The Substitute People
A book for the second best, the bridesmaids, the backup choices.
By Joe Guse
Foreword
Left out, on the sidelines, last one picked, or last one asked to lunch; these are all names we give to some terrible feelings. What is it like to feel second class? What does it feel like to only over-hear conversations and not to be a part of them? To realize where the in crowd is, only because you know you aren't part of it. Most of us share in some of these, but some of us share in all of these.
We all know people who seem a bit disconnected, a bit different; the ones not at the front of the class. If we are lucky we are born with a place. A position in life, solid, and defined, but most of all desired. Some of us have no such luck. We spend most of our lives on a constant journey searching for the path. We live our lives in relation to others, not with them. At best we find our place by only by hovering over the edge or between the margins of life.
Throughout much of my life I have felt like an outsider. I have come to terms with this only after years of self reflection and working with others. The job of a therapist can be one of the most rewarding and thankless jobs; both experiences happening in the same day. It comes with many dilemmas and many contradictions. I have often struggled with what to say to someone who has come to realize his or her position on the outside, while they likely saw me in juxtaposition on the inside. It makes a therapist uneasy to have to hold back from disclosure. “If I could just let them know that I am like them too.”
The road that brings someone to therapy is never easy and assuredly complicated. The average number of therapy sessions is seldom more than one. People let us in their lives and open up their fragile workings for us 50 minutes at a time while we do little more than rearrange a poke around. Unfortunately there are still many barriers preventing us from truly knowing others. While people tell us many of their secrets, we all selectively portray many details. To know, I mean truly know, the person on the other side of the coffee table can become a daunting task. Where can one go to learn about these experiences, certainly you’d want to understand and know all there is to know about them. Regrettably, few authors have captured the essence and the nuances of therapy. The job of getting to know someone is paramount. To make a connection that allows for another person to be known also involves exposing ourselves.
I spent most of my preliminary training reading works from Yalom, Corey, and other big names in the field. I viewed movies, read articles, heck I even sat behind several one-way mirrors, but I never understood the connection until I began to appreciate the characters on the “outside.” All the training in the world can’t prepare you to even fathom such a position. You won’t find any names in psychological literature for someone in this position. You must first understand life.
How do we know when we are with someone who feels left out, misunderstood, or perhaps unacknowledged? When we do find out a person feels this way, what do we say? Few lines say it better than this, “It’s okay… We aren’t in the same class. Just don’t forget that some of us watch the sunset too." These are words spoken by the character Pony Boy in The Outsiders, a novel written by S.E. Hinton. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the only book I had every read more than once in my life, it must have meant something. I was trying to tell myself something all along. Pony Boy echoed something that takes most of us "outsiders" years to comprehend; despite all of our differences, be they perceived or real, there’s still a bit of universality we all seem to lose after being on the outside too long.
I cannot stress how important it is to be truly bear witness to someone's life story. You don't have to be a phenomenologist to understand the weight it holds. A big part of what we (therapists) do is help those who feel out of place find a place, or let them know they always had one. Usually this is an arduous task. It requires more than your garden variety empathy; it's not enough to walk in the shoes of another, to feel the pain of another, or to look through the eyes of another. Generally, the only way we can find those who seem lost is by triangulation. Helping lost souls find their places all too often is a treacherous journey that both people need to be prepared to embark on. The process of triangulation takes a strong personal will. One will need to ask themselves tougher questions than asked of the client, and to occasionally make more changes than we expect of our clients.
In my career I have made countless connections with people. On my journey I have found myself as much as I have helped to relocate wandering souls. You know it when you do, because it invokes a feeling like no other. A strange feeling; confusion, sadness, empathy, pain, touch, and graciousness, which all form a vortex spiraling through the tacit levels of your being until it tingles your spine.
Feeling different or second class so often is not a story of being up or down, it’s a story about being in or out. Perhaps the most perplexing position of all is the one who is up, but rests on the fringe, just outside of first class. Most of us feel this way, but need someone else to articulate our stories.
Understanding the personal narrative is something that can be done only if you help write the chapter, only if you want to be there with the person. You must prepare yourself for discomfort. To walk a mile in someone’s shoes you need to be ready to feel his or her pain as well as your own. Old wounds you believed to have healed are now scar tissue coming back to life. As you begin to walk and take that journey you find old pains feeling new. Light and darkness change places in a dance as two people become more alive.
In our modern world we are all too often drawn apart by our conveniences. Technologies designed to make life easier make it harder, and isolate us. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, E-Date, Match.Com, and so on and so forth, are all things we believe will give us quantity of communication, but diminish quality and depth. We live in a society that is a melting pot of millions of cultures, practices, and beliefs. Today more than ever we need to know these people on the outside, the lost, the second class, the replacements; we need to know their stories.
