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Basic Failings or Basic Goodness

So many of us, going through life with such interior harshness, gnawing inner-criticism and attendant shame, fear, resentment, and anger.So many of us, blind to this force within us, unaware that this is the water in which we're swimming, the air which we are breathing.And because of this, so many of us projecting our own inner-criticism towards others as  judgement, shaming, name-calling.Perhaps we don't even understand we're doing it, but it settles us to have the outer world reflect our inner world. That way we can say "it's the world that is this way", rather than anything to do with us.And how it spreads, our inner acidity evoking and provoking the acidity of others.Could today be the day to call a moratorium on this inner battle we're fighting? To discover how much more there is to ourselves, and to others, than a constant barrage of comparison, belittling, and 'not-good-enough'.And to find out that there is another kind of contribution we can make - wiser, kinder, more transformative and not a jot less powerful - if we start by searching for and bringing out basic goodness rather than the basic failings we are convinced are the heart everyone, including ourselves.

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Who to help

A crisis.

Somebody is in need.

Time to jump in.

That way I know I'm being of use.

That way I can feel good about myself.

That way I know I'm needed.

But I have to ask

Am I helping the person in difficulty?

Or am I making this all about me

Helping myself, and not the other?

And could I assist in a different way...

...One that actually does something?

For some fabulously clear advice on this question, read The Ring Theory of Helping. It's of value in all kinds of crises - medical, existential, organisational.

And it answers a most important question when we want to be of use - not whether, but who to help.

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How to help

Of course you want to help.

Of course you want to relieve other people of their suffering and difficulty where you can.

But it’s easy to confuse what’s actually, genuinely of help with what makes you feel better.

In other words, it’s easy to do what makes you at ease and then take your ease as proof that you must be doing good.

But being of help does not and cannot always feel that way.

Genuine helping is an act of vulnerability and courage and openness towards another. It requires you to give up all your demands that things turn out or feel a particular way. And to give up needing a particular kind of response from the other person. In real difficulty, it might involve you giving up knowing, or pretending to know, what to do at all.

Confusion over this, and of course your wish that others not feel pain, can lead you down some queasy paths. You reassure a friend facing a possibly life-threatening illness that everything will be alright. You ask someone who is grieving if they are ok, when ‘ok’ is the word furthest from their experience.

In your attempts at kindness, you end up missing the other's simple deepest wish for connection: being seen and understood, their difficulty recognised for the suffering it is. Your kindness leaves them feeling more alone.

From speaking to others who have experience of this, and from an interlude of my own acute, frightening illness, it seems clear to me that the most compassionate and most helpful way you can speak to someone who is in difficulty of any kind is to first, simply, to ask them

“What is this like for you?”

And then listen. With every ounce of presence, openness and receptivity that you can muster. For as long as it takes for them to speak.

Allow yourself to hear something quite different from what you were hoping to hear.

And allow yourself to be changed by what they have to say.

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The mountain

We've believed that somewhere, at the top of the mountain we feel like we're climbing, everything will be alright at last. We'll be fulfilled, at peace, happy.And so everybody's climbing the mountain, and everybody else seems to be trying to sell us something that will get us there more quickly. 'Buy this product', the advertisements scream, 'and at last you'll be ok. At last you'll be able to rest'.So we climb, faster and faster, harder and harder, exhausting ourselves along the way. We're sure the answer is at the top. We tell ourselves, 'When I have that job, that house, a beautiful lover, children, money, fame, the right car, or body shape, or clothes, an advanced degree, my name on a book, when I retire, I'll be there'.And the climb becomes more frantic, more determined, because it seems that other people have reached the top of the mountain already. Film stars, celebrities, billionaires, models, TV presenters, novelist, the people in the next street with the nicer houses, your friends - many of them look like they have it together, that they at last have reached life's destination.There are books, and courses, and coaches and products that promise you all of this - that there's some secret to the climb that's right in front of you if only you'll buy it, some magical way to accelerate you to the top.And all the while, you're hardly in life at all. Always postponing, always deferring, and piling suffering upon suffering as you compare yourself with others who seem to be further ahead, living the life you should be having.But the mountain has no top.Each crest simply hides another, and the genuine, heartfelt relief that comes from reaching it is soon replaced by the understanding that you didn't arrive yet, that you have further to go. Gradually you realise that staking your life on reaching a peak that never existed isn't what you'd bargained for.Or - alternatively - you discover that you're already at the top of the mountain. And that you always have been.

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Not about them

So much of what seems so obviously true about other people is, if you look closely, a product of the particular way you see things. It might well be that your judgements arise precisely because of the categories you are insisting other people fit into.

Your obsession with detail - has other people show up for you as unreliable, chaotic, or inconsistent.

Your refusal to engage with emotions - has others show up as soft, or flaky.

