10 Things Your Mommy Forgot to Tell You

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10 Things Your Mom­my For­got to Tell You — We are taught from birth to only notice cer­tain things. This is the process of socialization.

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I’m call­ing this week’s arti­cle, “10 Things Your Mom­my For­got to Tell You,” — and I’m doing this in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way. But only sort of.

One of the key ingre­di­ents to actu­al­ly wak­ing up is becom­ing aware of what’s real­ly going on. Most­ly, as the quote mis-attrib­uted to R. D. Laing reminds us,

“The range of what we think and do is lim­it­ed by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is lit­tle we can do to change. Until we notice how fail­ing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”

I want to unpack this briefly before get­ting to the list.

Failing to notice is conditioned behavior.

What I mean by this, is that we are taught from birth to only notice cer­tain things. This is the process of social­iza­tion. It is, in its essence, the same for all of us, no mat­ter where we live.

I think of this as our cultural or tribal upbringing. But it of course begins with our parents.

Everyone knows that their deeply held, core beliefs are as old as the hills.

These beliefs, cou­pled with soci­etal repres­sion, cause us to want to pull in, behave our­selves, fit in, blame oth­ers for our mis­ery, and spend our lives com­plain­ing rather than doing some­thing about it. 

It’s the main theme in the book, “Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Road,” which I assume car­ried through into the movie. The main char­ac­ters spend their lives point­ing their fin­gers at the soci­ety they belong to judg­ing it to be inad­e­quate, a fail­ure, emp­ty and mean­ing­less, and yet find the ways and means to stay total­ly immersed in the same society.

Our tribal and cultural beliefs are sort of like rubber bands or bungee cords. 

You bump up against them and they yield, sort of like push­ing against a rub­ber sheet. Then, boom, right back where you started.

To do things dif­fer­ent­ly, you have to cut through them, and yet they always remain some­what attached to us.

Thus, as we press to be more self expres­sive and more self-actu­al­ized, the bungee cord of our social­iza­tion tries des­per­ate­ly to pull us back down into the fold.

Any­way, my point is this: we are who we are because of our con­di­tion­ing, and most peo­ple are there­fore liv­ing lives using 10% of their poten­tial. Or to quote R. D. Laing again,

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby con­fronts the twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry moth­er, the baby is sub­ject­ed to these forces of vio­lence, called love, as its moth­er and father have been, and their par­ents and their par­ents before them. These forces are main­ly con­cerned with destroy­ing most of its poten­tial­i­ties. This enter­prise is on the whole suc­cess­ful.”  [empha­sis mine]

The weird­est part of all this, and the rea­son I keep quot­ing R. D. Laing, is that our erro­neous beliefs are so deeply buried that we don’t even know that they’re there. Instead, we min­i­mize our symptoms:

• You might find your­self with some sort of men­tal chal­lenge, like sad­ness, or ennui, or worse.
• Your body might be a tight lit­tle ball of stress, you might find your­self get­ting sick a lot, or even­tu­al­ly even progress to hav­ing some kind of major disease.
• You might find your­self in a rela­tion­ship that isn’t work­ing, and are doing some­thing “bril­liant” like, “stay­ing for the kids.”

There is the underlying sense of “quiet desperation” that Thoreau noticed.

What I see hap­pen­ing, all the time is that peo­ple tell me that some­thing I said or wrote real­ly struck a nerve. They got it(!!!) and it was like some­one turned on the light. Except that in most cas­es, some­one had said the same thing many many times before.

They just hadn’t heard it. Until they did.

Or, as Joe Vitale puts it,

“First, you must real­ize that you don’t know what you don’t know. Your results are a prod­uct of what you have been taught and learned over your life, not because you con­scious­ly chose those beliefs. Once you rec­og­nize that your beliefs may be irra­tional or self-lim­it­ing, you can con­scious­ly choose to change.” Joe Vitale, Expect Mir­a­cles, page 108

The crux: “… you don’t know what you don’t know.” This is a great line. It’s the same as, “fail­ing to notice, until you notice.” Or, try it this way: “You don’t know that you don’t know.” 

This is because our upbring­ing is all about forc­ing us into a mold before we are able to even rec­og­nize there is a mold. When you think about it, it’s pret­ty hard to break out of the mold that you do not know is there.

So, here are 10 things your mommy forgot to tell you.

1. The way things are, is the way things are. Nothing means anything.

It is our nature to be mean­ing mak­ers, so we are uncom­fort­able with the thought of mean­ing­less events.

Because we learn to name things when we were lit­tle, we assume, first of all, that the name giv­en is accu­rate, and that we are pow­er­less to do any­thing about the thing we’ve named.

Many think it’s a big, scary world out there. 

I see peo­ple creep­ing and slink­ing about, hop­ing that bad things won’t hap­pen, hop­ing the bogey­man won’t get them. Or hop­ing that Trumpie will save them.

It’s quite odd. I often hear, “Well, there’s noth­ing I can do about that.” And I’m look­ing at the same sit­u­a­tion, and see 10 or 20 things that could be done differently. 

All that’s required is a change of perspective.

