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However—and here’s the good news I alluded to—we can learn to be responsible for the mind with which we create our world moving forward.
The mental prison camp Bessel identified was built and fenced in by the meaning my infant mind had forged from events that were painful and frightening and far beyond my control—not just by the events themselves. That meaning, the never-ending story whose moral is “I am a damaged being, beyond all hope of healing,” has frequently colored my subjective experience of life, regardless of external factors and regardless of all I’ve witnessed and learned to the contrary, even in defiance of my core values and convictions about humanity. I have always believed—and “believed” is not a strong enough
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“Edie,” I said, “I haven’t got over it yet, and here I am, seventy-six years later.” She laughed gently. “Gabor, perhaps you never will. You don’t need to. You just need to allow yourself to be with it.” Nothing needed to change, Edith was reminding me: only how I held my history in my mind.
“Today, I’m not afraid of being disliked, of disappointing someone. I’m not afraid of what I used to think of as my negative qualities. I realized that they are just the other side of being who I am.”
One of the most direct approaches to authenticity is noticing when it isn’t there, then applying some curiosity and gentle skepticism to the limiting self-beliefs that stand in for it, or just stand in its way.
Is there an inner guidance I am defying, resisting, ignoring, or avoiding? Are there truths I’m withholding from expression or even contemplation, out of fear of losing security or belonging? In a recent encounter with others, is there some way I abandoned myself, my needs, my values? What fears, rationalizations, or familiar narratives kept me from being myself?
Agency is the capacity to freely take responsibility for our existence, exercising “response ability” in all essential decisions that affect our lives, to every extent possible. Being deprived of agency is a source of stress.
Nor does agency mean some sort of false omnipotence or ultimate dominion over all happenings and circumstances. Life is so much bigger than us, and we do not forward our own healing by pretending to be in control where we’re not.
Agency does mean having some choice around who and how we “be” in life, what parts of ourselves we identify with and act from.
Agency is neither attitude nor affect, neither blind acceptance nor a rejection of authority. It is a self-bestowal of the right to evaluate things freely and fully, and to choose based on authentic gut feelings, deferring to neither the world’s expectations nor the dictates of ingrained personal conditioning.
People often ask me to define healthy “anger.” Here’s what it’s not: blind rage, bluster, resentment, spite, venom, or bile. All of these stem from an unhealthy buildup of unexpressed or unintegrated emotions that need to be experienced and understood rather than acted out.
Anger in its natural, healthy form is a boundary defense, a dynamic activated when we perceive a threat to our lives or our physical or emotional integrity.
Healthy anger is a response of the moment, not a beast we keep in the basement, feeding it with shame or self-justifying narratives. It is situational, its duration limited: flashing up when needed, it accomplishes its task of fending off the threat and then subsides. It becomes neither an experience to fear and loathe nor a chronic irritant.
Many of us have learned to minimize our anger to the point that we don’t even know what it looks like.
Anger’s core message is a concise and potent no,
Wherever we find ourselves tolerating or explaining away situations that persistently stress us, insisting that “it’s not so bad” or “I can handle it” or “I don’t want to make a fuss about it,” there is likely an opportunity to practice giving anger some space to emerge. Even the plainspoken admission that “I don’t like this” or “I don’t want this” can be a step forward.
The question for most of us is not whether to be angry but how to relate in a wholesome way to the feelings that naturally ebb and flow with life’s tide, anger included.
acceptance is the recognition, ever accurate, that in this moment things cannot be other than how they are. We abstain from rejecting or condoning. Instead of resisting the truth or denying or fantasizing our way out of it, we endeavor to just be with it. In doing so, we foster an aligned relationship with the actual, present moment.
Anger, sadness, trepidation, resistance, even hatred—within an accepting attitude, these all have room to say their piece.
Rejection of any part of our experience is an unnatural self-rejection, one that nonetheless feels normal to many of us.
Healthy grief—the jewel so often hidden within ossified grievance—frequently waits on the other side of accepting how things are and have been. That, too, can be hard to embrace, but when we forestall the energy of mourning that wants to move through us, we only cause it to build up.
Tolerating the intolerable, on the other hand, is deadening. For example, resigning oneself bleakly to conditions such as abuse or neglect involves rejecting crucial parts of one’s self, needs, and values that deserve to be respected and integrity that needs to be safeguarded. That is far from true acceptance.
The same applies to injustice or oppression on the social level. To accept that whatever is currently happening is happening—the simple fact of the matter—does not mean conceding that it should happen.
To deal with racism, poverty, or any other societal ill, we must first recognize that they are realities of life in this culture. They exist, and we must acknowledge our pain and grief that they do.
“Yet, I assure you, the science we have today demonstrates these practices of mindfulness, self-compassion, and compassion are some of the most powerful that exist to change your physiology and to benefit you in your own health, mental and physical, and in terms of your longevity.
The word “compassion” comes from the Latin, meaning “to suffer with.” Whether or not we experience another’s pain so vividly, entry-level compassion does mean the ability to be with suffering. It also means being moved by the awareness that someone is struggling; it does not register as a neutral fact.
Compassion is not the same as pity, which on some level always buys into a preexisting story about oneself or another. While compassion guides the best social policies, pity empowers no one. To take pity on you, I have to first cast us in unequal roles, looking down on your misfortune from some imagined perch.
The second compassion takes as its first principle that everything exists for a reason, and that the reason matters. We ask, without judgment, why a person or group—any person, any group—would end up being the way they are and act the way they do, even or especially when we are vexed or perplexed by it.
Absent a clear view of the context, one is left, at best, harboring inert good wishes and engaged in well-meant but ultimately ineffective interventions. We see this limitation in the woefully inadequate addiction-treatment approaches currently in vogue.
