The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (14 page)

That summer she was having trouble controlling her bladder, and she had to go to the bathroom all the time. Often, she would wet her pants. Her parents tried everything, even making her wash out her underwear. Instead of stopping, she got better at hiding the fact that she was wetting her pants, and started washing them out without anyone knowing.

On the first day of ballet school, she was holding the barre and trying to hold in her pee. When the teacher said “Everyone plié!” Lydia kept her legs crossed, knowing if she tried to plié she would pee on the floor. The teacher yelled at her, “Lydia, plee-ayyy!” The class turned to look at her, and as she bowed her legs the pee came streaming out. She ran from the room and refused to ever go back. It was the end of her dance career, and the end of her peeing problem. That accident helped her mother realize that Lydia might have a medical condition. She took her to a doctor, who found that she had a raging bladder infection and needed to be hospitalized immediately. She was put on IV antibiotics to treat the problem.

One day in the hospital, her dad sat at her bedside and apologized for how he had blamed her for her peeing problem. “I should have known it was a medical problem,” he told her. “You’re still perfect!” When she told him she was worried about missing school, he said, “Don’t worry—you’re smarter than all the other kids and will have no problem catching up; heck, you’re probably smarter than the teachers too!” And they laughed about that. She remembers saying to him, “You know, it’s not my fault that I wet my pants,” and he said, “I know. It was the infection. You really
are
perfect!” And that was their bond. She remembered thinking she always wanted to be perfect. And from then on, whenever something went wrong, she wanted to scream: It’s not
my
fault.

As Lydia tells this story it is clear even to her that this memory is a criti
cal one, in every sense. It’s the lens through which everything critical gets filtered. The ballet-class scene and the hospital-bed scene and even the scenes where she wet her pants and washed out her underwear are her screen memories. In her version, the scary ballet lady plays the villain, and her father is the white knight. But she also sees that her dad unwittingly set her up for a lifetime of disappointment, because nobody can be perfect all the time.

The key process to stop “screening” is to start living in the present and decide to, in Catherine’s term, “remetabolize” the past. Here’s how this works: First figure out if you’re allowing a defining moment to affect you today. Next tell yourself those memories are not always accurate. Catherine says they serve a purpose in life—for Lydia they’ve buoyed her and let her escape her own inner critic—but now they’re no longer working for her, and her goal of moving forward in her career is being impaired. By remetabolizing it, you learn to see it from a different perspective: The villainous ballet teacher was actually trying to be helpful; the supportive dad was just blinded to the actual fact that you (an extension of him) are not always perfect. Swap their roles, and you start to get the fact that critical feedback can be helpful. Closing your ears to it can lead to stubbornness.

Lydia’s sense that she will not get ahead at work until she learns to take criticism better is correct. As she contemplates opening her own agency, she realizes not many of her colleagues would go with her. They think she is too unbending and is not a good collaborator.

Lately Lydia’s been struggling with what’s going on at work, and calls her sister for advice. It’s during this conversation with her sister, a composer, that a lightbulb goes on. “When someone says my music isn’t right for the movie I’m scoring, I take a deep breath and contemplate what they’re saying. I wouldn’t get any more work if I dismissed it and just said, ‘That’s because they’re stupid.’ So even though I wrote it, I try not to take it personally. Just tell yourself it’s about your
work
, not about you
personally.
”

Lydia begins to understand she can hear criticism without having to hate it or the person saying it. She can even learn from it. She vows to be more of a consensus builder; instead of cutting off dissenters, she solicits the opinions of others and encourages them to tell her the truth. She also
practices telling herself,
It’s not personal
, and that is a first step toward really absorbing the message and not just rebuffing it, and the messenger. “I try to laugh at myself and say something like, ‘Tell me how you really feel!’” she says. “And I’m proud of myself, because my dad never could do that. It’s like I finally feel like I am growing, and that’s a good thing.” We’d add: Sometimes it takes looking backward to move forward.

Martha has a great life—nice house, loving family—but isn’t happy about her lack of career. She spends her entire day with their toddler and has another baby on the way. Still, even with this imminent development, she wants to make a change, find a part-time job, and do more with her day. “Don’t get me wrong, I love my son and having kids, but I feel so sidelined and like, I went to grad school for this? I feel brain-dead!”

Her husband, Matt, has a high-powered job as a money manager, and now that the economy is tight and things are tense in his office, he really can’t stand hearing her complain, since he feels he walks through fire every day and comes home and wants to be appreciated for the stress he’s under. Who wouldn’t want her deal? he asks her. Doesn’t she know how lucky she is? One day he even says to her: “Wanna switch places? I’ll go play golf all day and then you can make the bucks.”

Martha has a graduate degree in pharmacology and was working on drug development at a large drug company when she got married. Her dream was to develop the drug that would make AIDS a memory; the re
ality was that she was in a dead-end department and wasn’t getting paid all that much. Together, she and Matt decided that what was best for their family was for her to quit once they got married. Soon after, she also got pregnant, as planned.

“We made this decision together. We thought two careers would be too hard to manage because we wanted kids. We agreed that I would quit my job and come back later to do something that would bring some good into the world. Now he works a hundred and twenty hours a week, and I take care of everything else. He comes home exhausted, and I need a break, but he doesn’t help at all around the house. Now that I’m pregnant again, I think:
Wow, sometimes he can be really selfish
. I am totally wiped out, and yet I still have to make dinner, clean up, bathe our three-year-old, and take care of everything else around the house.