Most of us never see the truth, and those who do are frequently rendered powerless by it. It is inspiring to hear the stories of others, to learn, to improve our ability to assist and understand others. We must have the courage to do something with it, to do more than recognize it in others. By reading this book I hope each of you can come to a deeper appreciation of the human condition, and perhaps gain some critical insight into the lives of those who feel disconnected. Whether or not you are a counselor or in a helping profession, I hope you will find yourself immersing yourself in the experiences you read about. Examining the level of connection or sameness someone feels is a pragmatic yardstick we can use to estimate someone’s health. It is the job of all of us to share in these connections and to inspire them in others.
"I was getting to where I could see the truth. Someday I'll be brave enough to speak it"-H.S. Hinton.
Luke Fairless
The Substitute People
"You
and I have a special talent, and I saw it immediately. We're the
substitute people. I've been the substitute person my whole
life.
Claire from
the movie Elizabethtown
In reviewing the movie
Angus,
Roger Ebert remarked that if you watch movies long enough, eventually
you'll see your life up on the screen. I've had a few movies that did
that for me, some silly like Old
School, and some that
hit close to home such as Sideways.
But this exchange from the movie Elizabethtown truly hit me like a
ton of Bricks. This was it. This captured a feeling I've had my whole
life. I was a substitute person. A second choice.
How did this happen? In many ways I've lived a spectacular life. I've been a comedian on some of the most popular stages in the world, I've written books, had wonderful adventures, gotten degrees, and been, generally speaking an outgoing, kind, generous, and
compassionate person.
And yet. I’ve always felt second best. Always been the
guy in the bar walking out with the cleaning crew. The shoulder to
cry on, the "friend", the third wheel, the seat filler, the
loner, the single, the guy by himself at the dinner
table.
How does one become a substitute person? Is a
substitute person made or are we born? In my case a through
examination of my past held some clues, and I know as a
psychotherapist that much of this had to do with the way I thought
about myself. We're second best because we've slowly grown into these
roles and now it's what we think we must deserve. As with many types
of pervasive personality patterns, this likely starts in childhood.
My guess is many substitute people are often middle children of
some kind. Middle children are often the ones who get the hand me
downs, the used cars, and the leftovers, and this is something we
simply learn to live with. Many psychologists are middle children,
having learned to make peace in their families from their unique
perches in the middle of the debate. Middle children make good
diplomats. They are the Mary Anns to their older and younger siblings
Gingers. They are the sidekicks, the loyal friends, the fans, and the
men
and women behind the scenes.
So the focus of this book will be to examine why it is we substitute people feel second best. What happened, and what can we do about it? The fact is that many exceptional people conceptualize themselves as substitute people and don't reach their real potential. Personally I consider myself a recovering substitute person, having learned through many hard-earned years of struggle that I don't have to be anybody's second choice. Some of these reflections will describe people who I have seen in therapy who were comfortable with me sharing their stories in this book. It is my hope that people will write and share their own stories after reading this book, as a large part of my purpose here is to expose this phenomenon and bring substitute people closer together. Perhaps this is an ambitious goal, but if even one person recognizes this pattern and is assisted by this book, than I am grateful.
Anna
"Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive, look, experience, examine, and for once; just once, understand."
Ever known a beautiful woman who had no idea she was beautiful? If so you know a woman like Anna. When she walked into my office for the first time she was biting her nails and shuffling her feet back and forth, but clearly behind the nervous façade there was a truly beautiful woman. Still, as a therapist it wasn’t my job to worry about what she looked like, and I asked her to sit down so we could see what it was she wanted to accomplish.
She immediately told me that she didn’t think this was going to work. I felt like I was on a first date, and she had rejected me after just one look. Wow, my own substitute feelings were getting activated here, and I reminded myself to calm down and remain in therapist mode.
Eventually we did settle into a comfortable conversation, and she told me she had to constantly fight feelings of inadequacy. She felt she was ugly, overweight, not smart enough, and that people were constantly looking at her and judging her.
This is not an uncommon sort of therapeutic problem, and my training immediately started filling in pieces of her background. Probably an overbearing, perfectionistic mother in this story, who had stripped away at her daughter’s self-esteem for most of her life. Most likely she constantly talked to herself in a negative matter, and thoughts became feelings which then affected her behavior as well as her perception of the world around her. Boom, I has solved the case, I was the therapist of the year….
But I was wrong.
Her description of her childhood was pretty normal. She was an only child of parents who had doted on her a bit, but what she described was far from a standard overbearing childhood. Her parents were a bit older, and she had always wanted brothers and sisters growing up, but really what she described was far from what I expected.
No what she described was a kind of longing. She described walking past people’s houses at Christmastime and feeling a kind of penetrating sadness about something she thought she was missing out on. It was sad, sweet, and very touching.
So I could immediately go to the idea that perhaps being an only child filled Anna with a kind of pervasive loneliness that cast a long shadow over her entire life. This was partially correct, and Anna did have a kind of private internal world that was very difficult to penetrate. This is not uncommon with only children, as the lack of siblings often makes them turn inward, as they miss out on a lot of the socialization that comes from kicking, screaming, and laughing with brothers and sisters who are fighting for the same space.
