Too often the rules we will not break are the ones that forbid us from taking care of ourselves at the expense of someone else’s inconvenience or hurt feelings. We ask too much of ourselves, making up all kinds of silly rules to follow, and then invoke guilt when we fall short. You might be surprised at how much better you feel when you try a little piece of freedom or give yourself a break. Often just the symbolism of a small act of self-caring is enough to open a way out of hopelessness and bring one back into the world of possibility.
The Reassurance Addict
For the overly socialized person—the really good child—asking permission becomes a way of life. The ability to jump in and take what you want and need to fulfill yourself gets confused with too much concern over doing the right thing. This results in a loss of initiative and a habit of waiting to see what others think every time. There are times when asking for permission goes completely against the flow of life, against the dance of the real. It plugs up your inspiration and intuition, preventing you from taking what you need from situations and other people. Permission-seeking is the very opposite of taking charge. There are many moments in our lives when thinking too much about getting permission is the kiss of death to our confidence. We become hesitant and tentative. We lose track of what is okay and we become reassurance addicts.
Going ahead with our dreams is all about breaking this habit. In Rapunzel’s terms, it means challenging the witch. It necessarily means a degree of separation from loved ones and your old roles in the family. If your parents have brought you up to think for yourself and have respected your ideas, then it is going to be much easier for you to think clearly about where you want to go in your life. However, if your confidence was undermined by a parent who treated you as incompetent, or only gave you love when you were being obedient, then following a freely chosen adult path can feel daunting. Lest you think I am only talking about young adults here, let me reassure you that there are plenty of forty- and fifty-year-olds waiting for permission to do what they want with their lives. Of course, the permission will never come as long as they see themselves as needing to uphold expectations of their parents or others.
Mature age alone does not mean we have individuated from our parents at a mental and emotional level. That is where the homing pigeon of permission-seeking comes in, bringing with it the addiction of reassurance. We try to return to a source of security to get permission before we make that next step. And like the addict, we can never get enough.
The Permission of Experts
Asking permission keeps us stuck in a one-sided love affair with another person’s power. We can easily get trained into the habit of looking to experts to tell us what we should do. Often this is helpful, but sometimes expert opinions are the last thing you need. These opinions can get in the way of your own knowing, of your own real experience and intuition.
When you look to other people to tell you something as important as who you were meant to be or what you really want, it can confuse your purpose. You become like a driver looking backwards over your shoulder, asking the expert in the back seat to tell you where to go, when the road is right in front of you and the wheel is in your hands. Here is where permission-seeking has to end, even if it is in the constructive guise of gathering more and more information. Your direction has to come from the still, small voice inside you, from syn- chronicities and serendipities, from moments of enlightenment and moments of hitting bottom. Your job is to make contact with your own personal moments of realfration. There is no expert on that but you.
Why Are We So Afraid of Our Own Power?
Many of us give our power away. Why? Because responsibility can be so frightening. It is a bit like a favorite uncle giving us a wonderful toy which turns out to be a little nuclear bomb. There we sit on the floor, holding the so-called toy in our hands, stunned by the power of it, unable to move for fear we will blow ourselves up. That is often how we handle our own power. We are scared to death of it Not knowing how to handle the power, we want our uncle to take it back. We are eager to give that gift back. ‘You take it!” we say, and feel great relief. As grown ups, the responsibility of adult power can feel like our very own ticking bomb. We don’t want to hold onto it too long for fear of what might happen; so we pass it from our hands into the lap of the next person. Then we ask their permission for what we already had the freedom to do! It’s an arrangement many of us accept. It has the familiar ring of childhood security, as we sink back into dependence upon strong adults to take care of us. This is often what we adults secretly wish we could go back to.
But was that really what we wanted even as children? Look at the behavior of two-year-old children, three-year-olds and four-year-olds. Look at the normal six-year-old boy and twelve-year-old girl. All are in a constant battle for power and self-determination. If they have not been too traumatized by overpowering events, and if they have not been made to lose their natural confidence, they are on the lookout for ways in which they can increase their freedom and control. The two-year-old essentially walks around demanding, Power! More power! Give me power! Get out of my way! Coming through! Then we as adults convince him that his power is dangerous, will hurt him, and he had better trust us to tell him what to do.
The older some of us get, the better childhood dependence looks to us. We even tell our children and grandchildren not to be in a hurry to grow up, to enjoy their childhood. We don’t think about it from their point of view. What is there to enjoy about always being told you cannot do something, having your judgment second guessed, and having someone tell you you can’t do such small things as plug in a lamp or work the toaster, when you’ve seen your mother do those things a thousand times? The child knows better. She is in a hurry to grow up, open her own doors and pick out her own clothes. Nevertheless, in one way or another, she is told that she has to wait for permission. Over and over this inability to make our own decisions is drilled into our heads as children. We gradually learn that it is not a good idea to have too much initiative. After all, we could electrocute ourselves, bum ourselves up, get hit by a car, or whatever the awful outcomes were that our parents scared us with. Out of their desire to protect us, they taught us to be afraid of what we wanted to do.
Here is the tragedy: we don’t just learn not to chase balls into the street or put our fingers in light sockets. We also leam to mistrust the go-get-it impulse we had as we saw the ball go into the street. In other words, our curiosity, our urge to go after what we wanted are tagged as the things to resist, instead of the actual source of danger. After years of parents filling us with fear and expectations of punishment, we leam that when we feel intense motivation and burning curiosity, we are about to put ourselves in danger. This idea of our own inadequacy becomes an over-generalized belief that extends far beyond its boundaries of usefulness. From there it is but a short step to fear that we are going to cause harm to ourselves or others if we eagerly go after what we want.
The rule about not running into the street is not about the street being dangerous, it is about the cars on the street being dangerous. However, because we do not trust our children to look for the cars, we teach them that the street is dangerous. As we grow up, it becomes our responsibility as adults to figure out which of those old fears are unrealistic. We leam that reasonable caution allows us to cross all kinds of streets, to try all kinds of things with safety. We no longer have to stay in our own front yards.
Pleasurable Correctness—Are We Having Fun Yet?
At the beginning of our lives, we get our start using pleasure and pain to define who we are. If it feels good, it is me. If it hurts, it is not me. It is our original source of self-concept,