Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (23 page)
Read Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships Online
Authors: Harriet Lerner
Tags: #Anger Management, #Personal Growth, #Happiness, #Self-Help
Why Shouldn’t Sarah Let Her Son Know That She Does Not Approve of His Dating a Non-Jewish Woman?
She should. Sarah ought to feel free to share her thoughts and feelings about important issues like this one with Jerry. She might, for example, let her son know what her problem is with the situation. Instead, she criticizes, advises, and blames. Now, nothing would be wrong with this if Sarah were satisfied with the situation. But she’s not. As Sarah describes it, her interactions with Jerry frequently end in conflict and/or distance. The pattern has been going on for a long time, and Sarah is feeling angry and dissatisfied.
What Might the Payoffs Be for This Family in Maintaining the Status Quo?
The old pattern will keep Sarah and her son stuck together in a close way (albeit negative closeness)—just like Maggie and her mother (Chapter 4), who fought about the baby in order to avoid negotiating their ultimate separateness and independence. The triangle between mother, son, and girlfriend here serves to reduce anxiety in the family by keeping other important issues between family members underground. It also protects Jerry and Julie from squarely identifying issues and conflicts in their own relationship.
What Can Sarah Do to Get Out of the Triangle?
The three essential ingredients of extricating oneself from a triangle are: staying calm, staying out, and hanging in.
Staying calm
means that Sarah can underreact and take a low-keyed approach when stress hits. Anxiety and intensity are the driving force behind triangles.
Staying out
means that Sarah leaves Jerry and Julie on their own to manage their relationship. Therefore, no advising, no helping, no criticizing, no blaming, no fixing, no lecturing, no analyzing, and no taking sides in their problems.
Hanging in
means that Sarah maintains emotional closeness with her son and makes some emotional contact with Julie, as well. Sarah may temporarily seek distance when things get hot; but when “staying out” means cutting off, patterns tend not to change.
When Sarah was ready to get out of the old triangle, the following dialogue ensued:
“You know, Jerry, I owe you an apology for giving you such a hard time about Julie. What a terrible time I’ve had thinking about my son marrying a woman who’s not Jewish—and it still is not easy for me. Sometimes I react with a lot of anger and hurt, and I guess you’ve been the target for that. But I’m beginning to realize that my feelings are my own responsibility and that it’s not your job to ensure your mother’s happiness.
Your
job is to find the very best relationship that you can for yourself—and only you can decide if that’s going to be with Julie. Certainly, I’m in no position to make that decision for you or even to know what’s best. I haven’t even given Julie half a chance!”
Jerry stared at his mother as if she had just come down from another planet.
“Even though I’ve been on your back,” Sarah continued, “I know that you’re perfectly capable of making the best choice for yourself without my help. You know, I was just remembering something the other day. Before I met your dad, I was dating someone my parents didn’t approve of. I never really stood up to them even though I was grown up and earning my own money. Do you know what I did? I would sneak out of the house and see him in secret! Later, when my parents disapproved so strongly of your father, we ran off and eloped!”
Sarah let out a big laugh and Jerry closed his mouth, which had been hanging open. He looked at his mother with curiosity.
This was the first time that his mother had shared something about her own experience as it related to their angry struggle.
“Did you ever date a man who wasn’t Jewish?” he asked, not knowing what to expect next.
“You know, I simply never considered it. I really don’t think that it would have been possible for me. It just wasn’t an option.” Sarah became thoughtful and then continued: “But that was me, at another time. You and I are two different people.”
Sarah felt wonderful after this talk, but that night as she got into bed, she was mildly depressed. She felt irritated with her husband, Paul, and provoked a fight with him, which eased her tension a bit about the change she was making with her son. What Sarah felt is simply the discomfort that occurs as we begin to move differently in an old pattern and navigate a more separate and mature relationship with another family member. As we have seen, pressures to reinstate the old pattern come from both within and without.
Two weeks later, Sarah encountered some tough tests of her resolve to move differently. Jerry dropped hints that he and Julie were talking about getting married. Sarah was able to stay calm and underreact. She did not hide the fact that she had always hoped for a Jewish daughter-in-law; however, her attitude conveyed respect for Jerry’s judgment and recognition that choosing a wife was his job and not hers.
Jerry then began a new series of countermoves, as he started to criticize Julie to his mother. “Do you know, Mother, Julie’s father had a birthday today and I couldn’t even get Julie to call him or stop by.” With increasing frequency and ingenuity, Jerry invited his mother to join him in criticizing Julie. Sarah bit her tongue so as not to bite the bait. Instead she said, “Well, you know Julie much better than I do. If that bothers you, perhaps you can talk with her about it and let her know your feelings.” Or, “Whatever the problem is, I’m sure the two of you can work it out.” Sarah herself was initiating more contact with Julie and was discovering things about her she genuinely liked and respected.
Had Sarah joined with her son in criticizing Julie, she would have reinstated the old triangle.
The only difference would be that Julie, not Sarah, would occupy the outside position. People would change their positions in the triangle, but the triangle itself would remain unchanged. Anxiety would be reduced, but at the expense of each participant’s ability to identify and negotiate issues with other parties.
If triangles keep underlying issues in each two-person relationship from surfacing, what happens when a triangle breaks up? Here is a brief look at some of the changes that had occurred in this family eight months later as a result of Sarah’s extricating herself from a key triangle:
Jerry and Julie were aware of some significant difficulties in their relationship and Jerry was expressing genuine uncertainty about whether Julie was the woman he wanted to marry. His critical feelings about Julie and his own ambivalence about marrying outside his religion had previously been held in check by the old pattern in which mother criticized Julie and he was free to come to her defense.
