The Lies We Believe

by Dr. Chris Thurman

  “Dr. Thurman, they were not options for me. There is no way I would have asked Sandra to have our baby out of wedlock or to abort the baby!” He refused to budge an inch, and his eyes seemed to dare me to continue my line of conversation.

  “Look, Alan, I think I know where your bitterness and resentment are coming from, but I’m not sure you are open to seeing it,” I said gently, hoping he would let me open the door to truth just a crack.

  His rigid posture relaxed slightly.

  “Look, I’m here for your help,” he said at last. “I’ll try to listen to what you have to say.”

  I smiled reassuringly and then chose my words carefully.

  “It seems to me that the bitterness you’re carrying around about the way you got married has to do with your refusal to see that you did have some choices, both before Sandra became pregnant and afterward,” I suggested. “Prior to Sandra’s becoming pregnant, you both made the choice to be sexually involved. You and she also chose not to make certain she couldn’t get pregnant.

  “When she became pregnant, you both had some choices even then. Because of your values, though, abortion and adoption were options you were not willing to choose. So, you chose to get married instead—something you did not have to do. You and Sandra had choices. By not being willing to admit this and take responsibility for the choices you made, you now believe that you were forced into marrying Sandra by circumstances. And because you believe that you had to marry her, you resent her. You blame her, and you blame the circumstances you found yourself in for why you got married rather than take responsibility for the choices you made all along the way that helped create those circumstances.”

  Alan started to squirm in his chair. I could tell that he wanted to be open-minded, but his rigid notions about his situation were still too deeply ingrained in him.

  “I just can’t buy that! What would you have done if you were in my shoes? Would you have felt that you had a choice?”

  (It is times like these that most of us therapist types feel like pulling our hair out and going into a different line of work—say, renting surfboards in Maui.)

  “To be honest, Alan, probably not. But that just means I would be missing the truth too. The truth is, you had some options open to you, even if they didn’t seem like options. You made the choice that best fit your values—what you believed to be right. Your wife didn’t make you marry her. The circumstances didn’t make you marry her. You chose to marry her!” I said this last statement with an exclamation mark in my voice. I wanted to make it stick.

  “If that is true, how is it supposed to help me with the bitterness I feel about the whole thing?”

  “If you accept responsibility for choosing to marry Sandra, your bitterness toward her will ultimately make no sense. What would there be to be bitter about?”

  “Well, I would still be bitter that I had to . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized what he was about to say again.

  “I think I see what you’re after,” he said, “but I feel light-years away from really believing that I didn’t have to get married.”

  “I understand,” I said. “But becoming emotionally healthy is tied to allowing the truth about all this to take precedence over how you feel about it and giving the truth enough time to do its job in your soul. The truth is, you chose to marry Sandra even though you didn’t have to. She is not to blame for your choice. She owes you nothing for the decision you made. Your feelings of resentment are real, but you don’t actually have a legitimate reason for being resentful toward her. These truths need to become a lot more important than how you feel right now.”

  One of the most difficult tasks we face is that of taking responsibility for how we feel and how we act. The natural human bent is toward blaming other people or things for the unhappiness we feel and the actions we take. Yet blaming somebody or something outside us for our feelings and our actions is a cop-out.

  This was the struggle underlying Alan’s bitterness over his marriage to Sandra. Alan didn’t want to take responsibility for the choices he had made, so he fell into a have to mind-set that made it easy to blame Sandra. Once he had convinced himself that he had to marry Sandra, he was able to build up a mountain of resentment and bitterness toward her, as if she were the enemy. Doing that only added more problems to his real problem.

  In both small, barely noticeable ways and big, glaring ways clients often fail to accept responsibility for the decisions they have made and for the consequences of those decisions. Helping clients take responsibility for both is a central task of effective counseling. Some clients choose to take responsibility; others choose to keep blaming. The former get better; the latter stay troubled and sick.

  The unwillingness to accept responsibility for one’s own problems is a primary reason that therapy doesn’t “work” for some clients. A fair number of clients want to blame their problems on others. An example is a client of mine who sees the problem that brought him to counseling as “My company is the problem—my company is transferring me” rather than “I am having a hard time accepting the fact that I am being transferred.” When the counselor doesn’t join in on the scheme and dares to suggest that the client has a problem that isn’t someone else’s fault, the client sometimes becomes angry and stops coming to therapy. This is a more common scenario in counseling than you might imagine.

  Clients who leave therapy this way often tell people, “Well, I did everything I could to deal with the problem, even went into counseling, and nothing helped!” The truth of the matter is that they didn’t really do anything of substance to face the problem responsibly. It is a real battle at times to get clients to take any responsibility for their problems and for finding solutions to them. The beginning point for all this is helping clients see that they have problems and get them to accept responsibility for solving them.

  Seeing Options, Accepting Responsibility

  This, then, brings us back to Alan. The truth was, he did not have to marry Sandra. He did have other options, even if he didn’t like them. But he found it easier to blame Sandra than to see his own problem. In counseling Alan, I focused on helping him recognize that he did have options in the situation he faced with Sandra and that he was responsible for the decision he made.

