When you faced a personal crisis, have any of your friends or family members ever tried to comfort you with one of these platitudes?
“It’s what on the inside that counts.”
“You deserve better than this;” or: “You are way too good for him/her/them.”
“When one door closes, another opens.”
“This crisis is a blessing in disguise.”
“Things can only get better.”
“One day all of your hard work will pay off.”
“Your loved one is now in a better place,” (in times of grief);
or:
“Your loved one is watching over you now.”
Obviously you’ve heard them, and you have probably said something similar yourself when trying to uplift the broken spirit of a suffering friend. This makes perfect sense, right? It’s what good friends do. It’s the oldest trick in the book to help someone feel better quick. We call it compensation.
The purpose of compensation is to help us cope whenever we experience a loss of power. Let’s say for example that one day your boss calls you to his or her office and fires you. At first, frustration, helplessness and humiliation threaten to overwhelm you. You may give in at this point to feelings of depression and pessimism. But soon you’ll look for a way out, a way to feel better with yourself in order to go on with your life. You need to somehow shake off that sinking feeling. How would you do that?
Short term, alcohol, drugs, wild sex, or dancing all night at a club may blur your aching mind. But when you recover, the sting of your defeat will still be there. Like blood cells that rush to mend a bleeding wound, your psychic forces gather around a psychological wound in the effort to remove the pain and make things right again. To restore your sense of wholeness and integrity you create an inner rationale that makes you feel and think you are empowered and victorious even when in reality you’ve suffered a loss of power.
Compensation works through the realm of imagination. Harsh reality tells you that you have lost your job and that you face a confused and chaotic reality. So you tell yourself, “I deserved better than this,” or: “Now that this boring job is out of the way I can focus on my art.” Or a friend comes and says, “Hey, it’s all for the best, your dream job is probably right around the corner.” In that inner reality, losing one’s job can only make your life better. As you start to believe it, you feel good again. You feel that you haven’t been truly damaged, and that in fact your life is on course to a better future than the one that was ripped away from you. What a neat trick.
There’s an example of this from the ancient Greeks. In Aesop’s fable, “The Fox and the Grapes,” a hungry fox saw a bunch of grapes growing high on a branch. She jumped and jumped, but could never reach them. In the end, exhausted and defeated, the fox walks away. But as she gives the grapes one last look she says, “Those grapes looked unripe anyway. I’m sure they were sour. I’m so lucky I didn’t eat any!” The hungry fox created an inner reality that made her feel fortunate she did not get what she desired. From this 2,500-year-old fable we get the saying “sour grapes” – and a sense of just how old the art of compensation must be!
Compensation is often at work during a replacement: when you were denied some form of power you were striving for and then found a lesser power as a substitute for it. If you lost your job, you would seek another one as a replacement, or perhaps create one of your own. The replacement would definitely alleviate some of the pain and humiliation of your previous defeat. But not all of it. The stinging feeling would still be there, lurking in the dark. Compensation acts as a pain reliever of the psyche, creating mental, emotional and sensual means to form a conviction that your weakness was really an empowerment! In this way, for example:
“I cannot keep my job” turns into…
“I didn’t want to keep this job anyway,” which then turns into…
“It’s fortunate I lost my job. It was the best thing that could have happened to me!”
Your loss of power becomes an advantage, an opportunity, and even a source of pride. You avoided “sour grapes!” You replaced the rejection and denial of the outer world with a self-approving, self-encouraging, but self-created environment. This is of course not the same as coping with reality. It’s more like a bypass. You get to have your own internal world, which cannot be put to the test by anyone and anything. How did you learn how to do this?
You’ll recall from Chapter Five that the most significant replacements typically happen in childhood and early adolescence. At this time in our lives, each of us had to make bitter compromises between our primordial wish to be all-powerful and the need to find our true position in the hierarchy. Our young minds could hardly be expected to endure the inevitable pain of weakening, and so we invented compensations to retain a part of our proud self-image and to escape from life’s harsh realities. Some of these childhood inventions are profoundly imaginative. How about your childhood? Did you become attached to a doll or a blanket or toy that became for you a symbol of power or comfort? Did you invent an imaginary friend to be your loyal and wise adviser, like Calvin’s tiger, Hobbes, in Bill Watterson’s famous comic strip? Perhaps through prayer you could summon God or his angels to magically help you. Some of us developed fantasies that we were somehow born into the wrong family, and that our real family was going to come some day and take us back to the palace where we belonged.
