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Bonds that
Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves (Part
2)
by
C. Terry Warner
Many have told
me of doing everything humanly possible to change a negative attitude
or rescue a spoiled relationship, only to fail again and again and
finally give up hope. This seems to me the saddest part of being
driven by negative emotions or attitudes: We cannot see how to stop.
We feel stuck. What a savage irony! We have been endowed with the
capacity to imagine a happy and fulfilling life for ourselves, but
we cannot see how to make it that way.
Most curiously, we will look in vain for an adequate name for the
"stuck" condition I have been describing. Though clearly a pernicious
and, in its extreme varieties, a devastating kind of emotional "dis-
ease," it has no name in common usage that captures it in all its
scope. And this is true of other important aspects of this stuck
condition, including (as we will see later) its origins and its
consequences in our relationships with others. We have no names
for them. Having no concepts or words for picking them out of the
flow of experience, we remain largely ignorant of their true character
and therefore helpless to understand ourselves when things go wrong.
We are blind to the nature of our most troublesome personal difficulties.
So we need to find language to talk about being stuck in negative
emotions or attitudes. I will call them "negative," "accusing,"
"afflicted," "anguished," and "troubled," aware that none of these
words quite captures all I want to convey.
This is what I mean by "feeling stuck": experiencing other people
or circumstances as having more power over our own happiness than
we do. We believe they have the ability to cause troubling feelings
in us that we cannot do anything about, no matter how we try. We
wonder how we can ever be genuinely happy, inwardly peaceful, and
fulfilled. Obviously we can't as long as we continue feeling offended
or provoked or hurt, but we cannot stop feeling that way because
we can't see how to stop. Can we ever get out of this box once we
find ourselves in it?
I am reminded of a condition I suffered with much of my life: My
flesh would itch intolerably as if it were lined, on the inside
of my skin, with a wire-brush blanket, fiery in all its tips. Scratching
would bring me no relief at all--in fact, it made the itching worse.
Our troubling attitudes, emotions, and moods resemble that itching;
seldom is there anything we can think to do that actually succeeds
in preventing them or expunging them. Even "power emotions" like
anger and hatred carry with them a sense of powerlessness to stop,
a feeling that other people are provoking us, "making" us angry
or hateful by what they say and do.
The predicament I have been describing is as old as time. On no
subject has more diverse advice been given. Every profound ethical
or spiritual teaching speaks of it under some label or other. So
do many of the more superficial teachings that focus on success.
Some of these offer strategies for cultivating tranquillity amidst
affliction or adversity. Some show us a path of love they claim
will lead us away from fear and frustration. Some, with a much different
approach, encourage us to assert ourselves and defend our rights
in order to keep others from aggravating and taking advantage of
us. Some supply negotiation techniques for winning the respect,
deference, or cooperation of others. Some recommend suspicion, pessimism,
or resignation as tactics to make us less vulnerable to offense.
Generally speaking, such prescriptions for happiness don't work
very well. They don't work because they fail to show how our hearts
can be changed, and with "hearts" I include the troubled emotions
and attitudes that keep us "stuck." That failure is fatal, because
without a change of heart whatever we do will carry the smell of
our manipulative, selfish, or fearful intent, and other people will
readily discern it. (The "mature" and "soft" way I spoke to Matthew
in the bathroom is a case in point. Instead of caring about him,
I was accusing him to make myself look good, and he could tell.)
The self-help movement that began in the latter half of the twentieth
century suffers particularly from this flaw, for the personal and
interpersonal skills it seeks to cultivate are almost always designed
to get us more of what we think we want, rather than to bring about
a change of heart.
Much of the time, the advice we give one another, like the advice
of experts, is based on misguided diagnosis. Our advice trusts the
experience of those who feel "stuck" to identify the cause of the
trouble. But when we are "stuck," we think, falsely, the problem
lies with other people, when the truth is that the problem lies
within ourselves. We develop strategies for relieving ourselves
of our unwanted feelings without retracing the path that got us
into them in the first place. Lacking a sound diagnosis as a starting
point, we aren't likely to come up with treatments that will help
fundamentally.
On the other hand, a sound diagnosis can lead to a cure. It was
so with my terrible itching. It had grown worse during a nearly
two-year period in which I struggled to recover from the effects
of a rare strain of hepatitis, a disease that attacks the liver.
