Mindset _ The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck [74]
Yet Hillary could not have forgiven a person she saw as a liar and a cheat. She could only forgive a man she thought was earnestly struggling with his problems and trying to grow.
THE PARTNER AS ENEMY
With the fixed mindset, one moment your partner is the light of your life, the next they’re your adversary. Why would people want to transform the loved one into an enemy?
When you fail at other tasks, it’s hard to keep blaming someone else. But when something goes wrong in a relationship, it’s easy to blame someone else. In fact, in the fixed mindset you have a limited set of choices. One is to blame your own permanent qualities. And one is to blame your partner’s. You can see how tempting it is to foist the blame onto the other guy.
As a legacy of my fixed mindset, I still have an irresistible urge to defend myself and assign blame when something in a relationship goes wrong. “It’s not my fault!” To deal with this bad habit, my husband and I invented a third party, an imaginary man named Maurice. Whenever I start in on who’s to blame, we invoke poor Maurice and pin it on him.
Remember how hard it is for people with the fixed mindset to forgive? Part of it is that they feel branded by a rejection or breakup. But another part is that if they forgive the partner, if they see him or her as a decent person, then they have to shoulder more of the blame themselves: If my partner’s a good guy, then I must be a bad guy. I must be the person who was at fault.
The same thing can happen with parents. If you have a troubled relationship with a parent, whose fault is it? If your parents didn’t love you enough, were they bad parents or were you unlovable? These are the ugly questions that haunt us within a fixed mindset. Is there a way out?
I had this very dilemma. My mother didn’t love me. Most of my life I’d coped with this by blaming her and feeling bitter. But I was no longer satisfied just protecting myself. I longed for a loving relationship with my mother. Yet the last thing I wanted to be was one of those kids who begged for approval from a withholding parent. Then I realized something. I controlled half of the relationship, my half. I could have my half of the relationship. At least I could be the loving daughter I wanted to be. In a sense, it didn’t matter what she did. I would still be ahead of where I was.
How did it turn out? I experienced a tremendous sense of growth letting go of my bitterness and stepping forward to have the relationship. The rest is not really relevant since I wasn’t seeking validation, but I’ll tell you anyway. Something unexpected happened. Three years later, my mother said to me: “If anyone had told me I didn’t love my children, I would have been insulted. But now I realize it was true. Whether it was because my parents didn’t love us or because I was too involved in myself or because I didn’t know what love was, I don’t know. But now I know what it is.”
From that time until her death twenty-five years later, we became closer and closer. As lively as each of us was, we came even more to life in each other’s presence. Once, a few years ago, after she’d had a stroke, the doctors warned me she couldn’t speak and might never speak again. I walked into her room, she looked at me and said, “Carol, I love your outfit.”
What allowed me to take that first step, to choose growth and risk rejection? In the fixed mindset, I had needed my blame and bitterness. It made me feel more righteous, powerful, and whole than thinking I was at fault. The growth mindset allowed me to give up the blame and move on. The growth mindset gave me a mother.
I remember when we were kids and did something dumb, like drop our ice-cream cone on our foot, we’d turn to our friend and say “Look what you made me do.” Blame may make you feel less foolish, but you still have a shoe full of ice cream—and a friend who’s on the defensive. In a relationship, the growth mindset lets you rise