Being & Caring: Chapter 3

SELF-DETERMINATION AND AUTHENTICITY

“Our culture has taught us to value being self-determining: making our own choices about important events in our lives rather than having those choices made for us by others. That value is expressed in our desire to be authentic: to speak and act as who we truly are rather than shaping all our responses to fit other people’s expectations.

Each of us can learn to trust our own sense of what means most to us and accept it as our guide as we seek to find our own direction. To express yourself as you are, with minimal pretense, allows for a less stressful and more satisfying life. When I’m stating clearly what I want, I’m likely to be decisive and direct. I’m in touch with my strength – and so are you.

“A friend is a person who leaves you with all your freedom intact but obliges you to be fully what you are.” In that spirit, in being authentic, I don’t want to intrude on your authenticity.

Listen to the entire chapter as read by The Happy President from the book Being & Caring: A Psychology for Living by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz below.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Five

“BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER FIVE: CHOICE AND RESPONSIBILITY

When I pay attention to how my actions affect other people, I open the door to making the world around me more agreeable and a little more benevolently disposed toward me.

Each of us is touched by the effects of almost everything we do. We create a web of opportunities and obstacles for ourselves. Our temperaments, early learnings, and environments provide materials, but we ourselves are the architects, general contractors, carpenters, and stonemasons of our lives. We choose what to build and how to build it – as local representatives of the Karmic Construction Company.

RESPONSIBILITY AND SELF-SUPPORT

Ordinarily the word responsibility is synonymous with “accountability.” But there’s another equally important meaning. Perls separates the word into two parts: response-ability. In this often forgotten dimension, it means the ability to respond, to be alive, to feel, to be sensitive. It doesn’t just mean “obligations” or “duty” – especially not in the sense of something I’ve been directed to do without involvement, so that I do it automatically, without thinking – like a robot rather than a person. Growth in these terms is a move from letting others be responsible for me to taking responsibility for myself.

A relationship is enriching and satisfying when both people share the responsibility for clearly stating what they want and sharing what they have to give. Keeping a person dependent can cause hostility.

When I assign the cause of my behavior to you, to my “unconscious,” to my parents or my past, I make it difficult for me to change. I f my parents did it to me, they’re the ones who must undo it if it’s to be undone. If they’re gone out of my life, presumably I’m stuck with what they did: “It’s all their fault.”

Recognizing my responsibility for myself doesn’t mean I have to give up being any way I am, or doing anything I do. It does mean that I need to stop believing that I act in these ways only because of my ancient history. Each day I choose to act in the ways I do.

Responsibility and Authenticity

Responsibility and freedom are related to self-determination and authenticity. I can be authentic only to the degree that I make my own choices about who I am and what I do = including choosing those times when I’m willing to go along with what others want for me.

“What is not possible is not to choose…If I do not choose, I am still choosing.” Sartre.

To forget that I discover, create, and maintain the conditions of my life leads to alienation – the feeling that I have no control over my own destiny, that I”ma pawn moved by the hands of the unseen “They” who sit in seats of power. But as I regain my sense of being the doer, the thinker, the feeler, my life becomes my own and I reclaim the power that is rightfully my own.

The Effects of Our Social Environments

Each of us is born in a historical period, a race, a culture, a rich family or a poor one, and a neighborhood. No matter what personal transformations we undergo, these elements are part of our personal history.

But there is a difference between speaking of responsibility for our life situation and responsibility for how we are in our life situation. I have a choice about how I wish to be in that situation. Within the limits set by my environment, I can choose how I let the forces around me influence me. Deliberately or by default, I can select the way I am wherever I am.

Next time you watch TV, be sensitive to how the program or commercial manipulates your thoughts and feelings. Much of that is intentional, with objectives different from your own. You’re making all those things you watch, read, and listen to part of your existence. With them, and with other places where you spend your time, you can ask yourself “Do I want to make that part of me?” This question has both a personal and a political aspect: “How am I affected by my environment?” and “What’s in it for my environment to have me accept the messages it’s giving me?”

