CHAPTER SIX
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Grandiosity and Humility
Many of us hold tightly to the belief that we are terribly broken. Because we were hurt in some way as children, we feel especially singled out for harm, especially wounded. It feels like no one could ever know how badly we hurt. Our wounds made us special—unique victims of terrible injustice—and we felt isolated, unique, somehow different from everyone else.
But at the same time we were especially sensitive to the subtle dynamics of our family suffering, and so may also have felt specially gifted, uniquely able to heal what was broken, somehow chosen to fix what was wrong. We could see what no one else could see and felt specially charged with the responsibility to do something about it. Consequently, we learned to see ourselves as set apart from the rest of the world, both by the unique gifts and by the terrible sufferings that were given to us.
As we journey toward freedom and healing, we are often reluctant to let go of our deep conviction that we are special. Regardless of whether we feel specially gifted or specially wounded, our being “special” feels like a birthright, something to be secretly proud of, knowing no one will ever be or feel quite like us.
But if we are unlike anyone else, then the healing available for others— belonging and sanctuary, abundance and mercy—will remain forever beyond our reach. Whatever relief that is possible will never be possible for us, for our wounds are special, different, terminally unique. Holding onto the particularity of our suffering, we place ourselves, our gifts, and our wounds outside the circle of the rest of humanity. As a special case, we are not susceptible to the treatments and miracles that work for “normal” people. And so we feel condemned to suffer alone.
Grandiosity and Importance
We learn our first lesson in being special as a small player on the family stage. The child’s world is built on cause and effect: When the child smiles, Mom and Dad smile; when the child drops a bottle, Mom or Dad picks it up. When the child cries, someone inevitably comes to find out why. The child naturally feels that they create the world around them through their actions and desires, and they begin to feel very powerful.
This is the grandiosity of the child. We came to believe that what happened in our family happened because of what we did or didn’t do, what we did or didn’t say. Feeling ourselves at the center of the family drama, we felt that if we suppressed our wants and desires, we could create peace. If we soothed Mom’s anger, things would not get out of control; if we made Dad happy, he would not be so depressed and wouldn’t drink. If we pleased Mom and Dad, we could prevent a family fight at dinner. We felt powerful and important, charged with the responsibility to somehow keep things together. We felt it was our actions and behavior that turned the family wheel, and we felt singled out as the one who saw what no one else could see.
But if everything happened because of what we did, then how could we explain when things went terribly wrong? Whose fault was it when Dad did get angry, or Mom drank too much, or we were hit or violated in some way?
One explanation was that our parents were simply beyond our control, and that we could be hurt at any time. In our family, pain could simply happen at random. But for children completely dependent on the family for food and care—even for life itself—the idea of such a totally dangerous or unpredictable environment was much too terrifying. So the preferred explanation, the one that gave us a sense of control, was that family pain happened because of something we did. If suffering happened because of who we were, then we could fix ourselves, thus making sure we would never be hurt again. We cultivated the illusion of control by deciding we were the primary architect of our family experience.
Feeling an exaggerated sense of our own importance, we assumed everyone was responding to what we did and watching how we behaved. As we grew, we began to feel responsible for how everything around us turned out—the happiness and suffering of our parents, our spouses, our friends, our colleagues, and our children. One of the reasons we learned to judge ourselves so mercilessly is that we held ourselves to a much higher standard than the rest of humanity. Others were allowed to fail, to falter, to seek the help of others; we, on the other hand, were required to do it all perfectly, by ourselves, without a mistake, without the aid of anyone else. Bill was a psychiatrist with a very busy practice. He worked long hours as a consultant for a variety of treatment centers and was committed to being a good provider and a loving husband and father. But he said there was little joy in his life, as he felt choked by his responsibilities. There were so many who wanted so much, and there was so little left for him. Even though he felt overwhelmed, he never asked his family or friends for help; it felt as though he had to do everything by himself. When he first came to see me, he said he felt exhausted.
