The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  For several years prior to “D-Day,” as Kimberly later called it, she had been wanting to share her lesbian identity with her parents, especially her mother. Although a previous therapist had encouraged her not to tell (“Your parents don’t tell you about their sex life. Why do you feel this compulsion to tell them about yours?”), Kimberly nonetheless found herself moving in the direction of coming out. She was aware that keeping such a big secret from her family ensured that her relationships with both parents could only remain distant and superficial, colored by silence and lies. Her invisibility as a part of a couple also affected her relationship with Mary as well.

  Kimberly’s secret from her family was hardly a circumscribed one involving only “sexual preference,” meaning with whom she was sleeping or to whom she was attracted. Her lesbian identity also included her primary emotional commitments, her choice of a woman-centered life-style, and the everyday details of living, both large and small: from whom she vacationed with and how she spent her free time, to her recent role as an active organizer in the lesbian community. The long-term effects of staying closeted not only precluded the possibility of authentic emotional contact with family members but slowly eroded Kimberly’s sense of dignity and self-regard, as well. It also diminished her energies and joy (as holding secrets always does) in small, imperceptible, but cumulative ways and negatively affected her relationship with Mary.

  Kimberly’s decision to come out was an act of courage. Choosing not to come out, however, does not signify an absence of the same. As I said earlier, no one can predict the consequences of change—not for ourselves and surely not for others. We do not know how much change is tolerable for an individual at a particular time, nor how much anxiety she or he can sit with. We cannot really know another person’s story. For several years Kimberly had resisted pressures from her friends to come out to her family. Her resistance was also an act of courage, because Kimberly could recognize that she was not emotionally ready or prepared to make this announcement.

  Coming Out: A Woman’s Issue

  Let’s look more carefully at Kimberly’s situation, because coming out is an issue for all women. We all have emotionally charged issues in our family that are difficult to address. We all may find ourselves confronting a choice between authenticity and harmony in a particular relationship. We all have to deal with powerful countermoves and “Change back!” reactions—both from within and without—if we define the “I” apart from the roles and rules of family and culture. And we all, by virtue of being female, have learned to please and protect relationships by silencing, sacrificing, and betraying the self.

  Kimberly’s experience will allow us to consolidate some of the lessons we have already learned about defining the “I.” Her story teaches us what we can prepare for when we bring up any emotionally loaded issue and try to process it with our significant others. It reminds us of the dilemma of differences which always threaten as they inform—and which implicitly question the assumptions of the similar. We can count on the subject of lesbianism to be an especially loaded difference for families in our homophobic society.

  Keep in mind that emotionally loaded issues come in every shape and form. Some issues, such as incest, are obviously intense. Other issues may not seem that hot from an outsider’s perspective (“Mom, I’ve decided to leave the church”) but may feel totally untouchable to a particular individual in a particular family. For Adrienne, the facts and feelings surrounding the decision to institutionalize Greg made it an emotionally explosive issue. For Jo-Anne, our anonymous letter writer in Chapter 2, a statement to her husband that she planned to continue her subscription to Ms. magazine might be akin to “coming out” and feel no less dangerous. Sometimes a straightforward, factual question (“Dad, how did Uncle Bill actually die?”) may take years to lead up to.

  Why would we even bother to think about tackling a hot issue that no one wants to talk about? Why would we share something or ask something that makes us feel like we are dropping an emotional bomb on our family? Often, we won’t. Sometimes, however, our failure to share something—or ask something—greatly impairs our experience of self, our sense of esteem and worth, and our ability to be intimate with significant others. Once again, intensity from a key family relationship does not go away when we manage it through distance and cutoff. It only goes underground.

  How do we open up a difficult subject in a way that is ultimately healing, laying the groundwork for greater closeness? How do we avoid a confrontation that only evokes more reactivity and cutoff? These are the questions that Kimberly did not think about before she flew home to make her announcements.

  “D-Day” Revisited

  Kimberly came for therapy nine months after D-Day. The birthday card from her parents was their last communication and Kimberly was still furious at their response. She sought my help because she had heard I was an “anger expert”—and she was angry. At the same time, she was not motivated to reconnect with her family. She just wanted to “work through her anger,” whatever that meant—preferably without ever having to do anything differently with the people involved.

  Kimberly told me that she had disclosed her lesbianism to her parents in hopes of having “real relationships” with them, rather than distant and dishonest ones. But instead of a shifting toward greater intimacy, their relationships had moved from distance to more distance, and now into a period of cold war. What process had occurred—or failed to occur?

  It a Process!

  Although Kimberly knew better intellectually, she thought of coming out as something she would go home and “do” (“Well, I’ve done it!”) rather than as the first small step in a long-term process. She confused her parents’ initial response with what might come later from her efforts. Kimberly did not have a process view of change. In fact, she did not even have an objective view of her own process. There were many years between Kimberly’s first acknowledgment of her own different and “bad” feelings and her ultimate positive acceptance of her emotional and sexual orientation to women.

