Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (11 page)

It doesn’t work. “Hit-and-run” confrontation in an important relationship does not lead to lasting change. If Maggie is really serious about change, she still has a challenging road to walk.

First, Maggie needs to show (for her own sake as well as her mother’s) that at last she is declaring her separateness and independence from mother, but that she is not declaring a lack of caring or closeness.
Independence means that we clearly define our own selves on emotionally important issues, but it does not mean emotional distance.
Thus, Maggie needs to show, through her behavior, that although she will stand behind her own wants and convictions, she is still her mother’s daughter and loves her mother very much.

The work of negotiating greater independence—especially between a mother and a daughter—may be so fraught with mutual anxieties about rejection and loss that the person making the move (in this case, Maggie) must be responsible for maintaining emotional contact with the other (her mother). If Maggie fails in this regard, her mother will feel rejected and upset; Maggie will feel anxious and guilty; and both mother and daughter will unconsciously agree to return their relationship to the old predictable pattern.

How can Maggie best maintain emotional closeness with her mother at this time? She might ask her mother questions about her interests and activities. She can express interest in learning more about her mother’s own past and personal history. This is one of the best ways to stay emotionally connected to members of our family and, at the same time, learn more about our selves (see Chapter 6). When things cool off a bit and the relationship is calm, Maggie might initiate a dialogue with her mother on the subject of raising children—an area in which mother has valuable expertise. For example, Maggie might say, “You know, Mother, sometimes I try to comfort Amy and she keeps crying and crying. Did you go through that when we were little? How did you handle it?” Or, “What was it like for you to raise four children, especially when two of us were only a year apart?” If her mother were to reply in a huff, “Well, I thought you had enough of my advice!” Maggie might respond, “Actually, I don’t find advice helpful—even good advice—because I need to struggle with the problem myself and find my own solution. But I do find it very useful to learn more about your own experience and how you handled things.” Blocking advice-giving—if that is one of the problems—is not the same as cutting off the lines of communication. As we become more independent we learn
more
about our family members, not less, and we are able to share more about our selves.

In addition to the task of being the caretaker in maintaining emotional contact, Maggie will now face a series of “tests,” for her mother will need to determine whether Maggie really “means it,” or whether she is willing to return to the previous pattern of interaction. Again, this is not because Maggie’s mother is a rigid, crazy woman, but because this is the predictable reaction in all family systems. It is as basic as a law of physics. Maggie must be prepared to have her mother attack, withdraw, threaten, and “do her old thing” with Maggie’s baby, Amy. And she must be equally prepared to restate her convictions like a broken record if necessary, yet retain emotional contact with her mother as best she can. The point cannot be emphasized enough: No successful move toward greater independence occurs in one “hit-and-run” confrontation.

And so, Maggie’s work was far from over at the point when her mother rose and retreated to her room. On this particular day, Maggie had only begun the process of attaining a higher level of separateness from her first family. If she can stay on course, over time she will achieve greater independence and clarity of self that will manifest itself in all her important relationships. Her mother, too, is likely to shift to a more separate mode of interacting and to proceed in her own life with greater emotional maturity.

Will Maggie be able to tolerate the anxiety and guilt associated with clarifying a more independent self, or will she become so emotionally caught up in her mother’s reactions as to lapse back into the reassuringly familiar fights that kept her and her mother close in the old way? The ball is in Maggie’s court. And the difficult choice is hers.

As it happened, Maggie chose to work on changing the old pattern. She fell on her face many times and temporarily slipped back into fighting, instructing, criticizing her mother, or distancing herself from the relationship. But most important, she was able to pick herself up each time and get back on course. She continued to make her declaration of independence with increasingly less blaming and distancing as time progressed. In doing so, she established a new, more adult relationship with her mother and began to talk with her about topics that had previously been eclipsed by their endless years of fighting. Maggie began to ask her mother more about her past life, about her own mother and father and her childhood and memorable events. She even initiated discussions about subjects that had formerly been “taboo” (“Mom, how do you understand that you got so depressed after I was born?”). Maggie talked with her mother in a way that neither of them had previously done, since their interactions were so heavily based on silence, sarcasm, outright fighting, and emotional distancing. As they talked more and more often in this new way, Maggie was able to see her mother’s old “obnoxious” behaviors in a different light. She came to appreciate that her mother’s apparent intrusiveness and criticism were in fact expressions of her own wish to be helpful to her daughter, as well as her fear that were she not, she would lose Maggie. Besides advising and criticizing, her mother had been as bewildered as Maggie about how to be helpful and close. She, too, sensed Maggie’s need not to let go—to hold on in the old ways. Maggie also learned that her mother had had much the same kind of relationship with
her
mother, maintaining closeness through constant squabbling.

