letting go into uncertainty : some thoughts

I listened to an interesting interview yesterday on Radio National in Australia with a guy called Adam Grant. I shared some of it in a post I haven’t posted yet, the gist of his exploration is how we can tend to close our minds and defend a sense of certainty in ideals, ideas, ways of thinking or belief that may not be entirely warranted. He conceptualises ways we may do this using three archetypes :..the preacher, the persecutor and the politician.. After doing some research I found this in an article from the publication Forbes Review about his ideas online yesterday.

(Adam Grants’ book’s early pages suggest that when we ponder and speak, we often do so with the mindset of three different professions; that of preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. Each has its own identity. The preacher is what we become when we believe our beliefs are endangered. We start to deliver heartfelt lectures to defend and advocate our principles. We become a prosecutor when we see faults in other people’s thinking and work to prove them wrong. When we wish to be liked and seek approval from those around us, we turn into a politician. Grant warns that we are too focused on preaching that we are right, prosecuting those we feel are wrong, and politicking to gain approval. All this does not leave room to examine our beliefs and that which we hold to be true.

Yes, we can all seek ways to defend our beliefs and I was trying yesterday to also write a post on how the degree of defensiveness we feel may be proportional to the degree of insecurity, doubt or vulnerability we feel.. I also listened last night to a really good video on gaslighting and how gaslighter’s work to undermine both our reality as well as a sense of our own perceptions and sense of reality and self value.. Listening to it I heard described all of the things my ex partner used on me, If he lied or pretended about something he tried to turn that back on me by blaming my sobriety. He delighted in telling his family and friends how due to my abandonment issues I was such hard work forgetting he also underwent abandonment and often would fly into a rage about it or act that pain out onto both of his sons. In fact one of his sisters once asked him “what would happen if you just accepted and loved Deb as she is?”

According to Adam Grant it is a wise and strong mind that can stay open to doubt or a sense of insecurity in knowing things, that said when we were hurt by experiences in childhood and that pain was real it may be hard to hear from abusers that we just imagined it, or are, in fact, making a mountain out of a molehill.

I am also aware though that if we underwent a lot of abandonment in our life or have unfelt or ungrieved earlier losses some of us can harden in the face of that and become tough and even narcissistically defended against anyone else’s expression of genuine feeling, vulnerability or sorrow, we may try to shame them or shut them down.. This used to happen to me a lot with Phil.

I also have a sister in law like this.. she is the one who told me after my ex husband left in 2004 to get as far away from my Mum as possible.. She also said to me “do as your father did, he escaped his family and built a new life,” yes, Diana but how would running away actually have improved anything? Would I have not, ended up taking all of that with me? And it is her own grief over her mother who died when she was only 12 that has laid buried. (Strangely my father also lost his father at that age and a lot of that loss was left behind – but continued to be carried silently in the present – when he met Mum and ended up settling in Australia following the end of World War 2. See my sister in aw was so certain about what I needed to do that was right for me, but my therapist assures me it may not have been.. Come to think of it we can also turn into a gaslighter of ourselves if we had that done to us often enough in childhood.

Lately thoughI am working to surrender some of my defensiveness and fear of things being messy and out of control.. I am having lessons in this with the guy who is dismantling my old lattice fence and soon to be installing a reo mesh vertical garden.. Yesterday not only didn’t he turn up when he said he would, he didn’t call either. (this kind of thing – being left waiting in an empty void used to happen to me ALL OF THE TIME IN CHILDHOOD and is a trigger I have had to do a lot of work on in the past) . usually I would have stewed or told him the job was off…but instead I just texted him to ask what was happening and he we pretty prompt getting back to me, he had gone to the tip and encountered an issue there and got held up.. it took him another 2 and a half hours to arrive but once again I just chose not to stress.. I made something to eat, I was a bit worried too as the mobile groomer was on the way at 2.30 but by some miracle, Scott managed to dismantle and remove the old fence with just enough time for me to clean up before Meg arrived to groom Jazzie…Jasper got stressed with Meg, I got a panic attack through mirroring/projection but we rode both of those through and then I got to relax and read a book while waiting for them to finish. Meg did a great job with Jasper despite all my fears of her hurting him and everything worked out fine.

One of the hardest things about adult child issues, especially coming out of families riven with uncertainty, insecurity, unresolved grief, addiction and a loss of control is the fear of life and danger, as well as of mess and of things not working out well or of being hurt, betrayed or having good things taken from us again.. We who come out of these kind of environments can learn to be very fearful and controlling in subtle ways we may not even recognise, we may also become very defensive.. That is why in Al Anon we are encouraged not to criticise and try to convince ourselves of our own or the other parties ‘guilt’ or badness, rather we are encouraged to grow in peace, love, wisdom and understanding even as those we share out lives with coming out of that neglectful, abandoning or traumatising environment frustrate the hell out of us at times..

That said the anger needs to come out and the frustrations too, we just have to be mindful of how and when we are reacting from that place..where a need for certainty and assurances or to be seen as ‘right’ may, indeed, begin or continue to work against us.. Fear can lie behind so many of our reactions in life and at times its deeper roots may be difficult to recognize but we can rest assured in this fact : this fear problem is probably one we hold in common with a lot of humanity… The facing up to it is important.. I will end this post today with two acronyms I have heard for fear.

Fuck

Everything

And

Run

Or/and

Face

Everything

And

Rise