Shoulds are external controls over you that insist that you perform an action as a mere proxy for someone else's desires. (Or what you imagine their desires are.)

(When I talk about "should" versus "want", I'm not correcting your grammatic mistakes, I'm pointing out a choice that you make when you say it, and the effects of that choice.)

One way to tell if you're controlled in that way... is to vocalize it. There are evil words that you'd be better off to substitute with others. There are evil words that, once said, influence you and move your behavior further from your desires. There are six of those evil words --The Six Deadly Imperatives-- and I'll tell you what they are: should, supposed to, ought to, have to, got to, and must. I say 'em as two words, so they're easier to remember: should-s'posta-oughta, and hafta-gotta-must.

Them's fightin' words! I hope they set off a war within you; healthy rebellious identity versus servitude and submission! They cause feelings and actions that are the opposite of being spontaneous and joyful. You see it in your reaction to mom's order: "You should clean your room".

You didn't want to clean up your room, of course. It's no fun. Finally, when she pushed hard enough, you did it, but it was a drudge. It was slow. She had to tell you several times that you weren't finished. Today, you still have a place, and it still has to be cleaned. I bet that you sometimes still use the internalized mom in the back of your mind to force yourself to do it "against your will". That's a real procrastination-producer. "Trying" is also against your will or it'd not be any effort, would it? You use shoulds to the degree you are not yet separated from your mother! Does that getcha? (Well, OK; it's only partly true, but still...)

In wars and salesmanship today, all sides know the techniques to brainwash you. They'll make you a captive audience and repeat their message over and over, in slightly different ways and even contradictory ways, so as to confuse you. They'll use very subtle means to slip the message past your attention, through to the subconscious. But I repeat myself; I said the same thing in the paragraph above! Look at it. Yes, shoulds'll wash your brain; and worse, we get trained to do it to ourselves.

I sometimes use "Vaudeville Therapy"; I tell a client:
"If it hurts when you do dat, don' do dat!"
A comic feeling often can reach and effect the subconscious when rationality won't. "Rational" can be felt as the opposition.

Shoulds are a thief of real initiative; critical accusations of ignorance and incompetence; regressors to childhood. And when a should is internalized, there's a potential self-criticism at every turn. "I should be able to do it without help" (i.e. therapy) is a common and a good rebellion, but one could as well say, "I should be able to pound in a nail without a hammer." It's wise to chose the best tools for the job.

Imagine someone who operates 100% from shoulds. (Impossible, of course.) S/he makes no decisions of their own. What kind of person is s/he? An automaton; a live robot! S/he has no identity at all! That's not you. However, nobody is 0% or 100% of anything; we are all in the spectrum between. So to the degree you are externally controlled, you have lost identity!

You been robbed! Some part of your identity has been withheld or taken from you. And because you (unaware) had accepted it, the feeling you were left with was: undeservingness.
. . Shoulds remove deservingness. They give away the authority over your life. If someone thought they deserved to have the initiative to run their own life, I assume they would do exactly that. Therefore...

"No," the client says, "I didn't do as we talked about."
"Good", I'll say, "It must be that you did as you want; and desire things as to be they are."
This is not just reverse psychology.

If s/he (especially while very young) feels no power, s/he's likely to "explain" it by feeling that s/he deserves none. Everything in a young life tends to be felt as related to themself; even divorces and deaths.

Naturally, when a young person feels the respect that comes from someone who gives a reason and choice, s/he reacts with much more maturity than if s/he was given a should. It's good practice as one becomes an adult (and not everybody does, you know). Move away from a should-ing situation, and you automatically feel more mature. Take someone who feels irritated when things aren't done his/her way; they may have been influenced by having not been heard (respected) as a child. To give respect and reasons and choices is quite often the best way to get cooperation. Authoritarian shoulding makes it difficult for everyone, especially a young person who then doesn't learn how to decide on his/her own directions.

If you've ever backed up a car with a trailer, you know how difficult it is. You can see why trailers are not attached to the front of the car. It would be almost impossible to maintain your direction without a lot of constant attention, extreme alertness, and the resultant high blood pressure. It's an unstable situation, and threatens to veer off destructively at any moment. Imagine that you push and try to control yourself all your life; it's like pushing a trailer cross-country on your front bumper! Now you can see why it's so much better to be pulled by your desires than to push yourself with the desires of others!

