Anxiety, compulsion, maturity & the importance of having options

“Age is very high price to pay for maturity.“

TOM STOPPARD

 

“And many a times, even that ain’t enough!”

ANONYMOUS

A newborn calf is able to walk and join the herd within a few minutes of being born.

In contrast, when you were born, it was around a year before you took your first steps.

As an infant, you were utterly dependent on your parents and could look forward to years, if not decades, of learning and training before being able to fend for yourself.

In addition to growing into your body, you also had to undergo a long apprenticeship period to learn the rules and cultural norms of society before you were ready to take your place among other adults.

As human society has progressed, and more and more information needs to be transferred to newer generations, this period of apprenticeship has become even longer.

In earlier times it was not unusual for men and women to start their own families once they reached sexual maturity by the age of 15 – 16 years, have children and be considered adults for all practical purposes.

For you, having being born in the modern era, it was not till your late teens or even mid- twenties that you became financially independent from your parents.

This unusually long period of dependency had a great impact on your life.

During your formative years, your parents (or an adult-in-charge) were an essential source of security and authority. You had to do what you were told and live by their rules, whether you liked it or not.

You were in many ways, at their complete mercy, reliant on their feelings of affection toward you. Their actions during your childhood and your reaction to it, continues to have a strong influence on your behavior to this day.

As Dr. Feldenkrais writes in “The Potent Self”, “From the earliest moments of our lives, we can distinguish two sorts of actions:

(1) those where we are left to ourselves to work out our own way, as in learning to comply with the demands of our bodies, and (2) those where the adult in charge of us becomes emotionally excited and encourages us to continue our actions, or discourages us to the best of their ability or judgement.”

As a result, you ended up with two kinds of behaviors: ones associated with a low emotional tone and others which are always accompanied by emotional tension.

Dr. Feldenkrais continues, “The first actions are performed in their normal setting without any special bias for doing them; we can as easily refrain from them.

We can repeat them without any strong feelings one way or the other, or completely refrain from enacting them.

They rarely involve hesitation; in short, these are the most spontaneous acts we are capable of, and they constitute the bulk of activity of normal adults.”

The second type of actions, on the other hand, “continue to be associated with a high emotional intensity.

Children who have always had a lot of fuss made about their food, their clothes, or their looks continue to associate with these things an emotive intensity unless they have learned not to do so.” (Highlight mine)

Depending on the kind of parenting you received, and your own interpretation of that experience, some specific actions or behavior became charged with emotional content.

In areas where you were provided with an orderly environment to grow up in, you made consistent progress towards maturity, with no emotional residue. For instance, even if you had to undergo the harsh, but reliably consistent experience of burning your fingers when touching a naked flame, you quickly learnt to never repeat that behavior with no long term emotional scarring.

Your parents, however well-intentioned, were unable to provide such a consistent environment for you.

Both severe criticism as well as profuse praise offered by grown-ups for things that you did, or did not do, had the same effect. As did too much or too little discipline, intermittently applied. It interfered with the normal maturation process, one in which the needs of your body, or the stage of growth you were in, dictated what you did or learnt to do. As a result, your development was affected and in some cases, arrested. 

For a child, what their parents do or say, takes on disproportionate significance. While one would expect children with abusive parents to suffer maladjustments later in life, even children from “normal families”, if there is such a thing, can be equally affected. As a child, with your vivid imagination, you may have interpreted a set of benign acts or a normal situation, as something that threatened your safety or security.

Or you may have developed a certain characteristic way of obtaining the favor and cooperation of your parents. It does not matter if you achieved it by becoming the “good” child to get them to give you what you wanted, or by being the spoilt tyrant to whom parents gave in to, or even the kid who “earned their keep” by comforting their parents instead of the other way around.

What is important is that, even today, while doing these or related actions, you have an urge to stop, and in stopping yourself from doing them, you feel pressure to perform the action.

In either case, you exhibit compulsive behavior and experience an inner resistance to the act.

The inner resistance “is always expressed through muscular tension of the muscles of the face, the neck, the abdomen, the fingers, or the toes that can easily be detected if looked for.”

This unnecessary, or “parasitic” muscular contraction becomes associated with actions where you feel conflicting impulses, and it prevents you from smoothly performing the action without hesitation, or without excessive effort.

This is true for each one of us.

For there is no perfect style of parenting, and being a parent has made me realize that my parents were also learning on the job. Most parents did the best they could, given their own upbringing, their social and economic circumstances. As someone put it, being a parent is the only relationship where the measure of a job well done is a successful and (mostly) amicable, separation.

