No one is handed freedom on a platter. You must make your own freedom. If someone hands it to you, it is not freedom at all, but the alms of a benefactor who will invariably ask a price of you in return.Freedom means you are unobstructed in ruling your own life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery. If you cannot be unrestrained in making choices, in living as you dictate, in doing as you please with your body (provided your pleasure does not interfere with anyone else's freedom), then you are without the command I am talking about, and in essence you are being victimized.
To be free does not mean denying your responsibilities to your loved ones and your fellow man. Indeed, it includes the freedom to make choices to be responsible. But nowhere is it dictated that you must be what others want you to be when their wishes conflict with what you want for yourself. You can be responsible and free. Most of the people who will try to tell you that you cannot, who will label your push for freedom "selfish," will turn out to have measures of authority over your life, and will really be protesting your threat to the holds you have allowed them to have on you. If they can help you feel selfish, they've contributed to your feeling guilty, and immobilized you again.
The ancient philosopher Epictetus wrote of freedom in this line from his Discourses: "No man is free who is not master of himself."
Reread that quote carefully. If you are not the master of yourself, then by this definition you are not free. You do not have to be overtly powerful and exert influence over others to be free, nor is it necessary to intimidate others, nor to try to bully people into submission in order to prove your own mastery.
The freest people in the world are those who have senses of inner peace about themselves: They simply refuse to be swayed by the whims of others, and are quietly effective at running their own lives. These people enjoy freedom from role definitions in which they must behave in certain ways because they are parents, employees, Americans, or even adults; they enjoy freedom to breathe whatever air they choose, in whatever location, without worrying about how everyone else feels about their choices. They are responsible people, but they are not enslaved by other people's selfish interpretations of what responsibility is.
Freedom is something you must insist upon. As you read through this book, you will become aware of what at first may appear to be meaningless trifles of victimization imposed by others, but which are really efforts to seize your strings and to pull you in some direction that will end your freedom, however briefly or however subtly.
You choose freedom for yourself when you begin to develop a whole system of non-victim attitudes and behaviors in virtually every moment of your life. In fact, liberation, rather than slavery to circumstances, will become an internal habit when you practice freedom-commanding behavior.
Perhaps the best way to achieve freedom in your life is to remember this guideline: Never place TOTAL reliance in anyone other than yourself when it comes to guiding your own life. Or, as Emerson said in Self-Reliance, "Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."
In working with clients for many years, I have often heard the following kinds of laments: "But she promised me that she would come through, and she let me down." "I knew I should not have let him handle this matter, especially when it meant nothing to him and everything to me." "They let me down again. When will I ever learn?" These are the mournful regrets of clients who have allowed others to victimize them in one way or another, and consequently to encroach on their own freedom.
All this talk about freedom is not to imply that you should in any way isolate yourself from others. On the contrary, non-victims are most often people who love having fun with others. They carry themselves in uplifted, gregarious manners, and they are more secure in their relationships because they refuse to let their lives be run by manipulators. They do not need surliness or argumentative stances, because they have learned to feel from within that "this is my life, I experience it alone, and my time here on Earth is very limited. I cannot be owned by anyone else. I must be ever alert for any efforts to take away my right to be myself. If you love me, you love me for what I am, not for what you want me to be."
But how can such "healthy freedom" be pulled out of a past full of victim habits cultivated by the very victimizing tendencies of your society and your past?
Pulling Your Own Strings / Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
