Solemate
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Unfortunately, I had built my life on a very shaky foundation. As I entered my 30s, my old restless spirit began to break through. By then, we had left the United States to settle in Germany. First, we went to Hamburg, the city where my husband had grown up. Then we moved to a small village, 20 miles from the nearest city. For my husband, the move represented a new job opportunity, but for me, it was an isolating experience. By then, both my children were in school. Unable to speak the native language, I was now living in a town where no one spoke English. Alone for large blocks of time with nothing on which to focus my interests, I grew increasingly restless and depressed. Over the next several years, we would move again and again as my husband’s career continued to flourish. All the while, our marriage would continue to unravel.
Early on in our marriage, I’d collaborated with my husband on a series of holistic healing workshops. With my children in school, I felt compelled to start pursu-ing my career again. In 1990, I traveled to Los Angeles to complete my training as a workshop facilitator, followed by a series of various workshops and seminars. It was an invigorating experience. I felt infused with a renewed sense of purpose and creativity. Back in Germany, I began facilitating workshops for cancer patients with my husband. The work we were doing was groundbreaking, and we began to receive national media attention. My husband recognized my ability to facilitate deep, transformational work with the people attending our workshops and asked me to start counseling some of the patients in his medical practice. Eager to follow this path, I pursued my studies in Europe, India, and the United States. I was on a steep learning curve, moving in exciting new directions, but my marriage was falling apart. As the distance between us continued to grow, my husband and I decided on a trial, live-in marital separation. It was an unusual arrangement; we agreed to lead separate lives but continue to share the house and to raise our children together. Ultimately, instead of bringing us closer or motivating us to work on the problems in our marriage, the arrangement only served to pull us further apart.
There had been signs all along that our marriage was unraveling, but neither my husband nor I had the awareness, capabilities, or resources to halt its collapse. It was only years later, through my personal-development work, that I recognized the underlying problem: we had come together for all the wrong reasons. We had been drawn to each other because of voids within ourselves. To me, my husband was a smart, successful physician (like my father) who made me feel safe and protected. He represented safety and security. At the time, of course, I didn’t know this; I was madly in love and oblivious to my underlying motivations. Meanwhile, to him, I possessed a passion and spontaneity he had never known. In his eyes, I was exotic and exciting. In short, we were attracted to our own projections of each other—not to each other’s true selves.
When our marriage finally ended, I was in tremendous pain, feeling a deep sense of loss, loneliness, and fear. Not long after the children and I moved out, my husband’s girlfriend moved into what had been our home, exacerbating an already difficult situation. As we moved forward with plans to divorce, the situation spiraled out of control, becoming a nasty and grueling parting that spanned four years. For two of those years, I struggled to make ends meet in Germany as my relationship with my estranged husband worsened and his financial support declined. Within a year of the separation, my children and I had gone from living in relative luxury and security to struggling to make the rent in a fourth-floor walkup permeated by the noxious odor from a chemical storage facility next door. Professionally, I went from facilitating workshops and counseling patients in my husband’s medical practice to waiting tables at a local pub.
Living alone with virtually no support system in Germany, I was terrified of what our future would hold. Feeling alone, filled with despair, and, finally, reduced to using our security deposit to pay the rent, I sold everything the children and I had, bought three plane tickets to the United States, and returned home.
Hitting Bottom
The day the children and I arrived in the United States from Germany was probably the worst day of my life. It was July 14, 1995. We flew into Boston during the early stages of the Big Dig, a massive highway and tunnel reconstruction project. The city looked like a war zone. It seemed as if everything around us was torn up, a cruel metaphor for our own situation. It was steamy hot—hovering somewhere above 100 degrees—and there was no air conditioning in the van my parents had hired to pick us up from the airport. But I didn’t just feel hot and uncomfortable; I felt defeated and guilt-ridden and scared. I was 37 years old. I’d been married at the age of 23, when I hardly knew who I was. My husband had been my source of safety and security, and now my safety net was gone. Here I was with a 9-year-old boy and an 11-year-old girl to raise on my own, and no way to take care of myself—or them.
It would be two months before I really hit bottom. My parents, generously, took us in. But the situation wasn’t workable for very long. Their condominium was way too small for the five of us. The TV was blaring constantly. My parents both smoked and my mother, who had a history of poor health and undiagnosed depression, continued to decline. Wracked with guilt over the tremendous pain and loss my children were experiencing, feeling like a complete failure, and unable to see a glimmer of hope for the future, I was sinking deeper and deeper into depression myself.
I can still remember the feelings of despair I experienced on the Friday before Labor Day in 1995, a moment when it felt like the rest of America was heading off to the beaches with their intact families for the long weekend. I went into my parents’ den and told them that I needed help—now. “If I don’t get to a doctor or a hospital, or get some medication,” I announced, “I’m going to have a mental breakdown.” I had reached the breaking point, and, although I didn’t realize it at the time, that moment would prove to be a major turning point in my life.
