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4

Others on This Journey

The following people are fictionalized characters based on real clients with whom I have worked. The real clients are aware that they have been fictionalized and have read and approved the characters based on them. This fictionalization is intended not only to protect the confidentiality of the clients but also to protect the confidentiality of others in their stories. The essence of their issues remains accurate and clear.

Elizabeth

It is 1992. I’m working in my private practice office with Elizabeth. She is a beautiful woman of fifty-five years. She holds a doctorate degree in social work and is the director of a social services agency serving a relatively large region in our area. She is highly respected for her competence, sincerity, and reliability. She is articulate and bright and very sad. She has come to me for relationship problems. On this particular day in November we are talking about her relationship with her husband of thirty years.

Elizabeth describes a deteriorating relationship with her husband for the last five years and even more so over the last two years. “Nothing I say is right.” “I never know how he’s going to react.” “He needs to defy me, to fight with me.” “I feel attacked.”

I have inquired about his alcohol use. She reports some incidents of abuse of alcohol but is unclear about whether there is enough evidence of alcoholism.

Elizabeth is today particularly hooked by wanting to help her husband solve his problems. She is a very good problem-solver. Resourceful and creative, Elizabeth often uses these talents in constructive and desirable ways in her personal and professional life. But in her relationship with her husband, this just isn’t working out so well.

Elizabeth says that her husband comes to her complaining about problems with his real estate business. She listens and then tries to offer what might “fix” this situation. She believes that he has come to her for this. But no. When she tries to “help,” he rejects her offerings in a wide assortment of ways, all of which lead to conflict between them that sometimes gets mean, loud, and hurtful. They have been hurt, saddened, and lost by this repeating cycle of entanglement.

Today we are looking at ways to break that cycle, things Elizabeth could do differently to interrupt this deadly pattern. Yes, deadly. Though Elizabeth is not suicidal, she is quite despondent and discouraged. And though she says she would not kill her self, she does have thoughts of wishing she was dead. We know that untreated addiction can result in death or insanity. We need to acknowledge that untreated entanglements can result in the same tragic ends.

So we start to talk about emotionally backing off when these “help me/don’t help me” arguments start. We start to talk about listening and detachment. Elizabeth says to me, “Detachment is very hard for me. . . . How would you do that?”

How would you do that? How do you detach? I am struck by this basic question. I know some answers to it, thankfully, because I have been doing my own work in and out of my twelve-step program. It is both an easy and a difficult question to answer. I know that Al-Anon has given me some excellent ideas of what detachment is and when to do it. So have some of the books I have read, especially Women Who Love Too Much and Codependent No More. I know that some basic healthy communication skills also facilitate this process of detachment. I also realize that I have cultivated some of my own internal techniques for detaching as I have been working on these issues for my self. And I know how hard it is to detach even if you know ways to do it. It is very hard.

I respond to Elizabeth by verbally offering a list of ideas of ways to detach. This list is coming off the top of my head and is drawing off the resources I just described. I jot this list down very roughly as I say it. I have never put these ideas together in this concrete, pragmatic way before. The information has been developing there for a while, and I have been testing it out, but I have never laid it out for me or someone else in this way.

This feels like a good thing to be doing.

And before my work day is over, I find my self offering this list again and again, enriching it each time. Client after client asks me questions about detachment and similar emotional entanglements that have brought them to therapy. Their stories are each quite unique. Their entanglements involve different relationships. Addiction may clearly be present, or it may not be. Clients may identify them selves as adult children of people with addictions or as abused, or they may not. The way they identify themselves is not nearly as important as is their experience of losing their self in and to another person.

Anne

A few hours later, Anne comes for her appointment. She is in her late twenties, a small woman with sandy brown hair cut short and framing her face. She dresses quite fashionably and is eager to talk. She often has a smile on her face, but an edge of anger runs through much of what she has to say. We have been working together for a good while. Anne first came to see me shortly after she married. She was feeling so upset, confused, and depressed then about the angry and insecure way she felt around her husband. “He pisses me off” is a common sentence to hear from Anne.

Today Anne is focusing on her bad feelings about an important job from which she has been recently released. Anne had been working as the manager for a popular women’s clothing store. She had been very excited about this opportunity for career growth and had taken her work seriously. She had expressed concern to me, but she was not clear about all she was supposed to do and how to do it. She had described feeling overwhelmed at the store at times and feared that her boss was not satisfied with her work. Indeed, today she tells me her fears have come true, and she has been released from the store’s employment completely. She talks about wishing she had more supervision and feedback before they made their decision to ask her to leave. She is feeling angry and oh-so-bad about her self. Her feelings of failure and worthlessness are dominant. She easily recalls messages from her parents that told her that she could not make it on her own, that she should find a husband to support her and become a housewife. She is thinking this may be right after all.

Anne is asking, “Is it me? Was I wrong?” This is also a common sentence to hear from Anne. She has asked this many times as she has sorted through the issues with her husband. It is so easy for her to think it is all her problem. It is so easy for her to believe that everything would be fine if it wasn’t for her.

