Family systems therapists do not coach their clients to jump in and do something different. Eleanor met once a month with her therapist, working hard to become more objective about the emotional process in her own family. It took a long time before she could stop blaming her mother and view this core triangle in the context of other interlocking triangles and key family events that had occurred over several generations. Only after she had achieved this calmer, broader, and more objective perspective was she ready to think about slowly shifting her part in this core triangle.
Eleanor’s first courageous act of change with her father was a low-key allusion to the fact that she had a mother. “I was mowing over at Mom’s this morning and I think I got a bit too much sun,” Eleanor said, moving on to talk about the unseasonably hot weather. If you are not impressed, that’s because you don’t know Eleanor and the family context.
A Postscript on Self-Focus: Having a Life Plan
In the dances we get stuck in, we can only change and control ourselves. Each person in a relationship, however, does not have equal power to make new moves. Children who are supported by their parents do not have the same power to create a new dance as do the adults. A woman who is one husband away from poverty does not have the same power as her spouse.
If we are truly convinced that we cannot live without our husband’s support, our mother’s inheritance, our current job, or the room in our parents’ basement, our own bottom-line position may be “togetherness at any cost.” We may not articulate this bottom line or even be conscious of it, but in such circumstances we may find it impossible to initiate and sustain courageous acts of change. Kimberly, for example, might not have felt free to share her lesbianism with her parents if they were paying her apartment rent and if she saw no other options for generating income.
Think of Jo-Anne, our anonymous letter-writer in Chapter 2 who, according to her own report, canceled her subscription to Ms. to save her marriage. She may engage in endless cycles of nonproductive fighting, complaining, and blaming. She may invite thousands of Ms. readers to join her camp, siding with her against her husband. But in the end, she protects rather than protests the status quo. Only after Jo-Anne is confident that she can ensure her safety, her survival, and some reasonable standard of living can she go to her husband and say, “I will not cancel my subscription to Ms. magazine.” Only then can she maintain this position with dignity and firmness.
Paradoxically, we cannot navigate clearly within a relationship unless we can live without it. For women, this presents an obvious dilemma. Only a small minority of us have been encouraged to put our primary energy into formulating a life plan that neither requires nor excludes marriage. We may have generations of training to not think this way. Countless internal obstacles and external realities still block our path when it comes to planning for our own economic future and formulating long-range work and career goals. Yet such planning—which requires both personal and social change—not only ensures the well-being of the self but also puts us on more solid ground for negotiating relationships with intimate others.
My point here is not to undervalue the role of homemaker or of any unsalaried or underpaid worker. Women have been divided from each other by the media’s invitation for “Moms” and “Career Women” to pit themselves against each other. The issue is not, nor has it ever been, whether homemaking is more or less valuable, challenging, or fulfilling than running a corporation, for who among us could begin to make such a judgment? The real issue is that the role of homemaker places many women in a position of profound economic vulnerability, particularly given the current divorce rate, the lack of high-level training and re-entry programs for displaced homemakers, the low or uncollectible child-care payments, and negligible alimony. These facts are reflected in the alarming statistics on the poverty of single mothers.
You may already be one of these statistics. Or you may unconsciously be so afraid of becoming a statistic that you are not yet ready to risk making a courageous act of change with someone you depend on.
Having a life plan means more than working to ensure economic security as best you can. It also means working toward clarifying your values, beliefs, and priorities, and then applying them to your daily actions. It means thinking about what talents and abilities you want to develop over the next two—or twenty—years. Obviously, a life plan is not static or written in stone, but is instead open to constant revision over time.
Finally, having a life plan does not mean adopting masculine values and pursuing career goals single-mindedly. Some of us may be striving to lighten our work commitments so we can spend more time with our friends and family, or in other pursuits such as spiritual development or the peace movement. What is significant about a life plan is that it can help us live our own lives (not someone else’s) as well as possible. How we do this, and how we conduct our relationships with our own family of origin, is the most valuable legacy we can leave the next generation.
When we do not focus our primary energy on working on our own life plan, our intimate relationships suffer—just as they suffer when we cut off from our own kinship group to start a family of our own. Without a life plan, our intimate relationships carry too much weight. We begin to look to others to provide us with meaning or happiness, which is not their job. We want a partner who will provide self-esteem, which cannot be bestowed by another. We set up a situation in which we are bound to get overinvolved and overfocused on the other person’s ups and downs because we are under-focused on the self.
