More Germ Warfare
Chapter 13 of The Anatomy of Peace
By The Arbinger Institute

“In fact,” Yusuf replied, “Avi will tell you that his most common justification style invites him to go soft.”

The group looked over at Avi.

“True,” Avi nodded. “Shall I share some thoughts about it?” he asked Yusuf.

“Please.”

“When we find justification in softness,” Avi began, “it’s usually because we’re carrying around a third basic kind of justification box, a box we call the must-be-seen-as box.

“It looks something like this:”

“When I’m carrying around this kind of justification box,” Avi said, as he finished up the diagram, “I might be worried about being seen as likeable, for example. Such a box will keep me from being able to do the helpful and right thing when the helpful or right thing might be something the other person won’t like. Let me give you an example of that.

“Early on in our time here at Camp Moriah,” he began, “I hired a man named Jack as our field director ― the person who runs everything out on the trail with the youth. It didn’t take me too long to discover I had made a mistake. It turned out that Jack was a very poor manager of people. He had an ill temper and always blamed problems on others. He carried a better-than box that made out everyone he worked with to be inferior.

"As a result, he dismissed criticism out of hand, blamed every failure on others, and generally treated his coworkers with indifference and disdain. He was creating problems everywhere. I saw what was going on, of course, and knew that if he was ever going to make it here, he simply would have to change the way he worked and the way he managed.

"But you know what? I never said anything to him about it. He had a pretty volatile personality, and I was afraid to confront him with the problem. So I didn’t. Instead, I just started hoping he would move or decide to take another job!”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Lou blurted. “That’s exactly what has me worried about what you’re saying here — that it will make people paralyzingly soft.”

“But was I seeing Jack as a person in this story, Lou?”

Lou thought for a second. He wanted to say yes, but he suddenly began to see Yusuf and Avi’s point.

“If he’d have been a person to me, then I would have cared enough about him to want to help him succeed, don’t you think?” Avi said.

Lou didn’t say anything. He saw that he was on the losing side of this one.

“I agree, Lou, that my softness here as a manager was a problem, but I would suggest that in this case I was soft precisely because I saw Jack as an object, not because I saw him as a person. I had a must-be-seen-as box about being likable, or perhaps about not having problems, which caused me to completely ignore what would have been most helpful to Jack and to Camp Moriah. As Yusuf mentioned a moment ago, this kind of justification box — the must-be-seen-as variety — often invites us to go soft.”

Despite himself, Lou nodded ever so slightly. 

“This is also the kind of justification,” Yusuf jumped in, “that Pettis noticed in the Mordechai story when he reasoned that my turning away might have been motivated by a desire not to appear wantonly callous. In other words, I was making a presentation of myself; I had a need for others to see me in a way that justified me.

"It is similarly the kind of justification box that was behind me pushing the lettuce under the counter, where no one could reasonably argue that I should have seen it and therefore have picked it up. My pushing the lettuce away shows that I had a need to be seen perhaps as considerate or responsible or tidy — qualities others would not ascribe to me if they thought I consciously left the lettuce there.

"Of course, the fact that I didn’t just bend over and pick it up, which couldn’t have taken any more energy than scooting it away, suggests that I might also have been carrying around one of the earlier justification boxes we discussed. Which one, would you say?”

“You’re too important to pick up lettuce,” Gwyn answered. “It sounds to me like you have a better-than box.”

“Yes, Gwyn, excellent,” Yusuf agreed. “I think that’s right. “Which means, put another way, that I saw Lina as just unimportant enough that she should be the one to have to worry about that kind of thing.”

He paused to let that settle.

“How would it be to live with someone who thought of you like that?”

This comment thrust Lou into the middle of a problem that had barely occurred to him until this moment. He hadn’t bent over to pick up the lettuce pieces or their equivalents in his home for years, if ever. Unlike Yusuf, though, he never bothered to hide the evidence. It didn’t matter to him that it fell on the floor; he couldn’t be bothered by such trivialities.

But now Yusuf’s words rang in his head: I saw Lina as just unimportant enough that she should be the one to have to worry about that kind of thing. How would it be to live with someone who thought of you like that?

In this moment, Lou knew that Carol could answer that question. And he knew that she was probably sitting there thinking that very thing. With this thought, Lou suddenly noticed a sensation that was almost completely foreign to him, it had been so long since he had last felt it: he started to feel a prickly heat, as if someone had suddenly turned up the thermostat. And then he felt his ears go red and his cheeks flush. And then he knew — he was embarrassed! And then he felt embarrassed that he was embarrassed and felt his face flush all the hotter.

He looked at the board for a moment at the better-than box — superior, important, virtuous, right, impatient, disdainful, indifferent; others are inferior, incapable, wrong, and so on.

He felt nailed.

And then his mind reeled back to a conversation he had had with Cory on the plane: “I suppose you think I’ve really done you wrong, Dad.” Cory had said. “You’re even upset to be on this plane. You think it’s just another waste of time I’ve caused you.”

