So, you all received the e-mail detail­ing how sub­scribers to the BLOG can now down­load 3 of my e-books, absolutely free. I’m not sure if this is a “for­ever” thing, but let’s assume so, for now. If you look at the top of the e-mail ver­sion of this BLOG, sub­scribers have a link to the free e-books.

If you know any­one who would ben­e­fit from my e-books, and ben­e­fit from this BLOG, send them to: http://www.phoenixcentre.com/cgi-bin/prolinkz/pl.cgi?free

© Hugh McLeod,

In keep­ing with a long tra­di­tion around here, I’m going to first present a list of rea­sons why peo­ple find it dif­fi­cult to express them­selves. In the next arti­cle, I’ll look at ways to make self expres­sion, self-awareness, and self-actualization the hall­marks of your life.

I’m call­ing this week’s arti­cle, “10 Things Your Mommy For­got to Tell You,” — and I’m doing this in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way. But only sort of.

One of the key ingre­di­ents to actu­ally wak­ing up is becom­ing aware of what’s really going on. Mostly, as the quote mis-attributed to R. D. Laing reminds us,

“The range of what we think and do is lim­ited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is lit­tle we can do to change. Until we notice how fail­ing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

I want to unpack this briefly before get­ting to the list.

Fail­ing to notice is con­di­tioned behavior.

What I mean by this, is that we are taught from birth to only notice cer­tain things. This is the process of social­iza­tion. It is, in its essence, the same for all of us, no mat­ter where we live.

As I said last week, I think of this as our cul­tural or tribal upbring­ing. But it of course begins with our par­ents. I really do hope you read last week’s arti­cle, if not please go there now.

Every­one knows that their deeply held, core beliefs are as old as the hills.

These beliefs, cou­pled with soci­etal repres­sion, cause us to want to pull in, behave our­selves, fit in, blame oth­ers for our mis­ery, and spend our lives com­plain­ing rather than doing some­thing about it. It’s the main theme in the book, “Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Road,” which I assume car­ried through into the movie. The main char­ac­ters spend their lives point­ing their fin­gers at the soci­ety they belong to judg­ing it to be inad­e­quate, a fail­ure, empty and mean­ing­less, and yet find the ways and means to stay totally immersed in the same society.

To go back to my idea of gates, from the arti­cle two weeks ago, it might be help­ful if you pic­ture these gates as being sort of like rub­ber bands or bungee cords. You bump up against them and they yield, sort of like push­ing against a rub­ber sheet. In a sense you have to cut through them, and yet they always remain some­what attached to us.

Thus, as we pressed to be more self expres­sive and more self-actualized, the bungee cord of our social­iza­tion tries des­per­ately to pull us back down into the fold.

Have another look at Hugh MacLeod’s car­toon, near the top of this article.

He’s right — our choices are two, or at most three.

• The first choice, a com­mon choice, is to be a sheep and join the herd. This means duti­fully fol­low­ing the rules of our soci­ety, as taught to us by our par­ents and our tribes.
• If one chooses to be a wolf, which is another way, I think, of say­ing self-actualized, you’re going to be exist­ing, at best, in a small pack sur­rounded by the dis­tinctly ner­vous herd.
• The third choice, not men­tioned, might be called the bitch-fest. You’re in the herd, in the sys­tem, yet all the while are com­plain­ing loudly and to every­one about how screwed up the sys­tem is, and how you are not a part of what you are a part of.

Which is why I’m more inter­ested in what peo­ple do

than what they say.

