Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

by Harriet Lerner

  We repeated this same fight, in its same form, countless times over the next six months as our son continued even more conspicuously not to do what the book said he should be doing. The psychologist who tested him at nine months (at my initiation) said that he was, in fact, quite slow in certain areas but that it was too early to know what this meant. She suggested that we wait a while and then consult with a pediatric neurologist if we were still concerned.

  Steve and I became even more rigidly polarized in our fights, and we fought with increasing frequency. Like robots, we took the same repetitive positions, and the sequence unfolded as neatly as clockwork: The more I expressed worry and concern, the more Steve distanced and minimized; the more he distanced and minimized, the more I exaggerated my position. This sequence would escalate until it finally became intolerable, at which point each of us would angrily point the finger at the other for “starting it.”

  We were stuck. Our years of psychological training and intellectual sophistication went down the drain. It was clear enough that what each of us was doing only provoked a more vehement stance in the other. Yet, somehow, neither Steve nor I was able to do something different ourselves.

  “Your baby is fine,” a top pediatric neurologist in Kansas City reported blandly. Our son was almost a year old. “He has an atypical developmental pattern. There are certain babies who don’t do much of anything until they walk.” Sure enough, our son began to walk (right on schedule, no less) without having crawled, scooted, or in any way moved about preceding this. And so ended our chronic repetitive fights.

  Later, we were able to recognize the unconscious benefits we got by maintaining these fights. Fighting with each other helped both of us to worry a little less about our son, and deflected our attention from other concerns we had about becoming new parents. But what was most impressive at the time was how irrevocably stuck we were. We both behaved as if there was only one “right” way to respond to a stressful situation in the family, and we engaged in a dance in which we were trying to get the other person to change steps while we would not change our own. The outcome was that nothing changed at all.

  GETTING STUCK—GETTING UNSTUCK

  How do couples get stuck? The inability to express anger is not always at the heart of the problem. Many women, like myself, get angry with ease and have no difficulty showing it. Instead, the problem is that getting angry is getting nowhere, or even making things worse.

  If what we are doing with our anger is not achieving the desired result, it would seem logical to try something different. In my case, I could have changed my behavior with Steve in a number of ways. Surely, it was clear to me that my anxious expressions of worry only provoked his denial, which then provoked more worry on my part. For example, I might have taken my worry to a good friend for several weeks and stopped expressing it to Steve. Perhaps then Steve would have had the opportunity to experience his own worry. Or, I might have approached Steve at a time when we were close, and shared with him that I was worrying a lot about our baby and that I hoped for his help and support as I struggled with this. Such an approach would have been quite different from my usual behavior, which involved speaking out at the very height of my anxiety and then implying that Steve was at fault for not reacting the same way as I. Steve, too, might easily have broken the pattern of our fights by doing something different himself. For example, he might have initiated a talk in which he expressed concern for our son.

  We all recognize intellectually that repeating our ineffective efforts achieves nothing and can even make things worse. Yet, oddly enough, most of us continue to do more of the same, especially under stress. For example, a wife who lectures her husband about his failure to stay on his diet increases the intensity or frequency of her lectures when he overeats. A woman whose lover becomes cooler when she angrily presses him to express feelings presses on even harder, her problem being not that she is unable to get angry but that she’s doing something with her anger that isn’t working and yet keeps doing it.

  Even rats in a maze learn to vary their behavior if they keep hitting a dead end. Why in the world, then, do we behave less intelligently than laboratory animals? The answer, by now, may be obvious. Repeating the same old fights protects us from the anxieties we are bound to experience when we make a change. Ineffective fighting allows us to stop the clock when our efforts to achieve greater clarity become too threatening. Sometimes staying stuck is what we need to do until the time comes when we are confident that it is safe to get unstuck.

  Sometimes, however, even when we are ready to risk change, we still keep participating in the same old familiar fights that go nowhere. Human nature is such that when we are angry, we tend to become so emotionally reactive to what the other person is doing to us that we lose our ability to observe our own part in the interaction. Self-observation is not at all the same as self-blame, at which some women are experts. Rather, self-observation is the process of seeing the interaction of ourselves and others, and recognizing that the ways other people behave with us has something to do with the way we behave with them. We cannot make another person be different, but when we do something different ourselves, the old dance can no longer continue as usual.

  The story of Sandra and Larry, a couple who sought my help, is a story about getting unstuck. While the content of their struggles may or may not hit home, the form of the dance they do together is almost universal. For this couple, like many, was caught in a circular dance in which the behavior of each served to maintain and provoke that of the other. Once we are part of an established twosome—married or unmarried, lesbian or straight—we may easily become caught in such a dance. When this happens, the more each person tries to change things, the more things stay the same.

