Describe Yourself in Three Words
Most people manage it in about four seconds. Loyal. Organised. Ambitious. A worrier. The reliable one. Someone who has never been much good at confrontation.
Whatever came to you, notice how little effort it took. And notice that the three words probably aren’t all complaints. Some of them you’d stand behind quite happily, and you’d be right to. You are good with people, or you are reliable, or you do work harder than most.
When your conclusions about yourself are ones you are proud of, they will work for you in all sorts of ways. If they are ones you’re not so proud of, then those are the ones which probably don’t work for you so well.
In any event, your conclusions are a result of your experiences. Some of what you concluded was accurate. Some won’t be accurate. When they can become a problem is when those conclusions become hard facts in your belief system. This is the moment a conclusion stops being a conclusion and turns into a description.
When a Description Becomes a Definition
There’s a small shift in language that marks it, and it is easy to miss. “I learned to worry, because life was unpredictable for a while” becomes “I’m an anxious person.” “I learned that disagreement wasn’t safe” becomes “I’m just not assertive.” “I coped, because somebody had to” becomes “I’m the strong one.”
The first version is a history. The second is a fact about you. And once something is a fact, it stops being available for inspection, because nobody thinks to question a fact. A history is something you can look at. A fact is something you live inside.
The Point Where It Starts to Cost You
In The Five Levels of Attachment, Don Miguel Ruiz Jr sets out how deeply we can come to hold an idea. What’s useful isn’t the ladder itself. It’s that it tells you where the trouble starts.
- Authentic self. You can pick the idea up or put it down. It’s information, not you.
- Preference. You like it. You’d choose it. But you could manage without it.
- Identity. The idea has become a description of you. You’ve started saying “I am” where you used to say “I prefer”.
- Internalisation. You defend it. Someone disagreeing feels less like disagreement and more like being got at.
- Fanaticism. You need other people to agree, because not agreeing is a threat to who you are.
The five levels describe the depth of most of our relationships in the world, not just the one we have with ourselves.
How Attachment Plays Out
A family member of mine is a staunch football fan. Her life revolves around when the team are playing, and her mood depends on how they are doing. One day we met a rival fan who was disparaging about her team. To me it was banter, a mischievous tease. To her it was a threat and a disrespect she couldn’t forgive. She fumed all day about it, and nothing we said could get her to let it go. Her attachment meets the internalisation test comfortably, and hovers around fanaticism more often than she’d like to admit.
Most of us sit around the third level for a good many of our beliefs, and there’s nothing shameful in that. The threshold worth knowing is the one between preference and identity, because that’s where an idea quietly becomes a self. It can also become the seat of suffering.
The Seat of Suffering
Understanding where any relationship you have with yourself, with others, with your job, with a situation is located on the 5 levels is useful information. Once something is internalised, it’s no longer an experience we can bend with. We no longer experience it as something we hold. We experience it as part of us. So when that relationship is challenged, or we lose it, or it’s changed in any way, it isn’t just painful; it registers as damage. Pain is the natural outcome of loss. Suffering is experienced when we find it difficult to change our beliefs about that particular relationship. Suffering is the self defending its own borders.
Any of the beliefs we hold about ourselves, strong positive ones or those which find us wanting, can cause suffering depending on how attached we are to it.
There’s a quick test. Take one of your three words, better still, take the one you’re proudest of, and imagine putting it down. If the thought brings a kind of relief, you’re holding it loosely. If it brings something closer to alarm, or a strong urge to explain why it’s actually true, it isn’t a belief any more. It’s a border you’re guarding.
A Way of Being
Here’s the part that took me far longer to find. The beliefs don’t stay separate. That’s the thing about them. You don’t carry twenty individual convictions about yourself, filed neatly and consulted as needed. They settle into each other and become one thing: a paradigm, a way of being. An amalgamation so complete that it stops looking like a set of beliefs at all and starts looking like your personality. They become the reality through which you live.
A paradigm doesn’t wait to be asked. It decides in advance. It chooses which rooms you walk into, which conversations you start, which chances you decide aren’t for you, and it does all of that before you’re aware there was anything to decide. You don’t experience it as a choice. You experience it as the way things are. Which is why it’s almost impossible to see from the inside, and only visible in the shape of a life. My paradigm is still playing out. The difference now is that I’m on to it.
How My Paradigm Played Out
Two sets of beliefs were running at the same time. On one side, that I wasn’t worth much, wasn’t especially lovable, didn’t really matter. On the other, that I was resilient, that I loved learning, that I was loyal and loving. For years I thought of these as separate matters: the first lot to be dealt with, the second lot to be grateful for. They were never separate. They worked as a pair, and the good ones did more damage than I would ever have predicted.