But this wasn’t the whole story either.
I told Anna about the substitute theory and she immediately felt like it described her perfectly. She knew on some level that she was a perfectly attractive person, but emotionally she just never quite felt like she belonged. The idea of belonging is so powerful in psychotherapy, and finding out how someone belongs in the world is often one of the most important pieces of the therapeutic puzzle.
But substitute people often belong only partially. All the facts of their lives usually look just fine. They went to prom, weren’t picked last for the team, and fit in just fine with nearly everyone. This was true with Anna as well, everything she described about her life seemed remarkably normal.
So we kept coming back to how she felt about herself. One would have thought just from her sheer beauty she would have been reinforced over and over again in her life, but that wasn’t her experience at all. I walked a fine line with her in therapy. I could tell her she was beautiful, but really, if that didn’t match with her experience, then it was a poor therapeutic intervention. No it was more important for me to try and feel how she felt and perhaps help her find her way towards her best self. And in the meantime,
Do it for myself as well…..
So as time passed we talked a lot about this feeling. I told her a little about my own personal journey, but was also careful not to make the sessions about me, although I was sure I was learning as much from her as she was from me. Maybe more. We explored this topic together, and I asked me to teach me about her inner world, which she agreed to do with great relish. Somehow teaching someone who understood was very empowering to her, and she walked me through some of the earliest memories of her life right up to the present day.
They key to our relationship was that after many months of talking, she began to feel understood, which is not only a goal of therapy, but an important consideration in any human interaction. Eventually, through telling me her story, something slowly started to change. There was more of a strut in her step, and even the way she walked across a room seemed to be different. She had found her confidence by talking about how unconfident she was, and paradoxically left therapy a much more self-assured woman.
Although I would like to take credit for this wonderful therapeutic accomplishment, it was actually me who was in a sense getting therapy from her. I had watched her transformation, and contributed when I could by empathizing and listening and trying to understand. When therapy works best this is what it is, a process of watching someone find their way back to themselves. It was incredibly powerful, and a perfect example of how truly listening is often the best tool a therapist really has.
David
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?
Marianne Williamson
David was a prisoner. That was the way he described himself anyway. A neatly-dressed Black man in his 30’s, he was new to therapy and was admittedly a little uncomfortable about the process. He described himself as a prisoner of his own weight, and how it had kept him from being happy for as long as he could remember.
Again a client of mine had hit on a sensitive subject. I had also felt like this from time to time, and could definitely empathize with David’s struggles. The funny thing was he was no more than 15 pounds overweight, and in his well-tailored suit it was hard to tell he was overweight at all.
But I knew that wasn’t my job to tell him that, although that was certainly my first instinct. When I first became a therapist this was a mistake I made often, correcting people’s opinions about themselves and in many ways being a cheerleader.
My training however taught me that this can actually be counter-productive. What someone is looking for is confirmation of their experience. The desire to be understood is one of the strongest wishes we have. That’s not to say that you don’t help people examine their own self-sabotaging ways of talking to themselves, but our first job is always to try and understand a person’s worldview. If you correct someone too fast, or deny some aspect of a person’s experience, you have missed on an empathic level, and this is something I always try to keep in mind.
So David told me about his life as a prisoner. He described being overweight for most of his life, and how he was always the “fat kid” growing up for as long as he could remember. Through High School he described having a lot of female friends, but very few romantic partnerships. This pattern continued on through college, and now into his professional life as well.
Although I am single, and often find the dating world a hazy and confusing mystery, I did think there were ways I could be of service to David. I knew that if he could begin to feel understood, that over time he may develop more confidence which would then seep into other areas of his life. I know how this works because I have been in therapy myself. It was an extremely important piece of my own development, and I often left the sessions feeling a lot more confident when I was on the other side of the proverbial couch.
I told David about my ideas on substitute people, and he was immediately taken with the idea. He described being the guy who girls would take to the dance when no one else had asked them out, and how we was always kind of a second tier kind of guy when it came to dating. He described how now as an adult he had experienced so much of this kind of thing, that he had in a sense given up on the dating world, as he knew that people were simply not that interested in him.
One of the first steps in therapy is to actually examine the evidence of what people are saying and see if it holds up to scrutiny. I asked David to think about a college educated, well-dressed, polite and kind man, who had a good job and was financially responsible. I then asked him if I described that man to his female friends, how many of them would feel like that kind of man was extremely difficult, if not impossible to find.
He agreed this hypothetical man sounded great, and his female friends often did complain to him that there were no good men around. Still, although he was able to give this imaginary version of David the benefit of the doubt, he could not extend the same courtesy to himself. This is unfortunately a very common trait in people that struggle with depression, and it takes a lot of hard work and time to begin to undo the roots of this self-defeating way of approaching the world.
