Landon
(00:00.206)
You fall in love with a person. Does that mean you automatically tear down your tendency to build walls in your relationships? I mean, you see them, you fall in love and suddenly all your walls melt away. Well, of course not.
Announce
Hello again, everyone. This is Heartbeat, the podcast featuring insight and teaching from the more than 50 years of work done by Landon Saunders. Today's episode is the conclusion of Landon's focus on relationships and in particular,
How should we deal with those walls that inevitably pop up in our relationships?
Landon
Okay, now what happens if your relationships do not rest in joy? Let's probe that for a moment. Have you ever said to someone you love, you're driving me up the wall? Now you know that a wall is not a very good driving surface. And even if you get to the top, it's awfully hard to maintain your balance. Relationships that...
fall from the top of a wall are so broken that all the king's horses and men are usually unable to put them together again. Walls, relationships. Now how did these two things ever get together? Perhaps we should look more deeply into the situation. For example, have we looked at what happened before the fall? And have we asked the most basic question of all? Why be up on a wall at all? Even why
A wall. Well, let's begin at the beginning. Let's think about falling in love with someone. Now, as we talk about this, I'm talking about a relationship and we're using a romantic relationship as sort of the illustration. But know that it applies to every friendship you have, all the important relationships in your life. This will just make it clearer to grasp. You fall in love with a person.
Does that mean you automatically tear down your tendency to build walls in your relationships? I mean, you see them, you fall in love, and suddenly all your walls melt away? Well, of course not. You see, at this stage of love, it doesn't even demand that the walls come down. It's more like Rapunzel living at the top of her high -walled tower, just occasionally letting her hair down. The early days of love, it's letting your hair down a bit. Marriage in the beginning.
is letting down the drawbridge and pulling inside your protective walls the great trophy that allows you to proudly say to all the world, you see, I'm loved. It's something like the euphoria of the Trojans when they opened the gates of Troy and pulled the great wooden horse inside their walls. It was a trophy. It appealed to their vanity. It said, we're champions. This is more like love in the beginning. It shouts to the world saying, look, somebody loves me.
And so two people pull each other inside the walls of their own life, and then after a while it happens. The marriage partner finds that the beloved is different from what they thought, and suddenly they feel invaded. There's conflict, and they hear words, and they see ways that are alien to them. The soldiers spring from inside the wooden horse, armed to the teeth, and each begins to protect him or herself. Up until now, they'd been able to live right out of their egos, but now that is threatened.
And as each feels threatened, and no matter if the threat is real or imagined, they respond basically in one of two ways. They fight or they flee. More and more today are fleeing. They hide behind or on top of their walls. They put themselves, they think, beyond the reach of hurt, beyond harm's way. And when they do, they also place themselves beyond love's way. That's what walls are about.
Michael Noback put it this way. He said, naturally wants love, but the real thing when it arrives is cruel, disconcerting and frightening. One's partner refuses to be an object, a thing, an impersonal presence, and demands one's precious time and careful reflection and emotional entanglement. And the wall, it's our attempt to rise above it all, above the need for love.
and above the pain of giving up some of the self -involvements, the fantasies that have been years in the making. And so there's a great struggle not to come down from one's own wall, but, and this is an odd thing, to tear down the other's wall or make them feel guilty for having their wall. Every attempt is made to knock the other off his or her wall. No one thinks of him or herself. No one thinks of our own wall. We only think of the walls in the other's life.
and we try to destroy that wall or the person on it. It's king on the mountain, queen on the mountain type, the battering rams, the siege works are built up year after year. And this war is usually not one of passion. It's basically a cold war, a war of nerves, a war of indifference. And every day of indifference, of non -communication, is another brick in the wall that separates another day, another dollar relationship.
