by Connie Zweig
Gender experts Aaron Kipnis and Liz Herron point out that many men cover up their vulnerability, using the shields of wealth and power to be accepted. Women, on the other hand, often cover up their authentic power and use a shield of vulnerability to be accepted. In these ways, members of both genders perpetuate archaic cultural myths of the hero and the princess, or the victimizer and the victim. And men’s tender needs, depression, and helplessness remain in the shadow, while women’s competence, authority, and capacity for violence remain unseen as well.
Some opposite-sex friendships can compensate for missing elements in primary partnerships. For instance, Doug enjoyed a lively intellectual exchange with his friend Celia, a father’s daughter whom he had met in graduate school. In his marriage to an artist, Doug felt deeply satisfied, but after returning to school he wished for more intellectual stimulation. Clearly, the danger here is triangulation: His wife may feel inadequate or abandoned and forbid the friendship, or Celia may be unable to tolerate the limits of their bond. Any male-female friendship in which one partner is married will demand a solution to this potentially shadowy problem.
Sexuality complicates and sometimes endangers male-female friendships. If both know with certainty from the start that they do not wish for a romantic partnership with each other, their chances are better. But often one ends up vulnerable, Eros’s arrows pierce the heart, and dangerous secret sexual desires may be aroused.
Allen, twenty-nine, who had been in therapy for several years to explore his relationships with women, finally spoke about his closest friend, Tanya, twenty-eight. Friends since childhood, they confided in one another and enjoyed dinners and movies together. Tanya even helped Allen select clothing and furniture for his home. When Allen dated other women, he gave Tanya “veto power,” respecting her opinions and trusting her to hold his best interests at heart. At times, when he felt lonely and they were especially close, Allen imagined that one day he might invite her to become romantically involved. But he had not yet confided this forbidden fantasy to his best friend.
Allen had been dating June for several months when he told the therapist that he had not shared his growing feelings about her with Tanya. Instead, he communicated more openly with June, experimenting for the first time in a sexual relationship with the authenticity that he had reserved for friendship. He felt guilty, as if he were betraying the friendship with Tanya by withholding an increasingly important part of his life from her. Yet he did not feel the impulse to share these tender new feelings with Tanya. He was afraid that she would feel usurped; he was terrified that she would be critical. And he disclosed that he felt responsible for her feelings.
As he made this last point, Allen realized that he had turned his friend into his mother, projecting onto Tanya his mom’s critical voice and then feeling responsible for pleasing her. If he shared this insight with her, he would need to take back the critical voice from his motherly friend and claim his independence from her. Perhaps then he might clarify the sexual feelings that he had avoided with his friend for so long. Or he might be able to deepen his relationship with June without feeling guilty for abandoning his friend, Tanya.
There are few models of male-female friendship in myth, as in life. But in early Greece, where male friendship was prized and women were seen as the property of their husbands, there was one exception: the hetaera, whose root, heter, means friendship in Egyptian. A hetaera woman was a companion to men, property of none. Unlike the wives, she was free to attend school, read the starry skies, set sail on rough seas, recite the great poets, and make the proper sacrifices to the proper gods. She often established salons to participate in the intellectual life of the men. She, alone among women, was their equal.
Toni Wolff, who served as Jung’s hetaera, as well as his mistress, described this archetypal pattern in women: She stimulates a man’s interests and inclinations, giving him the sense of personal value and leading him beyond his responsibilities to a deeper soul life. If she touches him too deeply, he may leave his work and sacrifice his security, or seek divorce because he feels that she understands him better than his wife.
Today, too, some women find themselves primarily to be intellectual or spiritual companions to men rather than mates. They may collaborate on projects, sparking the fires of creativity rather than the fires of desire. They may inspire men to achieve or to pursue an inner life; yet typically they are not chosen as mates themselves. Cheryl, the friend of Gabriella’s discussed above, found that men sought her company and her guidance but did not desire her sexually. She suffered in part because she is a hetaera in a world that is blind to her beauty; she is a hetaera in a world that no longer knows her name.
Perhaps the naming of this pattern of friendship can help us to reimagine women and men together in novel ways. Perhaps hetaera men also can serve to inspire women in their creative lives, so that they free each other from the bondage of old patterns of inequality and together uncover the bonds of new friendship.
Do you have an opposite-sex soul friend? If not, what shadow character stops you?
SEXUAL SHADOWS: TRIANGLES AND LOYALTY WARS
All too often, friendships and romantic relationships threaten the very survival of each other. After a loyalty struggle between a partner and a friend, the friendship is often sacrificed, at the cost of great pain to those involved. A wife, for instance, may feel endangered by her husband’s female friend and attempt in some way to sabotage their bond. Or she may ask him for so much privacy that he cannot share his inner life with his friend, who ends up feeling disappointed and deserted.
Or two women friends may suffer conflict when one becomes romantically involved, leaving the other feeling envious and left out. Aligned in their singleness before the romance blossomed, the one who remains single suffers with abandonment, unable to feel happy for her friend, while the one who partners with a man cannot share her joy out of fear of heightening the friend’s envy.
