You Have a Choice, page 4
One of my clients, who I’ll call Sam, was newly hired into a C-level position at a startup and was struggling with a demanding CEO. He knew he needed to challenge the CEO’s thinking and explain what his team needed. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to say what he needed to say.
I asked Sam how the CEO made him feel and what other situations in his life made him feel like that. He said he felt small, and in doing so, realized the CEO unconsciously reminded him of his father. Sam had learned as a young child to play the peacemaker to placate his father and always agree, so that his father wouldn’t get angry. Taking on that role from a young age had conditioned Sam over the years not to challenge authority figures.
Once Sam made the connection, he realized that the rule he had in place to “never speak back to authority” did not apply in his work situation, because he was no longer the son, but a company leader. He tried an experiment to change his default behavior of deferring, and instead challenged the CEO on an important issue where he was confident in his position. The challenge was well-received, and he became more effective in his role as he grew more comfortable with direct communication. While Sam hasn’t changed his interactions with his father, he learned he could change the interaction rules he followed at work.
Like Sam, we create most of these rules as children to handle overwhelming emotions such as shame, embarrassment, or feeling unloved. We never want to feel those emotions again, so we create defense mechanisms or rules that help us avoid those situations. Those rules helped us get our emotional needs met as children, so they worked great for their original intention and in their original context! But we get ourselves stuck when we unconsciously apply them as adults in other contexts.
Getting unstuck requires becoming conscious of the rule’s original context and then making a conscious choice about when to apply the rule and when not to, as we will explore in the next exercise.
Exercise 2.2
Please reflect on the following questions and write down your answers.
1. Pick one of the rules you discovered in exercise 2.1.
2. Imagine breaking that rule. What emotions or physical sensations come up for you as you imagine doing the opposite of what you are supposed to do? These may include strong, unpleasant emotions such as shame or disgust, because your brain is afraid of what will happen if you don’t follow the rule.
3. Stay with those unpleasant feelings and ask yourself, “What other situations in my life have made me feel this way?” and “What is my earliest memory of feeling this way?”
4. Remember that original situation and explore how it made sense for you as a child to adopt that rule in that context.
5. Return to the dream option that activated that rule and see if it still makes sense to apply that rule in that context.
Privilege check: If you experienced serious childhood trauma, please do not attempt this reflection about childhood experiences without the support of a trained therapist. Bringing up unprocessed trauma can be very damaging without somebody to help you safely reprocess it and return to normal functioning. People with less privilege often have a lifetime of unprocessed painful exclusionary moments to which they adapted in ways that may seem harmful but were the best they could manage under the circumstances. Interfering with those adaptive mechanisms without addressing the underlying trauma can be dangerous.
You can’t do it all
Part of what makes these rules confusing is that we have different rules for different contexts where “I” have to do this, “I” must do that, or “I” can’t ever do the other thing. It feels impossible to do everything that “I” want to do, because “I” want to do so many things, sometimes including two opposite things in the same situation.
We are trained in school to believe there is always a “right” answer, which we can find if we only work hard enough or are smart enough. Classes and problem sets are constrained to focus on a limited domain where there can be a single right answer.
In the real world, however, we may struggle with multiple domains that have multiple, conflicting “right” answers. For instance, let’s take my situation as I write these words:
• The “right” answer for my coaching business is to work harder and take on more clients, as I have a rule that more is always better when it comes to work.
• The “right” answer for my family is to spend more time with my kids and my wife, rather than letting my attention be dominated by work.
• The “right” answer as an author is to spend more time writing, withdrawing from other activities like my coaching or my family so I can focus on this book.
• The “right” answer for my physical health is to spend more time exercising, sleeping, eating better, and resting so that my body can continue to support my other activities.
• The “right” answer for my mental health is to spend more time meditating and journaling, and giving myself more time to recharge rather than overscheduling myself.
• The “right” answer as a social being is to spend more time with friends who help me feel like I belong, so that I feel less lonely and stressed.5
• The “right” answer as a citizen is to spend more time getting out the vote, working on social causes, and contributing to my community.
And there’s still more! I “should” also be keeping up with the news, reading more books, cooking more meals at home, and learning new skills.
The reality is I just can’t do it all. Neither can you. There is far too much to do, and no possible way to do all those things I “should” do. And yet I keep getting tripped up because I know the “right” thing to do in each area and feel like I “should” be able to do it.