Any­way, my point is this: we are who we are because of our con­di­tion­ing, and most peo­ple are there­fore liv­ing lives using 10% of their poten­tial. Or to quote R. D. Laing again,

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby con­fronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is sub­jected to these forces of vio­lence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their par­ents and their par­ents before them. These forces are mainly con­cerned with destroy­ing most of its poten­tial­i­ties. This enter­prise is on the whole suc­cess­ful.” [empha­sis mine]

The weird­est part of all this, and the rea­son I keep quot­ing R. D. Laing, is that our erro­neous beliefs are so deeply buried that we don’t even know that they’re there. Instead, we min­i­mize our symptoms:

• You might find your­self with some sort of men­tal chal­lenge, like sad­ness, or ennui, or worse.
• Your body might be a tight lit­tle ball of stress, you might find your­self get­ting sick a lot, or even­tu­ally even progress to hav­ing some kind of major disease.
• You might find your­self in a rela­tion­ship that isn’t work­ing, and are doing some­thing “bril­liant” like, “stay­ing for the kids.”

There is the under­ly­ing sense of “quiet des­per­a­tion” that
Thoreau noticed 150 years ago.

What I see hap­pen­ing, all the time, with both clients and read­ers, is that they’ll tell me that some­thing I said or wrote really struck a nerve. They got it and it was like some­one turned on the light. Except that in most cases, I said the same thing many many times before.

They just hadn’t heard it. Until they did.

Or, as Joe Vitale puts it,

“First, you must real­ize that you don’t know what you don’t know. Your results are a prod­uct of what you have been taught and learned over your life, not because you con­sciously chose those beliefs. Once you rec­og­nize that your beliefs may be irra­tional or self-limiting, you can con­sciously choose to change.” Joe Vitale, >Expect Mir­a­cles, page 108

The crux of this quote is this. “… you don’t know what you don’t know.” This is a great line. It’s the same as, “fail­ing to notice, until you notice.” Or, try it this way: “You don’t know that you don’t know.” This is because our upbring­ing is all about forc­ing us into a mold before we are able to even rec­og­nize there is a mold. When you think about it, it’s pretty hard to break out of the mold that you do not know is there.

So here, in no par­tic­u­lar order, are 10 things your
mommy for­got to tell you.

1. The way things are, is the way things are. Noth­ing means anything.

It is our nature to be mean­ing mak­ers, so we are uncom­fort­able with the thought of mean­ing­less events. Because we learn to name things when we were lit­tle, we assume, first of all, that the name is accu­rate, and that we are pow­er­less to do any­thing about the thing we’ve named.

We think it’s a big, scary world out there. I see many peo­ple creep­ing and slink­ing about, hop­ing that bad things won’t hap­pen, hop­ing the bogey­man won’t get them. It’s quite odd. I often hear, “Well, there’s noth­ing I can do about that.” And I’m look­ing at the same sit­u­a­tion, and see 10 or 20 things that could be done dif­fer­ently. All that’s required is a change of perspective.

In other words, a thing is just a thing. How I relate to the thing is entirely my choice. Part of the dis­ci­pline of self-actualization is to let go of think­ing any­thing is intrin­si­cally big or impor­tant. This flies in the face of what mommy taught you: big peo­ple, espe­cially mommy and daddy, are impor­tant, much big­ger than you, and able to make you behave. You carry this with you as a fear of mak­ing waves.

The way out: sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple are sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple. The herd may behave toward such things in a cer­tain way, but that’s not required. It is how it is until you change your rela­tion­ship with it — from your side.

2. No one is out to get you.

Mommy, I’m scared!”

I wrote about closet mon­sters a while back, men­tion­ing that it’s nat­ural for lit­tle kids to be afraid of things that go bump in the dark. I can’t stress enough how dif­fi­cult it is for us to remem­ber how absolutely weird and ter­ri­fy­ing the world was when we were lit­tle. It’s likely why most peo­ple can’t remem­ber much before age 6. I sus­pect that if you have mem­o­ries that go back before age 6 or so, they are what I call implanted memories.—things you know you have been told about but have no direct rec­ol­lec­tion of.

When were small, every­thing was a threat. Think about it. We don’t know that falling down the stairs can kill us. We don’t know that glow­ing coils on a stove means hot. We don’t know that some of the big peo­ple that sur­round us do not have our best inter­ests at heart, and may be more inter­ested in what we can do for them than what they can do for us. Our par­ents, quite right­fully, teach us to be fear­ful. This, how­ever, is sup­posed to be in place only until we’re more grown up.

