A dear friend and Unitarian Universalist minister, Tom Owen-Towle, states it as follows: “[We] live more by our aspirations than by our accomplishments.” This is a profound truth, a statement of faith and courage. In fact, I fully believe that who we truly are is revealed in our aspirations, rather than in our accomplishments.
We all have the capacity to change, if we choose to. These words are revolutionary, coming from the pen of someone (me) who was once deeply mired in self-loathing, self-pity, self-absorption, and self-destructiveness. I once considered myself a hopeless case, no matter how “successful” and “effective” I appeared to others. I felt doomed to a life of being unable to accept who I was, let alone find a way to become something bigger.
But I did change, perhaps in spite of myself. And it happened through an “earthquake” in my thinking.
I have a spiritual guide whose contrarian personality naturally upsets me. He has a strong personality, and when I first met him I had qualms about him. But I was desperate for help at the time, so I surrendered to him – I decided to let someone else be right for a change.
This was a key: My way had produced nothing but utter self-destruction wrapped in an apparently successful skin. If you nicked the skin, a dark, fetid world of shame and bondage would be revealed. I spent almost all of my energy trying to preserve this fragile skin – it was exhausting. Finally, at 48 years of age, I succumbed to the obvious fact that my way was not working, and humbly asked my new spiritual guide for help.
His “help” took the form of constant mental challenges, challenges to my existing thought patterns and mental habits. He told me to write endless lists of things I was grateful for (not easy for someone with my negative attitude), and he told me to place (what were in my dark mind) patently false affirmations up on my mirror and recite them to myself: “I am lovable.” “I am worthy.” I did it grudgingly, haltingly, and completely without feeling. But I did it.
He had a peculiar habit of disagreeing with every single thing I said to him. This was at times irritating, frustrating, aggravating, and clearly unfair; most of all it was disturbing and extraordinarily uncomfortable. This was the “earthquake.” And here’s the remarkable thing: In spite of my discomfort, in spite of my fear and aggravation, I sat with him anyway, rather than leaving in a huff. I lived with the discomfort of having my world view challenged deeply and thoroughly, and the resulting mental earthquake eventually had the effect of interrupting those dark habits of thought.
Here’s how it first became apparent to me what was happening: One day I was rehearsing my litany of woes to him, simmering in a comforting, delicious soup of self-pity and shame. He said: “You are doing this to yourself. It is unnecessary to resort to shame every time you have a thought. STOP IT! Just STOP IT!”
I said to him “How can I stop it? It’s the way I think! I just think this way, and there’s no way around it.”
He pointed to a couple of bad habits I’d dropped, and said: “You dropped those; now drop Shame. STOP IT!”
It seemed impossible, but the earthquake of his words shook me up enough that his words came to mind the next time I began descending into a “shame spiral.” And here’s the remarkable part: Just that tiny bit of Awareness cast on the mental habit of shame and self-loathing revealed that Shame was a process, not an event. In other words, there was a window of time that revealed itself, during which I moved from Not-Shame to Shame. It was a rabbit hole that I myself jumped into, rather than just an event that occurred to me, unbidden.
Simply by noticing, I was able to see that there was a short period of time during which, with practice, I was able to interrupt my own decision to jump into the rabbit hole, and side-step it instead.
This was huge. It was the beginning of my understanding that I AM RESPONSIBLE for my experience of reality, the dawning realization that my decision to jump into the rabbit hole of Shame created my experience of Shame. By learning tools that shook up my own thinking (in the same way my spiritual guide shook up my thinking) I could avoid the rabbit hole altogether.
This was simple. The tools were given to me. Their application was straightforward. But I’ll be damned if it was easy. It took all of the Willingness and Awareness I could summon to interrupt my own thinking and avoid the cozy, comfortable mental habit of Shame.
What, you might ask, was the “payoff” of being so ashamed that it became my “go-to” emotion? It took me awhile to figure that out, but it wasn’t very complicated. By resorting to Shame, I allowed myself to slip into the comforting role of Victim, endlessly beleaguered by my surroundings, and – here’s the clincher – not responsible for my own situation.
It did not matter that it was a false comfort. It was simply an ancient mental process that established itself in my distant childhood, one that made it safer to exist in my dysfunctional family of origin. That it no longer really served me was irrelevant. It was a habit, and felt known. To experience anything besides Shame had become uncomfortable, and I resisted discomfort with every fiber of my being.
It was not until my set of automatic thoughts and beliefs in this area were shaken to their core that I could begin to observe the dysfunction, and learn ways to intervene. The process has taken much time and effort – it was not easy – but I can say with all my heart that the time and effort spent surrendering to my discomfort and trying something else made all the difference.
I share this entire story to say this: I thought I was irredeemable. I was wrong. I can change. It’s uncomfortable, but – stick with me now – discomfort, once my sworn enemy, has now become a dear friend.
When I am uncomfortable, it’s because I’m stepping into the unknown. Change is by definition unknown. Change is uncomfortable. But growth and maturity cannot happen without Change, and discomfort (pain) is the proof of progress. When I am uncomfortable because a mental habit has been challenged, I now know that this is the harbinger of Growth, one of my highest Values. Discomfort is to be embraced rather than avoided, and learning this simple fact has changed my way of being in the world.
And I shared this story to say this: When I bring Awareness and Willingness to Change to my situation, bright, shimmering worlds of exciting potential reveal themselves to me. The Change of personal development is never comfortable, but Oh. My. God! It is worth every bit of the time, effort, and discomfort!
So do you think you know who I am by knowing my history or my present circumstances? You’d be wrong. My history is unchangeable. My circumstances are my circumstances. But my future is limitless and defined only by the outer regions of my imagination. I Am Who I'm Becoming!
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