How Can I Forgive You? Part 4

Step #4: You protect yourself from further abuse.

Accepting someone who is physically threatening doesn't mean you have to open yourself to further abuse. In fact, the process of Acceptance urges you to take precautions to ensure your safety, and to set up physical barriers if necessary-changing routines so that you and the offender don't cross paths, switching jobs, moving out of your house or town, even obtaining restraining orders to keep him out of your physical s.p.a.ce.

Acceptance, as we know, does not necessarily mean reconciliation. You can accept someone and ban him from your life.

66.When You Forgive Too Easily With Cheap Forgiveness, your fear of rejection takes precedence over your need for protection, and you fail to cus.h.i.+on yourself from future harm, physically or emotionally. To demonstrate your humanity and smooth out the conflict, you sidestep such basic questions as, "Is this person healthy for me?" "Should I trust him with my well-being?" "What makes me think that someone who hurt me once won't hurt me again?" If you need to restore the connection at any price, you can't afford to process your feelings or look too clearly at the offender or at the offense.

Like the psychotherapist Karen Olio, I take issue with the author of I Can't Talk About It: A Child's Book About s.e.xual Abuse, I Can't Talk About It: A Child's Book About s.e.xual Abuse, 8 8 who insists that a child must forgive her unapologetic father for s.e.xually molesting her. Olio argues that survivors "who already must struggle with the feelings of self-blame caused by the abuse" are effectively re-traumatized when they are made to feel guilty or deficient for not being able to forgive.9 This was Sandy's problem. She grew up with a father who battered her and a mother who raged. Her parents divorced when she was nine. The man she married, Ed, tended to keep things inside, then explode, just as his own father had done. He threw plates. He made scenes. When he punched his hand through a screen door, she cringed. Would she be next?

Sandy wanted nothing more than to keep her family together, but she also needed to provide a safe haven for herself and her autistic son. She knew firsthand the danger of living with violence, but she loved Ed and learned to gloss over the truth about him-to make peace and get along.

One night she called me in a panic. "Ed just slapped our son,"

she blurted out. "Ed yelled at him to put his pajamas on and get ready for bed, and I guess he didn't 'snap to' fast enough. I'm scared.

But maybe I'm making too much of this."

Sandy was bad at feeling anger. It frightened her. But splintering Acceptance Acceptance 67.her family frightened her more. I advised her to be careful. "If you ignore what's going on, you could put yourself and your son at serious risk," I warned her.

Eventually, Sandy stopped questioning her right to protect herself and her child. She saw that she was contributing to the problem by making excuses for Ed and discounting the threat of danger. Ed had many lovable qualities, but she could never feel safe with him. "I don't know where it's going to end up," she told me, "but in the meantime I've contacted an attorney and gotten an injunction barring him from the house."

When You Refuse to Forgive When you say no to forgiving and fail to resolve the wrongs of the past, your wound continues to bleed and may infect your relations.h.i.+p with others. If, for example, you cut yourself off from a cold, uncaring parent and never come to terms with your pain, you may project your "emotional sensitivities and yearnings"10 onto your children, unconsciously burdening them with your unmet need for validation, and causing them, in turn, to feel unsafe with you. You risk imposing on the next generation a "revolving slate of injustices."11 Step #5: You frame the offender's behavior in terms of his own personal struggles. own personal struggles.

Your journey into the heart and mind of the offender doesn't excuse his behavior, but it may free you from the mistaken a.s.sumption that you caused or deserved it. When you accept someone, you remind yourself that, yes, this person did something to to you, but what he did was not necessarily you, but what he did was not necessarily about about you. you.

When Gloria Steinem spoke at a private girls' school in Connecticut, the young interviewer admitted that she had never heard of the well-known feminist. Asked whether she was insulted, Steinem replied, "It's not important whether she knows who I I am, so long as she knows who am, so long as she knows who she she is." 12 Bless the self-possessed Steinem, who reminds us not to let others dictate how we feel about ourselves. is." 12 Bless the self-possessed Steinem, who reminds us not to let others dictate how we feel about ourselves.

68.Replacing Shame with Empathy As you trace the offender's story and see how he was damaged, and how he subjected you to the same abuse or neglect he may have experienced himself, you begin to understand why he acted the way he did. You realize that he was born with a deck of cards, that over time he was dealt a few more, and that today he is playing out his hand with you. If you weren't there, he might be playing the same hand with someone else. The more you know about him as a person distinct from you, the less likely you are to take his behavior personally. And the less personally you take his behavior, the less likely you are to experience shame.

