The delusion of low drama is that by playing victim or by persecuting or rescuing something will change. This is a very expensive delusion. Low drama changes nothing. No matter how resentful we are, how perfectly justified we are, or how right we are, no matter how strongly we complain or attack with blame, nothing changes. The only thing that happens in low drama is that we get older. Change happens through responsibility, and low drama is about avoiding responsibility. Low drama is expensive because the time and energy we spend dramatically avoiding responsibility in low drama is time and energy that we will never get back.
Unfortunately, having intellectual clarity about low drama will not alter behavior. Behavior change occurs through responsibly experiencing what you are creating in each moment. The clarity in previous paragraphs about low drama may seem interesting, but don’t kid yourself. You will change no words or actions until it gets too painful for you to keep doing what you do now. The purpose behind the following handbook is to increase the pain of your moment-to-moment awareness.
SECTION 2-D
Handbook for Creating Ordinary Human Relationship
Here are 122 specific instructions and practices for how to start, grow and end ordinary human relationship. Study them carefully to improve your ordinary human relationship intelligence.
1. Complain to your partner about anything that does not suit you. Use a whining, victimy tone of voice when you complain. Respond negatively to any assurances given to you about anything. Make sure that the object of your complaints can never be resolved. You complain. Your partner tries to fix it. You create reasons why their solutions will not work. At least in this game you always have something to talk about.
2. Try to be right whenever issues arise. Argue your point. Do not give up until your partner concedes that you are right.
3. In order to supplement being right, also try to make your partner wrong whenever there is an opportunity to do so. After all, you are not making them wrong. They actually are wrong. You are just doing them the favor of pointing it out to them.
4. Take a rigid position about everything and anything (“I have to wash my face before I go to bed!”). Be fanatical about your positions. Go for the throat. Take no prisoners. Justify your position any way that you can. After all, everyone has a right to their own opinions.
5. Feel resentment about anything your partner ever did that offended or frightened or embarrassed you. Whenever you look at your partner, remember your resentments first. Never forget your resentments.
6. Feel resentment about your own child hood. Remember all of your old wounds. Assume that the people presently around you will wound you again. Project this onto your partner. Your partner then becomes your enemy with conscious or unconscious intentions to harm you. Stay little. Never grow up.
7. Feel resentment about your children, your boss, your colleagues. After all, resentment is a way to take care of yourself by feeling strong and righteous.
8. Have a never-ending competition with your partner about who has the worst life. Dedicate yourself to proving to your partner that your life is less fun than theirs. Even if life seems momentarily good, you have the shit end of the stick. Search for subtle evidence to demonstrate that your partner has it better than you. This gives you permission to go shopping.
9. If your partner does have a little bit of fun, make them feel guilty as hell. They should have been working on something. There is so much that needs to be done or that needs to be cleaned up. Who do they think they are having fun?
10. Confine your experience of love to the lin-ear, personal, transient, conditional, minimized, localized, ordinary, verbal-reality of “I love you.” As soon as the echo of the spoken words fades out of the room, so does your faith in your partner’s love.
11. Give up about little things. Give up about life. Have no hope. Try to make your partner rescue you from hopelessness. If they fail to rescue you, blame them for not caring and assume they are having an affair.
12. Get a nice car and keep it clean. Get a hi tech mobile phone and a slick computer. Live in your car, your phone and your computer. Look at your relationship and wonder why it is so messy compared to your car, your phone and your computer. Obviously, the mess must be your partner’s fault.
13. Be strong, try hard, be perfect, always keep pushing yourself. Push yourself until you break down psychologically, emotionally or physically and then make your partner pick up the slack for you so they can finally value all the work you have been doing.
14. Do not be happy. Do not enjoy life. Do not be powerful. Have excuses that blame other people or your life circumstances for not being happy, powerful, and enjoying life.
15. Give away your authority so you do not have to make decisions about your life. Give your authority to any authority figure: doctors, plumbers, computer guys, the phone company, the car mechanics, the government, your children, the tax people, to anybody. Feel weak and used. Feel stupid. Complain about the bad service and high prices.
16. Stay in your head. Righteously value intel lectual and rational considerations above all else. Confine your life to your reasons. No matter what, do not feel. Feelings are irrational.
17. Stay in your bed. Sleep in. Try to keep dreaming. Sleeping and dreaming are better than what is happening in your life. If you are sleeping and dreaming maybe people will leave you alone. Maybe things will change by themselves.
18. Do not be glamorous and sexy for your partner. Instead, be glamorous and sexy for people who do not matter so that you maintain a good public image.
19. Conceive of “here” as very big, covering everywhere that you have ever been. Regard “now” as immense, extending far beyond this moment, back into the past and far into the distant future. Ignore the obvious fact that you can do nothing to change the past and little or nothing to predetermine the future, and nothing about what is not here. Include the past, the future, and everywhere into a gigantic “here and now.” Then feel totally overwhelmed about how much you carry on your shoulders. Use this overwhelm as an excuse to eat chocolate.
