M E R I D I A N     M A G A Z I N E

Bonds That Make Us Free, Part 22: Influencing and Being Influenced
by C. Terry Warner

We have learned that one of the ways we can change in our hearts, in our way of being, is by opening ourselves to others and allowing the truth about their feelings and needs to influence us. It means letting ourselves be taught about them, and letting them be our teachers. It is this that brings about a change in us. It restores us from the defensive and hardened posture we have adopted to our more natural, open, and responsive I-You way of being.

These thoughts prepare us for two important and somewhat surprising ideas that cannot be separated from one another. Here is the first of the two ideas:

Allowing ourselves to be influenced is not only the way we change; it is equally the way we can influence and help change others. By allowing ourselves to be changed by others' influence, we become different: far less defensive and accusing, and far more caring.

Then, having changed, we give them a different kind of person to respond to than before. And we do this without making any effort whatever to manipulate them into being the way we want them to be.

We influence them simply by letting them influence us!

It should go without saying that when I refer to others influencing us, I do not mean that we allow them to persuade us to compromise what we feel is right. When that happens, we are using them as much as they are using us-using their persuasiveness to excuse ourselves in our own wrongdoing. By speaking of others influencing us, I mean that we let them, or the truth about them, guide us in treating them in the right way.

When we let others influence us in this manner, we give them a different sort of person to respond to, and this response on our part is what influences them. It influences them partly by eliminating the reasons and excuses we have been giving them for seeing us accusingly. When they no longer have to worry about defending themselves, they have the "space" to decide how they will respond to our new response to them. And very often they will respond in kind. There is no better means of promoting another person's change of heart than allowing our own heart to be changed.

We discovered this in analyzing Jenny's story of her relationship with Erin. It was when Jenny became a truly loving, I-You person, by allowing herself to be touched by Erin's struggles, that she suddenly gave Erin a mother to respond to who wasn't self-absorbed and accusing, a mother who did not judge or seek to manipulate her. Then, at last, Erin could respond unguardedly to her mother's influence.

Another example of influencing by being influenced is found in this story of a mother who had been trying to tell her six-year-old daughter not to try to clean the bathtub after her bath because of the mess she would invariably create.

I had told her many times not to clean the dirty ring as the water was going out, because she always used too much soap, but that's just what she tried to do on this occasion. And sure enough, she once again used a great deal of soap. Suds were everywhere, even flowing over onto the floor, and she was struggling in vain to control them.

My usual habit is to start criticizing immediately: "Look what you've done now. You've used too much soap! Now I'm going to have to spend twenty minutes getting this mess cleaned up!" And then she carries on about how it isn't her fault and cries like I'm being an ogre, which really makes me mad.

But this time I didn't follow my habit. I said warmly, "You've tried to clean the bathtub. I really appreciate that.

"And you know what she said? She said, "Yeah, Mom, but I used too much soap."

Our Influence Comes Back to Us

Now we are ready for the second of the two ideas.

When others undergo a change of heart (whether or not it happens in response to a change in us), they can influence us and help us change. For, as a result of their change, they give us a different sort of person to respond to.

By allowing ourselves to be touched or affected by this change in them, we are influenced to sustain our own change of heart or to allow it to be deepened.

Thus, by letting others influence us in the first place, we may influence them to influence us even more positively than before-and this can reinforce our change of heart.

You will remember Claudia from the previous part-the woman who thought her husband was cocky and contemptuous. When she stopped taking offense, she suddenly saw him in a new light, as insecure and afraid. After this event Claudia went to find him-he was living in a separate apartment at the time-and asked him if they might go for a drive. He consented. She expressed nothing about her altered feelings, but he sensed something different. As she listened he talked openly and freely throughout their entire ride together. This was unheard of in their previous relationship. In fact, one of her complaints had been that he was not willing to talk.

That change in her husband reopened her eyes to the man she had fallen in love with almost thirty years before. And predictably, this reawakening in her touched him further. Within a few days they were back together; when I heard from them several years later, they were still doing well.

So the change in us that comes from opening ourselves to others' influence invites responses from them that can reinforce our change. Our gift calls forth gifts from others; we get what we give, measured exactly. In supplying others an occasion to respond differently, we often find that in return they make it easier to be even more open and generous with them.

This self-reinforcing cycle, as you can see, is the positive counterpart of collusion. It is the dynamic aspect of what we have called the bonds of love.

Like many other crucially significant matters in human experience, this positive cycle lacks a name. So we must invent one, as we did with collusion. We will call the cycle a considerate relationship, signifying a reciprocal willingness on the part of two or more people to be open to and affected by one another. This will become an important concept in our further discussions of what we can do to escape troubled emotions and attitudes. Sometimes I will speak of one person being considerate of another, meaning that he or she is being influenced by the truth about this other person. And sometimes I will speak of a considerate relationship, meaning that all the parties involved are responding to one another in a considerate way and are thus being positively influenced by one another.

The discussions that follow will sometimes seem to focus more on our influence on others and sometimes on their influence on us. Either way, what is said will apply to all of us; we should put ourselves in both positions. The reason for this we have learned already. When we allow ourselves to be influenced, we influence, and those we influence-those who allow us to influence them-become an even greater influence on us. Generally speaking, when we play one of these roles, we play the other.