Many of our social institutions seem to want me to be available for ready manipulation. If I feel inadequate about making my own decisions, I give up my power, my responsibility, and my right to define who I am to big business, the media, government agencies, and other influential groups. As I discover how my social environment wants me to be, and why, I can more wisely choose with of its elements I want to incorporate into my life and which I don’t.

ACTIONS AND EXPERIENCE

To others, I am what I do and say. My acts, and how others view them, define me in my world. To myself, I am also what I think and feel – my intentions and urges that determine my actions.

I Am What I Do

Jean-Paul Sartre’s distinction between an action and an attribute. “Six feet tallness” and “tableness” are attributes. They can’t be changed. “Bravery” is different. It’s based on actions. There’s no such thing as a “brave man,” declares Sartre. If a man usually acts bravely, that’s all we can say. To others, his acts define him: “Man is…nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.”

I choose how I want to be. My authenticity depends on it. I create ways of thinking and feeling about myself. No matter how I may claim that my deeds don’t represent me, in fact they do. Though I may claim that I can’t act otherwise, in fact I can.

I Am What I Experience

To hear from you how your world is for you can be very different from defining how you are in my terms. Such a knowing opens dialogue and provides new access to each other.

Both our observable actions and our inner experiences are related to other currents in our personalities, conscious and unconscious, to which we now turn.

Intention and Volition

With our intentions we formulate our values, construct our behavior, and define our ways of approaching or withdrawing to get or be what we want. In their theory of positive intent, Luthman and Kirshenbaum point to a deep level of intentionality in which we want to be secure, to feel good, to love and be loved, and to express ourselves in our own ways.

It’s useful to distinguish the act of forming an intention from the act of carrying it out. How commonly we say of someone, “He has good intentions, but…” So I define intention as conceiving of, at some level of awareness, what I wish to do; and volition as mobilizing the energy to carry out an intention and doing so.

Unconscious Choices and Intentions

When my intentions and volitions derive from a fuller dialogue with myself, I’m less likely to do things today that I’ll regret tomorrow. I’m more likely to do things that in accord with my own nature – and that are responsive to the needs of others in my world. Then my subconscious me and my conscious me start to talk to each other, get along better, and use each other’s resources.

WHAT’S DONE TO ME AND WHAT I DO

Do you promise yourself that “someday” you’ll work on things you need to work on in your life? Do you expect someone else – a psychologist, social worker, friend, or minister – to solve your problems for you? Do you let the expectations of people in your past define what you can and can’t do for yourself today?

What do you need to do to be good to yourself? How do you avoid asking yourself that question? Once you’ve asked it, how do you answer? By avoidance, or by doing something for yourself? How is avoidance a way of doing something for yourself?

When I trace my problems back to their source, it almost always turns out that, in some way, I chose them. If I apologize for being alive, people will treat me as though I have no right to be here. And if I ask for something as though I don’t expect to get it, the chances are I won’t.

The way I ask a question tells the other person what kind of answer I expect. I can ask for something in a way that makes it easy to reply.

In my daily life, I can give myself at least as much consideration as I give others. I don’t have to set myself up to be a victim.

Whatever I’m doing, I’m creating a whole mood, whether it be a vigorous, lively one, or a shoulder-slumping droopiness. If I look pugnacious, I’ll probably intimidate some people and get into fights with others. If I come on like a doormat, I’m likely to get walked on. My way of presenting myself crates the context for my relationships.

Blaming Others

How often and how automatically many of us place responsibility outside ourselves when something goes wrong: “It wasn’t my fault!” “I couldn’t help it!” Democrats and Republicans do it all the time.

As long as I defend where you attack and blame, you control the action. I’m on the defensive. But I can protect myself against your blaming, and others’, by remembering that I am not obliged to accept anyone else’s evaluation of me. As counselor Norman Brice points out, When I depend on what others think of me, I’m vulnerable to being made to feel bad by every ill-dispositioned person I happen to meet. “There are few of us,” says Brice, “who have the presence of mind to say, ‘Oh no! That’s your truth. That’s not the truth!”