  “It’s hard for me to see how I could have opted for anything but marriage to Sandra once I found out she was pregnant,” Alan insisted.

  “Let’s try another tack, then,” I suggested. “Do you have to pay taxes?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s the law.”

  “Just because it’s the law doesn’t mean people always pay their taxes, however, does it?”

  “Well, no.”

  “It is a law that people are to pay taxes, but no one has to, if he or she is willing to run the risk of getting in trouble with the government.”

  “I’m not willing to run that risk.” Alan chuckled.

  “Me, either,” I said. “But let’s move this now from a question of legality to a question of personal standards. When the United States went to war against Mexico, Henry David Thoreau was so against it, he refused to pay his taxes. He was supposed to pay his taxes, but he didn’t have to. He chose instead to face the consequences. He was arrested and put into jail.

  “Thoreau’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was also very much against the war in Mexico, but because Emerson believed in the democratic rule of the majority and obeying the laws of the land, he paid his taxes. He didn’t have to, but he chose to.

  “One day, Emerson went to visit Thoreau in jail. He looked through the bars and asked, ‘Henry, good friend, what are you doing in there?’ Thoreau immediately replied, ‘A better question, Emerson, is what are you doing out there? ’”

  Alan nodded his head. “I see your point. Both men had a choice, but no matter which choice they made, it would bring consequences with it. Thoreau chose to disobey the government, and he wound up in jail. Emerson obeyed the government, but at the expense of his personal beliefs about the
war.”

  “Exactly! The point here is not that one man was right or wrong in what he did. That isn’t our concern. The only thing we are concerned with here is that both men had options. So if Thoreau were here today in my office telling me he had no choice but to go to jail over the war with Mexico, you and I would know that just wasn’t true. He did not have to go to jail. He chose that option.”

  “Just like I didn’t have to marry Sandra,” Alan said, seeing the personal connection. “I just chose that option because it fit who I am and what I want to stand for the best.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “It was your choice. And to be bitter toward Sandra about something you chose to do isn’t really honest or fair, is it?”

  He shook his head. “I guess I’ve been using her as a scapegoat. I just didn’t want to take responsibility for the choice I made. I suddenly feel like a real coward. I’ve been hiding behind my wife, using her as a shield against being responsible. I can see that there are a lot of things I blame her for, especially when it comes to the marriage itself.”

  “I know that seeing this is painful for you, Alan, and that the changes you need to make seem a long way off. But you are already on your way and farther along toward taking responsibility for your choices than a lot of people get.”

  At this point in our work together, Alan has taken more responsibility for his decision than ever before, but he occasionally lapses into a “look what you made me do” assault on Sandra. Now, though, he views his resentment toward Sandra as a problem he has—a struggle to see the truth more clearly. And struggle he does. As theologian Robert Munger so accurately put it, “All truth is an achievement.” This was certainly true in Alan’s case. Seeing that he didn’t have to marry Sandra and that he was responsible for his choice to do so was probably the toughest achievement of his life.

  I hope you will take the discussion in this chapter seriously. More than a few of us walk around with hundreds of have to’s dominating our thoughts and, much like Alan, feel pretty bitter toward people and life in general. We feel like victims, not victors. Alan had certainly built a huge case for what a helpless victim he was regarding how he got married, and he had a ton of bitterness and resentment to show for it.

  The truth we all need to see is that we don’t have to do anything. Even if someone has a gun pointed at your head and is demanding your money and valuables, you don’t have to give him what he wants (although I would suggest that you choose to). That is how free we are. Seeing this leads to greater acceptance of personal responsibility for what we choose to do in life and, consequently, a lot less bitterness and resentment.

  A quick thought out of the other side of my brain. If you want certain outcomes in your life, you can legitimately argue there are have to’s. If you want a healthy body, you have to exercise and diet. If you want a good marriage, you have to spend time working on it. If you want stable employment, you have to go to work consistently. But you don’t have to want a healthy body, a mature marriage, or stable employment. The point here is that there are no real have to’s until you choose to want some specific result or outcome in your life. Then, the have to’s are real, but you still freely choose them.

  Now, try out the following statements and see how they feel:

  “I choose to go to work.”

  “I choose to stay married.”

  “I choose to love my kids and raise them properly.”

  “I choose to lose weight.”

  “I choose to be unhappy (or happy) in my life.”

  “I choose to get angry at the guy who rides my bumper.”

  “I choose to let things from the past continue to hurt me.”

  “I choose to allow people to treat me the way that they do.”

  “I choose whether or not to have a satisfying life.”

  If these statements have the ring of truth to them, you are on your way to living a healthier life. If they don’t, you have a lot more work to do. Keep working, though; it will be worth it. It was for Alan.

  Growthwork

  For the next week, I want you to use the A-B-C-D-E model to keep as accurate a record as you can of all the times you tell yourself you have to do something. For example, let’s say someone at work whom you don’t like that much happens to like you a lot and asks you to have lunch every week. Using the A-B-C-D-E system to examine this, your entry might look something like this:

  “A” (Event): A person I don’t like that much asks me to have lunch every week.

