Priorities 2: the more you know the better

In the last post we talked about how a person’s true priorities are revealed by their actions and how that allows us to see the truth, no matter what they say or we want to believe. All well and good—you now know how to discern the truth about another person…or even yourself—what good is this to you?

Well, there is the superficial good, the ability to determine that, even though they may mean what they are saying in the moment they say it, when push comes to shove, something else will take priority. That means in a domestic violence situation, for example, when he comes to you and apologizes, is horrified at the bruises he gave you, and he is so so soooo sorry and he will never do it again, he very likely is not lying. He means it, he is sorry, he fully intends to never do it again. But he does—when tensions are high something inside says he is entitled to punish you for provoking him—and he repeats the behaviour. So what is the real truth? That he will never do it again? Or, given a sufficiently stressful situation, he will, no matter what he says or even believes about himself. The real truth is, he will do it again and he will blame you for it in the bargain. That is the superficial benefit of this knowledge you compare his actions with his words and, knowing that his actions have more credibility than his words, you can discern the truth.

A more in-depth benefit of this knowledge is that it gives insights that help you to understand a person’s motivations, which can give you even more information necessary to make decisions and choices. Too often we ACoNs feel stuck because we cannot feel certain of what is going on with our Ns. “Does she love me and just doesn’t know how to show it? Or does she care only for herself? Will I ever be able to get some sign that she loves me? What if I decide on NC and I regret it later?” Without more definitive information, too often we keep the status quo, waiting for that last bit of information that will move us one direction or another.

Despite the fact that life doesn’t come with guarantees we ACoNs often hold ourselves back waiting for them anyway (because we are afraid to be wrong). We often feel insufficiently informed to make momentous decisions like whether or not to allow our Ns into the lives of our children or whether we should go LC, NC, or just keep the status quo. Knowing your N’s true priorities can be that critical bit of information that tips the scales in your mind towards one action or another.

It can also help us to learn the truth about ourselves and help us adjust our own behaviours. Like my grandparents, we may believe things about ourselves that are not true: they truly believed that their home was open to me at all times but, in reality, when September rolled around every year they returned me to my mother without even exploring the possibility of me staying. We all do the same kinds of things: we believe things about ourselves that are not strictly true, things that our behaviour, if analysed for priorities, will reveal. When a philandering husband says “I love my wife,” he may well be telling the truth—he may very well feel love for her. When he says “I would never do anything to hurt her,” however, his behaviour tells a different tale. Faced with a choice between doing something that would hurt his wife vs doing something that would give him some illicit carnal pleasure, which one is his priority? Her feelings or his pleasure? He may love her, but his wife and her feelings are not his first priority, are they, despite his belief otherwise?

Passive aggressive behaviour is very much about priorities. It is what motivates behaviours of petty vengeance or resistance, even at the cost of another person’s respect and ability to trust you: you give your vengeance or resistance a higher priority than your relationship. Being “right” or getting payback or having control is more important than settling an issue or respecting another person’s feelings. When you introduce this dynamic into a relationship it is corrosive and guaranteed to erode the relationship until whatever it was originally based on is utterly destroyed. Your behaviour shows your priorities: what is most important to you is what you actually do.

How does that work? It is a lot simpler than you think. Imagine you are sitting in your living room in your pajamas. You haven’t showered or brushed your teeth yet, nor have you taken your morning pills (vitamins, whatever)). You haven’t eaten yet, either. You are sitting on the sofa with the remote in your hand and the clock on the front of the entertainment unit says it is 10 am. You told a kinda-sorta friend you would meet her for lunch at 12 and it is an hour’s drive to get there. You need to pee. Somebody is knocking on your door. A show you really like has just come on the TV and even though the series is in reruns, you haven’t seen this episode…and your DVR/Tivo isn’t working so you can’t record it… What do you do?

Here is what I would do: 1) turn off the TV; 2) go to the toilet; 3) answer the door and get rid of the person; 4) take my pills; 5) shower and brush teeth; 6) get dressed to meet friend; 7) text her I am running late if, indeed, I was running late. What is the significance of this chain of events? It is all directed towards keeping my commitment to this other person. The TV show will come again and even if it doesn’t, nothing of importance is lost if I miss it this time (did my world crash because I missed it the first time?). The person at the door is given short shrift because I have another commitment: unless my visitor is the police or the fire department telling me to evacuate, whatever this person wants can wait. The rest of my activities are geared towards keeping my commitment. So, out of the many things available to me, keeping my commitment was my priority.

