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Bonds
that Make Us Free, Part 32: Changing the Influence of the Past
by
C. Terry Warner
Collusion
between Generations
Children
born into a colluding family develop as persons not just by learning
the family's language and adopting its ways, but also by entering
into their family's ongoing collusions. In this way they become
colluders themselves, starting at a very young age. They make the
family's unpleasant emotional patterns their own. These patterns
generally become so ingrained in them that they can seem impossible
to break.
You will recall
the story of Mandy from Part 1.
In her adult life, you may remember, she felt deprived of acceptance
and attention and was frequently despondent.
In her lonely
hours she would remember bitterly the many times her father took
her brother with him to work or on trips and left her home, or
played with and kissed her little sister, Nessie, and not her.
There was even one night not long before he died when she and
Nessie switched beds for some reason, and when he got home late
Mandy lay quietly awake, with only the top of her head out of
the covers. He came into the dark room and kissed her forehead.
When he realized she wasn't Nessie, he said, "Oh, oh, I'm
sorry." Thinking about these things even as a child, Mandy
would feel so brushed off, so minimized, that she would hide somewhere
in the house so no one could see her crying, because when she
cried her father would get cross with her. As she grew older she
would often go off by herself, angry and dejected, and from time
to time she would attack with her sharp tongue some startled person
who happened to say something she found offensive.
One other dimension
of Mandy's story needs to be mentioned.
Mandy had
matured very early, at about age eleven, and was strikingly attractive.
Older boys, sometimes even men, paid her heavy attention. Her
father was very displeased about this and got after her for it.
He accused her of acting "like a slut."
He had stressed
education for his children; they knew he wouldn't tolerate them
slacking off in their schoolwork. She loved her school subjects
and often competed in class discussions if she thought the teacher
liked girls to participate. With her quick mind she had good insights
to contribute. But she had a hard time writing term papers and
seldom took an examination. A paper soon due would loom so large
that it paralyzed her mentally with fear of failure. A coming
exam would seem too formidable to attempt. She would get a sore
throat or start vomiting or become so discouraged she couldn't
bring herself to study. The problems got worse each successive
year. Her college transcript was full of "Incomplete"
grades, indicating that she still had to make up the course work
in order to pass.
You will recognize
the relationship between Mandy and her father as a collusion of
a special kind. This collusion took place between parent and child,
beginning so early in the child's life that it played a significant
and decisive role in shaping her personality. Mandy's part in the
collusion consisted of dwelling on and magnifying her victimhood;
she thought of herself as a person doing the best she could to get
on in life against obstacles so great she could never quite overcome
them.
We can easily
understand how she felt—always left at home when her brother
got to go out with Dad! Ignored while her father held and played
with her little sister! Having the person she wanted most to please
say she acted like "a slut"! Having teachers, whom she
wanted to like and admire her, get down on her when it wasn't her
fault that she couldn't complete her work! How could she shake herself
out of her angry depression? What was she supposed to do—not
care whether her father loved her?
Yet we need
to notice in this story the accusatory elements we studied in Part
12. Had Mandy allowed herself to stop focusing on her father's
actions and looked instead at her own behavior, she might have seen
how she was actively carrying on a collusion, and how this, her
own behavior, was the source of her present problems. Like all self-betrayers,
but in her own unique way, she bore the identity of a victim by
seeing the awful things her father did to her (and make no mistake,
some of them were wrong) as causes of her present unhappiness.
By casting herself in the victim's role, she emphasized the monstrousness
of what he had done and avoided having to consider her own role
in her problems.
COLLUSION
HOOKS
You can imagine what Mandy's college roommates and teachers
thought of her. She sought to be engaged in the life of the apartment
and discussions in the classroom, but would back off quickly if
she sensed that those present weren't accepting her. Her tendency
to sulk resentfully put people off, which gave her reason to feel
rejected yet again. Her physical attractiveness and quick mind drew
people to her, including her teachers, but sooner or later they
would come up against her failure to keep her commitments, her sometimes
snappish manner, and her sulky moods. Then they would stop trusting
her and, in the case of her friends, find more pleasant company
to keep. And this would give her more reason to accuse and avoid
them.
