The Viable Alternative

I credit the book, “The Way of the Superior Man,” by David Deida as one of the books I’ve read that changed my perspective on life. However, over the years as I’ve reread it, the one chapter I tended to skip was titled, “Live as If Your Father Is Dead.” To me, the title sounded kind of harsh. I mean, after all, who would want to think of one of their parents as being dead? The title made me uncomfortable so despite my desire to soak up knowledge and gain insight, I avoided this one altogether.

However, as of a couple of weeks ago, as I’ve been delving into my relationships with my parents in therapy starting from childhood, and how that has affected how I deal with the world and how I view myself and reality, my mind went back to that chapter, and I felt compelled to finally read it, giving it my undivided attention.

The true spirit of the chapter is not about our parents being dead per se, but rather us being able to find a way to live from the authentic core of who we are independent from the programming our parents instilled in us and their expectations.

Our parents were there from birth to love us, care for us, nurture and raise us. Having been here longer than we have, one of their purposes is to teach us about the world around us which includes how to get along in the world, how to interact with people, how to become productive, civilized members of society, and also how to survive in this world.

Despite our parents giving life to us and raising us, at the end of the day, they’re still human. This means they’re flawed just like us, their children. They have insecurities, fears, doubts, wounds, misconceptions and baggage from their own parents. As a result, because we were once totally dependent on them for life itself, and needed them to make sense of this “scary world” for us, we tended to believe everything they told us, good AND bad.

If we were to take stock of the areas of our lives that don’t look the way we want with a desire to change them, whether it be our relationships, career, finances, health, fitness, self-esteem, and a whole host of other things, they’d be directly attributed to by our behaviour, which in turn can be attributed to our outlook, which in turn is directly a reflection of our beliefs.

Many of these beliefs that are responsible for the dysfunctional, unhealthy or unbalanced areas of our lives were directly adopted from our parents.

The simple solution is to just change them, right?

The answer to that is yes. However, in my own life, and I’m sure in yours as well, though simple sounding, it’s not easy.

Recently, I uncovered from therapy that as a child, I developed a secret pact with my father to be like him which included being hard working like him, but to not ever be bigger than him. In return for agreeing to protect his fragile ego by making sure he got to feel bigger than everybody around him, I’d get his love, protection, and approval which of course I needed as a child under his guardianship. My therapist figured this out at our very FIRST session but I never was able to emotionally connect to this because I thought the whole idea was preposterous. It wasn’t until last week, a year and a couple of months into my therapy, that I was able to finally connect all the dots and actually get on an emotional level what he was talking about.

As a result of our agreement, the emotional and verbal abuse he gave me as a child to make himself feel bigger I turned onto myself by being overly hard on myself, constantly putting myself down, beating myself up on both sides for either making a mistake or for any progress I made not being good enough. I would also in one way or another hold myself back out of a fear of my own “greatness,” I felt uncomfortable accepting praise for something I did well, and I had a hard time trusting myself so I tended to believe the opinions that others had of me over what I knew about myself.

In the area of my finances, one of the very reasons why I started therapy in the first place, this all translated into me being the guy who worked very hard but despite that got peanuts in return. Whenever I’d be on the cups of a financial breakthrough that would change my life, I’d start having fears that I wasn’t worthy of it because it came too “easy” and I didn’t work hard enough for it, and in one way or another, the opportunity would come crashing down.

Thus, my life indeed was a reflection of the pact I had with my father. I got praise from my father for being a hard worker, but at the same time, because I barely made enough to get by, I had to depend on him for financial support and thus had to put up with his continued verbal abuse.

A complete fiasco.

Clearly, the debacle beliefs behind these patterns is that “I’m not worthy of success,” “Life has to be hard,” “I have to be smaller than my father,” “I’m unable to care for myself,” “I can’t stand on my own,” etc.

The solution like I said earlier would be simply to release these beliefs, but I faced GREAT resistance in letting go of them and felt compelled to hold onto them. This is because as children who knew little to nothing about this world, we wanted to believe everything our parents taught us. Believing everything they said took the responsibility off our backs of dealing with and understanding this crazy world and gave us a sense of protection. To suddenly doubt what our parents taught us would remove that sense of protection we felt from the uncertainty of this world and would’ve made us feel unsafe, so rather than accept our parents’ fallibility, we chose to believe everything they said, including the damaging, hurtful things.

This is why we find many kids idealizing their parents where they put the blame on themselves for any damage, emotional or otherwise, that a parent inflicted on them rather than placing the blame where it belongs, on their parents. (BTW, just because a parent is to blame for the damage inflicted on us, it’s our responsibility to fix it).

Also, as children, we wanted to be obedient to our parents so in turn we could get their approval and love, so in my case for instance, believing all the negative things about myself and adopting all the limiting behaviours that I learned from my father made me feel like a good little boy despite the fact that these beliefs and behaviour were detracting from the quality of my life as an adult.

To suddenly now discard all the negative things that were taught to me by my father in turn gave me a big sense of guilt because now I was being disobedient and questioning his authority.

Lastly, as children our parents literally had the power of life and death over us. We needed them for just about everything, including feeling loved. Me playing small and diminishing myself to make my father feel big was what I gave in order to get love, protection and support.

This was all why that logically though I knew my beliefs and behaviour didn’t serve me, I felt I couldn’t let go of them because on a deeper level that I had been unaware of, they fill an emotional need.

….as children who knew little to nothing about this world, we wanted to believe everything our parents taught us. Believing everything they said took the responsibility off our backs of dealing with and understanding this crazy world and gave us a sense of protection.”

It’s these very same reasons why may people can’t seem to let go of the beliefs and behaviours learned from their parents even though they’re causing all sorts of dysfunction in their lives.

These beliefs and behaviours helped us survive in a less than ideal environment. The problem is, they may have served us as children but they no longer serve us as adults.

The solution for this is to GROW UP. We do this by claiming our power as adults to take care of ourselves and create our destiny rather than continuing come from the helpless child.

We also do this by emotionally meeting the child at the level he was when he adopted those beliefs and behaviours, and becoming the parent to the child that our parents needed to be but weren’t by providing for it emotionally what it should’ve gotten from its parents but didn’t.

This could be unconditional love, unconditional approval, permission for the child to be as big as it wants to be, encouragement, emotional safety, etc.

In this safe environment that we create, the child will come to feel safe in dropping the beliefs and behaviour that mess up our lives as adults and our lives can start to reflect the core essence of who we are rather than our past baggage.

The title of the chapter, “Live as if your father were dead” in “Way of the Superior Man” is not mean spirited or vindictive. It’s a call for all of us to live as adults and not as children by assuming responsibility over our lives rather than running the same old tapes instilled in us by our parents over and over again. It means growing up by becoming present in our lives rather than unconsciously having it run by a frightened three year old. It means appointing ourselves as the guardian over our lives rather still continuing to hand over that role to our parents. It means living our truths not our parents’ “truths.” Finally, it means stepping in and providing to ourselves what we needed from our parents but didn’t get.

This way, we start afresh, living from the wisdom we’ve garnered in the present and the core of who we are rather than from the fallacies taught to us by our parents and our wounded inner child.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love