And what about Maggie’s father? Like many fathers, he was most conspicuous by his absence. Maggie’s distant relationship with her father had become even more pronounced following her parents’ divorce, in part because of an unspoken family rule that Maggie was to be her mother’s “ally” as her parents negotiated the divorce. When Maggie herself no longer needed to maintain her special bond with mother in the old way, she began working on having an adult, one-to-one relationship with her father as well.

This was not an easy task, because both Maggie and her father had a good share of anxiety and discomfort about establishing an emotionally close relationship. When Maggie first began to write to her dad, he reacted by distancing himself further, which was one of a number of countermoves, in response to her initiating a change. Indeed, her father’s “Change back!” reactions were as dramatic as her mother’s, although they took a different form. Much to Maggie’s credit, she was able to maintain a calm, nonreactive position and she persisted, in a low-keyed way, to write to him and share the important events and issues going on in her life. Although mother and father were still fighting it out, Maggie’s new level of independence helped her to stay out of the conflicts between them—a feat that required considerable assertiveness on her part. Over time, her relationship with her father developed and deepened.

As a result of the changes that Maggie made with her mother and father, she became free of the symptoms that first brought her to see me. Her headaches did not return and she became more sexually responsive with her husband, Bob. She also felt clearer and more assertive in all of her other relationships.

The work that Maggie did will have reverberations in the next generation. When her children are older, she will be better able to allow them the appropriate degree of independence and separateness, for the degree of independence that we achieve from our own family of origin is always played out in the following generation. Had Maggie not done this work, she would in time have found herself overinvolved and intensely reactive to one or more of her children. Or, alternatively, she might have been overly distant and emotionally cut off when her children were grown, which is simply the other side of the same coin. Although Maggie is not yet aware of it, the work that she did is the best “parent-effectiveness training” that money can buy.

The task of defining (and maintaining) a separate self within our closest relationships is one that begins in our first family but does not end there. Like Maggie, we can proceed to work on achieving greater independence (and with it, an increased capacity for intimacy and togetherness) at any stage of our lives. Renegotiating relationships with persons on our own family tree yields especially rich rewards, because the degree of self that we carve out in this arena will greatly influence the nature of our current relationships.

In this lifelong task of forging a clear self, our anger is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it helps to preserve our integrity and self-regard. Maggie’s anger at her mother was the signal that let her know she was not comfortable in the old pattern of relating to her mother and that she needed to make a change. However, as we have seen, venting anger does not solve the problem that anger signals. To the contrary, Maggie’s success at becoming her own separate person rested on her ability to share something about herself with her mother and father in a straightforward, nonblaming way while maintaining emotional contact with them throughout the process. It required, also, that Maggie uphold her position with persistence and calm, without getting emotionally buffeted about by the inevitable countermoves and “Change back!” reactions we meet whenever we assume a more autonomous position in an important relationship. This is what achieving selfhood and independence is all about. And it requires, among other things, a particular way of talking and a degree of clarity that are especially difficult to achieve when we are angry.

At this point in the escalating power struggle, I remembered what I had read about “I” messages. Every “you” message (for example, “You’re going to cut yourself”) could be turned into an “I” message—that is, a nonblaming statement about one’s own self. So, in a split second’s time, I made the conversion:

“Matthew,” I said again (this time without anger), “when I see you with that sharp knife, I feel scared. I am worried that you will cut yourself.” At this point Matthew paused, looked me straight in the eye, and said calmly, “That’s
your
problem.” To which I replied, “You’re absolutely right. It is my problem that I’m scared and I’m going to take care of my problem right now by taking that knife away from you.” And so I did.

What was interesting to me was that Matthew relinquished the knife easily, without the usual anger and struggle and with no loss of pride. I was taking the knife away from him because I was worried, and exercised my parental authority in that light. I owned the problem (“I feel scared”) and I took responsibility for my feelings. Later, I was to learn that Matthew had been cutting apples with a sharp knife for over a month in his Montessori preschool, but that is beside the point. What is important is that I was able to shift from “You’re going to cut yourself” (did I have a crystal ball?) to “It
is
my problem. . . .”

Of course, no one talks in calm “I messages” all the time. When my husband broke my favorite ceramic mug that had been with me since college, I did not turn to him with perfect serenity and say, “You know, dear, when you knock my cup off the table, my reaction is to feel angry and upset. It would mean a great deal to me if you would be more careful next time.” Instead, I cursed him and created a small scene. He apologized, and a few minutes later we were the best of friends again.

There is nothing inherently virtuous in using “I messages” in all circumstances. If our goal is simply to let someone know we’re angry, we can do it in our own personal style, and our style may do the job, or at least makes us feel better.

If however, our goal is to break a pattern in an important relationship and/or to develop a stronger sense of self that we can bring to all our relationships, it is essential that we learn to translate our anger into clear, nonblaming statements about our own self.