Do not use force. Use example.

Force comes in many flavours: manip­u­la­tion, logic, deceit, pos­tur­ing, flat­tery, and of course, brute force. It is cap­tured in the moronic expres­sion, “Don’t do what I do, do what I say.” The short cut of this one is sim­ply, “Do what I say!”

This is a line famil­iar to many teenagers. Many par­ents, exas­per­ated by what they per­ceive as their teen’s aber­rant behav­iour, lay down the law by using force. Now, I do not mind some use of force with kids. I want an adult to bod­ily haul a kid out of the path or a car, or forcibly remove a kid hav­ing a tantrum from the store. Kids need to learn that some things sim­ply are not acceptable.

I have yet, how­ever, to see a legit­i­mate use of force between adults (or any­one above the age of 14 or 15). Try­ing to maneu­ver some­one into doing some­thing against his or her will, using threats, bribes, or what­ever, sim­ply is not ever a good thing.

Yet, I see this end­lessly with client cou­ples. Whin­ing, bul­ly­ing, demands, “the silent treat­ment” — all of these are meth­ods used to get the other part­ner to com­ply, to behave.

Remem­ber, however,

there is no truth, no, uni­ver­sal belief, no com­mon­al­ity of under­stand­ing between peo­ple, so there­fore there can­not be a ’right’ way to be in relationship.

All there is are ways that work and ways that do not.

The real issue with using force is that, even if the force some­how works-i.e. bosses can use all kinds of manip­u­la­tive tech­niques to force employ­ees to “behave”-it misses the key point. Per­sonal growth is per­sonal. What this means is that even though it is pos­si­ble to force oth­ers to com­ply, it accom­plishes noth­ing of any mean­ing or depth for either the giver or the receiver.

Life requires the expen­di­ture of energy, and energy directed at sit­u­a­tions out­side of self is sim­ply a waste of that energy.

There seems to be a phase in rela­tion­ships where, as the nov­elty wears off, there is a pull to get one’s part­ner to act dif­fer­ently (read the way he or she wants their part­ner to behave.)

I remem­ber work­ing with a client who end­lessly referred to her mother and to the way her mother brought her up as the stan­dard for all per­sonal and rela­tional con­duct. She had a view of how life ought to be, and coin­ci­den­tally it matched per­fectly and totally her own upbring­ing. She was equally hon­est in say­ing that she had selected her hus­band because she knew he could be “taught” how to behave in polite soci­ety. Her effort and energy was end­lessly directed at this project. He, on the other hand, had got­ten tired of her end­less crit­i­cism, and had retreated to his den in the base­ment. He even­tu­ally exited the base­ment and camped out at his lawyer’s office. She could not under­stand why he wasn’t grate­ful for her end­less intervention.

She even went so far as to acknowl­edge that rela­tion­ships are about shar­ing, equal­ity, and learn­ing from one’s part­ner. She balked at the idea that her rela­tion­ship could be so — she fer­vently believed that she could never fix her hus­band suf­fi­ciently to want to share with or learn from him.

Power strug­gles are the root cause of failed rela­tion­ships. How­ever, most peo­ple equate drop­ping the power strug­gles with weak­ness and ’giv­ing in.’ This leads to an end­less chang­ing of the kind of force being applied. For exam­ple, cou­ples might choose to end ver­bal spar­ring, but then shift off to ’correcting.’

Here is an exam­ple that hap­pens quite often. Let us say that Max and Sally agree to use a com­mu­ni­ca­tion model as they dis­cuss dif­fi­cult issues. What tends to hap­pen, from a force per­spec­tive, is that ’Max’ says to ’Sally,’ “You’re not doing it right. You should do this…” and then ’Max’ pro­vides a cri­tique and demands that ’Sally’ change.

Now, of course, this is another form of manip­u­la­tion, as opposed to com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Rather than talk about the issue at hand, ’Max’ attempts to use ’com­mu­ni­ca­tion’ as the topic for declar­ing his part­ner wrong and forc­ing her to do all of the heavy lifting.

I sug­gest, end­lessly, that the only way com­mu­ni­ca­tion will hap­pen is if each per­son takes respon­si­bil­ity for their own com­mu­ni­ca­tion, no mat­ter what their part­ner is doing. I am not com­mu­ni­cat­ing if all I am doing is point­ing out what my part­ner is doing wrong.

Because most peo­ple are a bit dense about this stuff, I com­pen­sate by set­ting a goal and struc­ture. I say to ’Max’ that he is enti­tled to com­ment on ’Sally’s,’ com­mu­ni­ca­tion style only after he has com­mu­ni­cated per­fectly for 30 days.

In other words, once you repeat­edly demon­strate that you can com­mu­ni­cate, no mat­ter what your part­ner is doing, then you have a right to sug­gest your part­ner is not liv­ing up to the agree­ment to communicate.

Never, in 25 years, have I ever seen this hap­pen. Peo­ple who gripe about and try to manip­u­late oth­ers seem to find it impos­si­ble to stop crit­i­ciz­ing, com­plain­ing, and manip­u­lat­ing for 30 min­utes, let alone 30 days.

This is pre­cisely why I teach self–respon­si­bil­ity, as opposed to ’other–respon­si­bil­ity.’ Despite the attrac­tion of grip­ing about what oth­ers are doing-after all, what could be bet­ter than hav­ing some­one else to blame for all of one’s problems-the only per­son I have even a mod­icum of con­trol over is myself.

The other side of this one is this: how can I be so auda­cious and arro­gant to think that I can demand that oth­ers do what I am unwill­ing to do? This one just blows me away.

Often, peo­ple enter ther­apy with an unex­pressed wish. They hope to learn new, effec­tive ways to force oth­ers to behave. They even attempt to get me to agree that they are the poor, help­less vic­tim of what their part­ner is doing, or what their par­ents did to them, or some other ver­sion of “I’m help­less, please make me pow­er­ful.” They usu­ally annoy them­selves when I will not play along. I sug­gest that they stay out of their partner’s ther­apy, let their par­ents off the hook, and get on with the real work.

And the real work is always self–work.

Per­haps the sim­plest way out of all of this is to develop a sense of humour. I know that if I try to make what I am feel­ing or doing or think­ing about what Dar­bella is doing, she is going to burst into laugh­ter and sug­gest I get over myself. She just won’t bite on any attempt I make to blame her for my life. And vice versa, of course.

When con­fronted with accu­sa­tions, blame, or attempts to manip­u­late me, it would never occur to me to attempt to defend myself. As soon as I go there, I am tac­itly agree­ing that I am some­how to blame for another’s expe­ri­ence. Rather, I sim­ply invite the giver to take back respon­si­bil­ity for the real­ity they are cre­at­ing for them­selves. I will not argue with another about this. I just repeat myself–

“your life is about you. If you do not like how you feel or how you are think­ing, change yourself.”

In other words, no mat­ter what, I live what I preach, and I fix myself as soon as I notice I am off the rails.

Liv­ing by exam­ple is actu­ally quite easy. You believe that life should be a cer­tain way, and that is how you live, with­out excuses. No grip­ing about oth­ers, no com­plain­ing about how hard done by you are. You live the life you preach.

Once you get this, you rec­og­nize what a waste of time and energy try­ing to change oth­ers is. You let go of force and manip­u­la­tion, and devote your­self to your own development.