For most of us, our parents taught us compensations. Did your mother or father ever tell you when you lost a sports match: “Cheer up, you’re still better than the other side – you’ve got great team spirit that they could only wish for”? Or when you were heartbroken after your boyfriend or girlfriend rejected you did they tell you: “S/he wasn’t good enough for you anyway, you can do better.” Or if you failed in some endeavor, “Surely God has a better plan for you.” And as an adolescent, if you gazed into the mirror and hated how you looked compared to the more attractive and popular teens, did your parents point out your inner beauty, or tell you that for them “you will always be the most beautiful child on this earth”?
Your parents meant well, trying to shield you from painful feelings and boosting your young and fragile self-esteem. They knew what you did not: that life comes with unwritten and undeclared terms. No one asked you to sign the contract. It was signed without your permission at the moment of your birth. You got no say in the terms, and the life you were born into is almost completely out of your control. So the strategies of compensation seem like a clever way to opt out of this unfair world and into another world of fantasy in which we make all the rules and we will always win.
The resulting law of compensation is simple: the weaker you become in the outer world, the stronger your inner world grows in compensation. The inner world becomes your most reliable source of self-recognition and self-encouragement. This is not always bad. As well as children, adults in extremely stressful situations such as war can find compensations crucial for their mental health. Many forms of therapy employ compensations under the assumption that if people feel better about themselves, it can help them cope. Indeed, some individuals have even transmuted their inner world of compensations into paintings, poetry or other forms of great art, and that has value.
So what’s the problem with compensations? In truth, if you don’t know about inner power, why not make yourself feel better? The answer is that compensations always come with a heavy cost. We recognize compensations as false inner power, mind-tricks that provide pain relief. Like morphine, they numb you and make you feel good, while in fact they further incapacitate you. Compensations cannot resolve the basic tension of your life between your will and your fear of your own weakness. They cannot give you any real power.
Compensations disguise themselves so that you don’t see them operating in your own consciousness.
Try this thought experiment:
Think of your thoughts and emotions as like a compensation factory in your mind. Imagine visiting this factory floor as an outsider, as an external inspector. Observe what exactly those invisible factory workers are trying to do as they diligently create your conscious thoughts and emotions. Wherever events and actions went against what you desired, they reworked your largely unconscious feelings of helplessness and powerlessness into a mental, imaginary world in which you had the illusion of control. Part of their job is to stay out of sight, as if they worked behind a curtain. In this thought experiment, you are trying to see behind the curtain. At first you’ll only glimpse fleeting thoughts and emotions as they gleam and disappear in fractions of a second.
To help you with this mental inspection, here are examples of your inner factory’s finest products:
• Whenever you deal with serious challenges that feel overwhelming, your thought offers some ideas of mental empowerment. For example, if you suffer from stage fright then before a presentation or performance you might get comfort from telling yourself that everyone in the audience loves you, or you might use the old trick of imagining the crowd is naked.
• If you have been physically endangered, you find a magical way to make yourself safe. So if you suffer from a fear of flying, while in the airplane you imagine that you’re protected by angels, or that God won’t let you perish because he has a plan for your life, or that through reincarnation you will be reborn, so you can’t really die.
• When you need to cope with a serious disease, sudden abandonment or death of a loved one, you find some meaning in your suffering. If it’s caused by Karma, for example, there’s at least some point in your agony. Or if it’s “in God’s will,” then it is part of some greater plan and the “reason” for your suffering will be revealed some day.
• When you have been hurt by life and people, your thoughts may create an inner sanctuary that can never be invaded by the outside world. It’s like a dark corner in thought where you can escape life’s brutality and feel unaffected and unbreakable.
• When you have been betrayed, abused or abandoned, your thoughts can turn the hurt into a source of pride and independence. If you’re deceived by unreliable people in romance, work, or family, you can tell yourself: “My independence makes me strong; I don’t really need these people.”
• Whenever you want something badly, but you can’t attain it in the real world, your thoughts offer up the fantasy that you got it. A young man might get cut from a sports team and yet keep imagining over and over scoring the winning goal and being carried on his teammates’ shoulders as the hero. An ambitious woman might fantasize about one day becoming the boss, even as she is passed over for promotions repeatedly.
Can you see in all these situations how compensations enable you to detach from what is actually happening? Compensations draw people’s energy inwards, sapping their ability to act in the real world. We know you don’t like feeling weak. Neither do we. It’s natural to want to only experience what makes us feel strong. Compensations seem to offer an easy way to avoid feeling weak, and so they are very hard to resist – as hard as drugs for a junkie. And why resist if all that awaits you is the pain of your weakening? The journey to inner power gives you a reason to resist. In fact, it offers you a completely different path. Resist succumbing to compensation and instead agree to fully experience your weakening.
