The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at Brigham Young University on October 23, 2002 by Dr. James MacArthur.

            Let me just say at the outset that I was asked to speak about being a transitional character.  I take a certain approach to everything personal, which is I’m a fellow traveler, and I’m going to tell a bit of a personal story here.  These are always delicate topics for those listening.  I hope that I can tell you about my own transitional character trip and experience and the tutoring I felt that I received that prepared me for my role in my family.  There is in these stories some raw pain and some divinity.

            I remember as a young father, though I had in general already commenced the path of becoming a transitional character, suddenly it hit me that I had assumed that since I had made a big change in my life--I was a religious convert--a big spiritual change in my life, that since I had made this big commitment to the Church and change in life direction that all the hard work of redesigning and rebuilding a damaged self, which was me, was kind of automatically fixed.  Wrong.  I had the end result of being a transitional character in mind, but I didn’t have the needed building blocks in place.  I wasn’t really prepared to do it.  I thought that being a transitional character was kind of just an inherited position, and you just took it because it was handed it to you.  Wrong.  I had people tell me that because I came from an abusive, alcoholic background, that I had joined the Church at the age of seventeen and I had a new way of living, and I had a new concept of myself, that I was therefore--drum roll--a transitional character.  I was so proud and I was so wrong.

            A transitional character, I have learned, has building blocks just like an abused character, an abused person has building blocks, each of those is made up of certain key elements.  I remember when I was a young married person and a young father asking myself, “How does a troubled, abused person know when he or she has become a transitional character in a family?  Is it just location in the family tree?”  Well, I’m going to tell you the story of how I answered that question.  It’s much more than location in the family tree.  That part was handed to me.  Let me tell you about a significant emotional event that helped me see all of this much more clearly.  One evening I completely--now this was when I was first married and had young children--one evening I completely flew into a rage over the disobedient behavior of one of my children and humiliated him and emotionally just tore him to pieces, and then I went in the bedroom and sat down.  I was very embarrassed.  And I was actually quite stunned by my behavior.  I was very angry at--I don’t know what exactly I was angry at.  I was angry at a lot of things; I was certainly angry at myself.  I was struck by how I needed to change for the sake of my family.  I honestly was not sure if I would change for myself only.  I had tried to change lots of things about myself over, to that point, the 35 years or so of my life, but I, and I had made some, I’d had some success, but this experience certainly showed me that I hadn’t made as much progress as I had thought.  And I sat in the bedroom just kind of dumbfounded, thinking, “Well, this is a new opportunity.  Will I take the rest of the steps of rebuilding myself and being truly a transitional character for them?  Would I do it for them?”  I obviously wouldn’t do it satisfactorily for myself, as was evidenced by my behavior, but I wondered if I would do it for them.  I still remember that experience and the penetrating power of the look of fear on the face of my son as I emotionally humiliated him.

            Well, I’m a pencil and paper kind of guy, and I have these yellow pads of paper in my BYU office, and I can think about myself better when I can draw pictures and write words, so I took out my proverbial yellow pad, began to write down words that described the person that I thought I was, the troubled person that I was.  Yeah, it’s really kind of hard--I was a BYU professor, father of a number of children at that point, I had a Ph.D. in psychology, pretty smart dude.  Also pretty dumb dude.  And I had to sit there and write on my little yellow pad of paper that I was a troubled person.  Reminded me of a time I went to Alcoholics Anonymous with my two brothers who were alcoholics, and in those meetings you have to introduce yourself, and I thought, “What am I going to say?”  I’d never been a drinker--I was an LDS convert at that point--I stood up and said, “Hi, my name is Jim.  I’m an alcoholic.”  After the meeting my brothers said, “How did you--why did you say that?”  And I said, “Could be because I have all the building blocks of alcoholism in me; I just haven’t acted upon them.”  But I have to admit that the propensity for that weakness is riddled all through me, and I thought, “Well, maybe I could admit that because it hadn’t really happened.”  This one was, this was really tough.  I wrote down on my yellow pad of paper, “I am a troubled person.”  That was my first step.

