It’s Always About You

(Third in a Series)

The first and most important question I suggest you consider before embarking on a journey of growth–the one that, if answered correctly, will allow that growth to occur–and if answered incorrectly, will be an impediment to growth–is why you are seeking to grow in the first place. It serves us extremely well to examine this question deeply. And by deeply, I mean going several layers below the most immediate, seemingly obvious answers.

When it comes to wanting to grow in our ability to engage in healthy relationships, most people will say they want to do it because engaging in the unhealthy kind pretty much sucks. For most people (yes, I’ll include myself, absolutely) to even consider seeking growth, that suckiness has to have grown to epic, intolerable proportions. With real consequences on the horizon: break up, divorce. Starting over from square one.

Well, to start, let’s give “less suckiness” it’s fair due. Suckiness–let’s call it suffering–is the currency in this matrix for growth. As the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle is fond of saying, “People don’t grow in their comfort zones.” Suffering works as a change agent because it motivates us to get off our duffs and do something about it. And if it gets intense enough, we get motivated to actually get real and do something more than act out our habitual responses (which most often, let’s face, it, amount to pointing the finger at something outside of ourselves and demanding that it change). 

So less suckiness is indeed a laudable goal. We should all be interested in less suckiness in our relationships. Let’s be clear about that.

That said, what are the additional layers below the “less suckiness” motivation for getting more facile in relationships?

I’m going to make a pitch here for your freedom. For you to take a stand for it. 

We’ve all spent our fair share of time in that space of trying to manipulate our partners, our colleagues, our world, to conform to our demands for what our egos tell us we need in order to feel the way we want to feel. All the while couching it in some sort of justice narrative. He needs to learn how to communicate. She needs to take responsibility for her choices. The list of potential justice issues is endless.

Let’s set aside for the moment whether your justice narrative would win the day in court. Let’s just focus for a minute on how this endless battle leaves you feeling.

If you’re like me, and you’re being honest with yourself, it leaves you feeling not so great. Pretty God awful in fact. Time and again picking up the banner of justice and right, only to get shot down by those insurmountable counter-forces of all the things we can’t in any way control:

How our partner thinks and feels; how people behave; how the world works. Etc etc,

But the justice issue feels SO REAL. I get it. When you’re in it, that’s all you can see. 

So I’m asking something radical here. That you take a leap of faith. That there is something you are not seeing, that, once you see it, and start living it, will finally give you the peace, connection, respect, and groundedness you crave. And it’s something you can actually have an influence over, because it is a practice you will be taking on. As opposed to the futile hope that you can somehow get all those things over which you have virtually no control to fall out in the way you think you need them to.

I’m asking you to do this as a stand for your own freedom. And with it, the ability to make a real difference in the lives of those around you.

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So let’s say you are feeling ready to take a stand for your own freedom. The question then becomes: what are you willing to do to get it? 

Are you willing to step back from your most precious narratives of what is right and true about your partner? Are you willing to, even while you can’t yet see the reality of it, entertain the possibility that your justice narrative is nothing more than an obfuscation of the real work life is asking you to undertake? The work that will actually move the needle on your overall happiness and fulfillment?

If you’re open to these possibilities, read on. 

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Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, said the following his famous letter which came to be known as his core teaching on Emotional Sobriety:

If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand.

While Wilson is appropropriately lauded for his impact on addicts and the treatment of addiction, I believe he is channeling for us all here. He is pointing to something priceless, for each of us. He is pointing to our individual paths to freedom.

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Let me get something out of the way here first, though. I have to cop to an envy I have of Mr. Wilson. 

Pretenderization. As in, of his captive audience.

Purveyors of what Mr. Wilson had to offer arrived at the table with an inestimable gift: the gift of desperation. They had already tried all the strategies for gaining control and making the world conform to what they thought they needed it to be. Those strategies were laying at their feet, broken, shattered; in the form of decimated marriages and relationships with children, failed careers, trashed friendships, failing health, financial ruin. There was no longer any room for such people for the illusion that some realness did not need to be had. They were given the gift of having the stakes laid out for them, in technicolor: get real with this shit or die. 

