Choice Theory (3 page)

To substantiate my claim that vast numbers of seemingly un-solvable human problems are relationship problems, take a look at your life and the lives of the people you know. I’m sure that many of you are unable to get along with your spouses, parents, or children as well as you would like to. You may also admit that the longer you are with them, the harder it seems to get along.

Think about it. You were happy when you got married. Are you now miserable or divorced? Is there someone in your family you no longer speak to? Are your children as happy in middle school as they were in the early grades? Do you still find joy in the work you do?

If you experience any of the misery in the previous paragraph, you are involved in one or more of four variations of essentially the same attempting-to-control-someone-else situation.

1. You wanted someone else to do what he or she refused to do. Usually, in a variety of ways, some blatant, some devious, you were trying to force him or her to do what you wanted.
   

2. Someone else was trying to make you to do something you didn’t want to do.
   

3. Both you and someone else were trying to make each other do what neither wanted to do.
   

4. You were trying to force yourself to do something you found very painful or even impossible to do.
   

The first three variations are obviously different aspects of the same situation. Although the fourth is somewhat different, it is in the same genre. In this instance, you may have been trying to force yourself to stop smoking, stay on a job you hated, lose weight when you didn’t want to diet, or love someone you no longer even liked.

In the first three variations, you may be a wife complaining to your husband that you need more help with the children or a husband nagging your wife that her job has left her with no time for you. Or both complaining and nagging each other. You may be a parent or a teacher trying to motivate a child to do better in school. Or a boss coercing a worker to do something he doesn’t think is worth doing. As long as we continue to believe that we can control others or, conversely, that others can control us, the misery associated with common situations such as these will continue unabated. These variations are as old as history, and the resistance to this coercion is the reason we are making so little progress in our relationships.

One of the most puzzling exceptions to this widespread use of external control psychology is that we rarely use it with our best friends, people who have been with us through thick and thin for many years. With them, even though few of us are aware of it, we use choice theory. But whether or not we know the theory, most of us are well aware that we often treat our good friends differently from our mates, children, students, and employees.

We recognize that good friends are our most reliable source of long-term happiness. We seem to know we could lose them, and the happiness that goes with them, if we tried to force them to do
what they don’t want to do. I believe this reluctance to try to force a friend, when we have few qualms about trying to force almost everyone else, may be a good way to define close friendship. If we practiced choice theory with everyone, we would make—and keep—many more friends, and our happiness would be substantially increased.

What may also be involved here is ownership. Most of us believe that we should or do own our husbands, wives, children, students, and employees. I have the right to control my wife and kids because they belong to me. This is my classroom, and my students had better do what I say. I own this company and I own you, so do what you are told or look for another place to work—are all examples of ownership thinking. As long as we believe that we own people, we don’t hesitate to force them when they don’t do what we want them to do. We feel differently with our friends; we accept that we don’t own them and they don’t own us. Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship.

Without really thinking about ownership, most of us divide the world into two groups. The first group, those we own or try to own, is made up of lovers, wives, husbands, children, students, and employees. The second group, those we don’t own or try to own, usually a large group, consists of good friends; acquaintances; people who have some power over us, such as bosses; and, of course, strangers.

A good way to learn choice theory is to take a close look at how you treat your best friend, your boss, and most strangers compared to how you treat the rest of the people in your life. You know why you don’t try to force your boss or your friend. You rarely force acquaintances, and, if you have any sense at all, you never force strangers because you may get hurt or even killed. Why don’t we live and let live? Why don’t we practice the golden rule when most of us give lip service to it? Why do we keep trying to make other people do what they don’t want to do when, most of the time, we have so little success in this effort? Earlier in this chapter, I began to answer these questions. In the next chapter, in
which I introduce the basic needs, I add some new choice theory ideas to this explanation.

But first I want to describe the three beliefs of external control psychology in some detail, so you can understand what most people actually believe. You will easily see that it is the second and third beliefs that are so harmful to human relationships. The easiest way to understand this traditional psychology is to think of how almost all of us use it in our lives.

FIRST BELIEF: I answer a ringing phone, open the door to a doorbell, stop at a red light, or do countless other things because I am responding to a simple external signal.

SECOND BELIEF: I can make other people do what I want them to do even if they do not want to do it. And other people can control how I think, act, and feel.

THIRD BELIEF: It is right, it is even my moral obligation, to ridicule, threaten, or punish those who don’t do what I tell them to do or even reward them if it will get them to do what I want.

These three commonsense beliefs are the foundation of the external control psychology that essentially rules the world.

In the first belief, the ring of the phone or any other mechanical signal is the external control that most people think makes them answer. In the second, extrapolating from the first, the control is always someone outside the behaving person, for example, a parent telling a child, “Mow the lawn”; a teacher telling a student, “Stop talking in class”; or a husband saying to his wife, “You made me mad.” Following the third and most destructive belief, husbands, wives, parents, teachers, and bosses believe it is their right, their duty, and even their moral obligation to threaten, punish, or bribe children or adults who choose to disobey them because it is in these children’s or adults’ best interest to do what they are told.

The foundation of these beliefs, that we are externally motivated, is wrong. Just as the world was flat until someone began to
question that belief, answering a phone because it rings seems right until we begin to question it. Once any external control belief is questioned, it becomes clear that what was right is actually wrong. For example, we do not answer a phone because it rings; we answer it because we want to. Instantaneous as our response may be, every time we answer a phone, we have decided that this is the best choice. If we didn’t think so, we wouldn’t answer it.

