Dennis is a family man who owns and operates a small business as a mechanic. Like so many of us, Dennis awakens each day to a familiar host of hopes and hurts. And, just like most everyone we can think of, Dennis is basically and demonstrably a good person. His interests are populated by good faith and good wishes for the people in his circle. He wants to live a life of abundance and peace. His aspirations aren’t too grand, nor are they too small—he simply wants to engage a meaningful existence with his family inside of a reliable infrastructure of sufficiency and reasonable comfort. Dennis hopes the same for the people in his circle.

Daily, Dennis lugs this dynamic around in him as a form of hidden shame that he hasn’t found a way to translate to the people who are closest to him. His wife senses this in him, too, but couldn’t begin to tell you how she might help him in this department. Quietly, she feels just as helpless as he does in the quest to find solutions for her man. She wishes that the hope and confident ambition of the man that she married could find its way back. She wishes that those characteristics could once again find a way to inhabit the man that she’s come to know as her husband. She longs for the lighthearted optimism that they shared together in their younger years.

She misses being fed by the energy that she first witnessed in Dennis, that first drew her to him with bright inspiration and seemingly easy trust. His inner direction and his hopeful outlook were once agents of grounding for her. She felt more secure inside of his look ahead than when she thought of the future on her own. She felt like they were a team and she was often settled in the thought that he was the captain. She felt this at the time of their wedding engagement in a manner that she recalled surprising the 22-year-old version of her; his ‘being captain’ didn’t feel like a loss to her, didn’t feel like a degradation of her own agency or dignity. The surprise to her was that, rather than feeling deprived, she felt resourced and more plugged-in to the matrix of her own interests when she knew that Dennis had a strong vision for them and the family that they hoped to build together. She knew that Dennis’s vision was guided by his deep love for her and that most all of his interests revolved around this mission. Dennis’s leadership constituted a comfort to her inside of which she felt more able to pursue her own dreams. Now, these two decades later, Dennis moves in and out of a sense of failure and she feels their foundations shaking as a result.

What Dennis would also struggle to articulate is that he is haunted by a specific dynamic in nearly every interpersonal encounter that he has—particularly with males. While he would struggle to properly name that dynamic, it shows up in Dennis most potently when what he feels on his insides seems not to match what he perceives (what he thinks he perceives) on the outside of others. Whether against the backdrop of the host of athletes and other public figures to whom he compulsively compares himself, or more subtly in the course of daily interactions with his small staff and his customer base, Dennis’s personal sense of pride and sense of self are always up for question within him. He thus engages all men—those he knows in close proximity and those he ‘knows’ in media spaces—from a deficit perspective, and his quiet wonder within about not adding up to what he should, while never fully articulated, has become for him a merciless bludgeon in his mind and heart. It’s a gnawing sort of thing for Dennis—never overt enough to register with alarm or the need for immediate reform, never quiet enough to allow a true moment’s peace.

Despite the simple wishes that Dennis carries and the salutary character of his aspirations as a family man, business owner and community member, therefore, he routinely deals with self-doubt and, as a result, he routinely struggles with anger.

Sometimes he feels ambushed by these forces and, like so many men, he carries these in a hidden way. Dennis often thinks about a quote that he once heard—he always forgets the source, “Some man named, Henry, or David?” He can never recall the full statement, only the heart of it spoken as a single phrase, one that feels to Dennis like a curse: “Quiet desperation…”¹ He is haunted by this phrase. From the moment he heard it, he knew it would be with him for life. That early-life hook had a barb on it.

Dennis was struck by the phrase because of just how well it puts to language what he so often feels. By all accounts, Dennis is living the life that he should; he runs an honest business, one that he generally enjoys. He always liked cars and the early aptitude that he showed—for all manner of mechanical process, really—soon became a narrative that followed him around. As so many do, Dennis responded to that narrative in turn by following it around. He began to chase it. Maybe not the narrative in particular—that, he probably wouldn’t have been able to name—but the effects of it, the feeling. “That kid sure is good with his hands.” “You’d make a great mechanic one day.” “What are you working on these days—working on another fixer-upper? Hey, would you mind having a look at my Honda? It’s been pinging and I thought you might be able to help me assess it.” Such exchanges in his local community soon became one of the primary channels through which Dennis developed his sense of self. Every accolade contained a drop of elixir that he craved more of. One encounter after another, Dennis, compelled by each boost of affirmation, began to draft a story about who he was. Insidiously, this narrative became performance based.

