I call this next piece your “established truth.”
Basically, your formative years were all about establishing the truth. Your truth. Your subconscious map of reality coming together. Your truth about you, the world, the people around you, everything.
I should say here, very clearly, your “truth” and “the truth” are not the same, even though you have designed your life around the idea that they are. You have no idea what the truth is, although you would swear that you do.
Your gravitational draw for self-sabotage is, as we’ve already discussed, designed to repeat and repeat and repeat. But it’s also built on an illusion, the illusion of how you have seen your life to this point. As we discussed, that past of yours started with what you were thrown into, but that really was just a beginning.
Whether you’d say you have had a crappy life, an uneventful one, or a great one, your future is perpetually hampered by however you describe the past, though not in the way you might think it does.
Our past is the template upon which our entire future is based; therefore, it’s little wonder we live such lives of limitation and frustration.
Most people, if you ask them, will explain how their life has turned out by looking to a series of selective milestones. Some will take three minutes to tell you and others will take a mind-numbing three weeks, with more twists and turns than a bowl of ramen noodles and of much less interest than our squiggly friends of economical delight.
How would you describe how life has gone for you thus far? What are the milestones you’d point to? Whatever falls out of your mouth here is your established truth.
Basically, you have a tale to tell like everyone else, a ready explanation of yourself, your life, and why you now do what you do. As you stumble your way through your daily life (and yes, it’s a stumble), you refer back to this “truth,” occasionally recollecting the tired and well-rehearsed lines to justify and explain yourself—and, every once in a while, to try to understand yourself.
We’ve come up with standard ways to justify and explain how we are as adults. We use the same kinds of explanations, and we accept those explanations from others so that they’ll accept them from us.
It’s the kind of stuff you talk to your close friends about after your second or third drink when the conversation innocently slides away from the topic of your favorite Netflix show and into why you’re struggling these days. You connect the chaos or discomforts of your life today with some hurt, pain, or incident from your past.
You blissfully explain your life away in the same way your parents would explain theirs and your grandparents would explain theirs. This method of explanation gets handed down from generation to generation in the everyday meanderings of conversation. The details differ, but the bullshit continues.
Any random stranger could walk up to you, ask you to tell them a little about yourself, press the INFO button, and off you’ll go.
You’ll start with what you do for a living, where you work or live, and within the space of a few nudges of conversation out it comes:
“I’m originally from Buffalo, and . . .” or “I’m the youngest of three, so . . .”
Or “I was born in the eighties, which is why . . .” or “My father was a Marine, and . . .”
Or “My mom was a teacher, so . . .”
Now, most of that stuff is just plain old-fashioned thrown-ness you’re talking about, stuff you had no say in. You had no say in your dad being a Marine, right? But you and I both know it doesn’t end there, does it?
Oh, hell no. Because next comes the juicy stuff!
Stuff like “Dad was a Marine and was too strict with me as a kid. I don’t think he really cared about me. He seemed more interested in his career than in how I was doing. It was like I could never do anything right in his eyes. I became a bit of a loner in my teens and never really broke out of that.”
You can see where people might start shaping their lives around such statements. Changing themselves or their circumstances to avoid or suppress certain things. Building a life. Establishing a truth.
UNTRUTHING THE TRUTH
Okay, let’s do a little exercise.
Imagine you’re holding a cup of hot, black coffee. Suddenly, out of nowhere, someone bumps your elbow and the scalding liquid goes everywhere! It splatters across your bare arm, down your leg, all over the floor. The burning pain is intense, the mess irretrievable. Your pants are completely ruined, and you have a job interview in twenty minutes! You need to change clothes now!
Except you can’t. You’re in a Starbucks. You’re miles from home, and your interview is a fifteen-minute walk away.
You look at the guy who crashed into you and say, “Seriously, man?”
He shrugs his shoulders and mutters a barely audible apology, quickly walking away. Like he doesn’t give a damn.
Your heart is racing, your head a mishmash of thoughts, your body pulsing with anger, then frustration, before subsiding to helplessness and then down to resignation. It took ages to get this interview! You’re screwed. You leave and head home.
Okay, now imagine you are someone else who is watching this same scene from a corner of the Starbucks. Instead of the participant in it, you’re now an observer of it.
You’re quietly enjoying your morning tea and muffin when a guy comes in and catches the corner of your eye. He looks agitated, a little nervous. He orders a coffee, reaches for his wallet, takes out his credit card, and then drops it.
“Dammit!” he proclaims in a biting tone. He pays and steps to the side, past several other people between himself and the pick-up counter.
“Timmy!” says the server.
“Eh, it’s TOMMY, actually,” he retorts. (I’m fully aware that no one is really called Tommy anymore.)
Tommy grabs his cup, briskly turns, obviously not looking where he is headed, and BAM! He smacks right into a young guy who didn’t see him coming.
