Greg's Real Love Blogtag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2010:/blog/greg//12010-05-26T05:34:52ZLooking at the world through the clarifying lens of Real LoveMovable Type 3.36Growing Sunflowerstag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1332009-11-25T20:31:11Z2010-05-26T05:34:52ZI like sunflowers. Ringed by those outrageously yellow petals, their impossibly large heads stand ten feet in the air and perform a pendular dance every day as they follow the sun’s course across the sky. I’ve learned that if I...Greg Baer
seen the seeds that lead to love and joy.
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter how long we’ve been planting anger—or lying, or acting like victims, or running. We can choose to stop. We can tear up the plants that have grown from those seeds: our addictions to approval, control, and pleasure, among others, along with the misery that accompanies these addictions. We can plow the field and plant something new.
With every thought and every act, we plant seeds. We plant them in our own minds and hearts, and we plant them in the lives of others. What will you plant? It’s a choice, and the harvest is predictable. Examine each seed carefully. Just as the seeds of sunflowers and corn differ dramatically in their appearance, so do the seeds we plant in our lives. Anger looks nothing like loving. Blaming has no resemblance whatever to telling the truth about ourselves. Selfish demands have no similarity to thinking about the needs of others. Think about the fruit that each seed will yield, and make a choice to plant the seeds that will fill your soul with joy. Make a conscious choice not to plant the seeds that explode into the weeds that can literally choke out the light of the sun for you. Plant the seeds you really want to grow.
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Walking with Two Legstag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1322009-09-21T14:51:47Z2010-05-26T05:34:52ZI received the following letter from a member of the Real Love community, and I offer it to you without comment: In its simplest form the path to Real Love—and the lasting peace and happiness it produces—can be summarized as...Greg Baer
I received the following letter from a member of the Real Love community, and I offer it to you without comment:
In its simplest form the path to Real Love—and the lasting peace and happiness it produces—can be summarized as follows:
Tell the truth (about yourself).
Be seen.
Feel accepted.
Feel loved.
Start over with telling the truth and repeat for the rest of your life.
When we step into the Real Love process we usually enter it because we are in pain, and because we have been in and out of pain so many times in our lives that we’re confused. We’re looking for solutions, and although we’ve received partial answers from many sources, we still haven’t found what we’re looking for. Real Love provides those answers.
We’re in pain because we are empty, alone, and afraid. In order to eliminate this pain, we then chase the only things that have ever made us feel better, even though the results are temporary: praise, power, pleasure, safety, and the conditional love of others. From birth we have also learned to use the Getting and Protecting Behaviors that help us acquire as much Imitation Love as possible. We become addicted to these behaviors and to Imitation Love, just as surely as a heroin addict is addicted to heroin. Unfortunately, we return to our drugs of choice again and again, because their appeal is all we know. We haven’t even seen Real Love, so how would we ever pursue it?
The initial steps in Real Love can be difficult, because we must have faith in something we’ve never seen. We have to tell the truth about our addictions, and few of us enjoy that experience.
I see Real Love as a path we walk, and in order to walk effectively, we need two legs. Sure, you can bounce around on one leg, like I have for a long time, or you can learn to use both of your legs and begin to walk and maybe even run down the path of Real Love, which will lead you to lasting happiness and peace.
Let me describe the two legs we walk on. The first leg is an understanding of the Real Love principles, as spelled out in numerous books, CDs, and DVDs: the power of telling the truth, the Law of Choice, the Law of Responsibility, the Law of Expectations, Event-Judgment-Feeling-Reaction, and so on. With this first leg I learned to tell the truth about myself to myself. I was able to see my Getting and Protecting Behaviors. I saw my need to control, to be right, to limit other people’s choice, and to expect others to make me happy, and I was able to see how much conditional love there was in the world. I saw that I was addicted to Imitation Love. As I told these truths to myself—and occasionally in emails to others—I began to feel a happiness I had never felt before. It was amazing and so freeing.
So I was hopping on one leg down the path of Real Love, but in time I discovered that without a second leg I couldn’t really go any farther. With only the principles and myself, I ran out of energy. My sight was limited.
I needed a second leg, which I discovered involved the use of the Real Love community. There are very few people out there in the world of Imitation Love that can actually accept us for who we are, because they are users just as we are. But the people in the Real Love community offer love that often we can’t even comprehend initially, much less feel. They have the ability not only to accept us, but to help us tell the truth about ourselves. Without their unconditional love I could not have seen more of my getting and protecting behaviors, which I needed to do in order to feel even more loved and to make different choices.
Loving people throw us a rope or show us the way to the side of the pool, so we can stop drowning in the pool of Imitation Love. They give us choices we’ve never had and actually help us to make them. They can’t make the choices for us. They can’t keep pulling us out of the pool—because then we wouldn’t learn anything—but they can teach us to swim.
What I have come to treasure is that when I do get lose—when I jump back into the pool—I can simply make a call to someone in the Real Love community, who will give me some support and sometimes directions to the side of the pool, so I can pull myself out of the water. I need that help, because my addictions are strong. The lure of Imitation Love is always with us. We are not perfect. Telling the truth about ourselves is a life long continual process. You can always discover more truth.
I’m glad I have two legs—the principles of Real Love and the people who live them—and I encourage all of us to get out there and use both of them.
Life is So Hard—Or is It?tag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1312009-09-16T04:53:43Z2009-09-16T04:57:12Z“Life is hard.” “Life is pain.” How many times have we heard these words? And there’s the bumper sticker that reads, “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.” In the course of our lives, we certainly are presented with experiences...Greg Baer
we determine how difficult our lives are by the choices we make.
Years ago I took a large group of older Boy Scouts on a canoeing expedition to the Snake River in Idaho. I was aware of the challenging reputation of this section of the river, so for many months before we left I gave the boys considerable instruction in swimming, lifesaving, canoeing, camping, and other skills they would need. I explained that what they were learning would make their adventure both safer and far more enjoyable. I did not push them to learn anything but simply said that if they chose not to learn, the consequences of their ignorance would almost certainly be unpleasant. Nearly all of the boys were eager to learn everything they could, but a few listened half-heartedly and prepared themselves poorly.
When we arrived at the river, it was everything it had been advertised to be. In many places the descent of the canyon was quite steep, so the water moved very swiftly and created violent rapids that crashed against the many rocks and boulders that lay in the river bottom. The swirling water created eddies and whirlpools that were easily capable of entrapping and submerging a canoe and its occupants. These combinations of water and stone were quite capable of killing people—by direct trauma or by drowning—and had done so on many occasions in years past.
How did the boys respond to this? It depended on their preparation and their subsequent choices. Most of the boys had thoroughly absorbed the lessons of the previous months, so they were prepared for the river and had a wonderful time. They guided their canoes expertly through the passages in the rapids and avoided the perils that thrust up at every angle in the maze of jagged boulders. Rather than being afraid, they were exhilarated as they flowed along with the great force of the river, quite aware that they were constantly flirting with the cusp of danger.
A few boys, however, had prepared less diligently and chose to make decisions that were less wise about their paddling and their course in the river. These boys had little control over their canoes and were soon slammed by the current from one rock to another until their canoes tipped over, throwing them into the fast-moving—and cold—water. We fished them out of the water and retrieved their canoes for them, only to repeat the process more than once when they fell out again.
For many boys, this trip was the greatest adventure of their lives, and they reminisced about it for years—with me, with each other, and with their families and friends. For some of the boys, however, the trip was just another in a long line of huge inconveniences and sources of discomfort and irritation.
Observing the experiences of all the boys, I couldn’t help but conclude that the river itself was not “hard.” It simply flowed, providing opportunities for people to make choices. Some of them chose wisely and had an exciting and enjoyable experience, while others chose foolishly and suffered the consequences of unhappiness and even injury. Life works the same way.
Throughout our lives, the current of time rushes on inexorably, taking us past the jagged edges of experiences that can either be exhilarating or tear us to pieces. It’s not the current itself, however, that determines the outcome of our lives but the choices we make. In the absence of Real Love, we fight and claw for every available morsel of Imitation Love. We protect ourselves from every injustice and injury, real and imagined. We bounce from one rock to another, exhausted, fearful, angry, and bleeding, and life seems “hard” indeed.
But we can learn to choose more wisely. We can choose to take responsibility for our mistakes and feelings. We can choose to find and share unconditional love, and as we make these choices we float with relative ease and without pain past the rocks that would otherwise injure us. We float past the whirlpools that would suck us in and drown us. We can choose to avoid fear and anger and choose instead to live a life of faith and love. This is not a hopeful fantasy. On many occasions I have seen many people make these wise choices. I have watched them laugh as they have sailed past the rocks and other dangers of life that previously would have tipped them over into the cold, miserable water, where they would have complained that life was “so hard.”
