Personal Revolutions: A Follow Up Question & A Clarification

I opened my inbox on Wednesday, only to find an email from a former client. I will omit her name, obviously, but she has kindly given the permission to post her email here and respond publicly. I thought it would be a good idea since she asked a good question, one that highlights a flaw in my original, rather confusing blog post.

Dear Dr. Miletic,

A few days ago, I read your blog post called Personal Revolutions and I was confused and intrigued by it. Some parts resonated deeply, such as shame and shamelessness as the two sides of the same coin. To quote you here:

When you internalize expectations from the society, you can either bow to them and shape yourself accordingly, or you can reject them, but either way you’ve fallen into the trap – you are in a relationship with them. Shameful or shameless, you are not shaped by yourself but by external forces.

This is clear as day and I recognize how this trap of “shame vs shamelessness” can still sometimes be so tempting for me. Shame really does keep us in line! My ship is only steered in the right direction when I follow who I hope to become in my own eyes.

After this passage, everything you wrote is less clear. The solution you offer, “your” revolution, seems like something I wouldn’t want to do but I am not sure how to extract a method from what you wrote there. Can you explain what you meant? What is the process that I’m not understanding? How do we extricate ourselves from societal demands and how do we create something authentic, unique to us?

These are interesting questions and thoughts. As always, I’m really happy and grateful that my rambling was useful and thought provoking. The original post is messy and abstract, so I’ll try to tighten up and be brief with my response. I won’t address the term “authentic” as I’m not sure I quite understand it. I use if as we all do but it’s a complicated term. I hope you’ll see why.

We can’t escape society and its constructs because that’s a part of our reality. Social consensus is kind of like the backbone of our reality, it determines what and how we can think, and it gives validity, a firm footing for our ideas.

There is no self-creation outside of relationships with others because others are critical mirrors of our creative psychological endeavors. Others show us the constructs we use but might not be conscious of, and they give us feedback that validates or invalidates them – other will, therefore, propel us toward change or validate us as we are now.

What we can’t escape, we can accept or reject (partially or completely). When you reject a social rule, you can position yourself on its opposite end, which isn’t exactly a fundamental rejection or anything new for that matter. Counter-cultural is still counter to the culture, so in relation to it. It’s just flipping the coin, you are still trapped in the societal semantic system, you just position yourself on the undesirable part of the spectrum. You still end up with a team with rules and restrictions just like you did before.

You can find a third way by rejecting both sides: what society approves of and what it doesn’t approve of. Only a third way is truly new, but even that new way is made in relation to the public, societal way of seeing things. That’s why it’s hard for me to talk about authenticity. To quote Vladimir Nabokov, a genius is an African who dreams up snow. Most of what we do is building on foundations that we were born into. We never dream up snow. It’s perhaps wiser to talk about what’s meaningful, which path feels right to us, rather than to talk about authenticity.

Be warned, though, dissent sometimes means ostracism. There’s only what you can live with and what price you’re willing to pay. To truly produce a revolutionary change, we need a lot of courage. Kelly (1969) writes:

“What I am saying is that it is not so much what man is that counts as it is what he ventures to make of himself. To make the leap he must do more than disclose himself; he must risk a certain amount of confusion. Then, as soon as he does catch a glimpse of a different kind of life, he needs to find some way of overcoming the paralyzing moment of threat, for this is the instant when he wonders who he really is - whether he is what he just was or is what he is about to be.”

Revolutions are never cheap or painless. This is the price we must be willing to pay.