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We have been exploring the experience of not being something that you don’t value. The other possibility, thinking of yourself as not being something that you do value, turns out to be very different. Again think of something that you are not, but this time make it something that you value. “I’m not tenacious,” “I’m not graceful,” “I’m not patient,” or any other quality that you value. Take a couple of minutes to explore how you represent this, and what that experience is like...
Amy: I see a lot of pictures of what it would be like for me to have that quality, and I can sort of step into them to feel what it would be like, but the feeling is only partial, and I know I’m not there yet.
“Not there yet.” So this is a quality that you hope or expect to have in the future. What is your response to those pictures, and the feeling that you get from them?
Amy: It draws me toward them, it’s motivating. I think about it a lot.
It sounds like you might have future-paced examples of this quality, but you don’t have present or past examples of it.
Amy: Yes, I think that’s how I know I don’t have it yet.
Sam: I thought about a quality that I have, but I want to have more strongly, so I know I don’t have that additional strength yet. Like Amy, I feel drawn forward, and I like it.
Yes, representations of something that you expect to have in the future are pretty direct and useful; they set a goal that is positively motivating. Each of us did a great deal of this while we were growing up and developing our adult skills and abilities. However, thinking of a quality that you don’t have and don’t expect to have in the future is very different. Does anyone have an example of that?
Sue: Yes, I see others with the quality that I don’t have. I feel vulnerable because I don’t have it. I’m envious of them, and I feel different and inferior in relation to them.
Now I want to ask you all to do what Sue did, and to take this process to the extreme. Imagine that all your focus was on valued qualities that you are not, and that you expect that you will never have them. Take a couple of minutes to experience what that is like...
Alice: I feel like a Martian. I don’t like that everyone else has all these wonderful qualities, and I don’t. I feel really inferior to everyone else, and I don’t like them for being so different from me.
Dan: Again I feel an emptiness inside, because all I notice is what I’m not, and I don’t have any sense of who I am. I also feel a lot of distance, and the word “unfair” comes to mind.
Yes, thinking of yourself as not being able to have a quality that you value usually involves thinking of others as having it, so again there is an implicit comparison, noticing the differences between yourself and others. One of my criteria for an effective self-concept was that it not have comparisons, but only contain positive representations of your own qualities. Another criterion was that a useful self-concept would join people and not separate them into up/down, superior/inferior, etc.
When we compare ourselves with others, we usually think of only one or two qualities at a time; we usually don’t think of all the other differences between us, or about all the many similarities. When we compare ourselves with others, we can always find someone who is better or worse than we are, depending on what we choose to compare.
Whether we feel inferior or superior, this comparing makes our self-concept dependent on others, rather than being something that we have internally. Comparing with others also draws our attention away from the qualities that we value in ourselves, and is likely to result in judgement of our shortcomings, bad feelings and other unuseful consequences. When I feel small and inadequate, criticizing others can give me a little temporary superiority, and make me feel a little better about myself. Now what is it like if you think of having that quality someday?
Dan: I feel a lovely release, like energy and attention flowing outward toward what I now think I could become.
Sue: It never occurred to me that I could have it.
Well, it is occurring to you now. Play the “As if” game. What is it like if you think about expecting that you could have that quality someday?
Sue: If I think about having that quality someday, it’s still a bit unreal to me, but I start wondering how it would feel to have it, and how that could happen, so I feel better about not having it. I’m more curious about how those other people have it, instead of just feeling bad because I don’t.
Our expectation of future possibility makes a huge difference in how we respond to an experience of not having a valued quality. If you expect to have a quality in the future, it can provide a wonderful experience of being motivated to develop the quality. Seeing someone else who expresses a valued quality can be a rich resource for finding out how much is possible, and for finding out how you can also develop that quality.
However, if you don’t expect to have something in the future, and you compare yourself to the people who have it, this often results in dissatisfaction, envy, feeling inferior, etc. So if someone is thinking about a valuable quality that they don’t expect to have in the future, and you work with them to change their belief of impossibility into possibility, that can transform envy, inferiority, and unhappiness into eager motivation, and that is a huge difference!
“What experiences and beliefs underlie your expectation of not having the quality in the future? What is your evidence for this belief about yourself, and what evidence is there for the opposite belief that you could hope to achieve this quality at some time in the future? When did you experience even a small degree of the quality, perhaps in an unusual situation, or perhaps long ago, or in a dream? Can you think of a time when you thought you could never have something, and then later you surprised yourself? If you could have this quality, how would your life be different?”
Once you have loosened up their belief about the possibility of having the quality, you can often proceed to either build the quality, as I did with Peter, or transform an ambiguous quality into the positive one that they want.
Fred: At a certain stage of life, some things may no longer be possible for someone, especially when there are physical limitations.
Well, all of us always have physical limitations. Remember that we are dealing with personal qualities. Although a quality affects what we do, it primarily affects the way in which we do it. Even if there are major limitations in what we can do, we always have some range of choice in how we do it. A quality like physical grace can be expressed in pole-vaulting, or with offering someone a slice of toast, and that is true of most qualities.
Did anyone do something different that what we have discussed so far?
Wendy: When I thought of myself as “not kind,” all my counterexamples to kindness jumped out at me and became very prominent and overwhelmed the examples of kindness, so all I had left was cruelty.
Melissa: I started out with a movie of kindness, but then it turned into cruelty.
So you both flipped from “not kind” to representations of being cruel, a negatively-valued quality. People have lots of different ways of responding to words of negation, so you really need to find out what they’re actually doing in their minds, and not assume that they are doing the same thing that you do. I think we have discussed all the different possibilities, so these can guide your information gathering when you want to find out if someone is negating their internal experience.
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