1. The challenge of Life is to grow from codependence to interdependence. Consider this assertion: to love you correctly, I have to grow from a loving based on neediness to a loving based on appreciation. Do you find this statement true? Love means I want what is good for you, not that I want you for my use. Do I love you, or do I love the way you satisfy my needs? Or perhaps I love your need for me? Maybe you satisfy my need to be needed? What happens if you grow to the point where you don’t need me? Will I rejoice in your development? Will I love you for being the person you are? When we are acting out of needs we refuse to recognize or admit, we become more and more codependent. When we decide to give and receive the love we need based on our respect for our mutual dignity as persons, we become the interdependent members of God’s family that we were meant to be.
2. The Price We Pay for Relationships. There is a Woody Allen story that helps us see what we are willing to pay for whatever love we get in life: Man goes into the psychiatrist’s office and says, “Doc, I have a problem. My brother thinks he is a chicken.” The doctor says, “That’s crazy. Tell him he’s not!” The man says, “I would, doc, but I need the eggs.” BINGO! That hits the nail on the head. Codependency is the price we pay for relationships. It is the basic substratum of any and every relationship, even the most healthy, sane, and spiritually graced friendship. Why? Because, no matter who we are, we never get beyond our basic neediness. Needs are not something we have, but are. Our needs are endless, infinite, and insatiable, because need is the core of our created being.
3. Right and Wrong Ways of Loving our Neighbors and Ourselves. Consider the commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. That means I have to get beyond myself, deny myself, give myself away. But it means first I have to develop a self to give away. I have to grow to some kind of maturity, whatever that is. The trouble is that I can’t wait till I become mature to start loving, I have to start loving before I have myself together, before I acquire any degree of self awareness and self possession. So I am going to get it wrong long before I ever learn to get it right. What’s worse, the wrong will appear right because I will not know that I am acting out of needs I do not recognize. This is why we end up hurting ourselves and hurting others while thinking we are doing the right thing and loving them as we ought. We develop a style, pattern, or habit of relating that is counter-productive, self destructive, and mutually harmful, all in the process of getting to the point where we are capable of understanding what the love is that we are called to.
Inevitably, I do end up “loving” my neighbor as myself, because the self love that is in me gets inflicted on him. In my case, that self love ends up being an invisible barrier of self hate that moves me to relate to the other person incorrectly. You may doubt that this is true. I did. I thought being good or bad were two even choices, and we could go for one as easily as the other. Experience has shown me that the bad in us ends up affecting and coloring the good we do. Why? Because we naturally do what is wrong with more of a readiness than we do what is right. I base my argument on my experience of growing up in a family.
4. How a basic personality style develops: The following childhood memory may illustrate the transformation:
My brother and I are sitting at the kitchen table finishing our dinner. Mom gives us each a piece of pie for dessert. I look at his piece and say to her, “You gave him more than you gave me.” A three way squabble starts. She tries to persuade me that she is being fair, while he complains that I am always picking on him, and I start insisting that we trade pieces. This nonsense continues till my dad steps back into the kitchen and tells me that if I don’t shut up and eat my pie, he will eat it for me and I won’t have any dessert at all. Rather than risk that, I do as he says. But I am far from happy. I put my face down and pout as I fork the pie into my mouth, scarcely tasting it. I am tempted to kick my brother under the table, but my dad is still there. Better to wait and get even with him later on. There will be endless opportunities, especially when we alone in the bedroom later that night with no parent around to see which one of us started what….
Now, here is my “psychoanalysis” of that everyday situation. My sense of injustice isn’t really aroused because his piece may be a little bit bigger than mine. I just want more pie. Call it greed, gluttony, selfishness, or whatever you want. I want more, and any excuse will do. Whatever the underlying motive, I use my desire for more as the reason to raise a ruckus over nothing and afterwards convince myself that I am one hundred percent right. When I don’t get what I end up acting angry and resentful at my brother, and mother and father as well. Then, when I have calmed down a bit, I can see that I really was making a big deal over nothing and should have behaved better. But at that point I can’t admit it. Maybe it’s pride, or pigheaded stubbornness, or both. But again, what does it matter? What does matter is that now I feel a twinge of guilt or shame for the way I behaved, but would rather die than say so. This also complicates the situation.
That brief moment when I am a little mad at myself for being such a big baby is, I think, where self-hate enters the picture. That bad feeling, (call it guilt, shame, or remorse) means something inside me is waking me up to the fact that I am acting against myself, against what my insides tell me is right. It is something I don’t want to face, because it is humiliating. It is a feeling of me not liking me because of my behavior. If I acknowledge this feeling to myself I will end up by having to acknowledge it to everyone else too. I will look stupid to them, and that will be much worse than being stupid without their knowledge. (Don’t look stupid. Looking bad is worse than being bad.) This personal self-disapproval is the seed from which the hate will grow, if I bury the feeling deep enough and water it by continual self- deception. The more I deaden this inner stirring that tells me I am wrong by continuing to insist to myself and others that I am always right, the stronger the self-hate in me will become. And I won’t even recognize the disharmony inside myself. The disharmony itself will feel normal and become part of my style.
All the bad I do will get done in the guise of being good to myself and treating myself right, while on this deeper level I am acting badly and treating myself and others wrong. I will proceed through life to make my burden bigger, or heavier. How? By adding an ounce of guilt, a teaspoon of shame, a tablespoon of anger and resentment, and stirring the mixture up in a cup of stubbornness whenever I fail to get my way. The more I bake these ingredients together in the sauce of self deceit and pride, the larger the loaf of self-hate becomes and the more fuel I have for future disagreements. That’s quite an accomplishment for a little kid who begins by just wanting more pie. This is not the only way self-love feeds into self-hate, but the way I specialize in. We all have our own ways to do the same thing, based on our personality style.
