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Bonds That
Make Us Free, Part 34: "If We're Responsible, We Can Change"
by C.
Terry Warner
Most people
think emotional injuries are like physical injuries and not our
responsibility at all. According to this theory, our present-day
emotional problems are the effects of emotional wounds inflicted
in the early years of life. This we will call the "causal theory."
It says the troubles that make life hard to bear occurred in the
past—they were caused by something our parents or others did years
ago that damaged us. The truth is that these troubles are always
occurring right now. Our inner conflictedness and compulsive
emotions are the ways we are colluding, right now, with our
original caretakers or others of significance in our earlier lives.
They are accusations we are making now against those caretakers
for doing years ago what we continue to resent.
So, strictly
speaking, what actually happened way back then is of no significance
now; what is significant now are our present accusations
against them. Our emotional problems are the accusations we make
of others now. They are not scars from the past but actions
in the present. They are actions of portraying ourselves as
having been scarred in the past.
This, as we
have already noted, is great good news. Whatever elements of our
emotional and psychological suffering we are maintaining now—and
these are the ones that make life hard to bear—we can simply stop
maintaining. We can determine the effects that our adversities
have on us.
The following
story, which illustrates this principle rather vividly, presents
a person courageously ending a primary collusion with someone who
was not a family member or early caretaker, but a rapist. To this
story I add the suggestion that you not draw from it any conclusions
about how long this kind of healing takes (this healing happened
quickly; for others the healing might take years), or what's required
to initiate such healing (here there's a bold, forthright act which
might be counterproductive in other situations). Thus I do not offer
this story to show "how it's done," but rather, as with
many other stories in this book, to instill hope. The author's name
is Jay.
After she had
been married for several years, my sister Barbara came to me and
said she was going to divorce her husband, Frank. She would have
gone to our father, but he had died. She had discovered that Frank
had committed adultery several times, well, quite a bit, actually,
over the years. Her heart was broken. She was ashamed and hurt.
She seemed to feel she couldn't do anything else but leave him.
I could hardly believe it. I hadn't even guessed this kind of thing
might be going on.
I thought I
should speak to Frank. When we got together, I sensed something
was wrong. So I began to pry. Why had Frank done it? Barbara had
expected so much more. And hadn't she been loving to him? As we
talked I discovered something that stunned me. Throughout their
married life she had almost always refused him intimacy. Well, I
immediately thought of the tragedy that had happened to her when
she was raped when she was twelve years old. It was a savage thing.
But I had thought, and so did the rest of the family, that after
a couple of years she pretty much got back to normal and grew up
without a lot of scars. Now I realized she must have spent her whole
married life terrified and sort of walled in.
Frank said Barbara's
excuse for her behavior was that she cared about him, and the physical
part wasn't important. I was astonished.
What she had
done to her husband was terribly wrong, for him and for her. She
knew about her problem when she married him, and she blamed all
that had happened on him! I knew I had to do something, but I didn't
know what. I felt so sorry for her I couldn't stand it. She had
been going through all kinds of trouble inside herself, and the
rest of us in the family had more or less tried to forget about
the whole thing. But I felt that if I didn't watch out I'd help
her paint her situation in the darkest colors and she never would
see her way out of it. If I really loved her I couldn't stand by
while she ruined two lives because of her fears. Off and on for
more than an hour, as I drove to Barbara's house, I sobbed uncontrollably.
When I got there
she started crying and said, "He's shamed me so much. I can't
do anything now but leave him, though I'm sure that in a way he
feels he's already left me."
Then I said
I understood she had never allowed her marriage to be consummated.
Very defensively, she denied it. "Oh, no, that's not true!"
So I explained
to her what I meant and she said, "Oh, but that isn't important.
I have always let him lie close to me and tried to be affectionate."
So then I said,
"I want to tell you something." I was speaking pretty
forcefully, because my heart was breaking for her. "You knew
of the challenges you would have before you married Frank. And you've
put a terrible burden on him and blamed it on something that happened
to you years ago. This doesn't need to be! What you did is worse
than what he did, and what he did is reprehensible. You've been
mean and stingy and shriveled and small and unwilling to love and
willing to let him suffer because of it. If you don't go home with
your husband tonight and love him as you're supposed to love him,
I'm going to testify against you in the divorce proceedings. You
go home and do right and get this thing behind you."
