When to trust your man (or woman)

Skylar, I just read your question and one/joy’s responses. I love this part:

“‘starting’ to feel the anger is the beginning of freeing and integrating your emotional self. take it easy sky, it may take a long time, but you won’t get stuck in anger. and if you do, you will get unstuck. this is part of learning to trust your emotional self. don’t be looking to abandon her before you ever pick her up and hold her.”

It’s great that your anger is surfacing. It’s also normal for someone who isn’t used to having these feelings, particularly toward people that we love or feel obligated towards, to want to resolve them right away. To forgive them or figure out a way to handle it that will make it all better.

If you’re not used to being angry, it can raise questions in your mind about whether you’re a good person. They may not be exactly phrased like that, but there’s a lot of training, especially in families where everyone is responsible for everyone else’s feelings, that anger is selfish and that everyone else has a right to get upset if one person starts reacting with anger. It’s interpreted as abuse of power or unreasonable demands.

And if these questions come up in our minds, we start working overtime to save our self-images by converting our anger to “caring” about the people who harmed us and wanting to help them get better.

Forgive me for putting it this way, but STOP IT. You can be angelic later, when you’ve used your anger in ways that are useful to make you a strong, smarter, better person. Right now, your appropriate business is to explore what’s going on with you, filling out the memories of what happened to you, figuring out why you are entitled to feel the way you do, how the trauma affected your character and world view, and, if you’re dealing with our parents at all right now, to make clear statements about not participating anymore in any residue of this behavior that still exists.

What you’re supposed to do with anger is experience it until you’re finished with it. You’ll be finished with it when you’re certain that you’re no longer vulnerable to the thing that triggered your anger. If it’s a current threat, you neutralize it or get away from it. If it’s historical, and you realize that you’re dealing with long-term effects of not being able to neutralize or escape it at the time, you’re probably also faced with the problem that they people and circumstances that created the problem don’t really exist anymore.

Maybe they’re not dead, but they’re old. Even if they’re perfectly healthy and theoretically able to discuss this with you, things are not the same. You’re not a child anymore. Not dependent. They, in truth, are at a time of their live when they’re diminishing in many ways, and you have more youth and strength. Neither of you can change the past.

So what do you do?

Well, what would you do if they were dead? How would you resolve these feelings? The first thing I would suggest is make an effort to get in touch with the you that you were when the really bad things happened, or the things started that caused you to change. This is really about your experience, not anyone else’s (though, again, a good therapist can definitely help with this process). Find that younger you, and think about the parent you wish she had, and then be that for her. No one knows what she needs better than you. Help her to feel her righteous anger, instead of the grief and fear she’s been living with, and encourage her to believe that she was always entitled to be respected and appreciated for who she is. Reassure her that there’s a new parent in town that will take care of her better, someone who really cares about her feelings and will do everything you can to comfort her.

And then, back in your real life, step up to the job. Because the other part of getting through anger is using the clarity and energy it gives you to start recognizing threats and build better defenses and skills for dealing with problems. Because you are taking care of you now, not expecting some parent or quasi parent to show up to rescue you. Anger starts to illuminate the costs of that abdication of your own power.

Sky, this should sound familiar to you. You’ve been through parts of it already. But getting mad at your parents brings you much, much closer to the origens of the life strategies that have been bringing you questionable or really bad results. Like trading independence for safety. Swapping taking care of someone else’s inadequacies or insecurities if they’ll take care of yours. Anger really starts to illuminate the problems with how that works, and how no one ever really takes care of us as well as we want them to, because no one but us really understands what we need.

As far as dealing directly with your parents goes, here are a few ideas that may help you get through this period.

The fact that you are mad at them now means that you are already beginning to establish boundaries about whatever they did that was disrespectful or hurtful. So you can start thinking about new rules in your life that you can use to protect yourself from such things. Like you may want to limit your relationship and your conversations to ones in which you are treated respectfully as a person with your own ideas and reality, and you are appreciated and encouraged to be who you are. And when that’s not happening, you don’t invest or even participate. So you can develop statements like, “I don’t enjoy conversations like this and I don’t participate in them.” And if it doesn’t stop, you leave.