(If Hollywood makes a movie of this chapter, there would be no resemblance, of course, and it would be called: "Trailer of Desire!)

I'm sure you desire a greater sense of identity. To do that without a therapist, the best (and necessary) step is to move towards desires and away from shoulds. First, it takes awareness; you wouldn't change what you hadn't noticed. You can train your ear to hear shoulds and have a figurative bell go off. (ding)

Then you can rephrase to the desired positive result. Not "I want to clean my room." That's not true and the subconscious won't buy it! You can use "I want to have a clean room", or (the full truth) "I want the room to have already been cleaned!" On one hand, "I want it clean"; on your other hand, of course, "I don't want to do it". But look what happened now: it's in your hands! Not Mom's.

Now you can make a decision. In fact, that's all you can do! Simply by the awareness, you've taken responsibility. Either way, you have made a decision. If you clean, you have the result in mind and you'll find it's done much quicker and easier. If you don't clean, you've made a decision based on your own values; and if that is uncomfortable, then you have an unavoidable great opportunity, based on that insight, to change your actions; to manifest who you really are! Those actions would be from your desires, not mine or Mom's. Best of all, you'll realize that this takes no will power, no thought or effort, only awareness and permission!

"Now that I have declared my freedom not to do as I'm expected, I may do what I want, even if it's the same as what was expected! And when I'm truly free, I'll not need to declare such freedom, but just take it as my natural right; free not only of their expectation, but free of the need to be concerned of their beliefs of me."

It certainly harms no-one, and in fact you'll be easier to be with. You will notice that "I want" feels very self-respecting! Try it; experiment with the difference of feelings. You've already noticed that shoulds are no fun.

"Yes, but I don't want to go to the dentist! The music she plays isn't that good! I know I should, but... okay, I want it to be taken care of and I want it over with. And I want 'em not to rot and hafta all be pulled." To "not want" is fine, and you can still do it, if you "not want" the consequences more.

To feel uncomfortable about doing something, or not doing something, is to be respected in yourself. Examined it as a possibility of really meaning: "I want not to do this", or, "I want to do something about this." It could be another of the subtle messages that filter up from the subconscious.

Shoulds are a way to avoid feelings. Desires are feelings, and shoulds are someone else's judgements aimed at your control. If they'd said "I want you to...", you could've chosen.

Shoulds are a way to avoid choices, and thus decisions. That's another possible reason for a person's resistance to their own decisions and authorities: that is that if you find yourself with the power to chose, you're then faced making a choice! That can be a fearful situation to some people, though unnecessarily so.

It's easier to know what you want if you say what you want instead of what you think someone else wants. Ask yourself what your ideal self would do in a situation like this! The ideal that you only pretended to be would slowly become who you actually and honestly are. Who is the creator of that imagined ideal self, anyway? You? Then it's part of you already, isn't it? Each experience can be an experiment, a laboratory for the design of your next, slightly-more-ideal self.

As you begin to practice, don't be surprised to hear more shoulds than ever pour out of your mouth. It may be that the subconscious gets the idea and gives you a lot more practice, till you get sick of the words. At that point, your language habits change, and your self-image goes in for an overhaul. That may take a long time, perhaps a lifetime, but the process in itself will distract you only a short time. You are the world's foremost authority on your own feelings, needs, and thoughts.

What distracts you most will probably be the guilt that will come up. We've all been guilt-tripped to some degree; to practice awareness of your desires and to move toward them will challenge that guilty feeling. It may feel like you reject others, silly as that sounds, rationally. Concommitant with guilt is deservingness; do you deserve to have what you want? (hint: everybody does, automatically. It's a Human Right!(If it doesn't harm... yada yada...)) Deservingness is basic; without that feeling, habits form that won't let you have much of what you want.

Just to have this new language habit is not the cure-all for all psychological ills, but for nearly everybody, it's a first step that permits further steps, and makes them a lot easier besides. And, if continued energetically ('cause it feels good), it could be all the therapy that most people need! Self-respect is really the topic here.

An extreme example of a rephrase may be helpful. If you need to study for a test, you might say to yourself, "I really oughta study." Would you rephrase to "I want to study"? Doubtful. What is the desired positive result? To pass the test? That's only part of it. To pass the course? At least that'll be on a record somewhere; forgotten....

