I've been thinking about taking responsibility.
Thomas Merton, via The New Yorker
I was a good little boy who succeeded in school and played well with others. My cousins lived just blocks away and in the post-war nineteen-forties there were dozens of other young kids to play with. We were experts at shooting marbles at recess on the dirt at the fringe of the elementary school playground; at using the parked Buick as second base during street baseball games when the asphalt tore the leather cover off the ball and we replaced it with electrical tape so that it felt more like throwing a shot-put than pitching a hardball; at extended-family barbecues on Sunday afternoons in my uncle’s back yard.
When I was nine years old, I added the moral teachings of a conservative church to my family’s values, memorized commandments and beatitudes, childishly obeyed all of them, and received from my family and my Sunday school teachers the accolade I cherished for myself: I was, indeed, a very good boy.
Then adolescence hit. A rush of hormones turned lust into a tidal wave that drowned my most fervent efforts to observe the rules that had been given to me. I prayed for help, lying prostrate like a young postulant, asking God to save me from acting on my passions, which nevertheless erupted the following weekend as they had the previous weekend and the weekend before that. Fear of being found out by my parents and constant moral warnings from the church youth group, in which I became more of a leader year by year, never saved me from these wild desires. It was then that I wired deep into my psyche the conviction that my normal human sexuality was shameful, sinful, and something to be hidden and suppressed. I discovered pretty quickly that I was not the sort of person who could, in fact, suppress my impulses, but I could learn to lie about them, to conceal this part of myself from myself and from others so that I could maintain the image of myself that we had all agreed upon: that I was a good boy.
I continued to abide by most of the rules; I didn’t cheat on tests, I read the Bible and prayed on my knees every morning, I helped raise my four younger siblings and was loyal to my friends. But given the chance, I’d exercise my sexual impulses, no matter how hard I thought and prayed about ways to control myself.
Of course I had to keep all of this secret, so I began a decades-long pattern of deceiving others and increasingly deceiving myself, weaving this dark, dishonest thread into the bright fabric of my character. I did this to avoid responsibility for my bad behavior, to protect myself from my own haunting guilt and shame, and to avoid the judgement and rejection from others I knew I deserved. I spent these years developing a troubling disconnect between who I was on the inside and what I showed of myself to others. My problem, it turned out, wasn't really sex - it was denial, deception, and self-destruction employed in the upkeep of an image of myself I felt I had to protect at all costs while doing exactly what I wanted to do.
I now look back in wonder at these advanced skills I developed for avoiding responsibility, my growing capacity to find ways either to hide my bad behavior or to explain it away.
Sometimes I just lied. In my forties, when I had been in therapy for a decade, I decided to get involved in a relationship I knew my therapist would find destructively irresponsible, because even I knew that it was. But I wasn’t ready to give it up, so for months I didn’t bother to mention it in any of our bi-weekly sessions. By the time I told her about it I was out of the mess, never confessed my lie to her, and instead reported my avoidance of the mess as a victory for my good judgment. Brilliant!
At other times, I would lie to someone to avoid spending time with them, or gossip about them to mutual friends. When I got busted, I’d escape by saying something inane, like I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. This is not an apology; it is the verbal sleight-of-hand (or mouth) that shifts the conversation from my failings to your feelings. As if your feelings were really the problem! Ah, but it worked so often, and so well. People would feel my empathy, my sorrow for the pain I’d caused them, and nod or whisper their gratitude for my honesty, which was of course a self-serving scam.
Or I could insist that I wasn’t the only one on the wrong side of some bad behavior, and point to others: what about them? It’s unfair to single me out when several others are also at fault. Ugh! I get uncomfortable just acknowledging this. But these sleazy tactics often helped me to avoid being punished or rejected, and despite my bad behavior, helped me maintain my reputation as a good person and my ability to live too comfortably with my compromised moral self.
I was also a master of casting myself as the victim, no matter the truth of what happened between us. I could deny my original lie that hurt someone by lying a second time: I didn’t say that, and it hurts me that you would think I might have. My instant transformation from liar to victim!
Over time, I’ve discovered that conflicts in our marriage or with my friends are seldom one-sided and that I am almost never the victim of someone’s predatory behavior. Especially with people I love who love me, if there’s a conflict between us usually neither of us innocent. Conflicts between us are almost always stirred up in whatever self-protective instincts linger. As evolved as I consider myself, I am still reactive to things that frighten me or shame me or make me sad.
If someone slights me, or even if I think they did; if I’m left out of a social event I think should have included me; if I’m denied a seat at the table in a deliberation I feel qualified to be asked to join, I still regress into these victim instincts. I sulk, imagine scenarios of retaliation, spent a day or two plotting, until I realize how insignificant the issue is. Neither of us has clubbed the other, we just stepped thoughtlessly on one another’s toes. Thankfully, I quickly abandon my role as a victim and let the incident fade away.
Many years ago, an artist whose name I cannot remember said, The most interesting thing I ever came across was myself. Mulling over my moral past, I’ve discovered that in the midst of those times when I was playing out the worst of my bad behavior I was, simultaneously, a good person. Even when threatened, I took care of my family, I was loyal and loving to my friends, I was responsible with money, I bore constant witness to the justice issues I cared about.
Most of us are this mix of muck and glory. We’re capable of great affection and petty loathing, plentiful generosity and emotional stinginess, courage and an equivalent cowardice, self-sacrifice and narcissistic greed. So we struggle on, trying so hard to liberate ourselves from the darkness, working our butts off to turn on our moral light.
I live from the inside out. My behavior is an honest reflection of my spiritual, emotional, and intellectual convictions. I’m now at a place in my life where I’m pretty comfortable (which is as comfortable as I think any of us should be!) with my personal integrity. This easier relationship between my inside world and what the outside world sees of me is one of my blessed comforts as I age.
It’s a long time since marbles in the dirt and street baseball, a long time since waves of lust broke on my character. I no longer lie to protect myself, and I’m as transparent in each relationship as our trust in one another can tolerate. I know myself well enough to recognize when that self-protective muck in me is being roiled, and I pretty quickly get to the point where I tell myself the truth, accept responsibility for my behavior, repair any damage I’ve caused, and move forward.