The problem: Do you know that feeling you get sometimes when you try to do something and no matter what you do, how many times you try, how many different tools or strategies you use, it just does not work?
Well, that’s what a social phenomenon feels like. It’s that feeling of disempowerment and helplessness, as if you, as an individual, have no strength or capacity to do the thing you want to do. It is the same feeling you get when you try to do something that is too difficult, too big or too much for you. And because this is such a pervasive feeling in our societies that we learn from childhood (although perhaps at that time it is a normal feeling), we learn to live with the feeling that things are not made for us, they are too big, too complex, too much, etc. As adults we sometimes tend to take this feeling for granted and not spend too much time understanding where it comes from and what triggered it. The source of the confusion is that the same feeling can have at least two possible causes. On the one hand, there may be a real situation in which you need to train yourself and your abilities in order to perform the task you’d like to do and, on the other hand, a situation in which no matter how much you train yourself, it does not matter, because you are “fighting” with a social phenomenon that exceeds your capacity and your potential as an individual acting independently of others.
Our history with this problem
As individuals we are generally born with a certain level of empowerment and capacity to exercise our agency in the world, i.e. to do and set in motion the world around us in order to achieve some desired outcome. We know our power on this planet has some limitations, but within those limitations we are pretty much able to feel empowered once we master the ways in which things in our world can be done. However, when trial and error leads to no improvement, no feed-back and no clear outcome, we might have to face a choice in interpreting this state of affairs: is it something I am lacking or is so I need other people to sort this out? While this option range and framing sounds well and productive, the emotions that come with both of these choices are similar. They can be a blend of helplessness, disempowerment, fear, doubt, bewilderment, anger, frustration, stress and so much more. This is what a social phenomenon feels like for an individual.
Some examples
If you have been applying to jobs for a long time and you haven’t found one in more than 2 years, or if you have a higher education degree but there constantly seems to be someone who has better qualifications than you and this extends over a long period of time (six months to one or several years), and you have constantly added more diplomas, more skills, more experience, then this is no longer your problem, but a social one.
If you have been bullied in middle school, in high school, in university, at your job and the topic seems to happen over and over again, despite you going to therapy and receiving long terms support for healing trauma responses and maladaptive patterns, then this is no longer your problem, but a social one.
If you seem to be uncomfortable in your body and in constant fear of being sanctioned for how you look, not matter if you are the skinniest you have ever been, working out at the gym for years or at your most dreadful you have ever been, and you have been accompanied by a therapist to heal the emotional wounds that come with such body policing, but the sanctioning on your body does not stop, then this is not your problem, but a social one.
There are many instances of seemingly individual decisions, like how much to eat, what educational institution to go to and where you send your job applications, etc. that might look like they are strictly yours to make, but in fact, a big part of them (like your access, options, what you get and how much of what you could get, the probability of success if you follow a certain path and so on) belongs to social actors, like organizations, institutions, societies, governments, nations, cultures, international groups and world-level social orders.
The solution: Social Decision-making skills
Differentiating between the cases in which it is your responsibility and those where there is social responsibility, as well as understanding where your individual power ends and where social power begins is a skill that is tremendously important in decision-making, but that is currently not widely taught nor disseminated.
Nowadays we have seen a true breakthrough and tremendous results of all the efforts undertaken by psychologists’ associations and the psychological professional associations in the last 100 years in terms of the permeability of this psychotherapy into people’s lives. A tremendous amount of people have seen their life, relationships and inner peace substantially increase in quality as a result of access to high quality psychological counselling and therapy, psychiatric and neurological treatments and cures.
However, more and more people are witnessing difficulties with situations that don’t have anything to do with their mind, emotions, cognitions, behaviours, childhood trauma, attachments and experiences of their past and present and so on. Particularly if you have done therapy to heal past trauma and you are engaged into a continuous journey of personal development, you might get to a point at which you might feel that the therapy is not enough. We are not trained to spot the differences between what is psychological and what pertains to the social, between what belongs to us and what to the society we live in. We are also not trained to use the tools that are necessary to deal with social phenomena that affect us. Unlike individual action that you have been practicing since you were a child, social-level action follows different rules and requires completely different skill sets.
One of these skills that we are rarely trained in is social decision-making.
Could you already have this skill or not?
You might think that you are particularly good at it if you have a relatively decent life-style and if you are happy with how things turned out for you so far in life, if your children are relatively well-off or if you are doing slightly better than the people that matter to you. This however, is not an accurate manner to judge your decisions particularly if you don’t know or are not aware of the costs in human and material terms that have occurred as a result of your decisions.
You might think that you are particularly bad at making decisions if your life-style and life conditions are relatively worse off than that of the people that are important for you, if you feel you have not turned out so well, if your children are not really as well-off as you’d like them to be or if you are generally not happy with the current state of your life, even if there were significant amounts of time when you had a good or satisfactory life. But this is not an accurate manner to judge your decisions particularly if you don’t know or are not aware of the costs in human and material terms that have occurred as a result of your decisions.
Why is decision-making counselling important and different from coaching and psychotherapy?
There is often times a belief among those who are trained in decision-making in disciplines such as economics, psychology and engineering or even the (mathematical) decision theory that decisions are some type of individual action. In fact, this is seldom the case and without an understanding of sociological, political and administrative processes, decision-making will remain a skill that we have only half mastered, because it will lead our societies to undesirable outcomes, while a (moreover small) part of that society thrives and the other weaves.
There are even those who claim that since there are many people on our planet their life becomes less important. The more things or people there are, the lesser their value in the eyes of some of us. In economics, where many decision-making advice comes from, value emerges from scarcity and nothing else.
However, value does not emerge from scarcity, but from us as human beings. It is in our power and also our responsibility to value people, life, nature and things.
It is a consequence of our values that decision-making is not an individual process, but one that happens at multiple levels. As a consequence, the outcomes of our decisions can be seen at multiple levels, too.
However, for a very long time, the study of decision-making has focused on the consequences of decisions for “the actors involved in the decision-making process”, while those that do not participate in it, but who see their life, resources and loved ones affected by the consequences of these decisions are nowhere to be found in our decision-making models. Sometime, you could be one of those whose life has been affected by other’s neglectful decisions. Such decision processes are problematic because there is not place for the very things human being care most about: the intangibles, the human aspects, emotional and subjective, environmental and social consequences. Our decision-making processes are not concerned with care for life and the things we all value, but care for those things valued by those who decide for everybody. Our ideal decision-making process allows us to take care of the needs of the “majority”, while leaving behind those of anyone and anything that falls in the category of minority. Our decision-making models suggest that it is impossible to satisfy everyone and consequently we should not even try to.
What if you could find a way to stop this feeling of helplessness in the face of social problems? Would you want to look that solution up? Or will you choose to believe that this is not possible? Would you dedicate your life to creating and finding such a solution? Would you have your friends involved? Would you be able to imagine such a scenario? This is the point in which your decision counsellor can help out. Book some time with me if you’d like to check if this is the right service for you.