Tommy’s coffee explodes everywhere.
“SERIOUSLY, MAN!!!?” exclaims Tommy.
The entire room silences as everyone turns to find the source of the drama.
The young kid, clearly embarrassed and trying to get away from this spectacle, softly apologizes and makes a hasty retreat.
AAAAAAAAAND SCENE!!!
Now, which of these versions is “the truth”?
Well, both of them are. In the first scenario, you personally experienced the man bumping into you, which seemingly caused you to miss a job interview. In the second, where you were observing rather than participating, you saw both parties at fault for different reasons. If you had seen or experienced only the first scenario, you’d think the fault was completely on the other man. That’s the tricky thing about truth: we see it only from our own perspective. But what I want you to consider is that this exercise is your entire life in a microcosm. What you have relied upon as the truth is nothing more than your personal experience of incidents and circumstances, except that in your case you have carried these experiences around, as if they were carved in stone, and fabricated a life out of them.
“Oh yeah, Gary, but what about speaking my truth, huh?”
That’s fine, but what if “speaking your truth” is what keeps you trapped? For what it’s worth, I’m fine with anyone speaking their truth, just so long as you realize that’s just what it is, how it was for you. That doesn’t diminish or pooh-pooh your experience; it just allows you to see it in a way that empowers rather than victimizes you.
You are a magic little sponge permeated with a myriad of established truths upon established truths. Is it any wonder many people have trouble getting free from their past? They’re looking in all the wrong places, arguing with family and friends, trying to reconcile a past that they see as “the truth” with people who obviously had an entirely different experience from theirs.
Then they get furious about that! Your truth is NOT the truth to anyone but you, and if your truth does not light you up, it might be time for you to come up with anothe
r one. If this sentence infuriates you, that should give you a sense of how committed you have become to your own version of the past rather than confronting the life you’ve forged since those times and the future you are currently denying yourself.
Take a look right now and start to deal with what you’ve done with your life. Look at your relationships with your family, with yourself, the way you relate to love and sex and your potential and partnerships. Your hang-ups, your triggers, your rages, and your disappointments.
All of it based in, organized around, interwoven with . . . what?
Your established truth. Your version.
Let’s go back to the example of the kid whose dad was a Marine. Here, it wasn’t the fact that she was the daughter of someone in the military that compelled her to turn inward. Lots of people come from that background and have very different outcomes. It was the established truth she connected herself to that did the damage. Her established truth became what she told herself about the way her dad was more interested in himself than her, which led her to a life of being a loner.
Dad did what he did. That’s it! What she did with her established truth from there was on her. It doesn’t matter how shitty your past was. Many people have had upsetting or devastating experiences in their past that, as adults, they’ve tried to forget or managed to “overcome” by trying to put a positive spin on them. They fool themselves into the idea that they’re “over it” or that it no longer impacts them. They’re trying to get over something they took away from their already skewed and biased lens of the world.
I can completely understand that you might have been thrown into a life that included things that were blatantly inappropriate, often unjust, and in some cases even illegal or immoral. I get that. I have all the compassion in the world for you if that’s the case. My heart truly bleeds for you and what you experienced, but at the same time my head wants to give you a shake!
Your established truth lives on through you. You perpetuate it. It’s all yours now.
Once established, these truths of yours go deeper and reach further out and begin to take over your life, reaching all the way back from the past and crawling into your future like an existential shadow. You’re hooked on them. And I mean hooked.
It’s as if you’re stuck in your own personal Groundhog Day, except this isn’t funny anymore and Bill Murray isn’t coming along anytime soon to help you out with some of that caustic, dry wit and his cheeky midwestern grin.
Who or what have you blamed for your life being the way it has been? Maybe your life was turbulent and upsetting when you were growing up, or perhaps it was boring and uneventful. The thing is, there are plenty of people who grew up in similar situations who haven’t turned out anything like you.
Or maybe you came from a comfortable, peaceful home and had the childhood of your dreams! What did you establish as true about that?
Look, lots of people have dirt in their past. Some were made bankrupt, some were assaulted or robbed or cheated, while others were dominated by others and used for a purpose outside their wishes, but that kind of stuff does not define you or who you are. Who you have become is not a function of what happened back then but rather of the “truths” you picked out and held onto.
In our exercise there was a coffee shop, some people, and some spilled coffee.
THAT WAS IT, NOTHING MORE!! But if you were to ask a few people about the incidents and what they saw, you’d hear different perspectives, opinions, judgments, and unabashed drama.
Imagine all of that getting stuck in that magic little sponge! What would that do to a life? Consider the idea that your entire life is nothing more than your personal experience of it. An angle. A way of looking at your life that became much more than just a simple viewpoint. It became an excuse for why you keep falling into the same destructive patterns. But it doesn’t have to be.