            I was a troubled person who was repeating the sins of a previous generation.  I was doing it kind of unwittingly, but I was a troubled person who was repeating the sins of a previous generation.  What I was doing was just a pattern of coping that I had learned as a child and teenager.  I hope you’re feeling a little sorry for me.  Bingo!  If I had learned it, could I unlearn it?  Or could I do any new learning?  I remember that when I first wrote down on that paper that I was a troubled person, two things hit me: a profound sense of humility and honesty.  But I wanted to sort of cover for myself still.  I didn’t want to just own up to it; I wanted to say, “Okay, I’ll be honest about this as long as all of you out there will shed a few more tears for me and the pain of my past.”  But I kind of slapped myself in the face at that point--now remember, this is my story and my trip.  You may be in a very different place in the journey, so I hope I don’t sound insensitive to your own plight and where you are on your journey.  But I knew that for me, that I had to stop blaming and stop covering up and stop hiding out and stop pretending, and I knew that I must take full and complete ownership for all the troubled learning of my past.  I am me, I own it, I own everything that makes me me.  All of it.  I could no longer permit myself to say, “I have these explainable problems because my family life was messed up and I was not treated right, even though historically that was exactly true.”  Now listen to this, because whether you’re behind me in your journey or you’re ahead of me in your journey, maybe you’ll identify with what I wrote down on my proverbial yellow pad of paper and what I had to say next: “I have problems.  They are mine because I keep them.”  You know, when you’re a person who was abandoned and abused and life just completely humiliated you, which it did me for the first eighteen years of my life, to get to a point where I could say, “I have problems, and they’re mine because I keep them,” was a big turning point for me.  Because it’s--the minute you say that to yourself, you feel like rescuing yourself and coming back and giving yourself a big hug.  That’s a little hard to do.  But you feel like you want to be comforted and you want to go back to the historical point of view and say, “Now wait a minute.  This is explainable.  I mean, when I yelled at my kids and my son and humiliated my son, I mean, this is, as bad as I feel about what I did, it’s explainable.  There’s a reason for it.  If you had been through what I had been through, you would, you’d probably do things like that, and people would nod their heads and say, ‘You poor thing.  Yeah, that’s right.  Yeah, I might do that; I might do the same thing you did.  We all understand, and we feel sensitivity for your plight that you’re in.’”  And I just had this feeling, brothers and sisters, this is just Jim MacArthur at this point in his trip.  I had this feeling that I had to say, “Oh, please.  You have, whatever’s going on with you is because you’re keeping it.  You’re hanging on to it.  You want to hang on to it, you want to carry it down the line, go right ahead.  You’ll pay, your wife and ten children will pay.”  At some point, brothers and sisters, the origin of the problem is secondary to the fact that you are old enough, hopefully responsible enough and capable enough to climb out of the pit you are in.  That was the truth for me.  I had to decide if I was willing to own it and work with it.  It’s not like I hadn’t--I had tried to change myself.  Actually I have changed myself.  But I hadn’t done enough, and I think I had excused myself from some of the hard work I still had to do.  And I had to just own up to the fact that I was keeping the troubled aspects of myself by choice now, with quite full awareness.  And yet, in that very moment, I wondered if I could really make different choices.  Wasn’t I so patterned by my past that my anger, my depression, my self-pity, my immaturity, my irresponsibility were to some degree excusable, explainable, and understandable, that still kept, it just kept coming back to me.  And it was kind of a relief.  This is the battle I think that the transitional character must fight and work with.  It’s so, such a relief to say, if they had been there when X happened to you, then this trouble you still have in yourself would be excusable, explainable, and understandable, so just go easy on yourself.  But I was struck by how crucial this moment was for me--for me!  Because my answer to what I just said as I spoke to myself was, “No!  They aren’t any longer excusable, not any longer.  It’s been too long now.  When I was fourteen and in the midst of so much trouble, my anger or self-pity may have been more understandable.”  But that was 20 years ago then.  Lots more now.  That was, at that point in time when that happened, that was twenty years earlier, and I had to be honest with myself and say, “Guess what, Sparky (that’s my nickname--it will now go down in history, probably way down in history)?  Guess what, Sparky?  No more excuses, no more breaks for you.  Now!”  Personal ownership for anger, for self-pity, for immaturity, for personal weakness was the call of the day for Sparky.  Some years later, after this significant emotional event when I flipped out at my child and kind of confronted myself with all of this, some years after that a neighbor of mine--we used to run together a lot--he noticed something about me that was different, and he saw some changes in me, and he asked me why and how those changes occurred.  And here’s what I said--this is almost word for word what I said.  I remember where I was when I had the conversation with him--I was mowing my lawn, and he was running down the street, and he stopped and he asked me about this, and here’s what I said to him.  So he asked me, “Why did you--I noticed some changes--why did you make them and how did you make them?”  And I said this: “I got tired of how I was.  And my wife and children needed a different type of person in the family, not one who kept explaining his poor behavior by his past.”  Now I’ve shared this perspective with others from troubled backgrounds, and I always watch their face when I say it, because I know people are at different points in the journey.  If they’re ahead of me in the journey, they look at me knowingly, like, “Absolutely!  Click, you got it.  You got what you had to get.”  And then there are those who are behind me in the journey, and I can tell--I know how their face looks.  And I’ll say, “So what do you think?”  I already know what they think, but I say, “What do you think?”  And I know they don’t like it, because it sort of sounds like I don’t know how they feel, I don’t know what they’ve been through, I don’t know the horror of their life.  And so anyway, I look at them and I say, “You don’t like it, huh?  And you don’t feel like I understand why you are like you are, huh?”  Well, let me just tell you, brothers and sisters, it is precisely because I do understand how and why they feel the way they feel that I am able to say this.  My own personal story of trouble and recipient of abuse and terribleness in my life took me to the edge of personal and self-destruction.

