“True honesty requires courage, character, and integrity. (It is) a very expensive gift; don’t expect it from cheap people.”
— Frank Caprio, municipal court judge
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I’m starting to think the most important aspect of change is courage. Of my Big Three elements for successful counseling—courage, commitment, and honesty—courage must come first, not necessarily in importance but in time. It’s courage that you need to get started and, when you need to decide but don’t know what to do. It’s courage that you need to make a change when you’re not sure what will result.
Dragons
The myth of the dragon is a metaphor for courage. We’ll do all we can to avoid the dragon as no truly capable person looks for trouble, but the dragon represents what is unavoidable. You don’t understand the dragon and, unlike the sphinx, the dragon is not testing your intellect. In the myth of the dragon you are always underpowered.
I have been in situations that required courage, but cannot say the risks were necessary or well advised. It’s much easier to accept a risk that you have created for yourself than it is to confront danger that you didn’t ask for. But in either case, you’re forced to develop balance and resilience.
True courage takes a calm, dispassionate state of mind; it is entirely different from being heroic. When important things are happening quickly you cannot be distracted by extraneous thoughts. The reward of surviving a life-threatening gauntlet is learning to find and maintain a complete, balanced, and unbiased focus.
Soldiers
This is what soldiers are trained to do, but most simply endure without achieving a courageous state of mind. The ones who do go beyond endurance enter a transcendental calm. I encountered these qualities in people who were members of the Special Forces, and I feel I achieved this state of mind when I passed through life threatening situations in the mountains. It’s these character-testing situations that draw people into high-risk sports.
It was a desire to return to these kinds of situations that led to my meeting ex-soldiers who had become mountaineers. Their stories of calmly risking their lives to complete a mission echoed my mountaineering objectives and the attitudes of our climbing teams.
More than once I’ve heard climbers who were marrying say they hoped their life partners would be as reliable as their climbing partners, but this never comes to pass. The situations are too different and the commitments are neither as clear nor as conscious. In climbing, “until death do us part” is real and unquestioned. Few marriages display anything similar.
Responsibility is Not Heroic
Challenge teaches courage, but we often don’t know what we’ve learned. I believed other people made similar commitments in their lives and developed similar abilities, but I have learned otherwise. Few people have or develop courage.
We rarely speak openly about our challenges, fears, and failures. Our culture does not support such discussions and instead encourages us to advertise our successes. As a result, we don’t know what we’re missing, and we are barely aware of our cowardice. This is both unnatural and disabling.
A natural environment is one where you are directly in contact with obstacles and responsible for engaging with them. As we become more deeply wrapped in impersonal social, religious, and institutional structures we lose direct engagement and responsibility.
A person can succeed professionally while failing personally when professions become impersonal, and what professions do you know of that value individual, personal responsibility? If you consider professions in light of how responsible they are for individuals, those that have become the least personally responsible are the least helpful.
This describes world politics which has degenerated to a level where its benefit to humanity is questionable. This is the consequence of the rise of exploitative institutions. Our natural inclination is to move against these monoliths, but I think the more effective strategy is to develop one’s own sense of courage.
Gaining courage and modeling power is more inspiring than disputing one policy or another. This is why I emphasize our public discourse should focus on Donald Trump as insane, rather than debating the policies that are its result.
It’s safe to engage in emotionless, intellectual dialog. It’s easy to ramble on, avoid conflict, and achieve nothing. It’s harder to face the truth of one’s personal sickness, failure, powerlessness, and despair. Courage is built from engagement with the later, not the former.
Courage Sticks, Cowardice Slips
Courage is rare both in people and our personal situations. Cowardice is a more general attribute. You can have courage in certain regards, while being generally cowardly in everything else. Our language makes this point, but we overlook it.
Why is it that one with cowardice is a coward but we don’t have a label for one who is courageous? There is no noun to describe a courageous person, and why is that? You might say it’s just a coincidence, but that’s not how language develops. I think it’s because unlike cowardice which is general, courage is specific. It rarely describes a person.
Consider this in yourself. In what circumstances are you willing to endure discomfort, disrespect, disparagement, frustration, and perhaps self-doubt and unhappiness in order to maintain your faith in or commitment to something or someone? It is in those circumstances that you show courage. In all other situations where you give yourself an out, come up with an explanation, or have some righteous excuse you are a coward.
Do you consider that severe or overly judgmental? Would you prefer I be more lenient and accepting, more reasonable? This is the demarcation between courage and cowardice, it lies on the boundary of what you excuse. A person who runs from responsibility is always running.
