The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  “What were you trying to get across to her?” Cathy still hadn’t answered my earlier question.

  “First of all, my younger brother, Dennis, is doing poorly in school, and my mother constantly grills him about whether he’s trying drugs and why he’s out till midnight with his friends. That’s one thing I was trying to give her feedback about. Then, there’s the way she treats my dad, making all sorts of decisions for him. And finally, she’s always intruding into my life, especially since my divorce. She worries constantly about my son, Jason, and she is always telling me to pray to Jesus. She needs to be totally in control of everything and everybody, and the whole family is suffering.”

  “Anything else?” I asked, as if that wasn’t enough.

  “Well, those were my main agenda items for this visit. But of course there’s more. A lifetime more.”

  Cathy’s complaints sounded familiar. I had heard them countless times before—in countless forms—from countless women in psychotherapy. And Cathy, like Linda and like so many of us, was doing the very things with her mom that only served to preserve the status quo. She blamed her mother for unilaterally “causing” family problems. She assumed that she (Cathy) was the expert on how her mother should handle her relationships (such as with Cathy’s dad and brother). And she alternated between silence and distance, on the one hand, and fighting and blaming, on the other. As we have seen, these behaviors keep us stuck by ensuring that problems will not be addressed in a productive way, that old patterns will not be changed, and that intimacy will not occur.

  Mother-Blame/Mother-Guilt

  Cathy, like the rest of us, approached her mother, Anne, with only the best intentions. Her intention was not to blame Anne and certainly not to hurt her. According to Cathy, she confronted her mother because she wanted to lay the groundwork for a better relationship and because she wanted to help Anne deal with other family problems.

  “How do you understand the fact that your mother couldn’t hear a word you said?” I knew the question was premature, because Cathy’s reactivity to her mom was still so intense I could not expect her to reflect on this problematic relationship and, in particular, her part in maintaining it.

  “Because she’s so defensive. She just feels accused and tries to protect herself.”

  Without knowing Cathy’s mother, I could safely assume Cathy was on target here. Anne felt accused and tried to protect herself; she became defensive. So, what else is new? Or, to put it differently, why shouldn’t she?

  Our mothers have let us all down because they have lived with impossible and crippling expectations about their role. It is natural for a mother to react to her daughter’s criticisms with anxiety and guilt. In fact, guilt is woven into the very fabric of womanhood. As one family therapist puts it, “Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilt, and I’ll show you a man.” Feelings of guilt run deepest and are most ingrained in mothers, who are the first to be blamed and the first to blame themselves. For example, recall Adrienne’s mother, Elaine (Chapter 5), who felt responsible both for having a retarded son and for not keeping him at home. Or Kimberly’s mother (Chapter 9), who stayed awake at night thinking she had “caused” her daughter’s lesbianism—or that others would see it that way.

  Mother-guilt is not simply the personal problem of individual women. Rather, it stems naturally from a society which assigns mothers the primary responsibility for all family problems, excuses men from real fathering, and provides remarkably little support for the actual needs of children and families. A mother is encouraged to believe she is her child’s environment, and that if only she is a “good enough” mother, her children will flourish. It is only natural that Cathy’s mother was sensitive to blame, and defensive in response to being accused of not being a good enough mother. Only a remarkably flexible and secure mother would react otherwise.

  Let’s look more closely at how Cathy navigated her relationship with Anne, with an eye toward consolidating some of the lessons we have learned about changing our own part in the relationship dances that block intimacy and keep us stuck. Underlying most mother-daughter distance and conflict is anxiety about navigating separateness and independence in this key relationship—and the usual confusion about what “separateness” and “independence” really mean. Cathy thought confronting her mother was a courageous expression of her “real” and independent self. In fact, her behavior made it more difficult to achieve this goal.

  A Matter of Differences

  Cathy’s relationship with Anne had always been strained, but it had gone from bad to worse following Cathy’s divorce two years earlier. “Mother always made my business her business,” explained Cathy, “but since I’ve been living alone with my son, Jason, she really tries to run my life.”

  According to Cathy, Anne expressed a never-ending concern about Jason’s well-being and about Cathy’s lack of religious values. “My mother worries that Jason has been traumatized by the divorce,” Cathy said, “and she doesn’t like the way I’m raising him. Religion is the biggest issue between us. Saturday I had Mother over for lunch and I had to sit through her religion lecture for the tenth time—and in front of Jason!”

  Anne’s “religion lecture” took a variety of forms, but it basically boiled down to the following: First, Anne believed that Cathy should take Jason to church on Sundays. Second, Anne wanted Cathy to give religion a more central place in her own life. Whenever Cathy expressed sadness or anger over the divorce, Anne instructed her to pray. Cathy had no patience with her mother’s advice or criticism (although Cathy had plenty of advice and criticism for Anne), and she did not like her parenting to be criticized in front of her son.

