The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  And so, Linda made a courageous act of change when she asked her sister direct questions about suicide and shared her own reactions. She put the issue squarely on the table: “Claire, I may be overreacting, but are you actually thinking about suicide?” When Claire’s answer still left Linda feeling vague about the facts (“Well, Tuesday night I was sort of thinking about it, but I think I’m doing better now”), Linda asked questions that demanded more specificity. For example: “Where are you now on a one-to-ten scale, if one means that suicide is just a fleeting thought and ten means that you have a specific plan you’re about to carry out?” “If tomorrow night you had a plan, would you let someone in the family know?”

  Given the profound degree of anxiety surrounding a subject such as suicide, questioning may quickly take on a blaming, diagnostic, or overfunctioning tone. Linda was better able to avoid this because she was working in therapy to manage her own anxiety and to maintain a high degree of self-focus. Over time, she had reached a deeper and more genuine recognition that she could not change or fix her sister, or even know what was best for her. Certainly, no family member could keep Claire alive or solve her problems. What Linda could do for her sister was to care about her and to keep in touch.

  Learning to ask clear questions—to go for the facts—is a skill, as well as a courageous act. If we are concerned that a significant other is in trouble, be it from an eating disorder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, or low grades, for that matter, it is not helpful to avoid asking direct questions. We all have reasons not to ask (“I can’t do anything anyway,” “If I mention drugs, he’ll just deny it,” “If I say anything, it may just put ideas in her head”). Over the long haul, however, we all tend to do better when we have open lines of communication with our significant others.

  Sharing a Reaction

  Opening up the lines of communication requires more than becoming a skilled questioner. It also requires sharing our reactions and giving feedback. “I” language is a priority here. Often we think we are sharing about self, when actually we are trying to be an expert on the other.

  Linda shared her reactions with Claire when she told Claire how shaken she was at the thought of losing her: “Claire, the thought that you might ever try to kill yourself terrifies me. I love you and you’re the only sister I have. I can’t imagine how I would handle it if you were gone.” When Linda finished speaking, she burst into tears. It was the first time in Claire’s adult life that she had seen her big sister cry.

  These words may seem so obvious, or even trite, that you might wonder why they constitute a courageous act of change. Yet the higher the anxiety, the more difficulty an overfunctioner (or distancer) has simply sharing pain, fear, and concern without anger or blame and without having answers or advice for the other person. It’s hard to find the right words to say the simplest things: “I don’t know how I’d handle it, to lose you in this way. I love you, and I want you to be around for as long as possible. I can’t bear the thought that I could lose you now. I know that I can’t do a thing to help you solve this problem, but I want you to know how much I care about you.”

  Setting Limits—Taking a Position

  Of course, stepping out of overfunctioning does not mean that we fail to set limits and take a position on emotional issues. As we saw with Kristen and her dad, relationships can only become more chaotic and impaired when we cannot clarify limits or do not state clearly what we will and will not do.

  What position did Linda ultimately take around the suicide issue? First, she clarified that she would not keep the issue of suicide a secret from any family member. Nor would she aid and abet her sister’s self-destructive behavior in any other way. Again, regardless of the nature of the problem, our challenge is to define a clear and responsible position in the relationship, for self and not as an attempt to function for the other party. A look at a conversation between these two sisters illustrates how to “take a responsible position for self” and how difficult doing so can be. Such interactions are tough on both parties.

  At one point, Linda asked Claire to let her know if she ever felt suicidal, and she expressed her wish for a closer relationship. Linda said she’d like for them both to feel free to call each other when they felt down. Claire immediately challenged this move toward more connectedness.

  “Why should I tell you if I’m suicidal?” demanded Claire. “You can’t do anything to help me when I’m depressed.”

  “I know that,” Linda answered. “I don’t even have the answers to my own problems, let alone yours. But even if I could only give you a hug and tell you I care, I would still like to know.”

  “Well, you’ll have to promise me that you won’t tell Mom and Dad. They would just overreact or put me in a hospital or something.”

  “I can’t make you that promise,” Linda replied. “I would never keep it a secret if I thought your life was in danger. For one thing, my own anxiety would be out of control if I held that kind of secret. I just couldn’t do it. Yes, I’d call Mom and Dad. No, I wouldn’t keep it a secret from anyone in the family.”

  “If Mom and Dad were away, would you ever put me in the hospital?” Claire asked accusingly.

  “Claire, if I thought you might kill yourself . . . I’d call the police, the fireman, the hospital, or whoever I could think of. If you told me you were in immediate danger, I wouldn’t know what else to do. I know you’d be furious with me, but I’d just have to live with that. I couldn’t live with the feeling that I had aided your killing yourself. I just couldn’t live with that.”

  “But you can’t stop me anyway if I really want to.”

  “I know that, Claire. Of course I can’t stop you. But as I said, I wouldn’t sit around and be part of it happening. I’d be on the phone to everyone who loves you.”

