The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  Let’s turn now to the story of Anita, who provides a typical example of mild overfunctioning that swung into full force at a particularly stressful time in the family life cycle. Anita was able to make changes relatively easily because the “stuckness” that brought her to therapy was only of several months’ duration. When a relationship gets stuck in response to an acute reaction to recent stress, change is more manageable.

  “I’m Terribly Concerned About Mother!”

  Anita was a twenty-nine-year-old administrative nurse who came to see me several months after her seventy-eight-year-old grandmother had a serious fall. Anita was obviously tense and under considerable strain when she entered my office.

  When we first talked on the phone, Anita said she was seeking help because of headaches and anxiety spells. But during our first session, she focused almost exclusively on her mother, Helen, who was deeply absorbed in caring for her mother, Anita’s ailing grandmother.

  Anita shared that she had initially felt sympathetic toward her mother’s plight, but over time her sympathy had turned to frustration and then to outright anger. “My mother cares for Grandma at the expense of everything else in her life,” Anita explained. “She’s wearing herself to the bone, she’s neglecting Dad, and most important, she’s neglecting herself.”

  When we complain that our mothers (or whoever) won’t listen to reason, it usually means that they won’t see things our way or do what we want them to do. As with Suzanne and John (Chapter 6), one key issue here was reactivity to differences. Anita was clearly having a hard time accepting the fact that her mother’s way of managing a difficult situation differed from her own. Our reactivity to differences will always be higher at particularly stressful points in the life cycle (for example, at a wedding or funeral) because anxiety is the driving force behind reactivity.

  For most of Anita’s adulthood, she and her mother had shared a close relationship and could talk together openly and comfortably. Their relationship was not too polarized, in that each could share problems and relate to the competence of the other in solving her own difficulties. But when Anita’s grandmother’s health began deteriorating after her fall, Anita became focused on how her mother was handling this difficult situation. It was during this particularly stressful point that Anita’s tendency to overfunction went into full swing and another mother-daughter relationship became stuck.

  The Way It Was

  In the months after her grandmother’s fall, the interaction between Anita and her mother had become increasingly strained. Helen would complain to Anita about her continual exhaustion and about her unrelieved responsibility for her mother. Anita would then suggest ways that Helen could lessen her load; for example, by asking other family members to pitch in or by hiring a nurse to stay with Grandma several hours a day. Helen, in response, would either ignore this advice or tell Anita why her advice would not work. Anita would continue to argue her point, while Helen would continue not to listen.

  What did Anita do then? Sometimes she repeated the advice, although her mother was not making use of it. After a while, Anita would distance from her mother (“I just don’t want to hear her complaining if she doesn’t want to do anything about it”), or she would interpret and diagnose Helen’s behavior (“Mother, I think you secretly enjoy being a martyr and doing this super-responsible trip. You keep asking me for advice only to reject it, and that makes me feel angry and helpless”). When they managed to get off the subject of Grandma, their conversation tended to be superficial.

  Although Helen was overextending herself for her mother, she was actually underfunctioning in terms of problem solving around the caretaking issue. And the more Anita took on Helen’s problem as her own or focused intensely on the issue, the more Helen continued to underfunction for her self. Of course, Helen’s behavior invited Anita’s over-functioning, just as Anita’s overfunctioning invited her mother’s underfunctioning. That’s how a reciprocal or circular dance works.

  “How much of your worry energy—or emotional energy—is directed toward your mother at this time?” I asked Anita the third time we met. I asked her to be as specific as possible; I wanted a percentage figure.

  “About seventy-five percent,” she answered quickly. My estimate would have been even higher.

  “If that problem were to be magically resolved, if there were absolutely no cause for concern about your mother, where would that seventy-five percent worry energy be going? What else would you be paying attention to?”

  “I don’t know,” Anita said simply. “I’ve never thought about it.”

  And indeed, she hadn’t.

  How Overfunctioning Helps

  One of the nice things about any kind of other-focus is that we will not experience the full impact of our own issues. Obviously, lots of emotions were stirred up inside Anita in response to her grandmother’s downhill slide and the specter of her impending death. How did Anita want to relate to Grandma at this time? How much contact did she want to initiate? What, if any, unfinished business did Anita have with Grandma that she might want to address before it was too late? If Grandma died tomorrow, would Anita feel at peace with this relationship, or would she wish that she had said or asked one thing or another? These are just a few of the questions Anita was able to not think about—or not think too hard about—because she was thinking about Helen, worrying about Helen, and talking about Helen to her therapist, family, and friends.

  Another piece of psychological business that was stirred up for Anita at this time involved the question of a daughter’s responsibility to an aging dependent parent. Helen’s total and selfless devotion to Grandma made Anita anxious, because she experienced her mother’s behavior as an expectation that Anita would one day do the same. The notion that Anita would one day devote her life to her aging mother or father scared and angered her, although her parents had never voiced any such expectations. Nor had Anita consciously articulated her concerns—even to herself. Instead, Anita made an automatic, reflexive move away from her own anxiety to a worried and critical focus on her mother. That’s how people work. And this is how we begin to change it.