Slowly, but surely—as most of us do—Denis began to associate his value with what he had to offer through his capacities. Mechanics began to shift as a subject in his mind. What was once merely a life-giving interest and hobby had begun to feel like a destiny that carried with it an associated burden. Soon, and without him realizing it in any conscious way, the familiar and reliable store of inspiration and energy that the world of auto mechanics had constituted for Dennis transformed within him. It became a parasite that stole both his energy and his internal comfort. Slowly, a very particular, very frenetic anxiety began to take hold in him. He felt it most in moments of open space and stillness after particular encounters with particular people. He felt it especially at night, where, on any given day, he would face his first instance of noiseless stillness. He knew this as the witching hour and he dreaded it. Those initial minutes that met Dennis after everyone in his household had gone off to sleep—that little window of hush that opened before him each night as he walked in the quiet darkness of their slumbering home from the dim light of the fridge toward that other familiar glow in the living room—that tiny moment felt the heaviest. Dennis retired there each day in front of the family television. What awaited Dennis on the other side of that 10-foot expanse was a dancing parade of distracting political theater and entertainment. He couldn’t get to that beer and that theater soon enough.

The mental parasite that inhabited Dennis took the form of a nebulous ‘expectation’ that constantly seemed to change shape within him without ever revealing its true nature or origin. Over time, Dennis became more internally directed by ‘The Expectation’ than by his initial passion for life. The expectation was always there. Despite this, what Dennis didn’t realize was that ‘the expectation’ was actually never defined by him or by anyone else in specific detail. It was a fog.

What Dennis had loosely named as an expectation was actually simply anxiety. It was a state of being, not one thought or one principle in particular. He felt it without being able to describe it with any kind of articulate accuracy. What Dennis could feel was a particular weight or burden that was attached to so many of his functions and duties as a mechanic, a business owner, a husband and father. He also had a general awareness that, when dealing with a certain profile of customer at the shop, he would always come home to his wife and children ‘flatter’, more fatigued, and, if he wasn’t careful, much more irritable. Clues as to why this was so seemed to evade Dennis. His awareness of this movement within him was so thin that very often he chalked it up to simply having “had a bad day at work.” Sometimes he’d get a little further than that and would be able to pin it on a particular asshole who came into the shop and demanded “X of me today,” but that was about it. When asked by his wife or any one of his three children about whether he was ok, he simply said, “Oh, I’m fine. That’s the way it goes, I guess. It is what it is, right?”

Dennis’s father, Scott, was a stoic man. He wasn’t overtly abusive, but neither was he ‘present’. Dennis didn’t pay any particular attention to this relationship as a boy. In general, his father’s countenance toward Dennis was analogous to most people’s interactions with the judiciary system: if he didn’t get out of line, he didn’t run into it much at all. Further, and, just like the judiciary, most days Dennis’s father wasn’t in pursuit of him for any specific reason. Accordingly, Dennis was left to his own devices inside of the grid of do’s and don’t(s) that emerged from Scott as Dennis went about his daily life. The bulk of Dennis’s interactions with his father were, thus, haphazard and conflictual. The only reliable consistency in that relationship was that Dennis would be told when he hadn’t done something properly or had neglected to do something that constituted an in-home responsibility. That, Dennis could bank on.

What Dennis would also struggle to name is that there were consistent patterns of speech and thought that manifested in his family of origin with unwavering consistency. Like the coming and going of the tide, the oceanic movements of Dennis’s homelife as a boy were marked by patterns of conflict, of approach and avoidance, of standards applied to and demanded inside of particular tasks, whether scholastic, or simply related to chores to be done around the home. Each of these moments contained subliminal messages about ways to matter and about the dynamics inside of which Dennis would instinctually learn to find approval.

Each of these moments contained subliminal messaging about ways to matter and about the dynamics inside of which Denis would instinctually learn to find approval.