Accepting the moments in which you are weak will make you far stronger. This is the secret of really powerful men and women: they do not need to defend themselves, so they are less inclined to use compensations. They have learned how to use their weaknesses as a lever that helps them to advance and increase their strength. Behind this secret lies a very simple principle: as long as you’re afraid of the experience of weakening, you cannot really live. It’s meaningless to crave power-experiences without agreeing to pay the price of a possible weakening. It is only the primordial wish that hopes that somehow you will never ever lose a power play.
Agree to the weakening when it comes to you. Embrace it wholeheartedly as a natural part of life. Then you will no longer require compensations. Rather than escaping to a fantasy land in which you never lose the upper hand, keep standing there in the midst of defeat and admit it: “Yes, now I’m on the weak side of life.” Once you do that, you can use this moment of weakening as the first step to true inner power. Just as a martial arts master turns the energy of her opponent’s attack back against him, you will find ways to transform defeat to your advantage. You will find yourself saying: “So, what do I do next?” That next step is always a creative response, always flowing, never retreating. When true inner power is building in you, you will realize that compensations seem ridiculous and petty. You will feel strong at your core, at the depths of your being. In the later part of the book you’ll learn how to build this strong core. For the present, start by welcoming moments of weakness as legitimate visitors in your life.
As you practice welcoming weakness, see if you can notice the workmen behind the curtain immediately starting to manufacture a way to make you feel better. Caught in the act, they will most likely put down their tools and quit. Next, notice if something begins to shift inside of you when you let go of your need to always have the upper hand. Do you like how this feels? Doesn’t it feel strong? How strange is that? Accepting a weakening makes you stronger precisely because you are no longer pouring energy into your compensations. You are living in the real world, not generating a fantasy. Finally, tune in to the reactions of others who witness your power loss. Intimate friends might be surprised, even shocked by the change they see. You might notice them bracing for your reaction to your momentary weakness. Is this change in you a pleasant surprise for them? What comments do they make about it? Do they like it when you can admit a minor power loss and just move on with life? Do you?
The Psychology of Positive Illusions
In the past few decades an interesting body of scientific research has emerged on cognitive biases – the ways in which our minds systematically fool us into misperceiving reality. One cluster of these misperceptions is known as “Self-Enhancement Biases.” These biases provide us with positive illusions of ourselves as more competent, luckier and better than others – in other words, they reveal the mind at work creating compensations. Here are the four main biases that psychological researchers have studied and named that make up this cluster. See if you can recognize any of them in the people you know – or in yourself:
Illusory superiority bias: The tendency to form an unrealistically positive view of yourself. Quick – are you smarter than average? Congratulations. In studies on this question, most people think they are smarter than average too. Now rate your attractiveness on a scale from 1–10. What’s your number? In one experiment, researchers at UCLA conducted a survey of 25,000 people from 18–75 years of age, asking them this question. Most people rated themselves a 7. Fully one third of the participants under the age of thirty rated themselves a 9. You see the problem.
Illusion of control: The tendency to attribute good fortune to our own skill. Gambling is a great example of this. When you win at games of pure chance, you don’t just feel lucky, you feel in control, as if it is something about you that is making the dice or the cards fall your way. You can also sense this when politicians from rich families – people who had their education, employment, and health benefits handed to them – opine about how poor people are just lazy, and should not be coddled by the government.
Optimism bias: The tendency to believe everything will work out in the end. We can smoke and won’t get cancer. We can ride a motorcycle and not wear a helmet, and we won’t get in an accident. We can break the rules and not get caught. If we suffer a loss, good fortune waits for us right round the corner. This bias disappears the minute we look at other people – we know they are idiots for trusting their luck. We are the lucky ones.
These three biases are reinforced by a fourth more comprehensive bias:
Confirmation bias: The tendency to notice and remember events and information that match your beliefs, and to ignore the events and information that conflict with your beliefs. As a result, whenever you win or things are going your way, you’ll attribute the success to your amazing skills. But if you lose, that conflicts with your positive view of yourself, so you tend to focus on external factors – a late bus, a poor night’s sleep, bad teachers or bosses, or teammates. Over time, the events that don’t fit with your optimistic perception of yourself will fade away, and you mostly remember your successes, forming an inaccurate overall perception based more on your illusions than reality.
Will you find yourself saying…
“I’m overwhelmed and don’t know how I’m going to cope with this loss…There must be a reason for it…Oh yeah, that’s the workmen in my head manufacturing a compensation to try and make me feel better.”
“‘I deserve better,’ you say? Thanks for the offer of mental morphine, but I plan to stay in the real world and just deal with what I have to do next.”
“I can’t believe I just failed. I guess it’s my time to welcome weakness. If I can fully experience how this feels without resorting to compensations, I know this will make me stronger, and that’s what I really want.”