Читать книгу Coming Apart - Daphne Rose Kingma - Страница 20

Let's turn now to the other love story, Neil and Marie. Theirs is an example of a relationship that gives the gift of identity, and it shows how each partner can learn when valuable snippets of information from childhood turn up.

Marie was the youngest in a family of five children. She adored her older brother who, because he was so much older, was like a second father to her. Her father was gone a lot, so it was easy to replace him with her brother, who was also handsome and powerful.

Marie was always trying to get in her brother's good graces, to have him admire and adore her in the ways a father would. But by the time she arrived on the family scene, her brother had already coped with three other sisters. He was bored with being a brother, and, according to him, his pack of younger sisters was a nuisance. They were “into girl things.” They were trouble.

Since Marie was the youngest, she received the brunt of his irritation. “Your dolls are in the way again,” he would yell. “When will you ever grow up?!” The whole time she was admiring him for being big, grown-up, and handsome, he was putting her down for being little and a girl.

Interestingly enough, Neil had also been an older brother to a series of younger sisters. Neil's sisters had all been spoiled by a mother who always told Neil to set aside his own needs on their behalf. “Just remember they're girls,” his mother would say. “They can't help it.”

What Marie discovered in therapy was that her relationship with Neil was a replay of her relationship with her older brother. In fact, in their relationship, both Neil and Marie had recreated the roles they had played in their families. Neil became impatient and overly critical; Marie felt victimized and complained that he was always picking on her. Without knowing it, Marie recreated the role of the little sister who absorbed all the negative comments and criticisms of her irritated older brother (in this case, played by Neil, her irritated husband), while Neil was venting his years of buried resentment about the special privileges of women, as first exhibited by his three younger sisters.

This example shows how, consciously or unconsciously, sooner or later, most of us make sure that we watch the movie of our childhood. As one of my woman clients said, “I can't believe it, but my father was an alcoholic, my first husband was an alcoholic, and lo and behold, I've just discovered that my second husband is an alcoholic too.”

Another client, a man, said, “My father was an intractable bully, and so is my wife. I was always in a power competition with my father—which I could never win—and now I'm in a power competition with my wife. I can't win this time either. It floored me to realize that I'd married someone just like my father.”

As this story illustrates, relationship dynamics don't always follow conventional gender lines. For example, Liz realized that in her husband, she had married a man who behaved exactly like her mother. “My mother was in charge of everything,” she said. “She wore the pants. I married a man whose strength I admired, and then I realized that, just like my mother, Bob had to be in control of everything. He had to know my every move, had to make all of my decisions, had to make sure I never had any power of my own. I always thought women married men like their father—but my father was so gentle that I could never understand why I always felt so oppressed by my husband. Then, one day I realized that in marrying Bob I had married my mother!” These are all examples of people living reruns of their childhood movies and finally seeing the information they contain.

As the examples of John and Deborah and Marie and Neil demonstrate, whether or not we are aware of it, we form relationships to accomplish our developmental tasks. It follows naturally that relationships will often end because these developmental tasks have been completed.

In the case of John and Deborah, their relationship ended because their emotional wounds from childhood were finally healed. John served as a parent to Deborah, helping her incorporate the skills of adulthood into her life. Gradually, she became a capable, functioning, and self-sufficient adult. The more she applied the skills she learned from John to the pursuit of her own goals, the farther away she moved from him. In time, she began to resent his control. In fact, it became clear that aside from his parenting function, which was now becoming irrelevant, John and her had little in common. Indeed, their worlds scarcely overlapped, and like any other well-reared adolescent, after she'd learned the skills of adulthood, Deborah wanted to leave home.

As for John, he finally received the love he needed in order to know that he was valuable in himself. Being doted on, adored, and spoiled by Deborah filled a longstanding emotional deficit of his. He finally got a crack at the emotional indulgence he had missed as a child. Now that this void had been filled, he longed to use his adult skills on his own behalf. He realized that for years he had put aside his own career in order to focus on Deborah's growth. After she walked out on him, he bounced back with remarkable swiftness. With venture capital borrowed from a business colleague, he started his own foreign car dealership.