Now this is a good question to ask our self: “What part do I play in this problem?” And I believe we do need to do this. The problem here is that Anne, like many of us, takes on the majority, if not all, of the responsibility for the problem, whatever it may be. In so doing, we bog our self down completely with guilt, defeat, and hopelessness, which equals depression, so that we can hardly function, much less find our way out of the problem. We are lost to the totality of our self. We see only the dark and inadequate. We exaggerate the dark and inadequate. And we believe that is all there is of us.

Today Anne has lost her self to the store and to her boss with whom she worked. As Anne says, she’s feeling “lousy.” This situation is the singular focus of her thoughts and feelings both in and out of this office.

Charlotte

As Anne leaves, Charlotte arrives. Charlotte is in her thirties. Her shoulder-length hair bounces as she comes in, and she greets me with friendly, sparkling eyes. She is a jolly sort. She smiles and jokes a lot. She makes both of us laugh. Charlotte and I agree that Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse must have had her in mind when she wrote the description for the Mascot role in alcoholic families in her book Another Chance: Hope and Health for the Alcoholic Family. Indeed, Charlotte comes from a large, alcoholic family. Charlotte’s father was an untreated alcoholic who committed suicide two years ago. Charlotte worked as a flight attendant until several years ago when she married. She now lives with her husband and their two-year-old daughter and works part-time for a travel agency.

Charlotte is a relatively new client. She came to me several months ago concerned about her relationship with her husband and her tendency to spend too much money on stuff she does not need or really want. She thought perhaps she was “addicted to Wal-Mart.”

I have learned that Charlotte’s husband works many hours away from home at his job. He gets up early to go to work and returns in the early evening. Many evenings he spends working on their home and yard. When he sits down in a living room chair at the end of his day, he falls asleep. Charlotte wants to talk with him and hear from him about just anything. Often he has little to say. Charlotte struggles constantly with how to handle this relationship that she values and wishes to maintain.

Today, though, Charlotte is talking about her difficulties with her mother-in-law. She is feeling very angry with this woman who she believes wants Charlotte to say and do things the way she thinks they should be done. Charlotte both wants to please her and to tell her to get lost. On one side, Charlotte says, “I feel sorry for her.” On the other side, she says, “She thinks I’m not supposed to go anywhere. . . . Well, I got her number: Her number is she wants to make me feel bad. . . . But I don’t know what to do with it [i.e., her number].”

Then, in her characteristic way, Charlotte adds, “Isn’t that terrible?”

“Isn’t what terrible?” I ask her.

“Isn’t it terrible that I feel this way about her?”

And then, also in a characteristic way, she adds, “What should I do? What should I say? Did I do the right thing with her on the phone the other night?”

Mark

In the evening of this same November day, Mark comes for his appointment after a full day in his office. He is a handsome man in his forties. He has a professional business which he owns. Mark, too, has a clever sense of humor that comes with him as he deals with his deeply troubling issues.

Mark entered therapy after he was left by his wife of many years. That relationship had been happy and vibrant for Mark. They had good times and were carefully planning for their future together. With seemingly little notice, she ended the relationship and quickly got involved with someone else, and today Mark has come in telling me that he has just learned that she is now engaged to the guy and plans to be married as soon as their divorce is finalized.

Mark has already been using therapy time to look at his high tolerance for the emotional instability that was also characteristic of their relationship. “It’s always been a roller coaster . . . always something going on.” He has also been looking at his obsession with her that has come out in thoughts and in writings he has done. He has been obsessed with trying to understand her and to get some answers from her.

Now he is starting to feel obsessed with his anger toward her as well. In talking about her recent engagement, he says, “That makes me mad. . . . I feel anger and disdain.”

In a healthy effort to save his self, Mark adds, “I have to remember it’s crazy. . . . I don’t need to be in a relationship with anyone who would do what she has done.”

Meanwhile, in my therapy work with college students, clients with similar experiences were presenting themselves. The following two young women came in for counseling around this same time. And my work with them was an essential part of the development of these ideas for disentangling. Several days after I saw Elizabeth, Anne, Charlotte, and Mark, I saw these students for therapy.

Lindsey

Lindsey is a nineteen-year-old college junior with beautiful blonde hair and a long, tall figure. She has excellent grades and a full scholarship to college. She told me in her intake session that she has a history of bulimia, for which she was hospitalized in high school. She is not bulimic now, but does have a tendency to over-exercise. She also tends toward obsessive thinking. She seems to have a lot of insight and motivation to work in therapy.

When she first came to see me several weeks ago, she explained that she was feeling “really unfocused . . . pulled in all directions.” Fairly quickly on the heels of this she told me, “This summer I realized that my mother is alcoholic.” Her mother denies that she has a problem with alcohol. Her mother is divorced from Lindsey’s father and lives on her own. Her mother can be emotional and dependent on Lindsey for advice and support. She can also be very critical of Lindsey.

