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Bonds
that Make Us Free, Part 29: What Comes after a Change of Heart?
by
C. Terry Warner
Sustaining
the Change
In
every era and culture, people have sought for and obtained the awakening
we have been talking about. For some this change of mind and heart
has come by way of quiet insight, or many successive insights, while
others have experienced it as a cleansing and refreshing conversion
to a new way of life. Many have written of it or made it the centerpiece
of their religious or communal life, celebrating and memorializing
it. It feels like a gift, and indeed it is a gift. None of us can
produce it by our own deliberate effort.
But even at
its most profound, the change of mind and heart amounts only to
a beginning. We do not, we cannot, become considerate, self-forgetful,
and generous beings in a moment. Following the initial softening
experience we must re-enter our daily lives, there to encounter
again all the same situations and people who have upset us in the
past. We will find ourselves challenged, accused, and taken advantage
of, just as we did before our change of heart. We will discover
new manifestations of the weaknesses we thought we had overcome.
We may relapse into old patterns and then become discouraged. For
those who are earnest about their emotional and spiritual well-being,
the issue becomes Can I sustain, under fire, my new vision of things?
Can I learn to right myself when I bend or fall backwards?
In general,
to maintain ourselves in our renewed condition we must continue
in that same self-honesty, openness, and upright conduct that got
us there in the first place. To the extent that we do this, our
experiences will instruct us. Because we will interpret them differently,
the same sort of encounters and circumstances that formerly reinforced
our negative attitudes and emotions will instead reveal to us the
truth about others and about ourselves. Our teacher will be the
testing that life unfailingly arranges for us, augmented perhaps
by considerate individuals who enter or re-enter our lives. "When
the student is ready, the teacher will come." We will grow
in experience, judgment, and wisdom. We will develop strength and
assurance sufficient to keep us on our course.
In this section
we will focus on certain dangers we may encounter in our quest to
stay on course and how we might respond to them. Unfortunately,
there is insufficient space in this book to treat other aspects
of life highly relevant to this quest, such as adversity, sacrifice,
service, work, and gratitude, all of which contribute to our maturity
and refinement.
Not Progress
but Stillness
Some of us who are seeking to maintain ourselves in our new,
more open way of being get tripped up by our anxiety to measure
our progress. We want to know how we're doing. But worrying too
much about such things means we're probably still too self-absorbed
to maintain whatever change of heart we may have experienced. Such
worrying is not the sort of thing that people do when they are preoccupied
with enjoying or assisting other people or accomplishing their work
or delighting in learning or friendships or nature. Fixating on
our personal progress makes what really matters go out of focus.
We can call
to mind our discussion of self-improvement goals in Part
26. There's nothing wrong with goals so long as we don't pursue
them to prove we're something that we're not. But turning the maintenance
of a change of heart into a project with measurable steps of achievement
usually requires a pretty heavy focus on oneself. This produces
only a counterfeit of change. Preoccupation with personal progress
in such matters usually indicates that we are not making much progress.
What, then,
do we focus on when living in a self-forgetful and generous way,
if not a goal? Part of the answer is this. We do not think of ourselves
as "a force on the move" toward some important objective.
Instead, we feel still, inwardly still.
Ask yourself,
Who is the person I really need to be? A being who can come into
existence only by determined, gritty effort? I think on reflection
you will answer, No, the person I need to be is who I am already—or
more accurately, who I will be if I cease trying to display myself
as worthy and acceptable and thus make myself into a grotesque distortion
of who I really am. If this is how you answer, you like many others
intuitively agree that we become most ourselves, without distortion,
when we relax our frantic effort to justify ourselves and allow
ourselves simply to be still—which means, of course, renouncing
the self-betraying way of life.
Still is just
the right way to be.
You rise in
the morning to go about your day. You remember a friend who has
troubles. You don't quibble with yourself about whether to call
her; you don't write a reminder on your Palm Pilot or in your planner
to make the call tomorrow. You just call. Simple.
Your friend
is appreciative. Even over the phone there's a warmth between the
two of you that you don't recognize till later. But you laugh. You
feel an easiness during the conversation, brief though it is, that
nudges open the portals of the day. The way forward seems more warmly
lit and inviting than usual.
Your spouse
isn't up yet. You leave an encouraging note and a chocolate you
brought home from work for just this purpose. Easy. There is no
"do gooder'' feeling about any of this.
