These students—two women and two men—differed in where they placed their sympathy and their blame. But as the discussion continued, it was clear that they all agreed on one essential point. We all can change and make choices. This woman does not have to hide the magazine in her dresser drawer, nor does she have to cancel her subscription to Ms. She could choose to do otherwise. That is, as one student added emphatically, “if she really wants to change.”
Let’s examine this assumption carefully, with an eye toward determining what might block this woman from altering her key relationship by changing and strengthening her own self. This understanding will help us to more fully appreciate the dilemma of change.
Now is a good time to pause and give some thought to the anonymous author (let’s call her Jo-Anne) of the letter to the editor. How do you understand Jo-Anne’s willingness to compromise so much of her self under pressure? What in her past history might have led her to this place and what in her present context might keep her there? What is the worst-case scenario—both in the short run and the long run—that Jo-Anne might envision should she do something different and clarify a position of “more self” with her husband (“I don’t expect you to like Ms. or to approve of it, but I do insist on making my own decisions about what I read”)? If the cost of change is high, what is the cost for Jo-Anne of not changing—of continuing in this same pattern over the next ten years? What adjectives might you use to describe Jo-Anne’s personality or character?
A Problem in Context
Perhaps your reaction to Jo-Anne’s dilemma is decidedly unsympathetic. You may see her as an infantile woman who enjoys being her husband’s child and who refuses to grow up and take responsibility for herself. Maybe she even likes suffering and emotional pain—you know, one of those “masochistic” types who derive a secret unconscious pleasure from their victimized position. Or Jo-Anne may be downright immature, lazy, and unmotivated—unwilling to put forth the effort that change requires. If we keep a narrow spotlight on Jo-Anne and view the problem as existing entirely under her skin, these are the kinds of interpretations we are likely to come up with.
Suppose instead, we are able to view Jo-Anne’s problem in a broader context and examine her situation through a wide-angle lens. Would any of the following facts make a difference in how you understand her decision to hide Ms. from her husband and ultimately cancel her subscription?
Would it make a difference if Jo-Anne was a middle-aged woman with three dependent children, little formal education, and no support systems or marketable skills? Would it make a difference to know that changes in the direction of “more self” would be intolerable enough to her husband that he would ultimately leave her? Does Jo-Anne’s resistance to change make more sense if we know that she is quite literally one husband away from a welfare check?
Would it make a difference if this husband’s apparent good functioning rests on Jo-Anne’s poor functioning—that whenever she begins to look better, he begins to look worse? Does it make a difference to know that her husband has a history of violent behavior, as well as severe depression—but that he has been functioning well since Jo-Anne has moved into a more accommodating, submissive role in their marriage?
Would it make a difference if in Jo-Anne’s first family there was a powerful taboo against expressing differences, and that early in life Jo-Anne learned that asserting the “I” would threaten the most important family relationships on which she depended totally?
Would it make a difference to know that in canceling her subscription to Ms. magazine, Jo-Anne is doing exactly what women in her family have done for at least three hundred years? That accommodating to one’s husband is a deep-rooted family tradition that links Jo-Anne to the important women in her past? That for Jo-Anne to do otherwise, or differently, would be to challenge the very “reality” of generations of women in her family and would constitute, at least unconsciously, a betrayal—a loss of identity and meaning?
Does any of this information, these small additional pieces of a much larger picture, change or inform your personal reaction to Jo-Anne’s decision to cancel her subscription to Ms.? Or do you think, like the psychology students, that Jo-Anne could certainly make a change within her marriage “if she really wanted to change”?
How Much We Don’t Know
All of us are psychologists of sorts, even if this is not our trade. When we are not able to make a desired change, we will construct an explanation to make sense of our painful experience. We may diagnose ourselves (“I’m scared of my sexuality, that’s why I can’t lose weight”) or the other person (“He just can’t deal with intimacy”). We may blame our mothers, our genes, our hormones, or the stars, but in each case our understanding of the problem is just a small piece of the elephant.
We actually know very little about the strong human will not to change. If Jo-Anne were to go to ten therapists—and then resist their efforts to help her become a more assertive person—she would probably be on the receiving end of ten different interpretations. Each interpretation would be based on the therapist’s own particular theory or belief system about Jo-Anne’s resistance to change. All these theories and interpretations might be wrong. Or all might be correct, with each representing a small part of a much larger and more complicated picture. We are encouraged to accept “expert advice” as truth, when in reality a great deal about human behavior is unknown.
Perhaps the best truth we have is that no expert can know with 100 percent certainty what is best for Jo-Anne at a particular point in time or what changes she can tolerate. On the one hand, the costs of nonchange are often clearly apparent. For Jo-Anne, these costs may include chronic anger and bitterness, feelings of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, or even self-hatred. They may include sexual or work inhibitions, physical complaints, or any other symptom in the book. We do know there is a price we pay when we betray and sacrifice the self, when too much of the self becomes negotiable under relationship pressures.