In this way,
the emotions and attitude with which she carried on her collusion
with her deceased father tended to provoke the new people she would
meet to react to her negatively. She would interpret these reactions
as rejection, and thus she and they would create new collusions
together.
Let us call
Mandy's original collusion with her family members her primary
collusion. (I have emphasized only one dimension of this collusion.
Other family members were involved, but that is a story too complex
to detail here.) And let us refer to the other collusions as satellites
of the primary collusion. A primary collusion is one that
spawns various satellites and is not itself a satellite of any other
collusion.
All but inevitably,
we carry the I-It way we are with our primary colluders into our
relationships with others. We export our attitude or way
of being from a primary collusion and import it into a satellite
one. In this manner the emotions and attitudes we have been maintaining
in the deep background of our lives seep everywhere, like water
colors on wet paper, darkening all our associations, activities,
and even perceptions and muddying most if not all our other relationships.
We discussed
this idea of importation in a positive context. In Part
25 we spoke of how we are able to "activate" relationships
in which we are considerate, even while carrying on collusive relationships
elsewhere. We might, for example, recall the love or sacrifice of
a parent, the example of a teacher, the loyalty of a friend or an
animal, the goodness of God to us, or the need of someone in trouble,
and as we do this we may feel ourselves moved to gratitude, sympathy,
grief, or reverence. To the extent that we succeed in "dwelling
in" such a relationship, our way of being is an I-You one.
Then, in this open and considerate condition, we are able to turn
our attention to those with whom we have been colluding and import
into our relationship with them our more understanding and generous
way of being.
In a similar
way, we tend to export our way of being from our collusive relationships
into other relationships. We may export anger, self-pity, suspicion,
fear, sarcasm, or any other accusing, self-excusing attitude or
emotion and thereby create a collusive satellite of another collusion
carried on elsewhere. It's even possible by this means to turn formerly
considerate relationships into troubling collusions.
Mandy's story
demonstrates how the collusion from which we export an I-It way
of being can be a primary one and how this primary collusion can
spawn many satellite collusions. It showed us also the formative
role that a primary collusion can play in the development of our
personalities. We saw this too in the case of Eli, who carried forward
into his marriage and work life his vindictiveness toward his father,
treating every new person he met as a potential enemy. If our lives
are as afflicted as Mandy's or Eli's, we become walking expressions
of our ongoing troubled relationships with people who not only played
a significant role earlier in our lives, but who continue to play
this role, because we continue to walk through life displaying
ourselves as their victims.
You can visualize
being caught up in an oppressive primary collusion as carrying around
an extra limb. This limb is made of emotion and attitude rather
than flesh, and it's shaped like a hook. The hook is our I-It, insecure
attitude or mentality—our defensive and accusing way of being.
Subtly or blatantly we swing this hook in everything we do and everything
we say. We cannot hide it no matter how we try, let alone amputate
it; we swing it even in the manner in which we try to pretend it
isn't there. And to the extent that other people have collusion
hooks of their own, they sooner or later find us objectionable and
react to us the way most other people have reacted for most of our
lives. We and they catch each other with our hooks and create a
new collusion, a satellite of primary collusions operating somewhere
out of sight.
"JUST
THE WAY I AM"
It
was a number of years before Mandy began to comprehend the connection
between feeling rejected by her father and her apparent inability
to succeed and be happy. The way of being she maintained in relation
to him expressed itself in almost everything she did, even though
she didn't think she was portraying herself as a victim of his rejection.
She thought her tendency to feel hurt was "just the way I am."
"I'm not one of those people who stays on task very long,"
she would say. And "I don't handle pressure very well."
And "When people reject me, I just want to get out of there."
