ourselves. Our teeth aren't white enough, we aren't good enough parents, we're eating too much, we have ADHD. There are precious few messages out there that we are fine just the way we are (that's why so many people are attracted to Buddhism these days, I believe: because this is one of its main messages) or that we have what we need to deal with life. No wonder we feel overwhelmed—all the messages we hear reinforce that we can't manage as we are.
For instance:
Several years ago, Ann Landers was asked what question she was most frequently asked. “What's wrong with me?” she replied.
From birth, we're now examined for any deviation from what some expert considers “normal.” Fully one-third of schoolchildren are now on some kind of prescribed drug for a disorder.
My local newspaper's “Lifestyle” section is ten pages. Recently I counted how many pages were taken up with advice columns—half, excluding ads. Two general advice columns, plus one each on sex, money, parenting, manners, relationships, and romance.
A recent Psychology Today article examined the explosion of self-help advice on TV, radio, Web sites, books, and magazines, detailing how there is now even niche advice—for gays, for African Americans, for twenty-somethings, for intellectuals, for right-wingers. Here's how they put it: “People are keen to outsource a wide array of their needs, from personal finance to parenting.”
Apparently we've even lost the capacity to dress ourselves and decorate our homes, so we have What Not to Wear, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Trading Spaces, and While You Were Out, to name just the most successful shows in this genre, so that the whole country can laugh at our poor taste.
There is nothing wrong in and of itself with needing help. But much of the advice we're bombarded with reinforces the message that we are screwed-up and that the answer to our problem lies in following this particular expert's idea of what's right. Rather than being helped to understand how we best function, how to find the solutions that work best for us, we have become a people who look to others to define who we should be, how we should feel, and how we should live. This has led to an increased incapacity to deal with life.
You Are a One-of-a-Kind Miracle
I am larger and better than I thought. I did not know I held so much goodness.
—Walt Whitman
The other day, I was driving down a country road in upstate New York when a giant billboard for a car dealership caught my eye. It had a picture of a smiling infant with the legend “You Were Born . . . Preapproved.” Tears sprang to my eyes. How would the world be different if I, if you, could claim this basic trust as our birthright? How much pain would we have avoided, how much feeling odd and different, how much loneliness and fear? How less overwhelmed and more joyful would we be? How much more successful?
As I work with clients, as I hear from readers, as I go about my day as a mother, a friend, a partner, I am constantly in awe at the unique magnificence of each and every one of the human beings who cross my path, what incredible resources of mind, body, and spirit each of us possesses. And I feel great sadness at how unaware so many of us are about the riches we hold or how to use them to be happy and contribute our gifts to the world. It is to begin to address this terrible blindness that I'm writing this book.
You and I were preapproved at birth. Each and every one of us is a miracle of creation. Your particular mind/body/spirit has never been replicated in the more than seventy billion human beings who have lived on this planet. From the possible combination of genes of your parents, three hundred thousand billion different humans could have been created. But you were. Your brain is the most sophisticated structure ever created, with “thirteen billion nerve cells, more than three times as many cells as there are people on the planet,” as Og Mandino writes in The Greatest Miracle in the World. And science is just beginning to understand that our minds are not located solely in our brains; other cells in our bodies seem to have intelligence as well.
Through these genetic resources and our personal histories, each and every one of us has precious unique attributes to draw upon, sterling qualities that we were born with or have developed, as well as a lifetime of experience that is our treasure store of personal wisdom. No matter how much we've been wounded, how defeated or unworthy we've been made to feel, those inner resources lie in wait, ready to be used on our behalf at any moment in our lives. But we have to believe that they are there and know how to open the treasure chest. In other words, we need to trust ourselves.
Self-trust is a virtue, like patience, that has been all but lost in the externally focused society that has increasingly evolved over the past fifty years or so. It is a combination of three emotional and spiritual qualities: self-awareness, the accurate assessment of who we are and what we care about; self-acceptance, the embracing of who we are in all our complexity; and self-reliance, the ability to use what we know about ourselves to get the results we want in our lives without constant worry about the approval or disapproval of others.
That's what you'll learn in this book—the attitudes and behaviors that support self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-reliance, as well as the benefits you'll reap by committing to the process of trusting yourself.
Genuine self-trust, in the words of psychologists Carol D. Ryff and Burton Singer, “is not narcissistic self-love or superficial self-esteem, but a deep form of self-regard built on awareness of one's positive and negative attributes. . . .” In other words, it's not thinking, I'm great. It's about coming to understand how I am great, where I want that greatness to manifest, and how to use that greatness when I encounter the big and little difficulties of life. If we know these things, we can move through life like a regal schooner rather than a tippy canoe. For the more we come to understand our unique capacities and how to use them, the less overwhelmed we will be no matter the circumstances.
Self-trust is not the same as self-confidence. “Confidence is more cerebral,” writes Jack Gibb in Trust, “more calculated, and based more on expectations than trust is. Trust can be and often is instinctive. . . . It is something very much like love.”
Self-trust has always been an important quality of heart and mind, but it is even more crucial in these fast-paced, challenging times. Here's how James C. Collins and Jerry I. Poras put it in Built to Last: “With the demise of the myth of job security, the accelerating pace of change, and the increasing ambiguity and complexity of our world, people who depend on external structures to provide continuity and stability run the very real risk of having their moorings ripped away. The only truly reliable source of stability is a strong inner core and the willingness to change and adapt everything except that core.”
According to Webster's, the first meaning of trust is “Assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” When we trust ourselves, we're in touch with that inner core Collins and Poras are talking about. We have self-possession—an ease under stress that reflects a command of our powers. Consequently we know we can handle what life throws at us—we can complete the assignment, juggle our schedules, organize our desks, handle the difficulty with our boss.
When we trust ourselves, we can better navigate the waters of challenging emotional times—when we feel lost or grieving, angry, or afraid—believing somewhere in our hearts and souls that we will make it, even if we're not sure how or when. We're safe in our own care. We treat ourselves well, kindly, as a loving mother would nurture her beloved child. We learn from our mistakes instead of beating ourselves up about them, because we understand that life is about learning and therefore seeing errors as valuable information about how to go forward. We don't consider ourselves bad when we screw up, just not yet as skillful as we would like to be.
Precisely because we accept ourselves exactly as we are, we are more able to change. Shame and guilt loosen their grip. We may be in difficult or challenging circumstances, but rather than getting mired in them, we see ourselves like the lotus flower. The lotus's roots are deep in mud, yet its flower is one of the most beautiful in the entire world. Each and every one of us is like that lotus—precious