Time and time again I’m amazed by how plainly others can feel intentions and motivations on a subtle “energetic” level.
My friend Jason named that something about my motive felt off, and we were very quickly able to figure it out. I was sharing A Tactical Guide to Sideways Patterns with him, and he mentioned that there was some missing dimension of self-ownership, that I wasn’t sufficiently owning that this guide is for me, as opposed to for others in a kind of caretaking way.
As we talked, it became explicit that I have a cluster of beliefs that inform this caretaking instinct. I said that I believe that “I must meet everyone where they’re at” and that “the person who has more awareness has responsibility for sharing that awareness”. Moreover, there was a sense of responsibility that if I saw a friend going through a certain pattern that I was aware of and they were not, it was my responsibility to at least to attempt to share this awareness with them. After that, I can feel a sense of ease, because I had attempted to do my part.
Once stated out loud, there are a ton of weird dynamics here. Firstly, it’s arrogant. It assumes that I’m aware and others are not, that my experience and stories apply to them, and that on some level I know what best for them. In this arrogance there’s a compulsive kind of responsibility that I’m taking for them, which is exhausting for me, and likely weird and transgressive for them. Another belief is that “there is only an upside to listening”, which provides an excuse to impose stories on others even if they don’t want them. I’m more concerned with satisfying my own caretaking and self-assumed, non-consensual responsibilities than I am considering their experience and caring for them.
But how can I point out a pattern of repetitive injury on its own terms? While arrogance and caretaking are poor methods to do it, it still seems important to bring awareness to it. Jason pointed out that connecting and relating to it through my own lived experience rather than some decontextualized story could help reduce imposition and righteous arrogance, and make it explicit where it’s coming from in my own life.
More importantly, the core distinction that came up was separating “surrender to the pattern” with “surrender to experience”. There may be a pattern that produces repetitive injury, and it’s not about abandoning a friend to that pattern. Instead, the pattern is recurring because there’s some aspect of their experience which is not being full appreciated. In the “disembodied intellectual syndrome” someone may know the full story and structure of their pattern, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t continue to be reenacted. Reenactment occurs not because of lack of narrative awareness, but lack of embodied experiential awareness. Telling them their pattern doesn’t do anything to meet their experience, if anything it could drive them deeper into DIS, by offering a false sense of control. In contrast, celebrating their experience can help provide space to realize one’s ongoing experience, and from there unlock what’s at the root of the repetitive injury, which is some kind of dissonance between present experience and past conditioning.
In other words, if I simply make myself available to celebrate someone fully in their experience, and relate to them through care and self-ownership, it would likely accomplish my current objectives far more effectively than my current heavy handed caretaking. At the same time, I would likely be far more at ease and available to appreciate their experience on its own terms, and savor all the unexpected and beautiful aspects of their experience. There’s no covert agenda to fix or change others, only they can do that, perhaps all I can do is provide safe, accepting, playful space for them to appreciate their own experience.
This feels like the first unfolding of an ongoing realization, but it feels quite core to discomfort that others feel around me, and gosh, it totally makes sense.