Why did Marie and Neil's relationship end? When their fights became too frequent, they entered therapy, and it was there that they realized they were each simply repeating the roles they had played in childhood. Marie realized that in order to be loved by a man she didn't have to repeat the pattern of absorbing criticism and put-downs that had been the hallmark of her relationship with her brother. Neil contacted his feelings of resentment about women, which he had handily delivered to Marie. They were both able to acknowledge these things, to reveal them to one another, and to realize that their relationship had been of tremendous value. Through the repetition of the emotional configurations of their childhoods, they were each able to feel, express, and identify feelings that had long been buried. But after this task had been completed, they found that their relationship really had no life—no common ground, no shared interests, not even a similar set of values. Their parting was sorrowful but gracious.

As these examples show, relationships can end gracefully when the developmental process is complete for both partners. But when the completion is not simultaneous, endings are particularly painful. It may be clear to you that you have completed your developmental task, and you may be aware, at the same time, that your partner has not. That's where guilt comes in.

If you find yourself in this situation, it is important to remember that you can't necessarily make the completion happen for the other person nor must you feel guilty if the other person hasn't finished his or her task. Our developmental tasks are our own responsibility. If we don't complete them, that's our own problem.

An example of this is Sally and Paul. After seven years of marriage, Sally was totally frustrated with Paul's inability to talk, his unwillingness to fight, his refusal to seek counseling, and his general and long-term depression. After a year of therapy herself, she ended the marriage in a unilateral decision that devastated him.

Between the time she decided on the divorce and when it actually occurred, Sally was overcome with guilt. She was worried about her daughter, who had a close relationship with Paul, and she was afraid that there might have been some opportunity for reconciliation that she had overlooked. Perhaps if she pleaded more strongly, somehow he would be willing to change so they could have a workable marriage. But no matter what she suggested, he refused. “I'm happy with the way things are,” he said. “If you're not happy, that's your problem.”

When he said this, she realized that there really wasn't any hope and proceeded with the divorce. Paul continued to “not understand” what had happened: “You've made up your mind; there's nothing I can do,” he said. “I never wanted this divorce; I'm just your victim.” Years later, when his second marriage was ending (as he explained, “for all the same reasons”), Paul finally entered therapy himself. He was finally able to tell Sally what he was learning about his deeply buried anger at his mother and how he had applied it to every woman in his life. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I loved you; I just didn't love myself, at least not enough to learn what I needed to in order to keep our marriage alive.”

What this story shows is that sometimes the lessons are very long in being learned. It wasn't until fifteen years later that Paul's second divorce finally caused him to discover the unconscious blueprints by which he had conducted his life. Finally, at almost age fifty, he was completing his emotional developmental task.

What happened to Paul is an example of what tends to occur when people fail to understand what they were doing in their relationships: they keep on repeating the pattern until they learn its lesson. That's why so many people who get divorced and remarried find themselves having the same fights, the same dynamics, and the same disillusionments a second or even a third time. They never figured out what they were trying to accomplish in their first marriage and so they had to do it all over again.

Not every relationship changes every person to an equal degree. For many people, relationships are simply a resting place, a “holding tank,” where not much significant forward development is accomplished, but in which a certain state of being is allowed to continue uninterrupted. Sometimes this uninterrupted state of being is a kind of growth in itself. As one man said at the end of his relationship, “Ruth was disappointed because I wasn't ambitious; but I couldn't be ambitious then. I'd been through so much in Vietnam that what I really needed was a quiet place. I needed the same person to come home to every night. I needed reality to be unruffled and boring. I needed to cool my heels and get my bearings. In a sense, that was her gift to me: she gave me a place to vegetate for a while.”

Relationships also end when the developmental process gets out of joint. A relationship can continue for only as long as the two people in it are either in a parallel or similarly focused developmental process. But when one partner wants to change the agenda and the other prefers the status quo, there's trouble.

For example, Mike and Karen, both high school dropouts, met when they worked at an electronics factory. They were both movie fanatics and played on the company softball team. Since they had grown up in poverty, each dreamed of owning a home. After a two-year courtship, they got married. In order to save money to buy a house, Karen supported Mike while he went through training to become an electrician. They pooled their resources, and within four years they bought their first house.

