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Bonds that
Make Us Free, Part 36: Affirming Others’ Freedom Sets Us Free
by
C. Terry Warner
You can see
that in an unexpected and, to our ordinary way of thinking, odd
way, we owe to the people we are able to forgive a very large debt.
No matter how reprehensibly they may have treated us, they have
provided us with a gift. The gift is their humanity. Without their
humanity, to which we are able to open ourselves, we cannot get
ourselves emotionally unstuck no matter how we might try. We cannot
do it by denying or repressing our feelings or by willing ourselves
to feel differently—feelings are subject to our indirect but not
our direct control. We are able to do it only by recognizing, respecting,
and, yes, revering others as they really are, in the fullness of
their humanity and vulnerability.
This insight
makes connection with a principle we first encountered in Part
6: We are I-You individuals only insofar as others become fully
real to us. We need them in order to become authentic and genuine
ourselves. We do this, as we first learned when we talked about
yielding to the truth (Part
23) and studied further here, by letting their inward reality—their
needs and aspirations and fears—write themselves upon our hearts
and guide our responses to them. This creates bonds with them that
free us from the burdens of our self-absorption.
More needs to
be said about this respectful and reverent act of accepting the
gift. In one sense, it means recognizing that the choices others
make are not our affair. Our concern must be limited to our
own right conduct, not theirs; we need to concentrate not so much
on the choices they make as on the choices we make. "Ours
is only the trying," wrote T. S. Eliot. "The rest is not
our business."
This does not
diminish the care we have for others. On the contrary, it manifests
the purest kind of love. We care passionately about nurturing
and protecting their right and their ability to choose for themselves,
which right and ability I like to call their agency.
And therefore we recognize how inconsiderate and desecrating it
would be for us to override or squelch their agency by trying to
make their choice for them, and how it would invite defensiveness
on their part and draw them into collusion.
In approaching
her father to ask his forgiveness for her hard-heartedness toward
him, Ellie had no concern about how he would react. She was concerned
with her own wrongdoing. Therefore she did not apologize in order
to obtain his apology; she left that part wholly up to him. It was
only her own apology that she made her business. Consequently she
no longer believed that her well-being depended upon what he did;
she ceased to act as if his response could determine her feelings.
By seeking his forgiveness, she liberated herself from this very
unhealthy dependency.
In this way,
setting him free to respond however he chose set her free
to respond however she chose. She no longer gave him the
power to control her and her happiness that we studied in Part
13.
And when she
did respond freely, to what did she respond? Not to his lifelong
rejection of her but to his vulnerability and need. She did not
feel it necessary to make her father understand her, to insist that
she had been right, or to have the conversation turn out in her
favor. She was no longer bound in those chains of insecurity.
This liberating
element, which we might call the power of respect or the
power of compassion, stands out even more unequivocally in Margaret's
story, for Margaret got back no reciprocal apology from her mother.
After Margaret asked for forgiveness, her mother just sat there,
silent and cold. Yet Margaret's liberation from her self-enclosing
thoughts and feelings did not lag behind Ellie's in any respect.
In both cases, it was the act of setting another person free from
accusation that set the erstwhile accuser free from her self-afflicting
role as accuser.
We find the
liberating element in Mandy's and Samuel's stories also. They allowed
their fathers to be who they really were, rather than turning them
into scapegoats responsible for their problems. Samuel said, in
effect, that by insisting that he was the deprived and mistreated
one, he would not let his father be deprived and mistreated—he would
not let his father become real for him. Completely on his own, apart
from professional opinion, Samuel came to believe that his depression
was his way of controlling his father's impact on his life—and making
sure that impact would be a hardening and not a softening one.
Some people
think that forgiving abusers means minimizing the offense committed
and letting them get away with it—so that they won't have to suffer
the punishment they deserve. This isn't true. Abusers suffer quite
independently of being resented. They harbor wretched, hateful feelings,
and if they one day admit to what they've done, they will also suffer
exquisite guilt and sorrow. Our resentment cannot increase their
torment; it harms only ourselves. And besides, it may give them
an excuse to believe that we deserved whatever they did to us.
