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Bonds
that Make Us Free, Part 33: "My Beginning Will Not Dictate
My End"
by
C. Terry Warner
We have learned
that if a primary collusion does not keep us from undergoing a change
of heart, it is likely to lurk in the background after we have experienced
the beginnings of such a change. It will wait there, ready to cause
trouble. And sooner or later it will show itself unexpectedly in
the form of some impulse, aversion, stubborn preference, fear, irritability,
despondency, impatience, outbursts of anger, or similar behavior.
When this happens, we lose the considerate feelings we had recently
been enjoying, as Richard and Victoria both did when they reverted
to their old ways. Then we either revive an old collusion or create
a new one.
Such slippages
should serve as signals that there's more work to do if we are going
to obtain and sustain a change of heart. That work consists of tracing
our "long-running" emotional and attitudinal habits to
their source and rooting them out; this is sometimes called "unfinished
business." Unless we get ourselves engaged in and ultimately
succeed at this business, we shall never fully resolve the satellite
collusions that afflict us, for we shall never be rid of our collusion
hooks.
Every growing
season on my property I battle a noxious garden weed called morning
glory. It twines itself around anything in the vicinity and ruins
desirable plants. You can pull as much of it as you possibly can
out of the soil and still stupendously long pieces of root remain
underground, sometimes miles long. These roots quickly push their
way through the surface again. You can kill this weed, but only
with a powerful herbicide that travels all the way to the ends of
the roots. The absolute honesty of soul we have been discussing
in this book can kill the perversity of an I-It way of being, but
only if it penetrates to the deepest of its roots.
Transforming
"The Way I Am"
We are now prepared to see how this works in ending a primary
collusion. Recall the story of Mandy, the woman who felt constantly
rejected because, as she remembered only too often, her father had
spent his free time before his death with her older brother, Jeddy,
or little sister, Nessie, but seldom with her. (You might want to
look at this story again in Part
1).
Not long before,
something extraordinary happened. It unfolded one evening when my
husband had told me he would be home early, so we could have dinner
together. For some time a resentment had been building up in me,
especially over his preoccupation with work and with fixing up the
yard. We didn't talk very much, at least in the way I wanted
to talk. I had worked up my courage. I thought if I told him of
my need he might understand and sympathize and we could spend the
evening just talking about the things that mattered to us. I prepared
a meal he liked and he thanked me for it, but then said he needed
to get to the nursery for some bedding plants and potting soil before
it closed.
This struck
me like an ultimate blow. I had prepared myself to go out on a limb
and almost beg for his kindness—and he had better things to
do!
I went to the
bedroom and started to cry. But suddenly there came to me memories
of myself as a girl with deeply hurt feelings, holding back tears.
I remembered one episode after another of Daddy being too busy or
telling me I couldn't go with him or saying I was too old for hugs
and kisses. Right then I realized I was doing the same thing with
my husband as I had done with Daddy, only now I was supposed to
be grown up.
Then there came
memories of more episodes of feeling hurt by people who wouldn't
pay attention to me and thinking how cruel they were and not wanting
to be anywhere near them. It seemed as I reflected on it that I've
always been the hurt one, and always suspected people of wanting
to close me out. If they wouldn't gush over me, I took that as rejection.
One after another, I recalled these events and could see the truth,
glowing and terrible, in front of me. I had always rejected others
so they could not reject me! I felt so sorry. I felt I loved them
all and wanted to find a way to make it up to them.
But I couldn't
make it up to my father. He was gone. I wanted to apologize to him
and ask for his forgiveness. Daddy, I wanted to say, I didn't know
I was hurting you.
I went walking
out in my husband's garden. It was so well cared for. Unbelievable
as it sounds, this was the first time it occurred to me that he
kept that garden nice for me!
And then a whole
lot of memories came of Daddy and me together. He would have me
help him with the lawn and the flowerbeds. On Saturday morning he
often came to my volleyball games. It shamed and thrilled me to
remember these things. I must have held his hand quite a lot, because
I could remember very clearly how rough and hard it was and how
he smelled when he got home from work—I knew that because
I'd stand next to him in the bathroom while he washed his hands
and fingernails and arms and face and neck before we had dinner.
He would let me dry his mustache. I would make the bristles go upward
and he would pretend it hurt him and we would laugh. And then I
could remember we'd dry dishes together after dinner and he would
ask me all about school and my friends. Our vacations came back
to me, too, when Daddy would relax and we would play games and go
to the country store for a treat. How could I have forgotten all
these good things?
So focused are
accusing feelings that they obliterate or shunt into irrelevance
all other facts except those that support them. If, before her change
of heart, someone had reminded Mandy of her father's kindness and
frequent companionship, she would have said that she didn't remember
it or that it wasn't much or that it couldn't make up for his neglect.
But with that change came a revival of her memory of what he had
given her, and she found it fully sufficient for her happiness.
What happened
here? The past is the past, after all. The damage Mandy had sustained
was done. How could that damage be undone?
Though none
of us is responsible for the misfortunes that befall us, we are,
thankfully, responsible for how we use those misfortunes. We cannot
alter past events, it's true. Not having been responsible for them,
we cannot take responsibility for them. But we are responsible
for the effect they have upon us—for the meaning we assign
to them and the way we remember them. And we can learn and grow
from them.
This important
truth is expressed in the subtitle of a book written by Wayne Muller,
who has worked extensively with people abused as children. It reads:
"The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood." Whether
past pain blesses or crushes us is ours to decide. In working
with abused women, I, like others, have taught them that the first
step toward wholeness is to let go of all resentment and recrimination.
When they no longer carry themselves in the world as victims, they
can start on the road to recovery, but not until then. The fact
that Mandy had many good memories to recover when she "came
to herself" is inspiring but not essential. Even those who
have few or none can make it.