The constraint, of course, is time and attention. I can’t do it all because there’s only so many hours in the day. Each individual commitment feels attainable, but they far exceed my capacity in aggregate.
So why do I have so many different ideas of what I should be doing?
The answer: there is no single unified “me.”
Chapter 3
Accept Your Parts
We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world.
—Dr. Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
Instead of a singular self, our brains have created many “parts”1 to handle different situations, and those parts take over when their context is activated. The conflicting impulses we feel then make more sense: one part of “me” wants to do this based on one context, another part of “me” wants to do that based on another context, and “I” feel conflicted because I have different parts pulling me in different directions. Each part has its own “right” answer about what to do, but they don’t align!
Our parts are defined by the rules and constraints we discussed in the previous chapter. Because the parts are generally created when we are children, they have a very simplistic view of the world, which is why they use absolute rules framed as “must” and “never” without any awareness of how rules may shift based on context. But their intent is good—they want to help!
Since becoming a parent, I have started to think of these parts as toddlers with good intentions and clumsy execution. They are like my young son, who wants to help me in the kitchen but is also prone to making mistakes as he loses focus—as he did recently in cracking an egg perfectly but missing the bowl, so the raw egg slid off the countertop and splattered onto the floor.
Similarly, our parts intend to be helpful when they jump in to show that they know what to do in a situation. But they have a toddler’s limited skill and context awareness, so they only see one small piece of the situation—like my son focusing so hard on cracking the egg that he forgot to keep it over the bowl.
This mental shift was transformative for me in realizing that the parts of my mind and their associated rules are trying hard to help; they are just unaware and unskilled. So instead of beating myself (or my parts) up for leading me astray, I can approach them with compassion and love, much like I did with my son, working with him to clean up the dropped egg rather than yelling at him for being incompetent.
This is a particularly valuable shift because parts are generally created as defense mechanisms, with rules designed to help me avoid difficult emotions like fear and shame and grief. Some of the parts I’ve identified in myself are:
1. A part that feels compelled to please other people and make sure they are happy, because that part does not want to feel abandoned
2. A part that responds with great anger when others tell me what I must do, because that part does not want to feel a lack of autonomy
3. A part that shuts down and does mindless tasks when it feels overwhelmed because it can’t keep everybody happy; instead, it looks for a specific task like washing dishes or playing a phone game so that it can deliver on those more limited expectations
Each of these parts has a good intention—to help me avoid feeling difficult emotions—yet their strategies often get in the way of me achieving my conscious intentions and can even conflict with each other. Trying to please everybody (part 1, above) can make me feel overwhelmed (part 3) and angry that I can’t do what I want (part 2), so unless I’m mindful of that pattern, I can cycle through those parts and be constantly stuck and unhappy.
When I instead approach each part with compassion and understanding, I can acknowledge its good intention and its effort to keep me safe. These parts were created in a childhood attempt to earn love, and so when I offer that unconditional love to them (and myself!), they can relax and let go of their rigid reactions. Within that safety of loving myself and my parts, I’m not in a constant state of defensiveness and tension, trying to avoid the difficult emotions of life; instead, I can be with whatever arises as my whole self. Rather than being stuck in a cage constructed out of the rules of my parts, I can more freely choose what to do and accept the consequences, as illustrated below by applying our problem/choice framework:
What isn’t working for you?
I can’t decide what to do. I feel pulled in many directions: I want to do this, I want to do that, and I can’t figure out how to do it all.
How are you the problem?
“I” am stuck because I have a community of parts. Each part has different motivations and contexts that can overlap or conflict. The internal conflict I am feeling is because each action I consider is being blocked by a different part’s rule, and I am cycling through parts endlessly like a tiger stuck in a cage.
You have a choice.
When I unconsciously follow the absolute rules of those parts without being mindful of their original context, I am overconstrained and stuck, because there is no answer that all of my parts can accept.
To get unstuck, I can translate those rules from “I must do X” to “part of me feels I must do X.” Rather than let my parts determine my actions from their limited contexts, I can investigate the rules that each part holds, understand the context in which the part developed, and how its rules serve me.
With that greater awareness of the conflicting contexts, I can identify the different parts of myself in play, consider their intentions and perspectives, mediate between them, and intentionally choose what to do from a sense of wholeness.
Easier said than done, of course. We’ll talk more about practices that support this mindfulness throughout the rest of this chapter. But let’s start by getting you more familiar with your parts.