Happiness is a choice. If you’re finding that life is hard, that is a choice too. But you can begin to make different choices. One step at a time, you can tell the truth about yourself instead of blaming others, or acting like a victim, or withdrawing. You can choose to understand people instead of criticizing them. As we make these choices, we shed the heavy burdens of anger and bitterness. We discover that life can be beautiful and free and relatively easy. In the beginning, these decisions and this way of living may seem a little strange—even frightening—but if we exercise faith and persist, we soon experience the rewards. We begin to glide by the rocks and whirlpools of life, instead of being crushed and drowned by them, as we have experienced so often in the past.
As we immerse ourselves in the truth we discover that we create opportunities to receive unconditional acceptance and love in our lives. And it comes naturally and without any effort at all. Soon we gain the capacity to share this love with others, and under these conditions—receiving and giving love—life isn’t hard at all. It’s pure joy, even when the circumstances around us appear to be challenging, even when the current is swift and the rocks are many.
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Partnership and The Veto Principle tag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1302009-09-03T14:33:13Z2009-09-03T14:45:49ZI recently spoke with a man, Louis, who had been experiencing a recurring conflict with his wife, Barbara. Her brother had asked her for a loan, but Louis believed that they couldn’t afford it and that his brother-in-law would never...Greg Baer
could afford it, that he would pay them back, and—with special emphasis—that making the loan was simply the right and Christian thing to do. Louis complained that every couple of days Barbara was pressuring him to change his position on this issue, and his frustration was rapidly growing. We arranged for the three of us to meet.
After they had both taken their seats in my living room, I asked, “Would either of you like to offer a definition of marriage?”
They each made a couple of suggestions, which included the words partnership and union. “You would both agree then,” I said, “that marriage is a kind of partnership?”
They both nodded their heads.
“Partnerships have enormous potential advantages,” I said. “That’s why we create them: between people, animals, and even objects. For thousands of years, for example, men have partnered two oxen, because they have observed that two oxen can pull twice the load that one ox could pull. In this case, 1+1 = 2. But partners can often create miraculous results, far beyond simple mathematical sums, such that 1+1 can equal far more than just 2. For example, by itself how fast can a car engine move, and what can it carry?”
“By itself an engine can’t move at all,” Louis said. “It just sits there.”
“How about a car tire? By itself, what can it move?”
“Not much.”
“By itself, a tire isn’t good for much except to roll down a hill or decorate your front yard—depending on your neighborhood. But if you attach four tires to four wheels, connect a few other parts, and then partner them with that engine we just talked about, a real miracle in transportation becomes possible. Even though an engine and a tire are quite different in their qualities, if we partner them properly, the result can be quite productive. The same is true with a marriage partnership. When two people marry, they often possess qualities that are quite different, but if they are willing to share what they have as partners, the yield to themselves and to others can be remarkable. The sum of 1+1 can equal much more than 2.”
It was obvious that Louis and Barbara were following this, so I continued. “The benefits of such a partnership are possible, of course, only if each person accepts the unique qualities of the other partner. What would happen, for example, if the engine persuaded the tires to become more like the engine, so that instead of an engine and four tires, we had two engines?”
“The car wouldn’t move,” Barbara said.
“And 1+1 would equal useless,” I said. “So it is with a marriage. If Louis tries to get you to become like him, or if you try to get him to become like you, you would lose the benefits that come from the unique assets you each bring to your marriage. Sometimes we think we want to change our partners, but we fail to realize what we’d lose in the process. So the point is that in order to enjoy the benefits of partnerships, we must also accept the principles that govern them. One of these principles—as we just discussed—is that we must accept our partners and not try to control them. But let me talk for a moment about another principle that governs healthy partnerships. I believe you’ll find it useful in resolving your conflict about the possible loan to Barbara’s brother.”
“Louis just doesn’t trust my brother,” Barbara said with considerable impatience. “I don’t think Louis trusts me either. He doesn’t believe me when I say that my brother will pay us back, and Louis doesn’t understand that it’s just the nice thing for us to do.”
“See what I mean?” Louis said. “For weeks she’s been saying stuff like, and I’m tired of it. Then she even says, ‘What would Jesus do?’ That one makes me crazy.”
I raised my hand to stop their argument. “I assume that on plenty of occasions you’ve both stated your positions on this issue, so there’s no good reason to go over them again. Would that be fair to say?”
They both nodded and shrugged their shoulders.
“So let me suggest a principle that might help you come to an agreement here. In any partnership—business, political, or marital—we potentially gain advantages or strengths, but one of the reasons for these advantages is that we agree to function as a unit with our partners. This means that, to varying degrees, we no longer function entirely separately from our partners. We agree that before we make decisions that will affect our partners or our partnership, we will consult with them. If we did not do this, there would be no partnership and therefore none of the advantages from the partnership. To illustrate, let’s go back to the car engine and imagine that engines and tires could make their own decisions. What if the engine decided to go east while the tires decided to go west? How would that work out? Or what if the tires decided to rotate in reverse while the engine decided to move in a forward direction?”
“Impossible. Or it would destroy the car,” Louis said.
“Right,” I said. “and if engines and tires could make decisions, neither would want to make decisions that conflicted with the interests of the other, because the moment they did that, the car would malfunction, and all the advantages of working in partnership would immediately disappear. The car would become useless, which would make both the engine and the tires essentially useless. The situation is quite similar in a marriage partnership.”
“Explain,” Barbara said.
“If I’m married to you—if I’m your partner—and I make a decision that will affect both of us, without your willing consent, what am I saying about my feelings for you? Am I telling you that I unconditionally care about your happiness?”
Barbara smiled sarcastically. “No, hardly.”
“Exactly. Anytime I insist on making a decision that affects you, or that affects both of us, without your agreement, I’m telling you that I do not care about you, and that will have a terrible effect on our relationship, won’t it?”
“Yes.”
“I may rationalize that what I’m trying to do is right, but when I begin to make decisions without your participation and agreement, I will have a destructive effect on the Real Love in our relationship. We will no longer be working together as partners, and from that point everything we do—together and individually—will be less effective and less enjoyable. Do you want your marriage to be less effective and less enjoyable?”
They shook their heads.
“So I suggest that couples apply what I call the Veto Principle in their relationships. The Veto Principle goes like this: Either partner has the right to stop any activity that affects him or her in an unavoidable and negative way.”
“Explain that some more,” Barbara said.
“Glad to. Suppose you and I are married, and we’re driving somewhere together. I’m the driver. Suddenly, at seventy miles an hour, I announce that I intend to drive our car into one of the oncoming eighteen-wheeled trucks that is thundering down the road at frequent intervals. Is that fair? Or would you like the right to veto my proposal?”
“I’d like the veto.”
“Of course you would. Hence the Veto Principle. No loving relationship could exist without the right of either partner to veto any activity that would injure or frighten or otherwise negatively affect him or her. And no loving partner would want to make decisions that would unavoidably and negatively affect his or her partner. If I care about you, I would not intentionally drive you into the path of an oncoming truck. I would give you the right to veto that choice. If I really cared about you, I would always give you the right to stop any activity that affected you negatively, right?”
“Right.”
“Now, notice the language of the principle: ‘Either partner has the right to stop any activity that affects him or her in an unavoidable and negative way.’ I emphasize the word unavoidable because otherwise some people might tend to use the veto principle to control their partners. For example, let’s say that I decide to watch football all day. You might attempt to veto that activity, claiming that it affects you negatively, claiming that it keeps you from spending time with me. True?”
Barbara smiled. “The thought did occur to me as you brought up watching football.”
“But my choice doesn’t have an unavoidably negative affect on you. If I choose to watch football all day, you still have hundreds of other choices to make that could make you happy. My choice does not determine what you do.”
“Let me suggest a second consideration in the use of the Veto Principle,” I continued. “Most people consider the veto as a kind of weapon they can use to stop their partner’s behavior, but that is a selfish view. Ideally, the veto is freely offered by one partner to the partner who would be inconvenienced or injured. Imagine, for example, that I’m tired of mowing the lawn, so I decide that I’m going to replace all the lawn in my yard with an enormous concrete pad. Much easier to maintain in the long run.
