... when we humans feel emotional pain because of events, we often create unconscious beliefs that help us cope. But coping isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While it’s true that it’s better than giving up, there’s a high price to pay for adaptability.
-- Brenda Lane Richardson and Dr. Brenda Wade, “What Mama Couldn't Tell Us About Love: Healing the Emotional Legacy of Slavery, Celebrating Our Light”

Needless to say, we all have stressors in our lives, and on any given day, some of those events and pressures are unmanageable and far too heavy for us to navigate or see beyond. And because they are bigger or get bigger than we can gracefully and effectively handle, we develop masks and costumes to drape and protect ourselves from the situations, living on the surface of what ails and disturbs us, trying never to dig up the roots of our pain. Many times we find that it’s far easier to just cope with the circumstances of stress than it is to go to the source of that stress, address it, then alleviate it.

Which is why most of us are in the physical and psychological shapes and positions we’re in now.

Think on it. The pain you’ve experienced throughout your life, whether that pain be direct or that which flows through your genetic bloodstream, partly defines and creates what you think, feel, and do. Thus, if you believe the sky is falling, because one time it did, all of your actions, conscious or unconscious, will precipitate strategies useful for protecting yourself against the burn of the sun and the dark side of the moon. Likewise, if you believe the world is out to get you, because you’ve been gotten before, then every behavior, conscious or unconscious, will be directed at protecting yourself and possibly destroying others.

Thank you very much, Sadiqqa, for that basic psychological breakdown of animal nature, but the bigger point, however, is the examination of the outcomes produced as we hold true to some of the beliefs we’ve accepted as a result of our pain and stress. There is a high price to pay for adaptability or the settling in to a way of thinking and acting that doesn’t uplift and empower, but instead keeps us weak and powerless.

Adapting to, or tolerating, unfairness and inequality because you believe all you can get is this very little you’ve been receiving breeds resentment. For instance, if you feel devalued on your job, once you resent being undervalued, you may decide to slow down your output which ultimately puts you in jeopardy of losing your job. And when they hand you the pink slip, you then feel angry and become belligerent and need an escort off the property. Had you disputed and refused the inequity in the beginning, believing you deserved to paid and treated fairly, you would not be sitting on your couch surfing through the want ads today. And now, your resentment is even deeper than it was before.

Adapting begets narrow-mindedness; you can only see what you see and what you see is very limited. Because you have acquiesced to capitalist, individualistic ways of thinking, you believe anything less or else is foreign and needs to speak and sound the way you do. As well, when you believe and accept, unconsciously or not, that you’re a second-class citizen, you act in marginalized ways and help to create perceptions that keep you forever oppressed. Thus, if you believe you don’t belong, you actions will show such and others will likely endorse your belief.

So unless you change for the better what you believe about your experience and pain, then question fully what you are willing to cope and live with, anger, resentment, distress, and any other debilitating thing will seep from your crippled Self and guide every single move you make. If you never want to get ahead, if you never want to reach your fullest potential, if you never want to overcome, stay stuck where you are.

Sadiqqa © 2007