Reconnecting: How Your Essential Self Says 'No'

Excerpted from
Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live
By Martha Beck, Ph.D.

Anne's job search was not going well. When I met her, she'd just blown big corporate interviews, not with one company but with several. It was same thing every time: Anne would go into the interview process smiling and gracious, like a Miss America contestant, and pass the first screening with flying colors. As she moved on to the next round of interviews, Anne would start feeling a bit irritable. This grumpiness got worse and worse until, in each of her top-level interviews, Anne found herself barking inappropriate answers to the simplest questions.

"In my last interview," she told me, "this vice president asked me why I wanted to be in banking, and I said, 'I don't Just like that-I don't!' It sort of popped out, like a burp. Have you ever heard anything so stupid in your entire life?"

"Depends," I said. "Do you want to work for a bank?"

Anne recoiled visibly, as though I'd tossed her a snake. "Of course not," she said. "But it's good money."

In other words, Anne's social self (with lots of input from the "three P's": peers, parents, and professors) had decided that she should go into a field her essential self loathed. She told me she was "sabotaging" herself, and indeed she was-not by flunking her interviews, but by trying to get a job in a bank. Every time she came close to sealing this pact with Satan, her essential self managed to snuggle out of its restraints and save the day. It was sabotaging her interviews, but it wasn't sabotaging Anne.

This is the dynamic at work in most of the people who tell me they're chronic self-saboteurs. James said he was ruining his life by "flaking out" every time he got his career on track and straightened out his relationship with his parents. His pattern was to start showing up late-or worse, forgetting to show up at all-for office meetings or social events with his family. Dorrie's problem was that her mind "froze" whenever she had to give presentations, an important part of her job. Kurt had a little anger-management problem: He'd mined any number of personal and professional relationships by starting shouting matches over trivial issues.

As these people examined their lives, they all found that their "self-sabotage" was actually in harmony with their essential desires. James's parents were extremely controlling and had persuaded him to pursue a career that didn't interest him much. Dorrie didn't want the position she'd occupied since her most recent promotion; she preferred more solitary, analytical work. Kurt's anger had its roots in the prejudice he'd encountered growing up Turkish in Germany. The path to his North Star was to step back from his daily life, follow the anger until he could identify its source, embrace his ethnic identity, and learn to feel like a worthy person.

As they set out on paths chosen by their social selves, these clients' essential selves set up barriers, closed down operations, blew up bridges, and generally made it as difficult as possible to proceed down those errant roads. In this chapter, you'll learn the most basic navigational tool that will help you find your own North Star: the ability to recognize warning messages from your own essential self. By itself, this skill can't get you on your true path. What it will do, however, is help you change course before you end up in a catastrophically "self-sabotaging" situation.

The Language of the Essential Self

One of the reasons the essential self has to resort to such extreme measures in order to communicate is that it can't talk. Not in the usual way, at any rate. The language center of your brain, the part that processes, analyzes, and communicates verbally, is overwhelmingly dominated by the social self.

This is not to say that the essential self never uses words. It does. Hut when it speaks, you-that is, your social self--are usually surprised by what it says. Creative writers and others who express their essential selves through language often describe the process as occurring in a kind of dream state, during which they're not fully conscious of the words they're about to use. The social self does its best to interfere with this process. It peers over the poet's shoulder, making comments like "Not exactly Shakespeare, are we?" or "What will your mother think?" or "'Darkness visible'? What the hell does that mean, 'darkness visible'?" This is why so many writers drink.

Even for nonpoets, the essential self will occasionally verbalize its opinions. The classic Freudian slip is a good example: The speaker says what he means without even realizing it. (A friend of mine recently bought an antique at an Internet auction, only to find it was a fake. She complained to the seller, who wrote her an unctuous apology, urging her to return the object "at your earliest connivance.") Other verbal cues are more direct, like the comment that "popped out like a burp" during Anne's interview. Something similar happened to Joe, with much happier results. After a comfortable but unspectacular first date, Joe gave his companion a chaste peck on the cheek, then heard himself say, "Good-bye, Clare. I love you." He was absolutely horrified. "I thought I would explode like the Hindenburg from sheer embarrassment," he told me. "I barely knew her!" Apparently, Joe's essential self was on the right track, because at this writing, he and Clare have been happily married for five years.

The fascinating thing about these incidents is that although the conscious, verbal self is completely blindsided, the words that come out of nowhere are true in the deepest sense. Pay attention if your own words begin to surprise you. You probably don't have brain damage or multiple-personality disorder; on the contrary, you're getting crucial information to take you toward your North Star.

Most essential-self guidance, however, isn't so obvious. Because it takes enormous energy to shove the social self out of its command center in the rational, verbal part of your brain, the essential self usually "speaks" through parts of your being that aren't under conscious control. These are commanded by the deeper, more primitive layers of the brain, the parts that manage your emotional responses and basic body-maintenance functions like respiration, sleep and waking, and sexual desire.

When you leave your true path and start heading away from your North Star, your essential self will use any or all of its skills and tools to stop you. If your social self won't pay attention to mild warnings, the essential self has to get more and more dramatic. As a last resort, your core self will simply hijack the controls you use to direct your own behavior. You may be blithely oblivious to your own discontent until the very moment you find yourself weeping at a business luncheon, or punching your son's first-grade teacher. Fortunately, you can avoid such unpleasant situations if you learn just one "word" in your essential self's nonverbal lexicon: NO.