Openness to Challenge and Flexibility | The Road Less Traveled

The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life.

A life of total honesty [means] a continuous and never-ending process of self-monitoring to assure that our communications – not only the words that we say but also the way we say them – invariably reflect as accurately as humanly possible the truth or reality as we know it.

What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? it means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent self-examination.

To know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner.

The life of wisdom must be a life of contemplation combined with action.

Examination of the world without is never as personally painful as examination of thee world within.

It is right and proper that as human beings we should grow and progress as rapidly as possible.

Thee tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural ... to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

The primary reason people do not undergo psychotherapy is not that they lack the money but that they lack the courage. ... It is because they possess this courage that many psycho analytic patients are people who are basically much stronger and healthier than average.

Teaching [patients of therapy] that the only real relief will come through challenge and discipline is a delicate, often lengthy and frequently unsuccessful task.

Honesty does not come painlessly. The reason people lie is to avoid the pain of challenge and its consequences.

Lying is an attempt to circumvent legitimate suffering and hence is productive of mental illness.

Usually withholding [the truth] and lack of openness is rationalized on the basis of a loving desire to protect and shield [others] from unnecessary worries. yet more often than not such "protection" is unsuccessful [because others are already aware of the reality of the situation you're trying to hide by lying]. The result, then, is not protection but deprivation. They are deprived of the assurance they might receive if these topics were discussed more openly. Finally, they are deprived of role models of openness and honesty.

The exercise of discipline is not only a demanding but also a complex task requiring both flexibility and judgment.

To be free people we must assume responsibility for ourselves, but in doing so much possess the capacity to reject responsibility that is not truly ours.

To a greater or lesser degree, all people suffer from inadequacies of their flexible response systems. Much of the work of psychotherapy consists of attempting to help our patients allow or make their response systems become more flexible. Generally, the more crippled by anxiety, guilt, and insecurity our patients are, the more difficult and rudimentary this work is.

Mature mental health demands an extraordinary capacity to flexibly strike and continually restrike a delicate balance between conflicting needs, goals, duties, responsibilities, directions, et cetera.

The giving up of personality traits, well-established patterns of behavior, ideologies, and even whole life styles – these are major forms of giving up that are required if one is to travel very far on the journey of life.

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Dr. M. Scott Peck

The Road Less Traveled

From Section II: Discipline

Subsections:

Openness to Challenge

Withholding Truth

Balancing