Shame comes when you think that his behavior is about you- about your unworthiness, your defectiveness, your unlovability.

Shame lifts when you realize that his behavior is about him him -his innate disposition, his traumatic experiences, his responses to life's stress. You may not have access to this information about him, but in order for you to fight shame, it helps to come up with some hypotheses. This chapter will help you develop them. -his innate disposition, his traumatic experiences, his responses to life's stress. You may not have access to this information about him, but in order for you to fight shame, it helps to come up with some hypotheses. This chapter will help you develop them.

Stepping back and seeing him wrestle with his own demons is likely to be a restorative, centering experience for you-one that lets you regain your equilibrium and self-esteem, become the author of your own experience, and let go of your obsessive thinking. I'm reminded of a patient named Norma whose paranoid schizophrenic mother used to beat her and her sisters. Understanding that her mother treated her so inhumanely because the mother was ill-not because Norma was trash, as her mother led her to believe-gave Norma the strength to survive and let go of her shame.

Once you understand the offender's limitations, you're likely to stop expecting more of him than he can give. No longer fighting the ghosts of his past, you can give yourself the care and love he couldn't provide. Seeing his personal history spread out before you, you can free yourself from those obsessive questions, "How could he?" "How dare he?," and understand that what he did follows seamlessly from who he is.

69.When you look at him clearly and honestly and see how he, too, has suffered, you may come to view him as a fellow victim. You may realize, perhaps for the first time, how deeply and irreversibly damaged he may be. No longer is he the mere perpetrator of an unforgivable act. He becomes a real person whose internal battles-whose anxieties and insecurities-triggered his hurtful behavior. Armed with this wisdom, you may be able to release yourself from his grip and walk away.

Factors Underlying His Mistreatment of You Let's look first at those life events, those external factors, that may have upset his emotional balance at the time of the injury. You might begin by asking yourself, "What was going on in his world that affected his sense of self and made him feel so fragile, so self-absorbed, that he treated you the way he did?"

People can be harsh or insensitive because something terrible has just happened to them. I remember attending a fundraising dinner where I was introduced to a woman who seemed inexplicably cold. I later learned that her husband had just left her for a lap dancer, and she felt publicly humiliated meeting me, knowing I had written a book on infidelity.

There are countless reasons why someone might hurt you that may have absolutely nothing to do with you. One person may have been anxious or short-tempered because of financial worries-a drop in the stock market, a loss of retirement funds. Another person may have just had a fight with a sister or a lover and been too preoccupied to attend to you. Someone else may have snapped at you because he was stressed out trying to meet a deadline on a book con-tract or was worried about a friend who was being treated for cancer.

There are also internal internal factors to look for. Some have to do with the offender's cognitive errors-mistaken a.s.sumptions, such as "You think you're better than I am" or "You want to control me," that may have led him to misinterpret your behavior and respond inappropriately. factors to look for. Some have to do with the offender's cognitive errors-mistaken a.s.sumptions, such as "You think you're better than I am" or "You want to control me," that may have led him to misinterpret your behavior and respond inappropriately.

Another factor to consider is his personality. Is he usually shy, or sociable? Anxious or easy-going? Cranky or contented? Pa.s.sive or 70 aggressive? It's normal to see others in relation to ourselves, but the person who hurt you has a cl.u.s.ter of enduring attributes that were formed largely before you met, some of them biologically based, others ethnic or cultural. You can choose to take his behavior personally or not, but you're not going to change who he is and who he has always been.

A third factor to explore is his health. Was he feeling dizzy or sick? Was his behavior altered by alcohol or medications? Is he hard of hearing? Any of these extenuating factors could have affected his behavior.

What about his learned patterns of response-patterns of coping with stress that he developed in reaction to formative life experiences, usually in childhood? Seeing him in the context of his own damaged life won't necessarily make his behavior more palatable, but it may keep you from shouldering more than your fair share of blame. I invite you to read more about these coping strategies in the Appendix.

