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Bonds That
Make Us Free, Part 14: Blindness of Heart
by
C. Terry Warner
You can see
how Glen and Becky drove each other deeper into their defensive,
self-worried positions. He saw himself as acting in self-defense,
in response to her offensive behavior. He could not see that
on her side, Becky believed that she was acting in self-defense
and that it was Glen who was behaving offensively. He could not
see that her motive wasn't to demean him, but to protect herself
and the family. His defensiveness and self-absorption imposed a
limit upon his reality, which is represented by the edge of his
box (see figure 3). How she felt, including her real aspirations
and fears, lay beyond that limit.
And these same
sorts of things can be said of Becky. Glen's defensiveness came
across to her offensively and triggered her defensive reaction.
And therefore she could not see that his motives were not
to selfishly take care of his own needs and to fight against what
she was trying to accomplish in the family. She could not empathize
with him any better than he could with her. His hopes and feelings
and fears lay beyond the limits of her box. Figure 3 represents
all this.
The boxes superimposed
upon the circular diagram represent the limits and distortions of
Becky's and Glen's understanding. The perceptions that lie within
the walls of their respective boxes are misinterpretations of what
lies beyond those walls. He sees her in terms of his self-absorbed
worries and therefore has little sense of her worries. And
the same is true of her.
We can see that
what appears to be sheer selfishness, malice, or even abusiveness
from the outside is on the inside deep insecurity, deep worry, and
deep fear. The person who seems so offensive is in fact carrying
on self- defensively, doing the best he or she can see to do in
the situation. No wonder Becky and Glen felt at cross purposes and
afflicted by each other!
The large box
around the whole cyclical configuration indicates how completely
Glen and Becky were tied to one another even while experiencing
themselves as completely alienated from one another. This can be
expressed in these words: When we are in the larger box together,
we are in our smaller boxes alone.
In this book
we will speak only of two-person collusions. In fact, almost all
collusions involve many people. Often a number of such multiple-
person collusions are linked together in chains. We will talk about
such chains in a future segment.
GIVING OTHERS
POWER TO CONTROL US
We need to learn
a little more about colluders' ability to hit each other's buttons
consistently and accurately, almost as if they took dead aim, knowing
instinctively or by experience exactly how to get the other's goat.
"Why did
you look at me like that?" one demands indignantly.
"Like what?
I didn't look at you any particular way."
"Don't
deny it. I know what it means when you look at me like that."
We now understand
how one person can do such things to another without possessing
any special skill at giving offense, and probably without even trying
to provoke the offended. It can be done because the offended
one is already set to take offense—is on the alert for anything
that might be interpreted as offensive—and actively takes
offense whenever he or she can.
Consider Becky
in the Christmas story. She could hit Glen's buttons unerringly
only because he was looking for anything that might validate his
claim to be her victim. The general principle is this: One person
can give offense only if the other will take offense.
One person can insult, humiliate, intimidate, anger, bore, or provoke
only if the other actively construes what he or she does as insulting,
humiliating, intimidating, angering, boring, or provoking.
This observation
has a surprising and frightening implication. When we think about
how deftly and consistently one colluder like Becky can provoke
another like Glen (and vice versa), we may be tempted to say that
she exercises power over him. She keeps him upset by all her demands.
And once we say the same sort of thing about Glen, we want to call
their relationship a power struggle. But to describe the
situation that way is misleading. It is far more accurate to say
that Glen put himself in Becky's power. He enabled
her offensiveness by his readiness to take offense at just about
anything she did relating to Christmas. And on the other side, she
put herself in his power and enabled his offensiveness
in the same way.
Thus colluders
only appear to control one another; in truth, they give control
of themselves to one another, like people volunteering to play the
part of puppets in a Punch and Judy show. They individually use
their agency, which is their power to act, not in controlling the
other but in allowing themselves to be controlled! They use
their power to act to put themselves in one another's power! We
use words like touchy, thin-skinned, and hypersensitive
to describe such people. Sometimes I have thought of them as
missile-seeking targets.
This is a pathetic
picture of human relationships. Individuals scramble to control
or dominate or manipulate one another in order to get what they
think they want, when in reality they are giving themselves over
to the others' control. Each is swept along as if in a whitewater
flood by the offensiveness they ascribe to others. No one quite
feels able to take responsibility for the direction of the group,
whether it's a marriage, a family, a neighborly relationship, or
a work team. The result is that tensions and even hatred escalate
beyond what anyone intends or wishes, with each party certain of
the malice and perversity of the others. Managers in one northwestern
corporation that was riddled with collusions called this "the
monster system." Another and most ugly word for it is war.
Thus do colluders
lock themselves together in a single, complex control system wherein
each gives power to the others. Their destinies are tied together
more surely than with steel bands. The strength of these bands is
to my mind one of the most astounding aspects of all human experience.
It also astounds
me that people maintain the control system without deliberately
trying to keep it going. None of them has a plan in mind to provoke
the others so as to get proof of his or her innocence. It is enough
that each of them feels victimized and just by feeling this way
turns anything done by the others into a victimizing act. Together
they conduct themselves like colonies of ants, who in their swarms
go individually about their different duties without comprehending
any overall colony strategy, but do so with an efficiency and coordination
that could scarcely be improved upon if they did have an
overall plan in mind. Colluders, too, swarm in their colonies without
having in mind the circular and mutually reinforcing provocations
they supply for one another, and yet they could not do it any better
if they were being orchestrated by an invisible hand.
Each of us is
bonded to other people in one way or another. In some cases these
are bonds of love. In the case of colluders, they are bonds of suspicion,
enmity, and fear. Colluders knot themselves together more and more
tightly even as they individually feel further and further apart—misused,
isolated, lonely, and alien. They're in bondage to the emotions
by which they resent or fear or have contempt for one another. The
bonds between them are bonds of anguish, not bonds of love.
Next week,
we'll take a closer look at "self- righteousness," "perfectionism,"
and other counterfeit virtues that mask our self-deception.
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