“So far,” he continued, “we’ve been examining the internal experience of someone who’s in the box. But as you can imagine, my box can have quite an impact on others.

“Think about it,” he said, walking to the board. “Suppose this is me—in my box,” he said, drawing a box with a stick figure in it.

“If here I am in my box, what am I emitting?”

“What are you emitting?”

“I mean, what am I doing to others if I’m in the box toward them?”

“Oh,” I said, searching my memory. “Well. . . you’re blaming them, I guess.”

“Right. So if I’m here in my box,” he said, pointing to the diagram, “I’m blaming others.” He drew an arrow pointing out to the right from his box. “But here’s an important question: Are other people generally walking around saying to themselves, ‘Gee, I really feel blameworthy today; I need someone to blame me’?”

I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“I don’t think so either,” Bud said. “Most people are generally walking around thinking something like, ‘Look, I’m not perfect, but doggone it, I’m doing just about as well as you could expect under the circumstances.’ And since most of us have self-justifying images we’re carrying around with us, most people are already in a defensive posture, always ready to defend their self-justifying images against attack. So if I’m in the box, blaming others, my blame invites them to do—what?”

“I guess your blame would invite them to be in the box.”

“Exactly,” he said, drawing a second person in a box. “By blaming, I invite others to get in the box, and they then blame me for blaming them unjustly. But because, while I’m in the box, I feel justified in blaming them, I feel that their blame is unjust and blame them even more. But of course, while they’re in the box they feel justified in blaming me and feel that my further blame is unjust. So they blame me even more. And so on. So, by being in the box, I invite others to be in the box in response,” he said, adding more arrows between the boxes. “And others, by being in the box in response, invite me to stay in the box, like this.”

Bud then added a sixth sentence to the principles he was writing about self-betrayal:

“You can put any flesh on these bones that you’d like,” Kate added, pointing to the diagram, “and you’ll see that when someone’s in the box, the same self-provoking pattern always emerges. Let me give you an example.

“I have an 18-year-old son named Bryan. And to be frank, he’s been a struggle. One of the things that really bugs me is that he frequently gets home late.”

I’d been so caught up in thinking about Laura that I’d nearly forgotten my troubles with Todd. The mere thought of him now, in response to Kate’s comment about her boy, darkened my mood.

“Now imagine that I’m in the box toward Bryan. If I am, how do you suppose I’d likely see him and his getting home late?”

“Well,” I said, “you’d see him as irresponsible.”

“Okay, good,” said Kate. “How else?”

“You’d think he’s a troublemaker.”

“And disrespectful,” added Bud.

“Yes,” agreed Kate. Then pointing to the board, she asked, “Is it okay if I erase this blame diagram, Bud?”

“Sure.”

She drew a summary of what we’d said. “Okay,” she said, putting some finishing touches on a drawing. “So here we have it.”

“Now if I’m in the box and see Bryan as an irresponsible and disrespectful troublemaker, what sorts of things do you suppose I might do in this situation?”

“Well—” I said, thinking.

“You’d probably discipline him pretty severely,” Bud interjected.

“And you might start criticizing him a lot,” I added.

“Okay, good,” Kate said, adding to the drawing. “Anything else?”

“You’d probably start hovering over his shoulder to make sure he was staying out of trouble,” I said.

She added that to the drawing and stepped to the side. “Now let’s suppose Bryan betrays himself—that he’s in the box toward me. If he’s in the box toward me, how do you suppose he might see me and my disciplining, criticizing, and hovering over his shoulder?”

“He’d probably see you as dictatorial,” I said. “Or maybe unloving.”

“And nosey,” Bud added.

“Okay, ‘dictatorial,’ ‘unloving,’ and ‘nosey,’” she repeated as she added to the drawing. “Okay, good,” she said. “Now look what we have.”

“If Bryan’s in the box and seeing me as an unloving, nosey dictator, do you suppose he’ll want to be home earlier or later?”

“Oh, later,” I said. “Far later.”

“In fact,” Bud added, “he’ll be less likely to do anything as you’d like him to do it.”

“Yes,” Kate agreed, drawing another arrow from Bryan’s box to her own. “So around and around we go,” she said, adding still more arrows between the boxes. “Think of it: we provoke each other to do more of what we say we don’t like about the other!”

“Yeah, think about it, Tom,” said Bud. “If you were to ask Kate in this situation what she wants more than anything else in the whole world, what do you suppose she would tell you?”

“That she wants Bryan to be more responsible, less trouble, and so on.”

“Precisely. But what’s the effect of what Kate does in the box? Does she invite more of what she says she wants?”

I looked at the diagram. “No. In fact, it looks like she invites more of what she says she doesn’t want.”

“That’s right,” Bud agreed. “She invites Bryan to do more of what she says she hates about him.”