Rebuilding My Self, Rebuilding My Life
Today I’m an independent, self-sufficient woman. I own my own home and have a successful business coaching individuals, consulting to corporations, writing, and teaching. My children are grown up and realizing their own dreams. My son just graduated from college and has been accepted to Harvard Law School. My daughter, who is about to receive her M.B.A. in sustainable development, plans to help companies become more socially and environmentally responsible. I, too, have grown and changed. I bear little or no resemblance to the young woman who struggled with depression, the restless soul who couldn’t quite manage her life, or the defeated 37-year-old who flew into Boston from Germany that day in 1995. It took me more than ten years to get where I am today. Looking back, I recognize the wisdom of the famous line from Nietzsche: What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Everything I’ve been through makes me the person that I am today. All my experiences give me the depth of compassion and understanding that I bring to my work, and they have taught me the lessons I’m passing on in this book.
That Labor Day weekend in 1995, I found a doctor who prescribed an antidepressant as a short-term solution to manage my depression and keep me from complete mental and emotional collapse. That, in turn, led me to a wonderful woman named Terry Kellerman, who became my therapist and coach, and served as a loving guide through an eight-year journey that changed my life and informs my work today.
Once I began to emerge from the throes of depression, my priorities began to crystallize. I had to find a way to support myself and take care of my kids. I decided I had to complete my American bachelor’s degree and then go on and get a master’s degree. At that point, my parents really stepped up to the plate, offering to pay for my return to college and help with the bills while I was in school. I had no idea how to manage money, so that, too, became a priority.
My children were struggling with all the changes occurring in their lives and they needed me more than ever. It’s always traumatic for a child when the family is torn apart, but many children stay in the same school and keep their friends, or they remain in the same house or community. They
see both parents and have a sense of continuity. For my children, life as they knew it was completely destroyed. When we left Germany, they gave up their school, their neighborhood, and their friends to move to the United States—what was, for them, a foreign country. Their economic circumstances and lifestyle changed dramatically. Their father was no longer a presence in their lives, and that was an enormous loss for them. For me, it meant the responsibility for their well-being fell completely on my shoulders—and I knew I’d have to rise to the challenge.
As my mental and emotional health began to improve, and I began my personal-development work with Terry, my attitude began to change. I saw that I had been presented with a rare opportunity. I was living in a sleepy little town. I didn’t know anyone, and there was really nothing much to do. Instead of being restless and bored and lonely, instead of digging myself into an emotional hole, I began to see things from a different perspective. I took long, meditative walks by myself in the mornings when my kids were in school. Without the distractions of a relationship or an active social life, I could focus on fixing what was ailing me and helping my children cope with their new life. I could concentrate on taking good care of them and good care of myself—by eating right, getting enough exercise, and focusing on my mental and emotional health. I could begin to live more deliberately.
I also began to see my divorce—and my relationship with my ex-husband—in a different light. Instead of feeling like a victim, I began to see myself as an active participant in our marriage and its undoing. I began to take responsibility for what had happened to me, to my marriage, and to my children—and I stopped blaming others. I took an important first step when I started taking responsibility. In my personal-development work, I asked myself: What role did I play in the breakdown of my marriage? Only as the answer became clear was I able to begin to replace my feelings of anger and bitterness with compassion and forgiveness for myself and for my ex-husband.
These are all elements of the process of mastering the art of aloneness that I will share with you in this book. But the cornerstone of my experience is this: I began to understand and address the roots of my lifelong restlessness and unhappiness—the patterns I had developed long ago that originated in my childhood and family.
Working with Terry, I began to look deeper into my family of origin—and the relationship between my experiences growing up and my self-defeating patterns of behavior. I began to differentiate between my conditioned self and who I really am. Only then did I begin to recover my wholeness. I learned that I am an incredibly strong and independent person, and yet I had built this illusion that I was incapable of taking care of myself—that I was helpless and that I needed a man to rescue and take care of me. And at its root, that’s a belief I had adopted long ago in my family of origin.
Where I Come From
I grew up the youngest of four children in the old whaling city of New Bedford, Massachusetts. My earliest memories include feelings of extreme loneliness, a feeling of being unwanted, of being invisible. My mother was 38 when I was born, with three boys ages two, seven, and eight. I was unplanned, and she was overwhelmed and depressed following my birth. A cousin was brought into the house to take care of me during the first few years of my life, followed by a series of other caretakers. I had raging colic as an infant. When I started nursery school at the age of three, my parents hired a driver—a man in his 50s—to drive me back and forth to school, which was about a mile from our house. I can remember feeling frightened and alone in the back seat of his car, coming home and being set in front of the television to eat my lunch alone, then being sent upstairs for a nap.
My strongest memories from early childhood were of my mother—or, rather, of her absence. In the morning, she had difficulty getting up and would lie in bed with a facecloth over her head and her sunglasses on. She’d say she had a migraine and needed to rest. She’d finally get up around four o’clock in the afternoon and start cooking dinner and drinking Canadian Club whiskey. Although it’s never been acknowledged within my family, she was clearly an alcoholic.