“One approach would be for me to simply begin work on the lawn removal and the laying of forms for pouring of the concrete. Then my wife—who would not find an all-concrete lawn attractive—would be forced to state her right to a veto. But a second approach is much more loving: Before I even finalize the concrete decision in my mind, I will talk to Donna and ask her what she would like. As I do this, I am demonstrating an interest in her feelings, and I’m offering her the veto, rather than requiring her to pull it from her holster like a gun. Ideally, this is how the veto should be used.
“The Veto Principle is not intended to be a weapon that we use against our partners in an effort to protect ourselves and get what we want. If I use the Veto Principle to control my partner, it will tend to detract from the love in our relationship. If, on the other hand, I use the Veto Principle to control my own behavior, the Veto will communicate a genuine concern to my partner for her happiness and will add significantly to the Real Love in our relationship. Now, with all this in mind, can you apply this to your situation with the loan?”
Barbara appeared thoughtful before she said, “So you’re telling me that Louis has the right to veto the loan to my brother, and that I should just tell my brother to forget it, even though I think it’s the right and Christian thing to do?”
I smiled. “You may not have realized it, Barbara, but you just went through your entire argument again, trying to prove your case. You believe that the loan is justified because he’s your brother, right? You believe you can’t refuse a request from family. You also think the loan is justified because you believe he’ll pay you back. And you believe it’s the Christian thing to do. All that, yes?”
“Yes.”
“But despite all that, Louis simply disagrees with you. And he gets to. Engine and tires, darlin’. You two are simply different, and if this marriage is going to work, you have to allow each other to be different. You have to support each other while you’re different, not just when you agree. Even though you’re different, you have to be going in the same direction, and that can only happen while you both feel loved and supported by the other. Are you with me so far?”
“Mostly.”
“How would you feel about me if you knew that I would never, ever do anything that would hurt you or frighten you or affect you in a negative way? What if you knew that if you felt the least bit afraid or even inconvenienced, all you had to do was put up your hand, and I would stop doing whatever was contributing to your negative feelings? How would you feel toward me? Would you trust me? Would you feel like I cared about you?”
“Yes.”
“That is what the Veto Principle is all about. It’s a communication of love between partners. It’s a way of saying, ‘I will never intentionally hurt you.’ We may not entirely understand the thinking of our partner. We don’t have to. That’s the beauty of the veto. If I really care about my partner, she doesn’t have to explain herself to me when she exercises her veto.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Most of the times that people vehemently object to an activity, they’re afraid of something, and—with rare exceptions—we simply don’t have a right to frighten or injure people. Sometimes people can explain their need and fears, but often they cannot, because most fears are irrational. If my partner can’t adequately explain the fears that underlie her veto, I don’t care. My love for her is enough reason for me to accept her objection.”
“So you’re saying that Louis gets to control this loan,” Barbara said.
“Oh, that would be a terrible way to see this. I’m saying this: A decision about a loan has presented itself before the Barbara-Louis partnership. You would grant the loan, but for reasons that may not be clear to you—fears you may not understand, perhaps—Louis disagrees. Compared to the importance of the maintenance and growth of the Real Love in your marriage, this loan means nothing. So the real decision that lies before the Louis-Barbara partnership is this: What will we do here that will increase the love in our marriage? You are in complete control of that. By comparison, the veto of the loan is a tiny matter indeed. It’s insignificant. So what will you focus on: a loan to your brother, or the love in your marriage? Will you see this as Louis controlling a tiny thing, or you being in control of all the happiness in your life and your relationship? It’s all your choice.”
“I recognize,” I continued, “that you also have fears around this decision. You are probably afraid not to give the loan, because if you don’t, your brother will not be happy with you.”
“That’s true,” she said.
“So you might be tempted to believe that the Veto should work in your favor, that Louis should agree to give your brother the loan so that you are not affected in a negative way. But it doesn’t work like that. What you’re contemplating is a decision whether to loan the money—which is a change from the way things are—and the Veto affects that decision, or any decision to do something. You can’t use the Veto in a twisted way, to claim that not doing something would affect you negatively, thereby forcing your partner to do what you want. If we did that, one partner could say to the other, for example, ‘I will be negatively affected by your not having sex with me, so I veto your not having sex with me, and now you must have sex with me.’ We can’t use the Veto Principle to control people and get them to do what we want.”
Several days after Barbara and Louis left my office, I learned that Barbara did decide to accept the Veto Principle, and she told her brother that they would not be giving him the loan. As a result of this demonstration of love and trust for Louis, he experienced a change of heart and decided that they could loan half the amount to her brother that he had originally requested. What really mattered, however, was not the giving of the loan but that Louis and Barbara learned to love and trust each other as a result of living a principle.
In short, the essence of the Veto Principle is that I will choose not to continue in any task or activity that unavoidably causes my partner inconvenience or harm or fear. I also want my partner to feel free to stop me from causing such a negative influence at any time, because I want her to feel my love for her. As we all choose to live in such a way, our relationships can only flourish.
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Real Love—Doing Vs. Feelingtag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1262009-08-06T16:48:08Z2009-08-06T16:57:36ZRecently I was asked the following insightful question: “Real Love sounds like a noble goal, but if we really love people unconditionally, won’t we end up loving everybody the same? I can’t imagine loving everybody the same as my wife,...Greg Baer
unconditionally, won’t we end up loving everybody the same? I can’t imagine loving everybody the same as my wife, for example. It seems like Real Love would cheapen the love I have for my wife or my children.”
First let’s address the imprecise way we tend to use the word love. When people talk about love they’re almost always referring to a confusing combination of actions and feelings, so we need to clearly identify these components before we can understand any discussion about love.
Unconditional love is a choice we make to care about the happiness of others without expecting anything in return, and we demonstrate this caring with our thoughts, words, and behavior. Loving is something we DO, and this is possible with a wide variety of people. The question is, can we unconditionally love some people—the “special people” in our lives—more? Of course.
In order to illustrate this, let me describe my relationship with Donna, my wife and My Favorite Person in the World. I try—with varying degrees of success—to love everyone unconditionally, so how is my relationship with Donna different? How is it special? How can I love her without conditions—as I attempt to do with other people—but also love her more than I do others? If I love her more than others, wouldn’t that necessarily be conditional on some characteristic she possessed or on something she did?
First, when I married Donna I made a commitment to put her first—to share more of my unconditional love with her than with anyone else. This is a choice I continue to make, which is not conditional on anything she does. If Donna requests my time, for example, I am far more inclined to stop what I’m doing for her than for anyone else. In terms of effort and inconvenience, I am willing to sacrifice more for her than for anyone else. And, finally, there are certain activities that I will share with no one but her. In a number of ways, then, our relationship is unique, despite my efforts to unconditionally love many people.
The more often we express our unconditional love for any person, the more connected we become to that person and the more we want to love that person. Most of us have seen this confirmed on many occasions where we or others have become engaged in acts of service—when we go on medical missions, serve in soup kitchens, visit the sick in hospitals, and so on. The more I serve Donna’s needs, the more connected to her I feel, and then I care about her happiness all the more. The act of loving begets more of the same.
But now we need to talk about the feeling of love, because this is where most people get confused. When people say that they love their partners and their children more than they love everyone else, they’re usually talking about a feeling. Real Love, however, is not primarily a feeling. Real Love is a conscious choice to care about the happiness of another person. As I care about the happiness of another, though—Donna, for example—the natural result IS a feeling. When I choose to love Donna, I feel wonderful, even if she gives me nothing in return. Let me illustrate this with a story.
A couple of years ago Donna had a major surgical procedure, after which she was in pain and unable to take care of herself. I had her transferred to a special wing of the hospital where I could stay in her room and take care of her around the clock. I was thrilled by this opportunity to care for her. I got up every two hours through the night to give her intravenous pain medication, so she wouldn’t be awakened by her pain and have to ask for relief. She couldn’t get up or roll over without help, and this gave me an opportunity to serve her with no thought for what I would receive in return. The more I took care of her, the more I found that I enjoyed it.
What was going on here? What I was doing was loving her. But what was I feeling? If you had asked me during the experience about my feelings, I might have said that I was feeling “love” toward her, and this is where the confusion arises in so many relationships. We often use the word love when it would be more correct to use the word enjoyment or happiness or gratitude. With my thoughts and behavior I was loving Donna, and, as a result, what I was feeling was happiness.
