M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Bonds That Make Us Free: How We Betray Ourselves
by C. Terry Warner

We are seeking to understand the source of our troubled, afflicted emotions and attitudes and the way they foul our relationships with others. Here is a clue: those times when we feel most miserable, offended, or angry are invariably the occasions when we're also most absorbed in ourselves and most anxious or suspicious or fearful, or in some other way concerned about ourselves. Why is this? Why do we get so caught up in ourselves and so ready to take offense at what others do?

Going Against Our Sense of Right and Wrong
To answer these questions, we first need to learn about something we all experience but seldom notice. I call it self-betrayal.

Often we have a sense that something is right or wrong for us to do-a sense, for example, that we should or shouldn't treat some person or other living thing in a certain way. We have only to pay attention in our everyday experiences to notice ourselves having such feelings about how we ought to act. We might, for example, feel called upon to smile when someone smiles at us, choose words carefully so that someone can better understand what we're trying to say, help a child who's having trouble, keep from cutting across someone's new lawn, share what we're eating with someone else in the family, visit a person who's had a recent setback or who's simply lonely, or let another driver move into the flow of traffic. Those of us who live in an urbanized and impersonal world may have gotten out of the habit of acknowledging the needs and feelings of others in public settings. But even in such settings, we can often catch ourselves having a sense of what we ought to do, if we just pay attention.

Self-betrayal occurs when we go against the feelings I have just described-when we do to another what we sense we should not do, or don't do what we sense we should. Thus self-betrayal is a sort of moral self- compromise, a violation of our own personal sense of how we ought to be and what we ought to do. For example:

Entering her workplace, a senior manager sees discouragement in the face of a groundskeeper and feels she ought to reach out briefly and express her appreciation and support. Instead she hurries on to do her business.

* * * * *

A busy man driving home late at night notices the gas gauge dropping near empty. Almost imperceptibly, yet unmistakably, he feels he ought to fill the tank for his wife so she won't have to do it the next day. But he doesn't.

* * * * *

Despite repeated scoldings and many warnings from her mother, a teenage girl has left her room in an awful mess. The exasperated mother feels impressed that instead of berating her daughter again she should welcome her cheerfully and listen to her concerns. But when the girl enters the house, the mother finds herself saying the same blistering words as always.

* * * * *

A teacher makes a Friday afternoon appointment to see a parent whose daughter has been struggling in school. But friends invite him to play tennis. A feeling that he ought to keep his commitment squeezes at him, just for an instant. But he ignores it and calls to cancel the appointment with the parent.

Our Living Connection with Others
From where does our sense of right and wrong come? In general, from other beings around us-other people and even animals (and, as I believe, God, though faith is an issue I will reserve for the Epilogue). For example, in the expressions on others' faces, the tone of their voices, and their posture and gestures, we find indications of their emotional needs and feelings, and this gives us a sense of how we ought to treat them. To recognize another individual as a person, even if we don't see a face or hear a voice, is to know that we should treat him or her differently from the way we would treat a mannequin or a statue. There's nothing mysterious about any of this; perceiving the cues or signals from others that guide us in how to treat them is basic to just about all we do in life. It is as commonplace, almost, as breathing.

Often we call our sense of right and wrong conscience, though that name doesn't capture the way it arises from our living connection with other beings (we will speak of this further in chapter 7). Think about the senior manager who discerned an opportunity or need to reach out to her fellow employee, or the man who, remembering his wife, imagined her having to fill the gas tank the next morning. It would not be exaggerating to say that, at the moment of sensing what was right to do, each of them was alive to another human being, aware of and sensitive to his or her inner life and feelings. (It would not make him or her less alive and aware if he or she happened to be wrong about what this other person needed on that particular occasion, just as it would not make me blind if I mistakenly thought the dog I saw was a cat.)

Our own humanity is intimately bound up with our capacity to sense something of others' needs and feelings. That is why I call the violation of that sense self-betrayal. We may or may not betray someone else when we do wrong by others, but we always betray the most sensitive and humane part of ourselves.

This living sense, in connection with others, of what is right or wrong for us to do is not necessarily binding upon other people, and in this it's unlike any moral rule. It may not even apply to us on other occasions.

