He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (45 page)

We want to warn you against placing all your hopes on this kind of reunion scenario. Your partner may well return, but unless major changes are made, you will simply replay the same old relationship. True, there often comes a time where the active partner, having tasted freedom, begins to have second thoughts about what has happened. If your partner wants to see you again, it is our opinion that you should only do so in a controlled environment—the office of a truly understanding and helpful couple’s counselor or the office of a clergyperson who has been trained in couple’s counseling. You cannot jump back in willy-nilly until you have some concrete assurance that things will be different.

SECTION TWO

Recovering from a Commitmentphobic Relationship

Because many people come to a book such as this just as a relationship is ending, we felt that we had to say something about recovery. Many fine books have been written dealing with recovery in more depth, but we want to talk here about some of the special circumstances that affect men and women in relationships in which commitmentphobia is the underlying theme.

You will notice that the emphasis in the following pages is different depending on whether you have active or passive commitment conflicts. Those with passive conflicts typically have to learn to move through their loss and on with their lives. Those with active conflicts need to be certain that they spend enough time thinking about what they are doing and what they are losing.

We both know what it means to recover from a commitmentphobic relationship. Not only have we talked to countless men and women in the various stages of recovery, but we’ve also experienced this process on a deeply personal level. We have both had our own losses and conflicts to work through. It is our hope that the insights we gained, as well as the insights our interviewees provided, will be helpful to you as you move through your own process. We know all too well that there are no easy answers or simple formulas for getting over the loss of a love, but we also know for certain that you can heal, and you can change your pattern.

RECOVERY FOR THE ACTIVE PARTNER

If you were the active partner, the time leading up to the breakup was undoubtedly one of tremendous conflict for you. Only you know the depth of your conflict. Only you know the kind and quality of the conversations that led you to decide whether or not to let go. Only you know how many times a day you asked yourself what to do and whether you did the right thing.

Well, it’s over. Now what? Even if you are the one who wanted out, the loss of a relationship with a person you cared about is going to stir up all kinds of uncomfortable and unexpected feelings. If you are like most people with active commitment conflicts, you are going to try to spend as little time as possible dealing with these feelings. You are going to want to get away from them, much as you wanted to get away from the relationship that provoked them. We believe very strongly that if you want to be able to change your pattern in the future, all of these feelings need to be acknowledged and attended to.

We think it’s important that you be prepared to experience all of the following:

• Expect to feel very ambivalent
  

• Expect to feel relieved one moment, scared and lonely the next
  

• Expect to be confused and overwhelmed
  

• Expect to feel sad and sentimental
  

• Expect to feel guilty
  

• Expect to think about your ex-partner a lot
  

• Expect to want to blot out all thoughts about your ex-partner
  

• Expect to question seriously whether or not you made a mistake
  

• Expect to entertain thoughts of trying again
  

• Expect to fantasize about reunion scenarios
  

• Expect to want immediately to jump into a new relationship
  

We think any action you are likely to take right now, whether with your ex-partner or someone new, will not be appropriate. You want to feel better and get rid of all those unpleasant and confusing feelings. We understand that. But now is the time to sit with those feelings and try to understand what happened and why. It’s not the time to do anything that can cause even more confusion and chaos.

You need to see this ending as a new beginning. Not necessarily as a second chance to make your relationship work or as a chance to find someone new, but as a chance to come to terms with your ambivalence in a way that will no longer hurt your partners and hurt yourself. And that’s going to require real work, not just good intentions and wishful thinking.

Recovery Means Cleaning House

If you are the active partner, the challenges you face at the end of your relationship depend a great deal on how you orchestrated that ending. Once again we need to look at the three most likely possibilities:

• Did you provoke your partner into ending the relationship by starting a huge argument or engaging in some type of outrageous behavior that you know your partner would be unable to tolerate?

If you provoked your partner into ending the relationship, it’s very easy for you to play the role of victim right now. Your partner was the one who ended it, so you can lay all kinds of blame. Your ex-partner was “too jealous,” “too crazy,” “too needy,” “too possessive,” and so on and so forth. But all this does is help you avoid the truth and thus keep you stuck.

You have a choice right here. On the one hand you could let your former partner accept the blame. But doing this is not going to help you resolve your conflicts, and it’s also incredibly unfair.

Your other choice is the truth. Part of you knows just how much you wanted this relationship to end. Part of you knows how cleverly you brought this relationship to the point of no return. If you want your life to be different, you need to start facing your refusal
to work on the relationship. Your ex-partner deserves this for his or her peace of mind, and you need it for your own recovery.

You need to honestly face how much you participated in pushing your ex-partner over the top. You need to take responsibility for your part in this, and you need to do so now.

If you constructed a triangle with a third person to fuel the fire, you had better face that too. Dealing with both partners honestly and appropriately is also an important part of your recovery.