  “Well then, forget it!” was Claire’s quick and angry reply. “I’m not telling you anything.” Claire left the room then.

  Linda sat by herself for about five minutes. Then, before leaving, she told her sister: “Claire, I’m really hoping you’ll reconsider what you said about not telling me anything, because I care about you. As your sister, I feel terribly sad to think we could end up not being able to talk about things that are important to us. I’ve been thinking about Mom and Aunt Sue [a sister from whom their mother is cut off] and I think how much I don’t want us to end up like that.”

  This conversation illustrates the key aspects of “defining a self” that we have touched on in earlier chapters. Let’s summarize:

  First, Linda is maintaining a nonreactive position. Emotional, yes. Linda cried when she told Claire she was scared of losing her, and that she felt terrible about the prospect that they might end up as distant as their mother and Aunt Sue. But Linda was thinking, and she was maintaining her new position rather than reacting to anxiety in her usual patterned ways.

  Second, Linda defined a clear bottom-line position (“No, I won’t keep suicide a secret. Yes, I’d call the police or hospital, if necessary”) and stood behind it, even in the face of intense emotional pulls to do otherwise. Linda resisted the temptation to back down from her position, and then perhaps to blame her sister for “manipulating” or “blackmailing” her.

  Finally, Linda stayed entirely self-focused and stuck with “I” language—nonblaming statements about the self. She put her energy into taking a responsible position in the relationship—and not into taking responsibility for her sister, or acting as if she could solve her sister’s problem. She did not lapse back into overfunctioning. At no time did Linda suggest that she was a better expert on Claire than Claire was on her self. This was part of a new pattern for Linda where she stayed in her own skin and worked to relate to her sister’s competence—something we easily forget how to do when we are relating to a chronically underfunctioning individual.

  Sharing Underfunctioning

  What else did Linda need to do to create a different dance with Claire? Linda slowly shared some of her own problems with Claire, as well as with
her parents. She started slowly, with small pieces of information, because of the extreme difficulty of modifying overfunctioning. Sharing one’s vulnerability with family members and seeing the underfunctioners as having something to offer are not easy shifts.

  Thus, Linda did not begin by telling her sister about her poor track record in choosing men, which had led her to therapy because she despaired of ever having a decent relationship. Instead, when Claire became depressed and called her one evening, Linda told her she wasn’t really able to listen or be helpful right then. “Everything has gone wrong today,” Linda complained to her sister. “In fact, I was just about to call you. I messed up a meeting at work, I burned my dinner, and I’m just feeling totally stressed-out.” For Linda, this sharing was yet another courageous act of change. It pushed against the polarities in her family, where there was too much focus on the incompetence of one member and not enough focus on the incompetence of others. Later, when she was ready, she shared with Claire some of her problems with men and openly acknowledged that this was her significant area of underfunctioning. She also asked her sister for advice and help in areas where Claire had a history of expertise.

  Linda and Men

  When Linda first came to see me, her primary concern was her long-standing problem with men. Her relationships tended to intensify quickly, and equally quickly she would lose her ability to be objective about the man she was dating. She described herself as “a leaf blown about by the wind” when it came to romantic involvement—a stark contrast to her usual sense of mastery and control on the job.

  Many firstborn, overfunctioning daughters share Linda’s experience. And although the connection may seem elusive, the work she did on her own family was particularly helpful. Linda worked to modify her overfunctioning position and to share a more whole and balanced self with her sister and parents, which included both her competence and vulnerability. She also worked in therapy to obtain a more objective and balanced view of both the strengths and weaknesses of other family members. In turn, she began to look more objectively at the men she was dating. Things still heated up fast, but Linda could then step back to consider the strengths and weaknesses of a prospective mate.

  Over time, Linda put much effort into observing and changing her part in some old patterns, polarities, and triangles in her family. In addition to the shifts she made with Claire and her mother, she also connected more with her father, who was an extreme distancer and something of an invisible phantom on the family scene. As Linda learned more about her dad’s own family and history and shared more of herself with him, she was also on firmer footing with her male partners. The more we can stay connected and define a clear and whole self in the intense field of family relationships, the more grounded we are in other relationships.

  At the time Linda terminated psychotherapy, she was not dating anyone in particular nor did she feel a great need to be. She was, however, doing a fine job of avoiding relationships that would ultimately waste her energy or bring her pain.

  A Postscript: The Dilemma of Overfocus

  When another person underfunctions—be it a misbehaved child, a depressed husband, a symptomatic sibling—significant others may become focused on that person. Over time, the focus on the other may increase, whether through blaming, worrying, fixing, bailing out, protecting, pulling up slack, covering up, or simply paying too much attention with too much intensity. To the same extent, the focus on self decreases, with less energy going toward identifying and working on one’s own relationship issues and clarifying one’s own goals and life plan. When this happens, the underfunctioner will only tend to underfunction more and longer.

