Cold Shower 22: WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE?

Cold Shower Who Put You In The Cage? Volume I, Article XXII

This is a column by Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., industrial psychologist and former corporate executive for Nalco Chemical Company and Honeywell Europe Ltd. For the past thirty years he has been working and consulting in North & South America, Europe and South Africa. He is author of five books and more than 200 articles on what he calls cultural capital – risk taking, self-reliance, social cohesion, work habits and relationships to power – for a changing work force in a changing workplace. He started out as a laborer, working his way through college, and ended in the boardrooms of multinational corporations. These columns will answer questions troubling modern workers everywhere.

Question:

Dr. Fisher, here is my predicament. I am close to retirement on a job that I have hated since the day I took it. When I took the job, it was supposed to be temporary, but my girlfriend got pregnant, and I had to marry her, support the kid. My religion, or should I say my wife’s religion, wouldn’t permit birth control, so every time I looked at her we had another kid. I have six grown kids now with two daughters and their two kids back living with me. No husbands in sight. They still like to party which means leaving me and the wife with their brats. I’ve got another son, 27, my youngest, who refuses to work, and sits around all day smoking my cigarettes and drinking my beer. If this doesn’t beat all, my mother-in-law joined us two years ago. She is nearly blind, and besides a royal pain in the ass. Need I go on? I’ve always wanted to go to school and make something of myself, but what am I, a maintenance man at the plant and a fix-it-man for every relative and neighbor within sight. I’ve never read your books, but I catch your columns now and then. Can’t say I make much sense of them, but thought it fun to see what you’d have to say about my predicament.

Dr. Fisher Replies:

After more than thirty years of dealing with people, I can still be amazed. Yes, your letter amazes me. It would suggest that you have never grown up; that you have spent your entire life reacting, not acting. You are not in charge of anything if this letter is truly a reflection of your situation.

Brick by brick, situation by situation, you have constructed a prison in which to barricade yourself. Granted, you don’t see it that way. How could you? You are insulated from self-knowing by the elaborate carapace of your cultural conditioning. You have accepted each situation as you have thought it best to accept it in terms of what you were told was right and just. But right and just for whom? And why?

Your job, which you claim you hate, has kept you incubated in a dependent state free of struggle, pain, of making decisions or of showing any sign of maturing into an adult. I define a mature adult as a person with a defined character, a character which he or she states subtly or emphatically to significant others so there is no confusion. What I perceive from your letter is that you have allowed others and other circumstances to define who you are, what you are and even why you are. You are out-of-control, a victim, a man in a cage.

If you have read what I say so far, and get mad, it means I have touched home. That is a good sign. Somewhere in your development you got stuck. Before we become ourselves, we must first pass through what is important to our parents, relatives, peers, and authority figures outside the home (teachers, priests, nuns, storekeepers, police). Should we internalize all this contradictory data without examining, screening, evaluating and discarding it, our persona is a stranger to ourselves. We are everyone and no one. We display a victim’s mentality. We are unhappily stuck in social confusion unable to reach contact with our essential self.

What we call personality is our acquired self, the product of all this conditioning. Our real self, or our essence is the natural fruition of all that we are innately given at birth. Our essence requires that we rebel against the prevailing norms, not violently but frequently and politely. Otherwise, we remain inauthentic to ourselves from cradle to grave.

Society is showing some maturity. Today, chances are you would not have married your girlfriend, which might have been better for you both. I sense little love in that marriage, just obligation. Obligation can produce a great deal of psychological if not physical damage. Your wife has a right to her religious beliefs, but so do you. Moreover, nowhere is it written that you have to take in your grown offspring. To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons. Unless your children have some genetic deficiency, other than being spoiled brats, they should be on their own. You are doing them no favor.

Perhaps the most important word in the English language for a mature adult who wishes to enjoy a modicum of freedom is the word “No!” Try it, you will be amazed at what a leveler it is, and how quickly you can regain control of your life. “No!” to your pampered children. “No!” to your exploiting relatives and neighbors. “No!” to your mother-in-law, whom I understand from your letter has the means to afford a full-service retirement home. But “Yes!” to taking a course at your community college that meets your fancy. “Yes!” to a vacation for that long-suffering wife of yours whom I understand is equally a victim of circumstances. You were not put on earth to wear a long face and a hair shirt. The irony is that you do no one a favor by relieving them of their own burden. Each of us must carry our own. The purpose of all of our lives are what we do with them, not what we would do with them if things were different. We define and determine all our own circumstances with the emphasis on “all.” Whatever our situation, we have made a decision to abide by it, probably because we have a higher need to meet the needs of others than our own. Should that be true, we have put ourselves in a cage. We are not our own best friend but our own worst enemy.

Copyright (1996) Look for WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? Book is to be released in 2005.