After three more years they had two children, and Karen began to be discontented. Now that she was at home with the children, she missed the stimulation that in the past her work had afforded. She also realized that for most of her life she had been pressed into the caretaker role. As a child, she had had to take care of her sick grandmother, an experience that now caused her to resent staying home with the children. She realized she wanted to go back to work, but when she discussed this with Mike, he became irrationally enraged.

Mike was from a broken home, and it was very important to him to be the provider for his family. He'd been willing to have Karen work while they were saving to buy the house. But now that it was theirs, he believed her place was in the home. He wanted his children to have a stay-at-home-mother, the way he never had.

At this point, Mike and Karen's process began to be distinctly out of joint. They no longer had a common purpose. When they were both working toward buying a house, they were the perfect partners for each other. But as Karen pressed forward with her psychological need to develop her own capabilities, Mike's dream of a traditional family was threatened. After a year of discussion, bargaining, and pleading, Karen delivered an ultimatum: whether he liked it or not she was going back to work. Declaring that she was an unfit mother for the children, Mike took the two boys and moved out.

What I am trying to show in all these examples is the profound impact of childhood on adult relationships. Without realizing it, we often choose partners who will help us trace back through the dark woods of our childhood, like Hansel and Gretel, picking up the scattered crumbs of our identities along the way. It never ceases to amaze me how little most people know about their own childhoods by the time they reach adulthood, the altar, or the divorce court. For all of us, childhood is the archaeological site from which all the important information about ourselves can eventually be excavated: our hopes, our deficits, our expectations, our personal myths about love and sex, our beliefs about the opposite sex, our sense of self-worth, our feelings about our bodies, and all the thousands of other perceptions and beliefs that form our self-concept.

Most of us move into adulthood essentially uninformed about ourselves, unconscious about all of the influences, persons, and scenarios that have shaped us. As a result, we try to design the experience of adulthood on a conscious level, but also, and more importantly, we try to design the experience of childhood on an unconscious level, in such a way as to recreate what has already occurred so that we can finally understand it.

That's why we frequently see women who as children were abused by their fathers marry men who beat them. It also explains why men who had aloof, unaffectionate mothers often marry women who are physically and emotionally distant.

For every single one of us, childhood is the first run of the most important movie of our lives. It would have changed our whole lives if we could have seen it when we were young, but unfortunately we missed it the first time around. Years later, we catch the rerun at another theater—in our love affairs and marriages.

For almost all of us, the vital information about our childhood that we absolutely must have comes only with our adult relationships. Magically, unconsciously, we take the scenarios and emotional dynamics that existed in our relationships with our parents and recreate them in our relationships with our sweethearts, lovers, husbands, and wives. It's as if we're saying to ourselves, “I'll have to do this again until I get it right.”

There are a couple of theories about the repetitive psychological patterns in which we all seem to engage. One is that we are all hopeless incompetents and masochists. We just keep doing the same rotten, miserable things over and over because, at heart, we thrive on misery. The other theory is that we keep creating a rerun of our childhood movie because we're trying to understand it, to get the information we missed the last time around (or the first time around). This theory holds that we reenact, recreate, and review the childhood movie until we have received the lesson it has to give us and then go on in our lives—as ourselves, able to have healthy, whole, adult relationships.

As you may guess, I subscribe to this kinder view of human nature. I don't believe we're all masochists, but I do believe that it takes us a long time and often many experiences to teach us the things we need to learn about ourselves.

Since adult relationships are our primary means of learning the lessons from childhood, it follows that often these adult relationships will not be the perfectly crystalline, boundlessly happy eternal unions we wish they would be. Rather, it is in their very raggedness, incompleteness, and frustration that they become powerfully instructive. It also follows that through them and at the end of them there will be much to be learned about our relationships with our parents—about what I call the unfinished business of childhood—and hence about ourselves.

For every person—married, living with a partner, or single—the paramount task of living is the creation of the self. The reason relationships are so important to us, and the reason their endings are so painful, isn't just that when they are over we miss the company; it is because through them we undertake the process of bringing ourselves into being.

Let me say again that in my view, it is the creation of the self—living as exactly and wholly as oneself as one possibly can—that is our primary task as human beings. Because relationships assist us in accomplishing this purpose, I see their endings not as tragic but, although needled with pain, as potent opportunities.