Being self-sufficient and self-actualized means being able to tell a threat from child­ish fear. And here’s a hint: 99% of it is a child­ish fear.

The way out: see point 1. Things are exactly as they are. Becom­ing a self-actualized adult requires being able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate. While peo­ple are def­i­nitely self-centered in their actions, most of the herd is painfully non-self-aware. It’s sort of like they’re just blun­der­ing along, and many of them have big feet. Our job is to be nim­ble, step out of the way, and let them plod on. They’re not out to get us — they barely even see us. Our job is to be like water — to bring aikido to our lives — we step out of the way, with­out judgment.

3. No one is com­ing.

This is a slo­gan that hangs on my therapist’s wall. Back when we were small, when we wailed are pitched a fit, an adult showed up and made it all bet­ter. Or, if we came from a dys­func­tional fam­ily, some­thing bad might have hap­pened when we made a noise, but at least some­thing hap­pened. The expec­ta­tion was, “I am in pain — you fix it — change it, make it better.”

I have many clients who pull this with their part­ners — they expect that if they whine long enough and com­plain loud enough, their part­ner will be so moved by love, or manip­u­la­tion, that they will make the boo-boo all bet­ter. If, for some silly rea­son, the part­ner tries, then the expec­ta­tion is this will always hap­pen. If the part­ner refuses, they’re being stub­born and unloving.

The prob­lem is that res­cue is an inside job, at least for adults. There is no exter­nal res­cue, not from a part­ner, not from your rel­a­tives, and not from some mag­i­cal being up in the sky. There is just you, and the life you have created.

The way out: accept total, per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity for who you are, where you are, and what you are doing. Until you give up your belief in exter­nal res­cue, you are doomed to be “somebody’s baby.”

4. No one will ever love you like mommy and daddy love you.

But how can I cook you dinner?

Actu­ally, lots of dys­func­tional fathers and moth­ers do teach this les­son. They are totally unwill­ing to let their kids grow up. They tell them and tell them to be depen­dent, to call home, to get permission–and thus to remain child­like adults.

This plays out in many ways. Some of my 40 and 50-year-old clients are still try­ing to please their par­ents — to do what their par­ents want them to do — and may be stuck in careers they hate, doing stuff they detest, all to get a nod of approval from good old mom and dad. Oth­ers dis­ap­prove of who their par­ents are, and spend decades try­ing to get them to change — to be the kind of par­ents they wanted as opposed to the ones they had.

Still oth­ers spend decades try­ing to prove their par­ents wrong.

Par­ents raise us the way they do because they have to get us to adult­hood — in other words, they have to see to it that we sur­vive. They kiss our owies, pre­tend they can make things all bet­ter, and are our prin­ci­pal arbiters of truth. In other words they tell us what to think and how to inter­pret our life expe­ri­ences. The key here is, they’re sup­posed to stop doing this when we grow up. Now, many will, and will there­after treat us as adults. Some won’t, and will cling to par­ent­hood– and to boss­ing their adult chil­dren around until they die. That’s just the way it is.

The way out: grow up and get over your­self. While you may choose to be in rela­tion­ship with your par­ents until they die, the roles need to change. They need to become adults, and so do you. Con­tin­u­ally vet­ting your deci­sions or tak­ing your prob­lems to mommy and daddy is the mark of a fix­a­tion on infantile-ism. It’s a copout. You’re look­ing, again, out­side of your­self for per­mis­sion to be who you are. As an adult, as a self-actualized per­son, it is always okay to relay data — never okay to ask some­one else for per­mis­sion to be you.

5. Self-exploration is not self­ish — it’s essen­tial to dis­cover who you are

Self­ish means not shar­ing your toys. Par­ents want their chil­dren to share, to work together with other peo­ple, and to be pop­u­lar. Par­ents would also pre­fer that their chil­dren behave our­selves accord­ing to their stan­dards, so they “invite” us to do it their way.

