WHY DO WE KEEP REPEATING THE SAME DYSFUNCTIONAL PATTERNS?
You know the drill — you look back over your life and see the same mistakes repeating and repeating. Oh sure, there are differences — how you got rejected in grade school is different from how you got rejected in high school, college, in your first job, etc., etc., but the pattern is there. How is it possible that you seemingly never learned from these incidents and kept repeating the same basic tropes?
For me, it was snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. In classes, on jobs, in relationships, I’d start out strong and then, somehow, shoot myself in the foot. When I was in college, I took a summer job at a resort in the Catskills. I was a bellhop in a pretty big hotel, and during my off hours I spent a lot of time in the hotel coffee shop. The owners of the coffee shop concession were an elderly couple, probably Holocaust survivors. She was everyone’s mother (and managed the kitchen), and he was a mustachioed, gruff old man with a heart of gold who managed the shop operations. As I got to know them, they took me under their wing (a Jewish Ivy Leaguer — all I needed was to be pre-med to be every Jewish grandparent’s dream) and finally the old man offered me a job. It didn’t take much to lure me away from schlepping suitcases every Sunday, and I went to work as a short-order cook. Within a few short weeks, I managed to get into an argument with Mr. Cohen, insult him with no sensitivity to the impact of my words, and got fired.
That was my pattern and it persisted into my Sixties. Start strong, have a disagreement, vehemently insist and prove that I was right, and lose if not the job, the relationships that were important to me. It happened with clients, with bosses, and with friends.
Being in the human development business, I could not help but notice the pattern, and I had plenty of coaches and colleagues who pointed it out, but I seemed to be powerless to stop it. With work, I determined that it was rooted in my childhood — in my childish perception, everyone compared me to my older brother — he was 12 years my senior, athletic, well-liked, good in school, got along with my parents (and everyone else, it seemed) and on every measure I seemed to fall short. I developed a pattern of “proving myself.” I would show you that I was as good as or better than my brother, and inevitably I’d fall short, be miserable, pick myself up and start the cycle all over again.
Intellectually I knew I had nothing to prove, yet I kept proving it. It seemed like I was addicted to showing up as less than my brother.
I began to look more closely at the pattern, and noticed that, in the time before it all came crashing down, there was enormous excitement — this time I was going to make it! This time I’d show them! Followed by the crash and descent into depression and resignation before I was lured back into the game. What was that about?
Then I remembered something from my training as a psychologist — I had learned (and forgotten) that human beings do not begin to develop the ability to think abstractly until somewhere near the end of the first decade of life. This means that for children under 10 perceive everything concretely — to oversimplify, there are no metaphors, no similes, no concepts — just concrete reality. “Boys don’t cry” is the cognitive equivalent of “rocks are hard.” I felt everyone was comparing me to my brother, so they were. I felt that they were judging me to be less than my brother, so they were. I concluded that I had to show them, so I did. And I bought into the judgment I felt from them, so I believed I’d never be as good as my brother — so I never would be.
A second important learning in my training was that little children have, in effect, to answer the question “what do I have to do to survive around here[1]?” The pattern of concrete thinking I just described forms the answer to this question. In effect: “I’ll never be as good as my brother, but my survival depends on my being as good as my brother, so I’ll keep trying.” The result: a double bind.
There is one more thing that needs to be factored in here. Because of my inability to think abstractly when I answered the survival question, that question was not metaphorical. For the child younger than five, the survival in question is a matter of life and death. If I was not as good as my brother (and for a lot of reasons “as good as” came down to “as smart as”), I would cease to be. That rush of excitement when I came close to proving myself, was the experience of surviving not being good enough, and there is no rush that compares to the rush of survival. The crash when I failed was disappointing, but just made me hungrier for the rush. Like a junkie who comes down, the coming down primed me to seek my next fix.
Until we break the existential link between our deepest feeling of inadequacy and the rush of survival, we’ll keep seeking the experience of excitement that precedes the crash.
By “existential link” I mean to emphasize that the experience, logical or not, is that our very being depends on the combination of the feeling of inadequacy and the rush of survival. Given how deep-rooted that connection is, rationality alone won’t break it. To quote Marianne Williamson: Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
What is required is a shift or transformation in who we are — a self-creation. When we face our deepest fear — the fear that we are inadequate, insufficient, flawed, and expose it to the light of reality, discovering that it is in fact a superstition, we impose a dysjunction between that (acquired) feeling of inadequacy and who we really are, and can then constitute ourselves as anything we choose to be. When we do that, we break the chain of failing, surviving, and then failing again in order to survive again.
[1] I’ll spare you, reader, the theory behind why this is so, but you can find a full accounting in my book “Inclusion, The Role of Leadership,” in the chapter called “The Politics of Identity.