  We cannot simply decide to deintensify our reactivity and focus on another person’s problems. It’s not something we can just “do,” nor is it something we can pretend. If we try to fake it, our efforts will be short-lived at best, or we may flip from overfocus to reactive distance—the other side of the same coin. We can deintensify our focus on the other only after we find the courage to work on other relationships and issues that we do not want to pay attention to. Each of us has enough to work on for at least several lifetimes. If we move forward with these challenges for self, we can avoid becoming overfocused on and reactive to that other party.

  So, Who’s Responsible for Claire’s Depression?

  When something goes wrong in a family, we naturally look for someone to blame. Or perhaps we point the finger at two or three people. But Claire’s depression, like any serious problem, was probably several hundred years in the making; it may have been affected by issues, patterns, and events that were passed down over many generations. Whatever our particular theory (and there are countless biological and psychological theories that will continue to change and be enlarged over time), we are best to be humble. There is far more that we don’t know about human behavior than we do know. Our most esteemed experts would have, at best, only a partial and incomplete explanation of Claire’s depression.

  So, who is responsible for curing Claire’s depression or solving her problem? There is only one person who can do this job, although others will try, and that is Claire. It is her job to use her competence to become the best expert on her self and to figure out how she will work on her problem. Others may make it easier or harder for her to work toward recovery, but the challenge is hers.

  But what of all the good work Linda did? Didn’t this help Claire? Linda got out of the middle of the relationship between Claire and their mother. She modified her overfunctioning. She opened up communication. She set limits with Claire and defined a position around the suicide issue while letting Claire know she cared about her. She shared her underfunctioning side. She worked to deintensify her focus on Claire and to put more energy into her own issues, such as her distance from her father. She stayed in touch. These are extremely helpful actions that we as family members can take when someone we care about is underfunctioning. However, that’s all they are. Only helpful. They do not solve the other person’s problem, nor is doing so our job.

  To what end, then, did Linda change? The work she did will give her the best chance of keeping her own anxiety down, having solid family relationships, and proceeding with her own life as well as possible. Linda’s changed behavior will also make it easier, rather than harder, for Claire to use her competence to work on her own problem. But there is nothing that Linda or her parents can do to either cause or cure Claire’s depression. Claire will either find a way to work on her problem when she is ready—or she will not.

  12

  Our Mother/Her Mother/Our Self

  Before all else, we are daughters. Our relationship with our mother is one of the most influential in our lives and it is never simple. Even when we have been separated from our mother at birth—or later by death or circumstance—a deep and inexplicable bond connects daughter to mother, mother to daughter.

  As adult daughters, this bond may be one of profound ambivalence. We may still be blaming our mother, trying to change or fix her, or we may still be keeping our emotional distance. We may be absolutely convinced that our mother is “impossible,” that we have tried everything to improve things and that nothing works.

  So, what is the problem?

  The problem is that these are cardinal signs of being stuck in this key relationship. They are signs we have not negotiated our ultimate separateness from our mother, nor have we come to terms with her separateness from us. If we are still blaming our mother, we cannot truly accept our self. If we are still fighting or distancing, we are reacting to the intensity in this relationship rather than working on it. And if we fail to carve out a clear and authentic self in this arena, we won’t have a clear and separate self to bring to other important relationships. As we have seen, whatever goes unresolved and unaddressed in our first family will go underground—and then pop up somewhere else, leaving us in a more shaky, vulnerable position with others.

  By working on the task of reconnecting with our mother, we can bring to this relatio
nship a greater degree of self and can learn to appreciate the “separate self” of this woman we call mother. We hear much about how a mother impedes her daughter’s separateness and independence. We hear less about the daughter’s own difficulty in experiencing her mother as a separate and different “other,” with a personal history of her own.

  In the pages that follow, we examine the changes that one woman, Cathy, was able to make in her relationship with her mother. Her story, like others I have shared, will illustrate the process of moving toward a more mature intimacy in which we can define the self and respect the emotional separateness of the other. While we have already examined this process in depth, Cathy’s struggle will allow us to summarize and appreciate anew the complexity of change and help us to think further about our own relationships.

  Cathy and Her Mom

  “My mother is really impossible!” concluded Cathy after a recent evening in her parent’s home. “She’s totally defensive and she won’t listen to anything I say!”

  “What was it you were wanting her to hear?” I inquired. Cathy had been in psychotherapy only briefly, and I knew relatively little about her family.

  “First of all, there are a whole bunch of things I’ve been angry about for a long time, and I wanted to clear the air. I figured it would be good to get things out in the open, instead of just sitting on my feelings.”

  Cathy paused to catch her breath and then continued, with obvious exasperation in her voice, “My mother simply cannot deal with my anger! Each time I’d raise a legitimate complaint, she would say, ‘Yes, but . . .’ and then she’d end up criticizing me. I tried to get through to her—but as always, it’s impossible.”