And so I was on the phone again with my mother and sister, asking questions about the legacy of health issues and “worry” on our family tree. I felt somewhat chagrined by my failure to connect my worry about Matthew to my own misdiagnosis with diabetes years earlier. And only two weeks before the ball game, a routine physical had revealed sugar in my urine. I had seen an endocrinologist, who diagnosed my condition as glucose intolerance.
Another obvious factor (which I had not thought about) was that my mother’s diagnoses of cancer and diabetes had occurred the same year and were thus mixed up in my mind, just as I was prone (as are we all) to mixing myself up with my mother—and with my children. And when I took out my genogram (family tree) to study a bit more, I also realized why diabetes was a loaded issue for me and why “survival” anxieties had surfaced during this particular month. The details of my family history are only important here in that they enabled me to put my emotional energy back into my own issues. We all have important emotional issues—and if we don’t process them up the generations, we are more than likely to pass them on down.
A Familiar Lesson
Kids aside, we are always in triangles of one sort or another because we always have “stuff” from our first family (as well as elsewhere) that we are not paying attention to and that may overload other relationships. Throughout this book, we have examined how we detour anxiety and emotionality from one relationship to another. Seeing the process in our own lives, however, is no easy matter, and working on it is even harder.
Working on triangles means more than identifying and addressing issues with our first family that fuel anxiety elsewhere. It also means observing and modifying our current role in key family triangles. Sometimes a triangle will last only a day, a week, or several months, as the examples in this chapter illustrate. But any relationship pattern can become chronically stuck if we don’t become calm enough to examine our part in it.
Let’s look now at an entrenched family triangle where anxiety was chronically high and where an underfunctioning overfunctioning polarity had been in high gear for as long as anyone could remember. We’ll also think a bit more about our own position in triangles, which should help us further understand the fine points of the overfunctioning-underfunctioning dance.
11
Bold New Moves: The Story of Linda
Linda, a twenty-eight-year-old financial planner, came to see me with the goal of working on her “poor judgment with men.” One week after her first appointment, however, a family crisis placed another matter at the top of the agenda. Her younger sister, Claire, was acting depressed and, according to her mother, was leaving her apartment a mess and eating poorly. Both parents responded with intense anxiety, scooping Claire up and taking her back to stay with them in their small nearby apartment. There they cooked for her, did her laundry, and set her up with a therapist whom Claire refused to see after three appointments.
Linda herself was anxious about her sister, who fourteen months earlier had been hinting that she was considering suicide. At the same time, however, Linda was angry with her parents, especially her mother, whom she blamed for her sister’s problems. “My mother has never let Claire grow up, that’s the problem!”
During anxious times such as this one, Linda dispensed copious advice to her mother about how to manage Claire, which her mother ignored. Linda, in frustration and anger, would then seek distance from her entire family. “The best thing I can do for my own mental health,” she stated flatly during our early work together, “is to stay as far away from that crazy group of people as possible!”
So, What’s Wrong Here?
Linda began therapy with the notion that telling other family members what they were doing wrong (or not doing right) was the hallmark of assertiveness and selfhood. As we have seen, however, this belief is hardly true. True selfhood and assertiveness are self-focused, not other-focused.
Linda also thought that her mother made Claire sick. Mothers cannot make their children sick. Mothers are only part of a much larger picture and they do not have power over the whole.
In addition, Linda saw herself as having the answers to their family problems, and she blamed her mother for failing to follow her good advice. Linda did not recognize how her own behavior contributed to the problem she was trying to fix.
Finally, Linda thought that the best thing for her own mental health was to distance as much as possible. But that didn’t work either. It lowered her anxiety, but only temporarily. Linda began eating excessively, and often awakened early in the morning anxiously preoccupied with the fear that her sister might kill herself.
Tracking the Triangle
What was Linda’s position in this common family triangle? When anxiety was low, her relationship with her mother seemed calm and close, although their “closeness” rested heavily on their mutual focus on Claire. Claire, a chronic focus of concern, had the more distant relationship to both her mother and her sister. (See Diagram D.)
Claire’s outside position in the triangle could get quite pronounced as her mother and Linda consolidated their relationship at her expense. For example, her mother would tell Linda “secrets” that were not for Claire’s ears, because Claire would get “too upset” or “tell the wrong person.” Linda participated in the secret-keeping business at a cost to both Claire and their relationship as sisters. Claire also did her part to maintain her role as the fragile one, or the one who couldn’t be counted on.
