The Courage To Be Disliked: The life changing multi-million copy global bestseller (Courage To series Book 1)
Last read February 29, 2024
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Highlights
60 highlights.
None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it’s impossible to share your world with anyone else.
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TRAUMA DOES NOT EXIST
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‘No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.’
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But the important thing is that nothing is actually determined by those influences. We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences.
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PEOPLE FABRICATE ANGER
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You did not fly into a rage and then start shouting. It is solely that you got angry so that you could shout. In other words, in order to fulfil the goal of shouting, you created the emotion of anger.
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HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT BEING CONTROLLED BY THE PAST
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it is Freudian aetiology that denies our free will, and treats humans like machines.
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ARE YOU OKAY JUST AS YOU ARE?
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‘The important thing is not what one is born with, but what use one makes of that equipment.’
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UNHAPPINESS IS SOMETHING YOU CHOOSE FOR YOURSELF
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But no one, not even the most hardened criminal, becomes involved in crime purely out of a desire to engage in evil acts. Every criminal has an internal justification for getting involved in crime. A dispute over money leads someone to engage in murder, for instance. To the perpetrator, it is something for which there is a justification, and which can be restated as an accomplishment of ‘good’.
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When we try to change our lifestyles, we put our great courage to the test. There is the anxiety generated by changing, and the disappointment attendant to not changing. I am sure you have selected the latter.
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Adlerian psychology is a psychology of courage. Your unhappiness cannot be blamed on your past or your environment. And it isn’t that you lack competence. You just lack courage. One might say you are lacking in the courage to be happy.
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WHY YOU DISLIKE YOURSELF
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Students preparing for their exams think, If I pass, life will be rosy. Company workers think, If I get transferred, everything will go well. But even when those wishes are fulfilled, in many cases nothing about their situations changes at all.
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forget, it’s basically impossible to not get hurt in your relations with other people. When you enter into interpersonal relationships, it is inevitable that to a greater or lesser extent you will get hurt, and you will hurt someone, too. Adler says, ‘To get rid of one’s problems, all one can do is live in the universe all alone.’ But one can’t do such a thing.
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ALL PROBLEMS ARE INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP PROBLEMS
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Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them. To feel lonely, we need other people. That is to say, it is only in social contexts that a person becomes an ‘individual’.
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LIFE IS NOT A COMPETITION
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It is in trying to progress past who one is now that there is value.
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FROM POWER STRUGGLE TO REVENGE
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PHILOSOPHER: The moment one is convinced that ‘I am right’ in an interpersonal relationship, one has already stepped into a power struggle.
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PHILOSOPHER: I am right. That is to say, the other party is wrong. At that point, the focus of the discussion shifts from ‘the rightness of the assertions’ to ‘the state of the interpersonal relationship’. In other words, the conviction that ‘I am right’ leads to the assumption that ‘this person is wrong’, and finally it becomes a contest and you are thinking, I have to win. It’s a power struggle through and through.
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When one can think, Whenever I am with this person, I can behave very freely, one can really feel love. One can be in a calm and quite natural state, without having feelings of inferiority or being beset with the need to flaunt one’s superiority. That is what real love is like.
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in Adlerian psychology, self-reliance as an individual and cooperation within society are put forth as overarching objectives.
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Freudian aetiology is a psychology of possession, and eventually arrives at determinism. Adlerian psychology, on the other hand, is a psychology of use, and it is you who decides it.
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Wishing so hard to be recognised will lead to a life of following expectations held by other people who want you to be ‘this kind of person’. In other words, you throw away who you really are and live other people’s lives.
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‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’
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You are the only one who can change yourself.
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way: intervening in other people’s tasks and taking on other people’s tasks turns one’s life into something heavy and full of hardship. If you are leading a life of worry and suffering—which stems from interpersonal relationships—first, learn the boundary of ‘from here on, that is not my task’.
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When reward is at the base of an interpersonal relationship, there’s a feeling that wells up in one that says, ‘I gave this much, so you should give me that much back.’ This is a notion that is quite different from separation of tasks, of course. We must not seek reward, and we must not be tied to it.
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In Adlerian psychology, there are aspects that are antithetical to normal social thinking. It denies aetiology, denies trauma and adopts teleology. It treats people’s problems as interpersonal relationship problems. And the not-seeking of recognition and the separation of tasks, too, are probably antithetical to normal social thinking.
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An adult, who has chosen an unfree way to live, on seeing a young person living freely here and now in this moment, criticises the youth as being hedonistic; of course, this is a life-lie that comes out so that the adult can accept his own unfree life. An adult who has chosen real freedom himself will not make such comments, and will instead cheer on the will to be free.
