The false promise of discipline

It’s about more than being kind to yourself

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

Hey there everyone—

Imagine a change you’re wanting to implement: an exercise habit, a meditation practice, a weekly phone call with a far-away friend. Or maybe you want to “subtract” something: sugar or caffeine; screen time; criticizing others. What happens when you picture yourself making this change? What words do you hear in your head? What do you see, as you imagine yourself doing this new thing?

If you have a moment, stop reading or listening to this post and jot down the answers to these questions:

• What does the change mean to you?

• How will it feel to start making the shift?

• What will you need, in order to stick with the change?

• What are you telling yourself about your ability to succeed?

Behavior change is characterized by ambivalence: the desire to make the change fights with the loss of what came before. I want a strong core; I lose donuts in bed. The ambivalence can generate fear: What if I fail? What if I announce this change to my friends, they’re pumped, and then I come back two weeks later, bag o’ donuts in hand?

A common response to these fears is either to give up in advance, or to summon a call to discipline to make the change stick. No excuses. Just get up a half-hour early and work out; just go to bed and read; just stop complaining—your negativity is poisoning the air.

There’s a cruelty here, underneath these exhortations. “It’s not that hard” can quickly devolve into “What’s wrong with you? Anyone could do this.” Or, “Why are you so weak, so self-indulgent, so unable to take care of yourself, so incapable of doing the thing you’ve tried to do, over and over, for years?”

There’s this idea that “discipline” can overpower the mewling, excuse-making part of us—that we all have an inner drill sergeant, waiting to show up. But there’s a catch. If you have a history of being abused, shamed, nagged, or dominated, especially in childhood, you’ll likely respond to the voice of discipline with contempt and rebellion. Now you’re at war with yourself, and possibly mired in traumatic memories. The inner teenager might come to your rescue, telling you it’s all bullshit, this goody-goody goal setting—you’re better off not trying to be anything other than who you are right now.

Engaging in “discipline” can double your workload. You need to figure out the steps to make the change, but you can’t do that, because you’re managing a bully in your head. The tyrant steals the energy you need to actually make the change.

So what’s a better way? And if you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you may be wondering why I’m writing about individual behavior change, when the focus of this newsletter is on structural violence and oppression.

If you’ve read any writing by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, you’ll know that he chose the word “discipline” to characterize the interlocking structures—schools, prisons, hospitals, the mental health apparatus—that implement and reinforce the ideologies that the dominant culture circulates, teaching us to keep ourselves in line, to save the State the trouble and cost of policing us. The physical, institutional entities of discipline are part of the the same logics of domination that denigrate entire groups of people, and then position some bodies, some identities as inherently productive, efficient, able, rational and worthy, and others as weak, deficient, abnormal, lacking and dependent on the social safety net to survive. 

If we want to change the broader culture, we have to find ways to engage change beyond discipline. If we want to do more than make small changes in our individual lives, we’ll have to build our resilience, our uncertainty training, because before we can even embark on change, we have to slow down enough to notice when discipline is in play.

Think about how many self-help strategies begin with reassurance-–just follow this time-tested, evidence-based, deeply-researched strategy and you will be ok; in fact you’re very likely to succeed! 

The idea that we change to become ourselves, but “better”—isn’t that a bit like becoming a new and improved cake mix? Same cake, only better? Me, plus the removal of everything that’s discomfiting about me? Isn’t that what corporate DEI is tasked with? The company can stay essentially the same, just remove its white supremacy, its sexism, its salary inequities; just “welcome in” some new folks to this company that’s essentially the same? But to fight massive problems like ecological extinction, economic inequality, sexual violence, police brutality—we are talking tranformation, not improvement.

I’ve been asking myself what changework without discipline might look like. I notice how much I default to discipline and time management, every time I take on something new. I buy a new notebook. I try bullet journaling. I calculate the number of hours the new change will require and toggle things around on my calendar. I turn myself into a one-woman assembly line, with me as boss and worker. A couple of hours in, I won’t notice that my back hurts; I won’t care that I’m hungry; I won’t ask how I feel.

It’s more than hypocritical to be invested in cultural transformation and to think I can get there through domination and efficiency—it’s demoralizing; it’s staggering; and, when I’m being kinder to myself, it’s evidence of just how steeped I am in the methods of self control.

When I look at the goals I actually stick to, it’s not because of my discipline, or because I’m a hard ass. It’s because of love. It’s hard to write that sentence. It feels squishy and vulnerable and naive. But I don’t mean love like “I love it!” I mean love like protection, fierceness, like coming back over and over again, when you don’t know what you’re doing, because you care enough to stay in it. Love that’s so immense that your daily frustrations and uncertainties and general laziness are just no match for it.

Toughness is about walling things off, including our relationship to our own pain. But being in contact with structural violence and oppression requires entering the pain of others, as well as our own. It requires an enlarged capacity for holding grief and outrage—the feelings we instinctively recoil from. But these feeling states arise out of our love. If we didn’t feel so much love, so much connection, we couldn’t suffer and grieve when others are in pain. To stay connected to that love can power us into that space of possibility. Even if we can’t yet envision its fullness, we’ve already touched a tiny version of it in our everyday encounters with all the forms of Being in our world. When you are wanting to change, even a small thing in your own life, ask yourself first to find its source in love.

I’d love to know if you’re already practicing change from a place of love—or how you turn things around, when you’re demeaning yourself in the midst of trying to do something hard.

Stay safe out there this week —

xo

Rebecca