At work, you
talk with people about the interests you share. Word comes down
that the project you've put your heart into for many months might
be canceled. Others in your office wring their hands. The engines
of speculation start churning out analyses of malice or mischief
on higher levels. Past grievances are resurrected and amplified.
Somehow, you don't feel flustered. Your inner stillness can't be
touched by this. One way or the other, everything will work out.
Shall we call
this stillness progress? I think not. You have made no progress,
because there is no progress to be made. Being fully human, fully
who you are, is not an achievement. It's more like a homecoming.
One teacher
whose approach resonates with what I have been speaking of in this
book told me, "Not one of my students who I think is doing
well says, 'I am becoming better.' On the contrary, they struggle
on with challenges that are much like those they struggled with
before. But more and more frequently they have the sense of coming
to themselves, and more continuously. An increasing portion of the
time, they feel peaceful. But they don't notice it much.
They're too caught up in whatever they're doing and the people they're
doing it with and the people they're doing it for."
Relapsing
Being overly concerned about our personal progress is just one
of the ways we can slip back into self-absorption. Before we look
at some others, we will do well to study briefly some general features
about relapses. We will focus on three of them.
First, once
we begin to slip, we tend to slip a lot.
All the old
suspiciousness, defensiveness, and insecurity return, the way drunkenness
almost inevitably follows an alcoholic's decision to take only one
drink. I'll illustrate this with the story, introduced in Part
l, of a woman burdened with the behavior of the other members
of her family.
Though exceptionally
competent, Victoria sabotaged her own management career by her determination
always to get things done "the right way"—which
meant Victoria's way. This tendency had just about ruined her family
as well. "What a shock it was to me to wake up one day and
realize why Ron (my husband) and my children appreciate nothing
that I do for them, and I do a lot. Whatever our family activity,
like working in the yard, going on trips, or deciding what clothes
the children should buy, it always has to be done my way. 'My way
or the highway'—that's me. Here I am, forty-eight years old,
always thinking I know best and always needing to run the show and
always blind and deaf where other people are concerned. Forty-eight
years old and never realized any of this before!"
Victoria's fifteen-year-old
son, Rusty, had been doing very poorly in school and staying out
long past the legal curfew. "He'd walk in and I'd start right
away getting after him and telling him how to get his life straightened
out." But with her change of heart, that stopped. Then one
day he came home and she listened. Like the drummer, Benson, she
discovered she really wanted to hear what he had to say. To her
further amazement, he started staying at home more often. Some days
he and she would talk for an hour or more. After several weeks of
this he came home one day to ask if there was anything he could
do to help her. She could scarcely believe it.
These developments
raised her hopes. "He's turning around," she thought.
Not surprisingly but disastrously, she decided to do her part to
help him along. She called the school to make sure he could still
pass the term's classes if he applied himself. And when she saw
Rusty again she carefully worked the subject into the conversation
so she could encourage him, yet knowing she might be treading on
dangerous ground. After a few minutes, he left while she was still
talking and didn't return until the next day.
Specters of
all her old troubles arose in her mind. Angry feelings returned,
especially against Ron for not making the boy toe the line. Then
it dawned on her that she might have caused this new problem by
returning to her controlling ways. She decided to make an extra
effort. "I told myself I shouldn't get on Rusty's case; I reminded
myself how effective it had been when I just listened. I even made
a vow not to criticize or give him suggestions when he came back.
But then when he walked into the house again all the old warning
words just came spewing out as if I had no control of my mouth.
I spent a sleepless night wondering why I would want to wreck everything,
just when it was becoming so good."
Victoria's relapse
swept her back into the I-It way with the same swiftness that her
change of heart had swept her out of it. That's the first point
I want to make: the slope is steep. Start to slide, and it's easy
to find yourself all the way back at the bottom.
Second, it
is our old patterns of response, our old tendencies and habits,
that we fall back into.
What Victoria
did to alienate Rusty again was the same sort of thing she had done
before, apparently to prove to herself how much she was sacrificing
to help her boy succeed. She had developed this style over a lifetime,
and with her first relapse into self-betrayal she returned to it.
Third, after
undergoing a change of heart, it is ours to decide whether and to
what extent we will indulge again in our old habits of accusation
and self-justification.
The change of
heart does not obliterate our susceptibility to fall back into these
patterns, and we activate that susceptibility if we begin to betray
ourselves again. A relapse can be a minimal and instructive thing,
indeed, part of a normal process of our growth, or else it can plunge
us into a condition even worse than before our change of heart.
