One of our biggest obstacles to effective communication, one that prevents us from even knowing our true feelings, is that we easily get stuck in our various personal and professional roles. Either we have no awareness of this or we feel helpless to break out of the rigid constraints they can impose on our attitudes and behaviors. Roles have a momentum of their own, the momentum of the past, the way other people have done things, the expectations we hold for ourselves and how we should do things or that we think other people hold for how we should act. Men can unconsciously take on habitual roles with women, and women with men, parents with their children, and children with their parents. Work roles, group roles, professional roles, social roles, roles we might adopt in illness—all can be confining if we have no awareness of them and how they mold our behavior in so many different situations.
Role stress is a side effect of our ingrained habits of doing when the domain of being gets eclipsed. It can be a major obstacle to our continued development as a human being, what some might call psychological or even spiritual growth, and a source of much frustration and suffering as well. We all have strong views about who we are, about our situations, about what we do and how things should be done, what the parameters are within which we can work, what the rules of the game are, and also how confining they can be. Usually these are colored by very strong beliefs about what can and cannot be done, what constitutes appropriate behavior in a particular situation, what we would feel comfortable with, and what it means to be a _____, where you fill in the blank: mother, father, child, sibling, spouse, boss, worker, lover, athlete, teacher, lawyer, judge, priest, patient, man, woman, manager, executive, leader, doctor, surgeon, politician, artist, banker, conservative, radical, liberal, capitalist, socialist, older person, grandparent, elder.
All these ways of acting in the world can have a stylized component to them, often a set of unwritten expectations that we have of ourselves about what it means to be “good” at what we do. Each role can convey an identity, as well as a mantle of importance or authority or power. While some of this is basic to knowing the role or the calling, much of it is merely posturing, a creation of our own mind more than anything else, an attaching of a particular view and expectation to ourself that we then act out and get caught up in. If we fail to perceive that we may be treading this path, such entanglements can wind up causing us much distress and prevent us from being who we really are while doing what we need to do. The momentum and demands of our roles, coupled with these self-imposed unconscious expectations, can drive us to the point where our roles can feel highly constraining, sometimes even like prisons of our own making, rather than vehicles for expressing the fullness of our being and our wisdom and the unique ways in which we might share it with the world.
Mindfulness can help us to extricate ourselves from the negative effects of excessive role stress because, once again, much of the stress comes from unawareness, partial seeing, or misperception. When we are able to observe our own involvement in the stress that we blame on our roles, then we will be able to act in imaginative ways to restore balance and harmony and get unstuck.
This happened dramatically in class one day during the pushing exercises. Abe, a sixty-four-year-old rabbi who came to the clinic with heart disease and who was recently having a lot of trouble in his relationships with people, had a difficult time with the entering and blending exercise described in the last chapter. After attempting it with a partner, he just stood still, looking bewildered. His body reflected his state of confusion. Then all of a sudden he exclaimed out loud, “That’s what it is! I never turn! I’m afraid I will get hurt if I turn!”
He had realized that he wasn’t turning when he was being attacked, that his body was rigid when he attempted to take hold of the other person’s wrist. This was why there was no harmonious blending of his energy with his “attacker’s.”
Then, in a metaphorical flash of insight, he connected this to his relationships in general. He saw that he never “turns” in his relationships, that he is always rigid, that he only holds his point of view, even as he plays at seeing the other person’s. And all because he has a fear of being hurt.
Then Abe took it one step further. He said, pointing to his partner in the exercise, “I could trust him. He’s trying to help me.”
Abe shook his head, dumbfounded, as the whole experience took hold and he saw its ramifications. He called it a new type of learning for him. His body had taught him something in a matter of minutes that words could never have accomplished. For one moment, it had released him from a role he is so enmeshed in that he can almost never see it. Now he has to keep this newfound awareness alive and find alternative ways of relating to people and to potential conflict.
Sometimes it is easy to feel that the role you feel confined in is the worst possible role. We readily project that other people in other roles or even in the same role never have the kinds of problems that we do—but it’s not true. Just talking with other people who are in your situation or to people who are feeling stress in entirely different situations can be healing, because it puts things in a larger perspective. We feel less isolated and less alone in our suffering. We learn that other people feel as we do, that they too are in or have been in similar roles and circumstances.
If you are willing to discuss your roles, other people can mirror your situation back to you and help you to see new options, ones your mind may have edited out for you as being “unthinkable.” They are unthinkable only because your mind is so attached to one way of seeing or because you are so unconscious of your roles that you can’t see them at all.
One day in class, a woman in her mid-forties who was referred with heart disease and panic attacks recounted her trials with one of her grownup sons, who was being extremely abusive of her but who refused to move out of the house, although she and her husband wanted him to. They were in an ongoing stalemate, with the son refusing to leave, and the mother alternatively telling him to leave and feeling guilty about not wanting him around and fearful about what might happen to him if he did leave. Her disclosure occasioned a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and advice from other people in the class who had been through similar situations. They tried to help her to realize that her love for her child was preventing her from seeing clearly that he needed to leave and was even asking her, by his behavior, to kick him out into the world. But the love of a parent is so strong that often it can lead to being stuck in a role and dynamic that is no longer working, no longer helpful to either the child or the parent.
