THAT'S MEN:'WE WANT everyone to behave as we think they should – the right way," writes Eknath Easwaran, the author of a number of books on meditation. "When, naturally enough, they not only behave their own way, but expect us to do as they do, we get agitated. And what we see through this agitation makes up our everyday reality."
This quote, from Easwaran’s book Meditation: a Simple eight-point Program for Translating Spiritual Ideals into Daily Life is a favourite of mine because I recognise its truth in myself.
When I’m driving, for example, I notice that other drivers just will not do what I believe to be the right thing.
And sometimes they are so deluded they get vexed with me because they mistakenly imagine that I am doing the wrong thing.
This kind of behaviour – seeing through a lens of agitation and dissatisfaction – is also a feature of relationships, especially long-term, committed ones.
As any relationship counsellor could tell you, some people get so locked into their annoyance about all the things that are wrong with their partners that you wonder why they would even want to keep the relationship going.
Oddly enough, this can even happen with people who have been getting along fine for years, even living together, and who get married – and suddenly everything the other person does is wrong. Why?
“The solution to the mystery is that many husbands or wives regard the marriage licence as a licence to criticise,” is how Dr William Glasser explains it in his book Control Theory – a New Explanation of How We Control our Lives.
“Unfortunately, as we grow more and more familiar, we believe that it is not only a right but a duty to tell people close to us, constructively of course, how badly they are doing and how much better off they would be if they did it ‘our’ way.”
It is not only other people who suffer at the hands of our know-all selves. Day in and day out, the target of my dissatisfaction is my own self.
I know everything about how I ought to behave. I’ve known it for years.
I also know I don’t behave that way. It’s as though I am two people: the one who thinks he is in charge of the show and the one who just goes and does what he wants to do anyway.
Of course every now and then I am a good boy and I manage to behave the way I think I ought to behave.
Then I can go around thinking I’m a great fellow altogether. But sooner or later that stubborn, unsatisfactory self will be back – and usually sooner.
The gap between those two selves is filled with self-criticism. “Perhaps the most insidious form of criticism is self-criticism,” writes Glasser. “If you criticise me, I can usually get away from you. But where can I go if I criticise myself?”
Taken to the extreme, he warns, brutal self-criticism can lead to depression, alcohol abuse and even suicide.
In another passage I find very striking, the writer Pema Chodron in her book The Wisdom of No Escape points out how allowing dissatisfaction with ourselves and with life to take the upper hand really limits our vision.
“When we start getting angry or denigrating ourselves or craving things in a way that makes us feel miserable, we begin to shut down, shut out, as if we were sitting on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but we had put a big black bag over our heads,” she writes.
Do I have a formula for stopping this type of behaviour?
I wish I had but I fear that we are so addicted to our own view of the world that we will always find ourselves criticising ourselves and other people.
But recognising the silliness of it all might be the start of some kind of wisdom.
Glasser’s book has been out of print for a long time but you can find it on abebooks.com. The others are still in print.
Padraig O'Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book, Light Mind – Mindfulness for Daily Living, is published by Veritas. His mindfulness newsletter is free by e-mail