Everything we’ve talked about in this book up to now will succeed or fail for you depending upon your ability to apply it to your life. The master decision is the key to personal liberation, happiness and high achievement.
The starting point of personal liberation is for you to accept complete responsibility for who you are and for everything that you become. You must accept, without reservation, that you are where you are and what you are because of yourself. If you want things to change, then you must change first. Your thinking determines your attitude, your conduct and your behavior, and they in turn largely determine your success or failure in life. Because you are always free to choose the content of your conscious mind, you are always fully responsible for the consequences of what you think.
You can dream big dreams, learn how to control both your conscious and subconscious minds and improve your self-concept and performance. But none of these efforts will give you any lasting benefit until you embrace personal responsibility.
When I was twenty years old, having failed high school, I was living in a tiny one-room apartment and working as a construction laborer in the middle of a very cold winter. I had almost no money. I was far from whatever home I’d had and I wasn’t planning to go back. One night, as I sat alone at my little kitchen table, it suddenly dawned on me that everything that I would ever become was completely up to me. No one else was going to do it for me. Someone once said, ’True maturity only comes when you finally realize that no one is coming to the rescue.” That revelation suddenly opened my eyes. I was never completely the same again.
You are programmed from infancy to believe that someone or something else is responsible for much of your life. When you are a child, if you are fortunate, your parents take care of everything. They provide you with food, clothing, shelter, educational opportunities, recreation, money, medical attention and whatever else you need. You are entirely provided for by other people. You are a passive player in the process.
It is normal and natural that our parents provide for us during our formative years. The problems begin when people come into adulthood with the unconscious expectation that somewhere, somehow, someone else is still responsible for them and for their situation. But from the age of eighteen onward, and sometimes earlier, you are in the driver’s seat. You are the architect of your own destiny. Whether or not your parents have succeeded in raising you as a totally self-reliant individual, from that moment forward there is no looking back. Everything you are, everything you become from then on, is up to you.
In one of Tolstoy’s short stories, he writes about a group of children who are told that the secret of happiness is hidden in the backyard of their home. They will be able to find it and possess it forever as long as they refrain from doing one thing. They must not think about a white rabbit while they are searching for the secret. Each time the children go out to search for the secret they try not to think about it. But the harder they try, the more they think about a white rabbit, and of course, they never do find the secret of happiness.
Everyone has a “white rabbit,” and sometimes, many white rabbits. These are the excuses that you use to avoid setting clear goals and making total commitments to the things you really want. Since the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your life, you need to become a skilled thinker if you sincerely desire to fulfill your potential. Part of being a skilled thinker is to objectively analyze any mental blocks, or excuses, that you have that you may be using as reasons for not moving ahead.
Some of the most popular “white rabbits” that people use as excuses are self-limiting ideas, such as “I’m too young,” or “I’m too old,” or “I don’t have any money,” or “I don’t have enough education,” or “I have too many bills,” or “I’m not ready yet,” or “I can’t do it because of my boss, my children, my parents” or some other reason.
What are your personal “white rabbits”? What are your favorite excuses for not making the changes that you know are necessary if you are going to achieve your goals and fulfill your dreams? Go “rabbit hunting” in your own life. Root them out and run them down. Carefully analyze them to see if they have any validity.
Here’s a simple way to test your excuses. Ask yourself: “Is there anyone, anywhere with my problem or limitation who has succeeded in spite of it?”
If the answer is “yes,” you know that your excuse is not valid. It is not a legitimate reason for your failure to make progress. What one person has done, someone else can do as well. The disease of “excusitis,” the inflammation of the excuse-making gland, is invariably fatal to success. If you have it, resolve to get over it right away before it sabotages all your hopes for great success.
The acceptance of complete responsibility, the giving up of all your excuses, is not easy. It’s one of the hardest things you ever attempt. That’s why most people never do it. It is like making a parachute jump for the first time: It is both scary and exhilarating. When you cast free from your excuses, as when you leap out of the plane, you suddenly feel completely alone, completely vulnerable. However, in a few moments, you start to feel a rush of excitement, your heart starts pounding faster and you feel remarkably happy and free.
You can never give responsibility away. The only thing that you can give away is control. And you know, from the Law of Control, that you only feel good about yourself to the degree to which you feel you are in control of your own life. If you try to make someone or something else responsible, you end up giving them control over your emotions. You are still completely responsible, but by giving up control, you lose your peace of mind.
Self-responsibility is the core quality of the fully mature, fully functioning, self-actualizing individual. Superior men and women take both the credit and the blame for everything that happens to them. People who are failures take credit for their successes, but they blame their problems on bad luck, other people or circumstances beyond their control. Successful men and women have a strong sense of internal accountability, which extends to their work and to all of their relationships. Failures try to evade accountability at every turn.
Sometimes I ask my seminar audiences the question, “How many of you are self-employed?” Usually, fewer than 20 percent of the audience raise their hands. Then I point out to them that this is a trick question. I tell them that the biggest mistake one can ever make is to think that one works for anyone but oneself. We are all self-employed, no matter who signs our paycheck. You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You are in charge.
The top 3 percent in every field treat their company as if it belonged to them. They see themselves as self-employed. They act as if they own the place. When they refer to their company, they use words like “we” and “our” and “my” and “us.” The average employee, on the other hand, always refers to the company as if it were something separate and apart from him or her, as if it were just a job, with no other meaning or significance.
There is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you are willing to accept for results and how high you rise in any organization of value. There is a direct relationship between your income, your status, your position, your level of prestige and the recognition you receive, on the one hand, and the amount of responsibility you are willing to accept, without excuses, for achieving the goals and objectives of your organization, on the other.
Here’s an easy question: If you were an employer and you had two people working for you, one who treated the company as if it belonged to him, and another who treated it as just a job, a place to come from nine to five each day, which one of these two would you be most likely to promote? Which one would you want to invest in? To which of these would you give additional training? For which of the two would you create opportunities for advancement? I think the answer is obvious.
Your attitude toward self-responsibility is one of the most important statements you can make about yourself and the kind of person you are. Everyone can be located somewhere on a scale, from high acceptance of responsibility, all the way down to low acceptance of responsibility, or irresponsibility.
A highly responsible person tends to be positive, optimistic, self-confident, self-reliant and self-controlled. A person at the lower end of the scale, with an attitude of irresponsibility, will be negative, pessimistic, defeatist and cynical, as well as aimless, fearful, unsure and often neurotic or mentally unstable.
Thomas Szasz, the controversial psychiatrist, says, “There is no such thing as mental illness; there are merely varying degrees of irresponsibility.”
Self-responsible individuals tend to be positive and mentally healthy. Irresponsible individuals tend to be negative and mentally ill. This observation brings us to one of the most important discoveries in the history of human psychology and personal performance.
