Princes and Frogs

Originally posted July 21st, 2005.

I was reading in the paper today, it was actually yesterdays paper, that was done about a woman who studies men. She had some good points that really reminded me of some things that I'm going through. She pointed out that men have the capability of being both princes and frogs. She said it really depended on how the woman treated him which is true in part but there is certainly more to it than that. Men can be complete jerks or complete romantics. I believe that this is because men are broken hearted. They have a part of their self which is healthy and good but they have another side which is evil and selfish. Men can be completely different people depending on what part of their heart they are working out of.

How did this divide come about? Personally, I believe that we were born with a good heart but the shame and guilt and hurt that happened to us while we grew up ripped our hearts apart to varying degrees. Some of us felt worthless. Some of us felt like we needed to win the approval of others. But all of us came to believe that only we could satisfy ourselves. That is where the selfishness comes from.

The flipside is that the good side of us fights desperately to believe in the higher good. We believe in morals and love because we believe in something spiritual. That side of us is still present but depending on how much we've been hurt (and how much we have hurt ourselves with faulty thinking) is limited.

So how do we act out of the good part of our heart? By sheer will power. If we pay attention, we can be good people. That is why, early in relationships, both the man and the woman seem to be perfect. But when defects in the relationship come in, it becomes much easier to default back to the selfish mode to protect yourself from getting hurt more.

How do we become better people then? If we can only be good when we have the will power to do so there isn't much hope. When it is a matter of volition then we must have the attention to make the right choice. But I did a project as an undergraduate on multi-tasking that made it clear that the human attention is very limited. We should not be ashamed that our attention is so limited and we revert back to the bad self. But we do have hope to change. By addressing the faulty thinking and the selfishness we can replace the bad part of our hearts with a healthy good side. This is a long process but every step has its own reward. We can not get rid of our selfish side until we have addressed and replaced each broken thought and feeling with a true and good one. Once the good part of our heart is bigger and has a larger share of our heart, we can act out of the good part of our heart more often.

So, I have been a prince on many occassions and a selfish and mean frog on many others. It is an internal battle over my heart to choose to stick with the one I feel safe with, meeting my own needs and blocking others out who might hurt me, or by venturing out and basing my worth on the fact that my creator has found me worth dying for.