Recover Personal Authority
In Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa defines the warrior not as an agent of destruction but as one who is “brave,” and then observes “that this is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.”1 This is an incredible paradox. Why should we be afraid of ourselves? We weren’t born that way. But soon we learn experientially, and increasingly consciously, that we are tiny, vulnerable, and dependent upon the huge powers around us, most notably the giants we later call parents. Whatever powers nature invested in us are easily overrun by the forces outside of us, and so we learn to deny, even fear, the powers within.
For example, Cynthia spends her life feeling inadequate and ill equipped for her life. Her patterns are a combination of avoidance, timorous responses to challenges, and even self-sabotage. She had the fortune/misfortune to be the child of a star, a highly accomplished, highly degreed, highly recognized mother, whom she believed she was called to emulate. Whatever capacities she may or may not have been granted by the fates, Cynthia believed early on that she was incapable of meeting the level of her mother’s achievements. No one, apparently, explained to her that she wasn’t supposed to equal or surpass her mother because that would have been living her mother’s life and not her own.
How many of us have felt compelled to look over our shoulder and compare ourselves with classmates, neighbors, or ancestors, and believe that we have to equal whatever they did in their lives? What few of us know is that many whom we would emulate have (if we were to experience their inner reality) served demonic self-doubt and self-recrimination, and frequently with drives that pathologized them even as they garnered accolades. Few of us realize that it is not what we do but what we are in service to inside that makes all the difference. If we but knew what drove, hounded, and compelled those whom we admire, we might truly not want to live their lives after all.
Jung asserted that all our difficulties derive from the fact that we become separated from our instincts, those internal energies, drives, and feeling states that move us toward greater wholeness. And Nietzsche further characterized us as “the sick animal.” Neither was, of course, endorsing a life governed only by instinctual impulse, but the suspicion of, the fear of, and the estrangement from those instincts mean that one is cut off from the vital, nourishing roots of life. Too much instinct constricts us to an animal existence, but too much consciousness separates us from our natural sources.
The first half of life, at least for most of us, is essentially a giant, unavoidable mistake. When I have offered this thought, with deliberate hyperbole, to various audiences, inevitably people laugh, the laugh of rueful recognition. When well-meaning parents have asked, “What can I do to spare my child the disappointments and disasters of life?” I have said, “You can do little, if anything, because they have to try out their lives, make those mistakes, and learn whatever they can from them.” In time, such painful experience becomes the smithy in which a more authentic journey becomes possible — that is, if one does the work to learn what there is to learn.
The second half of life is not a chronological moment but a psychological moment that some people, however old, however accomplished, however self-satisfied in life, never reach. The second half of life occurs when people, for whatever reason — death of partner, end of marriage, illness, retirement, whatever — are obliged to radically consider who they are apart from their history, their roles, and their commitments. Every young person “escapes” home and then goes out to repeat it, to be owned by it in overcompensation, or to attempt to “treat” it unconsciously through an addiction, a fugitive life, or some form of distraction. Given that the farther away one gets from those primal influences, the more these spectral influences still call the shots, most people sooner or later hit a wall. What they do then makes all the difference in their life.
A thoughtful, conscientious, accomplished life that ends prematurely may mean simply that that person served the complexes, tapes, instructions, or fears of his or her family, or Sitz im Leben (a German phrase, roughly translated as “setting in life”). It is only when fate or something very deep within forces us to examine our essential premises that we ever begin to consider, and possibly differentiate, the streams of influence that flow within us.
We have to recover personal authority because the din and demand of the world is too huge to ignore, too intrusive to resist, even if we think we have rebelled and held to our own course. And yet, every time someone avers, “I haven’t lived my mother’s life,” or “I won’t repeat my father’s path,” they are still responding to someone else’s life, some de facto external authority. At any given moment our ego consciousness is subject to a plethora of voices, a cacophony of claims upon it. Which voices are mine? Which admonitions derive from another time or place? We don’t often ask those questions. Finding personal authority requires two things: sorting through the traffic within and living what we find with courage and consistency. In a letter in the 1950s, Jung observed that the work of being an evolved human being consists of three parts. Psychology can bring us insight, but then, he insisted, come the moral qualities of the individual: courage and endurance. So, having potentially come to consciousness, to have embraced insight as to what a dilemma is really about, one then has to find the courage to live it in the real world, with all its punitive powers, and to do so over time in the face of opposition both external and internal.