Something occurred to me with David however, and at about 6 weeks into therapy I decided to take a chance. Although we talked a lot about his childhood, his self-defeating ways of talking to himself, and engaged in a lot of the standard therapeutic conversations, he kept coming back to being a prisoner of his weight.
So, with a very deep breath, I asked him, as gently as I could, if it was possible that he was overweight because he wanted to be overweight. This is a dangerous kind of question for a therapist to ask, as it can be perceived as blaming the victim. On the other hand a large part of your goal is also to promote personal responsibility, and it was in this vein that I decided to ask the question.
David was very offended at first, and got angry which is what I expected. We spent that hour in a kind of uncomfortable silence as I tried to explain what I meant by this, but it was clear his emotions had become aroused, and it was therefore very difficult to continue the conversation. Still, I thought it was important. I provided him with this quote from Marianne Williamson at the beginning of this story to think about when he returned the next week.
It was a tense week waiting for that next session, but when David did return it was with a smile on his face. He reported he had been up half the night thinking about what I had said, and how that quote had in fact summed up his feelings, which is what I had hoped for. Personally he thought he was capable of a lot of great things, and described how he spent hours daydreaming and visualizing the life that he thought he was capable of living. But he was also afraid, and he wondered aloud if maintaining the little extra weight he carried was his way of keeping himself safe from having to risk rejection if he did chose to follow his dreams.
This blew me away, and reminded me that people are often much more insightful about themselves than we sometimes give them credit for. It has been my experience that people often have the answers to their own questions if we just give them time and space to explore these questions. David knew on an intellectual level that he could lose 15 pounds easily enough, he was an athlete in High School and had been thinking of joining a gym for years. What he had done however is make a connection between a surface level symptom (being overweight) and a deep-seated fear he had of living the life he was capable of living.
What happens next after such a revelation is reached is always interesting to observe. Some will tell you that insight in therapy is essentially useless, as it simply reveals the problem without providing any tools to change the problem. Regardless of that particular debate, it is always important to take action. A therapist can provide all of the insight in the world, but ultimately it is the client who has to do the heavy lifting.
So in David’s case we set some goals. Along with joining a gym and losing the weight, he had an idea for a small business he wanted to start, so we also set some goals around that. He became a man on a mission, working out and researching, and generally finding a whole new gear in his life that he never knew he had. It was wonderful to observe, and within a month David had his business up and running and was doing well.
Obviously not every case in therapy goes this well, but I wanted to think seriously about what had happened. Somehow having someone actually become interested in his life had made David interested in his life again, and he had tapped into some kind of long dormant desire he had about the kind of life he wanted to live. As he had gotten older he had moved further and further away from this life force, and became content to simply as a “prisoner” in his own body.
I have seen David for over a year now, and yes, he has begun dating again over the period with a lot of mixed results. He told me one of the women he had dated thought he was too “cocky” and this was really kind of amusing considering where we had started out just a few months before. Over the course of this year we talked a lot about how this substitute pattern happened in the first place, and I think it is an important question that I very much wanted to figure out.
P.S. I joined a gym yesterday myself. Physician heal thyself is I think the proper expression.
Personal
Reflections
"Real
courage is risking something that you have to keep on living with,
real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink
your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real
courage is risking one's cliches."
Tom
Robbins
I include both of these stories to demonstrate how closely our own issues can overlap with the people that come into therapy. I know that I am effective sometimes because I have stumbled into a lot of the same dark rooms as my clients and fallen down a lot of the same stairs.
This idea in psychology was explored by Carl Jung, who said that it “was only the wounded healer who can heal.” Essentially what he was saying was that the therapist has been hurt in a lot of the same ways as the people he sees, but has hopefully learned to recognize and identify these hurts. Ultimately he can then draw on memories of how he personally coped with this hurt to assist his clients. This was particularly relevant to me in considering the idea of substitute people, and I wanted to share some personal reflections about this.
My guess is I am not a typical substitute person, although I’m not really sure there is such a thing. The common trait seem to be more about feeling that you are just not quite anyone’s first choice, and personally I knew exploring my childhood held some clues as to how this happened.
As the second oldest in a family of four kids very close in age, the problem was not really with attention. My parents divorced at a very young age, and, although my mother was seriously overworked, she always had enough time for me, maybe even more than my share. The next logical thing you might go to is sibling rivalry. Often a second-born kid becomes rebellious, as the role of the responsible one has been taken by the eldest. Ok, this one was definitely true in my family. My sister was a high achiever and I definitely kind of went the other way. Still, I wouldn’t frame the relationship in terms of jealousy, so this doesn’t really seem to be a great explanation either.
