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- This has been a humbling week as I have been reading about pride and its effects on the one who is prideful, the spouse of one who is prideful, and the families and friends and even co-workers of same. I have found areas that I am prideful in that I hadn’t realized before.
- I have my work cut out for me!
One the most piercing comments from H. Wallace Goddard, Ph.D.’s book, Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage is: “We define the problem – whatever it is – in terms of our partner. And we tell the story to ourselves in ways that suggest we were earnestly and innocently going about life when our partners hurt us. We are innocent. They are guilty. Our narrow focus keeps us from noticing our own gaps in knowledge, our personal failings as well as the good qualities and good intentions of our partners.” (Pg 72) How often are we each guilty of that? For me, more often than I’d like to admit!
Something that came to mind as I was pondering on this topic is how entrapping and lonely pride makes one. It causes the person who is prideful to be constricted and less happy in the long run. If one doesn’t give up their prideful ways, they can see their partner (or another person) at fault for any number of real or imagined things.
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But, if a prideful person looks beyond themselves, to see the other person as someone who should be respected and has no more faults and flaws than their own, there is room for appreciation and happiness to grow in their relationship.
When we continually look for fault in another, we raise ourselves as better than another and falsely so. This act of fault-finding and being prideful, in my mind, is very claustrophobic thinking. It leads one nowhere but in a negative direction. There is no positivity to it. It finds no good in another. It compounds upon itself. It just seems so restricting. Pride is even counter intuitive, it seems to me, because someone who is so prideful, one would think, would want and expect only the best for themselves, but the reality of it is, that that is not what they will obtain.
On the other hand, when we are prideful, and we all will be many times in our lives, and we REPENT and turn from fault-finding to look at how we are involved and perpetuating a negative situation, we then have an opportunity to change. This change will allow us to improve our character and in so doing, be happier. When we are understanding, empathetic, and willing to appreciate our spouse’s differences, we give them room to trust us. They are then more likely to feel our love. When we change our prideful behaviors and have a more accepting heart, we allow room for their hearts to create positive change also.
The liability of pride, when turned around through the use of agency, can be a blessing as we work through the process to turn toward others. Whether we will be cocooned forever in despair or be transformed through it by our humility to emerge, as it were, a free beautiful butterfly is our choice. It is my hope we will choose the latter.
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Reference:
Goddard, H. Wallace, Ph.D. (2009). Drawing Heaven into Your MARRIAGE. Cedar Hills, UT: Joymap Publishing.
Marriage Ponderments 