Intimate relationships cannot substitute for a life plan. But to have any meaning or viability at all, a life plan must include intimate relationships.
How essential are intimate relationships, really? In my own life, there are times when I am either so anxious or so eager about personal projects that the most treasured people in my life feel like distractions; my highest priority is to be left alone to do what I want to do. At other times—such as when a real crisis hits my family—nothing is more important than the love of my family and my friends and the support of my community; so necessary is this love, and my connectedness to others, that nothing else seems to matter.
Obviously, we will have varying and changing needs for distance and connectedness throughout the life cycle, and even during the course of a week or a day. It is as normal to seek distance occasionally as it is to seek togetherness; there is no “right” amount of intimacy for all couples or for all relationships. But without a viable connectedness in our kinship group and community, we just won’t do very well when the going gets tough. Since everyone’s life includes some hardship and some tragedy, we can count on the going getting tough.
Throughout history, women have stood for connectedness by working to maintain ties to past and future generations. Unfortunately, we have often done this at the expense of the self, sacrificing personal and career goals central both to our self-esteem and to our economic security. Not surprisingly, men have had a complementary problem; they have tended to focus on moving up and measuring up, at the expense of responsible connectedness to past and future generations. The success, if not the survival, of our intimate relationships rests on our being able to get this in balance. So, too, does the success and survival of our world.
Epilogue
Just as the female legacy does not promote thinking in terms of a life plan, it is also not part of our legacy to view ourselves as powerful agents of change. Women often feel powerless to initiate change, whether in their personal lives or in the public sphere. Like our fairy tale heroines, we may believe that we have to lie helpless in the teeth of the wolf, or asleep in a glass coffin, until we can be rescued by a handsome prince. We have been told that our sex is passive-dependent—that it is men who take charge and make change happen in the real world.
Such feelings are understandable, because in reality, women have been deprived of power. Men chart the stars, create language and culture as we know it, record history as they see it, build and destroy the world
around us, and continue to run every major institution that generates power, policy, and wealth. Men define the very “reality” that—until the current feminist movement—I, for one, accepted as a given. And although women throughout history have exercised a certain power as mothers, we have not created the conditions in which we mother, nor have we constructed the predominant myths and theories about “good mothering.” Even today, there is no female equivalent of America’s best-known child-rearing experts, Dr. Spock and Dr. Brazelton. (This is not because women do not know as much about taking care of babies as men do.)
Because of our condition of inequality, it is easy to feel powerless and to view women as ineffective agents of change. But, as we are learning, nothing could be further from the truth. Over the past two decades, women and minorities have been excavating the rich treasure of their history. If you studied women’s history today, you would be surprised and exhilarated by the lives of our foremothers—and stunned by how these women’s pioneering accomplishments have been overlooked in our culture’s great texts. A detailed genogram of your own family over three or four generations will likely help you discover the women on your own family tree who were bold and courageous pioneers of change. Knowing the strength of our own legacy is empowering.
This book has focused on individual change and intimacy, surely a personal subject. Yet it is my hope that we will work toward becoming more courageous and effective agents of social change as well. It is the larger context of our lives—which we call the “social,” “political,” “societal,” or “cultural” context—that gives shape and form to our most intimate interactions and to our very definition of family.
Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change. Intimate relationships cannot flourish under conditions of inequality and unfairness. Indeed, all our intimate relationships will look entirely different to us in a future where women are truly valued and equally represented alongside men in every aspect of public life. Just how such relationships will look, and just when such a future will be, we can only begin to imagine—but we must continue to work for those relationships and that future.
Acknowledgements
Although The Dance of Anger was a five-year undertaking, this book was finished in less than a year and a half. Happily, I have fewer people to thank.
My friends Emily Kofron and Jeffrey Ann Goudie read drafts on short notice, never failing to offer encouragement and good advice. mary Ann Clifft generously put her editorial skills to good use, going through chapters with a detective’s eye. Other friends and colleagues reposnded to my call for help along the way; my thanks to Susan Kraus, Tom Averill, Monica McGoldrick, Jo-Ann Krestan, Claudia Bepko, Meredith Titus, and Nolan Brohaugh.
I am especially grateful to Katherine Glenn Kent for all she has taught me about Bowen theory and systems thinking furing our many years of friendship. Her influence is reflected in all my work, and this book would not be the same, nor as good, without her. I am also indebted to the Menninger Clinic for providing an atmosphere that has challenged me to clarify my own ideas and to write. From the time of my arrival in 1972 as a postdoctoral fellow in clinical psychology, I have been blessed with dedicated teachers and colleagues, a superb secretarial and support staff, an unparalleled professional library, flexible work hors, and remarkably diverse opportunities for learning. All this, combined with my growing love for Kansas skies and the simple life, has led me to forgo Big-City living to settle down in the Midwest.
