Living with Reality

If suffering were sufficient motivation for change, humanity would have transformed a long time ago.

Have you ever found yourself compelled to behave in a way that you knew would hurt yourself or others, but you just couldn’t stop yourself? Eaten the wrong thing? Married or slept with the wrong person? Said something that you knew would be shaming and/or counterproductive? Avoided a conversation long overdue? Did you feel baffled by your action at the time? Did you kick yourself later? Or did you go into denial and blame someone else for the negative outcome?

You and I have created needless pain, and so has everyone else. Sometimes we are the only ones to suffer the consequences; sometimes we hurt a lot of other people along the way. Sometimes our actions are individual, such as buying the widescreen TV when our bank account is empty; sometimes our actions are collective, such as when the auto industry focused on SUVs and gas-guzzling vehicles in the face of global warming. Sometimes we create pain through our actions, such as driving when drunk; sometimes we inflict harm through our words, such as demeaning someone who is already vulnerable.

Many of us are aware that we create needless pain, and we’re trying to do something about it. The popularity of personal counseling, twelve-step programs, self-help books, and other healing modalities points to our desire for self-transformation. Through our experience, we have learned a lot about what works. For example, we know we need to:

• Acknowledge that much of our suffering is self-created
• Embrace a positive vision of what is possible
• Utilize tools and techniques that enable us to fulfill that potential
• Support ourselves and one another so that we can accomplish together what we can't face alone

But if we have the tools, motivation, and support, why are we still so often stuck in our old destructive and self-destructive patterns? Why are we still addictive, reactive, and focused on short-term gain, rather than long-term sustainability? Why are we alienated from ourselves, depressed, anxious, and stressed? Why do we continue to overeat? Why do so many women still wear uncomfortable clothes? Why do so many men still drink beer instead of talk about their feelings? Why do we continue to compete rather than cooperate, worry about how we look more than how we feel, demonize one another rather than acknowledge our similarities, and fight reality, rather than learn to relax into the process of living? In other words, why do we all still do stupid things?

And we human beings all do them – one or one hundred destructive and self-destructive behaviors. When we’re not in denial of these destructive behaviors, we often busily blame one another for it. When we’re not blaming one another, we tend to blame ourselves.

One thing is clear: If so many of us are stuck in the old patterns, the problem cannot be rooted in our individual psyche. It must be rooted in the way we are designed as human beings. For example, if only a few people were compulsive eaters or anorexic, we could assume that those individuals had unusual physiological or emotional characteristics that affected their eating. But we know that is not the case, because millions of people have food disorders. Similarly, if the only addiction we had was food disorders, we could assume that human beings had a particular physiological or emotional tendency to be compulsive about food. But we know that is not the case; we can be and are addicted to many substances. And if our only negative behaviors were related to addictions to substances, we could conclude that human beings have a tendency to become addicted to certain chemicals, such as those found in alcohol, drugs, or food. But we know this is also not the case; we are equally addicted to behaviors, such as gambling, overwork, thrill-seeking, and escapism. We also compulsively shop, worry, self-sabotage, abuse, criticize, and act out sexually.

Individually and collectively, we human beings suffer from the compulsion to behave in ways that often hurt us and others, and these ingrained behaviors are difficult to break. Part of the difficulty, of course, is that we are patterned physiologically – either through genetic inheritance or repetition. But even when we are able to overcome the physiological addiction, we are still patterned psychologically. And when we try to change, we meet our own resistance – the tendency to cling to the same behavior over and over regardless of the negative result. What’s worse, we often deny that our actions are causing those negative results, which is evident when talking to couples where each party blames the other for their misery.

We should not shame ourselves about this tendency to stay stuck in destructive behavior. It is clearly a human phenomenon. But we do want to change it. To change, first we have to confront our denial of our dysfunction. Then, once we get past our denial, we have to face our shame. Once we have released our shame, we can commit to transformation. So the bottom line is: If we could finally admit the sorry state of human consciousness, including our own, we could look into the psyche of humanity in order to understand why we resist self-awareness and positive change, individually as well as collectively, and we could then use our understanding of the human psyche in order to develop strategies to overcome that resistance and really support us to transform.

Living with Reality provides a comprehensive, compassionate, step-by-step roadmap to the human psyche and its reprogramming and transformation. But before opening the map, we need to understand and overcome our resistance to using it. Let’s confront that resistance now.

Why Do We Resist Self-Awareness and Change?