Back in 1968, I had to select which col­lege or uni­ver­sity I was going to go to. I had a free ride schol­ar­ship to any uni­ver­sity in New York State, of which there was at least one in Buf­falo. Mom really wanted me to stay home and go to school in Buf­falo. I decided to go to Elmhurst, Illi­nois for my BA. Mom said, “Typ­i­cal. Always think­ing of him­self.” I smiled, shook my head, and went any­way. I mean, it was my BA, after all!

Self-exploration requires us to step out of oth­ers’ expec­ta­tions. In other words, to step out of the herd. But the pull of the herd is strong, and many, many peo­ple will tell you that too much intro­spec­tion will lead to all sorts of ter­ri­ble things. What they are really telling you is how scared they are of self-exploration. And then they see you doing it, or try­ing it, and they freak out.

The way out: it’s cap­tured in all of our quotes today. You have to dis­cover, through ther­apy, body­work, med­i­ta­tion, what­ever — what you don’t know — about your­self, and about the way the world works. Not the herd world, but the real, under­ly­ing one. We all need peo­ple in our lives who can help us to see what we’re miss­ing — such peo­ple are rare, but are there if you look. They have noth­ing invested in what you can do for them — they’re there to help you open your eyes and truly see. Go find them. Move heaven and earth to work with them, for as long as it takes.

6. Wis­dom is dif­fer­ent from intelligence

Our soci­ety val­ues intel­li­gence – stack­ing up of more and more data. There’s noth­ing wrong with this. It’s just not the whole pic­ture — you might say that whole pic­ture see­ing is a way to define wis­dom. Wis­dom is more about putting together than tear­ing apart. It’s about see­ing things as a flow –learn­ing the ways things work together — as opposed to form­ing judg­ments, the­o­ries, or expla­na­tions. Wis­dom is engag­ing in life as opposed to dis­cussing life.

The way out: choose wis­dom. It’s not easy to be wise while try­ing to fit in to a herd that prizes brute intel­li­gence. The wise, in a sense, seem way too sim­ple. They’re not inter­ested in get­ting involved in deep and mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sions that lead nowhere. They’re more inter­ested in exper­i­men­ta­tion — with their lives, with their expe­ri­ences, with their rela­tion­ships. If some­thing works, they do more of it, if some­thing does not work, they stop doing it. Way too sim­ple. Yet wis­dom is the only key that opens the door to true under­stand­ing and self-actualization. Cul­ti­vat­ing wis­dom is the mark of an adult.

7. “Play nice together” is boring

Mom and dad had a vested inter­est in our being pop­u­lar. It meant they were being good par­ents. There were bask­ing in the reflected glow off thir kid’s cheru­bic lit­tle head.

While my men­tion of herd men­tal­ity may be get­ting bor­ing, you really have got to get this.

We behave our­selves and act nice so as not to offend the herd. Or at least that’s what we fear.

The odd piece is that most every­one is bored, bored, bored — bored with cock­tail party chat­ter, bored with mean­ing­less rela­tion­ships, bored both in the bed­room and in the board­room. And I’ve noticed a cor­re­la­tion. Nice peo­ple often end up as door­mats for the plod­ding feet of the masses to trod upon. Even odder, most door­mats look up from the floor and thank the peo­ple walk­ing over them — “Thank you! So glad to be of service!”

The way out: put a lit­tle charge into your life. Exper­i­ment with new things. Say what’s on your mind, with ele­gance, not with anger. Be forth­right and hon­est. This is not a pre­scrip­tion to be a jerk. This is a sug­ges­tion that bor­ing is… well… bor­ing. And it’s not like you get a sec­ond chance, or a do-over, for your life. Put more of you out there, just because you want to — not for approval.

8. Take a risk

I actu­ally think my mom and dad did a pretty good job bring­ing me up and let­ting me go. Mom had some hanging-on issues, but in gen­eral their sup­port and encour­age­ment was excel­lent. While per­haps they stepped in a bit too often to keep me from fail­ing at some­thing, after 17 or so they def­i­nitely let me stand on my own two feet. Chiefly, they taught me to take risks.

