What Keeps Us from Trying...
Michael Lerner
The emotional roots of surplus powerlessness are not the products of any single experience or set of experiences. These roots have been produced by the dynamic interaction between childhood experience, adult personal life, and the world of work - all mutually informing and shaping each other.
Reality is a seamless whole. It exists as a totality, and every part of it shapes and is shaped by every other part. We can, for the purpose of describing it, break things up into analytically separable parts as long as we understand that this is just a way of speaking about reality. At any given moment all of our experiences in the economic world - our experiences of competition and betrayal, of self-blaming and anger, of playing along to keep our jobs and of wishing to do more than we can - all of these are present in our interactions with our families and friends. And all that happened to us - how we felt about ourselves as kids, the ways that our parents and teachers treated us, the ways we got disappointed by friends, the experiences on the first dates we had, the movies we have seen, the books we have read - all are present and shaping our understanding of this particular moment and every other particular moment.
If we keep this in mind, it becomes much easier to understand how people come to believe that:
(a) We cannot trust anyone else; that
(b) we are completely alone in the world; and that
(c) we have made a mess of our lives...
We have experienced pain from early childhood, a pain generated by our need to abandon parts of our fullest potential so that we could receive recognition from our parents, who both wished to have real contact and simultaneously felt connected to us only through the set of roles that they had learned and inherited. Our parents had a need to make us "wrong", so that they could avoid the pain of recognizing how they were emotionally abandoning us. Had they understood how their supposed "failure" was itself a product of circumstances out of their own control, had they had real compassion for themselves and their limitations, they could have realized that it would OK to acknowledge the ways that they were not able to be real for us, the ways that they had themselves been deformed by the legacy of their childhoods, family life, and the world of work. With such an understanding, they might have experienced genuine anger at a world that was now even deforming their relationships with the very children whom they most wanted to love - and their anger might have led them to struggle to change the world. Failing that understanding, they felt terrible about themselves, tried to hide those feelings from themselves, and ultimately participated in a process of making us feel guilty about our anger at them, to the extent that some of us even had to deny to ourselves that we ever even felt such an emotion.
Lacking memory of the source of our anger, we began to feel terrible about ourselves. We tried desperately to break through to our parents, in the process becoming more and more like them, adopting their personalities as our own in an attempt to capture their love and attention. But we never quite succeeded, and we came to feel that this personality that was our "true" self, was really not very wonderful or deserving of love.
These dynamics were continued in school, where our feelings were systematically ignored and discounted, while we were increasingly trained to see ourselves as deserving to be in whatever part of the class structure we were being trained to fit into. Finally, we came to work situations in which we could not have real fulfilment, but in which we were taught that we had shaped our own reality through our own merit or lack of merit. And while we nurtured fantasies of finding deeper fulfilment in personal life, we increasingly become aware of how personal life wasn't working - a final confirmation of our own failures, which, after all, we "knew" we really deserved.
The outcome of all this is an individual increasingly isolated from other human beings and increasingly afraid to make deep and real contact. Because every contact with another is an opportunity in which our supposed inner awfulness will potentially show through, precisely what should be our most satisfactory experiences, our connections with other people, are permeated with anxiety. We distance from each other out of fear. And we experience each other's distancing as a confirmation of own worst fears of ourselves - they are smart because intuitively they have recognized what we "know" is our inner yuckiness and, hence, they are keeping their distance from us.
It is critical to understand that this is not just some individual pathology, but a collective social process lived through by each individual as personal life. To each of us it appears that the world just is a certain way - because everyone acts in that way. We develop a Social Unconscious: a way of perceiving the world that shapes each individual perception according to our shared understanding of isolation and powerlessness.
No wonder, in this context, that many human relationships feel ultimately unsatisfying. Even good friends have, as a kind of cantus firmus or psychological framework for their closeness, the deep belief that the other can't really be counted on for very much, and that if things got really bad there would be no one there for us. Moreover, there is a deep and seemingly intractable belief that abandonment and isolation are somehow fitting - that it is the way the universe was meant to be. Nowhere is this more striking than in the biggest risk most people are willing to take; the risk of connecting with another in marriage. It would be very nice to believe that if people learned better communication techniques all the distancing would disappear. But human beings socialized in the ways we have described will have to recreate themselves in very profound ways before they can hope that their marriages will come close to providing them with the levels of deep intimacy that they both yearn for and need.
At the same time, the existence of our distrust of other human beings which generates so many of the pitfalls of marriage, will simultaneously act to strengthen marital bonds: because, having taken the leap into commitment of some sort with one person, we are sure that we cannot allow ourselves to trust others even this much. Often couples that stay together do so not so much on the basis of having overcome the obstacles to deep trust, as from a deep conviction that no one else outside can be trusted, and so they need to rely on each other as a kind of fortress against the rest of the scary world.
Every aspect of our lives is governed by this distrust and its resultant isolation. We can't stand up to the boss because we know that we will be alone in doing so. We don't speak up at union meetings because we don't want to call attention to ourselves. We are certainly not going to call for militant action through our unions when we know that workers throughout the society will view us as selfish, and will go about their own selfish interests without giving us the support we need to win our struggles. We drive home on crowded freeways, frustrated by the ride but knowing we can't stand up to the powerful auto and oil lobbies that have prevented the creation of adequate mass transportation systems. We watch violence-filled television programs, because our choices are even dumber situation comedies - and we know that no one is ever going to listen to us about what kinds of shows we would really like to have (which we demonstrate by giving serious shows like "Roots" or "The Wall" the highest TV ratings in television history). We enjoy attending or watching on TV large events at which tens of thousands of people like ourselves are present - but we think it impossible that we could ever organize such events ourselves around activities that we more deeply believe in than rock concerts or football. If we are political people, we put our energies into making very small changes, convinced that nothing larger is possible and seeing few others who would join in more transformative social movements. If we are religious people, we make compromises with established groups, even though they miss important things that we believe in, because we don't think that we could ever get people to join us to create spiritual lives in the ways that we believe would be most fulfilling. We accept schools for our children that we know are overcrowded, uncreative, or which fail to teach the values that we know children need to learn. And we accept chemicals in the air and in our foods that we know have not been adequately tested and which may be shown to cause cancer at some future time after we have already ingested unsafe amounts. In our most relaxed moments, we sit with our friends and fantasize about how we would like things to be - but we immediately retreat from the excitement such visions generate, because we "know" that they are impossible, that no one would ever join us in doing what needs to be done to make them happen, and that even our friends would probably not really want to do it with us.
But is this all really Surplus Powerlessness? Isn't it really true that if one person were to try to act differently, she or he would not suddenly change it all or even very much? Yes, that is true. But the key here is "any one person". Alone there is very little that can be accomplished by "any one person". But together, most of this reality could eventually be changed. True, only eventually, and then only after prolonged and intense struggle. But it could be changed.
What keeps this from happening, in part, is that we can never allow ourselves to become part of this potential "WE" that could transform things. We look at the world with our carefully developed "realism" and we see that everyone is acting only for their own self-interests and consequently that we would be foolish to trust them. We feel deeply convinced that our isolation is inevitable, and that no real basis exists for transcending ourselves and connecting with others in a deep way for any length of time. It is this deep conviction that keeps us from trying, and keeps everyone else from trying or responding when someone does try.
The process that creates us as separate individuals is very powerful. But by the time we get to be adults we are no longer making judgments about what we can change and what we cannot. Instead, typically, we are simply accepting as "common sense" the way the world actually is, including both our isolation and our belief that the world is simply made up of a conglomerate of isolated beings like ourselves...