The Missing Experience

john welwood and the human predicament

I was into the perspective of David Schnarch for a while. I still keep his perspective about a solid self, but now I think he’s missing two key elements. First, he dismisses the human experience – the very notion that to be HUMAN is to have a reflected and dependent sense of self !!!! Listen to the John Welwood recording on SoundsTrue.com. And then he seems to miss the importance of empathy. Empathy for the human struggle that ensues from this tragic-comedy of a dependent sense of self! Again, Welwood lays it out nicely.

More and more, I’m seeing how we are human in ways I had not been aware of, or that I had not been so willing to acknowledge.

It’s so compelling to think that we just have to toughen our skins and grow up.  Schnarch’s battle cry sounds so cool and tough and even sexy. Wouldn’t you agree? Everyone wants to jump on it and he taunts those who are not on board as being babies who need to grow up and derides therapists who work with an attachment model like Sue Johnson as just enabling and furthering a pathetic sense of dependency.

I believe the problem with his model is that it isn’t based in reality, so I don’t see how it can work. Unless a person is in an enlightened state, it’s not how people actually are! You’d be hard-pressed to meet someone who really doesn’t give a shit about what other people think of them. Just read the writings of Pema Chödron when she shares about her own internal experience. But what I have seen actually working for couples is simply acknowledging, allowing, and owning and expressing this vulnerable stuff, rather than trying to transcend or deny our essential humanness.  And by expressing, I don’t mean rampaging.  Instead, just owning it, rather that it owning us.  I stole that quote from Tony Robbins.

And in the end, just holding all of it with caring.  Stephen Goodman at CIIS said that as far as Tibetan Buddhism is concerned, “compassion is the only game in town.”

Implicit in that caring is a larger state of consciousness.  A self that’s not a reflection of someone else’s opinion.  I love how John Welwood says it, so nonchalantly, that of course, we also know that we are fundamentally OK.

I also love how Welwood doesn’t say that this predicament of being human is good or bad. He just sees it as a path of growth. To try and get a grip, and then relate to others with transparency and consciousness. So I have been using this as my model now.

There isn’t anything new about this, but maybe listening to Welwood got me clearer on it. And he also adds some additional things that I had not heard that felt refreshing – like his explanation for the ambivalence that people feel in relationship – both the love and the resentment we feel for being dependent on someone for our sense of being loved. And how hard it is not only to love unconditionally, but to receive love fully, and how it’s all mixed up with that tender spot inside, so it’s no wonder we are wary of being authentic with others.