The Rut

This morning I’m reflecting on my own tendency to corral and trap myself. I have just entered a friendship with a new person in my life. This is a source of great joy for me. But, it is also a reason for soberly looking at all of my past relationship ways. I have some patterns I would like to forego. I don’t want my anxiety to determine how available I am in this friendship. And I can’t help but see that when I lose myself out of anxiety, or disconnect for similar reasons, I have repeated a pattern that I have been hurt by many times, and that I have hurt others with just as often. It all seems to be related to the way (the rut) I choose to live.

I’ve been talking with my new friend about the very human tendency to create systems of thought and activity and then to get captured by them. I know I can, and do, frequently corner myself in this manner. I have actually been aware of this tendency for a long time. As a psychotherapist I work, almost daily, with people (individuals, couples and groups) who have created for themselves the prisons they are struggling to free themselves from. The once-imagined mansion on the hill has all of a sudden become the prison cell.  And, this happens over and over again.

I don’t much like knowing this. I know I am not immune to it. My mansions, my systems, have become the ruts I trap myself, and others with. Although I know this is utterly human and probably unavoidable, I chafe against this knowledge, this self-defeating and pain-causing attribute of who I am. I have even gone so far as to imagine that I should wear a sign, much like the surgeon general’s warning, that says “danger — relationship with this person could be bad for your health.”

I haven’t figured out a way to escape from the prison-building rut-inducing warden of myself yet. But, I keep trying. And failing. I take some solace from a friend of mine who is a developmental scientist. She says that one of the states of adult development, that is seldom reached, but possible, is what she calls “construct-aware.” That means, as I understand her, that one can achieve a state of awareness where one can realize they are creating constructs, I think she means favored belief and action structures, systems or ruts in my terms, and through awareness, not be captured by them. I hope so.

In the meantime though, I am saddled with the unsettling partial awareness that I am creating these elegant ruts for myself, and maintaining distances with my latest versions, and am unable to stop myself. Every direction I look I am implicated in causing pain and restriction. I wish that weren’t true. I’m afraid it is though. I don’t really take comfort from knowing that this is an aspect of the human condition.

What can I do? Right now, it seems that all I’m really capable of, is creating suffering, and being aware that I am doing it. I have compassion enough for myself to know that being aware, of the damage I’m causing. is something. But, I want to stop it. Or, so I tell myself. The trouble is, and it is deeply humbling to admit it, I don’t know how to stop. Do you? If so, please help me. If you, like me, are a perpetrator and victim of your ruts, then you have my heart-felt sympathy.

Maybe my new friendship will be a help with this. We have talked about it. We have tried changing things around to avoid the ruts we know about. But, I haven’t yet admitted, until now, that I am totally caught in the web I keep spinning. I can’t seem to help myself and I know I am dangerous.

I want to do better. I really do. I know that the kind of relationships I am capable of, and the kind of community I build (and allow), are governed by the ruts I create, and indulge in. I spent all of last year writing, and thinking about freedom, and the tyranny of the self, and this is the amount of progress I’ve made with my on-going struggle to free you, and I, from the one in me who governs what I do.

I am glad to have come this far, to know my real responsibility for what is happening, and I feel sad and desperate. There is nothing grand about the suffering I do, or the hurt I create. Forgive me! And forgive anyone else you know who is doing it. This is part of my brokenness. It is part of my poignant, mysteriously imperfect humanity. In truth, it is part of the nakedness with which I arrive at this our shore.