One thing that did affect me personally was growing up kind of poor. Seeing other kids with nicer things was kind of hard, and I think a part of me always thought I was missing out on something. Hard to describe exactly, but really it is a kind of feeling that something is going on just out of your grasp that is a lot more hip than what you’re doing. I’ve felt like that my whole life, and heard similar sentiments from a number of different people I’ve seen in therapy.
It was funny because even when I went on vacation I often thought I might be missing something. I would anticipate and anticipate, and when I got to where I was going, it just wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be.
Over time, when you feel second best for long enough, you begin to make choices that confirm your ideas about yourself, and wake up one day with a second rate life. This is an exceedingly difficult pattern to break out of, and for me it took reinventing myself by moving to another place.
So when I was about 21 or so I hit the road, working in a number of our National Parks. I found that for a summer at least, I was far from a substitute person, and for a time truly felt the beam of a very imaginary spotlight as I met new people from all over the country. Dating was easy in these days, as we were all young, free, and adventurous. I went out with some beautiful women during these years of my life, and seemed to be on my way to a happy and prosperous life with any number of them.
But eventually the summer would end and I would have to return to my life, which was always in disarray. I would return home and all of the old substitute patterns would begin to creep in again. Somehow familiar surroundings always brought back those old feelings of being second best.
So I hit the road over and over again. Somehow a change of place was always a remedy for these feelings, and each time I landed in a new place I found I was able to reinvent myself. In many ways these were the best years of my life, as I met thousands of people, had a number of wonderful relationships, and got to see a big chunk of the world.
Eventually I moved to Chicago to become a comedian, where strangely, I met a number of people who had found a wonderful way to deal with being substitute people by learning to laugh about it. I became one of these people too. These were hedonistic years for me, and I fell into the very familiar pattern of joking about myself in the evening, while suffering the consequences of feeling second best during the day. Eventually I truly had to hold my life up to a microscope when my comic idol and extreme substitute personality Chris Farley overdosed on drugs just a few short blocks from my house.
So I had my dark night of the soul. I realized that continuing on the path I was on would likely result in an early demise, and I wasn’t quite ready to check out just yet. I started to study Psychology. First I got a Bachelor’s degree, than a Master’s degree and then another Master’s degree. There, I had done it. I had so many degrees I couldn’t possibly feel second best anymore, right?
Wrong…
The crucial moment for me was actually getting into counseling. That is where I first came to realize that changes in your external world have very little to do with the day to day operation of your internal machinery. No, small, internal changes were what occurred as I continued with therapy, and one day I just woke up and realized I felt differently. The best way I can describe it was an ability to laugh with myself rather than at myself. Gradually I learned that virtually everyone, from the hottest celebrity, to the prom queen, to the richest businessman, feels like a substitute person at one time or another. This was reinforced for me again and again in my work as a therapist. I found that if you looked behind the lives that seemed like they were using a bit too much effort to exude superiority, there was usually a case of crippling self-loathing and insecurity.
So I again try and return to the idea of humor in therapy, because that was my personal path to wellness, although I also recognize there may be others. I constantly see people who struggle with inferiority, and in one way or another it seeps into every aspect of their lives. Shared absurdity, that’s become my mantra. I mean what the hell are we really doing here anyway? I remember watching a video called “The power of ten” a few years back that kept zooming away from the earth by a power of ten. Looking at our tiny speck of dust fade into the distance, I suddenly realized not going to some dance seemed a little less important, and it is a lesson I try and remember. We all have an idea about what it is we are doing here, but all we really know for sure is that we are on this tiny blue speck of stardust together. For better or for worse we’re stuck here together, and personally I think there’s got to be something better than trying to make each other feel bad about what we don’t have. When we can learn to laugh about our shared experience it truly does become a shared experience, and sometimes that can make it pretty bearable.
The Death of a Friend
"Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part of ourselves to give or, more often that not, the part we have to give is not wanted. And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them-we can love completely without complete understanding."
A River Runs Through It
Got word from my sister today that her best friend, who was also a friend of mine, had died. When you hear news like this a million questions go through your mind. How did it happen? What happened? Was it an accident? Suicide? We want some explanation as to how this happens because it doesn’t make sense to us. Young people aren’t supposed to die, and when they do, we also for a second consider our own mortality.
So in talking with my sister I learned that her friend had essentially drank herself to death. She had been drinking secretly for years, and finally her organs had shut down and her heart had eventually stopped.
This was devastating news for my sister in more ways than one. Losing your best friend at such a young age is awful enough, but losing them to something that could have been prevented hurts even worse. You wonder, what could I have done? Did I miss a sign? A cry for help? You think constantly of all of the things you might have said or done to help, but it’s simply just too late.
Which leads me to the quote at the beginning of this entry. Why is it that we are so often unable to lend assistance to the people closest to us who seem to be in so much pain? Does our fear of intrusion prevent us from asking the right questions? Should we be able to intuit people’s internal pain and find these things?