Self-Blame

When I acknowledge some of my responsibility for my own troubles, I can no longer use my presumed “helplessness” or “inadequacy” to distract myself from doing anything to change. I can tell myself, “I got into this; now I can get out of it and into a situation I’ll feel better about.”

Mistakes are familiar mice in everybody’s cornfield. If I think as clearly and act as honestly and wisely as I can, that’s enough. We can decrease our self-aggravation and suffereing by learning to take our mistakes, failures, and half-successes as a “texture” in our lives. My “errors” and “defeats” sometimes teach me more than my successes. In that important sense they aren’t failures at all.

What’s Yours and What’s Mine

In most cases, what happens between you and me results from what we both do. You anger yourself, feel hurt, feeld good, etc., in response to my words and actions. I can’t, all by myself, make you angry, hurt your feelings, or make you feel good. You’ve got to be willing to use my input to go to one of those places. Usually, the most I can do is create the situation.

In the many instances when I don’t know how you’ll respond to what I say or do, however, I take responsibility only for my wants and actions. I have no responsibility for – or control over – your response.

Likewise, how I feel in response to what you do is my own doing – not yours. Even when I have ot deal with difficulties you cause me, it’s within my power to maintain a creative state of mind. I don’t have to get in my own way by making myself miserable and thereby making life even harder.

ONLY I CAN DO IT

A monk asked: “How does one get emancipated?” The master said: “Who has ever put you in bondage?” – D.T. Suzuki

We often say, “I can’t,” when the truth is, “I won.t”

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter Three

BEING & CARING, A PSYCHOLOGY FOR LIVING by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984

Highlights from the book chosen by The Happy President.

CHAPTER THREE: SELF-DETERMINATION AND AUTHENTICITY

Our culture has taught us to value being self-determining: making our own choices about important events in our lives rather than having those choices made for us by others. That value is expressed in our desire to be authentic: to speak and act as who we truly are rather than shaping all our responses to fit other people’s expectations. Self-determination and authenticity are different sides of the same issue: Each requires the other for its full expression.

Each of us can learn to trust our own sense of what means most to us and accept it as our guise as we seek to find our own direction.

Relying upon anyone’s advice as to what you “should” or “shouldn’t” do will have you living borrowed pieces of other people’s lives instead of being responsible for your own life. No one is more suited to be you for you than you are.

When others respond with mistrust to my choices and actions, I can describe in the most caring way I know that I do appreciate their concerns and suggestions, but that as part of my own growth I have to be accountable to myself and to make certain decisions for myself. That may not “make everything all right,” but at least it opens the door to dialogue – especially when demonstrating my respect for them may help them to demonstrate greater respect for me.

Existentialist Martin Heidegger – “When we take refuge in the decisions of others it is not long before we think what others think, feel what others feel, and do what others do.”

Soren Kierkegaard used the term authenticity to refer to being in touch with our inner selves and acting from that full contact with who we are. To be authentic means to be true to myself. I cannot be authentic and put up a false front before others at the same time.

Being True To Ourselves

In each area of my life, I can ask, “How much room do I have to be myself in this situation? How much of the room I have do I use?”

It’s possible to be authentic when I’m not happy or comfortable as well as when I’m feeling good. When I’m lonely, for example, I don’t need to pretend that I’m not. If I reveal my loneliness to you, there’s at least a chance that we’ll touch each other in a way that has meaning for both of us. Even if we don’t, my attempt to communicate has intrinsic value. But if I keep silent when I want to tell you how I feel, we probably won’t make contact in more than a superficial way.

Steppingstones are significant turning points or periods in our lives – pleasant, painful, or neither – that brought us where we are today. They can help us recognize the “deeper than conscious” directions in which we move with our life currents.