This isn’t ending the relationship. It is simply ending something that’s going on that you don’t like. That’s taking care of yourself.

It’s also retraining people in terms of how to deal with you. It’s a good thing if you can express what you want. Like “I wanted to be treated with respect. I’d like us to get along. But part of that is you recognizing that I’m a grown-up woman with my own ideas, and it would be nice if you actually liked me for who I am.”

If they’re used to being able to bully or manipulate or guilt-trip you, they probably won’t deal with it very well at first. But if you’re consistant and back up your rules with enforcement (you refuse to participate or leave when you don’t like what’s going on), they’ll eventually get it. Probably after they’ve whined to everyone else in the family about how selfish and impossible you’ve become. But if anger is giving you some clarity, you’ll recognize they’re just trying to get what they want at your expense, and hold firm to your requirements for relationship and your willingness to enforce them.

See what great practice this is for life?

Admittedly none of this gives you the imaginary pleasure of venting in to their faces about how terrible they were to you, what monsters they are, how you have suffered because of it, the report from your doctor that your internal organs are turning to jelly from a rare stress-induced illness (oh, why not while we;re at it?) and enjoy the view as they whine and groven in abject apology and regrets, begging for your forgiveness and thanking you for helping them to see the light.

This is what bottled up anger would like to happen. But the truth is that neither your face-off with them nor their apologies can fix what’s really wrong with you. Nor vengeance. Nor trying to drink or work or screw or fall in love or skydive or eat your way through a mountain of chocolate. The problem is not what they did, though you really truly need to understand that. The problem is not even what their behavior did to you. Thinking like this still gives them all the power.

The real problem is the compromises you made to deal with it. The hope and expectations you gave up, the sense of entitlement to have your own opinions and needs, the terrible accommodations you made to their demands that you be a source for them (as one/joy put it so well), allowing them to abdicate their correct role of nurturning you and you agreeing to parent them.

This is not something to blame yourself about. You were a child. Children are survivors, and you did what you believed you had to do to survive.

But now, as an adult, you can rediscover those events that caused you to compromise and make yourself less than you were meant to be, and you can take your life back. You can change your mind about agreeing to those demands, because you’re no longer dependent on them for physical and emotional nurture. (It would be nice if they were still your parents and cared about you, but it’s not going kill you now if they don’t. Back then, you had good reason to fear that your life or at least you’re ability to thrive was at stake.) Now your surviving and your wellbeing is about how well YOU take care of you, and your relationship with them needs to be shaped by how well it supports you and your needs. Just like every other relationship is.

I know what I’m saying may be hard to wrap your mind around. I have friends, ones who have been grievously abused and have struggled their whole lives because of it, who cannot stop feeling responsible for their parents. Because they “feel sorry for them,” because the parents are mentally ill (because they must be to have treated them so horribly). So as middle-aged adults, they continue to perpetuate the same exact dramas, with their parents and with every other major relationship in their lives, because they have never emotionally left their parents’ houses.

Children leave. They are supposed to leave. In adolescence, most children think their parents are oblivious to what’s important and actually hopelessly dim. That is also supposed to happen, as they prepare to start their own lives with their own ideas. It is very common for young adults to continue to think their parents are wrong about almost everything until they start to face some of the same challenges that they remember their parents facing. And this finally gives them something in common as adults, and they develop new relationships that are more like equals and friends.

All this is normal. Children from abusive backgrounds often do not properly separate, and they stay enmeshed with their parents, continuing to feel responsible for them in the ways they were burdened too early. And part of getting well is really growing up through some of these missed phases. Separating from them and letting them be responsible for themselves, for their own feelings, as we adult children are finallly realizing that we need to learn finally to take care of ourselves.

Sky, I realize that I’m writing another long monologue and perhaps not really giving you concrete answers to your questions. Or maybe you can find them in here. I do know that getting in someone’s face because I was mad about for something that happened in the past never solved anything for me. It was a lot more useful to work with those feelings with a commitment to using them to make myself safer, stronger, smarter, more free and empowered in my life.