Ultimately I think the answer is no to all of these things. Often a great deal of guilt comes along when someone close to us self-destructs, but ultimately we are all responsible for our own lives. I think so much of our external problems start with some internal disruption going on inside our troubled hearts and minds. Many of us can fake our way through a day, and yes I speak from a great deal of experience on this. But ultimately we have to resolve these inner conflicts if we want to live the life we know we’re capable of living.
So I think a lot about my friend who died today. The stories in this book have all been success stories so far, but it would be unrealistic to suggest that everyone gets over feeling second best in their lives. Some of us need to escape this feeling and drift towards addictive behavior. We need a respite from these feelings, and often something like alcohol or overeating provides some temporary relief.
The problem with this solution is that the thing that provides relief is also what keeps the door locked on our self-awareness. Addictive behavior also leads to self-loathing, which then further reinforces the original feelings of inferiority. This is a vicious cycle that becomes deeply habituated and very difficult to extract yourself from.
So I think about my friend and how she must have felt as she continued to drink massive amounts of liquor even as her body was failing. She was one of the funniest, sweetest, women I’ve ever met, but somehow what was going on in her internal world was just too difficult to face. Sometimes this looks like boredom, but I also think it can be deeply rooted in the substitute pattern. Our idle time is painful in part because we haven’t found a sufficient level of challenge in our lives to induce creative solutions. We have in a sense “settled’ for a life that is less than we were capable of, and this is very difficult to face. So we fashion an escape. For some it can be wandering the world, while others find they can find the same journey is available in a bottle of Vodka in the comfort of their own living room.
So perhaps there are levels of inferiority that vary widely from person to person. That has been my experience as a therapist. The psychologist Alfred Adler said ‘The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.” This also seems relevant to a discussion of addiction, as the emotional agitation in some cases becomes too difficult to bear for even short periods of time.
So in my overwhelming sadness for my friend, I think about what could have possibly happened to alter her life course. My wish was she could have gotten into some kind of therapy, and at least begun a dialogue about what her inner world was like. She may have found a gentle and supportive therapist to work with her on this. I know therapy works because I have personally experienced it. All of us, every one of us, at times feels very alone in this world, and therapy can be one place where you have someone unequivocally and totally devoted to you. In a sense this is more intimate than a marriage, a parental relationship, perhaps even the relationship between a person and their clergy. If you feel like my friend did, or if aspects of her story seem familiar to you, please think about making that call. Sometimes even a glimmer of hope is enough of a catalyst to begin the process of change, and any good therapist will help you in your journey to find and develop this sense of hope.
Thomas
Whenever
Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at
him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean-favoured
and imperially slim.
And he was always quietly arrayed,
And
he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses
when he said,
"Good Morning!" and he glittered when he
walked.
And he was rich, yes, richer than a king,
And
admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine -- we thought that he
was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So
on we worked and waited for the light,
And went without the meat
and cursed the bread,
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet in his head.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
For a long time I thought
it was money that was at the root of the substitute pattern, as it
was something from my own background that often made me feel left
out. Working as a therapist however has convinced me that money has
very little to do with feeling true belonging with others, and in
some cases it can even be a terrible hindrance.
I
remember reading this poem about Richard Cory when I first started
college, and being a little confused by it. Richard seemed like he
had a lot going for him. What I hadn’t considered was how much
Richard felt left out of what was going on around him, and this
feeling of being left out is often at the root of the substitute
pattern.
Which
brings me to case of Thomas, a well-dressed man in his 40’s,
who came into my office a year or so ago wanting to talk about how he
could stop yelling at his kids so much. Thomas was a wealthy man who
worked in the financial industry in Chicago, and had reached his 40’s
having accomplished all of the things he had envisioned for himself.
He had a beautiful wife, two great kids, and had made his first
million already. He had a big house, nice cars, and the country club
membership
to
go along with it.
But he was miserable.
I remember reading a book
years ago by Joseph Heller called “Something Happened”.
The book described a man much like Thomas, who thought that if he
just painted the numbers like he was supposed to, happiness would
follow shortly afterwards.
But
something happened.
And so it was with Thomas.
He described feeling this internal pressure all of the time, yet he
couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. So we began a
dialogue about this, and I asked him to describe what his life would
look like if I could wave a magic wand and take him to the life that
he imagined for himself. His answer surprised me. Most people, when
asked this question will orient their answer to the present or the
future, but in this case Thomas went back to the past. He
recalled,
“I remember back when I was about 10 watching
the Irish boys from my neighborhood play football in the park. I
wasn’t allowed to play with them, so I would sometimes just
sneak down and watch from a distance. I would study how they teased
each other, how they laughed, the jokes they told, and I would go
home and practice talking like they talked. I always thought they
were having some kind of wonderful fun that I would never know about,
and that thought has stayed with me for as long as I can remember. I
guess then, to answer your question, I would go back and be able to
fit in perfectly with that group of boys.”
