The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (22 page)

According to Charlotte, Shep is too much of a pushover and so loving that she’s too much in control of the relationship. She wishes he were more Caveman than Prince Charming. Many women have tamed their spouse to the point where he can’t do
anything
right, even “take her” in the way she imagines a one-night stand would. Catherine says they are both responsible for this dynamic, since now he’s trying so hard to please her that he can’t be himself in bed. Charlotte’s now walking all over him while complaining that he has become a doormat. They have to step back and take a break, or take turns being in charge in their life, and in their bed.

For starters, Charlotte has to come clean with herself and figure out what inner conflict is blocking her from knowing what she really wants. She likes to blame Shep, but is this more about her lack of satisfaction with herself? She needs to look inward and remind herself of her lifelong struggle with self-esteem. Shep isn’t there to make her whole. Only she can do that.

Feeling worthy, pretty, smart, sexy, or whatever it is you want to feel cannot be supplied by another person, at least not for long. You have to generate those feelings from within in order to have them be sustained for more than a fleeting moment. A partner can enhance good feelings, but can’t provide them for you. If he’s the only one providing validation for you, eventually you stop believing it because you can’t internalize the positive self-worth. So you continually seek it from others, and are never truly satisfied with the partner who tells you how great you are.

Charlotte wonders whether she should tell Shep about her one-night stand. Catherine says women who cheat often want to know if they have to confess. But usually it’s for the wrong reasons. Women want to relieve their guilt, but Catherine asks if the admission is going to be useful and important in rebuilding the relationship. If it’s just “truth dumping,” then you’re making a big mess messier. Many times, the hurt caused by telling is the injury that lingers. It can also derail you, since he gets focused on that other person and misses the bigger picture, the real issues that were bringing you down.

Charlotte
can
tell Shep what she needs in bed and in their relation
ship, and redefine what she considers “great sex,” since sometimes it can be more about expressing love and making an emotional connection than how many fireworks she’s seeing. Charlotte and Shep can work on making things better in bed, but she can also appreciate him for his many good qualities: Maybe there will never be fireworks in bed, but there are lots of other highlights. Is it enough? Only you can decide if the good outweighs the bad. Make a decision and enjoy your life.

Kimberly is dating seriously but not eager to get married. She is so guarded that she won’t let herself need anyone, and it may end up costing her this relationship, because he wants to get married.

Kimberly was raised in a chaotic household by an abusive stepfather who regularly told her she would amount to nothing. She felt neglected at best and abused at worst. “I won’t allow myself to care that much about anyone, so that I can’t get hurt. I refuse to put up with anything but perfect behavior in my relationships, like if my boyfriend says
anything
mean, I’m outta there. I am the only one I can depend on. I know that makes it hard for me to be in a relationship.

“Look, my honey is great, but he’s trying to move closer to me, and it makes me pull back and I feel suffocated. It may be unfair, but I feel like he’s trying to take control of my life. My way to deal with this has been to set rules about how many times a week I spend the night at his place, and even taking every third weekend totally off. If a guy can’t respect that then I’m like, See ya! I’ve always liked it this way, but now I wonder, Am I holding myself back? He can’t understand why I am so rigid. Yet I wonder
if I let down my guard, will I still keep enough of me intact? I don’t want to lose everything I’ve built for myself: my independence, my life, my career, my own personal happiness.”

As a teenager Kimberly considered running away but knew she couldn’t support herself. She considered suicide but couldn’t stand causing her mother that much pain. So instead she put up with her stepfather’s verbal abuse for years, even giving it back to him at times. She finally left home at eighteen and put herself through community college by working two jobs. “Leaving my mom was hard; I cried every tear I could as a teenager. I felt completely alone and depleted. It was as if I could not go any lower, and it was up to me to build my life from there. I always think of myself as my own hero, and I never let myself rely on anyone else.”

Kimberly is so self-protective that it’s as if she’s wearing emotional armor, which makes Catherine ask: Is she really as fragile as she thinks she is? Would her sense of safety be so easily lost if she took off all those defenses and shared herself more fully? What does she think will happen?

Kimberly has reason to be proud of her own accomplishments. But she still has a huge streak of insecurity. “I finally accepted myself this way, but now that I’ve been with this man for two and a half years and know he really loves me, I realize it’s causing a new problem: If I can’t change, I might end up alone for the rest of my life.”

She wants independence and has built walls around herself, yet deep down she hopes someone will scale them and take care of her. It’s a terrible conflict, and she is still in the basement of her childhood memories, working through issues and unhappy memories of her mother (a doormat) and her stepfather (a bully). Meanwhile, neither she nor her boyfriend can understand why she feels distressed when he tells her, “I would fly to the moon for you.” To Kimberly it feels like he’s trying to hold her back.

Catherine points out the unconscious process of “transference” at work here. Kimberly has made all her love interests into the wicked stepfather, and she spends all her energy guarding against pending injury or hurt. Whether you get caught in this pattern or another one, it can become a “repetition compulsion,” because you end up doing the same thing over and over, and this can keep you from evolving in your life. Only
when you realize you’re stuck in a pattern can you change it. Even then, it can take years. You literally have to relearn how to act. If you’re lucky, you realize there’s a good reason to change; Kimberly now knows she could stand to lose the best relationship she’s ever had, with a wonderful guy who gives her exactly what she needs—security, safety, love, and respect.

