CONFIDENT THINKING COMMANDMENT NO. 6
START LIKING YOURSELF
THE MORE YOU LIKE YOURSELF THE MORE GENEROUS
LIKE YOURSELF AND YOU HAVE NO TIME FOR HATRED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 2006
Novelist Robert Goddard writes in “Borrowed Time” (2006): “As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to analyze my own behavior as well as other people’s. I’ve come to understand that just as every mood is temporary, so is every triumph and every disappointment. It isn’t much of a consolation, but it’s an effective antidote to despair. One day, I suppose, it’ll make even death seem an acceptable tradeoff with reality.”
If this seems ominous, it might be well to take inventory of how you feel about yourself and why. Murray Kempton wrote in the “New York Review” (1995): “The Almighty is presumed to pass His judgments and dole out His penalties to individuals, which allows us to suppose that nations are spared painful sessions with the Recording Angel. But if ours is ever so summoned, we may suppose that the inquiry into its cardinal sins might begin with the question: ‘And why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?’”
Kempton was referring to an Olympic Champion diver, who happens to be gay, only to find his life turned inside out once it was made public. Some can roll with the punches of social abuse once secrets of their lives are revealed, but most of us cannot, as was the case with Goddard’s fictional hero and this great athlete.
In June 1993 an article of mine in “The Reader’s Digest” opened with the line: “To have a friend you must be a friend, starting with yourself.” The volume of reprint requests of this article prompted me to write “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend” (1996) where I wrote:
“We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts. Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage. The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage of loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.”
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Few of us would disagree we are a competitive society. In fact, we take pride in being such a society, but is that beneficial? I submit that many of us are unhappy campers. If we were happy, escapism wouldn’t be such a big business; nor would we be so hard on ourselves.
Our approach to life is a result of early self-training due to our interpretation of situations. Role demands and self-demands show their faces very early on as does the “ideal self” and “real self.” We are programmed to be self-critical rather than self-accepting with little likelihood we will realize these conditioned responses to life are inappropriate or inadequate holdovers of our early programming as a child.
This programming starts with being compared to our siblings, then our peers, and can get really out of hand when compared to our parents who go on how bright, athletic, attractive, accomplished, and perfect they were at a similar age. Comparing and competing with siblings, peers and parents make for a powerful “no win” situation. The inclination is to be down on ourselves for not being “them” when they could never be “us.”
Kahlil Gibran in “The Prophet” (1972) reminds parents: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
It is sometimes a monumental struggle for the youth to make the transition to the adult he is expected to be. He must first replace the adolescent mindset of seeing him always falling short of the mark, and then become that confident adult inclined to assist others.
This is so because the youth will avoid the pain he creates for himself by trying to solve adult problems with a child’s evasive tricks. Evidence of this is also in the adolescent adult who takes certain delight in the false steps of others, while avoiding self-examination. Schadenfreude, or enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others, is a manifestation of childish behavior, and an example of self-hatred.
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Psychiatrists Willard and Marguerite Beecher, authors of “Beyond Success and Failure” (1966),” find competition is the chief obstacle to self-reliance and maturity. They reason competition enslaves and degrades the mind, and is one of the most destructive forms of psychological dependence.
Surely, being competitive makes it difficult to know and accept ourselves as we are, and therefore nearly impossible to like ourselves. What is the first reaction when you strike out playing baseball, get a bad grade in a test, lose a job, have an automobile accident?
Most would say they are forced in on themselves, but not in a positive sense, but in terms of disappointment on the brink of self-disgust. They have let someone down: the coach and the team, their parents, or their loved ones. Then quickly, self-contempt takes on the face of somebody else to ease the discomfiture of the moment. “It was not my fault!” But it was and it is, and therefore in acknowledging the fact is key to everything else.