To get a degree? Unless you do something with it, it's just to paper your wall. To get a good job? Could be, if a job, years away, is sure to be enjoyable. The money? We're almost there... The probable lifestyle? I hope so. If not, and if you find no other desired result, feel about your motives for a while. Is it really yourself that wants the result? If not, who is it that does? If someone else does, do you too? If there's someone else too, is it okay for you both to want it? "I want", "I Wish" (when referring to the past), "It'd be best"; them's fitting words!

In college, many years ago, I devised a test of Chauvinism, to see if it would correlate well with three other tests that I also used on the group. The group was of the laboratory animal most used, other than the white rat: the freshman student. We'd already studied what I called "rodentistic psychology". The other tests were Rigidity, Dogmatism, and internal/external Locus of Control. These are known to correlate well with each other, as you'd imagine. The result was that mine correlated well with those. The interesting part was that the group was also divided by gender, major, religion raised under, and political party.

Divided that way, the divisions most Chauvinistic, Rigid, Dogmatic, and Externally Controlled were female, nurses, Catholic/fundamentalist, and Republican. The whole point of this talk, and in fact, therapy itself, is to help you become more internally focused (able to see yourself) as well as externally focused (able to see your place in the world). But less externally "controlled". Ergo, more identity; and don't you imagine that a clearer identity would correlate well with contentment?

When you hurry to do something or get somewhere, you can feel that the "hurry" has within it an attitude of pressured subservience: hey, whaddaya know, it's a should! You notice that, with the pressure and with the fact that you tried to intuit how you're "supposta" do it, you made more mistakes. It's easier and less wear to simply "go fast". It's likely to be a little faster, but a lot more pleasant. Also, it's you that makes the decisions, and so your identity grows. Incidently, when it's not necessary, you're not required to go fast, either. "Duty" is too easily a should.

The shoulds have been not only an external control, but a subtle "You should want to", taking you two steps away from being yourself, like the client who said "I don't know what I should want". It splits you in two; one self that knows what you want, the other that thinks of what others say you want. So you try the impossible: to force yourself to deny your desires and to really want what they say you want. It's obvious how destructive this is to your identity. It influences all choices in life, and these add up to our direction. Then we wonder how we drifted there.

So often there's a deeper connotation to "should(n't) think, should(n't) do". That's "should(n't) feel"! Now, that's not just an invasion, that's an invader that sacks and plunders!

A client might say "Yes, I really ought to talk with my father." If so, I know we're not through with the subject yet. There's been no decision. I still haven't heard if he/she wants to, or will plan to actually do it. The chances that someone does something s/he wants to is vastly greater than the chance them of doing what s/he "ought to". Your growing identity--your slightly more ideal self--is the total of the behaviors you desire (You are what you want... if you then do it). Sometimes I feel frustrated as I listen for a real voice through a facade. A facade is a denial of the self. So do my ears a favor: lemme hear who you are.

It takes a lot of awareness, clarity, strength, to take on the task of developing a unique identity. It's so much easier to take in a pre-digested identity. A John Wayne/Rambo/Macho fool, white picket fence, Don Juan, 3-piece suit, Hippy, cult, gang, mother or caretaker (not so much dad), There's a lot of mere luck involved; we seldom actually choose. You may fill a role that's expected of you by the mate/friend/group/lover you happen to fall in with. A vast number of things are just assumed and it's difficult to be aware that we can redecide.

Self-image, then, is more introjected that created. A xerox of a set image! Accidental, unexamined, undecided. And it's a matter of degree, of course. We've all taken on some roles, especially when young. When we "played games" we worked on feeling out our desired and our expected roles. Play is valuable. What parts of roles have you taken on? It's hard to know because the process has simply always been there, like water to a fish. Fish-water.

As we learn this self-denial as a child, we all develop degrees of a facade. Self-denial denies the self. A bold front that masks the frightened real self. We feel phoney and, worse, we're told that we can't measure up to our hero or ideal, so we begin to pretend that we already are that image. Most men's fear will masquarade as pride. That, or "what the guys will think". Then we're nervous that someone will find out; they'll find a chink in our armor.

Muscles begin to try to replace that armor. And somewhere inside, the person we think we are, and who we really are... are lost within that larger shell; rigid, cold, dark and alone. It's hard to touch someone through such defenses; and it's seldom that someone would be able to touch us. Very little growth of the real person can be done in these concrete clothes. These are "clothes" that do not "make the man" (person).

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"Shouldn't have to": is that equivalent to a double negative?