Exercise 3.1
We will use the exercises from the previous chapter to guide you in identifying your parts:
1. Recall the list of rules you discovered in exercise 2.1, when you explored what was keeping you from enacting your “dream” options.
2. For each rule, go through exercise 2.2, when you imagined breaking the rule, identified the unpleasant feelings that arose, and recalled the childhood experiences that might have led to the construction of that rule.
3. You have now identified a part that was created in childhood to avoid the unpleasant feeling of shame, anger, or grief that arose as a child. Imagine this part as a toddler learning the rules of the world:
a) “If I drop a ball, it falls to the ground.” (Cause leads to effect.)
b) “If I talk back, then I get yelled at by my father and feel abandoned.” (Cause leads to effect, so the part learns to not talk back to avoid that feeling of abandonment.)
4. Most people have a few dozen parts, and you don’t need to identify them all in this exercise. But I do recommend going through this exercise to identify a few parts and look for ways in which they might conflict, e.g., “If I talk back, I feel abandoned,” vs. “If I don’t speak up for myself, I feel powerless.”
Catch the parts in action
Seeing the bars of our cage is only possible when we can see the parts and rules that we have been holding unconsciously for our whole lives. But how do we bring them to consciousness? In the remainder of this chapter, I will share practices that can help you catch when your parts are acting without your awareness, and experiments to bring them into greater alignment with each other and with your whole self.
Let’s take the example of a director (I’ll call her Lucy) who was given the feedback that she needed to be clearer and more direct in her communications. Her team was swirling and confused because they couldn’t get a straight answer out of her, and her message seemed to change depending on who she talked to. This was partly because she had several cross-functional stakeholders, each of whom wanted different things urgently, so she felt like she had to change the top priority for herself and her team after every meeting.
Lucy also wasn’t holding low performers on the team accountable because she felt her job was to make everybody on the team successful even if they weren’t doing their job. Instead of setting clear performance standards and letting people fail to deliver, she was doing people’s jobs for them because she felt their failure was her failure. This tolerance was affecting the morale and performance of her team because they also had to cover for the low performers, and it was draining Lucy because she was doing their jobs as well as her own.
Yet she found herself using a “likable cheerleader” voice of encouragement with everybody and avoiding the direct conversations she needed to have with her stakeholders and her team. Her actions did not align with her conscious intent to be clearer and more direct, which was a sign that unconscious parts were at work.
I asked her, “How do you feel in that moment before speaking up?”
Anxiety and terror were what came up for her. She felt as if she were under so much tension that her life was under threat. When we explored a little more of her history, she revealed, “I used to be that direct and was called a bitch and difficult to work with.” In fact, she had been fired from multiple jobs for not being “respectful” enough.
Her parts naturally wanted to protect her from those threatening conditions, so they took over and did what they had learned would create safety: do whatever it takes to please everyone around you, encouraging them and not holding them accountable. And that strategy worked! It made Lucy successful as an individual contributor creating fantastic work, and it got her promoted.
But “what got you here won’t get you there,”2 and those same people-pleasing tendencies were now keeping her from being successful as a director. She had too many people depending on her, and they all wanted different things; trying to keep them all happy was impossible, putting her into a constant state of anxiety and terror. No matter what she tried, somebody was unhappy, and her unconscious parts “knew” that if somebody was unhappy, she was going to be punished.
Her unconscious parts were now the problem, not the solution, as they were steering her away from the very actions she needed to take to improve her situation:
• Rather than have a direct conversation to hold people on her team accountable for their underperformance, she was enabling them and even doing their work for them, which meant she was falling behind on her own responsibilities.
• Rather than have a clear conversation about expectations with her VP and cross-functional stakeholders, she was saying yes to everything being asked of her, which created unreasonable amounts of work for her and her team, leading to burn out.
That left her with a dilemma. Her unconscious parts were taking over and reacting before she even had a chance to think about how she intended to respond. She felt stuck because she could see how her previous patterns were no longer serving her, but she didn’t see how to change those reactions.
Intention, attention, action
We all know of the New Year’s resolution model for behavior change, which involves setting an intention to eat healthier or exercise more. This model rarely works to change our actions because we are not aware of how our current unconscious behaviors are serving us in some way (remember, those parts were created for a reason!).3
I prefer the model of Intention, Attention, Action: to achieve our Intention of taking different Actions, we must first focus our Attention on how and when our parts take over to follow a previously learned rule. Only by developing that awareness will we have a choice: to react as we always have, or to consciously choose a different Action that creates new possibilities.