“But that’s crazy,” I said, after a moment’s reflection. “Why would she ever do that? Why would she keep that going?”

“Great question,” said Bud. “Why don’t you ask her?”

“Consider it asked,” said Kate. She paused for a moment, apparently collecting her thoughts. “The answer is that I can’t see what I’m doing. Remember, I’m in the box—self-deceived. And in the box, I don’t see clearly. In the box, I’m blind to the truth about myself and others. I’m even blind to my own motivations. Let me give you an example of something that happened in this situation to show what I mean.

“As you might have assumed, I’ve been in the box toward Bryan. Everything you said I’d probably do—discipline harshly, criticize, hover over his shoulder—I’ve done them all. But it’s not so much what I’ve done that’s been the problem but the way I’ve been when I’ve done it. I think that in some cases, discipline—even harsh discipline—is what a child might need. But my problem has been that when I disciplined Bryan, I wasn’t doing it because of what Bryan needed. I was doing it because I was mad at how he was making my life difficult. So the problem with my disciplining, and so on, has been that I’ve been in the box when I’ve been doing it. I haven’t been seeing my own son as a person to help but as an object to blame. And that’s what he has felt and responded to.

“Well, on a Friday night in the middle of all this, about a year ago, he asked if he could use the car. I didn’t want him to use it, so I gave him an insanely early curfew time as a condition—a time I didn’t think he could accept. ‘Okay, you can use it,’ I said smugly, ‘but only if you’re back by 10:30.’ ‘Okay, Mom,’ he said, as he whisked the keys off the key rack. The door banged behind him.

“I plopped myself down on the couch, feeling very burdened and vowing that I’d never let him use the car again. The whole evening went that way. The more I thought about it, the madder I got at my irresponsible kid.

“I remember watching the 10 o’clock news, stewing over Bryan the whole time. My husband, Steve, was home too. We were both complaining about Bryan when we heard the squeal of tires in the driveway. I looked at my watch. It was 10:29. And you know what?”

I was all ears.

“In that moment, when I saw the time, I felt a keen pang of disappointment.”

“Now think about that for a minute,” she continued after a short pause. “That night, I would have told you that the thing I wanted most was for Bryan to be responsible, to keep his word, to be trustworthy. But—when he actually was responsible, when he did what he said he’d do, when he proved himself trustworthy, was I happy?”

“No, you weren’t,” I said, beginning to think of the implications.

“That’s right. And when he came bounding into the house and said, ‘Made it, Mom,’ what do you think I said? Do you think I patted him on the back and said ‘Good job’?”

“No, you probably said ‘Yeah, but you shouldn’t have squealed the tires’ or something like that.”

“That’s right. What I actually said was ‘You sure cut it close, didn’t you?’ Notice—even when he was responsible, I couldn’t let him be responsible.”

“Wow, that’s amazing,” I said half under my breath, thinking of my own son, Todd.

“Yes. So is a responsible son what I really wanted most?”

“I guess not,” I answered.

“That’s right,” she said. “When I’m in the box, there’s something I need more than what I think I want most. It’s like I said a couple of minutes ago. In the box, I’m blind even to my own motivations. So what do you think that is? What do I need most when I’m in the box?”

I repeated the question to myself. What do I need most when I’m in the box? What do I need? I wasn’t sure.

Kate leaned toward me. “What I need most when I’m in the box is to feel justified. And if I’d spent my whole night, and really a lot longer than that, blaming my son, what do I need from my son in order to feel ‘justified,’ to feel ‘right’?”

“You need him to be wrong,” I said slowly, a knot forming in my stomach. “In order to be justified in blaming him, you need him to be blame worthy.”

In that moment I was transported back some 16 years. I was handed a little bundle by the nurse, and from that bundle, two cloudy-gray eyes looked up in the direction of my face. I was completely unprepared for what he would look like at birth. Bruised, misshapen, and gray, he was a funny-looking kid, and I was his daddy.

I had been blaming Todd almost from that day. He was never smart enough, never coordinated enough. And he was always in the way. Since he started school he had been in constant trouble. I don’t remember ever feeling proud when anyone realized he was my son. He’d never been good enough.

Kate’s story scared me to death. I asked myself, What must it be like to be the son of someone for whom you can never be good enough? And if Kate’s right, then there’s a sense in which I can’t let him be good enough. I need him to be a problem in order to feel justified in always seeing him as a problem. I felt sick, and I tried to push Todd out of my mind.

“That’s exactly right,” I heard Kate say. “Having spent the evening accusing Bryan of being a disappointment, I needed him to be a disappointment so that I would be justified in accusing him.”

We sat for a moment in thought.

Finally, Bud broke the silence. “This raises an astonishing point, Tom,” he said. “When I’m in the box, I need people to cause trouble for me—I need problems.”

