MAP OF THREE KINDS OF RELATIONSHIP
We have all had experiences in extraordinary human relationship. These are moments when love seems to work. Our mind is empty of busy-ness and full of quiet respect, our heart overflows with joy, our body vibrates with passion, and our being is inspired with electric aliveness. We bathe in an abundant love that cannot be described, only felt, and it feels so right. Perhaps you have only dreamed about a love that hits on all four cylinders and hums smoothly and long, but I suspect it has been an actual experience for you – possibly long ago, perhaps only for a few moments. Still, I think that you already know deep in your bones that extraordinary human relationship exists and that you want to get back there … often.
There is no secret. Extraordinary human relationship is an automatic side effect of responsible Adult actions. For the most part, however, we have a fuzzy idea about what is meant by responsible Adult actions. That is no fault of our own. Our lack of understanding and experience in Adult responsibility is also a characteristic of our general culture.
The tendency of our culture to avoid Adult responsibility creates a virtual boundary that we will have to approach and eventually step through if we want to enter and explore extraordinary human relationship. The virtual boundary restricts our perceptions, our thinking, our feeling, and our actions, and remains an effective barrier until we are ready to take responsibility for breaking the rules. Taking the situation into our own hands and finding our way to the other side of the “normal” barrier is a prerequisite for entering extraordinary human relationship.
Gaining competencies for creating extraordinary human relationship is the equivalent of a university graduate degree program. Your success will come from committing to acquire extraordinary human relationship skills at that same level of discipline and professionalism that you would commit to obtaining an advanced degree. Along the way, large chunks of past understanding about reality and how the world works will fall away in the face of experiential clarifications about what it is to create and maintain extraordinary human relationship. This chapter opens possibility after possibility for finding your way into the domain of Adult responsibility. Because of how quickly the game can slide from extraordinary back to ordinary again, there is no time when your efforts are not important, even if in the moment they appear to have no success.
SECTION 6-A
Responsibility and Practice
Our education about responsibility has been thorough. We have been trained to avoid taking responsibility. We have been trained to be irresponsible about responsibility.
Instead of learning the ways of gripping responsibility cell by cell and nerve by nerve, so that the universe moves when we move and responds when we speak, we have learned the ways of cheating and getting away with the most for the least. If we can receive a benefit and avoid paying the full price, we call this profit. The game has become: Whoever has the most toys when he dies wins! Avoiding responsibility is the life plan we have inherited from our modern culture.
As children we innocently admitted full responsibility for anything we did. But then we found out that if we broke a vase and took responsibility we might get scolded. If we started a fight with our brother and admitted our motives we might get spanked. If we were late for school and revealed that we chose to come late because catching frogs in the stream was far more interesting than sitting in class, there would be serious consequences to contend with. We rapidly learned that creating excuses, blaming circumstances, finding scapegoats, lying and cheating were far less painful than taking responsibility. Over the years we perfected our techniques, until now; evading responsibility has become an automatic response that may form the basis of our relationship to life. We avoid responsibility because we have learned that:
• Responsibility has painful consequences.
• Responsibility makes us guilty.
• Responsibility means it is our fault.
• Responsibility means we are to blame.
• Responsibility means we are the one to get punished.
• Responsibility is a burden difficult to carry, even more difficult to put down.
There appears to be nothing attractive about responsibility. What we have not been shown is the cost of living life as a game of “Responsibility Dodge Ball.” The price tag is so high because we live in a responsible, cause-and-consequence universe.
A responsible universe works like this: If you decide to do an experiment and walk through the woods and pick up litter, even if you hate picking up litter, even if you know that your picking up this litter is a theatrical act, if after the walk you have picked up litter then the litter has actually been picked up.
Avoiding responsibility brings us out of relationship with our fellow human beings, with nature, and with the practical realities of the universe. The opposite of maneuvering to avoid responsibility is taking responsibility for responsibility. Taking responsibility for responsibility means:
• Being at source for
• Being the cause of
• Being the creator of
• Being in relationship with
• Being the originator of
• Owning
• Taking care of
• Managing
• Representing
• Speaking for
• Taking a stand for
• Declaring
• Having the consequences of … and so on
Taking responsibility is a delightful and honorable expression of caring for yourself, for others, and for the world. Responsibility is extraordinary human love in action. Entering the domain of extraordinary human relationship will depend on establishing a passionate relationship between yourself and responsibility.
Inquire about this: Is winning the lottery high up on your wish list? If yes, why? Why do we want to win the lottery? From the perspective of responsibility, winning the lottery is how we can cheat the world out of having to be responsible. Western culture teaches that the game of life is won by cheating. If we somehow feel left out or disappointed for having never won the lottery, this could only occur because we lack skills and practical experience in how the technology of responsibility works.