In society there have always been social and economic conditions which systematically encourage, even ensure the emergence of compulsive behavior. However, there is no guiding mechanism for the development of maturity. It is often left to the parents and the child to figure out.

According to Dr. Feldenkrais, “The object of education should be to eliminate these compulsive states and to help the person acquire the ability for potent action.”

He used the word “potent” in a broader sense than is generally used.

He defined impotence as a state where we are repeatedly unable to accomplish something, despite much effort and a strong desire to do so (and without any underlying physical condition which prevents us from doing so).

For example, you may face difficulty in asserting yourself in situations where it is needed. Or struggle to be open and relaxed even among close friends.

Or find yourself unable to commit to a career or a relationship. Or even achieve a cherished goal despite many attempts because of that one thing about yourself that always gets in the way.

The one thing that you are just unable to change.

By this definition, impotent anger has a lot in common with an inability to perform sexually.

Potent activity, on the other hand, is the sort we demonstrate as we mature whereby we “gradually learn to rely on ourselves and decide how much pleasure we are ready to forgo in not complying with the habits of thought and action instilled in us, and how much displeasure we are ready to incur by acting against them.

In short, we gradually take the responsibility for our own actions.” (Highlight mine).

For me, being able to take responsibility for ourselves, or in other words, to take care of ourselves, is the minimum requirement for maturity.

I tell students attending “Awareness Through Movement” or ATM lessons that the main thing I ask of them as adults, is to take care of themselves (along with looking after their own comfort) during the lesson.

At the face of it, it seems a somewhat redundant, even a little ludicrous statement, as the movements during ATM lessons are usually very gentle. Moreover, the students are made aware from the start that the emphasis is not on doing the movements “correctly” or doing them “well”, but on paying attention to what feels good and is easy for one to do comfortably.

You would be surprised, however, to see how many students struggle to stay within what is comfortable for them, or to refrain from doing the movements “as well as the person on the neighboring mat”.

The students are, in that moment, compulsively re-enacting scripts deeply ingrained during their formative years.

Coming back to Dr. Feldenkrais on the subject of maturity, he continues, “Short of this maturity, we revert to passive resistance, enacting partly our defiance of the habit and partly our compliance with it.

In those planes of life in which our maturity is least developed, we continue acting compulsively; we do (or we do not do) things knowing perfectly well that we want the exact opposite. Under these circumstances, impotence appears. “

You see others around you being able to do the very thing you cannot, casually and with ease. You begin to blame yourself for some moral failing or inherent weakness, or even invoke fate or the will of God to explain your lack of success.

You also begin avoiding that activity or sphere of life. Maybe it was not meant for you and you convince yourself that it was not that important anyway.

In this way, you reconcile yourself to living a much smaller life than what is possible.

For there is nothing wrong with you except the faulty learning which has outlived its necessity in the dependence period and is now sustained by force of habit.  Internal conflict, compulsive behavior and the accompanying bodily tension is now intimately associated with that action.

Further, when deployed beyond the dependency period, your way of finding security or reconciling internal conflict, one which served you so well in the past, may not work at all times, in all contexts.

And this leads to anxiety.

Dr. Feldenkrais continues, “At the root of all anxiety, where education has failed, lies inner compulsion to act or to check action.

And compulsion is sensed when motivation for action is conflicting; that is when the habitual pattern that the person can enact is sensed as compromising the person’s security.

The feeling of security is linked with the image of the self that has been cultivated in the dependence period.

Thus for some people, their good looks – for others, absolute unselfishness, absolute virility, superman ideas, absolute goodness, and all kinds of imaginary, untestable notions, habits of thought and patterns of behavior – have served as a means of obtaining affection, approval, protection, and care.

Compulsion is sensed when there is a threat of any of these means becoming ineffective; the person feels endangered and left without any means of protection.” (Highlights mine).

I grew up being a “good boy” and being “nice” is my default setting to date. I still struggle to refuse a request or respond in kind to a rude person, or an unkind act.

Being nice per se, is not a bad thing in itself, but when the behavior is compulsive, the niceness loses its meaning.

It almost feels as if Dr. Feldenkrais is addressing me when he writes in The Potent Self, “The person who never refuses anybody because he cannot may seem kind, but is most of the time suffering from his own goodness. He does more harm in his own charming manner to himself and to others than do healthy people who are good when necessary and cruel when it is justified.”

While I am at ease handling large financial transactions, and can calmly use logic to make tough financial decisions, a simple request from an acquaintance to do something I am not inclined to do, is enough to create enormous and unnecessary stress in my life.

For me, the simple act of saying “no” to a casual request takes on a much larger meaning.

Another way to look at this is that: Anxiety arises from a lack of perceived options. The script that worked so well in the past is no longer working. Yet one is compelled to enact the same, and the stakes are perceived to be high.