  Cathy felt chronically tense in her mother’s presence. She believed she had tried everything she could to change their antagonistic relationship; when nothing changed, she diagnosed the situation as hopeless. In reality, however, Cathy had explored no option other than moving from silence and distance to fighting and blaming, and back again. And both she and her mother acted as if they were the best expert on the other.

  The Old Dance

  Although Cathy periodically confronted Anne about her mismanagement of other family relationships, Cathy more typically said nothing at all when she was the target of her mother’s criticism and unsolicited advice. She excused her failure to speak out. “My mother won’t listen; it only makes things worse. My mother just can’t hear the truth!” Sometimes Cathy refused to see Anne: “Mother upset me so much after the divorce that I avoided her for several months. If I could have afforded the plane ticket, I would have gone to China.”

  By distancing and failing to speak out on her own behalf, Cathy kept her relationship with her mother calm. As a way of managing anxiety, distancing does work in the short run, and that’s why we do it. However, in Cathy’s attempts to preserve a pseudoharmonious “we,” Cathy was sacrificing the “I.” The degree to which we can be clear with our first family about who we are, what we believe, and where we stand on important issues will strongly influence the level of “independence” or emotional maturity that we bring to other relationships. If Cathy continues to avoid taking a stand on emotionally important issues, she will remain “stuck together” with her mom, and she will be on less solid ground in other relationships as well.

  According to Cathy, she did occasionally “take a firm stand” and “share her true feelings.” But just what did she mean by this? Typically, it meant that Cathy moved from silently seething in her mother’s presence to letting it all hang out. Like a pendulum that has swung too far in one direction, she occasionally went to the other extreme with Anne. When this happened, Cathy would come to therapy describing an interaction that sounded like a confrontation between Godzilla and Tyrannosaurus rex. “My mother went off on her religion kick again, and I told her that she just used religion as a crutch—a simple solution to all of life’s problems. Things escalated and she ended up storming out of the house in her usual dramatic fashion.”

  Fighting and blam
ing, like silence and distance, protected both mother and daughter from successfully navigating their separateness from each other. Again, “separateness” does not mean emotional distance, which is simply one means of managing anxiety or emotional intensity. Rather, separateness refers to the preservation of the “I” within the “we”—the ability to acknowledge and respect differences and to achieve authenticity within the context of connectedness. How well we do this within our own kinship group largely determines our capacity for intimacy elsewhere, and influences how well we will manage other relationships throughout our lives.

  Defining a Self

  One of the first steps in achieving independence or in “defining a self” is to move beyond silence and fighting, to begin making clear statements about our own beliefs and our position on important issues. For example, Cathy might choose a time when things were relatively calm to say to Anne, “Mom, I would really prefer that you don’t discuss how I’m bringing up Jason in front of him. If you’d like to talk about my not taking him to church, let’s find a time when just the two of us can discuss it.”

  Cathy can learn to address the real issues at hand rather than marching off to battle without knowing what the war is really about. In the old pattern, Cathy argued endlessly with her mother about whether Jason needed to go to church, and about the role of religion in their family life. Such fights were bound to go nowhere, and they kept Cathy stuck for two reasons: First, Cathy was trying to change her mother’s mind, which was not possible. Second, she was behaving as if there were only one truth (about religion, child-rearing, or anything else), which both she and Anne should agree on.

  The fact is that Cathy and Anne are two separate people who understandably have two different views of the world. Failure to appreciate this blocks real intimacy, which requires a profound respect for differences. We have seen how vulnerable we all are to confusing closeness with sameness and behaving as if we should share a common brain or heart with the other person.

  This is especially true between mothers and daughters. With our beliefs about “women’s place” shifting so dramatically over the past two decades, it is no surprise that mothers, in particular, may react strongly to their daughters’ declaration of themselves as different from the generations of women who have come before. A mother may unconsciously experience such difference as disloyal or as a betrayal—a negative comment on her own life, or perhaps simply a reminder of options and choices that were unavailable to her. And of course, a daughter’s “declaration of independence” can be especially hard for a mother who may feel she has nothing—not even a self—to return to after her children are grown. When women are taught that mothering is a “career” rather than a relationship, “retirement” becomes an understandable crisis. And because many daughters do handle their struggles with independence by distancing, blaming, or cutting off, then a mother’s feeling of loss is understandably great. Mental health professionals may also contribute to the problem by instructing mothers “to separate” from their daughters, as if “to separate” means only giving something up, rather than working slowly toward a new and potentially richer kind of connectedness.

  In sum, Cathy’s job is to address the real issue in her relationship with Anne—the fact that she is a separate person with thoughts, beliefs, priorities, and values that differ from her mother’s. To do this, Cathy must stop trying to change, criticize, or convince her mother; she must instead begin to share more about her own self, while respecting her mother’s right to think, feel, and react differently.

