Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

by Harriet Lerner

  Can you now begin to identify your own position in a key family triangle? “Joe” may be your father, your grandmother, your cousin, or your aunt. If you’re saying, “This doesn’t apply to my family,” keep thinking about it.

  How would you respond to your mother’s telephone call if your task was to move out of the triangle rather than participate in it? Close this book and get clear on what you would say, before reading further. If you feel stuck and unclear, reread Chapter 8.

  Detriangulating Moves

  When your mother calls to talk about Joe (or he talks about her), you can casually show disinterest. Remember that triangles are driven by emotionality and anxiety (our own included), so that the more low-keyed you can be, the better. You might say, “Well, I’m not sure what Joe is up to. Beats me what it’s all about. I just don’t know what to say. To change the subject, Mother, what are you up to lately?” When one party pressures you to give advice or take sides, you can do neither, and instead express your confidence in both parties: “Well, I don’t have the slightest idea about what’s going on, but I love you both a lot and I trust that the two of you can work it out.” If your mother’s focus on your brother remains persistent and intense, you might address the issue more directly in a nonblaming way. “You know, Mother, I feel kind of selfish about our time together and I’d like to use it talking about us and what’s happening in our lives without bringing my brother in. I know you’re struggling with him, but I don’t have the slightest idea how to be helpful, and it takes time away from you and me. When I’m with you, I like to talk about you, and when I’m with him, I like to talk about him. Right now I’m much more interested in hearing about . . .” In extremely rigid triangles, even greater directness may be required: “Mom, I just can’t listen to you talk about Joe [Dad, etc.] anymore. I love you both and I need to work on my own relationship with each of you. I’ve no way to be helpful, and for some reason I just start feeling tense when you talk about him.”

  The exact words you choose are far less important than your ability to maintain a warm, nonjudgmental, nonreactive position. That is, you can calmly communicate that your relationship to both parties is important to you and that you have nothing to offer in the way of help, advice, blame, or criticism as far as their struggle with each other is concerned. Keep in mind that changing a pattern is never a one-shot deal but something we do over time—getting derailed when intensity mounts and then getting back on track again.

  Do’s and Don’ts

  Here are some do’s and don’ts to keep in mind if you are in the blaming position in a family triangle, as mother is in the above example. It’s not only hard work to stay out of other people’s conflicts, it requires just as much courage to keep other people out of our own. These suggestions can apply to any relationship network that you are in:

  1. If you are angry with one family member, put your emotional energy into dealing directly with that person. If your reaction is, “But I’ve tried everything and nothing works,” reread this book and think about new ways to move differently. If you feel stuck in an unsatisfying relationship and you want to talk about what is wrong with the other person, talk to someone outside the immediate family who does not have a relationship with the person at whom you are angry. It can be enormously helpful to share your struggle with a close female relative who may have been through a similar experience, if you can steer clear of a blaming position as you learn more about how she handled her own problem.

  2. Avoid using a child (even a grown-up one) as a marital therapist or a confidant. Don’t try to protect your children by telling them what’s wrong with their father even if you are convinced that it will help them to know the “truth.” Children need to discover their own truths about family members by navigating their own relationships.

  3. Distinguish between privacy and secrecy. Each generation needs its privacy. Siblings need privacy from parents, and parents need privacy of their own. Secrecy, however, is a cardinal sign of a triangle when it crosses the generations. (“Don’t tell your father that you had an abortion, because it will upset him too much.” “Don’t tell your sister that Dad lost his job, because she’ll tell the neighbors.” “Dad, I’m living with Alex now, but you can’t tell Mom about it.”) We may have the loftiest motives (“So-and-so just couldn’t handle the information”), but the bottom line is that we are asking one person to be closer to us at the expense of another. If you are at the listening end of the secret-keeping business, you can let people know that there are certain secrets that you’re just not comfortable keeping.

  4. Keep the lines of communication open in the family without inviting others to blame or take sides in your battles. It’s fine to tell your mother or your kids, “Yes, Frank and I are really having a hard time in our marriage now. We have many differences and we are struggling to work them out.” This is quite different from inviting a family member to be your ally or take your side. Do your best to block other family members from getting involved in your battles. If little Susie says, “Daddy is just terrible to divorce you,” you can say, “Susie, I am feeling angry with your father now, but it’s my job to work on that, and not yours. Your job is to work on having the best relationship with me and with your dad that you can.”

  All of the above are different reminders that every family member needs to have his or her own person-to-person relationship with every other family member—that is separate from your anger and your relationship issues with a particular party. You may be enraged at your ex-husband or black-sheep sister, but try not to discourage other family members from having the best relationship with that person that they can. Not only will others be more sympathetic with your situation in the long run, but you will be less likely to get entrenched in a bitter position in which your anger only serves to hold the clock still.

