Greg's Real Love Blog

Dear Greg,

“This weekend I visited my parents, and I saw some things I had never noticed. I picked up some trash from the back seat of the car, and when my father saw me on my way into the house to throw it away, he attempted to make it easier for me by opening the garage door so I could just drop it in the trash can in the garage. From my mother’s reaction, you would have thought
he had just shot someone. She said, “What are you doing?! You’re letting all of the cool air out of the garage and letting all the hot air in!! How many times have I told you about that?” And this was accompanied by sighs and a tone of voice and a facial expression that screamed, “You are such an idiot! I can't believe how stupid you are.”

“Only six months ago I would have been on my mother’s side. If you had opened the door like that, I would have thought, ‘Use your head. Think. Look at all that electricity you’re wasting when you open the garage door in the middle of a hot afternoon.’ Worse, I would have thought I was being loving in correcting you, because I was showing you how to save money.

“As I watched my mother, my jaw hit the floor, because I realized that I have treated other people exactly like that on so many occasions. I realized that that’s why my ex-wife finally left me. And I was humbled to realize that I was well on my way to treating my own son the same way my mother had treated me. Until I studied Real Love I just didn’t know how controlling I’ve been.

“Later that afternoon I was driving somewhere in the truck with my father, and I shared what I had observed my mother do, as well as what I had learned about myself. He said, ‘I have put up with that from your mother for almost fifty years.’ I was speechless. But he didn’t stop there. He said, ‘I’m probably just more laid back than most people, so I let most of it go in one ear and out the other. Your ex-wife, on the other hand, just couldn’t put up with it.’

“All during his marriage, my father alternated between two choices. Sometimes he chose to live with the pig and hate it, and other times he chose to live with the pig and like it. My ex-wife chose to leave the pig. Until this past weekend, I never realized that I was the pig. I’m not beating myself up here, just seeing how much I was the cause of the problems in our marriage. I also see where I learned to behave as I did.

“But the best thing is that I’m still learning, and the more I learn, the more able I become to avoid repeating those old behaviors. I love that.”

This man destroyed his marriage with his criticizing and controlling, and he had no idea what he was doing. His wife tried to explain it to him, but he couldn’t hear it—partly because he genuinely didn’t understand her, partly because it’s all he knew (having been trained to behave that way from birth by his mother), and partly because his wife was telling him while she was angry and therefore screaming I don’t love you at him. Unable to see his behavior, he was absolutely doomed to repeat it. What else could he do? He could only do what he knew.

With an understanding of Real Love—and feeling the love of other people—he is now able to see his unproductive behaviors. He’s able to make wiser, more loving, more productive choices, and it’s making quite a difference in his life. The price of the lesson was high, to be sure—he lost his marriage—but that’s nothing compared to losing all the joy in his entire life. Now he can love his son instead of controlling him, and he can teach his son how to be loving. He might find another relationship, and with what he knows now, it WILL be different. Everything is different under the influence of Real Love.

A man—let’s call him George—called me to describe the unbearable pressure he was feeling from his family. They were a “tight-knit family,” he said. They had always “been close,” and now they were “relying on him to help them” with more and more things. His mother was sick and constantly needing his help to take her to the doctor, to come over and fix things around the house, to spend time with him on the phone, and so on. His father called to complain to George that his wife—George’s mother—was always miserable and never stopped complaining about pretty much everything. George’s brother was out of work and called to ask for money. His brother said he was too busy and didn’t have the gas money to go and help his mother out with her many needs. The list of demands on George was piling up to the point that George was about to go crazy, and to top it all off, his wife was becoming irritated that he was spending so much time with his mother, father, brothers, and some others in the family who also required his time and attention. He wanted to know what he could do. He felt trapped.

I get a great number of emails and phone calls from people who believe they are in impossible situations: with their spouses, their children, their parents, and other people in their lives. They feel trapped: No matter what they do, they disappoint the people who present them with lists of demands that are never fully satisfied. It’s a terribly frustrating way to live for everyone.

Let me share with you—as I did with George—an experience I once had with a couple of my children when they were young. We were beginning to walk outside in our backyard in the fall, as the leaves were well into the process of falling. Our house is surrounded by hardwoods, so when the winds blew, quite a number of leaves would fall with each gust. In an effort to provide them a moment of novelty, which children usually enjoy—and keeping in mind that my sense of humor is considered by some to be a bit bizarre—I suddenly gasped and said, “Oh no, the leaves are falling.”

The children looked at me with alarm, and I said, “What shall we do?”

With eyes wide, they shrugged their little shoulders, counting on me for the answer to this terrible situation.

So I ran to a nearby tree with branches that extended low to the ground, and I hastily began to gather up leaves on the grass, which I then skewered to the exposed tiny branches, using each branch like a spear. The children were relieved that there was something they could do in this emergency, and they gathered around me to help solve this problem. We worked as hard as we could, but each time the wind blew, more leaves fell.