The
honesty and depth of his recollection moved me a great deal, and I
could clearly see that Thomas had struggled his whole life to find a
sense of belonging in this world. Somehow he had glimpsed the nature
of belonging as a child, but he was always the outsider looking in
from a distance.
Now Thomas again lived high upon a hill looking down at the working-class people of his town. It was in a sense a perfect metaphor for the course his life had taken, and as therapy progressed we talked a lot about how this reinforced a pattern he had been stuck in
his entire life.
So as we continued to have this discussion, Thomas made an important revelation. What if he was yelling at his kids because he saw them repeating the same pattern that he himself had fallen victim to? What if he was resentful of them, trying to live vicariously through them, and trying to reinvent a youth through them that
he never had access to?
Thomas made all of these
associations himself, which once again reinforced the idea for me
that people are almost always their own best clinicians. What they
often lack is the encouragement to pursue these ideas. There is
perhaps nothing more disheartening than to come to some kind of
deeply insightful personal revelation, only to find that when you try
to share this revelation, people don’t understand. The
difference with a therapist is, if they are any good at their job,
they will give you every ounce of their concentration to try and
understand these insights.
Working with Thomas on these
associations had really started to make him rethink the way he was
parenting his children. He eventually came to the conclusion that he
couldn’t make his wish come true, not exactly, but what he
could do was provide his children with choices that would increase
their sense of belonging.
In Thomas’ case most of the
restrictions he placed on himself and his family came from the voice
inside of his head. Looking a little further, this voice had its
roots in the way he was raised by his parents. His mother was
judgmental and condescending while he was growing up, and she
literally had become a part of an imaginary audience that Thomas
always felt accountable to. There is actually an entire school of
psychology based on this idea called Object Relations, and these
visions we have of our parents that influence our present day lives
is one
of its most important tenets.
So we started talking about how he could identify and answer this voice in his head, and as he became more mindful of this voice, he even began to develop a sense of humor about it.
As we continued to talk, he began to blossom into a very funny person, He described how he and his kids had begun to do more things together, including playing football and basketball and a number of other things they had never done together before. It was very nice to hear. Often times parents who did not gratify their own desires in childhood literally make their children instruments of their own ego, but this wasn’t the case with Thomas at all. Most people describe wanting to give their children the things they never had, referring to material things, but in his case he was able to give them a sense of playfulness. He was in essence letting them be children, and in doing this became a child himself again. Seeing and encouraging this transformation made Thomas one of the most fun people I’ve ever worked with.
This is a potential gift we have when we become parents. If we are mindful enough we can learn from the mistakes of our own childhoods and try and make sure patterns don’t get handed down for generations. In the case of Thomas he was able to reinvent himself by thinking of how important of a job being a parent was. When he came into my office he wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong, but knew that something had to change. His parental instincts had led him to therapy, where with just a little listening and encouragement, he was able to make important changes in both he and his
children’s lives. Working with him reminded me once again that the substitute pattern and the need for belonging affects people from all races, sexes, and in this case social classes.
The Mythical Joneses
Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long, and in the end it's only with yourself.
Mary Schmich
There is an interesting history behind the idea of keeping up with the Joneses here in America. As the industrial revolution progressed and people began moving from farms into cities, everyone began living a lot closer together. With this newfound closeness also came a little more nosiness. Now people were more and more interested in what their neighbors did with their money, and soon this arrangement increased competition.
World War 2 changed a lot however, as the able-bodied men went off to war, and the women went to work doing their jobs. Perhaps more than any other time in our history, the people in America embraced cooperation, and banded together to fight the war at home while the soldiers did battle overseas. I remember reading a very poignant essay on similar occurrences in England, where people reported feelings of euphoria despite the war raging around them. Social psychologists attributed these feelings to the breakdown of the social classes, and how being freed from these restraints seemed to dramatically increase feelings of happiness despite the horrific nature of the war itself
A strange thing happened after the war ended however, as Americans in particular were now more prosperous then ever. The advertising industry seized on this newfound sense of prosperity, and began convincing people to buy things they didn’t need, often pairing products with famous celebrities to accentuate the point. With the proliferation of new media came more and more advertisements. Suddenly all of our newfound motion picture heroes were being paired with things to buy. It was effective.
And so the die was cast. America crossed the Rubicon in the 40’s and 50’s and we haven’t been back since. The early seeds of equating our value with what we owned were planted during these years, and it is a pattern that had become even more deeply entrenched in the decades since World War 2.
So we’ve come to measure our personal value on how well we fit in. That is the essence of the idea of belonging. and in America belonging is often measured by the quantity of a person’s possessions, and also how many of these possessions are also owned and appreciated by our neighbors. It’s a vicious circular game without a clear beginning, middle, and end.
In a nutshell then, advertisers have seized on one of the most basic and primal human needs, which is the need to feel a sense of belonging. This is problematic in many ways, and has caused a gulf in our society that often is demoralizing to a person’s self-esteem when they have neither the means nor the opportunity to purchase the things required for membership.
