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Repeating the same old fights protects us from the anxieties we are bound to experience when we make a change. Ineffective fighting allows us to stop the clock when our efforts to achieve greater clarity become too threatening. Sometimes staying stuck is what we need to do until the time comes when we are confident that it is safe to get unstuck.
Opposites do attract, but they do not always live happily ever after.
Sandra was consciously angry and frustrated at Larry’s apparent lack of feelings about the incident, yet she was unconsciously helping him to maintain his strong, cool, masculine position.
“How can I change my steps in the circular dance?”
Rather, it is simply to say that we don’t have the power to change another person who does not want to change, and our attempts
to do so may actually protect him or her from change. This is the paradox of the circular dances in which we all participate.
When a pursuer stops pursuing and begins to put her energy back into her own life—without distancing or expressing anger at the other person—the circular dance has been broken.
Sandra’s earlier focus on her husband and children had protected her from confronting some difficult questions: “What are my priorities right now?” “Are there interests and skills that I would like to develop?” “What are my personal goals over the next several years?”
And while Sandra poured all that effort into trying to change someone she could not change, she failed to exercise the power that was hers—the power to change her own self.
To attempt to change another person, particularly a parent, is a self-defeating move.
By participating in fights that lead nowhere and never speaking directly to the real issue. You fight with your mother rather than let her know where you stand.”
as long as Maggie chose to fight, or to remain silent on issues that mattered to her, she would never really leave home.
Independence means that we clearly define our own selves on emotionally important issues, but it does not mean emotional distance.
No successful move toward greater independence occurs in one “hit-and-run” confrontation.
To the contrary, Maggie’s success at becoming her own separate person rested on her ability to share something about herself with her mother and father in a straightforward, nonblaming way while maintaining emotional contact with them throughout the process.
persistence and calm, without getting emotionally buffeted about by the inevitable countermoves and “Change back!” reactions we meet whenever we assume a more autonomous position in an important relationship. This is what achieving selfhood and independence is all about.
If, however, our goal is to break a pattern in an important relationship and/or to develop a stronger sense of self that we can bring to all our relationships, it is essential that we learn to translate our anger into clear, nonblaming statements about our own self.
The more significant issue for women is that we may not have a clear “I” to communicate about, and we are not prepared to handle the intense negative reactions that come our way when we do begin to define and assert the self.
As we have seen, women often fear that having a clear “I” means threatening a relationship or losing an important person.
It is not just anger and fighting that we learn to fear; we avoid asking precise questions and making clear statements when we unconsciously suspect that doing so would expose our differences, make the other person feel uncomfortable, and leave us standing alone.
Karen was afraid to be clear about the correctness of her position, because she would then experience pressure to continue to take up her own cause. And to do this might make her the target of her boss’s anger and disapproval. As Karen put it, a “real fight” might ensue.
Karen had a deep unconscious fear that fighting might unleash her fantasied destructive potential,
Karen had little practice expressing her anger in a controlled, direct, and effective fashion.
Karen was afraid of transforming her anger into concise statements of her thoughts and feelings lest she evoke that disturbing sense of separateness and aloneness that we experience when we make our differences known and encourage others to do the same.
Separation anxiety may creep up on us whenever we shift to a more autonomous, nonblaming position in a relationship, or even when we simply consider the possibility.
More often, and more crucially, separation anxiety is based on an underlying discomfort with separateness and individuality that has its roots in our early family experience, where the unspoken expectation may have been that we keep a lid on our expressions of self.
Karen had a long-standing pattern of attempting to restore the togetherness of her relationships by crying, criticizing herself, becoming confused, or prematurely making peace.
Karen’s story illustrates how our unconscious fears of destructiveness and of separateness may block us from maintaining our clarity and using our anger as a challenge to take a new position or action on our own behalf.
“We teach what we most need to learn.”
Using our anger as a starting point to become more knowledgeable about the self does not require that we analyze ourselves and provide lengthy psychological explanations of our reactions, as I did with Susan.
Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.
Learning to use our anger effectively requires some letting go—letting go of blaming that other person whom we see as causing our problems and failing to provide for our happiness; letting go of the notion that it is our job to change other people or tell them how they should think, feel, behave.
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. To recognize our lack of clarity is not a weakness but an opportunity, a challenge, and a strength.
It is an act of courage to acknowledge our own uncertainty and sit with it for a while.
If we are searching for the ultimate “truth” of the matter (How much should a parent ask? How much should a daughter give?), we may be failing to appreciate that there are multiple ways of perceiving the same situation and that people think, feel, and react differently. If I persist in repeating this point, it is because it is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, and hold on to, when we are angry. Conflicting wants and different perceptions of the world do not mean that one party is “right” and the other is “wrong.”
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.
The one who has the problem is simply the party who is dissatisfied with or troubled by a particular situation.
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!”?
No matter how much we sympathize or identify with Katy’s situation, it is her problem, nonetheless. This is not to imply that Katy is neurotic, misguided, or wrong. Nor is it to say that she is the “cause” of her dilemma. 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 from others, when we begin to pay primary attention to the quality and direction of our own lives, may certainly invite us to become anxious and guilty.
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.
The fact of the matter was that Katy—like most women—had more than enough people telling her what to do.
What Katy really needed to do was to calm down and do nothing, at least for a while.
She could begin to recognize that it is her job to separate herself a bit from his wishes and expectations in order to clarify her own values, to evaluate her own choices and priorities and to make decisions regarding what she will and will not do.
In terms of lasting change, Katy’s job is to strive to achieve a lower degree of emotional reactivity and a higher degree of self-clarity.
First, she can share her problem with other family members, including her father; second, she can gather data about how other relatives—especially the women in her family—have dealt with similar problems over the generations.
Learning how other family members have handled problems similar to our own, down through the generations, is one of the most effective routes to lowering reactivity and heightening self-clarity.
All of us inherit the unsolved problems of our past;
If 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.
Human relationships, however, don’t work that way—or at least not very well. We begin to use our anger as a vehicle for change when we are able to share our reactions without holding the other person responsible for causing our feelings, and without blaming ourselves for the reactions that other people have in response to our choices and actions. We are responsible for our own behavior. But we are not responsible for other people’s reactions; nor are they responsible for ours. Women often learn to reverse this order of things: We put our energy into taking responsibility for other people’s
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How can we learn to take more responsibility for the self and less for the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of others?
