Midlife Mastery Journal » commitment

The Consuming Corrosion of Fear

Les Brown — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:00:22 +0000

I drive a red 1994 Jeep Wrangler that I bought brand new. It has sat outside in all kinds of weather for the past sixteen years. Last week, I noticed with some annoyance that one of the tires was losing air . . . again. Last time, it was the left front. Now, it’s the right front. I was tempted to blame my repair place, because I’ve been bringing it back there with the same complaint a number of times. This time, when I picked the car up, I asked, “Why do the tires keep losing air?” The receptionist told me, “Oh, the wheels are pretty corroded and we had to clean them up and apply some special sealant.” I recognized that it was my seemingly-benign neglect that had been the trouble all along. The rust and corrosion is gradually eating up not only the wheels, but the bumpers and some of the body as well. Is the fate of the whole vehicle in question?

Think, if you will, about the RMS Titanic, resting on the bottom of the deep Atlantic Ocean since its spectacular sinking one cold April night in 1914. I’m sure you’re familiar with the photos and videos that have been published over the years since the wreck was finally discovered by Robert Ballard in 1977. The great ship, weighing in at 46,326 tons when she left the shipyards in Belfast, is now festooned with ugly growths called ‘rusticles.’ Gradually, the iron ship’s massive hull is being consumed – eaten actually – by iron-eating bacteria. Before too very long, the great ship’s entire structure will disappear into virtual puddles of bacterial excretions. The pile of refuse that remains after the bacteria have done their work will be unrecognizable.

The Jeep, the Titanic, and your most intimate relationships may have a great deal in common. We humans are subject to a corrosion that beats out the destruction caused by oxidation and bacteria hands-down. I am convinced that fear causes more destruction in the lives of men and women than any other single agent. We all have it; yet, when the bravado of self-assured adulthood begins to yield to the deeper questioning that comes with midlife, fear emerges with a ferocity seldom experienced at any other period of life.

When I was considering the subject of this article over the past week, I was troubled and questioning my own understanding and appreciation of this universal phenomenon. “If fear is so corrosive and damaging to life and to relationships,” I wondered, “why is it so universal? Why is it there at all?” I’ve often heard that a little fear is a good thing. The more I think about it, the more I am certain that fear provides us with the necessary protection that we need to avoid getting into life-threatening trouble. There definitely is such a thing as a ‘healthy’ fear. We all need it to keep us from getting too irresponsibly cocky and making rash and self-destructive decisions. A little fear is a very good thing, I concluded. “So,” I asked myself, “is a little fear like a little rust?”

I have come to believe that there are actually two types of fear. The one – healthy caution – provides us with the protection that we need against rash decision-making. There is another type of fear, however, that arises from insecurity and self-doubt. This kind of fear, like the iron-eating bacteria in the hull of the Titanic, slowly but consumes its host. Psychologist Carl Jung located the core of self-doubt in what he called the ‘ego,’ while the true personality he identified as the ‘Self.’ In this sense, your ego, convinced of your fundamental vulnerability, lives in mortal terror. While the Self continues to try to convince you that you’re fundamentally OK – regardless of what’s happening within or around you – the ego drowns out that more rational voice with its own terrified screaming.

At midlife especially, when the Self finds itself beset with radical changes on all fronts, the Ego’s constant doubts have a chance to erode not only your self-confidence, but also, at the same time, your capacity for acceptance, trust, and engagement. Under the fearful influence of your ego, your willingness to accept life on life’s terms (and your most significant relationships on their own terms), to trust in your own judgment and others’ good will, and to engage yourself unreservedly in the work of giving of yourself begins to collapse. Self-preservation begins to assume a priority beyond anything you’d previously experience. Your choices no longer to accept, no longer to trust, and no longer to engage begin to take their toll. Fear begins its corrosive corruption of your quality of life.

The popular spiritual work, A Course in Miracles, defines the ego as “a fearful thought.” I completely agree. The ego is convinced (and is determined to convince you) that you are in mortal danger and that only you can save yourself by withdrawing from intimacy. Ironically, under the guise of self-preservation, your ego infects you with the fear of being killed, while, at the same time, it’s in love with death. Its strangling fear begins by cutting off your vital connection with the divine Spirit by convincing you that your Higher Power, or God, cannot and will not save you from death and destruction: that the only Savior you can count on is yourself.

