomplete information and even misinformation. While the Internet descriptions of the behavior seem mostly accurate, the widespread labeling of passive-aggressiveness as a disorder seems absurd to me.
I know I am not alone in recognizing many of the behaviors listed in myself, because everybody, at one time or another, criticizes, distances, sulks, avoids intimacy or dependency, creates chaos, and behaves like a victim. It’s called being human, and could, indeed, be seen as a fatal, incurable illness if one were so inclined. But isn’t there a more positive way to see our behavior? Instead of labeling and pigeon-holing and trying to turn human behavior into a disease, couldn’t we instead seek to understand where the behavior comes from and why we sometimes engage in it?
I would go so far as to say that some of these traits are patterns for me. I can be ambiguous and sarcastic when I feel threatened (and sometimes just to be funny). I still struggle with intimacy issues. I’m still terrified of being dependent on somebody. I still have a hard time standing up for myself. And I sulk sometimes when I get angry, especially when I’m in that in-between place of knowing I’m wrong and not yet being ready to apologize.
Does this mean I have “passive-aggressive personality disorder”? No, not even if I believed in such a thing. People learn coping behaviors, and many of the ones I learned growing up were less than helpful–some even passive-aggressive. Neither of my parents were good communicators, to say the least. My mother, like many people who feel powerless, manipulated my father (and others, I suppose, including her children) rather than risk asking for what she wanted. Like all the women in her family, the idea of direct communication was unfathomable to her. Both of my sisters and I, who also felt powerless in the face of my father’s rage and alcoholism, learned that being direct could be harmful to your health. I’ve had to work hard to un-learn this style of communication, and I still fall back into it at times. Does that mean I’m passive-aggressive? Sometimes, yes. But so what? This was how I survived my childhood, and while I’m not proud of it, I refuse to accept the label of “disorder” when I’ve worked so hard to own and move past the behavior.
Passive-aggressiveness, like any “undesirable” behavior, is far more a spectrum than an either/or. We all do it sometimes, to some extent, usually when we feel threatened or anxious. People diagnosed with a “personality disorder” do tend to be firmly entrenched on one side of the spectrum, but that’s far more because they’ve found it advantageous than because they have a disease. That is to say, it isn’t that they can’t change, it’s that they won’t. Being able to recognize both of these facts–one, that some people behave passive-aggressively because they learned it and can work at un-learning it, and two, that some people act this way because it’s how they get what they want–can save you from a lot of heartache. You can be gentler on yourself when you slip into the behavior, and you can make better choices about spending time with people who fall into the second category.
The Buck Stops Here
Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine. –Anthony J. D’Angelo
Most people know that President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk in the Oval Office that said “The buck stops here.” It was a reference to the phrase “passing the buck,” blaming other people for what’s going wrong. This was Truman’s clever way of saying that he would step up and take responsibility for the country’s problems rather than find scapegoats to blame for them. I think it was also his way of expressing a guiding principle of his life; if he thought highly enough of it to make a sign out of it and put it on his desk for all to see, then it must have been an important ideal for him. It makes sense that someone capable of holding the most powerful, stressful, difficult job imaginable would be someone willing to make tough decisions and take responsibility for the results. Regardless what you think of some of those decisions, you have to admire the courage required to make them and stand by them.
This is a reminder that the buck stops here is true for everyone. People who take responsibility for their lives seem to have the most success and the most happiness. We all have trauma in our pasts, we all have circumstances and people we wish were different, we’ve all made mistakes we have to live with for the rest of our lives. The question isn’t if we have those things, because everybody does. The question is how we deal with them. Do we step up, take responsibility, and do the best we can with what we have, or do we ruminate over a past, people, and circumstances that we are powerless to change?
It seems like common sense, I know. But it’s amazingly easy to feel stuck and victimized over things we can’t change, and just as easy to ignore what we can. This is particularly true for people with very traumatic pasts. When you are small and powerless and at the mercy of a narcissistic, or even sadistic, adult, it is not uncommon to get stuck in this victim-like place. (I wrote about this here). And even the most ardent responsibility-taking, step-up-to-the-plate, positive-thinking people occasionally get despondent and fall into hopelessness. So what does that mean for the rest of us?
