Choice Theory (7 page)

Power destroys love. No one wants to be dominated, no matter how much those who dominate protest their love. Love also means working out how much to be together—there is less room for freedom in a good relationship than many of us want. Over time these amounts will change. If they cannot be successfully worked out, the relationship may fail.

The partners are the coleaders of a sextet of needs, his and her need for love, power, and freedom. Anytime there is tension in a marriage, it may be that the relationship among these six needs is no longer working. One or the other partner wants more power or more freedom if he or she is to give as much love to the marriage as the marriage needs.

Negotiation is necessary whenever there is a major change in the marriage. One or the other may need more power or freedom when a partner (or both partners) starts or stops working; children come; jobs change; they move to a new city; they buy an expensive home; and, especially, when one or both partners retire. For example, if the husband retires and is now around the house all day, the wife who had not worked or had retired earlier feels suffocated. He now begins to intrude in parts of her life where he had shown no interest before. If that marriage is to avoid a crisis, the couple must renegotiate the need for freedom.

The best time to negotiate this need is before the husband retires, but the wife should insist on it as soon as she feels uncomfortable. The longer she waits, the more difficult it becomes. If this couple had been familiar with the needs and had previously negotiated, there should be few problems. If this was the first time they attempted to negotiate, it would be very difficult. The way to do this negotiation is described in detail in chapter 5 in the discussion of the solving circle.

By now it is obvious that we are social beings, and to satisfy our needs we must have good relationships. Robinson Crusoe did not need Friday to survive, but he was a lot happier when Friday came along. Unless we are hermits, if we are doomed to a life by ourselves, even if we have all we need to survive and plenty of comfortable space to live in, life does not cease but it is miserably lonely. Misery is being without the people we want and need. When we are alone and want to be with others, we live in perpetual hope that someone will come along. That someone will be our friend and even possibly love us. He or she will listen to us, learn and laugh with us, not try to force us to do what we don’t want to do, and maybe help us to survive.

In summary, power isn’t worth much unless you can use it to influence people. It would be hard to satisfy your need for power if you were just appointed chief of sales in a tobacco company; selling access to the internet would be a lot more rewarding. Freedom is the freedom from others but never
all
others; our genes do not allow us to enjoy that much freedom. And what fun is it to learn anything or achieve anything if we can’t share it with others? A friend of mine, a dedicated golfer, shot a hole in one playing by himself. Disaster.

A
LL OF US ARE AWARE
that we live in a world we can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. We call it the real world or reality and tend to assume it’s the same world for all of us. But as in the fable the Blind Men and the Elephant, no two of us perceive it the same. As difficult as this fact may be to accept, especially for those who pride themselves on their objectivity, we all perceive a great deal of reality the way we want to perceive it. Optimists and pessimists live in the same world, as do the sane and the crazy, but each sees it far differently. Much of what we see may be close to what others see or we couldn’t get along at all, but it is not the same.

Choice theory explains that the reason we perceive much of reality so differently from others has to do with another important world, unique to each of us, called the quality world. This small, personal world, which each person starts to create in his or her memory shortly after birth and continues to create and re-create
throughout life, is made up of a small group of specific pictures that portray, more than anything else we know, the best ways to satisfy one or more of our basic needs.

What these pictures portray falls into three categories: (1) the
people
we most want to be with, (2) the
things
we most want to own or experience, and (3) the
ideas or systems of belief that
govern much of our behavior. Anytime we feel very good, we are choosing to behave so that someone, something, or some belief in the real world has come close to matching a picture of that person, thing, or belief in our quality worlds. Throughout our lives, we will be in closer contact with our quality worlds than with anything else we know.

Most of us know nothing about our basic needs. What we know is how we feel, and we always want to feel as good as we can. Therefore, the overwhelming reason we chose to put these particular pictures into our quality worlds is that when we were with these people; when we owned, used, or experienced these things; and when we put these beliefs into action, they felt much better than did other people, things, or beliefs.

Our quality worlds contain the knowledge that is most important to us. As much as we may try to deny the importance of this knowledge, we cannot. When we say,
I don’t care,
we are not telling the truth. If what we are talking about is in our quality worlds, we care deeply. All day long our minds drift back and forth to the images in our quality worlds; we can’t get them off our minds. Examples of these pictures are the new homes we are saving for; the new jobs we want so much; the good grades that are so important to our future; the men or women we plan to marry; and our sick children, who are recovering their health. For alcoholics, the image is the alcohol they crave so much; for gamblers, the run at the crap table that is always on their minds; for revolutionaries, a new political system to replace the one they hate so much; and for religious people, the picture of heaven or paradise in which they hope to spend eternity.

For each of us, this world is our personal Shangri-la, the place where we would feel very good right now if we could move to it.
Anytime we are able to succeed in satisfying a picture in this world, it is enjoyable; anytime we fail, it is always painful. If we knew it existed and understood the vital role this world plays in each of our lives, we would be able to get along much better with each other than most of us do now.

For example, if Scarlett O’Hara knew that she was jeopardizing her place in Rhett Butler’s quality world, she might have been much more careful how she treated him. If she had, he might never have spoken his famous line, “Frankly, my dear, I have just removed you from my quality world.” (For skeptics, I admit that my copy of
Gone with the Wind
^*
may be the only one in which this quote appears.)

It is a paradox that all of us know what’s in our quality worlds to the minutest detail, but few of us know that these worlds exist. I may know nothing about my quality world, but I do know that my daughter, an actress, is very important to me. When I go to a play she’s starring in, I perceive her as a great actress. If she has flaws, I don’t see them. I tell anyone who’ll listen how great she was, and I’m peeved if anyone disagrees with me. For me, her great performance is my reality no matter what others say. If the whole city raved about her acting, I’d be ecstatic because my reality would have been accepted as reality by a lot of people. So one way all of us tend to define reality, or the real world, is to base it on what a lot of people say it is as long as they agree with us. I see the one critic who tore her acting apart as crazy or detached from reality; that critic will never gain entrance to my quality world.