The feeling that naturally results from being loving is happiness. This naturally occurs because when we’re loving we bring ourselves in harmony with the most positive and powerful force in the universe. Love is the natural order of things. It is the universal, creative force. When we’re loving, we’re at peace with the laws of the universe. When we’re not loving, however, we’re in conflict with everything that is good and true, and we can only be unhappy. Again, allow me to illustrate with Donna. As I love her, I find that I am genuinely happier. I am motivated to be even more loving toward her, because I am simply happier when I behave in a loving way toward her. I enjoy how she feels when I’m loving, and I enjoy how I feel. I can hardly help myself. This happens whether she appreciates what I do or not.
This brings us back to the original question: Is it possible for us to simultaneously love many people unconditionally but still have a special love for certain people in our lives, like spouses, children, and others? The answer is now obvious. We can unconditionally love many people, but we can share that love to a much greater degree with certain people in our lives, and, as a result, enjoy a more profound happiness with them. No matter who we share Real Love with, however, our lives are greatly enriched by the experience.
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The Cotton Candy Treetag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1242009-07-14T00:18:38Z2009-11-25T20:30:47ZMany years ago I was out in the garden pulling weeds with a couple of our children. At one point my son Joseph asked, “Dad, what makes something a weed?” I thought that was pretty insightful, especially since none of...Greg Baer
were desired. In most cases, I added—because I was tired of pulling them—it seemed that weeds grew much faster than the plants around them. Certainly that was true for the weeds we were pulling that day, which threatened to overwhelm the beets and carrots we were trying to save.
Had we failed to weed the garden that day, we would have lost only a few rows of vegetables. Far more serious are the weeds that infest the gardens of our minds and souls, the weeds that distract us emotionally and spiritually and thereby destroy our happiness. These weeds, which come in the form of Imitation Love and Getting and Protecting Behaviors, grow quickly to the size of bushes and then trees, which take over our entire garden. Moreover, these insidious weed-trees bear a variety of fruits that we thoroughly enjoy—praise, power, pleasure, and safety—so we become quite reluctant to pull them up or cut them down.
Imagine that we’re trying to grow a field of beans and corn, which would create a diet sufficient to sustain our lives. But throughout our field are large trees that have sprung up with little or no conscious effort on our part to plant them or take care of them, and these trees have enormous branches covered with leaves that block out the sunshine needed by our beans and corn. But we are reluctant to cut down these trees, because every branch produces abundant swirls of cotton candy, which is delicious—so delicious, in fact, that we have become addicted to it and cannot live without it, not even for a few hours.
Even though the cotton candy tastes wonderful—no doubt of that—there is simply no nutritious value to it, so slowly we begin to starve to death, no matter how much we eat. If we are to survive, we must cut down the trees, to allow the sunlight to reach our beans and corn. We must tend to the real crops, which requires more effort, but which—in the long term—will save and sustain our lives.
And so it is in real life. Without any effort on our part, the seeds of Imitation Love are planted constantly, and they grow at astonishing rates—like weeds on steroids—bearing abundant fruit all the while. Oh, there’s no doubt that Imitation Love tastes good—just like cotton candy—but soon the weeds become trees that block out the sun and make the growth of Real Love and happiness impossible.
This is why we must tell the truth about the Imitation Love in our lives—and about the Getting and Protecting Behaviors we use to gather it—so we can begin the process of tearing up the weeds that are preventing us from being happy. We must exercise faith that if we give up the cheap and immediate thrills of eating cotton candy, we will harvest an emotional and spiritual feast that will be both nourishing and joyful.]]>
So Many Alonetag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1212009-05-08T13:40:09Z2009-05-08T13:41:39ZRecently I had the opportunity to visit a state prison, functioning as the spokesman for a prisoner who was appearing before the parole board in the hope of obtaining parole after spending ten years in the care of the state’s...Greg Baer
five to one. There were fewer than twenty of us at the tables, while there were more than a hundred men who didn’t have a single soul who cared enough about them to show up on that day to offer support. Is it any mystery how so many people end up in prison? With such an obvious lack of love in their lives, they reach out for anything that will fill their emptiness, and it’s regrettable that so many of the things that fill that void—anger, violence, money, sex, power, and so on—stretch or break the limits of social and legal acceptability.
A great many of us feel tragically alone. But there is hope. We can learn to see this condition in each other, and as we reach out to connect, this deadly sense of separation vanishes. Our emptiness disappears, and we no longer act out in the ways that bring us before the courts and cause us to be taken to prison. Nor do we act out in the ways that destroy marriages and children. Wherever I go, whether I’m counseling couples or talking to children or visiting men in prison, I’m impressed with how consistently it is “always about Real Love.”
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Asking for Helptag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1192009-04-10T18:12:25Z2009-04-10T18:26:57ZEarlier today I received a call from a man, Bob, who is engaged and making preparations to get married. He and his fiancée both own their own homes, so they made a decision that he would sell his home and...Greg Baer
difficult, they’re almost always using difficult as a code word for afraid. Rarely, however, do they realize this, much less what exactly they are afraid of. I knew this when I spoke to Bob, but I was asking the question just to get the conversation started.
“Let’s look at some of the negative things that could happen as a result of your asking Shirley for help, because as you recognize them, simply bringing them into the light may make you less afraid. The unknown is usually more frightening than what we can see. And we might be able to come up with a plan for overcoming some of these obstacles. So, think about it. Picture yourself asking her to help you with the decorating, the house selling, the contractor, everything. What could happen?”
He paused for quite a while before he answered. “It might not be the way I want.”
“Excellent,” I said. “If you ask for help, you might lose some control over things, right?”
“Yes,” he said, with a tone of surprise. “I never thought of it that way. I never thought of myself as a control freak.”
“We all like to control things to be our way to a certain extent. And now you get to learn a powerful lesson. Why are you getting married?”
“Because I love her.”
“Really?”
“I think so,” he said.
“And really loving her would mean to care about her happiness, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Which would mean learning a whole new way of doing things. It would mean learning to do things in a way that contributes to the happiness of the two of you, not just the way you want to do things, which is how you’ve been accustomed to living. Being married means doing things together as a unit. It means losing some of that control you just said you were afraid of losing.”
“Hmm.” He knew there was more coming.
“So, if you ask for help here, you’re concerned about losing control, but asking for help and losing control is exactly what you need to do. You need let go of control and let someone else into your life so you can learn to love, learn to be loved, and learn to be a couple. You already know how to be alone and in control, and that hasn’t made you all that happy. Understand what I’m saying?”
“Yesss . . .”
“There’s a but in there.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re still wondering if you let her start doing things, she might just screw up and make a mess of things.”
“Yeah.”
“She might actually do that on occasion. And that’s when the two of you will learn how to work together as a loving couple. These apparently minor occasions are actually critical. They begin to establish the pattern for the remainder of your relationship. Consider what is important to you. Do you want a particular thing done your way, or do you want to build the unconditional love in your relationship? If you control everything she does, you might as well live by yourself for the rest of your life. If you control her, you’ll just turn her into an extension of yourself, and that is not a partnership. It will kill any feeling of love between you. On the other hand, you don’t have to accept every form of help she offers. If she’s helping you in a way you just can’t live with, speak up and say something. Tell her you really would prefer she do whatever-it-is a different way. You will spend your whole lives together practicing the principles of Real Love, and you start right now, by asking for help. Making sense so far?”
“Sure.”
“Now let’s talk about a second fear you might have. What if you ask her for help, and she lets you down? You need quite a bit of help. What if she just isn’t there for you as much as you need, and you’re disappointed? Does that bother you?”
“Yeah, it does.”
“How many people in your life have consistently been there for you whenever you’ve needed them?”
“Zero.”
“So it would be a significant fear for you that if you asked for help you might be disappointed. But we all live with that. There just might be occasions when she’ll deliver less than you’d like. But until you ask for help, you also won’t get any help at all. You’ll be pushing away all the opportunities for her to demonstrate that she cares about you. You’ll feel alone and unloved. So why not let her try? Why eliminate all the opportunities for love, just because there might be a few occasions when she’ll love you less than you’d hoped? That would be like deciding to never eat again because you’re afraid that an occasional meal might be disappointing.”
“I get the point.”
“Here’s a third reason you might be afraid to ask Shirley for help, and it’s a variation on the first reason. You might be afraid that she would use this as an opportunity to control you, to tell you what to do. Shirley is pretty outspoken, while you’re fairly quiet, and this would give her a chance to intrude and control you.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Who else in your life did this?”
“My mother, every chance she got.”