Well, I think the best anyone can do is commit herself to the principle of personal responsibility, and make an effort to do the best job of it that she can. But before you can do that, you must truly believe that this is what will ultimately bring the most happiness and the most success, and that such a commitment is the only logical option. It’s a values thing, really; if you value personal responsibility, and see it as a guiding principle of your life, then despite all the inevitable failings and setbacks, then this principle will guide you in the right direction.
Personal responsibility can be scary because it strips a person of excuses and scapegoats. But this is good news, because it means only you have the power to make your life satisfying and meaningful. You aren’t dependent on anybody else for that. It’s all in your hands. As intimidating as this can sometimes feel, it’s something to be gleeful about. Thank god we’re not dependent on other people for happiness! I shudder to think what the world would be like if that were the case.
Now, it is true that there are many, many things we don’t have any control over. I’ve already mentioned the past and other people. We also have no control over the weather, or the government (for the most part), or whether our employer will remain in business, or countless other things that do, in fact, affect our lives. But we do have control over our attitude toward these people, places, and things, and also over the choices we make about how to deal with them. Nobody holds a gun to your head and forces you to remain victimized by a narcisstic parent, for example; you just have to be willing to deal with the consequences of not doing so (and granted, they can be nasty!). Also, there is no law that says you can’t go to therapy and go back to school at the same time; that is, you don’t have to wait until you’re “healed” to move forward with your life. And if there were such a thing as a cosmic justice system, it would never demand rumination over old wounds beyond that required to heal them; resentment can be a nice (or at least necessary) place to visit, but living there is soul-sapping.
I suppose the truth is that the only thing we really do have control over is our own attitude. But that is enough, because your attitude determines your values and, beyond luck and biology, your values determine everything about how your life will go. Granted, luck and biology are big factors, but your attitude, your values, will also determine how you handle it when the luck and biology don’t go your way. In short, values are everything, and values of personal responsibility offer the greatest opportunity for self-determination in a world of fragility and uncertainty.
So choose wisely those choices that are within your power to make. The buck stops here, at your own feet, and that is a most powerful truth to understand.
Moodling
Moodling is a term used by Brenda Ueland in the classic book If You Want to Write. Ms. Ueland defined moodling as “long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering,” which she believed was necessary for the writer’s imagination to flourish. I absolutely believe this, but I think the benefits of moodling stretch far beyond those for people in creative fields.
Moodling is great for your mental health. It’s calming and relaxing, and it nurtures the spirit. You don’t have to come up with the idea for the world’s greatest novel for it to be “useful”; just feeling more relaxed is enough. Doing nothing but letting your mind wander aimlessly in a state of relaxation is like a fantastic luxury that we can all afford.
Yet most people struggle with allowing themselves this time, me as much as anybody. When I try to moodle, I often feel, I don’t know, wasteful and unproductive, and like I should be doing something. A sense of uncentered urgency plagues me, and I find it incredibly difficult to enjoy myself, much less be creative. Yet if I can manage to get past my anxiety about “doing nothing,” I find moodling incredibly enjoyable.
One of the few times I can seem to let myself relax completely is before I fall asleep. Sometimes, I give myself a topic to think about and let my mind run with it. Other times, I try to not think of anything in particular (and stop myself when I do) and just observe what comes up. Both are good creative exercises that always bring something interesting to the surface.
Sometimes I’m able to moodle when I listen to music. I find instrumental music best for this as singing distracts me from my thoughts. But music isn’t always a good moodling companion. If I find myself too engrossed in it, I either give up on moodling and enjoy the music, or turn the music off so I can moodle. It’s a win-win decision as either option is wonderful. I only wish I put myself in that spot more often!
My mind will also relax and wander when I do mindless chores and exercise. This is fine, but I don’t really consider it moodling. True moodling must be time set aside specifically to nurture and cherish lazy, idle thoughts. Not to say you can’t enjoy idle thoughts while you’re doing mindless tasks, because you certainly can. But moodling is in a different category because it’s a specific thing you do for yourself that can be difficult to do.
I’ve inspired myself. I’m feeling lazy today, so I think I’m going to end this here and go do some moodling.
What better way to turn laziness into an asset? 
Two Halves Do Not Make a Whole
Many people have the idea that when they find the right person they will feel whole. This idea is foisted on us in novels, movies and songs, and was expressed most directly in the movie Jerry Maguire when Tom Cruise tells Renee Zellweger, “You complete me.” And of course, she melts, and all her anger at this otherwise childish, self-absorbed person evaporates and they live happily ever.
