He's Scared, She's Scared: Understanding the Hidden Fears That Sabotage Your Relationships (49 page)

Another Major Obstacle to Closure: Refusing to Lose

Some people can’t face themselves and say it’s over. They can’t accept the loss; they can’t let go. Some passive women have very strong internal voices urging them to hold on and hope. The waiting role model that they are adhering to doesn’t take into account the eternal unavailability of someone with deep conflicts.

Other passives, particularly men, can’t let go because their egos can’t take the loss. They don’t want to “go out as losers.” Instead
of seeing that there are no winners, they deeply personalize the breakup and keep trying to “win” at it.

If you are hanging on to a relationship because you feel as if your entire ego is on the line, you need to take a careful look at all the voices in your head that are primed to beat you up. Why do you have so much ego vested in the success of this relationship? What does it mean for you to lose? Why are you terrified of telling friends, family members, and/or acquaintances the bad news? What do you imagine they would say or think?

Right now, it may feel like it’s your own voice that is beating you up, but that voice is an internalization of many voices you have heard throughout your lifetime. You need to face each of those voices, with the help of a therapist if necessary, if you are going to be able to lose this relationship without losing your sense of self.

Be Wary of the Obstacles to Your Healing
     • The Obstacle of Friendship

Right now your number-one priority is healing. Healing requires grieving, and it is almost impossible to grieve if you are trying to be friends with “the corpse.” No matter how much you care about this person, no matter how much you still want him/ her in your life, and no matter how much he/she says about wanting to stay in contact with you, right now you need to separate.

You also need to ask yourself some questions. Why do you want to be this person’s friend? Is it because you think she would be a supportive, loving friend? Is it because he is pushing for this friendship? Is it because you need to keep the connection? What we are trying to get at is this: Is it really a friend that you want or are you holding on to give yourself another chance to revive the relationship down the road? Be honest.

Regardless of your agenda, a friendship cannot work
now
. Maybe in six months or a year, but not now. If you want to start healing, you need to try to sever all ties, at least for the time being. If this person truly cares about being your friend, he/she will understand and will wait. If your ex-partner can’t accept your need to take care of yourself right now, he/she is not a good friend.

There is something else that needs to be said here. Maybe you
really believe that you can be your ex-partner’s friend, no strings attached. Maybe it seems crazy to you to never again speak to someone who has been such a significant part of your life. We understand these kinds of feelings. But we also know that it’s hard for an active runner to become a good friend, even with the best of intentions. Beneath the desire for friendship is often a powerful and selfish need to maintain an entrée into your psyche. For this reason any kind of friendship, now or later, needs to be approached with extreme caution.

•
The Obstacle of Getting Caught Up in a Partner’s Conflicted Behavior

“We had been living together for three years and were talking about getting married and having a child as soon as possible. He said we should take it slow because he was scared. That’s what I was doing. Then one night he said he had to get away for a while because it was too much pressure. He called me a month later to say that he missed me and that he was marrying someone else. Now he calls once a week; he says he’s confused and wants to talk about his feelings.”

“She says she doesn’t want to see me anymore, but she calls me every time she has a problem—every cold morning when her car won’t start, every time she has a situation at work, every time she has an argument with a friend. These problems happen sometimes as much as three or four times a week. I’m supposed to just listen and not say anything. The minute I sound like I’m a real person with real feelings, she tells me that I’m making demands on her and hangs up.”

“When he moved out, he left all his clothes. I can’t get him to take them. He keeps coming by to get things a little bit at a time. Whenever he does, he acts like he’s jealous about anything else I might be doing. It’s as though he doesn’t want to see me anymore, but he wants to make sure nobody else does either.”

“She said that I was closing in on her and she needed to be away from me. Since then she has called every single person I know and said she wants to stay friendly with them. Then she asks them about me. If she wants to be away from me so much, why does she attach herself to my life?”

“He calls me and leaves messages on my machine. If I don’t call him back, he keeps leaving messages. When I call him back, when he hears my voice, he sounds annoyed and tells me he’s too busy to talk.”

Right now you have to be especially concerned with protecting yourself from your ex-partner’s conflicted behavior, behavior that can be both bizarre and provocative. Your ex-partner’s conflict can wreak havoc on your attempts to grieve.

What you have to understand is that leaving the relationship may have ameliorated your partner’s anxiety, but it did not eliminate the conflict. This person is still hearing different voices. When you were together, the loudest voice was the one telling him or her to get free. But no sooner is he or she “free” than another voice is apt to be activated—the voice of longing. This person can now look back on all of the positive aspects of the relationship and appreciate them in ways that were not possible when you were together. Far away from the pressure to deliver, this person can reconnect and start to miss the relationship, but the minute the two of you are together, the anxiety and the need to get free surfaces again.