What was true
of Mandy is true generally. Because of our primary collusions, we
often greet the world anxiously or angrily and do not comprehend
how we became the way we are. We simply find ourselves beset by
some inexplicable dislike, selfish desire, judgmental attitude,
uncontrollable fear, despondent feeling, explosion of temper, or
other mood, preoccupation, or impulse, without being able to explain
why. We can't see that we have any responsibility for having this
attitude or feeling. It seems to rise up in us whether we like it
or not, like an alien force not subject to our will.
For this reason
we tend to think of our negative emotions, attitudes, and moods
as personality traits or character flaws or even disorders embedded
in our natures. The more our negative feelings or attitudes push
us to think and act in ways we regret, the more we say, "This
is just the way I am." And this makes us feel that it's hopeless
to try to change.
This hopelessness
gets reinforced by the way in which our unwanted patterns of feeling
and thought—our collusion hooks—tend to sabotage our
relationships, even new relationships in which we want to start
afresh with a new attitude. For a while we may manage to do a creditable
job of pretending. But then the old fears or resentments anxieties
reappear, and in spite of ourselves we find ourselves turning each
new relationship into a repetition of all the rest.
How drearily,
discouragingly predictable our life seems then! We feel certain
that there's something within us that defeats all our efforts to
be a better person!
Such are the
kinds of observations we often make of ourselves when stuck in a
primary collusion—observations of tendencies, emotions, and
impulses that keep getting us into trouble, that we do not believe
we've created, and that we can't seem to change. We resign ourselves
to the belief that, for us, personal change is going to be limited
to superficialities, like courtesies, various behavioral modifications,
and image-creation—all outward, cosmetic stuff. As far as
we're concerned when we think this way, the idea of changing our
heart has got to be fantasy.
A RECOVERY,
NOT A CHANGE
The description just given of how we self-betrayers often observe
ourselves tells us how things often seem. But it is not
how things are. Contrary to how we experience them, our accusing,
self-excusing thoughts and feelings do not spring from the depth
of our natures, and therefore they are not utterly beyond our control.
Such thoughts and feelings can often be traced to our primary collusions
and the self-betrayals associated with them—even though we
may not believe it at the time. You will recognize what great good
news this is. If our self-destructive dispositions and impulses
arise from our present self-betrayals and collusions rather than
our natures, we're responsible for them and therefore can eliminate
them. That is the diagnostic linchpin of this book. The discovery
that we are responsible for our troubles does not condemn us, but
opens up a way of escape.
To his amazement,
Glen discovered that Becky did not value Christmas more than she
loved him, and she learned that he did not prize his work more than
he cared about her (see Part
19). Christmas and career were pseudo issues. Glen's and Becky's
offensive behavioral styles did not manifest unalterable personality
traits or character flaws, but the false and fortunately temporary
way they were being with their respective families of origin and
with one another.
This suggests
that when we escape our stuck, self-betraying condition, our nature
does not change. The I-It mode of being is not our nature. It is
this temporary condition into which we plunge ourselves by means
of our self- betrayals. So in a very important sense, when we experience
a change of heart we do not really change at all. We simply stop
betraying and justifying ourselves. We stop feeling victimized.
In short, we let ourselves be the person we would be if we were
not "messing ourselves up" by trying to prove a point
about ourselves.
We have compared
being "stuck" in an emotionally troubled condition to
physical illness. If people are ill, we do not expect them to be
transformed into a different kind of physical specimen. We expect
them to become as they used to be—healthy or whole (which,
incidentally, mean the same thing). They need to "feel like
themselves again." As we learned in Part
27, that transformation does not "make us over" into
a different kind of creature, but restores us to that nonconflicted,
straightforward condition we sometimes call "being ourselves."
It's misleading to speak of this recovery as a change. The turnaround
moment in the life of the prodigal son, as told in the famous parable,
is described in these words: "He came to himself."
In
the next section we will continue to learn how to finally put an
end to "primary collusion"....
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