Trampled Underfoot
Letting Go of Control in Your Relationships
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”
The idea that our presence in the lives of others has a lasting effect, that in some way, both for good and ill, we leave a mark on those we spend our days with, is easily accepted. But there remains in each of us, a weakness for control, a belief that one of our primary jobs here isn’t simply to be a positive influence on others, but to deliberately, even forcefully change them.
We think we know what’s best. We want our perspective to not simply be an option but the option. The fact that people even give us as much leeway as they do is astonishing. Life is painful and heavy and full of confusion. And it is always a bit terrifying opening doors within ourselves so widely to others.
There is a sacredness to vulnerability, an unspoken covenant urging us to not completely screw each other up. We can’t thrash about like a coked-up gorilla riding a bull through a China shop whenever someone invites us in.
Perhaps a bit more post-modern and of the moment, is the frequent assumption that our goal in the relationship, our calling, is to enact change upon the other person, to reorganize, reorient, and refine our spouse or friend. But our ability to inspire others toward change is not a mission, it is a gift, and one that each of us should approach with humility.
Consider for a moment, the immeasurable complexity and beauty of an individual human life. We are subject to endless influences and ways of processing both the world around us and the world within. Each of us is given a handful of lives to draw near to. On occasion, we are gifted with an invitation to explore the cave within the cave, to drink from the well below the well that everyone else has access to. It is the place where our most profound ideas and sublime ecstasies play freely. Equally, it is where our most intense fears and sorrows go to hide.
We should be so lucky to have that kind of access. I don’t say this so you’ll begin stepping on eggshells around those you love. In there lies an equally perilous outcome, death by fear and timidity, and an increasingly useless relationship. All of my best friendships are the ones where honesty and healthy challenge flow unhindered. Loving someone well often involves a certain intensity of will and action. And in the healthiest relationships, there will always remain a place for sharpening one another.
Still, this invitation into someone’s inner person holds tremendous power. The opportunity we are given in long-term relationships to go deep and to affect change, is one built on no small measure of trust, something not easily obtained and even harder to recover once lost. And trust is never established through tyranny, even a quiet and well-meaning one.
The fact that we long so greatly to control others, to push them toward what we want them to become, says a great deal about our ignorance of love, even after so long eating of its fruits. As so many of us have discovered, the more we begin to really love others, the more we learn to first listen. This is the beginning of intimacy, the choice to lay down our nagging self-interest, to set aside our ideas of perfection and gladly choose an imperfect life with someone who is as flawed as we are.
There is a difference between what we think is best and what really is best for someone else. Despite our good intentions, the two often do not run parallel. Our advice, though frequently needed and occasionally sought after, is far from perfect. Our perspective is always lacking in data and our outside view can never fully grasp another’s situation. Still, we often behave as if we understand someone’s personal experience, that we know exactly what we would do given the same set of circumstances. We don’t. And if the time comes when we must face down a similar trial, this truth becomes viscerally apparent.
It is wise to use the experiences and choices of others to make sense of trials before they happen to us. If we can learn by example instead of by pain it is far less damaging and saves us a great deal of time. But our idea of what we might do is tainted by the simple fact that we don’t know what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes, and no amount of conjecture will relieve that ignorance.
Our understanding of the situation is merely intellectual. Even if we’ve navigated similar ordeals and possess a measure of sound advice to offer, not every individual has the same goals or desires for their life. Our hopes and dreams, along with our scars and frailties are even more diverse than the cultures we inhabit.
This conflict arises often between parents and their adult children. We naturally want our kids to build a meaningful life. And we have a great deal of wisdom and insight to offer them. But their right to make their own path is as vital to them as it was to us. We long for them to find happiness. But their fulfillment is not necessarily based on the things that made us happy. We want to see them successful. But they often have a different vision of what success looks like.
This, of course, goes both ways. Adult children need to remember that while their fathers and mothers value their input, their help, and certainly their presence, they cannot reorganize their parents’ life completely or change the established values and goals of their mother or father simply because they think they’ve got a more modern or relevant outlook.
The hope is that each of us is learning from one another, that each generation strengthens all the others. But some things will remain despite our protest. And this ability to pursue life on our own terms is an essential freedom each of us has access to, even though we botch it up from time to time.
In our day, self-development, something ultimately good in its intentions and frequently helpful, has become an obsession. Not to mention a commodity, feeding a multi-billion dollar industry. It’s also draining too many good souls out there. It’s one thing to pummel yourself in an attempt to change. It’s something else entirely to make it your quest to pummel someone else into changing.