It is uncommon to take failure or unexpected circumstances in stride. Life is built around certainty, predictability, security, and control, all of which are anathema to surprise, loss or disappointment. Yet, all of these are part of life and living. Failing is the learning plateau but is seen as the very opposite. We have been programmed to be competitors, and competitors are programmed to win, to be in control, on top of things, to succeed, to keep failure and therefore defeat at an absolute minimum. Unfortunately, life is much more about failure than success. It is the reason life is a learning experience. Consider a major league baseball player is considered a great hitter if he has a lifetime batting average of 300, which means that seven out of ten times he failed to get a hit.
Eventually, if obsessed with winning, a person will be afraid to take chances, afraid to grow, and instead become dull, imitative, mediocre, burned-out, stereotyped, devoid of initiative, imagination and spontaneity. Competition will have killed his spirit for renewal. The enemy of his enemy will be himself.
Then why are we such a competitive society? The short answer is that we have a narrow gauge to measure excellence, and that narrow gauge is not based upon the individual competing with himself to bring out his best but comparing that same individual with others in terms of skill, talent, brilliance, athleticism, beauty, culture, sophistication, and achievement.
Competition leads to copycatting and to inauthentic man. It has managed to produce a new category of people, celebrities, and persons with no defining talent or contribution to society. The journalistic polemics of Ann Coulter on the right of the political spectrum and Michael Moore on the left come to mind. They rant cruel and tasteless nonsense in verbal exhibitionistic name-calling, shedding little light on current issues of public concern, while playing on the deep darkness of divisive self-hatred. They don’t wish to inform or promote rational discussion and accord, but to amuse themselves with discordant stereotypes of a self-hating public.
Competition breeds fear; fear breeds comparison. No matter how healthy, wealthy and wise we are there is always someone more so. Fear and comparison breed competition. We are never enough. We always should be more. There is no time to relax. We must prod ourselves on; never content to be the person we actually are, minting ourselves into an outside without an inside. Self-hatred makes certain the two sides will never be in harmony, but always in conflict.
The perfectionist is a manifestation of this, the increasingly frightened competitor that always must win to be secure. The perfectionist has played a game with his mind seeing perfection as the embodiment of truth. Implicit in this mindset is the need to see himself above criticism and therefore superior to those less perfect. The perfectionist is constantly comparing himself with others, always feeling that his advantage is in jeopardy. You know him by his fault finding and belittling of others. No one is ever good enough as he maintains a critical eye of the Achilles heel of imperfection in others, while, paradoxically, unable to see it in himself.
There are two kinds of people, creative people and self-haters. Self-haters hate because they compare, fear and compete. Creative people are lovers of life and take pleasure in activities for their own sake. Self-haters are competitive and tie their minds in knots, as they must win be it in love or war. Creative people find work is love made visible. Love is always without an object. Love is in the doing itself. There is no room in love for fear.
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Next to competition being a sickness of the soul of the United States of Anxiety, there is the matter of aloneness and loneliness. They are not the same.
Aloneness, or “al one ness” is the basis of our greatest strength. It is a holistic view of life. If we don’t accept that we are alone and enjoy our own company, how can we ever feel fulfilled and enjoy the company of others?
Loneliness is a sign of our greatest weakness. We must be connected to others, dependent on their point of view, have them encourage us to think and behave properly “for our own good.” We dare not rely on ourselves. Life becomes a second hand experience guided by someone else’s information.
Aloneness is a mark of maturity. Loneliness is a mark of immaturity.
Robert Putnam writes in “Time” magazine (July 3, 2006): “American are more socially isolated today than we were barely two decades ago. The latest evidences of that comes from a topflight team of sociologists who, after comparing national surveys in 1985 – 2004, report a one-third drop in the number of people with whom the average American can discuss important matters.” Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone” (2000), assumes from this that Americans are getting “lonelier.” The good professor falls into the trap of the United States of Anxiety by suggesting more community involvement, spending more time with family and friends, family-friendly workplaces or having a picnic or two, “could just save your life.” If it were only so.