There is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you accept in any area of your life and how much control you feel in that area. In turn, there is a direct relationship between how much control you feel in any given area and how much freedom you feel you have in that area. Responsibility, control and a sense of freedom, or autonomy, go hand in hand. The equation looks like this:
RESPONSIBILITY = CONTROL = FREEDOM
There is also a direct relationship between responsibility, control and freedom, on the one side, and the number of positive emotions you enjoy, on the other. In other words, there is a direct relationship between the level of responsibility you accept and how positive and happy you are overall. Self-responsibility and mental health go hand in hand. They are always in balance. Here is the equation in its shortened form:
RESPONSIBILITY = POSITIVE EMOTIONS
At the lower end of the scale, people with attitudes of irresponsibility, who feel that they are not responsible for their life or what happens to them, also feel they have little control, or feel out of control entirely. They feel that they have little or no ability to make a difference in their life. Nonresponsible people feel that they are controlled by external forces and by other people.
This feeling of not being in control causes them to feel a lack of freedom, to feel trapped. An attitude of irresponsibility, feeling out of control and feeling trapped triggers negative emotions, such as unhappiness, anger and frustration. Here then is the opposite equation from the above:
IRRESPONSIBILITY = LACK OF CONTROL = LACK OF FREEDOM
In its shortened form, the equation looks like this:
IRRESPONSIBILITY = NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
Negative emotions are the “robber” emotions of life. They are the primary causes of underachievement and failure. They make people physically and mentally ill, ruin relationships and destroy careers. They cast a shadow over everything a person tries to do. Negative emotions strip out any joy a person might get from any achievement. They are totally harmful and are the great enemies of human happiness.
The elimination of negative emotions is job one for the person who aspires to great success and achievement. Nothing is more important. Peace of mind is the highest human good, and peace of mind only exists in the absence of negative emotions. You can’t be negative and at peace at the same time. One cancels out the other.
When I began studying this subject some years ago, I was astonished to discover that virtually all the problems that we have in life are rooted in negative emotions of one kind or another. It became clear to me that if you could find a way to eliminate negative emotions, your life would be wonderful. All the mental laws described earlier would begin to work in your favor. You would accomplish more in a short period of time than the average person accomplishes in years.
On the other hand, the failure to eliminate negative emotions would undermine all your efforts and take much of the joy and pleasure from anything you managed to accomplish. Negative feelings would cause the mental laws to work against you. Destructive emotions could cause you more grief and heartache in a shorter period of time than any other factor in your life.
I saw clearly that the elimination of negative emotions was central to the achievement of all lasting health, happiness, freedom and prosperity.
The insight that changed my life was the discovery that negative emotions are completely unnecessary and unnatural in the life of man. There is no need for them. They serve no good purpose. They are only destructive. They are the major reason men and women fail to grow and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and character. And you do not have to suffer them at all if you consciously choose to get rid of them.
Up to that time, I had always thought that negative emotions were a normal and natural part of being a human being. I thought that, just as you have positive emotions, you have negative emotions. They were a part of human nature, to be accepted as inevitable, just like the rain or the sunshine.
Then I learned that no one is born with negative emotions. Have you ever seen a negative baby? Every negative emotion that we experience as adults, we had to learn, starting in childhood, through a process of imitation, practice, repetition and reinforcement. And since negative emotions are learned, like most things, they can be unlearned, and you can be free of them.
Many people have a hard time with this subject. They have been negative for so long that they find it difficult to accept that negative emotions are completely unnecessary. They resist the idea that they can be eliminated. Of course, the Law of Belief states that whatever you believe, with feeling, becomes your reality. If you absolutely believe that negative emotions are a necessary part of your life, then they certainly will be, and they will remain so. However, it is easy to prove that negative emotions serve no useful purpose. Realizing this is the first step to getting rid of them.
The most common and easily identifiable negative emotions are doubt and fear. There are also guilt and resentment, which usually go around together, like twins. Then there is envy, the root negative emotion of socialism, communism and much political demagoguery. This is followed closely by jealousy, that great destroyer of happiness and relationships.
More than fifty negative emotions have been identified. But they all eventually boil down to and are expressed in the core negative emotion of anger. Anger is perhaps the worst of all the negative emotions, the most powerful and the most destructive. Anger, once generated, is always expressed, either inwardly or outwardly.
If it is expressed inwardly, as when you suppress or repress your angry feelings, you make yourself sick. If you express your anger outwardly, you harm your relationships with others. You make them unhappy, and in extreme cases, physically ill.
How do you feel when you are angry? How do you think or reason? How do you get along with others? How do you sleep or digest your food? When you’re angry, doesn’t it feel as if there was a dark cloud over your mind? Don’t you find that you cannot concentrate or think straight? Doesn’t your mind become totally preoccupied with the object of your anger? Don’t you talk furiously to yourself as you rehash what happened, how you were wronged, and what you’d like to do to even the score?
The longer your anger continues, the more all-consuming it becomes, like a brush fire burning out of control. It can rob you of sleep, of friends and of employment. It can cause you to behave irrationally and to act in ways that make you feel ashamed and embarrassed.
Does anything good ever come from anger, or any other negative emotion? The answer is a definite no. Negative emotions, rooted in irresponsibility, serve no useful purpose at all. Why, then, do people experience so many negative emotions? Let’s answer that by starting off with the main causes of negative emotions in the first place.
There are four main causes of negative emotions. The first cause is justification. Justification occurs when you attempt to justify and explain, to yourself and others, why you should feel this negative emotion, why you are entitled to feel angry or upset for some reason. Justification and self-righteousness feed on each other, and are flip sides of the same reasoning process.
Whenever you feel badly used for any reason, your first reaction is to flare up in anger. Your second reaction will be to marshal all the reasons anger is a justifiable reaction. You need to be able to say, “I have every right to be angry.” You look for people who will agree with your reasoning and your feelings. You lay out the situation for them in great detail so they will see clearly that you are obviously the wronged party in this situation. In fact, without being able to justify yourself and your anger, you can’t keep your anger going.
You can begin the process of eliminating negative emotions by simply refusing to justify them. Refuse to allow yourself to create all kinds of reasons you are entitled to feel as bad as you do. Refuse to pass judgment on the other person. You will find that all judging of others eventually leads to some form of condemnation, and the negative emotions of intolerance and anger that go with that condemnation. But when you withhold judgment, which is an act of mental control, it is often sufficient to stop the negative emotion from starting in the first place.
When someone does or says something that causes you to react, neutralize your tendency to flare up by excusing the other person for some reason. What I say to control my emotions is something like, “God bless him; he’s probably having a bad day.”
Have you ever been driving along in traffic and been cut off by another driver? Did you notice how you instantly became angry? Even though you had never seen the other driver before, and the other driver has never seen you, you reacted exactly as if that driver had carefully plotted and planned, and then waited to ambush you as you came driving innocently along. But, the instant you stop telling yourself what a terrible driver he or she is and just laugh it off, your anger quickly dissipates and disappears. Refusing to set yourself up as a judge and jury removes the trigger that starts the anger and allows you to calm down and take control of your emotions.