  LEARNING ABOUT YOUR FAMILY

  Katy’s story (Chapter 6) is one illustration of how useful it can be, not only to share our problems with other family members, but also to solicit from them information about how they dealt with similar issues.

  If you didn’t do so when you read about the Kesler family (Chapter 7), put together your own family diagram. You’ll be surprised at how many things—birth order of aunts and uncles, marriage dates, causes and dates of grandparents’ deaths—you don’t know. You may also be surprised at the connections you can make if you study this diagram. For example, you may notice that the year that you and your brother were constantly at each other’s throats was the same year that your grandmother’s health began deteriorating. Perhaps the fighting between you and your brother reflected the chronically high level of anxiety in the family at that time. The more you can enlarge your focus to the broader multigenerational picture, the less likely you will be to blame or diagnose yourself or others.

  Many of us think we know our family background. Certainly we all have stories we tell about our family to other people. Such stories may elicit their admiration (“Your mother sounds like an incredible person!”) or their anger (“How horrible that your father treated you that way!”) or their pity (“What a terrible childhood you’ve had!”). We may tell these stories over and over during our lifetime, constructing explanations for things that we seek to understand. (“My mother always put me down; that is why I have such a bad self-concept.”) However, these stories, including the psychological interpretations that we learn to apply to ourselves and others, are not substitutes for knowing our family in the sense of asking questions of our parents, grandparents, and other relatives and inviting them to share their experience. Most of us react to other family members, but we do not know them.

  Give it a try. Use the diagram of the Kesler family on page 172 as a model for your own. The typical amount of information on a family diagram includes the dates of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and illnesses, as well as the highest level of formal education and occupation for all family members, going back as many generations as you can. This may sound like a boring and tedious
job, but you may be amazed at what you will learn about your family and yourself if you go about the task, perhaps reconnecting with family members along the way to get the information. Don’t write off your “crazy Aunt Pearl” or “black-sheep cousin Joe” as sources of information just because they are the family underfunctioners. Every family member has a unique and valuable perspective and may be surprisingly eager to share it, if approached with genuine interest and respect.

  Is learning more about our family truly a daring and courageous act? Yes, it is. It is not easy to give up the fixed notions that we have about our family. Whether we rage against one family member or place another on a pedestal (two sides of the same coin), we don’t want the “stuck-togetherness” of our family to be befuddled by the facts about real people. In addition, we may not want to openly ask questions about taboo subjects in our family, such as our aunt’s suicide or our grandfather’s alcoholism. The problem is that when we are low on facts, and when important issues stay underground, we are high on fantasy and emotionality—anger included. We are more vulnerable to having intense reactions to any of the inevitable stresses that life brings—and to get stuck in them.

  Remember that we all contain within us—and act out with others—family patterns and unresolved issues that are passed down from many generations. The less we know about our family history, and the less we are in emotional contact with people on our family diagram, the more likely we are to repeat those patterns and behaviors that we most want to avoid. Remember the old adage “What you don’t know won’t hurt you?” Well, research on families just doesn’t support that one! Rather, it is the very process of sharing our experiences with others in the family and learning about theirs that lowers anxiety and helps us to consolidate our identity in the long run, allowing us to proceed more calmly and clearly in all of our relationships. “But my parents won’t talk!” Well, gathering family data is a skill that can be practiced and learned; how you do it determines what you get.

  The Courageous Act of Questioning

  Pick an emotionally loaded subject in your family. The “hot issue” may be sex, marriage, cancer, success, fat, alcohol, or Uncle Charley. If it is a “hot issue” with your mother, for example, chances are you feel angry and “clutch” inside whenever the subject comes up. Perhaps the subject rarely comes up these days because you have taken a strong “I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it” stance.

  Your courageous act is to stop reacting with anger long enough to open up a real dialogue on the subject by sharing something about yourself and asking questions of others. Your task in questioning is to gain some perspective on what has occurred in the previous generations that has loaded a particular issue to make it “hot.” Only by gathering the broader family picture can you replace your angry responses toward family members with empathic and thoughtful ones. Let us take a couple of specific examples:

  Suppose that one hot issue is your single status; every time you go home, your mother gets around to taking a jab at your unmarried state. What is your task?

