Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (4 page)

A form of de-selfing, common to women, is called “underfunctioning.” The “underfunctioning-overfunctioning” pattern is a familiar one in couples. How does it work? Research in marital systems has demonstrated that when women and men pair up, and stay paired up, they are usually at the
same
level of “independence,” or emotional maturity.
Like a seesaw, it is the underfunctioning of one individual that allows for the overfunctioning of the other.

A wife, for example, may become increasingly entrenched in the role of the weak, vulnerable, dependent, or otherwise dysfunctional partner. Her husband, to the same degree, may disown and deny these qualities in himself. He may begin to direct the bulk of his emotional energy toward reacting to his spouse’s problems, rather than identifying and sharing his own. Underfunctioners and overfunctioners provoke and reinforce each other’s behavior, so that the seesaw becomes increasingly hard to balance over time. The more the man avoids sharing his own weaknesses, neediness, and vulnerability, the more his woman may experience and express more than her share. The more the woman avoids showing her competence and strength, the more her man will have an inflated sense of his own. And if the underfunctioning partner starts looking better, the overfunctioning partner will start looking worse.

My brief telephone conversation with Barbara suggests that she is the underfunctioner in her marriage. Of course, not all women sit on the bottom of the seesaw in their relationships. In real life, there are any number of happy and unhappy arrangements. A man may sit on the bottom of the seesaw, or a couple may keep the seesaw moving over time, or each partner may compete with the other for the more helpless, one-down position.

What is important is that being at the bottom of the seesaw relationship is
culturally prescribed
for women. While individual women may defy or even reverse the prescription, it in fact underlies our very definitions of “femininity” and the whole ethos of male dominance. Women are actively taught to cultivate and express all those qualities that men fear in themselves and do not wish to be “weakened” by. And, of course, cultural teachings that discourage us from competing with men or expressing anger at them are paradoxical warnings of how hurtful and destructive the “weaker sex” might be to men if we were simply to be ourselves!

Sure enough, those old dictates to “play dumb,” “let the man win,” or “pretend he’s boss”—are out of vogue. But their message still remains a guiding rule that lurks in the unconscious of countless women:
The weaker sex must protect the stronger sex from recognizing the strength of the weaker sex lest the stronger sex feel weakened by the strength of the weaker sex.
We learn to act weaker to help men feel stronger and to strengthen men by relinquishing our own strength.

Underfunctioning can take any number of forms. It may be as subtle as a wife’s turning down a job opportunity or avoiding a new challenge when her husband gives a covert communication that he would prefer things to remain as they are or when she fears he would feel threatened by such a change. A woman may protect her man by confining herself to work that he prefers not to do and by failing to recognize and develop interests and skills in “his” areas. She may, in the process, acquire emotional or physical problems. Underlying her various complaints lurks the unconscious conviction that she must remain in a position of relative weakness for her most important relationship to survive. If the woman is further convinced that she herself cannot survive without the relationship, she will—like Barbara—vent her anger in a manner that only reinforces the old familiar patterns from which her anger stems.

By engaging in a battle that she could only lose, she failed to exercise the power that she really did have—the power to take charge of her own self. Barbara would have taken a significant step out of her de-selfed position had she clarified her own priorities and taken action on her own behalf. She might have refused to fight entirely and instead said to her husband, “Good or bad, radical or not, the workshop is important to me. If I cancel my registration because you want me to, I will end up feeling angry and resentful. I look forward to the workshop and I plan to go.”

What prevented Barbara from moving from ineffective fighting and complaining to clear and assertive claiming? Perhaps she feared paying a very high price for this move. Many of us who fight ineffectively, like those of us who don’t fight at all, have an unconscious belief that the other person would have a very hard time if we were clear and strong.
Our anxiety and guilt about the potential loss of a relationship may make it difficult for us to change in the first place—and then to stay on course when our partner reacts strongly to our new and different behavior.

What if Barbara did something different and clarified a new position with her husband? What if she approached him at a time when he would be most receptive to hearing her and stated her position firmly and calmly without anger or tears? For instance: “I know that you don’t think the workshop is worth the money and I appreciate that this is your opinion. However, I’m a grown woman and I need to make my own decisions. I don’t expect you to approve of the workshop or to be happy about my going, but I
do
need to make this decision for myself.”

Let us imagine that Barbara could stand firm on the
real
issue here (“I will make my own decisions”) and avoid getting sidetracked into arguing other points, such as the value of the workshop or my character and credentials. Let us suppose that without fighting, blaming, accusing, or trying to change her husband’s mind, she simply held to her statement of what she wanted to do: “Right or wrong, good or bad, I need to make this choice for myself.”

What next? What would happen to this couple if Barbara challenged the status quo by calmly asserting her decision to attend the workshop? What would her husband’s next move be? Would he draw the line and say, “If you go, I’ll leave you?” Would he say nothing but then hit the bottle, have an affair, or become abusive in some way? Would he respond more mildly and become grouchy or depressed for several days?