You can imagine
how stunned she was and how angry. When I left she was so upset
she could not speak. But I'll tell you, she came to my home the
next morning before I even left for work. She hugged me and the
tears were flooding down her face and she said that what I had told
her had changed her life forever. "Jay, you're the first person
who ever talked to me straight. Everyone else helped me think I
couldn't do it. Last night I loved Frank with all the physical and
emotional completeness that a person can, all of it, and I'm not
afraid anymore. And Jay, it's hard to believe, but I don't hate
the man who did that awful thing to me anymore."
When she wholeheartedly
accepted the truth of what her brother had told her, Barbara liberated
herself from the hatred she felt toward the man who had raped her.
Prior to this, her hatred had discolored every thought she had of
her husband and their relationship. Not being able to bring herself
to love him completely was her way of continuing to say to the world,
"See how badly abused I was, that long time ago! See how I
haven't been able to recover even now!"
So self-absorbed
had Barbara become in making a victim of herself that she couldn't—she
wouldn't—admit to herself how she had withheld herself from Frank
or how much he needed her. But yielding herself to the truth, first
about herself and then about Frank, she let go of the proof against
the rapist she had been clinging to. She abandoned her hatred. By
that very stroke she ceased "horribilizing" her victimizer,
"catastrophizing" her misfortune, and exaggerating her
loss. She let the event become exactly what it was—a very, very
hard experience indeed, one of the worst a human being can suffer.
But not an excuse. Thereby her soul deepened in experience and wisdom
and expanded in compassion. She broke out of her self- enclosure,
opened to the interior reality of her husband, escaped the bondage
of self-induced affliction, and discovered what it is to love another
person.
The parts of
our psychological history that make a difference now do not reside
in the past. They are present. It is our presently held story of
the past that is our bondage or our freedom. Strictly speaking,
the rest does not exist for us. Even Sigmund Freud, who invented
the term "primal scene" for the experiences in infancy
that in his view leave a scar, acknowledged that such experiences
do not have their scarring effect until the child later endows the
remembered scene with significance. For Freud, too, it is the present
story of the past that works destruction in the individual life,
not the past itself.
The difference
between the ideas of this book and the causal theory is of the utmost
consequence. If we are victims of our history, we can do nothing
to correct our problems. The past has already wrought its damage
and cannot be called back. We may be able to work around and compensate
somewhat for the searing events in our past, but we can never eradicate
them. On the other hand, if we are not victims but instead producers
of our emotional problems, and if it is right now that we are producing
them, then we can eliminate the problems at their source. By the
means we have discussed in this book, we can stop producing them.
TRUE AND
FALSE COMPASSION
Some think it unfeeling, even harsh, to hold individuals responsible
for their attitudes and emotions. Isn't this being judgmental? Doesn't
compassion require that we excuse people for their unsavory behavior
on the grounds that they're not ultimately responsible for it? After
all, people start out in this world with a genetic makeup that's
not their fault, and they develop into adults in response to examples
and training they themselves do not choose. Clarence Darrow, the
brilliant Chicago attorney, became well-known for arguing, in the
celebrated 1925 "Monkey Trial," for John Scopes's right
to teach evolution in Tennessee. A year earlier he had become famous
for his position on the subject we're studying here: He defended
the child murderers Leopold and Loeb on the ground that anyone with
their backgrounds would have turned out the same way and done the
same sort of dastardly things. He interpreted the French saying,
"To understand all is to forgive all" to mean, "To
understand all is to excuse all."
Though this
point of view may be part of the intellectual fashion of our age,
it is false, and not only false, but uncharitable as well. It says,
"You can't!" rather than "You can!" Although
those who hold this view think they're being compassionate and kind,
they are only being indulgent. Indulgence is a punitive counterfeit
of charity. It extends no hope at all for freeing ourselves of our
emotional troubles. It takes the position that we are stuck with
being the deficient vessels we think we are and are doomed to cope
with our lot as best we can.
It is because
we are responsible for whatever we have become that there is hope
for us to change fundamentally. True compassion can be found only
in extending this hope to others, never in denying it to them.
In our next
selection, Part 35, we will seek to understand the true implications
of "forgiveness"....
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