Next, its corrosive influence extends to your most intimate relationships, seeding doubts and watering them with imagined faults and failings in the other that “threaten” your security and well-being. It convinces you that, once again, only you can “protect” yourself from ruin. Finally, as its work runs its course, it not only cuts off your capacity for unconditional and unqualified love of others, it locks you into a kind of imagined self-protective mode where not even the grace of God can reach you. Ego-driven fear, left to run its course, will eventually succeed in causing you to forget, at the deepest level of your being, who you are.

Who are you? You are the beloved Child of a Power greater than yourself Who called you into being from the origins of the universe and who sustains and protects you in all your ways, regardless of any detours your fallible human consciousness my send you on along your way. All your Higher Power or God requires of you are the ‘virtues’ that I wrote about in my last article: acceptance, trust, and engagement (or ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love’). If only you would choose to ignore the fearful screaming of your ego and focus on the invulnerability of your Self and your connection with your Higher Power, you can be set free from fear to choose to respond to that Power with unconditional Faith, unconditional Hope and unconditional Love. Only then, in truth, can you accept, trust, and love yourself or anyone else.

Do your choices show that you actually believe that you are who you are? As a Child of your Higher Power, do you exercise unconditional acceptance of life on life’s terms and of the others with whom you share the gift of intimacy in this life? Do you trust that, no matter what happens to you or to others, you will always be cared and provided for? Are you willing to accept that your life depends on the quality of the commitments that you’re prepared to make on a daily basis?

“What about getting hurt?” “What about betrayal?” you may ask. In return, I want to ask you, “What is your circle of influence, and what is your circle of concern?” You may well be concerned about other peoples’ ideas or behaviors, but you have no control over them! You have control only over your own attitudes and choices. Your decisions to accept, trust, and be committed never depend on what the other person says or does. They depend wholly and exclusively on you and your willingness to love regardless of the cost. That’s the way your Higher Power loves you; that, in a nutshell describes the essence of Love itself. Love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy; love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy (those things require two committed people). But love does require you to choose commitment over fear, and forgiveness over anger and resentment. Can you handle it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

Confronting Change — Opportunity or Opposition?

Les Brown — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000

We
here in the United States are witnessing a very strange — but at the
same time very human — reaction to changes in the way our citizens pay
for their health care. People are fighting fiercely (some would say
irrationally so) for their point of view to win out. It's no secret
which side of the debate I stand on: I'm all for change. What I'm
observing, though, is that those who are fighting the most fiercely as
those who are opposed to the change. It's a perfect example of
systems theory at work, which says, "A system faced with change will
resist it, even fiercely, in order to maintain the status quo even when the change is for the benefit of the organization."
That's why I say that what we're experiencing in this country seems so
strange: attempts to fix a system that's admittedly broken, unfair, and
resulting in needless deaths are met with unbridled fury.

What does this have to do with the midlife transition? I think it
offers us a powerful lesson. If we're going to be successful at
navigating the many life-altering transitions that we have to face at
midlife, we're going to have to be prepared to be fierce
about it. As in all things worth doing, "Half measures avail us
nothing." We are facing . . . and we're going to continue facing . . .
serious changes as we continue to evolve from child through adolescent
through adult and finally to maturity. Changes confront us . . . and
will continue to confront us . . . in each of the three principle
circles of influence: our families, our careers, and our own health and
well-being. Many of these changes are . . . and will continue to be . .
. radical and upsetting. In every case, we're forced to confront these
changes fiercely, or allow them to overwhelm us. How our lives play
themselves out — as success or as failure — will depend to a great
extent on whether we choose to confront these changes as opportunities
for growth or in opposition to our own stubborn wills. Either way, our
battle for survival will be fierce (or none at all). How can we turn
the ferocity of our determination into an evolutionary transformation
that will result in our becoming stronger, more committed and more
powerful people than ever before?

The key to our success lies in embracing fierce transformations. Here's what I mean.

Fierce transformations require that you become fiercely independent.
This attribute is key to the midlife transition. In order to come into
your own and to become the person who you were always meant to be, you
must leave behind you all your reliance on other people's opinions and
expectations. These things are necessary to see you through the
adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood, but they're like
training wheels on a bicycle: when you approach true maturity, it's
time to leave them behind. Embracing fierce independence means that
you've been able to internalize the truth that other people's opinion
of you is none of your business.