• Did you construct such enormous boundaries (emotional or physical), withdraw so thoroughly, or create so much distance between you and your partner that the relationship died of attrition?

If you took the back door out of this relationship, your first order of business is dealing with the expectations you left behind. Your ex-partner may be holding on to some powerful fantasies that the relationship may one day be revived. Maybe you think you are being kind by letting your ex-partner believe there is hope for the future. Well, you’re not. You need to release your ex-partner so that he or she can get on with life. It’s only fair.

You also need to release
yourself
so you can get on with
your
life. That means thinking about how you behaved and the mixed signals you gave. You probably have your own fantasies that you’re not ready to give up. You may sense that if you changed your mind one day, you could take the boundaries down and bring the relationship back to life. It may feel reassuring to have a contingency plan, even if you doubt you’ll ever use it, but keeping this plan alive in your brain is a tremendous obstacle to accepting responsibility for your behavior and the end of the relationship. If you want to be with this person, you have to figure that out and work on it. If you want the relationship to be over, you have to come to terms with your loss and grieve it. It’s the only way to recovery.

You need to let go, and so does your partner. Confronting your partner with the truth is going to hurt both of you a lot, but it is also liberating and healing in a way that none of your convoluted explanations could ever be. The hurt, the anger, and the sadness that follow are appropriate and ultimately manageable. What is not appropriate and not manageable is the desperation and con
fusion that come from trying to hold on to the shadows that were once a relationship.

If you back out of a relationship slowly and never offer an honest explanation, nothing changes. But if you face what you have done and cop to your problem, the opportunity for real recovery, real growth, and real change begins.

• Did you up and disappear, perhaps finding a second partner to hide behind?

If you leave a relationship without an appropriate explanation, your partner is not going to be the only one who suffers. The sudden ending is going to take its toll on you too, and your abrupt exit may come back to haunt you very quickly with feelings of guilt.

Before you move to another state or join the Peace Corps just to get out of this relationship, you need to stop for a moment. There is nothing more healing for you and for your partner than the truth. Yes, it may provoke incredible anger. Yes, it may generate tremendous hurt. Yes, it may trigger incredible disgust. Yes, it may bring about enormous sadness and guilt. But all of these feelings may be appropriate and ultimately manageable.

Don’t run away and pretend the relationship never existed. To do so is tremendously cruel to your ex-partner, but it’s also unfair to you because when you wipe out what you shared, you’re also wiping out a part of yourself.

Curtain Calls—When You Have Second Thoughts

Once you are “free,” even if you are seeing someone new, you may find yourself thinking a lot about your ex. You may even start obsessing. You may question your decision. You may wonder if you’ve lost the best thing you ever had.

Before you “reappear” on your ex-partner’s doorstep, swearing your true love and promising to change, think about this. Right now you have not done anything that will enable you to back up these words. Maybe at this very moment you’re not feeling frightened at the thought of making a commitment, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a commitment problem. It’s easy to
want a commitment when you don’t have one. It’s something else entirely to make and keep a commitment when a real opportunity presents itself.

If you’re going to contact your ex-partner, it should be to present an explanation, not a plea for reconciliation (a letter would be just fine—a personal visit is not necessary and not recommended). Part of your recovery involves facing the fact that the conflict doesn’t go away just because you’ve gone away. If you want a second chance, you need to earn that second chance. And the only way you’re going to do that is through a lot of hard work, preferably in the office of a competent therapist.

Learning to Grieve

Men and women with active conflicts rarely take the time they need to evaluate their past relationships and grieve their losses. Take the time. We know you’re not sure if you did the right thing. We know you’re not sure of what to do now. Here are some ideas to help you get more clarity:

1. Try to resist the impulse to rush into another relationship.

Jumping from one relationship into another isn’t appropriate, and it’s very confusing. It’s almost impossible to know what you are really feeling. This is difficult for everyone, and you are apt to act out the same old scenario. It’s your pattern. Or you may do something that looks different but turns out to be very similar. Whatever you do, do not triangle this new person into your old drama. If you don’t know who you want to be with or what you want right now, you probably need to be alone for a while.

Try to show some respect for your feelings, for the feelings of your ex-partner, and for the feelings of any person you might meet. Take some time to grieve one relationship before getting into another.

2. Don’t use the person you left behind to work out your conflicts.

When you aren’t sure whether you’ve done the right thing, and if you still have a great many feelings, there is a tendency to hurry back to your ex-partner to reassure yourself that you can go back if you want. Then you may change your mind again. In fact you can go back and forth this way many times.

This is unfair because you’re not fully considering what this is doing to someone else. If you can’t control your ambivalence, consider some form of therapy to help you through this period. If you truly want to resume your relationship, it might also be wisest to do so with the help of a trained couple’s counselor who can help both of you establish new ways of being together.

3. Take time to reevaluate your relationship pattern.