As a child of an angry alcoholic, Bill had learned to figure everything out himself. He felt it was his job to do everything right, never ask for help, and make sure everyone was taken care of. In the process, he learned to feel extremely important—so important that he could not allow anyone to share his burden.
During one session, I asked him to close his eyes and quietly scan his body for any strong sensations. He said he could feel his heart beating strongly, working hard. “Tell me what your heart is saying,” I asked. “If you could give it a voice, what would it say?”
He was silent for a moment, listening to the voice in his heart. Then he spoke: “I am tired. I feel that I am always beating, I must always keep working, or everything will die. I can never rest. I feel like I am straining to keep everything alive. Everything depends on me. I cannot let them down. I can never stop.” Bill began to sob.
With his eyes still closed, I asked him to imagine a color that would soften the tension in his chest, and to breathe that color into the chambers and vessels of his heart. “Allow the heart to soften, to rest. Feel the sensation of softening as it touches the cells and muscles of the heart. Allow it to feel rest.” As he let the healing breath open and expand the tension around his heart, his breathing became slow and steady. He seemed more relaxed.
After the meditation, he told me he had recently been to a doctor because his heart had developed an arrhythmia—it would periodically skip a beat. They suggested he take medication, but he was reluctant to do so, and he now saw that the condition of his heart mirrored the condition of his life. “It feels like when my heart skips a beat, it is the only time it can rest.” He saw clearly the strain he had put on himself—and on his heart—by taking on such a tremendous sense of responsibility. His insistence on being the source of all life for everyone around him had brought serious emotional and physical costs. After a few weeks of our meditations together, his arrhythmia disappeared.
Bertrand Russell once said that “one of the signs of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”
When we take on the mantle of “special,” we invariably delude ourselves with the measure of our own importance. Seduced by the notion that our work is indispensable to the continuation of the species, we invariably feel tired, frightened, and alone, holding onto a deeply private suffering that no one can touch. Only by letting go of our inflated sense of importance may we begin to find the companionship and healing that comes with being simply human.
Grandiosity and Woundedness
A second, more subtle form of grandiosity arises within our experience of feeling broken. When we enter therapy, when we go to workshops and read books and talk to friends, what we most often bring is our brokenness. Our wounds and hurts, our pain and suffering become our offering, something we carry like a gift to the altar. When we were hurt as children, nothing seemed as real or as sacred to us as our pain. We feel convinced that we have been handicapped by our childhood sorrows.
Doug is in his mid-thirties and afflicted with albinism. His hair, which he wears to his shoulders, is snow white, as is his beard. His skin is extremely light in color, and his overall appearance is striking, even handsome—although Doug feels more shame than pride about his appearance. With his skin color, he could easily get burned if he stayed too long in the sun. Nevertheless, when he was a child, his father would regularly take him to the beach and make him stay there to “toughen him up.” Kids in school often beat him up because of his looks; when he told his parents, they never seemed to do anything about it. He was in great pain, and no one would listen.
As Doug and I explored the hurts of his childhood, he said he was afraid nothing would give him relief, given his physical condition and childhood pain. His affliction was so obvious, everyone stared at him, and there was nothing he could do about it. He felt his particular problems were too unique, too special to be alleviated by therapy.
“Actually, Doug,” I said to him one day, “I find you to be quite ordinary.” At the mention of the word ordinary, Doug became enraged. “You have no idea how much I suffered, how hard it has been. I am different—just look at me! People stop to stare at me, I can’t go outside in the summer, and I was beat up almost every day as a kid. I have problems that nobody can ever understand.”
Doug had transformed his wound into something sacred and important. His wound had become his most intimate companion, the lens through which he looked at his life. His wound identified him and set him apart.
It is hard for any of us to let go of feeling broken. As long as we take a certain pride in how wounded and misunderstood we were as children of our family pain and dysfunction, the more tenaciously we hold onto our conviction that we are special. But what if we are no longer sick, no longer handicapped? What if we have simply become addicted to the idea of being especially ill—-to the point that when someone accuses us of being ordinary, with no special needs or problems, we feel slighted?