Keep in mind that Acceptance is a gift to yourself, not to the person who hurt you. It is a process you enter into primarily to free yourself from the trauma of an injury. Your goal is not necessarily to feel sorry for him, to feel compa.s.sion or pity for him, to excuse him, to develop positive feelings for him, to wish him well. It is certainly not to sugar-coat what he did to you or compromise the authenticity of your response.

I can't say this often enough: Your attempt to understand his mistreatment of you in no way frees him from responsibility for his behavior or ent.i.tles him to hurt you. Nor does it obviate your need to seek justice or a just punishment, should you believe it's warranted. Knowing what motivated him doesn't mitigate the wrong he did or make it less painful. What such knowledge may do, however, is help you respond in ways that are more proportional to the violation, less vengeful, obsessive, or apologetic. Your new insights into his behavior may also help you feel less devastated, more solidly in control of your life. But you should never confuse your willingness to understand him with the act of forgiving him.

71.When You Forgive Too Easily When you forgive too easily, you're likely to be the master of extenuating circ.u.mstances, dredging up whatever you can about the offender's injured past as evidence that his behavior toward you is no fault of his own.

"He was victimized by circ.u.mstances he didn't deserve or control, so how can I hold him responsible for what he did to me?" you tell yourself, ignoring the fact that, though life may have loaded the gun, someone pulled the trigger. When you dwell on the fact that he inherited a genetic predisposition to alcohol, say, or was born with a physical disability, you fail to see that biology is not always destiny.

By writing off his injurious behavior, you free him from any obligation to treat you with the same respect he's likely to expect of you.

Excusing a person's behavior because of his personal damage is pseudo-forgiveness. So is over-identifying with him, and reasoning, "We're all wounded. We're all sinners who need to be forgiven.

We're all products of our upbringing. No one has it easy. Everyone has a story to tell. Who am I to judge?"

I'm not suggesting that there isn't truth and wisdom in this charitable approach to forgiveness. But compa.s.sion needs to be balanced against a full appreciation of the harm he did to you. I ask you to have as genuine a concern for yourself as for him, to care as much about how you you have been wronged as about how have been wronged as about how he he has been wronged. Setting these priorities will free you to consider Acceptance as an alternative to Cheap Forgiveness. has been wronged. Setting these priorities will free you to consider Acceptance as an alternative to Cheap Forgiveness.

When You Refuse to Forgive Those of you who refuse to forgive will balk, "Don't ask me to waste my time picking through someone else's garbage. Why should I care why why he hurt me or how his parents neglected him? Is it my job to dredge up compa.s.sion for someone who has deliberately wronged me, and make excuses for his transgression? To h.e.l.l with his story." he hurt me or how his parents neglected him? Is it my job to dredge up compa.s.sion for someone who has deliberately wronged me, and make excuses for his transgression? To h.e.l.l with his story."

This response is understandable. When you view him as a victim, not just as a perpetrator, you risk feeling empathy and compas-72 sion for him. Seeing him in one-dimensional terms-as evil, as bad-makes it so much easier to keep your distance, feed off your self-righteous anger, and dismiss him. When you frame him in more complex ways, as a flawed human being struggling to survive his troubled past, you make it more difficult to pigeonhole or condemn him.

To those of you who are determined never to forgive, let me ask: If by learning more about the offender you come to feel compa.s.sion for him, must you feel compromised? Is there anything dangerous in deepening your understanding of him? You can be softer without feeling weak or foolish or allowing yourself to be stepped on. You can know with certainty that what he did to you was wrong, yet be touched by whatever hards.h.i.+ps he has personally endured.

Step #6: You look honestly at your own contribution to the injury. to the injury.

When we feel hurt or angry, it's easy to fault someone else.

"You're to blame," we insist. " to blame," we insist. "You made me feel this way." But the fact that we feel upset at someone doesn't necessarily mean he's guilty. made me feel this way." But the fact that we feel upset at someone doesn't necessarily mean he's guilty.

Sometimes our rage is our own, forged in our own hearts and minds, fed by our personalities, our provocations, our exaggerated response to conflict. Yes, this other person may have done something to offend us, but perhaps not to the degree that our intense response would suggest. Our reaction may be entirely inappropriate or even dangerously misguided.

Owning up to your issues-tearing down your defenses and looking honestly at yourself-can be painful work. The process may teach you that you were more than just a victim, and that, perhaps, there is no one to forgive but yourself.