Waiving Our Demand for Justice
Think about the enormous contrast between the "before" picture of our collusive relationships and the "after" picture, when we have changed and have become considerate. Before the change, we communicate the message, "You deserve whatever treatment you are getting from me. Justice is going to be done, and that means you must suffer." But after we change, we no longer demand that they pay the last farthing before we will let them off the hook for what they have done to us. We excuse them from having to pay because we no longer think they owe us anything. We drop all our charges against them. For their sakes we happily sacrifice all bitter satisfaction, all retribution, all demand for repayment, all vengeance. And we do all this without regret or second thoughts.

This sacrifice of retribution is not just an attitude of love, it is an act of love. We make the sacrifice because it is the right thing to do for them, not because we want them to do something for us.

A man named Peter once visited me who had acquired a list of points I had written about self-betrayal and collusion. He said that the night before, he and his wife had stayed up late going over the troubles in their relationship, each acknowledging to the other where he or she had been in the wrong. "A spirit of love settled upon us," he said, "that we have not felt for many years."

Then, he said, something equally memorable happened the next morning, the morning of his visit to me. Seven-year-old Penny bounded into the kitchen and said, "Hey, something's different here. What's different?" Soon after that Billy, age ten, appeared and, as always, started tormenting his little sister. "On other days I would have become irritated and impatient and probably thumped him on the head, and I started to feel that way again. But I looked at Billy and felt the same love for him as I had for my wife the night before. I just looked at him and said, 'Billy, we aren't going to do that anymore.' And he stopped and then he put his arms around me and buried his head in my chest and wept."

This sacrifice of retribution I am calling love clears a space in which others can let down their guard and be emotionally truthful with themselves.

I met a man once who had taught himself to live by this principle, which he formulated in a couplet. Adapted to the terminology of this book, the couplet can be expressed this way:

When we criticize people, their consciences console them.

When we love them, their consciences indict them.

"One Person I Can Never Love"
Bruce is a broker in a Seattle firm. During a class I was teaching, he seemed a ready student. After the second session, he stopped me and said: "I believe I know where you are headed in these classes, and I agree with the direction. But I just want to put you on notice here and now that there's one person I can never love, and no one else in my circumstance could love him either." I listened without trying to persuade him otherwise.

Bruce had sold his very nice home to the individual he referred to in our conversation. The sale contract called for him to leave the major appliances-stove, freezer, refrigerator, and so on. But the buyer's wife informed Bruce one day that because she and her husband had their own appliances, he could remove these from the house. So he did. The buyer was furious. Then the buyer discovered that the air conditioning didn't work properly, and that there was a small hole cut in the living room carpet for an electrical socket that had been covered by a lamp when the buyer had looked at the home. After he had made an intensive inspection, the buyer found many other things wrong as well. He drew up a list involving many thousands of dollars.

Bruce felt he was being treated as if he were a criminal and was being accused, in an exceptionally nasty manner, of fraud. The appliance problem wasn't his fault; the air conditioning had worked the day he left; he hadn't meant to keep the floor socket a secret, and so forth. Both parties insisted it wasn't just a question of money; it was a matter of principle. "All I care about is seeing justice done," Bruce said. What the other guy was trying to get away with just wasn't right. Bruce stewed about it when he woke in the mornings, any minute during the day when his mind wasn't otherwise occupied, and all through the evenings. He even woke up in the night to fret and lay his plans.

They arranged to sue each other. Depositions were to be taken on a designated day between the second and third sessions of our class. But the ideas we had been studying in the class began to erode Bruce's determination to take vengeance. Somewhere during the night before the scheduled meeting, his heart changed. Suddenly the most important thing in his life was not to revenge himself upon his adversary but to do what was right. So he called him on the telephone.

"Whaddya want?" the buyer asked rudely.

"I was hoping we could avoid an all-out conflict and be friends." The buyer was resistant, but reluctantly agreed to a meeting.

When they got together, the buyer asked again, "Whaddya want?" just as belligerently as before. Bruce picked up the list of items in dispute. Starting with the first item, he said what he thought was right. For example, he said he understood that any buyer would be upset upon discovering that something he had purchased was taken away, and he, Bruce, apologized-not only for removing the appliances but even more for having bad feelings toward the buyer. For each item he either offered to bear the expense or said he didn't believe it was his responsibility. His offers to pay for various things weren't the sort one makes hoping the other person will object and say, "Oh, it's okay, never mind." He really did want to do what was right.

When Bruce finished, the buyer sat silent, his eyes wet. Finally he said, "All my life people have been trying to take advantage of me. You are the first friend I ever had." Then for the next two hours he told Bruce his life story, including things he said he had never breathed to anyone else. When they were ready to part, Bruce tallied up what he owed and began writing a check. The buyer said, "That doesn't matter to me anymore."

"No," said Bruce, "I need to make it right."

"Well, then," the new friend said, "give me a hundred dollars and forget about it."

When Bruce asked for the meeting, there was, of course, no guarantee that the buyer would allow his heart to be softened rather than hardened. Nor were there any such assurances about the boy who spoke rudely to his sister, the girl cleaning the bathtub, or Claudia's difficult husband. But what amazes me is how often people do respond well-how often reconciliation follows a showing forth of love. Hard indeed are those who will not be touched by someone else's sacrifice of retribution.

In the next article we will take a closer look at the influence exerted by those who choose to live truthfully....

This article is part of a serialization of Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves by C. Terry Warner.

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