The acceptance,
respect, and love that I am calling "forgiving" is one
of the basic principles of all human flourishing. It frees us from
the benighting, subtly controlling lies that structure the I-It
world. Moreover—and by now this should go without saying—it invites
those we accept, respect, and forgive to become accepting, respectful,
and forgiving in their own right. We liberate ourselves from bonds
of anguish by cultivating the purest form of love.
FORGOING:
THE EVERYDAY WORK OF LIBERATED PEOPLE
Return with
me for a moment to Jane Birch's story of Elizabeth, that remarkable
exemplar of self-forgetfulness in whose presence Jane could also
be self-forgetful (this story appears at the end of Part
23). It would not be accurate to give the name forgiveness
to Elizabeth's ability to perceive no offensiveness in others.
It can't be called forgiveness because during the episode that Jane
recounted, Elizabeth did not perceive her insensitive companions
as needing to be forgiven.
We can describe
Elizabeth's responses in the story by means of a term that will
distinguish them from forgiving. What she did was to forgo
accusation, rather than to repent of it. If forgiving can be thought
of as recovery from moral and emotional illness by means of a change
of heart, forgoing is never falling morally and emotionally
ill in the first place, never needing a change of heart. If forgiving
helps us recover from relapses, forgoing keeps lapses from happening
at all. It is prevention rather than cure. This is the daily manner
of life of those free people who don't have to spend all their time
suffering from, agonizing over, and repenting of their repeated
mistakes.
Here is another
example:
Jeff and Robin
have made for themselves one of the best marriages I know. They
have complete respect for one another; they do volunteer work together;
and their children, now grown, reflect their emotional healthiness
and serenity. The road leading to this unity has had more than its
share of obstacles and treacherous ruts, but they've handled these
unselfishly and cooperatively, and this I think has had a formative
impact upon the children.
But their marriage
didn't start out this way. In school, Robin had been the trophy
girlfriend of the boys with status, and she reveled in this glory.
She had picked out Jeff as the one she wanted most and, deploying
all her instinctive wiles, caught him—much to his parents' concern.
When the wedding ceremony ended, it quickly became clear that she
had invested about as much in the relationship as she was going
to. She lost none of her childish hedonism. She stayed in bed till
noon, refused to acknowledge any domestic duties, shopped in the
afternoon, and took off on her own at night for parties and dance-hall
hopping with her old friends. Jeff's friends and family mourned
for him; what they had predicted had come to pass.
But Jeff didn't
mourn for himself. Not once did he complain. In fact, he consistently
showed his gratitude for Robin. He got up early to make breakfast
and leave her portion for when she arose; he cleaned the apartment
at night; he treated Robin with unwavering respect. He was an unflagging
embodiment of the principle of forgoing the taking of offense.
A year went
by, and then two. Robin started showing signs of disillusionment
with her party life. She complained about the selfishness of her
friends. She wondered why they couldn't be more like Jeff. Then
she began to worry about the possibility that Jeff might leave her
and told his mother he had every right to do so. His quiet, undaunted
love didn't fit into "the world according to Robin," in
which people acted only to please themselves. That confused her;
she couldn't figure him out. Why didn't he ever tell her he'd had
enough of her? For a while her worry became so great that she seemed
almost depressed.
Then one day
she announced that she wanted to accept Jeff's parents' invitation
to Sunday dinners, which she had almost always refused, and a little
later she started visiting his mother, asking her questions about
their family and about making a home. In time, she told Jeff she
wanted to become a mother and do it in the right way, and she did.
Jeff's early
career success might have been slowed by his service to Robin. No
one can know this for sure. In any case, Jeff did not seem concerned
about that issue. He responded to the circumstance in which he found
himself by simply doing what lay before him and needed to be done.
No pity, no blame. Consequently he became the occasion for Robin's
change of heart, in just the ways we have studied in this book.
