M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

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.

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