A thing is just a thing. How I relate to the thing is entire­ly my choice. Part of the dis­ci­pline of self-actu­al­iza­tion is to let go of think­ing any­thing is intrin­si­cal­ly big or important. 

This flies in the face of what mom­my taught you: big peo­ple, espe­cial­ly mom­my and dad­dy, are impor­tant, much big­ger than you, and able to make you behave. You car­ry this with you as a fear of mak­ing waves.

The way out: sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple are sit­u­a­tions and peo­ple. The herd may behave toward such things in a cer­tain way, but that’s not required. It is how it is until you change your rela­tion­ship with it — from your side.

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2. No one is out to get you.

It’s nat­ur­al for lit­tle kids to be afraid of things that go bump in the dark. I can’t stress enough how dif­fi­cult it is for us to remem­ber how absolute­ly weird and ter­ri­fy­ing the world was when we were little.

It’s like­ly why most peo­ple can’t remem­ber much before age 6. I sus­pect that if you have mem­o­ries that go back before age 6 or so, they are implant­ed memories.—things you know you have been told about but have no direct rec­ol­lec­tion of.

When were small, every­thing was a threat. 

Think about it. We don’t know that falling down the stairs can kill us. We don’t know that glow­ing coils on a stove means hot. We don’t know that some of the big peo­ple around us do not have our best inter­ests at heart, and may be more inter­est­ed in what we can do for them than what they can do for us. 

Our parents, quite rightfully, teach us to be fearful. 

This deep-seat­ed fear, how­ev­er, is sup­posed to be in place only until we’re older.

Being self-suf­fi­cient and self-actu­al­ized means being able to tell a threat from child­ish fear. And here’s a hint: 99% of it is a child­ish fear.

The way out: see point 1. Things are exact­ly as they are. Becom­ing a self-actu­al­ized adult requires being able to dif­fer­en­ti­ate.
While peo­ple are def­i­nite­ly self-cen­tered in their actions, most of the herd is painful­ly non-self-aware. It’s sort of like they’re just blun­der­ing along, and many of them have big feet. Our job is to be nim­ble, step out of the way, and let them plod on.
They’re not out to get us — they bare­ly even see us.
Our job is to be like water — to bring aiki­do to our lives — we step out of the way, with­out judgment.

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3. No one is coming.

This is a slo­gan that hung on my ther­a­pist’s wall. 

Back when we were small, when we wailed are pitched a fit, an adult showed up and made it all better. 

Or, if we came from a dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly, some­thing bad might have hap­pened when we made a noise, but at least some­thing happened. 

The expec­ta­tion was, “I am in pain — you fix it — change it, make it better.”

Lots of folk pull this with their part­ners — they expect that if they whine long enough and com­plain loud enough, their part­ner will be so moved by love, or manip­u­la­tion, that they will make the boo-boo all better. 

If, for some sil­ly rea­son, the part­ner tries, then the expec­ta­tion is this will always hap­pen. If the part­ner refus­es, they’re being stub­born and unloving.

The prob­lem is that res­cue is an inside job…

at least for adults. There is no exter­nal res­cue, not from a part­ner, not from your rel­a­tives, and not from some mag­i­cal being up in the sky. There is just you, and the life you have created.

The way out: accept total, per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty for who you are, where you are, and what you are doing. Until you give up your belief in exter­nal res­cue, you are doomed to be “some­body’s baby.”

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4. No one will ever love you like mommy and daddy love you.

Lots of dys­func­tion­al fathers and moth­ers do teach this les­son. They are total­ly unwill­ing to let their kids grow up.

They play games to keep the “kids” depen­dent: to call home, to get permission–and thus to remain child­like adults.

This plays out in many ways. 

Some 40 and 50-year-olds are still try­ing to please their par­ents — to do what their par­ents want them to do — and may be stuck in careers they hate, doing stuff they detest, all to get a nod of approval from good old mom and dad. 

Oth­ers dis­ap­prove of who their par­ents are, and spend decades try­ing to get them to change — to be the kind of par­ents they want­ed as opposed to the ones they had.

Still oth­ers spend decades try­ing to prove their par­ents wrong.

Par­ents raise us the way they do because they have to get us to adult­hood — in oth­er words, they have to see to it that we sur­vive. They kiss our owies, pre­tend they can make things all bet­ter, and are our prin­ci­pal arbiters of truth.

They tell us what to think and how to inter­pret our life expe­ri­ences.

The key here is, they’re sup­posed to stop doing this when we grow up. Many do, and will there­after treat us as adults. Some won’t, and will cling to par­ent­hood– and to boss­ing their adult chil­dren around until they die. That’s just the way it is.

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5. Self-exploration is not selfish — it’s essential to discover who you are

Self­ish means not shar­ing your toys. Par­ents want their chil­dren to share, to work togeth­er with oth­er peo­ple, and to be popular. 

Par­ents would also pre­fer that their chil­dren behave them­selves accord­ing to the par­ents’ stan­dards, so they “invite” us to do it their way.