Cory was right. Lou was angry about having to be on that plane, having to spend this time away when his company was coming unglued. All because of a son who lacked even a shred of gratitude for everything Lou had offered him, a son who was ruining the family name. It isn’t fair that one boy could ruin so much! Lou shouted within.

The word unfair suddenly leaped from his thoughts, and he looked up at the board once more: The I-deserve box — you see life as unfair and others as ungrateful, and mistreating. You are prone to resentment and to feelings of entitlement.

It’s true, Lou thought to himself. He did feel like he deserved a better son — like his older son, Jesse. And then Yusuf’s words rang in his mind again: “How would it be to live with someone who thought of you like that?”

Lou shook his head and looked again at the diagrams: the must-be-seen-as box — need to be thought well of. No, I couldn’t give a damn, Lou thought. I don’t have that one. But then he noticed that this style of self-justification often sees others as threatening. And he knew in that moment that he did see Cory that way. Cory threatened the family reputation and name. He put Lou’s reputation at risk. I’ll be damned, Lou thought to himself in surprise, I do care what others think of me.

“Finally,” came Avi’s voice, pulling Lou back into the present, “there is a fourth common category of self-justification. It came up in our Mordechai discussion when one of you mentioned that Yusuf might have become depressed by the thought that he was actually a bad person. This style is illustrated by the worse-than box.” He then drew the following:

“Can I ask a question about this one?” Carol said.

“Of course, Carol, anything.”

“I’ve been wondering about this kind of view since the Mordechai story,” she continued. “Frankly, I see a lot of myself in this one, but I don’t see how I feel justified when I’m seeing things in this way. In fact, if anything, I feel just the opposite. For example, when I was in the middle of my eating disorder, I just felt worthless and no good. I didn’t feel justified at all.”

Avi nodded. “Let me share something with you,” he said.

“I had a speech impediment until I was nearly twenty. I stuttered terribly. I can’t tell you how embarrassing it was. I pulled away from others and looked for every excuse to be alone. Did I know I had a problem? Yes. And it was my problem, I knew that. But it affected my view of others. I looked at them longingly, not out of any kind of love or concern, but rather out of a kind of nagging jealousy.

"I was jealous that I couldn’t be more like them; jealous of how easily speech came to them. I was always afraid I would encounter a block, that my eyelids would flutter pathetically while I tried to spit out the words. I imagined this scene many times, and I lived in perpetual fear of looking ridiculous.

“So did I feel justified?” he continued. “It depends what you mean by that. I wasn’t justifying my stuttering, since stuttering itself doesn’t need justification. There is no crookedness toward others in merely having trouble with speech, or in any other disability for that matter. While I wasn’t justifying my disability, however, I was justifying something else.

"In fact, I was actually using my disability to justify something else — something that was crooked, something that required justification. I used my disability as justification for separating myself from others. This — the separation from others as people — is what needed justifying, for it was this act that was crooked. I turned from people at every opportunity, not allowing myself to be penetrated by their needs, and blamed my disability all the while. I told myself that I couldn’t be expected to do this thing and that given my disability. My disability was my justification! It was my excuse for failing to engage with the world.”

At this, Carol started nodding. “Okay, I think I get it then,” she said. “So in my case, it may not be that I was feeling justified for my eating disorder but that I might have started to use my disorder as an excuse for why I couldn’t be better with others.”

“That is worth thinking about,” Avi said. He then gazed back at the boxes Yusuf had written on the board. “As I look at these boxes,” he said, “and compare my early life against them, I would say that I can certainly relate to the worse-than box. I would say that I can relate as well to the must-be-seen-as box.

"In fact, in my life the must-be-seen-as and worse-than justifications have often come together. While suffering from my stuttering, I desperately wanted others to think well of me. As a result, I almost never spoke because I was afraid that I would look foolish. Just as that box suggests, I viewed others as judgmental and threatening, and I always felt as if I was being watched, listened to, and evaluated.

"Cutting myself off from others as people, I lived in perpetual fear and anxiety. And the more I cut myself off from them, the more the anxiety grew.”

Carol pondered this. “Yes, I can see that in myself as well,” she said. “I think I sometimes pull away and try to just slink off into the shadows. Lou here is such a successful and accomplished person, a lot of times I don’t think that I measure up, and I end up getting really down on myself.”

Avi nodded. “I know the feeling. I spent most of my first twenty years feeling the same way.”

“What did you do about it?” Carol asked. “Was it just as simple as getting rid of your stutter?”

Avismiled. “Believe me, getting rid of the stutter wasn’t easy at all.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Carol said, turning pink.

“I know, I know, don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m just teasing. But in answer to your question, Carol, stuttering wasn’t the problem.”

At that, Avi looked down at the floor for a moment. “How do I know?” he continued, looking back up at the group. “Because I tried to commit suicide twice after I had mostly overcome my stuttering.”

This mention seemed almost to suck the air out of the room. It was as though everyone stopped breathing for a moment, their minds too interested in what Avi just said to bother with the mundane details of moment-to-moment living. 

“One time with pills, one time with a razor blade,” he said, as he squinted in recollection. “The second time around, my mother found me on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood.”

Copyright © 2006 by The Arbinger Institute
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