The same factors that influenced the way the offender treated you may have influenced the way you treated him. Again, some of these factors may be external. You might ask yourself, "What was going on in my world at the time of the injury that may have affected me emotionally, making me feel more vulnerable, less in control, less resilient, so that I reacted inappropriately? Did these life Acceptance 73.events throw me off-balance and lead me to act in ways that were callous or otherwise offensive?"

Internal factors may also shape your response. It helps to ask such questions as, "How did my personality affect my reaction? How did it influence the way I was treated?" If you're innately shy, say, and the offender took this personally and a.s.sumed you didn't like him, that was his mistake, not yours. You didn't hurt him; his mistaken a.s.sumptions about you hurt him. But if you're shy and didn't speak up and then felt offended that someone didn't show interest in you or respect your position, you need to confront how you contributed to your own pain. It may be that your own silence-not his behavior- set a trap for you.

What about your dysfunctional ideas about yourself and the world, ideas that may have been based on damaging early life experiences?13 Did they play a role in your mistreatment? These fixed ideas often pre-date the offense and even your relations.h.i.+p with the offender, and create what I call channels of psychological vulnerability channels of psychological vulnerability.

What happens is that your heightened sensitivity-to being abandoned or ridiculed, for example-leads you to misperceive or misre-act to events today.

How You Incite Others to Mistreat You It's intriguing how, when we treat others according to our a.s.sumptions about ourselves and the world, we induce them to treat us in kind, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, if you believe, "Nice guys finish last; my strength is in my toughness," you may act aggressively and provoke antagonistic responses, confirming your belief that you need to be "hard" to function in this mean-spirited world.

A "hurt party" named Patrick is a case in point. He learned to fight his father's verbal and physical abuse with a combativeness of his own, a pattern that carried over into his marriage. After fending him off for seventeen years, his wife, Maggie, said "enough" and left. A year later, he called and asked her to talk out what had led to their divorce. "For my own personal growth, I'd like you to tell me how I pushed you 74 away," he said. "If you'd like, we can do this in front of my therapist. I won't argue or defend myself. I promise just to take notes."

Maggie chose to talk on the phone. She rattled off the following list of complaints, which he transcribed and brought into therapy: "Patrick, you were intimidating, not only to me but to the kids. You didn't actually hit me, but the threat was always there. Your words can be harsh and mean. You think people owe you, and that by being tough you'll get your way. And you may, but at a huge cost to your relations.h.i.+ps."

Patrick knew that Maggie used criticism to deflect attention from her own failings, which he believed were numerous. But by opening himself up to hear her story, he moved beyond the role of helpless victim which he had been conscripted into by his bullying father, and faced how he had driven her to reject him.

Owning Up to Your Share of the Problem You may refuse to accept even the smallest share of owners.h.i.+p in what happened. You may be convinced that you've been been wronged, not that you've wronged, not that you've done done wrong. But the a.s.signment of blame is rarely binary-as in, "I'm innocent, you're guilty." Injuries are more often systemic, each person's behavior ricocheting off the other's, each misstep pus.h.i.+ng you both further toward the edge. wrong. But the a.s.signment of blame is rarely binary-as in, "I'm innocent, you're guilty." Injuries are more often systemic, each person's behavior ricocheting off the other's, each misstep pus.h.i.+ng you both further toward the edge.

You're likely to want the offender to undo his damage first: "You change, and then I will," is the name of the dance. Or, "You hurt me, so you make it right, and then I'll decide if I want to warm up to you." This att.i.tude often leads to marital meltdown, as it did for Arnold and his wife, Jill.

Arnold complained that Jill rejected him s.e.xually. She complained that she was too exhausted for s.e.x because he never helped with the kids. Both felt angry, hurt, and sanctimonious. What Arnold needed to understand was that for Jill, as for many women, s.e.xual intimacy is inseparable from emotional intimacy and must be cultivated outside the bedroom. His giving the kids a bath would have romanced her. His emptying the dishwasher without being asked would have lubricated her libido. Until he helped out more, Acceptance 75.Jill was going to shut down. She in turn needed to see that if she embraced Arnold s.e.xually, she would make him feel wanted and would kindle in him a willingness to pitch in more around the house.

When you're locked in confrontation, you can easily get caught up in the moment and in your own self-serving version of the truth.

