72. Do not notice the predictable feeding patterns of the energetic vampire creatures that devour your life energy. Do not notice that you explode in rage and have an emotionally charged conflict once a month for five days, or once a week for a day and a night, or a few times a day. Do not notice that you have several identities within your psychology who do not know each other and who each think that they are the only one.
73. Live in the world of “me, me, me,” as if you were separate from everyone else and they were all separate from you. If you do not take care of yourself, who will?
74. Stay in survival. Live a minimal life. Do not indulge your personal whims for adventure, extravagance, new experience, generosity, learning, discovery, exploration, or expansion. Instead, watch television night after night. Have no imagination. Be timid, linear and predictable. Let your fears stay bigger than you so that you can remain in a life of survival.
75. Engage in an ongoing power struggle with your partner. Struggle privately at home – about the children, about money, about making plans. Struggle publicly at meetings, at parties, at work, so that when you win, others can witness your great victory over your partner. Always make sure that your partner does not have more power or recognition than you do. If they do, figure out ways to undermine their power and destroy them. But not totally. If they were totally destroyed how could you continue enjoying the power struggle?
76. Be jealous of your partner’s attractiveness or success. Resent them for it. Pull your appreciation away from them and minimize your love for them because they already get more than enough love and appreciation from other people.
77. Feel small. Feel weak. Feel like a failure. Feel unworthy. Feel unlovable. Find evidence to continuously prove the view that you are unlovable. This proves that your partner is stupid because they chose someone to love who is unlovable. This proves that life is bad. When life is proven to be bad then you can continue to live as you always have and not really care about anything.
78. Twist everything your partner says so that you are sure they are telling you, “You are wrong,” “You are stupid,” or “You are not good enough.” Respond to your interpretation of what your partner says, not to what they actually say. Do not realize that you are twisting their communications around. Do not let them explain themselves.
79. Use your fear to limit your partner’s radiant exuberance. Obviously there needs to be a balance. When your partner is effervescing beyond your permitted aliveness limit, then dump cold water on them. Keep your aliveness limit low so you get to dump cold water on your partner a lot. This way you have job security. Only be alive when your partner is not around to see.
80. Fight unfairly. Call your partner names (Know It All, Mr. Independent, Sad Sack, Mrs. Prudence). Use the words “never” and “always.” Get violent, hit or throw things, or threaten violence. Think that the conflict is all their fault and that you are not equally responsible. Use the children or money or sex as weapons.
81. Think that you know who your partner is. Do not listen to your partner so that you can repeat back what you heard them say. Refuse to be-with your partner in the conflict. After the fight cut yourself off from your partner for days and sulk.
82. Use intimate time with your partner to “triangulate” (to speak about someone who is not there). Complain about people to your partner rather than speaking only about that person to their face. Do not acknowledge that you again trivialized a moment that could have been profound.
83. Triangulate about your partner when they are not there. Gossip about your partner to your friends, to their friends, or to relatives when they are not there. Let the others lead you on until you share intimacies that would embarrass or hurt your partner.
84. Exaggerate when recounting stories about your partner to other people. Make your partner sound braver, stronger, and smarter, or weaker, slower and stupider than what actually happened. Exaggerate so often that you live in your own fantasy of what happened rather than in the simplicity of what really happened. If your partner exaggerates stories about you, assume they are doing so to hurt you. Make their transgression really important.
85. Use your partner as a garbage can for all the bad things that happen to you during your day. When you are finished unloading your psychic shit into their soul, then assume that your obligations for being intimate with them are over for the day.
86. Do not respect the natural inherent nobility, elegance and dignity of your partner as a man or a woman. Do not even see the possibility of such qualities in them or in their lives. Treat your partner as a child, or as a kind of monkey with the capacity for living only an ordinary low-grade animal life.
87. Do not let your partner have their own problems. Do things for your partner because you are afraid that they are incapable of doing those things for themselves. Think that you are helping your partner. If they ever complain, get offended because if they do not want your help then they obviously do not want your love.
88. Find evidence to support the story that your partner is a pig. Find a little piece of evidence each day. Even the tiniest piece of evidence is sufficient. After all, you have so much evidence already in the “evidence sack” that you carry around with you that you actually do not even need to find any more evidence at all. The new evidence just helps you to remember that your partner is a pig. You can also use the evidence to prove pigness to your partner so they do not forget it either.
89. Live as if you are your psychology. Live as if the reality that your psychology paints for you to live in is the one and only true and actual reality of the world. Believe it like the sun shines. Live as if your view is as solid as granite and your truth is as objective as God. Regard anyone who so much as hints that they doubt you as if they are an attacker.
90. Live as if your partner is their psychology. Assume they are always going to stay that way, and that they are completely inflexible and rigid. Take what they say as an absolute that you must either destroy or become the slave of. Do not assume that your partner is anything but their arguments and reasons. Do not let love or relationship or acceptance or healing be bigger than your psychological differences. Never simply rest in the psychology-free communion of being together.
