I have always loved watching toddlers and young preschoolers as they take apart buildings they have built or structures created. They examine each piece of block, Lego brick or bolts and screws dismantled. In their hands they turn over each little piece sometimes even tasting or smelling them in order to understand fundamentally what their world is all about.
As I start to unhinge the double bind, inevitably I must unravel each part, dimension, aspect, or characteristic of the dynamic in order to fundamentally understand what my world of relationships is all about.
I discover that when I was a child, the importance of responding appropriately to absurd double messages lay in developing a sense of self-worth in my need to be loved. However, there is more. There is also a competition to be the best. To match up. In our family, there is much to aspire to be: the most loyal, most sane, the best mother, sister, daughter, politician, reader, movie critic, writer, scholar, psychologist, gardener, and so on. And herein lies yet another bind. For what does it mean to be the best of all those things? In fact, there is no clear definition for each of these attributes, and even if there was at first, it is created by one or two people, who are also the only ones who can change the definition to suit their needs, usually without giving the rest of us notice. So I might aspire to be the best of all those things but even then the boundaries or rules of the definitions are so unpredictable or arbitrary that I probably will not succeed in matching up anyway.
In order to unhinge the bind further, not only must I stop expecting to be loved or base my self-worth on this absurdity, I must cease the competition. For how should I expect pride or acknowledgment for my achievements if their definitions are constantly changed in midstream? I realize that these expectations or theories have no basis in reality. They have nothing whatsoever to do with what I aspire to be or not to be.
Instead, they are, in fact, connected to people's fears, or chaotic, insecure and unmanageable worlds. Indeed, they retain a tight control on all definitions in this life competition in order to preserve the illusion that if they know for sure the truth about how things must be, they can never fall apart.
Comments