Dennis’s mother, Janet, for example, was lonely in ways to which she dared not be present. Her emotionally distant husband provided no opportunity for her to be ‘held’ in his care or any evident interest in the dynamics of her day as a stay-at-home-mom. Scott barely knew what Janet did in the hours between his departure to his work as a middle-manager at a local industrial supply company and his return to their home. The two of them appeared at most to be mutual functionaries who jointly carried out the tasks of the day with mundane resignation. Dennis sensed this in his mother and felt the need to keep things light for her in a compensatory way. He noticed himself telling a joke or asking if he could make her a tea in response to the particularly lifeless countenance that hung on her face many days. Dennis’s mother, while not fully realizing it, could feel within her the flush of internal relief that simply came from being thought of. Rather than exposing herself to the reservoir of longing that splashed in her beneath those flashes of compassionate engagement with her son—a longing to receive the same and more from the man by whom she’d been looking to be seen her entire adult life—Janet granted herself these little indulgences as the more immediate and accessible solace. Over time, and as Dennis ascended the years of his adolescence, she came to count on her son’s reliable reflexes. Dennis, in response, began to engage these moments as part of his daily rhythm. While his mother would never find the courage to admit it to herself, she had become accustomed to making pronounced displays of emotion to Dennis in order to hasten these movements from him. She and Dennis had become emotionally enmeshed. Both knew this only as a familiar kind of energy that they didn’t experience with anyone else in quite that way. They ‘knew’ something was distorted, felt twisted up. It felt unsafe but was simultaneously compelling. Had either of them had the opportunity to be properly taught about these dynamics, they would recognize each element as a hallmark of psychological enmeshment.

The problem in it all was that neither of them felt they had any practical access to the part of them where this ‘knowledge’ was located. That ‘part’ in both of them, that part and what it contained, was buried beneath too much rubble, too much hurt and fear. Years ago—neither of them could name how many—both had signed a ‘contract’ with these relational dynamics. They did so because of the immediate benefit of the initial ‘hit’ in the first instance. In that initial case, both were met by a very particular kind of effect. One can’t call this effect a ‘benefit’, though one could call it a ‘reward’ in a merely Pavlovian kind of way.

Such ‘effects’ require a little piece of you in the obtaining of them. A sacred piece. The tragedy revealed in the pursuit of these particular effects lies in witnessing that in every case of their achievement, still more of the person is lost to them. They pay you back with death. Certain drugs simply cannot benefit human life. The insidious nature of such modes between people, seeded into otherwise sacred bonds of family and community, will take more and more until nothing is left. The terminus in any unchallenged addiction, whatever the variations on the pathways to that end, is always death…

Dennis and Janet would seek out that mode and its effects, again and again, like a junkie does their dealer. The obvious duplicity in these compulsions betrayed Dennis and his mother as often as they engaged them. They were playing a game. Both of them resented themselves for it. A bit of make-believe, cast as life between a mother and a son. All, painted in a patina of virtue. They had both become signatories, indentured servants to a disastrous pact that neither could properly tease apart. While neither could name the initial instance, neither could either of them recall what life looked or felt like before the contract had been drafted and signed. Dennis’s father and sister had signed contracts of their own in connection to these family patterns and slowly, assuredly, this became the primary governing compulsion and only mode of engagement in their all interactions with one another.

The truth in Dennis’s family was that no one ever brought their deepest longings or the true nature of their real experience into any space that they mutually inhabited, whether merely, in passing conversation, or while gathering with extended family—the contracts that they had each signed wouldn’t allow it. In what had become the most vivid display of these hidden contracts, the Christmas season had established itself as a source of dread and doom. Dennis detested bringing his children to his parents’ home for Christmas dinner. He quietly boiled within as he forced each smile past gritted teeth and nodded robotically during stilted conversation—could one even call it that? —with his father in the den. Neither one of them ever dared avert their eyes from the television screen toward the other.

Dennis’s wife, Kim, had had it with the antics between her husband and his parents. Kim resented Dennis’s mother for the ways that—Kim was sure—she was emotionally manipulating her husband. When she would inquire with Dennis about this, he would sluff it off as overreaction on Kim’s part, “What does it hurt for me to make her a tea or bring her desert to her room for her? I’m just trying to be kind, Kim.” Kim felt trapped between them all and often felt like she was losing her mind in their collective midst. More than becoming angry about it, she was afraid of the ways that she could feel herself losing respect for her husband.

