Staying harmless through confusion
I confuse myself so I can do what you want (although I don't really want that).
I confuse you, so you’re not angry or don’t perceive what it is that you want to do, and so maybe I can get my own way anyway.
Confusion is a strategy to stay harmless and is such an insidious strategy we can carry from childhood. It penetrates everything we do, every single wish and relationship we have.
We confuse others, we confuse ourselves, and we stay in the confused state because if we weren’t, we would be angry and know our wishes and our boundaries—and would need to communicate them.
If we were clear about what we wanted, we could no longer be harmless. And as children, we learn to be harmless to survive. At least some of us do.
In If I am only nice enough…, I describe recognising this strategy in myself. In this article, I describe how it works, how it keeps itself intact, and what happens when it operates collectively.
Being good at the cost of showing—and then knowing—who you are
A child depends on other people for care. Depending on who their parents are, showing what they want, being angry, or making demands can threaten that care.
So as a child adopting a strategy of being good becomes a way to survive and remain harmless to your surroundings.
By harmless, I mean you are not dangerous. You are not angry. You do not threaten the status quo, and you fit into the structures given to you, starting with your parents, then school, then societal norms.
What you want as a child, what you perceive, and what you know inside yourself become irrelevant and get overwritten by all the systems you walk through.
Confusion keeps us harmless
As adults, we continue using this childhood strategy. We confuse ourselves, we confuse others, and we stay in the confused state. If we weren’t confused, we would be angry.
Anger gives us access to clarity, boundaries, clear communication, and the energy needed to act on those things.
If we were clear, we would no longer be harmless.
If I am confused, then I am not clear. If I am confused, I am harmless. If I am confused, I don’t know 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.
In the confused state, there is no clarity and no decision and no action and no anger and no boundaries.
We can live a whole life in this soup of unclarity. Then we can be nice, and people can love us and pat us on our heads, and we have someone to take care of us. To feed us, and later to pay us for doing something we maybe don’t even like anymore.
How this exhausts our lives now
We agree to something we don’t really want to do. But our wishes don’t disappear because we haven’t communicated them. Unconsciously, we resist, delay, or sabotage what we promised.
Relationships do not work out. Or not really.
We confuse others too, so they don’t understand what is happening or how to move forward. The anger comes out sideways. What we want remains unspoken, and what we promised remains only half fulfilled.
Or maybe we fulfil it for a while, and then we wreak havoc and rebel against the very thing we fought to get and keep.
We become confused, and more confused, and more confused. Then we occupy ourselves and our incredible mind machines with solving the confusion, understanding its root cause, and finding many ways to fight the symptoms.
Everything revolves around trying to resolve the confusion: our relationships, our work, our decisions, our inner work.
Our energy goes into this while the things we want to create remain undone.
How the confusion strategy keeps itself intact
This strategy keeps us from perceiving the very things that would allow us to recognise it and leave it: our wishes, our anger, and our clarity.
To recognise the arrangement, we would need to notice: I don’t actually want what I have agreed to. I am angry. There is something I need to say or change.
But these are exactly the things we have learned to suppress in order to remain harmless and be taken care of. When a wish or a disagreement appears, we get confused.
So we don’t clearly recognise that we are maintaining an arrangement we don’t want. We experience confusion instead—and then try to solve the confusion.
The arrangement continues because it prevents us from recognising why we would want to leave it.
Even sincere spiritual or inner work can become part of that occupation. We can feel that we are working towards change while the underlying structure of confusion stays intact and sabotages everything anyway.
The question becomes concrete: what am I agreeing to? What do I expect in return? What am I not saying? What do I really want?
Reclaiming our anger
The way out begins with recognising that confusion is a strategy. It is something our mind creates to keep certain things from becoming clear.
Part of the solution is reclaiming our anger. Owning anger, feeling anger, and learning to work with it.
If anger has threatened our connection to the people who take care of us, even feeling it can be frightening. Before we can recognise a clear disagreement, fear comes up.
We feel guilt and ponder whether it’s okay to be angry, because we have seen anger act as such a destructive force. Maybe we even swore as children that we would never do this. Be angry, I mean.
Because being angry is dangerous. Anything but harmless.
When you start working with anger, you also need to work with the emotions that make it difficult to access. The fear we have been afraid to feel. The sadness and pain we still carry. All the unfelt emotional layers from childhood that prevent us from accessing that pure, raw anger force.
People using this strategy may also have difficulty being in the now, being in their own physical sensations, or having a felt experience of reality. Taste, sensation, and body awareness can be difficult to access. There may also be low physical sensitivity or sexual difficulties.
Coming back into body sensations means encountering what we have kept ourselves from feeling. The frozen fear, the sadness, or maybe even the joy we repressed. So many of us have learned to repress joy.
Doing the work means bringing anger into its highest potential: clarity, boundaries, decision, and action.
Feeling anger does not require hurting someone. We can learn to feel its intensity and choose how to express it. Instead of coming out sideways through resentment or sabotage, it becomes available for saying what is true and acting on it.
That can mean saying: I agreed to this, but I don’t want it. I have not been clear with you. This is what I can offer. This is what I am asking for.
What being an initiated adult really means
Many people are being driven by their hurt inner children. Their four-, six-, or nine-year-olds are driving the adult machine.
The wishes and needs, the unfelt emotions, and the unfinished conversations around what we needed and wanted as children prevent us from growing up internally.
In contrast, the adult position is the one from which we acknowledge what we want, communicate it, and act towards it. The position from which we can take responsibility for our participation—or non-participation—including the consequences of our actions.
As adults, we can stop promising compliance as the price of care. We can ask for care directly and get it or not.
As adults, we can create what we really, really, really want.
Because we can.
The collective confusion
Unrecognised, hurt inner children can dominate and take over whole conversations. Some of our politicians are hurt inner children driving whole nations into havoc.
Collectively, we are confused. We are even sleeping. Confusion does not allow us to see.
Actually, we don’t really want to see and don’t really want to take responsibility, and we enter this collective soup of fog and confusion about what we are actually doing.
We do not get informed about so many things. Like how our food is produced. Under which conditions other people have spent their lives so we can buy a carton of milk for 1.– at a supermarket.
We want to be taken care of without seeing what sustains us and what it costs.
We do what is assigned to us and leave the decisions to someone else. We remain in this soup of unclarity where we can keep feeling harmless and nice, doing what we know best: doing what we are told.
At the same time, the people in the driving seats have their own inner children, hungry for what they never received. They become hijacked by them, but now they have the power to act that out over whole nations.
The earth gets ruined in all of that.
Coming out of the confusion means looking at the whole chain of events in which we participate. Who and what sustains us? What does our receiving ask of us?
There is a difference between eating a meal while watching a TV series and the true realisation that an animal had to die for you to eat this piece of salmon.
When we are really here, it dawns on us what needs to happen.
We can see what has been given to us, and the responsibility that comes with receiving it. We can see the depth and the consequences of what we participate in.
Our own pain is still there, but it no longer keeps us from seeing beyond it.
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