Fierce transformations therefore also require that you maintain fierce commitments. You know and can clearly state your
personal core values. The values on which you base your decisions are
the ones that have proven to be tried and true, and
the ones to which you've chosen to give your full commitment. The
fiercely independent person can easily be recognized as someone who is
a person of high principle. You have no trouble looking deeply into
your eyes in the mirror and valuing the person who is looking back.

Fierce transformations furthermore require you to become a person of fierce integrity. You recognize in yourself — and others recognize in you — the unwavering virtues of integrity and honesty. Integrity depends entirely on fierce humility.
Since we define humility as seeing yourself as God sees you and acting
accordingly, being fiercely humble simply means refusing to get caught
up in any kind of pretense and grandiosity. It means being well aware
of your strengths, fearlessly acknowledging of your failures, accepting
of others (whoever they may be and whatever they may do or say), and as
ready to apologize as to forgive.

Fierce transformations also require of you fierce loyalty.
The word 'loyalty' is nothing but a synonym for the word 'love'.
Loyalty, like love, means making a decision and not just feeling an
emotion. This means recognizing that, no matter how fiercely
independent you may be, you cannot succeed alone. The term 'human
family' has to mean more than just a platitude. You recognize that
we're all in this together, and, as Benjamin Franklin once quipped, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
Fierce loyalty means that when one of your brothers or sisters is in
need, and you're in a position to be of assistance, they know that
you're the one they can count on.

Fierce transformations in addition require from you fierce trust. Many people wrongly characterize this as the so-called theological virtue of 'faith,' when, in fact, it's really 'hope.'
As men and women fiercely committed to faith in a Higher Power, we can
fiercely trust that the universe has a direction and, as part of that
universe, our lives cannot be directionless or purposeless. Trusting
that we've been given a purpose and destiny, and that we haven't been
led this only to be dropped on our heads, we gain the courage also to
trust others who demonstrate that they are people of good will. We as
readily rely on their good will as we forgive their well-intentioned
failures.

Finally, fierce transformations always require that you maintain fierce endurance. Regardless of any other character strengths or weaknesses you may possess, this one is, by far, the most critical because obstacles and setbacks are inevitable and your constant companion through life. Far from being obstacles, they serve to provide the footholds that can bring you to your next level of achievement (whatever that may be). Your life experience can be likened to that of a cyclist pedaling uphill. The steeper the incline, the more energy you have to expend and the more pain and exhaustion you're likely to experience. However, should you decide to stop pedaling to rest, you won't just stay where you are on your path: you'll roll backwards. That's why we have to understand the challenges and difficulties that we face as opportunities rather than as obstacles. They provide the resistance that we need in order to grow and develop.

Now, ask yourself, just how fierce are you prepared to be? The success of your transitions and the quality of your life depend on the answer to that question.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Les Brown — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:00:00 +0000

It’s really fitting that the song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” is by a group called The Clash. That tends to be THE major midlife question for many people, doesn’t it? I don’t honestly believe that anyone at any time who has been in a relationship of any depth at all and who hasn’t asked him- or herself that question. There are many reasons that this happens to everyone. It’s part of our human nature, and it’s part of the nature of human relationships.

Everyone brings to a relationship an odd mixture of personality traits, learned behaviors, and a set of expectations, some realistic, others not so much. Everyone also brings to a relationship a certain capacity for trust, for communication, for openness to change and growth. Finally, each person brings his or her own willingness to commit. As always, my guest on this past week’s internet radio program, “The Unstoppable Coach” Frankie Picasso, gave us some wonderful insights. One of these was the difference between ‘trying’ and ‘committing.’ It was a distinction I had never thought of before, and one that bears more consideration. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

With everyone coming to his or her relationships with a different and, perhaps, completely unique set of personal ‘baggage’, you’d think that preparation for getting involved in a relationship would be of paramount importance. At the same time, I’d be willing to bet that a very large percentage — if not the majority — of failed relationships happen because of inadequate preparation: those involved haven’t done their ‘homework’ and haven’t done the hard work necessary to develop necessary skills like self-reflection, or empathetic questioning, or even just ‘fighting fair.’ Some years ago, I took instrument flight instruction. Up to that point, I had thought that I was a decent pilot, and had been very successful flying all over the East Coast, into Canada and even to the Bahamas. As I started my training and learned the skills necessary to perform precision flight maneuvers, I was shocked to consider that for so many years I had been allowed to fly with such a poor skill set. For a mature person, one who is going through or has gone through the midlife transition, recognizing the poverty of our relationship skill set should be a real eye-opener. In flight, my life (and the lives of my passengers) depended on my maneuvering skill set; in living, the life of my relationship depended on my communication skills. I believe the bottom line here is the quality of your relationship will depend greatly on the amount of effort you’ve spent preparing yourself for it.