We suffer in all sorts of roles. Usually it is not the role per se but rather our relationship to it that makes it stressful. Ideally we want to make use of our roles as opportunities; opportunities to do good work, to learn and to grow, and to help others. But we need to be wary of identifying so strongly with one view or one feeling that it blinds us to seeing the full extent of what is actually happening and narrows our options, confining us to self-created ruts that ultimately frustrate us and prevent us from growing.
Every role has a particular set of potential stressors that goes with the territory. For instance, let’s say you are in a role at work that identifies you as a leader and innovator, as a hard-driving problem solver. If you succeed in bringing your enterprise to the point where things are more or less under control, it may leave you feeling uncomfortable and out of sorts. You may be one of those people who function best under pressure, with constant threats, crises, and impending disasters to which they can devote their full energies. You may not know how to accommodate yourself to situations in which you have already succeeded at bringing some stability to the scene. You may continue to be hard-driving and seek out new windmills to tilt at, just to feel comfortable and engaged. Such a pattern may be a sign that you are becoming stuck in a particular role. Perhaps by this point you are only feeding a chronic addiction for work while devaluing your other roles and obligations.
If this work addiction results in an erosion of the quality of family life, for instance, it may be sowing the seeds of much unhappiness. You may find that you are very successful in some arenas while at the same time you are not relating well to your children or to your spouse anymore, or your grandchildren, just as we saw with Dr. Eliot, the cardiologist in Chapter 26 on time stress. You may find a gulf broadening between you. Your mind may be full of details about work, absorbed in your own problems that they don’t even know about or wouldn’t find interesting. You may not be around very much, either physically or psychically. You may not even know that much about their lives anymore, about what they are feeling and what they are going through each day. Without even knowing it, you may gradually have lost your ability to tune in to the people you love and who love you the most, perhaps even your ability to express your feelings for them. You may have become stuck in your work role and unable to operate in your many other life roles comfortably. And you may even have forgotten what is most important to you. You may even have forgotten who you are.
All people who are in positions of power and authority in their work lives run the risk of this kind of alienation. We call this “the stress of success.” The power, control, attention, and respect you get in your professional role can become intoxicating and addicting. It’s hard to make the transition from being the authority who commands, dictates, and makes consequential decisions that influence people and institutional policies to being a father or mother, a husband or wife, a role in which you are just a regular person. Your family won’t be too impressed that you make million-dollar decisions or are an important and influential person. You still have to take out the garbage, do the dishes, and spend time with the kids, be a regular human being, just like everybody else. Your family knows who you really are. They know the good, the bad, and the ugly, the kind of things you can conceal in your work life to make yourself look a certain way, more perfect, more authoritative. They see you when you are confused and unsure of yourself, stressed, sick, upset, angry, depressed. They love you for who you are, not for what you do. But they may miss you deeply and become alienated from you if you undervalue your role in the family and forget how to let go of your professional persona. In fact, if you get too lost in your work role, or too attached to it and what it satisfies in you, you may wind up jeopardizing your relationships to the point where the gulfs you create may become impossible to bridge. By that time, of course, no one may want to even make the effort anymore.
The clash of your multiple roles and their tug in different directions is one ongoing manifestation of the full catastrophe in this brave new world we are continually reinventing at warp speed now. It has to be faced and worked with. Some kind of balance has to be struck. Without awareness of the potential dangers of role stress, the damage may be done long before you come to realize what is happening. This is one reason there is so much alienation between men and women in families, between parents and young children, and between adult children and elderly parents. It is certainly possible to grow and change within our roles without abandoning them. But roles can become confining and can limit further growth if we lock ourselves or each other into them.
If we bring awareness to our various roles, we will be more likely to function effectively without getting stuck in them. We might even risk being ourselves in all our various roles. We might at some point feel secure enough to be true to ourselves and be more authentic in everything we choose to do. Of course, this means being willing to see and let go of old baggage that no longer works for us. Perhaps you have gotten stuck in a bad-guy role, a victim role, a doormat role, a weak-person role, the role of the incompetent one, the dominant one, the big authority, the hero, the one who is always busy, the one who is always rushing, who has no time, or the role of the sick person, or the sufferer. Whenever you have had enough of this, you can decide to bring an element of wise attention to these roles. You can practice letting go of them and allowing yourself to expand to the full extent of your being by changing the way you actually do things and respond to things. There is really only one way to do this. It takes a ruthless and, at the same time, kind and self-compassionate commitment to seeing your own impulses to go for the familiar, to fall into habitual patterns and confining mind-sets, and a willingness to let go of them in the very moments when they arise. As Abe saw so clearly, you have to turn, turn, turn to stay fresh and avoid the ruts.
Maybe there is something to be learned from the fact that the Chinese character for “breakthrough” is written as “turning.”