The second main cause of negative emotions is identification, or taking things personally. You can only become angry about something to the degree to which you can personally identify with it and see it as affecting or harming you in some way.
The minute you stop taking things personally, you get your emotions back under your own control. The way to do this is to practice detachment, standing back from the situation and forcing yourself to look at it objectively. Be philosophical; try to see it from the other person’s point of view. Your ability to “disidentify” with what has happened gives you greater calmness and clarity and makes you much more effective in dealing with the problem, whatever it is.
This need for detachment and objectivity in dealing with difficulties is why it is said that “a man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client.” Perhaps the most valuable quality of a senior executive is his or her ability to function well in a crisis. This ability is solely a result of refusing to get caught up in the emotionality of the moment.
The third major cause of negative emotions is lack of consideration. You become angry when you feel that people are not giving you your just due, that people are not respecting you the way you feel you deserve to be. If someone is rude to you, or slights you, or does not acknowledge you properly in a social situation, your ego becomes involved and you feel hurt, angry and defensive. This is why a wise man once said, “You should not worry so much about what other people think of you, because if you knew how seldom they did, you would probably be insulted.”
You must starve your negative emotions. You must withdraw the energy from them by refusing to justify them, by refusing to identify with them and by refusing to let the behavior of others toward you get under your skin. But the very fastest way to eliminate negative emotions, virtually in an instant, is to go right to the root of them and cut them off.
Blaming is the fourth and final cause of negative emotions and it lies at the root of almost all of them. Probably 99 percent of your negative emotions depend for their very existence on your ability to blame someone or something else for something that is making you unhappy. The instant you stop blaming, the instant you refuse to blame anyone or anything else for anything, your negative emotions cease, just as if the power to them was suddenly cut off, just as unplugging the Christmas tree lights causes all the lights to go off at once.
The simple switch you can throw to short-circuit any negative emotion is explained by the Law of Substitution. This law states that the conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time, positive or negative, and you can deliberately choose that thought. You can substitute a positive, constructive thought for a negative, destructive thought, and in so doing, you can push the negative thought out of your mind.
Whenever you feel negative or angry for any reason, you can immediately cancel the thought that is causing the negative emotion by saying, very firmly, “I am responsible.”
This is the most powerful of all affirmations for mental control. These words put you back in the emotional driver’s seat. The words “I am responsible!” switch your mind immediately from negative to positive. They enable you to assert complete control over your emotions. They make you feel calm and relaxed, and enable you to see the situation with greater clarity. The words “I am responsible” put you in charge of yourself and enable you to deal with the situation more effectively.
You can develop no further than you have up to this moment with your negative emotions intact. It is not possible for you to grow and evolve to higher levels of understanding and effectiveness except to the degree to which you free yourself from them. Your negative emotions are like forces of mental gravity that are holding you in your current reality. You must leave them behind.
This acceptance of responsibility, and the accompanying elimination of negative emotions, is not optional. It is mandatory. It is central to your health, happiness and personal effectiveness. The development of a positive mental attitude toward yourself and your life, characterized by the elimination of negative emotions, is essential if you want to develop your higher mental powers. Positive, constructive emotions are the foundations of all happiness, achievement and long life.
To begin the process of clearing your mind, pause for a moment and think over your entire life, past and present. Analyze each memory or situation that makes you feel negative in any way, as if you were holding it up to the light. Then neutralize any negativity associated with it by simply saying, “I am responsible,” over and over.
The fact is that you are responsible. Whatever your difficulty or problem, you probably got yourself into it. You were free to choose. And you are still free. You probably knew at the time that you should not be doing it, but you went ahead anyway. So you are absolutely, completely, 100 percent responsible for your situation, for the consequences of your decisions.
Often people ask, “Isn’t accepting responsibility the same as accepting blame?” The answer to that is that responsibility always looks forward, always to the future. Blame always looks backward, to the past, for someone who is guilty.
Responsibility says “next time” or “in the future” or “what do I do from here?” Blame always says “he did” or “she did” or “if only.” Responsibility gives you a sense of control, of self-reliance, of pro-activity. Blame makes you feel angry and frustrated and vengeful.
Someone runs into your car at a stoplight. Legally, you are not at fault. But you are responsible for the way you react to the situation. You are responsible for your conduct and your behavior. You can respond either by becoming angry, upset and emotional, or by being mature, calm and controlled. The choice is yours. And how you feel is determined by how you decide to respond, not by the situation. Responsibility or irresponsibility; the choice is yours. It always has been.
Usually when you think about responsibility in these terms, you decide that, from this point forward, you are going to accept complete responsibility for your life. However, almost every person is still carrying around at least one negative experience for which there is no way that he or she is going to accept responsibility. Each person has a favorite negative emotion that he or she is not going to part with by accepting responsibility for his or her emotions, or for what happened.
You say, “If you only knew what that other person did to me, you could not ask me to accept responsibility.” But here is a key point. The continued existence of even one negative emotion in your conscious or subconscious mind is in itself enough to sabotage all your chances for happiness. A single negative emotion of blame or anger can interfere with your peace of mind indefinitely.
To illustrate this critical point, imagine that you have just purchased a brand new Mercedes 600 SEL, from the factory, beautifully engineered and mechanically perfect in every detail. There is only one problem with this car. A mistake was made in assembling the braking system and one front wheel brake is locked. The wheel will not turn. Now, let us say that you decide to take your beautifully engineered car for a drive. You get in, you start the engine, you shift it into gear and you step on the gas. If everything in this car is perfect except for that one front wheel brake which is locked on, what would happen when you stepped on the gas?
The answer is that you would spin around that locked wheel. The car would go around and around. No matter how hard you stepped on the gas or how much you twisted the wheel, you would simply go in a circle.
Your world is full of people who are just like that new car. You may be one of them. They may be intelligent, good-looking and well-educated, and may seem to have everything going for them, but their lives just seem to go around in circles. Almost invariably this is because they are holding on to at least one key experience from their past for which they are refusing to accept responsibility. They are still blaming someone or something for a hurt they have suffered.
I have spoken to men and women fifty years old who are still angry and resentful over something that happened to them in childhood. This unresolved bitterness affects their relationships with their spouses, their children, their coworkers and their friends. It manifests itself in psychosomatic illnesses, and in extreme cases, it can even lead to early death.
The field of psychotherapy is built around helping people to deal with these unresolved feelings of anger, guilt and resentment. The patient is cured when he or she can identify what is holding him or her back, face it honestly and let go of it. You can accomplish very much the same thing by identifying any feelings of negativity you have toward anyone, accepting responsibility for the situation and then letting it go. You will discover that you are cured as soon as you do.
You become what you teach. Once you have begun accepting responsibility for every part of your life, encourage your friends and associates to do the same thing. When people tell you about their problems and their frustrations, empathize with them and then remind them, “You are responsible.”