Here’s the rub: Ending a relationship is also a commitment, and your partner may be discovering right now just how difficult it is to make any commitment. This produces new conflict. Let’s look at how this gets acted out.

•
The Obstacle of a Partner Who Is Hanging On

Your ex-partner knows that if you are left alone to grieve and recover, you may be lost for good. That may be too much of a commitment. So, just as you are preparing yourself to believe that it is truly over, suddenly you are the recipient of strange phone calls, peculiar visits, or unexpected mail. He/she wants to be “your
friend” and wants to keep in touch. You may find it difficult to get your belongings back, especially your keys. About your ex-partner’s belongings: you are told to “hang on to them for a while.” The hidden message is “I will return.”

All of this can make you feel, and rightly so, that the person who just left you is still hanging on, though you may not understand why. This person seems to be having second thoughts. Once again you are the recipient of mixed messages. These messages encourage you to believe that it’s not really over. This can stall your healing process.

When Your Ex-partner Cuts You Off Completely

It’s your worst nightmare come true. Suddenly the person who was totally there for you is totally gone. Not only is it over but it feels as though your ex-partner is denying what existed. It’s mind-boggling. You can’t believe it’s the same person.

The worst part is that your ex may have found someone else. They might be talking about getting engaged; they might even be talking about marriage. It’s so soon, how could this be possible? Here you sit, in tremendous pain, and the one you love is with someone new, holding hands in your favorite restaurant. The breakup has been painful enough, but this is overwhelming.

Why is this happening? Because the only way your ex can deal with the conflict is to bury it. Your ex-partner can’t live with the two loud voices of conflict, so one of them has to be destroyed. The easiest way to turn off the voices and try to eradicate the conflict is to find someone new.

The fact that someone can jump from one intense relationship to another is proof of a commitment problem. It highlights the fact that this person can only have a relationship based on fantasy. The moment any commitment becomes real, the same problems will emerge.

It’s a mistake to get caught up in the psychodrama of your ex-partner’s new relationship. In our experience one of the following two patterns is likely to be taking place: Those with active conflicts behave the same way in all their relationships; or they find people with even greater conflicts and so much built-in distance that it never becomes genuinely intimate. Either way be thankful you got
away. Now you can resolve your own issues and move on to the kind of relationship you want and deserve.

Protecting Yourself from Your Ex-partner’s Anger

Your ex-partner seems so hostile and angry that someone might think you initiated the ending. The anger comes out in words and in actions. It comes out in behavior that is provocative and hurtful. It comes out in so many small, perverse ways that you can’t even try to explain it to anyone else. This person’s anger is so strange and so intense that it sometimes makes you feel that you must be at fault. Why is this person you love and care about so angry at you?

Keep in mind that your ex-partner knows better than you do what was promised and what was withheld, and is probably feeling guilty. One way of relieving this guilt is to shift the entire responsibility onto you whenever possible. If your ex-partner can believe that was all your fault, it’s easier to sleep at night.

Your ex-partner’s guilt can easily translate into additional hurt for you. He/she may be doing things to get your attention or to get your goat. Your ex-partner is acting as though it’s your fault that it’s over at the very time when you probably would do anything to still be together. He/she may even be flaunting a new relationship in a way that can’t help but be extra hurtful.

Don’t get fooled into feeling that you did something that caused this behavior. Protect yourself by maintaining as much distance as possible.

Making a Commitment to Yourself

As you are going through the recovery process, perhaps the best step you can take on the way to resolving your commitment conflicts is to learn how to make a commitment to yourself. That means promising yourself that you will spend more time looking at your own “stuff” than you will looking at what any of your partners are doing or not doing.

During this period you should be looking at your own fears, trying to establish why you have made the choices you’ve made and why you have allowed yourself to be so “committed” to an
unstable situation. You have to ask yourself why you might sometimes feel that you are more committed to another human being than you are to yourself or any of the things you value or believe in. No partner or relationship should ever become that much more important than oneself or one’s belief system. It’s up to you to make certain it doesn’t happen again.

Right now you should make a firm commitment: to start focusing your creative and psychic energies on building a life for yourself—a life that cannot be so totally disrupted by the breakup of a relationship, no matter how important that relationship may be.

A DELL TRADE PAPERBACK

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Copyright © 1993 by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol Coopersmith

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eISBN: 978-0-307-76347-1

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