If two close friends discuss one’s mate in a critical way, evaluating him harshly or devaluing her, the married friend, feeling forced to choose this alliance, may abandon the friendship at a later time. One man, who had listened at length to a female friend who told him not to marry another woman, danced with this friend at his wedding and never spoke to her again. Fifteen years later, breaking the silence, he told her, “You didn’t respect my choice. You should have trusted that if I loved her, there was more going on than you could see.”
Dennis and Gerald, soul friends for twenty years, also violated the Third Body in an irreparable way in another version of triangular betrayal. Dennis’s lover told Gerald that she was unhappy in her relationship with Dennis and intended to split up with him. She recounted a series of emotionally abusive incidents, and in response Gerald expressed empathy, saying that he understood why she might want to end the relationship.
Later that day, Gerald told Dennis of the conversation, including the news that his lover intended to end their romance. Dennis became furious that Gerald had not defended him but had, instead, aligned with his girlfriend. “I don’t want a friend who can do that to me, who is unable to give unconditional support.” Dennis hung up the phone and refused calls from his friend. For a long time, Gerald tried by phone and mail to reconnect with Dennis, but to no avail.
During the first year of no contact with his friend, Gerald thought of him every day with grief and longing. In the second year, he thought of him perhaps once each week, with a sigh of sadness. Eventually, with bitter disappointment he gave up hope for reconciliation, although he continued to try to sort out why Dennis was so hurt and angry that he could not forgive him. Gerald knew that Dennis had witnessed his alcoholic father physically abuse his mother and that he had never forgiven him. And he knew that Dennis closely monitored the wrongs done to him as well, cataloging a litany of injuries by others that he could not forgive. So for Dennis to forgive Gerald’s betrayal, he would have had to admit the latter’s imperfection and risk being hurt by him again.
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br /> Internally, Dennis would have had to recognize his own cold resistance to Gerald as a harsh character at his table to be acknowledged. Instead, Dennis allowed scar tissue to grow over his wounds so that he would no longer feel the sensitivity. Then he could cut off Gerald without feeling anything at all.
In addition, Gerald admitted that secretly he had been angry at Dennis’s lack of reciprocity in their friendship and had related to his friend’s lover openly and honestly, even to the point of joining her in criticizing Dennis. In this way, Gerald realized that he had not honored the specialness of Dennis over his girlfriend. Because he rejected his own specialness, he sought to treat relationships equally, thereby dishonoring their special bond and losing the friendship.
In this story we see a psychological basis for the popular superstition: never step on a friend’s shadow. In other words, do not tell a friend something difficult about himself; do not point out an unconscious flaw unless you are willing to risk the consequences, which may include destroying the relationship.
At times, the competition between male friends in a bid for a woman can be ritualized. When Lyle, thirty, and Max, thirty-two, two close friends, both felt attracted to the same woman at a conference, they argued about who saw her first and who had the right to pursue her. When Lyle walked her to the car and got her phone number, Max was furious. He felt that his friend had ignored his feelings. So the two men decided that they would have an open competition for this woman’s attentions, allowing her to decide between them and putting their friendship before the romance. In the end, Lyle became her lover, Max became her friend, and the men’s friendship deepened.
POWER SHADOWS: SUPERIORITY AND INFERIORITY
A soul friendship is a safe place in which to experiment with authentic power— that is, the power that issues from the voice of the Self. But if we use inauthentic power, which is tied to the ego, to relate to others, we end up creating power struggles and feelings of superiority and inferiority, which do not lead to safety but instead lead to competition, envy, and jealousy.
Lloyd, forty, tries mightily to take a stand with his friend Jay, forty-five, but often feels overpowered by the more articulate, aggressive lawyer. “I try to prove a point, but I don’t feel heard. I feel impotent, as if nothing I say makes any difference. He points out that I’m not logical or that I don’t get the facts right. Then I lose my words altogether. And I don’t know if my opinions are legitimate anymore. In fact, I don’t know if I have a right to my opinions at all.”
In these conversations, which continued for about five years, Lloyd holds the inferior position and feels unseen and misunderstood by his friend. At dinner one evening with their wives, Lloyd began to make furtive, seductive glances at Jay’s wife, who smiled in response. Instantly, Lloyd felt a heady sense of power, the ability to attract and perhaps lure his friend’s wife into an affair. Shocked and disturbed by his own behavior, he told his therapist about the incident and discovered that the power shadow was at work, attempting to give him feelings of superiority in a relationship in which he felt so inferior.
Some people hold the superior position with an attitude of elitist self-righteousness, a kind of holy judgmentalness that keeps them on higher moral ground than others. As a result, when they meet someone with other viewpoints that they cannot tolerate, they simply write them off.
Roz, thirty-five, a white feminist diversity trainer for corporations, struggled with this pattern. She felt she needed friends who believed as she did in “political correctness,” or she could not respect them and feel equality. When she went to a movie about African-American issues with a white male friend, she was stunned at his response to the film: “Blacks should give up their anger and forgive already. I wasn’t a slave owner, so don’t blame me for the problems today.”
Roz was furious, and her self-righteous indignation flared. “If someone I know does not think about things appropriately, I can’t tolerate it. I can point out where they are wrong, but I don’t have the patience to teach them everything. I just can’t be bothered. So, nine times out of ten, I cut them off. After all, I can’t be friends with everyone.”
Ironically, Roz is a diversity trainer who is ruling out diversity in her own life. Understandably, she is distressed when she sees evidence of archaic attitudes of racism or sexism in those she loves. But her politically correct ideal leaves no room for shadowy, “incorrect” feelings and attitudes. By narrowly defining what is acceptable, she creates a wide-ranging shadow and makes it more difficult to address issues with depth, complexity, and ambiguity.
As a result, people who don’t fit her ideal become inferior, while she holds all of the superiority. With this kind of black and white polarization, she then finds a rationale for ending the friendship. If, instead of trying to change him, she saw her friend as a mirror reflection and looked at her own exaggerated response as a message from a rigid character seated at her table, Roz might see that she is intolerant of him just as he is intolerant of people of color. Put another way, the same racist character in him that eliminates others is living in her, eliminating him.
By refusing to collude with the dominant, power-driven institutions of society, but cutting off individual people, Roz is, in fact, colluding with the process of domination (or power shadow) in her personal life. Just as many African Americans have taken a stand in their own communities and refused to collude with the larger racist society by not participating, and just as many lesbians have created their own communities and refused to participate in a homophobic world, Roz has chosen to excommunicate people who differ from her. She does not work through her crises of commitments because the power-driven character who values being right more than cultivating empathic relationship rules at her table. So, in exasperation, she simply gives up on the Other and remains locked in the power complex.
The issue is not a simple one: Individual shadow-work on collective issues may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for solving large-scale social and political problems. In some cases, in fact, we may need to maintain our rage or even sustain a projection to feel motivated to act for change in the larger society. If therapy remains merely a place in which to reduce all issues to personal psychology, if therapists fail to see the political and economic contexts in which personal issues emerge, then therapy becomes a conservative force rather than a force for change at large.
How can you befriend someone whose attitudes are intolerable to you? How much dissonance can you accept? How much compassion can you include?
MONEY SHADOWS: SHAME, CLASS, AND THE MYTH OF EQUALITY
Mark Twain once said, “The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.” Certainly, to borrow money is to evoke shadowy feelings of shame, dependency, and obligation. To loan money is to evoke dark feelings of superiority and entitlement. Perhaps this weight of money on friendship explains why so many friends carefully monitor the financial aspect of their relationship, sharing costs equally or trading things of equal value to balance their accounts. If the issue of money is not addressed in a conscious way, it quickly becomes a shadow issue.
Money also carries soul value among friends. Ken, a wealthy real estate developer, told his friend Mel that he would not loan money to many people, but he would loan it to him. Mel heard the Turkish in his friend’s message: “Ken is telling me that he knows I am not his friend because of his money. I felt very valued by him even though I never took him up on his offer.”
Money secrets abound among even the closest friends. It seems to represent that which we wish to keep private. To expose our money matters is, in some way, to expose our nakedness. Stephen said recently that he had earned a large sum of money when he sold his business, but he could not tell his best friends, who had less money. He feared evoking their envy and having to deal with his feelings of guilt and responsibility for them.
Envy among friends can bring on painful feelin
gs of inferiority and inadequacy. Financial envy, in particular, may shroud deeper issues. Vicky grew up in a poor white section of Atlanta. She remembers sitting on the stoop of the family home and feeling disgraced by her older mother’s white hair, her father’s pawnshop, and, most of all, their dirty, ramshackle house. Vicky was the first in her family to graduate college; she had dreams of a professional life and a beautiful home. But the dreams have not come true.
Now fifty, Vicky has tried her hand at several careers but given up each one. She is married to Earl, a gifted artist who cannot work for health reasons. They live in a poor neighborhood, where she hears gunshots at night, in a ramshackle house that Vicky is ashamed to show her friends, all of whom are more successful and financially secure. “I feel as if I am branded for life with poor white trash, as if we live in an invisible caste system and I can’t alter my fate.”
Vicky describes sitting at a table of women friends who wore diamond rings. “Unlike me, they were blessed with high birth. I feel like I’ve done something wrong, so this is my destiny.”
In particular, Vicky envies Denise, who appears to live a life of ease. “She has a career that pays well, so she can own a home in the hills and a new car. She has a closely knit family in town, so she feels loved and supported.” But beneath Vicky’s envious character lurks the judge: “She’s like a princess with her nose in the air, no connection to the underclass, no struggle that’s worth a fight, and, worst of all, no deeply held spiritual belief.”
Denise senses the undercurrents of her friend’s envy. She feels unseen in her struggles and unappreciated in her complexity, as if she were reduced to a stereotype. When she tries to speak to Vicky of her loneliness as a single woman or of her painful issues with her family, her friend cuts her off; Vicky feels no empathy because she cannot imagine that Denise truly suffers.