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‘freedom is being disliked by other people’.
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It’s that you are disliked by someone. It is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance with your own principles.
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the cost of freedom in interpersonal relationships is that one is disliked by other people.
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Unless one is unconcerned by other people’s judgements, has no fear of being disliked by other people, and pays the cost that one might never be recognised, one will never be able to follow through in one’s own way of living.
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He hit me that time, and that is why our relationship went bad, is a Freudian aetiological way of thinking. The Adlerian teleology position completely reverses the cause-and-effect interpretation. That is to say, I brought out the memory of being hit because I don’t want my relationship with my father to get better.
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For me, it was more convenient to not repair my relationship with my father. I could use having a father like that as an excuse for why my own life wasn’t going well. That for me was a virtue.
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People who are obsessed with such a desire for recognition will seem to be looking at other people, while they are actually only looking at themselves. They lack concern for others, and are concerned solely with the ‘I’. Simply put, they are self-centred.
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In Adlerian psychology, however, a sense of belonging is something that one can attain only by making an active commitment to the community of one’s own accord, and not simply by being here.
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at the gateway of interpersonal relations, we’ve got the separation of tasks, and as the goal, there’s community feeling. And you’re saying that community feeling is having ‘a sense of others as comrades’, and ‘an awareness of having one’s own refuge’ within the community.
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When one is not following through with one’s tasks, it is not because one is without ability. Adlerian psychology tells us that the issue here is not one of ability, but simply that ‘one has lost the courage to face one’s tasks’. And, if that is the case, the thing to do before anything else is to recover that lost courage.
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It’s quite simple. It is when one is able to feel I am beneficial to the community that one can have a true sense of one’s worth. This is the answer that would be offered in Adlerian psychology.
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Self-affirmation is making suggestions to oneself, such as ‘I can do it’ or ‘I am strong’, even when something is simply beyond one’s ability. It is a notion that can bring about a superiority complex, and may even be termed a way of living in which one lies to oneself. With self-acceptance, on the other hand, if one cannot do something, one is simply accepting ‘one’s incapable self’ as is, and moving forward so that one can do whatever one can. It is not a way of lying to oneself. To put it more simply, say you’ve got a score of sixty per cent, but you tell yourself I just happened to get unlucky this time around, and the real me is one hundred per cent. That is self-affirmation. By contrast, if one accepts oneself as one is, as sixty per cent, and thinks to oneself, How should I go about getting closer to one hundred per cent?—that is self-acceptance.
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Accept what is irreplaceable. Accept ‘this me’ just as it is. And have the courage to change what one can change. That is self-acceptance.
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Kurt Vonnegut quoted in one of his books: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom always to tell the difference.’ It’s in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
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to feel ‘it’s okay to be here’ one has to see others as comrades. And that to see others as comrades, one needs both self-acceptance and confidence in others.
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one may say that people who think of others as enemies have not attained self-acceptance, and do not have enough confidence in others.
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community feeling is not something that is attainable with just self-acceptance and confidence in others. It is at this point that the third key concept—contribution to others—becomes necessary.
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‘Those who hear my talk today can be happy right now, this very instant. But those who do not will never be able to be happy.’
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all we need is the subjective sense that ‘I am of use to someone’, or in other words, a feeling of contribution.
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In a word, happiness is the feeling of contribution. That is the definition of happiness.
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people can only be truly aware of their worth when they are able to feel ‘I am of use to someone’.
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When a child engages in problem behaviour, his parents and other adults rebuke him. Being rebuked, more than anything else, puts stress on the child. But even if it is in the form of rebuke, the child wants his parents’ attention. He wants to be a special being, and the form that attention takes doesn’t matter. So, in a sense, it is only natural that he does not stop engaging in problem behaviour, no matter how harshly he is rebuked.
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Why is it necessary to be special? Probably because one cannot accept one’s normal self. And it is precisely for this reason that when being especially good becomes a lost cause, one makes the huge leap to being specially bad—the opposite extreme. But is being normal, being ordinary, really such a bad thing? Is it something inferior? Or, in truth, isn’t everybody normal? It is necessary to think this through to its logical conclusion.
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For example, the person who had dreams of becoming a violinist was always looking at pieces of music, and concentrating on each piece, and on each and every measure and note.
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When someone posed these questions to Adler, this was his answer: ‘Life in general has no meaning.’
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Adler tells us that all problems are interpersonal relationship problems. But if one does not know how to build good interpersonal relationships, one may end up trying to satisfy other people’s expectations.
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