  “B” (Faulty Self-Talk/Lies): I have to have lunch with him, or his feelings will be hurt. I can’t really say no, even though that is what I really want to say. Why do people do this to me?

  “C” (Response): Tense physically; feel irritated and guilt ridden; avoid running into him at work.

  “D” (New Self-Talk/Truth): I don’t have to say yes. His feelings might be hurt, but that really isn’t my responsibility. I can tell the truth, which is that I already have lunch partners. I could thank him for asking me to eat lunch—it is a compliment to have been asked. I could try to eat with him now and then, like once a month, just to show some kindness and interest. Whatever I do, it is a choice. I really don’t have to say yes just because I was asked. I’ll be honest and tell him that meeting regularly won’t work for me, but that I will be glad to meet with him once a month.

  “E” (New Response): Less tense; feel calmer, more at peace, somewhat anxious about having the conversation with him; called him on the phone to talk.

  The thrust of this assignment is to help you fight your have to’s with the truth that you always have options, the freedom to choose from among them, and responsibility for what you decided to do. I encourage you to prove this truth in your life as often as you can. In the process, you will see more clearly than ever before that you don’t have to be a victim in life or put up with the emotions that go along with being one.

  Remember, you are about as free in life as you think you are.

  12

  THE VIRTUE LIES IN THE STRUGGLE, NOT THE PRIZE1

  When the one Great Scorer comes to write against your name,

  he marks not that you won or lost, but how you played the game.

  —Grantland Rice

  One day two women met on the street.

  “Lucy, I haven’t seen you in ages,” said the first woman. “Your new pet store must really be keeping you busy.”

  “All the animals got sick from bad water,” said Lucy. “They died and I lost the business.”

  “My word! How tragic. You and Ralph must be heartbroken.”

  “Ralph is dead. One of the dogs bit him, and he contracted rabies. Didn’t last a month.”

  “Incredible,” said the first woman. “Your son must miss him terribly.”

  “The shock was too much for him. He died of a heart attack.”

  “Your son too? This is just too much to believe. How dreadful!”

  “Oh, but wait,” said Lucy, starting to smile, “you haven’t heard the good news yet . . .”

  And just then a bolt of lightning struck her, and she fell dead on the sidewalk.

  We all might laugh at this story, not because we enjoy sick humor but because we all can identify so strongly with the poor woman’s problems. As you face each day, it can seem as though life is one problem after another. On Monday your electric bill arrives, and it’s three times as much as you have left in your bank account. On Tuesday your child comes down with strep throat. On Wednesday your car dies. On Thursday your spouse tells you he or she is sick and tired of being married. On Friday you discover you have lost thousands of dollars in a poor stock investment.

  And so it goes, never ending.

  Maybe that’s why we laugh so hard when we watch Wyle E. Coyote in his continuous efforts to catch the Road Runner. It’s like watching ourselves. When something goes wrong for the coyote, it usually leads to a chain reaction of catastrophes. The boulder he rolls down the hill at the Road Runner circles up the opposite wall and com
es back down and smashes poor Wyle E. . . . and then the cliff ledge he is on gives way and he drops down the canyon and smashes into the ground . . . after which, the same boulder falls on him again. Finally, he squeezes from under the boulder, staggers to his feet, only to be run over by a passing truck.

  It’s so stupid, yet for thirty-plus years I’ve watched those cartoons and laughed my insides out. It’s fun. It’s fun because even though we see the coyote squashed into an accordion, we know that ten seconds later he will be up and ready to try again.

  There’s a message in that. When we’re laughing at that ridiculous coyote, we’re laughing at ourselves, at the way we are, at the way life is. Pursuing the Road Runner gives meaning to Wyle E. Coyote’s life. Catching and eating the scrawny little bird would almost seem anticlimactic after all those years of scheming and plotting for his capture. After the conquest, what next? It’s the struggle that brings out the persistence and drive and ingenuity of the coyote. That’s what makes us laugh—he is always getting smarter because he just doesn’t know when to quit.

  And neither do we, I hope.

  The Need for Struggle

  There is a lot of human nature in Wyle E. Coyote. We often love a struggle even more than the prize it offers us. It has always been that way. When Alexander the Great conquered the entire known world in 323 B.C., he sat down and wept. There were no more battles to be won. Hundreds of years later, just months after the July 20, 1969, date when Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. became one of the first two men to walk on the moon, Aldrin realized that, as a pilot, there were no greater achievements he could strive for in his lifetime, and he had a nervous breakdown.

  A great irony of life is that people complain constantly about how hard it is to “get ahead”; yet when they no longer have to struggle, they seem to go stir-crazy and make work for themselves, or they lose their inner sense of purpose and develop emotional problems. Few people seem able to “stand success” and enjoy the “prize” once they have it.

  This has been a recurrent theme of great literature. For example, throughout the novel Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo, a police inspector named Javert hunts the elusive criminal Jean Valjean. In the end, when Javert finally has a chance to capture and arrest Valjean after many years of pursuit, he cannot bring himself to do it. Instead, he hurls himself into the Seine River, committing suicide. The chase had given him a reason for living. For it to end was for life to end.