Being authentic requires self-trust.

Being open with others can be frightening, for it increases my vulnerability and lessens my options for manipulation. In a way, I’m safer when you’re mystified by my cloaks, masks, and shadows, for then you seldom know just who or where I am.

If you and I are authentic with each other, we may become very close. The general principle is clear: To express yourself as you are, with minimal pretense, allows for a less stressful and more satisfying life.

Personal and Social Selves

Newborn infants have no roles to play. They just are, completely true to themselves. We could say that a newborn is entirely a personal self.

Conflict with and response to others lead to the beginnings of a social self. This early social self includes all of the personal self. Thus integrated, there’s nothing that the infant is unwilling to reveal to others.

The social self, or persona as Jung called it – a word that comes from the masks ancient Greek actors wore to symbolize the roles they played – serves two purposes: to make a specific impression on other people, and to conceal the inner self.

When people identify heavily with the persona and deny the rest of who they are, psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1969) speaks of a divided self.

We may stay locked into certain roles out of habit.

Each of us has the option to present ourselves in our social roles in ways that moves closer to who we are inside, so that our personal and social selves overlap more.

Acting As If

When I’m being authentic, I’m voicing my real wants and needs. When I’m concealing and manipulating, I’m testing you.

When I trust you to deal with me as I am, I communicate clearly who I am and what I want. When I act from the part of my social self that’s different from my personal self, I speak and act as if I’m thinking and feeling something other than I am.

When I’m stating clearly what I want, I’m likely to be decisive and direct. I’m in touch with my strength – and so are you.

Hypocrisy is a particular kind of as-ifery. It means being phony, presenting a public front of seeming to act in the service of higher principles than I really am. If I tell people I’m doing something because I want to help my community, or because it’s “the American Way,” when in fact my reason is because it helps my business or gives me a tax writeoff, I’m being hypocritical.

The Script

Psychiatrist Eric Berne speaks of the parental instructions we’ve received about how to act and be, and what to do with our lives, as our scripts (1961). Our scripts are also our own doing.

Until I realize that I’m acting out an obsolete script, I may be struck with some ineffective, unproductive, or even self-destructive behavior. When I follow a script that no longer fits me, I expend a lot of energy trying to bottle up the spontaneous flow of my life force. I don’t have to waste my energy in stopping myself. I can judiciously appraise where I have room to be myself in a fuller way and where I don’t.

HOW WE BECOME STRANGERS TO OURSELVES

Disconfirmation, Confirmation, and Pseudoconfirmation

Through my responses to what you do and say, I confirm or disconfirm your sense of who you are.

If significant others validate what you think, feel, and do, you’re encouraged to develop a secure, reliable sense of yourself. IF you get feedback that reinforces your own impressions, you learn to trust your ability to discern what’s going on around you. You’re likely to develop a clear sense of contact – of where you leave off and other people being, rather than becoming enmeshed in the sticky web of what Perls terms confluence, where you’re not sure of your boundaries.

But when others act in ways that deny y our actions and your perceptions of yourself and your world, you may become confused and uncertain about your identity. In order to keep the love and protection of significant others, you may choose to repress your questions and misgivings and agree with their insistence that they know you better than you know yourself.

What’s different about words and actions and confirm and those that disconfirm? A confirmatory response, say Laing, acknowledges your action – though it doesn’t necessarily agree with it. Disconfirmation, by contrast, has a tangential quality. My response appears to deal with your concern, but actually it deals with an aspect of the matter that concerns me – not the one that concerns you.

An especially subtle and fascinating process is that of pseudoconfirmation. This is pretense at confirmation, giving teh appearance of it without the substance. I tell you who you are, then I confirm my definition of you. I induce you to accept my ideas about you, then confirm your attempts to apply them to yourself.

“A friend is a person who leaves you with all your freedom intact but obliges you to be fully waht you are.” In that spirit, in being authentic, I don’t want to intrude on your authenticity.

