Brave New Kitty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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