12 Sep Find on your own your Shoulds, Musts and Oughts | Part C’
A Look at the Common Payoffs of Musterbation
Some of the reasons you have for hanging onto your shoulds are detailed below. These payoffs, like those in all erroneous zones, are mostly self-destructive but nevertheless constitute a certain support system of their own.
• You can take solace in being a “good boy” or a “good girl” by following all of your shoulds. You can pat yourself on the back for being obedient. This dividend is a regressive one in which you go back to an earlier developmental period when you were rewarded with approval whenever you behaved, which meant relying on someone else to establish your roles of conduct.
• Your obedience to the external should allows you to assign the responsibility for your standing still to the should rather than to yourself. As long as the should is the rationale for what you are (or aren’t), you can avoid the risks involved in trusting yourself to change. Thus your shoulds keep you from growing. For example, Marjorie has a should in her head that all premarital sex is a taboo. She is thirty-four years old, and to date she has never had a sexual experience because of this learned should. But Marjorie has no inner peace. She would like to have a sexual relationship, and she is very much dissatisfied with herself in this area. Moreover, it is possible that Marjorie will never get married, and her should (in this case should-not) would then keep her from participating in sex for an entire lifetime. When she is confronted with this possibility she shudders at the thought, and yet her should-not is still there. Marjorie has spillover effects from her should. She can’t even stay overnight in the same house with her boyfriend out of fear of being judged by others. Thus she is constantly being inconvenienced because of her shoulds by having to come home to Mamma at night. Hanging onto them keeps her from the risky business of testing herself out in the scary act of sexual involvement. But her response is always, “Ί shouldn’t do it.” Plainly, her shoulds wotk against her own happiness.
• Your musts make it possible for you to maneuver others. By telling someone this is the way it should be done, you can make him do it the way you want it to be done.
• It is easier to haul out a should when you lack confidence in yourself. As your self-image wanes, the should becomes your bulwark.
• You can remain self-righteous about your behavior and retain your hostility when others don’t fit into the shoulds that you have for yourself and the rest of the world. Hence, you build yourself up in your mind at the expense of others who don’t obey the rule-patterns.
• You can win approval by conforming. You feel good by fitiing-in, which is what you were told all along that you should be doing. That old approval-seeking need creeps in here as well.
• As long as you focus on others, and live through their successes and failures, you don’t have to work on yourself. Having heroes can reinforce your own low opinion of yourself and allow you to escape from having to work on yourself. As long as the heroes can be the cause of your good feelings, or responsible for your bad feelings, there is no reason for you to take on that responsibility. Your self-worth in this case is really other-worth and thus fleeting and transitory. It depends upon all of those great people, and how they come through for you.
Some Final Thoughts on Should Behavior
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in Literary Ethics in 1838,
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning anecdote, all flock to their aid.
What a beautiful thought. Stay with tradition and you ensure that you’ll always be the same, but toss it aside, and the world is yours to use as creatively as you choose.
Become your own judge of your conduct and learn to rely on yourself to make present-moment decisions. Cease leafing through a lifetime of policies and traditions for an answer. Sing your own song of happiness in any way that you choose, oblivious to how it is supposed to be.
Part A’: http://www.lecturesbureau.gr/1/the-folly-of-shoulds-musts-and-oughts-part-a/?lang=en
Part B’: http://www.lecturesbureau.gr/1/the-folly-of-shoulds-musts-and-oughts-part-b/?lang=en
Your Erroneous Zones
Wayne Dyer
Image: ‘Pentateuque’ by Fabien Merelle (http://www.designboom.com/art/pentateuque-by-fabien-merelle/)