We determine by our response which it will be. That response, which
is actually many responses over the course of years, must be counted
as important to our well-being as our initial change of heart. Think
of it as the continuing decision whether to sustain that change.
When Others
Don't Respond as We Expect
When those around us don't understand and appreciate the change
we've made, but keep on in their old ways or worse, how will we
react?
Typically we
will be able to sustain our openness to them for a while. We can
see that they mean to cause no harm but are only acting defensively.
But it is deceptively
easy to take offense again and start to slip back into our old thoughts
and feelings. We find ourselves having to pick up after the same
people again or tolerate their boisterousness or because of them
miss out on something we had anticipated. We get a little fussed.
We can see so clearly how they are betraying themselves and misusing
others. Why can't they see it?
Still, we try
to buck up. But it gets discouraging, we tell ourselves, to always
have to adjust or compensate for someone else's shortfall. We have
caught a glimpse of what it might mean to live in peace and mutual
consideration, and we want this for others' sake as well as for
ours. This seems to have been Victoria's pitfall.
So then, after
trying hard for a while to accommodate other people, we begin to
wonder why they don't get it—why they don't come around to
our way of thinking, why they have to be so obtuse (as obtuse as
we were for so many years!). Very likely we will then start pressing
them to change, and of course they will not take this very well.
Outright impatience may follow, and everything we have gained will
be lost.
We have forgotten
the collusive role we have played in their response to us. Before
our change of heart we supplied them with provocations and excuses
for taking offense, for suspecting our motives, and for reacting
to us accusingly. In effect, we "trained" them to respond
this way. Yet, in spite of that, we unreasonably expect them to
pick up on our change of heart, jump for joy, and quickly submit
to a change of heart themselves!
Some do, of
course. They detect the change in us right away and are softened
by it. But others suspect we have only adopted a different strategy
for getting our own way. These react to what they have believed
about us in the past, reflecting back to us not what we are or desire
to be now but what we have been. For example, if we no longer feel
comfortable spending time doing what they like to do, they may think
us "holier than thou."
And even if
they eventually allow their hearts to soften toward us, they may
escalate their offensive behavior for a time, as if trying to break
us down or test us to see if the kindness we are showing them is
genuine. This shouldn't surprise us. It is not any easier for them
to be touched and softened than it was for us; they too must give
up long-entrenched self-betrayals.
It is a key
sign of danger when we expect that others should change in response
to our change. This signals a lapse on our part, back into
self- absorption. Why so? Because the moment we begin to feel that
we need others to change before we can be free of our troubled,
afflicting thoughts and feelings, we have either lost the joy we
felt when we experienced our change of heart or else we never experienced
that change at all. We're back in our self-absorbed condition or
we never got out of it. Anyone free of that condition enjoys an
emotional freedom that no external circumstance can destroy—including
the reactions of other people.
Some of us succumb
to a different danger when we start to slip. We use the new vocabulary,
with which we now describe our past errors, to accuse others and
decontaminate ourselves. If reading this book has led you to new
realizations, you will very likely start to see self-betrayal, rationalization,
accusing emotion, and collusion everywhere. You might then indulge
in a feeling of superiority. You might use the weaknesses you perceive
in others as evidence against them. Because you are paying the most
careful attention to these matters of self-betrayal and self-deception,
you're confident you can't be in the wrong. ("How could
I be self-deceived?" you ask yourself incredulously.
"I'm a keen-eyed member of the self-betrayal police!")
Without realizing what is happening, you will have gotten yourself
back in the same dark condition as before, not in spite of your
new vocabulary but, ironically, with its help!
One man who
had been particularly accusing of his wife encountered the material
of this book in a class he took and made it a point to search me
out. "I saw her in everything that was said. That class proved
I have been right all along." Hearing things like this, I cringe.
When we are
locked into self-betrayal, our capacity to take any situation whatever
and twist it in our favor knows no limit. And our new vocabulary
of self-betrayal and collusion enables us to do this more cleverly
than ever. An instructional psychology professor heard me lecture
on these subjects, marched home, put a stern finger in his wife's
face, and announced, "I'm not going to collude with you any
more!"
Many are the
occasions over the years when, near the beginning of some class
I have been conducting, someone says, "I wish my spouse were
here; he (or she) really needs this!"
The general
principle behind these danger signs: When we find ourselves preoccupied
with fixing others, we can know that we have either lost our softness
of heart and generosity of spirit, or else we never regained it.
In the next
section we will take a look at what role pride plays in our relapses
and move on to a discussion of how we can "safeguard"
our change of heart over time....
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