|
Bonds That
Make Us Free, Part 12: Am I a Monster Underneath?
by Terry Warner
Why would anyone,
let alone a man of Merrill's sensitivity and dignity, ever do such
a thing? Why would he misuse his children and pollute his own happiness
just to prove himself innocent of what he was doing? Was justifying
himself in his insensitivity to that woman worth sacrificing what
mattered most to him? This seems especially puzzling when we remember
that he had the power to stop doing it at any time. Surely he could
see what he was doing. It doesn't seem to make any sense.
Nor does it make sense that any of us indulge in this kind of self-
destructive behavior. Why don't we get fed up with the wretchedness
of being angry, resentful, irritated, vindictive, petty, humiliated,
offended, or whatever, and say to ourselves, "Living like this stinks!
Who wants to wallow around in pain? I'm quitting! I'm tossing out
these afflicting feelings-packing them around is ruining my life!"
Why don't we just stop? Why do we relentlessly pursue such a misery-making
course? Why work so hard to ruin our lives? When a situation gets
painful in other areas of life, we flee. But when we betray ourselves,
far from fleeing our misery, we can't let go of it, because we need
it as evidence of our innocence. Of all humanity's mysteries, none
seems more unfathomable than this systematic self-destruction of
the soul. Why would it be more important to us to justify ourselves
than to free ourselves from deep emotional pain?
What we have learned about self-victimization helps us understand
this mystery. Once we betray ourselves, accuse others, and box ourselves
into the victim's role, we no longer see things the way they really
are. In our minds, there can be only two options: one is that we
are right in accusing them, which means that they are guilty of
all the trouble between us and that we are their victims; the other
is that we're wrong and they aren't guilty after all, and this means
we're guilty of the trouble and they are our victims.
Anxious to justify ourselves, we insist on the first of these possibilities-
the people we accuse are wrong and we're right. But they don't accept
this. They protest their innocence. They accuse us of treating them
unfairly. In defending themselves against us, they constantly throw
in our faces their insistence that they are not the monsters we
claim them to be. On the contrary, they insist that we are the monsters.
Think what these accusations against us mean. Here we have been
displaying ourselves as doing the best we can in spite of them.
Their being in the wrong is our proof that we're in the right. But
if it were to turn out that they were right and not monstrous after
all, it would follow that we could not be right-we could not be
the admirable people we've been portraying ourselves to be. Instead,
we would be the monsters they claim we are. If that were so, our
public portrayal of ourselves as justified and worthwhile would
be nothing more than a façade. And underneath that façade
would lurk a malicious and hypocritical person, willing to accuse
others falsely, willing to make them look bad solely to make ourselves
look good! What kind of moral scum, what kind of monster, would
do such a thing?
You can see from this why, when we're in self-betrayal, we can't
even conceive of not casting ourselves in the victim's role, even
if it means making ourselves miserable. For as we have seen, if
we were to acknowledge not being a victim, in that very instant
we would in our own eyes become a victimizing, hypocritical monster.
A hypocritical monster, moreover, who has been accusing others of
being hypocritical monsters! If the woman Merrill accused turned
out to be innocent of his charges, it would mean he sent his little
girls off to be rejected by her! How could he stand himself? How
could he endure this absolute obliteration of his self-respect?
No wonder he painted himself as her victim in a hundred different
ways-it was the only way to "prove" his innocence! It was the only
way he could fight off the possibility that, underneath his public
behavior, there lurked a monster too despicable even to contemplate.
The emotionally anguished life of a victim, fraught with accusing
attitudes or emotions like anger, resentment, suspicion, fear, anxiety,
and such, is the price we pay for avoiding the self-condemnation
I have been describing. For some, that price becomes completely
consuming-like carrying lifelong grudges for years, refusing ever
to forgive, nursing and even cherishing resentment and vengeful
feelings, even taking their own lives-because for them, in their
self- betraying condition, everything depends on the others being
shown to be wrong, so that they can be shown to be right.
The bitter nectar that is our victimhood, with all the sacrifices
and losses it entails, has a narcotic effect. We acquire a taste
for the momentary relief from responsibility and accountability
it seems to provide-we don't have to face what we suspect might
be awful truths about ourselves. We perversely find a kind of sweetness
in the fact that it is so bitter.
More About
Who We Are
Here's what's most ironic about all of this. The monster we
vaguely suspect and fear we would be if our accusations of others
and self-justifications turn out to be false-this monster doesn't
exist! The despised qualities we struggle to cover up are fictional,
exactly as fictional as the admirable qualities we are publicly
trying to project. It is worth taking a moment to explain this crucial
point.
We create this monstrous image of ourselves when we project an idealized
image of ourselves. These two self-images come into being together.