This kind of power struggle deprives a relationship of one of its greatest benefit, a benefit described by Searle Connolly as a dualogue, a kind of ongoing permanent conversation that lasts until death breaks the record. It's a marvelous idea, isn't it? A permanent conversation. One that includes all the passages of your life. One that includes your fears, your hopes, your dreams, your tears, and your life.
to be able to talk with another person as we grow and as we change and as we're afraid and as we're disappointed and as we fail to be with someone that stays with us and that listens and do along. How can you get this? Well, you may not get it to the degree you want it or even need it. That's why I began with asking whether you're fun to be with because there's nothing I've just said that should interfere with your being fun to be with.
If you do not have the kind of duologue that you really want, that doesn't mean you don't have to be that you're not fun to be with. In fact, the worse the relationship, the more fun you'd better be. If you don't, mercy, you'll be miserable. Do see how much there is behind this wall imagery? Is this basically true in your experience? Maybe at first there were no white flags, were there? You'd drive each other up your respective walls.
And when you're approached, you're quick to anger, quick to speak, quick to wrath. It's you against your partner turned opponent. You feel betrayed. And we basically go off to find a place for the relationship to die. I remember an old Tarzan movie about the elephant's graveyard. And the old elephants found their way to this special secret place to die. In a way, that's what happens in a relationship, except most don't go off and die. They stay right in the house together and die.
He's dead in his lazy -boy lounger and she's dead on her feet. And occasionally they look at each other with looks that, if they weren't already dead, would kill. And this is part of the silent treatment, which is not meditation therapy. We're talking sounds of silence, Paul Simon style, or silence like a cancer grows. And when the silence is broken beyond what's for dinner or anything on TV, then every question is taken to be a grappling hook that
digs into our own defense. But to say the least, it's all very uncreative. Resentment is a very ugly thing, and it usually makes the situation worse.
You cease to think about the other person, except as a source for your misery. When one partner can think of him or herself as the victim or the martyr, this is a terrible situation because something in you always dies. And you look up and you see the writing on the wall and it says just what the writing on the wall in the book of Daniel says, Meany, Meany tickled you farsen, you have been weighed and found wanting. And doesn't that make you mad?
Just a few days ago, you were singing, dear Lord, it's hard to be humble when you're perfect in every way. And then all of a sudden, here's the person you trusted most that has so rudely pointed out to you that you're not perfect. And you thought in marriage, the two became one. And they do, of course. But the question is, which one? You see, each struggles and tries to make the other over in his or her own image. Now, what is this? Isn't this the struggle for ownership of the relationship?
Isn't it an attempt to control the other's behavior? Relationship, though, is not ownership. And no person is an extension of yourself. No person is here to be shaped by you. And in the beginning of your relationship, you just paper over all those doubts with rationalizations. Because you feel down deep that somehow the person you love is, after all, just a box of jello. And that by adding the wonders of your love and stirring them with your personality and
pouring them into the mold of what you want them to be, that very soon they'll gel into all you've ever hoped and dreamed they would be. Boy, it doesn't work that way. To make a relationship, you must form a new mold. You must break up and throw away your expectations about who the other person is and what they will do for you and how your life will be. Your mate is not Jell -O as you've probably by now already found out. And so what should you do?
What should a person do who constantly experiences this in relationship? Well, here's what they do. You start by listening. Someone said, listening comes understanding, from speaking comes repentance. To understand is to forgive, but understanding is built up over a period of time. It's not a ladder that you build to climb up another's wall. No, it's a process of listening and understanding the other person, a process of revealing yourself.
You let them see you climb down from your wall, run by run. And it helps to realize that so many personality conflicts are really conflicts with the self. We fail to realize that the other person is not doing this or that against you. They're doing it for themselves. If I'm having trouble with you, chances are I'm having trouble with myself. But if you don't understand this and you react harshly, you'll only confirm my belief that you're the problem. On the other hand,
If instead of reacting, you listen, you absorb, you understand that my real problem isn't with you, then I'll have a chance, a climate, an environment in which to work things out. You see, you have to want the best for the person you're in relationship with, because if their life isn't satisfying, then they won't be able to have a satisfying life with you. And so sometimes when deep problems arise in relationships,
Eric (11:57.888)
It's just a sign that your life needs more nourishment. It might be that as Spencer Johnson suggested, when someone comes to you and they're mistreating you, you might look at them and say, hey, you better find some nourishment for your life. Because you see, if you can get them nourished better and get them feeling better about themselves, they won't be so obnoxious. They'll treat you better. And so instead of throwing the skillet, why not say, hey, you need some time? Some time?