20. Never say just “yes” or “no” in response to “yes or no” questions. Always go sideways instead, and make sure that you add in all the details.
21. Never answer the question that is asked. Always assume that your assumptions about the question and about the questioner are more correct than the questioner’s. Then answer the question that you assume they are really asking.
22. Always be worried that the worst thing that ever happened to you is any minute going to happen to you again. Make it your partner’s responsibility to protect you from this worry.
23. Limit your experience to your vocabulary. Have no experience that you do not have a name for. Regard everything else as ridiculous and irrelevant. Teach this to your children.
24. Create and maintain the story in your mind that your partner is inferior to you or that your partner is an idiot. Consistently find little pieces of evidence to support that story. Whenever you look at your partner, see your stories about them instead of them.
25. To supplement the view that your partner is inferior to you, also create and maintain the story that you are superior to your partner. Find little ways to constantly remind your partner of this, especially when in the company of relatives, business associates, or mutual friends.
26. Have expectations about how your partner should act, about what they should feel, about where they should sit, about how they should dress, about how they should treat you, about what they should order to eat in the restaurant, about how they are driving, and so on. Get angry if their behavior ever fails to meet your expectations.
27. Feel afraid if your partner dares to express their feelings to you. As soon as they begin expressing their feelings to you, panic and express your feelings to them. After all, if they stop withholding their feelings it is only fair that you express your feelings too. Make sure that your feelings are bigger and stronger than their feelings.
28. Blame your partner
for everything that is not handled, everything that goes wrong, everything that ever went wrong, and everything that could possibly ever go wrong. What else are they there for?
29. Attack your partner whenever you feel any kind of discomfort. This way they know you are there. If your partner ever thinks that you are comfortable, who knows, they might not give you any more attention.
30. Be a public doormat. Neurotically worry that you might cause a problem for somebody. Walk on eggshells around everyone. Keep imagining that you are being a problem for your partner or for others. Keep giving many excuses and reasons why it is not your fault, and also blame your partner for the unfairness of thinking that you are a problem.
31. Do not live your life. Feel resentment for having to be adaptive and not being able to be yourself and live your life. Never clear your resentments.
32. Make assumptions freely about whatever you want. Make your partner responsible for the effect of your assumptions.
33. Ignore the possibility of being an adult man or woman. Let your childhood thinking and feeling patterns take over and dominate your adult life. Create the popular fantasy of a scared needy adaptive inner child, and give more importance to this fantasy than to your mate.
34. Project your father onto your man. Find evidence to prove that he is your father because he is doing it to you again!
35. Project your mother onto your woman. Be in bed with your mother when you are in bed with your woman. Blame your woman for this.
36. Be scared about everything that you do not know and cannot control. Use your fear to control your partner.
37. Whenever your partner is willing to listen to you, complain about the mobbing at work, complain about projects being prematurely terminated, complain about the incredible laziness of your colleagues or employees or your boss, describe people dying in bizarre accidents, describe what is happening in the war, describe what is happening in politics, complain about the housework, complain about the kids always interrupting, complain about having too much to do and no time to complete anything. Keep talking about something. Above all do not be together in silence. Always keep the radio on.
38. Without making it obvious, distract your partner and yourself from entering the spaces where it would be possible to speak together about love or beauty or grace.
39. Be needy in such a way that your neediness can never be fulfilled. Make it your partner’s responsibility to fulfill your neediness.
40. Be adaptive to the person who comes to your front door and asks for donations. Be adaptive at work. Be adaptive to the telephone salesperson. Be adaptive to your parents. Be angry with your partner for not protecting you from all the people with whom you are adaptive.
41. Let your parents’ opinion about your life have more importance than your own opinion about your life. Let your parents’ opinion about your partner’s life have more importance than your own opinion about your partner’s life.
42. Let your parents question and berate your decisions about childraising, vacations, housecleaning, and your job. Let your parents berate your mate. Give your parents controlling authority in your household. Decide that you will wait until your parents die before you start living your own life. Wait impatiently. Let the years go by.
43. Draw conclusions about whatever you want in life so as to sustain your present view of things. Believe your conclusions in the face of contradictory evidence. Especially ignore evidence offered by your partner.
44. Defend yourself from intimacy. Do not let anyone, especially your partner, get closer to you than your mask.
45. Do not trust your partner. Continuously collect evidence to prove that they are untrustworthy.
46. Defend yourself from evolution. Do not try to learn. Think that your habits are you. Try to stay solid in your habits and persevere with the set of behaviors that you established for yourself long ago. Always serve the same menu for Christmas dinner.
47. Become expert in avoiding responsibility. Procrastinate. Hesitate. Use your energy for creating excuses rather than creating results. Take no risks. Leave well enough alone. Do not rock the boat. Keep your hands clean. Relate to responsibility as if responsibility means fault, blame, guilt or a heavy burden. Do not play your life full out.
