Honoring the Self

by Nathaniel Branden

  Wanting to explore this line of inquiry further with the present client, I shifted to a new sentence stem.

  If I could have had mother all to myself—

  It would have been wonderful.

  We could have been closer.

  I would have felt loved.

  I would have felt like a man.

  I wonder how my brothers and sisters would have felt.

  Father would have been hurt.

  I don’t think mother would have missed father.

  In a purposely relaxed and easygoing manner, I gave him a new stem to explore. “Just keep repeating, If I could have had sex with mother—,” and let’s see what occurs to you.” (He gave no evidence of being taken aback by this stem, as my clients almost never do—sometimes to the astonishment of psychoanalyst observers at my group therapy sessions.)

  If I could have had sex with mother—

  I would have liked it.

  I would have known she loved me.

  I would have been scared.

  It would have been overwhelming.

  It would have been exciting.

  Father would have hated me; he might have killed me.

  Father would have felt I betrayed him.

  I might have been able to let go of mother.

  Perhaps I would be free to fall in love today.

  I wouldn’t still feel I want something from mother.

  In discussing his reaction to what he had been saying, he seemed surprised and yet unsurprised, as if at one level it was all new and unfamiliar and at another level it was already known—which was precisely the case. We continued with another stem.

  If mother thought I was in a happy sexual relationship—

  She’d be jealous. She wouldn’t understand.

  She’d tell me that no one will ever love me as she does.

  She’d feel abandoned.

  She’d say, “How can you do this to me?”

  She’d try to break us up.

  She’d tell me the girl isn’t good enough.

  She’d say, “I hope you’re not planning to get married.”

  She’d warn me about feminine wiles.

  She’d want to know what the girl wants from me.

  She might suggest that a doctor check me for venereal disease.

  The scary thing about women is—

  I don’t know what they want.

  They’re overwhelming.

  They have needs I don’t understand.

  They give conflicting messages.

  I’ll be swallowed up.

  I won’t know what to do.

  I might have trouble having an erection.

  They’ll want more from me than I can give.

  I’ll be dominated.

  Women to me are—

  Overwhelming.

  Powerful.

  Insatiable.

  Frightening.

  Exciting.

  Seductive.

  Controlling.

  Too much like mother.

  If it turns out that other women are not my mother—

  Mother would have a fit.

  I might be able to fall in love.

  I could be a man.

  I could grow up.

  I wouldn’t have to be so frightened of being controlled.

  Mother would feel I had abandoned her.

  I might be able to let go of mother.

  If mother had seen that I was only a little boy—

  I wouldn’t be so screwed up today.

  She wouldn’t have tried to seduce me.

  Maybe she would have loved me as a little boy.

  Maybe I could have loved her as a mother.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have looked to me for what she didn’t get from father.

  Maybe I wouldn’t be so afraid of women.

  Maybe I would have gotten the support I needed.

  Maybe I wouldn’t feel like I’m still four years old.

  Maybe I wouldn’t still be longing for a mother.

  Maybe I wouldn’t put mother’s face on every woman I meet.

  In subsequent therapy sessions he engaged in imaginary dialogue with his mother and father in which he played all the roles, the purpose of which was to allow him further to own, experience, and integrate feelings and reactions from long ago that were obstructing his development to normal adulthood. I shall not linger on the therapeutic process here, since my purpose is only to illustrate a failure of adequate separation and individuation as it affects sexual development.

  Before going on to the emotional realm, I want to offer another illustration of a sexual problem, this time involving a disposition to masochism.

  “It’s frightening,” Sally said to me during one of our early therapy sessions, “because I’m afraid one day I’ll let things go too far. It’s been more like playacting so far: me the helpless victim, my lover free to do whatever he wants with me. Me playing the little girl, him playing the punishing daddy. It’s exciting. I don’t know why ordinary sex doesn’t do anything for me. When a man is kind or tender, I can’t feel anything. Sometimes I feel repulsed. When I’m tied up, given orders, when I feel like someone else has taken over my will, it’s rapture beyond words. I guess this sounds awfully sick, doesn’t it?”

  “How powerful you must feel!” I said.

  She looked astonished and uncomprehending. “Powerful? What do you mean? Haven’t you understood? Power is the last thing I feel. The whole point is, I become excited through feeling weak and helpless.”

  “Yes, exactly, weak and helpless. And the man has made you so.”

  “Yes!”

  “And the man is doing just what you want him to do.”

  “Yes.”

  “He makes you feel part child, part slave.”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s how you want to feel.”

  She looked at me, puzzled. “So what are you saying?”

  “I would say that a woman who is so effective in getting a man to do just exactly what she wants is powerful. Not every woman knows how to do that.”

  She began to laugh. “Oh, I see. Yes, to tell you the truth, it is rather a lovely feeling. Weakness is its own kind of strength.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But it’s humiliating.”