Courage keeps you committed and honest. Courage keeps you focused. Without it you hesitate and dissemble. The first is a failure to commit while the second is a failure to be honest. Perhaps courage is not one attribute but a compilation of many, something like virtue.
My Evidence, Your Evidence
I’ve seen evasive behavior in my parents, my wives, society in general, and some climbing partners and often in clients. The amount of evasion mirrors what is tolerated or excused. We excuse from being honest people who are troubled by it, and in this way support the infantile behavior schooling so generally encourages.
I’m becoming more discerning and less tolerant. I now require courage in parents, friends, partners, and spouses. I will avoid situations and people who lack courage. You could do this too. The question is, once we eliminate the cowards, will we have any parents, partners, or clients? The most robust answer must be “no.” You have to be willing to sacrifice for what you believe in.
If you don’t believe in something enough to give it priority, then it’s not fundamental. I have no partners, no parents, and few clients, but I constantly remind myself of the despair that has followed accepting the wrong ones.
I am satisfied with my courageous clients. You might say, and I myself wonder, that my task as a counselor is to help create the courage that I believe is necessary for clients to progress. I do feel that modeling courage and clarifying its importance is an obligation. The question is how tolerant should one be of cowardice and how accepting should one be of failure?
Emotional Dysregulation
A general diagnosis for severe emotional dysregulation is Borderline Personality Disorder. I feel emotional dysregulation is evident in all of us on occasion. One of the more successful therapies for this sort of dysregulation is called Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which is a particularly non-self-explanatory name.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, is really a form of structured parenting. It is a therapy that insists on clarity, honesty, and responsibility. It does not accept excuses and what I call cowardice.
DBT does not appear to teach courage, but it does teach structure. It insists that you think about what you’re doing, reflect on what you’ve done, and hold yourself to a consistently high standard. These are some of the ingredients of courage, but courage itself does not seem to be stated as a requirement.
The primary motivation that emotions provide are attraction and repulsion. We’re attracted to comfort and satisfaction, and we’re repelled by pain and fear. Courage is the willingness to confront pain and fear. Courage is what it takes to direct and redirect your emotions. You need courage if you’re going to confront emotional dysregulation.
Is There a Middle Ground?
Perhaps I’m being too polarized in painting courage as something you either have under your control or lack entirely. I hesitate to allow much middle ground because we tend to rationalize or evade when given open ground. I will admit that there is a path from one to the other. You can find courage without risking your physical life, but you might have to risk your spiritual life, or rather your lack of a spiritual life.
I picture each of us as a composition of alternately dominant personalities. Normally, these personalities are aware of each other and communicate to some extent. We call them moods, attitudes, or states of mind. We may not distinguish them but we are attached to them. We are so attached to them that we’ll fight tooth and nail for the right to express ourselves even when what we express is injurious, cowardly, or reprehensible.
I discourage the middle ground; it’s a no-mans land. It’s too easy to lose sight of one’s better judgment through indulgent feelings and weak thinking. You may be unable to avoid the equivocation of the middle ground, but at least recognize what you’re doing. It’s better that you see that you have something to resolve, or perhaps absolve, than to indulge your bad emotional habits and put off courage until another day.
It gets complicated because there are various tools to insight and tracks to personal growth. I advocate counseling at times, brain training generally, and critical self-observation always. To have insight sometimes and be oblivious at other times only creates a fractured life and a dissociated personality.
Self-observation is a skill, much like thinking but allowing for more perspectives. While thinking requires words, structures, and intentions, self-observation is primarily a matter of perception and awareness. All perception is self-perception at its root.
Paths to Courage
The purpose of talk therapy is to improve your intellect. Mastering your emotions is something else. Emotions are broadly linked to memory, and a verbal explanation traces only one root of an emotion. Mastering your emotions is more a matter of going out and doing things, and then seeing how you feel about them. Talking about emotions without feeling them is evasive.
In counseling, I emphasize your subconscious. The subconscious is the container of all things below your consciousness. It is the hull, sail, and engine room of your intentions. These are in contrast to your rational self that sits at the tiller trying to understand and direct these larger forces.
It is my hope that many of us can become courageous just by setting our minds to it, but I have no real evidence of this. The courageous people I known have been battle hardened. The battles have been situations of sacrifice, risk, and responsibility.
The cowards I’ve known never experienced conflict and have developed evasion as a gymnastic skill. Not to sound too much like a grumpy old man, but I’ve found cowards everywhere. They may become courageous one day, but only when they run out of ways to avoid it. There will always be situations that forge courage, your death will be one of them. The question is whether you see the benefit of confronting them and becoming courageous, or whether you leave them to last.
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