Confessing Greatness

There’s an exercise that the Rabbi Marc Gafni often has his students do, called “The Confession of Greatness.” I’ve seen many people find it more difficult than gold old fashion confession (of sins, etc.); for various reasons, we can find it harder to tell another what’s great (not just, well, “kinda nice”) about ourselves than it is what’s supposedly wrong or broken. I’ll suggest some of those reasons below, but first, here’s the exercise:

1) Get a partner.
2) Sit together, facing each other, and one person becomes the Confessor, and the other the Listener.
3) Set a clock for two minutes (you can increase if you like), and the Confessor starts by saying, “I’m great at…” and then filling in whatever is true for them (not whatever is necessarily comfortable).
4) The Listener’s job is to listen closely, and receptively, giving the Confessor the experience of being received, really received, and accepted. Then, when the Confessor stops or stalls, the Listener’s only response is to say, “Is there more?”
5) Continue till the timer rings, then switch rolls with your partner. 6) You can then share experiences of the exercise with your partner.

Simple enough. Try it with someone you trust, though. Don’t pull a stranger off the street, or that angry relative at the reunion (at least initially). See what it feels like to be unapologetic about your competance, excellence, greatness, and power. The goal is to be neither demure nor grandiose. This is about speaking the truth.

Now, why might it be difficult to do this exercise? Shouldn’t we all want to be mirrored in our greatness, like kids showing off?

I think the short answer is, yes, of course we all want that, but many (if not most) of us don’t trust it. One way or another, we expect to be shamed, or attacked. Maybe our parents responded to our young greatness, and assertions of greatness, with, “Don’t be arrogant. You’re no better than anyone else.” Or perhaps we had a parent who felt unworthy themselves, and couldn’t tolerate our worthiness, our bigness, finding it too painful. Or maybe our culture has a bias either towards narcissism/grandiosity, or towards homogeneity/similarity, and we learned that either greatness equates to domineering behavior (with narcissism) or attack and diminishment (with a culture of sameness). Regardless of the form, we came to associate, viscerally, speaking to and owning our greatness with pain, ostracism, or shame.

If you have or are around young children, you can see what happens when their greatness and bigness is either received or rejected. The child of three comes running up to Mom and shows a crayon scrawl, beaming, wanting acknowldegment and praise. Mom says, “That is amazing! Good job!” The child has their sense of self and self-validity reinforced. Then contrast with Mom saying, “That’s nice, dear,” or, “Red doesn’t look good. You should do it over.” Wilting is probably the best descriptor for what happens in the child. And these memories, when repeated over time, stick with us into adulthood, such that the Confession of Greatness exercise can feel excruciating because it exposes us to painful memories that we’d just as soon, and perhaps have crafted our behavior to forget.

What’s great about us needs to be reclaimed (not what’s grandiose about us–we don’t want to reinforce that because, essentially, it obscures our true greatness) . Especially when you are experiencing depression and anxiety, which revolve and are anchored in a negative, deficient sense of self. When our very selves are seen in their true bigness, and are met (inside and out) with support and validation and appreciation, then the old, “shamed self,” starts being displaced by a self that’s more true. When that happens, we start experiencing ourselves responding to old depressive messages (“You’re nothing, you’re worthless,” etc.) with, “Wait a second, buddy. I deserve better than that, and I’m worth more than that.” The depressive downward spiral, from small slights to major collapse, gets short circuited.

Exercises like the Confession of Greatness, like all other tools, are merely that: tools. But they enact and support a process (that takes time and effort) which truly does lead to less vulnerability to depression, not just because you are coping better, but because the very machinery of depression is, progressively, dismantled.