Perhaps one of the kindest things that you can do for a true friend is to put that person back in touch with his or her own good sense by reminding him or her that he or she is responsible. When a person complains, respond by saying, “You are responsible, what are you going to do about it?” Don’t try to give advice. It’s probably not wanted and will be ignored anyway. Just listen. Be sympathetic. Then encourage the person to accept responsibility and get busy doing something about the situation.
At one time, my wife, Barbara, wanted to be a guidance counselor and eventually a psychologist or psychotherapist. She wanted to help people through their problems. She would practice by spending many hours listening to her friends and counseling them the very best way that she could. She would give them her very best guidance and advice to help them deal with their difficulties.
Whenever I was involved in one of these “counseling sessions,” especially with her friends and coworkers, I would avoid all the hours of going back and forth dissecting the problem and simply cut to the core of the matter by saying “You are responsible, what are you going to do about it?”
Barbara felt this was too simplistic. She told me that I was not giving sufficient consideration to the complexities of the various situations these people were facing. She was then astonished to see how many of her friends, after endless counseling sessions, actually went out and got themselves together. They took action shortly after they had been told, in no uncertain terms, that they were responsible, and that it was up to them to do something about their situations.
Barbara and I now have a standing joke around the house. When Barbara has lunch with a friend who has a problem, or some kind of personal difficulty, I will ask her what she told the person to do. She replies by saying, “I just gave her ‘the advice.’”
It is much simpler, it works much better, and it is much easier on everyone involved. The advice is, “You are responsible, what are you going to do about it?”
Become your own psychotherapist by repeating to yourself over and over, “I am responsible, I am responsible, I am responsible.” Then, give “the advice” to others who have problems. Just say, “You are responsible, what are you going to do about it?” Let them get on with the rest of their lives so you can get on with yours.
Take a pad of paper and draw a line down the center. On the left side, make a list of every person or situation about which you harbor any negative feelings at all. Number each one.
On the right side of the page, write out a series of sentences that begin with “I am responsible for this because . . .” and complete this sentence. Do this for each item and be as hard on yourself as you possibly can. Be brutally frank and honest. Write out every reason why you might be responsible for what happened. Do the same for every negative situation in your past or present.
When you have completed this exercise, you will be amazed at how much more positive and in control you feel. You will be free from the mental burdens you’ve been carrying for so long.
The golden key to inner peace and outer success, especially in your relationships with other people, is contained within yourself and your responses to the world around you. There is a principle that is indispensable for the development of higher consciousness and for the full use of all your mental powers. It will enable you to largely eliminate negative emotions of all kinds and to take full responsibility in everything you do. This principle will liberate you from the burden of countless problems in your past, going back to your earliest childhood. It will develop in you a fine and noble character and make you the kind of person that people want to be around and be like. Thousands of our graduates have reported to us that the practice of this principle has revolutionized their lives, as it will yours. You will learn this principle in this chapter.
Everything that you are today is a result of your habitual ways of thinking. As the Law of Correspondence states, your outer world is a physical manifestation of your inner world. Everything you see around you—your health, your relationships, your career, your family and your worldly accomplishments—is an expression of the workings of your mind.
Your behavior, attitudes, values and habits of thought are learned. You did not have them when you came into the world. You have learned them as the result of input and repetition, over many years. And because they have been learned, they can be unlearned. You can unlearn the habits of thought you have acquired that are not consistent with the person you want to be or the goals you want to achieve.
A feeling of optimism is a prerequisite for success and happiness. Yet most of us are plagued by negative emotions of all kinds, especially anger, fear, doubt, envy, resentment, irritability, impatience, intolerance and jealousy. In spite of our best intentions, these negative emotions tend to arise unexpectedly, often at the worst possible moments, and cause us to act in ways that we later regret.
Negative emotions are feelings and responses that have been learned like any habits. They can be unlearned as well, if you have the key to the lock that holds them in place. To unlearn them, however, you must understand the psychological factors that create a fertile breeding ground for negative emotions in the first place.
Fortunately, there is no permanent place for negative emotions in your subconscious mind. If negative emotions could become permanent, there would be no hope for you to improve your temperament or your personality through your own efforts. They are vagabond emotions, which can be chased away with the correct procedure.
Just as you are born with no self-concept, you are born without negative emotions. You have to be taught negative emotions as you are growing up. You usually learn the negative emotions that are the most popular in your family. You imitate the negative emotions and reactions of your mother or your father, or both. You imitate the negative emotions of the people with whom you identify. If someone suggests to you that your way of acting is inappropriate, you dismiss their input by saying, “That’s just the way I am.”
Often, you’ve had certain negative ideas for so long that you’re not even aware of them, or where they came from originally. But one thing you can be sure of: You weren’t born with them. They are not permanent. You can be free of them if you want to be.
You develop a propensity for negative emotions as a result of two experiences that happen to you early in life. The first of these experiences is destructive criticism. More damage has been caused and more people destroyed by destructive criticism than by all the wars in history. The difference is that wars kill the physical bodies of people while destructive criticism destroys the inner person and leaves the bodies walking around. Virtually every problem you have with yourself and with other people can be traced back to some incident in which your value and worth were challenged or attacked by some sort of criticism.
Children up to the age of six are open and vulnerable to the influences of the important people in their lives. They have no capacity to discriminate between true and false evaluations and criticisms. The child’s mind is like wet clay upon which their parents and siblings write and leave marks. And the more intense the emotion, the deeper the groove.
When you grow older and develop the powers of discrimination, you can “consider the source” of negative input. If someone criticizes you, or disagrees with you, you can stand back and judge whether the assessment is valid. You can choose to accept what you consider to be helpful and reject the rest.
When you’re a child, however, you have no such ability. Because you are still in the process of learning who you are, you are like a little sponge. You absorb the evaluations of the important people around you as if they were telling the absolute truth, as if they were actually in a position to know your true character and capabilities. The more you value their love and respect, the more likely you are to accept what they say about you as a valid assessment of your character and worth. And once you accept something as true about yourself, you begin to see yourself by the light of that belief.
Your mind attempts to serve you by validating what you’ve decided is correct about you. It sorts and winnows your perceptions. It causes you to see examples that “prove” your beliefs while simultaneously causing you to ignore experiences that contradict it.
If you’re told that “you’re a bad boy,” or “you can’t be trusted,” or “you’re a liar” (all children tell lies; it’s part of their learning how to interact with other people), you start to believe that these criticisms are indelible facts about your basic personality. If you accept them consciously, they are then accepted by your subconscious mind where they are recorded as instructions for future behavior.
When I was growing up, I was told that I would never amount to much, that I was a big disappointment to my parents. Not meaning to, they judged me by impossibly high standards. Not understanding that children are little learning organisms who make mistakes continually, they demanded behavior of me, their first child, that I wasn’t capable of delivering.
When I had my own children, I resolved not to do to them what was done to me. Instead, I tell them every day that I love them and that I think they are the best kids in the world. When we are driving together, I talk to Barbara as if they weren’t in the backseat and tell her how lucky we are to have such wonderful children. Privately, I whisper to each of them, “You’re the best in the West!”