And I know I said it earlier, but I’m repeating it. Forget about forgiving them. It’s not the right time for that, and you don’t need to do that to be a good person. In fact. forget about being a good person. It’s the wrong thing to be worried about that too. Use your energy to explore your history and your feelings, and then to develop better boundaries and skills at dealing with threats and other problems. You’re learning how to be your own woman. That’s what’s important.

And if you really need to DO something with these feelings, get creative about it. Literally. I wrote poems. If I knew how to paint, I would have done that. Creative expression is great therapy, and it helps you find insights too.

Love —

Kathy

Skylar,

It’s not easy for me to see that your parents are spaths or narcissists. The only things that are clear from your letter is that they seem to be fearful people without a lot of backbone, because they’re behaviors don’t match what they say their intentions are, but in a weak, non-performing way.

Am I to assume to that were raised Catholic? So was I. And at the risk of offending any Catholics on the board — especially since the modern church seems to be somewhat different than the one I grew up in — the church in my day seemed to generate a lot of meek followers and, on the flip side, a lot of noisy bullies. People could get very happy and peaceful inside the teachings, but if their personal relationships went “outside the lines,” they often didn’t have a lot of resources to deal with it. Way back in the time that I grew up, we used to joke that Catholic girls got pregnant out of wedlock because they couldn’t possible use birth control, because that would mean admitting that they planned to have sex.

Be that as it may, the more important thing is what I hear from you. And it is largely a frustration that these people are hung up in whatever is going on in their heads (and whether they are narcissists or spaths isn’t relevent here) and failed to fulfill some of the things you expected from them as parents. Specifically protecting you, giving you guidance, and even telling you the truth about what they perceived and thought about it. Instead they wishy-washed around and acted like nothing was more important than have things happy-happy between you. And what makes it worse, more confusing perhaps, is that they were so tough and rigid with you when you were younger, demanding absolute obedience and conformity with their wishes and values as the price of love.

Am I getting this right? I’m trying to understand the facts through all the emotions in your recounting of the story.

If so, here’s what I think. Maybe you did make a mistake in assuming they were still acting like parents (or what you imagine parents act like) after you had your rebellion and they agreed to give you conditional freedom. That whatever they agreed to went “outside the lines”in terms of their understanding of how parents guide and control their children’s upbringing. And if they couldn’t keep you totally under control, they just gave up. I suspect they were very rules-based, and they didn’t have anything to replace those rules when they couldn’t raise you like their parents raised them. So they just moved into the only other mode they could imagine which was “happy family,” doing whatever they could think of to promote that illusion. But in reality, they are fairly resourceless poeple in dealing with you and you siblings once you developed opinions of your own and start pushing back. I don’t see a lot of flexibility or creativity in these people in dealing with you or in dealing with the people you want them to protect your from. They don’t sound particularly confident or strong.

All that doesn’t mean you need to feel sorry for them. Anything but. You are the one who feels injured and offended. And maybe I’m making a mistake by doing this second-hand psychoanalysis of your parents, because you may be tempted to let them off the hook. And that’s not good for you. But what I do hope to communicate with you is, whether they are spaths or narcissists, or whether they are weebly little codependents that just want to be loved (even at the cost of giving up as parents), they are what they are. It may not be what you want, but it’s what you got.

Now what about you and your feelings about their behaviors? And let’s for the sake of your mental health stick with looking at their behaviors. I read in another one of your posts that you like delving into the psychology of sociopaths, and I think that not exactly the most helpful thing in the world. Spaths are really simple. They’re Pacman eating machines and whatever they leave in their wake is just road litter. But so are virtually all personality disorders, including codependents, from the perspective of the person dealing with them. Because these people are caught up in their own internal dramas and, until they get well, we will never be real to them except as role-players in those dramas. For you, who is on the road to being a healthy, whole person, the important fact here is that you will never have the opportunity to have a full-fledged relationship with people like this. And if you’re paying attention, from the perspective of someone who wants more than that, you’re going to understand their limitations through their behaviors, and they way they limit you. Limit your expressions of your feelings, limit your scope of behavior, limit what you can do with them, etc.