“Our last big fight came after I told him he could help out more, and he said, ‘There are pregnant women who work at real jobs, and they never complain about their swollen ankles or aching back.’ I wanted to throw something at him. Then later that night he wants to have sex. Sex? Forget it, we’re barely speaking.”

Catherine says Martha is acting out. She’s not being direct about what she needs—to go back to work? To have more help? To be appreciated?—and instead is taking out her frustrations and anger on her husband. She may not even know what she needs or realize why she’s so angry. Most times when you’re acting out it’s because you don’t know what you’re feeling; you just feel the need to change
something
, so you change the dynamic of your relationship by fighting. You act out your feelings instead of talking through them to figure out what is going on.

These two may need to move out of the office and into a space where they can talk, like the kitchen table. (A room note: Many problems couples deal with lead to the bedroom, but sometimes the first stop is to go to a neutral place to sit and talk, like the kitchen table.)

But there’s still a lot of denial going on. Ask Martha if she’s happy, and she’ll say, “Why wouldn’t I be? I have a great life, a beautiful son, a second on the way, a nice house, and we’re healthy! I shouldn’t complain! I
know these arguments with my husband are small things and I have the life I said I wanted with the man I wanted. But I also know from not working for the last few years that I need to do something, even if it’s just part-time, because I have to contribute, in ways other than picking up smashed peas under the high chair. Maybe I’ll volunteer or work at the hospital. But I know there’s something more, something that could make me feel like I am contributing to the greater good. I’m still trying to figure out what it is, how I can give back to people who need help out there in the world.”

The fact that she is asking herself this question is the crucial step, and too many women never take it. She knows that she wants to make the world a better place, and yet right now she’s too busy playing Bob the Builder, and it’s making her feel trapped.

Catherine observes that though Martha
says
she’s happy and grateful, she sometimes finds herself weeping for no reason. “I just get overwhelmed by the little things like shopping, doing the laundry, and getting my son to his play group on time. I think,
This is my life? I wanted to cure AIDS, and I can’t even manage to make my son a healthy supper every night?
And then I’m crying in the shower and hoping my husband won’t notice. I mean, I signed up for this. It’s exactly what we both planned.”

Martha misses her professional life and the sense of purpose she had there. “I could tear my hair out sometimes because when I was young and won a science prize I had dreams of winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry.”

One of the reasons Martha is acting out is something Catherine calls the “return of the repressed,” which is a Freudian concept for explaining how extreme feelings in the present are actually the result of an unresolved conflict from the past. Catherine’s favorite lay expression for this is “hysterical is historical,” which means if you find yourself overreacting, weeping uncontrollably, or screaming, the antecedent for the emotion may well be in the past.

The source of Martha’s problem is that her parents had a terrible marriage and she vowed never to be like that—a couple of miserable people who never wanted to spend time together. She wanted to make her rela
tionship with Matt her top priority. But neither of them is happy; he would prefer not to be at the office 24/7, and whenever she complains about how hard she has it at home, he says, “I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat.”

They both made this bed and now they realize it’s broken. They have to change something, but their issues aren’t actually originating in the bedroom. She pretends to be sleeping when he comes home from work at 10 p.m. because at this point she’s angry that he never gets home for dinner, never makes her a priority, and she isn’t going to be “open for business” when he finally rolls in and she’s exhausted. It’s not initially about sex, but now that they aren’t having it, the issues are piling on: It’s about everything, sex included, at this point. They need to sit down and rethink the “plan” and make dramatic changes to their situation, perhaps even where and how they live, get a caregiver, make it possible for Martha to return to work, or this one issue—her lack of satisfaction—could cost them the marriage.

Both Matt and Martha desperately want more meaning in their lives and once they start honestly opening up, they’ll realize that each brings issues from childhood. He wanted a stay-at-home mom and never had one, and she wanted parents that were loving partners. Now both feel they need to “get it right” for their own kids. But the plan’s not working, and they have to reconcile their reality with their expectations.

Catherine suggests leaving the past behind for a moment and talking about what’s really making them fight. Matt may find he’d be happier in a less-pay/less-stress job, and he’s always wanted to open a wine shop, something he would enjoy doing, and have normal hours. They may actually decide to trade places to be happier, with Matt being the one with the more flexible schedule (he could get home for lunch with the kids if the wine shop was nearby, or drop them off at school on the way into work). She might need to travel to Africa to test antiretroviral meds for HIV trials.

You have to maximize your assets and not play a role, Catherine points out. It’s as if they signed up for an
Ozzie and Harriet
view of the world, and neither one of them is enjoying it. These two have to get their view of “family” and the roles of mom and dad out of the basement, and stop trying to create a “fixed” version of their own flawed childhoods and fami
lies. This is why they should first sit at the kitchen table for an honest conversation about what would work in today’s world, what they really want for themselves and for their children, and then take the steps to create a new life that reflects who they really are.

They can be happy, but they have to be honest with each other about what they really want, and that means not taking pages from their childhood scrapbooks. They may have to get outside their comfort zone, beyond the traditional roles society once set out for a mother or father, because it isn’t working for them.

They also have to be nicer to each other, communicating instead of acting out, since he is staying at work to avoid her, and she is going to bed early to avoid him. The key process in this room is to talk it out, not act it out. Whenever these issues come up, we’d say, be direct. Figure out what you want and express it. The pearl: To have a relationship, you first have to relate.