Whole Sight

Reason-giving & roses on the cliff-edge

April 28th, 2008

When do lists of reasons get in the way of actually deciding? And how else might we decide, if not for reasons?

This has to do with choices we tell ourselves we “should” say “yes” to, as part of going after our values - but which we end up saying “no” to all the same. For me these are things like getting a regular job, going on a diet, etc. For someone else it could be having a kid, going back to school - whatever it is in life that seems both important and scary.

Naturally for each such decision we’ve got plenty of reasons pro and con. Reasons why we should do what we’re not doing - a big long list - and reasons why we haven’t done it yet and may never do it - another big long list.

I recently took a look at one of my own typical “no” lists, and realized that every single reason on it can be boiled down to one or another of a handful of primal fears: fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of making a mistake or taking a risk, fear of death, etc. Of course, the way my reasons are phrased, they’re always much cleverer than that - very subtle, very convincing. Terrific, really. It’s only when I follow their trail that I see where they eventually lead.

But let’s get back to the question of values & not doing anything about them & why this might happen.

It’s my belief that if we know we “should” do something because it’s in line with our values, but enough pain & fear is involved that we say no, our reasons “yes” actually function as part of the reason we say “no.”

How can this be? Well, from my experience, if I feel coerced, the whole thing feels futile. I put it off, which is like saying “no.” Or even if I do say “yes,” I feel like it pretty much sucks, and quickly find a way to break my commitments if at all possible. And many others report the same experience. The more difficult and risky or painful the choice, the more we snare ourselves in our lists of reasons.

Not knowing what else to do, we keep digging. We revise our lists, going over them & over them, still seeking to solve the problem in some way that yields pain-free, risk-free certainty. To quote ACT researchers Kelly Wilson and Amy Murrell, in a chapter they wrote a while ago on values and decison-making, we wind up “dwelling in the land of should I/shouldn’t I, making little lists in our head of the reasons we should and reasons we shouldn’t, in the vain hope that the scales will finally tip decisively and will tell us the truth about the choice we should make.”

But what if we can draw back a bit and see our various lists of reasons as simply that - “lists of reasons,” whether scribbled in our head or on a pad of paper?

Seeing a list of reasons as a list of reasons would be like seeing thoughts as thoughts. A list of reasons can seem as plausible, as 100 percent true, as we can imagine. We can even go so far as to agree that each reason on the list is true. Why argue? But it will still be a list of reasons.

And since the reasons all boil down to those primal fears I mentioned - of rejection, of failure, of risk, of not just my death but the end of everything human some day sooner or later - we can reduce even the most complicated of lists to a simple choice - a choice we can finally see as a choice.

Hanging from the cliff, about to die, do we choose to smell a rose anyway? We can say no if we want. No reason is required.

What matters here isn’t picking the right reasons. It isn’t trying to get a spotless, risk-free, perfect outcome. It isn’t even whether we end up finally saying “yes.” What matters is that we get free of that sense of “having no choice.”

Even that is still putting it too strongly - “what matters” has a coercive ring to it. So what happens, then. What happens is, we get free of that sense of “having no choice.”

And face to face with the silence and emptiness that is freedom, we can choose.

Entry Filed under: Intentionality and self-change, Mindfulness, Third-wave behavioral therapies - ACT, DBT, etc.