Who Are You Meant to Be? (4 page)

Percy was not connected to himself; instead, he was behaving the way he thought others expected him to behave. In his mind, he was being rational and strong, cutting himself off from expressing his emotions. It took him several months of therapy to start to glimpse the need to express himself authentically, and to release the pain he had buried for most of his life.

Learning to Survive

You are not responsible for the programming you picked up in childhood. However, as an adult, you are one hundred percent responsible for fixing it.

—Ken Keyes Jr.

It has taken thousands of years for us to evolve to our present industrialized cultures, in which we typically don’t have to devote all of our energy to the basic life-or-death tasks of finding food and shelter. Our brain and nervous system, however, still have these built-in survival instincts to ensure our physical and psychological survival. This means that we emerge from the womb prewired to battle for our
physical
survival. Infants and young children are driven by internal cues that trigger emotional responses designed to get their needs met. A baby’s experience is something like this: “I am hungry, so I cry. If you don’t come fast enough, my crying will be infused with fear and rage. If I am content, I will wriggle with pleasure.” The internal world of the infant and small child is where the action is. They are all about their experiences and emotions. Caretakers are just objects to satisfy their needs.

Our psychological appetites and needs demand satisfaction as well, and as infants and young children, we go through this same process of seeking to ensure these needs get met. Babies and young children cry when they are afraid or when they need connection, touch, or comfort for any other reason. If their needs are consistently met during childhood and their early bonding experiences are loving, nurturing, and without disruption, they form a secure attachment to their primary caregiver. With this solid bond established, it is much easier for them to learn that they don’t have to constantly worry about getting their needs met. The same is true for us as adults: if we are secure and confident that our basic needs are being met in a consistent way, we don’t feel pressure to adapt our personalities to fit into a prescribed societal role so that people will like us, accept us, and make us feel good about ourselves. Instead, we set out to become who we are meant to be.

If a caregiver doesn’t attend to a child’s needs consistently, the child doesn’t build a strong bond of trust with the caregiver, and the child’s sense of security does not develop normally. The child forms an insecure attachment to his caregiver and doesn’t feel safe in the environment. The child is stuck in its instinctual survival mode. Such children become adults who are ever cautious of the perceived and imagined threats to their psychological well-being. They become hypervigilant, looking outside of themselves for cues about whether they are okay. They get locked into a system where they survive by adapting to what is expected of them or using their emotions to keep them safe—like the time when you were three and your overzealous Aunt Betty’s attempt to give you a hug sent you running from the room screaming. Some of us have discovered the hard way that the tactics we used to feel safe at the age of three just don’t work as well once we are old enough to tie our own shoes and pay income taxes.

When we live in survival mode instead of looking inside of ourselves for cues and clues about who we are meant to be and what we desire, we look outward to see what we
should
have, how we
should
behave; in other words, we try to be like others so that we feel safe. Or we look for things that might explain why we feel anxious and dissatisfied with our lives, our work, or our relationships, blaming ourselves and being obsessed with finding out what’s wrong with us. We compare ourselves to others instead of accepting and getting to know who we are and what gives us pleasure. We may abandon bold and courageous aspirations we once held (“I want to quit my job and work for the Peace Corps”) and start obsessing about desires that are born of fear (“I want to get a nose job so people won’t stare at me anymore”). We can never accept and live from our authentic self when we are constantly looking out the window, a vantage point that never lets us see what’s in the mirror. Unknown to us, we are using emotional reasoning rather than logic. Is it really logical to get a nose job because you don’t have the courage to quit your job? Of course not. But there’s no limit to how creative we can be when we are rationalizing our emotional decisions.

Development—From Emotion to Reason

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.

—Judith Wright

We don’t have to think too much about how any of the organs of our body develop, because for the most part, we are born with them ready to function In the same way, many people believe that our brains will grow on a preset course as we age and that it really doesn’t matter what we do, think, or experience. We think that our brain and emotions are sort of like fruit: with age, they naturally mature. Most people also believe that, with a few exceptions, everyone’s brain is the same, humming along on its track like a well-oiled locomotive, passing predictable milestones along the way—I call the process the Brain Train to Adulthood. It goes something like this:

Observe the stop called Three Years Old, where you are too old to wet your bed or want to sleep with your mother. Then move along to stop Six Years Old, where you should master reading and writing. All aboard! At Eight, enter Big-Girl-and-Boy-Ville—no more temper tantrums or crying over hurt feelings! At Thirteen, drop off all childish baggage such as playing with dolls or hugging your parents in public. At Eighteen, please select the college major that will determine what you do with the rest of your life, then proceed at full speed to Twenty-One, where you debark from Childhood and are handed your transfer ticket to Full-Fledged Adulthood. Now get off the train and, whether you are ready or not, pick a life partner, get in your jalopy, and fasten your seat belt. It’s definitely going to be a bumpy ride!

If you don’t follow this route as you grow up, your parents and other adults might call you “immature,” “lazy,” or even “stupid.” They may say things like, “Why can’t you be more like Janie? She doesn’t go crying to her mother every time she hurts herself!” Parents can shame or guilt children for not staying on track with school or career choices. In a family therapy session I had a number of years ago, a mother said to her seventeen-year-old son, “You’ve always been such a good student. I don’t know what’s wrong with you that you want to take a year off to decide what you want to do in college. You are going to end up a lazy bum like your Uncle Ted.” The son didn’t know what he wanted to do and didn’t want to waste his and his parents’ money. He was being rational but his parents were on autopilot, afraid that if he didn’t stay on track he wouldn’t survive. In their minds, you don’t get off the train before you finish high school and go to college. If you do, there is something seriously wrong with you—end of story.

