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Six Blind Elephants:
Volume II
Understanding Ourselves and Each Other
by Steve Andreas
Hidden Negation (excerpt from chapter 2, Negation)
As we interact with other people, we are always responding to each other, and
some of these messages will be liking and disliking aspects of what we and others
do. As long as these messages are freely given and received, with no demand to
be different, and with no threat to our well-being, there is no problem. That
is the same as liking some food or art better than others. The expression of our
preferences is one way that we come to know each other. We may even ask for this
kind of feedback information in order to know someone else better, and whatever
they express—positive or negative—is accepted as useful information. As Fritz
Perls used to say, “Contact is the appreciation of differences.”
This free give and take becomes transformed into something very different when
someone has negated themselves in some way. This inner negation is often obscure,
making it hard to realize what is going on. For instance, many people are concerned
with wanting to feel that they deserve to have a good life, or they want to have
“self-worth.” Others seek “acceptance,” a “secure place in the world,” or “a right
to be here,” and all these goals sound positive.
However, underlying these desires is thinking that they “don’t deserve to be happy,”
or feeling a lack of self-worth, that they are not accepted and don’t have a place.
These are all negations, and they can negate a relatively small scope of the self,
such as intelligence, beauty, or confidence, or the much larger scope of the entire
self, “You are garbage.” “I wish I had never been born.”
When babies are born, they certainly aren’t concerned with “self-worth” or being
“deserving,” “accepted,” or “finding a place in the world.” Like other animals,
they have needs and desires, and they are very direct and emphatic about announcing
their presence, and demanding satisfaction of their needs. They don’t show the
slightest doubt about their “right to be here” or “deserving to have what they
want.”
Then parents and other adults send them messages, first nonverbally and then verbally,
about not being worthy or deserving, not being accepted, or not having a place,
and the child learns to think that they don’t belong. All these have the same
structure: negation of the natural functioning of the child, a negation of part,
or all, of who they are. These experiences continue as memories, which can be
in any or all of the different sensory modalities. Although this could be primarily
an image or a perceptual feeling, for simplicity in discussing how this works,
I will assume that an internal voice negates: “You don’t deserve it.”
Then when someone seeks to counter these negations with reassurances that they
do belong, are deserving, are accepted, or do have a place, that is actually an
attempt to negate what is already a negation. “I’m not undeserving.” “I’m not
unworthy,” etc. This sets up incongruent categorical opposites within the person:
“not self-worth” and “self-worth,” “not deserving” and “deserving,” etc. For simplicity,
I will use the word “reassurance” to refer to any response that affirms something
that someone has already negated.
Reassurance feels good in the short term, but over the long term, it doesn’t solve
the problem, and it actually increases the incongruence between the negation and
the negation of this negation. This happens in several different ways.
First, no matter how much reassurance someone gets, this doesn’t regain what the
small child began with, and what they really want: total and unquestioning being
who they are, without a hint of either non-acceptance or acceptance.
Second, reassurance from others is actually “other-worth” rather than the “self-worth”
that they want and seek. Since people differ in what they approve of, someone
will need to do very different things in order to get reassurance from different
people. That usually results in a strong involvement with others, which can extend
to “chameleon” behavior, attempting to satisfy different people in different ways.
And since some people are almost impossible to get approval from, this may sometimes
result in extreme behaviors like “acting out” or a suicide attempt.
A somewhat different way of getting reassurance from others that they are OK is
to follow a particular set of social or religious teachings, so as to get reassurance
from that group of people. This is more stable, since someone is always attempting
to satisfy the same standards in order to get reassurance, rather than different
people with different standards. However, it can lead to less contact with other
people, since matching a set of abstract standards doesn’t require attending to
the responses of individual human beings.
Third, when someone seeks reassurance from others, that is inevitably conditional
rather than unconditional. It is conditional upon the behaviors that the person
uses to ask for reassurance, and it is also conditional upon the willingness of
the other person to provide it. If someone stops asking, or if other people stop
responding, they will no longer receive reassurance.
Fourth, reassurance from others is temporary, because it doesn’t eliminate the
underlying negation; it only opposes it and offsets it. The internal voice will
continue to negate the person’s being, lovability, acceptability, or place in
the world, etc., and they will need to repeatedly seek acceptance to counteract
it.
Fifth, each external reassurance that “I am worthy” will tend to elicit an opposing
“No you’re not” from that internal voice, escalating in the same way as an argument
between two people, increasing the incongruence. If someone has an internal voice
that negates who they are, and their lives seem to confirm this by being relatively
unsuccessful in their job, relationships, etc., that is very unpleasant, but at
least it is congruent.
But if someone has the same internal negative voice, and they are successful in
work, relationships, etc. the contrast between their internal voice and the outward
success will be much greater. They may have a much better life, but at the cost
of greater incongruence. The more reassurance they get from others and worldly
success, the larger the incongruence between the internal message about not being
worthy and the external message about being worthy. Their internal voice will
nullify any amount of external success.
