Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (14 page)

It 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.” “Tell her you won’t be friends with her anymore if she does that again.” “Just tell him no.”

Slow down!
Our anger can be a powerful vehicle for personal growth and change if it does nothing more than help us recognize that we are not yet clear about something and that it is our job to keep struggling with it. Let us look at one woman’s journey from an angry, blaming position to a productive confronting of her own confusion.

“My father has a big problem,” she explained, with unveiled desperation in her voice. “He makes excessive demands on me, especially since he can’t drive anymore because he lost some vision following a stroke. I’m supposed to take him shopping when he calls and drive him to his appointments. He asks me to do things for him in his apartment and then criticizes me for not doing them right. There are many things he could do for himself, but he acts like a big baby. Sometimes he calls me two or three times in one day. When I tell him no, he withdraws and makes me feel guilty. I’m really at the end of my rope.”

When I met with Katy for the first time and requested clarification, I heard more of the same:

What was striking, and also quite typical, about Katy’s brief synopsis was that everything she said was about her father:

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.

As you read ahead, keep in mind the lessons you have learned from the previous chapters. Katy’s problem with her father has certain similarities to Maggie’s problem with her mother. Struggle a bit with your own thoughts and reactions to the questions that follow before reading mine.

Is Katy’s Father Wrong to Make Such Demands?
I don’t know. Who among us can say with certainty how many demands this particular seventy-two-year-old widowed father should rightfully make on his grown daughter? If we were to ask ten different people for their opinion, we might get ten different answers, depending on the respondent’s age, religion, nationality, socioeconomic class, sibling position, and family background. If I were in Katy’s shoes, I would probably also complain that my father was “too demanding.” But that’s because I’m me. Another person in the same spot might feel happy to be so needed.

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.”

Does Katy Have a Right to be Angry? Is Her Anger at Her Father Legitimate?
Of course. As I stated earlier, feeling angry is neither right nor wrong, legitimate nor illegitimate. We have a right to everything we feel, and Katy’s anger deserves her attention and respect. But Katy’s right to be angry does not mean that her father is to blame. Rather, Katy’s chronic anger and resentment is a signal that she needs to re-evaluate her participation in her interactions with her father and consider how she might move differently in this important relationship.

What’s Wrong with Katy’s Communications to Her Dad?
For starters, Katy is not being particularly tactful or strategic. Few people are able to listen well when they are being criticized or told what’s wrong with them. Unless Katy has a remarkably flexible father, her statements are likely to elicit further defensiveness on his part and make it less likely that she will be heard.

Second, Katy’s communications convey that she is an expert on her father’s experience. Katy diagnoses her father as a selfish, neurotic, and demanding man who is using his daughter to fill up the empty space left by his deceased wife. This psychological interpretation may or may not fit. There are countless other possible explanations for father’s behavior, as well.

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.

Who Has the Problem?
“My father has a big problem. He makes excessive demands on me.” These statements—Katy’s opening words to me on the phone—reflect her conviction that it is her
father
who has the problem. And yet, from Katy’s description, her father is able to identify his wishes, state them clearly, and even get what he wants.

Katy
has the problem. She has yet to find a way to identify and clarify her own limits with her father so that she is not left feeling bitter and resentful. It is Katy who is struggling and in pain. This is
her
problem.

To say that Katy has a problem, however, is not to imply that she is wrong or to blame or at fault. “Who has the problem?” is a question that has nothing to do with guilt or culpability. The one who has the problem is simply the party who is dissatisfied with or troubled by a particular situation.

What Is Katy’s Problem?
Katy’s problem is that she has not sorted out some major questions in her own mind: “What is my responsibility for my own life, and what is my responsibility toward my father?” “What is being selfish, and what is being true to my own wants and priorities?” “What amount of help can I give to my father without feeling angry or resentful?” Not until she comes up with clear-cut answers to these difficult questions can she meet her father on a different plane.

Katy’s problem is not that her father “makes” her feel guilty. Another person cannot “make” us feel guilty; they can only try. Katy’s father will predictably give her a hard time if she shifts the old pattern, but she alone is responsible for her own feelings—guilt included.

Surely, there are no simple answers. What would your reaction be if Katy were to clarify new limits with her father? Would you view her as selfish or would you cheer her new claim to selfhood? Who knows? How many of us can distinguish with confidence where our responsibilities to others begin and end? 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!”?

“A woman’s work is never done” was the credo that Katy had lived out with her children, and now that the youngest was leaving home, she was continuing the drama with her elderly father. Katy, I learned, had been “giving” for most of her life, as her mother and grandmother had before her. 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. Katy had devoted herself so exclusively to the needs of others that she had betrayed, if not lost, her own self. She felt the rage of her buried self but hadn’t yet been able to use it in order to make changes.

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.

Katy sought my help because she wanted to “do something” with her father and she wanted me to tell her what that something was. The fact of the matter was that Katy—like most women—had more than enough people telling her what to do. Her mother, by example, had taught her that selflessness, self-sacrifice, and service were a woman’s calling, and now Katy’s friends were telling her that self-assertion was the key to her liberation. “Don’t say yes when you really mean no” was the most oft-repeated statement that Katy heard from her advisers, until she herself began to believe that her problem might be solved if she could only find the courage to mutter this unspeakable two-letter word.

What Katy really needed to do was to calm down and do nothing, at least for a while. It is not wise to make decisions or to attempt to change a relationship at a time when we are feeling angry and intense. Also, Katy has really not thought very much about her situation, because she is too busy reacting to it.

Katy would get off to a good start if she stopped blaming and diagnosing her father. 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. Katy could also recognize that she is not yet clear about these things and does not know how to solve her problem. Acknowledging our unclarity is, in itself, a significant step.

What could Katy do next? What can any of us do when we feel angry in reaction to demands being placed upon us but see no new options for changing our behavior? Our anger signals a problem, but it provides us with no answers—not even a clue—as to how to solve it. Anger is simply something we feel—or allow ourselves to feel. At the same time it tells us that we need to slow down and think more clearly about the self, our anger can make clear thinking difficult indeed!

At this point, Katy’s task is not to “do something” with her anger, although criticizing her father and inviting others to do the same may bring her short-term relief or at least a sense of moral superiority. 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. How? Katy will become clearer about her convictions and options if she does the following: 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.

When Katy told her father a little about her problem, it was a high-anxiety moment and no less significant than Maggie’s talk with her mother. By calmly sharing something about where she stood on an emotional issue in the family, Katy shifted the old rigid pattern in the relationship. The conversation went something like this: