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Bonds That
Make Us Free, Part 17: "I'm Just Not Any Good"
by C.
Terry Warner
We will need
to consider one more style of excuse-making. It's given a section
of its own because it requires a more thorough treatment than the
others. It is generally more difficult to recognize as the living
of a lie.
We've talked
about three styles or story lines in which Jennifer might have carried
out her self-betrayal regarding her aunt. In one, she visits her
in the hospital proudly conscious of what it's costing her to do
it. This we called self-righteousness. In another, she stretches
herself beyond all reason to do everything imaginable for her aunt,
fretting morning and night over whether she's done enough. This
style we called perfectionism. In a third story line she
stays at home, insisting it's not fair or right to have to pay such
a price for someone who won't even appreciate the visit. We called
this style self-assertiveness.
Besides these
three story lines, there is available to her another, which we'll
call self-disparagement. Jennifer might stay at home, castigating
herself for failing to do what she should have done. Imagine her,
brooding about what an unworthy person she must be not even to have
the gumption to visit a relative who has fallen ill. She feels crummy.
She remembers the many times she has disappointed herself this way.
She thinks, "More proof that I'm just not one of those courageous,
good people who does noble, admirable things for others."
It looks
like she's admitting a truth about herself, but not so. Instead,
she's putting forward an excuse. She doesn't do what she's supposed
to do because, she claims, she's just no good. Blaming oneself
can work as an excuse just as well as blaming someone else.
Like all self-betrayers'
excuses, this excuse always includes an accusation of others, though
more subtly. You can see this in the following story, in which Ardeth
is sitting at the piano with her daughter Tiffany.
Ardeth: We pay
Mrs. Simpson forty dollars a lesson, and you refuse to practice.
Tiffany: I am
practicing!
Ardeth: You're
more worried about what you're wearing than about doing the serious
work Mrs. Simpson gives you. What good is it for us to make the
sacrifice so you can have this good training when you won't make
the time count?
Tiffany: You
always say that. If you'd quit bugging me all the time, I could
practice just fine.
Ardeth: It doesn't
do any good to practice a piece incorrectly. You learn to play the
wrong way, and then you have to waste a lot more time undoing the
bad habits.
Tiffany: I know
what I'm doing. You're not the one Mrs. Simpson shows how to do
it.
Ardeth: You
might as well take the group lesson from Miss Baker for fifteen
dollars if you're going to practice it wrong.
Tiffany: If
you're so worried about the money, why don't I just stop taking
lessons?
Ardeth: Don't
fly off the handle. When you get all upset, you can't concentrate
on practicing.
Tiffany: I came
in this morning and started prac-ticing, and all you can think of
is everything I'm doing wrong. I don't even want to play the piano.
I could have gotten my blouse pressed in the time you've wasted
hassling me for nothing.
Ardeth: You
see, you're trying to get out of practicing just like all the other
times. You see?
Tiffany: Okay.
So I don't want to practice! So I am trying to get
out of it by all my little tricks! I am only interested in
what I'm going to wear to school so I can impress all the boys.
I don't think that playing the piano is the most divine thing
people can do. So now are you satisfied? I'm just exactly as rotten
as you say I am!
Ardeth: That's
all I'm going to take of this, Tiffany Ann Thomas! I do everything
I can to help you develop your talents so you won't turn out to
be a nothing, and this is what I get. Get practicing, young lady,
or you won't be going out with your friends for a month!
Initially, Tiffany
countered her mother's charges of poor discipline and neglect by
contending she was practicing as well as she could. Then suddenly
she shifted, "confessing" to everything that her mother
had accused her of. "So now are you satisfied? I'm exactly
as rotten as you say I am!" By this stratagem, she robbed her
mother's criticisms of their force and gave herself a new and different
justification for what she was doing. This was a justification more
difficult for Ardeth to deal with than Tiffany's previous arguments.
The excuse Tiffany had now was iron-clad: "I can't help what
I'm doing because that's just the way I am!"