I could have made other choices. I could have said “I may never have another chance to see this episode—I can have lunch with Jenny another time.” I could have decided whoever was at the door was more important—my upstairs neighbour is at the door with a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies and the latest juicy gossip about the woman across the hall whom we both despise… I could decide I can’t go with dirty hair and I can’t go with wet hair and I don’t feel like hunting for the hair dryer… There are numerous choices and whichever one I make and follow through on indicates what my priority is in the moment. All my actions in the first scenario are oriented towards going to that lunch, so that is my priority which, taken a level deeper, is actually about maintaining my integrity. But in the second one my priority is the TV show, not the lunch—if the lunch was my priority, I would be doing things to make that happen. In the third scenario, getting the latest dirt on a mutual antagonist is more important to me than going to that lunch because that is what I did—I sat down and gossiped rather than told my neighbour “…hold that thought…I’ll be back by 2 and we can talk then!” No, by inviting the neighbour in and having a gossip fest, I demonstrate that the most important thing to me is the gossip because I put the lunch aside in order to do it. The actions we engage in indicate where our priorities lie.

You can argue against that by saying you have a higher priority but have to get this little (unrelated) thing and that little (unrelated) thing done first but that doesn’t wash. If you need to sit down and break out the check book and write the monthly bills but instead you fritter away your time deep cleaning the carpet (which won’t fester and decompose if it waits another 24 hours) or defrosting the deep freeze (which will be no more frosty tomorrow than it is today), your behaviour says these items take precedence over paying the bills. Even if you acknowledge they are delaying or avoidance tactics, it doesn’t alter the fact that, in the scheme of your priorities, you gave them first place over writing out those checks. And even if you are clear in your mind that the bill paying comes first, the moment you delay it in favour of something else, you are actively giving that something else a higher priority.

This is a very useful tool for you in learning about yourself. You can write down a list of things you want/need to do in a given week, in order of priority and then see what priority you actually give them, as judged by the order in which you accomplished them. What if you find, at the end of a week, that something you ranked #1 priority out of 10 still isn’t done, even though some of the other items are? What does it tell you?

It identifies areas that you need to explore. For example, for many years I had a hard time sitting down to write the bills. Why? Because when once did, I was out of money. And that was terrifying. Even though I knew I had a roof over my head for another month and phone and electricity and water, and I knew there was enough for groceries…what if something awful happened? What if I needed a couple of thousand dollars for an emergency? I wouldn’t have it, would I? So every month was a struggle for me. I would avoid sitting down to write the checks and distract myself with other things—things like defrosting the freezer or cleaning a carpet—to take my mind off the struggle. Every month I would eventually sit down and write the checks and then it was another struggle to make myself put them in the mail. Once those checks left my hand, the money was gone and I was stressed about a possible emergency until the next pay check came in—and then the struggle to write those checks started all over again.

Having credit cards with a large enough line of credit—having thousands extra in the bank—did not fix this. I was still struggling with this internal tug-of-war when I had $20,000 extra in the bank. That is because the problem wasn’t really about not having enough money, it was my fear of being alone and without resources—abandonment—that came from my childhood. Enough money made a good buffer, but no matter how much I had, releasing some of it scared me and I put that off as much as I dared.

So, while I thought my first priority was paying the mortgage and the utilities so that I would continue to have a roof over my head and heat, my real priority was to assuage that fear of being alone and without sufficient resources to survive. And I learned that by paying attention to my behaviour and learning to analyse even the scary bits.

You can do this too, not only for yourself but for others around you. You can look at your passive aggressive sister and recognize that her priority is not getting you to come to Thanksgiving dinner at NM’s house, even though that is what it looks like. You can ask yourself what is she really after? How is she behaving? Is she wheedling and pleading? Is she demanding? Is she judgmental and shaming? Do you suspect she really wants you to come? Or would prefer you stay away? Look at her behaviour beyond being your NM’s flying monkey—what is her behaviour telling you that her words are not? What is her priority? (Very likely it is to stay in NM’s good graces and get whatever reward NM distributes to her good little bootlickers because her sense of self rests in the opinions of others and she is dependent on them to feel good about herself.)

