Let’s examine the world of “shoulds.” The most frequent use of “should” is used when we interact with people. Whether they are our family members, friends, lovers, colleagues, service providers, we have a sense of expectations around them. The most classic “should,” the one that is the source of most suffering in the realm of relationships, is our expectations of how our parents “should” have parented us. Almost every person, in the western hemisphere, has complaints about how s/he was parented. There seems to be some universal delusional mechanism that all adult children hold on to regarding some sense of being neglected, abused, and unloved, by their parents. Now, if one compares his or her childhood to the ideal, then yes, every parent has failed miserably. But why do we compare our parents to the ideal? Where does, parents “should” be perfect, come from? Parenting, for the most part, is a learned behavior, particularly in the emotional realm. Generally, parents vicariously learned how to be parents through experiencing their parents. Most parents greatly love their children and do their best, with the tools they have. Yet, we ascribe significant blame to how deficient their actions were. Furthermore, we walk around as adults carrying all these “shoulds” that ultimately leave us with a feeling of being unlovable or unworthy. This is not a criticism, it is just an observation. If we truly examine some of our expectations, we would realize they are not reality based.

Another common expectation exists between lovers. People meet, fall in love and proceed to want to change their partners. The idea here is that the people we met and fell in love with are not the way they should be. They should conform to the scripts our minds created them to be. We do this with our children, our friends, our bosses, our colleagues, our finances, our political arenas- we do this in every situation where we are dealing with other human beings and their systems. Notice though, that we don’t come with expectations towards the weather, animals, trees, stars, vegetables, chemistry, viruses, the speed of light – we don’t do this with anything that we perceive as related to nature. We understand that nature is a byproduct of cause and effect, and we have no expectation that it should be a certain way. We recognize that things in nature show up the way they show up as a result of certain conditions being present that give rise to the way they show up. Therefore, we accept when it rains; we understand that if a tree does not bear fruit, there must have been some genetic or environmental conditions that interfered with its ability to produce fruit; we don’t judge viruses, we seek to understand the underlying causes of diseases. In other words, we approach the world of nature as orderly and rational, and if we don’t like how it shows up, we examine the conditions that give rise to it, and where possible, we change those conditions to achieve the outcome we want. Where we don’t fully understand or are able to change those conditions, we accept them and accommodate as best as we can.

Yet with each other, we have no such appreciation or understanding. We walk about in our lives with preconceived notions of how others should behave. Our minds are constantly chattering about who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s good, who’s bad, who’s beautiful, who’s ugly, etc. Somehow, we have come to separate ourselves from nature, from each other. Human beings are just as much a byproduct of nature as grass and dogs, and therefore, the same rational laws govern us. But our minds do not seem to tap into that reality as they go about judging and criticizing. That too, is part of nature, the nature of the mind.

This lack of awareness as to the nature of our minds and its relationship to the whole, results in great suffering. Unaware of the machination of our mind, we operate from a belief that what we think, is truth. Consequently, we experience great upset when our minds interpret a particular interaction as incongruent with what we think ought to be. If we stopped to examine our notions, we would recognize that they come from expectations. If we looked deeper into the expectations, we would find that there is no basis for those expectations to be there, other than they fulfill our subjective, often unconscious and irrational, need to feel safe. We would discover that we are denying the other person’s, or our own, natural self-expression. We would realize that we are railing against nature, human nature. Now, this awareness does not presuppose that accepting something means we condone it. It means that we need to understand the nature of the person/situation so that, if it is possible, we will know what we need to do in order to achieve our desired outcome.