True responsibility is not a burden, despite what the culture tells us. It is a joy and a privilege. Responsibility is intimate participation in a dance with the moment-to-moment causes and needs of the universe. Through responsibility, your creative spirit exuberantly lives and expresses its passions in the world.
The process of establishing reciprocity with responsibility includes both internal and external changes. New parts of the Box get born, a few parts get ejected, and some parts get reengineered. Entering responsibility could be likened to being swallowed whole by a giant, and proceeding through his digestive system with no way out until the stinking end, at which time you have become useful to something greater than yourself. Being digested by a new relationship to responsibility occurs over time and through efforts. Efforts involve both starting new behaviors and diverting yourself from repeating other behaviors. Many experiments for developing responsibility-muscles are outlined in this book.
For starters, begin tracking the little ways that you habitually avoid responsibility in your day-to-day life. At the office, on the street, at home with the family, at parties, in private, wherever you go, whatever you do, simply notice the details. How are you trying to get away with things? Who do you specifically not listen to? What do you avoid noticing? Where do you make little messes without any consideration about cleaning them up? How do you avoid seeing the long-range picture? How do you numb yourself to feeling the consequences of what you do or don’t do? Where do you leave responsibilities to someone unknown to you? Start keeping an “Irresponsibility Journal”; list whatever you discover. The exercise is not to blame yourself, but rather is meant to encourage you to be accountable and to discover how responsibility is avoided. The more precise your personal examples are, the more clearly you will grasp exactly how you
r Box works.
Ante Up
The most important ingredient in creating extraordinary human relationship is practice. You don’t get practice by reading a book. Practice you get only when you practice.
You can practice alone. You can practice in the company of others. You can practice in trainings, in workshops, in weekly meetings, in men’s or women’s groups, and in many other different circumstances. Intellectual understanding is valuable and interesting, of course. But regardless of what you understand, long-term changes occur only through consistent practice.
We could have learned many of the skills related to creating extraordinary human relationship as children, but our culture did not provide these skills for us. If we want these skills now, it is within our power to search for them wherever they exist, and start regularly practicing them ourselves. When we speak differently or process our thoughts and feelings differently, the improved quality of our relationships will naturally radiate. Each more responsible behavior improves our relationships over time.
MAP OF OVERWHELM
Overwhelm is one of the Box's favorite self-defense mechanisms:
STEP 1: Take on too much.
STEP 2: Feel overwhelmed.
STEP 3: Stop practicing.
STEP 4: Go back to normal.
Voilà! The Box wins. Very clever, Mr. Box.
Establishing responsible Adult attitudes and actions in our repertoire of behaviors is like paying the ante to get into a poker game. If we don’t pay the ante we can’t even start to play the game. Of course, paying the ante does not guarantee that we will win – it just gets us into the game. But if we don’t pay the ante there’s no chance at all of winning. The way to pay the ante in extraordinary human relationship is to practice relationship according to certain clear distinctions. The rest of this chapter is devoted to establishing those distinctions. It will present far more than you can reasonably be expected to absorb all at once. An individual can only manage to effectively advance one or two change-initiatives at any one time. Otherwise it is easy to feel overwhelmed and then to stop all efforts. If you stop all efforts, the Box wins. Overwhelm is one of the Box’s favorite self-defense mechanisms.
Pace yourself. What this means will be different for each person. Perhaps you can best pace yourself by first reading all the way through this chapter while making notes about what most interests you. Then you can go back to those items and start working with them. Or perhaps while reading you will find one or two practices that inspire you to take immediate action. In that case, start experimenting with only those few things, but on a regular basis. Whatever your approach, make the decision now to take persistent baby steps. In terms of change, stable results are more likely to blossom through micro-experiments repeatedly practiced over the long run with consistency, rather than through dramatic but sporadic sudden moves.
SECTION 6-B
Adult Ego State
Voices in Your Head
The maps, clarifications and experiments that follow are each aimed to get you into the “Adult ego state.” As we’ve previously noted, Dr. Eric Berne labeled three “ego states” or Boxes that we use throughout our days and our nights: the “Parent,” the “Adult,” and the “Child.” In Section 2-B we explored Parent and Child ego states. Here we will explore the Adult ego state.
First let us review. When identified with the Parent ego state, in our mind we hear either “nurturing Parent” or “critical Parent” voices that give us affirming or denying opinions about our self, about other people, or about what to do to survive a situation like this with people like them. But our Parent ego state voices are not our voice. These voices came from other people, perhaps from past authority figures like parents, teachers, relatives, or TV commercials. The voices were so important that we made them normal. When we left the source of the voices, we maintained our sense of normal by keeping the voices going inside our head.