What is far more difficult to determine—what we cannot know completely or with certainty—is the price Jo-Anne would have to pay for change at this time. In fact, Jo-Anne herself can only begin to know this after she makes a change (“I will choose what I read in this marriage, whether you approve of it or not”) and as she holds to her decision through the inevitable turmoil and anxiety that such a change inevitably evokes. As Margaret Mead so aptly pointed out, the disruption caused by change can only be solved by more change, and so one thing leads to another. If Jo-Anne decides she will not cancel her subscription to Ms., she will begin to feel an internal pressure to take a position on other issues that are important to her. As the old marital equilibrium is disrupted, her husband will also be called upon to change. How much change can these two, as individuals and as a couple, manage over time? The answer is that we do not know.
Change requires courage, but the failure to change does not signify the lack of it. Women are quick to blame themselves—and to be blamed by others—when we are not able to make the changes that we ourselves seek or that others prescribe for us. We fail to respect the wisdom of the unconscious, which may tell us “No!” as our conscious mind says “Go!”
Keep in mind how little even the experts know about the process of change. And remember also that even the most self-defeating and problematic behavior patterns may exist for a good reason. We saw this in the brief example of seven-year-old Judy (Chapter 1). Here is a firsthand account.
The Will Not to Change: A Personal Story
When I was twelve years old, my mother was diagnosed with advanced endometrial cancer. Earlier symptoms of the disease had been misdiagnosed as menopause, and when the correct diagnosis was finally made, she was given a very poor prognosis. This was in the fifties, a time when children were typically “protected” from such painful information through secrecy and silence. No facts were provided about my mother’s health problem, although it seemed obvious that she was dying. The level of anxiety in my family was chronically
high, but the source of the anxiety was not mentioned. The word “cancer” was never spoken.
My older sister, Susan (a typical firstborn), managed her anxiety by overfunctioning, and I (a typical youngest) managed my anxiety by underfunctioning. Over time our positions became polarized and rigidly entrenched. The more my sister overfunctioned the more I underfunctioned, and vice versa. Here’s how it went.
Susan, then a freshman at Barnard College, traveled three hours each day on the subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan, returning home to organize and take care of the entire household. She cooked, cleaned, ironed, and did everything that needed to be done with perfect competence and without complaint. If she felt scared, vulnerable, angry, or unhappy, she hid these feelings, even from herself. I, on the other hand, expressed enough of these feelings for the entire family. I became as bad as she was good—creating various scenes, making impossible demands for clothes that my family could not afford, and messing things up as quickly as my sister was able to clean and straighten them. I acted up in school and my parents were informed that I would never be “college material.”
My father distanced (a typical male pattern of managing stress) and my mother handled her anxiety by focusing on me. Indeed, about 98 percent of her worry energy went in my direction. She became concerned, if not preoccupied, with the thought that I would not make it if she died. (Susan, she concluded, would do just fine.) My mother, who has always prided herself on being a “fighter” and a “survivor,” decided that for my sake, she could not die. And die she did not. Even today (as I write this, she is pushing eighty), my mother does not hesitate for a moment when she is asked how she stayed alive against all medical odds. “You see,” she explains, as if the answer is perfectly logical and merits no further explanation, “I could not die at that time. Harriet needed me. She was such a mess!”
A mess I was—and an incorrigible one at that. I was sent to a psychotherapist who did his best to straighten me out, but my unconscious will not to change was stronger than his best efforts to offer help. I remained a mess until I felt more confident that my mother was out of the woods.
Did my being a mess keep my mother alive? Recently, I called her in Phoenix and put this question to her directly. Now that our family is able to talk much more openly about difficult emotional issues, I continue to process this painful period of my life in a way that was not possible at the time. I asked my mother whether she truly believed that it was my being a mess that allowed her to live. Would she actually have died—as she now sees it—had I given her the impression that I was doing just fine?
My mother’s most honest and thoughtful reaction was to say that looking back, she really was not sure. When the cancer was diagnosed, she had “no self”; although she could give and do for her children, she could not give and do on her own behalf. At first, she explained, she was fighting the cancer 80 percent for me, and 20 percent for herself. Over time, the balance began to shift as my mother learned to value her own life and make it a priority.
Did my being a mess really allow my mother to survive? We cannot know for sure. I am confident, however, of one thing. At some unconscious level, this twelve-year-old child believed it was my job in the family to keep my mother alive by being a mess. I believed this as deeply as my sister, Susan, believed that the integrity of the family depended on her being the all-good, all-responsible daughter who would hide any sign of vulnerability and pain. I was steadfast in my unconscious determination to resist all efforts to help me shape up. And sadly, we did not have the kind of help that our family actually needed, help that would have made it possible for all four of us to process my mother’s cancer in a more open and direct way.
