Beyond blame and living out weaknesses—September 18, 2011
When my students and I reached this point, they sometimes questioned why we went through the process if we didn't want to discover who was to blame for all our adult weaknesses. That was a question fraught with complexities.
Such a question assumed weaknesses on the part of all of us. It's not that they and we don't live with qualities and choices we might want to rethink and renew, but calling any quality of self a "weakness" presupposed its near if not absolute permanence. Students responded that if they were to change, and many felt they wanted to and needed to change, they would have to know their weaknesses so they could work on them. The way to do that came out of looking at the past and discovering the places where the weaknesses developed. The ones who participated in any recovery program called them their "issues." These "issues" involved a concentration on the negative side of their past uncovering every ill that happened to them so they could find blame. Once they did that, they could learn to deal with what happened and the weakness and problems that arose from those experiences.
In the face of these student stories and concerns, I discovered a response. From what I had seen and heard, this therapeutic process didn't make most people feel any better about themselves. It seemed that when they went to some form of therapy, the process meant a high concentration on the "weaknesses," "problems," and "issues" that had caused their adult failures. When they engaged in sessions that were meant to help, the therapy process centered on gathering together all the rotten stuff that had happened to them and all the rotten stuff they had done, so therapy could examine the patient and the experiences and do some sort of analysis. It seemed like putting a glass or plastic bottle with the fluids of past negativity in front of our eyes and looking through that bottle as "through a glass darkly."
When we bring that bottle up to our face and place it in front of our eyes, all we can see directly is the bottle itself and the liquid in it. It becomes all we see. Because it is directly in front of our eyes, we see it out of proportion; it's enormous and overwhelming. It also distorts everything we see through that bottle. We see the world and all our lives through this monochromatic prism. All is weakness, sorrow, and failure: a one color spectrum. That didn't seem a very strong place to begin the process of returning to the becoming self after years that denied that becoming self, delayed that becoming self, or simply let that becoming self slip from consciousness.
A becoming self sees all the difficulties and the suffering of the past, but if we can get on with our becoming, those things we feel devalue us become part of a larger a more accurate perspective. When we take the bottle away from our eyes and place it on the tabletop, we can see it against the whole story in front of us. The bottle filled with the past was still there, but now it formed a rather small part of the overall. The tabletop or our life contained many other things, all in a clear and undistorted presentation. All of a sudden, the dreaded weaknesses and unhappiness, and mistakes of the past take on a much reduced form in perspective and a very reduced proportion. We can see ourselves more clearly without the mitigation of concentration on the negative. The past offers us a great deal of meaning, but the meaning doesn't come when all we concentrate on is the past and the selective ugliness and grief it holds if we look for it that way.[43]
Our becoming happens in the present and in the future informed by the past. The past contains a great deal of valuable information that often came at a high cost, so we wouldn’t want to just forget it. We want to learn from it and put it to a positive use in our present heading to the future. Blame doesn't do that. It makes for an endless repetition of the story of the past. We become trapped in the story, and the past becomes the present. We cannot move toward the autonomous and individuated, the movement toward the becoming self. We become trapped and dominated by the dominations of the past. Too much and the wrong kind of concentration on the past leaves us enslaved to it rather than liberated into the present. Through such liberation, we may well find our way back into the becoming self, find the transformative learning that can and will come to us when we open ourselves to it. It means that we can work on and concentrate on our strengths and let the weaknesses shrink in significance as a natural function of seeing them in perspective to our past, present, and increasing strengths.
In that way, we can shift our locus of control back into our selves, effectively seek an autonomous and individuating life, and return to the creation and discovery of the becoming self as we had defined it.
Looking clearly at the processes of how we become an identity that fears our self, as we had been doing, is meant to allow us to uncover the unquestioned meaning perspectives that keep us from autonomy and individuation, that keep us from our liberated becoming self. When we gain such information and understanding of these meaning perspectives, we can critically reflect on them and decide on their validity or their dishonesty. This uncovering, questioning and critically reflecting process often brought us to a question that came to me one sleepless moment in the night: "What would happen if you found out that every negative thought and feeling you ever had about yourself were unfounded, unfair, and untrue?" Engaging in transformative learning, a kind of learning that comes naturally when the opportunity arises, can lead us to the joyous answer to that question. It leads us out of the dominator model and conformity. Transformative learning can assist us into individuation and a greater sense of community within and without.