I have changed the title of my blog yet again and think maybe it is the final one. Below is what I think might be the introduction for the book I’m working on with the same title.
Lord, I am not worthy to receive you....
You know when you spend two solid hours filling out some long, elaborate but urgently important registration form online that halfway through requires you to hunt down obscure information from a file you forgot you had? You take 10 minutes to remember what you labeled the file. Then you search every spot you squirrel away files when you’re sure you will never need them again. You finally find it in the last place you look. Then you go back to your computer and it has timed out. So you fill out everything again. Then you are finally almost finished and your 8 year old starts screaming, “Quick, mom, help me!!” You run in an awful panic to find he has climbed up onto the decorative ledge lining the ceiling of your entryway by way of climbing over the stair railing and straddling to it. There is no way to get him down other than calling the only neighbor who has a ladder high enough to reach your ceiling ledge. Once you get him down and try to scare him badly enough from ever doing it again, you break your rule about no TV during the day and place him in front of it. Your computer has of course timed out again. You drink a lot more caffeine and start over. Almost done, you realize there is one more file you need to look up. Unable to maintain composure at the thought of the computer timing out again, you bolt through the kitchen to the filing cabinet, whacking your shin so hard on the open dishwasher door that you actually fall down and have to writhe in pain a while. Undeterred, you get up and run to the file fast enough to prevent another time out. You feel a surge of relief to be close to finishing when the computer suddenly shuts down. You scream. Loudly. This time your 8 year old comes running to you. “What’s wrong, mom?” “The computer just went down!” you say. Your 8 year old says, “Oh, I might have pulled out the computer wire when I hooked up my video game.” At this point you are so angry and frustrated you go numb and try to laugh. Two hours later you are in the driveway with all your children bundled up waiting for your husband to come home. As his car pulls up you stop him in the street with a look that says, “Don’t ask,” open the back door, usher your kids into the car, and tell him to take them anywhere for 2 hours. You get back to your calm place and start over. You finally finish and breathe a huge sigh of relief. Then of course the registration requires payment so you go find your Visa and start that process. You have finally done the impossible and finished everything. You now joyfully get to press the box embracing that beautiful word called COMPLETE. Then the worst case scenario happens. You get the red xxx’s with the words “an error has occurred.” You have a mini melt down, then steel yourself to figure out what the error is. You spend literally 45 minutes assessing every possible variable you could have gotten wrong. You are sure you answered one of the questions incorrectly on the registration and you pour over and edit every line item 10 times each only to get “an error has occurred” every time. At minute 50 you’ve decided to give up and you are about to implode. Then, you see a very teeny tiny red x next to the expiration date of your Visa you hadn’t noticed the whole 50 minutes of scouring each page. You remember you just got a new Visa 3 months ago with a new expiration date. You type in the new date, hit COMPLETE, and the whole thing processes.
Not being able to complete a mandatory task due to a problem I cannot for the life of me solve has to be one of the most frustrating feelings in the world. Having had many experiences wrestling and wrestling and wrestling a problem in order to complete a mandatory task, I have identified a few factors usually common to these kinds of experiences. Typically, I have been trying to solve the seemingly insolvable problem from an angle that had nothing to do with the solution, in other words, I have been looking in the wrong places for the answer. Or I have misinformation, the application of which keeps steering me in the wrong direction.
Discovering the right place to look and/or discerning my misinformation usually leads me to a very enthralling "aha" moment. Aha moments are always a kick for me. Well, this book is about one of my aha moments that felt as enthralling to me as all my lifetime aha moments combined and multiplied by one hundred million.
This aha was the mother of all aha's for me, and it changed everything about everything for me. The aha came to me one amazing day while observing one of my students with special needs solve a problem. The purity of his problem solving process revealed to me in an instant how thoroughly “outside-in” I had been engaging my own problem solving processes my whole life. The purity of his decision making once he solved his problem led me to develop a brand new “inside-out” theory of the
human personality.
As soon as I had the aha moment I knew exactly where I needed to stop looking and where I needed to start looking to find solutions in my life. I also discerned the misinformation I had been applying to my own decision making processes my whole life. You might say I finally saw exactly where all the red xxx’s in my life were pointing. I knew in that moment I could metaphorically press the word COMPLETE, and my whole life would fall into place according to the original blueprint of my biological design.