Focussing on behaviors allows you to judge things in a way that you can’t really do as easily (or perhaps even fairly or correctly) if you try to paint the whole person with a single broad judgement about what they are. If, instead, you focus on behaviors, you can pretty quickly discern if you like it or you don’t, if you feel like it’s good for you or it’s not, if it worked for you or it didn’t. It even allows you to evaluate things in terms of your expectations (and disappointments), and to think about the relationship deals that you think you have. Which is always a good thing to think about, especially if you’re discovering that you and the other person aren’t operating from the same playbook.

But most important, especially in a situation like this, is that it makes it relative easy to talk about it. Talk about what happened (or is happening right now). Talk about the feelings it creates in you. Talk about what you thought the deal was. Talk about the deal you want. Andif you’ve thought that far (which this kind of thinking leads to), talk about what you plan to do if you can’t get the deal you want. All of this defined in terms of behaviors.

I said before that your parents are what they are. Back when I was dealing with my sociopath, I got really hurt and frustrated when he didn’t behave like I thought a person was supposed to if they “loved” someone. After a while, it became clear that he was incapble of that, and after doing some research I named him a sociopath and got really angry at him for taking advantage of my “rules” about how people behaved when they loved each other to exploit me in a number of ways. All the while he kept telling me, both in so many words and through his actions, I was an idiot for not taking care of myself and I was volunteering for it every step of the way, so of course he was going to take advantage of the situation because he was in this for what he could get.

It took me a long time, a lot of healing, before I finally got the fact that he was what he was, and if anyone was the crazy person in this relationship it was me. Because I was participating and literally putting myself in front of PacMan and saying “eat me.” It wasn’t that I was a fool or wanted to be hurt. It was more like I was stuck in a kind of brainwashing that didn’t let me respond to what was happening. I had my own set of rules of about how I had to act and how other people had to act, and anything outside of them made me resourceless. I simply didn’t know how to respond except to go back to what I already knew and try to make it work, over and over.

Guess what? I had a personality disorder. I’m not even going to name it, because I’m not sure what it would be called. But the fit my definition of a pesonality disorder, because it was overuse of one life strategy and inabilty to flexibly move into other ones that were more appropriate to the situation. I was stuck in that range because of the impact of trauma from my upbringing. You expressed surprise about what I wrote about my son and his upbringing. Here’s the simple answer about that. In my determination NOT to be like my parents, I became something just as dysfunctional. A bad parent in a different way. What we fear shapes us. As Charles Shultz wrote in Peanuts, “We have met the enemy and they are us.”

You are angry at your parents for not meeting your needs. That is a really simple way of putting it. You feel like you were entitled to have certain types of behavior from them, and you didn’t get it. I am not arguing with you. In fact, I am wildly applauding you for getting clear about some of your normal human needs and your entitlement to get them met. I hope you continue to get clear about this, not just about your need for personal safety, authenticity from the people around you, and some peace and consistency in your life. The are a lot more needs that are important that you’ll get to later as you work this all this. The fact that they are truly needs, not just “like to haves”, means that you are entitled and actually responsible for making sure that yo get your needs met. This is another definition of taking care of ourselves.

Obviously we can’t force people to meet our needs. But on the other hand, if we don’t tell them about our needs and what we’d like to happen, it’s a lot less likely that that we’ll get what we want from them. So in that spirit, you may find it worthwhile to discuss their behaviors with your parents and let them know that you have feelings about them. Especially where they’re not meeting your needs, historically or right now. If you want to leaven this with a little encouragement for them, you might also consider letting them know the behaviors that you appreciate, so they don’t feel like they’re being flattened by a tsunami of talk about how they failed you. But make it clear that certain behaviors were not what you expected from them as parents, and that you are disapponted and actually feel like they are partially responsible for some of your suffering, because you assumed they knew you were inexperienced and still depending on them to give you advice, or at least tell you the truth if they thought you were in danger. Which may bring up the topic of how you are depending on them now for certain things as well, that their behaviors are not exactly what you’d hoped for, and that’s kind of upsetting too.

