Choice Theory (27 page)

I
F, BEFORE
I
WAS BORN,
I knew all I have learned and experienced since childhood and was given the chance to pick my parents, I would not hesitate to pick my father. No son ever had a better father, and I owe much of what has been a good life to how he chose to relate to me for the more than fifty years I knew him. Although he has been gone for many years, his picture is still strongly in my quality world, and I feel certain mine was in his as long as he lived. As I look back over our long relationship, I see that what I had with my father was trust. It never crossed my mind that he ever meant anything different from what he said. From my father I got the gift of personal freedom, love without control. I was a very lucky child.

Although she had some outstanding qualities, I would not pick my mother. It wasn’t that she didn’t treat me well as a child or even as a young man, but I would not want to relive the way she treated me and my family later on. I don’t mean that what she did
after I was an adult harmed me or that her good treatment of me as a child did not contribute to my success. But knowing what I have known for many years, I believe I would have been better off with someone else. From the time I was very young, my mother was unpredictable. I never felt free really to trust her. In that respect, she was far different from my father.

Unlike all others who are in our quality worlds, we do not consciously choose to put our parents in. By the time we become aware of them, we have made that choice; they are there. Many animals bond with their young for survival for a short time when the young are growing up. We don’t bond genetically, but what we do when we put our parents into our quality worlds and they put us into theirs may be stronger than that short-term bonding. For most of us, it lasts a lifetime.

It is almost impossible for children to take parents who raise them out of their quality worlds because in most instances there is no one to replace them. For the same reason, it is difficult to take many other family members, even stepparents or adoptive parents, out of our quality worlds if they have been there from close to the beginning. Even if they treat us terribly from the moment we are aware of them, most of us struggle to keep these people in our quality worlds far longer than anyone we meet later in life. And it is the same for our children. No matter how our children choose to behave, we find it next to impossible to take them out of our quality worlds. In this respect, the child-parent relationship is unique.

Abused or severely neglected children know nothing about their quality worlds, especially how strong these worlds are and that their parents or parent substitutes are so firmly in them. Because they don’t realize the strength of their quality worlds, I think they sometimes wonder why they can’t seem to give up on their abusive or neglectful parents. Frequently, they accept the mistreatment in a desperate attempt to please the people they need so much. The pain of the abuse is far more bearable than the idea of separating from what children believe are irreplaceable persons, which, of course, means taking these persons out of their quality worlds.

This was the problem of the hero of the movie
Shine,
young David Helfgott: Neither he nor his father could remove the other from his quality world. The movie painfully depicts how his father loved him, but Helfgott could not help but perceive that this love was conditional. To get it, he had to submit to his father’s domination. When he first asked his father to let him leave home to pursue his gift as a pianist, his father cruelly rejected this request, all the while protesting how much he loved him.

Even when Helfgott finally summoned up the strength to escape his father’s domination and leave, the separation was only physical. He still was not able to take his father out of his quality world. He suffered unbearable pain over the conflict between his need for his father and his need for the freedom to pursue the piano.

Finally, to escape from this painful conflict, to find the personal freedom he needed so badly, he chose to turn his life over to his creative system, not an unusual choice for a talented person such as Helfgott who is already well in touch with this system.

I believe that Helfgott’s choice to give up playing the piano by choosing to become psychotic was his final resistance to his father’s insistence that he could not have his love unless he was willing to be the musician his father wanted him to be. But after ten years—time does heal some wounds—he felt free enough to return to the piano. Shortly afterward, he was fortunate enough to meet his wife and, with her love, he has come back as far as he has.

Because of well-intended but brain-damaging electric convulsive treatments Helfgott was given during his psychosis, he may never regain the creative artistry he once had. But we should not underestimate the ability of our creative systems to work around brain damage. He still jabbers, he still needs that protection his creative system gave him, but he is no longer psychotic. He is criticized unfairly for not being as normal as some righteous critics think he ought to be to perform. But he has triumphed over a lot of adversity, and the audiences enjoy seeing how far he has come back.

Now that he is happily married, he may finally be close to taking his father out of his quality world, as was depicted in one of the last scenes in the movie. While visiting his father’s grave, his wife asks him what he feels. Helfgott answers, “I feel nothing.” Even that answer does not mean he has taken his father out of his quality world. It may mean that with the love of his wife, he is finally able to deal with the father who may always be there and retain his sanity. The healing potential of finally satisfying his need for love, without believing he has to satisfy anyone else’s conditions to get that love, is equally clear.

Many abused or neglected children are in similar situations. They are stuck with the pictures of their abusive or neglectful parents in their quality worlds. Because of the abuse or the neglect, when they are young, they are too weak and frightened to do much but suffer. As they grow older and separate from the weak relationship they had with a parent, many of them are too distrustful of people to consider trying to find happiness in human relationships. They now have no one, not even their parents, in their quality worlds. But they want to feel good—
we all want to feel good
—so many of them pursue what is available to them, the pleasures associated with violence and drugs. Study after study has shown that prisons are filled with people who were abused or neglected as children.