“So, what could you do so that you could feel less afraid of being controlled?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just tell the truth about it. Always deal with the truth. When you ask for her help, tell her about this fear. Tell her that you’re afraid of being controlled. Tell her that it’s an old fear—not about Shirley—one that came from interactions with your mother. Then propose a solution, because you don’t want this to get in the way of the love in your relationship. It’s always about keeping and building love. If an occasion arises where you feel like she’s telling you what to do—whether she actually is or not—you’ll give her some kind of indication that you’re feeling anxious. You could agree on a hand sign (raising your hand like a stop sign) or a set of words (‘I need to pause here to talk about this step’) or something that would bring everything to a stop. At that point, whatever is going on needs to stop until you feel like you’re being listened to and a course of action is being taken that you agree with.”
“But then what would I say?”
“Easy. In a calm, non-defensive way, you tell her what you need from her in the way of help. If she persists in doing something her way—where she is not listening to you—you tell her that she has three choices: (1) She can help you your way and like it; or (2) help you your way and hate it; or (3) not help you at all. Remember, she is helping you, and you really do get to decide how she helps you, or whether she helps you at all. Would that make you feel more comfortable?”
“Oh yeah. I just never thought about all those options.”
“There’s possibly a fourth reason you would find it difficult to ask Shirley for help. When you were a kid and asked people questions, or asked people for help, did people ever make you feel weak or stupid?”
“All the time.”
“Is that playing a factor here?”
“Yes. I feel like all this is stuff I should be able to handle by myself, so if I ask for help, that makes me both stupid and weak. A real man should be able to handle all this, and I’m really feeling overwhelmed. I don’t like this feeling very much.”
“That’s a huge advantage of having a partner. You now have someone who complements you, which means someone who fills out what you don’t have, who completes you. How can you take advantage of that huge gift unless you ask her to help you? Not asking would be kind of stupid, wouldn’t it? That would be kind of like getting a new car and not turning on the key, because you were afraid that you might get a flat tire, or you might wear out the engine, or you might have other problems. Yes, you might have all those problems, but so what? That just goes with having a car. You can’t have benefits without risks. Relationships are like that. Love is like that. If you want all the rewards of love and a partnership—which are abundant beyond expression—you have to start taking the risks, and it starts right now. You have to start asking her for help. You have to start getting intimate, which begins with moments like this. Are you willing?”
Bob decided he was willing to take the risks.
As we seek closer relationships with others, it is inevitable that we ask for help, ask questions, tell the truth about ourselves, and inconvenience each other. In the process we will make mistakes—lots of them. Taking risks and making mistakes, in fact, is required, and if we are willing to make them, we will be showered with the sweet rewards of Real Love and the intimate relationships we seek.
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The Nature of Disappointmenttag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1172009-03-19T18:45:37Z2009-03-19T18:52:06ZOn many occasions I have defined Real Love as caring about the happiness of others without any thought of return for ourselves. It is not Real Love when I do what you want and you like me. That is simply...Greg Baer
disappointment and irritation that separate Real Love from all the pretenders.
I have been asked repeatedly, however, “Is all disappointment selfish? Isn’t a certain amount of disappointment normal? In some circumstances couldn’t disappointment be compatible with Real Love?”
The nature of disappointment varies from one situation to another. Sometimes it’s selfish and unloving, while on other occasions it is not. Let’s suppose I ask you to do something for me, say, spend some time with me. You refuse, and I am deeply disappointed. I carry this disappointment around with me for several hours, perhaps even days. In fact, I resent you a bit for refusing my “request” and feel somewhat less inclined to respond positively to any request you might make of me in the future. In this case my disappointment is selfish, and I have proven that when I “asked” you to spend time with me, I wasn’t making a genuine request. I was really making a veiled demand, with an attached expectation that you would give me what I wanted.
Now let’s imagine another occasion where I ask you to spend some time with me. Again you refuse and again I feel some disappointment, but this time my disappointment is both mild and short-lived. I also feel no change in my affection toward you, nor am I reluctant to grant any request you might make of me. This kind of disappointment is not selfish. When we don’t get what we ask for, some disappointment is natural. After all, the whole reason we ask for something is that we actually want it, so not getting it naturally involves some disappointment. But if we’re making a true request—as opposed to a demand—the disappointment we feel is slight and brief.
If we make a request, it is accompanied by a healthy hope that our request will be fulfilled. If that request is not fulfilled, it’s natural that we are mildly disappointed—although it’s possible that even mild disappointment will not be experienced. Our happiness is certainly not diminished. It should be noted that we are capable of making true requests only if we feel sufficiently loved unconditionally. If we are empty and afraid, we feel compelled by the desperation of our pain to make demands, with their attendant expectations and exaggerated disappointments.
Can we feel unconditionally loved and still have expectations? Of course. In business, if I pay you to deliver a package to my door by a specific date, I will expect you do make that delivery. Even in friendship, if you promise to meet me at a certain place at a specific time, I will expect you to be there. Both expectations are reasonable, but if I feel sufficient Real Love in my life, my happiness will not depend on your filling my expectations. Then if you should fail to deliver the package on time, or fail to meet me at the appointed hour, I would not be irritated or unhappy. I might feel disappointment, but it would be only superficial in character and brief in duration.
It is simply a part of life that sometimes we will not get exactly what we want. Because people are mortal and flawed, they often will break their promises, inconvenience us, and otherwise fail us. Sometimes our plans will be obstructed in ways that won’t involve people at all: a flat tire, rain on a picnic, a malfunctioning computer, and so on.
All of these deviations from our plans are potential disappointments, but with our preparation we can determine entirely how they affect us. If we have sufficient Real Love—which we can all find, with enough faith and a little effort—we can tolerate and even thrive with a great number of these occasions where circumstances go contrary to our plans. With enough Real Love, disappointments take their proper place as minor inconveniences, rather than sources of frustration and unhappiness. As always, it’s about love, not about the people and events around us.
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It’s Real Love That Everyone Needstag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1152009-02-13T16:01:58Z2009-02-13T16:05:08ZWith Real Love, nothing else matters; without it, nothing else is enough. People who behave badly are simply reacting with Getting and Protecting Behaviors to the painful emptiness and fear that result from a lack of Real Love. When people...Greg Baer
how they got there, what they really need, and how very much we’re like them. We all need Real Love. We all behave in similar ways when we don’t have enough love. We all have a desire to tell the truth about ourselves and be accepted and loved by those around us. We also have a desire to hear the truth about others and to accept and love them. We just need to understand the process and begin to create those opportunities. As we do that, we’ll find the happiness we’ve always wanted.
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A Tale of Two Victimstag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1132009-01-31T14:36:47Z2009-01-31T14:53:09ZAllow me to tell you about two men, John and Michael. When I met them, they had both been married for more than ten years, and they shared the painful bond of each being married to a consummate victim. Despite...Greg Baer
Real Love, but he didn’t know how to apply what he’d read to his own situation.
First I talked to Michael a little about Sandra’s behavior, so he could understood her. I helped him see how she had always seen the world as a victim and manipulated everyone around her with guilt and anger to get what she wanted, which was mostly power and safety.
“Do you know how afraid you are of Sandra?” I asked.
“Afraid? I’m not afraid of her,” he said.
Most men do not like to be told that they’re afraid of anything, much less of their wives, so it was understandable that he would resist this notion.
“I apologize,” I said. “I didn’t mean to use the word afraid. I meant to say terrified. This woman snaps her whip, and you bark like a dog. She has a chain in your nose and pulls you anywhere she wants you to go. With a single word, she can stop a conversation, stop you from being happy, and pretty much make you do what she wants. True or not true?”
“That’s not true.”
“Really? Why are you and I having this conversation. Did you come to me to report that you were happy with your marriage?”
“Well, no.”
“Absolutely not. You told me you were miserable beyond description. So, are you doing what you want in your marriage?”
“No.”
“So, if you’re not doing what you want in your marriage, there’s only one feeling that could be keeping you from doing what you want. When people really want to do something, but they don’t, what feeling stops them?”
“Fear?”
“Yes!! And you were reluctant to admit that because you have a judgment that being afraid is somehow weak. I understand. But until you see what it true, you can never change. You are simply afraid of Sandra. Most people are afraid of their partners, and that is what keeps them from being truly intimate. You’re far from alone in this. What are you afraid of? When Sandra barks at you, you’re afraid to respond to her. What are you afraid could happen if you did try to respond?”
Michael could not answer that question, and I was not surprised by this. People rarely have a clear understanding of their fears, which often have deep roots in the past. Moreover, their fears distort their thinking, so fears make a mess of everything. We talked until Michael freely agreed with all of the following:
1. He was afraid that everything his wife was saying was right: that everything he did was wrong, that he was a complete screw-up, and that he was the cause of all her unhappiness. He had learned that if he tried to argue with her, she just proved in greater detail—she presented even more evidence—that everything she said was true.