She felt as though it was being stolen from her—she knew it, actually—a little piece of it with each new interaction of the sort. Kim had also noticed what everyone else in the family had: that her personal capacity to make wine vanish during their gatherings had become remarkable. About this she felt a deep ambivalence. A rebellious side of Kim drank during such gathering to spite them all; to require of them that they be as uncomfortable as she amid so many crippled and clumsy inquiries about the kids’ sporting achievements and her mother-in-law’s favourite recipes. Despite the fact that she almost never drank at home, she felt mischievously compelled to allow Dennis’s side of the family to develop this alternative story—the story being written in their midst; the one carried along by the hushed tones; the one decisively imparted in the furtive glances exchanged by Dennis’s mother and her sisters on Christmas Eve. “Let them think what they want,” Kim would grumble to herself with sardonic contempt and a wry grin.

On one occasion on this particular year, Kim, upon overhearing the whispers wafting from Janet and her sisters, poured a glass right to the brim and proceeded to chassé abruptly through their midst, goading them further into gossipy scandal. Kim was astonished by the passive-aggressive impulses that seemed to possess her under Scott and Janet’s roof. She always felt shame and regret about it the next day. On the other hand, Kim felt hurt and anger as Dennis’s mother and sisters seemed so very sufficed by their distanced view of Kim, so very sated by their impression of her as a lush. “How could you not want to truly know the wife of your own son?” she thought.

After each Christmas encounter, Kim vowed to herself that that would be the last time. “Next Christmas I’m telling her how I really feel about her—someone’s got to confront her about how she treats Dennis. She’s emotionally dependent on his continued care for her. She needs to confront Scott about her needs.” And every Christmas, she felt her resolve leave her body in the very number of steps it took to trod upon the snow between their car and the front entry way to Janet and Scott’s home. Resolve fell out of her like sand. She knew Dennis had to do it. She also knew that if she did, she would never recover from the loss. She knew that if she did, the last bit of respect that she held in her heart for her husband in that space would be gone. She worried for their marriage against that backdrop.

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The Nature of Developmental Contracts:

We are all likely to find bits of our own experience in the vignette above. The truth is that whatever the nuanced differences between families and their respective cultures (whether at the local level of immediate family or in the broader context of societal cultures themselves) there really are two populations, two kinds of family, two kinds of couple, two kinds of individual, when we think inside of this particular frame.

The frame I am thinking of here is one related both to emotional intelligence and to relational maturity, but it is predicated upon still a more central aspect of human life than either of those: intention.

It turns out that our intentions, as they relate to our family life, first, and our relational life in each of its facets to follow, are every bit as important as our intentions prove to be in courts of law. They are the central agents by which the verdict on either our guilt or our innocence is determined. They are the very measure by which we are held responsible. In the relational context, our intentions are ‘proven’ by our habitual actions, in what we are prepared to grant our time and our energy and resource with consistent effort.

Both attention, and the intention that follows it, as it turns out, are moral acts, and are not merely arbitrary reflexes. The two populations of family are therefore: the ones who are intentionally and decisively present to the matter of non-conscious contracts and those who are not; the families who intend to face these dynamics with requisite courage and those that do not.

Very particular differences emerge from within both kinds of family. The differences are accompanied by reliable patterns of interaction and associated increments of stress and disorder on the one hand and peace and order on the other.

If we go back into the history of our friend Dennis, just far back enough to observe the fruit of the intentions that his parents brought to the marriage to which they were mutually avowed, we would see along their way that certain emotional realities were prized more than others and that certain compulsions were allowed to take shape around those realities amid the slow creep of daily life. Instinct, much more than principle, had comprised the heart of the interactive style between them. They lived thus inside of a governance structure which neither of them had chosen per se. Rather, they had compulsively surrendered themselves over the years into the instinct to avoid conflict. Of course, they had their own reasons for this inside of their own history and they need to be afforded all of the graces, mercy and understanding that we are willing to reasonably extend to ourselves in these departments.

Everyone has their own story and that story always emerges from within someone else’s.

That said, Dennis’s parents—and, now, Dennis along with his own family, with his own marriage and children—represent a population of people who have resigned themselves to aiming at something other than the heart of the truth between them. This really is—in terms both practical and theoretical—its own form of commitment. The sad reality that accompanies this particular commitment, however, is that when truth becomes a casualty, so does love.

Wherever truth is not permitted, love cannot take hold.