Today Lindsey is feeling a lot of confusion about how to handle this relationship with her mother, even though it is long-distance. Breaks from college find her spending her time at home with her mother. Financially, she is still dependent on her as well. And at a more basic level, Lindsey would simply like to have a good relationship with her mother.

She is quite torn and confused. Like Charlotte, Lindsey is pulled in different directions. On one hand, she wants very much to help her mother in whatever ways are needed. She wants very much for her mother to be happy, saying, “If she was happy, I’d be happier.” On the other hand, Lindsey says, “She’s crazy, and she makes me feel like I’m crazy.” Lindsey states that her mother’s negative views about things “rub off on me.”

No wonder that Lindsey feels “pulled in all directions.”

Her personal goals include becoming more self-aware and less confused without feeling like she’s “abandoning my family.”

Trish

Later in the afternoon on this same day, Trish comes for her fifth appointment with me. Trish is an eighteen-year-old college freshman. She is a petite young woman with short, bouncy hair. She has a sweet smile and a very tentative way of speaking and presenting her self. She acknowledges being shy and having a history of being picked on and teased.

Trish entered therapy because of adjustment problems to college life. She described feeling both anxious and depressed since starting college. In our initial session, she described having trouble breathing at times and feeling “so dark inside.” Many of her issues seemed to focus around peer relationships. She described her self as worrying a great deal about the question “Do people like me?” She said she had this problem in high school, but it had gotten better. “This insecurity thing came back when I got to college. . . . I’m afraid that if people really know me, they won’t like me.”

As part of her history, Trish has told me about a difficult relationship with her father. Trish’s mother and father divorced when she was eleven, and she has had regular visitation with her father. She describes him as demanding and controlling. Trish has tried for years to feel like she is pleasing him but believes she is “never good enough.” Trish has said to me that she still hopes that “maybe I’ll get him to really like me.”

Today, however, Trish wants to talk about her attachment to a peer on her campus, an attachment that is making her feel obsessed and frustrated. Trish describes an intense interest in this person who lives near her. The person parties a lot, studies very little, and comes to Trish’s room to borrow her things. Trish is aware that this is a “bad relationship” for her in that it leaves her feeling inadequate and not okay. She states that she tries hard to “conform” to what she thinks this other person wants her to be. She states, “I’m hooked. . . . I have no life outside of her.” Trish is aware of all of these thoughts and feelings but expresses an inability to do anything different. Her healthy self states that one of her therapy goals is to find her own identity, to be able to say, “This is me, and I’m okay with me.”

And then there are also teenagers working on these same issues in counseling. Many have surfaced over the years in my private practice work, but one case in particular has been with me through the development of this disentangling work and is rich in details of lostness and growth.

Rebecca

Rebecca is a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school. She is a pretty, petite young woman who is bright and articulate. We have been working together for two years. Rebecca first came to see me after being raped by an acquaintance while on a beach vacation with her parents. She was very depressed and convinced that “it was all my fault.” She was being “harsh” on her self about what happened to her. She was tearful, moody, and having some flashbacks from the rape. Just prior to our first appointment, she made a suicidal gesture of cutting on her wrist with a razor. I facilitated her hospitalization, which stabilized her in a matter of days, and she returned to our community and began her therapy work with me.

Rebecca’s work over these two years has helped her greatly with exploring and starting to form her identity. She has become more stable in her moods and more accepting of her self. She continues to work on relationships, particularly intimacy. She knows she has a tendency to jump in with both feet really fast, and in so doing scares others away. She can be too open, allowing her self to be vulnerable often to the wrong people. She has come to know that she can too easily “self-sabotage.”

And she often describes her self as “an extremist,” meaning that she goes from one extreme to the other, and that she is all-or-nothing no matter what the situation or relationship may be. “Extreme in everything I do,” she says. “My grades have to be perfect, and everything has to be up to my standards of everything-is-under-control. I can’t stand to not be understood or for there to be a problem. I have to solve things immediately.”

Today Rebecca is struggling with the ending of her relationship with her first real boyfriend. She has been with Ben for a year and a half. The relationship has been relatively stable and supportive, tender, and kind. This fall, however, Ben moved with his family to their new home about four hours away. After one month there, his relationship with Rebecca began to fall apart as their lives took different directions. Over the month of November, they have been struggling with what to do with their relationship now. Ben has expressed his wanting to end it; Rebecca wants to keep it.

Today Rebecca tells me she has received a letter from Ben saying, “I’ve fallen out of love with you. . . . Give me some space.”

Rebecca is distraught. “He never loved me. I’m absolutely baffled with life. I haven’t even grasped it. It hurts like a bitch!”

She is depressed and consumed with this problem. “I missed the PSATs on Saturday because I was arguing with him. I’ve missed lots of classes and am behind on my work. And I don’t want to get high, but I’m weak now and probably will.”

And she goes further: “I can’t deal with this. I feel like I have no control. I never realized how obsessive I am. My thoughts always drift to ‘it’s not worth it.’ I get in these fits. If I had sleeping pills, I would be dead.

“This whole thing with Ben is driving me crazy. I want him in my life.”