People make mistakes. Besides lacking even basic preparedness for the stresses of an adult relationship, very often people with a tendency toward addictive behaviors become strongly attracted to those with complementary issues. We call it “diseases calling to one another.” These are often people who consider their partner to be their “other half.” They feel incomplete, and the sense of completeness they experience around the pathological ‘yin’ they find to their pathological ‘yang’ (or vice versa) becomes not only compelling: it can become overwhelming. Yet, in relationships, two sick people do not a well person make. Instead, such relationships exhibit strong symptoms of dis-ease, such as cling-clung behaviors or the ever-popular ‘I love you; go away!’ behavior. Have you ever experienced a couple whose very existence as a couple could be designated a war zone? These dysfunctional relationships are often mistakes and may need to be terminated in order to free both parties to start again on a new basis. These may often be mistakes, but they’re not always so. If each partner is committed to developing a new tool kit of healthy attitudes and behaviors and if each partner is committed to learning new ways of interacting, then even a once-dysfunctional relationship can be salvaged. It’s certainly not easy, there are no guarantees of success, but it can be done!

Once we move beyond the realm of unpreparedness and mistakes, that doesn’t mean that we’re beyond the issues posed by our human relationships. The assumptions that we carry with us into our commitments begin to be challenged almost from the outset. But, it’s generally only at midlife, when our core assumptions are put on the line, that relationships can get really dicey. Remember that the attitudes that most people carry with them as they approach midlife are denial (there’s nothing wrong) and blame (even if there is something wrong, it’s certainly your fault). The conflicts that arise in a maturing relationship are never about the other person, no matter what s/he has done. There’s a wise saying that goes, “Dating is for learning about yourself. A relationship is a 24/7 date.” Keep in mind, also, that if a relationship has lasted for the long term, all the obvious easy lessons have been learned. What remain are the covert, deep-seated, core issues that are very hard to get at and even harder to address. If you keep hacking away at the sweet pulp of any fruit, you’re eventually going to be left with the bitter seeds. At midlife, you face serious challenges to your assumptions about who you are and who your partner is. There’s very little room left for window-dressing.

If you’ve passed the ‘preparedness’ test, and you’ve weathered the ‘mistake’ phase, you’ll probably, sooner or later, wind up here at the “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” question. Here’s where the difference between ‘trying’ and ‘committing’ that I spoke about earlier comes dramatically into play. A relationship is a living entity that is more than either one of you. Yet, it’s wholly dependent on both of you for its very lifeblood. You can’t ‘try’ to be in a relationship with someone, anymore than you can ‘try’ to pick a pencil up off your desk. As Master Yoda told young Luke, “Try not; do.” Or, as some are fond of saying, “Trying is lying.” Your relationship depends entirely on your level of commitment; but it’s not just a commitment to the relationship, it’s also a commitment to change and growth on your part. Even a so-called ‘toxic’ relationship can be saved, but only if both parties are completely committed to becoming personally more healthy.

Every day, someone leaves his or her life partner to find or to acquire someone ‘better’. And very often, some of these people discover that the relationship they created was as bad or worse than the one they left. If patterns of dysfunctional behavior are following you around, take a look at the common denominator: it’s YOU! Change lies at the heart of the midlife transition experience, but it’s not about changing the world or changing others; it’s only about chaning yourself. If you’ve accepted that challenge and you’ve committed yourself to growth and change and to building the best relationship possible, but your partner is only ‘trying’ to get along, then the answer to the “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” question becomes evident. However, if both of you have what it takes (the commitment to growth) to make the midlife transition into maturity — no matter what kinds of difficulties you may be having in your relationship today — then where there’s life there’s hope. The midlife transition, once completed, brings with it miraculous transformations; so, if you’re both in it for the long haul and for better or worse, don’t quit before the miracle happens!

