A few weeks ago, I was listening to a podcast, I don’t remember which, and this CEO guy was talking about the decision to organize his company around particular research goals, not profits, because otherwise all of their research would be fundamentally altered before they even began.
Their mission statement oriented them toward pursuing technological advances over ignoring interesting avenues that could potentially be unprofitable.
Now, I don’t know if that’s a disastrous financial decision ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but it struck me that all of us, as we’re going about our lives, have our own mission statements.
The problem, though, is we often don’t know what they are.
That, or our conscious mission statement is wildly at odds with our unconscious programming, and alas, the latter will win out 99.999% of the time, because the unconscious is a mountain towering over the itty-bitty mouse of the ego.
A brief story
Over last year’s winter holidays, I had conflict with one of my parents when I wasn’t available to talk on the phone as long as they wanted to. They became angry, making a point of not wanting to say “I love you” as we were getting off the phone.
The next day, I reached out in hopes of repairing the connection, and I was told, “I can see how your abandonment issues would’ve gotten activated,” followed by an insistence that none of their choices were actually hurtful, and their motivations were entirely blameless.
It was just me, apparently, and my pesky abandonment issues that were causing the problem.
In this conversation, my parent said something that struck me:
“You know you can just be yourself around us,” ‘us’ being the family.
In the moment, I was utterly incapable of expressing just how much this statement clashed with my actual, lived experience.
In fact, the whole reason we were on the phone was because, just the day before, I’d ‘been myself’ and wasn’t available to meet their needs, and that hadn’t gone over well at all.
That easily offered advice— ‘just be yourself!’—made it sound so simple. I could set the intention to ‘be authentic’ and voilà! Problem solved.
Right?
But what happens when, from the very beginning…
…the company that is my family establishes a mission statement? And what if that mission statement is: Be what the family expects you to be. Do not be yourself—never ever—if that conflicts with family expectations.
And further, what if this mission statement is accompanied by firmly established rules of operation, which include:
If someone isn’t behaving the way you want them to, withdraw connection and ‘love.’
Retaliate with anger, and then blame them for your response; they deserve it for not complying.
Emotionally bully them or administer the silent treatment until they comply.
Talk poorly about them to other family members until they comply.
Comply, comply, comply.
With this mission statement, how, exactly, do you ‘just be yourself’?
What I’ve seen in my own life, and what I hear other people struggling with, too, is the mistaken belief that not being able to thrive in a particular system (a wounded family system, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, ableism—the list goes on) is solely a personal failing.
Try harder!
Do better!
But failure is baked into the mission statement. It influences everything downstream.
Sure, technically I could ‘be myself’ in my wounded family system—but at what cost?
And when those costs are emotionally, mentally, and physically draining, thereby negatively impacting everything else in my life, what then?
Does this sound familiar:
A common fear is if you don’t people please, people will not like you. Better not set boundaries or tend to your own needs if someone else needs you first!
Because this is an oppressive, joy-zapping way to live, though, we need to hang a light at the end of the tunnel, however dim it may be.
Often, that light takes the form of:
If you people please enough, eventually you will earn the right to be free. You’ll finally get that day to yourself or the confidence to say what you want.
Really, though, the only thing we ‘earn’ from people pleasing is the ability to people please some more.
If we don’t set boundaries, there won’t be a day when, magically, we’re granted permission to set boundaries. We’re the only one who can sign that permission slip.
In essence, we’ve established a faulty if/then statement.
For instance, if we’re building a computer program and we set up the condition:
Every time you press the orange button, the computer turns off
It doesn’t matter how many times we press the orange button with the hope and intention that the computer will stay on. It doesn’t matter if we press it harder. Or hold it down for an entire minute. Or tap the button in time to our favorite song. Or press it only on Wednesdays. (Or maybe it’s Fridays?)
We’re not pressing the button incorrectly.
It just doesn’t work that way.
Now, in personal interactions, things can feel more slippery, so let’s break down our people-pleasing example. I see this, too, as a mismatch between the ‘computer program’ and what we’re hoping or intending will happen when we press the people-pleasing button.
Let’s say the computer is programmed as follows:
When someone behaves in an unwanted way, they receive the silent treatment.
Because this understandably feels constricting and terrible, we create a fantasy program to help us cope:
If I do what everyone wants, I’ll finally be able to be myself.
Do you see how these two programs have very little, perhaps even nothing, to do with one another?
But let’s go deeper.
Say you assiduously follow the rules and no one gives you the silent treatment for a couple of months.
This gets filtered through your fantasy program—If I do what everyone wants, I’ll finally be able to be myself —which interprets the lack of silent treatment as proof that, yes, if I people please enough, I’ll finally be free of the pressure to comply. I’ll be able to be myself.
Really, though, the system’s program hasn’t changed. It’s still there, running in the background:
When someone behaves in an unwanted way, they receive the silent treatment.
You just haven’t tripped the program yet. This isn’t the same as having the freedom to be yourself, not even close.
These programs (or whatever your personal variations might be) frequently get conflated on an unconscious level, and this makes it harder to address the real issue, because, to our conscious mind, it simply does not compute why the darn computer keeps shutting off when we press the orange button. We aren’t seeing the little string of programming that ensures it will do precisely that, every single time.
Okay, so where do we go with all of this?
Well, a powerful way to shine a flashlight on unconscious programming is to get super duper curious when we’re feeling resentful.
This uncomfortable but useful emotion can highlight where we’re feeling stymied whenever we follow fantasy programming and we’re not getting the ‘reward’ we expected (because the system’s programming is not the same as our fantasy).
Give yourself time to journal on your fantasy program. Here’s a tip: You might find it easier to spot if you flip things around. Think of the person who’s triggering your resentment. If you could say anything with zero consequences, fill in the blanks below, doing your best not to censor yourself. No one needs to read this but you.
If you would just stop _____________, then we wouldn’t be having this problem.
If you would only start _____________, then we wouldn’t be having this problem.
For even more clarity, once you’ve filled in the blanks above, rewrite the back half of the sentence with something more personal to your situation.
For instance, once you have:
If you would just stop blaming other people for your lack of productivity instead of learning how to manage your time, then we wouldn’t be having this problem.
Maybe personalizing the back half looks like:
If you would just stop blaming other people for your lack of productivity instead of learning how to manage your time, then people would respect you more at the office.
The advice you wish you could give to this annoying person is probably pretty darn close to your fantasy programming.
Maybe it’s something like:
If I am super productive and carefully manage my time, people will respect me.
Do you see how we reassembled the above material into an if/then statement? Let’s take it a little further, though, because chances are, the need for respect can yield further clues.
Fill in the blank:
If people don’t respect me, I’m afraid that _____________.
In other words, take the second half of your fantasy program (the ‘then’ in our if/then statement), and ask what you’re afraid might happen if this doesn’t come to pass.
Maybe that looks like:
If people don’t respect me then I’ll lose all agency and have no say in my own life.
Ah ha, now we have a link between two conditions:
IF I’m not super productive and carefully manage my time THEN I’ll lose all agency and have no say in my own life.
It would make sense that with this program running in the background, it would feel very scary—terrifying, even—to be anything less than maximally productive and rigidly scheduled, because this has been falsely conflated with having zero agency.
And if you see someone else flouting this ‘rule,’ your resentment and anger toward them is likely to be out of proportion to the situation. (To be clear, we’re not presuming that they’re blameless, little angels, only that your experience of the situation is likely heightened and your perception altered by this programming.)
If this is your cup of tea, this is exactly the sort of thing we talk about in the Portal every month, mixed in with Jungian Magic deep dives. You can join us here.
Happy New Moon! 🌑