You may argue, “If I don’t answer the phone because it rings, then what’s the purpose of the ring? I certainly don’t go around answering phones that aren’t ringing.” The ring does have a purpose, but it is not to make you answer. It is to give you information, to tell you that someone out there wants to talk to someone here. The ringing of the phone, and all else we perceive from the outside world, including what we perceive from our own bodies, is information. But information is not control. Choice theory explains that stimuli, in the sense that they can consistently
control
a human being to make a specific choice, do not exist.

Since information does not make us do anything, we can choose to ignore it or act on it any way we see fit. We are not machines. We are not, as machines are, designed to respond in a specific way to an external control. When we do as we are told, it is because we choose to do it on the basis of the information we have. In the case of the phone, if we don’t want to answer it, we can let it ring, let a machine answer it, pull the clip out of the wall to disconnect it, or yell to someone else to answer it.

Whatever behavior we choose is generated inside our brains. Choice theory explains that we are, as all living creatures are, internally motivated. You may ask, “What difference does it make why I answer the phone or do anything else I do? I’ve done it, so what?” For simple mechanical information like the ringing of a phone or a red traffic light, it doesn’t make any difference. It is not until we go from the first belief to the next, much more complicated second belief—trying to make someone do what he or she does not want to do or believing someone else can control our behavior—that you can begin to appreciate the enormous difference between external control and choice theory.

For example, if I know choice theory, you cannot make me feel guilty by telling me that you wish you had a house as nice as mine. If I had done something to deprive you of a nice house, I probably should choose to feel guilty, but if I haven’t, why should I choose to feel guilty? Freedom from the undeserved guilt that floods the external control world we live in is a huge benefit of learning to use choice theory in your life. Many mothers rely on external control psychology to
make
their children feel guilty. But choosing to feel guilty because you don’t do what your mother expects of you is a choice. When you learn this lesson—and if you have a skilled guilt-tripping mother it is not an easy one to learn—you will find that it frees both you and your mother to make better choices.

A striking example of the freedom to choose is best illustrated by the behavior of a good friend of mine, a criminologist, who didn’t think that this theoretical difference between external control psychology and choice theory was important. He may owe his life to the fact that when he made what most of us would consider a poor choice, external control psychology was threatened but not used.

My friend went to Las Vegas on some academic business and was put up in a fancy hotel. Even though friends warned him to be careful and quickly lock, bolt, and chain the door every time he entered his room, he did not pay attention to this information. On one occasion, he forgot even to close the door securely, much less bolt it and chain it. A moment later a man, brandishing a gun, stepped in through the unlocked door. If you had been there, you would have witnessed a very unusual sight: a criminal and a criminologist face to face. The criminal, a seemingly firm believer in this traditional psychology, said, “Gimme your wallet.” My friend, much to his surprise (he was surprised because he was practicing choice theory), told the thief, “You can’t have my wallet. I’ll give you money but not the wallet.” The criminal took the few dollars that my friend put on the floor and left.

If the criminal had been a dedicated practitioner of external control psychology, my friend might not have lived to tell the
story. A gun in the hands of a man who will use it is about as strong an external control as there is. At a crucial moment, just after my friend made the choice not to give the criminal the wallet, the criminal switched to choice theory and chose not to shoot him. Choices, even what may seem to be unusual choices, are what this book is all about. If even a dedicated criminal can give up external control when it seems better to do so, it should not be that hard for most of us.

But many times in life, when we are miserable it is because we continue to blame others for our misery or try to control others when it is against our best interest to do so. To explain, I’ll continue the father-son example I started earlier. You grounded your son who didn’t do his schoolwork, and now he has stopped working altogether. He is hanging around with the “wrong” kids and admits to smoking marijuana, and you have caught him sneaking out of the house on weekends.

You have spent a lot of time punishing and arguing, but your son is worse than he was before you started. You have now taken the step of grounding him during the week as well as on weekends. As time goes by, you begin to realize more and more that the punishment that may have worked when you and he had a better relationship is no longer working. He has stopped talking to you, and you have a note from school that he is cutting classes.

Punishment isn’t working, but you firmly believe that what you are doing is right. Yet as you continue to keep him in, you notice that you no longer have any influence with him. When you try to talk with him, he just rolls his eyes as if to say,
Who would want to listen to you?

As far as your son is concerned you are close to a nonentity. What little relationship you had with him before you grounded him seems to have disappeared. He is nothing like the son you had a few years ago, and you are at your wits’ end. Your own child is treating you like an enemy. Even though you have no way of knowing what’s actually wrong, you do know that what you are both doing is tearing the two of you apart.

Some variation of this scenario can be observed in much of the
long-term misery many parents and teachers experience with teenagers. Marriage is also fertile soil for long-term misery, as is an unsatisfying job. But this current pain is controllable. It is different from the pain of uncontrollable tragic events, such as the loss of a loved one or the terrible disappointment that follows losing a good job through no fault of your own. It is controllable because you can choose to stop punishing the teenager you want to get along with and learn to deal with him so that disobedience rarely occurs. How to do so is covered in some detail in part 2 of this book.

In the case of your son, punishment—whether it’s right or wrong—isn’t working. Before you grounded him, he was doing some schoolwork; now he is choosing to do none. Before, you could at least talk to him; now he and you don’t speak. From what was once a good relationship, you have become adversaries. Your choice to follow the second and third beliefs of external control psychology—that you can and should force your son to do what you want him to do—is the reason for your misery. If you can choose to stop controlling, even in a world based on external control, you can stop contributing to your own misery and to the misery of those you are using it with. Knowing that others need you as much as you need them, even if they are trying to control you, can help you to stop retaliating, and then things have a chance to get better.