“Insanity,” said Albert Einstein, “is doing the same thing over and over again, each time expecting different results.” That quote has been so frequently quoted in the recent past that it rivals the popularity of anything that Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac has to offer. What’s more, like Franklin’s aphorisms, this one is based in solid fact. If nothing changes, nothing changes. When you’ve made a mess, apologizing for it and even making amends for it means very little if you’re unwilling to do make the effort to change the root causes that led you to create the mess in the first place. This is one infallible piece of evidence that will allow you to distinguish a genuine apology from mere face-saving (or, even worse, mere posturing): How far is the apologist prepared to go to do things differently from now on?
This is the essential factor in the process of cleaning up your mess that rejects all blame and rationalization and commits you to a long-term program of increasing your self-awareness, deepening your consciousness, and changing those thought patterns that led you to choose poorly in the past. This, in fact, is where “the rubber meets the road” in terms of turning your attention away from reactive efforts to make up for the past and toward proactive effort to create a different future for yourself and those who depend on you (within our outside of your conscious awareness of them). Here’s your opportunity to get down and dirty with yourself, to unearth those dark corners of your soul where you feel most unloved and vulnerable, and commit to taking positive action to addressing those areas with spiritual courage.
When you create wreckage, it’s because you’ve applied the wrong formula to the wrong problem. Merely accepting the right answer isn’t enough. You need to correct the formula you’re using so that the next time the problem comes up, your answer is the right one the first time. This is how we learn and grow: try, fail, correct, try anew, succeed!
Facing the wreckage of our lives with insight and the courage to “change the things I can” defines this stage of apology as an essentially spiritual step. Whenever we need or want to create transformational change, we need to recognize the profoundly spiritual nature of our work. It’s a totally “inside job” that has three essential phases to it: honesty, openness, and willingness. Each phase contributes its part toward empowering us to make substantial change toward authentic growth and the realization of our human potential. This is the essential process that drives us toward the fulfillment of our God-given destiny — as individuals and as humanity.
The first phase is a commitment to honesty. That demands that you lay aside all blame and rationalization and that you embrace the person that your behavior has revealed you to be with humility. Are you fearful? Are you angry? Are you arrogant? Are you self-centered? Are you judgmental? Seeing your character defects this way in the light of your bad behavior can bring up defensiveness: “You’d be that way, too, if you’d gone through what I did!” And yet, we’re not responsible for what others have done to us; however, we are responsible for our reactions to that. We all have built-in defense mechanisms that we created to keep ourselves safe when we felt overwhelmed. However, now, those defenses are no longer serving us. They’re keeping us from connecting effectively with others and with our Higher Power. When bad behavior reveals our own dysfunction, it’s time that we accepted our condition honestly. It’s time that we admitted the weaknesses that we’ve so long tried so hard to cover up to ourselves, to our God, and to another human being. Humbly admitting the truth will, indeed, set us free from it.
Openness implies the readiness to look at the situation differently: to change our minds and get rid of old beliefs that no longer serve us. As an adolescent, I was deeply angry at my father for not being close to me. All that changed when I went through a spiritual crisis that caused me to take another look at the situation. I discovered to my surprise that, from my earliest recollection, I continually judged my father’s attempts at connecting with me as insufficient. There was nothing he could do to satisfy my childish demands. In effect, I pushed him away, then blamed him for not being emotionally present. Once I saw my truth, I was open to looking at the situation from a new perspective: forgiveness became possible, and I was then free to reinterpret our relationship. Once you’ve taken an honest inventory of yourself, you have the opportunity to see the same old hurts and injuries and woundedness you have always experienced festering there, and to give those experiences new meaning. You don’t get to choose your experiences, but you do get to decide what they mean for you. When you discover a meaning that no longer serves you, you can be open to experiencing it differently. That’s your choice.
Finally, willingness is just another name for courage. Many people read spiritual and inspirational books. Self-help is a popular genre. You can read inspired authors like Maryanne Williamson and what they say can resonate in your heart and in your head. Then, like many people, you can file what you’ve learned away like you’ve done with the plots of novels you’ve read over the years, and go on about your business creating the same kinds of messes that have entrapped you numberless times before. Willingness means giving practical answers to these questions: 1) how am I going to think and feel differently about these experiences when they come up again? 2) what practical steps will I take to avoid falling into the same reactive traps I’ve set for myself in the past? and 3) what decisions will I make now about how I will change my behavior when these things come up again?
This stage of cleaning up your mess is all about change, and everybody hates change. It’s painful, it requires both humility and courage, and it takes a lot of energy to change. Yet, change is synonymous with growth. As grew from childhood to adolescence, we experienced physical ‘growing pains;’ as adolescents growing to adulthood, we experienced mental and emotional ‘growing pains;’ now, as adults growing into spiritual maturity, our ‘growing pains’ are at a far deeper level than ever before: at the spiritual level. That’s why one of the most important shifts of consciousness we can experience at this stage of life is to see our messes not as failures, but as spiritual growth experiences. Take to heart the old saying, “No pain; no gain!” and embrace your mess (with all the pain that goes with it) as a gift and your golden opportunity to make a difference in your world — for that is precisely what it is!
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown
Tags: change, core issues, courage, embarrassment, guilt, honesty, humility, openness, pain, shame, willingness