91. Try not to know that you are going to die. Live as if you have all the time in the world. Do not appreciate those rare moments of simple companionship as if they could be the last moments. When nothing happens it is just wasted time. If one of you is sick, it is a problem. Something is wrong. It is a mistake in the program. Again, it is wasted time. If one of you dies or goes away, be shocked, but do not fundamentally learn anything about life.
92. Feed your addictions. Use part of your attention, even during the most intimate of times, to crave videos, foods, drinks; use it for self-gratification, for complaining, for being depressed; use it to judge, to stay in your head and think. Never learn to tolerate the ever-increasing intensity of being wholly with another human being. Get yourself a drink and turn down the volume of passionate love. Keep it normal. Only go where you already have been. Then you can be bored, and you do not have to be afraid of how magnificent and glorious life really is.
93. Do not speak about what really matters to you. Do not dare to risk sharing from the depths of your heart. Never trust so deeply as to open your soul and reveal your deepest, most tender, delicate, incomplete, uncertain desires to your partner, even alone in bed together. Assume that your partner would just laugh at you anyway, or use it to make fun of you in public. Instead of sharing your inner world, keep your desires secret. Do not allow life to be a creative playground in which you can unfold your being and create what really matters to you. Take your secrets with you to the grave.
94. Try to be a good boy. You know what a good boy is. Your mommy taught you to be a good boy. So did the teachers. If you are not a good boy, the teacher will tell mommy and mommy will tell daddy and daddy will whip you in the worst way. The rules for being a good boy are deeply imprinted and socially accept
able. Being a good boy is safe. If you keep being a good boy, even though the price is excruciating, gut-wrenching heartache about not being yourself, at least you are a good boy. Maybe a nice girl will approve of you like mommy and the teachers and then everything will be fine.
95. Dedicate yourself to being a nice girl. Give your authenticity over to the magazines and advertising media. Try to make yourself beautiful according to standards set by the makers of anti-aging creams, stylish clothing, and cellulite producing prepack-aged cake mixes. Be a nice girl so deeply that you can no longer find the wickedly sensuous creature of whole-body orgasms skilled enough to keep a man at bay until she herself is satiated. Nice girls don’t do that! At least your living room looks well ordered.
96. Permit yourself to be repeatedly disrespected and dishonored. Use this as permission to get revenge. If you save up enough “disgrace points” through silently eating disrespect and dishonor, perhaps you can cash them in for a wild spending binge, for an affair, or maybe even for a righteously justified divorce complete with lawyer-enforced alimony payments.
97. Decide that since you went to school you 97. know everything there is to know about being a man or a woman, being in a human body, being in a long-term committed relationship, and being a parent besides. Do not go outside of your culture to learn things that your culture is incapable of teaching you. Do not admit to the necessity of change. Do not use your relationship as a way to create the necessity for evolutionary development. Act as if everything is okay. Act as if things are as they are and make it clear that you are not responsible for making them any different.
98. Surround yourself with “eggshells.” Create a complex and sophisticated protective layer of ways that you can be offended. Maintain a hair trigger to threaten your partner with violent rage or other childish behavior so that you can control them.
99. Stay identified with the rules and views of your cultural, political or religious affiliation. (I am Italian. I drive only Fords. I am from the Big Apple. I am a Dodgers fan. I am Buddhist. I am Republican. I am vegetarian.) Hold on to your identification more strongly than to your partnership. Attend gatherings of your false identity circle to sustain your illusion of self-knowledge, belonging and being accepted. Never find an intimacy that is more subtle or profound than the intimacy of a cheering football crowd or a bar song.
100. Do not really care about the well-being of your partner. They are, after all, adult, and they should be able to take care of themselves. Use your partner as the butt of your jokes, feel glad when they lose, feel glad when they are not strong, feel glad when they are feeling pain. It is only fair that they too should suffer sometimes.
101. Worry about what the neighbors think. Make your highest priority to be seen and accepted as normal. Enter deep denial about your lack of connectedness in order to keep up the appearance of being in a happy relationship.
102. Worry about keeping up with the neighbors’ possessions or vacations.
103. Complain about not having enough money. Buy things on credit. Live in subtle terror and deep confusion about not knowing how you are going to pay bills even if the bills are not due until far off in the future.
104. Keep around mementos and souvenirs of past relationships such as photos, letters, gifts and clothes. Keep putting attention on those objects as if they mean something. Do not give that attention to your partner.
105. Compare your partner to somebody else, such as their parents, past partners, their siblings, or movie stars. Find your partner lacking and point it out to them, more than once.
106. Do not apologize to your partner. Do not accept apologies from your partner. Never forget what has offended you, even if it was a long time ago. Never forgive your partner.