Even when I have to reprimand them, I start by saying, “I love you very much, but you mustn’t do that because you could get hurt,” or whatever is necessary.
Parents criticize with the intention of helping the child, of improving the child’s performance. But because destructive criticism lowers the child’s self-esteem and weakens the self-concept, the child’s overall performance actually declines. The child’s self-confidence diminishes. The likelihood of the child’s making mistakes increases. If the child is criticized too often, or if the criticisms are taken too emotionally, the child will become anxious and afraid and will begin to avoid doing those things altogether.
In the worst case, the child will become hypersensitive and will be insecure and afraid of trying anything new. When the child grows up, he or she will be extremely emotional about criticism of any kind and will react angrily and defensively to any suggestion of disapproval from a spouse, boss, friend or coworker.
Everyone has areas where they are hypersensitive, usually in the parts of their lives where they have the greatest emotional investment, such as their families or careers. One of the most important things you can do for yourself is to develop a certain objectivity or detachment about criticism in these key areas. Learn to stand back and evaluate the opinions of others unemotionally. It’s not easy, but it saves a lot of wear and tear on your system. This ability to avoid being overly affected by the criticism of others is a key quality of the self-actualizing person.
The second factor that predisposes you to negative emotions is a lack of love. The most traumatic experience a child can endure is the withdrawal of love by one or both of his parents. When parents react to the child with anger and disapproval, the child is terrified. He or she feels anxious and fearful and flails around emotionally. Because the child needs his or her parents’ love so much, when it’s withheld for any reason, he or she begins to wither inside. If the love is withheld indefinitely, or given unpredictably, it causes severe personality problems that erupt in anger and negativity in adult life.
If you did not receive a sufficient quality and quantity of love during your formative years (and most people did not), you seek it all your life. You will continually feel an emotional deficiency, a longing, an insecurity, that you will strive to satisfy or compensate for. You will look for unconditional love in your relationships and you’ll feel tense and uneasy if love is interrupted or withheld. Just as early calcium deficiency causes rickets in children, which shows up as bowed legs in the adult, a deficiency of love in childhood is manifested in negative emotions when you grow up.
For you, or anyone, to feel completely loved as a child, three conditions must exist. An absence of any one of these three will appear in adolescence and adulthood in the form of insecurity, negative emotions and destructive behavior.
The first condition for healthy emotional development is that your parents must love themselves. Your parents cannot give you more love than they have for themselves. If your mother or father doesn’t like himself or herself very much, he or she will have little love to give to you. The rule is that high self-concept parents raise high self-concept children, while low-concept parents raise low self-concept children. As within, so without. The self-concepts of the children become mirrors of the self-concepts of their parents.
Your parents gave you all the love they had to give. They didn’t withhold any. They just didn’t have any more to give in the first place. There wasn’t anything you could have done to get any more than you got. You got all there was.
The second condition that must be fulfilled for a child to feel fully loved is that his or her parents must love each other. Children learn about love by experiencing it directly and by observing it taking place in their families. It has been said that the kindest thing that a man can do for his children is to love their mother, and the reverse is also true. When children grow up in a household in which the mother and father love each other in a way the children can see and experience, they are far more likely to grow up with feelings of security and self-confidence.
You learn how to have your own adult relationship with a member of the opposite sex by observing such a relationship in your own family. If you grew up in a household in which you didn’t experience it, you can spend the first few years of your adulthood learning how to get along with another person by trial and error. Many first marriages today are “practice marriages,” in which individuals learn how to be married. They learn what it is they want or don’t want in a marriage partner and how to make a relationship work.
The third condition that must exist for a child to feel fully loved is that the parents must love the child. This is one of the most sensitive subjects that an adult ever has to deal with. The fact is that many of our parents did not love us. They wanted to, and they intended to, and they planned to, but they never really got around to it. Perhaps they didn’t have the time, or the emotional energy, or the interest, or perhaps they had unresolved conflicts with their parents or with their spouses that made loving us impossible.
Many parents do not like their children very much. Sometimes this is because they start off with the idea that the role of the child is to fulfill their expectations. If the child has a personality of his or her own, the parents often take this as a personal affront. They respond by criticizing the child or withdrawing their love. If they do this for long enough, it eventually becomes a habit. Parents then get into the habit of criticizing and tolerating their children instead of loving and cherishing them.
It is important for you to know that whether or not your parents loved you, you are still a valuable and worthwhile person. Your parents’ love or lack of love says nothing about your inherent possibilities. Parents are what they are. They do the best they can. At the very least, they got you here and gave you a chance at life. Accepting that one or both of your parents may not have loved you, or may not have loved you enough, is an important step to full maturity.
Most adults were brought up in homes in which they were the victims of destructive criticism, and they suffered a lack of love in some way. If this was your experience, you were too young to know why this was happening. You merely internalized the message that “for some reason, my mommy and daddy criticize me and don’t love me. Since they know me better than anyone else, it must be because of something I’ve done.”
Destructive criticism and lack of love, in combination, create the negative emotion of guilt. Guilt is the major emotional problem of the twentieth century. It is the root cause of most mental illness, unhappiness and almost all other negative emotions. A child who feels guilty feels that he or she is not worth very much, that he or she is, in fact, worthless. Destructive criticism and lack of love instill in the child’s subconscious mind the feeling of worthlessness.
Guilt is used on people deliberately for two reasons: punishment and control. Using guilt on another person as a form of emotional punishment is extremely effective. It is an essential part of negative religious teachings. It is used by many parents to make their children feel bad, to make them feel worthless and insignificant.
Guilt is also used as a tool of control or manipulation. If you can make a person feel guilty, you can control their emotions and their behavior. If you can make them feel guilty enough, you can get them to do things for you that they might not do in the absence of those guilty feelings.
Mothers are often skilled at the use of guilt. I used to say that my mother had a black belt in guilt and gave courses at the local YMCA. My mother learned to use guilt as a tool of interaction from her mother, who learned it from her mother, and so on back through the generations. Fathers are often skillful at using guilt as well.
If you were raised under the influences that produce feelings of guilt, you will experience this guilt in several different ways.
The first and most common manifestation of guilt is feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and undeservingness. You feel that you do not deserve good things to happen to you. In fact, if several good things happen to you in a row, you will become extremely uncomfortable. You will feel out of your comfort zone of deservingness, and you will probably start engaging in self-sabotaging behavior to stop the good things from happening.
The truth is that you deserve all the good things that come to you when you keep your mind focused on what you want and keep it off what you don’t want.
These feelings of inferiority, inadequacy and undeservingness are often expressed in the words, “I’m not good enough.” Some psychologists refer to this as the “fear of success.” The fear of success is simply another way of saying that, because of your deep down feelings of unworthiness, any achievement that contradicts your self-limiting beliefs makes you feel uncomfortable.