If the one critic who panned her was the greatest critic in the city—greatest because he was in the quality worlds of the city’s theater lovers—what he said probably would be seen as reality by most people, especially in terms of her getting another part. It would hardly matter to the people reading his review that the lesser critics raved, since these critics are not in their quality worlds. Most people
would base their opinions on what this popular critic said and not go to the play. It’s hard to go against the beliefs of powerful people. Therefore, for each of us, as difficult as it may be to accept, reality has a lot to do with what a lot of us or some important or powerful people say it is.

But ultimately, whether people agree with us or not, we define reality in the way it works best for us. That is, I may never be able to agree with you about what is going on in the real world if what we are arguing about is pictured differently in our quality worlds. I watch the president on television and say he was marvelous; you look at me as if I was crazy. The president was what he was, but we do not have the ability to see him in the same way. To avoid controversy, many people tend to stay out of political and religious arguments and instead talk about the weather. Whatever weather is in our quality worlds, no one will fault that picture.

Because my daughter is in my quality world, I cannot see her as she actually is on the stage. But I, along with almost everyone else attending the play that night, tend to see the set the same way. We may admire it, but unless we designed it, the set is not in any of our quality worlds, so there is no need to see it any differently from the way it is. Total objectivity is a myth. It could exist only if we all had exactly the same quality worlds.

We see this discrepancy most clearly in jury trials. If the defendant is in the quality worlds of the jurors for a wide variety of reasons, they may pay little attention to the evidence and acquit him. If he is not the kind of person any of the jurors would put into their quality worlds, he is likely to be found guilty even on flimsy evidence. That is why defendants try to dress well for their trials and to be respectful to the judges. As much as we think we can, we cannot view a situation objectively unless it has nothing to do with what is in our quality worlds.

But in operation, there has to be such a thing as a real world. If we were not able to see huge parts of it in much the same way, we would be living in the equivalent of the Tower of Babel and be unable to deal with each other effectively enough to get anything done. For example, most of us agree on what time it is or there
could be no concept of being on time. But time is not usually in our quality worlds; under ordinary circumstances, we get no great pleasure from knowing what time it is. If I am a dispatcher in a railroad yard, however, time is very much in my quality world because my not knowing the correct time can cause a severe accident. There is hardly anything that is not important to someone, but most of the time there is enough that is unimportant to almost all of us so that we can agree that what’s out there is reality.

As we attempt to satisfy our needs, we are continually creating and re-creating our quality worlds. If I want a lot of power, I may put politics into my quality world. If survival is all I want, I may make Ebenezer Scrooge my role model. If freedom dominates the pictures in my quality world, I may buy a small sailboat and blissfully sail the sea alone. If I want a lot more sex, I may ignore my mate and look for a sexier partner who matches the one I picture in my quality world. If I spend a lot of money running for office and fail to get elected, I may eventually take politics out of my quality world. I tend to keep the pictures in as long as they have any chance of working for me.

But I still may keep these pictures too long because, frustrating as they may be, it is painful to take them out. It is giving up on something that was very satisfying to one or more of my needs in the past. So most of us keep pictures in our quality worlds long after we are no longer able to satisfy them to the extent we want. You may keep an ideal picture of your wife in your quality world for quite a while after you are no longer able to satisfy that picture in the real world. She has been there a long time, and you keep hoping she’ll change. Also, if you take her out, you will be tempted to leave her, which could result in financial problems and unhappy children. You may be unhappy with your wife, but you’d be even unhappier if you took her out. No matter how good a reason you have to keep someone in your quality world, if you can’t be with him or her the way you want to, you suffer. Romeo and Juliet might have been better off separating for a while until they got older, but their quality worlds did not give them that choice.

As I explained in the first two chapters, even feeling good is complicated because there are two different kinds of pleasure pictures. One pleasure I called happiness, which means that if you are unhappy, you keep trying to satisfy a picture of you and someone else being close. At a minimum, happy people have some people, usually loved ones, some family members, and at least one friend in their quality worlds.

But a lot of people have not found anyone they can trust and enjoy being with. They may have been rejected or abused, and they begin to give up on happiness, on feeling good in a relationship. In many instances, they discover that there are ways to find pleasure without relationships. To feel good, they begin to replace people pictures with nonpeople pleasure pictures—pictures of violence, drugs, and unloving sex—in their quality worlds. As they do so, they separate themselves further from people and happiness, compounding the urgency of their problem. The more lonely they get, the less they are able to accept that they have rejected people and the more they believe that people have rejected them. Many of them blame the government or people who are different from them.

If they are men, they often hate women and enjoy degrading them. They hate them because they need them sexually, and they like to see themselves as macho men who don’t need anyone.
Hustler
magazine depends on the quality world fantasies of these men. And there must be a lot of them because that magazine has made millions for its creator.

A few years ago, my wife, Carleen, and I worked for a year in an inner-city middle school where most of the students did not have teachers, each other, or schoolwork in their quality worlds. The students felt no happiness in that school, but they did feel some pleasure talking about, and sometimes satisfying, the usual pleasure pictures of unhappy young people: drugs, violent clowning around, and nonloving sex. They were resigned to the fact that they would never be happy in school. It was apparent to us that because they had experienced so little pleasure in school, and what they had had been years ago in the primary
grades, they couldn’t even conceive that happiness in school was possible.