When I chanced upon this title a few weeks ago, my first response was: Ha! Why do I need that? Not the courage part, which one can always use more of, but the rest of it, which came so easily to me already!
As an INFJ, having lived for 50+ years, the recurring experience has been that of being not seen, ignored, or misunderstood. Especially in groups. When I was younger, I used to be awkward in groups, unsure of how to participate and wanting to get away as soon as possible. These days, the tables have turned, and my presence in a group often causes awkwardness in them, who are used to certain dynamics and social mores, which an INFJ is either clueless about or does a terrible job of adopting. The result: the group is left wondering how to respond to the INFJ’s weirdness. As a best case, they choose the safe option of politely ignoring, because it takes much more effort to be curious about the person, and accept them for who they are.
So being disliked is not a new experience for me — I just roll with it, secure in my understanding of myself and having made some progress recently from a lifetime of being an erstwhile Mr Nice Guy.
I did read the book — The Courage to be Disliked — from the beginning to the end, and I gleaned some insightful pointers that helped me navigate a few recent situations. The format of the book is a Socratic dialogue between a young person struggling from a lack of purpose and a wise old philosopher, who is happy.
Aetiology vs Teleology
The ideas presented in the book are based on Adlerian psychology, which is quite different from the Freudian/Jungian approach. While Freud/Jung sought causes in the past to understand current behaviour (aetiology), Adler suggested the study of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than its cause (teleology).
Adler’s approach is radically different because he denies the existence of trauma altogether! Much of modern therapy is built on the singular idea that a person’s psychic wounds (traced to childhood) cause his/her present unhappiness. Adler, on the other hand, states:
No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences — the so-called trauma — but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.
Isn’t that a shocker! To be fair, this idea has been stated in other ways too:
- Nothing is good or bad, except thinking makes it so
- Our suffering does not arise from what happens to us, but from the stories we create about what happens to us
What is novel about the lens of teleology is that it turns the question (about our experience) on its head and thus enables us to snap out of a sense of inevitability. Take the example of someone who is a recluse and is anxious about meeting people. The Freudian approach would look to identify the cause of his anxious behaviour in his past, while teleology suggests that he already has the goal of not going out, and he is manufacturing a state of fear as a means to achieve the goal! Whoa!
Teleology reframes the question about his behaviour by asking: what purpose does his anxiety serve? And in this example, it is to meet his pre-determined goal of not wanting to go out! To change his behaviour, all he needs to do is change his goal. But of course this simple shift is not easily done, thanks to a whole host of justifications and denials; the book gives tools/perspectives to cut through the Gordian knot with a single swipe and enable such a change.
Chew on that for a while. Pick a recent example of a behaviour from your own life and instead of searching for causes, ask yourself what purpose does that behaviour serve? And it might lead to some interesting insights, topped with oodles of denial! The critical discovery through this process is the realisation there is no one to blame for what one is experiencing, that our unhappiness (if any) is our own choosing! When rightly understood, this insight opens the door to freedom from our conditioned existence.
Interpersonal problems
The second key idea is that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems. Essentially, if one were all alone in the universe and all other people were gone, all manner of problems would disappear. Sure, we would still need to survive, but that is practical, and no different than any other animal. However, all the problems that we stew over in our minds stem from the presence of another human being — they don’t even have to be physically present (or even alive), we just have to think of them for the internal battle in our minds to begin waging!
I have often noticed that there isn’t a pronounced sense of ego in the presence of a tree, a river, or a dog. But insert a human being (friendly or otherwise) into the scene and boom, something within gets activated, essentially from a mechanism that compares, which gives rise to a sense of inadequacy, inferiority/superiority complex, and the whole drama of humanity is born in an instant.
We fail to recognise that we are the only one bothered about our appearance! We fail to see the essence of the other, which is identical to our own. Instead, we enter into competition, perceive people as enemies/threats, and fail to accomplish what Adler calls life tasks, which fulfill two objectives: to be self-reliant, and to live in harmony with society.
Separation of tasks
The next key idea in becoming self-reliant and to live in harmony is to discard other people’s tasks. What this suggests is that we often take on others’ tasks as our own, or we allow others to take on our own tasks, leading to a muddled existence. Being able to see clearly what is one’s task, and what is not, is the first step in taking responsibility for one’s life. It is a movement away from seeking recognition, belonging, reward and praise, and towards authenticity.
This was the key idea I used recently to work through a particular interpersonal situation. Rather than focusing on the other, asking what purpose my behaviour served, followed by a clear separation of tasks, led to clarity, lightness and resolution, without blame or self-pity. Every time we do something to change another person’s behaviour, we are stepping into their tasks. Whenever we allow others to determine our behaviour, we are abandoning our tasks.
Discarding other people’s tasks makes life much simpler. It also helps us have the courage to be disliked, in the sense that we stop pleasing and manipulating people out of fear, and live authentically.
So far, the book deals with life at the level of personality and relationships, but spiritual traditions ask deeper questions about the meaning of life, the origin of the universe and who am I?
The latter section begins to touch these deeper questions, though it is framed in a different language. There is a convergence between Adlerian psychology and spiritual inquiry in recognising that there is no inherent meaning/purpose to life beyond that which we give to it, that the value of all life is that it simply exists, that experiences are spontaneous arisings (like dots) rather than a continuous story on a linear timeline, and finally that life is most wisely lived in the here and now.
Featured Image: Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash