What is free will? It is the ability each of us has to make decisions. As simple as that. But what happens when our free will is influenced by someone else? It is no longer free, because it is conditioned by the other person’s wishes. It is no longer our decision; now it is someone else’s decision acting through us. One way or another, these people get us to do what they want out of their desire to control and always be right, and often without realizing it, we give in to their wishes to avoid any kind of conflict.
These habitual manipulators, who live with terror in their veins at the thought of situations slipping out of their control, often plant ideas in us that go against our principles, and we allow them to take a certain degree of control over our lives for fear that they will become angry or that we will make them feel bad.
But who knows better than we do what is good for us? Let me give you an example. Some time ago, a “friend of a friend” went out with a young man who was very kind, attentive, helpful, and affectionate. He was certainly very courteous toward her, but although they talked a lot and very often, something deep inside her would not let her go beyond a simple friendship, despite his insistence. The relationship stayed that way for just under six months. Very early in this “friendship,” however, they went to a restaurant, where she ran into a friend she had not seen for a long time. They chatted for a while, exchanged phone numbers, and that was that.
A couple of months later, her relationship with this young man was still in the same place, because something deep inside her would not let her go any further. She receives a call from that friend, inviting her to have coffee together. She accepts. This friend had arranged the meeting to reproach her over their “mutual friend.” He had been in a relationship with the woman who was now confronting her—a relationship that began when he got hold of her number at the restaurant—and had cheated on her with a neighbor. It is worth pointing out that when the coffee meeting happened, the young man was still insisting on a romantic relationship with my friend. You may be wondering: where am I going with all this? What would have happened if she had ignored her intuition when it told her there was something about him she did not like, though she did not yet know what it was? What if she had given in to his wishes and overridden her own will to do what he wanted? She would have been caught in a romantic entanglement involving four people, hardly advisable for any of us.
Let us pay more attention to our intuition; let us listen in the silences to what it wants to tell us. Most of the time, it will steer us away from danger, conflict, or any uncomfortable situation about to unfold. Let us make decisions guided by it. Surely it knows better what is good for us than those outsiders who trample over us, negate us, underestimate us, and wear down our will to feed their egos and make us part of the entourage they gather in their desire to control.
Giving in to someone’s wishes when something deep inside tells you no means overriding your own will.
“Man tends to hide his own free will behind his supposed weakness of will.”
Viktor Emil Frankl