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Did she do the right thing? Joan did the right thing for Joan, but some of us in her place might
have chosen to do something different—or not have known what to do at all.
using our anger as a guide to determining our innermost needs, values, and priorities, we should not be distressed if we discover just how unclear we are. If we feel chronically angry or bitter in an important relationship, this is a signal that too much of the self has been compromised and we are uncertain about what new position to take or what options we have available to us....
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We suffer most when we fail to grapple with the “Who am I?” questions and when we deny feeling the anger that signals that such questions are there for us to consider.
is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.
Too often, anger propels us to take positions that we have not thought through carefully enough or that we are not really ready to take. Nor does it help that those around us may be full of advice and encouragement to act: “Leave that man, already!” “Tell your boss that you won’t do the assignment.” “You just can’t let him treat you that way.” “...
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Katy is doing what most of us do when we are angry. She is judging, blaming, criticizing, moralizing, preaching, instructing, interpreting, and psychoanalyzing. There is not one statement from Katy that is truly about her own self.
Diagnosing the other person is a favorite pastime for most of us when stress is high. Although it can reflect a wish to provide a truly helpful insight, more often it is a subtle form of blaming and one-upmanship. When we diagnose, we assume that we can know what another person really thinks, feels, or wants, or how the other person should think, feel, or behave. But we can’t know these things for sure. It is difficult enough to know these things about our own selves.
How can women—trained from birth to define ourselves through our loving care of others—know with confidence when it is time to finally say “Enough!”?
Deep down, she felt too scared and guilty to reveal that long-buried part of herself that wanted to put forth her own needs and begin to take.
The rules and roles of our families and society make it especially difficult for women to define ourselves apart from the wishes and expectations of others—and negative reactions
If, however, we do not use our anger to define ourselves clearly in every important relationship we are in—and manage our feelings as they arise—no one else will assume this responsibility for us.
her job to separate herself a bit from his wishes and expectations in order to clarify her own values,
we do not know about our own family history, we are more likely to repeat past patterns or mindlessly rebel against them, without much clarity about who we really are, how we are similar to and different from other family members, and how we might best proceed in our own life.
preoccupation with her father had organized her life and helped her to avoid confronting her isolation from her own peers. She also learned that she was far more skilled at giving help than asking for it.
for other people’s feelings and reactions and blame them for our own.
How can we learn to take more responsibility for the self and less for the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of others?
need to make a conscious effort to become less reactive in
order to focus our attention on the task of getting the facts.
our job is to learn to take responsibility for our thoughts, feelings, and behavior and to recognize that other people are responsible for their own. Yet, at the same time, how we react with others has a great deal to do with how they react with us. We cannot not influence a relationship pattern. Once a relationship is locked into a circular pattern, the whole cycle will change when one person takes the responsibility for changing her or his own part in the sequence. Assuming this responsibility does not
ask a person to do more housework (or parenting) and then say “Do it the way I would do it” or “Do it the way I want you to” is a move that blocks change.
Men also have this difficulty balancing the forces of separateness and togetherness; however, they tend to handle anxiety by emotional distancing and disengaging
(thus, sacrificing the “we” for the “I”), whereas women more frequently handle anxiety by fusion and emotional overfunctioning (thus, sacrificing the “I” for the “we”).
their problems and trying to be helpful. The most helpful thing we can do is begin to share part of our own underfunctioning side.
mothers, we are led to believe that we can, and should, control things that are not realistically within our control.
Emotional overfunctioning reflects the fusion in family relationships.
Family roles and rules are structured in a way that fosters overly distant fathering and overly intense mothering. If
When we learn to stay in our own skin and avoid assuming an overfunctioning or “fix-it” position, children—whether they are four or forty—demonstrate a remarkable capacity to manage their own feelings, find solutions to their problems, and ask for help when they
about when we stop trying to shape up the other person and begin to observe patterns and find new options for our own behavior. As we sharpen our observational skills, some patterns may be easy to identify (“I notice that the more I ask Claudia to discuss her feelings about the divorce, the more she closes up. But when I leave her alone and calmly share some of my own reactions to the divorce, she will sometimes begin to talk about herself.”) Other patterns that involve three key people are more difficult to observe, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Triangles serve to keep anxiety-arousing issues underground, and that is why we all participate in them. When
Yet all of us are vulnerable to intense, nonproductive angry reactions
deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family—in particular, losses and cutoffs. If we do not observe and understand how our triangles operate, our anger can keep us stuck in the past, rather than serving as an incentive and guide to form more productive relationship patterns for the future.
three essential ingredients of extricating oneself from a triangle are: staying calm, staying out, and hanging in. Staying calm means that Sarah can underreact and take a low-keyed approach when stress hits. Anxiety and intensity are the driving force behind triangles. Staying out means that Sarah leaves Jerry and Julie on their own to manage their relationship. Therefore, no advising, no helping, no criticizing, no blaming, no fixing, no lecturing, no analyzing, and no taking sides in their problems. Hanging in means that Sarah maintains emotional closeness with her son and makes some
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Focusing on a “problem child” can work like magic to deflect awareness away from a potentially troubled marriage or a difficult emotional issue we may have with a parent or grandparent. Children have a radarlike sensitivity to the quality of their parents’ lives and they may unconsciously try to help the
family out through their own underfunctioning behavior. The “difficult child” is often doing his or her very best to solve a problem for the family and keep anxiety-arousing issues from coming out in the open.
women are trained to be pursuers and underfunctioners with men except in the areas of housework, child work, and feeling work, where we may overfunction with a vengeance. Men
“I need a little time to sort my thoughts out. Let’s set up another time to talk about it more.” Seeking temporary distance is not the same as a cold withdrawal or an emotional cutoff.
Don’t use “below-the-belt” tactics. These include: blaming, interpreting, diagnosing, labeling, analyzing, preaching, moralizing, ordering, warning, interrogating, ridiculing, and lecturing. Don’t put the other person down.
Don’t participate in intellectual arguments that go nowhere.
convince others of the “rightness” of your position. If the other person is not hearing you, simply say, “Well, it may sound crazy to you, but this is how I feel.” Or, “I understand that you disagree, but I guess we see it differently.” 9. Do recognize that each person
never helps anybody’s performance to talk about them rather than to them. The more
when we are low on facts, and when important issues stay underground, we are high on fantasy and emotionality—anger
The less we know about our family history, and the less we are in emotional contact with people on our family diagram, the more likely we are to repeat those patterns
you are an underfunctioner, guard against presenting your problem as if you are just a bundle of weakness and vulnerability; if you are an overfunctioner, try not to make it appear as if you have it all together and don’t need anything from anyone.
advice can be bad for our emotional well-being if it ends up conveying the message that major changes can be made easily or quickly—that,
equally crucial for us to connect with
the family of womankind,
circular connection between the patterns of our intimate relationships and the degree to which women are represented, valued, and empowered in every aspect of society and culture.