  “And isn’t that delicious?”

  “But what’s it all about? What does it all mean?”

  “You mean you don’t know?”

  “Of course I don’t know! If I knew, I wouldn’t be here, probably.”

  “It’s a complete mystery.”

  “Yes!” she said, with some exasperation.

  “Let’s do some sentence completion. ‘When my lover ties me up—’ ”

  When my lover ties me up—

  I feel helpless.

  I feel controlled.

  I feel taken care of.

  I feel someone else is in charge.

  I feel safe. I feel loved.

  I feel free of responsibility.

  I feel my life is in his hands.

  I feel he really cares for me.

  I feel I’m really important to him.

  I’m the center of attention.

  Everything revolves around me.

  When my lover orders me around—

  I feel submissive.

  I feel feminine.

  I feel loved.

  I become sexually excited.

  I feel I really matter.

  I feel I have my own god to look after me.

  I feel intoxicated.

  I remember the one time when daddy lost his temper and spanked me and I thought, Maybe he does love me after all.

  Daddy was always—

  Not there.

  Remote.

  Distant.

  Leaving me alone.

  Mother was always—

  Busy.

  Flying around.

  Playing bridge.

  Ignoring me.

  Letting me get away with murder.

  Tell
ing me I was her good, sweet girl.

  What I wanted from father and didn’t get was—

  To be taught things.

  To be cared for.

  To be loved.

  To be noticed.

  To tell me what was right and what was wrong.

  To let me know when I’ve gone too far.

  To give me attention rather than money.

  What I wanted from mother and didn’t get was—

  Time.

  Love.

  To help me understand about life and things.

  Guidance.

  A role model I could respect.

  When my father finally spanked me—

  I felt he loved me.

  I felt I mattered to him.

  I thought I had found a way to get his attention.

  I thought, At last I have a father; but it never happened again.

  It felt wonderful being overpowered.

  Everything inside me felt like it was swimming.

  I got dizzy, and I wanted the dizziness to get worse.

  The bad thing about a man who treats me well is—

  There’s no excitement.

  He wouldn’t react to my provocations.

  He’d let me get away with things.

  I’d feel alone.

  I’d feel abandoned and unprotected.

  There’d be no ground underneath my feet.

  I’d just be floating.

  There’d be no foundation to my life.

  I’d hate him for not understanding me.

  The hard thing about growing up is—

  I don’t want to!

  I’m not ready.

  It’s boring.

  It means I’ll grow old and eventually die.

  Building on the foundation of these sentence completions, we were able to see that her masochistic longings reflected the unmet safety and support needs of childhood and the fear of self-responsibility and, in addition, the fear of growing up, growing old, and dying. Once again, I shall not concern myself with the subsequent phases of therapy, which would take us away from the immediate subject.

  These two stories have in common a failure to negotiate successfully a stage of childhood development, which obstructed evolution toward adult sexuality. Sexuality was arrested at the level of preautonomy. A necessary process of separation and individuation had failed to take place.

  An individual who appears to fulfill conventional criteria of adult sexuality—say, someone who is heterosexual, orgasmic, and with no bizarre predilections or fetishes—may still be emotionally immature.

  Sheila, a married mother, age twenty-seven, displayed symptoms of agitated depression when her forty-four-year-old mother announced her intention to remarry after many years of being single.

  “You’ve always been available to me whenever I needed you,” Sheila protested. “Now you’ll be traveling, flying around the country with your husband, busy, busy, busy—where will you be when I need you?”

  When I suggested that surely, at the age of twenty-seven, she was competent to take care of herself, she gave an astonishing answer. “I didn’t ask to be born. Mother owes me. Her obligation doesn’t end just because the law says I’m grown up.”

  She had no friends. When I asked her about this, she answered, “My daughter is my friend.” Her daughter was one year old at the time.

  In terms of emotional age, I would have put her at a preteenage level. She was unable to relate to men and women of her own age. Her voice was that of a child, and so were most of her observations about life.

  And yet in school she had been a brilliant student. Her thinking ability was above average, when she and her own life were not involved. But since the time that she left school, she had thought about nothing but herself and her daughter. Her marriage was suffering, in part because of her husband’s feelings of neglect, in part because her husband seemed almost as immature as she was.

  Her mother had been widowed at an early age and had raised her with help from no one. Because her mother had had to go to work, Sheila had been placed in a nursery school. “You weren’t there when I needed you,” she told her mother.

  “I’ve spent a lot of years trying to make it up to you,” her mother replied sadly.

  “You can’t make it up,” said Sheila. “I feel abandoned.”

  Her mother, who had requested that our next meeting take place without Sheila, asked what I thought she should do.

