UGOTABU

Deb has these letters on her car’s “vanity plate.” Most people can’t figure out what UGOTABU means, but others seem to get it in a heartbeat. I wonder what might be the neurological, grammatical, analytical ability some people have in order to translate UGOTABU to “You have to (gotta) be you (U).” Deb chose this license plate largely because of what she does for a living as a psychotherapist, but more to the point, she chose this acronym because her work with people is to help them be themselves. Simple as this project sounds, many people struggle with how to “be themselves,” mostly because they can’t seem to adjust to the world in one or more ways. This phenomenon would describe our work with everyone one we see in our offices, and in a way, it is the centerpost of our work with people. If people can’t seem to really “be who they are,” they have trouble with many phases of life, like work, education, family, friends, property, and even ideas. And very importantly, if one can’t be who they are, they can’t engage with others as they are. Allow me to report on a few people (all men; I just see men, you know) whom I have seen this past week:

• John is 50. He is in a good marriage and has been a good father, now to children who have moved out of the house engaging in further education and work. He is an artist and has worked diligently at his trade and avoided the “starving artist” nature where so many artists find themselves. In fact, he has worked so hard for the past 15 years that he is exhausted and doesn’t know how to cope with all the work he has lined up for himself, mostly in the form of art shows and conventions. He wants to “be himself”, which seems to be an artist, but he can’t seem to do that fully while he is doing his art and simultaneously think about “paying the mortgage,” as he says.
• Jack is roughly half of John’s age, works remotely and successfully in life. Importantly, Jack describes himself as “Christian homosexual.” Important to him is this identification rather than “gay” or even “queer” that so many homosexual people prefer these days. His “Christian” orientation is evangelical, which you might know is a literalistic orientation to Christianity together with somewhat stringent views of how life should be run, one of which is that homosexuality is “not in God’s plan” for anyone, is “sinful,” and “can be changed with right thinking and living.” Jack tried to be something else than homosexual for many years without success and has come to believe that “God created me as homosexual.” As you might suspect, this understanding does not resonate well with his evangelical Christian community.
• Peter’s age is about halfway between Jack and John and is neither artistic nor homosexual. In fact, he can’t seem to find any kind of definition of “who he is” that leads him anywhere meaningful, much less practical. He has been fired from at least two jobs, left two others, and has been generally unemployed for most of the past 10 or 12 years. Interestingly, he has been subsidized in his unemployment condition by various sources from people who love him, but in so doing, they are keeping him from finding himself, being himself, and giving himself to the world.
• Frank is the youngest of the men I saw recently at 22. Frank lives at home, which consists of his mother and himself, and works part-time doing some kind of warehouse work, a job he just got a few months ago having “taken three years off” when he finished high school and evidently didn’t do much but play video games. He did some kind of electrical assistant program at the local community college but “hasn’t been able to find work” locally because “they want me to do some meaningless” kind of electrical work.
• Dick is 40 and is looking at “who he has been” over these 40 years, finding that he has been “everyone’s man” under varying circumstances. He was a faithful husband to a woman who subsequently left her son and husband and soon died of complications from her serious alcoholism. He worked diligently to raise their son for the past 20-odd years, served in the American military, and developed a small successful business. Now that he is no longer in the military and his son is off to college, he realizes that he doesn’t want to live in this area, doesn’t want to do his business, and doesn’t want to be near his biological family. He has vague thoughts of moving to Canada that has been a kind of dream for a long time.
• Sam, 37, comes out of a truly traumatic childhood together with a kind of indulgence from both of his parents in different ways culminating with his spending a year of his late adolescence in some kind of treatment farm. He slowly found his way into the real work by going to college, developing a successful business, foraging around with things that were quazi-illegal, but never having a successful relationship with man or woman. He worked hard to get himself into a very financially rewarding job and has found what seems to be a good woman who could be a life’s partner. Yet Sam is uncertain about what he wants to do. Oddly, the good woman and good job are not assuredly right for him.
• Dwight admittedly squandered his teenage years and his 20’s before he got together with his female partner and helped conceive their son, now 16 months. While Dwight has worked here and there in the past, he is not working now, largely because his partner received a significant inheritance from her parents and money is no real problem. Asked what is important to him, he could only say that it was his son. Asked what he might like to do, he said that he has thought of being a therapist. Yet he barely finished high school 13 years ago and hasn’t done any further education. He is safe and secure, but one must ask what his life will be in the future.

All of these men display some important things: intelligence, honesty, and even physically fit. You would think those characteristics would be enough for them to “find themselves” and make something of themselves, but it seems that such things are not sufficient to make an impact on life and find meaning in who they are and what they do. The element that is missing is first having a sense of what psychologists call “self,” sometimes identified as “real self,” or “inner self.” Then, very importantly the next task is to engage the world. We sometimes say that psychotherapy is first “selfish” and then “selfless,” perhaps more accurately, foundationally being oneself and practically serving the world in some way. But to be oneself and ultimately to serve the world, one has to adapt. What does it mean to adapt? But before we examine adaptation we need to examine what it means to “be oneself.”