  New Steps

  The first thing Anita was able to do differently was to stop giving advice. Learning how not to be helpful is an especially difficult challenge for those of us who move in quickly to fix the problems of other family members or to rescue those in distress. Of course, there is nothing wrong with Anita giving advice to Helen if Helen finds it useful and if Anita recognizes that her advice may not fit her mother (“Well, this is what I would do in your shoes, but that may not be right for you. What are your thoughts?”).

  In the old pattern, Anita was giving advice from an overfunctioning or overresponsible position. She was truly convinced she had the answers to her mother’s problem, and she became angry when her mother ignored her advice. For this reason Anita would do well to stop giving advice, at least until she can shift to a more respectful position regarding her mother’s need to find her own solutions.

  When we overfunction for family members, we can be sure they will underfunction for themselves and act less competently to solve their own problems. Furthermore, Anita already knows that her mother resists her advice. Doing more of the same can only keep Anita more stuck.

  When Anita was ready to break the old pattern, she stopped trying to change her mother and began to change her own responses. When Helen called and complained about feeling drained by Grandma’s illness, Anita asked questions and listened empathetically. She did not advise her mother in any way. Anita’s attitude conveyed respect for the fact that her mother was the best expert on herself and that she was struggling with a truly wrenching dilemma.

  It Doesn’t Mean Silence!

  What do overfunctioners do when they get angry, frustrated, and exhausted? As we have seen, they typically move into a position of reactive distance. I speak here not just of physical distance (“I just won’t call or write him anymore”) but also of emotional distance around th
e issue of concern. Kristen, for example, initially confused distance with substantive change on her part when she went from trying to fix her father’s drinking behavior to acting as if it were not happening.

  Clarifying our position around an important issue is always a key part of defining the self. Anita learned to do this by saying something about her own self rather than trying to be the expert on her mother. After a telephone conversation in which Helen again presented herself as exhausted and stressed-out, Anita responded: “You know, Mother, your ability to take care of Grandma truly amazes me. If it were me, I simply couldn’t do it. I would have to find some way to get help and get time for myself, no matter what it took.”

  When her mother responded by giving a dozen reasons why help was not possible, Anita did not argue the point. She just said again, “You know, Mother, I just couldn’t do it. I’m not saying I have the answers for you. I’m just saying that I could not be doing so much for anyone, no matter how much I loved them. I don’t think I’d even be physically capable of it. But I recognize that you and I are different.”

  Anita stayed on track, although she often had to bite her tongue to avoid going back to the old pattern of advice-giving and arguing. Over lunch several weeks later, Helen told Anita that caring for Grandma was taking a toll on her own health. At this point, Anita turned to her mother and said warmly, “Mom, I’ve always admired how good you are at taking care of everyone. Your ability to keep giving to others never ceases to amaze me. You’ve taken care of three children. And you’ve taken care of Dad. And when Uncle Harry was in trouble, you were the first to be there to take care of him. And now you’re taking care of Grandma.

  “But there’s only one problem. Who is taking care of you, Mom? This is what I worry about sometimes. Who’s taking care of Helen?”

  Helen became teary, and Anita suddenly realized that she had never seen her mother cry. Helen told Anita that no one really took much care of her and that furthermore she probably wouldn’t allow it. She talked some about her own childhood and how her father’s early death had left her feeling that it wasn’t safe to depend on anyone. When they parted that afternoon, Anita knew her mother better.

  What allowed this conversation to happen was Anita’s ability to share her genuine concern for her mother without going back to her overfunctioning pattern (which was similar to her mother’s pattern) of advising, rescuing, or fixing. Anita was sharing from the self, without implying what Helen should think, feel, or do, and without telling her specifically how she should solve her problem. Not long thereafter, her mother did begin to use her competence to make a change in her situation. The solution wasn’t one Anita would have chosen, but it offered Helen some relief.

  The change on Anita’s part was not just a strategic shift into “I” language. It came from a deeper place, from a growing recognition that we cannot know for sure what is best for another person—what they can and cannot tolerate, what they need to do, when, and why. Surely it is difficult enough to know this for one’s own self.

  The Hardest Part

  In Anita’s case, the challenge of sharing her own anxieties and issues with her hitherto focused-on mother was a manageable challenge, because she and Helen had had an open and flexible relationship before the crisis created by her grandma’s ill health. And so, sitting together on a park bench one fall afternoon, Anita began to tell Helen what had been stirred up inside her in response to the recent events. Mother and daughter were able to talk about their reactions to Grandma’s deteriorating health, and cried some together. This sharing of emotions contrasts with emotional reactivity, which is an anxiety-driven response. Anita also asked her mother directly if she, Helen, would expect the same kind of caretaking from her children in her old age that Helen was now giving to Grandma. Anita’s anxiety was much alleviated as she and her mother talked openly about the subject; Anita no longer had to float around in her own fantasies and fears.

