photo by diametrik (mod­i­fied WC Allen)

Point­ing, Pointing

I sup­pose I talk about this one most—as the great­est of all of the hin­drances to liv­ing a com­plete, present, and sat­is­fac­tory life. It’s dif­fi­cult to stop blam­ing oth­ers, because it all seems so real. Some­thing goes wrong, and boom, our heads go cran­ing about, seek­ing some­one to blame.

I worked with a cou­ple last week, and as usual blame was pretty much their cho­sen cop­ing skill. I talked about hav­ing a breath, let­ting go of the need for a cul­prit, and mak­ing other choices. There was a lot of sigh­ing, and lit­tle agree­ment to try another path.

After they left, Dar­bella and I headed to the Bank. On the way out, Dar said, “I’m not tak­ing my purse.”

We got to the ATM machine and I dug into my front pocket for my lit­tle wal­let thingy. Not there! In a flash, I remem­bered I’d called the Bank ear­lier that day, and my wal­let was next to the phone. No prob­lem, I thought. Dar has a Bank Card for my busi­ness account…

In a mil­lisec­ond, as I was say­ing “Can I bor­row your Bank Card,” I remem­bered. Dar had said, “I’m not tak­ing my purse.”

I then said, “Shit.” I then started to say, “Why can’t you just carry your purse? If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have to drive home to get my Bank Card, you incon­sid­er­ate per­son you.”

What I actu­ally said, (after “Shit…”) was, “Why can’t you…”

I then felt my mouth stop mov­ing. At pre­cisely that moment, Dar star­tled smirk­ing at me.

Now, I des­per­ately wanted Dar to be at fault. How­ever, since there was only the two of us there, and messes in my life are never her fault, this was going to turn into one of those, “Damn, it’s my fault again” things.

So I did the only thing I could. I started laugh­ing, and said, “I guess I still need to pol­ish my no-blame skills.” We then drove home, I got my Card, and we went back to the Bank.

Now, this exam­ple might seem triv­ial. In 25 years of coun­selling, I’ve almost never heard a blam­ing rant that wasn’t triv­ial. Because, at the end of the day, once the blam­ing is over, there are only two choices. Fix it, or stay stuck.

Many of my clients want me to appoint them the teacher of their part­ner. They want to point out the partner’s flaws, while gloss­ing over their own. I demur. Your job is to catch your­self blam­ing in a few words as pos­si­ble, while get­ting off your partner’s case.

Blame has to go, because noth­ing gets more in the way of walk­ing a new path. Your job is to walk your path, while walk­ing your path.

Some­times, that means being strict with your­self, or cre­ative, or dis­ci­plined. No mat­ter how appeal­ing the blame story, in the end, there is the walking.

Stubbornness

I’m work­ing through a new, very long OSHO book, called “The Book of Secrets.” It’s about Tantra, among other things, and I’ll likely men­tion it again. I briefly looked to see if I could quote this sec­tion, and decided to para­phrase. OSHO says he finds it amaz­ing how often the fol­low­ing hap­pens: some­one asks him for help in liv­ing life dif­fer­ently. OSHO makes sug­ges­tions. The imme­di­ate response? “Oh. That won’t work.”

Clients spit that line out, a lot, along with, “You just don’t under­stand,” or “My part­ner won’t coöper­ate,” or “Why am I always the one who has to change?”

Last sum­mer I worked (once) with a guy who was 40. He was due to get mar­ried in a few months, and his fiancé wasn’t behav­ing right. He was wor­ried that she’d con­tinue to fail to live up to his stated his expec­ta­tions for her. He didn’t like con­flict, so when they fought, he left and spent the evening with his girl­friend. (Such is the life of a therapist…)

I spent an hour talk­ing about how he might want to stick around and talk with his fiancé as opposed to mak­ing demands. He assured me that I knew noth­ing about rela­tion­ships. He’d been in mul­ti­ple rela­tion­ships, for the last 2.5 decades, and he knew that all he had to do was insist prop­erly, and his fiancé would, from that point on, do it his way. When I pointed out that he had never been in a suc­cess­ful rela­tion­ship, and that maybe he might con­sider doing rela­tion­ships dif­fer­ent, he said it was clear that I didn’t understand.

