Nuance, Beliefs, Cir­cu­lar­ity, and Choice

It’s a hard lesson—what you believe to be “so,” or want to be “so,” often isn’t.

This is “so” because we refuse to see the dif­fer­ence between fact an opin­ion. Dar­bella has to fol­low­ing as her e-mail signature:

“Every­thing we hear is an opin­ion, not a fact.

Every­thing we see is a per­spec­tive, not the truth.”

And this goes both ways.

What I do with every­thing I see and hear is my opin­ion, my per­spec­tive. It’s nei­ther true, no a fact.

We tend, in gen­eral, to have a pri­mary belief sys­tem that was shoved down our throats. For our own good, of course. It’s usu­ally about as sub­tle as a Mack truck. It’s a sys­tem of absolutes. “All women are … “No son of mine … ” “Work until you drop.” “Some day, my prince[ess] will come…”

Then, we add our own, which are based upon our pri­mary belief sys­tem. “No one ever lis­tens to me … ” “Every time we talk, you always … ” “No one loves me, every­one aban­dons me…” Or another odd one I’m see­ing a lot lately: “I’m des­tined for greatness!”—spoken by peo­ple who are wait­ing for great­ness to appear by magic—they are not doing great things.

Such rules take on a life of their own

In other words, they become self-fulfilling proph­e­sies. We assume that our opin­ions and per­spec­tives are true, and then we defend them by fit­ting all the data into what we expect to find. in other words, we bend real­ity (ongo­ing events) to fit the fan­tasy (our inter­nal sto­ries.)

Yet: Things are not as they are. Things are as YOU are.

I wrote about this in one of my books. I worked for a while with a 28 year old client. She grew up with a hyper-critical father, who remained con­trol­ling and crit­i­cal, and treated his daugh­ter like a child. As a result, her default story is that she is an unloved fail­ure, des­tined for end­less trauma.

At the first ses­sion, she told me that she had walked away, with noth­ing more than whiplash, from two car crashes in twelve months. Both crashes destroyed the cars. She then said, “After the first acci­dent, I thought, ‘Boy, God is out to kill me, but he missed.’ After the sec­ond one, I KNEW he was try­ing to get me. He’s just got lousy aim.”

Every ses­sion, she’d walk in and announce that she’d had a lousy week. She would then go on to describe an inci­dent that took place the day before, usu­ally a fight with her father, in which he has crit­i­cized her. I find it interesting:

• that she is still amazed when her father crit­i­cizes her, as that’s what he almost always does, and
• that she thinks that a fight with her father the day before means she had a lousy WEEK.

Now, of course, what’s going on here is a pro­jec­tion of her inter­nal self-view onto the world she sees. She described her­self, graph­i­cally, as a fail­ure, a dope—a poor excuse for a human being. She not only spoke this to her­self internally—she said it aloud to whomever would listen.

Her life, her “story,” had a pecu­liar “spin.” She assumed that the uni­verse was con­spir­ing to “get” her. Even God was out to get her. As she per­ceived it.

Like most peo­ple, she’s bend­ing the world to match her pre­con­ceived notions.

She was study­ing to be a nurse. One day, after leav­ing a ses­sion, she was dri­ving home and came upon a bad auto crash. She pulled over, grabbed a med­ical kit from her car, and ran to the car.

The dri­ver was dead. The pas­sen­ger badly injured, in a crushed back seat. She wig­gled into the car, and stopped him from bleed­ing to death. She then turned him over to the para­medics. Called her dad, crav­ing praise.

Dad: “You idiot! You could have killed him, and they’d sue you! When will you ever learn!”

She called me and told me what had happened.

I said: “I don’t get it.” You’re a young woman who is healthy, shoes on the right feet, and you just saved a stranger’s life. And you did it with a sup­pos­edly bad back.”

“You also has a dad who loves to crit­i­cize. All that hap­pened when you talked to your dad was that he did what he always does. You can con­tinue to buy into his crappy story, or you can notice what just hap­pened, and think about what you are set­ting in motion for yourself.”

I sug­gested that she look at how she was see­ing things—what judge­ments she was mak­ing. In short, I asked her to begin tak­ing respon­si­bil­ity for her own world view.

A look of shock crossed her face. She said,

“If I buy what you are say­ing, I’ll have to change every­thing I believe, every­thing I’ve been taught, all the rules I’ve been given.”

I said, “How happy are you with your life?” She replied, “I’m miserable.”

I said, “You are who you are, and your life is what it is because of your beliefs. There’s noth­ing defec­tive about you. You might want to con­sider chang­ing what you believe.”

The parable-nature of this story (…and he turned away, sor­row­fully…) played out a month later: her father per­suaded her that her bad back, and “being a dope” pre­cluded such a vocation–this after she had 2 semes­ters at the top of her class… and she also left ther­apy. She said, “What you are say­ing makes sense, but not for me. I’m not will­ing to change–I just want a dad who loves me. You want me to be self-responsible, and I can’t.”

In the end, what we actu­ally see of life is a per­fect mir­ror of what we already believe (pre­con­ceived notions.)

In my E-book, Liv­ing Life in Grow­ing Orbits, I present 52 weeks of lessons, along with daily exer­cises. The very first is “Rock.”

Rock beliefs are foun­da­tional beliefs—the very first things we were taught by our “tribe(s).” In the “Rock” chap­ter, I sug­gest that our first “job” is to unpack the beliefs that form our self-view and world view. This is often a painful process, as we begin to strip away the veneer of “truth” that oth­ers have given to the con­cepts that we use to define our­selves and how we view the world.