            So I understand that there are people here today and people that will hear this when it’s rebroadcast that may not be ready to adopt this, and all I’m doing is inviting you to consider it.  When you get to the right place in the journey, you will know that, you’ll recognize this language.  You’ll recognize these questions.  You’ll recognize this position on the trip.  So I just believe that for me at that point in the final analysis to be the transitional character that I was being called upon to be, I had to create what I wanted in myself.  I had to create what I wanted in myself in the face of all of these inhibiting factors, all these things in my past that were going to slow me down and trip me up.  I had to decide that I was going to create what I wanted in myself, and why was I going to create it?  Well, I personally was tired of the old person, but I really wanted it for my wife and children.  The road to breaking cycles of abuse and trouble is seldom smooth, however, and there are many ups and downs, and I hope you can just stay with it.  I believe it’s worth it.  One of my, one of the thoughts--I don’t know where I got this thought; I probably stole it from someone, but I can’t give them credit because I don’t remember where I heard it.  Maybe it was a revelation--I get one every fifteen, twenty years.  But here’s the thought that has always been real powerful for me: “Don’t let the past hold your future hostage.”  The present and the future now belongs to you and it belongs to you alone.  Your present and your future don’t have to be controlled by the people who brought the original trouble into your life.  What an awful thing to do to yourself to say, “Somewhere back in my past, somebody took something away from me.”  It may have been sexual, it may have been personal, it may have been emotional, it may have been physical, it may have been all of the above.  The form of abuse and trouble that you experienced, and so the worst thing you can do is to say, “As an award for what they did to me, I’m going to give them my future.  They already took my past, but I’m, you know, I’m so thankful for what they did, I’m going to give them the rest.”  Now I believe that your choice to move into a very different personal future must be unilateral.  There can’t be any, “Well, I’ll do this when and if…”  Well I’m talking to myself; I just felt like it was at a point where it had to be unilateral.  I just simply had to do it.  As I looked at my damaged self from the perspective of this sincere personal ownership for whatever I was at that point, I saw a challenge for myself.  I saw a huge challenge for myself.  To become a true transitional character in my own family history, I had to face some very specific things in me--this goes back to what I said earlier about there are building blocks that are the essential elements that make you, that explain the abused personality that you are, you must understand what those building blocks are and take them apart and look at each one and face it personally.  This is unilaterally your decision.  So I’m just going to be very candid with you and tell you what, there were a group of things that were the components of who that guy was that humiliated his son and hurt his son’s feelings and scared his son to death, looking in his eyes and seeing that penetrating fear--I can still see it.  Who was that guy, and what was that guy made out of, and I was going to dismantle that guy.  Piece by piece, and here are the pieces.  Now I say this not because your pieces will be the same as mine, but just so you can kind of see what you have to do.

            Fear.  I was a person of fear.  I was a person--out of my fear came hyper-vigilance and distrust.  I was a person of anger.  I had a very high need for control.  I was a person who greatly feared intimacy because it always hurt me.  I was a person of significant guilt, depression, and I always expected the worst--I was a very fatalistic person.  And finally I was a person that believed that love was based on deserving it.  And so I would make my family members dance and perform for me.  So essentially those five areas were the, I wrote those down on my proverbial yellow pad of paper so I could think about what made me the mean-spirited person who attacked his son.  And I was the transitional person!

I had to really try to change my fundamental beliefs about what was possible for me to do in those areas that I just gave you.  I felt so owned by them.  I felt so trapped by them.  I talked to myself--I do that a lot.  I talked to myself and challenged myself to take new risks over time.  Let me just tell you a little bit about those areas.  Fear, distrust, and hyper-vigilance--do you know what hyper-vigilance is?  It’s when you watch everybody and everything so you can control it, because if you can control it, it won’t hurt you.  That was my deranged belief system.  I feared life, I feared the world around me, I feared people, I feared what would happen mysteriously.  In my childhood, in my teenage years, I was constantly hurt out of the blue.  I mean, I’d just be going along and something would just hurt me so badly, and I had just become afraid of the world around me and people.  The better the world looked, the more nervous I’d become because I knew that behind the smiles and the supposed veneer was hurt, trouble.  And I was sure that, I was sure I had this learned belief that risk, if I took a risk, it would turn to disappointment, failure, and hurt.  But I had to realize that that was the old life, that was the old script and the old settings, and I could if I would try for new possibilities.  I was with new people now.  I was in new settings.  All risks taken would not work to perfection, but some would be much better, and I could grasp hold.  And I thought, “Are you willing to try this?  Are you willing to give new people in your life a different chance?”  Because see what I was doing with my son that day was to say, “You’re just like my old enemies, and I’m going to take you out so you can’t hurt me.”  I was putting on my son the old script: you’re my enemy.  I was treating him like he was my enemy; that’s how I did it before with people that I knew would hurt me.  They’d hurt me before.  I’d just get them before they hurt me.  And now I was doing that to my son, or my wife?  And I’m the transitional character?  I’m the transitional idiot!

            The second area: I had always protected myself from disappointment and hurt by using anger and by controlling my environment and by working hard at tight-fisted control.  But again I had to try to believe that I now had new relationship and new associations and new possibilities; I didn’t need to fear hurt and disappointment so vigorously.  I mean, you know what I was doing in this area?  I was protecting myself from essentially nonexistent challenges.  They really weren’t there.  But you just never know when one’s going to pop up, right?  I’ve always loved Steve Covey’s story of the boy who in the winter the other kids would throw snowballs at him, so he got a trash can lid and he would carry it with him anywhere he went so that if anyone threw snowballs at him he could just bounce them off and protect himself.  Well, it became spring and summer, and he still carried the trash can lid around, and finally someone said, “I can understand you carrying it in the winter, but why are you carrying it in the summer?”  You never know; somebody might have one of those snowballs home in the refrigerator.  They might get it and throw it at me; I’m ready.  That’s kind of what I was doing in my family.  I was not only not the transitional character; I was acting as if my current situation was as dysfunctional and troubled as the one I had grown up in.

            The next area: I had a tremendous fear of intimacy and closeness.  I sometimes wonder how I ever got married, because intimacy or closeness to me just basically produced hurt and pain and the past.  I’d been so hurt by the people that I’d trusted, and I’d been so hurt by their invitations to get closer to them and then they would just hurt me.  And so I was placing that overlay on my current life and my current family.  I could now, I just had to believe that I could build relationships of trust, and I could learn how to deal with the limited possibility of closeness producing rejection and abandonment.  It could happen, but it was a limited possibility.  I had to think of it that way, and I had to give permission to the people in my life to be different.  In fact, they were.  In fact, I was afraid to trust that they were.  In fact, I had to make a decision to let them be that to me.

            And then the next area that I mentioned earlier was I had lived in a world of personal guilt for years.  My first eighteen years of life taught me to be sad and depressed about myself.  That’s an awful way to be.  I had personally tutored lessons in being sad and depressed about myself for eighteen years, and then because those lessons were so indelibly written upon my soul, I carried them with me for eighteen more, believing those lessons that were written on my personal blackboard.  I believed that I should be a sad and depressed person about myself.  I had so many reasons not to be, but I insisted on being sad and depressed about myself.  I just sat there that day on that yellow pad of paper in my office and I thought, “There can be a new personal horizon for me if I will erase what they wrote on my blackboard and write something different, create myself.”  I said that earlier, create myself.  I’ll tell you what I wrote in a few minutes.  Just the hopefulness of this whole new way of thinking about it helped me to feel less sad about myself and less angry about life.

            And then the last area that I had to work on was I had wondered if I was worthy of anybody’s love.  That was a big one for me.  I just wondered if I was worthy of anyone’s love, and so when my children would disappoint me, or my wife would disappoint me, I would just say, “Well, you know, there it is.  Another brilliant testimonial of my unworthiness to receive anyone’s love, because they’re not giving it to me.  I mean, every day I didn’t get it for eighteen years, and now sporadically I don’t get it, which means it’s still a truism.”  In fact, that wasn’t what was happening at all, but I was interpreting it that way.  I will never forget, brothers and sisters, after I joined the Church, I was in a sacrament meeting when someone made the statement, “God loves all of his children,” and I felt immediately angry at such a pronouncement because I knew that he did not love me.  So where was I going to go with that one, O great and wonderful transitional character that I am now destined to be?  Well, I had to quit waiting for love and become a bearer of the gift and nurture love in my family so it became a noticeable and predictable part of our family environment.  You say, “Well, but you poor thing!  You never learned how to do it.  You didn’t know how to recognize it, nor how to deliver it.  We certainly can’t expect you to do that as a transitional person.”  Sure you can, because one of the stunning revelations of my adult life is, you do not have to be all fixed to do it better.  Isn’t that, what a hopeful idea that is.  Now you know how I know that’s true?  Because I’ve done much better than you would have predicted all my adult life simply because I decided to try.  You don’t have to go to baseball camp to throw a baseball.  You might want to go to baseball camp to throw it really well, but you don’t have to go to baseball camp to pick it up and throw it.  I didn’t have to go to family love camp to learn how to be a bearer of the gift; I just had to believe the doctrine and get upon my knees and believe that my Heavenly Father would give me by gift of the Spirit a gift of his love, which then was, my job was to give it away in the context of my family.  Was I incapable of doing that?  No, I wasn’t incapable of doing that!  I probably didn’t do it as well as you can do it, but I could do it.  I could start doing it, I could get better at it.  And I suddenly knew that I could approach little by little my life in these areas that I just mentioned by giving myself some challenge and some, in a sense, requirement to change.