When a heavy gust would blow, I would sometimes look around and say, “Oh no! What can we do? There are so many leaves! We’re falling behind.” And in those moments, a look of genuine panic and heavy concern would cloud the eyes and furrow the brows of those two little children.

I know, what a mean father, but I didn’t allow that childhood trauma to continue for long. After a few minutes of skewering leaves on branches, I laughed and said, “I’m just kidding.” I pointed to all the leaves on all the trees and said, “All the leaves will fall. They’re supposed to fall. And then we’ll rake them up into a big pile and throw you into them.” As I said this, I raked a pile of leaves together with my arms and put both of them into the pile, laughing. And then we had a leaf fight, throwing leaves at each other, having a great time playing with the leaves.

The instant those two children realized that they had no responsibility for gathering up the leaves and putting them back on the branches, their heavy emotional burden disappeared. In a single moment they were transformed from a state of fear to joy, and the same transformation is available to all of us as adults—any time we want it.

We are not responsible for putting the leaves back on other people’s trees. We are not responsible for other people’s happiness. We are responsible only to do whatever we can do, and to make the best choices we can make in any given moment, and if someone else isn’t happy with those choices, that is their problem—that is their leaf on the ground—not ours.

When we leave someone else’s leaf on the ground, it’s not a reflection of our not caring about them. It’s simply a recognition that we cannot be responsible for other people. In the end I am responsible for my happiness. You are responsible for yours. I am responsible to love you as well as I can, but you are still responsible for your happiness, and the moment I take responsibility for your happiness, you become less of a human being. You become less capable of being happy.

People may offer you responsibility for their happiness, but that doesn’t obligate you to take it. They may offer you the opportunity to pick up their leaves and pin them on their branches, but you do not have to take advantage of the offer. Make the best choices you can instead and enjoy a walk in your own backyard.

When we’ve been empty and afraid for a lifetime, we tend to settle into established routines of Getting and Protecting Behaviors that we eventually come to accept as normal. In many cases, we don’t notice these behaviors at all, even when they are destroying our happiness.

When we’re blind to our destructive behaviors, we need help of other people to identify them. On many occasions, when I have been lost in the wilderness of my Getting and Protecting Behaviors, I have needed the insights of other people in order to find my way out. And at times my insights have been similarly useful to others who have been lost and confused.

When people are accustomed to certain behaviors by a lifetime of use, however, they are often less than grateful when we try to point out to them the error of their ways. They become resistant and defensive, and for that reason we may have to temper our eagerness to guide and instruct them. Allow me to illustrate this concept by describing an interaction I once had with a friend, Dennis.

For some time Dennis had been complaining about his loneliness and misery. Despite my describing how he could find Real Love, he preferred to complain. He insisted on bringing one woman after another into his life, and, predictably, each failed to make him happy. Finally, after many conversations on the subject of women, his loneliness, and women again, I told him that he wasn’t ready for a relationship with any woman. I clearly described how he behaved like a victim most of the time, and I strong recommended that he learn how to find Real Love from men before he even thought about another date or encounter with a woman.

Predictably, he was offended and accused me of being harsh.

“How many times have we talked about your unhappiness?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

“Guess.”

“Oh, maybe six, eight times.”

“Easily twenty-five,” I said, “and in all that time have I said anything that got across to you the point that your unhappiness will not be cured with the companionship of a woman?”

“You’ve mentioned it.”

“But did I get it across? Did I say it in a way that made a difference?”

“No, I guess not.”

“So today I decided to try harder. I care about you enough that I’m not willing to stand by while you continue to destroy yourself. Now, you’re not obligated to do anything. I’m not trying to change you. That’s not my business. But I do get to choose what I will do, and I choose not to stand idly by while you continue to be miserable. Have you ever pounded a large nail into a board?”

Dennis paused before answering, wondering why I had changed the subject. “Sure,” he said.

“And if you try to drive the nail in by tapping it lightly with the hammer, what will happen?”

“You might get it to stick in the wood, but nothing more.”

“But what if you tap it lightly a lot of times? Twenty times?”

“You still won’t drive it in.”

“A hundred times?”

“No.”

“What will it take?”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you tap it lightly. You need to hit the nail hard maybe three or four times with the hammer—really firm blows.”

“Exactly, and that’s all I was trying to do with you. I do not claim that I did this right with you, but I do know that I tried tapping you lightly with the truth at least a couple of dozen times, and nothing happened. Probably never would have. Finally, I decided to hit you hard enough that it might sink in. I took the risk that you might be offended, and now you have a choice to make. You could choose to be offended—which will keep you blind to what I’m trying to say—or you could actually listen and learn something potentially very valuable. Your choice. I’ll be fine either way.”

I’m not advocating that we carelessly or unkindly pound other people with the truth. Hardly. I am saying, however, that on occasion we have to recognize that breaching the barriers of blindness requires more than a gentle hint, and if we’re not willing to take the risks that go along with that effort, we may not be able to help some people see the truth about themselves and find the happiness they need. Helping other people change their lives requires real courage. The rewards, however, are worth the risks.