Well-Turned Souls

1 July 2023

There’s an expression typed out on a document I try to read each morning: A good day = do good things well.  I don’t know if I lifted that from some ancient Greek text or if I coined it, but the simplicity still appeals.  That simplicity is shared by a 12-step expression that has surfaced recently in some SMART Recovery meetings: Do the next right thing.  What both expressions share is the presumption of self-evident goodness, that is, that we know what the next right thing is.  Is the good self-evident?

A recently deceased thinker of considerable power, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote that three barriers, to seeing things as they are, include ego, culture, and genetic inheritance.  This is hard to refute.  Often, in SMART Recovery meetings, an issue will arise about a loved one with addictive behaviours who “...won’t even admit he drank the bottle when I’ve got it in my hand!”  He won’t admit it because he’s in denial.  Denial “...is a defense mechanism in which unpleasant thoughts, feelings, wishes, or events are ignored or excluded from conscious awareness. It may take such forms as refusal to acknowledge the reality of a terminal illness, a financial problem, an addiction, or a partner’s infidelity. Denial is an unconscious process that functions to resolve emotional conflict or reduce anxiety” (APA Dictionary of Psychology).

I see denial more practically, perhaps, than the APA.  I see it as a lack of ego strength necessitating a lie to preserve an illusion one can’t bear to part with.  If that illusion is a person’s belief that they can manage their own drug use, confronting them with contrary evidence may be so painful that they believe admitting the lie would result in a sort of self disintegration.  How would a self disintegrate, you might ask.  If the self is built on a chain of illusions, shattering a primary illusion may cause other illusions to shatter and fall to such a terrifying extent that one needs to face the whole broken edifice—and that may be too much to ask.  In short, there is a lack of congruence between the denying person’s self and the real world. 

I believe my first brush with congruence was in geometry.  Two congruent lines have the same length.  Philosophically, congruence is a one-to-one mapping or what early software programmers called WYSIWYG (pr. Wis-ee-wig): What You See Is What You Get.  In terms of how we learn from the world, getting (receiving, understanding) what you see is perceiving accurately.  That sounds like it might involve sensory acuity, intelligence, and neurological properties all of which are implicated but not our main focus.  Today’s focus is on what you, dear reader, can do to improve your own capacity to get what you see.  Let’s look at a quote.

“This is why we say that nothing happens to the wise person contrary to their expectations.”

—Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind, 13.3b cited in The Daily Stoic, 25 June.

In that quote, Seneca is pinning wisdom on a wise person’s expectations.  And this is where it gets tough and interesting.  If you are a hard realist, you have faced the fact that you could die any day.  Similarly, your most cherished loved ones could also be taken from you on any day, and you have no control whatsoever over that fact.  I can hear a cacophony of AFMs (affected family members) screaming that if you control your children, you can keep them safe from these things.  How do you protect your child from cancer, an irresponsible car driver, or a falling piece of steel?  Moreover, what is the effect on that child of the parent’s obsessive over-protectiveness.  In short, such behaviour has negative impacts on both lives because of unnatural expectations.

In contrast, Seneca’s wise person knows her children can die from the moment she gives birth to them.  It is why she holds them firmly and tells them she loves them each time she says hello or goodbye.  Similarly, the wise person has sufficient humility to know that he, too, may have that dreaded moment in the doctor’s office when she turns to him and says, “Dan, time to get your affairs in order.”  It sure ain’t something I wanna hear, but I know that every day I continue to live, the chance increases.  But, in my attempts to emulate the behaviours of Seneca, Cato the Younger, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, I admit the daily possibility of death but resist any temptation to dwell on it.  Or to create expectations around longevity.  That’s what Seneca’s wise person does: she forfeits expectations in favour of radical acceptance.

Montaigne (1533-1592), a shrewd French aristocrat, wrote that “to study philosophy is to learn to die.”  Cox (2023) argued that this was due to the fatalism of the ancient Stoics based on their belief that the gods foreordained all things. I am not a fatalist but have considered how many causal strings I would need to control to keep our children, my wife, myself, or even my dogs safe from all things...and realized it is the drive-through route to neuroses, anxiety, and probably depression. 

As so often in these blogs, this is part of acceptance.  Once accepted, really accepted, there’s a weight of undue responsibility lifted from our shoulders.  How can I be responsible for the drivers, constructors, violent people, and viruses near my own children who, as I write, are about 30 and 150 miles from me?  It is unrealistic, cruel, and anti-life to carry such a weight.  I hope we’ve covered the unrealistic part.

Carrying the load of unrealistic responsibility is cruel in two ways.  First, it puts an undue chronic stressor on you for as long as you’re willing to carry it.  Second, by continuing to carry it, you’re providing an unhealthy and unrealistic example for those who admire and learn from you.  What would those admirers see and learn if they saw you shed that weight and devote the freed energy toward the joyful pursuit of your own values?

Finally, carrying the weight of responsibility for the life-safety and protection of others is anti-life because it contradicts and confuses the purpose of life, which is to become, as fully as possible, who we are.  How can a plant’s leaves turn their breadth to the sun if someone has put clothes pegs on the leaves, folding them back and weighing them down, so only a fraction of the leaf face is exposed to the sun’s goodness?  To do good things well, a thing must be fully itself.  We know the next right thing when our souls are congruent with our own independent self-actualization.

Dan Chalykoff is (finally!) a Registered Psychotherapist (Qualifying).  He works at CMHA-Hamilton and Healing Pathways Counselling, Oakville, where his focus is clients with addiction, trauma, burnout, and major life changes.  He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understanding of ideas.  Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.  Please email him (danchalykoff@hotmail.com) to be added to or removed from the Bcc’d emailing list.

References:

American Psychological Association.  (2023 26 June).  APA Dictionary of Psychology.  https://dictionary.apa.org/denial

Cox, J. D. (2023 30 June).  That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die: Montaigne on Stoicism.  https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Montaigne_Philosophy/index.html#:~:text=Montaigne%20titles%20his%20most%20stoic,happen%2C%20so%20human%20beings%20cannot

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1993). The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium.  HarperPerennial Modern Classics.

Holiday, R. & Hanselman, S. (2016). The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living.  Portfolio/Penguin.