‍This relational style isn’t born consciously; it doesn’t stem from decisive determination to honour a principle. It’s what inevitably lies in wait on the other side of the absence of such principles in a family system. It becomes a ‘syndrome’, manifest as a host of non-conscious commitments, born inside of mere instinct. As it turns out, when left to instinct alone, no family can grow in the direction of relational wholeness. In order to achieve that, principled commitment is required.

The driving forces in the contracts that we draft, non-consciously as it were, are always instinctual. The driving force in the conscious contracts that we draft however, while also capable of hurting us if not properly oriented within an order of meaning and purpose, stand an actual chance of benefitting us. The difference between these two—both in their nature and their effects—is as stark as the difference in the level of conscious awareness and intention that we possess when click, “agree,” to the ‘cookies’ requirement on the webpages we browse, versus the signature we penned when we entered the covenant represented by our marriage certificate.

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Features of the Contracts That Harm Us:

Here are some of the features of the contracts that harm us. We’ll get to how to combat those to follow.

Feature Number 1:

Conscious contracts stand a greater chance of benefitting us than non-conscious contracts. Non-conscious contracts will always take the form of burden and will lead to disorder, both internal and external.

Feature Number 2:

Non-conscious contracts are more often than not, representative of deep-seeded fears that are always related to belonging, inclusion, and our sense of personal value. In summary, non-conscious contracts have the effect of fracturing our identity.

Feature Number 3:

Non-conscious contracts have the effect of leaving us more hungry and less resourced when we engage them than when we do not. They take the form of ever-increasing cravings for ever diminishing pleasures and are thereby incapable of serving us.²

Feature Number 4:

Non-conscious contracts pay to us an immediate benefit that constitutes a blockade to our sight of the broader benefits associated with breaching them. They can never positively promise something for tomorrow, only something small for ‘right now’. They function in this sense as addictions do.

Feature Number 5:

Non-conscious contracts are never rooted in love and are most often rooted in fear, anger, or shame.

Feature Number 6:

Non-conscious contracts are always demanded of us by emotion more than thought or principle.

Feature Number 7:

Non-conscious contracts must be consciously broken. They do not tend merely to dissipate over time.

Feature Number 8:

Non-conscious contracts tend to grow in their reach and influence. They have the effect of pervading and eventually stealing the self away from the autonomous control of the person in all of its dimensions.

Feature Number 9:

Given the instinctual nature of non-conscious contracts, they tend to form in us in our youth and have the character on those grounds of ‘younger’ versions of us. They are therefore visible in the most vulnerable places within the body and soul of a given individual. They sound younger, less resourced, less measured, less balanced, more anxious, and more critical than any of the thoughts and feelings that tend to populate our conscious experience.

Feature Number 10:

Non-conscious contracts can be forged in two primary ways: during peak emotional experiences (such as instances of abuse or neglect) or, amid the granular movements and more subtle messaging evinced in our family habits and ritualized behaviours.

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How to Breach Non-Conscious Contracts:

You’ve probably asked this question along the way: “How can I possibly change something that I’m not conscious of doing?” If you haven’t asked that question yet, well, there it is. It may come as a relief to know that attending to that which has previously remained non-conscious in us is actually quite possible. You can’t see the wind, only its effects. The wind proves itself in the whisp of your hair and the movements of the trees. The effects are what we pay attention to here as well.

To settle any doubts about the matter, just recall (or, for some of you, behold) the ways that your children moved through the various stages of their development, from infant to toddler, from toddler to pre-teen, from teen to young adult, etc. In each case, the rite of passage—the bridge spanning the distance between the stages of development—can be thought of as this:
a) successful movement of previously non-conscious motivators within the self into the territory of the conscious awareness, at which point,
b) those contents can be rightly attended to by their being brought under the governance of a rightly ordered mind and heart.

In other words, the child is steadily developing as a self through the conscious adoption of responsibility. We praise our children for these movements and invite them in such directions with deep hope. We celebrate when our toddler-daughter learns to subdue her impulse to bite her younger brother by learning to name the emotions of jealousy and fear that haunt her little mind inside of the ground she feels she is losing with their mother against the backdrop of his emerging presence. This act of citing and naming emotion as the driver in her reflexive impulse becomes the very skill required to shift her habits and behaviours away from instinct into conscious (that is, intentional) decision. Initially, she has to work against the impulse as the conscious awareness of it in her increases. Little by little, her ability to overcome the impulse becomes a settled feature in, and of, her identity and character. Slowly, she is becoming self-possessed rather than self-obsessed. She learns to separate her sense of self from the cloud of emotions that she feels in relation to her brother and then learns to do the same in other contexts. She becomes responsible in greater ways for her own behaviours. She is growing. She is becoming more integrated and whole. She is also becoming more resilient and understanding.