For many of these children, the only people besides their mothers and gang members whom they could relate to are their teachers. But the external control system that dominates our schools deprives many of these needy young people of this opportunity. It is also sad that many teachers who try to care for these children are criticized and ridiculed by the external control system that dominates our schools. The educational message of our existing schools,
Learn what we tell you whether it is useful or not or we’ll punish you,
compounds this problem, a problem that only the schools have any chance to solve. I explain this situation in more detail in the next chapter.

Huge numbers of people are not willing to settle for lives with no happiness. They are not willing to give up on people or turn
their lives over to the search for pleasure without happiness.

Many of these unhappy people want very much to find others to love, but because of the reality of their life situations—they are poor, old, uneducated, unattractive, workless, homeless, sick, or criminal, the list is long—they are unable to.

There may be an answer to the poignant question posed by the Beatles:
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
They come from a world in which they are separated from their husbands, wives, children, teachers, and employers by this destructive psychology.

I will now explain how we may prevent many of these relationship problems by applying choice theory to families and, especially, to rearing children. As I stated earlier, by far our best chance for good relationships for our whole lives is with our families. If we could get rid of the urge to control, our families would be much stronger than they are now.

Child abuse, rejection, and neglect, widespread as they are, are far from the main reason families are unhappy. The vast majority of family unhappiness is the result of well-intentioned parents trying to make children do what they don’t want to do. And in search of freedom, children, often adult children, resist their parents’ efforts. Much later, the same conflict is commonly revisited when adult children try to make elderly parents do what they don’t want to do, such as give up driving, move in with a child, or move to a place where they can have the care they need.

What makes these struggles so much more miserable than marital or nonfamily conflicts is that parents and children are stuck in each other’s quality worlds forever. I have no good answer for what to do with elderly parents; there may be no answer to this problem. But the better the elderly and their children get along together while the parents are still able to take care of themselves, the later this problem may occur.

I can hear parents of school-age children saying,
Are we supposed to abdicate our responsibility as parents? Let our children do anything they want to do?
Of course not. When we deal with children, we have to learn our limitations and do as much as we can do within these limitations. To try to do more results in accomplishing less. What bothers people, especially parents, is that choice theory, which states that we can control only our own behavior, imposes such strict limitations on what we can do when we want children, or anyone else, to behave differently. This limitation does not change when we deal with children who are using drugs, failing in school, or being sexually promiscuous any more than it changes when our mothers or fathers become alcoholics, start running around, or keep losing jobs.

This limitation needs to be repeated because it is so hard for people, especially parents, to accept how limited they are in what they can do when they are dissatisfied with how their children are behaving.
They are limited to controlling their own behavior. All they can give to other people, including their children, parents, and mates, is information.
This information may be threats, bribes, beatings, and incarceration, but it is still information. Short of extreme measures, such as incarcerating an uncontrollable child, there is nothing that external control psychology can offer to this problem. Since this psychology is all we have, it is no wonder that many of these problems seem insoluble.

Few of us are prepared to accept that it is our attempts to control that destroys the only thing we have with our children that gives us some control over them, our relationship. The choice theory child-rearing axiom is this:
Don’t choose to do anything with a child whom you want to grow up to be happy, successful, and close to you, that you believe will increase the distance between you.
It is all but impossible for controlling people to accept that axiom when it means don’t criticize, threaten, complain, put down, punish, or bribe anyone, including your children, with whom you want to stay close.

In fact, this axiom goes way beyond children. It applies to all relationships and is the core of beginning to use choice theory in
your life:
Do not do anything with anyone if it seems to increase the distance between you.
Unsatisfying as it may be, doing less may be the best thing to do. Here again, prevention, which means keeping a failing relationship going, may be much better than anything else you can do. Children grow up, and what was once a poor relationship often gets better. But if there is too much of a split, it may get better but never get to the place either child or parent wants.

To illustrate what I mean, let me show you how I counseled a forty-five-year-old divorced woman. As you read what I did, try to put yourself in the place of the client. Her name is Linda, and I’ll start when she sat down in my office.

“You mentioned on the phone you were having some difficulties. Can you tell me a little more about what’s going on?”

“Well, actually, my doctor sent me. I’ve been having these terrible tension headaches, you know, the kind that go up the back of your neck and throb in your forehead. I thought I had a brain tumor.”

“I’m sure your doctor gave you a thorough checkup, CAT scan, the whole nine yards.”

“That’s right, he found nothing physical. So he said I was probably suffering from stress and recommended that I come to see you. If I seem skeptical, it’s because I don’t think that kind of pain could be caused by stress, whatever that is.”

“Well, whatever we do, it has no chance of making things worse, so please go back to see your doctor or to another doctor if what we discuss doesn’t help you.”

I always say this to people who are sent by a physician for any reason. It reassures them that I don’t think they are crazy or that their doctor is necessarily right. I try to come across as someone who will help and, more important, as someone who will listen to what they have to say. Many physicians today, trapped in the demands of managed care, haven’t the time to do so.