The problem with this is that loneliness will not be cured with cosmetic approaches. Loneliness is the emptiness felt by a leaning dependency on others for comfort, entertainment and support, indeed, for living at all. Obviously, communal involvement has some merit, and having a close family connection cannot be faulted, but they are not panaceas for loneliness. Nor will family-friendly workplaces necessarily be reinforcing. The typical high tech workplace for the past quarter century more resembles a playpen than a workplace, and it hasn’t reduced anxiety on the job.
The dependent person has not learned how to enjoy his own company. He must have a personal trainer for exercise, constant noise from the moment he rises until he goes to bed. He needs someone to constantly reassure him he is okay, someone who can amuse, divert, distract, and define for him what he is and what he should be doing. Loneliness is the complete inability to face the world alone. He most fears a quiet mind. He would be intimidated by the quiet of nature. This quiet would force him back on himself placing him in the company of that friend inside that he so desperately seeks outside. In short, the dependent person needs and seeks a baby sitter. He has not trained himself to invent activity of his own, to create, design, build and make discoveries of the world in which he lives.
Gore Vidal once said, “To be interesting, you must be interested.” You cannot be interested if you are always looking for stimulation outside yourself. You seek the hand of someone else to lead you to something interesting. When a person finds no one will provide such stimulation, or make him the center of their support and attention, deep and abiding loneliness sets in.
This appears to be the culture of our times. Kempton’s words ring loud: “And why, America, did you, in your arrogance, teach so many of your children to hate themselves?”
Putnam is right about lonely people when he says they are unable to establish enduring relationships. Lonely people also tend to be nonproductive and shallow, while others find them boring and consequently avoid them. They are needy and needy demands so much and gives back so little. As a result, lonely people are thrown back on themselves. This reinforces their loneliness.
Programmed from birth to lack self-reliance, the situation is unlikely to change. Failure is a good teacher of self-reliance, and failure avoided too often erases learning from experience, which in turn can lead to loneliness. You are never alone doing something you love. The problem of lonely people is they never go to the trouble to find such love.
Aloneness, on the other hand, is the mirth of hearing our inner voice because we have somehow managed to steer clear of the clatter of outside noise. We don’t have to have the television on as soon as we rise in the morning, conning ourselves into the conviction we have to know what is going on in the world and the latest weather reports. We don’t have to have the car radio on listening to talking heads spewing their nonsense as we make our way to work. We don’t have to rush to the cafeteria to have a coffee and chatter away with others with the current gossip. We don’t have to repeat the same reverse action as we go home at night, having the television on until we retire without a single moment in the entire day without noise.
The mature individual has learned to shut his mind off from this conflicting noise outside himself to listen to the music of his own inner world. With aloneness, we finally “let go” of desire to compete, to possess, to dominate, to exploit, to manipulate, or manifest other remnants of childhood reinforcement. We are ready to hear what is going on within, to listen to that inner voice that alone belongs to us that waits so patiently to be heard.
Krishnamurti puts it succinctly: “In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself.”
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If this is so, why are we so blind to the fact? It goes back to our programming. Progress is civilization’s most important product, and we have been made into machines to desire, distort, improve, modify and change the outside world finding little contentment in leaving it as it is, or ourselves as we are. Change is the god of the machine. There isn’t an institution that doesn’t deaden if not kill our spirit because of the constant cacophony of this machine. We must have a cell phone in our ear, laptop on our knee, an iPod or BlackBerry in our hand to ensure we are electronically connected to that ubiquitous machine. There is no place or time for our inner world.
Self-acceptance suggests contentment with “what is” which is anathema to progress. With self-acceptance, there is a fullness of the spirit, which knows no feeling of want or poverty. We are never alone when we are “al one ness.” Loneliness is the empty world of constant seeking of outside reassurance. It is the need for change for change’s sake. Nothing can be left to resonate on its own.
Man’s intelligence and sense of urgency created the modern world so that he could afford to relax and enjoy the magnificent civilization he had created, only to find it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency. He is like the man Colin Wilson refers to in “Access to Inner Words” (1983), who lived out on the lawn in a tent, while he built himself a magnificent house, then absent mindedly went on living in the tent and left the house empty. That is precisely what modern man has done. He has created a climate to relax but never finds the time.
