“A drunk man is searching busily under a street lamp. A policeman approaches him and asks what he has lost. The man answers: ‘My keys.’ Now there are two who are looking. Finally, the policeman asks the man if he is sure he lost the key here. He answers: ‘No, not here, but behind there, but it is too dark there .”
Surely this story (which appears in the book “The Art of Making Your Life Bitter” by Paul Watzlawick) will seem absurd to you, with no sense. Who is stupid enough to be looking for a lost object in a place where there is not the slightest chance of finding it? Why wasting energy and time on a search that will produce no results?
Well, the news is that we have all, at some point and to a lesser or greater extent, acted like the drunk in the story. I would dare to say that approximately 70% of the cases I have attended someone who came with a problem (which they apparently wanted to solve) but in reality their difficulty was different.
When we move to the psychological level, the place where the keys fell is even darker and it scares us much more. That is why sometimes we prefer to look elsewhere, even though we know, more or less consciously, that our search will be fruitless, that it is more of the same, in short, that it is a sure recipe for not moving forward.
Why do we behave like this?
First of all, we find people who are very little introspective. That is, those who, if they get angry, simply take it out on everyone because they do not have a good awareness of their inner world. Therefore, they do not ask themselves if there is something in them that does not work as it should, they do not even consider the possibility that part of the problem is themselves.
Secondly, we find people who do not want to recognize where the key fell. That is, those who suspect that part of the responsibility is theirs but refuse to accept it, usually because the truth is too hard to be faced effectively.
Whether it is one case or the other, our mental patterns are at the base of this mechanism. In our brain we try to give a logical order to the world around us and we love that this order remains unchanged because this way we feel safe and confident. Continuing with the initial example: if we have the car key in hand we feel safe, if the key is lost we panic.
The problem is that the place where we lost the key (which could be our emotions or our system of values and beliefs) scares us even more because if we start digging in that place we will probably discover things that we don’t like, things that enter in contradiction with the image we have formed of ourselves, therefore, to avoid cognitive dissonance, we do everything to eliminate them, even if that means looking for the key where it is not.
What’s the point?
If we look for the solution where we cannot find it, we will not only waste time and energy without obtaining any results but we will be fueling the problem. If we do not solve a problem but continually think about it, it will end up becoming a great monster that devours us little by little, leading us to immobility and generating a feeling of insecurity and misery.
I know that on many occasions looking in the right place scares us, but… doesn’t the idea of spending a good part of your life wandering around without solving anything because you’re looking in the wrong places scare you even more?
Of course, the solution is not to plunge headlong into the darkness, risking a heart attack from fear, but to take a candle and, little by little, clear the darkness until we find the cause of the problem and, with it, the solution.
Source:
Watzlawick, P. (1984) The art of making life bitter. Barcelona: Herder.
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