It is worthwhile to take a slight detour at this point and delve into the importance of having options.

Being a useful and valued member of society is important to each one of us, as our very survival depends on it. Accordingly, members separated or expelled from their tribe develop certain anxious behaviors such as hyper – vigilance and frequent waking up during sleep. 

The goals of society, however, are often at odds with the wants of the individual.

Society needs conformance, while the individual wants individual expression and freedom. 

As a means to control our behavior and to keep us in line, people with authority often use the mechanism of presenting us with only two choices, where one of the two is a terrible option.

This leaves us with, in effect, only one “less terrible” option.

Thus, a mother may command her son to clean his room, “or else.”  Similarly, we must obey the law, go to school, get a job, pay taxes, “or else.”

For you to have true choice, you must have at least three options to choose from.

These options are often available but we do not perceive them, which is not surprising as since childhood, most choices have been presented to us in a binary, “or else” format and we get conditioned to evaluating decisions in this “all-or-nothing” fashion.

So, coming back to my own example, I can either comply with the request and be nice, “or else” say “no” and come across as a terrible person.

There is a third possibility – that I politely refuse and my acquaintance does not mind, and simply goes on to ask another person. This does not occur to me in my heightened emotional state associated with being “nice”.

For someone else, saying “no” may be a simple matter while handling finances could be the cause of nightmares. Depending on their personal history, what is important to one person, is of little consequence to another. Therefore, “more often than not, trying to imitate other people’s behavior only complicates the issue and makes finding the right solution for the individual even more difficult.”

Is having options simply a matter of choice? Something “nice-to-have”, as in while choosing from a varied selection of merchandize online?

Clearly not. From a fitness and survival point of view, having only one way to do something important can be risky. The environment or circumstances can change, and that one way of acting may no longer be viable. As a result, your way of doing things, and perhaps your very existence may come under threat.

This way of looking at options explains how at times, our best traits also become the ones that limit us.

We all develop skills during childhood which help us deal with people or situations. We select a few which worked well for us in the past and continuously hone these skills, deploying them in different situations, making them stronger at the expense of developing other skills.

These become our “go to” and sometimes, only option for tackling a problem. When faced with a situation where that particular skill or approach does not work, we are left with few, if any, alternatives.

For example, the youngest sibling in a large family may develop hyper-competitive tendencies at a young age in order to obtain the same share of attention and resources as the older siblings. He may find the ability, as well as the motivation to compete, a useful asset throughout school and in his professional life. However, he may find himself experiencing the same competitive urge in situations where it is not as useful – for instance in interactions with his spouse or even with his children. He senses it is not appropriate in this situation, yet at the same time, he struggles to stop himself from competing, unless he learns not to do so.

This approach also explains why, despite repeated painful encounters or experiences, people keep making the same mistakes.

A woman may leave an abusive husband, only to find herself in a similar relationship with a different man a few years down the line.

Or a man may leave a job he hates only to find the same problems at his new place of work.

Repeating the same thing while expecting a different result, has been equated with being insane.  For only an insane person would keep repeating an action despite the same, painful result each time.

But looking at it from this perspective, where one is acting from a lack of options, or where one’s habitual way of being is seen as the only means to find security, repeating the compulsive behavior, despite the painful result, may be the only course of action available to an immature person.

The mature person, on the other hand, has the flexibility to act with choice rather than compulsion.

She learns to disassociate the act from the emotional content attached to it from the past. Free of the emotional baggage, the choice to do, or not do the act, is in line with her preferences and not what it meant in the past.

Instead of the reverting to the pattern from the past, or even its exact opposite as an act of rebellion, she simply does what is expedient under the circumstances.

Instead of looking outwards to external authority, she is able look within and be her own authority on what is right for her in that moment.

In other words, maturity is the ability to respond to what is in front of you by looking within yourself, and without the emotional intensity attached to the event from the past.

You may have noticed that the conclusion that we have arrived at by following Dr. Feldenkrais’ line of thinking is remarkably similar to Zen, Confucian, Daoist or Buddhist thinking, where we act spontaneously in accordance with the current situation, as opposed to acting in accordance with the past, or with abstract principles or rules that are general and not fitting particular circumstances. 

This is altogether not very surprising given that Dr. Feldenkrais pursued and incorporated elements from eastern thought and philosophies into his Method. He arrives at this conclusion, however, using a different route and with a very different perspective.

I hope you found this view on maturity, anxiety, compulsion and the importance of having options an interesting and thought provoking read.

Having defined maturity, in the next chapter we will focus on how we can improve in areas where we exhibit immature or compulsive behavior.