We are in perpetual motion like the man who has been driving all day, and who keeps waking up at night, imagining himself still behind the wheel. We are the lonely and have slipped into the insidious habit of anxiety, tension, over-alertness, and always being on, craving connection to fill a void that only exists because we are afraid to stop.
Some reading this may declare that they take care of themselves physically, earn a living, build a business or profession, manage a family and otherwise conduct themselves with much success in public and private affairs, so what is this about liking yourself anyway?
You don’t necessarily have to like yourself to prove functional. But you do have to like yourself to prove yourself human and in touch with your soul. Otherwise, you can become hateful, cynical, alcoholic, tyrannical, depressed, psychotic, neurotic, and an emotional burden on all those around you. If so, chances are you have not learned to be emotional self-reliant or to operate with the maturity of the adult. More likely, you are suspended in the terminal self-indulgent adolescent.
The indicators of emotional dependence are evident at all stages of our lives and obvious to everyone with whom we relate. We are what we do, not part of the time, but all of the time. And what we do is the real answer to what we mean and intend, not just what we say. What we say is neither hear nor there. The word “love” is empty if it lacks agreement in our actions.
If you like comfort in numbers, social scientists estimate that only about 10 percent of the American population has developed emotional self-reliance and maturity. It prompted Daniel Goleman to write “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” (1997). Goleman’s book is clearly an effort to improve emotional self-reliance by alerting people to the importance of passion, and how passion acknowledged and utilized can lead to fulfillment.
Passion is a gift of the self-accepting mind. Such a mind is self-trusting which is a gauge of emotional self-reliance. We don’t have to have someone looking over our shoulder for us to do the right thing. We are not kind and considerate to please others with our virtue. We don’t do the best possible job because it will mean a good performance appraisal and segue to a raise. With emotional self-reliance, initiative is natural as being in competition with others is not. We do all these things because we can; we have a passion to create a better world. It is not necessary to be found out. It is enough to know within ourselves.
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Systematic of distrust and emotional immaturity is a top heavy managed society, like our own, where there is a supervisor for every twelve to twenty workers, and a teacher for every twelve to twenty students. We don’t trust students to do the work assigned nor do we trust workers to complete their jobs. Once it was the weary eye of a person standing over us. Now it is as likely the ubiquitous electronic eye of a hidden camera, or electronic sensing devices at work monitoring our computers. Managed society has implanted psychological self-loathing on its people with the result that creative pursuit and spontaneity are as rare in appearance as Halley’s Comet.
Workers and students are programmed to be dependent. Consequently, top-heavy management and teacher-dependent learning are considered doctrinaire despite spectacular technological innovations. To be fair electronics have resulted in a healthy Gross Domestic Product. Nonetheless, US markets continue to shrink for manufactured goods, the trade deficit soars, while student performance fails to keep pace with other advanced societies despite the US investing more in education than most other nations.
When told what to do and precisely how it should be done, there is little learning, creativity or initiative in the process with intellectual rigor mortis setting in. This was the case while America slept, and then suddenly there was a dramatic change in the global marketplace. Panic followed. Young people and seasoned workers were now expected to automatically be “born again,” to take the initiative, to display self-discipline, to become self-managed, and to think with emotional maturity.
Instead, students and workers have dissolved into feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, falling apart and out of control, and predictably, looking for someone again to rescue them. The panic since South East Asia has taken markets away from automakers and other manufactured producers has resulted in a push in industry and education for individual initiative in the workplace, and “no child be left behind” in education. It is wishful thinking out of a utopian dream because it is expected without sacrifice and only cosmetic change. And now there is India and China to contend with as well.
Confident thinking is not possible without maturity. Our cultural programming has never solved the problem of emotional self-reliance. Nothing in our culture has prepared the individual to like himself for himself, or to know how to stand-alone. The paradox is that a person cannot truly work together until he first is able to stand-alone.