The right and wrong we sense in our living connection with others differs from what we generally have in mind when we speak of right and wrong. The meaning we usually give these words is tied to certain rules of behavior we have learned, many in our childhood, and some through our social and professional associations as adults. Such rules express the behavior that members of the group expect of one another. Here are some examples: "Do not tell a lie." "Show up on time." "Don't talk with your mouth full." "Don't speak unless you're spoken to." "Speak kindly to others." And so on. In ordinary usage, right means conforming to such rules; wrong means violating them.

But such rules can be conformed to hypocritically, and this makes them different from the gentle guidance we receive when we look at, listen to, or think about others. For example, we can tell the truth to make ourselves look good, act politely to hide an evil intention, and even speak kindly to make another person squirm. (I did something very close to that when I responded to my son Matthew; see page 3.) That is because rules tell us what to do, not the reasons we should have for doing it. By contrast, our living sense of how we should respond to others requires something more, and that something more is wholeheartedness, consideration, and respect. It requires us not just to act honorably or kindly, but to be honorable or kind. Rules work like unwritten contracts, specifying the minimum we should do in regard to one another. But the personal obligations we feel to one another, soul to soul, call us to give of ourselves without reserve. Anything less, as we shall discover in this book, is self-betrayal. That is perhaps what the Baal-Shem, the founder of the Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism, meant when he said that sin is anything you cannot do wholeheartedly.

Self-Justifying Stories
The fact that self-betrayals are ordinary and commonplace might make them seem almost normal and, in the broad scheme of things, relatively harmless. But, in fact, they wreak devastation. We cannot betray ourselves without setting in motion all manner of emotional trouble. This is demonstrated by the experience of a businessman named Marty, in his early thirties, who told the following story:

The other night about 2:00 a.m. I awoke to hear the baby crying. At that moment I had a fleeting feeling, a feeling that if I got up quickly I might be able to see what was wrong before Carolyn would be awakened. It was a feeling that this was something I really ought to do. But I didn't get up to check on the baby.

The matter did not end there. Marty didn't quickly forget about this small episode. He couldn't have simply forgotten about it. Here he was, a man expecting himself to get up, thinking that his wife would benefit from his doing so, and knowing in his heart that it was the right thing for him to do. And yet not doing it. He had to deal with this dishonorable situation somehow. But how? How could someone like Marty get away with not doing what he knew he should do?

The answer to this question is very important to understand. Somehow, Marty had to minimize the obligation he was placing upon himself, or in some other way make it seem right not to do what he felt summoned to do. He had to find some way to rationalize his self-betrayal.

Marty continued his story:

It bugged me that Carolyn wasn't waking up. I kept thinking it was her job to take care of the baby. She has her work and I have mine, and mine is hard. It starts early in the morning. She can sleep in. On top of that, I never know how to handle the baby anyway.

I wondered if Carolyn was lying there waiting for me to get up. Why did I have to feel so guilty that I couldn't sleep? The only thing I wanted was to get to work fresh enough to do a good job. What was so selfish about that?

From the instant he decided not to get up, Marty began to make it seem as if what he was doing wasn't his fault. He reminded himself that he had to make a presentation the next morning-he couldn't afford to miss his sleep on that particular night. He noticed irritating or difficult elements of his circumstances, such as Carolyn's failure to wake up. Maybe she was only pretending to be asleep, he thought, waiting for him to get up and take care of the problem. Such matters hadn't even crossed his mind before the self- betrayal. But now he suddenly could think of nothing else. He remembered things he would otherwise have forgotten entirely, such as Carolyn's not having changed the baby just before putting her to bed.

So here was the mental situation he created for himself: Just seconds before, as he had awakened to his infant daughter's crying, he had focused on the baby's need and, if only fleetingly, on the possibility of saving Carolyn from the inconvenience of having to get up. But now he focused on himself. He became irascibly alert, collecting data as though he would be required to submit a deposition to the family court for his pretrial hearing on charges of spousal abuse and child neglect. One moment he was lying there pleasantly enough, and the next he was agitated, rationalizing his conduct and accusing his wife. Though in itself subtle and all but unnoticed, his self- betrayal quickly spawned a jumble of troublesome feelings. As my four-year-old daughter Emily said when asked to explain temptation: "You know what's right and you know what's wrong, and you get a fuss in your mind."

