Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (22 page)

The family diagram alone provides some good clues. At age eight Mr. Kesler lost his father and was left with his mother, Lorraine, who was the younger sister of a sister. What is known about the typical characteristics of a younger sister of a sister? As parents, often they are not comfortable taking charge, assuming a position of authority, and taking the initiative to do what has to be done. As a first-born child (and
son
), Mr. Kesler might have exercised
his
typical characteristics of “responsibility” and “leadership” at a very early age, perhaps trying to fill his father’s shoes and help his widowed mother out.

When I met with Mr. Kesler, my speculations were confirmed. He had been a “little man” at an early age, and his own need to be a kid who could goof up and let others care for him was buried under a lifetime of overfunctioning and worrying about other family members. He was quick to react to the first sign of irresponsibility in Billy because Mr. Kesler was
so
responsible as a child that he never really had much of a childhood. As he was later able to say to me, “I think I get so hot under the collar when I see Billy goofing off to have fun, because I’m a little jealous. After my father died, I stopped being a kid and became a worrier, long before I was really ready. My problem is that I feel
too
responsible for things.”

“Billy, this week I’ve been getting very upset and grouchy when I see you goofing up at school. I sure have been getting on your case. I think I figured out what my problem is. You know, Billy, when I was eight years old, my dad died and I was left without a dad. I felt angry and sad and frightened. And now that you are eight years old, like I was at that time, a lot of those old feelings are coming back. And sometimes the way that I deal with those feelings is to get on your back and fight with you so that I don’t have to feel so sad about my own dad.”

Billy looked at him wide-eyed. Then he said, “That’s not fair! It doesn’t make sense.”

Mr. Kesler replied, “You’re right, Billy, sometimes dads do things that don’t make too much sense. I sure owe you an apology. It’s my job to work on these old feelings I have about my dad dying. It’s your job to decide what sort of student you’re going to be in school. I’m going to do my best to try to work on
my
job and try to stay out of
your
job. I won’t be successful all the time, but I’ll be working on it.”

“Does this mean that I can play with my friends and not have to do my homework?” asked Billy, with some mixture of anxiety and glee.

“Not a chance!” said Mr. Kesler, giving Billy a playful punch on the arm. “You know what the rules are, kid, and it’s up to you to follow them. But you’re going to have to decide what sort of student you’ll be in school and I can’t decide that for you, even though I may try sometimes.” Billy said nothing, but several weeks later he began to ask all kinds of questions about Grandfather Lewis.

Taking the emotional focus off Billy did not mean adopting a “do-whatever-you-please-and-I-don’t-care” attitude. Mr. Kesler’s own style was to set pretty strict rules about the consequences of misbehavior. The degree of strictness or permissiveness will vary from family to family and is not, of itself, a problem. What is important is that Mr. Kesler enforced his rules without getting emotionally intense and blaming, and he made it clear to Billy that he (father) was dealing with his own issues and problems. It is also crucial that each parent support, rather than undermine, the rule-setting of the other, even if they don’t always see eye to eye.

Most of us would not think of sharing something personal about our struggles with our children, as Mr. Kesler did—or as I did following my visit to my parents in Phoenix. Yet, there is hardly a more effective way to break a circular pattern. We maximize the opportunity for growth for all family members when we stop focusing our primary worry energy and anger energy on the underfunctioning individual and begin to share a bit about our own problem with the situation. This involves a shift from “You have a problem” to “I have a problem.” In time—after working on the task of mourning his dad and modifying his overfunctioning position with his mother and sister—Mr. Kesler was able to do more of this.

What about Ms. Kesler? As we look at her side of the family diagram, what predictions might we make about her relationship with Billy?