Pardon my crudeness, but, gag me.
In the world of romantic relationships, two halves do not make a whole. No matter what the popular notions about this are, no matter how much people want to believe that the “right person” will complete them, no matter how many songs, stories, novels, poems, tv shows, movies, and advertisements tell us otherwise, it is simply not the case. When two half-people hook up and try to have a romantic relationship, the result can only be disastrous.
If a person is only “half-developed” in the sense of not having undertaken the difficult work of healing from emotional wounds, what will the relationship look like? The most common pattern is for a person whose lack of healing causes her to be insecure to hook up with someone whose lack of healing causes him (or her) to be emotionally aloof. Both are acting out of neediness, one externalizing and one internalizing (although this is somewhat of a simplification), and when they first meet there is indeed a sense of completion, which can be extremely powerful when you are operating from a place of deficit. In fact, this is often what causes that intoxicating feeling of early “love.” But what happens in the day-to-day grind of being present for a partner when you haven’t yet learned to be present for yourself? We all know, because we’ve all been there at least once: a feeling of loneliness far more unbearable than the loneliness of being by yourself. And it goes downhill from there.
This sense of completion common in early romantic relationships has almost nothing to do with love. Yet sadly, this feeling is exactly what most people are looking for. They’re fooled into believing it is love by popular sentiment and their own longing. The truth is, in the world of romantic partnerships, there is no such thing as a white knight, as being rescued, as being completed by another person. These are all highly skewed notions of what a good relationship is all about.
In The Power of Myth series, Joseph Campbell described romantic love more accurately than anything else I’ve heard. He called it “an ordeal.” It is not for the faint-hearted or needy, who simply do not have the fortitude to stay present with another human being in the trenches, which, as one of the most difficult, stressful, exhausting, frustrating undertakings imaginable, is what romantic love demands. Of course, it is also one of the most rewarding ones, which is why it gets so much attention. The rewards just tend to not be what most people think they are. In fact, if most people understood the true nature of a love relationship and the emotional demands it would make on them, they would probably run as fast as they could in the opposite direction! (The same goes for parenthood, but that is another topic.)
Romantic love is, at its best, a partnership of two equals whose melding creates a whole greater than its parts, a connection and a synergy that didn’t exist before. But this is not a wholeness that can develop between two people operating from a place of deficit and neediness, which, when put together, only makes a greater deficit and more neediness. No, this is a wholeness borne of strength. And also fortitude, willingness, patience, empathy, kindness, tenderness, forgiveness, and so much more. If you view love as a way to fill an emptiness inside yourself, it is unlikely you’ll have many of these necessary traits. Better to forego romance for awhile and work on developing them in yourself; the long-term results will be vastly more satisfying.
This is not to say that a person must be “cured” of all her humanness before being capable of real romance. If that were true, romantic love would be nonexistent. But for a relationship to work, both people ought to have a few things figured out: you don’t have to be completely free of emotional baggage, but you do have to know how to deal with it on your own, and take responsibility for it when it rears its ugly head in the relationship. And ideally, you’ll have dispelled all your notions about romantic love whisking you away from yourself and curing all your pain and problems because, in reality, it merely provides another avenue to confront all that messy, uncomfortable, scary stuff that you were hoping to avoid. (Which kind of explains a lot if you think about it, doesn’t it?)
Ironically, when needy people seek completion in another person, their impulse is correct; they just get the execution wrong. The wholeness they intuitively seek can only be found by looking inside themselves. Looking for it externally is largely an avoidance tactic, and will keep them stuck in that place of deficit they’re so unwilling to face. Sadly, sometimes for a lifetime.
The desire for completion is a natural human drive and nothing to be ashamed of, but if you don’t understand that what you’re looking for can only be found within, then your thinking about love will be forever skewed, and you will never find it or yourself, and that is truly a tragedy.
Saying Grace
When I was little and I ate over at my grandma’s house, she always said, “Come Lord Jesus and be our guest, and let these gifts to us be blessed, amen” before the meal. My parents weren’t religious, so this was my earliest exposure to saying grace. My grandmother said it hurriedly, mouthing the words like meaningless sounds and not as though she actually wanted Jesus to show up and eat with us. I thought it was dumb; it sounded exactly like all the goofy little poems my friends and I said to each other. No wonder my parents didn’t take religion very seriously. Even at that tender age, I could see, or at least intuit, its shortcomings.
