she offered me to help with this rethinking:
“You have not succeeded in pleasing him so far. You are not going to please him. So please you.”
“Just act like a person would. You don’t have to get permission.”
“Find the truth in whatever ways you can.”
“Letting go is scary as hell because it involves a leap of faith.”
And I have learned so much by my work with my clients. It was their questions to me about how to handle some of these same feelings and issues that pushed me to think through the details of this work even more thoroughly and methodically and to in fact create the first draft of what is now this book.
“I felt like I gave my self away.”
The following people are fictionalized characters based on real clients with whom I have worked. The real clients are aware that they have been fictionalized and have read and approved the characters based on them. This fictionalization is intended not only to protect the confidentiality of the clients but also to protect the confidentiality of others in their stories. The essence of their issues remains accurate and clear.
Elizabeth
It is 1992. I’m working in my private practice office with Elizabeth. She is a beautiful woman of fifty-five years. She holds a doctorate degree in social work and is the director of a social services agency serving a relatively large region in our area. She is highly respected for her competence, sincerity, and reliability. She is articulate and bright and very sad. She has come to me for relationship problems. On this particular day in November we are talking about her relationship with her husband of thirty years.
Elizabeth describes a deteriorating relationship with her husband for the last five years and even more so over the last two years. “Nothing I say is right.” “I never know how he’s going to react.” “He needs to defy me, to fight with me.” “I feel attacked.”
I have inquired about his alcohol use. She reports some incidents of abuse of alcohol but is unclear about whether there is enough evidence of alcoholism.
Elizabeth is today particularly hooked by wanting to help her husband solve his problems. She is a very good problem-solver. Resourceful and creative, Elizabeth often uses these talents in constructive and desirable ways in her personal and professional life. But in her relationship with her husband, this just isn’t working out so well.
Elizabeth says that her husband comes to her complaining about problems with his real estate business. She listens and then tries to offer what might “fix” this situation. She believes that he has come to her for this. But no. When she tries to “help,” he rejects her offerings in a wide assortment of ways, all of which lead to conflict between them that sometimes gets mean, loud, and hurtful. They have been hurt, saddened, and lost by this repeating cycle of entanglement.
Today we are looking at ways to break that cycle, things Elizabeth could do differently to interrupt this deadly pattern. Yes, deadly. Though Elizabeth is not suicidal, she is quite despondent and discouraged. And though she says she would not kill her self, she does have thoughts of wishing she was dead. We know that untreated addiction can result in death or insanity. We need to acknowledge that untreated entanglements can result in the same tragic ends.
So we start to talk about emotionally backing off when these “help me/don’t help me” arguments start. We start to talk about listening and detachment. Elizabeth says to me, “Detachment is very hard for me. . . . How would you do that?”
How would you do that? How do you detach? I am struck by this basic question. I know some answers to it, thankfully, because I have been doing my own work in and out of my twelve-step program. It is both an easy and a difficult question to answer. I know that Al-Anon has given me some excellent ideas of what detachment is and when to do it. So have some of the books I have read, especially Women Who Love Too Much and Codependent No More. I know that some basic healthy communication skills also facilitate this process of detachment. I also realize that I have cultivated some of my own internal techniques for detaching as I have been working on these issues for my self. And I know how hard it is to detach even if you know ways to do it. It is very hard.
I respond to Elizabeth by verbally offering a list of ideas of ways to detach. This list is coming off the top of my head and is drawing off the resources I just described. I jot this list down very roughly as I say it. I have never put these ideas together in this concrete, pragmatic way before. The information has been developing there for a while, and I have been testing it out, but I have never laid it out for me or someone else in this way.
This feels like a good thing to be doing.
And before my work day is over, I find my self offering this list again and again, enriching it each time. Client after client asks me questions about detachment and similar emotional entanglements that have brought them to therapy. Their stories are each quite unique. Their entanglements involve different relationships. Addiction may clearly be present, or it may not be. Clients may identify them selves as adult children of people with addictions or as abused, or they may not. The way they identify themselves is not nearly as important as is their experience of losing their self in and to another person.
Anne
A few hours later, Anne comes for her appointment. She is in her late twenties, a small woman with sandy brown hair cut short and framing her face. She dresses quite fashionably and is eager to talk. She often has a smile on her face, but an edge of anger runs through much of what she has to say. We have been working together for a good while. Anne first came to see me shortly after she married. She was feeling so upset, confused, and depressed then about the angry and insecure way she felt around her husband. “He pisses me off” is a common sentence to hear from Anne.
Today Anne is focusing on her bad feelings about an important job from which she has been recently released. Anne had been working as the manager for a popular women’s clothing store. She had been very excited about this opportunity for career growth and had taken her work seriously. She had expressed concern to me, but she was not clear about all she was supposed to do and how to do it. She had described feeling overwhelmed at the store at times and feared that her boss was not satisfied with her work. Indeed, today she tells me her fears have come true, and she has been released from the store’s employment completely. She talks about wishing she had more supervision and feedback before they made their decision to ask her to leave. She is feeling angry and oh-so-bad about her self. Her feelings of failure and worthlessness are dominant. She easily recalls messages from her parents that told her that she could not make it on her own, that she should find a husband to support her and become a housewife. She is thinking this may be right after all.
Anne is asking, “Is it me? Was I wrong?” This is also a common sentence to hear from Anne. She has asked this many times as she has sorted through the issues with her husband. It is so easy for her to think it is all her problem. It is so easy for her to believe that everything would be fine if it wasn’t for her.
Now this is a good question to ask our self: “What part do I play in this problem?” And I believe we do need to do this. The problem here is that Anne, like many of us, takes on the majority, if not all, of the responsibility for the problem, whatever it may be. In so doing, we bog our self down completely with guilt, defeat, and hopelessness, which equals depression, so that we can hardly function, much less find our way out of the problem. We are lost to the totality of our self. We see only the dark and inadequate. We exaggerate the dark and inadequate. And we believe that is all there is of us.
Today Anne has lost her self to the store and to her boss with whom she worked. As Anne says, she’s