For a more honest look at yourself, you need to step back and observe what you may have done to trigger the offender's objection-able behavior.

This is exactly what Martha needed to do to salvage her relations.h.i.+p with her twenty-seven-year-old son. She constantly grum-bled that he never called her or sought her company. What she failed to see was that every time they got together, she a.s.saulted him with questions on the very topics he felt most anxious and inadequate about-his dating situation and his job. The more silent he became, the more advice she gave, until, guess what?-he turned away and found excuses not to meet. Caught in her own hurt, she was unable to see how she pushed him away.

Challenging Your "Official Story" 14 Why is facing our own issues so challenging at times? Why is it so hard to admit culpability, not just to the person we hurt but to ourselves? One reason is that it forces us to contradict our "official story." This is our personal, predigested take on the truth that protects us from knowing what we fear or despise in ourselves.

"Perhaps the most universal form of solace for the frailties we need to deny," writes clinical psychologist Robert Karen in The Forgiving Self, The Forgiving Self, is "the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. We soothe ourselves, consciously and unconsciously, with fairy tales tinged with grandiosity that leave us feeling less vulnerable than we really are."15 is "the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. We soothe ourselves, consciously and unconsciously, with fairy tales tinged with grandiosity that leave us feeling less vulnerable than we really are."15 An example of an official story might be your view of yourself as a great parent, certainly better than your parents ever were to you. Perhaps your father worked incessantly and rarely gave you the attention you craved. Now, as an adult, you consider yourself more empathic, more available than he ever was. But then one day your twenty-year-76 old son gets furious at you and calls you selfish, the most selfish person he has ever known, and suddenly you're forced to choose sides-his or yours. You may want to blame him for grossly distorting the truth, for being so remarkably unappreciative-and you may be right, to some degree. But you also may be disavowing another piece of the truth: that perhaps you haven't been there for him as reliably as you would like to believe you were, that perhaps you, too, have been self-involved and neglectful. Hit with the unvarnished truth, your precious core belief about yourself is likely to crumble.

How dare you make me confront the ugly truth about myself?

A child isn't the only one who may threaten your fantasies about yourself. A partner may, too. You may think of yourself as a very attractive mate-a great catch-then, suddenly, he leaves you for someone else. For years you told yourself you weren't happy and should move on. But now he has left you, and you somehow have to absorb that reality. It challenges your official story of yourself as the deprived, neglected one. You want to blame him for his selfishness and his weak, unsteady character. But now he tells you he's leaving because you make him feel invisible. Suddenly, you're experiencing the sense of abandonment you felt as a child. You hate this person for dredging up those painful moments buried in your past. But is there some truth in his accusations? Could it be that because of what happened to you as a child, you never fully committed yourself to him and injured him in ways in which you felt injured? Is there a powerful lesson here, and are you willing to open yourself up to learn it?

The person you accuse of hurting you is sometimes guilty of nothing more than bearing witness to your faults and vulnerabilities.

You're likely to feel a.s.saulted by him, but you might at the same time feel grateful for the insights he forces you to confront-insights into how you were hurt in the past and how you continue to get hurt today.

When Karen writes, "To mourn is to love again,"16 I take this to mean that when we look at ourselves unflinchingly and face our imperfect selves, we open ourselves to the possibility of healing.

77.Mourning the injuries of the past frees us to love again and to give others what no one gave us.

Questioning Your "I Am an Abused Person" Story One of the most difficult "official" stories to go back and rewrite is the "I am an abused person" story. As the injured party, you fancy yourself the victim, pure and simple. You excel at recalling all the ways you were harmed over your lifetime, all the people who exploited you, denigrated you, let you down. What you may fail to see is that you feel abused too easily. You resent too freely. You twist the truth and imagine that someone meant to harm you when no one did.

What gives rise to this "official" response? It could an inborn tendency to be negative or pa.s.sive. It could be a cognitive error such as "personalization" (you a.s.sume someone meant to hurt you when he had no such intent). Or it could be your early life experiences, which taught you that people will betray you. Whatever the source, you end up feeling chronically and pervasively abused-"a feeling,"

psychoa.n.a.lyst Karen Horney says, "which in its extent and intensity goes beyond, and is out of proportion to, actual provocations and may become a way of experiencing life."17 Embracing your "official story" of abuse lets you: * see yourself as good, right, fair, and virtuous; * disavow the destructive impact your behavior has on others; * hold others responsible for whatever goes wrong in your life; and * hide behind a veil of oppression when it's you who fail to protect or promote yourself.