If I were to describe my family’s outward appearance, you’d get a very different picture. My mother was a beautiful, articulate, and highly intelligent woman who had a successful career prior to her marriage. To the outside world, she appeared to be a sophisticated and affluent doctor’s wife who had it all—a successful husband, four healthy children, and an immaculate, beautiful home. My father was a doctor, an active and beloved leader in the community. He was a charming, successful man and a model citizen. He’d worked his way through medical school and then married my mother, a southern belle from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a head nurse at the hospital in Florida where they had met. They had been married for 56 years when my mother died in 2004. For the first few years of their marriage, my father’s mother lived with them. Eventually they bought a new home with my father’s office attached to our house—all of which calls to mind the picture of an active, engaged family.
But, in fact, like many families, we were the picture of dysfunction. For one thing, my grandmother, who despised my mother for marrying her only son, was hardly the model of a loving, nurturing grandparent. I remember her sitting on our living-room sofa with a bottle of Scotch in her lap, getting drunk and berating my mother, who was always trying to win her approval. I barely remember my father as a presence. He was so involved with his work and civic activities that he was largely absent. As I got older, I recall coming home from school to find my mother lying down in bed watching soap operas. If I wanted to spend time with her, I had to sit in front of the television and be silent. She often had crying fits. She’d lock herself in her room while I stood outside the door trying to get in, confused and scared, wanting to be able to console her, to fix it, but I never could. Her depression went untreated, just as her alcoholism went unacknowledged.
We were a family of disconnected people. In the evenings, during dinner, we’d sit down in front of the television while we ate. We didn’t talk to one another. I think, growing up, my brothers—especially the older two—had each other. The youngest of the three was very introverted and kept to himself in his room. But I was extroverted, with a sensitive, artistic, and inquisitive personality. I had no one in the family with whom to connect. At the time, I thought that life as I knew it was normal. Looking back, I realize that as a child I didn’t feel nurtured, supported, cared for, or wanted.
In my early adolescence, all hell broke loose. I started to act out. I became angry, depressed, resentful, and moody. When I was 11, I had my first alcoholic drink at a friend’s house. At 12, I was smoking and experimenting with drugs—uppers and downers I found in the family medicine cabinet, samples from my father’s medical practice. At 13, I was hanging out with a rough crowd in the public parks of New Bedford, with kids three or four years older who were shooting heroin. And, at the age of 14, I ran away from home—and never really went back until I was an adult.
In retrospect, it was a strong survival instinct that drove me to leave. And, while running away led to a series of self-destructive and even dangerous situations, I believe it helped me hold onto an important piece of my authentic self. Throughout my young adult life, I kept repeating self-defeating patterns, which I continued throughout my marriage. If I hadn’t met Terry Kellerman and begun the personal-development work that took me to the root of my problems, more likely than not I would be repeating those patterns today.
Connecting the Dots
In one way or another, just about every family is dysfunctional. As writer Sue Grafton once said: “People talk about ‘dysfunctional’ families; I’ve never seen any other kind.” Everyone emerges from their family of origin with a distinctive set of issues. Within some families, children grow up experiencing extreme dysfunctions such as physical, verbal, or sexual abuse. In others, they experience subtler dysfunctions that shape their core beliefs and behavior—maybe taboos that impede their ability to express their feelings, constant criticism that erodes their self-es
teem, or rigid rules that inhibit self-expression. We are all products of our families’ unique patterns and dysfunctions. We all take the core beliefs and behaviors learned in childhood with us into adulthood. Some of these beliefs and behaviors are like viruses, infecting our lives, our relationships, and our sense of well-being. And, until we become aware of what they are and how to move beyond them, none of us is truly whole.
If you don’t feel like a whole and complete person on your own—someone capable of expressing the full range of human emotions and achieving your full potential—you’re always going to be seeking someone else to complete you. Take the example of a man who grows up in a family where he’s never allowed to express joy or enthusiasm or excitement; he’ll be looking for someone else to bring those expressions into his life. Or a woman who never feels safe or secure on her own—she’ll spend her life seeking safety and security from others. That’s the kind of dynamic I saw in my own marriage. It created a relationship that was built, not on our strengths and who we really were, but on our individual pathologies.
In my coaching practice, I’m amazed by the number of people who come to me with little understanding of the human conditioning process and how it holds them back in their lives. Many people invest countless hours, dollars, and resources in self-help approaches focused on changing their behavior—but they still struggle with the same issues over and over. I strongly believe that it’s because they’ve failed to address these family-of-origin issues. Others spend years in therapy talking about their family-of-origin issues. They may come away with an intellectual understanding of their families and patterns of dysfunction, but they don’t know how to move past them. They lack the strategies to change their habitual patterns. The challenge is to connect the dots. With Sole-mate, that’s what I’m endeavoring to do: help you connect the dots. That means focusing in on the core beliefs and behavioral patterns you adopted in your family of origin and developing workable strategies that will help you change them. Once you begin to understand the patterns that are creating negative results in your relationships and in your life, you begin treating yourself very differently. Your attitudes and outlook begin to change. You begin to live more consciously and deliberately. And you can accomplish things you never dreamed possible. The transformation can be dramatic. That’s the journey on which you’re about to embark.