  SANDRA AND LARRY

  “Well, how do each of you see the problem in your marriage?” I inquired. It was my first meeting with Sandra and Larry, who had requested marital therapy at Sandra’s initiative. My eyes fell first on Larry and then on Sandra, who quickly picked up the invitation to speak. She turned her body in my direction and cupped her hands against her face. Like blinders, they blocked Larry from her view.

  With unveiled anger in her voice, Sandra listed her complaints. It was evident that she had told her story before. It was also evident that she thought the “problem” was her husband.

  “First of all, he’s a workaholic,” she began. “He neglects the kids and me. I don’t even think he knows how to relate to us anymore. He’s a stranger in his own family.” Sandra paused for a moment, drew a deep breath, and continued: “He acts like he expects me to run the house and deal with the kids all by myself, and then when something goes wrong, he tells me I’m crazy to be reacting so emotionally. He’s not available and he never expresses his feelings about things that should worry him.”

  “When Larry comes home, and you’re upset about something at home, how do you ask for his support and help?” I asked.

  “I tell him that I’m really upset, that I’m worried about our money situation, and that Jeff is sick, and that I had to miss my class, and that I’m going nuts with the baby today. But he just looks at me and criticizes me that the dinner isn’t ready, or tells me that I’m overreacting. He always says, ‘Why do you get so damn emotional about everything?’ He makes me want to scream!”

  Sandra fell silent and Larry said nothing. After several minutes, Sandra continued, her anger now laced with tears: “I’m tired of being at the bottom of his list of priorities. He hardly ever takes the initiative to relate to me and he neglects the kids, too. And then, when he does decide that he wants to be a father, he just takes over like he’s the only one in charge.”

  “For example?” I asked.

  “For example, he goes out and buys Lori, our oldest daughter, this expensive dressing table that she’s had her eye on, and he doesn’t even consult me! He just tells me after the fact!” Sandra is now glaring at Larry, who refuses to meet her eye.

  “When Larry does something that you
disapprove of, like the dressing-table incident, how do you let him know?”

  “It’s impossible!” Sandra said emphatically. “It’s simply impossible!”

  “What is impossible?” I persisted.

  “Talking to him! Confronting him! He doesn’t talk about feelings. He doesn’t know how to discuss things. He just doesn’t respond. He clams up and wants to be left alone. He doesn’t even know how to fight. Either he talks in this superlogical manner, or he refuses to talk at all. He’d rather read a book or turn on the television.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I think I understand how you see the problem.” It was Larry’s turn now: “How do you define the problem in your marriage, Larry?”

  Larry proceeded to speak in a controlled and deliberate voice that almost masked the fact that he was as angry as his wife: “Sandra isn’t supportive enough, she doesn’t give enough, and she’s always on my back. I think that’s the main problem.” Larry fell silent, as if he was finished for the day.

  “In what ways does Sandra fail to support you or give to you? Can you share a specific example?”

  “Well, it’s hard to say. She cuts me down a lot, for one thing. Or, I walk in the door at six o’clock, and I’m tired and wanting some peace and quiet, and she just rattles on about the kids’ problems or her problems, or she just complains about one thing or another. Or, if I sit down to relax for five minutes, she’s on my back to discuss some earthshaking matter—like the garbage disposal is broken.” Larry was angry, but he managed to sound as if he was discussing the Dow-Jones average.

  “Are you saying that you need some space?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” replied Larry. “I’m saying that Sandra is very overreactive. She’s very overemotional. She creates problems where they don’t even exist. Everything is a major case. And, yes, I suppose I am saying that I need more space.”

  “What about the kids? Do you—“ I had not finished my question when Larry interrupted:

  “Sandra is a very overinvolved mother,” he explained carefully, as if he were describing a patient at a clinical conference. “She worries excessively about the children. She inherited it from her mother. And, if you could meet her mother, you would understand.”

  “Do you worry about the kids?” I inquired.

  “Only when there’s something to worry about. For Sandra, it seems to be a full-time job.”

  Although one would not have guessed it from this first session, Sandra and Larry were deeply committed to each other. At our initial meeting, however, they appeared to share only one thing in common—blaming. Like many couples, each spouse saw the locus of his or her marital difficulties as existing entirely within the other person, and each had the same unstated goal for marital therapy—that the other would be “fixed up” and “straightened out.”

  Let’s take a closer look at the details of Sandra and Larry’s story, for there is much to be learned. Though couples differ markedly in how they present themselves, the ways in which they get stuck are very much the same.

  “He Just Doesn’t Respond!”

  “She’s Very Overemotional!”

  Sound familiar? Sandra and Larry’s central complaints about each other will ring a bell for many couples. His unfeelingness, unavailability, and distance is a major source of her anger: “My husband withdraws from confrontation and cannot share his real feelings.” “My husband is like a machine.” “My husband refuses to talk about things.” “My husband is more invested in his work than in his family.” And it is no coincidence that men have a reciprocal complaint: “My wife is much too reactive.” “She gets irrational much too easily.” “I wish that she would back off and stop nagging and bitching.” “My wife wants to talk everything to death.”