Very often, people will work extremely hard for the success they desire. They will put in long hours and make great sacrifices. However, just as they almost reach their goal, something will go wrong. They will act consciously or unconsciously to kick the chair out from under themselves.
The salesman on his way to close the deal of a lifetime gets into an automobile accident. The lawyer on the way to the signing of a big contract leaves his briefcase in the taxi with the only copy of the contract locked inside. Many people turn to alcohol, drugs or extramarital affairs in an attempt to escape from the discomfort of succeeding in spite of their inner feelings of unworthiness.
The second adult manifestation of guilt is destructive self-criticism and self-defeating behavior. If one is criticized while one is growing up, one soon learns to criticize oneself, and continues it through life. You often hear people say things like, “I’m always late,” or “I’m terrible with numbers,” or “I’m not very good at this.” They are continually reinforcing negative ideas that may have little or no basis in fact. They are repeating what they’ve been told about themselves, and in so doing, making it their reality.
Your subconscious mind accepts whatever you say about yourself as true. When you constantly criticize yourself, your subconscious mind accepts your words as commands. Your subsequent words and actions will then fit a pattern consistent with your self-criticism. You will behave on the outside the way you talk to yourself on the inside.
The third way you demonstrate that you’ve been raised with feelings of guilt is that you are easily manipulated by guilt. You are an easy mark for the irritation or impatience that others use to manipulate your behavior. Even people you don’t know can pull your “guilt-strings” and make you feel uncomfortable or even acquiesce to their demands. You become like a puppet, and the guilt-thrower becomes the puppeteer.
Virtually all charitable solicitations are based on the skillful use of guilt to manipulate your emotions, to make you feel that you are undeserving of your standard of living and your accomplishments.
Taxi drivers, waitresses and flight attendants use guilt on you to control your behavior. I know, for example, that you lose a pint of water per hour through dehydration when you fly. I therefore drink a lot of water in the air. I continually ask for refills to my water glass.
Most stewardesses resent this. They know all about dehydration and they are schooled to drink fluids continually when they fly. But they don’t want the extra work of refilling your water glass. So instead of asking, “Can I get you anything else,” they ask, “Will that be all?”
If you ask for more water, they sigh heavily, as if you just asked them to carry a hundred-pound suitcase, and go off to get it for you. When they bring it back, they tend to be abrupt and disapproving, as if this will cow you into submission so they can go back to the galley and continue reading their magazines.
You need to be aware of how commonly guilt is used as a tool to influence you. You will see it everywhere.
The poet W. H. Auden wrote, “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”
The fourth manifestation of guilt is using guilt and blame with others. If you were raised as a victim of guilt, being constantly criticized and blamed, you will grow up and use guilt as a way of communicating with others. Many parents use guilt exclusively to get their children to do what they want. Many bosses rely on guilt as their primary method of control.
The fifth manifestation of guilt, and perhaps the most common, is the development of the “victim complex.” The individual feels like a victim and talks like a victim. The person with deep feelings of guilt is always making excuses or apologizing. He or she is always saying, in effect, “I’m sorry.” In addition, he or she uses “victim language,” ways of speaking that are really pleas of “not guilty.”
Perhaps the most common forms of victim language you hear are phrases like “I can’t” or “I have to,” or combination phrases such as “I have to, but I can’t; I can’t, but I have to.”
Another form of victim language is the word “trying.” Whenever people say “I’ll try,” they are apologizing for failure in advance. They are telegraphing their belief that they are going to fail in whatever it is they are saying they will try to do. And you intuitively know that these words are signals for upcoming failure.
If you went to a lawyer and you asked him to defend you in a lawsuit, and he examined your case and replied by saying, “Well, I’ll sure try,” how would you feel?
If you went to a doctor with a life-threatening condition, and you said to the doctor, “I sure hope you can help me,” and the doctor said, “Well, I’ll try,” it would be time for you to get a second opinion.
The words “I’ll try” mean “I’m going to fail at this, and I want you to know in advance so that you can’t come back to me later and say that I didn’t give you any warning. If you do come back I can remind you that I only said that I would try.”
In our business, whenever a supplier says that he or she will try to get something done by the end of the week, or will try to complete a project on a certain schedule, all our alarm bells go off. We immediately recognize that the individual is probably planning to fail. We go back and insist that he or she give us a firm commitment rather than saying that he or she will “try.” You only accept “I’ll try” when the schedule or outcome is not that important to you.
Another form of victim language is contained in the words “I wish.” Whenever you say “I wish” before a goal or ambition, you are signaling to your subconscious mind that you don’t really believe it. If you say, “I wish I could quit smoking,” or “I wish I could lose weight,” or “I wish I could save money,” what you are really saying is, “But I don’t believe that it is possible for me.”
Every time you use victim language—“I can’t,” or “I have to,” or “I’ll try,” or “I wish,” or “I’m sorry,” or “Don’t blame me,” or ’That’s not my fault”—you are reinforcing the negative emotion of guilt and driving it deeper into your subconscious mind.
Make the decision, right now, to eliminate victim language from your conversation. Speak with definiteness and conviction instead. Say “I will” or “I won’t.” Say “I want to,” rather than “I have to.” Especially say “I can” or “I will” rather than “I can’t” or “I wish.”
How do you rid yourself of the feelings of guilt that interfere with your happiness? There are five things you can do.
First: Eliminate destructive self-criticism from your thoughts and your conversation. Refuse to say anything self-deprecating. Refuse to say anything about yourself that you do not sincerely desire to be true. At the same time, refuse to allow anyone else to speak to you in a negative way. If someone criticizes you, simply say, “I would appreciate it if you not speak to me like that because it’s not true.”
Remember, your subconscious mind is absorbing information constantly and internalizing it as part of your self-concept development. If you allow someone to say something negative about you without responding, your subconscious accepts it as a valid description of you and files it away to reinforce your feelings of guilt and inferiority. Negative statements by yourself or from others, if not canceled out or challenged, set you up for failure in the future.
Second: Refuse to blame anyone for anything. Accept complete responsibility for your life and everything in it that you can do something about. Most people do what they think is right most of the time. There is nothing to be gained by criticizing, condemning or complaining. Criticizing and blaming others actually lowers your own self-esteem and reinforces your own feelings of guilt and inferiority. When you start to feel angry with someone, use the Law of Substitution and simply say, “No one is guilty; I am responsible.”
Third, refuse to be manipulated by the guilt-throwing behavior of others. Each time anyone says or does anything to make you feel guilty, and you acquiesce to their demands, you reinforce the guilty feeling and make it easier for people to manipulate you in the future. You should have a decent respect for the feelings and needs of others, but this doesn’t mean you should sacrifice your emotional integrity to them.
There is probably at least one person in your life, perhaps more, who is accustomed to interacting with you on the basis of making you feel guilty. It can be a mother, a spouse, a boss or a coworker. You may be in a relationship in which guilt is the basic operating principle. In any case, you are responsible for changing this dynamic.
