The Ultimate Pivot

(Second in a Series)

There is a true hack to being in relationships with other humans. To being in life. It is the one pivot that has the power to change everything. It may be the most important pivot any human can make in their life, in terms of how it impacts quality of life and of self.

Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. It will color and inform everything you say, think and do from the moment it becomes clear to you until the end of time.

However, just as truly, until you see it, your lack of seeing it will color your choices, experiences and very concept of reality as powerfully as will seeing it when you come to the other side. 

What is this seeing, this knowing, that has the power to change everything?

Owning Your Experience.

Wait a minute, you say. What is that supposed to mean? What does it mean to own my experience? 

In its simplest form, it is this: taking 100% responsibility for your own internal experience. It means, quite simply, that you relinquish, unconditionally, the right to place responsibility for your internal experience outside of yourself. Full stop.

Woah. Now hold on just a minute. The objections write themselves, even as I articulate this pivot in its simplest form. Let’s give those objections due consideration and respect.

Let’s start with this: what owning your experience does not mean is that your partner isn’t 100% responsible for how they are showing up too. So the fact that I’m taking 100% responsibility for my internal experience doesn’t mean that my partner gets a pass for being out of integrity in their agreements with me; or for being dishonest; or behaving abusively or neglectfully. By owning my experience, I give up no right to request integrity from my partner, to express my desires, or to make requests of any kind. Not only do these rights remain fully in play, but as you will start to see, they are super-charged in their potency as you begin to realize the potential of this pivot.

What it does mean is this: I don’t get to make you responsible for my happiness. Or for that matter, I don’t get to make you responsible for any aspect of my internal experience. Nor do I accept responsibility for any gradient of that for you. Nope. Instead, I accept 100% responsibility for my own internal experience.

OK, so the objections are just getting started. What, I hear you say, about the impact my partner inevitably has upon me? Am I not entitled to demand that they meet minimum standards of behavior? Aren’t they at least responsible for the effect their leaving their dirty underwear on the stairs has upon my well-being?

I get it. This can be confounding. Let’s get back to basics.

Once again: taking ownership of your experience places no boundaries on your right to make requests of your partner. What it does though, is so groundbreaking, so earth shattering, and yet so subtle as to be practically invisible. It is this:

When I take unconditional ownership of my experience, it causes a seismic shift in how things get worked out in my relationships. 

Let’s break this down.

Almost all of us were victimized in some way as children. Being born into a human existence is, quite simply, hard. As children, we all were faced with the inevitable conflict between being a fully authentic expression of ourselves, and what we come to believe we had to be in order to be accepted by our parents, and by society at large. Being socialized is an unavoidable element of being social creatures after all. Given the existential choice between the loss of the love and care our instinct tells us we need to survive, and being fully authentic, we inevitably choose to surrender our authenticity. 

Of course, this choice is not made explicitly. Nor is it consciously understood by us as children as we make it. 

But we nevertheless feel the loss of our authenticity, And so begins, for so many of us, the slow but steady descent down the slippery slope of relinquishing one little piece of our authentic selves at a time. All in the name of belonging.

This is not even to mention the more radical victimizations that occur for many of us. Abuse. Neglect. Bullying. Abandonment. All of these are very real ways that many of us have been victimized.

The problem that so many of us end up having to face though, is this: that we fail to own how we have been victimized. And as a result, we miss how we are showing up as a victim in all sorts of inappropriate and unhealthy ways as adults. 

Stay with me on this. First, many of us fail to embrace, in a healthy and honest way, how we were victimized as children. No, it actually wasn’t OK for dad to put all of his energy into work and have nothing left for his family when he got home; regardless of all those complicated feelings I have about him trying to be responsible for our financial well-being, etc. No, it wasn’t alright for mom to check out most nights with that third glass of chardonnay, using me as a sounding board for her complaints about my father. That stuff simply wasn’t OK.

