Seize Permission to Be Who You Really Are

Recently I entered a supervisory session with a quite mature, gifted, experienced therapist, who is eminently thoughtful and qualified to do this work. She presented the case of a woman who is in a terribly one-sided marriage with a narcissist spouse, one for whom there is only criticism and derision of his wife’s therapist. Of course, we know his terrible secret: he is terrified of self-examination because, as a narcissist, he already suspects there is no real core identity within. Such persons survive by control, domination, manipulation, passive-aggressive strategies, and the like, and cannot bear the strong light of consciousness upon themselves. Both of us agreed that the woman knows full well what she is married to, but inexplicably she is unable to do very much about it. She offers the lame rationalizations, which come so readily at hand to justify her paralysis: her friends were married and having babies while she was not, her vows promised “for better or worse,” and so on. The fact that her own father fit a similar profile renders her even more powerless to acknowledge and leave, for it would mean that she might go through her history of abandonment again, even though it would rise out of her strength. We talked about this stalemate and reviewed how many other cases we had of such resistance to what the clients knew to be true. Even though this woman’s psyche has already spoken to her, already made the judgment that the marriage is not healthy for her, and registered its disapproval through her psychopathology, she prefers to retreat from the abyss of choice.

The implicit message for this woman, growing up with the parent granted her by fate, was, “You are powerless here. Your well-being will derive primarily from orbiting this large parental planet and accommodating to it. Do not expect to be met halfway by the other; you don’t get that opportunity.” This message was reinforced by the presence of an acquiescent mother, who also modeled adaptation over authenticity. After all, if the other “big person” cannot model a balanced relationship, what hope could there be for the child? Is it any wonder then, with this intrapsychic imago, this paradigm of self and other ingrained so deeply, repeated day after day through her formative years, that this woman would seek the familiar, a narcissistic partner, and fuse with him? And so she did, and so one does, because of two factors: the power of this unconscious conditioning and the lack of permission to live one’s own journey.

This theme of powerlessness shows up time and time again as the inordinate influence of early models of self and world, self and other, and it shapes our inner paradigms. Even though the great religions endorse the notion of the soul, the preciousness of the human being, and even though the government of enlightened nations ratify the pursuit of life, liberty, and satisfaction, this issue of permission is critical. Many of us, most of us, were raised to be nice, to fit in, not to promote ourselves, and this somehow got translated into self-abnegation, self-criticism, and self-avoidance. It is not narcissistic to become — it is a duty. But who has ever heard that in his or her childhood? Very few, if any.

Add to the constrictive powers of genderism such other procrustean pathologies as racial and ethnic constrictions, sexual and relational scaffolding, and socioeconomic structures, and we wonder why we are not comfortable inside our own skin and in our feeling life! Still, as we learned early, to push back is to risk either punitive responses or the loss of approval and support — both devastating to the fragile equilibrium of the child. So we learn to adapt, push the unlived life further below, and try to fit in. Outnumbered, the child gives in and thereafter deepens self-estrangement.

In the superficial world of most psychological practice in the Western world, we are defined as behaviors, which we are; thought constructs, which we surely have; and biological processes, which are self-evident. But such a definition of the human being leaves out the most important thing of all: we are a meaning-seeking, meaning-creating animal, an animal that profoundly suffers the disconnect from meaning. More symptoms arise from, more addictions bespeak, and more sociopathies testify to this disconnect than any other etiology. Over the last few centuries, and especially through the twentieth century into ours, mythic linkage to the mysteries have eroded and been replaced by secular surrogates and sundry distractions.

What we need to know is already known within. Sometimes life circumstances require that we risk trusting that inner authority. Sometimes a therapist, in the transference that often happens in therapeutic relationship, embodies the permission-granting authority figure, the simulacrum of an empowering parent, but even that does not always work. Sooner or later, a person has to understand and revisit the basics: we are not here for long; we are accountable for the life we have lived or not lived; we are summoned to choice, courage, and perseverance in living this life. From that recognition, the necessity of permission becomes more than obvious; it becomes the vital oxygen we must breathe, or we choke to death on the fumes of the unlived life.