Confusion is a strategy we use to stay harmless:
“I will confuse myself so I can do what you want. I will confuse you so that you’re not angry on top of it.”
We confuse others, we confuse ourselves, and we stay in the confused state because if we weren’t, we would be angry or demanding.
If we were clear about what we wanted, we would no longer be harmless.
In If I am only nice enough…, I describe recognising this strategy in myself. Here is how it works, how it keeps itself intact, and what happens when it operates collectively.
Being good at the cost of showing who you are
A child depends on other people for care. When showing what they want, being angry, or making demands threatens that care, being good becomes a way to remain harmless.
But the child’s wishes don’t disappear. To keep being good, the child questions those wishes and becomes unclear about them.
The child can do what is expected because they no longer clearly know what they want themselves.
This is a childhood strategy of being harmless through confusion and through confusing others.
Confusion keeps us harmless
As adults, we continue using this childhood strategy. We confuse ourselves, we confuse others, and we stay in the confused state. If we weren’t confused, we would be angry or demanding.
The only way to navigate this arrangement is to be confused: to not know anymore what we want, to question ourselves, and to not be clear.
Because if we were clear, we would no longer be harmless.
“If I am confused, then I am not clear. If I am confused, I am harmless. If I am confused, I don’t know what I want. So if I am confused, I can give you what you want because maybe I think this is actually what I want.”
There is no clarity and no decision and no action and no anger and no boundaries.
We live in this soup of unclarity, where the only way for this arrangement to survive is for that unclarity to exist. Then we can be nice, and people can love us and pat us on our heads, and we have someone to take care of us.
How this exhausts our lives now
We agree to something we don’t really want to do. But our wishes don’t disappear because we haven’t communicated them. We resist, delay, or sabotage what we promised.
We confuse others too, so they don’t understand what is happening or how to move forward. The anger comes out sideways. What we want remains unspoken, and what we promised remains unfulfilled.
We become confused, and more confused, and more confused. Then we occupy ourselves with why we are confused and keep trying to sort it out.
Everything revolves around trying to resolve the confusion: our relationships, our work, our decisions, our inner work.
Our energy goes into this while the things we want to create remain undone.
How the strategy keeps itself intact
This strategy keeps us from perceiving the very things that would allow us to recognise it and leave it: our wishes, our anger, and our clarity.
To recognise the arrangement, we would need to notice: I don’t actually want what I have agreed to. I am angry. There is something I need to say or change.
But these are exactly the things we have learned to suppress in order to remain harmless and be taken care of. When a wish or a disagreement appears, we question it, explain it away, or turn our attention back to what is expected of us.
So we don’t clearly recognise that we are maintaining an arrangement we don’t want. We experience confusion instead—and then try to solve the confusion without letting ourselves know what we want.
The arrangement continues because it prevents us from recognising why we would want to leave it.
Even sincere spiritual or inner work can become part of that occupation. We can feel that we are working towards change while the underlying arrangement stays intact.
The question becomes concrete: what am I agreeing to? What do I expect in return? What am I not saying?
Reclaiming our anger
The way out begins with recognising that confusion is a strategy we are participating in. It is something we do to keep certain things from becoming clear.
And it has a lot to do with anger. Owning anger, feeling anger, and learning to work with it.
If anger has threatened our connection to the people who take care of us, even feeling it can be frightening. Before we can recognise a clear disagreement, fear comes up. We feel guilty, question ourselves, or turn the anger against ourselves. We become confused again.
So working with anger also means working with the emotions that make it difficult to access. The fear we have been afraid to feel. The sadness and pain we still carry. All the layers that come up when we begin to say: I don’t want this. I disagree. Something needs to change.
Coming back into the body means encountering what staying outside it has kept us from feeling. It means encountering what feels like frozen fear, allowing ourselves to feel what has been held there. This takes space and support; we don’t have to force our way through it.
The work is to bring anger into its highest potential: clarity, boundaries, decision, and action.
Feeling anger does not require hurting someone. We can learn to feel its intensity and choose how to express it. Instead of coming out sideways through resentment or sabotage, it becomes available for saying what is true and acting on it.
That can mean saying: I agreed to this, but I don’t want it. I have not been clear with you. This is what I can offer. This is what I am asking for.
The adult position is the one from which we acknowledge what we want, communicate it, and act towards it. From which we take responsibility for our participation, including the consequences of our actions.
We can stop promising compliance as the price of care. We can ask for care directly and allow the other person to answer.
The collective sleep
Unrecognised, hurt inner children can dominate and take over whole rooms of people.
Collectively, we are sleeping. We don’t want to really see and don’t want to take responsibility, and we enter this collective soup of fog and confusion about what we are actually doing.
We do what is assigned to us and leave the decisions to someone else. We remain in this soup of unclarity where we can keep feeling harmless and nice.
The people in the driving seats have their own inner children, hungry for what they never received. They become hijacked by them, but now they have the power to act that out over whole nations.
We have people who want someone to take care of them, and people in the driving seats who themselves still want to receive what they never got.
The earth gets ruined in that.
Whole nations get driven into havoc while we remain in this collective sleep and don’t want to see what we are doing.
We want to be taken care of without seeing what sustains us and what it costs.
Coming out of this confusion means looking at the whole chain of events in which we participate. Who and what sustains us? What does our receiving ask of us?
There is a difference between a prayer before you eat your food and the realisation that an animal had to die for you to eat this piece of salmon.
When we are really there, it dawns on us what needed to happen. We can see what has been given to us, and the responsibility that comes with receiving it. We can see the depth and the consequences of what we participate in.
Our own pain is still there, but it no longer keeps us from seeing beyond it.