My wife, Susan, went to work with her characteristic tenacity to
find a cure. She took note of the fact that my mother and sisters
experienced the same itching in the later stages of pregnancy because
of a condition called cholestasis, wherein the liver does not function
well and allows bile into the bloodstream. So she reasoned that,
being related to them, I too had a liver that did not function very
well, especially under the added stress of my illness. She put me
on a strict diet, which I have followed faithfully since. And voilà!
The itching subsided almost completely. Finding the truth about
the source of the problem pointed the way to the cure--which in
this case did not relieve the itching so much as prevent it from
occurring.
Yielding to the TruthLearning the truth about a problematic
condition in our physical bodies enables us to take steps to find
the remedy. As they say, the diagnosis is half the cure. But with
emotions and relationships, the truth is the cure. In the realm
of emotions and attitudes, as we will discover in this book, honest
self-understanding liberates us from our stuck emotions.
For example, realizing what I had done to Matthew shocked and discouraged
me-- but it also brought an end to my piously punishing attitude.
I couldn't admit the truth to myself and continue hardening myself
toward him. Difficult though it was, that moment of truth following
our bathroom confrontation inaugurated better times for us. Mandy,
who felt unloved for much of her life, thought her troubles stemmed
from having been rejected by her father. But she came to realize...how
much she was responsible for her feelings, and how badly they had
skewed her memories of her childhood. And that recognition of the
truth freed her from her emotional troubles.
Norm, the business owner who controlled his employees, did something
similar.... [H]e saw the way he treated people in a new, truthful
light and suddenly could understand why they resisted his influence.
They quickly became more important to him, and because of this change
in him, they began to respond to him cooperatively.
Victoria, who had the nonresponsive teenagers, achieved in her family
what Norm did at work, at least for a time.... She realized that
she had tolerated only one way of doing things--her own--and had
constantly chastised and corrected family members who deviated.
With this realization came a change in her feelings and a desire
to listen to her children rather than berate them. But she relapsed,
and the old troubling emotions and sour relationships returned.
Her failure to maintain her change of heart will prove to be as
instructive to us as the change itself.
In due course, we will examine the details of these and many other
personal stories to see that even when our emotional burdens seem
very heavy, we can rid ourselves of them and recover from any subsequent
relapses. And we will also learn why so many who desire to do this
do not succeed, so that we can avoid their mistakes.
* * * * *
Because honest self-understanding plays such a crucial role in a
change of heart, I will avoid speaking of the solutions to our emotional
problems at first and concentrate instead...on the sources and character
of those problems.... Until we get hold of the truth about our condition,
our continuing self-misunderstanding will guide us to do things
that only make matters worse-- like my desperate scratching of that
fiery itch. When I was small, growing up in San Francisco, my father
brought home a toy from Chinatown, a woven tube six inches long
and about as big around as one's index finger. He called this toy
"Chinese handcuffs." When you put a finger in each end of the tube
and then tried to draw your fingers out, the tube would tighten.
The more you pulled, which seemed the logical thing to do, the tighter
it would grip. But when you understood why it gripped, you saw that
pulling outward was not logical at all, but illogical. You needed
to press inward so the fibers would relax; then you could draw your
fingers out.
Just so, when we learn how our troubled emotions and attitudes have
a stranglehold on us because we have misunderstood their grip on
us, we will give up our futile strategies for escaping them. Our
new understanding will have loosened that grip. Being honest with
ourselves is the key.
But while we are stuck in troubled thoughts and feelings and need
relief, the remedy we will learn about in this book will appear
illogical--the way the secret of the Chinese handcuffs seems to
those who haven't yet comprehended it. Reading the book can fix
that problem. As it unfolds, chapter by chapter, our misunderstanding
of our emotional troubles should decrease, and when it does, the
remedy will make perfect sense. To this prediction, I add a cautionary
note. When the self-understanding comes--and we will recognize it--we
will not have completed our work. On the contrary, we will have
just begun. The good part is that, at that point, our frame of mind
and our feelings will enable us to be taught by our experiences
what we need to know for our next stages of growth--provided, of
course, that we want to learn.
In the next section, we will discuss our living connection with
other people and how we betray ourselves when we go against our
sense of how to treat others.
This
article is a serialization of Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our
Relationships, Coming to Ourselves by C. Terry Warner.
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© 2001 Meridian
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