As each year passes, more and more children are sent off to school with only a modicum of emotional or physical self-reliance. It is a habit of our culture to do more and more for children and to expect less and less of them. Later, when these same children are of an adult age they are inclined to act as if obedient or, indeed, disobedient twelve-year-olds suspended in terminal adolescence either management dependent or counter dependent on the company to take care of them. When a crisis comes up and it is not in their job description, they don’t report it or take charge of the situation. Instead, they echo the sentiment: “Not my job!” To imagine them self-responsible, self-reliant, and self-accepting is absurd.
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In this cultural climate, liking ourselves for us is difficult if not impossible. First, we are programmed not to be comfortable with who and what we are apart from others. Second, we have never been programmed to seize the “now!” We either live in the past or pine away the time dreaming of the future. Our programming has failed to make us comfortable “being,” that is, what we are, but has instead persistently pressured us into “becoming,” that is, what we are not, but could and should possibly be.
As a result, we take little comfort in the journey but are obsessed with the end. Few students enjoy what they are doing now, at any level. The same can be said of workers. They are looking to the future; in the case of workers, towards a bigger job and increased pay; for students to the next grade level, or the college degree. The whole focus is “getting out!” and not “being in!”
Life is a bore for them all, a burden, and mind-numbing experience. So, whom do they blame? Students blame teachers. Workers blame their bosses or the company. No one stops to realize blame is irrelevant. All anyone has is this very moment, nothing more.
Students drop out of school because it is boring. Workers retreat into substance abuse or dog it on the job because they are fed up. Notice boredom is always someone else’s fault, never the bored. They think life is entertainment and they want to be entertained, not educated, certainly not employed. That said there is no past and no tomorrow, there is only today. Since this it too heavy to contemplate, they retreat into ubiquitous noise.
Life is “being,” and “being” is now. There is nothing to achieve, nothing to get, nothing to prove, nowhere to go, no big brother checking on us, no head higher than our own. “Being” is all about reality.
“Becoming” is all about the illusion of progress and wishful thinking. “Becoming” is ambition, the desire for personal recognition; “becoming” is needy, “please accept me”; “becoming” is dependent on the approval of others; “becoming” is the feeling of emptiness or emotional poverty; “becoming” is the treadmill in search of the ultimate reward; “becoming” is living on empty hopes of future benefits; “becoming” is the abdication of living now. How many times have we heard people say they hate what they are doing but they have a plan and when the plan comes to fruition everything will fall into place?
An executive once came to me, a chief engineer of a high tech company, who hated his job, but had eleven years to retirement. I asked him what he would prefer doing. “I’d love to be a stockbroker. I love studying the market. That’s what I’m going to do when I get out of here!” Why don’t you quit and do it now? “I can’t afford to,” he answered, and then thinking a moment, “besides I would not get my maximum pension.” He stayed until retirement; fell off his roof with a serious head injury and never worked again.
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To combat this pressure to be self-hating and to find your way to liking yourself involves self-knowing. There is a three-step process to assist you in this regard:
SELF-AWARENESS – awareness is seeing yourself as you actually are, warts and all, comfortable in the knowledge that you have rocks in your head and snakes sunning themselves on the rocks. These are your secrets and need be known by no one else, but obviously must be appreciated by you. They are the touchstones of your character that have materialized as you have encountered and dealt with life. They are the possible missteps you have made that assist you in better understanding yourself. They are life as you have stumbled upon it. No attempt should be made to evaluate why you are the way you are, or why you did the things you did. They are you, and they are not good or bad, but only life knowing itself. Self-awareness is to see yourself as clearly as your mind allows.
SELF-ACCEPTANCE – what you see that you are you must accept unconditionally because it is the way you are. Acceptance is another word for “liking yourself as you are.” Many factors and circumstances occur in life to make you as you find yourself. There is no point in becoming judgmental, or blaming parents or circumstances for your predicament, whatever it is. You accept what you find and allow yourself to be tolerant, understanding and forgiving in that acceptance. It will provide you with an amazing insight not only into your own character, but also into the character of every other person you meet. When you refuse to hide from yourself, others cannot hide what and who they are from you. The con must go elsewhere to ply his trade.