They can be thought of as two sides of a single coin. Before we
betray ourselves, neither image exists for us-doubts about our worth
have not arisen, and neither have we attempted to overcome such
doubts. But with our self-betrayal, and our insistence that we are
acting conscientiously and acceptably, comes the perception that
we might not be that way at all, but just the opposite.
We've all known a teenage beauty who's convinced she is hideous.
Or a macho daredevil and small-time terrorist driven to prove that
he is not a weakling. Or a "supermom" keeping the family going by
her indefatigable efforts and struggling to fight off depression
over her inadequacies. The beauty would never have suspected herself
hideous if she had not made her appearance a major issue by wishing
to be gorgeous. The macho punk would never have doubted his strength
and courage if he had not first indulged in fantasies of himself
as strong and courageous. The mother who doubted herself to the
point of depression would not have sunk so far had she never gotten
herself into the business of proving herself a "supermom." All of
these people would never have imagined the possibility of their
monstrousness if they had never tried to prove themselves impressive.
So as self-betrayers we project an image of a deserving, worthwhile
person, and then we struggle constantly to produce evidence that
we're measuring up to that image. This is hard work and exceedingly
stressful. We must conceal what we suspect we really are so as to
keep from being "found out." But what we cover up when we hide behind
this "false front"-when we publicly project an idealized and fictitious
version of ourselves-is not real. We are no more the worthless person
we are trying to hide than the impressively worthwhile person we
are trying to hide behind.
We may then ask, If we are neither the ideal people we fancy ourselves
to be, nor the worthless kind of persons we sometimes suspect we
are, then what kind of persons are we? The answer comes in two parts:
First, we are not inherently evil, worthless, illegitimate, or even
self-seeking, even in part. That idea is false. But such a view
of humanity is a very widespread fiction, because we are all self-betrayers
to some degree, and part of the self-betrayer's lie is to believe
this fiction. Many of us do act evilly-indeed, some of us are in
bondage to evil-but that is because of self-betrayal; it is not
the expression of an evil nature that we are trying to hide and
that we can never obliterate.
Second, we are infinitely worthwhile, but not because we are the
idealized beings who appear in the positive self-image we project
publicly. Instead, our measureless worth, which for me means our
inherent goodness-has something to do with our capacity to respect
and revere others. But that is a subject we will take up later in
this book. We have but little conception of how worthwhile we are
because we are working so hard to prove how worthwhile we are! In
the vast fields of our possibilities, many of us, shrouded in the
fog of that resentment and fear, hold out far too little hope for
ourselves.
When Hell Itself Looks Like the Solution
It will be helpful to trace out one more dimension of the way we
victimize ourselves when we get locked into self-betrayal. We have
learned how we get ourselves boxed in by our false interpretations
of others and of ourselves. We think our attacks on others and our
protection of ourselves are somehow fending off disaster and saving
our necks when in actuality we're digging ourselves deeper into
the box. We think that the world offers us solutions-solutions such
as standing up for ourselves when we're caught in a conflict with
someone or graciously giving in-but these, when pursued, only drag
us further into bondage.
In C. S. Lewis's allegorical story The Great Divorce, there appears
a series of "Ghosts"-spirits of people who have passed away-who
refuse to enter into heaven. To them, it seems like hell. Why? Because
heaven provides none of the proofs of their self-justification to
which they have become addicted. No one there will mistreat them
sufficiently.
When a Ghost arrives in heaven's outskirts, a "bright Spirit" is
dispatched to lead him or her farther into heaven's interior precincts.
The bright Spirits are former Ghosts who have given up their self-absorption
and consequently have experienced love and joy. One of the male
Ghosts refuses to go with his Spirit- guide because he knows that
this guide led a far worse life on earth than he did. Consequently,
the Ghost feels unfairly treated; he is not being given his due;
his rights are being denied. He is confident that his guide has
made it into heaven's inner circle by exploiting an "Old Boy" network.
So, self- victimizingly, he decides to resist this discriminatory
treatment; he refuses to cooperate with the Establishment. Not surprisingly,
a note of triumph accompanies the bitterness in his voice when he
announces his decision. He turns his back upon his happiness in
the conviction that he is not only protecting himself from the abuses
of these Spirits but is also taking a stand against the evils of
favoritism.
A female Ghost is embarrassed to go with her attendant Spirit because
it and the other Spirits radiate a brightness that exceeds hers.
In life she was the sort of person who could be mortified by the
thought of being inappropriately dressed for an occasion. The Spirit
sent to help her invites her to fix her mind on something other
than herself, but that only makes it plainer to her that the Spirit
cannot understand the embarrassment she feels. "But they'll see
me," she protests. "What does it matter if they do?" the Spirit
asks. "I'd rather die" is her response, not realizing that what
she really needs to do is to die, which is to say, to give up the
fictional self she has always portrayed herself to be.