The rest of us do not necessarily have this luxurious gift of desperation. We have instead the allure of the righteousness of our claims. On our partners. On our families. On our friends and colleagues. On our communities. We get the raw deal of having it be so very easy for us to pretend that we, no less than the addict in the ditch, are in a fight for our very souls. That our entire way of life isn’t under threat as a result of our religious, cultish adherence to the littany of misplaced victimhood. That we aren’t willing participants in a grotesque battle to claim the seat of the alpha-victim, that is playing out on billboards across the social and other media landscapes of our society right now. That is literally threatening to tear the fabric of our society into pieces. 

Well, shit. Hail to the victor of that crap contest. Isn’t there a better one?

I say, you’re goddamn right there is. And I’m here to fight for it. So bring what desperation you can muster to this fight. Because the stakes could not be higher.

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So, here’s the situation. We have allayed against us a cruel and diabolical enemy. It has the ability to convince us, to an absolute certainly, that the source of our discontent–of our dis-ease–is out there. Waiting to be met. Met and broken, on the anvil of our entitlement. Our entitlement to have others, to have the world, conform to what we believe we need it to be to meet our needs.

But wait, it gets much more diabolical than that. What we’re being tricked into fighting for aren’t even our actual, real needs. They are the needs of a childish part of ourselves, which didn’t get met when we were children. They are entirely out of place in our current, adult circumstances. 

And it gets even more cruel. Because the enemy has stacked the deck against our valiant crusader. Because he is coming from that childish, unhealed place, bringing it into a context in which it is out of place, distorted; because of this, every way in which that animal attempts to get its needs met will actually result in repulsing them away. Because adults met with this unspoken, childish energetic will instinctively be repulsed by it. Repulsed by it’s unreasonable demand that we conform our behavior to meet it’s unspoken and unacknowledged needs, which are frankly out of place in the current context. 

It doesn’t matter that no one is consciously aware that this is what is happening. The evidence that it is there can be directly deduced from the outcomes: endless, unproductive arguments. Building resentment. Growing disconnection. All the opposite of what our poor crusader actually wants in his poor, innocent heart of hearts. 

But, this diabolical enemy has the power to convince us–again to an absolute certainly–and believe me, I’ve heard and made every argument in favor of this narrative there is to make–that we must sacrifice everything: real love, real connection, real intimacy, real strength–in order to have some chance at getting the needs met, the animal fed. And so we trade all of the things we really, truly, in our heart of hearts, treasure, in exchange for a bill of goods.

And that’s the final twist on this sad tale: that it is, entirely, a bill of goods. Because that animal ain’t ever going to get fed in the way it thinks it has to be fed. 

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You may as well hear this from me. I’ve taken the slings and arrows for you. You are welcome to have at them as well, for as long and as productively as your young, virile self wants to take them on. And you can cause as much collateral damage as you need to on your way to the realization I am here to offer you. 

But, if you are ultimately willing to be honest with yourself, I put to you that you will arrive at this same, unavoidable portal:

That the ONLY path to freedom is to own our own responsibility for our own internal experience. To own that whenever we feel any disturbance, the only focus that makes any sense for us to take at the outset is how that disturbance is originating from within us. To realize that it is ONLY from this vantage point that we can hope to have access to any useful emotional technologies to get us what we ACTUALLY desire in the world: real, authentic love and connection.

So yeah, that circles us back to the title of this article: It’s Always About You. Because it’s true. It’s true from the standpoint of finally deciding you’d rather be free than be right. That taking on some humility is actually the path to a strength orders of magnitude greater than the brittle bullshit your ego (and the media, as a mirror of the collective ego) is trying to sell you as desireable. It’s about taking a stand for your personal freedom. 

It starts with you powerfully claiming something: that you are worthy of something better than what your ego has been trying to sell you. Real connection. Real love. Real freedom. 

And then, it’s a stand for doing your personal, powerful part to bring our society back from the brink of self-destruction. Yes, even more powerful than the super-well constructed opinion that you just totally blasted out there on twitter, and got tons of retweets on. The part that actually brings us together, in relationship. Where we need to be if we are going to have any chance in hell of actually resolving any of the existential issues currently facing our species. 

So yeah, the stakes are pretty damn high. Who’s with me on this?

Peter Fabish is Co-Founder of Conscious Family™ Law & Mediation.