Back in 1968, I had to select which col­lege or uni­ver­si­ty I was going to go to. I had a free ride schol­ar­ship to any uni­ver­si­ty in New York State, of which there was at least one in Buffalo. 

Mom real­ly want­ed me to stay home and go to school in Buffalo. 

I decid­ed to go to Elmhurst, Illi­nois for my BA. Mom said, “Typ­i­cal. Always think­ing of him­self.” I smiled, shook my head, and went any­way. I mean, it was my BA, after all!

Self-explo­ration requires us to step out of oth­ers’ expec­ta­tions. To step out of the herd. 

But the pull of the herd is strong, and many, many peo­ple will tell you that too much intro­spec­tion will lead to all sorts of ter­ri­ble things. What they are real­ly telling you is how scared they are of self-explo­ration. And then they see you doing it, or try­ing it, and they freak out.

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6. Wisdom is different from intelligence

Our soci­ety val­ues intel­li­gence – stack­ing up of more and more data. 

There’s noth­ing wrong with this. It’s just not the whole picture.

Whole pic­ture see­ing is a way to describe wis­dom. Wis­dom is more about putting togeth­er than tear­ing apart. It’s about see­ing things as a flow — learn­ing the ways things work togeth­er — as opposed to form­ing judg­ments, the­o­ries, or explanations.

Wis­dom is engag­ing in life as opposed to dis­cussing life.

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7. “Play nice together” is boring

Mom and dad had a vest­ed inter­est in our being pop­u­lar. It meant they were good par­ents. They basked in the reflect­ed glow off their kid’s cheru­bic lit­tle head.

While my men­tion of herd men­tal­i­ty may be get­ting bor­ing, you real­ly have got to get this.

We behave our­selves and act nice so as not to offend the herd. 

Or at least that’s what we fear will hap­pen if we “let it all hang out.”

The odd piece is that most every­one is bored, bored, bored — bored with cock­tail par­ty chat­ter, bored with mean­ing­less rela­tion­ships, bored both in the bed­room and in the boardroom. 

And I’ve noticed a cor­re­la­tion. Nice peo­ple often end up as door­mats for the plod­ding feet of the mass­es to trod upon. Even odd­er, most door­mats look up from the floor and thank the peo­ple walk­ing over them — “Thank you! So glad to be of service!”

The way out: put a lit­tle charge into your life. Exper­i­ment with new things. Say what’s on your mind, with ele­gance, not with anger. Be forth­right and hon­est. This is not a pre­scrip­tion to be a jerk. This is a sug­ges­tion that bor­ing is… well… bor­ing. And it’s not like you get a sec­ond chance, or a do-over, for your life. Put more of you out there, just because you want to — not for approval.

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8. Take a risk

I think my mom and dad did a pret­ty good job bring­ing me up and let­ting me go. Mom had some hang­ing-on issues, but in gen­er­al their sup­port and encour­age­ment was excellent.

While per­haps they stepped in a bit too often to keep me from fail­ing at some­thing, after 17 or so they def­i­nite­ly let me stand on my own two feet.

Chiefly, they taught me to take risks.

Now, this flies in the face of most par­ent­ing today. It’s like par­ents want their kids to be encased in a bubble.

Par­ents seem invest­ed in pro­tect­ing their kids from every­thing. Germs. The bogey­man. What­ev­er. Nev­er mind that for 100,000 gen­er­a­tions kids have been sur­viv­ing just fine with­out being bathed in anti­sep­tic. Mod­ern par­ents know bet­ter — the herd tells them so.

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9. Choose your own bean

As in bean counters. 

We learn mea­sures of self-worth from our tribes. In the West, this often has to do with mon­ey, pos­ses­sions, pow­er, and accumulation. 

Some­how we’ve been sold a bill of goods that to have more is to be more. So we end up with peo­ple with lots of stuff and very lit­tle satisfaction. 

I there­fore encour­age my clients to fig­ure out what they’re mea­sur­ing their self-worth against.

This is not to make light of edu­ca­tion, degrees, job titles etc. This is not an exer­cise in doing away with cul­tur­al mark­ers. It’s an exer­cise in expansion. 

If all you ever do is mea­sure your­self against oth­ers, if all you ever do is con­nect your self worth to the height of your pile, you’re like­ly always going to feel low self-worth — like you just don’t quite mea­sure up.

The way out: I’d like to sug­gest that an ele­gant “bean” to use is this — do I know more about myself today? In oth­er words, the mark of progress is in your per­son­al lev­el of self under­stand­ing, being self respon­si­ble, and being self-actu­al­ized. I spend my life remov­ing items from the “I do not know that about myself” list, while adding items to the “Here is what I do and here is who I am” list. Find your­self. A bit more and a bit more each day.

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10. Drop all lists

Every­one has a lot of lists, a lot of rules and reg­u­la­tions, and many con­cepts for liv­ing tucked away in the recess­es of their minds. 

Lists, in and of them­selves, while easy to read, are inher­ent­ly use­less. Many, many peo­ple con­fuse hav­ing a list with hav­ing wis­dom — con­fuse hav­ing a list with doing something.

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