to nourish yourself. And before I forget it, let's not lose sight of realism. If you're in a difficult relationship, yes, of course, sometimes you're going to have to protect yourself a little. You might even want to slip behind a wall to regroup, to dream, or re -you. And you'll use some silence. And you'll make yourself strong enough to be vulnerable, strong enough to do the things that will
help the other person have a chance to strengthen their relationship with themselves. We're so external oriented. We're so worried about our image that we fail to take steps to grow strong on the inside. I like the words of Lloyd Douglas who said, the greatest thing anybody can do is to build himself up strongly on the inside. The trouble with most people is that they don't think enough of the value of their own inner selves. If they do something courageous,
They want credit for it. They want to be flattered. They want to tell others. And you see, the real value of it to themselves is gone. They've collected all their pay for it in their families' owes and odds. They get all their reward from the outside instead of privately storing it up on the inside.
Isn't that a great statement?
Now let me give you a slightly different image to work with for a moment. It really says the same thing that we've been talking about. Think of the difference between lobsters and human beings. Now lobsters are hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and they have claws designed for cutting and crushing, and they have powerful tails for running away. Sounds a bit like humans in relationship,
But on the other hand, human beings are just the opposite. They're soft on the outside because they're for touching and relating. And they have hard bones on the inside that keeps them stable. Now, when we resort to our wall strategies, we're more like lobsters. We try to make ourselves hard on the outside. But when we do, we must remember that we've made ourselves weak on the inside. We're like jelly. So when the marriage of walls breaks down, the people are in a very...
poor situation. We are made to be strong on the inside. Otherwise, we'll share our lives only on our own terms. We can't stand not to be in soul control. We can't stand to hear a different version of reality. We don't like the picture. The mirror of our partner reflects back to us. And so we run away. We flee. And the irony is, when you first begin to run, you always think that someone's going to come after you.
But when you have two people who are fleers, you have the terrible situation of hide and seek where they both hide and nobody comes to look for them.
Once there were three men, two of them wise, one foolish. They were in a dungeon that was black as night, and every day food and eating utensils were lowered down to them. The darkness and the misery of the imprisonment had deprived the fool of his last bit of sense so that he no longer knew how to use the utensils he could not see. And one of his companions showed him, but the next day he had forgotten again, and so his wise companion had to teach him continually, day after day. Meanwhile, the third prisoner sat in silence, didn't bother about the fool. Once,
The second prisoner asked him why he never offered his help. Well, look, he said, you take infinite trouble, and yet you never reach the goal, because every day destroys your work. But I sit here and try to think of how I can manage to bore a hole in the wall so that the light and sun can enter and all three of us can see everything. There are two matters of wisdom here. One is not giving up on the training. You keep working. You keep looking for techniques.
You keep hoping that there's going to be a breakthrough, but that's not enough. You need more than techniques. And what you need at this point is joy. Joy is the breakthrough. It's the hole in the wall that lets in the light so we can see and grow again. It's so hard to work in the dark behind our walls.
Announcer
Bust through that wall with a little bit of joy. Thanks for joining us for today's episode of This is Heartbeat, the podcast.
And a favor, if you appreciated today's content, we'd like to ask you to rate and review the podcast wherever you get your material. It really helps with the algorithm as other people are seeking this kind of information. And also we'd like to remind you that there are additional materials available from Landon Saunders. You can access them by simply visiting the website, thisishartbeat .com.
And until next time, thanks again for joining us. This is heartbeat, the podcast.