In effect, without
realizing this was what he was accomplishing, Jeff made it his work
to help Robin overcome the primary collusion in her life, the collusion
in which she played the role of a spoiled child. In response to
this profoundly considerate and generous man, Robin became a different
sort of person; she was able to leave behind entirely the sort of
person she had been in relation to her early family and friends.
When we think about the gift he gave her and its decisive impact
upon her, upon their children, and (as I write these words) upon
their children's children, we begin to see that he could scarcely
have accomplished anything more significant in his life, no matter
what else he achieved. As we discovered in Part
23, love is a power, greater than any other.
Jeff's story
teaches us about one of the precious fruits of true friendship,
whether in marriage or out. He came into Robin's life so considerately
that he invited her into a relationship in which she was able, after
a good deal of resistance, to become considerate herself. And when
she did, she broke free of her primary collusions with her own original
family. Jeff helped her do this. He accomplished this by forgoing.
Though others found in her much that they deemed worthy of blame,
he did not. Violence of heart seemed alien to his emotional repertoire.
He did not even think of himself as exercising patience.
We should note
that Jay's gift to his sister Barbara—we read their story in Part
34—was no less liberating than Jeff's. Some might think he acted
harshly. On the contrary, his telling Barbara the truth was both
compassionate and tender, and it was motivated strictly by love.
That's why it touched her so. In their different ways, both Jay
and Jeff show us that what love dictates may be easily misunderstood.
It can't be put into a formula (e.g., "When such and such happens,
do or say this"). It's never sentimental or indulgent, but
instead compassionate. It may look wimpish or it may look harsh
when in fact it's courageous. It may require endless patience or
decisive initiative, but not for advancing oneself. Understand the
deep similarity of Jeff's and Jay's conduct and you have the secret
of influencing people to yield their hearts to the truth.
Not As Preposterous
As It May Seem
These points
may seem difficult to swallow. What if Robin had never changed?
You might ask, What if Jeff had made the sacrifices for nothing?
If that's your
question, then I have a question for you. If in fact Robin had not
changed, would Jeff have been better off to have dealt with her
selfishness impatiently and angrily? Should he have left her when
it didn't seem that she would change? Would that have made him happier?
Most of us will
find it hard to resist answering, Yes, it would have made
him happier. But we need to remember that if he had reacted to
adversity in this manner, he too would have been stuck in a self-absorbed
way of being, just as she was. He would not have been cheerful and
uncomplaining but angry, resentful, and full of self-pity.
Still we may
think: But look what he forfeited because of her! If this
is our objection, we need to realize that it looks that way only
through I- It eyes. Viewed through I-You eyes, the loss must be
counted as next to nothing compared with the happy state of his
spirit.
Let me explain
what I mean by comparing two situations. You enter upon your day
with your agenda all worked out. A neighbor calls. Will you help
her jump- start her car? You feel disrupted and a little violated.
You help her, though, hiding your agitation about your disrupted
day, yet letting her know in little ways how hard you're working
to hide it. Was her request an interruption? Yes.
On another day
you get a different call, this one from a neighbor who's observed
you trying in vain to start your car and offering
to give you a jump. Interruption? No. Why? Because you constructed
the day's agenda with your self-interest in mind, and the offer
of help furthered that self-interest—in contrast to the call asking
you to be the helper, which did not.
Jeff's is the
second kind of case, not the first. He didn't consider serving
Robin a deflection from his life's purpose because she was
its purpose. He let her needs dictate his days. He made serving
her his work, not a disruption of his work. That's why, too, he
never felt noble or heroic during those early years of marriage,
and also why, when others felt sorry for him, he never felt sorry
for himself.
Jeff's life
answers his critics. They say, "Look what he gave up!"
But he can say, "Look what I gained!" After all is said
and done, he has been right, not they. He has been right about Robin.
He and she have fashioned an extraordinary marriage and together
created a remarkable family in which they find great joy.
In
the next and penultimate part of this serialization of Bonds That
Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves, we
will learn how to live from day to day in the "best of all
possible situations"....
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