If the prompting to attend to the baby had not come to him, Marty would not have had any reason to engage in this kind of mental research. He would have had no need to collect facts with which to defend himself. It would not have occurred to him to assemble a story that would portray him as justified or excused in what he did. But once the prompting came and he failed to follow it, finding excuses for not getting up became his biggest concern and commanded all his attention. He wove these excuses into a story that, in his own mind, proved he was justified in not doing what he felt he ought to do. That story got him off the hook.

Marty's story is reminiscent of mine as I stood with Matthew in the bathroom and collected all the facts I could to justify myself in refusing to understand and sympathize with him. My story, too, grew out of a self-betrayal. I mentioned that the toilet in the basement bathroom had been broken for several days. I had felt I ought to attend to it immediately, but I didn't-that was how I betrayed myself. Predictably, between my initial self-betrayal and eventually getting around to trying to fix the toilet, I got caught up in all sorts of rationalization. Repairing it was just one more obligation on a list already longer than I could manage-a list I rehearsed more than a few times in my mind. Why couldn't someone else in the family step up to some of the maintenance tasks around the house? How could I be expected to master the complex mechanics of the toilet when I had my work, my family, and various community and church responsibilities to worry about? I was certain that anyone looking on, observing my depiction of myself struggling valiantly against all manner of adversity, would sympathize and take my side!

By our self-betrayals Marty and I each plunged ourselves into a desperate project of weaving a story by which we might justify ourselves. We needed to make the wrong we were doing seem right-or at least not our own fault- especially in our own eyes. Marty blamed Carolyn and his boss and the baby; I blamed Matthew and Susan and everyone else who had expectations of me. We both felt overwhelmed with responsibilities and fatigue. In the life-stories we were composing, the fault for our failure to do as we knew we should lay elsewhere, not with us. We insisted that we were doing all that we could reasonably be expected to do.

We All Understand about Living a Lie
I have discovered that everybody knows how this works. I once gave a talk at a training school for mentally challenged children. I decided to try to explain the idea of self-betrayal as simply as I could, together with the ways that we rationalize and blame other people. One boy of about twelve said aloud, "Oh, you mean living a lie." Yes, that was exactly what I meant.

When I tell a self-betrayal story to a group I am just beginning to teach, I may ask what they think might have gone through the self-betrayer's mind. Occasionally someone will say, "Guilt" (a subject I will speak of later). But most of the time the answer I get is, "Rationalization." Then I will ask for examples of sentences that someone like Marty might actually say in his mind. Here are some samples of their responses:

"Carolyn's not having a difficult time in her job like I am."

"I can't handle the baby as well as she can."

"If I do this once it will set a bad precedent. I'll be expected to do it all the time."

"She's the one who wanted to have the kid in the first place."

The term self-justification seems just right for accurately describing such contorted efforts to make what's wrong seem right, or at least not our fault. Justification means trying to make something straight or to bring it into line-for example, we justify the text we are typing on the computer when we enter the command that straightens up one or more of its edges. When Marty tried to justify himself, he strove to make his crooked decision, which went against his conscience, seem straight. He worked at making the case that his decision to stay in bed lined up with what was right. Carnival fun houses sometimes sell glasses that make the world appear crooked. Self-justification, as we have seen, is like putting on glasses to make our crooked behavior appear straight.

"For the justification of sins," Leo Tolstoy wrote, "there exist false arguments, according to which there would appear to be exceptional circumstances, rendering the sins not only excusable, but even necessary. These false justifications may be called 'snares.'" They are lies that catch and trap us. We get caught in our own snares when we start presenting ourselves as if we are excused or justified in what we're doing when in reality we're not.

An expressive word for Marty's commitment to the lie he was living is "self- deception." "It is no doubt an evil to be full of faults," Blaise Pascal wrote in the seventeenth century, "but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and unwilling to recognize them, since this entails the further evil of . . . self-delusion."

In the next excerpt we will see how we blame others for our own emotions and attitudes...

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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