While the emotional cutoff between Ms. Kesler and her brother keeps the anxiety down in
that
relationship, it is re-energized in her relationship with her son Billy, partly because he is in the same sibling position as Les and also because he happens to possess some actual physical and personality characteristics that remind mother of her big brother. Often, the underground intensity from a cutoff is not re-energized until an anniversary date comes up—for example, when Billy turns twelve, which is the age at which Les began getting into trouble, or twenty-three, Les’s age when Ms. Kesler cut off from him. In the Kesler family, the intensity between mother and Billy began to surface when Ms. Kesler got out of the middle of the relationship between her husband and son and things calmed down on that front.

To some extent, we are all prone to confuse our children with ourselves and with other family members. We project onto our children who we are and what we unconsciously wish, fear, and need. This process of projection gains steam from our unfinished business with siblings and parents. If mother makes no changes in her own family of origin, her projections onto current family members may be especially intense. She may, for example, encourage Billy to be a star in the family—an especially good child who will show none of the black-sheep qualities that she sees in her brother or fears in herself. Or, she may anxiously worry that Billy will turn out to be an irresponsible and troubled child like Les and unwittingly encourage this behavior by the intensity of her watchful focus on it. Billy may sense that his mother needs him to be a certain way for her own sake, and proceed to accommodate to or rebel against her needs. In either case, both Ms. Kesler and Billy become less able to directly manage the challenge of their own personal growth.

Like her husband, Ms. Kesler had “homework” to do with her family of origin.

Over time, Ms. Kesler gathered more data about her mother’s and father’s families, which provided her with a more sympathetic and objective understanding of why Les (rather than she) was more likely to underfunction and live out the black-sheep role. She learned to observe the patterns and triangles in her family of origin, as she had in her current nuclear family, and she took steps to get out of the middle of the relationship between Les and her parents. She did this by maintaining one-to-one emotional contact with all parties, without advising, taking sides, or talking with her parents about Les’s problems. To do this required her to initiate closer contact with her brother, and she began to gradually share with him more about her life, including her own underfunctioning side. Eventually, she became much less focused on and reactive to the behavior of her husband and son, and she no longer felt dominated by anger and worry in these important relationships.

What Mr. and Ms. Kesler both learned is that children have a remarkable capacity to handle their problems when we begin to take care of our own. The work they each did with their own families was like money in the bank for Billy and his two siblings, because children are the carriers of whatever has been left unresolved from the generations that went before. Talking about the fact that Mr. Kesler lost his father and Ms. Kesler was cut off from her older brother may seem a bit removed from the subject of women and anger.
Yet all of us are vulnerable to intense, nonproductive angry reactions in our current relationships if we do not deal openly and directly with emotional issues from our first family—in particular, losses and cutoffs.
If we do not observe and understand how our triangles operate, our anger can keep us stuck in the past, rather than serving as an incentive and guide to form more productive relationship patterns for the future.

Let’s take a look at a simpler family triangle in order to review the major points we have learned about observing and changing three-person relationship patterns.

Jerry, I learned, was the younger of two brothers and still living at home. Although he graduated with honors from college, he had since been shifting from job to job, and his lack of direction was a source of family concern. Jerry, then, was in an underfunctioning position in the family.

Sarah’s story is more than familiar to us by now. She is engaging in increasingly intense efforts to change her son despite the fact that such efforts only help keep the old pattern going.

What is the pattern? According to Sarah’s description of her interactions, she blames and then distances under stress. Sometimes she blames Julie (“She just doesn’t consider other people very much, does she?”) and sometimes she blames Jerry (“I think you are rebelling against your family rather than making a mature choice”). When Jerry comes to Julie’s defense or to his own, Sarah fights and then distances. While this is going on, Jerry’s father distances from both his wife and his son, and then later unites with his wife in their shared concern over Jerry.

Sarah describes herself as occupying the outside position in the key triangle between herself, Jerry, and Julie.

When Sarah criticizes Julie to her son, she implicitly invites him to side with her against his girlfriend. Should Jerry go along with this, he and his mother would have a closer relationship at Julie’s expense and Julie would temporarily occupy the outside position in the triangle.

What more typically happens, however, is that Jerry comes to Julie’s defense, which Sarah experiences as siding against her. At this point, conflict is likely to break out between mother and son.