Here’s the really tricky part, though. By failing to truly acknowledge how we were victimized; and much more importantly: by not taking the time and self-respect to allow ourselves to feel all the feelings that naturally go along with all of those betrayals–the anger, the outrage, the grief, the fear–we kept ourselves stuck in the posture of victim. And we unwittingly show up in that posture in all kinds of ways in our adult lives. No where more than in intimate relationships. 

Pause on that for just a moment. Truly ask yourself: how many ways am I showing up as a victim in my life, right now? How many ways am I subtly, and not so subtly, trying to manipulate the people close to me to behave in ways that I believe will give me the internal experience I want?

We are unhappy because our partner isn’t living up to our expectations. He refuses to give me the attention I believe I deserve. She won't acknowledge me the way I know she should be doing. We JUST KNOW we are entitled to these simple, reasonable things from our partners. And yet, no amount of demanding, complaining, withdrawing or begging seems to get them to behave the way we know they should. IT’S ENOUGH TO DRIVE ANYONE CRAZY. 

The absolute misery of being in this victim posture–beyond the fact that most of us are almost entirely unaware that we are in it (or that there is a much better alternative)--is this: our entire focus for what is needed for our experience to be what we want it to be is placed very exactly and precisely on the one thing we have almost no real control over: the outside world. 

What so and so is thinking or believing; how who and whom is behaving; the economy; politicians; the movement of the tectonic plates. You name it. You know what? You’ve got barely a whiff of influence over how any of those things play out. 

It’s bad news. But it's the truth.

Well. Isn’t that a fix. I’m miserable. The only way for me to stop being miserable is for something I have no control over to change. What’s a reasonable person to do under those bleak circumstances?

Well, here’s what most of us do: we try to force the issue anyways. We cajole and manipulate our partners to force that behavior change that will make everything OK. We post a bunch of stuff on facebook to give ourselves the illusion that we’re making a difference with our full throated opinions. And we wring and wring our hands, holding on for dear life with our most earnest and sincere prayers that God will finally take our side and make things be the way we want them to be. 

And all the while we baste in existential despair. Why? Because we know in our heart that no matter how hard we try, all these things are beyond our meager ability to affect. 

And worse: we know that by trying to control these things, we are only pushing away the very things we REALLY want: love, connection, respect, authenticity.

Here’s where things get even trickier. Because our psyche–remember, the one that we overrode, failed to acknowledge where it was victimized, and pushed down the feelings we needed to feel, in order to get along?–that psyche is convinced of two things: (1) that this shit is REAL. I.e. that there is a TRUE JUSTICE ISSUE HERE, and that so and so simply needs to finally get it through their thick skull that I’M RIGHT ABOUT THIS; and (2) the only way to get to that feeling of wellbeing that I so appropriately long to feel is to make the outside world conform to what I believe it REALLY, IN ALL FAIRNESS, WHO COULD ARGUE WITH ME ON THIS, SHOULD BE in order for my experience to be OK.

This is the part I told you about at the beginning. The part where, until you see it, you are quite literally trapped in this very seemingly real world in which you are perpetually a victim of outside circumstances over which you are powerless. In which you are condemned to suffer until you can get those things outside of yourself to change. 

In other words, you are trapped in a world in which you are condemned to suffer.

So. If you’re still with me, you may justifiably be wondering why you came along this far. Is there an alternative to this bleak condemnation to strive and strive against the inexorable tide, heroically seeking that moment of redemption where everyone will finally, unconditionally, acknowledge that you are right and that we all have been screwing up your life for far too long? Is there any hope for redemption for us poor humans?

Well, yes, there is. It’s the pivot we’ve been talking about. The one where you accept 100% responsibility for your experience. It quite literally has the power to change everything. Here’s why:

As soon as I take on 100% responsibility for my internal experience, I am finally–with full national honors for the level of surrender it clearly takes for me to take this on–placing my attention on the one thing I actually do have a say in: how I’m showing up to this situation. 

And here’s the real kicker: doing that opens up a whole world of possibilities that will forever remain hidden to you until you take this pivot on. 