            Now let me just tell you one area of creating a different person to be the transitional character that really helped me.  This is one of the things that has helped me the most.  It’s a major consideration, I think, in strengthening the transitional character person that you may be called upon to be.  As I said upon before, you don’t have to be all fixed; you can just venture into this.  It has to do with values.  I think you should design a values commitment that is personally yours.  And this would be a group of devotions or personal commitments or values, if you want to call them that, that become kind of the skeleton of the fundamental structure upon which everything else about your future self will hang.  It’s kind of like your personal charter; it’s the center or core of what you decide to be about.  Essentially you decide what you care about, you decide what you’re committed to, you decide, you declare your own personal and most important devotions.  This is core stuff.  What I’m talking about here when I say personal charter is you say, “What at the center of me, at the core of me, am I going to be about?”  This is a decision.  I usually recommend to people the number five in terms of identifying what these devotions or values or personal commitments might be.  It doesn’t really, they don’t really have to be five.  It just means get some.  So let me just tell you the five that I use right now, and I’ll tell you how I do it.  Here are the five: gospel, faithfulness, and service is one; family devotion and service is another core commitment; personal integrity is another one--does my behavior match my stated values and commitments?  That’s a really interesting one; just follow yourself around for a week.  It’s not easy to do, but follow yourself around for a week and just keep, every night before you go to bed, just write down what you saw in yourself that was consistent with your personal values and commitments and devotions and what was inconsistent and see how much integrity or match you find.  That’s a really interesting thing to do for a few days.  And then the next one, the fourth one is professional service and contribution.  I’m a psychologist, and I help people professionally every day, so that’s a big part of who I am and what I’m about, and then the fifth and last one is helping others.  I just try to help others.  A few days ago, I saw someone downstairs getting off the elevator here in the Wilkinson Center, and they just--it was a family group--and they looked lost, so I mean, this is one of my core values, I just went over and said, “You look lost.  Do you need help?”  They told me what they needed, and I helped them figure out where to do, and they were glad, and it wasn’t--I mean, you’ll never read about it on the front page of the New York Times--but it’s part of who I want to be.  I just want to help.  I spent so many years not being helped--I just like to help.

            So here’s how I translate those five things into my real daily world.  I get up before everyone else does in the morning at my house, and I take some time to translate some of these into actions.  I just have them written in my planner, and I just say, “Okay, let’s see.  Number two: family devotion and service.  Yeah, I like that, that’s one of my favorites.  I’m going to do that.”  I just say, “Okay, with whom?  How?  What am I going to do?”  And I come up with something, and I just do it.  And I am very aware of these, and it makes me feel wonderful.  It makes me feel like I didn’t wait to get all fixed; I just looked at my future world and said, “Transitional character, figure it out and look at these commitments and do something.”

            This way of doing things helps me see that I can be different by choice and decision from the tendencies I brought with me from my pre-transitional character life.  Hard?  Sometimes.  What grade do I give myself on each one of these that I do?  Do I get an A sometimes and a C minus sometimes?  Yeah.  A C minus is better than being inactive.  But what was my ultimate motivation for moving into all this?  It was the day I exploded at one of my children as a young father.  I think of that day--I think on that day, a real transitional character might have been born.  But I had to grow it up.  Listen to that again: I think on that day, a real transitional character may have been born, but I had to grow it up.  The realization that my life and how I choose to be is connected to my wife and children is so apparent to me.  Behaviors are important to change, but I knew something had to change at the core of me, and that the core change had to have long-term consistency.  To see the troubled human spirit regenerate in spite of earlier crippling life encounters is among the noblest of human experiences--I saw it in myself.  I saw my crippled human spirit regenerate, but the beginning of the regeneration happened when I took personal ownership for whatever made me me at that point.  No more excuses, no more blaming, no more investigations into the excusability, the explainability of whatever made me a damaged person--those days were over.  I believe it could be yours and your family’s.  Let me just say in conclusion, about a year ago I received an e-mail from one of my four-year-old grandchildren, Mikey in Arizona.  Here’s what the e-mail said from four-year-old Mikey: “Grandpa Sparky, do you say your prayers?  I love you, Grandpa.  Mikey.”  Now that’s the grandchild of the person who screamed at and humiliated his own son many years before and who was willing to make the attempt to own who he was and to move forward with it in the way that I’ve tried to describe to you today.  And when I read Mikey’s e-mail, I knew that my efforts at becoming a transitional character were worth whatever they required of me.  And unfortunately we can’t see the fruits of our labors to become transitional characters, but I’ve lived just long enough now to begin to see some of the fruits of that hard work, and it certainly has been worth it.  Now am I all fixed?  Nope.  I still get depressed, I still get anxiety, I’d still do stupid things.  But I’m way better than I used to be, and I believe that I can fairly say that I am now playing the role of a transitional character to bring a very dysfunctional and troubled alcoholic family background out of the darkness into the light of the gospel and into the light of personal commitment, to be better for the sake of those that I love.  I hope that you’ll find the same in your efforts in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.