If I am only nice enough…
… I will find someone who will take me under their wing and take care of me forever. I won’t have to make decisions myself. I will let them assign tasks and activities to me, and I will swear total loyalty and fulfilment of those activities.
I won’t communicate what it is that I really want.
Because I don’t believe that I can get it. Because I experienced in my childhood that I wasn’t getting it. The love, the attention, the care which I needed and didn’t get.
I will be who you want me to be.
Because then I’m perfect in your eyes and you will take care of me.
The promise I was making
I silently promise compliance in exchange for care, while hiding what I actually want.
However, my own wishes are not disappearing because I have not communicated them. So, in truth, I have agreed to something that I do not really want to do.
Then I will also not be able to fulfil what I promised. I will unconsciously sabotage it, because I do not actually want to do what I agreed to. But I do not clearly state that either.
It all happens in the shadows of what is unknown to me, in my unconsciousness. But it is still there.
This happens in relationships. And this happens also at work.
How confusion plays into this
I do not know what I want. I doubt who I really am. I am lost. Not sure where to find truth. Not sure who to trust. Not sure how to navigate my life.
It’s a symptom. Actually, I adopted a state of confusion as a child so I could be nice.
Confused, I am harmless. I don’t know what I want. I have no clarity. No boundaries. No wishes I can clearly perceive. I don’t need to be angry. I don’t need to say what I want.
So if I am confused, I can give you what you want because maybe I think this is actually what I want.
I confuse myself so I can be nice. I confuse you so that you’re not angry.
If I were clear, I would know where I disagree. I would feel the anger underneath, my boundaries, and my true, clear wishes and needs. I would then need to communicate them.
I would no longer be harmless.
Realising what I am doing
What changed something for me was the realisation that being nice is a strategy from childhood that I needed to survive.
What helped me even more was understanding that the confusion itself is a strategy. It is not a result of me not knowing what I want. It is a strategy for me not to be able to see what it is I want or need. A strategy that I chose as a child to implement to be safe.
A rather insidious strategy, because confusion obscures the very root cause of the problem. Namely, the confusion itself.
Confusion is a strategy. Being harmless is a strategy. This is something I am doing, not something that is happening to me.
At the same time, I noticed that being confused and being nice never allowed me to really take responsibility for my own life. The person in the driving seat is this six-year-old child who just wants to be loved. Who would do anything to finally get that. No questions asked.
It’s not an adult. It’s a child.
And this is killing my relationships and my creative power, because, as a whole, I am not getting what I want, except a semblance of love and care.
I had been asking myself how I want to shape my life for five years. And all my energy has been seeping through nothingness, not creating anything of value for anyone, just trying to get the care I didn’t get when I was six.
The turning point was admitting: okay, this is what I am doing. This is the truth. And I want to do it differently.
There is something in that like standing up at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and naming what has been happening.
This article is that declaration.
Learning to inhabit the adult position
Before this moment, I felt moulded by my patterns, my history, my upbringing, my genetic luggage. As though they determined what I could do, and I did not have any real freedom to act outside them.
Then I discovered that while my child had been at the wheel for years, the healthy adult had not been there.
I began to see that the belief that I had no freedom to act outside my patterns was a lie. I actually can. I was just not doing it. I had never learned to inhabit that adult position, that’s all.
The adult position is the one from which I acknowledge what I want, communicate it, and act towards it. From which I consciously create the reality I want and take responsibility for my participation in it, including the consequences of my actions.
There is this position of being an initiated adult: taking full-on responsibility for what I create, because I have the possibility to create what I want.
I need to learn to inhabit that position. And yes, it means coming back into the body and really being here. It means I feel anger. It means I feel pain. And I feel fear.
Growing up does not mean becoming better at living by the rules we learned as children.
Being an adult means I can shape my reality, my encounters, and my life anew, so that it becomes interesting and magical. It does not have to be what I imagined adulthood meant when I was a child. I do not have to become “responsible” according to that childhood picture.
I can create anew.
You can find more details on this strategy, how to work with it, and its collective consequences in Staying harmless through confusion.
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