2. He was afraid of not feeling loved. He was afraid of her disapproval. In virtually every interaction with her, she attacked him and loudly communicated the “I don’t love you” message, so he did whatever he could to avoid that message. He learned that if he backed down from her, she stopped blaming and attacking sooner, so the “I don’t love you” messages stopped sooner. It’s ironic that at every opportunity victims scream that other people are hurting them and are failing to love them, but in response to their pain they hurt other people and fail to love them—the very crimes they condemn.
3. He was afraid that their relationship would never change. Sandra had been acting like this for many years, and if he said nothing, at least he could hope that she might change with time. Each time he spoke to her, however, he received plentiful confirmation that she was on an undeviating course of misery and despair. It was very discouraging to him.
“Michael,” I finally said, “you don’t have a relationship with Sandra at all. You’re a prisoner—a hostage. Sandra just owns you.”
“I never saw any of this,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”
“Of course you didn’t see it. It’s all been quite unintentional—for both of you. So if you didn’t see it, there’s also nothing to be embarrassed about. The question is, Do you want to continue like this, or do you want to change it?”
“Oh, I want to change it. I’m tired of it. But I don’t know how to change it.”
“Of course you don’t know how, or you would have long before now.”
I first explained to Michael that helping Sandra to stop her victim behavior would be a very loving act on his part. Sure, it would be a relief forhim not to be attacked constantly, but it would also be an enormous benefit to her. As long as she was acting like a victim, she could never be happy. Victims are constantly buying Imitation Love with their behavior, so they can never feel unconditionally loved. If we can help them see their behavior and stop it, we introduce the possibility that they might begin to feel Real Love and genuine happiness.
Further, I wanted to demonstrate to Michael that he played a critical role in her behavior as a victim. “Michael, why do people behave as they do?” I asked.
At first he looked confused, but then he began a discussion about genetics and training and culture. I stopped him after a couple of sentences and said, “Let’s make this simpler. On the whole, people behave as they do because they get something from it. Babies cry because their parents come running and give them whatever they need. Thieves steal because it gives them a livelihood and a sense of power. In short, we behave as we do because our behaviors get us what we want, and if a given behavior begins to consistently fail to produce a positive result, we tend to give up that behavior. When we were infants, we cried to get what we wanted. When we became older, most of us were told that crying was no longer an acceptable means for accomplishing that end—in fact, many of us were punished for crying—so we gave up that behavior and learned other ways of getting what we wanted.”
“The same is true with victims,” I continued. “They continue their behavior because they GET something from it. When Sandra acts like a victim with you, she gets your attention, your time, your sympathy, your guilt, your cooperation, your frustration, your helplessness, and your complete involvement in her emotional drama. She becomes the queen of the hour, and in her distorted world, that seems like a lot. In the absence of Real Love, all that Imitation Love seems like it’s a lot better than nothing at all. But it’s really killing her. Somebody has to finally cut off her supply of Imitation Love. Somebody has to quit rewarding her for this game she plays. You can’t stop her from acting like a victim. You can’t control her, but you can stop rewarding her behavior.”
“How do I do that?” Michael asked.
Then I explained to Michael what he might do on the occasions when his wife acted like a victim and began attacking him (and I’ll paraphrase here).
1. First remember why she’s attacking you. She’s only responding to emptiness and fear. She’s just drowning. It’s not about you.
2. Remember that you don’t need her to love you in that moment. You never need any one particular person’s love. You have other people who do care about you. This will require that you tell the truth about yourself to other people who are loving you unconditionally.
3. As soon as she starts acting like a victim or attacking, interrupt her. This might sound rude, but it’s important not to let her go on and on. Why? The idea is not to prevent her from attacking you. It’s to help her. The more she spouts her venom without interruption, the more she stays in a pattern that keeps her from feeling loved and loving. In addition, she interprets your silence as agreement with what she’s saying, and then she feels even more justified in her victimhood—which again will keep her in this unproductive way of living.
4. First indicate that you have genuinely listened to what she was saying. This is very easy to do. Victims usually make their point in the first few seconds they speak, and then they repeat it over and over again, with only slight variations. That’s why interrupting them makes very little difference. I’ll give you some examples of what really listening to her looks like.
5. Point out to her what was true or not true about what she said, rather than responding to the emotions or attacking of what she was saying.
6. Describe the choices available to her—more productive choices in her behavior—the choices she obviously does not see. Victims feel victimized precisely because they feel as though people and circumstances have left them with no choice but to react with misery and Protecting Behaviors.
This is a general description, the application of which will become clearer shortly. I also told Michael that he couldn’t hope to experience any success with this if he didn’t feel loved himself. So I recommended that he tell the truth about himself to some friends, or that he participate in the conference calls on www.RealLove.com. If he didn’t feel loved himself, he would interact with Sandra in an unloving way, and then it wouldn’t matter what words he used with her. She would only feel attacked or manipulated, and she would respond with increasingly victim behavior.
Michael had been in a rut with Sandra for a very long time, so changing the way he interacted with her was not easy or smooth. The first few times Michael tried what I suggested, Sandra erupted like a volcano. She was not about to give up her long-established pattern of behavior easily. But Michael persisted, despite his fears, and within a couple of weeks he began to experience quite a number of successes.
One afternoon, for example, Sandra walked into the kitchen and launched into a loud and bitter tirade about the condition of that room. It was a “horrible mess,” it was “never clean,” Michael “never helped her with anything,” and so on.” The mess had been created by their two children, whose job it was to keep it clean, and she was upset by the mess, the fact that the children created it, and that Michael didn’t more closely supervise the kids to make them do their work.
After perhaps twenty seconds, Michael raised his hand and said, “I would like to see if I’m getting the message of what you’re saying. May I do that?”
Sandra looked surprised but said, “Okay, I guess.”
“The condition of the kitchen is unacceptable to you, and you’re quite unhappy about it. Does that pretty much sum it up?”
“Well, that’s not all,” she said. “You never—”
“Oh, I know you want to repeat what you said and drill it in, but I pretty much got the general message. Now, let’s look at some of the details. You said the kitchen is a ‘horrible mess.’ I certainly understand that it’s less than you’d like it to be, but would ‘horrible mess’ be accurate? I see a few things out of place on the counter, and a couple of places need to be wiped up. If there were an outside ‘kitchen critic’ here to judge the place, would this be called a ‘horrible mess,’ or would it be called ‘mildly untidy?’”
“Well, okay, so maybe not horrible, but—”
“Okay, so not horrible. Everything in life is a decision we make. You came into the kitchen and made a decision to call this a horrible mess and then, based on that assessment, to blow up—to thrown away your happiness. Now we’ve discovered that it’s not really a horrible mess. So, now you have a choice to make. Choice A: You could realize that your initial impression was a mistake and decide to give up your anger, since you’d be angry over nothing. Choice B: You could continue to be angry, even though the kitchen isn’t really a horrible mess. That doesn’t make much sense to me, since you’d be choosing to throw away your happiness when you could simply choose to be happy instead.”
Sandra made a horrible face as she could see her entire life of victimhood slipping away, and she was not about to let this happen without a fight. She said, “I’ve changed my mind. I can’t live with a mess like this. I do think it’s horrible.”
“Fine,” Michael said. “You have the right to decide what is horrible to you. So, we’ll back up and call the kitchen horrible. Doesn’t matter. You still have a choice whether to be happy or not. No matter what the condition of the kitchen, you can still choose to be happy and loving, or you can choose to throw it all away and be blaming and miserable.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If somebody makes a mess in my kitchen, of course I’ll be upset.”
“You say ‘of course’ as though there were no other choice, but it’s obvious that there is another choice, because I can describe other choices. For example, I am standing in the same ‘horrible mess’ that you are, and I am choosing to realize that our two children are just kids. They are learning to be responsible, and in the process they will make mistakes. If they haven’t learned to be responsible, in fact, it’s probably mostly our fault—that we haven’t taught them well, that we haven’t applied consequences consistently, and that we haven’t unconditionally loved them well. So I can hardly be angry at them for what I haven’t taught them. I also realize that I need to teach them lessons in responsibility, and they certainly won’t learn these lessons better while I’m angry at them. They’ll only feel unloved and defensive. Anger will only fill our home with a tension that will destroy love and any possibility of happiness and learning. Realizing all that, I choose not to be angry. I don’t know why you’d want to make the unhappy choice—being angry—but it’s there if you want it. I’m just pointing out that you always have a choice in all this. What choice do you want to make?”