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Here’s just one example of how this has played out in my life. See if you can see where it happened for me,

Early on my childhood was pretty good. Our family sprung a household in that rich, 1960s American soil, where a burgeoning middle class was laying legitimate claim to Everyman’s slice of the American Dream. I was popular and self-expressed. I loved writing, and my teachers encouraged me enthusiastically. They all thought I was headed for bigger things it seemed. 

But then, when I was around 10 years old, things started to turn difficult. My mother’s descent into addiction and depression began to take hold. She would spend hours crying on my shoulder and complaining to me about my father. I took this on as a matter of honor: my mom was treating me like a real adult, and seeking my support. I had no idea how this inappropriate shouldering of adult responsibility was negatively affecting me. 

And then, tragically, things got far worse. My mother took an overdose of the valium her psychiatrist had given her to numb her despair. She died. Her mother (my grandmother), overcome by her own guilt over not doing more, blamed my father for her daughter’s suicide. She cut the rest of the family off from us. In a sudden, radical act of violence, my brothers and I lost our mother and all of our extended family relationships.  

I turned in full desperation toward the one adult relationship left standing: my father. To his credit, he did not abandon me or my two stricken brothers. He kept a roof over our heads. But, the cost to him was great. He had no ability to provide any of the emotional support we children needed to process this upending of our worlds. There was no therapy. There was no discussion. My father sat us down on the bed, told us our mother was dead, and asked us if we had anything to say. We didn’t. And then we never talked about it again.

My trying to keep things managed had not worked out. My mother had died. All the adults had fled. My older brother was engaged in passive suicide by taking greater and greater risks with his health. My younger brother, whom I’d been so close to, had shut down completely. 

So what did I do? I doubled down on trying to control things. I set out to show my dad that I was a worthy little boy. I sat and listened to him go on for hours about all the ways the world was messed up, and that if only people had the good sense to see things as he saw them, things would be a whole lot better. I tried to show how much I understood his complicated theories on all of this. But my dad had no space for my little ideas about things. So I learned to shut up and listen. And to hold on tight with my newfound hypervigilance, trying like hell to manage everyone’s feelings around me so that I could somehow keep things safe for all of us. 

OK. So we’ve established the part where I got victimized. And like a good enlightened member of the Age of Aquarius, I acknowledged my victimization and allowed myself to feel all the rage, grief and powerlessness that I should naturally have felt as a child, right?

Well, no. I buried all of those feelings, as deeply as I could. I resolved to try so hard to make everything work out for everyone that I’d somehow manage to keep myself and everyone else safe from the impending doom my nervous system told me was always just around the corner. I engaged in all forms of addictive behavior, to keep the feelings at bay. 

So that’s how I messed up part one (acknowledging how I’d been victimized and feeling the feelings).

Here’s how I messed up part two (owning my experience). I took on that I was a rugged individualist. That I didn’t need anyone. That I wasn’t about to be vulnerable to getting hurt like I’d been hurt before. That I was an island. 

Except I wasn’t. Behind my image of being in control and not allowing myself to be vulnerable, I was needy in all sorts of inappropriate ways. I wanted to be cared for and acknowledged in the ways I should have been when I was a child. But the way I went about trying to get those needs met ended up repulsing what I wanted. I wanted people to love me for who I was, when I was incapable of generating that love for myself. My shame kept me trapped in a victim role, which I felt powerless to set right. 

Fast forward to my second marriage, the one I’m still proud to be a part of today. In my last article, I talked about how my wife showed up with the perfect fit for my special brand of unresolved issues. She was going to prove her worth as something other than just a sex object by saving me with her brilliant insight and deep, powerful love. I was going to rise like a phoenix, healed by her love from my tragic past, forever grateful for the gifts she gave me. 

It all sounds pretty good, right? 

But alas, it didn’t work out the way either of our unhealed personas hoped it would. My need for care and acknowledgement, coming from that childish, victimized, but not-realizing-I’m-being-a-victim place, was taking up more and more space and air. My wife was steadily growing resentful of the needs of this persona, which could never quite get her, or the rest of the world, to fully meet its needs. 