All too often, when dealing with Ns and their sycophants, communication is a mine-field of miscommunication, subtext, innuendo and outright lies. But if you recognize that what a person actually does—the words s/he chooses to communicate—the attitude s/he displays—the action s/he takes—these things tell you what is really going on with them. Close your ears to what they say and notice what they do because therein lies the truth.

If you can discern what their real priority is, you can have a better handle on how to take care of yourself in dealing with them. And if you can figure out what your real priority is, you can more quickly learn what you need in order to take steps to go in the direction you really want to go.

Finding the truth—priorities tell the tale

Thirty something years ago I was sitting on the therapist’s sofa bemoaning my then-husband’s latest rounds of narcissistic behaviours. I knew nothing about narcissism in those days and it was not a disorder that was high on the radar of the mental health community. I was hurt, lost, and above all, confused—he would tell me he loved me but then he would do something mean or disrespectful or insensitive, making it difficult for me to believe what he said. His words said love, but his behaviour felt painful, disrespectful, and sometimes frightening. Unsure of myself—being the child of a narcissist I was not particularly confident of my ability to make good choices and my track record up to that point was anything but stellar—so I was complaining to my therapist that he lied so often, but so well, that I never knew what to believe.

She gave me a piece of advice that was to stand me in good stead for the rest of my life: when the words and the actions don’t match, believe the actions—it is easy to speak a lie but much harder to live it.

While this advice is excellent and it has been very helpful in my life, it was only recently that I began to understand that I had only understood the most superficial aspect of my therapist’s words. With some thought I came to realize that there is additional depth to this advice, a nuance that takes its meaning much deeper than the simple act of comparing one’s words and deeds in order to find the truth.

When I was two my mother abandoned me, telling the State of Oregon to find me an adoptive home. Her mother, on hearing the news, rescued me from the foster home and for the next two years I lived with them. When I was almost four my parents reconciled, collected me from my grandparents and shortly thereafter, away we went to Southern California, as far as we could get from our rustic little farming town.

My mother had created a scandal and in small towns like Timber Creek, gossip spread fast. My grandfather was a successful businessman and one of those “pillar of the community” types, president of the local chapter of the Lion’s Club, an elder their church, and so on. For many, many years I simply assumed that my grandparents had rescued me because I was their grandchild and they loved me. Seven decades on, I begin to realize that it wasn’t that simple: my grandparents took me to live with them because, according to their personal code of conduct, family took care of family and they would look bad if they, prominent, respected and financially comfortable members of the community, left a grandchild of theirs to be absorbed into anonymity at the cost of the taxpayers.

After examining the evidence I have collected over the years—much of it recollections of other relatives, most of whom were less than complimentary about my mother and her behaviour—I have begun to realize that the motives for my rescue were less about taking care of a helpless, abandoned toddler and more about minimizing the social and financial impacts of my mother’s scandalous behaviour.

To anyone who cared to pay attention, it was clear that my mother didn’t want me. Why else would she tell the State to find me an adoptive family and yet not surrender her newly born son? She didn’t want my father either but in retrospect I don’t know if they were just separated or actually divorced. Whatever it was, despite behaviour that humiliated my father, his parents and her own parents as well, they reconciled and when they did so, my idyll with my grandparents came to an end and shortly after my brother’s second birthday, we moved to SoCal.

There was a problem with that, too—both of my parents were dead broke. A move from central Oregon to Southern California isn’t exactly cheap, even if you didn’t have a lot of stuff to move. Between gas for the car and food, it was a trip that took money to make and my parents didn’t have any. The car was an old Ford Tudor, probably early 1930s, that someone had painted dark green with a paint brush. The back seats had been taken out and I remember sitting on a wooden child-sized bow-back Windsor chair in that empty back space and my brother on a pallet of old wool Navy surplus blankets. We drove to Southern California in that old junker and when we got there, we had no place to live and neither of my parents had jobs.

So now I have to think about my grandparents. Where were their priorities? Was caring for their abandoned grandchild a burden they no longer wanted to bear? Was my presence in their lives—they took me to church and shopping and many other places with them—a constant reminder not only to them but to the members of their community of my mother’s disreputable behaviour? Was I a constant reminder of the scandal that they undoubtedly wished to put behind them but they could not bring to an end?

