What happens if a couple remains other-focused over time? She continues to insist that the only way the relationship will improve is for him to become more responsible. He says that instead she must become less critical and more sensitive to his needs. What happens is that no change will occur. I have yet to see a relationship improve unless at least one individual can give up his or her negative or worried focus on the other and put that same energy back into his or her own life.
Every courageous act of change that I’ve described in this book, like those in our own lives, requires a move toward greater selfhood or self-focus. Whether the other party is our lover, spouse, child, sibling, parent, friend, or boss, self-focus requires us to give up our nonproductive efforts to change or fix the other party (which is not possible) and to put as much energy into working on the self. Only then can we move out of stuck patterns and create a new dance.
We need to understand, however, that self-focus does not mean self-blame. It does not mean that we view our selves as the “cause” of our problems, or that we view our struggles as being isolated from the broader context of family and culture. It certainly does not mean that we remain silent in the face of discrimination, unfairness, and injustice.
To clarify the point, let’s momentarily consider the changes brought about by the second wave of feminism. None of these changes could have occurred had we denied and disqualified our anger at men or maintained a narrow focus on the question “What’s wrong with me?” At the same time, however, feminists could not have become effective agents of change if we had gotten stuck in reactive gear and focused our primary energies on trying to transform men or make them into nicer and fairer people. The women’s movement changed and challenged all our lives because feminists recognized that if we did not clarify our own needs, define the terms of our own lives, and take action on our own behalf, no one else would do it for us. Thus, feminists began busily writing women back into language and history, establishing countless programs and services central to women’s lives, starting new scholarly journals and women’s studies programs in universities, to name just a few actions. Only in response to our changing our own selves, and to our taking individual and collective action on our own behalf, would men be called on to change.
Moving toward self-focus does not mean narrowing our perspective. To the contrary, it means viewing our intimacy problems in the broadest possible context of family and culture. This broader perspective helps us think more calmly and objectively about our situation and how we might change our own part in it. Our part in it is the only thing we can change.
Self-Focus and Humility
Self-focus requires more than an appreciation of the fact that we cannot change the other person and that doing so is not our job. It also requires a transformation of consciousness, a different worldview from what comes naturally. I refer here to the challenge of truly appreciating how little we can know about human behavior and how impossible it is to be an expert on the other person. As I emphasized at the start of this book, we cannot know how and when another person is ready to work on something and how she or he (and others) will tolerate the consequences of change. These things are difficult enough to know for our own selves. Yet in the name of love and good intentions, we readily assume an “I-know-what’s-best-for-you” attitude. This attitude precludes the possibility of intimacy and makes it much harder for other persons to assume responsibility for solving their own problems and managing their own pain.
Self-Focus and Being a Self
At the same time, we have seen that taking the focus off the other does not mean silence, distance, cutoff, or a policy of “anything goes.” Rather, it means that as we become less of an expert on the other, we become more of an expert on the self. As we work toward greater self-focus, we become better able to give feedback, to share our perspective, to state clearly our values and beliefs and then stand firmly behind them. As Adrienne and Linda’s stories have illustrated, we can do this as part of defining a self, and not because we have the answers for the other person. The following story shows another example of a woman working toward greater self-focus.
Regina’s husband, Richard, became severely depressed after losing his job and his father in the same year. He spent more and more time in bed, isolating himself from others and failing to put much effort into seeking new employment. For several months, Regina, a natural overfunctioner, organized herself around his problem. She did double-duty housework and childcare, because Richard said he couldn’t handle it. She circled help-wanted ads in the newspaper and brought Richard leads about job openings. She turned down social engagements he wished to avoid. Increasingly, she accommodated to her husband’s problem or tried to solve it. Richard’s depression persisted and worsened.
After several months, Regina was feeling exhausted and out of sorts. She told Richard that she wasn’t taking good care of herself and that she needed to make doing so a priority. She joined an exercise class, began going out with friends, and accepted social invitations even though Richard stayed home. She also stopped covering up or functioning for him. For example, when the phone rang and he said, “Tell Al I’m out. I’m too depressed to talk,” she handed him the phone and said warmly, “Tell him yourself.” When Richard insisted that she keep his depression a secret, she clarified a position she could comfortably live with. “Look, I won’t tell your mom or Al, because I figure that’s your job. But I have talked with my parents and Sue about it, because I can’t have a relationship with them and keep such a big secret.” Increasingly, Regina struggled to clarify a responsible position for herself and she stopped organizing her behavior around Richard’s symptoms and his demands.
When Richard continued to remain in hibernation, Regina walked into the bedroom one Saturday and said, “Richard, if this continues for one more week, I’m going to be so depressed myself that I’m going to crawl into that bed with you. Then this family will really be in a fix. So what are we going to do about it?”