For several weeks I playfully accused Doug of being the most ordinary person I had ever met. One day he came in and said to me, “You know, I have been trying on the idea of being ‘ordinary,’ and at first I felt small and afraid, angry that no one was paying attention to me. But when I stopped working so hard at being special, I realized no one was paying attention to me, and I could just be who I was. I started to feel relaxed, even calm inside. Even when it lasted only a few minutes, I felt incredibly free.”
Nobody Special
“In our everyday life,” said Zen master Suzuki Roshi, “our thinking is 99 percent self-centered. ‘Why do I have suffering? Why do I have trouble?’ ” This kind of thinking makes us attached to how important we are, how important our suffering must be. Suzuki Roshi goes on to say, “It is just you yourself, nothing special.”
When we were small, our family members rarely (if ever) spoke openly of their tender, human feelings. So when we felt sad or afraid, we assumed we were alone in feeling those things. But unknown to us, everyone in our family was in some pain; each of our parents, our sisters, and brothers felt fear, sadness, loneliness, and confusion from time to time. Although they went unspoken, painful feelings were shared by everyone in our home.
Since our feelings were kept secret, we felt our wounds set us apart from those we loved. We quietly took possession of sadness and fear as our sadness, our fear, belonging to us and to no other. What we could not know was that every child born experiences these very same feelings. The way pain came to us need not set us apart. On the contrary, it may invite us into a deeper communion with all living beings. Our pain does not make us a victim; our gifts do not make us important. We are simply human— nobody special.
Many of us suffer from what Walker Percy describes as “the great suck of the self.” When we feel the world has conspired to cause us suffering, we undoubtedly overestimate our relative importance in the planetary scheme of things. For some of us, this suggestion may feel like an insult, but it may also give us great freedom. If we are not so important, we are no longer responsible for living up to the imagined expectations of a universe infatuated with our every move. Instead, we are set free to live each moment listening to what is true in our body, heart, mind, and spirit without scrutinizing our every move for signs of greatness.
In the second century A.D. , a number of monks who came to be known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers set up spiritual communities in the Egyptian desert. Abba Or, one of the Desert Fathers, said, “Either flee from people, or laugh at the world and the people in it, and make a fool of yourself in many things.” When we stop taking ourselves so seriously, we are set free to more playfully engage the world in which we live. We are free to explore our boundaries and to experiment with what is possible. When we begin to be “nobody special,” there is nothing to defend; we are free to be whomever we are.
Humility
Chuang Tzu said:
The man of Tao
Remains unknown
Perfect Virtue
Produces nothing
“No self”
Is “True Self.”
And the greatest man
Is Nobody.
Kurt Vonnegut once described human beings as “sitting up mud.” The word humility comes from hummus, which means earth or mud. To be “humble” is to feel ourselves as part of the earth—made from dust, returning to dust. The Hebrew creation story says God created humans by mixing dust and spirit. Thus, even the word human reflects our sense of oneness with the earth.
There have been times when I found myself wanting to show someone what a marvelously insightful teacher and healer I turned out to be. I want whoever is with me to be impressed with my wit and wisdom as a counselor, and I subtly hold them hostage until they are suitably moved by my skillfulness and magic. I play the Wizard of Oz—complete with lights and smoke and booming voices—when all the while I am simply a frightened little boy, pulling levers and pushing buttons, hoping it all works, hoping no one pulls back the curtain, hoping I won’t get caught.
But I am already caught—caught in wanting them to feel sorry for my pain or to be impressed with my life. Either way, I have turned them into objects of my game rather than subjects of my heart. When I need people to see me as special, I focus primarily on my need and cannot hear the depth and breadth of who they are in that moment. In my rush to be special, I do not honor the common humanity that binds me to others.