Questioning your "official story" is a daunting business because of what it may reveal about you. But it can also bring rewards, helping you to: * clarify what happened-untangle who did what to whom; * sort out your feelings about the offense and the offender; 78 * decide what you want to correct in yourself that would foster more authentic, gratifying interactions; and * transcend the traumatic effects of your childhood.

The challenge is to face your flaws honestly while still having compa.s.sion for yourself-still liking, even forgiving, yourself.

Step #7: You challenge your false a.s.sumptions about what happened. what happened.

We all give meaning to the drama of our lives. Unfortunately, we don't always distinguish our version of the truth from what really went on. Identifying distortions in our thinking-separating the facts from what they signify to us-is a critical part of the Acceptance process. It requires much hard work-much self-scrutiny, much information-crunching-but it will help you respond with greater objectivity and ease your anger or pain.

Here are a few of our most common cognitive errors.

Dichotomous Thinking This cognitive error is also known as "all-or-nothing" or "black-and-white" thinking. Here you tend to view others in terms of rigid, polarized categories: You're perfect or horrible. You're right or wrong. You're good or bad. Cataloging someone in this way fails, of course, to do justice to his complexity. An overly critical portrait leads to character a.s.sa.s.sination and reinforces your decision not to forgive. An overly positive portrait leads to idealization and reinforces your decision to forgive at any price.

Mind Reading When you engage in mind reading, you a.s.sume, often incorrectly, that you know what the other person is thinking. Marsha's response to her husband, Dave, is typical. After he ended his affair, the couple entered therapy to rebuild their marriage. One day Marsha found an old photo of them taken at a family picnic. "How happy we look," she said, nostalgically. She waited for Dave's reply, but he said nothing.

79.Later, when Marsha and I were alone, she said, "He's angry at me for bringing up the affair again. But what does he expect? He's got to know that for every time I bring it up, I must think about it a hundred times. Why can't he be patient with me? Does he think I'm made of iron? He's probably still in love with that other woman."

The truth was that Dave wanted nothing more than to restore his wife's faith in him. He had said nothing not because of the reasons Marsha conjured up, but because he was overwhelmed with guilt. "I hate myself," he told me. "I destroyed her trust in me and much of the joy we once shared. I feel evil."

Marsha misinterpreted Dave's silence, and her false a.s.sumption significantly altered her response to him. I suggested she ask herself, "Am I misreading what he's thinking and feeling? What do I know, and what do I only a.s.sume? Can I check out my ideas by saying to him, 'You seem annoyed, upset. I'm wondering what you're thinking' ?"

Like Marsha, you need to get the facts straight and not fill in the blanks with your own homemade a.s.sumptions. Before you can respond fairly to the offender, you need to examine whether your ideas say more about you than they say about him.

Overgeneralization When you overgeneralize, you make too much of a single detail and get caught in the belief that "he always does this; he never does that."

Jill's response to her husband, Dean, is ill.u.s.trative. She was irked when he chose to finish up a mailing for a charitable organization and missed the awards ceremony for their daughter's swim team.

"I've got to question whether I'm married to the right guy," she told me. "We seem to have completely different values. I want a spouse who cares about his family and enjoys being part of it. Dean's always busy when I need him."

Jill's emphasis on this one particular offense prevented her from seeing the bigger picture-that her husband coached their daughters' field hockey teams, attended parent-teacher conferences, and regularly helped the girls with their homework. Her relations.h.i.+p to 80 Dean became hostage to a single negative memory. To gain objectivity, she needed to ask herself, "Am I seeing this one moment in the context of our whole life together, or am I isolating it and drawing sweeping conclusions?"

With Acceptance, you consider all the data, not just those facts that prove your point but also those that contradict it. You also look at the whole person, not just at his flaws or virtues. You may decide that his behavior toward you is so egregious that it wipes out anything good about him. Or you may decide the reverse. Whatever you conclude, you'll make a wiser, more self-interested decision if you view the full person, not a single act.

Personalization Personalization is when you see someone's behavior only in terms of yourself and ignore all other explanations-explanations that might leave you feeling more neutral and less scarred.