48. Do not make boundaries, or if you do make a boundary, make it too feebly or too late so that you get hurt first and are justified in making the boundary as a way to get revenge.
49. Do not ask for what you need. Expect that by now other people around you should already know exactly what you need.
50. If you do not get what you need, then use that as a good reason to cheat. Do not ask for what you want. Then, when you do not get it, live a double life and sneak to get what you want somewhere else.
51. Withhold sex to punish your mate for not giving you what you want. Lie about why you are withholding sex.
52. Make your own personal comfort and security the highest priority. Make other people dance around you to make you feel comfortable and secure. After all, you deserve basic comfort and security, don’t you? Other people should know how to make you comfortable and secure. Be neurotic in ways that make it impossible to be comfortable or have security.
53. Attach yourself to your partner by getting into their private spaces. Look in their drawers, read papers on their desk, open their mail, cross-examine their friends and colleagues, check their receipts, listen to their phone messages, and snoop into their stuff. Know what they are going to do before they do. Be psychologically, emotionally, and energetically enmeshed with them. Think that fusion is closeness.
54. If your partner does not give you pleasure, if they do not cook you the right meal at the right time or the way you want it (without too much salt, eggs not too wet, salad torn rather than cut the way you like it), if they leave messes, if they do not touch you the right way, if they play the music too loudly, if they dress improperly, then feel insulted and close up your love for them. If they do not give you pleasure then obviously they do not love you. Why should you love them?
55. Try to make your partner change. If your partner will not change, then complain about them to their mother. Maybe she can make them change.
56. Try to change your parents, your boss, your colleagues, and your relatives. Hate them for not changing, or hate yourself for failing to change them, or hate both them and yourself.
57. Be involved in all the latest diet and health fads. Secretly think that your partner has no life if they do not get excited about your diet or health plan. Spend a lot of money. Change your plan when you get bored. Do not explain anything to your partner.
58. Blame the faults of your children on your partner. Your children obviously inherited their bad characteristics from your partner or your partner’s family.
59. Guiltily buy expensive little things and put them away in your closet or in the garage. Wait. When you finally wear them or use them and your partner notices, say, “Oh, I’ve had this a long time…”
60. Be a victim of time. Stay super busy. Chase after the clock. Be in a hurry. Rush around. Do not have enough time to feel or to be relaxed. Do not make time to really be present with anyone. Starve yourself from deep, nurturing, adult human contact, and go to bed exhausted each night.
61. Be late. Do not keep your time commitments. Never arrive on time. Make people wait for you. Always pack your things at the last minute and be completely wiped out or even sick before leaving on any trips with your partner.
62. Feel overwhelmed about all the details and responsibilities of life. Attack anyone who does not feel as overwhelmed as you for being irresponsible or unconscious.
63. Do sports. Use all your extra energy for athletic competition. Come home exhausted. Get hurt so your partner must respect your sport because it has the power to interfere with their life. Constantly talk about your sport whenever you get together with friends even if your partner does not participate. Use sore muscles and exhaustion as an excuse to avoid physical intimacy. Get up early an
d run seven days a week because it is inarguable that everyone needs cardiovascular exercise. Then you don’t have to come up with another reason for not having sex in the morning.
64. Suddenly become holy. Read spiritual books and do whatever they say. Do breathing practices, yoga postures, Buddhist meditations, and shamanic rituals. Fill your house with crystals. Tell your partner what they should or should not do by quoting from your books. Bring over weird friends who are not really your friends but at least they are holy.
65. Surround yourself with persecutors and rescuers. Wake up in the morning and before you even get out of bed, count your enemies. Put on the day as if it has the same possibilities as yesterday, like wearing dirty clothes.
66. At parties, make jokes about your partner’s personality quirks.
67. Be mean to your partner, but feel well justified that it is payback for all the times when they were mean to you. Accept disrespectful behavior from yourself toward your partner.
68. Expect your partner to be everything for you. Do not have friends. Do not let your partner have friends. Starve yourself from contact and make your partner starve themselves from contact so that you can prove that you have a “monogamous” relationship. Stay with your partner even if your relationship is no longer living so that you can have a relationship “’til death do you part.” Sacrifice your aliveness to the customs of your culture and times.
69. Indulge yourself in addictive sentimentality, nostalgia, depression, and melancholy. Expect your partner not to react or to need you to be present for them.
70. Mix your emotions from the past with your feelings from the present to create confusion for yourself and others so that you never have to be accountable for what is happening right now.
71. Use your relationship to feed “psychological vampire-entities.” Pretend that you don’t know what I am talking about. Try to stay unconscious about the fact that you host psychological vampire-entities that feed on your partner as their main source of food. Let yourself be fed upon by your partner’s psychological vampire-entities. Call this reciprocal vampire-feeding frenzy a “relationship.”
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 7