For the second time around I have been fortunate to be under the wing of Janet Goldstein, my editor at Harper & Row, who has influenced this book from start to finish, suggesting changes with clarity, delicacy, and tact, while respecting my need to proceed in my own way. I appreciate the careful work of the book’s production editor at Harper & Row, Debra Elfenbein, and the fastidious copyediting by Andree Pages. My agent, Sandra Elkin, played a major role in making all this happen, and I thank her as well.
Many others have helped out in important ways. My friends in Topeka have closely shared my frustrations and successes as a writer, offering sympathy or champagne at the appropriate stages. Aleta Pennington and Chuck Baird have been generous-hearted and patient in the face of my computer anxiety. Jeannine Riddle worked beyond the call of duty when it came down to the final push. Betty Hoppes has facilitated my career from the start. Judie Koontz, Marianne Ault-Riché, and Ellen Safier have provided emotional support at home base. My long-distance community of feminist friends and colleagues has energized and sustained me through the best and worst of times. Countless readers of my first book have sent messages of overwhelming gratitude and affection, reminding me at the inevitable low points of authorhood that it is all worthwhile.
This book does not create a new epistemological framework for the understanding of relationships. Rather, I have worked to translate and bring to life what I have found to be empowering, theoretically sound, and useful in my personal life and professional work. In this regard I owe the greatest intellectual debt to Murray Bowen, founder of Bowen family systems theory, for the ideas and concepts that make up the very fabric of this book. At the same time, my interpretation and application of Bowen’s work has been influenced by my feminist and psychoanalytic background, and by a worldview that differs significantly from Bowen and his colleagues at the Georgetown Family Center. For this reason, The Dance of Intimacy is by no means a pure translation of Bowen theory and as always, the ultimate responsibility for this work is my own.
It is understandably difficult to find words to thank those with whom one shares the most complex ties. I am grateful to my parents for all that they have given me throughout my lifetime and for being people I have come to so deeply admire and love. My sister, Susan, is an enthusiastic supporter of my work, and our friendship has flourished in our adult years despite geographical distance. My husband, Steve, has been my intimate partner in love and work for two decades; I thank him for his help with all my projects, including this one, and for our good life together. Finally, our two sons, Matthew and Benjamin, are a source of great joy. I thank all these people for what they have taught me firsthand about intimacy and for reminding me that being in relationships is a rich challenge indeed.
Appendix
A genogram, or family diagram, is a pictorial representation of the facts of a family system for at least three generations. It is a springboard to help you think about your family and a useful format for drawing a family tree.
The genogram is a widely used tool in psychotherapy and family assessment. Some therapists use it simply to keep track of the cast of characters and dates in a particular family. For others, the genogram serves as a rich source of hypotheses regarding complex family emotional patterns. The genogram shows the strengths and vulnerabilities of a particular individual, or a particularly troubled family relationship, in a much larger context to give new meanings to problems and behavior.
Although the genogram is widely used by therapists of varying orientations (as well as by family physicians, historians, biographers, and the like), it is most frequently associated with Bowen family systems theory. Additional sources of information about the genogram can be found at the end of this appendix.
Genogram Symbols
Because there is diversity in how genograms are drawn, other therapists may use symbols somewhat different from those shown here.
Female
Give name, age, birthdate (b.), highest level of education, occupation, significant health problems, and date of diagnosis (dx).
Male
Give name, age, birthdate, highest level of education, occupation, significant health problems, and date of diagnosis.
Index Person
You are the index person in your own genogram. Darken the outline of your gender symbol.
Death
Give age, date of death (d.), and cause.
Marriage
Give date of marriage (m.).
(Husband�
��left; wife—right)
Separation and Divorce
Separation (s.)—one diagonal line with date
Divorce (d.)—double diagonal line with date
Living Together or Significant Liaison
Draw a dotted line.
Multiple Marriages
(Mary was twice divorced before marrying Joe. Joe was widowed.)
Children
List in birth order beginning with oldest child on the left.
Twins
Indicate whether identical or fraternal (I. or F.).
Adoption
Give birthdate, adoption date (a.), and any information about biological parents. (Do two genograms if information about birth family doesn’t fit.)
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