Endless variables and gender-based arguments aside, abuses of our motives and actions in our relationships usually take a slightly different form with the masculine and feminine. The masculine generally seeks to change their loved one through force of power (tyranny). The feminine, through force of influence (manipulation). However, this does get reversed sometimes.
No matter how it manifests in us, we often use our best traits, those things that could otherwise be harnessed to uplift and encourage, instead to push others toward our vision for their life, to squeeze them into a mould we’ve fashioned from our own obsessions. We try to use our critique of someone else to assuage our dissatisfaction with how our own life has turned out. We want life to be better, bigger, sexier, sweeter, more epic (to tap an overused word of the 21st century), and we try to achieve this by changing those around us - because the attempt is a lot easier than shifting our own choices.
Doing the work to change anything significantly in our own life is uniquely difficult and full of obstacles and endless course changes. It always takes more energy than we think it will, and it never looks like what we thought it would. Too often, instead of doing more of our own work, we pour that energy into changing others around us, unconsciously believing that these revisions to their psyche will alleviate our own unrest.
It goes even deeper than this. Our desire to have an impact on others comes from a very primal and very essential part of our being. It touches two of the most important branches of our existence. Namely, our longing for connection and our desire to have our words and actions mean something in the world. If we really do love someone, we generally want good to come their way. We want our time with them to bear fruit.
This is a beautiful thing and part of what defines us as human beings. But this desire to realize satisfaction in this area should never supersede our desire for others to find their own healthy way forward. Our longing for meaning in this area should stem from seeing others grow into a stronger version of themselves, not into a model closer to the image of them we keep in our mind’s eye.
Love, when it is real, says “I want the highest good for you.” Love, when it is muddled, will say “I want my highest good for you.” We’ve all had those conversations, the ones where someone else or even we, go on about another friend or family member and how they should do this for a career instead of what they’re doing, how they should go to this school instead of that one, how they should dress or behave more like their brother or sister, how they should value what so and so values. It’s good to remember how dreadfully boring and lopsided humanity becomes whenever unchecked conformity and endless uniformity are championed above creativity, individuality, and freedom.
These generalizations are connected to our incomplete understanding of human life and our fear of the near limitless variability of choice we have during our time here. We worry about those we love because we don’t want to see them get hurt. But get hurt, they must, if they are to learn from their choices just like we do. We also think we know better, and our often narrow view of what constitutes a good life can be stifling to those around us.
A good way to know that we’re approaching a loved one from a healthy mindset, is by first asking ourselves why we want to offer them advice. Secondly, it is by asking ourselves if it is that person’s best we are looking out for or some version of our own dream we’re trying to offload on the cheap.
Wisdom doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is born of experience and it needs to be shared. But true wisdom, though its source and usefulness remain universal, leads to different outcomes in different people. Wisdom never says “My way is the only way, my vision the only clear vantage point.” It says “I’ve walked part of that road. Let’s find these truths together. Let’s work to uncover your individual path.” Wisdom helps us take the general to the specific, make the universal individually applicable.
Love is a strong force. At times we can long for good in someone else’s life with such intensity that we feel we might collapse under the weight of this desire. We certainly know love is real when we experience it at this level. And this intensity should always feed our desire to see another’s life flourish, to see them expand into more of the person they were meant to be.
No matter how passionate or well-meaning it is within us, our love should never lead us to manipulation or to strong-arming others into change. Like the actions of the best mentors and leaders, their very presence will inspire those around them to make better choices. And their guidance will come from a heart to see others gain the strength, resources, and willingness to change their own lives.
Quality leaders know they are also servants. They are in service to the potential in others, to the capacity within each individual to decide for themselves. They simply want to use their experience and their unique outlook to give the other person a clearer view and an easier time finding the right way. This goes equally for spouses, partners, friends, and family.
How we honor others through our time with them also reveals how much we respect ourselves. You can be sure that those who try hard to push others into certain decisions have little respect for their own identity and autonomy, and probably suffered the same heavy hand from someone else. Oh, they may worship the idea of their own autonomy, but they do not understand its importance in the context of the rest of their life. And they are most definitely afraid of it.
Be careful who you allow to speak into your life. And be conscious of how you speak into the lives of others. Don’t auto-pilot your way through significant interactions. Be free, of course, in your relationships, neither inhibited nor repressed. But consider the weight of your words and the severity of your impact.
Regardless of how it makes you feel, help those you love to build their own vision, not fulfill yours. Love, at its best, allows us to see the potential in others that they might not see in themselves and to inspire them to reach for it. But equally, it urges us, even as we learn to be bolder in our words and actions, like Yeats declared, to tread softly when it comes to the life-path of another, for we tread on their dreams.