Many moons ago, I wrote a list of 12 Prin­ci­ples that were the basis of my under­stand­ing, both of my life and of my coun­selling prac­tice. I’ve been think­ing about pulling them together into a small book that I could give to new clients.

I’ve decided that I’d, at least for now, tackle each of the top­ics here, in the blog. We’ll see how it goes.

9 . My “I-am-ness” is lim­ited only as I choose to limit myself. If I iden­tify with “good/bad,” right/wrong lists, or with what oth­ers think or what oth­ers want, my “I-am-ness” becomes a small, tight box. I must real­ize that I am not a noun. I am a verb. The ques­tion, then, is this: how much of my “I-am-ing” will I bring into con­scious­ness, and how much will I choose to live?

One par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing way to look at our­selves as human beings is to explore our free-flowing-ness ver­sus our rigidity.

As with every­thing else we’ve talked about, where you are on this scale is totally your choice. In other words, we choose between rigid­ity and flex­i­bil­ity.

And, equally impor­tant, who I am is absolutely and totally demon­strated by what I do.

There is often a vast dif­fer­ence between who I am
and how I iden­tify myself (who I say I am.)

While there’s no doubt that infants are born as blank slates, it’s also true that each infant has has a vast array of inborn tal­ents and abil­i­ties. Mate­r­ial is often repressed, so most of us cart around piles of sub­con­scious and uncon­scious mate­r­ial. This “stuff” might be unex­plored, but it has its ways of get­ting our atten­tion. Dreams, strange inspi­ra­tions, unex­plained desires — these things have their roots in the unknown material.

Most of you know that Dar­bella teaches grades seven and eight in what could be described as a mid­dle school—a school just for sev­enth and eighth-graders. In her almost 30 years at the school, two things remain the same—the kids enter as imma­ture chil­dren and exit as some­what mature teens, and more impor­tant, all but the strongest are forced into com­pli­ance through peer pres­sure.

Rebel­lion! In groups!!

It’s quite ironic. It’s pre­dictable that teens think they are stretch­ing their wings, rebelling against parental norms, and stand­ing on their own two feet, when all that’s really hap­pen­ing is that they are exchang­ing parental rules for the stan­dards of their peers.

When you think about it, this is actu­ally the process of all aspects of our socialization.

We get the first of it from our par­ents, the next part from our tribes (reli­gious groups, neigh­bors, rel­a­tives, etc.) and the third part from our peers. One researcher, Steven Pinker, sug­gests the ratio is 10% genet­ics, 40% par­ents, and 50% peers, as far as influ­ence goes. What hap­pens, and it only dif­fers in degree, is that more or less of our free­dom, our “I-am-ness,” is locked away behind the prison walls of soci­etal norms.

The walls, the defenses, serve a twofold pur­pose: to keep the world at bay, and to keep our­selves in check. In other words, we feel threat­ened by “the great out there,” and fear­ful of the power of our own passion.

It thus seems safer to hide behind the rigid walls

of our own making.

This often comes out when clients blame oth­ers for their reluc­tance to make changes. I hear a lot of, “What can I do? I have kids. I can’t leave.” Or, “I chose this, and now I’m stuck with it—my father told me I make my bed and now I have to lie in it.” Or, “I want to do my life dif­fer­ently but my [par­ents, sib­lings, chil­dren, part­ner,] won’t let me.” And on and on. Many are the excuses, the eva­sions, the equivocations—all of which add up to a deathly fear of liv­ing life fully.

For most, self respon­si­ble liv­ing is entirely too self responsible.

The resis­tance is twofold:
1) peo­ple resist by over thinking—over analyzing—as opposed to act­ing, and
2) peo­ple resist by tight­en­ing up their bod­ies, and through shal­low breath­ing. They thus cre­ate a per­son locked inside their own walls, some­thing Wil­helm Reich called char­ac­ter armor.

Our approach, in a sense, is to knock loudly on the walls. It’s not my job, as a ther­a­pist, to knock someone’s walls down. That’s an inside job.

In a sense, I’m sort of like a con­sul­tant on a home ren­o­va­tion project. I can tell you how to do it, and I will likely pick up the ham­mer and give you a demon­stra­tion, but the rest of the job, the hard slog­ging part, is up to you.

My refusal to do the job for you is a real problem—until you become self responsible.

For all your life, some­one has done the hard slog­ging for you. Or more likely, peo­ple have left you because you demanded that they do your work for you, and you’re still run­ning around look­ing for some­one to save you. At the end of the day, how­ever, you built the walls—and you con­formed. It does not mat­ter that you didn’t know what you were doing.

The way through the walls is to pay attention—to your dreams, to your hopes, to your aspirations—to the things that arise from inside.

Open the door to the full pos­si­bil­i­ties of you. Explore your grow­ing edges, your pas­sions, your block­ages, the hid­den recesses that con­tain the things you really want to do and be. Also, find your­self a Body­worker or deep tis­sue mas­sage ther­a­pist to help you break through the char­ac­ter armor.

It’s the work of a life­time to dis­man­tle the walls that you have built up since you were born.

This work requires con­stant vig­i­lance, a sense of humor, and a will­ing­ness to get your hands dirty. It also requires enact­ing, in the real world, what you learn about your­self. It may require dras­ti­cally chang­ing or leav­ing rela­tion­ships, chang­ing careers, or even mov­ing to a new loca­tion or find­ing a new com­mu­nity. There is noth­ing sim­ple, easy, or quick about any of this.

What you gain in self know­ing, in “I-am-ness,” is decid­edly worth the effort.

After all, walk­ing around encased in armor, bear­ing the bur­den of the walls soci­ety and you have wrapped around you, means that being in the world is very hard indeed.

With ded­i­cated effort, with focus, and with the help of the com­mu­nity of fel­low walk­ers, true free­dom, true relax­ation, and true depth can be yours.

It’s what the world cries for.