My big aha moment, in the moment, played out like I was in an outdoor amphitheater, probably because I was outside at the time! I actually imagined a bolt of lightning cracking open the atmosphere around me. When the lighting faded out, I was a completely different person. All the biological wiring in me was rebooted and reformatted to work exactly the opposite of what it had been working. My rebooted personality started working the way it was originally designed to work, and it felt exquisitely functional and sublimely comfortable.
In my experience, most of these dramatic personal revelations create only a fleeting sense of well being. I am usually disappointed by how fleeting. I knew this time I would be able to hang onto this sublimely comfortable feeling because I knew what I had just witnessed created a major paradigm shift in my thinking.
This paradigm shift changed the way in which I understood myself. It therefore changed the way I understood other people. It also changed the way I existed in the moment to moment sense of the word because it changed the way I assessed all information and it changed the way I made decisions.
The contrast between how I use to feel and how I feel now can be described like this: You know how it feels when there is a super annoying noise in the background of your environment. After hours and hours it suddenly stops. Instantly your whole body relaxes and relief spreads over you. The noise had been so constant you stopped noticing it. Only after your immense relief did you realize how uncomfortable you had been.
I realize now my old life felt to me like there was a dentist drill droning on in the background twenty-four-seven. However, because I never knew my life without the drill, I did not simply lose awareness of the discomfort it was causing. I never had the chance to know what I could feel like without the “drill” in the background. I never knew how comfortable and pleasing it could feel to be a human being, to be me.
When I inadvertently identified the metaphorical dentist drill and was able to turn it off, relief spread over every inch of my brain and body. My existence suddenly felt pleasing and comfortable. Almost two years later my existence still feels pleasing and comfortable. I am engaging myself in the world the way I was biologically loaded to.
After almost two years of living from what I call the inside-out instead of from the outside-in I am floored at the discoveries I still make all the time about how loaded I am with biological cues and navigation devices. My turbo charged biological functions feed me with constant streams of information to help me make good decisions in ways that can make sense for how I am able to sense, process, and understand. I was biologically designed to be really effective, efficient, and good at being human. Who knew??
As early as I can remember I had been taught by the nuns and priests that I had to work hard at overcoming my humanity in order to be good and kind. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.” I knelt down and said these words once a week from the time I could read at age 5. These two sentences were lovely to say in the beautiful church of my childhood surrounded by family, community, and truly kind nuns and priests. But these two sentences were one of many messages that kept the dentist drill droning on in the background of my life.
The dentist drill whirred on with the messages I was not a worthy instrument the way I came into the world. I was taught I needed lots of work and lots of healing to be worthy. I was taught how to do this work from the outside in, because what was inside of me was a bunch of confounding and confusing material that caused me to sin. If I did not get “control” of my inner life, I would not be a good person.
I was made aware from the get-go my biological hardware came into the world as damaged goods. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” It was up to me to heal this puppy up, my brain and body that is, and figure out how to craft a life dissociated from my biological hardware. The first opportunity I was graced with to start the clean up process was the Sacrament of Confession.
I received the Sacrament of Confession when I was 7 years old. I was coached about how to think of what I had done wrong while playing at home and school and how to go about confessing my sins to the priest. I was told the priest would give me some prayers to atone for the sins I had committed.
As a girl of 7 I was down with all of this. I took it all seriously and wanted to be a good Catholic like my mother, grandmother and the kindly nuns, (well except for one nun.) I was taught regular Confession would help me resist temptation by helping me follow God’s will as opposed to my own. Confession would help me develop my self control. And it would help me feel cleansed to have my sins washed away from me whenever I confessed them to a priest.
I was never directly told I was dirty or inferior. But I was constantly told I needed God to help me wash away my sins. I was constantly told I needed to pray to be cleansed through prayer.
I was indirectly taught on a regular basis that I was inferior and dirty as I was. I was directly taught I could become less inferior and less dirty if I constantly dissociated my own biological cues and thoughts and instead referred to the rules of Christianity to make my daily and life decisions. These messages went down smoothly delivered by the saintly priests and nuns inside of my beautiful catholic church.
The upshot was I would never be worthy or clean enough to be holy and good, which I really wanted to be, if I did not silence the inside of me and exist in the ways I learned to. The inside of me was bad, outside good. I learned early on how to disassociate my inner cues and thoughts and replace them with external cues in order to make decisions in my life. I learned how to live from the outside-in.