Yeah, I thought. I guess that’s right.

Bud paused and then rose from his chair.

“Remember when you asked me this morning whether you can actually run a business being out of the box all the time? I think your point was that it seemed like you’d get run over if you were out of the box all the time, seeing people as people.”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“And then we talked about how that question is misguided since you can do almost any behavior—‘soft,’ ‘hard,’ whatever—either in the box or out of the box. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now we can say more about your question. It’s an important question. Let’s apply what we’ve just learned to it. Think of it this way: Who needs to be run over—the person who is in the box or the person who is out?”

“The person in the box,” I said, amazed by the implication.

“That’s right. Out of the box I get no mileage whatsoever in being run over. I don’t need it. And what’s more, I’m usually not doing anyone a favor by letting them run over me. In the box, on the other hand, I get what I most need when I’m run over: I get my justification. I get my proof that the person running over me is just as bad as I’ve been accusing him or her of being.”

“But in the box, you don’t really want to be run over, do you?” I asked. “I mean, that’s kind of strange. Kate’s story got me thinking about my son, Todd. Laura and I feel like we get run over sometimes, but I don’t think either of us really wants that.”

“That’s true,” Bud responded. “We’re not saying that in the box we enjoy problems. Far from it. We hate them. In the box, it seems like there’s nothing we would want more than to be out from under them. But remember, when we’re in the box we’re self-deceived—we’re blind to the truth about others and ourselves. And one of the things we’re blind to is how the box itself undercuts our every effort to obtain the outcomes we want. Let’s go back to Kate’s story and I’ll show you what I mean.”

Bud walked over to the board. “Remember,” he said, pointing to Kate’s diagram, “Kate would tell you in this situation that she wants Bryan to be respectful, responsible, and less of a troublemaker. And she’d be telling you the truth. She really does want that. But she’s blind to how everything she does in the box actually provokes Bryan to be just the opposite. Notice—her blaming provokes Bryan to be irresponsible, and then, when he is irresponsible, she takes that as justification for having blamed him in the first place for being irresponsible! Likewise, Bryan’s blaming provokes Kate to be on his case, and then, when she is on his case, he takes that as justification for having blamed her in the first place for being on his case! By the simple fact of being in the box, each helps create the very problems they blame the other for.”

“In fact,” Kate added, “Bryan and I provide each other with such perfect justification, it’s almost as if we colluded to do so. It’s as if we said to each other, ‘Look, I’ll mistreat you so you can blame your bad behavior on me if you’ll mistreat me so I can blame my bad behavior on you.’ Of course we didn’t ever say that to each other, or even think it for that matter. But our mutual provocation and justification seem so perfectly coordinated, it looks like we did. For this reason, when two or more people are in their boxes toward each other, mutually betraying themselves, we often call it ‘collusion.’ And when we’re in collusion, we actually collude in condemning ourselves to ongoing mutual mistreatment!”

“And we do this,” Bud jumped back in, “not because we like being mistreated but because we’re in the box, and the box lives on the justification it gets from our being mistreated. So there’s a peculiar irony to being in the box: However bitterly I complain about someone’s poor behavior toward me and about the trouble it causes me, I also find it strangely delicious. It’s my proof that others are as blameworthy as I’ve claimed them to be—and that I’m as innocent as I claim myself to be. The behavior I complain about is the very behavior that justifies me.”

Bud placed both hands on the table and leaned toward me. “So simply by being in the box,” he said slowly and earnestly, “I provoke in others the very behavior I say I hate in them. And they then provoke in me the very behavior they say they hate in me.”

Bud turned and added another sentence to the principles about self-betrayal:

“Once in the box,” Bud said, backing away from the board, “we give each other reason to stay in the box. That’s the grim reality.”

“Pretty grim,” I agreed, suddenly aching for my boy.

“Now look, Tom,” Bud said, sitting back down in his chair. “Think about how self-betrayal, and everything we’ve been talking about, explains the self-deception problem—the problem of being unable to see that I have a problem. To begin with, when I’m in the box, who do I think has the problem?”

“Others.”

“But when I’m in the box, who, in fact, has the problem?”

“You do,” I answered.

“But what does my box provoke in others?” he asked.

“It provokes them to behave badly toward you.”

“Yes. In other words, my box provokes problems in others. It provokes what I take as proof that I’m not the one with the problem.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I agreed.

“So what will I do if anyone tries to correct the problem they see in me?”

“You’ll resist them,” I answered.

“Exactly,” he said. “When having a problem, I don’t think I have one. I think other people are responsible.” He paused for a moment, then said, “So here’s the question: So what?”

So what? I repeated to myself. “What do you mean, ‘So what?’”

“I mean just that,” Bud answered. “Why should we care about any of this at Zagrum? What does it have to do with work?”