Taking Our Anniversary All the Way to Happy

Les Brown — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:06:44 +0000

Today, my partner and I celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary (OK . . . I’ll admit it: we were both late bloomers and re-treads). As usual, these annual celebrations present an opportunity to look back over the years, to see what worked well (and what worked not-so-well), to take stock of how far we’ve come, and, most of all to express gratitude to our Higher Power and to one another for our very many blessings. Making a life-long commitment in the midst of the midlife transition does offer a number of advantages over going through the transition while struggling to make a relationship work: at least we had the advantage of leaving most of the starry-eyed stuff in the hope chest of faded memories.

Those young couples who ‘get it right’ the first time are becoming an increasingly rare breed — almost miraculous, in fact. Based on the statistics, you’d think that the harbingers of doom out there are right when they so loudly proclaim that ‘the family is in trouble.’ They blame it on all sorts of pressures and distractions that afflict today’s families and, I’ve got to admint that today’s couples do, indeed have many more pressures to deal with than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. Yet, I don’t believe that you can pin the blame for failed relationships on the pressures of family life alone. Much of it has to be laid at the feet of an increasingly ineffective midlife transition.

Once you’ve accepted the fact that you can define ‘adulthood’ as ‘childhood without the parental constraints,’ you begin to see the seeds of the problem right away: too many people go into marriages that are founded upon little more than hopes, feelings, and wishful thinking. Our cultural preoccupation with individuality and personal privacy does little to disrupt these TV sitcom-style belief systems. Who’ll show you the difference between ‘love’ and ‘romance’? Maybe you’ve seen those facts of life spread across a kitchen apron somewhere: "Kissin’ Don’t Last . . . Cookin’ Do!"? (Remember that jokes are only funny because they’re true.) The difference between love and romance hinges on the fact that love is a decision; romance is a feeling.

Feelings, particularly strong ones, fade over a relatively short time. Mass marketers rely strongly on that fact. If you see or hear a particularly annoying commercial over a long enough period of time, your annoyance will fade, but you’ll remember the advertiser when you’re thinking about their product or service. Romantic love and hate are not opposites: they’re the same emotions only expressed in different directions. The opposite of romantic love is indifference. When romantic love fades (as it absolutely must), what’s left behind should be the decision to commit to one another. Have you ever heard someone say, "I love him/her, but I’m not in love with him/her"? That’s not necessarily a bad thing — in fact, it’s a very important phase of relationship-building — but for many relationships, it spells the beginning of the end.

Since the untransformed adult (really the ‘adult child’) bases most of his or her decisions on what it feels like, when the Cinderella clock strikes twelve, the time comes to cut and run. There’s another factor that I need to mention here, and that’s the rather obvious but sad fact: that one person can’t have a relationship. That implies that if your partner completely gives up on your relationship, there’s nothing you can do all by yourself to save it. It’s only if both of you have entered into the personal transformation that we call the midlife transition that your relationship can similarly transform from a decision based on feelings to feelings based on a decision.

For the sake of argument, let’s shift the scenario from the love of one partner for another, to the love of a parent for his or her child. For the vast majority of people who are capable of experiencing parental love, they experience that love as unconditional. At some point between birth and the teenage years, these parents make a transition from the emotional high of new parenthood to the acceptance of parental responsibility as an expression of their love and commitment to their child. Even should it come down to a decision to throw the youngster out of the house, the pain the parent feels comes from his or her unconditional acceptance of the child. Anger, even hatred, arises from frustration and disappointment in both the child and themselves. Yet, generally, regardless of the circumstances, their commitment to their child remains, holding out life-long hope that the person on the other side of their parental bond will change his or her mind.

I’m not saying that, to have a truly mature relationship, a person has to carry a hopeless torch for a lost loved one. However, when both parties in that relationship decide to carry that torch for the other, regardless of how dimly it may be burning, each will learn a great deal about the other and, in the process, they’ll come to learn even more about themselves. They’ll come to appreciate a little bit more each day the gifts that they themselves have to offer their partners and, therefore their world. In the struggle to bear their relationship through the difficult transitions that they themselves are experiencing, they’ll find that their love has deepened and transformed with it, to the point that, almost at will, they can summon the emotion — the passion — that they feel for one another. Every year, they can stop, think about how far they’ve come, and truly celebrate their choice to maintain their commitment ‘for better or worse’ and to be grateful to each other for summoning the courage to have held on to that commitment for one . . . more . . . year.