On the one hand, I appeared as a mature, functional adult, capable of managing a challenging business and mastering many other competencies. On the other, I continued to unwittingly show up as the child-victim of my need for care and acknowledgment that I unintentionally kept pushing away. 

My wife and I increasingly fell into bitter arguments: unresolveable ones, where I tried to convince her of how she wasn’t showing up like she should (e.g., could she just be a little more kind), and she tried to convince me I wasn’t asking for things in the right way. 

It all came to a head one day. We were driving to a family gathering, when my wife became engaged with her phone. This had been happening more and more lately, as her non-profit had been gaining momentum and the demands on her as Executive Director continued to mount. I decided I was going to ask for a discussion of how we could agree to set limits on phone use when we were together. I shut off the podcast we were listening to, and announced my intention  to engage in this discussion.

My wife exploded angrily. She told me it was completely unreasonable for me to make this request in the way I was making it. I was shocked by her anger, and became furious myself. After some robust and unproductive yelling, we retreated to our corners, bewildered by how once again we’d fallen into an argument that was clearly the other person’s fault. 

My narrative of the situation seemed perfectly reasonable and correct to me: I was simply asking to engage in a discussion of how my wife and I could better spend our time together and connect more by agreeing to limits on phone distractions when we were together. Her anger was completely unprovoked and unreasonable. I married a maniac!

This story–that I was a victim of my wife’s inability to control her rage–left me with few options. I could try to berate, beg and/or manipulate her into being more calm. I could leave. Or I could shut up and take her abuse. God knows I’d been trying the first option. The last sounded really lame to me. The second was looking better all the time.

Fortunately for me, we were committed enough to our marriage to seek the help of a relationship coach. That coach–who knew me, my behavior, and my history well–gave me a gift that, because I was willing to take and use it, offered me a way out of the victim hell I’d been stuck in.

What he helped me to see was this; my request wasn’t actually coming from the calm, unengaged place I thought it was. It was actually coming from my victim persona: the one that was endlessly getting triggered by the ways I was being told by my wife that I wasn’t important–that I wasn’t being cared for or acknowledged as I should be. I was having an emotional reaction to that story, and I was blaming my wife for that emotional reaction. And I was looking to manipulate her into changing her behavior for my victim persona to get what it wanted. 

My wife, after years of engaging with this persona, was actually running out of patience for it. Even though she also didn’t realize exactly what was happening, her nervous system was reacting to it, in an increasingly intense way (that frankly surprised even her). 

As I started to finally really see this pattern at work, I felt an enormous sense of relief. What I had been interpreting as a source of misery over which I had no control (my wife’s behaviors and unprovoked anger) was actually coming from something I could control (taking responsibility for my own emotional experience). 

What our coach was helping me see was, as long as this victim persona, born out of my childhood trauma, was in charge of trying to manipulate others to create the emotional experience I wanted (obtain care and acknowledgement so I could feel loved, respected and appreciated), it would inevitably create exactly the opposite response in those around me.

This realization fit with my history. I recalled how so many times, my persona had bitterly sought care and acknowledgment, only to receive rejection and anger. Some part of me thought there must be something terribly wrong with me. Another part of me thought there was something terribly wrong with everyone else. 

But, since I couldn’t really see what was happening, I was left feeling bitter, resentful and victimized. It wasn’t until I saw how my unresolved, traumatized childhood self was acting out from a victim stance in my adult relationships, trying to manipulate my adult partners into taking responsibility for my sense of belonging and self-respect, that I could do anything but continue to create the opposite response than the one I so desperately wanted. 

From that perspective, it was an invaluable gift for me to have been graced with the ability to see what was happening. I finally had the opportunity to start generating different outcomes. (Note: Of course, my wife was also engaging in her own practices of emotional manipulation (i.e., her own failures to own her experience), which she has been taking the opportunity to work through during our marriage as well. But those have been her files to work out, which is not something I could do for her.)

In my next article, I talk about some of the challenges of making the pivot–which is really more accurately described as taking on the practice–of owning your experience. As well as why it is so incredibly important and liberating in relationships and in life.

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