SELF-ASSERTION – once you see yourself clearly and accept what you see dispassionately, you can continue to act as you are or you can choose to change, whatever serves your best interests. It is a matter of choice. Self-assertion is the “action step.” You no longer reflect or attempt to intellectualize your predicament, but are ready to act upon what you find. You have a strong sense of pleasing yourself, which is not selfish but a matter of self-preservation. It is best reflected in not experiencing difficulty saying “no” when it is the optimum response to the situation. You will not carry other people because you will not own their problems. They may not realize this but you are doing them a favor because carrying someone else’s burden only makes them weaker, not stronger.
This three-step process leads to emotional self-reliance, and maturity. You are your own person thinking confidently because you see yourself on the main stage of your own life and not in the wing waiting for someone else to mouth your lines.
Whenever we define friendship, it is always about someone else. It is assumed we are natural friends to ourselves. If this were so, we would be more generous of spirit towards ourselves and therefore towards others. Jean de La Fontaine (1621 – 1695) captures something of its essence: “Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.” Friendship is a maturing process strengthened by the ordeal of life. Pioneering psychiatrist Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937) points out that friendship is indeed a shadow thing with so much that is unconscious in our consciousness and so much that is conscious in our unconsciousness that it is useless to separate ourselves from friendship. If we cannot be friend to ourselves, then to whom can we be friend? So often we seek friends to exploit to our advantage right down to taking the shirt off their backs. To such people a friend is someone who would not resist exploitation. Often the one exploited with such thinking is the person himself.
I have a son-in-law who is constantly exploited by such friends: he gives them work and they don’t complete it; he loans them cars and trucks and they take them to be their own; he goes into partnership with them and gives them generous shares of the business with little investment, and then they don’t hold up the terms of their agreements. Obviously, he is as guilty as they are and shows little friendship with himself; indeed, little self-acceptance or liking of himself.
Most relationships we call friendships are nothing more than mutual-advantage or mutual-exploitations, pacts, something-for-something, which dissolve as soon as the element of mutual advantage disappears on either side. I have seen this particular scene repeated again and again. When it is no longer emotionally or physically profitable to know each other, we drift apart. The problem with ourselves is that we cannot do that, or if we do we are self-estranged, spinning in a terrible cycle of confusion, adrift in constantly becoming, never being, and therefore never arriving, anywhere.
Real friends are those who accept us as we are, not as we should be. Real friends like us for who we are not what we are. Friendship is limited first by our ability to be a friend to ourselves, comfortable in our own skin, with a tolerance for others as we find them. Friendship makes no demands. “It is,” that is, it is a condition of fullness that flows from everything we do and over everything we are. Like rain, it falls impartially on all our peccadilloes and virtues. It demands nothing for itself and allows everything to fulfill itself in its own way and time. Friendship is without a need to control others or to withhold itself. It lives and lets live.
Being a friend to yourself places you in the main tent instead of in a sideshow as the Beechers put it. It puts you on center stage and author of all your deeds. Remember, the two amazing gifts that one receives who accepts (likes) himself as he is: the incredible talent of reading people accurately, and the ability to say “no!”
When people constantly fool us, and we cannot find the capacity to say “no,” we have the problem of addiction. Yes, I said addiction. Addiction is not limited to substance abuse. It is an addiction when you constantly choose your friends unwisely. Addiction is simply a way of evading the demands of everyday life. Addiction is an alibi for not facing what is demanded of you, providing an escape. Addiction is self-hatred since we avoid the threat of confronting the image of ourselves as we are, the image we don’t want to see, while at the same time, maintaining the appearance that we can accept.
Confident thinking demands living and working in an association that is reinforcing and therefore is in harmony with you. It is an environment that is self-friendly where you are the host of life and not the guest, where you are in the driver’s seat and not a passenger on someone else’s destiny; and where you have a moral center with a working compass.
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