When anxiety was up, the “inside” positions in the triangle became far less comfortable. Calm gossip turned into angry tension between Linda and her mother, as Linda would tell her mother what to do about Claire and her mother would discount her advice. During one visit home, for example, Linda watched her mother wash and fold two baskets of Claire’s laundry, while Claire sat on the living room couch thumbing through magazines. Linda phoned her mother the next day and let her have it. “Claire will never grow up if you keep treating her like a baby! She has arms! She has legs! She’s twenty-three years old! She can carry a laundry basket!” Linda’s mother, for her part, felt misunderstood and believed that Linda failed to appreciate the gravity of Claire’s situation. During the particularly stressful period after Linda began therapy, the triangle looked like this:
When Linda and her mother talked (or argued) about Claire’s problems, both were concerned about her. Surely they did not intend to have a relationship at her expense. As we have seen, however, the patterned ways in which we move under anxiety are rarely helpful. It is simply not helpful to an underfunctioning individual to overfocus on her (or him)—or to talk about her at the expense of talking to her. And efforts to mediate, make peace, or fix another family relationship are just about doomed to failure. We cannot be therapists in our own family.
So what does help? And how does one begin to move out of such a triangle in order to create a new dance?
Out of the Middle
Linda’s first challenge was to try to stay out of the relationship issues between her mother and her sister, and to work toward having a separate, person-to-person relationship with each of them. At the beginning of therapy, Linda could not move in this direction, because like any good overfunctioner, she was convinced that her mother and sister needed her help and that she had the answers for them. For a long time, Linda clung tenaciously to this view despite her mother and sister’s failure to solve their problems and despite seeing her advice only temporarily heeded at best.
What exactly would staying out look like to Linda—or to any of us, for that matter? Staying out does not mean that Linda crosses her arms in front of her chest and announces firmly to her mother and sister, “Please keep me out of this triangle! You don’t take my advice anyway, and it’s not helpful for me to be involved!” Such a position would still reflect a reactive, “I-really-know-what’s-best-for-you” stance. And it’s a blaming and distancing position as well.
Let’s look at what staying out actually requires. We will also learn more about the
fine points of overfunctioning, because learning how not to function for other people is a big chunk of the task at hand. When we take responsibility for another person, in contrast to taking a responsible position in that relationship, we are operating at that person’s expense. Because this notion challenges the worldview of the over-functioning individual, many of us just don’t “get it.”
As we look at the specific changes that Linda made in her family, try to think about your own relationships. Keep in mind that the specific players and the specific symptoms (for example, Claire’s depression) are less important than understanding the patterned ways in which we operate under stress. This triangle could have been with Linda, her mother, and her father; it could have been with Linda, her mother, and her grandmother; or it could have been with Linda and her two best friends. Instead of depression, Claire could have had any other emotional or physical problem. The principles of stuckness and change remain the same.
Getting off Claire
When Linda was ready to work on this core triangle, she began by trying to keep the conversation with her mother focused less on Claire and more on the two of them. Because core triangles are pretty intense (your mother is off the plane only five minutes before she says, “Let me tell you what your father has done now!”), shifting the focus can be quite a challenge.
Linda handled it pretty well. She stayed nonreactive when her mother talked about Claire, and she did not participate in diagnostic conversations or offer advice. She shifted the conversation toward sharing more about herself (“I’ve been having a real dilemma at work this week”) and learning more about her mother’s family (“Mom, wasn’t Aunt Carole on some kind of medication for depression? Did she ever talk with you about the problem?”).
Moving out of the triangle did not mean that Linda flatly refused to talk about Claire, which of course is a distancing position. Linda just didn’t get into it in the old way. She still gave her mother occasional feedback when appropriate, but not in an intense, advice-giving, or instructive way. Here’s an example of her changed behavior, which illustrates this crucial distinction.
One afternoon when Linda and her mother were shopping, her mother’s focus on Claire was particularly intense. The situation at home had become unbearable, she said, with Claire just hanging around the house making impossible and manipulative demands. Linda heard her out and then said lightly, “Well, Mom, you’re just so competent at doing for others and doling out all that good stuff—it makes sense to me that other people would be more than eager to take all they could get.”
In this brief statement, Linda shifted significantly from the old pattern. She gave feedback (that is, by clarifying her own thoughts on an issue) in a light manner, without becoming instructive and without asking her mother to follow her advice. The perspective that she shared did not blame or take sides, but was, rather, a calm reflection on the dance as she saw it (their mother was good at giving, Claire was good at taking). When her mother ignored her comment, Linda did not take it further, recognizing that her mother’s anxiety was too high to allow her to absorb even light feedback. Her mother and Claire would either solve their problems together, or they would not.
Getting Put to the Test
Moving out of a triangle is a process that will test us over and over. When we start to move out, others in the triangle will intensify their efforts to invite us back in, which is just human nature and the normal resistance to change. Linda’s efforts to shift her position in the triangle with her mother and sister encountered this kind of “Change back!” reaction.
Claire was preparing to leave for a three-day trip to Cape Cod, where she planned to stay with some friends who were renting a summer cottage. At this time, however, she was acting mopey and depressed, and she had commented twice to her parents that life didn’t seem worth living. Her mother did not think Claire was fit to go on the trip and tried to convince her to stay home. When this failed, she phoned her daughter’s friends to express her concern. She asked them to provide a “low-stress” visit for Claire, to watch her for signs of depression, and to call if they noticed anything that looked “serious.” Claire’s mother did not tell her about the call, and she asked her daughter’s friends to keep the call confidential. On the last day of Claire’s visit, however, one of them spilled the beans.