  First, calmly share something about where you stand on the subject. For instance: “Mom, I can see that you are concerned about my not being married. To tell you the truth, there are times when I feel concerned about it, too. At this point, I don’t know if I’m scared of commitment, if Mr. Right just hasn’t come along yet, or if I don’t want to get married. I’m not clear about it yet, but I’m working on sorting it out.” If you are an underfunctioner, guard against presenting your problem as if you are just a bundle of weakness and vulnerability; if you are an overfunctioner, try not to make it appear as if you have it all together and don’t need anything from anyone.

  Second, open a dialogue with your mother about how the issue of female singleness versus marriage has been experienced in her family. Block advice-giving and other “fix-it” moves by clarifying that you are not interested in solutions right now but in your mother’s own perspective and experience instead. You might then ask your mother any number of questions, such as:

  “I’ve been wondering, have you ever struggled with the question of whether marriage was right for you? And if so, how did you reach a conclusion?”

  “What worries do you have about me if I don’t get married?”

  “If you yourself hadn’t married, how do you think your life would have gone differently? What sort of work would you picture yourself doing?”

  “What was your mother’s attitude about marriage and how would she have reacted if you had stayed single? How would your father have reacted?”

  “How did each of your parents react when Aunt Ruth didn’t marry and worked on her career instead?”

  “Who in our extended family has not married, and how have they fared in your eyes?”

  Questions like these will allow you to break the old communication pattern, reconnect with your mother in a more mature and separate way, detoxify the marriage issue by getting it out from under the table, and learn more about yourself and your family history. You may also learn about alternatives the family has found acceptable in the past, and prepare your mother for a greater range of outcomes in the future.

  Now suppose that the “hot issue” for you in your family is your mother’s ignoring your intellect and achievements and focusing on the successes of your brother. Again, your task would be to share some difficulty you’re having in this area and then to ask your mother to help you out by sharing more about her own experience and perspective. What is most useful is to formulate questions that will allow you to get a picture of how the same emotionally loaded issue was played out a generation back with your mother and her family. For example, write your mother a letter explaining that it is difficult for you to work at succeeding and that the reactions of others are often too important to you. Then ask:

  “How did your mother and father react to your talents and achievements?”

  “Were you seen as smart in your family?”

  “Which of your brothers and sisters were viewed as smart or not smart?”

  “Did you ever think about going to college? What were your parents’ attitudes about that?”

  “If you had started a profession early in life, what career would have been your first choice?”

  “Do you think you would have been successful at it? What might have stood in your way?”

  “How was it decided that your brother was able to go to college and you weren’t? What were your feelings about that?”

  “What was it like for you to have so much responsibility in your family when you were growing up?”

  “Did both your mother and father view themselves as smart and competent? Did they view each other that way?”

  If you develop your skills in questioning, you will find that family members usually do want to share their experience if we first share something we are currently struggling with and assure them of our sincere interest in learning how they dealt with similar problems. Parents and grandparents do not think to tell us their own experience. Instead, they tell us what they think we should hear or what they believe will be helpful to us. Unless you are a good questioner, members of the previous generations are unlikely to tell you what it was really like for them.

  A final postscript about fathers and mothers: If you take the initiative to move closer to your more distant parent (usually, but not always, your father)—by sharing more about yourself and asking more about him—you may find yourself feeling a bit disloyal to the other parent. For example, the distance that so often exists between us and our fathers may be the source of our angry complaints (“My father has no concern about me whatsoever”); yet we may actively (although unconsciously) go along with our father’s “odd-man-out” position in a family triangle.

  Be courageous! Defining a self rests on your ability to establish a person-to-person relationship with each family member that is not at the expense of another family member who is in an “outside” position. Also, keep in mind that if a parent reacts with increased distance to your initia
l efforts to be more in contact, this countermove is an expression of anxiety, not lack of love. Hang in, in a low-keyed way, and stay in touch. Remember, what is important in the long run is not the reactions you get from others but what you do—and how you define your own self and your personal ground in relationships.

  EPILOGUE

  Beyond Self-Help

  “Defining a self” or “becoming one’s own person” is a task that one ultimately does alone. No one else can or will do it for you, although others may try and we may invite them to do so. In the end, I define what I think, feel, and believe. We do not define what I think, feel, and believe. Yet, this lonely and challenging task cannot be accomplished in isolation. We can only accomplish it through our connectedness with others and the new learning about ourselves our relationships provide.

  Self-help advice can be bad for our emotional well-being if it ends up conveying the message that major changes can be made easily or quickly—that, for example, if only you are motivated enough and follow this book carefully enough, you will achieve the happily-ever-after life. It is my hope that I have provided my readers with new perspectives on old angers; applying even one or two lessons from this book can make a significant difference in your life. But we both know that lasting change does not come about in a smooth, stepwise fashion and many of the women described in these chapters had the benefit of long-term psychotherapy to help them along.