There are two techniques you can use to break another person of the habit of using guilt to manipulate or control you. The first and easiest is simply the use of silence. It takes two to tango. If you refuse to respond, the game comes to a halt.
The next time someone attempts to use guilt on you, go completely silent. Say nothing. Refuse to answer. Don’t allow yourself to be provoked. Remember, you are conditioned to respond automatically to guilt by defending or apologizing. When you exert your mental control and refuse to react, you become stronger and more capable of dealing with the person and the situation.
When the other person asks you what you have to say, you reply, “I’m not going to respond to that.”
Be polite, friendly and courteous. Smile gently, even if you’re talking on the phone. Resist the temptation to explain yourself. You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to explain yourself to anyone. You’re in charge. Even the feeling that you have to respond is based in the reaction pattern of guilt that has been set up in the past.
Guilt throwing and guilt catching is like tennis. It only works as long as you are willing to hit the ball back across the net. You stop the game of guilt by being silent, and by sticking to it.
People who are used to getting the things they want by using guilt will react quickly and angrily to any attempt by you to change the game. They will become more demanding and adamant. They will sense immediately that they are in danger of losing control and will pull out all stops, using every tool in their repertoire to bring you to heel. They will vehemently resist their loss of power over you. Be prepared for this and don’t give in.
What you want is either a healthy relationship with the other person or none at all. To achieve this, be willing to change the dynamic. Be willing to undergo the negative reactions of the other person until he or she realizes that guilt throwing and manipulation is no longer effective. He or she will be forced to try something else, and that something else will almost invariably be an improvement.
The second method you can use to break someone of the habit of using guilt is an assertiveness technique called “broken record.” It’s both simple and effective. It requires courage and willpower at first, but then it works better and better.
When the other person attempts to manipulate you using guilt, you respond by saying, “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?” You ask this question in a low-keyed, nonthreatening way, even with a tone of genuine wonder and curiosity, as if you’re amazed at such a possibility.
When Barbara and I were first married, we found ourselves using guilt on each other as a regular tool of interaction. We had come by our skills honestly, both of us having been brought up in homes in which guilt was the common language of control. And we had learned well. We could slip into an aggrieved tone of voice at the slightest suggestion that we were not going to get exactly what we wanted, exactly when we wanted it.
Fortunately, we recognized this dynamic forming and we decided to use “broken record” to break ourselves of it and abolish it from our marriage.
The way it worked was simple. Whenever one of us felt that the other was starting to use guilt for any reason, he or she would stop and say, “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?”
There is something in the human psyche that knows that guilt is a bad thing. No one consciously sets out to use guilt on another. It is a habit that we learn as children and slip into as adults. We learn to do whatever works in our relationships with others, and as long as the other person buys in, guilt works as well as or better than any other behavior to enable us to get others to do what we want them to.
If I asked Barbara, “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?” she would immediately respond by saying, “No, of course not.”
I would say, “That’s good, because for a moment there I thought you were using guilt on me, and that’s not a good thing.”
A little while later, she would try to use guilt again. And again I would ask, “Are you trying to make me feel guilty?”
Again she would deny it. Again I would say, “That’s good, because guilt is no way to run a relationship.”
This exchange would continue until, in exasperation, she would reply to the question by saying, “Yes, I am!”
Then I would say triumphantly, “Well, it’s not going to work!” And that would be our moment of recognition. It would be our signal to stop trying to use guilt, and get back to open, honest discussion of the issue. Discontinuing the use of guilt would give us no choice but to settle down and talk like mature adults.
You’re not trying to make the other person feel guilty for using guilt. You’re not trying to punish him or her for making you feel bad. Your sole aim in using silence or broken record is to bring his or her behavior to a higher level of awareness. At that level, you can deal with guilt, and begin eliminating it from your relationship. You can both be free of an emotion that is as destructive to the user as it is to the victim.
The fourth way to rid yourself of guilt is to refuse to discuss the guilt of others. Refuse to gossip or exchange “dirt” about other people. Refuse to get into “ain’t it awful” conversations. Eliminate badmouthing and backbiting from your discussions. Remember, everything you talk about and think about is having an influence on your subconscious mind and on your personality. Make sure that what you’re saying about others is what you would want to be true for yourself. Talk about others as if they were present and you wanted to make them feel good about themselves.
The fifth way to eliminate guilty feelings and reactions is the most effective method of all. It is perhaps the most powerful and practical principle ever taught to build happiness, health, prosperity and wonderful relationships with others. It is what I referred to earlier and it is the Law of Forgiveness.
The Law of Forgiveness states that you are mentally healthy to the exact degree to which you can freely forgive and forget offenses against you.
The inability to forgive lies at the root of guilt, resentment and most other negative emotions. Holding grudges and remaining angry toward people who you feel have hurt you is the major cause of psychosomatic illness. The inability to forgive causes diseases that run the entire gamut from simple headaches to heart attacks, cancer and strokes.
To fulfill your potential, to develop your full mental capacities and to liberate your emotional and spiritual energies, you absolutely must forgive everyone who has ever hurt you in any way. You must “let go” and walk away from your anger and your resentment. You must refuse to continue paying, over and over, for the same unfortunate experience. You must put your desire to live a great life, to develop a fine character, and to become an outstanding person higher than any negative emotion that you might still be holding toward any other person.
Because your outer world reflects your true inner world, because you attract people and circumstances that harmonize with your dominant thoughts, because you become what you think about, your ability to forgive is the one indispensable quality you have to develop, through practice, if you sincerely want to be happy, healthy and completely free.
There are three people in your life who you need to forgive to free yourself from negative feelings of guilt, inferiority, inadequacy, undeservingness, resentment and anger. When you let these people go, you will experience a feeling of release and joy and your life will begin to open up for you in wonderful ways.
The first people you have to forgive are your parents. Whether or not they are living, you must decide today to freely forgive them for every single thing that they ever did that hurt you. You must forgive them for every injustice and for every act of unkindness or cruelty you feel they inflicted upon you. You must rise above the hurts of childhood and let them go, accepting that your parents did the very best they could with what they had.
Almost everyone is still upset and angry over something that one or both of his or her parents did when he or she was growing up. Many men and women in their forties and fifties are still in a state of emotional distress because they have not yet forgiven their parents. A lifetime of resentment is a terrible price to pay for something about which nothing could have been done anyway.
In many cases, your parents are not even aware of what it is they did that you are still upset about. Usually, they have no memory of it at all. If you tell them why you are still angry, they will often be astonished because they have no recollection of the event ever taking place.
There are three ways that you can forgive your parents. The first is the most important, and that is to forgive them in your heart. Each time you think of the thing that he or she did that hurt you, use the Law of Substitution and replace the thought by saying, “I forgive him (her) for everything, I forgive him (her) for everything.”
