When evaluating a new client for degree of independence, I consider four factors:
1. Emotional issues: Does the person have good resources within himself or herself for coping independently with emotional issues that come up, or does he or she turn to parents not only for advice, but for cues as to how to react to the event in question?
2. Financial issues: Does the adult child earn an adequate living on his or her own, or does he or she rely heavily on parental input for things such as job contacts, supplemental funds, or housing?
3. Practical issues/interactive situations: Can the person manage day-to-day living, finances, nutrition, exercise, and housekeeping?
4. Career/education issues: Does the person have a rewarding job or career that is commensurate with his or her abilities and offers the potential for further success? Is the person willing to learn new things to increase his or her productivity or compensation?
These are basic skills of living, many of which are addressed in the social ability questionnaire. Just as there are levels of social functioning, so too there are levels of independent functioning. All three of the following levels describe an adult with some degree of dependency problems. A healthy adult is someone who is independent financially, is able to manage practical and interactive issues, and who stays in touch with family but does not rely almost solely on family for emotional support.
Level 1—Low functioning
Emotional issues: Lives at home with parent(s) or away from home in a fully structured or supervised environment.
Financial issues: Contributes virtually nothing financially to the running of the household.
Practical issues: Chooses clothes to wear that day, but does not manage own wardrobe (i.e., laundry, shopping, etc.). Relies on family members to buy food and prepare meals. Does few household chores, if any. May try a few tasks when asked, but seldom follows through until the job is finished.
Career/education issues: Is not able to keep a job, and therefore does not earn an independent living. Extremely resistant to learning new skills or changing responsibilities.
Level 2: Moderately functioning
Emotional issues: Lives either at home or nearby and calls home every day. Relies on parents to discuss all details of daily life, from what happened at work or school that day to what to wear the next day. Will call home for advice rather than trying to figure something out for him- or herself.
Financial issues: May rely on parents for supplemental income—parents may supply car, apartment, etc. May be employed by parents at an inflated salary for a job with very few responsibilities. May be irresponsible about paying bills.
Practical issues: Is able to make daily decisions about clothing, but may rely on parents when shopping for clothing and other items. Neglects household responsibilities such as laundry, cleaning and meal planning.
Career/education issues: Has a job, but is unable to cope with much on-the-job stress; job is therefore only minimally challenging, or a major source of anxiety—discussed in detail with Mom and Dad.
Level 3: Functioning
Emotional issues: Lives away from home. Calls home a few times a week, relies on family for emotional support and most socializing. Few friends.
Practical issues: Handles all aspects of daily household management independently.
Financial issues: Is financially independent, pays bills on time.
Career/education issues: Has achieved some moderate success at work. Is willing to seek new information, even to take an occasional class to improve skills.
As you consider these levels of daily functioning, keep in mind that you, as a parent, may perceive a much higher degree of independence than is actually present. It may take some further investigation to determine exactly where your adult child fits in the spectrum. A single factor—a good job, nice clothes—is not enough to determine overall functioning level. What you want to consider is the extent to which your adult child relies on you to manage the activities of daily living such as household duties, financial planning and responsibilities, and basic coping and decision making. Be objective, parents! A hard look at reality may be uncomfortable, but you owe it to yourself and your child to be honest. Don’t participate in denial.
This reminds me of one woman who called me to discuss her daughter Julie, who, although she was maintaining a respectable B average at a college an hour away from home, called almost every night in tears over some new “crisis.” Her mother’s response? “Julie really needs a break from school,” she told me. “I encourage her to come home some weekends, since it’s so close. That way, she can concentrate on studying and won’t have to worry about anything else.” The occasional weekend soon became every weekend. Finally, her mother did ask Julie whether she wouldn’t rather stay on campus to have fun with her friends. But Julie just said no and quickly changed the subject.
Julie’s grades that semester were excellent, but she seemed distracted and unhappy. Her mother, still concerned about how well her daughter was coping, came to see me. After hearing her out, I told her what I thought. By reacting strongly to every new “crisis,” and encouraging Julie to hide out at home every weekend instead of attempting to manage her newly independent life on her own, this well-intentioned mother was not being supportive. “But I’m only trying to help her through a difficult time!” the mother told me. What she needed to understand was that, in smoothing things over, in letting her daughter revert to little-girlhood, this woman was encouraging dependence—and rewarding her daughter’s dependent behavior.
Separation issues often surface during young adulthood, so it was not unusual for this girl to have conflicting emotions about coping. But these issues, if not dealt with when they first arise, continue to crop up in later years. One couple contacted me about their daughter Alison, who at age thirty-one worked at her father’s small printing company. The family was close, and Alison enjoyed tagging along on outings with her parents and their friends, including a few trips with tour groups. But the couple worried that their daughter had no friends her own age and, after a few brief, unsuccessful relationships in her early twenties, had not dated at all. When I tried to point out that she was overly dependent on her parents for emotional support, her father cut me off defensively. “But she lives alone,” he said, “and she pays all her own expenses.”
