Bonds That Make Us Free, Part 4
by C. Terry Warner

Blaming Emotions and Attitudes

The blaming that self- betrayers do as they shift responsibility for what's going wrong to someone else consists of more than rationalizing words. It includes feelings, like Marty's and mine, of irritation, humiliation, self-pity, resentment, or frustration. Marty, for example, justified himself not only by thinking certain thoughts like "It's her turn" and "It's not fair." His self-justification required him also to adopt and indulge in negative emotions like those I've mentioned. Without such emotions he could not have convinced himself that he was being taken advantage of. His rationalization would have been no more believable to him than an actor performing Hamlet with the passion of a newscaster. We lie with our emotions and attitudes (and often even with our moods) as well as with our words.

The many kinds of emotions and attitudes with which we can do this are too numerous to itemize completely. But I include a partial list below.

You will notice that these emotions and attitudes have in common some element of accusation. In addition, the list contains no attitudes or emotions that unite us with other people, but only ones that divide us from them. It includes no reference to love, delight, generosity, consideration, sympathy, or kindness. Nor does it refer to such empathetic and caring emotions and attitudes as grieving and sorrow, which are forms of emotional pain that contain no accusation.

Who Causes Such Emotions and Attitudes?

We have seen that when as self-betrayers we develop a self- justifying story, we don't merely tell ourselves a lie. We live the lie. We get completely caught up in the lie, emotions and all.

We can see this happening in the following exchange between a father and his daughter:

Louisa: Daddy, I can't figure this math problem out.

Howard [her father, watching Monday Night Football and feeling that he should help Louisa]: Sure you can. You've just got to struggle with it.

Louisa: But I've tried, and I'm getting nowhere. If you could . . . [Louisa begins to cry, her head on her book.]

Howard [his eyes still fixed on the screen]: You're trying to take the easy way. They wouldn't give you the problem if they hadn't taught you all you have to know to solve it. [His voice rises as he turns to look at Louisa.] Why do you wait until I'm right in the middle of watching my game? In fact, you should be in bed, young lady. Why did you leave your homework till the last minute, anyway?

Louisa: I didn't think it would take me very long . . .

Howard: Well, ask your sister upstairs. She had the same math last year. She knows it better than I do.

Louisa: But I've just got one question.

Howard [his anger blossoming]: Louisa, I'm tired of you trying to get me to do your work for you. Now, I've told you what you need to do to get it done and you're just avoiding doing it.

Louisa [pouting]: When Danny asks for help, you help him.

Howard: Oh, boy! Look, if you would do what you are supposed to do, I would be glad to help you. There is a difference between helping Danny after he's struggled with something and helping you when you haven't made any effort on your own. You just want me to do your work for you.

Starting with Howard's self-betrayal, we can track the development of the lie he lived, beginning with his trying to brush Louisa off and ending with his full-blown anger.

Louisa didn't cause that anger, as Howard believed. It was his own doing. Nevertheless----and this is the crucial point----he was angry, genuinely angry. He wasn't merely pretending; he actually felt his anger well up in him. That's what made the lie so convincing--because his angry feelings were real, he was sure the person toward whom they were directed was causing them. But she didn't cause them. He did.

When we betray ourselves and shift responsibility onto others by means of our accusing thoughts and feelings, we, like Howard, believe it is their mistreatment of us that leads us to accuse them. This is the self-betrayer's lie. The truth----the profound, almost world-shaking truth----is that we accuse them because of our mistreatment of them. Seldom has this profound insight been more arrestingly expressed than by King Solomon: "A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it" (Proverbs 26:28).

Fable

Our accusing, self-excusing feelings such as anger, frustration, bitterness, self-pity, and so on, are signals that we are in the right.

Fact

Such feelings are signals that we are in the wrong.

To a person who has accusing thoughts and feelings, the things I have been saying will seem unbelievable. "What if the accusing feelings are how I really feel? I'm not just pretending to have them. How can you say they are lies?"

As Howard's story shows, self-betrayers truly do have their accusing, self-excusing feelings. But this does not mean that the feelings themselves are truthful. We can take up a false position with our emotions and attitudes just as well as with our words. In my episode with Matthew, I claimed by means of my upset feelings to be suffering wrong rather than doing it. Feeling offended was my way of saying, "Look how you are hurting me!" My feelings were real but not truthful. Matthew wasn't making me suffer. My upset feelings were being caused by no one but myself.

Fable

When we're stuck in troubled feelings, we believe that all our feelings are true--that is to say, we believe that by our emotions at that moment we are making accurate judgments about what's happening. If I'm angry with you, I'm certain that you are making me angry.

Fact

Though we truly have these feelings, they are not necessarily true feelings. More likely I'm angry because I'm misusing you, not because you are misusing me.

Like Living in a Box

In his experience with Louisa, Howard created or projected an illusion around himself--an illusion that he was living with a daughter who had the power to make him irritable and impatient. He projected this illusion by means of his accusing feelings. You might compare his projection of this illusion to the projection of the image of a sunset onto a screen. The projection is real; the sunset image is real; the screen is real--but the sunset is not. Similarly, Howard's feelings and the way he portrayed Louisa by means of these feelings were real, and Louisa too was real--but a little girl who could make her father angry was not real. The screen wasn't a sunset, and Louisa wasn't a person with the power to make Howard angry.

It takes a projection that is being cast by the right kind of equipment to create the illusion of a sunset on a screen, and it takes real feelings to create an illusion that others have power to offend and anger us.

Projecting such interpretations upon everything around us is in many ways like living in a box of our own making. The walls of the box surrounding us are like that sunset backdrop--they are the negative interpretation we project onto others. You might think of these walls as a falsification of reality--a distorted way of seeing, feeling, and thinking about other people that makes them seem offensive or malicious or otherwise untrustworthy. Remember, the people are really there, but we wall ourselves off from the truth about them by the false way we picture them.

I readily acknowledge that it seems preposterous, when we're beset by a troubled emotion, to say that our circumstances do not cause us to feel as we do. Think of Mandy, remembering years of resentment toward her father and certain she was neglected by him. Or of Norm, overwhelmed by the laziness and stupidity of the people on whom he relied. Surely, he would have said, he wasn't just imagining the pain his financial losses caused him.

Living in the box means being convinced that other people and our circumstances are responsible for our feelings and our helplessness to overcome them. What we can't see when we're in the box is that the way the world appears to us is our projection, and that we are making this projection to justify ourselves in self-betrayal. We cannot see that it's not others' actions but our accusations that result in our feeling offended.

The next excerpt helps us understand how and why we betray ourselves.

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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Bonds that Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3