Seeking approval from others is like using make-up or any other artificial behavior
to attract someone. The more you use, the more it contrasts with what it’s covering
up, and the more you know that the other person is responding to something that
is not real, rather than to who you really are. This greater incongruence causes
instability, and a loss of the external success may result in someone collapsing
into mid-life crisis, depression, or suicide.
Sixth, there is an interesting parallel between the voice that says someone is
not deserving, and the reassurance that says that they are. Both are based on
the opinion of other people, not the person themselves. Whichever voice someone
attends to, they become slaves to someone else’s opinion, rather than attending
to their own experience.
If reassurance doesn’t work to counter negative feelings of self-worth, what can
someone do? The answer to this puzzle is to make the original negation clear,
and find a way to eliminate it, so that someone can return to their original state
in which they neither deserve, nor not deserve, they just are.
One way to do this is to listen carefully to those internal messages of negation,
and realize that those messages are about the adult who said them, not about the
child who heard them, a change in scope. Those messages came from adults with
limitations, people who couldn’t just say directly, “I’m overwhelmed; I can’t
(or won’t) provide what you need and want.” Instead, they said in effect, “The
only way I can deal with what you ask for is to tell you that you don’t deserve
it. That way you won’t ask for it, and I won’t have to provide it.”
A slightly different way to elicit the same realization is to first collect and
list all the internal rejection messages that the client has accumulated, including
the emphasis, tempo, and tonality in which each statement was made. “You’re no
good.” “You’re stupid,” etc. Then ask the client to visualize themselves as a
newborn infant or small child, and ask them to say each of these messages to this
child, including the volume emphasis, tempo and tonality. This shifts the person’s
perceptual position from being the receiver of these messages to being the sender.
From this position, usually it quickly becomes obvious that this is totally inappropriate
and ridiculous. Their response to the rejection messages changes from taking them
seriously to hearing them as messages about the parent’s limitations and inadequacies,
rather than their own.
Virginia Satir’s “family reconstruction process” provided a vivid dramatization
of what a client’s parents had to deal with from their parents, and how that created
their limitations. In this process, the parents’ bad treatment of the client is
seen as a consequence of the parents’ limitations, and had little or nothing to
do with any limitations in the client. Their previous thoughts about “not deserving,”
etc., were all a result of a mistaken scope.
When you realize that your understanding was a mistake, you can easily shrug it
off and move on. Of course, some people will blame themselves for making the mistake,
but that is also a mistake, at a more general logical level. The same kind of
process can be used to elicit this realization. “See yourself as a tiny infant
or young child, and scold them for making this mistake in misunderstanding their
parents.”
Another way to work with internal negation is with Connirae Andreas’ Core Transformation
process, in which someone is guided to a realization of what they really want,
which is an experience of being, uncluttered by “not deserving” or “deserving.”
When “not deserving” disappears, there is no longer any need for “deserving” to
negate the “undeserving.” Unpleasant things and pleasant things happen to each
of us, and that’s a fact. We can be sad about the unpleasant events, and grateful
for the pleasant ones, and realize that we didn’t deserve (or not deserve) either
one. That allows us to return to simply experiencing whatever is going on—including
our responses to what is going on—free of any thought or question about deserving
it or not. This is something that sages and saints have described for centuries,
using various terms like “enlightenment,” “waking up from the world of illusion,”
or “simple acceptance of what is.”
Many people who actively seek spiritual or mystic experience are driven by an
underlying negation without realizing it, seeking bliss and oneness without first
neutralizing the inner negation that keeps them from returning to their original
integration and oneness. This is even more likely to be true of spiritual teachers
and gurus who become invested in the status and importance of their employment,
and have to uphold their role of being “enlightened,” a sure sign that they are
not.
Deserving Now let’s examine “deserving” in more detail, to find out how people
get into this kind of mess in the first place. The meaning of the word “deserve”
is a shortened version of “I think I should have/get something because I have
a right to it.” Whenever a word is a condensed and shortened form of a longer
communication, it is usually packed with hidden or poorly recognized meanings
that can become a trap for the unwary—both speaker and listener.
There are both pleasant and unpleasant versions of deserving, as in “She deserves
a medal for what she did,” or “He deserves to be hung for that.” So “deserving”
is an expression of reward and punishment, established by someone’s judgment of
what ought to be.
Usually the word “deserve” is used without any additional information, “He deserves
it.” That kind of statement is called a “factive,” because it is stated as a fact,
not to be questioned. Even when deserving is stated as someone’s personal view,
“I think he deserves it,” the reason for deserving is often omitted.