If we listen to those voices at all, or grant them any credibility in our life, we are giving our power away to the authority that was long ago imagined to be behind those voices. To create extraordinary human relationship we need to take our power back. We need our own voice.
Realizing that the praising or blaming Parent-ego-state voices are not our voice does not necessarily make those voices go away. The voices can persist senselessly for years, simply from the momentum of habit, like a broken CD-player mechanically repeating the same track over and over again without purpose. Quite boring – especially for anyone forced to listen to us repeating what we hear the voices say.
If you think those old voices are useful think again. Voices do not make you good or bad, responsible or irresponsible. Voices cannot protect you or harm you. You cannot hide behind the voices. You cannot justify yourself with voices. You cannot blame the voices. Voices are completely irrelevant. It is what you do or not do that matters. Results are stark naked and voiceless. The results do not lie. The comments, judgments and opinions that come from the voices are not even ours, so we may as well get rid of the voices. But how? Dealing with voices becomes quite simple when you use your Voice Blaster®.
Voice Blaster
“They” probably never told you about your Voice Blaster. Every person is born with a Voice Blaster on their hip. Reach down; pull your Voice Blaster out of its holster and hold it in your hand. It looks like your hand pretending to be a pistol, but it is actually your own personal Voice Blaster.
Your Voice Blaster has always been there, ready for you to use. If you have never before used your Voice Blaster it is probably because it never occurred to you before. Expanding what is possible to occur to you is the business of this book. What you get here is the possibility that for the rest of your life it could occur to you to use your Voice Blaster.
The Voice Blaster (Mark IV) is an efficient modern weapon for vaporizing voices. The Blaster holds an infinite number of charges, so you never run out of ammunition, and a blast from the Voice Blaster never misses its target. Here are your Voice Blaster Operating Instructions: Shoot quickly in the direction of the voice and the “hunter seeker” function of the blast always finds its target. (“Hunter seeker” comes from Frank Herbert’s incredible book Dune, and in A. E. Van Vogt’s The Weapon Shops of Isher, guns protected the bearers by jumping into their hands and shooting whenever there was danger.) Please take note that voices that seem to be “in your head” are actually not in your head. Voices flutter around your head “out there” like a vampire bat flutters about its victim before it strikes for blood. The instant you sense a voice coming, whip out your Voice Blaster and “Bang!” Say it out loud, “Bang!” as you blast that voice right out of the sky.
MAP OF THE VOICE BLASTER
Instructions: Pull out the Voice Blaster, aim, pull the trigger “Bang!” and slide the Blaster back into its holster.
The voice either falls dead “Blop!” on the floor in front of you, or it flutters raggedly off, trying to come around for a second attack. Any voice that returns “Bang!” … dead again! “Bang! Bang! Bang!” Blast away, however many times it takes.
Sometimes voices present you with whiny little reasons why you should listen to them. They plead. They nag. They justify themselves. They pester. They tell you to be nice and obey the voice of reason from your elders. They tell you to be civilized and careful. They tell you that life without them would be terrible. If you listen and try to argue or reason with any voice at all, then you are already hooked and they’ve got you. The only conversation ever to have with a voice is “Bang!” End of conversation. Game over.
It may take a couple of months of repeated blasting before some of the more persistent voices decide they could probably get an easier blood-sucking meal with somebody for whom it does not yet occur to use their Voice Blaster.
Keep your Voice Blaster handy, even when you are in bed. You never know when you might be having sex with your partner and some little voices come around saying: “Remember what happened last time? That’s probably going t
o happen again this time! You will never make it. For sure you have bad breath. You are a clumsy sex partner anyway. He / she is not really attracted to you. You are not beautiful enough. You are not sexy enough. You do not look like Brad Pitt. You are not…” “Bang! Bang! Bang!” (It took you long enough to remember your Voice Blaster! Man, shoot those suckers quicker, before they even get a chance to say anything. You are not a victim of your voices. Just blast ‘em.) “Bang!” Then blow off your smoking pistol, spin it around your trigger finger, and drop it back into its holster ready for the next time. Welcome to the Adult ego state.
The Adult ego state speaks with your own authentic voice, and may be completely neutral and silent in circumstances where the nurturing or critical Parent voices are screaming their heads off. In using your own Adult voice you have your own power. Using your Voice Blaster is how to vanish pesky Parent-ego-state voices and anchor yourself into your Adult ego state.
Childhood Needs
The Child ego state includes both the “free natural” Child and the “scared needy adaptive” Child that originate with considerations from the past. Because it is childish, it communicates about being scared, needy and adaptive so as to avoid encountering uncomfortable things that have already happened to you, or to continue encountering “warm-fuzzy” experiences that are naively irrelevant.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 18