107. Listen to the critical voices in your head. Keep an internal dialog going in your mind about how stupid your partner is, what they are doing wrong, how they will never get it, how they are so self-centered and never think about the wants and needs of anybody else.
108. Get offended or scared if your partner is ever unpredictable. Allow no freedom for explorative expression, even in the privacy of your own home. Maintain your “kinkiness detector” on high, and reject your partner if they ever get weird beyond what you think your mother would accept. (Although, if you actually knew what your mother was doing …) Declare yourself to be sane, and control your partner so they behave within your defined sanity limits, especially at parties.
109. Use your bed or your bedroom as a place to psychologically analyze or “process” your partner. Create no refuge. Protect no sanctuary. Permit no asylum free of your criticisms or complaints. Let there be no place in your home or no hour in the day that is a safe haven from the all-consuming considerations of Ordinary human relationship.
110. Assume that your partner’s potential is limited. Assume that your relationship’s potential is limited. Assume that you have already achieved the maximum of that potential, perhaps years ago. Relationship then becomes an endurance test. How long can you stand it? Whoever breaks first is the bad guy.
111. Assume that you have a problem child. Having a problem child distracts you from having a problem relationship. Focus all of your time and worries on managing the “proper education” and “proper socialization” of your “problem child” and let twenty years go by, zippity doo-dah! Use your children as the reason to postpone learning how to create anything but Ordinary human relationship until your learning faculty crystallizes into nonfunctionality. Then you don’t have to think about it anymore because learning won’t happen. (By the way, there is no such thing as a “problem child.” However, this is the subject of a different book!)
112. Keep involved in conflicts in many areas of your life. Have fights with your boss and colleagues. Have fights with your partner’s parents, siblings or relatives. Have fights with the labor union and the butcher. Have fights with the tax people, the government, the minister of the church, and the dog next door. By the time your day is over you are too worn out for anything else.
113. Repeat your parents’ neurotic relationship patterns, whatever they are. Create a cult of pairs with your partner. Stay isolated and have no friends at all. Or have many superficial friends and be friends with your partner through being friends with everybody else.
114. Make sure that all of your life decisions are limited to good reasons and insist that your partner’s decisions are too. Do not allow nonlinear or evolutionary influences to enter your life or the life of your partner. Protect your partner from questionable activities. Keep your lives squeaky clean and defensible. Read the newspaper.
115. Flirt, in subtle and overt ways, to make up for what you do not get from your partner. Flirt because you have no discipline with your gluttonous, greedy and insatiable appetite for sexual energy no matter where it comes from or how it contaminates you. Flirt with sexually overt billboards. Flirt through your computer. Flirt with singers on the radio. Flirt over the telephone. Flirt with the waitress, the postman or your tennis teacher. Flirt with total strangers and with your mother-in-law. Also flirt when your partner is around to make them afraid that you might leave so they shape up. Flirt to prove that at least somebody is sexually attracted to you.
116. Get worried if you start to feel something. Think that if you are having feelings then something must be wrong with you. Use addictive substances to stay away from your feelings. Use television, sugar, newspapers, alcohol, speeding, shopping, overwork, overexercise, videos, the Internet, and so on, to keep you from being authentic about what is going on for you. Hide any feelings that leak out sideways, or find external reasons to legitimize your internal feelings.
117. Allow relatives, neighbors, babies, sales men or friends to have priority over your partner when it comes to having your full admiring attention or expressing love and joy. For example, be vivacious and cheery while talking on the telephone with anyone who calls, and then when you hang up, go back to being dull and contracted. Forbid yourself to realize that your rel
ationship is only an act of theater, and that you can shift roles in any moment with anyone.
118. Limit your concept of intimacy so that it only includes sex. Forget that you can explore and completely enjoy other physical intimacies such as cleaning out the garage, dancing, gardening, hiking, filing finger- and toenails, washing hair, massage, singing, playing music, yoga, martial arts, cooking, eating, trying on clothes, painting the house, and so on. If opportunities for these other intimacies occur, stay in your head and consider them as merely chores.
119. Bring your work home so there is no time for intimacy. Stay late for work or have to travel so there is no time for intimacy. Use any way you can think of to avoid intimacy. Always have a good excuse. As a back door, be a hypochondriac. Always have some physical complaint. Make comments about your physical pains an important part of your daily conversations. Keep at least one illness alive so that you can use your illness if you ever run out of other excuses to avoid intimacy.
120. Assume that your partner has expectations of you. React to what you think your partner is expecting of you, even if they do not say that they have expectations. Get offended about what you think they expect of you. Let your emotional reaction destroy the possibility of communion.
121. Be a slave to your reactions. Create no gap between your internal emotional reactions and your consequent external actions. Definitely do not develop the discipline to observe your own behavior patterns by splitting your attention so that you can use part of your attention to become conscious of what you are doing with the rest of your attention. Instead, stay identified with your reactions as if you had no other choice. Be completely mechanical.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 8