In this mode
of self-presentation the self-disparager appears to confess
to being completely at fault. She appears to accept as true
the "I am worthless" image. But this is not so much a
forthright confession as a strategy for evading responsibility,
an excuse for not doing what needs to be done.
When we are
caught up in self-betrayal, "admitting" we are unworthy
is just one more strategy in our repertoire. It gives us just as
good a justification for acting irresponsibly as the strategy of
condemning others. It is a powerful maneuver because claiming to
be a victim of our make-up or nature is even harder to refute than
claiming to be a victim of others. (To call it mistaken seems like
telling terminally ill patients that they are exaggerating their
illness.)
The maneuver
is powerful for another reason. We think that we are being honest,
that we are "admitting the truth at last." If we were
living a lie before, then surely, we think, we are telling the truth
now. Indeed, we can say that although we may not be the wondrous
individuals we have made ourselves out to be, we at least are not
being hypocrites anymore. We believe we have mustered up the courage
to be honest with ourselves. But the truth is, we are taking up
this position accusingly and self-victimizingly—and therefore
with violence in our hearts. We make people feel guilty for not
rescuing us, or for being successful themselves, and thus hold people
hostage to our misery (recall Wally's unwillingness to sing in front
of his friends, described in Part
11).
We have all
met breastbeaters who, convinced of their worthlessness, beat themselves
up verbally and emotionally. Breastbeaters are not as purely self-
condemning as they look. Theirs is really just another way of playing
the victim and nurturing feelings of self-justification. Nietzsche
wrote: "When we despise ourselves, we love the despiser in
ourselves."
Thus Tiffany
said to her mother: "I'm a spoiled and lazy kid wasting your
money and trying to impress the boys. I'm just exactly as rotten
as you say I am!" By this she blamed not only something inside
herself she believed she wasn't responsible for, but her mother
also. Tiffany is gaining again that delicious sense of self-justification
that for a moment she thought she had almost lost. She wouldn't
have admitted it, but she loved the self-despiser in herself.
We can imagine
Tiffany play-acting this part just a bit, only half convincing herself
of her victimhood. But in many other cases self-disparagers experience
themselves rather thoroughly as worthless and unacceptable. They
know first-hand—and they are right—that their suffering
is real. They are sure of their worthlessness and unacceptability.
Ernie, one of
our salesmen who works on straight commission, is constantly down
on himself. He's one of those guys who talks himself out of making
about half the calls he should be making. And he backs away from
opportunities to close a sale.
It seems to
me like he's on the verge of tears most of the time, because of
the hopelessness of his situation, I guess. I've heard him say,
"Nothing breaks my way" and "I can't seem to do anything
right." He hates himself for all his failures and yet he keeps
failing anyway.
He's said several
times he'd like to quit because he's dragging all the rest of us
down. One time when I was reviewing his monthly performance, he
asked how I could stand to have a person like him around.
Self-condemning
guilt like Ernie's can be thought of as self-betrayal on the "pay
as you go" plan: If as guilty people we feel terrible enough,
then we have paid for the right to keep wallowing in our problems;
we do not have to accept responsibility for them. By seeing
himself as no good, Ernie grabbed hold of a perfect excuse for not
performing. He could not do any better than he did because
he was convinced there was something wrong with him—and there
was also something wrong with all those others whose example or
competition or contempt or rejection of him put success beyond his
reach.
Ernie's story
raises an issue we should address here. Any one of the styles or
story lines we've discussed can dominate a person's life so completely
that it seems to define his or her personality and character. Ernie's
particular self-disparagement seems at least as enclosing and final
as any of the other story lines, even at their worst. Of him we
want to exclaim, "That's just the way he is! It's not
a matter of his choosing how he will be. So it's foolish to imagine
him changing in any fundamental way."
That indeed
is how he seems. But against this impression there's something hopeful
to keep in mind, which springs from what we are learning about the
origin of negative, afflicted attitudes and emotions. To the degree
that these attitudes and emotions are accusing and self-excusing,
we are responsible for them, and to that very degree we can stop
indulging in them. For a lot of people the major question is whether
we can escape them. But the whether question is settled:
We can escape. The vital and imperative question is how.