The Ghosts in Lewis's story are ensnared in bonds of anguish. Escaping
their bodies in death is insufficient to liberate them from such
bonds, because the bonds are not physical-they are emotional and
spiritual. In each case, all that is required to ensnare them in
these bonds is an obsessive preoccupation with justifying themselves.
And it is because heaven threatens to destroy their carefully cultivated
justification that it seems to them like hell. When the bright Spirits
extend kindness, the Ghosts suspect malice. Yet the Spirits will
not be manipulated; the Ghosts cannot use their old maneuvers to
flatter or provoke. In desperation they want to curse their Spirit-guides
and flee. They actively resist their salvation, convinced that they
are saving themselves when in fact what they are struggling to save
is only a false image of themselves.
Self-betrayers do not comprehend that what they need is the destruction
of this fictional self. By trying to save themselves, they damn
themselves. The phony self-image must die in order that they, as
sensitive human beings, might live. As I said to Keith, the advertising
executive whose story appeared at the end of Part 8, "Whichever
choice you make, a part of you is going to die. The only question
is, Which part?"
Lewis's tale is not so much a story about the afterlife as it is
an allegory about every person's possibilities in this life. What
he calls heaven is more familiar to us as the people we encounter
daily, understood without distortion. Lewis wants us to realize
that it is infinitely joyous (as well as completely safe) to rid
ourselves of self-deception and see others and ourselves as we really
are.
Understanding Creates Compassion
The idea that we can make victims of ourselves easily lends itself
to misunderstanding. First of all, it does not mean that we who
may be victims are necessarily responsible for whatever happens
to us. As I said earlier, there is such a thing as being victimized,
pure and simple, by some act in which we do not collaborate at all.
But quite apart from such abuse, we can use the fact that we have
been (or are being) victimized to excuse or justify ourselves in
failing to live up to our own sense of right and wrong. Even if
Matthew really did yell at me in the bathroom, it's a separate issue
that I used that fact to blame him for the demeaning way in which
I treated him.
We may have a hard time accepting this idea. We sympathize with
a person like Mandy, the woman hypersensitive to rejection and subject
to depression whose story I recounted in Part 1. She connected her
problems with her father's having largely ignored her when she was
a girl, spending his time instead with her brother and sister. When
we read her story, we doubt that we would have responded to these
same childhood experiences better than she did, and in this we are
almost certainly right. Life can be very, very hard. None of us
gets through it without having to struggle with some form of the
emotional and attitudinal difficulties we are discussing in this
book. For that reason, we hesitate to think of ourselves-and Mandy,
for that matter-as being responsible for deep fears and resentments.
But remember-and this is the first of two important points that
needs to be made about this topic-by saying that Mandy is responsible,
we do not lay blame and call her unworthy. We do not imply that
she could have been expected to grow up in her family of origin
without any resentment at all. Instead, we suggest that the harsh
judgments contained in her resentful attitude were her doing-these
judgments engaged her energy and intelligence and were therefore
her responsibility.
That's Point One. Point Two is that Point One opens up hope. Precisely
because Mandy was responsible for doing what she did, she could
stop doing it. Whatever her father did was a separate matter. She
bore no responsibility for that and had no power to change it; she
could not change how her father had treated her. But she could change
the resentful and despondent way she conducted herself afterwards,
because she did bear responsibility for that. We will study this
subject further later in this series. There we will discover that
the most destructive part of her experience-the part that made her
life hard to bear-was not what her father did to her, but what she
did with what he had done to her. In other words, what made her
life hard to bear was the unforgiving and resentful way she felt
toward him.
Simply by understanding these points, we become able to see that
self- betrayers do not accuse others and make themselves miserable
maliciously. A real fear motivates them-a real fear of something
that is not real. Self- betrayers struggle anxiously with what,
from their point of view, are threats to be dealt with. In the world
as they construe it, they act purely in self- defense.
If we fail to understand this truth about those who are caught up
in self- betrayal, we will think them the monsters they fear they
might be, maliciously motivated underneath a "righteous" public
facade. We will condemn them in the way they fear they'll be condemned.
We will make ourselves their enemy. But if on the other hand we
understand how threatening the world seems to them, we will set
ourselves free of our accusing, judgmental attitude. We will become,
as onlookers, more open, truthful, and considerate in our way of
being, more responsive to them as they really are.
Understanding self-betrayal and self-victimization can soften our
accusations of others, open us to acceptance of their efforts, and
enable us to let go of our accusing attitudes and emotions. These
benefits of thus opening ourselves to the truth about others will
be discussed further in the next section.
Click
here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.
© 2001 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
|