  As we have seen, the predictable response to substantive change is increased anxiety followed by countermoves (“Change back, or else . . .”). If we are serious about the work, we need to anticipate countermoves and plan to manage our own reactivity in the face of them. Countermoves (“You don’t mean that!” “How can you be so selfish!”) do not mean that our efforts toward change are misguided or have failed. It simply means that the process of change is proceeding along normal lines. It is our job to hold our ground in the face of countermoves, without becoming defensive, without trying to convince others to think or feel differently, and without cutting off.

  Counting on Countermoves

  Margie, a twenty-six-year-old woman I saw in therapy, said she felt like she was “coming out” when she began to share some of her troubles with her mother. Margie’s label in her first family was “Little Miss Sunshine.” For as far back as she could remember, she was the “Always-Happy-Child” who would give her mother nothing to worry about, unlike her father who was addicted to gambling and repeatedly involved in unwise business ventures. It was clear that her mother was highly reactive to the slightest sign of distress in her daughter and was unable to relate to Margie’s competence to manage the sadness and depression that life’s circumstances inevitably evoke.

  Margie’s earliest memory was of returning from kindergarten feeling tearful and rejected because her classmates had made fun of her. She wanted to be alone in her room, but her mother came in and “grilled her” about her feelings, trying desperately to lift Margie’s spirits. When Margie became even more upset, her mother burst into tears herself. As it turned out, her mother’s brother had committed suicide in his twenties and two other family members had received the diagnosis of manic-depressive illness. An underground issue in this family was her mother’s fear that she might have passed on the “depression gene” or “suicide gene” to her daughter. It was Margie’s job in the family to not show depression so
as not to worry her mother.

  When Margie began therapy she was in a polarized arrangement in which her live-in lover was the depressed one. Margie overfocused on him and overfunctioned for him. She worked in therapy for more than two years to understand the legacy and meaning of “depression” in her own family before she was ready to experiment and slowly share with her mother a bit of her more vulnerable side.

  At first, for as long as a year or more, Margie’s mother disqualified or minimized Margie’s self-disclosures, sometimes changing the topic when Margie shared a small piece of her underfunctioning side. Only gradually did the lines of communication open up around the hot issues of depression and suicide. Even now, four years later, at times of high anxiety Margie’s mother will revert to her old pattern (“Just get more sleep and you won’t feel sad, honey!”) and Margie can gently tease her about it. To an outsider, Margie made “small changes” (“What’s the big deal about telling your mother that you had a lousy week?”). For Margie, though, because she was a severe overfunctioner, the change was monumental. This first step helped her to modify her overfunctioning position with her lover and ultimately enlarged her capacity for genuine closeness.

  Margie could not have initiated or sustained this change without keeping the long-term process in mind. Nor could she have navigated the change if she had insisted on moving in with a big bang (for example, a heavy confrontation or “deep discussion” with her mother) rather than moving in slowly and in low-key fashion, counting on countermoves that were as sure as the sunrise.

  Resistance from Within

  In Kimberly’s case, she opted for cutoff, in part because she really did not want to process the issue of her lesbianism. Her resistance was quite normal and was manifested by her decision to “orphan herself” after receiving the birthday card signed, “Love, Mom and Dad.” Considering the context, this card was a small but significant move toward connectedness by her parents—to which Kimberly responded with anger and more distance. That was Kimberly’s countermove to change.

  Processing a loaded issue is not easy. Not only must we define our own position clearly over time, which in Kimberly’s case would include some sharing of both the joys and the hardships of being gay, but we must also listen to the other person’s reaction without getting too anxious about differences and without rushing in to change or fix things. It means keeping our own reactivity in check.

  When Kimberly finally did begin to process the issue with her mother, she found it hard to sit still through her mother’s expressions of disappointment and pain. On the one hand, her mother’s reactions were entirely predictable, given the negative attitudes toward homosexuality that her mother had absorbed. And in our mother-focused culture, it was no surprise that Kimberly’s mother was waking up in the middle of the night obsessed with worry that she had “caused” her daughter’s “illness.”

  But there was more than this. Kimberly’s mother also grieved the loss of the unfolding of the generations, as she knew it, as well as the loss of her illusions about her daughter and her images of Kimberly’s life. This sudden and forced recognition of profound difference felt to her at first like the severing of her own ties into the future, like the “end of the line,” as she put it. That she could identify and express these feelings was ultimately useful. Had she responded only with false liberalism and glib acceptance (“It makes no difference to us that you’re gay, honey. We just love you for who you are”), mother and daughter would have lost the opportunity to process the issue before them and to ultimately arrive at a deeper and more authentic dialogue.

