The present moment leaves me trying to resolve a dilemma. A twelve step program has steps four and five which are taking a fearless moral inventory and then admitting to God or a higher power, then ourselves and lastly another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs. The latter step I have been considering as confessing my character defects which I usually use to confess my undesirable traits to my psychiatrist. An analogy I have thought of is as follows, a ship can have barnacles on its hull below the water line. These barnacles stand proud of the surface of the ship's hull and create friction or drag impeding the progress of the boat. Similarly, character defects act like the barnacles creating friction between myself and other members of the population. The friction can lead to confrontation or dissent often leading to hyper vigilance or feelings of indignation to name a few. The indignation or holier than though attitude can be obstructive preventing growth and distancing myself from other people. The resulting grandiosity in setting myself above others does not go down well with other people as everyone has their story to tell, no matter how humble.
A character defect of impulsiveness can lead to someone leaping before they look. Confessing the defect and humbly asking my higher power to take this undesirable trait from me should remove the risk. You cannot fight a character defect as you would be struggling with yourself, but you can substitute it for a more desirable one.
The second part of the dilemma is that my therapist considers that my undesirable traits are not character defects but normal emotions produced by my experiences and I should not be ashamed of them. The experiences leave an affective inheritance which I interpret as a disposition or an attitude towards your environment, and your beliefs concerning it. Rather than throwing my personality out of the window by listing character defects, or throwing the baby out with the bath water, my personality traits should possibly be seen as part of a learning curve and natural, intrinsic to my being. Of course, I thought, this is behavioural cognitive therapy, my therapist believes in behaviourism that we are a genetic potential with predispositions interacting with the environment, in other words we are a product of our genes and surroundings. Cues or triggers in the environment can lead to habitual responses or habits or certain types of behaviour. Hence the environment can influence our behaviour, and our traits are normal and nothing to be shunned, in fact they can be seen as a part of a learning curve.
The twelve step program I believe is a process of ego reduction. If I am unmanageable in some part of my life, I learn to use my higher power's will instead of my own self will. If I keep falling into a pit on a particular route, handing the problem over to a higher power will obviate the obstacle, or an alternative could be a suggestion, or a spiritual insight to choose a different route or course of action. This is divine providence or foresight from God. Instead of the ego tackling a problem unaided, ego reduction or a higher power, or making something or somebody else the centre of attention can provide the inspiration needed to overcome obstacles to progress. Ego can step in to justify excesses. Ego reduction or confessing certain defects of character can realign yourself with people and the environment. There is a bit of another dilemma here, the part of the mind that admonishes the ego is the ego itself. So, do we acknowledge a problem or an unmanageable issue and just carry on ?
Ego reduction, or removing character defects may break the patterns that one established in earlier life that led to a confrontation, or stress or an illness etc, but do we need to punish ourselves or should we adopt a stance of self – compassion even though it could bolster our ego and feelings of self – importance. Perhaps I should reach a compromise where a healthy ego or consciousness is better than being ego less and having consciousness flooded by a plethora of images I cant block out or control.
Rather than listing undesirable traits as character defects, perhaps it would be better to list them as helpful behaviours and unhelpful behaviours. This would be more compassionate to myself than saying there is something innately wrong with me. An insight which helped me recently was a mindfulness meditation which stated that life is not the absence of conflict, it is how you deal with it. Rather than be arrogant and fight with resistances in my life, I should think that where there is resistance there is information and opportunity for growth and new experiences.