Carl Rogers describes an attitude that he terms “unconditional positive regard,” which he defines as “an atmosphere with…demonstrates ‘I care’; not ‘I care for you if you behave thus and so’” (1961). This kid of acceptance is not so easy. It can take hard work to set aside my goals for you – what I want for you and what I think would be good for you – and leave you room to be yourself. But it opens the way for me to know you as you are.

Excerpts from “Being & Caring”, Part One Chapter One

“BEING & CARING, A Psychology for Living,” by Victor Daniels and Laurence J. Horowitz, 1976, 1984.

Selections curated by The Happy President.

PREFACE

We all write, direct, and act the parts we play in the theaters of our lives. These roles grow out of how we feel about ourselves, how we want the world to see us, and the constraints of our environments. Within these contexts, each of us has the option of finding ways to live that help us to feel good and know ourselves more deeply – to create and flow and to stretch and reach.

Being and Caring begins, in Part One, by setting out some guiding principles:

Learn to appreciate and enjoy yourself, your life, and other people, rather than depreciatively judging all these. Live in a self-determining, authentic way that’s based primarily on who you are rather than what others want you to be. Develop the neglected sides of who you are and become a more fully integrated person. Increase your freedom and power by accepting responsibility for your behavior. Sharpen your ability to be aware of events both within and outside yourself.

Part Two presents skills and information about interacting with other people. Parts Three, Four, and Five consider emotion, cognition, and overt behavior. The order is psychological: Emotional clarity facilitates clear thinking, and both feeling and thinking affect our actions. Part Six returns to our connections with others with an emphasis on intimate and other long-term relationships.

PART ONE: FOUNDATIONS

CHAPTER ONE: PERSONAL EVOLUTION

Look in the mirror: What tales do the lines in your own face tell? In our first few years, we all live with the faces we were born with. After that, we start wearing the faces and living the lives we’ve created for ourselves.

Each of us becomes more of who we can be in part by being fully who we are now. “Don’t push the river,” said Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt therapy, “it flows by itself.” So often, to fit our ideas about who we should or could be, we stop ourselves from acknowledging who we are. We don’t have to rush headlong into changing ourselves, nor feel unhappy about who we are today to evolve in constructive ways. As we recognize our complexities – our diverse parts that interact, conflict, demand, and counterdemand – we’re more likely to appreciate our processes, purposes, and actions.

Finding ways to enjoy and appreciate ourselves, those around us, and our interactions with the circumstances of our lives is part of what might be called personal wisdom – something as unique as your fingerprints, signature, or way of laughing. Such wisdom includes actively seeking choices and alternatives rather than passively playing the role of a “victim of circumstances.” You can confront your reality creatively rather than accepting other people’s solutions and limitations.

THE EMERGING YEARS OF “PEOPLE PSYCHOLOGY”

Amid the material growth and prosperity that followed World War 2…Unhappiness was seen as a defect in a life of all possible goods. A popular textbook from the forties and fifties comments that a “maladjusted” person was often viewed as morally “bad” or “wrong”.

Adjustment textbooks, valuable to many readers though they were, suffered from two significant limitations. First the goal was some abstraction called “normality.” Normal is “an accepted standard, model, or pattern; especially corresponding to the median or average.” The old “adjustment psychology” sought to help troubled people become like everyone else instead of accepting their own uniqueness.

Second, most of the values and conditions to which a person was asked to “adjust” were unquestioned.

Fritz Perls (1947) argued that in the context of a society changing as rapidly as ours, it’s not clear just what we’re supposed to adjust to. He held that the demand to adjust can interfere with the self-reliance that maturity requires. To adjust blindly, he asserted, is to participate in the collective madness inherent in some aspect of our society.

Jungian analyst James Hillman goes a step farther, pointing out that the “manic consumerism and overtiredness and sleep depressions” of many clients in therapy today reflect the environments in which they live. We need to develop a psychopathology of civilization. As we discover how our culture is crazy, we can conceive of saner, wiser ways to redirect it.