  Kimberly and her mother could talk together only after Kimberly was able to calmly invite her mother to share her reactions (“Mom, what is the hardest thing for you about my being gay?”) and to hear her out over time without becoming critical or defensive. This happened at first through letters, which gave both parties a little more time and space to cool off and think about their own reactions. Only later did Kimberly’s mother express an interest in looking through the material that Kimberly had sent her before.

  Laying the Groundwork

  When Kimberly first revealed her lesbianism, things got off to a particularly difficult start because she opened up the subject in the context of an extremely distant relationship with both her parents. In fact, before D-Day, she almost never discussed personal matters with them. Whether it was good news (organizing a poetry reading at a local university) or bad news (being in a car accident that left her unharmed but badly shaken), Kimberly did not share important information with her family. Distance was the name of the game.

  Earlier, I mentioned that you cannot learn to swim by jumping off the high dive. This is particularly true when it comes to emotionally loaded issues. Before bringing up a big one, we need to practice bringing up the small ones. And then the medium ones. It may take us several years before we can even picture ourselves in the same room with that other person, talking about the weather.

  At Glacial Speed

  The more intense the issue and the greater the degree of cutoff, the more slowly one moves. For example, many years ago I began working with a woman named Rayna who came to see me because she was unable to enjoy sex with her steady boyfriend. She related the problem to a history of incest which began when she was eleven. More specifically, she had participated in sex play—twice leading to intercourse—with a brother who was seven years her senior.

  For the first couple of years in therapy, Rayna worked on processing this incident and putting it in a broader family context. The incest had been one of a number of things that had happened in this family following a traumatic period of multiple losses and an unexplained disappearance in the extended family. Rayna also began reading about incest and attending lectures on it, and she joined a group of incest survivors. During the third year of our work together, Rayna was able to make some initial contact with this brother, starting with sending a Christmas card and later birthday cards to his children. A year later, she stopped briefly at her brother’s home for lunch during a cross-country trip and spent two hours with him. A splitting headache preceded the visit, however, and severe back spasms followed it—perhaps signals from Rayna’s unconscious that she was attempting too much too soon.

  To make a long story short, it was many years before Rayna had established enough contact with her brother to open up and process the issue of incest. Rayna first wrote him a note saying that she had been thinking of many painful events that had happened in their family when she was young, including some between the two of them, and she wanted to talk with him about this at some point. Later, she sat down with him and brought up the subject directly. How did he understand that such a thing could happen in their family? Why did he think it had occurred? How did he make sense of it? Did he still think about it? How had it affected him?

  Rayna had prepared herself for the worst-case scenario (“He could deny it and tell me I’m crazy”) and had thought about how she would handle this if it occurred—which it didn’t. Finally, she clearly let her brother know that she still struggled with this part of her past. She shared that she had been in therapy for years, trying to work through what had happened, and she told him that the incest continued to diminish her self-esteem and influence her relationships with men.

  Later on, Rayna and her brother were able to talk about their family and the broader, troubled context in which the incest occurred. At the same time, Rayna did not back down from the matter of individual responsibility. When her brother said, “Well, you didn’t stop me,” Rayna told him how she saw it. “Look,” she said, “I’ve struggled with terrible guilt about this and I’ve blamed myself for many years. But I did not initiate sex—and I was eleven and you were eighteen. To me, that is an important difference. I no longer accept the verdict of guilty, although I still struggle with the feelings.” In a later letter she elaborated:

  I know that what happened between us did not occur in a vacuum. I’ve given lots of thought to the things that were h
appening in our family when the incest began. I’ve also given lots of thought to what men learn in our society, and how they are taught to dominate women and see women as existing for them, sexually and otherwise. I know this is all part of the picture. But I want to be very clear with you that I believe you were responsible for your own actions. If I deny this, or try to deny the anger that I still feel toward you, it will be all the harder for me to work on having a relationship with you. And as painful as it is to try to work this through, it would ultimately be more painful for me to pretend that I don’t have a brother.

  If the incest had been perpetrated by Rayna’s father, the anxiety would have been greater still and Rayna would have moved even more slowly, allowing more time to process the trauma in therapy and understand its occurrence within the larger family context. Moving at glacial speed in the face of very high anxiety is the optimal way to proceed. Rather than signifying a lack of strength or perseverance, moving slowly—or sometimes not moving at all—may be necessary to preserving and protecting the well-being and integrity of the self.

  Back to the Source

  Is it really necessary or even helpful to process a traumatic event or a loaded issue at the source? Why can’t we work it all through in a safe and supportive environment such as that provided by therapy or a women’s group? These are places to begin—and many of us will end there too. The gains can be considerable. I believe, however, that in the long run we will do better if we can move slowly toward some carefully planned contact and eventually unearth the issue with the other person who was directly involved. The next generations, our children and grandchildren, will also reap the gains.