The failure to understand this triune task — insight, courage, endurance — leads many to misunderstand the dilemmas we face in life. Thus the couple that approaches a marriage counselor to “work on their relationship” may not have discerned what forces, healthy or unhealthy, brought them together in the first place and what it means to “stick to a commitment.” In one person’s history, conflict may have been so invasive that she will cut and run at the first opportunity, and therefore that person’s summons in the relationship has little to do with the outer partnership but a great deal to do with confronting the fears of history and the compelling defenses of flight. The other person may have learned helplessness in early childhood, where a reticulated overpowering environment said, “You have no rights here; you have no choices here.” Such an individual will remain in bondage to a narcissistic partner, an abusive other, who simply repeats the pathologizing messages of history. If that person is to see that his “enemy” in this context is not the partner but the compelling powers of conditioning history, then he may realize that longevity alone is an unworthy goal. It is not the other, but our relationship to history, to the disabling messages of our dependent past, that is imprisoning. Again, simply to realize this is only part of the battle. Then comes the courage to face what is internally programmed and still feels terrifying — the disapproval, the anger, the putative retaliation of the other. Ninety percent of the fears that bind us derive from our psychological history, when adaptation, surrender of personal truth, was obliged by an environmental situation. Not only is this archaic anxiety to be confronted in the moment of insight, but over time, day in and day out, the rest of our life. It sounds simple perhaps in the telling, but going through our historic fears of overwhelmment or abandonment is the hardest thing we ever have to do. And we have to do it today, here, now, and again tomorrow, to ever recover personal authority.
So, to come back to that telling definition of bravery — not to be afraid of oneself — we see that we are all asked to re-vision our journey, to reframe our understanding of self and world. Ironically, we are abetted in this process by something called psychopathology. This is a rather ugly word, but etymologically it translates as “an expression of the suffering of a soul.” That translation puts a different spin on things surely. It could be argued that life is actually rather simple. If you do what is right for you, it is right for you; if you do what is wrong for you, it is wrong for you. But it is not so simple, is it?
How do we know what is right for us? Well, the body knows, our deepest feeling knows, and the psyche knows, and each expresses its opinion, even as we learned early in life to evade these continuous messages from our own depths. So, the recovery effort must typically begin with the experience of inner discord, outer conflict, and sometimes heartache and loss.
Whatever health and wholeness is, it surely involves aligning our outer choices with our inner reality. When the path we are on is right for our souls, the energy is there. When what we are doing is wrong for us, we can temporarily mobilize energy in service to goals, and often we must, but in time such forced mobilization leads to irritability, anger, burnout, and symptoms of all kinds. When what we are doing is right for us, the feeling function supports us. That is, our autonomous feeling system supports rather than opposes our choices. The support of this autonomous evaluative process confirms the rightness of our choices, even when those around us do not endorse them. When we are doing what is right for us, we will feel a sense of purpose, meaning, and satisfaction, and that communicates itself to others also.
Living our personal authority will not spare us from conflict, from suffering, from marginalization, or even from martyrdom. Many whom we most admire in history lived wretched lives, but we venerate them because something truthful was served through them. They lived their calling in the way in which we all are called.
Sorting and sifting over time leads to discernment. That is what is necessary to find our voice in the midst of the many claims upon us, the collisions of obligations, and the impulsive service to our complexes. And then, as Jung reminded, come the moral qualities. Can I mobilize the courage to face my life, to meet all the challenges that show up, knowing that I am most undermined by the adaptive reflexes within that were once so necessary? Those “protections” are now constrictions in which I am imprisoned by my own past. And then can I live those choices out over time, in the face of consequences, perhaps the loss of understanding and support of loved ones or estrangement from my tribe? Sometimes we simply have to set out on that course because we are inescapably aware of our life as a summons to show up as ourselves, as best we can. Sometimes we have to act as if we are not afraid simply not to be governed by fear. In those moments, we move from creatures of adaptation to creatures whose lives testify to the unfolding possibilities of being.
Insight, courage, and endurance — not a bad litany of which to be mindful every day. The days we remember and do our best — all that is ever asked of us — are the days in which we reclaim personal authority from the vaults of history. Then we may know we have truly moved into the second half of life, the part where we get our life back.