THE MYSTIQUE OF SELF-FULFILLMENT

The humanistic orientation in psychology. (Theorist) Rogers emphasizes a person’s capacity to define the central issues of his or her life. Perls identified the fragmented nature of many people’s experience and the need to move toward a sense of integration and wholeness. Maslow described needs common to all of us as we seek both to be our unique selves and to understand the ways of the world we live in. Their perspectives can help each of us participate creatively in our world without being consumed by it.

The self-fulfillment ethic appears to have three different roots. One is the emergence of a psychology that aims at helping people discover themselves at a deep level, use themselves creatively, and achieve a full, happy life that doesn’t depend entirely on possessions and status. A second is our historic attitude of commitment to individualism. A third is our consumption-oriented economic system that relentlessly exhorts people to buy everything they want – today!

Is the quest for self-fulfillment an unmixed blessing? Some think not. “You’re obsessed with your own fulfillment but you don’t help others with theirs,” such criticism runs. “There’s no cooperative glue there, no shared effort of the kind that’s needed to build a mutually nourishing society.”

In their movement toward greater self-knowledge, people go through stages of development.

The next step beyond self-fulfillment is to take our more fulfilled selves into mutually enriching social relationships with others.

BEYOND CONFORMITY AND THE “ME GENERATION” – BEING FOR ME AND CARING ABOUT YOU

From birth until death, a person can grow in his or her ability to be with other people in mutually fulfilling ways. At the same time, the person is developing an ability to be independent, separate, and unique. Thus contemporary theorists speak of an interplay between two motives: individuation and relatedness. At every point, both are active. The two tendencies not only coexist but support each other. The more I know and the better I feel about myself, the more supportive, challenging, and caring I can be in my relationship with you. And vice versa. This interplay represents the guiding perspective of this book.

When I’ve learned to stand on my own feet, I’m ready to move toward you and with you. It’s then that I discover what synergy means: self-interest enlightened by appreciative awareness of myself in your existence and of your participation in my world. We do for each other in ways that enrich us, too, and do for ourselves in ways that enrich each other.

LIVING BY OUR REAL CONCERNS

Taking Time for Assessment

Taking stock of our lives is something we need to do more.

Living and discovering in ways that embody my life themes may require important redirections of my energy. These may involve changes wihtin my life. My deep concerns are found both in the far future and in how I do what I do each day.

I need to find a way to feel all right about what I do. This doesn’t mean “Chip up and put a sunny face on what’s nasty and uncomfortable.” Rather, it means that if I’ve examined how I use my time and energy and find no more effective alternative, I may need to go easier on myself, and recognize that, all things considered, I’m doing the best I can for me and those important to me.

Clarifying Our Directions

Evolving toward ways of living that demonstrate our own values and priorities involves a self-determination that’s more than just rebellion against others’ expectations. It’s an active process of redefining what we want to do with who we know ourselves to be. How do I know if the direction I choose is a productive one? If it leads me to make better use of who I am, I’m willing to call it growth.

I can distrust my ability to accomplish anything when I focus only on the finished product, and forget that the process of creating somethign can be as rewarding as completing it. When I’m afraid I’ll never make it, I don’t even start. Perhaps if we pay attention to the ways we frighten ourselves, that act will be a start toward what we want to accomplish.

ETHICS AND WISDOM

The direction of our evolution is influenced by the natur of our ethics. Our approach is this: to experience our acts in terms of how helpful or harmful they are – how useful or counterproductive – to whom or what, how under what circumstances.

Our knowing process becomes distorted when we’re required to learn large amounts of information in which we find little meaning or value. Understanding is seeing relationships among facts that are important to me. As I develop understanding, I become able to use my knowledge.

Wisdom goes beyond understanding. Wisdom is the knowledge of the spirit. We tend to expect a different kid of knowing from our spirituality than from our heads – a very personal integration of knowing, feeling, sensing, and doing.