50 Ways to Create Great Relationships by Steve Chandler

Author:Steve Chandler [Chandler, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Maurice Bassett
Published: 2017-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Climb Your Ladder

We have done with hope and honor,

We are lost to love and truth,

We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung.

~ Rudyard Kipling

There’s a ladder inside all of us.

It’s called the ladder of selves. It’s a ladder I talk about in most of my courses and write about in most of my books because it always applies to the subject at hand. And people almost always become interested in using it.

People use it as a mental picture. It takes exactly one second to use.

On the lower rungs of the ladder we have our lowest selves—the ones that require the lowest levels of consciousness. These low selves are our physical selves. We activate these personalities in us when, for example, when we’re walking down a dark street at night and someone jumps out at us. We can physically run or we can physically fight. We can activate our “feets don’t fail me now” self, or we can activate our Jackie Chan self. But whichever physical self we activate, it does not require a lot of creative or strategic thinking.

As we go up the ladder, past the physical self, we find our emotional selves. We blindly reach out and find the rungs on the ladder for fear, guilt, anger, resentment, and as we go a little higher up, we find the positive emotions: contentment, enjoyment, euphoria, and so on. These middle rungs on the ladder, the emotional selves, take more consciousness than the physical selves, but not much more. It is from these emotional selves that most relationships are maintained, which is why most relationships are so unsatisfactory.

We usually communicate to each other from emotional self to emotional self without even realizing it. My fear talks to your anger. Your anger talks back to my fear.

“What can I do to make you feel better?”

“Nothing; it’s not about you. Why do you think you can control other people’s feelings? That’s part of the problem we’re having here. You’ve got to know that you can’t just talk your way out of things. Sometimes you have to do something.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“That’s just it! If you’re doing it because I want you to, then you’re still not taking any responsibility. You’re just trying to placate my moods. You are effectively trying to make every problem we have be my problem. It’s always made to look like it’s me. It’s not that anything’s really wrong, it’s just that I can’t handle it. I would love it if just once you would realize on your own that something is really wrong and then do something about it. Instead, you wait and wait until I finally blow up emotionally, and then you have the problem be my emotions. As always, you get to be the saint. I’m tired of that! You can take a hike!”

Although we put words and phrases to these emotions, we aren’t really communicating. Not in the highest sense. Not in the sense that we’ve created a solution or an agreement together.

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