Inner Absencing
Read the article in Italian, Spanish, French, German and Traditional Chinese.
The past two pandemic years have been some of the hardest of my life. As the world around me collapsed in several ways simultaneously, a parallel collapse happened inward. Too often I felt relegated to a place of darkness devoid of the kind of insight that might make the experience transformative. Only now, as I and the world begin to emerge from the most acute phases of the pandemic, can I see with clearer eyes my own inner experience. I’ve been reflecting on this experience through the lens of Theory U — the framework for profound societal and personal transformation developed by MIT Sloan School of Management’s Otto Scharmer.
Choice Point
At the heart of Theory U there is a choice point: it lies in the breath between presencing and absencing. Presencing is the act of opening to the world around us and entering into direct relationship with it. It is a conscious decision to engage with genuine curiosity, open-heartedness and courage to step into new action. Absencing is a mode of operating that leads to many of the world’s most wicked problems. It is characterized by a series of acts that create and maintain separation: denying and de-sensitizing to the realities of others, closing to collective potential, locating the source of problems outside oneself, and engaging in various forms of violence.
Again and again, we face the choice to either open to others and the world around us or not to, instead turning away from or even turning against. Absencing is not so much a choice as a tendency — an often unconscious response to draw away from what is happening around us and to the vulnerability of opening to the unknown. It is in this space, the choice point between presencing and absencing, that our consciousness is born and lived out through myriad moment-to-moment decisions made each day.
More recently I have been sensing another pull in the presencing-absencing dynamic — less visible but equally destructive — that deserves our attention. It is the turn against self, which can be thought of as inner absencing.
Inner Absencing
Inner Absencing takes the tendency to move to denial, de-sensing, blame, and destruction and, rather than direct it at others, direct these actions towards ourselves. It is a tendency to deny our own selfhood, to de-sensitize to the knowing we hold within us, to blame ourselves and, at its worst, to participate in our own self-destruction. Among 15–19 year-olds, suicide is the fourth leading cause of death and across the lifespan, depression is one of the leading causes of disability. Ultimately, inner absencing blocks us from opening to the potential that lives within us and from creating the conditions that allow it to surface.
The turn against self takes place in the most private arena — our inner world. This makes it more difficult to see and discern, but no less real. For those who recognize this turn, I imagine it takes on different forms for different people. These are some that I see around and within me, viewed through the lens of Theory U’s mind, heart and will.
Open-minded engagement with the world requires a kind of humility, the recognition that there is much I don’t know and stand to learn by paying deep attention to others. What happens when humility turns in on itself? It can slide into a feeling of smallness in comparison to others. Humility, absenced, can become a sense of inferiority which robs us of our confidence and belief in our right and competence to act. It is born of an inability in the moment to see the piece of the puzzle that is our gift to hone and nurture and value.
Open-hearted empathy and compassion depend on a certain vulnerability that allows us to open fully to the world and to be touched by it. Turned against itself the vulnerability of compassion can shift to overwhelm, particularly when we bear witness to suffering. Personally, I find the line between empathy and overwhelm to be microscopically thin at times. Too often a news story bores into my heart, sending me into a free-fall of rage and heartbreak at the injustices laid out before me and my sense of powerlessness within them. In moments of overwhelm, I lose touch with the sense of service that grounds and guides my life.
Open-willed surrender calls on us to let go of all that no longer serves and to make space for the quiet voice of emergence to be heard. Turned in on itself, ‘surrender to’ shifts to ‘surrender of’. Inner absencing at the level of will marks a shift from surrendering to what wants to move through to surrendering our own agency to co-shape the world. While it can look like throwing our hands up in a gesture of hopelessness, I experience it more as being pulled in any direction without a sense of purpose or choice. Acting from open will requires a clear sense of being in the world, of existing and having a place in the order of things. Somewhat paradoxically, it is the solidity of being that enables us to surrender.
Inner absencing is fueled by thought patterns and experiences that leave us feeling small, overwhelmed and helpless. We find ourselves in various states of contraction and inner collapse that cause us to lose confidence in our own agency. The counter to inner absencing is the connection to a sense of self grounded in purpose, arising from an understanding of our place in the world and a sense of what is ours to do within it.
The Turn Toward Self
In the first instance, the turn toward self needs us to quiet the noise of inner absencing. To do this, we need to engage in a particular act of kindness: self-kindness. A group of researchers at the University of New Mexico found that the measure of self-kindness is determined by our ability to face three key challenges to self — criticism and rejection, failure or making mistakes, and becoming aware of flaws and imperfections — with acceptance, kindness, patience and love. When we turn to ourselves in our most difficult moments with a disposition of self-kindness, we open a space for something new, creative and life-giving to emerge in our lives.
Yet this shift away from inner absencing — changing our thoughts about ourselves — is notoriously difficult to achieve on our own. Psychologist Kenneth Gergen, author of The Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, argues that our very concepts of self are products of social relationships and interaction — that the distinction between self and other is an artificial one. This means that the social fields in which we find ourselves have a crucial role to play in the shift away from inner absencing. If I were to trace the root of my own recent return to self, I would locate it in three words: I see you. This was the closing remark, repeated and resonating, in a powerful circle where I was held in a generative field of attention and care. Seeing myself through the eyes of my circle members stilled some of the restlessness and noise inside long enough to perceive something new and to begin to turn toward it. It is difficult to feel small while being seen; it is difficult not to feel clarity of purpose when our potential is held up and mirrored back at us. This is the gift we can offer one another: our attention and openness, listening and mirroring, seeing one another and seeing the potential lying just outside our perception. By gifting our attention, we can spread presence.
Self as Instrument
In the work of societal and systems transformation, we are the primary instrument of the work. While we have tools and methods, it is essentially our very being that we offer to the change process. When the qualities of our being that we seek to bring to the work are overextended — too much humility, too much vulnerability, too much surrender — they lose their transformative potential. Doing the inner work of social change means bringing these qualities into balance with a sense of purpose and agency. To do the outward work well, we need to do the inner work of being in good relationship with ourselves, turning toward ourselves with openness and kindness. The choice to turn towards ourselves is always available — not easy, often in need of support — but available. In a world and time where there is so much pain, so much wrong, such need for healing and where we often feel powerless, there are many drivers toward inner absencing. Yet, at the same time, our inner world is the place where we have the greatest agency to act. Changing our disposition towards ourselves, bringing kindness and openness to our inward gaze, will ripple through our lives and work and improve them both. It is a point of intervention that is always within our reach.
I would like to express my gratitude to Jim Gavin for his commentary on multiple iterations of this piece, and to Jayce Pei Yu Lee for providing the visual. I would also like to thank the following for their generosity in translating the article: Paolo Fedi (Italian), Patrick Brandabur (Spanish), Fiston Muganda (French), Izabell Herzog (German), Jayce Pei Yu Lee and Crystal Huang (Traditional Chinese), and Laura Pastorini and Florentina Bajraktari for their translation support.
To learn more about Theory U visit https://www.u-school.org/theory-u or join this year’s u.lab cohort.