Even someone like Ernie can abandon his life story line and start
afresh, like a writer who junks a novel she's been writing when
she realizes she'll never be able to make it work.
NO EXIT?
To the extent we have stricken ourselves with moral blindness
and made ourselves unable to tell our counterfeit actions from genuine
goodness, we have lost the opportunity to do what is genuinely good.
That opportunity has disappeared from the world as we are experiencing
it for one simple reason: Everything we can think of to do while
in our darkened state will be no more genuine than the acts we're
trying to stop doing. Our efforts to get ourselves unstuck only
keep us stuck.
Think about
Glen in the midst of his Christmas collusion with Becky, fending
off her pressures, preoccupied with how he would get his responsibilities
at the office completed, and imagining the chaos that would befall
the family if they tried to implement all her plans for Christmas
projects and activities. In that condition, he could not conceive
of responding to her the way he had before the Christmas collusion
began. He could not imagine, given the frustrated and accusing feelings
in his heart, of delighting in her being, prizing her ideas, wholeheartedly
seeking her happiness, wanting never to be out of her company, or
welling up with a grateful and generous spirit toward her. He could
not cherish her while judging and criticizing her. Becky as he knew
her before she became so demanding, he could cherish—but not
Becky the way she was now.
You can see
Glen's moral blindness in this. The opportunity to do what would
have been truly considerate, generous, and caring was hidden from
him in the most effective manner possible—by his own self-worried,
self-excusing attitude. That opportunity disappeared from the world
as he perceived it. It had no place in the interpretation of Becky
that he projected onto her. He could not have discerned that opportunity
no matter how hard he scanned the situation in front of him. That's
what it means to be "in the box"—to be reduced to
moral blindness by the darkness of our eyes.
No wonder, then,
that he thought his wrongdoing right, or at least excusable. For
there lay before him only two main ways to respond to Becky, and
both of them were accusing and self-excusing. He could refuse to
do much to help her on the Christmas projects and believe he was
standing up for what he thought was right. Or he could give in,
sacrifice his work and the balance of family activities he kept
talking about, and do everything she wanted. These were the possibilities
as he saw them—submit, give in, and sacrifice, or stand up,
assert himself, and defy. Both of these alternatives are accusing;
neither is generous-spirited, kind, happy, or truly willing. Thus,
the boxed- in world we experience as self-betrayers offers us
opportunities to submit in humiliation or to stick up for ourselves
defiantly, which are both self-absorbed actions, but it offers us
no chance of simply doing the right thing without concern for ourselves.
***
What has just
been described—the condition of moral blindness in which we
cannot distinguish between doing the right thing and portraying
ourselves (falsely) as doing the right thing—explains why we
are stuck. We have no way to test our thoughts and feelings and
actions to discover their dishonesty because we have lost touch
with the honest thoughts and feelings and actions we would need
to compare them to.
Our predicament
is not unlike that of the victim of one of those detective- novel
burglaries in which the priceless diamond tiara is replaced by a
cubic zirconium imitation that looks just like it to the untrained
eye. When the owner checks to make sure nothing has happened to
her prized possession, she always receives reassurance that it is
safe and sound, and she may therefore never discover her loss. In
just this way, Glen (of the Christmas story) and Jennifer (refusing
to visit her aunt) and Ethan (packing the family van and making
the meals) all felt they knew all about what it meant to treat family
members kindly. In observing themselves, they could see with their
own eyes an individual trying his or her best to be kind in spite
of a situation that made it hard. Yet all the while what they were
doing was counterfeit and wrong, and what they were thinking and
feeling was self-deceived and false.
We shall never
get out of this predicament until we can chase the darkness from
our eyes, see what's right without distortion, and do the right
without counterfeiting it. This requires a change of heart. But
how can we change our hearts when we can't even appreciate how much
our hearts need changing?
Answering
this question, at least in part, is our next purpose.
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