“I realize I have to learn to open up. I am teaching myself this in baby steps, and I’m finally learning to talk about my feelings and trust other people. I figure if I can do it with them I can learn to do it with my boyfriend too.” It would be easy to blame her lack of ability to get intimate on her tough family dynamics, but she has to step up and work this out for herself.

Kimberly is in the wrong room and needs to resolve her basement issues so that she can be happy in her relationship and in the rest of her house. Otherwise she will end up finding a guy who is aloof and disconnected, and not really safe and secure at all. Her current boyfriend seems like a man who could be a great partner. But she has to let her guard down a little to create a new level of connection—within the relationship. It’s about giving up some of her independence in order to gain intimacy and trust. Her pearl: You have to give a little to get a lot.

By everyone else’s standards, Jackie is a together, happily married working mom living the dream. And yet she found herself having crushes on men and enjoying a lusty fantasy life. She never acted on those fantasies, until…

“I lost weight, I got in shape, and my husband never even noticed,” Jackie says. “Other women
and
men were telling me how great I looked, but I never heard this from my husband.” Jackie was feeling so much better about herself that she switched careers and got a more exciting job.

She met a guy in her new job, and they worked closely together day and night. He was younger, available, and admired her very much. “I already had myself a smart, solid, good-looking man and yet I was completely lusting after this guy.” She started sending flirty text messages and then began communicating with him constantly. She kept pushing the limits because it was so exciting and dangerous. Then she started lying to her husband and saying she was going out for drinks with friends. And she wasn’t. She was meeting
him
.

“Who could resist?” Jackie says. “He made me feel sexual and funny and confident and smart.” Their affair lasted just two weeks. He called it off, saying, “I am not going to be the home wrecker. I want to get married and have kids.”

Jackie was devastated. She wanted to be adored. And she wanted to keep having what she calls “crazy-good sex.” She skulked home and realized her husband never even noticed that “drinks with a friend” went way too late, or that her time texting had increased immensely. She was crying out for him to catch her cheating, want her back, and woo her romantically, but instead he was indifferent.

This marriage is in trouble but not necessarily over.

Catherine says that Jackie acted out her feelings of not being noticed and appreciated and of wanting to be validated for her new figure and job. Her key process could have been to talk it out and be direct with her husband and tell him how she was feeling and what she needed and wasn’t getting. But what she is lacking—self-esteem—isn’t something another person can provide.

She may tell her husband, “I don’t feel loved and adored and noticed.” But he may feel that he is giving her everything she wants and needs—the big house, the fancy car. Regardless, she doesn’t feel like her emotional needs are met. And she is starving for his attention and affection. Back in her marriage now, with no other man in her life, she’s depressed, isolated, and angry.

Jackie is hoping that someone else (her own kids or an adoring man or an exciting new job) can make her feel whole. But they can’t. It’s as if she is part of a person and wants someone else to complete her and give her meaning and fulfillment. She has some soul-searching to do, since in her marriage, she allowed herself to be half a person, half a circle, hoping another would “fill” in the rest of the drawing. But she never developed herself fully, became her own person, defined her own ideas and desires. When the kids were able to take care of themselves, and her job was on autopilot, she woke up to see that her marriage was dead. Having a hot, younger man adore and ravage her was fun, but it won’t sustain her. Now she needs to learn how to better define herself, be “whole,” and draw in the rest of the line herself. Her pearl: Only you can make yourself whole. No one completes you but you.

Andrea is singing a sad song. “I know that one reason I stay with the wrong men is that I hate being alone. Like on a Friday night I look for pals
to see a movie with and everyone is either paired off or has kids by now. My group of friends has gotten younger and younger as my usual peer group has moved to the ’burbs. It’s fun to hang out with younger people, but they all want to go to bars and get drunk and I think,
What am I doing here?
I feel the blues come on and think I’d have been better off at home. But at home I feel lonely. And when I do choose to stay home, I feel like such a loser and like I should get out there and meet people. It’s like I’m never in the right place…since I always feel like I should do something else.

“So I’m stuck. I host dinner parties, but whenever I ask pals if they know any single men, they don’t. Which is why I think I stayed in those two long relationships as long as I did. It was like, What did I have to break up for? There weren’t a lot of other options. But now I think I blew it. I may never have a family, and I love kids. So I get depressed. Then I think:
If I were a guy I wouldn’t want to date me either.”

Andrea has lost her ability to focus on the other things in her life—her great job, her love of reading, her desire to write a screenplay, and even her physical health, since she’s staying out and spending time with people she doesn’t care about, rather than following her inner compass and being the person she wants to be.

If she wants the next chapter of her life to be different, she has to do some reevaluating. She thinks that she always chooses the wrong guy, but why? And was “he” wrong? Guy One, it turned out, had no money, so she discounted him as a potential spouse. But instead of looking to what she later would jokingly call “my poet” to be both a romantic poet and a meal ticket, she could have made her own money and decided that he would have been a great stay-at-home dad, since his teaching and writing life would have allowed her to have a built-in caregiver.