Now, this flies in the face of most par­ent­ing today.

There’s a com­mer­cial run­ning in Canada, for some kind of kids’ face wipe. There are all these dirty lit­tle munchkins play­ing on the play­ground, and one mom’s kid is stuck in a bub­ble, so he won’t get dirty. The mom sees a dad wip­ing his kid’s choco­late encrusted face with one of the wipes, grabs one, and lets her kid out, say­ing, “No more bub­ble for you!” Shake­speare would be proud.

That bub­ble, how­ever, is not an exag­ger­a­tion. Par­ents seem invested in pro­tect­ing their kids from every­thing. Germs. The bogey­man. What­ever. Never mind that for 100,000 gen­er­a­tions kids have been sur­viv­ing just fine with­out being bathed in anti­sep­tic. Mod­ern par­ents know bet­ter — the herd tells them so.

The way out: you may have to force your­self, but it’s essen­tial to start tak­ing risks — and by this I mean doing things that are out of your com­fort zone. This could be any­thing from learn­ing to kayak to climb­ing moun­tains — to build­ing a new skill set in an area that inter­ests you — invest more in a gen­eral explo­ration of what turns you on. It may be decid­ing to expe­ri­ence your feel­ings, emo­tions, and the flow of energy in your body, as opposed to block­ing or resist­ing feel­ing. It may involve leav­ing one thing or rela­tion­ship and start­ing another. What­ever. In a sense, you already know what you need to explore next — it’s the thing you’re scar­ing your­self over.

9. Choose your own bean

As in bean coun­ters. We learn mea­sures of self-worth from our tribes. In the West, this often has to do with money, pos­ses­sions, power, and accu­mu­la­tion. Some­how we’ve been sold a bill of goods that to have more is to be more. So we end up with peo­ple with lots of stuff and very lit­tle sat­is­fac­tion. I there­fore encour­age my clients to fig­ure out what they’re mea­sur­ing their self-worth against.

This is not to make light of edu­ca­tion, degrees, job titles etc. This is not an exer­cise in doing away with cul­tural mark­ers. It’s an exer­cise in expan­sion. If all you ever do is mea­sure your­self against oth­ers, if all you ever do is con­nect your self worth to the height of your pile, you’re likely always going to feel low self-worth — like you just don’t quite mea­sure up.

The way out: I’d like to sug­gest that an ele­gant “bean” to use is this — do I know more about myself today? In other words, the mark of progress is in your per­sonal level of self under­stand­ing, being self respon­si­ble, and being self-actualized. I spend my life remov­ing items from the “I do not know that about myself” list, while adding items to the “Here is what I do and here is who I am” list. Find your­self. A bit more and a bit more each day.

10. Drop all lists

At the end of the day, every­one has a lot of lists, a lot of rules and reg­u­la­tions, and many con­cepts for liv­ing tucked away in the recesses of their minds. Lists, in and of them­selves, while easy to read, are inher­ently use­less. Many, many peo­ple con­fuse hav­ing a list with hav­ing wis­dom — con­fuse hav­ing a list with doing something.

The way out: while there is some truth to the corny quote, “I am a human be-ing not a human do-ing,” the mark of full, authen­tic being is encap­su­lated in what you do.

Think­ing about doing is silly. (This is not to say that plan­ning is silly — this is to say that most peo­ple stop with the plan and never get around to doing.) Many peo­ple have plans — about all the things they’re going to do — about how deeply they’re going to self explore. And then they pull out the other list. This is a list that pro­vides all of the excuses — all the rea­sons why the first list can­not be enacted now. Not enough time, not enough money, not the right peo­ple, not the right rela­tion­ships, and on and on. But they sure are pleased that they’ve at least got a list. Phooey. Drop the list mak­ing and get on with the walk.

More next week