  As typically happens, the very qualities that each partner complains of in the other are those that attracted them to each other to begin with. Sandra, for example, had been drawn to Larry’s orderly, even-keel temperament, just as he had admired her capacity to be emotional and spontaneous. Her reactive, feeling-oriented approach to the world balanced his distant, logical reserve—and vice versa. Opposites attract—right?

  Opposites do attract, but they do not always live happily ever after. On the one hand, it is reassuring to live with someone who will express parts of one’s own self that one is afraid to acknowledge; yet, the arrangement has its inevitable costs: The woman who is expressing feelings not only for herself but also for her husband will indeed end up behaving “hysterically” and “irrationally.” The man who relies on his wife to do the “feeling work” for him will increasingly lose touch with this important part of himself, and when the time comes that he needs to draw upon his emotional resources, he may find that nobody’s at home.

  In the majority of couples, men sit on the bottom of the seesaw when it comes to emotional competence. We all know about the man who can tie good knots on packages and fix things that break, yet fails to notice that his wife is depressed. He may have little emotional relatedness to his own family and lack even one close friend with whom honest self-disclosure takes place. This is the “masculinity” that our society breeds—the male who feels at home in the world of things and abstract ideas but who has little empathic connection to others, little attunement to his own internal world, and little willingness or capacity to “hang in” when a relationship becomes conflicted and stressful. In the traditional division of labor, men are encouraged to develop one kind of intelligence, but they fall short of another that is equally important. The majority underfunction in the realm of emotional competence, and their underfunctioning is closely related to women’s overfunctioning in this area. It is not by accident that the “hysterical,” overemotional female ends up under the same roof as the unemotional, distant male.

  The marital seesaw is hard to balance. When couples do try to balance it, especially under stress, their solutions often exacerbate the problem. The emotional, feeling-oriented wife who gets on her husband’s back to open up and express feelings will find that he becomes cooler and even less available. The cool, intellectual husband who tries calmly to use logic to quiet his overemotional wife will find that she becomes even more agitated. True to stereotype, each partner continues to do the same old thing while trying to change the other. The solution for righting the balance becomes the problem.

  DOING THE “FEELING WORK” FOR LARRY

  Sandra had long been furious at Larry’s lack of reactivity without realizing her own part in the circular dance. She failed to recognize that she was so skilled and comfortable in expressing feelings that she was doing the job for the two of them, thus protecting her husband from feeling what he would otherwise feel. Doing the “feeling work,” like cleaning up, has long been defined as “woman’s work,” and lots of women are good at it. As with cleaning up, men will not begin to do their share until women no longer do it for them.

  Although it was not her conscious intent, Sandra helped Larry to maintain his underemotional stance by expressing more than her share of emotionality. The unconscious contract for this couple was that Sandra would be the emotional reactor and Larry the rational planner. And so, Sandra reacted for Larry. She did so in response not only to family stresses that concerned them both but also to problems that were really Larry’s to struggle with. Here are two examples of how Sandra protected Larry by doing the feeling work for him:

  An Injustice on the Job

  One evening when Larry returned from work, he told Sandra that a co-worker had gotten credit for an idea that was originally his. As he began to outline the details of the incident, Sandra became upset and expressed her strong anger at the injustice. As her emotional involvement in the incident increased, she noticed that Larry was becoming cooler and more removed. “Aren’t you upset about this?” she demanded. “It’s your life, you know! Don’t you have any feelings about it?”

  Of course Larry had feelings about it. It was his career and the injustice had been done him. However, his style of reacting, as well as
his tempo and timing, was very different from his wife’s. Also, Larry was using Sandra to react for him. Her quick outburst actually took him off the hook. He did not have to feel upset about the incident because she was doing all the work. The more emotion Sandra displayed, the less Larry felt within himself.

  Sandra was consciously angry and frustrated at Larry’s apparent lack of feelings about the incident, yet she was unconsciously helping him to maintain his strong, cool, masculine position. By criticizing him for not showing feelings and demonstrating the appropriate degree of distress, she was applying a solution that only reinforced the very problem she complained of. Sandra could not make Larry react differently. However, she could do something different herself. When Sandra stopped doing the feeling work for Larry, the circular dance was broken.

  It was not easy for Sandra to change her behavior, but eventually she did make an important shift: Sometime later, when Larry shared a crisis at work, Sandra listened calmly and quietly. She did not express feelings that appropriately belonged to Larry, nor did she offer solutions to a problem that was not hers. Given sufficient time and space around him, Larry did, indeed, begin to react to his own problem and struggle with his own dilemma. In fact, he became depressed. But, while this was the very reaction Sandra had overtly sought and wished for (“That cool bastard doesn’t react to anything!”), she was uncomfortable seeing her husband vulnerable and struggling. She realized, to her surprise, that part of her wanted Larry to maintain the role of the cool, strong, unruffled partner.