Our brains actually develop through experience, stimulation, and engagement. When we are allowed to explore, interact with, and master activities in an environment of consistency, predictability, and loving parenting, we arrive in adulthood ready to work at becoming who we are meant to be. However, our development can just as easily take a detour in its trajectory and become temporarily (or permanently) stunted, so that instead we arrive in adulthood in search of ourselves or trying to be what others want us to be. We go to a certain college because our friends are going there or our parents want us to. Or we don’t go to college because we don’t know what we want to do or don’t really want to work that hard. Having limited life experiences because of overprotective parents causes some young adults to take whatever job or relationship keeps them close to home, so that they don’t have to leave their comfort zone. Before they know it, they’re stuck in Rutsville, just getting by day to day, unfulfilled but safe.

While we all need to adapt to the society we live in, the brain develops best when we aren’t forced to conform excessively, as this leads to a perpetual state of discontent with ourselves. We end up never feeling that we are fully measuring up to all the “shoulds,” “musts,” and “ought-tos” that we have learned to believe will make us a “good” or “nice” person. Playing it safe rather than living our lives to the fullest, we use our precious energy to obsess about what is wrong with us, to seek help for our perceived shortcomings, or to pretend that we don’t feel as empty as we do. This leaves us perpetually searching outside of ourselves to fill the emptiness we feel inside.

Instead of mining the vast treasures that are waiting in our more evolved brain centers, we continue with primitive behaviors such as “hunting and gathering,” because this is what we know how to do. We go to shopping malls to hunt and gather the biggest, the best, and the latest goods available. We want to know what our neighbors have, so we gather information from TV, the Internet, newspapers, and those mobile devices that we can’t seem to do without. We gather friends on Facebook; we gather DVDs for our home library; we gather experiences and credentials for our résumés (the more the better); we hunt for bargains, for love, for the perfect body and the perfect mate. These instinctual and emotional impulses find their outlets in overeating, overworking, overconsumption of alcohol, and compulsive gambling, among other problems. Of course, none of these behaviors brings us closer to understanding our true selves and our deep needs. In fact, studies show that the more affluent a society becomes, the unhappier its people.

Living life on autopilot takes us off our own path and moves us to one that someone else predetermined for us. However, it is possible for us to get back on track, beginning by taking stock of our needs and emotions. Without experiencing and using our emotions effectively, we have no fuel to engage in our lives and to stay on our own path when life becomes difficult. Getting to know our emotions, the role they play in our lives, and how we can best use them can prevent us from getting hijacked while on the road to who we are meant to be.

Emotions Drive Behavior

Emotions operate on many levels. They have a physical aspect as well as a psychological aspect. Emotions bridge thought, feeling, and action—they operate in every part of a person, they affect many aspects of a person, and the person affects many aspects of the emotions.

—John D. (Jack) Mayer

Our emotions alert us to how we experience what is happening and how we feel about how things are going in our lives. Emotions influence what happens in our brain and motivate us to behave and act in certain ways. Additionally, they affect our physical body as much as they do our thinking and feeling. When we repress, ignore, deny, vent, or act out our emotions, it has a negative impact on both our mind and our body. We don’t always understand why we feel the way we do because we haven’t taken the time to process our emotions. Like food we can’t digest, unprocessed emotions get stored, compartmentalized, or simply rejected, rather than being life-enhancing sources of information and understanding about ourselves and the world around us. Either their energy stays with us or we release it indirectly through our behavior and our life choices. Unknowingly, we set off a chain of chemical reactions in the body that lead to chronic states of depression, anxiety, and discontent.

Biologically, our emotions arise because of our interactions with the world. Unless you live alone in a remote cave, someone, at some time, is going to upset you. (And even a cave-dwelling hermit can be vexed occasionally—for example, by a hungry tiger!) Your partner, child, coworker, or boss is going to do something that provokes anger, fear, sadness, or any of the full range of other so-called negative emotions. When we pay attention to our emotions, especially the more difficult ones such as anger, anxiety, and helplessness, we have a great opportunity to look at ourselves and realize what is causing us to feel the way we do. Then, with increased self-awareness, we can respond to the situation authentically, working through the challenges that may have led to the negative emotional state in the first place.

However, in the quick-fix culture we live in, we look for the fastest way to stop the feelings; we act out our emotions; or we lose ourselves in emotionally engaging characters in books, on TV, and at the theater. We often choose to repress or displace our feelings rather than really investigate them, because we see emotions as problems rather than authentic expressions of our experiences.

For example, imagine that your household finances are tight and your partner decides to splurge on an expensive luxury item, which makes you feel angry. You can respond to this emotion in several ways. You could express it: “I feel angry because you spent that money on a luxury we can’t afford.” You could act out the emotion by shouting, locking your partner out of the house, or buying something even more outrageously extravagant, such as a Tilt-A-Whirl amusement ride for your front lawn. Or you could deny the emotion, telling yourself that mature people don’t allow themselves to get angry, or that because anger is a harmful emotion, you’d rather not feel it. If you choose any of these methods of dealing with your anger and you still feel upset, you might go on to compound your bad feelings by scolding yourself for having them. But emotions exist no matter how much we deny them or their effect on us.

We don’t realize that most of the time we are motivated by our feelings, not our thoughts. I know we like to think that as grown-ups we are completely rational beings, but how does that account for our flipping off the driver who makes us angry? How does it square with being rude to the cashier when we’re in a hurry and she has to change the tape in her register? Or when we know we need to do the laundry but instead lie down on the couch and enjoy a few movies with that tub of rocky road ice cream? We like to do what gives us pleasurable feelings. We also do things to avoid pain. This doesn’t mean that we are going to be happy with ourselves—quite the opposite, in fact. We find ourselves perplexed when, rather than doing what we said we would (e.g., going to the gym, balancing the checkbook), we choose more self-indulgent or self-destructive behaviors.