Claire was furious with her mother about the incident, and unconsolable. Mother felt Claire was “overreacting”—blowing things entirely out of proportion. Claire, still living at her parents’ home, began refusing meals with them, choosing to eat at a nearby McDonald’s instead. At this point, her mother called Linda and implored her to “talk some sense” into her sister. This call provided Linda with an opportunity to practice not returning to her old pattern.
Linda rose to the challenge. She told her mother that she really didn’t have the slightest idea how to be helpful to the two of them, and she expressed confidence that both parties could work out their difficulties over time. When her mother pressed her, she did not return to her old overfunctioning position, but rather responded empathetically to the struggle facing her mother and sister, indicating that she knew it was not easy. She said, “Mom, it sounds like you and Claire are really at a standoff. I love you both and I’m sorry that this is such a tough time. I know it looks impossible right now, but maybe later on things will look different.”
At the same time, Linda did not back down from sharing her perspective when asked. Again, the ability to share our thoughts, values, and beliefs is part of defining a self. Such sharing is not overfunctioning—if we can do it calmly, with respect for differences (others need not see things our way), and with an understanding that our way may not work for or fit others.
And so—when asked—Linda let her mother know that she also would have been upset if she had been Claire, because she would have wanted her mother to deal with her directly rather than secretly call her friends. When her mother said, “You mean you wouldn’t have made the call if you were scared to death about your daughter?!” Linda replied thoughtfully, “Well, if I had made the call, I would have told Claire about it. That’s just my way.”
When her mother angrily accused her of not understanding that Claire was impossible to talk to directly, Linda didn’t argue. Instead, she said lightly, “Well, I’m just sharing my own thoughts about managing a difficult situation. I’m not saying I have the right answers.” When her mother added, “And your sister is just trying to make me feel guilty by eating her meals in McDonald’s every night!” Linda laughed and said, “I guess I wouldn’t be doing things her way either. Nothing in the world would get me to eat a Big Mac if your home cooking was on the table!” At this point, her mother laughed too, and the tension eased a bit.
And Again, and Again!
Of course, this was not the last test Linda had to deal with. As we have seen, substantive change is aprocess that is never quite finished. The following week, the relationship between Claire and her mother escalated to a fever pitch. When Linda dropped by one afternoon to pick up a package her mother cornered her in the bathroom. As Linda described it, “Mother looked so tense and puffed up that I thought she was about to pop.” Mother put her face right up to Linda’s and spoke in an angry whisper. “Do you know what your sister is doing now! She has stopped speaking to me! Can you believe that she is behaving this way! What do you think of that! You would never do anything like that, would you!?”
At first Linda clutched inside. She felt momentarily panicky, the way Kristen (Chapter 7) did when her dad called her to insist that she drive him home. But then she was able to think. “You know, Mother,” Linda reflected, “you’re probably right. I don’t think I’d handle the situation the way Claire is because that’s not my way. I think it would just be too painful for me to be feeling that distant from a family member. But as I’ve shared with you, I wouldn’t have handled the situation your way either,” Linda smiled and then added warmly, “I guess it makes sense that I’d handle the situation
Her mother looked exasperated and said that she needed to start dinner. When she called Linda later that week, she did not mention Claire. When Linda visited several weeks later, it was obvious that her mother and Claire were sharing the easiest communication Linda had seen in a long time. “I feel kind of humbled by the whole experience,” Linda told me later that week in psychotherapy. “They really are doing better without my help.” It was Linda’s first real experience of staying calm and connected—yet outside the old triangle.
These dialogues were dramatic turning points for Linda, and they came after much hard work in therapy. Yet Linda needs to appreciate that the work she is doing will always be “in progress.” Whenever anxiety is high in her family, everyone, including Linda, will tend to reinstate the old pattern. Such is the nature of triangles and human systems. What is important is not that Linda always stay calm and “get it right,” which is simply not humanly possible, but that she slowly move forward, and not backward, over time.
Connecting with Claire
As Linda stopped having the answers for other family members, she became more in touch with her own worry about her sister, as well as her own distance. Claire had talked suicide long before Linda had started therapy, but Linda had not really asked Claire direct questions or shared her own fears.
Linda was occasionally anxiously preoccupied with the subject, and like a true big sister she had prescribed everything from exercise and medication to psychoanalysis. But the lines of communication were not really open. When I asked Linda how serious her sister had ever been about suicide (Had Claire ever made a plan?), Linda was not sure. Nor did she know what Claire’s own perspective was on her depression, what efforts she had made to solve it, and what she had found helpful or not.
The Dance of Intimacy Page 15