Relationships
My romantic relationships have been the most devastating of it. The unworthiness did the choosing, and it chose efficiently. I picked partners who would go on to confirm exactly what I already believed about myself. But it was the loyalty that kept me there, and the resilience that made staying possible. I could withstand a great deal, so I did. Someone with less staying power would have left years earlier and been better off for it. I used to think I was bad at protecting my heart because I was weak. I wasn’t. I was strong in the wrong direction.
Working Life
For a working-class girl, I did reasonably well, better than my background predicted. I’ve thought a long time about how I managed that while believing what I believed, and the answer is that I was proving something. Achievement was the argument I was making against myself, and it was convincing enough to pass for ambition.
Where it showed was in the business. I set up on my own, and it never became what I wanted it to be, and when it began to struggle, I didn’t fight for it. For a long time, I read that as a failure of resilience, which stung, because resilience was the one thing I was sure of. I’ve since decided it was something else. I didn’t want the business. I wanted to be the sort of woman who had one. You can’t persevere through the hard part of something you only took on to prove a point. So, I took two things from it. I did need more staying power than I had. But I also needed to stop building things in order to answer an accusation nobody had made.
Children
Then there are my three children, the loves of my life, who grew up in split homes as a direct result of the choices I made. I’m not going to dress that up. The paradigm didn’t only cost me. It set the conditions of their childhood, and I was the one who set them.
They are adults now, and remarkable ones. Loving, capable, making a good job of their own lives, and I am eternally proud of them. I try not to use that as a way of letting myself off. What I did do, being so aware of where my own turns had taken me, was try from very early on to help them find their own higher selves.
Which brings me to the part that is hardest to write about, and the most important. Amidst all the negativity and neglect I grew up with, I always knew there was a loving presence available to me. It wasn’t a belief, and it wasn’t something I was taught. It was simply there, and I could reach it. I’ve come to think it was the one thing the paradigm never got hold of. Everything else about me was open to negotiation. That wasn’t. It is the reason I have been able to keep looking at any of this, and it may well have been the saving grace for my children as much as for me.
None of the decisions felt like beliefs operating. Each one felt like a reasonable assessment of my circumstances, which is the whole problem. A paradigm never presents itself as a paradigm. It presents itself as good judgement.
Nothing Is Lost by Looking
A belief doesn’t sit quietly and wait to be assessed. It decides what you notice, what you let pass, and how you explain what you noticed, then hands the results back to you as proof. Which is why arguing with one never works. You can’t reason your way out of something that is choosing the reasons.
So, looking is the only move available. I’d like to say I chose it. I didn’t. I experienced my life for a long time without once standing outside it, and what eventually made me look was pain, the sort that goes on long enough that you run out of other things to do with it. Looking isn’t a tidy business either. Sometimes standing back was enough for the pattern to come clear all at once, and I could see precisely which belief had made a decision on my behalf. Often it didn’t. I would look straight at something I had done and have no idea why I had done it. No explanation available, just the fact of it. That confusion isn’t a sign of doing it wrong.
And nothing is lost by that. The person you have built isn’t a lie, and isn’t a mistake. That person was a working answer to a question you were far too young to be asked, and a great deal of theirs is worth keeping. My appetite for learning, my independence, my ability to stay reasonably calm when other people can’t. All assembled, all useful, all mine. You don’t stop being capable the moment you notice you learned to be capable. Nothing falls over. The only difference is that you are holding it now, instead of being it.
Try This
Write your three words down. Then take each one in turn and imagine putting it down for good.
– Which one brings relief?
– Which one brings a flicker of alarm?
– Which one do you immediately want to explain?
The last two have stopped being descriptions.
Then one further question, and this one doesn’t need answering today. What have you already arranged, chosen or turned down because of that word?
If something in you can stand back far enough to ask that, then that something was never part of the construction.
There is one thing it does require, and it is smaller than it sounds. Not understanding your beliefs. Not fixing them. Not feeling any differently about them than you do today. Only a willingness to look at all. Everything in this article I did badly at first, and it still worked, because willingness is the one part that can’t be substituted for anything else. Without it, no amount of technique gets off the ground. With it, even clumsy-looking takes you somewhere.
Until now, whether you knew it or not, you have been the experiencer of your life. Inside it, subject to it, taking its meanings for facts. Willingness is all it takes to begin becoming the observer of it instead, and that is where we go next.
Articles in Self-Awareness
Self-Awareness: The Gateway to Your Higher Self
- Why You React the Way You Do
- How Beliefs Shape Your Experience
- The Only Thing You Have to Do Is Be Willing
- Turning From Experience To Observation
- From Observing to Choosing