This is why changing these dynamics—breaching our non-conscious contracts—is always best framed as a matter of maturation and character formation. Cultivating the ability to do so comprises the very essence of what, at heart, our humanity consists in.

We are called forward by the demands of life to become responsible, loving stewards, first of our own lives and then of the features of life beyond our own over which we hold sway. Our families are the training gym for life.

The first principle involved in naming non-conscious contracts is therefore to become savvy to their effects. Because I can’t first ‘see’ the contract, I must instead look for its familiar fruits. As was noted above in the spate of disquieting effects that such contracts tend to produce, I take these effects as a reliable body of knowledge that I can prove the presence of the contract against.

• I look for emotion—to where I feel afraid, or flattened.
• I look for ‘states’ of physical fatigue.
• I look for the feeling of separation and the atomizing experience of shame.
• I witness what happens to my otherwise settled confidence.
• I observe my patterns of sleep.
• I pay attention to what I find myself perseverating upon (to the anger fantasies, or the rehearsals of conversation, or imagined movement through conflict with a particular colleague or family member).

These, as I pray to understand such matters, open before me as a sort of mental map. I even consider writing them down or literally mapping them on a page. I discover inside of all of these dynamics, that certain people in particular, certain tasks in particular, certain times of year, certain aspects of my work, take me out of settled interiority and self-possession into the fog of an anxious and angry condition.

From there, I name these dynamics. I write them, I speak them, I pray them, I share them. In other words, I wrench them up from the depths by means of exposure to light. In a word, I confess them. In that moment, I am no longer alone with them in the same manner as before. I am now walking toward them in some very real and tangible way as opposed to running away from them. Accordingly, while I have not yet named the particular ‘contract’ at this stage, I am nonetheless beginning to heal. That is, in the act of confession, I demonstrate that I have summoned the courage to face that which I was previously and instinctually compelled to avoid; I am no longer dependent merely upon myself for resource.

Confession is a matter of integrative re-membering in two ways:
1. The self is being brought back together, first, in that my mind finally surrenders to what my soul knew and was carrying ‘alone’ within me. My mind and soul are thus integrated by this act.
2. As my mind integrates with my soul, I am properly inclined to re-member myself in ways that are properly recollective; I recall the other features of my past experiences (many of them ‘successes’), the salutary features of my character, the kind interests and the deep hopes that have always been with me and that motivated me in moments where I felt properly resourced inside of a reliable order of relational sufficiency.

My body follows suit with associated reductions in stress hormone, with more balanced breathing and with generative homeostatic and metabolic adaptation. All this, well before being able to name a contract. In this regard, one begins to heal at the very moment that one determines to move toward the problem.

Next, I listen to the ways that these dynamics of fear, of dissipation, of atomization and separation seem to point back and still back. I notice that they tend to take me in the direction of a seminal experience, to an initial instance of that particular cluster of physiological sensation and psychological habit, to a formative moment of inception.

In Dennis’s case, the relational dynamics in which he was non-consciously enmeshed with his mother and father while growing up in his home seamlessly transposed themselves onto his experience as a man at work. Were he to have undertaken the evaluative process that we are all attempting to engage (the one reflected in what I’ve written above), he would notice that he felt compelled to drop his shop rate for certain customers whenever the threat of complaint emerged regarding a service that his staff had provided. In Dennis’s ‘contract’, when someone is upset with you, you surrender something from yourself as a penitent attempt at keeping them close. You surrender the truth in order to appease an emotion. In this case it was anger. It was always the stoic men, always in their early 70’s, especially if they had a professional veneer about them.

Were Denis to pay more attention, he’d even have realized that a particular scent of hair gel added to this effect in him. A mere question from such a man about the price of an auto part during a service could set all this into motion in Dennis—could enact the contract in him. From there he would notice that in the presence of such men, he becomes uncharacteristically jovial, smiling and gesticulating in unseemly ways that always puzzled his staff. He would laugh more often in the course of the interaction with a tone and a force that his usual manner of laughter never carried. He would then begin to run within from the feelings of worthlessness, the cloying accumulation of saliva under his tongue and the knotting constriction of his larynx. While his palms sweated and his ears rang, he would play performatively at the keys at the desktop while attempting to mask the mad scramble occurring in between his ears.