UGOTABU (Being oneself)

Before you can adapt to the world, you have to “be yourself.” We often say something like this: being yourself means seeing who you are, understanding who you are, expressing who you are, and communicating who you are. Many people, like all the men described above have gone through their lives without this basic ingredient of knowing who they are. Rather, they have engaged the world as something to adjust to, accommodate, and otherwise do what seems to be what they have to do. Dick concluded that he just needed to do what was the responsible thing to do, like serving in the military, raising his son, and even caring for his alcoholic wife. Peter worked hard to get good grades in high school and went to college because that was expected of him before “crashing” just before he graduated college realizing that he had no idea of who he was or what he should do aside from being the superhero of his childhood dreams.

How can we make practical suggestions or directions so that these good people can find themselves, to be who they are? If we can’t help them find out who they are, we will never be able to help them adapt to the world, much less serve the world. To help a person to find what it means to be oneself, allow me to suggest a path that often takes, hours, weeks, or years. We might also suggest that this path of finding and being oneself is and should be a lifelong process.

We start with an understanding of the threefold path of life. We call it the “10-2-1” process, a term that Deb came up with several years ago, and which we find almost universally helpful for people to find what it means to be a person. You might look up the 10-2-1 blog we did a bit ago. The 10-2-1 process is this: feel 10 times, think twice, and do once. If people “just do,” they usually find that they are doing something that has no meaning to them, what other people want them to do, or perhaps just do nothing at all. To get to meaningful doing, you have to feel a lot, think a bit and then do something. “Feeling a lot” is the “ten times,” but in fact, it may mean feeling 100 times.

This whole business of “feeling,” however, is more complex than you might think. It is not just feeling emotionally. It might be helpful for you to read our book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we discuss the whole idea of feelings, particularly that feelings includes emotion but actually starts with physical feelings, then emotional feelings, then cognitive feelings, which then leads to a demonstration of feelings in some kind of action. Feeling ten times, much less feeling 100 times is very hard, and is not something that most of us learned in our families, schools, friendships, or playgrounds. I won’t elaborate on how a person can feel 10 times (or more) except to say that everyone wants to think or do before they have felt enough. When people think or do before they have felt their feelings, their action will be infused with emotion, which should not be the motivating force for thinking and doing.

The think twice is this: if you have felt through your feelings so that you are no longer burdened by physical or emotional feelings, you can think clearly. If you can think clearly, you can chose between two options (sometimes more) and take action. Once you take action, you can assess your action as being good, not so good, or not enough and make an appropriate adjustment to what you do in life, however small or significant your action might be.

All of this feeling, thinking, and action is the essence of what it means to UGOTABU idea, of being yourself. The results of being yourself are primarily twofold: confidence and humility. This means that you feel confident in what you do as well as being humble enough to see the error of your way. Because of this combination of confidence and humility, you feel grounded in being yourself. This “grounded” feeling is emotional, cognitive, physical, and spiritual. Grounded doesn’t mean what you feel, think, or do is the right thing, but that you do not feel afraid: not afraid of making mistakes and not afraid of being criticized. Indeed, you might feel sad if you make some kind of blunder or even if you are crudely criticized for what you said or did. You cannot feel sad and afraid at the same time, which is the essence of how we look at these emotions, something that we outlined in The Positive Power of Sadness. The story of life, however, does not end with being yourself, feeling good about yourself, or even doing something. You have to adapt to the world. what does adapting to the world mean?

UGOTADOU (Adapting to the world)

Adapting to the world means engaging the various aspects of the world, namely education, vocation, property, and people. You can do this effectively only if you have done the first part of this UGOTA theme. Many people engage one or more of these aspects of life without a proper understanding of what it means to be a self first, an adapter second, and a servant third. Many people are particularly good at adapting to people, so good in fact, that they functional as chameleons, which means that they adapt to the people around them so as to be like these people. Other people act the part with education or work, which means that they do what is expected of them, like Peter, who knew how to get good grades in high school and college until he started asking the question of himself, “Why am I doing this?”

To adapt to the world, granting that one has gone through the process of seeing himself, understanding himself, valuing himself, and communicating himself, he must now do approximately the same for the world: seeing, understanding, valuing, and being open to communication from the various aspects of life. An individual must see, understand, value, and listen to the various aspects of the world: education, vocation, property, and people.

Seeing the world

You can “see” all of these aspects. You can see education as a necessary aspect of life, namely something that increases your knowledge and skills. You can see vocation as a means of demonstrating your acquired knowledge and skills in such a way that benefits you and others. You can see property, including money, as a necessary part of life that gives pleasure, opportunity, safety, and charity. When you “see” people, you see their basic goodness, inner strength along with their abilities.