I’ve kind of changed my mind since then about saying grace. Not because I came to respect my grandma’s beliefs (I haven’t). I still think the way most Christians say grace seems silly and largely pointless. Whatever they’re trying to accomplish with their hurried words, I don’t understand. (If I were God, I would not appreciate such insincerity one bit, much less reward it with eternal bliss.)
But a few years ago, I did a silent retreat at a Buddhist meditation center. I am no more Buddhist than I am Christian, but the Buddhists do seem to have a better understanding of why they do certain things, which makes it easier for me to look past some of the dogmatism (which is inevitable in any belief system) and focus on the practices of silence and meditation, both things I wanted to delve into. It was at this retreat that I first began to understand the real meaning behind saying grace before a meal.
While mainstream Christians perform rituals out of rote habit or because they’re afraid they won’t make it into heaven if they don’t, Buddhists perform rituals for more rational reasons, such as deepening compassion and dispelling pride. (At least, this is true for most Buddhism practiced by those who grew up in Western cultures. From what I understand, many who are raised Buddhist practice it much like mainstream Christians practice their religion, which is to say, without a lot of sincerity or interest–but that is another topic.) The Buddhist equivalent of of saying grace, is a ritual meant to deepen understanding about the fundamental connection and interdependence of everything in the Universe.
How does saying grace accomplish this?
Well, much like the Christian version of grace, the Buddhist version is about gratitude. But rather than give thanks to a cosmic father figure, you instead, for those few moments, contemplate everything that was involved in that food being there for your nourishment and enjoyment. You think about all the people involved in the meal: the cook, the grocery store employees, the factory workers, the farmers, the seed growers, the engineers and chemists and biologists who produced the seed, for example. You think about all the elements necessary for that food to be there: the sun, the rain, the nutrients in the soil, the spinning of the earth. If you are having meat, you think about the animal whose life was sacrificed for your hunger, and feel some appreciation for him and for the cycle of life and death of which we are all a part. Maybe you think about the government, with its laws and controls that make it unlikely that any of this food will make you ill. And you think about the people you’re eating with, how they fit into your life and how precious this time, this moment of sharing and sustenance, is for all of you. There are many other directions you can go in as well, but I think I’ve gotten the idea across: that if you contemplate even a few of these things, it becomes difficult to eat the meal without some sense of reverence for the food in front of you and for the vast, amazing interconnectedness of everything in the Universe that makes our being alive possible at all.
The point of grace, then, is to create a pause in the busi-ness of everyday life to re-connect with the higher, deeper, more profound aspects of our humanity, however you define those terms. It fits with any belief system, as its only purpose is to elevate thinking and awareness. Seen in this way, grace ceases to be a silly dogmatic ritual that’s far too easy to dismiss and poke fun at, and instead becomes an act of commitment to deeper understanding of this thing called life. If you want a rational reason for doing it, or at least for seeing its practice in a less harsh light, I can’t think of a better one.
I suppose you could think of giving thanks to a heavenly father as a sort of shorthand for all of this. But that kind of shorthand is a step removed from actually noticing the truly miraculous nature of the present moment, of life, of conscious awareness. In the shorthand version–just thanking god for everything–it is still possible to achieve that sense of awe, but it becomes much easier to avoid it. Which is what my grandma was doing, which is what most mainstream Christians do, and which misses the point about the practice almost entirely. I know it isn’t just Christians, that people of other faiths also miss the point of many of their rituals, and that, conversely, there are Christians who are sincere and who do understand the point of what they’re doing; I don’t mean to pick on Christians exclusively. However, some 90 percent of Americans claim to be Christian, yet from what I’ve read and observed, most of these people practice their faith much like my grandmother did.
And that’s sad, because it means that most people don’t understand their own religion, that they have no meaningful ties to their own spiritual practices.
Anyway, it’s easy to make fun of religious rituals that don’t have deeper ties to values, or scoff at rituals practiced because of irrational beliefs. But most rituals are at least rooted in some rational purpose and, when practiced with sincerity, can have beneficial results. I’m not saying that we should all begin practicing rituals or even that that would be desirable (I don’t know if it would be or not). But if some practice helps you be more understanding, compassionate, circumspect, or connected, shouldn’t you at least keep an open mind about it?