Many of the people with whom I worked knew in a vague way that when they didn't make an active choice, that was a choice. Still, in a post-modern age, many also lived with a kind of existential passivity if not despair. Life and choice become a kind of resigned shrug, a "No" that seems to inhabit the world for them even before they make their non-choice choice. To quote a bumper sticker: "_________ happens and then you die." Whatever fills in the blank, it often implies a lack of real choice because it asserts a uselessness in life. In the face of such a feeling, we often give up making active choices, a "Yes," and just get on with acting out the meaning perspectives that have become the unknown and unquestioned center of our perceptions and our lives. The "No" as an essential part of our identity makes something of our lives that we don't really want to choose. As familiar as the "No" feels, "Yes" comes as part of our human nature, our defiant human spirit, our becoming self and whole being—"Yes."
When we choose to say "No" to our lives, we say "No" to our becoming self. The negative we speak paradoxically but inevitably speaks a positive. It says, "Yes" to the life denying dominator model. That model acts on the belief that it knows what's best for us because what's best for us is best for the dominator model. That model tells us who we should be and holds us to the abstract standard we have seen and discussed before. It tells us who we are and that we have to make ourselves conform to the way things are in whatever way we need to do so. It defines us as early as possible. In most ways, the family myth helps in saying "No" to our whole being and "Yes" to the dominator model.[122] Although done without malice, the unquestioned way we talk about children serves that purpose. One child is the smart one. Another child is the emotional one. Another child is the artistic one. These early references to a developing self, to a child wishing to make some form out of the world she/he finds around her/him can distort the process. The child wants to find and make form in and out of the becoming self, but myths and labels get in the way. These family labels get exacerbated by a school system that labels students soon and often. Those labels can and do distort the inherent "Yes" within each child, the "Yes" that forms an essential part of the becoming self.
Many students came to me with an embedded myth or label, a "No" about themselves. This meaning perspective prevented them from reaching their becoming self and reaching out into the world, so they could that would make a positive form out of their lives however those lives were constituted. One student, Ruth, quickly showed her intelligence and perceptive abilities in our first meeting. She reported to me that she spent most of her adult life as an exotic dancer in various clubs. She also danced with dependencies of one kind or another. She had ended both dances soon before we met, and she wanted to begin her life again. She told me she felt somewhat hampered by her appearance. She was endlessly told she was "cute," a rather dismissive comment in terms of her other and more personal and professional qualities.[123] She showed these in many ways, but she also believed she was permanently hampered if not definably hindered by her "learning disability." At some early point in her school life, she got bored and restless and labeled ADHD. That put her in special classes and put her through the same sort of dismissive pattern we have seen before in other special class experiences. She also learned best visually, and she reported that seemed to keep her out of learning almost altogether. She came to the training center to learn skills to use in a new career, but she was telling me she couldn't learn—not a great start for her.
The power of meaning perspectives showed in her in this very unhappy and restrictive way and they hampered her life. We talked about these unquestioned barriers she had learned if she learned nothing else at home and at school. She told me she had to think about these ideas, so she left and came back the next day ready to talk but wary of where we might be going.