A CURVEBALL
What you’ve been pointing to as “truth”—every incident, every scene, every drama, joy, and upset from your childhood all the way through to five minutes ago—is little more than a perspective. It’s not the truth. It’s an angle from which you participated in the life you were thrown into. Everyone has one of those.
Which one is “the” truth?
None of them . . . or all of them. But not one of them.
You’ve lived as if your “truth” is objective, like a solid, immovable object that is the way it is. But it’s not. And that’s why we argue—in politics, in relationships, in business, and in our families. Painfully trying to reconcile, to agree on a single truth, when the reality is that there is none.
On one hand, you can never change the past, but on the other, you can choose to change how you see and explain it. Which in turn changes how you feel about it. Which then, in every sense of the word, changes the past for you. At the very least how it impacts you.
This news could also be terrible for you. Why? Because you may well have witnessed your family disintegrate or your love life founder or your dreams crash because they were organized around your version of events. And you fought for your version. You became dug in about your version, and you’ve been right about it ever since.
Your truth, your view, as if it were the only truth, the only view. Screw everyone else and how they experienced things, right?
Explaining your current life could now become a bit more challenging, given this news. Uh-oh!
It’s at this point of the inquiry that many people start to panic. They cop out and myopically blame genetics or some intangible mystery of life that they seemingly cannot have or change. The need to excuse and explain is compelling. You’ll pivot and start to rationalize that some people are just smarter, more gifted, or superlatively stronger or more intuitive than you, basically ANYTHING to get you off the hook for how this life of yours has been going.
You might start claiming that I’m discrediting or diminishing the severity of your experience and that no one can possibly understand your “journey.” Maybe I’ll become yet another of those people who never understood you or don’t “get” you. Then you can throw this book down in a hissy fit and head back to your BS life.
Just so you know, I’m face-palming the shit out of myself right now.
You? You’re victimizing yourself into a truly forgettable life. Like most people, you’d rather explain your life than intervene in it.
Oh well, you’re fucked, might as well just go live in a cave in the mountains, huh?
Give me a break. I’m not backing down, and neither should you.
Your past is basically an explanation, something you came up with to explain why you are you. Period. An excuse. This shit has just got to end.
The French Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre sums it up perfectly here:
“Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.”
Look, at some point, you just have to get sick of yourself and your justifications, but do it in such a way that you don’t become victim to yet another thing. This isn’t about despair, or guilt, or shame, or any other negative state; this is about finally taking total and complete ownership of your life. Dry your eyes, sit up in your chair, and finally set the record straight with yourself.
Whatever truth you own doesn’t own you.
If you’re still struggling with this, start with the idea that at some level you get something out of keeping your established truths the way they’ve been. Something gets proved and confirmed by your continued squirming and avoiding taking ownership of your life. To separate yourself from the damage you’ve done.
So, you think you’re fucked up because you were born in a trailer park and you never saw your drunk dad, or your parents divorced, or you were bullied at school, or someone betrayed your trust or manipulated you as a kid? Maybe you were a standout sports star at school and now just a washed-up has-been. Maybe you didn’t flourish at school at all and now that’s why you don’t pursue a life that requires some academic or intellectual application.
Rea
lly? Sure, your life might be off track or, hell, even in the gutter right now, but your established truths you use to explain it just don’t cut it in the cold light of day anymore. Not after what you’ve just read here. That truth doesn’t own you.
Stop squirming! I can hear you now: “But other people have drive/ambition/purpose, and I don’t have that.”
So, that’s what your life has come down to? A feeling? A momentary surge of your emotional state? You’re waiting on a passion suddenly rising? That’s why you haven’t broken out of this cycle? Listen closely. You’re not any different from anyone else! You have all of this untapped potential, a greatness, a contribution to make to this life and to people, yet you spend your days explaining yourself away!
You’re going to have to confront the idea that you are in fact not defined by your established truths and that they are nothing more than a shiny, easy-to-explain excuse for your life, just like your thrown-ness. They are your heavy, significant, and justified get-out-of-jail-free card.
In short, the jig is up. You do not self-sabotage because of mommy issues or daddy issues or trust issues or confidence issues or anything else. You don’t even have issues! We did this before—you’re not a category! This isn’t about what was done to you or what has happened to you or where you are from or your genetic luck of the draw.
You self-sabotage because of something else entirely . . .
Your sabotage is completely a function of the three saboteurs. And it’s now time we unmask them.
“There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion.”
—Daniel Dennett
07
The Three Saboteurs
You are in a perpetual state of fucking yourself over so that you can repeatedly save yourself from what fucked you over in the first place!
If you haven’t taken a break until this point, take one now. There has been a lot to take in, and the next part will be all the more impactful if you’ve had a chance to percolate with everything we’ve covered.
Stop Doing That Sh*t Page 6