In truth, none of us is more special than anyone else. Each of us was given a particular combination of wounds, gifts, talents, and imperfections that merely gives texture to the quality of our experience. Our wounds and gifts do not set us apart, they are simply human qualities that unite us. Joseph Campbell describes this humanness as a doorway to love and understanding: “The umbilical point, the humanity, the thing that makes you human and not supernatural and immortal—that’s what’s lovable.”
Perhaps we may learn to approach life as a beginner. If we are not under continual pressure to prove how extraordinary we are, we can begin each day with the mind of a novice. None of us are experts in being alive. We are simply human, players in a life where sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t. When we pretend to be more knowledgeable, talented, or successful than we really are, we cut ourselves off from the wonder of our own curiosity and the discovery of new experiences. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,” said Suzuki Roshi. “In the expert’s mind there are few.”
We are all human beings who are born, trying to survive, learning to love, and preparing to live and die with some dignity and peace. No more, no less. To learn humility is to honor that your hurt and mine are one, that my life and yours are cut from the same cloth, and that we share the gentle communion of being human.
Just as we took refuge in being special, we can learn to take refuge in being ordinary, not being in charge, not being the center of the universe. Indeed, perhaps the first step in our healing is to be able to admit a certain level of ignorance and powerlessness in our lives. How many of us really know what we are doing? How many of us truly feel we are experts in the practice of life, that we have it all together? Rumi playfully reminds us:
Do you think I know what I’m doing?
That for one breath or half-breath I belong to myself?
As much as a pen knows what it’s writing,
Or the ball can guess where it’s going next.
Humility and Accomplishment
Some of us try to create an illusion of our own importance through our accomplishments in the world. We seek to elevate our worth by demonstrating how much work we can do and how well we can do it. By accomplishing more and more, we eventually give the world no other choice but to recognize our special gifts and talents. We may even take some secret pride in how much more effectively, creatively, or efficiently we accomplish what others have been unable to do before.
But those of us who seek to feel important through our accomplishments must be particularly careful. As we strive to accomplish more and more, we tend to take ourselves and our work very seriously, until over time we feel increasingly tired, unappreciated, overwhelmed, and isolated. The more we are convinced our work is specially important, the less we feel able to ask for the support, sustenance, or company of others. Tara Tulku Rinpoche, a Tibetan monk, once cautioned that “the intensity of our sorrow will vary in direct proportion to the intensity of our feeling that ‘I am important.’ ”
In some cultures, those who build, lead, teach, or heal are certainly seen as important but are given no more importance or special treatment than anyone else. Working hard and doing good work are simply parts of the ordinary practice of being human and require no special reward. Dr. Richard Katz, the Harvard anthropologist, writes of his experiences among tribal leaders, teachers, and healers in a Fijiian community: “Becoming a healer in Fiji does not bring economic rewards or increased social status. On a variety of economic and social indicators, healers are the same as nonhealers. They are given no special privileges in order to perform their healing.”
The practice of humility invites us to consider that while there is much important work to be done in the world, our work does not make us important. Our importance, our value, and our worthiness rest in having been born as a child of God on the earth. Nothing more is required. We, like all people, deserve to be fed, clothed, sheltered, and loved, not because we are special, not because we have accomplished what no one else could do—we deserve belonging and care simply because we are human.
Kip Tiernan is a charismatic, dedicated community organizer who founded Rosie’s Place, a shelter for homeless women in Boston. One day she came to a meeting where several of us were discussing the urban poor and how we could help them. She began by sharing her early experiences working in Roxbury, a struggling neighborhood in Boston:
I first moved to Roxbury in the late sixties. I went with tons of files, assuming that somewhere in all of them were all the answers for the problems of Roxbury. The people of Roxbury treated me with tender concern. They laughed at my seriousness and said to me “It’s okay, Kippy, nothing much is gonna change because you’re here. But we’re glad you’re here.” It was one of the greatest lessons I hope to learn about myself.
We make the mistake of thinking that the problems of the entire world are on our shoulders, and it’s up to us alone to solve them. Well, we don’t. I must remind myself that I am part of the struggle and that is all that is really expected of me... to celebrate small victories, to have fun on the run.