Michael then went on to examine other phrases that she had used, such as “never clean,” and that Michael “never helped her with anything.” He freely admitted that the kitchen wasn’t as clean as she would like all the time, and then he asked her to look at whether the phrase “never clean” was accurate. It was not. He also admitted that he had often failed to be the loving partner that he wished to be, but he helped her see that “never helped me with anything” was simply not true. Then he outlined the choices available to her, which involved choices about happiness, follow-up with the children, and lessons with the children on responsibility during regular family meetings.
Sandra was somewhat confused and frustrated by this conversation, but she did stop her blaming and attacking on that occasion. Michael continued to have interactions like this with Sandra over the succeeding several weeks, and about two months after my first conversation with him he called me.
“It’s been five days,” Michael said.
“Since what?” I asked.
“Since Sandra had a fit with anybody over anything.”
“Wow, that’s impressive. How long has it been since she’s had a run of non-victim days like that?”
“Judging from what her family says, I’d say since she was four.”
Michael then described one event after another, easily a dozen occasions, where Sandra was inconvenienced and had had plenty of opportunity to express her anger, but she didn’t.
“What’s it like around your home now?” I asked.
“It’s so much happier that I can hardly begin to describe it. And Sandra is like a different person. Almost unrecognizable.”
Michael was afraid of the victim tools that Sandra had honed over the years, but he exercised the faith required to change the way he had always interacted with her—despite her initial resistance, which was intense—and the results were hugely positive. He removed her usual rewards for acting like a victim, and she responded by deciding that it wasn’t worth acting like a victim any longer. That required enormous courage on Michael’s part and a decision on Sandra’s part to stay in her marriage and try something different. She could have decided to become more of a victim and eventually leave her marriage, but she didn’t.
I mentioned earlier that I would be telling you about two men, so now let’s turn our attention to the second man, John, who was similar in age to Michael and married to a woman whose behavior was quite comparable to Sandra’s. Much as I had with Michael, I encouraged John to break the cycle of victimhood with his partner, so that Real Love and happiness could replace the blaming and misery that had long characterized their relationship.
But John was too afraid of his wife to do what I suggested. When he tried to interrupt her tirades, she became furious, and he immediately backed down. When he did that, she was promptly rewarded for her attacking and learned—once again—that victimhood was the way to survive in the world. John could not exercise enough faith that if he persisted long enough on a course of love and truth, the pattern of victimhood could be broken.
Why did John fail? Perhaps he couldn’t feel the love of others while he was being attacked by his wife. Perhaps he had just been wounded too badly in the past, so when his wife attacked him, the sum of the old wounds and present fears became too painful to bear. Perhaps he got enough reward from his own victimhood that he was reluctant to give that up. It’s hard to know the exact origins of fear in a given case, but his fears were understandable in a general way, because the onslaught of a victim is certainly frightening. Victims often terrorize the people around them, using every means at hand, until they get what they want.
The stories of John and Michael highlight the effects of victimhood, and also demonstrate that we can always make choices to change this behavior and to find happiness in our lives. Inconvenience, pain, and injustice will always occur. How we are affected by these conditions, however, is always a choice we make. We don’t have a choice about being victimized, but we always have a choice about feeling and acting like victims. Always.
Moreover, we can change the way we interact with the people who act like victims toward us. We must understand that we cannot stop people from acting like victims, but we can certainly change the way we respond to them, thereby freeing us from the bondage of these sick relationships. In many cases—like that of Michael—we can stop our interactions with victims and point out to them that they do have choices other than blaming and misery. With some victims, however—like with our bosses—it may not always be possible for us to point out their behaviors or their alternative choices. But we can always choose how we feel about the blaming of a victim. We can remember that the victim is empty and afraid and responding to a lifetime of not feeling loved. The victim is drowning. The victim’s behavior isn’t about us. In short, we don’t ever have to feel personally attacked by a victim.
It’s all about choice, isn’t it? Happiness is a choice. No matter what happens to us, we can choose to feel loved and loving and happy, rather than feel like victims or act like victims. And no matter how much people act like victims around us we don’t have to accept their invitations to be miserable with them. We don’t have to accept their blaming and accusations and guilt. We can choose to be happy instead. Why not make that choice?
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A Matter of Life and Deathtag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1042009-01-20T15:41:07Z2009-01-20T15:45:57ZNot long ago a man—we’ll call him Bill—was talking to me about an argument that he’d been having with his wife, Melissa. After hearing people describe a few thousand of these conversations, I’m impressed with how similar they really are...Greg Baer
she wasn’t changing to suit his needs more quickly, and Melissa was annoyed that he wasn’t more sensitive to her. Bill was absolutely certain that he was right, and I gathered from his comments that she was just as certain that she was right.
Now, to be sure, Bill was right about a number of issues. It’s true that Melissa was not listening to him, she was not being cooperative, and she was not being kind toward him, but he was entirely wrong about his conclusion: that what was needed in this situation was for Melissa to change her behavior. If he had managed to assert his will with her and control her completely—which probably would have delighted him in the short term—he would not have achieved a happy marriage, only a slave-owner relationship with a very unhappy wife. No, Bill didn’t need to change Melissa in this situation. He needed to learn how to become more loving toward her. Regrettably, the two of them had been battling for control—and defending each other—all the years of their marriage, despite the fact that this approach had never worked.
After listening to his complaints for several minutes, I asked him, “Bill, if Melissa had a heart attack right now, and her life were hanging in the balance, do you think you could stop complaining and simply take care of her?”
He was silent for a moment before he answered. “Yes, I suppose I could.”
“So, why can’t you do that now? Why can’t you spend more time now thinking about what she needs instead of complaining so often and loudly about what she’s not doing for you?”
“That’s different. If she had a heart attack, that would be a matter of life and death.”
“So is this, Bill. But in this case, it’s a matter of life and death for both of you. You two have been married for years, and for most of that time you’ve been angry, and complaining, and attacking each other, and acting like victims, and withdrawing from each other. Now pay attention to this next part: Each time you make one of these unloving choices, you’re taking a step toward misery and emotional and spiritual death.”
Bill looked skeptical, but I continued. “This isn’t some metaphor I’m using here. You two are literally dying inside, and eventually you won’t be able to step away from the darkness that’s consuming you. Death will just suck you in with a force you won’t be able to resist. The problem is, as you’re making these selfish choices, you’re still breathing and eating and walking and talking—nobody actually dies physically—so the consequences of your choices don’t appear to be as serious as a heart attack. And, between your arguments, you seem to recover emotionally, so you underestimate the seriousness of each conflict. But the effects of these conflicts accumulate—like toxic waste—and eventually they become overwhelming. Each choice you make today—each choice to be either loving or selfish—really is a matter of life or death. They may not be as obvious as the choices associated with a heart attack, but they’re every bit as serious. So, now I’m asking, When will you take these choices as seriously? If you don’t, you won’t just lose your marriage. You’ll lose the ability to be happy yourself.”
I emphasized to Bill that it was not my intent to scare him. This was not a hellfire and brimstone sermon. The goal of life is not to avoid pain, misery, and death. My intent was to demonstrate that he was barely enduring a life in hell when he could have been choosing to fully live a life of joy instead. Why should we choose to barely survive from one conflict to another, when we can choose to live spectacularly?
Bill got off the phone and apologized to Melissa for being selfish, not just on the occasion of the argument we’d been discussing, but for their whole marriage. He didn’t change his life and his marriage overnight, but from that moment he began to think more carefully about each of his choices—whether they were loving or not, whether they contributed to a life of happiness or a life of misery and emotional death.
And so it can be for all of us. So many of us wait until the end of our lives to consider the impact of all those choices we made. We look back and, with unspeakably tragic regret, think “if only.” Now is the time to be thinking of the life and death consequences of each of our choices, and, if we will do that, we can gradually learn to make the decisions that lead to love and happiness, now and for the rest of our lives.
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The Flight of the Storktag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2009:/blog/greg//1.1112009-01-14T05:06:44Z2010-01-26T05:31:06Zcontinued from The Real Love Letter ...Nature gave them. These birds have wings that are both wide and long — with a span of about six feet — which makes them well suited for gliding but not flapping. In order...Greg Baer
continued from The Real Love Letter
...Nature gave them. These birds have wings that are both wide and long — with a span of about six feet — which makes them well suited for gliding but not flapping. In order to fly for long distances, storks require currents of upward moving air — called thermals — which are generated when the sun heats the surface of the earth. If a stork finds the right currents, it can travel for hours without a single flap of its wings.