And in all of this, you want to communicate clearly about what’s important to you now. What you’re needs and values are. You want honesty in your life. You want to cultivate safe circumstances that don’t leave you vulnerable to people and circumstances that are potentially harmful. You want some consistency and not a lot of surprises about things that are your business. And finally you can ask if they can work with you on this. Do they think that they could have this kind of relationship with you? Because its so important to you that you’re not sure if you can maintain a real and loving relationship with them, if you guys can’t get on the same page.

And if they’re confused and asked for details, you can talk specifics about their behaviors (not their character) and how they impacted you. How they made you feel. The difficulties you faced. The work you had to do to deal with them. And what you actually expected. And what you would have preferred. (Notice this is all about you, your viewpoints, your needs, your opinions, your feeling about what they did. They may quite reasonably come back with response about their feelings, viewpoints, values, intentions. And that’s a good thing, if it happens, because you’ll all learn a lot more about each other and what’s really been going on.)

You can’t make them care. In particular, you can’t get a response that is material from them, if you’re moving into their personality-disorder zone. If they can’t be protective about you and your things, it’s a good bet they can’t be protective about themselves either and, instead, they try to make up for it by being nicey-nice and hope they can be charming enough to convince the lions not to eat them. Or maybe they’re sociopaths or narcissists and they’ll use the opportunity to do something really clever to get what they want.

But whatever they do, the important thing is how it affects you. (Back to Donna’s advice.) Maybe whatever they say will make you feel a little better. Maybe you’ll feel better from just being so open with them. Maybe you’ll feel relieved because you’re no longer confused about the fact that you can’t really depend on them in situations where they have to face down scary or aggressive people, and you’ll realize you have to give up on trying to get them to do it , and you’ll have to take care of your stuff in some other way or just give up on the stuff, and find other ways to feel safe. Maybe you’ll come out of it feeling sorry for them, or maybe disgusted with them, or maybe realizing that they never were who you thought they were and feeling a little alone in the world. Or maybe you’ll feel cool as a cucumber about the whole thing, and knowing that you’ve shaken them, but you’ve also given you all a chance to grow into a better relationship, and you’re ready to wait it out.

Or maybe you’ll feel all of it at the same time. What matters is that you’re inside you’re own reality, taking action on your own wellbeing, and living through the adventure of it. Nothing in our lives is clearcut or even easy. We are in learning experiences all the time, living with the ups and downs of our progress, trying to figure what the messages from the universe mean, trying to understand what the right the to do is, trying to avoid the law of unintended negative consequences (and sometimes failing). This is life. And if you are being active and working at being creative in how you approach it, and understanding that the failures and disappointments are a necessary part of the process, then it can get to be pretty interesting and often a lot of fun.

And how this relates to what’s going on with you, you are learning a not of new things, like how to use anger for what you’re supposed to use it for, and to come out of the experience with transformations in your circumstances that you, in taking action, created (when things are in your power) or influenced (when they’re not, like when we’re dealing with other people who have their own power over their choices). You’re learning not to be afraid or ashamed of your feelings, and not feel guilty about having needs, and not feel stupid about making mistakes. You’re doing the very important work of acquiring more and better skills for acting on your feelings. What I talked to you about today is a good way of dealing with feelings triggered by people we care about, that we want to maintain a relationship with if possible.

With people we don’t care about, it’s easier just to walk away.

I hope all this makes sense.

Love —

Kathy

Thanks Oxy. This was difficult to write, and I’m not sure I was seeing things correctly. I really don’t know the whole story and I’m running, as usual, by the seat of the pants.

I’m beginning to thing that maybe Skylar and I should take this offline.

And I’m also not sure that some of the mental and conversational techniques I’m talking about are useful for people who are in the early stages of healing and completely overwhelmed with feelings.

Or even for people who really want to get into their anger and act out a bit before they get so rational.

Oh well.

I can’t believe that it’s snowing here again today. Just a little. But it thawed out a little bit yesterday and I have long icycles hanging from gutters. Not a good sign in terms of the possibity of ice dams, when it melts more, but for the moment it’s gorgeous.

Back to work. I hope you’re staying warm. I keep fiddling with the thermostat trying to conserve oil until I can’t stand it and then turning it up again. Hurry up, spring.