“True,” I countered, “but she relies on you and your wife to initiate any social activities and vacations, and she isn’t really doing the kinds of things that people her own age like to do.” They saw my point; after all, that was why they had asked me to treat her, wasn’t it? Alison, I explained to them, didn’t socialize with her peer group because she didn’t feel she needed to. She had everything covered—her work life and her social life were all wrapped up in her parents’ lives.
Alison turned out to be a tough sell when it came time to ask her to work on her social anxiety issues. But this didn’t surprise me. As I said, with all her needs being met, why change? She would scarcely admit to anxiety, saying only that she didn’t usually get on well with people her own age. Of course she was in denial. How could it be worth forgoing a known situation—a situation that was comfortable and familiar, that she had in fact known for her entire life—for all the unknowns and anxieties of making friends and meeting men? In Chapter 2, we discussed the reasons why it is worth the trouble. People are social animals. They want friends. In time, Alison came to accept these truths.
I wasn’t surprised to meet with resistance on Alison’s part because I had seen it so many times before—even in people who come to me on their own for help. I typically encounter one of two basic attitudes in people with sociability problems: They are either cooperative or resistant. This is true for both children and adults. Parents of younger children, however, are generally even more resistant because they fear the stigma of therapy. “How come my child is in therapy? Have I failed as a parent?” (Children, too, may feel a stigma associated with being in therapy.) Parents also can become qui
te preoccupied with appearances, worrying about what kind of people are in the therapy groups, and what their parents are like. In fact, I think fear of failure is where some of the resistance over involving parents in therapy sessions comes in. Parents may be afraid of blame. But looking at these issues is not a question of blame. Rather, it is a way of letting the individual evaluate the past and present, acknowledge it, take responsibility for it, and move on.
Whether a client is cooperative or resistant, denial of the problem may be evident. In a cooperative person, someone who has come in either at someone else’s suggestion or on his own, but who truly wants his life to change, denial may be more subtle: Not “I don’t have a problem socializing” but “Of course I’d like to go to the singles group at the Y, but I’ve got too much work to do to prepare for my meeting next week.” Tricky, huh? In fact, the person who said this to me very much wanted to meet other singles but was afraid to express the desire and was even more afraid of the unknown situation and the anxiety it might cause. Still, in cooperative clients, denial isn’t as big a stumbling block, and the focus is more directly on the anxiety and the avoidance it causes.
Where there is resistance, denial is far more pronounced, and treatment usually begins not at the person’s own request but as the result of family intervention. In fact, it’s fair to say that the more denial there is, the more dependence there is likely to be. Conversations with resistant people usually sound something like this one I had with a twenty-eight-year-old man who worked part-time in a video store:
“I don’t know why my sister wanted me to come here. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Well,” I said, “your sister tells me that you don’t get out much at all, except when she and her husband ask you to a movie or something. Is that true?”
“I do go to work,” he argued. “I just don’t feel like seeing people when I’m home. What’s wrong with that?”
“She says you don’t have any friends. Do you have anybody you like to do things with?”
“I do things with her. I don’t need friends.”
I don’t need friends. I have heard this excuse literally thousands of times. The assertion is denial, plain and simple. If you don’t need something that you don’t have, why seek it? But we all need friends. If “need” makes you uncomfortable, it is enough to say that we all want friends. And it is possible for all of us to have friends, if we would only admit that we want them and then do what we can to make ourselves available for friendship.
This portion of the chapter is directed at those of you whose son or daughter or other relative is in denial about his or her social life. No matter what your relationship is to this person, you need to tell yourself—daily, if necessary—that it is okay to want this person to become independent. Right now, the person is a burden to you. It is not selfish of you to want to lessen the burden of being the sole emotional support of someone else. It is selfish of the other person to ask you to be that support. But you have every right to try to foster, nurture, even at times force a healthy independence. There is an old saying that you may want to keep in mind as you proceed: “It is better to teach someone to fish than to fish for him.” It is better, much better, to give someone the courage, strength, and skills to become socially independent than to be that person’s entire social world. You’ll feel better. And the person you care about will ultimately feel better too.