In such cases for Dennis, he already knew how the landing would be stuck—he had heard himself say it a million times before and the typing was but a perfunctory preamble to the inevitable. “Let me see what I can do here,” he’d say, so often before the customer had even finished their sentence. “You know what, I think I can help you with that shop rate. How would you feel about that?” Dennis passed it all off within himself as a kind favour. What his mind had written up as generosity, however, his soul knew as the prostituting of his kindness—and his dignity—to unwitting others. Both his mother and his father showed up at the shop in such moments… not literally of course, but in the effects of the winds that had blown about the spaces between them and Dennis over so many years. And not just in the spaces between them of course, but in each and every relational space inside of which Dennis had concealed his real experience of a real moment.

Dennis was living out his contract with his mother and father in every one of these moments. All he needed was a provocative icon with whom to act it out; in this case, a 70’ year-old man who hadn’t a clue that he had done anything beyond asking about the price of a part again because his hearing aid had run out of battery. Dennis’s smile in that moment was for his mom. His version of, “Come now, things aren’t that bad, mom. Let’s find something brighter to focus on.” Dennis’s shop rate reduction, on the other hand, was for his Dad: “If I can’t gain his pride for me in the quality of my work, perhaps I can find it in serving him in some extraordinary way—maybe then he’ll tell me he’s proud of me.” Unaware, Dennis reinforced yet another expectation of an unwitting customer by promising a dynamic into their relationship that would become another bar in his prison within, the mobile prison he knew as his life. More labour guaranteed for Dennis, more customer expectation connected to that labour. Each instance produced a little more departure from the truest dynamics that lurked there within him. Dennis had become a fragmented and undifferentiated man and the contract that he had signed guaranteed self-loathing and exhaustion as the longstanding return on his investment.

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Aids for Breaching Contracts:

Aid 1:

Cultivate the capacity to name and address emotion. Become familiar with a broadened vocabulary for emotion (study and keep in frequent view a lexicon of emotion)³

Aid 2:

Notice:

• States of mind and body (oriented and settled vs disoriented and chaotic)
• Types of location and environment
• Times of year and type of ritual (seasons of year, holidays)
• Types of emotion (see Appendix A)
• Types of person, their sex, their age, potentially their ethnicity, their accent, the sensory markers particular to them (their scent, the sound of their voice, etc.)

Aid 3:

Locate an earlier instance of these feelings and note the similarities in tone and feel.

Aid 4:

Identify the ‘tape’ that plays in terms of “I” statements that accompany the moment, e.g., “I’m so stupid.” “I can never do anything right.” “I am detestable.” (That person hates me.) “I don’t belong.” “I’m a fraud.”

Aid 5:

Go even further back if possible. Repeat step 3.

Aid 6:

Once you’ve discovered an earlier instance of the matter, ‘confess’ it, first to yourself (in a moment of written reflection for example) and then to someone else (a spouse, a friend or a group). Confess the matter along these lines: When I am near __________ (person, place or thing), I feel and experience _____________.

Aid 7:

Begin to name the contract along these lines (think of Dennis). “When I encounter stoic men in their senior years, I feel compelled to appease them by volunteering my service to them. I developed the view when I was younger that if I supplied this from me into the relational space between us, not only would I avoid conflict with them, but they would reward me by engaging me in ways that I hoped would garner their pride in me and at the very least would prevent them from writing me off all together. In this, I guaranteed my exhaustion and I devoted myself to never telling the truth about my insides to the people whose approval I craved.

Aid 8:

Begin to breach the contract by avowing yourself (consciously intending) to not allow such a moment to pass again without reflective confession (in your times of solitude, spend time seeing and articulating these dynamics in written form). Regularly and intentionally take these reflections beyond solitude and prayer into the company of others via confession.