So what is the solution? In working with a number of families over the years, I have discovered that parents are often in a seemingly no-win situation. They try to instill in their children the idea that they are not defined by their possessions, but meanwhile the pressure to have what the other kids have is a powerful force instilled in children from a very early age. Too often the guilt a parent feels with the idea that they are contributing to their kid being different makes them give in and play the game.
Somewhere along the way, if we are to get out of this trap, we have to wander off this path onto the road less traveled. This is a difficult fork in the road, as most of us are socialized in a million different ways to associate success with the acquisition of possessions. In a fascinating article entitled “Why the self is empty” Phillip Cushman makes the argument that we fill up our empty selves by buying things. Who among us has not relieved some temporary bit of suffering by purchasing something we didn’t really need? My guess is almost all of us. This is a pattern that helps us avoid dealing with legitimate suffering, which Cushman argues is an important piece of individual growth.
In making this deviation from consumerism, we often have a dark night of the soul. When we for a minute shed our materialistic coping methods we are left looking into a strange abyss, and this is where we have an opportunity for self-exploration. In many cases we have to unlearn a lifetime of programming that has led us to measure our happiness against our friends and neighbors. Ultimately this is a rope we have to let go of to truly journey down the road of self-exploration.
I include this essay in this book because through my work with people of every socio-economic class, I have noticed that a great deal of what makes someone feel like a substitute person originates with deeply conditioned ideas about how we compare to the people around us. Virtually everyone has felt they were missing something everyone else seemed to be getting, but for substitute people this is a feeling that can rest on their shoulders for a lifetime.
This can be a difficult moment in a person’s life, as we are taught that finding belonging is an important piece of feeling socially interested in others. As we individuate, we must balance this need to belong while also weighing what this belonging may cost us. Perhaps before we can come back to others we have to truly spend some time alone with ourselves and emerge from this alienation with a more secure sense of self. We often mistake being alone with loneliness, and combat this loneliness by buying things to make us feel closer to the imaginary herd.
I would like to close this essay by sharing a story that happened to me last Christmas, while I was barricaded for two solid days in the Seattle airport due to extreme weather conditions. I hadn’t been home for Christmas in years, and this was the year I decided to break the streak. I avoided coming home in part because Christmas stirred up a number of my own substitute feelings, and, like I suspect happens in many households over the holidays, I dreaded playing the “let’s compare our lives” game with friends, family, and everyone else.
But this year things were going well. I was a therapist, had written books, and was scheduled to appear on Television later that month to talk about one of my books. A part of me wanted to go home again as a successful guy with good things to say about my life. I put on a nice suit and flew out of a freezing cold Chicago evening into what I hoped were greener pastures.
But I was wrong.
It so happened Seattle was having one of their worst snowstorms in a century. As I got off my plane, I heard the announcement that all the planes that night had been grounded for the evening. We were told to return to the lobby and check back in with the counter to figure out when our next flights would be leaving.
What I saw when I exited the terminal was a sea of humanity unlike any I had ever seen. There before me were thousands of people lying all over the place of every shape, size, age, race, and creed. I was demoralized. I looked at the line and it went on for hundreds of yards, snaking around over and over again. I reluctantly lugged my very large bag to the end of the line. I was in that line for nearly 24 hours, which, taken at face value, would appear to be one of the most torturous things a traveler could ever experience. It wasn’t. What occurred next was one of the most interesting sociological developments that I have ever had the pleasure of observing.
I sized up the people next to me in line. A family of hillbillies with plastic bags. A couple of dorks that looked like insurance salesmen. A lady that looked like she had just got out of a Honky Tonk after drinking for 3 straight days. Jesus. This was going to be the longest day of my life.
No one spoke for the first hour as we all began to get a sense of what we were in for. Finally I broke the ice and made a small joke, and everyone seemed eager to do a little venting. I busted out a bottle of wine I was bringing home for Christmas, thinking that somehow we needed it more now. Someone else produced some snacks, and soon we had a regular little party going on.
And all those judgments that went through my head? They were wrong. These people seemed to be incredibly nice and I had clearly misjudged them. What had happened here? How and why had a bunch of strangers decided to become some fast friends? What was the psychology behind this?
As I pondered these questions I came to the conclusion that most of it had to do with the fact that in this time, in this place, none of us were any more important than the other. We were all simply wayward travelers stranded together in the middle of a snowstorm, and for those 24 hours all hints of difference in social class had been dissolved. It was one of the greatest 24 hours I ever spent actually, as I truly got to know dozens of people in line as we continued to laugh and tell stories about our shared predicament. It never came up that I was a therapist, to them I was simply, “suit guy” who was every bit as stranded as they were. I don’t think I’ve ever continuously laughed more than I did that day, and as we finally got to the front of the line, a kind of melancholy seemed to settle over our entire group.