The No. 1 piece of advice that I give parents who want to help their adolescent or adult child is this: Use your influence to help your child face up to his or her anxiety. It need not be done all at once. I’m not suggesting you walk your child to the mouth of the volcano and leave him there, but you need to be the one who never falters. Your child, who suffers anxiety in social situations, will inevitably backslide from time to time. His improvement will be steady, but it will not be constant. So you have to be there to provide firm support and active, vocal encouragement throughout his journey to socialization. What I am asking you to do is nurture your child’s independence. Do not rescue him from what he fears. Do not confuse nurturing—saying to him, “I know you are afraid, but do the best you can because I believe you can succeed”—with rescuing, saying, “I know you are afraid, so I’ll call and cancel your plans and maybe you can attend that club meeting another time when you’re more ready.” Do not confuse teaching him to fish with fishing for him.
And incidentally, if temper tantrums are a part of your relationship now—those angry outbursts or the silent treatment—it is natural to fear the reaction you might get as you try to get the socially anxious family member to confront his fear. One mother I met with had a twenty-five-year-old son who was a rock drummer living at home with her. Onstage he was a captivating performer, and women paid attention to him, but on his own, he felt extremely anxious and seldom dated or socialized. When his mother asked him to get a “day job” so that he could bring some steady income to the household, he flew into a rage, and his angry outbursts became personal attacks on his mother’s ability to manage. These verbal attacks continued. They made the mother feel terrible—and terrified. Soon she became avoidant as well, in an attempt to keep the household free of conflict. But inside she was angry and hurt and wished to find a way to make her son more independent.
Temper tantrums at any age are controlling behavior. But don’t let that kind of acting out undermine your commitment to nurturing your child’s independence. Don’t allow your anxiety as a parent—fears of what will happen if you take action now—keep you from thinking about her future and what will happen to her once you are gone and she has no choice but to live independently. One of my clients left the program with her father’s blessing after just a few months of participation. How did she persuade him to let her stop coming? Although I had warned him that Jenny would be extremely resistant to change, her father could not withstand her verbal assaults against him. As basic issues were raised, Jenny began acting out her anger and defiance. Her father simply couldn’t cope. “If this is the result,” he told me, “I’d rather assist her in living her own quiet, isolated life. I can’t take it.” Fear of retaliation—emotional or physical—does occasionally keep parents from intervening. But careful planning can make intervention more bearable. If you as a parent are especially resistant to suggesting change in your socially anxious child, follow the guidelines later in this chapter to firm up your own commitment (see p. 69), and then arm yourself with the stress management techniques outlined in Chapter 6.
“HE’LL GROW OUT OF IT”
I have seen this confusion take its toll in socially anxious children of all ages. Six-year-old Jimmy, for instance, was singled out by his elementary school physical ed teacher for his skill at tumbling. His proud mother signed him up for Saturday gymnastics classes at the local recreation center. When he went to the first class, he felt anxious and clung nervously to his mother, who stayed for the full one-hour session. When the next week’s class rolled around, Jimmy cried and said he didn’t want to go. His mother’s response? “Okay, if you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.” End of story, but the beginning of a lifetime of rescuing or enabling interaction between mother and son.
I don’t advocate forcing a child to attend enrichment programs that don’t interest him. It would not have been better for Jimmy’s mother to tell him, “You’re going to gymnastics and I don’t want to hear anything more about it.” That would have scared him even more, and made him feel further out of control. Instead, it would have been good for Jimmy—and his mother—to discuss why he didn’t want to go. Can a conversation about feelings be of any benefit when the anxious person is all of six years old? You bet. Let’s imagine:
“Why don’t you want to go to gymnastics class today, Jimmy?”
“I just don’t feel like it.”
“You don’t like tumbling anymore?”
“I like tumbling but I don’t like balance beam. They make you do balance beam there.”
“Why don’t you like the balance be
am?”
“I think I’ll fall off because I don’t know how to do it.”
“If the teacher showed you how to do it, would that be okay?”
“Yeah, but I wish Mr. Graham would show me.”
“But he’s your P.E. teacher at school. Miss Lacy is your teacher at the rec center.”
“I don’t like her.”
“Why not?”
“She’s new.”
Fair enough. By having a conversation with Jimmy, his mother finds out that he is worried about two things: that he doesn’t know how to use the balance beam (this may mean he’s afraid of getting hurt, but more likely that he’s afraid of being humiliated in front of the new teacher, and all the new kids in the class) and that his teacher is “new” and unfamiliar to him. What can Jimmy’s mother do with this information? Without a lot of extra effort, she can try to smooth the way for Jimmy by arriving a few minutes early to let him get to know Miss Lacy. If Jimmy is still hesitant, she can tell him they are going to stop in to see her for just a minute, and that if he doesn’t want to stay, he can decide then. Miss Lacy may even have a minute to talk to him about the balance beam. Chances are, once Jimmy feels comfortable with the new situation, he will feel much less anxiety. And his mother has done more than just get him to attend gymnastic classes. She has shown him that it is okay to talk about your fears, and that there are steps to take to help confront them.
BEYOND SHYNESS Page 6