"Unconditional" love and testing

Earlier I wrote about how the promise of unconditional love from parents is a hollow one. What are the consequences of this?

One of them is that, because the existence of conditions is denied, neither we nor our parents know where the boundaries actually are. This means that your parents, thinking there are no boundaries, only become aware that something is unacceptable long after the boundaries have been crossed.

It's easier to get a grasp on this if you imagine a hypothetical situation. Imagine you are in your backyard and you have beer in an open cooler.  Someone comes in and you offer them a beer. They finish it and help themselves to a second. Your thinking that was a bit rude but you don't say anything. Then they do it again and you let that slide. Somewhere around the sixth bottle you're thinking that's a bit much. Or they leave and go home and then come back for another beer. You now have to establish a boundary but, because you've let things slide so far, you have to tell the person that something you've had no problems with up until now is too much. There is no non-aggressive way to do this.

Think how that feels to a child. They are going along doing things that no one has corrected them for and then they are not just corrected but pushed back aggressively. That is frightening and confusing. Children start thinking there are a set of moral landmines out there.

In the worst cases, a child will grow up to think that everything is a test. You'll find yourself, I certainly did, resenting every request anyone makes of you because you'll see it as a test you haven't been allowed to prepare for; you'll feel like you've been set up to fail.

I was forced to face this more clearly by going back to school. I'm doing this as an adult because I want to do it. And  yet, every time I faced a test—exam or essay—I started to feel a resentment and that led me to procrastinate. I didn't want to prepare and I didn't want to research. I still felt the resentment that came from being asked to perform without being told what all the expectations are. This is comes from being told that you are loved unconditionally only to find nothing of the sort is true.

And what to do about it? It's not a life or death issue. I've just realized that I have this lingering resentment now but it was there through some 17 or so years of schooling and an entire work career after that. I've done alright despite this but I don't think I've ever performed at my full potential until the last little while.

Part of the cure was to do volunteer work at my church. That enabled me to test myself, to set my own conditions for what was good enough. Ironically, those conditions were not only higher than what others would have set for me, they were much higher. But they were known conditions that were clearly set out. It also helped that they were set out by me.

I started applying the same approach to school work. The first step, something I borrowed from Robert Glover, will initially seem perverse. It was to give myself permission to fail. What that does is to wipe away any sense of being set up to fail because others have not set the conditions out clearly. Then I can ask myself what should be achieved (note the caveat below). Then I can ask what I can reasonably hope to accomplish in the time left to me. Related to this, I can ask how I might do this better next time as one of the things that will inevitably become clear is that I could have done better if I'd started earlier.

Caveat: passive aggressive responses

Any time we find ourselves saying something like, "I'll do it on my own terms," or "I'll do it at my own pace," we are lying. That's one great stinking pile of bullshit we are peddling to others and to ourselves. "My own terms" or "my own pace" is just another way pretending to have no boundaries. A boundary is something you can set out and measure whether you've succeeded. I'm going to deadlift four-hundred-and-fifty pounds means I'm going to take a barbell and plates weighing that much and lift it according to a certain procedure. "My own terms" is just a whiny little child resenting others and planning to fail. That's not only a recipe for failure, it's unkind to others. passive aggressive = malicious consent.