When you personalize, you put yourself at the center of the uni-verse, so to speak, and act as though all things revolve around you.

The truth may be that you're not quite so important to the offender, and that you're flattering yourself to think you're the sole target of his anger or scorn.

I saw personalization in action one day when I walked into an upscale boutique on Madison Avenue, dressed for theater. A salesperson approached and asked if she could help. I told her no thanks, I'd like to look around, and she walked away. Another woman, standing close by, turned to me and complained, "I guess I'm not worth being waited on."

There was no way to know whether the woman was a serious shopper or whether the salesperson had even seen her; if the salesperson had, my guess is that she would have been delighted to earn a commission on anyone who came through the door. What was clear was that the woman had applied her own personal meaning to an ambiguous situation and created unnecessary emotional distress for herself. It's possible, of course, that the salesperson did did think the customer wasn't worth her time, but if so, the customer would have think the customer wasn't worth her time, but if so, the customer would have Acceptance 81.to question why the salesperson-someone she didn't know and probably would never see again-mattered so much to her.

Jumping to Conclusions Here you make a.s.sumptions about an injury without getting the full story, and wound yourself unnecessarily. Faced with vague or incomplete data, you fill in the gaps and respond to issues of your own making.

When the World Trade Center was attacked, Sally and Max were traveling in Europe. For what felt like an eternity, they didn't know the whereabouts of their daughter, who lived in lower Manhattan. As they raced back to their hotel, hoping to find a message, Max launched into a tirade on how the disaster would ruin the economy and undermine the dollar. Sally told me, "I felt sick listening to him. Who was this unfeeling monster? How could he care so little for our child?"

Max explained later, "I saw Sally flipping out. There was nothing we could do until we reached the hotel, so I just tried to fill the air with conversation. I must have sounded ridiculous, but the truth is, I was in a state of shock myself."

As Sally learned, you can't respond to an injury in a constructive way unless you know the "offender's" intentions. The process of Acceptance asks you to look for various plausible, less hurtful explanations and not jump to easy conclusions.

"Should" Statements Your response to the offender's behavior will be deeply affected by your rules about how people should act, what you expect of them, and what you believe is right for the world. Aaron Beck refers to these as "should statements."18 Albert Ellis refers to them as "musterbations"19-the musts musts and and ought to's ought to's which we impose on others and on ourselves. Fred Luskin calls them our "unenforceable rules." 20 Judith Beck calls them "imperatives." "You have a precise, fixed idea of how you or others should behave," she writes, "and you overestimate how bad it is that these expectations are not met." 21 which we impose on others and on ourselves. Fred Luskin calls them our "unenforceable rules." 20 Judith Beck calls them "imperatives." "You have a precise, fixed idea of how you or others should behave," she writes, "and you overestimate how bad it is that these expectations are not met." 21 82."Should" statements include: My mother should be able to provide emotional comfort for me when I need her. My father should take interest in my sports and attend my games. My son should thank me for all the things I buy him. My daughter should want me to be highly involved in her wedding plans. My daughter-in-law should spend as many holidays with us as she does with her family. My boss should realize how hard I work and fight to get me a raise. My brother should spend more time with our elderly parents. My sister should call me on my birthday. My neighbors should keep their animals on their own property and see the reasonableness of my argument.

Most "should" statements are a set up for disappointment because they ask people to deliver more than they have to give.

When someone fails to meet your exacting standards, you're likely to feel bruised and self-righteously blaming-pointing a finger at him rather than at your own unrealistic expectations.

To correct this tendency, you need to recognize that your rules are exactly that- your your rules, not necessarily anyone else's. They represent your morality, your needs, your values. The rest of the world is not required to go along. When you insist that people should be different from the way they are, you're bound to cause yourself frustration and anguish. rules, not necessarily anyone else's. They represent your morality, your needs, your values. The rest of the world is not required to go along. When you insist that people should be different from the way they are, you're bound to cause yourself frustration and anguish.

Albert Ellis, founder of Rational Emotive Therapy, was once asked, "How do people plagiarize your work without the slightest compunction? How do they feel so comfortable stealing your ideas without referencing you?" His response was vintage Ellis: "Eee . . .

asily!" If only more of us could be like Ellis, a man without "shoulds"

who subst.i.tutes humor for indignation and accepts people for who they are, not who he wants them to be.