Beginning at
age six, Jacqueline had been abused sexually by several men during
her childhood in the Detroit ghetto where she was born to a nineteen-
year-old prostitute. After an uncle rescued her from that situation
when she was a teenager, she worked hard to make something of her
life. When I met her, she occupied a trusted, influential position
in one of America's forty largest corporations. It was not hard
to understand why—she was bright and incisive and had built
a reputation for getting difficult things done. Besides that, everyone,
including Susan and me, found her warm and welcoming, and she was
so instinctively, artlessly therapeutic that at noon and after work
people would wait outside her office for a chance to talk with her
about their troubles. No anger or self-pity hobbled or confused
this woman; she had vacated her horrendous past, taking with her
its lessons without its liabilities.
Six months or
so before we met, Jacqueline initiated a court proceeding against
her former husband; long, long before that she had discovered that
he had violated their two daughters from their childhood. In the
first weeks of our association—she worked with the Arbinger
Institute for a time—she allowed herself to acknowledge the
abusive background from which he had come, and to see him forgivingly.
With her daughters, she left all of her resentment, though not all
of her sorrow, behind. On occasion she would tell her very moving
and inspiring story publicly, always in the third person, as if
she were talking about someone else. Then, at the end, she would
add two sentences. The first: "That little girl whose story
I have told you is me." And the second: "The mission statement
for my life is 'My beginning will not dictate my end.'"
Killing the
Root
Mandy's and Jacqueline's stories illustrate vividly the principle
that we determine whether our past crushes or blesses us. So does
the following story of a man named Samuel.
Since puberty
Samuel had exhibited symptoms that would have led many therapists
to assume childhood abuse even before talking to him about his history.
Much of the time he was sunk in deep depression, a kind of utter
darkness of spirit that would completely incapacitate him. He had
been put up for adoption by his natural parents, and his adoptive
parents were highly dysfunctional individuals who apparently could
not relax their concern with their own personal agendas enough to
nurture or to love him. Like many other victims, this was a child
whose shocking introduction to this life was cold, systematic rejection
and mistreatment.
So harsh was
Samuel's self-loathing that he became involved in what he himself
considered despicable sexual activities. Professionals labeled him
an addict. He spent a great deal of time with psychiatrists who
for a period of years medicated him heavily, with very limited success.
One day he appeared at my door and asked me to help him. We talked
about the ideas I have been presenting in this book, and then I
suggested he talk also with certain others. The following week he
recounted to me a significant event.
That very morning,
he had been pondering a recurrent dream in which he found himself
in an abandoned house—the furniture was gone; the windows
were boarded up. The waning light of sunset filtered through the
windows. He became aware of beings moving outside the house; they
were vampires, scratching to gain entrance. As he continued in this
reverie, he found himself reliving the dream, even though now awake.
He realized this was the house of his grandparents. In the scene
he was reliving, he went out on the veranda where he encountered
his adoptive father, in his early thirties, smiling.
The two men
walked together onto the lawn and sat down to talk. Samuel felt
a desperate yearning for his father to provide something of the
care and love and emotional sustenance of which Samuel felt he had
been deprived. As they sat there, his father put his head on Samuel's
shoulder and then, gradually, began to diminish in size, becoming
smaller and more vulnerable than the adopted son sitting by his
side. All of a sudden Samuel realized that his father was the one
who needed to be loved. For the first time ever, he felt compassion
for this man.
After this experience,
Samuel spent the hours before he came to see me that day walking
in the mountains, weeping profusely, in a release, both painful
and joyous, of pent-up feelings for which he did not even have a
name. "I anticipated that I would one day need to go through
some sort of process of excusing my father for how he treated me,"
Samuel said. "But that is not at all what happened. Instead
I came to the realization that he needed me even more than I needed
him, and I had closed my heart toward him."
Samuel said
that in a deep way that he could never before put into words he
had always known this. Now he admitted it freely. "What left
me at that moment was my conviction that my parents were to blame
for my condition. Yes, in one sense they had misused me, but they
could not have done better than they did. I remembered with great
sorrow something I had once been told, that my father stuttered
as he was growing up and that his father took him to the
basement and beat him to get him to stop. Why had I not remembered
this before now?"
This reminds
us of Mandy's recovered memories when all accusation left her heart.
Samuel allowed his father to be as he really was, a man deprived
and mistreated. Previously he had refused to allow him this, and
the way he refused was to insist on being the deprived and mistreated
one himself. This shows clearly that his resentment of his father
lay behind his depression; the depression was the way he carried
on the resentment, just as Mandy's quickness to feel rejection and
school failures were her way of doing the same sort of thing. Samuel
said he realized that the depression "allowed me to excuse
myself for closing myself to my father and his needs." It was
in allowing the father he had so much resented to become real for
him that he was healed. I call this receiving the gift of his
father's humanity.
That day marked
the turning point in Samuel's existence. Previously, with great
determination he had achieved some control over his sexual behavior.
But beginning with the day I have described, his depression began
to lighten and his addictive cravings gradually disappeared.
Mandy's and
Samuel's stories illustrate with a shimmering clarity the organic
connection between primary collusions and the satellite collusions
connected with them. Healing a primary collusion helps to cut
many satellite collusions at their source. We kill the root
of a present anguished emotional condition and then—but only
then—it dies.
This doesn't
imply, by the way, that the only way to end a satellite collusion
is to heal the primary collusion from which it springs. Progress
on a satellite, though incomplete, can soften us enough that we
can at last work on the primary collusion successfully.
"Most
people think emotional injuries are like physical injuries and not
our responsibility at all...." In Part 34, we'll look at how
taking responsibility for our emotional difficulties is a necessary
step toward resolving them....
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