5. Our Heart’s Movements and our Personality. There are three basic movements of the heart, summed up by the humble prepositions, towards, away from, and against. In my example, I was being somewhat aggressive towards my brother, i.e. moving “against” him. Why? To get what I wanted. Another way to get what I wanted would be to try to please him and get him to like me more. (That would have been mom’s style.) Kill him with kindness, so to speak. That way he would end up wanting to give me his pie, and feel guilty if he didn’t. I didn’t have the patience or the inclination to try this technique. It would have taken too much time even if it did work. Being nice is not the usual style of brothers, or boys in general. My first impulse was always to bicker and fight to get what I wanted. My second was to draw back, or move “away from” if the movement ‘against’ didn’t work. Moving away from doesn’t usually get us what we want either. It is a defensive posture, a way of protecting ourselves from getting hurt. It works for the moment, but not in the long run because it isolates us from others and prevents real communication. Given my basic instinct to fight or flight, and of resorting to first one and then the other, it was a long time before I learned to move “towards” another in anything like real caring. My kindness was more a phony politeness, a way of getting along and avoiding conflict, not a way of pleasing the other person by doing what was right and good out of concern for him. But I was able to see that some people really did care for others and genuinely move towards them in a sincere effort to please.
I could also see how caring for others could end up in manipulating and/or being manipulated. Momma did that all the time. She often had a pity party and bemoaned the fact that my brother and I didn’t appreciate everything she was doing for us. Of course we didn’t. Our chief form of recreation was to amuse ourselves by discovering new ways to drive her crazy. If she wanted kids who were going to please her, she should have had girls instead of boys! When we told her that, the results were more confusing than ever. We boys felt she was trying to glue us to her, cling and cloy, control and smother, all in the name of doing her job and being a good mother. Yes, she was moving towards, but it was too much towards, excessive, and it had the effect of reinforcing our resistance and moving us to push her away. And this, of course, she interpreted as rejection. All the melodrama took place in our young minds and hearts with very little degree of self awareness as to who was acting out of what needs or why. It was just part of growing up, part of life. I guess we were developing into what I later learned to call a dysfunctional family. It’s what happens when we develop a style of relating based on moving towards, away from and against, in a way that is too much or too little. We all build up behavior patterns of doing these three movements of the heart wrong before we realize what we are doing, and then spend our lives trying to get them right. The wrong way feels normal to us, while the right does not.
Throughout my life, I will expect that they, the people who are the objects of my “love” satisfy my needs, never make me face my shortcomings or look bad, agree that I am right, calm my fears, fulfill my desires, and be responsible for ensuring my complete happiness. Unless corrected, the dynamic continues till death. It means I want to make myself into God for the other person, or want the other person to be God for me. The situation works either way, me idolizing someone else, or someone else idolizing me. It also works both ways at once, and with more than one partner, depending on how complicated our codependent collusion has become. The one unpardonable sin is for the other persons to point out my neediness to me, or expose their basic level of need to me. Such naked honesty would pull me out of my comfort zone and be the first step towards Christian love. I too have to careful not to tease anyone and break our tacit promise not to mention hidden faults. One heedless word, and the bubble of false peace bursts. It is much easier (and a lot less painful) to collude with others, and have them wordlessly contract to collude with us by “loving one another” within the sick styles that have shaped our personalities. Be happy with the eggs we get, even if they are rotten.
6. Our Need for God to Move our Hearts beyond our Needs: Too often, psychology can be a substitute for spirituality instead of a means to spiritual growth. “Go see a shrink and get your head on straight”. There is a world of difference between that advice and “Get yourself a spiritual director so you can begin to see what God is calling you to be and do.” The first presupposes you are in control, and the second that you are not. But I may need to do the first as a way of getting to the second. However, psychological health is not the same as spiritual holiness. I can be psychologically unhealthy, neurotic, depressed, etc. and still grow in God’s grace. Growing in His grace may help me psychologically, but the basic character defects my neediness expresses itself in, are going to remain in me. My growth in holiness consists not in denying or ignoring them, but in exposing them to the healing rays of God’s mercy. That way the stumbling blocks become stepping stones. His power is best manifested in our weakness. That’s what our weakness is for.
Saint Paul helps us to get it right (or maybe less wrong). “Owe no one anything except to love one another.” (Romans 13:8)I do not owe you anything but the love God commands of me. I do not have to make you happy, tell you that you are right when you are wrong, reinforce your suspicions and fears, lie to you about your self-deceit, or pander to your narcissism. I do not have to live up to your expectations of me, or define myself by your reactions to me. I do not have to live for your approval not wither and die if you withhold your praise. Nor do you owe me any of that nonsense.
“With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you, or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time.” (I Cor. 4:3-5) Strange as it may seem to us, Paul could care less what anyone thinks of him. He is not being contrary or acting like a curmudgeon. He is actually being supremely humble and charitable. The only opinion important to Paul is Christ’s. What does Christ think of him? That is the only thing that matters.
Why do what others think mean so much to us? Why do we base our lives on their opinions of us, their praise or disapproval? It comes down to our basic neediness. After his conversion Paul had profound awareness of his needs because he always and only saw himself in relation to Christ. So he did not live out of his delusions, desires and self deceptions. He lived out of his relationship to our Lord. From that center he had the proper perspective from which to relate, live with and love everyone and everything the right way. If we get out relationship with Him right, we will relate to everyone else correctly. In fact, “we will be able to be all things to all men” not because we have become experts at playing games with everyone, but because we have learned to love them with Christ’s love.
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