Here is what I learned to say to the priest in the confessional once he opened the secret window to indicate he was ready for me to speak:
“Bless me Father for I have sinned. These are my sins:”
I would then recite a litany of my sins. Dear Father, I yelled at my little brother when he accidentally pushed me down the stairs after he tripped on the dog and bumped into me. I also had a bad thought about my mom when she made me clean my room.”
Once I recited the sins, the priest blessed me, recited some secret incomprehensible words, and then gave me my penance. At age 7 I was asked to formally apologize for how I existed by saying 3 Hail Mary’s, 1 Our Father, and then by praying the Act of Contrition.
THE ACT OF CONTRITION:
Oh my God, I am heartly sorry for having offended Thee.
I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of hell.
But most of all because they offend Thee, my God,
Who art all good
And deserving of all my love.
I firmly resolve, with the help of Thy grace,
To confess my sins
To do penance
And to amend my life
Amen
By 7 I was told explicitly my life needed to be amended. I was not OK the way I was and I required a whole lot of effort to keep on amending my thoughts and behaviors to get myself right. Psychological rhetoric of my childhood reinforced the same exact message, albeit passive aggressively.
Never did I receive the message I was a fully functional human being who came to this party with everything I needed to fully participate. The psychological ideologies I was raised with presented to me a secularized version of many of the same messages I received in church. The psychological messages taught me my biological cueing system was a confused network of confounding messages funneled to be by my alleged unconscious. As I got older I had the intellectual choice to decide whether or not I was made intermittently inferior by my unconscious or my overall state of original sin.
Cut to age 50. After watching my student be effortlessly who he was and having my aha moment, I realized, “Hey, wait a minute. I was perfectly functional all long….. Damn.”
My daughter who has Down syndrome and all of the 50 or so students with special needs I taught every year for 7 years revealed to me this. We all come to this party ready to dance in ways that are 100% unique to our 100% unique biological structure and function. We don’t need assistance to be human. Our personalities do not need to be improved upon, they just need to be exercised. Our knowledge and experience base can be added to or amended, not our personality structure and function.
Religious and psychological organizations that talk about how to be kind to one another, how to help those in need, and how to support one another in community have many positive aspects. Currently however, all religious, spiritual, and scientific ideologies and theories I know of are not working with an accurate definition of the human personality. They cannot because we do not have one.
Not understanding the fundamental principles of how humans are biologically designed to engage their evaluative and decision making capacities allows personality damaging practices to persist. Personality damage leads to anxiety, rage, violence, addiction, depression, and mental illness. It is my goal that one day our support systems, whether religious, spiritual, therapeutic,
educational, economic, or otherwise, will engage in biology friendly practices.
My theory to follow will not be the most exciting read, but hopefully my stories of successfully applying it will be. My theory has helped me understand myself and everyone else from a point of functionality as opposed to dis-functionality.
My new theory and definition of personality has allowed me to live a different life in a different world as a different person. I didn’t have to do anything special. I simply inadvertently came to the recognition I was born with the capacities to be a fully functional human being without needing to improve, amend, or develop greater awareness of myself.
I now have an awareness of the biological idiosyncrasies of my personality structure and function. This awareness allows me to manage my reactions and responses predictably and reliably. Previously I had no idea what made me angry or irritated. Self management was all hit or miss.
It turns out I am designed to interpret information in ways that make sense to how I am able to sense, process, understand, and manage that information. My students who have low muscle tone, poor balance, and poor eyesight are going to make very different kinds of decisions than their peers who are athletic, sure footed, and have 20-20 vision. We are not biologically equipped to make decisions to satisfy standards placed on top of us. We are equipped to make decisions so our bodies and brains can manage the decisions we make.
My personality consists of the mechanisms by which I make decisions so my brain can understand the decisions and my body can handle the ramifications of my decisions. For example, my daughter with Down syndrome does not ever choose to run down steep hills. Her balance and coordination could not handle the ramifications of that decision.
Upon finishing this post I took a break and just now read about the drug overdose of a famous actor. I am passionate about promoting a new definition and theory of personality because the discomfort we feel when we are not engaging our senses and thoughts from the inside out is unpleasant for all but unbearable for some. The consequences to us when we receive confusing and critical information about how we personally engage our personality structures and functions often causes irreversible damage. How we engage our evaluative and decision making capacities is the most important, private, and protected part of us. The solutions to preventing personality damage are surprisingly easy.
Our personalities consist of the processes by which we make decisions, not the quality of our decisions as judged by an authority.