Your insistence that everything is treated as black or white, right or wrong - has others show up as incomprehensible to you.

Your longing to be loved, to be seen - has others show up as uncaring.

So what would happen if you treated your many judgements about others (your criticisms, your comparisons) as telling you nothing about them and everything about yourself?

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Back to front

When you find yourself in genuine difficulty, which path you do choose?

The path of self-harshness? This is the way of criticism, loathing, comparison. And the way of pushing harder and harder.

Self-harshness, so familiar to so many of us that we don't even see that it is what we are doing, has the surprising effect of increasing harshness everywhere in our lives.

Or the path of self-kindness? This is the way of taking exquisite care of yourself, asking for what you need, stepping into the deep bonds of support that are so often available to us, turning the loving attention of your own heart towards yourself in the midst of your difficulty.

Self-kindness, so unfamiliar to so many of us that we do not even consider it an option, has the surprising effect of making kindness possible towards many others, even in the darkest, most frightening, most disorientating of times.

Most of us are confused about this. We equate self-harshness with righteousness (perhaps we think we'll redeem ourselves if we add to our suffering) and self-kindness with a moral softness (perhaps because we're so convinced we're broken and at fault already that kindness would be an act of irresponsibility).

But the more I look at the results of my own self-harshness, and that of others, the more convinced I am that we've got it all, precisely, back to front.

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Moods - truth or manipulation?

Watch how your emotions and moods play a part in your dramas.

He doesn't ask about your day in the way you were hoping for...

She doesn't say to you how brilliant your contribution was to this morning's meeting...

He doesn't tell you he loves you at the moment you wished he would...

...and you become angry, resentful, or sulking; overtly or quietly, with loud demonstration or with a roll of your eyes, with a slouch of your back and shoulders, or with silence.

Are you actually, truly, angry or resentful or resigned?

Or could it be that this mood that's swept upon you is itself a way in which you keep the drama going?

Because each mood tells a story to you and to others, casting you and them in roles that call for particular kinds of action. These moods, in particular, establish you as the wronged one, with the other person as wrongdoer. And, because moods are public even if you're doing your best to hide them, you're instantly affecting the other person, calling from them a new kind of response, even before you speak.

If you get the response you wish for - an apology, an admission, an offer, loving attention - does the mood subside?
And if you don't, does it deepen, continue, heighten?

Moods are not just occurrences that sweep over you unbidden but actions in which you are involved. And as you observe this you might start to see that they are rarely simple reflections of what is happening, but a way in which you act to have new things happen.

I think this is what Robert Solomon means when he tells us that our emotional responses can be cultivated, made more sophisticated - more truthful - over time. It's an important project, for each of us, to find out how what we're feeling is not some simple unquestionable truth but also a way that we're involved in keeping our dramas going, and in getting what we want in indirect and often confusing ways from the people around us.

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Keeping it going

Dramas - the stories in which we're at the centre of things: ignored, hard-done-by, unfairly treated, not seen, unrecognised, imprisoned by the actions or insensitivity of others.

Of course sometimes our stories are not dramas in this sense at all, but genuine accounts of oppression or neglect, upon which action must be taken.

But it's illuminating to see how often our drama stories are in large part an invention.

And how we keep them going.

Because, even when wildly inaccurate, dramas have huge payoffs.

They tell us we're the centre of the world (doesn't it feel better that way?)

They make others responsible for our difficulties (gets us off the hook)

They stir up our anger, resentment, fury - even our hate (all of which feel so much better than confusion, uncertainty, boredom)

And because of all this they're usually wildly more attractive to us than any of the alternative truer stories, which would have us act, step up, step in, talk to people and take responsibility for our part in the difficulties in which we find ourselves.

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Dramas

Dramas - the stories you spin into being, which although perhaps painful and frustrating and fearful, place you right in the centre of the action.Dramas - all your stories of how people are not paying you due attention, seeing you in the way you want to be seen; all the ways you are left out, overlooked, your needs and wishes unnoticed and unmet; all the ways in which others are conspiring against you or, at least, taking care only of themselves; how the world seems organised to particularly frustrate your personal hopes, your longings.Dramas - perhaps unsurprisingly - are a powerful way of generating some sense of self-esteem in the midst of a world that's confusing, contradictory, and chaotic; a world far beyond our understanding which does not obviously attend to our particular needs and wishes as quickly or as completely as we would wish.Once we start to see that our dramas are not the way the world 'is' but a purposeful activity on our part to make ourselves feel better, or to get seen, or to manipulate others to get our needs met, perhaps we can begin to loosen our grip on them a little.Because by placing ourselves in the centre of the world, our dramas seriously reduce our capacity to respond to the needs and longings of others. And in this way our collective commitment to keeping our dramas going brings about exactly the self-centred world we fear is excluding us in the first place.

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