What was most important to them? Considering that my father’s parents were farmers who struggled to make ends meet and that neither my father nor mother had steady employment, where did the money come from for the move to SoCal? It was obvious that my mother did not want me or to be married to my father—she abandoned me and left him, after all—what could have prompted her to reconcile with my father and accept responsibility for me after two years?

Well, the only thing that really motivated my mother was money. And of the players in this little drama, only her parents had any. So the only scenario that makes any sense is that my grandparents funded the move and very likely engineered both my mother’s reconciliation with my father and my return to my mother’s custody. What motivated my father? Well, when I was eight my parents again separated and my father met a nice woman and began dating her. When my mother found out about Patsy she cancelled the divorce proceedings and demanded that he return home. He told his girlfriend that he had to go—because of his children. (I know this because two years later my mother finally did go through with a divorce, he married that nice lady and she was my stepmother for 53 years: she told me that was what he said when he broke up with her.) So my father’s motivation was most likely his children.

I was afraid of my mother. I have a few memories of us living in Salem after I was back living with my mother and father (before we actually packed up the car and left for California) and I have a memory from that trip. What both memories have in common is fear of my mother and wariness of being too close to her (I liked to stay out of range of her so she couldn’t slap or trip me. My grandparents had to know I was afraid of her: how could I live in their house, under their noses, when I was too small to have learned to keep secrets or tell lies, and they not be aware that she scared me? My dogs can’t even talk yet I know what each and every one of them is afraid of.

So how does this shake out? My mother didn’t want me, and she didn’t want to be married to my father: she abandoned me to the state with instructions to find me an adoptive home; she left my father and took up with other men, causing a long and ugly scandal in our sleepy little town. Neither my father nor his parents had any money, nor did my mother—certainly not enough for gas and food for four people to move more than a thousand miles away. And yet…my parents reconciled, I returned to my mother’s care, and my father drove drove that old rattletrap Ford all the way to Southern California with enough money to not only get there but to stay in a cheap motel while they looked for jobs. The whole thing had to have been engineered and funded by my maternal grandparents—nobody else had the dosh.

So what does this say about my grandparents? What was their priority? Well, if you go by their behaviour, it is pretty clear that their priority was not my safety or my happiness: I was plainly afraid of my mother. I flinched when she raised her hands around me (and got smacked for it if she saw me). I cried when I had to be alone with her (and got smacked for that, too). But my presence in their household was a constant reminder to the entire town of my mother’s transgressions, that the daughter of a prominent citizen was the town tramp and as long as I was living there, would remain a living reminder that their daughter had thrown away her own child, a fact that cast aspersions on the entire family and could not be forgotten with my presence a constant reminder.

Their priority was not my father’s happiness, either. He was a means to an end. He could be manipulated with his children: if my grandfather held out a pretty scenario of the four of us living on the beach, all together again, without the constant fear of insolvency hanging over our heads, my father would go for it: he would have his children back and a chance at a real job.

Was their priority my mother’s happiness? Doubtful because my mother clearly did not want me or my father in her life. She had dumped me and walked out on him. But my mother was motivated by money and the sense that she had something better than anyone else had. Her world being very small and insular, the idea of living in California near the beach, a stone’s throw from (ok—a two hour drive to) Hollywood was exactly the thing that would seem glamorous to her and feed her one-upmanship drive. And she could take us along if that was the price of the ticket, and discard us once she got there.

So what was the truth of our move to California? It was always sold to me as a necessary move because there was little work in Oregon—an entirely plausible reason. But my father had been discharged from the military for five years by this time and he had managed to keep body and soul together working at a variety of things. My mother, who saw little Salem (barely 43,000 people!) as the “big city,” seemed content to tempt and seduce her way through a round robin of honkytonks, roadhouses, and juke joints, conquering as many hearts as she could. She was in her element—why would she want to leave for parts unknown, saddled with a man she had already discarded and a kid she didn’t want?

