Confronting our monsters
One of my clients recently told me about Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s literary essay, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)” in which Cohen looks to understand culture by studying the monsters we’ve created. While Cohen’s analysis largely refers to larger cultural monsters such as racism and sexism, I think his essay also gives us another means to look at the monsters we create within ourselves. The monsters that represent our fears, the automatic ways we learn to protect ourselves. I think looking at these monsters is central to opening the gates to our own possibility and it is also another way to look at the work of coaching.
Cohen’s Thesis V is “The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible.” He argues that to move beyond what is deemed possible by our monsters is to “....risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or (worse) to become monstrous oneself.”
This is something I talk about often with my clients. The closer we get to possibility, the greater the voice of fear grows telling us that it’s a horrible idea, that we will be rejected, to stop at all costs! It is the voice that gives rise to the fear of what others might think, how we might risk belonging or success or love by going after what we really want. I often think of these fears as different versions of ourselves that show up when we get scared. Perhaps we revert to hyper productivity or doom and gloom or silence. As you read this, you can probably conjure up the character(s) you become in these moments, that version of you designed to keep you in your comfort zone at all costs.
It is when these characters or monsters show up that we truly know we are onto something. Cohen’s Thesis VII is “The Monster Stands at the Threshold…of Becoming.” Cohen contends,“These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. They ask us why we have created them.”
To know our monsters is to know ourselves and to have a deeper knowledge of who we’ve been. It is when we recognize who they are, what they have gotten in the way of, where they may not be right after all, and who we can be without them that we can go to that place of becoming who we are and want to be. To face the monster fully and with awareness is the bridge to crossing the threshold. The monsters will return again throughout our lives in those moments we push the edge of our comfort zone. The difference is that we now have access to choice and the bridge that allows us to cross the threshold.
In many ways, this is the work of coaching - the work of addressing what’s really stopping us. In my experience thus far, it is never really the work of how. I think Brene Brown says it best in her book, “The Gifts of Imperfection:”
“My work–me–the decade I’ve spent doing research—it’s all about ‘the things that get in the way.’ I’m not about the ‘how-to’ because in ten years, I’ve never seen any evidence of ‘how-to’ working without talking about the things that get in the way.”
I’ll leave you with this: What monsters are getting in the way of your becoming?