We need to explore the rules we may not even know we oper­ate under. Many of the rules we live by were inserted by oth­ers in an attempt to con­trol us or social­ize us accord­ing to what oth­ers thought was “right.” If we don’t look at what we believe and see if what we believe makes sense for us now, in terms of our own con­tent­ment, we are doomed to live out some­one else’s life plan for us. And be totally mis­er­able in the process.

Things are not as they are. Things are as YOU are. Whom, then, do you CHOOSE to be?

I have a client, who, among other things, believes that “All men are the same,” espe­cially when it comes to phys­i­cal con­tact. (Although when she hangs around with me, she’ll say, “All men are pigs. Except you, of course.” I assume she means the pig part … )

Her belief goes back to an amal­gam of her father’s hands off approach (no hugs) and the early and evi­dent onset of puberty, with boys grop­ing her from age 12 on. Now, at age 34, when her boss shakes her hand, squeezes her fore­arm and wishes her a Merry Christ­mas, she’s sure he wants more. Her belief, then, is this: men should never touch; if they do touch, they always want sex.

Sub­tle. Like a Mack Truck.

While it’s nice to have a bank of mem­o­ries so that we know, for exam­ple, not to lean our hands on the red coil on an elec­tric range, there really are no reli­able “all the time” rules regard­ing our inter­per­sonal relationships.

What’s going on in our rela­tion­ships, as we com­mu­ni­cate, as we inter­act with each other and the world, is often in the nuance. The glance. The tone. The glimmer.

For exam­ple, we assume that when some­one uses the tone of voice another used, and the other per­son was angry, then the present user is angry too. We may miss the telegram she is hold­ing, the start of a tear in her eye, the catch in her voice. All we hear is the shouted, “Leave me alone!!!”

And then we find our that the telegram announced that her grand­mother died.

What I am talk­ing about is not sim­ple, obvi­ous, nor plain.

It’s vapour. It’s nuance. Grab for it, think you own it, and it is gone.

Thus, this walk is about pay­ing atten­tion all the time, to every­thing. To the big pic­ture, but espe­cially to the hints. The sub­tleties. The nuance.

I often watch the body lan­guage of those I’m with. The way the per­son is breath­ing, walk­ing, stand­ing, hold­ing them­selves, speaks vol­umes. I also spend a lot of time ask­ing peo­ple what they mean by what they say or do, as I only know what say­ing or doing some­thing means to me. Again, the truth is in the nuance.

The more one knows, the more one com­pre­hends,
the more one real­izes that every­thing turns in a cir­cle.
~~~ Goethe

Often, what brings peo­ple in for coun­selling is just the oppo­site of this sense of cir­cu­lar­ity. Clients come because life has finally become too full of seem­ingly unre­lated tri­als and traumas.

For most, life seems to be an end­less series of obsta­cles, each unique and uncon­nected to what has gone before.

Most mar­i­tal dif­fi­cul­ties, for exam­ple, are often described this way—as a shop­ping list of dis­ap­proved of behav­iours per­pe­trated by the spouse.

Such a lin­ear approach to life hap­pens because we choose to see each of the stick­ing points in our lives as being unre­lated. Instead, a bet­ter ques­tion is, can I learn to see the pat­terns, and then choose to behave differently?

The events of our life fol­low patterns.

Life is about remem­ber­ing whom we are and what we’ve for­got­ten. The lessons we get help us remem­ber. The lessons we need to learn repeat and repeat. All that changes are the details, the play­ers. The base issue remains the same. Forever.

Until we notice. And choose to do some­thing dif­fer­ent. Each and every time.

As soon as we notice how we are stuck, what our per­sonal pat­tern is, we see that far from liv­ing a life where each prob­lem­atic issue or rela­tion­ship is dif­fer­ent, we are actu­ally caught repeat­ing the same behav­iour in dif­fer­ent ways, with dif­fer­ent people.

When we notice that, we begin to see that we are actu­ally revis­it­ing the same issue over and over again. We begin to find wis­dom when we real­ize that if we keep react­ing to what we con­front in the same way, we’ll ALWAYS get the same results. We’ll be caught, for­ever, in the same loop.

Is there a way out? But of course!

In prac­ti­cal terms, when we see our pat­tern com­ing around again, we can choose to do things dif­fer­ently. As soon as we do, the sit­u­a­tion changes. We move through it, learn from it, take the les­son with us. We will then loop around, expe­ri­enc­ing other, sim­i­lar, chal­leng­ing things. As we come back to the old issue, and it will rear its head again, but we will approach it dif­fer­ently. With grace. With understanding.

And we will remem­ber that to escape (this time!), we must actu­ally change what we are doing.

If you will exam­ine your life care­fully, you will see your own repeat­ing pat­terns. You will notice that, far from hav­ing a ton of issues, you have one or two that play out in many sit­u­a­tions. And your life will sud­denly appear to be a cir­cle, as opposed to an end­less line of unre­lated events.

From there, you can begin to look for alter­na­tive ways of being and seeing.

As you find them, rather than just think­ing about them, you can apply them in your life. The sit­u­a­tion will then seem to change, but what has changed is YOU. And your life will appear to be a spi­ral. Around and around. Learn­ing, adding, grow­ing, tran­scend­ing, includ­ing. And then you will see that there are infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties, and get­ting stuck is a choice.

And why, oh why, would we ever choose to be stuck?