Each time you recall the hurtful experience, you quickly cancel it by saying, “I forgive him (her) for everything.” If you continue forgiving them every time you recall the incident, before very long you will be able to think back on the experience unemotionally, with no negativity attached to it. Eventually you will forget it completely. You will be free.
The second way to forgive your parents is simply to go and see them personally, or telephone them. Many of the people who take our seminars go and sit down with their parents and discuss what they did and why they are still angry. Then they say, “I just want you to know that I forgive you for every mistake that you ever made bringing me up, and I love you.” By forgiving them, you set them free, and you free yourself.
The third way to forgive your parents is simply to write them a letter, in as much detail as you desire, forgiving them for every mistake they ever made. Many parents with low self-esteem hope that someday their children will forgive them for the mistakes they made in bringing them up, which they are not strong enough to admit.
It is only when you forgive your parents completely that you become a fully functioning adult. Until then, you are still a child inside. You are still dependent on them emotionally. It is only when you let go of the unhappy experiences of growing up that you can have a mature relationship with your mother and father. For most people, the very best years of their lives with their parents begin on the day that they forgive their parents and put all the negatives of growing up behind them both.
The second person that you have to forgive is everyone else. You have to unconditionally forgive every single person in your life who has ever hurt you in any way. You have to forgive every wicked, senseless, brainless, cruel thing that anybody has ever said or done or spoken about you, without exception. The refusal to forgive just one person can be in itself enough to undermine or even destroy your future happiness.
You don’t have to like the person. You just have to forgive him or her. Forgiveness is a perfectly selfish act: It has nothing to do with the other person, it has only to do with your own peace of mind, your own happiness, your own success and your own future. Perhaps the dumbest thing in the world is for you to still be angry or resentful toward a person who doesn’t care about you at all. As someone put it, “I never hold grudges; while you’re holding a grudge, they’re out dancing.”
Whatever the situation, you probably got yourself into it anyway. Whether it was a business deal, an investment, a job or a relationship, you made the choices and decisions that made it possible in the first place. It probably couldn’t have happened without your active participation, which you could have withheld. You were responsible. You were free to choose and, unfortunately, you chose inappropriately. Now, let it go.
Even if you had nothing whatever to do with it, even if you were a completely innocent third party, you are still responsible for how you respond. You are in charge of yourself and your emotions. You are free to decide what you do from this moment onward, and the best policy of all is to forgive.
If you have been through a bad relationship or a bad marriage and you’re still not over it, there is a technique that you can use to get yourself free. It is called simply “the letter.” It is taught in several places now and is incredibly powerful and liberating.
The first thing you do is to sit down and write the person a letter. This letter consists of three parts, which you may make as long or as short as you want. In the first part, you say, “I accept complete responsibility for our relationship. I got myself into it and I have no excuses to offer.” You refuse to mention how innocent and aggrieved you are, as you may have done in the past.
In the second part of the letter, you write, “I forgive you for everything you ever did that hurt me in any way.” Sometimes it is a good idea to spell out all the things that you forgive the other person for. A woman I know who used this technique wrote eight pages of things that she forgave her ex-husband for.
In the last part of the letter, you end by saying, “I wish you well.” Then you take the letter, address it properly, put sufficient postage on it, take it down to the mailbox and send it off.
The instant you let go of the letter and let it fall irretrievably into the mailbox, you will feel a sense of freedom and exhilaration that you cannot now imagine. At that moment, the relationship will be over and you will be ready to get on with the rest of your emotional life. Up to that moment, however, you remain trapped in the quicksand of the unresolved anger and resentment that attaches to any romantic relationship that doesn’t work out.
A businessman who came through our seminar told me a remarkable story with regard to “the letter” and forgiveness. He had been married and had four children. He and his partner worked together for ten years to build a successful business. One day, his partner wasn’t in the office and when he got home that night, his wife was gone. He learned later that his wife and his partner had been conspiring together for some time to strip the business of its assets, several hundred thousand dollars, and then go off together. And they were now gone. His whole life collapsed around him. He was left with four children and an incredible sense of anger and betrayal.
For four years, he was consumed with bitterness and resentment. His wife and partner had moved to another country and the cost of going after them legally was prohibitive. He turned all his attention to keeping himself from going into personal bankruptcy. His relationships with his children suffered terribly. Day and night, he was preoccupied with how badly, how unfairly, how unjustly he had been treated.
Throughout the first day of our seminar, during which we explained the concept of forgiveness, he sat silently. He got up and left that evening without saying a word. The next day, however, when he came back into the room, he was a different man. He was relaxed and smiling. He greeted other people and introduced himself. He told me privately that he had sat up for three hours the night before writing the letter. He then got up and walked several blocks to mail it. He said that it had worked exactly as I had described in the seminar. From the minute he dropped the letter in the mailbox, he felt like a totally different person.
After the seminar, he went out on his first date in four years, with a woman he met in the class. Later, he told me that his relationships with his children had been transformed. They all forgave the mother for leaving, and then resolved to get on with the rest of their lives, together. They were happy again for the first time in years.
The third person that you have to forgive is yourself. You have to forgive yourself for every foolish or hurtful thing you have ever said or done.
Remember, you are not perfect. You make mistakes. You say and do a lot of foolish things in the course of growing and maturing. If you had them to do over, you would have done them differently. But remorse and regret over previous mistakes serves no purpose. It is a sign of weak character. Remorse is often used as an excuse for not moving ahead. All wise and mature men and women have made silly, foolish mistakes. That’s how they became wise and mature. And now you must forgive yourself for everything.
Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom of mental and spiritual development. When you practice being a totally forgiving person, you are emulating the character traits of the greatest men and women who have ever walked the earth. You are putting yourself on the side of the angels. The act of forgiveness begins the process of washing away all the accumulated residue of guilt, anger and resentment that breed negative emotions in your subconscious. The regular practice of freely forgiving everyone for everything makes you a calmer, kinder, more compassionate and optimistic human being.
Finally, if you have done anything to hurt someone else and you still feel badly about it, go to him or her and apologize. Say, “I’m sorry.” Repentance is good for the soul. It frees you from the feelings of guilt and unworthiness that go with the knowledge that you have done something that is not consistent with your highest ideals.
It doesn’t matter how the other person reacts or responds. All that matters is that you have had the courage and character to accept responsibility for your actions, to apologize and say that you’re sorry. You can then get on with the rest of your life, and let the other person get on with his or hers.
Here is an exercise: First, take a sheet of paper and make a list of everybody you can think of who has hurt you in any way. Second, go down the list, read the name, think of what happened, and say, “I forgive him or her for everything; I now let it go.” Repeat these words two or three times for each person on your list. Then put the list away. From now on, whenever you think of that person or that situation, immediately cancel the negative emotion associated with it by saying, “I forgive him (her) for everything, I forgive him (her) for everything,” and then get your mind busy elsewhere.
Your whole life begins to open up for you when you finally forgive and let go. Forgiveness is the key to the kingdom of inner peace, the hardest thing you ever do, and the most important.