  “Get married and be happy. Thinking you should be doing something is playing into her problem. I suspect that you’ve already overprotected her too much, to make up for your absence during those early years. Let her suffer, let her make mistakes, let her find out she can survive without you. Apologizing or feeling guilty serves only to confirm her in her feelings of helplessness and dependency.”

  “If only she would agree to come to therapy,” her mother said.

  “But she won’t. You’ve offered, and she’s refused. Besides, your cutting the umbilical cord is part of the therapy she needs. Letting go is the most helpful thing you can do.”

  After Sheila’s husband left her, she moved to Canada and subsequently remarried. The man was homosexual, which Sheila knew, and they agreed to a sexless relationship in which Sheila would be supported in exchange for looking after his home as well as performing social duties.

  “This is just temporary,” Sheila wrote her mother. “I don’t expect the marriage to last. But for the time being it’s very convenient. My daughter and I are treated very well. That’s all I care about now. I wish you could be more understanding. You supported yourself ever since you were young, so you can’t understand my choosing not to work. But I’m not going to treat my daughter the way you treated me. I’m not going to go off to work and leave her alone. So someone has to take care of me. That’s just the way it is. In my own way, I’m a very independent person. Didn’t I come to Canada on my own? And I’m not immoral, either, because my husband doesn’t even want any sex. So why should you be disappointed in me? Why can’t anyone understand that my daughter means everything in the world to me and I must be with her twenty-four hours a day? And later, I’ll be wanting to be there for her when she comes home from school. It’ll be a long time before she’s ready to go off on her own. I’ll think about my life then.”

  In the event that Sheila does not change, the likelihood seems high that one day her daughter will have to undergo her own struggle for separation and individuation, and the struggle will probably be unnecessarily difficult, because it is not easy to visualize Sheila supporting her daughter’s impulses toward independence. Like many mothers who invest their whole sense of identity and worth in their relationship to their children, she is unlikely to recognize that she has made of her love a choke-hold.

  Consider some of the differences between emotionally mature and immature people in the conduct of their relationships.

  Emotionally mature, autonomous individuals understand that other people do not exist merely to satisfy their needs. Maturity entails accepting the fact that no matter how much love and caring exist between two persons, each of us is ultimately responsible for our happiness and our self-esteem. An autonomous individual does not experience his or her self-esteem as continually in question or in jeopardy. The source of approval resides within the self. It is not at the mercy of every encounter with another person. One of the characteristics of the emotionally mature is that they have grown beyond the need to prove to anyone that they are a good boy or a good girl—or, for that matter, a rebelliously bad boy or bad girl. The essence of their relationship to their spouse or romantic partner is not that of daughter or son, although they may experience moments when they would like their partner to function as mother or father; such moments, experienced occasionally, can be quite normal, but they do not form the essence of the relationship.

  In the best of relationships, there are occasional frictions and unavoidable hurts. The tendency of poorly individuated, immature individuals is to translate s
uch minor incidents into major evidence of rejection.

  Emotionally mature men and women have a greater capacity to see the normal frictions of everyday life in realistic perspective; even if they are hurt occasionally, they tend not to make such moments into catastrophes. Further, such men and women respect their partner’s occasional needs to be alone, to be preoccupied, to think about vital matters other than the relationship. Well-individuated people also give this freedom to themselves.

  Men and women who have reached an adult level of individuation and maturity have assimilated and integrated the ultimate fact of human aloneness. They understand that it is the fact of aloneness that gives love its unique intensity.

  With emotionally immature men and women, the story is entirely different. Many such persons face life with the attitude that “when I was five years old, important needs of mine were not met—and until they are, I’m not moving on to six!” On a basic level, these people are very passive, even though on more superficial levels they may appear active and even aggressive. They are waiting to be rescued, waiting to be told they are good boys or good girls, waiting to be validated or confirmed by some outside source.

  They did not discover their possibilities for strength and self-support in the normal course of their development through childhood and adolescent years; now they may have organized their lives around their sense of deficiency, trying either to please, to be taken care of, or, alternately, to control and dominate, to manipulate and coerce the satisfaction of their needs and wants, because they don’t trust the authenticity of anyone’s professed love or caring. They have no confidence that what they are, without their facades and manipulations, is enough.

  Whether they seek completion and fulfillment through domination or through submission, controlling or being controlled, ordering or obeying, there is always the fundamental sense of emptiness, a void in the center of their being.

  An immature woman looks at her lover and, deep in her psyche, there is the thought “My father made me feel rejected; you will take his place and give me what he failed to give me. I will create a house for you and cook your meals and bear your children—I will be your good little girl.”

  A man looks at his bride and there is the thought “Now I am a married man; I am grown up; I have responsibilities—just like father. I will work hard, I will be your protector, I will take care of you—just as father did with mother. Then he—and you, and everyone—will see that I am a good boy.”