M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

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.

Click here to sign up for Meridian's FREE email updates.