No, there was another hand behind this, someone else who benefitted from the move, and that someone else had to be my grandfather and grandmother. Don’t get me wrong—I am quite sure my grandparents loved me—they made surprise visits on my mother when we lived in California to make sure things were “ok,” they took me in almost every summer from age 7 to 17, giving me respite from her and a place where I felt loved and valued. But the people who benefitted most from sending us all off to California were my grandparents. With the four of us heading out of town as a group and returning only a year or two later as an intact family sporting all the trappings of prosperity, my grandparents were finally able to lay my mother’s scandal to rest, gloss it over with the image of her as having seen the error of her ways and reformed, and all was right in their world again. It was all an illusion, but the rest of Timber Creek didn’t know that and their lives returned to normal, being the respected and admired big fish in Timber Creek’s tiny pond.

My grandparents’ behaviour plainly indicated their priority: restoring their reputations in the town. They brought me into their home because, on the one hand they were horrified at their daughter’s actions, but on the other hand, it would not look good—they would not look good—if I remained in foster care and was eventually adopted. But after a period of time, when my mother had not seen the errors of her ways and “straightened up” and resumed responsibility for me, it began to reflect poorly on them, both in terms of their parenting (they raised the amoral tart who was my mother, after all) and in terms of my presence being a perpetual reminder of my mother’s scandalous behaviour. As my summer hosts, they were just normal grandparents with a grandchild for the summer, but with me living with them, that implied that my mother had gone off the rails again and they did not want to be judged for her behaviours.

My grandparents are but one of a million examples of people living their priorities no matter what they profess to the contrary. If you were to ask my grandparents, they would have said that I was welcome at their house at any time—and they would have meant it. But when I wanted to stay in Oregon at the end of the summers and live with them and not go back to my mother, tension swiftly filled the house. Suddenly, the spectre of the old scandal was again rearing its head and even while they believed what they said about me being welcome at any time, keeping their petticoats clean was their first priority and anything that threatened that had to be held at arm’s length.

People show you the truth with their behaviour. Their behaviour is based on their priorities. And people often are not even consciously aware of their own real priorities: they only face that when they are confronted. I am sure that one or both of my grandparents felt a little guilt at sending me back to my mother but I also will bet that neither of them understood it as guilt. They “felt bad” because they had to disappoint me perhaps but, in all truth, they didn’t really have to, did they? They were wealthy—if my mother was worried about the child support money she would be missing out on if I came to live with them, they could easily have afforded to pass it on to her. Whatever their reasons for sending me back into that snake pit every September, those reasons held a priority in their lives over my well-being, whether they acknowledged it or not.

“How can you say that?” you might ask. “You weren’t inside their heads, you can’t know what they were thinking!”

But that is the whole point here—I can tell what they were thinking based on their actions. If my happiness and safety held the highest priority in their lives, if it truly was their very first priority, do you think they would have sent me back? Whatever you answer, that is what their priority was. And that is the point: people always do what is the most important thing for them to do at any given point in time. If you accept an invitation to go to the movies with your friend and then don’t show up, aren’t you giving whatever you have chosen to do instead a higher priority than the movie with your buddy? Now, sometimes this is legitimate: your girlfriend gouged her hand with a slip of a kitchen knife and you have to get her to the ER—clearly this is an appropriate shifting of priorities since keeping her from bleeding to death is more important than watching the latest X-men or Transformers flick. But what if you don’t feel like getting up and taking a shower and driving all the way across town to see a movie with a friend? If you succumb to the urge to be lazy and blow off the movie, then you are giving your immediate desires a higher priority than your commitment to your friend.

What you actually do demonstrates your priority, even if you do not consciously realize it. The choice you make, the action you actually take, is your priority. Your intellect may tell you that keeping your promise to your friend is your highest priority but if you keep sitting on that sofa eating Rice Krispies in chocolate milk when it is time for you to get up and go to meet your friend, you have clearly shifted your priority. Your priority is whatever you actually do, not what you think your priority is.

So what does that mean in the general scheme of life and things? It means that what you make a priority demonstrates what is most important to you. So if you decide to stay home in your jammies and watch reruns of Friends, eating another bowl of cereal, then indulging your immediate desires is more important to you than your friend’s feelings or your integrity: you just demonstrated it with the choice you made and the action you took.

This is true across the board. The choices a person makes and the actions they engage in tell you where their priorities lay, even when they don't realize they have choices and are making them.

What people actually DO tells you what is most important to them, not the words they say or write, not the memes they post, or the excuses or promises they make. The real truth is in their behaviour because it tells you what they really value, what they really care about, regardless of what they would have you believe.