The words humility and humor share the same root. When we see ourselves in a lovingly humorous light, it becomes more difficult to see ourselves and our accomplishments as the measure of all things.
When someone makes an obvious mark on our world—someone like Gandhi, for example, who, through a timely combination of insight, creativity, and devotion, accomplished a great deal on the human stage— history often judges them as somehow special, set apart from the community of humans from which they came. But history often confuses success and accomplishment with importance. For, while Gandhi’s talents were certainly admirable and unique, he himself taught that his gifts rendered him no more important than anyone else involved in the struggle for freedom. Gandhi placed no more value on his own life than he did on the parents who gave him birth and raised him, on the farmers who grew the food that fed him, or on his followers who did so much of the work. “ I claim to be no more than an average person with less than average ability,” he wrote. “I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.” Gandhi believed that he was simply another pilgrim on the common path of peace. Similarly, each of us who reads Gandhi’s writings and tries in our own way to change the world in which we live is, like Gandhi, a child of the earth, capable of great success and failure, able to give and receive, able to touch the divine spark deep within ourselves—ordinary human beings, blessed with the tremendous gift of life.
Thomas Merton speaks of the rewards of approaching our career, vocation, work, or spiritual practice with this same measure of humility:
The more you are able to work in a spirit of detachment, the closer you come to working for God rather than for yourself, the less strain there is on your nerves. You do not worry about things so much, and therefore you do not get too confused, so mixed up, so tired.
In fact, you learn to recognize that your self-love, your pride, is trying to take over the work by your reactions. When you are exhausted and upset and haunted by work that seems to be going badly, it means you are working for yourself, and are taking the consequences.
But when you are free you work with an ease that amazes you. Half the time, without any necessity for special thought on your part, God seems to remove obstacles and do half the work for you. When God wants a thing done, the speed with which it achieves completion and success almost takes your breath away.
EXERCISE
The Practice of Being Ordinary
This exercise is simply about noting how often we feel special, different, or somehow set apart from those around us. It is an exercise that you can practice frequently as you go through your normal daily activities.
Several times a day, wherever you are, take a moment to examine your relationship to the people around you. Whether you are driving down the road, sitting in a meeting, in line at the supermarket, or with a group of friends, notice how you see yourself in relation to everyone else. Do you feel special, somehow different from everyone else? In what way? Do you feel more intelligent, more complex, harder to understand? Are you more introspective, more sensitive, somehow deeper than everyone else in line at the bank? Perhaps you feel more wounded, more insightful, or maybe you just feel you have more (or less) potential than everyone else.
Notice how often, and in which particular ways, you feel qualitatively set apart from your fellow humans. What feelings arise as you notice your “specialness”? How does it feel in your body? What are your impulses? Does it make you want to hide or go away, or does it make you want intimacy, or to somehow make contact?
Once you have examined the sensation of being “special,” take a moment to imagine the possibility that you may, in fact, be quite ordinary; that you are, in fact, nobody special. Imagine saying to the person next to you, “I am just like you. We are exactly the same. There is nothing special about me that sets me apart from you. I am as ordinary as they come.”
How easy (or difficult) is this to say? Where do you get caught? Ask yourself this question: What would I have to give up in order to be ordinary, to be just like everyone else? Which unique or sacred gift, which special wound or talent do I use to prevent myself from truthfully admitting that I am not really special at all?
Watch yourself experiment with feeling ordinary. Notice the resistance, the discomfort, the fear, or uncertainty that arises. As you imagine being ordinary, nobody special, what possibilities arise? If you were in fact nobody special, what would you do today? If you were released from the burden and responsibility of being exceptionally unique, and could simply be an ordinary human being, how would you feel free to act? What normal, unexceptional activities would you enjoy today?
Allow yourself to play with the freedom that comes from being ordinary and nobody special. The pressure is off. You can relax. Nothing special is expected of you. Nobody is watching. Why should they? You are just an ordinary child of the earth. Perfectly unexceptional, perfect just as you are.