Aid 9:

Begin to consciously identify alternative behaviours based on alternative frames. In the case of Dennis, he has a lot of work to do: in addition to contending with the suite of wounds and emotions that marked his interaction with his parents, he also has the work ahead of him of identifying an authority that he can trust in the territory of worldview. He needs to choose a wisdom tradition by which to be informed. This step is a matter of returning to the wisdom tradition that we have already identified as trustworthy; a matter of allowing it to provide the countervailing narrative on our behalf. From there we begin to incrementally apply that narrative to what we have learned to be the hidden dynamics of the various contracts that we have non-consciously signed over the course of our years.

Aid 10:

Seek and secure resource in enacting the new behaviours and the new frames required of me in order to breach my contract. Again, in Dennis’s case, this would involve a chosen accountability from trusted staff with particular kinds of customers. In his confession, he might announce to his staff that men in their 70’s summon particular vulnerabilities in him. He would name the compulsions that tend to mark these interactions and ask that his staff be gently present with him when they notice that certain customers are present. They might even get as creative as coming up with code language aimed at reminding Dennis, both, of his commitment to change and of their support there with him.

The first of the matters to address of course, would be to commit to holding firm on his shop rate—he might even write a manifesto connected to all of this wherein he explicitly avows himself to prohibitions against changing the rate. Over time, however, Dennis is aided by both his and his staff’s commitment to moving him further and further along in his process toward differentiated self-possession. First, the most basic commitment to not changing the rate, then, perhaps, to keeping an eye with him on how ‘authenticly’, how truly revealed he, is amid such dynamics. “Dennis, my friend, what was that tone in your laugh when you were at the till with Mr. Schoenfeld? Was that the old contract trying to rear its ugly head? Were you even searching anything just now, or were you making a display at the computer again?”

Aid 11:

Articulate in an official manner, the truths adopted and held in place of the lies that led to the contract. Consider writing this as a manifesto to be read and rehearsed with ritualistic consistency (perhaps upon waking or upon ending the day). For Dennis this might take the following form. “I was raised in a low-interaction, low-trust, high-stakes dynamic, where I developed the belief that I was only worth what I could do for others. I learned to supplant my real experiences—inclusive of my true desires and emotions—of moments with my parents in order to try to keep them close and win their favour. This shows up as a contract that I attempt to enact with others who remind me in so many ways of the experiences and feelings that marked the many moments between me and my parents.

I am slowly learning that my worth comes from elsewhere—I’m learning inside of a tradition that tells me that my value comes from God’s pronouncement over me; that the God who makes that pronouncement is, in both nature and function, love. God’s loving sight of me proves my worth before I’ve done anything in particular.

Accordingly, I am committed to challenging the feelings and habits that seem to want to emerge from me around particular individuals. I am devoted to confessing when I am struggling with the familiar feelings associated with such interactions and am progressively changing the frequency that I allow familiar falsehoods (tones in my laugh, the frequency and authenticity of my laughter, the factors that I identify as warranting the surrendering of my own needs into undue labour for others) to emerge from me.

I am resolutely committed to receiving others’ sight and naming of these dynamics when I am unable to see them myself. I will not spurn such loving admonishments from any of the people that I love or who love me.

My ‘why’ in all of this is robustly connected to my wish to become a man of greater integrity; first, in honour to my own sense of who I am and to God; second, for the sake of my family, my relationship with my wife and my children.

Further, I wish to hand to my children a legacy of relational truth, maturity and wholeness. Paradoxically, to the degree that I attempted to attend to these problems alone, I found myself further and further ensnared by them. I am thus committed to the principle that the only way out of them is to no longer be alone in them. On these grounds, I will humbly accept the help of trusted others wherever it is kindly offered to me to these ends. I am God’s good idea. I will do my best to live increasingly inside of that knowledge and allow it to mark the emergent habits of thought and behaviour inside of which my daily existence consists. May God help me as I go.”

Step 12:

Share my manifesto with trusted others as an act of humble submission to a new way of living and a new vision for all of my relationships. Recognize this new way as the putting down of a tireless and imprisoning contract in exchange for a covenant of care.

I’m rooting for you, friends. May we each be met by the grace we require in our respective cases. I am praying for us all as we aspire together in the direction of these aims as community.

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Appendix A:

Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.  Retrieved here.

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Footnotes

¹ Thoreau, H. D. (1884). Walden: Life in the Woods. Ticknor and Fields: Boston.

² Lewis, C. S. (1942). The Screwtape Letters. Geoffrey Bles: United Kingdom.

³ Plutchik, R. Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. Retrieved here. See above.