When we consider those whom we have discussed, parental figures mostly, we can fall into another trap that will deflect our search. As we discussed before, blame will always do others harm and do ourselves harm. As blame traps others into a diminished human role as we have judged that role, it will trap us in our vision of the other and thus trap ourselves in our vision of ourselves in relation to the other. Anything that traps us, anything that closes us, anything that offers us a permanent and frozen identity, will keep us from the process of the becoming self.
Frederick Douglass observed this phenomenon in a very direct and startling way.[47] In his life as a slave, he saw people come to the plantation with a relatively idealistic attitude toward those held in slavery. After some relatively brief time as a slave owner, they took on the meaning perspective of a slave owner thus took on the relationship to the slave as an owner, and that relationship corrupted those originally innocent people. He noted that these former idealists become so embedded in their role as slave owners that they, originally well meaning people, became the worst of that breed of slave owners. They even became demons. They would never saw the danger they faced in absorbing the ambient slave society meaning perspectives, but they did, and the danger turned into a reality that distorted them for life.
Beyond the danger of absorbed meaning perspectives and their resulting identity, we also face the continuing need for us to keep the elements of unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and the acceptance that links them ready for use with everyone we have known in our past and will encounter our lives.
Whatever you read here, nothing written here intends to move us away from using those elements no matter how much we feel that some others have done us harm in our lives. If we can shift ourselves into a kind of involved detachment, we might conjure a vision of the nature of meaning perspectives in all the lives around us. If they exist at all, they exist for nearly everyone to one degree or another. A complete vision of the panoply of meaning perspectives affords us a few of a nearly infinitely connected matrix and maze of perspectives received and enforced by all, from all, to each other. This display takes us deeply if not endlessly back in time, for each immediate meaning perspective finds connection to previous meaning perspectives. If our parental figures enforced their meaning perspectives on us, then generally, their parental figures did the same. That would go back as far as when human beings shifted from purely instinctual animals to largely self-conscious ones with a mediated view of the world, themselves, and others. In the face of all those infinite connections going back so far in time, we can surely find a way to use our compassion to keep from judging people we have known whatever problems arose out of those relationships. Every relationship can offer us positive things if we look for them. In that we can learn from all relationships, we can learn in positive ways from the ones that we felt hurt us as much if not more than the ones we felt directly beneficial.
Our conscious use of a compassionate meaning perspective will keep us from developing a new, judgmental meaning perspective based on what we experience through this reading and our possibly aroused memories. Many influences have helped us develop a blaming meaning perspective about our parental figures and others[48], but we can choose another, far more conscious and productive perspective. Unconditional positive regard, compassion, forgiveness, and the acceptance they motivate can keep us and our perspectives toward the world and others open and free.
Our freedom to move fully into our becoming self comes partly in how we view our relationship with the parental figures in our lives. Dr. Elisabeth Lukas spoke about this liberation at a conference on Logotherapy in 2000.[49] She offered the image of people constructed like a ship in the middle of a harbor. As these people are constructed, they are anchored to the floor of the harbor for safety until they can sail safely off. At some point, each ship reaches its full construction, fully fueled and ready to go. But the anchor still holds the ship. It is the anchor to their parents. In order to separate ourselves from that anchor, we can do the following three things in immediate action or in memory.
First, we can choose to feel grateful to our parents. Whatever else, we would not have entered the world at all if not for them. Whatever life we live, we live by dint of their actions. In that way, we accept them as they are or were. Second, we can choose to love them, if for no other reason than we feel compassion for them as people and for what they have felt and dealt with the world. In that way, we offer them unconditional positive regard. If we wanted it from them, the least we can do is offer it to them. Third, we can forgive them for all the mistakes we feel they made with us and with themselves. If we can choose to forgive them, we can better forgive ourselves, for we will make as many trespasses in our lives as they did in theirs.
Once we can make those choices, the anchor slips away, and away we can sail. Oddly, in our freedom now achieved, we will also find that we have established a positive bond to those parents whom we have just chosen to give our gratitude and acceptance, unconditional positive regard, and forgiveness. We have separated and found our connection simultaneously. Besides, it may well simply stand as the right thing to do for its own sake.
With all this in mind, we can look at the many influences that brought their judgmental, unquestioned meaning perspectives into our lives and which we examine to become conscious of them and free from them.