These were not just words on Regina’s part. She really meant it. She had no answers for him, although she had a few suggestions if he were interested. What she did know was that she could not continue with the status quo for much longer, for her own sake—and out of her concern for him and the family as well. At this point she was no longer willing to keep his depression a secret from any friends or family.
Regina ended up taking a bottom-line position that Richard had to do something because she could no longer live with the situation. Richard was briefly hospitalized and then began psychotherapy. Regina was able to give him lots of space to struggle with his depression because she empathized with his pain without focusing on it. She put her primary energy into her own problems, which she shared with him. And when he initially “couldn’t listen,” she addressed this with him over time (“Rich, I hear you saying that because your problems are so much more serious than mine, my feelings don’t really count. The situation at work with Joe is real distressing to me and I need to be able to talk with you about it—if not now, then sometime soon”).
This shift from other-focus to self-focus is particularly hard for overfunctioners who truly believe that the other person will die without our help. We may not pay attention to the fact that they may be dying with our help.
Does a shift toward self-focus bring intimacy into a troubled relationship? Not in the short run. When you set new limits and boundaries, the other may not respond positively. This is true whether you are telling your husband that you will no longer pack his lunch or informing your bulimic daughter that if she vomits in the morning, she has to clean up after herself, even if it makes her late for school. A move toward “more self” in a relationship is usually followed by anxiety (our own and the other person’s) and countermoves (“How can you be so selfish?”). If we can hold to a new position, however, without distance or blame, intimacy may come later—or at least the relationship has the very best chance. But you can’t initiate a courageous act of change because the other
person will love you for it. The other person may not love you for it, at least not in the short run and possibly never.
Self-Focus and Emotional Separateness
As we become more self-focused, we define a responsible position in a relationship, based on our own values, beliefs, and principles rather than in reaction to how the other person chooses to define the relationship. As we have seen, this self-focus requires lowered reactivity and a high degree of emotional “separateness” from the other.
Consider Janine, a woman who married out of her own religion and converted to Catholicism. In response, her mother and an older brother would not attend the wedding and refused to acknowledge her as a family member. They did not respond to Janine’s attempts to explain her decision to convert, nor to her pleas for greater flexibility and tolerance on their part. Their resolve to cut her off was so firm that neither acknowledged the arrival of a new granddaughter.
Janine was ultimately able to accept her mother and brother’s decision, although she did not like it. As she gathered more information about her family history, she recognized that for several generations people in her family had cut off from each other around differences. There were two warring factions in her extended family, which included relatives who had not spoken to each other for many years. It was Janine’s job to consider whether she wished to continue this pattern of managing anxiety and pass it down through the generations.
Janine ultimately decided that the position she would take in the family was one of connectedness rather than cutoff. Although her mother and brother had proclaimed her “dead,” she sent each of them cards with brief notes on holidays, birthdays, and other life-cycle events. In these communications, she did not attempt to change their minds or move them toward reconciliation. She made clear to both her mother and brother that she understood the pain her conversion to Catholicism had brought them, and that she accepted the fact that they did not want to have a relationship with her. But she also explained that it was not possible for her to pretend she did not have a mother or brother. She simply found it too painful to deny the existence of people who were so important to her.
When Janine first decided that she would stay connected, she wrote her mother and brother a short note in which she mentioned her awareness of the many people in the family who did not speak to each other. She said that while she respected this as a necessary choice for some, she personally would feel devastated if she stopped speaking to a family member. Although Janine was clear about her own resolve to maintain some contact, she kept subsequent communications short and low-key, recognizing that to do otherwise would be to disregard the position of distance that her mother and brother had chosen to take. She also refrained from either criticizing or explaining them to other family members, thus avoiding triangles.
Four years later, Janine’s mother called her. Earlier that week she had received a fiftieth birthday card that Janine had sent. She explained to Janine that she had been sitting in church that Sunday and suddenly realized that God did not want her to reject her daughter. “It is not God’s will that I should lose a good daughter,” she said with deep emotion. Then she pulled herself together and added matter-of-factly, “Life is too short for this. I want to see my grandchild.” Janine’s brother continued to avoid her at this time.
Would this reconciliation between Janine and her mother have taken place if Janine had responded to her mother’s anger and cutoff with more anger and cutoff? We do not know. What was important was Janine’s decision to take a position of responsible connectedness rather than cutoff, whether or not her mother or brother ever spoke to her again. Janine defined a position that allowed her to feel like a more solid and responsible individual in her own family. She initiated new steps in a family dance that had been ongoing for generations. This example, like many others we have seen, illustrates the “separateness” that self-focus requires. It is a separateness that ultimately allows for a more solid connectedness with others.