  For example, Cathy might say to Anne, “Mom, I know that religion has an important place in your life, but it’s not where I’m at right now.” If her mother begins to argue the point or criticize, Cathy can avoid getting drawn back into the old fight, because she knows from experience that intellectual arguments go nowhere and only keep her stuck. Instead, she might listen respectfully to everything Anne says and then merely reply, “Mom, I know how helpful your faith has been to you. But it’s not my way.” If Anne becomes hysterical and tells Cathy she is bringing disgrace to the family and causing her mother to have a coronary, Cathy can say, “I’m sorry if I’m hurting you, Mom, because that’s not my intention.” When her mother brings up religion for the 120th time, Cathy can joke with her or lightly reply, “I understand your feelings, but I see things differently.”

  Sound simple? Such conversations require a lion’s share of courage, because they bring the separateness between mother and daughter into bold relief and, as a result, evoke tremendous anxiety. If Cathy stays on track, her mother will react strongly to her daughter’s changed behavior by upping the ante in some way, perhaps by criticizing and blaming Cathy, or by threatening to sever their relationship.

  It is important to keep in mind that countermoves or “Change back!” reactions occur whenever we move toward a higher level of assertiveness, separateness, and maturity in a key relationship. When we are the one initiating a change, we easily forget that countermoves express anxiety, not lack of love, and they are always predictable. The challenge for Cathy is to hold on to a process view of change, and to sit still through her mother’s countermoves without returning more than temporarily to the old pattern of distancing or fighting. She can learn to sound like a broken record, if necessary, in the face of countless “tests.” We have seen how change in a stuck relationship often feels like an uphill battle. It can require stamina and motivation, as well as a good sense of humor, to keep moving against the enormous and inevitable resistance from both within and without.

  Moving Toward the Hot Issues

  How did Cathy actually do in this difficult task of “defining a self” with her mother? In some areas, quite well. For example, she was extremely clear and consistent with Anne about not discussing her parenting in front of Jason, and when her mother continued to “drop comments” in front of him, Cathy didn’t take the bait. Instead, she’d joke with her mother or otherwise deflect her criticisms—and then bring up the subject later when Jason was not within hearing distance. Cathy did not get intense or reactive to her mother’s “tests” and countermoves, and she was clear in her own mind that she would not participate in arguments about Jason in his presence—even when “invited” to do so.

  Whenever the religion issue came up, however, Cathy had a far more difficult time. As she put it, “Every time my mother brings Jesus into the conversation or tells me to pray, I just clutch and lose it.” Over time, Cathy gained more control over her behavior, but not over her strong emotional response. “When my mother gets going about religion, I get knots in my stomach and I just feel like screaming at her,” explained Cathy. “The best I can do is to drop the issue and change the subject.”

  In one sense, Cathy is correct. The worst time to try to discuss a hot issue in a stuck relationship is when we are feeling angry or tense. Emotional intensity only makes people more likely to react to each other in an escalating fashion rather than to think objectively and clearly about their dilemma. If Cathy is clutching inside and feels like screaming, it’s not a bad idea for her to drop the issue, change the subject, take a walk, or escape to the bathroom to seek temporary distance. Over the long haul, however, Cathy will do best if she can begin to move toward the subject of religion, to get a broader perspective on her mother’s attitude and on her own strong emotional response to the subject. How can Cathy move toward opening up such a difficult subject?

  The Broader Picture

  Every family has its hot issues, which come down the pike, unprocessed in one generation and played out in the next. In Cathy’s family, religion was one hot issue, especially between mother and daughter. You can recognize a hot issue in your family if a subject is focused on incessantly and intensely, or if it cannot be talked about at all. You can be sure it’s a hot issue if you clutch inside when the subject comes up.

  How could Cathy gain a calmer and more objective perspective on this hot issue in her family? First, she had to widen the focus a bit. To this end,
I asked Cathy a number of questions to help her think about what religion meant to her family in previous generations. What was the place of religion in her mother’s own family as she was growing up? Did her mother have differences of opinion with her own mother; if so, were they openly expressed? If such differences existed, how were they handled? How would her grandmother have reacted if Anne had become a self-declared atheist, like Cathy? How did Cathy’s mother arrive at her religious and spiritual beliefs, and in what way did they evolve over time? At what age did her mother become religious, and what significantly influenced her religiosity? Who else in the previous generations had “left” religion? Who had been most involved in it? What else was going on when important changes in such involvements occurred?

  It was understandably difficult for Cathy to approach her mother calmly, factually, and warmly about this particular subject. By definition, the hot issues in a family can’t easily be discussed objectively and productively, and of course, the more we avoid discussion, the hotter they become. When Cathy was finally able to get the subject out on the table, in a genuinely curious and uncritical way, the deep emotionality surrounding the subject of religion in her family took on a new meaning for her.

  A Piece of History

  What ultimately emerged in Cathy’s talks with her mother was the story of a traumatic, early loss in her mother’s own family. When Anne was five years old, her three-year-old brother, Jeff, died after ingesting a toxic substance in the family home. In addition to profound feelings of loss, Cathy’s grandmother must have struggled with a deep sense of guilt and despair regarding her own fantasied or real contribution to Jeff’s death. She was the only person home with her son when the tragic event occurred.