Thermals are not generated over the surface of the ocean, so far out to sea — over the Mediterranean, for example — the storks would be forced to flap their huge wings to create their forward progress, and they would soon fall to the water. As the storks migrate over Spain, Asia Minor, the Middle East, and Africa, they easily find warm currents of air that have been heated over the deserts of those regions, so even though their journey by these routes is far longer than flying directly over the Mediterranean, it’s actually easier because of the assistance of abundant thermals. Even with the assistance of air currents, however, the migration is a long and difficult affair, and some birds die in the process, as a result of storms, predators, hunters, disease, and exhaustion.
Similarly, we human beings travel through our lives on long and perilous journeys, and many of us sicken and weaken in the process. If we flap our wings hard enough, emotionally speaking, we can actually lift off the ground and take flight, but the effort is exhausting. Some of us, however, have discovered that if we simply stretch our wings wide, we can experience the power of being lifted from the ground by emotional and spiritual thermals — almost without effort — high into the sky, for long distances.
It is Real Love that powers these thermals that carry us high and far — personally and in our relationships. With them we experience a richness and fullness of life. Sometimes we may be tempted to take shortcuts — across the Mediterranean, as it were — where we travel without the benefits of Real Love, but in the absence of these lifting currents we are left to struggle on our own. Eventually, the effort becomes unbearable, and we fall to the earth, exhausted and alone.
We already have our wings. All of us are worthy of being loved as we are. All we have to do is unfold those wings and take advantage of the great power that is available all around us. We only need to learn how to be more open and honest and faithful, and allow the love of other people — and God — to lift us from the bonds of this earth to the celestial heights above and to limitless horizons beyond.]]>
Love and the Price of the Perfect Diamondtag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2008:/blog/greg//1.1102008-12-22T02:16:25Z2010-01-26T05:31:06Zcontinued from The Real Love Letter ... to have flaws after it was cut. It was a difficult decision, because he would have to sell everything he had in order to make the purchase. In the end, he decided not...Greg Baer
continued from The Real Love Letter
... to have flaws after it was cut. It was a difficult decision, because he would have to sell everything he had in order to make the purchase. In the end, he decided not to buy the diamond, because he wasn’t willing to make the sacrifice and assume the risk.
After he passed up the purchase, someone else bought the diamond. When it was cut, the diamond was found to be the largest perfect diamond ever discovered, and the owner sold it and the pieces cut from it for a greater profit than he could have imagined.
Real Love is a perfect diamond, and in order to enjoy it we must be willing to give up all of our unrelated possessions—our pride, our anger, our blaming, our defensiveness, and our addictive attachments to praise, power, pleasure, and safety. Giving up what we have—what has made us intermittently comfortable for a lifetime—to achieve something we’re not entirely certain of is the very definition of faith, but without this faith, and without the sacrifices that always attend faith, we can never find the Real Love we require to be happy in this life.
We all want to feel unconditionally loved. We all do. And we want the joy that comes with being unconditionally loving toward others. The question is, what are we willing to pay to possess this diamond? Are we willing to give up all that we have? Are we willing to give up the blaming and instead tell the truth about ourselves? Are we willing to give up our selfish wounds and demands, and instead see the needs of others? Are we willing to trade our anger for joy? When we’re willing to do this, our actions will tell the truth about our intentions, and the diamond will be ours.]]>
Compacting the Soil tag:www.reallovecoaching.net,2008:/blog/greg//1.1012008-12-10T22:22:11Z2008-12-10T22:29:22ZRecently I completed a plumbing project in my backyard, which necessitated my digging a ditch eighty feet long. When I had finished connecting all the pipes, and when I was certain that the water was flowing properly, I began filling...Greg Baer
want to put all the excavated dirt back into the hole. If I tried to force all the dirt back into the hole, I’d injure the roots of the plant.
In many instances, however, it is important that we get as much of the dirt as possible back into the hole. Actually, what matters most is not the amount of dirt we replace but the way we do it. In order to get all the dirt back into the hole or the ditch, we must carefully and sometimes rather forcefully push the dirt against the bottom of the hole as we shovel it in—a process known as compaction—because as we do that, we eliminate the air pockets and return the soil to the dense, tight condition it possessed before we dug it out of the hole.
Compaction can be done with your feet, with the end of a board, with motorized devices, or any number of makeshift tools, and if it’s done properly, the compaction must be done every time four to six inches of soil is shoveled into the hole or ditch. But many people try to shortcut the compaction process. They will, for example, fill up a six-foot-deep hole and stomp on the dirt only at the end of the project, not realizing that compaction then happens only in the upper few inches of the hole. Over time, rain and gravity will compact the remainder of the dirt, and as the soil settles, whatever rests on the top layer of the soil—a house, a road, and so on—will sink, usually in an uneven and unpleasant way.
It is often because of poorly performed compaction that you see so many places in city roads where repair jobs have resulted in depressions in the road and bumps for all the drivers that happen by. Or you can look out over a cemetery, and you will see many monuments tilted this way or that—because of irregular or no attention to compaction during the replacement of dirt after digging. Many houses built on hillsides have had their foundations laid on dirt that was brought in to build up the ground for some part of the foundation. But if the compaction was improperly done, the dirt later settled and the foundation cracked.
And that was why I was compacting the soil under the pipes I had laid. My ditch was on a slope, and as I dug I found it difficult to keep the bottom of the ditch at exactly the same angle for the entire distance. When I laid the pipe, I therefore discovered that in some places the pipe touched the compacted dirt on the bottom of the ditch—as it was supposed to—while in other places there was a gap of several inches between the pipe and the bottom of the ditch. If I had simply thrown all the dirt into the ditch to cover the pipes, the soil would have settled over time and exerted pressure on those sections of pipe not touching the bottom of the ditch, bowing and distorting them, which would have created the possibility for breaks or separations at joints in the pipes. My compaction of the soil eliminated that possibility.
Building foundations of dirt is not entirely unlike building the foundations of our lives, which also must be laid carefully, layer upon layer, each properly compacted, or the entire structure may fail. I see the importance of these foundations as people come to me with the complicated problems in their lives, often conflicts with their spouses or children or co-workers or whoever that have burdened them for a long time. They want me to offer them a quick fix.
But there is no quick fix, and the problem is not complicated. Almost uniformly the problem is a basic lack of compaction. They’re having problems because the soil wasn’t properly laid down and compacted in the first place, and now they’ll have to do some work on the foundation before they can work on the walls or the roof. Before we can work on what we believe to be “complicated conflicts,” we have to learn to tell the truth about ourselves. We have to learn to find more Real Love in our lives. We have to feel more loved and become genuinely more loving. We must understand the Law of Choice and truly respect the right of other people to make their own choices because we really care about them. All this lays a firm foundation for genuinely loving relationships, and then conflicts simply begin to fade away. We discover that they weren’t really all that complicated, as we had supposed.
A man once came to me, eager to eliminate the anger in his life. He had been eaten up with anger for decades, inwardly fuming at the world for its many injustices and outwardly blowing up at everyone around him for all their many crimes against him. People were afraid of him, and he tended to isolate himself from them. He had virtually no long-term relationships, even with his family. He’d been through three divorces. He’d been to therapy, but his anger persisted. I suggested that we meet a few times.
I didn’t do anything complicated. I just loved him. We talked. I asked him to tell the truth about himself, and I just loved him. After a few meetings, he called and said that for the past week something had been happening to him, and he wanted me to explain it to him. He said that the same old stuff had been happening to him—his truck had broken down, his boss had yelled at him, the rain had washed out part of his driveway, some drivers had cut him off in traffic, and so on—but somehow he had “forgotten” to get angry. In the past all those things would have sent him into a rage, but now they just didn’t seem to bother him, and he couldn’t figure out what was different. Now he just didn’t care when those things happened, and he called to ask me why.
I explained to him that his foundation was now in place, so that each time it rained—each time somebody did some little thing to him—his foundation didn’t settle or wash out from under him, leaving him empty and afraid, after which he then reacted in the only way he’d ever known: with anger. He understood.
We have to compact our soil We have to tell the truth about our emptiness and fear and our Getting and Protecting Behaviors to people who will love us unconditionally. And then we have to practice sharing that love with others, so the love within us will steadily grow. And we have to do all that gradually, in steps, compacting the soil as we go, so that when difficult times come—which they always do—the entire foundation won’t wash away. And if we’re willing to do that, we’ll be able to build a loving home in which we’ll want to live, a place where we’ll want to invite others to share the love and joy we have. It’s quite a way to live.
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