So, what’s up here? The guy came up with a way to be with women, back when he was 15, it never worked, and he was, by god, going to keep doing it that way until some woman gave in and agreed he was right. Failed rela­tion­ship after failed rela­tion­ship, and he knows where the prob­lem lies.

Hmm.

Here’s a flash. If some­thing doesn’t work, stop doing it! If fight­ing doesn’t stop fight­ing, try stop­ping fight­ing. Cling­ing on to ways of doing things, based upon, “That what I’ve always done” is a bit silly, don’t you think?

Lethargy

I get an e-zine from Leo Quinn, on finances. He quoted a new book, called “You’re Broke Because You Want to Be,” by Larry Winget. Here are two quotes from the book:

1) “There are only three rea­sons peo­ple don’t do well in life. They are stu­pid, lazy, or don’t give a damn. Which fits you?”

2) “The prob­lem never is that you don’t know what to do. The prob­lem is that you don’t do it. In other words, you are lazy! And you don’t care. I don’t get this at all! I don’t under­stand how any­one can know what it takes to do bet­ter in life and not care enough about them­selves or their fam­ily to do it.”

I agree.

I see peo­ple flirt­ing with finan­cial, spir­i­tual, rela­tional ruin, and blithely and blindly con­tin­u­ing down a dead end path. On and on, and when ques­tioned, say, “It’s too hard to change!” “My mom and dad did it this way!” “I’m sick, I’m tired, I’m worn out.”

In other words, I know this is get­ting me nowhere,
but I think I’ll do it again.

At the end of the day, effort is required to first of all catch behav­iour that is not work­ing, and then to imple­ment some­thing new. In other words, there is noth­ing sim­pler than repeat­ing old, non-functional behaviours.

As Winget points out, pre­tend­ing we don’t know what to do is disin­gen­u­ous. We always know what to do. We always know how to fix things, to get back on the path. Many, how­ever, are too lazy to do the work, or, per­versely, think that fail­ing will finally be the way they get the mes­sage across to their partner.

Me, I’d rather fig­ure out what to do next, and then do it. Silly me, eh?

Mag­i­cal Thinking

There’s a tale told by Rumi, the Sufi writer:

There was once a man who was on his way back home from mar­ket with his camel and, as he’d had a good day, he decided to stop at a mosque along the road and offer his thanks to God.

He left his camel out­side and went in with his prayer mat and spent sev­eral hours offer­ing thanks to Allah, pray­ing and promis­ing that he’d be a good Mus­lim in the future, help the poor and be an upstand­ing pil­lar of his community.

When he emerged it was already dark and lo and behold – his camel was gone! He imme­di­ately flew into a vio­lent tem­per and shook his fist at the sky, yelling:

“You trai­tor, Allah! How could you do this to me? I put all my trust in you and then you go and stab me in the back like this!”

A pass­ing Sufi dervish heard the man yelling and chuck­led to himself.

“Lis­ten,” he said, “Trust God, but, you know, tie up your camel.”

Mag­i­cal think­ing is every­where. Notice how, with the lat­est stock mar­ket melt­down in the US, there are calls for the gov­ern­ment to inter­vene. One won­ders how long it can go on. (Answer: not long…get your ducks in a row…)

Same thing per­son­ally. Many peo­ple expect to be rescued—by their faith, by a ther­a­pist or teacher or guru, by some­one or some­thing out­side of themselves.

It’s another form of laziness.

The cos­mos does seem to con­spire to bring us exactly the expe­ri­ences we need to learn vital lessons, and many of them are unpleas­ant. The unpleas­ant part is sel­dom unex­pected. I see this with phys­i­cal stuff—in Body­work, we talk about how our bod­ies often are let­ting us know some­thing is not work­ing, and this is hap­pen­ing before our minds come on line. Most peo­ple pop a pill, go to the doc­tor, get physio. And never deal with the cause.

There is no pill for what ails us. There is just this:

Pick a bet­ter, fresher, newer path, and walk it!