Thinking About Our First Family
Slowly moving toward more connectedness rather than more distance with members of our own kinship group is one of the best insurance policies for bringing a more solid self to other relationships. When we have few connections with extended family, and one or more cutoffs with a nuclear family member (a sibling or parent), our other relationships may resemble a pressure cooker, particularly if we start a family of our own. The degree to which we are distant and cut off from our first family is directly related to the amount of intensity and reactivity we bring to other relationships.
Of course the goal is not just to move toward connectedness—meaning any kind of connectedness. Rather, the challenge is to move toward a connectedness that preserves the dignity of the self and the other, allowing for the creation of real intimacy. Each example in this book illustrates a move in such a direction, and each woman’s story is worth a careful rereading if you think it may apply to you.
Before you are inspired to plan your own courageous act of change, I suggest that you first do your own genogram (family diagram) and study it. This task may itself require courageous new behaviors, because you won’t be able to get the necessary information without reconnecting with people on your own family tree (see appendix). As I mentioned at the conclusion of the previous chapter, paying attention to your genogram will help you stay self-focused, and you’ll get a broader view of who is family, apart from the few people you interact with. Our current problems with intimacy are not “caused” by the bad things that one or two family members have done to us. They are part of a much larger, multigenerational picture of events, patterns, and triangles that have come down through many generations.
Your genogram can also help you evaluate the level of chronic anxiety in your family. How intense are the triangles? How pervasive is conflict and distance? Are there cutoffs among family members? How extreme are the overfunctioning-underfunctioning polarities?
To what extent have important issues in the family been processed and talked about? How open are the lines of communication? How much tolerance does your family have for differences? How easily do family members polarize around hot issues such as sex, religion, divorce, illness, responsibility to aging parents, and Uncle John’s drinking? Extreme positions over the generations reflect chronically high anxiety, indicating that the process of change will require very slow and small moves on your part.
A Matter of Timing
Plodding slowly forward is probably a good idea for us all. If I keep repeating this point, it is because the examples in this book are bound to invite an overly ambitious attitude. I have described changes certain women have made over a period of years, sometimes with the help of therapy, and have condensed these changes into a chapter or even into a page or two. This makes change look too easy, no matter what I say to the contrary. Do remember that courageous acts of change include, and even require, small and manageable new moves, along with inevitable frustrations and derailments. How small (and how frustrating) depends on how hot the issue, how chronic the anxiety, and how entrenched the patterns. Trying to do too much will only give us a great excuse to end up doing nothing at all. Let’s look at two brief illustrations of seemingly small moves, which required large amounts of courage.
A woman named Marsha worked in therapy for several years before she felt ready to ask her father the names and birthdates of her grandparents. Her father had been adopted at age four, after losing his mother in a flu epidemic. There were countless unanswered and unspoken questions. What happened to Marsha’s grandfather after her grandmother died? Why didn’t he—or some other family member—raise her father? What did her father know about his birth parents and their families? Marsha’s father never spoke of his past and had become overinvolved in his wife’s family. He also was vulnerable to severe depression—which Marsha was unconsciously attuned to—and the unspoken family rule was to never question Dad about his past or talk with him about anything emotionally important. On Marsha’s genogram, he
r father’s side was entirely bare in terms of biological kin.
Marsha herself was depressed and had sought therapy for this reason. She had no intimate relationships and not much sense of self. Her father was extremely intense and child-focused, reflecting the extreme degree of cutoff from his own family. Asking her dad the names and birthdates of his birth parents was a courageous act of change that was all Marsha felt ready to do for quite some time. It was, for Marsha, a significant first move toward selfhood and connectedness. She did it with her heart pounding in her chest, but she did it.
A year later (perhaps in response to changes that Marsha was making) her father began the equally courageous task of initiating a small move to track down his own roots. He had long stifled curiosity about his past out of loyalty to his adoptive parents and his profound inner trepidations about what he might discover. This prohibition under which he operated was an important factor in his depression and colored all his relationships. Although to this day he has chosen to learn “just a little bit,” this little bit may make a significant difference in his life.
When patterns are entrenched and reactivity is high, it can be useful and sometimes necessary to enlist professional help. A friend of mine named Eleanor was in an extremely rigid triangle in which her parents were legally but not emotionally divorced and the intensity between them was so high that probably nothing short of her funeral would have gotten them in the same room together. Her part in the triangle was to be in her father’s camp at the expense of a relationship with her mother, who had had multiple affairs during her marriage which she had lied about. Eleanor saw her father as the “done-in” spouse, and to wave his banner, she unconsciously sacrificed her relationship with her mother. This core triangle and Eleanor’s inability to work on having a person-to-person relationship with each parent, free from the intensity between them, affected all of Eleanor’s relationships. Eleanor’s position in the triangle also made it less likely that her parents would tackle their unfinished marital business and really separate. Triangles, once they get “fixed,” operate at everyone’s expense.
The Dance of Intimacy Page 19