The willingness to seek the why before leaping to the how is the compassion of curiosity and understanding in action.
Bruce is embodying what I call the compassion of recognition, which allows us to perceive and appreciate that we are all in the same boat, roiled by similar tribulations and contradictions.
Whatever our intentions, we do no one any favors by fearing their pain or colluding in their banishment of it. As people work to heal their traumas, hurt will inevitably arise. This is why all of us go into denial, suppression, repression, rationalization, justification, hazy memory, and varying grades of dissociation in the presence of hurt. When we face all the ways we have numbed ourselves, pain will inevitably emerge—in fact, it has been waiting a long time to do so. Of course, the fear of these exiled parts is also natural.
That some attachments may not survive the choice for authenticity is one of the most agonizing realizations one can come to; and yet, in that pain, there is freedom. It reverses and vindicates the tragic, mandatory choices we had to make in the opposite direction as we started in life.
Truth and compassion have to be reciprocal partners. We are not being compassionate by dumping unwelcome truths in someone’s lap, perhaps justifying it on the grounds that “I’m just being honest!” “Only when compassion is present,” writes A. H. Almaas, “do people allow themselves to see the truth.” And without safety, the truth cannot do its healing work.
The compassion of possibility, I would say, is a door we keep open so we can see that victory coming. If we didn’t mistake ourselves or one another for whatever personality features and behavioral traits appear on the surface, “good” or “bad,” if in each person we could sense the potential for wholeness that can never be lost, that would be, for us all, a victory worth savoring.
Cure can never be guaranteed. Healing is another matter, and it is available until we draw our last breath. It is the movement toward experiencing oneself as a vital whole, whatever may be happening corporeally. Healing is not an endpoint: it is as much a process as disease is.
“When I first said I wanted to live,” he said, his voice notably stronger and more resonant, “I meant I wanted to live longer. I don’t see it that way anymore. I still want to live, but I now know that ‘living’ means not chronology but quality. I really want to be in my life every moment, experience what is ahead of me to the fullest, as I have never done before.”
I would never tell anyone that they should be compassionate with themselves. Compassion brooks no “should.” In any case, our defended, walled-off parts do not respond positively to such demands—why would they? It is far kinder and more effective to bring attention to the lack of self-compassion, to notice it and be curious about how it presents in one’s life. Once seen, it softens, allowing one to investigate its long-ago origins and present-day impacts.
Everything is a candidate for inquiry, even intensely negative experiences like self-loathing.fn3 Rather than admonishing ourselves for hating ourselves, we can be curious as to why self-hatred arrived on the scene in the first place.
When the beauty in us can compassionately accept the beast—allow it to “be our guest,” if you will—the latter may transform into a handsome and loving companion; at the very least, it can relax and stop hounding us so ravenously.
The brain’s reward mechanisms may even revel, in a manner very much like addiction, in the elevated levels of dopamine and endorphins that flow when others appreciate or benefit from our self-denial. There’s a reason for the term “adrenaline junkies.” The drive to be good to others, a genuine impulse when not compulsive, can thus overwhelm the equally authentic imperative to be good to ourselves.
If you have a hard time spotting the story underlying your behavior, try asking, “What must I believe about myself to deny my own needs this way?” The answer, even a speculative one, will likely be very close to the mark. Our stories, though neither objective nor accurate, are always internally consistent with our behavior and our experience. Some
We usually think of double standards as differential rules of the road from which we exempt ourselves while holding others to unsparing scrutiny—as parodied in the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do.” In practice, such unconscious duplicity is just as often employed against the self: call it reverse hypocrisy. I often ask people, “If your friend said no to some request because that’s what felt true to them, would you condemn them as ‘weak’?” The answer is, predictably, “Of course not.”
The presence of a negative belief says nothing about you as a person; it is not a moral failure or a character weakness, just the effect of circumstances over which you had no control. What you do have now is some say over how you respond to the negative belief.
So here’s the game plan: if you manage to catch a negative self-belief striving to seize control, find something else to do. This takes awareness, and it’s best not to beat yourself up if you miss it at first. Sometimes these belief patterns just take over before we can swing into action. Your initial goal is modest: buy yourself a quarter of an hour. Choose something that you enjoy and will keep you active, preferably something healthy and creative, but really anything that will please you without causing greater harm. Instead of helplessly sinking into the familiar despair of negative
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The road to hell is not paved with good intentions; it is paved with lack of intention. The more you relabel, reattribute, refocus, and revalue, the freer you will be to re-create. Are you afraid you will stumble? Guess what: you will. That’s called being a human being.
To conclude, a word to the wise—or those who wish to be. If we remove the hyphen from “re-create,” we are left with the verb form of “recreation,” as in “play.” An excellent reminder that we do ourselves no favors by taking ourselves, or the process of inquiry, so seriously that we lose a sense of spontaneity and vitality. These steps may not be much fun, but they still work best when infused with some lightness. I have seen more than a few people surprise themselves, mid-process, with a smile.
The truth is, these disturbers of our peace have always been friends, strange though it may sound. Their origins were protective and beneficent and that remains their current aim, even when they seem to go about it in a misguided way. We need not fear, avoid, reject, or suppress these “undesirables”; in fact, we merely delay our emancipation from them when we do. It isn’t them but rather our desperate efforts to keep them at bay that levy the heaviest toll on our mental or physical well-being.
Agency is gained not through resistance to ourselves but by way of acceptance and understanding.
Although they cause us pain now, they first came along to save us. Their presence is in fact an unmistakable sign of the deep intelligence of the human bodymind. And fortunately, healing does not require their disappearance, only their realignment—or perhaps their reassignment. What matters is that we, rather than they, are in the lead.