Of course, we don’t have the slightest idea. We know little about this couple. One thing, however, is certain: Whenever one person makes a move to rebalance the seesaw, there is a countermove by the other party. If Barbara behaved in this new way, her husband would make some “Change back!” maneuver as an attempt to reduce his own anxiety and reinstate the old familiar patterns of fighting. Such a maneuver would occur not because he no longer loved his wife or because he was intimidated by this particular workshop, but because he felt threatened by the new level of assertiveness, separateness, and maturity that Barbara was demonstrating.

Barbara’s new position would have implications far beyond the question of her attendance at an anger workshop. It would be a statement that it is her responsibility, not his, to make decisions about what she will and will not do. In calmly and firmly clarifying this important issue in the relationship, she would no longer be the same woman whom he married and with whom he feels comfortable and secure. She, too, would be feeling very anxious and uncertain if she behaved in this new and different way.
There are few things more anxiety-arousing than shifting to a higher level of self-assertion and separateness in an important relationship and maintaining this position despite the countermoves of the other person.

If Barbara gives up her fantasy that she can change her husband and starts using that same anger energy to clarify her choices and take new actions on her own behalf, she will be less troubled by the “anger problems” that spring from her de-selfed or underfunctioning position: headaches, low self-esteem, and chronic bitterness and dissatisfaction, to name just a few. The price she will pay is that her marriage, at least for a while, will likely be rougher than ever. Underlying issues and conflicts will begin to surface. She may start asking herself some serious questions: “Who is responsible for making decisions about my life?” “How are power and decision-making shared in this relationship?” “What will happen in my marriage if I become stronger and more assertive?” “If my choice is either to sacrifice myself to keep the marriage calm, or to grow and risk losing the relationship, which do I want?”

Perhaps Barbara is not ready to be struggling with such threatening issues at this time. Perhaps she would get very little support in such a venture. Perhaps she believes that any relationship is better than no relationship at all. For all we know, she herself is scared to attend the workshop and is unconsciously inviting her husband to express all the negative feelings for both of them.

It is important to appreciate that there are real dangers here. If Barbara was to stand firm about the workshop, she would inevitably feel an internal pressure to take a stand on other issues as well. Whereas in the past she and her husband may have fit together like two pieces of a puzzle, she would now be in the process of changing her shape. Would he change along with her so that they could continue to fit together, or would he eventually leave her? Would she, while making her own changes, decide that she needed to leave him? At least for now, Barbara has made her choice to protect her husband and continue in the old ways. It is not simply an act of “passive submission”; rather, it may well be an active choice to safeguard the predictable familiarity and security of her most important relationship—her marriage.

Many of us make such choices without being consciously aware of what we are doing and why we are doing it. We do not allow our own selves to know that we would like to attend a workshop on anger. We avoid entertaining new ideas and ways of thinking that would lead to overt conflict and disagreement in our relationships with important others. We may not allow ourselves to identify the unfair arrangements in which we participate. We may also cancel our registration to things new and different, but we may be unaware of the sacrifices we make to keep things on an even keel and ensure that peace reigns.

How might such a peace-keeper have handled the workshop situation? Most likely, she would not have struggled with her partner, because there would have been nothing to fight about. She would not have considered attending an anger workshop in the first place. She would not allow herself to become seriously interested in anything that would threaten another person or disrupt the status quo in an important relationship. If she did allow herself some initial interest in the workshop, she might test out her partner’s reaction before she signed up. She might approach him and say, “Listen, I’m thinking about attending this workshop. . . .” And then she would sensitively evaluate his spoken and unspoken response. If she picked up any signals that he felt threatened or was disapproving, she would move in quickly to protect him. She might say to herself, “Well, the workshop probably wouldn’t be that good,” or, “We don’t have the money now,” or, “I’m not really in the mood to go, anyway.”

In this way, a woman avoids conflict by defining her own wishes and preferences as being the same as what her partner wishes and prefers her to be. She defines her own self as he defines her. She sacrifices her awareness of who she is in her efforts to conform to his wants and expectations. The entire de-selfing process goes on unconsciously so that she may experience herself in perfect harmony with her husband. If she develops emotional or physical problems, she may not associate her dysfunction with the self-sacrifices that she has made in order to protect another person or keep a relationship calm.

In a somewhat less extreme position is the woman who would be able to maintain her interest in the workshop despite the risk of recognizing that she and her partner were not of one mind. She would allow herself to be aware that she is a separate and different person from him, with ideas and preferences no less deserving of respect than his. Nonetheless, she might still find a way to avoid bringing differences between her and her partner into bold relief and incurring his disapproval. She might say to herself, “Well, I do want to go to the workshop, but I can tell there’s going to be a big hassle if I push it and it’s not worth the fight.”
“It’s not worth the fight”
is a familiar phrase that protects many of us from confronting the challenge of changing our behavior. As Barbara’s situation illustrates, fighting per se is not the issue. What matters is the degree to which we are able to take a clear position in a relationship and behave in ways that are congruent with our stated beliefs.