  Easy conversations? No. But Anita had an easier job than many of us would, because the stuck relationship pattern that brought her into therapy was an acute reaction to the anxious emotional field created by Grandma’s ill health. Prior to this crisis, she and her mother had had a mature and flexible relationship where each preserved a high degree of separate self. This meant that they could listen to the other’s problems—and stay in their own skin—without rushing in to fix things and without getting too nervous about differences. They could give advice or feedback, when appropriate, but each could also relate to the competence of the other to find solutions to her own problems. They could state their own opinion on any issue, while leaving room for the view of the other. This makes the process of change about as easy as it gets. Which actually, from Anita’s perspective, was not particularly easy at all.

  At times of high stress, all of us can get stuck in an other-focused position. The process may be a temporary and circumscribed reaction, as in Anita’s case, or it may evolve into an extreme, overfunctioning-underfunctioning polarity, as in Kristen’s family. Or we may be somewhere along this continuum of acute to chronic, somewhere between “mild stuckness” and a carved-in-stone polarity.

  In my first family, my sister, Susan, and I participated in an overfunctioning-underfunctioning polarity that was linked to an issue of survival. No wonder that today, some thirty years later, it doesn’t take too much anxiety to get us back into doing our old thing. We’ve both come a long way in working on our part of the pattern, but I presume it will always be a challenge. Had the level of family anxiety been even higher and lasted longer, and had our family possessed fewer emotional resources to manage this anxiety, the challenge for us today would be greater still.

  Of course, I have a few conspicuous areas of overfunctioning, just as Susan has significant pockets of underfunctioning. Although every person has a predominant operating style, we will manage anxiety in different ways according to context and circumstance, according to the particular relationship and the specific issue at hand. For example, a woman may be an overfunctioner at work and an underfunctioner in her marriage. Or she may be a chronic distancer with her father and a chronic pursuer with men in her love life. Far from being a “contradiction,” my sister’s experience with David (Chapter 4) illustrates that a woman’s distance from her father (or more specifically, the unaddressed issues and emotionality that are managed by distance) may be what raises anxiety (managed by pursuit) in other intimate relationships.

  Anxiety continues to be a key concept in understanding how stuck our relationships will get, how resistant we (and others) will be to change, and how much change can actually be tolerated. We have seen how anxiety locks us into polarized positions in relationships, blocking productive communication and problem solving, and making intimacy impossible to achieve. Anxiety hits us from all directions, moving vertically down the generations and horizontally as we pass through life-cycle events and just plain hard times. As our next example will illustrate, a particular subject may itself carry so much anxiety that it is difficult to discuss in an open and respectful way. If a topic feels too hot to handle, we may opt for silence at the expense of authentic connectedness—or we may feel we have to make a choice between having a relationship and being a self.

  9

  Very Hot Issues: A Process View of Change

  What’s a daughter to do about a mother?

  When she’s the apple of her mother’s eye?

  Does she make her mother squirm

  By exposing the worm?

  Or does she help her mother deny?

  “The Daughter’s Song”

  Where did I go wrong?

  Am I the one to blame?

  What was it that I did to her

  To bring about this shame?

  How did it happen?

  How could it possibly be?

  That she . . . she . . . she’s

  So different

  From me?

  “The Mother’s Song”

  Lyrics by Jo-Ann Krestan

/>   Three weeks before her older sister’s wedding, Kimberly flew from Kansas City to Dallas and told her parents that she was a lesbian. Mary, her lover of three years, was with her during this self-disclosure. Kimberly’s father responded as if he had been struck across the face. He said nothing and left the room. Kimberly’s mother wept and then fired accusing questions: “Why are you telling us this?” “How can you sit here and tell me that you are a homosexual?” “Are you getting help for yourself?”

  Kimberly’s attempts to defend herself fell on deaf ears. After about ten minutes or more of the same, she told her mother that she and Mary were not prepared to listen to insults and that they would stay overnight with a friend. Kimberly left the friend’s telephone number on the kitchen table, with a note telling her parents to call if and when they were ready to discuss the subject in a civil fashion. Kimberly heard nothing. She returned to Kansas City and decided she would not recognize her parents’ existence if they would not recognize her partner and respect her life choice. She also decided not to attend her sister’s wedding, “partly for financial reasons,” as she put it. She had already spent enough money on her recent visit home.

  About six weeks later, Kimberly’s position softened. She decided to give her parents “one more chance.” She gathered together some literature on gay and lesbian issues and sent it off to Dallas, with a letter inviting reconciliation. She expressed a wish that her parents would read the material so they could confront their homophobic attitudes and adopt a more informed view.

  Kimberly’s parents opened the package and resealed and returned it without a word. They did, however, send her a birthday card the following month, signed, “Love, Mom and Dad,” but without their usual note and gift. It was at this point that Kimberly declared herself an orphan, with no further use for her parents.