Understanding the world

You can only understand the world, namely the four elements of education, vocation, property, and people, if you first see the world. Understanding is based on perception, but perception using all five physical senses and possibly that sixth sense of intuition. Understanding is a basic operation that we have as people and it is distinctly different form judging. That having been said, we need to base our understanding on what we see in order to see how these basic elements of adaptation actually work. Many people haven’t been able to see how education is the basic of vocation, and vocation is the basis of managing property, and finally understanding people is seeing how they operate in what they say or do is a reflection of who they are. People who really understand people are predominantly using their perceptive function in order to evaluate why certain people act in certain ways.

Valuing the world

If you see something—really see it, you will understand it. If you understand it, you will value it because you will see how this thing helps the world go ‘round. Seeing, understanding, and valuing the world is a natural progression with the world is valuing all the world, or at least as much as you can see and understand. It means, for instance valuing education, vocation, property, people, and ideas. You may be a person with a lot of formal education, which probably means that you value education. You may be someone who values vocation, people, property, or ideas. The more you can expand your valuing of these aspects of the world, the better you will do at adapting to these necessary aspects of living. All of us tend to value one or two elements of the world because we were raised in environments that enhanced seeing these elements, but not others. The challenge, as well as the responsibility for us to adapt to these various aspects of the world is to move beyond what comes easily to us and listen to the world.

Listening to the world

I use the term, listening, in a broad sense beyond our sense of hearing. You may “listen” to wind, or “listen” in the abstract sense to Nature as she demonstrates her wisdom. You may be good at listening to beauty in some form; you may be good at listening to money and other forms of property as you see the positive and negative effects that property can bring people; you may be good at listening to all the complications of your work or profession, sometimes as simple as listening to the proper motor noise or improper motor noise. Perhaps, most importantly in life is the ability to listen to people. Listening to people can include all six senses, which might include listening to your intuition, a feeling that comes to you when you are listening to a person talk or a professor lecture.

All of this adapting to the world, starting with seeing, followed by understanding, valuing, and listening naturally brings you to another important dimension: serving the world.

UGOTAGIVEU (Serving the world)

We remind you that good psychotherapy begins with a kind of “selfish” approach, namely understanding, valuing, and communicating yourself to the world. That having been accomplished, which by the way, is a never-ending process in life as we understand it, you naturally find it necessary to move beyond valuing yourself, to adapting to the world, and eventually serving the world. Consider how you have served the world, or perhaps you know people who have served the world. We won’t suggest how you might serve the world, but allow us to return to some of the men we referenced earlier to suggest how they might serve the world:

• John the artist. He has already served the world in many ways including helping his wife out in her business for many years, raising his step son for 10 years, properly managing the finances of the household and the house itself. Perhaps most importantly, he has served the world in his art by bringing beauty to the world. Now that he has found that the art world is a challenging world, he is looking to be more content with himself and his family and continue to be of service with his art, perhaps being more creative than productive, which might serve all the aspects of his life.
• Jack the “Christian homosexual” is yet looking as to how he can adapt to the world being himself. During our last session I suggested that he is certainly not the only person of his nature and his conviction and that ultimately he might be able to serve people with his nature, people with different natures, and perhaps even organizations like churches to see, understand, and value someone who is homosexual.
• Peter the wanabe Superman or President just might be the brightest of these men but is really stuck with how to adapt to the world, largely because he is still finding ways to be himself instead of Superman or President. He has found this to be a tough task, but if he can manage to find a good understanding of himself, then a good understanding of the world, he might see ways of helping the world with his brilliance and passion. Bright people often struggle with adapting and serving because things often come easier to them than for the rest of us
• Frank the video-game player is just beginning the work of being himself and valuing himself, and as such has not really truly engaged in the business of adapting to the world. It is possible that I will only be able to help him with one of these projects given the challenge of helping him grow up. Frank is, however, also quite bright, which could help him find something, some people, or some place where he can use his intelligence to make the world a better place.
• Dick is “everyman’s man” has done a great deal of adapting but not enough self-understanding and self-communicating. Yet as I see Dick, I see a man who has served the world in many ways in his military career, raising his child, and starting a people-helping business. If he can continue on the path of self-understanding, he might be able to serve the world because he is very good at adapting.
• Sam the successful businessman has worked diligently in self-understand as well as adapting to the world. If he continues on this path, I can see him doing what he really craves to do: some kind of nature protection and nature engagement, which is far cry from making buildings and money. He has the tools and the passion of a person who can do such things without a simplistic understanding of how money and property management actually works.
• Dwight is now beginning to understand how property and people actually work, but needs to get a clearer picture of who he is and communicate that, primarily to his partner, and look beyond his current set of circumstances. His idea of becoming a therapist might work, but this is a long haul for someone at his age has no higher education.

UGOTABU, UGOTADOU, and UGOTAGIVEU are not clear stages in life as we can see with these men, who have done one or two of these elements but not the third. We invite you to consider which of these is where you are in life, and then find self-acceptance of you and life around you. We wish you the very best in this endeavor.