When people say that they “deserve” something, usually the implication is that
someone else should give it to them without their having to do anything to receive
it. Their reason is usually because they are “entitled” to it, and often this
is because they are special, more important than someone else who doesn’t deserve
it—a version of the “divine right of kings” and the nobles that the kings “entitled”
by giving them titles.
In NLP terms “deserving” is an outcome that is “ill-formed,” because it is not
under the control of the person who has the outcome—someone else should provide
it. Since we have no direct control over what someone else does, this puts the
person who “deserves” at the mercy of someone else’s ability and willingness to
provide what they want. When someone else doesn’t provide what someone “deserves,”
they usually complain, rather than taking useful action themselves.
If someone has made an agreement that specifies what they are to receive by that
agreement, then they do deserve to receive whatever was promised—no matter how
silly or ill-advised the agreement itself might have been. Like the word “fairness,”
“deserve” only applies to agreements, a limited scope, and what someone deserves
is specified clearly by the agreement.
However, many people go far beyond this appropriate scope, thinking that they
deserve things that have nothing to do with any agreement. They often act as if
they had some kind of written agreement with God, or nature, or the universe,
specifying what they should receive. For instance often people say, “A child deserves
a loving home,” or “I deserve an opportunity to succeed.”
I certainly prefer a world in which everyone has an opportunity to satisfy their
needs, and has a loving home and opportunities to succeed, etc., and I do my best
to move the world in that direction, but that is based on my desire, not an imaginary
agreement.
Some people even say that something is a “God-given right.” But if it were really
“God-given,” then we would all have it, and certainly no one could possibly take
it away from us! Once I observed Fritz Perls smoking in a school auditorium where
he had just given a demonstration of Gestalt Therapy. A woman approached him and
asked, “How come you have the right to smoke when all the signs say, “No smoking”?
Perls responded, “I don’t have the right, and I don’t not have the right; I just
do it.”
As far as I know, life is a gift, and it comes with no agreement or guarantee
except that it ends in death—usually much sooner than we would like. Making sure
that all people have opportunities to satisfy their needs is a job for us all.
It is not based on any kind of “deserving.” It is based on what we want to have
happen because we think will work best for all of us, and it is up to us to create
and maintain the kind of personal agreements, society, and government that support
that.
Self-worth “Low self-worth” is another term that is packed with obscure meaning.
In ordinary usage, we say things like, “That car isn’t worth much money,” or “That’s
a valuable idea.” Whenever we make a statement about value or worth, there are
always three elements.
1. The thing or event that is valued (the car or idea).
2. A way of measuring value, which is usually monetary, but could also be a description
of something else valuable that could be exchanged for what is valued.
3. Who values the thing or event; who is willing to pay for it, or exchange something
of value for it?
Imagine, in turn, that there is no thing or event to value, . . . or nothing that
can be exchanged for it, . . . or no one to value it, . . . and you will find
that the idea of “worth” or “value” is completely meaningless. All three elements
are necessary for “worth” to have any meaning.
Now lets see if the idea of “self-worth” has all three elements. Presumably you
have a self, which can be valued, so that element is present.
“Self-worth” specifies that the thing valued and the one who values that thing
are the same. That doesn’t fit the description above, but for the sake of argument,
lets say that you can split yourself in two, and value yourself.
Without your self, “you” would not exist, and you would have nothing, so the value
of your self to you is immense, and no amount of money or goods would be enough
to buy it. Since the value of your self, your self-worth, is huge, how could you
possibly have “low self-worth”?
If your self did have a monetary value, and if your self was something that could
be transferred to someone else, that could create a value to someone else. However,
that would only be relevant to establishing an “other-worth,” not a “self-worth.”
So what on earth do people mean when they use a term like “self-worth”? If you
ask them to describe what they mean, you will find that they are making a self/other
comparison, measuring their worth by comparing themselves to someone else, and/or
thinking about what someone else values, thinking that someone else would find
them not worthy. It is not really “self-worth” at all, it is “other-worth,” and
the need for it results from the same kind of critical and derogatory comments
from parents and other adults that make people feel “undeserving.” “You’ll never
amount to much.” “You’re stupid.” Marshall Rosenberg describes these critical
comments as different versions of the category, “You’re PPP, PPT” (“piss poor
protoplasm, poorly put together”). As with “deserving,” the remedy is to realize
that these parental messages are about a different scope. They are not about you,
they are about the speaker’s limitations and judgments, as described above.
Another way to create this kind of separation and realization is to teach the
“strategy for responding to criticism” that my wife Connirae and I developed over
twenty years ago, in which you keep yourself physically separate from critical
comments, whether external or internal, and then go through a simple evaluation
process to decide whether or not they make sense to you before taking them in
as valid comments on your behavior.
Read Exerpts from Several Chapters
Contingent Implication (excerpt
from chapter 1, Implication)
Recursion
(excerpt from chapter 5, Self-reference)
What others have said about Six
Blind Elephants . . .
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