I have shared this story with you, and asked you to reflect on one woman’s letter to the editor, in the hope that you will approach your own attempts at change with patience. The ideas and suggestions that lie ahead will be most useful to you if you can greet them with an open, courageous, and experimental attitude. But also keep in mind that no one else can tell you what changes you should make, at what speed, and at what cost. No expert, not even your therapist, can know for certain when it is the right time for you to change, how much change is tolerable and in what doses, and how various moves forward and backward will affect your emotional well-being, your relationships, your sense of self, your moorings in this world, and your (or someone else’s) immune system.
Fortunately, the unconscious is very wise. What you read in this book will always be there for you—long after you think you have forgotten it—until the time is right for you to make use of it. Respect the fact that all you do and are now, has evolved for a good reason and serves an important purpose. Trust your own way more than the experts who promote change, myself included, because ultimately you are the best expert on your own self.
Selfhood or De-Selfing: Defining Our Terms
If our capacity for intimacy rests first and foremost on our continued efforts to be more of a self, how can we judge where we are on the “selfhood scale”? How can we measure the degree to which we are able to carve out a separate, whole, independent self within our closest relationships? Whether we call it “selfhood” or prefer a different word, such as “autonomy” or “independence,” what are the criteria for having a lot of it—or not very much? Before reading on, you might want to jot down your own standards of measurement. How do you define it? Exactly what do you mean when you say, “She (or he) is a very independent person!”
Let me begin by sharing what I do not mean when I use these words. I do not mean, “She sits on the board of General Motors.” I do not mean, “He really doesn’t seem to need other people very much.” I do not mean, “She doesn’t care what other people think of her.” I do not mean, “He has it all together—no problems.” These statements refer more to pseudo-independence than to real self. We all need people, we are all deeply affected by how other people treat us. No one is without vulnerability, anxieties, and problems. And despite its rewards, there is nothing particularly “independent” about moving up the ladder of success. In fact, success in the public domain may require a high degree of conformity and sacrifice of personal values.
If, however, we have come to believe that such is the real stuff of which independence or selfhood is made, then men may appear to have far more of it than women. That’s not the case. What is the case is that many men have more pseudo-self or pseudo-independence, often acquired at the expense of others: women, children, and less powerful men.
How, then, can we think in a more objective way about this business of “self”? How do we begin to define our term
What’s “Low” on the Selfhood Scale?
Jo-Anne’s letter to the editor provides us with an obvious example of a couple that is operating at the low end of the selfhood scale. Her husband, we can assume, is threatened by the emergence of differences in their relationship and by his wife’s own growth. His position of dominance (being the one who makes the rules in the relationship) may give him a sense of pseudo-self (or pseudo-independence), but this rests on his wife’s one-down, accommodating stance. Jo-Anne, for her part, sacrifices a great deal of self in her marriage. Surely, subscribing to Ms. is not the only issue in their relationship on which she fails to take a stand and thus behaves in ways that are not congruent with her own beliefs and values. This is not to say that this couple’s behavior is without sense or reason. In fact, this marital dance is an exaggeration of one that is encouraged and prescribed in our culture and held in place by social and economic arrangements. But it is probably clear to even the casual reader that neither husband nor wife would rate at the top of the selfhood scale.
There are other ways in which we sacrifice or lose self that are less obvious to observe or label. When anxiety is high, and particularly if it remains high over a long period of time, we are likely to get into extreme positions in relationships where the self is out of balance, and our relationships become polarized. Consider how my own family operated during the per
iod of high stress following the diagnosis of my mother’s cancer.
For starters, my own role as “the mess” in the family, or “the problem child,” was a de-selfed position. I was not able to free myself from the anxious, emotional family field in order to make use of my competence and show my strong, positive side to others. Like Jo-Anne, I believed that the integrity of my relationships, perhaps my very survival, depended on my giving up self. Unlike Jo-Anne, I could not have articulated my dilemma. I did not consciously give up self, as she did.
What about my sister? She behaved so competently, maturely, and responsibly—and so clearly seemed to have it all together—that surely she would be high on the selfhood scale. That’s how others saw it, including my parents, who viewed Susan as sailing through the crisis. And yet Susan’s overfunctioning behavior was as de-selfed as my own underfunctioning behavior. She was no higher on the selfhood scale, she was only sitting on the opposite end of the seesaw. All of us have a vulnerable side, just as all of us have strength and competence. When we cannot express both sides with some balance, then we are not operating with a whole and authentic self.
What about my father? Like many men, he distanced. This may have been his attempt at helping the family, and certainly at lowering his own anxiety. Distant people are often labeled as “having no feelings,” but distancing is actually a way of managing very intense feelings. It is also a de-selfed position. We are not high on the selfhood scale when we cannot stay emotionally connected to family members and speak directly to the important and difficult issues in our lives.
The Dance of Intimacy Page 3