It was predictable that when Sarah got out of the middle of this relationship and gave Jerry her blessings to do the very best for himself, the real issues between Jerry and Julie would surface. If their relationship had been on firmer ground, it might well have been strengthened at this point. Apparently this was not the case.
The relationship between Sarah and her son became calmer and more open as Sarah became genuinely less reactive to her son’s relationship with Julie. With the intense focus off this third party, the important issue of negotiating separateness and independence surfaced between her and Jerry. During one of our sessions together, Sarah said to me for the first time, “Julie or no Julie, I’m beginning to think that Jerry is having a hard time leaving home. What is a grown man doing still living with his parents? I find myself wondering if there’s some connection between
his
problem leaving home and
my
problem letting him go. You know, I was never really very independent from my own mother. When she protested my marriage to Paul, we ran off and eloped and I didn’t write to her for several months. I didn’t have the courage to say to her, ‘I love you, Mom, but I love Paul, too, and it’s my life.’ I just cut off from her and didn’t face the issue.”
Paul was a quiet, withdrawn man who was not very comfortable with closeness. The mother-son-girlfriend triangle served him well because it basically left him out of this intense family dynamic and kept him and his wife focused on
parental
rather than
marital
issues. When Sarah stopped focusing her major “worry energy” on her son, she and Paul came face to face with the distance and dissatisfaction that each of them experienced in their marriage, and they were forced to pay closer attention to their own relationship. As a consequence, Sarah and Paul informed Jerry that he was to move out because they were getting older and wanted to enjoy some time and space for themselves. Jerry did find his own apartment, but he still attempted to hang on harder to test out whether his parents really meant business. When Jerry learned that they had no plans to take him back in and that they were managing just fine without him, he began to put his energy into coming to grips with his own pattern of multiple failures at work and in relationships.
Focusing on a “problem child” can work like magic to deflect awareness away from a potentially troubled marriage or a difficult emotional issue we may have with a parent or grandparent. Children have a radarlike sensitivity to the quality of their parents’ lives and they may unconsciously try to help the family out through their own underfunctoning behavior. The “difficult child” is often doing his or her very best to solve a problem for the family and keep anxiety-arousing issues from coming out in the open.
Sarah’s focus on Jerry and Julie also protected her from thinking about her own life goals. When she removed herself from the old triangle, she was suddenly confronted by some serious questions: What were her current priorities? What goals did she want to pursue at this point in her life? Sarah came face to face with her own self. How easy it is to avoid this challenge of self-confrontation by keeping our emotional energy narrowly focused on men and children, just as society encourages us to do.
If you are directing your primary emotional energy toward an underfunctioning family member, have you ever wondered where all that worry energy or anger energy would go if that individual was off the map? When Sarah stopped busying herself with her son’s life, she began to worry about her own. Jerry, in turn, began to worry about his.
Jog, meditate, ventilate, bite your tongue, silently count to ten . . .
There is no shortage of advice about what you can do with anger in the short run. Some experts will tell you to get it out of your system as quickly as possible and others offer different advice. In the long run, however, it is not what you do or don’t do with your anger at a particular moment that counts. The important issue is whether, over time, you can use your anger as an incentive to achieve greater self-clarity and discover new ways to navigate old relationships.
We have seen how getting angry gets us nowhere if we unwittingly perpetuate the old patterns from which our anger springs.
If you are serious about making a change in a relationship, you may want to read this book more than once. The important how-to-do-it lessons are contained in each woman’s story. It is up to you to connect these with your own life. The patterns I have described are universal among women and you have undoubtedly recognized yourself many times. Nonetheless, you may initially feel discouraged when you try to move differently in
your
relationships. When you are
in
the dance, it is especially difficult to observe the broader pattern and change your own part. In this chapter I will suggest a few tasks to help you review some of what you have learned, add to your understanding of triangles and circular dances, and test out your ability to move differently in relationships. You may want to get together with a friend or form a group with other women who have read this book and who share your new vocabulary and insights.
PRACTICING OBSERVATION
Begin to observe your characteristic style of managing anger.
Do you turn anger into tears, hurt, and self-doubt, as Karen did with her boss? Do you alternate between silent submission and nonproductive blaming, as Maggie did with her mother? We all have predictable patterned ways of managing anger and conflict, though they may vary in different relationships. For example, when conflict is about to surface, you may
fight
with your mother,
distance
from your father,
underfunction
with your boss, and
pursue
your boyfriend.
Give some thought to your usual style of negotiating relationships when anxiety and stress are high. My own pattern goes something like this: When stress mounts, I tend to
underfunction
with my family of origin (I forget birthdays, become incompetent, and end up with a headache, diarrhea, a cold, or all of the above); I
overfunction
at work (I have advice for everyone and I am convinced that my way is best); I
distance
from my husband (both emotionally and physically); and I assume an angry,
blaming
position with my kids.
If you are having difficulty labeling your own style, use the following as a guide:
- react to anxiety by seeking greater togetherness in a relationship.
- place a high value on talking things out and expressing feelings, and believe others should do the same.
- feel rejected and take it personally when someone close to them wants more time and space alone or away from the relationship.
- tend to pursue harder and then coldly withdraw when an important person seeks distance.
- may negatively label themselves as “too dependent” or “too demanding” in a relationship.
- tend to criticize their partner as someone who can’t handle feelings or tolerate closeness.
