Sarah's notes on Choice Theory

If we are not sick, poverty stricken, or suffering the ravages of old age, the major human problems we struggle with-violence, crime, child abuse, spousal abuse, alcohol and drug addiction, the proliferation of premature and unloving sex and emotional distress- are caused by unsatisfying relationships.

We choose all our actions and thoughts and, indirectly, almost all our feelings and much of our physiology. As bad as you may feel, much of what goes on in your body when you are in pain or sick is the indirect result of the actions and thoughts you choose or have chosen every day of your life.

The seeds of almost all our unhappiness are planted early in our lives when we begin to encounter people who have discovered not only what is right for them- -but also, unfortunately, what is right for us. Armed with this discovery and following a destructive tradition that has dominated our thinking for thousands of years, these people feel obligated to try to force us to do what they know is right. Our choice of how we resist that force is, by far, the greatest source of human misery.

What may also be involved here is ownership. Most of us believe that we should or do own our husbands, wives, children, students, and employees. I have the right to control my wife and kids because they belong to me. As long as we believe that we own people, we don't hesitate to force them when they don't do what we want them to do. We feel differently with our friends; we accept that we don't own them and they don't own us. Caring for but never trying to own may be a further way to define friendship.

To achieve and maintain the relationships we need, we must stop choosing to coerce, force, compel, punish, reward, manipulate, boss, motivate, criticize, blame, complain, nag, badger, rank, rate, and withdraw. We must replace these destructive behaviors with choosing to care, listen, support, negotiate, encourage, love, befriend, trust, accept, welcome, and esteem. These words define the difference between external control psychology and choice theory.

Laughing and learning are the foundation of all successful long-term relationships. When a marriage begins to go sour, fun is the first casualty. That's too bad because fun is the easiest need to satisfy. There are so many things you can do to have fun, and rarely does anyone stand in your way.

To get along better than we do now with another person, we need to try to learn what is in that person's quality world and then try to support it. Doing so will bring us closer to that person than anything else we can do. But it is not easy to find out what is in another person's quality world, and it is not always easy to support what we find out, as the example of anorexia shows so clearly.

Not only are we always behaving, but we are also always trying to choose to behave in a way that gives us the most effective control over our lives. In terms of choice theory, having effective control means being able to behave in a way that reasonably satisfies the pictures in our quality worlds.

When you are strongly depressing, what you are most aware of is its miserable feeling, a feeling that takes over your thinking, acting, and even your physiology and tends to slow you down. It takes a lot of energy to block the angering completely, which is why you are so tired. As long as you depress, you have little energy to do anything else. If we were not able to depress quickly and effectively, we could not function in marriage, as a family, or as a society. Depressing prevents huge amounts of marital and family violence. If most of us didn't depress a lot of the time when we were frustrated, our streets and homes would be war zones.

The test for love and belonging is not early sex but a continuous interest in sex and ongoing attempts to please the other as much as or more than to satisfy oneself. When sex starts to wane early in a marriage, it is not because the couple lacks hormones. It is because one or both partners begin to feel that there isn't enough love attached to the sex. This is rarely genetic; there is usually enough love, but the love has been turned off by too much control.

If you have found that you are less willing to take risks than most people, you have a high need for survival. If you have about the same willingness as most people you know, you have an average need, and if you are willing to take more risks than most of your friends, you have a low need.

The key to assessing the strength of your need for love and belonging is how much you are willing to give, not take, compared to your family members and friends. Be careful with this need; look hard before you leap into a loveless marriage. Don't confuse sex with love. Pay attention to belonging. As I said in chapter z, don't marry someone you would not be friends with if there was no sex between you.