Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships (27 page)
Read Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships Online
Authors: Harriet Lerner
Tags: #Anger Management, #Personal Growth, #Happiness, #Self-Help
Many of us
think
we know our family background. Certainly we all have stories we tell about our family to other people. Such stories may elicit their admiration (“Your mother sounds like an incredible person!”) or their anger (“How horrible that your father treated you that way!”) or their pity (“What a terrible childhood you’ve had!”). We may tell these stories over and over during our lifetime, constructing explanations for things that we seek to understand. (“My mother always put me down; that is why I have such a bad self-concept.”) However, these stories, including the psychological interpretations that we learn to apply to ourselves and others, are not substitutes for knowing our family in the sense of asking questions of our parents, grandparents, and other relatives and inviting them to share their experience. Most of us
react
to other family members, but we do not
know
them.
Give it a try. Use the diagram of the Kesler family on page 172 as a model for your own. The typical amount of information on a family diagram includes the dates of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, and illnesses, as well as the highest level of formal education and occupation for all family members, going back as many generations as you can. This may sound like a boring and tedious job, but you may be amazed at what you will learn about your family and yourself if you go about the task, perhaps reconnecting with family members along the way to get the information. Don’t write off your “crazy Aunt Pearl” or “black-sheep cousin Joe” as sources of information just because they are the family underfunctioners.
Every
family member has a unique and valuable perspective and may be surprisingly eager to share it, if approached with genuine interest and respect.
Is learning more about our family truly a daring and courageous act? Yes, it is. It is not easy to give up the fixed notions that we have about our family. Whether we rage against one family member or place another on a pedestal (two sides of the same coin), we don’t want the “stuck-togetherness” of our family to be befuddled by the facts about
real people.
In addition, we may not want to openly ask questions about taboo subjects in our family, such as our aunt’s suicide or our grandfather’s alcoholism. The problem is that when we are low on facts, and when important issues stay underground, we are high on fantasy and emotionality—anger included. We are more vulnerable to having intense reactions to any of the inevitable stresses that life brings—and to get stuck in them.
Remember that we all contain within us—and act out with others—family patterns and unresolved issues that are passed down from many generations. The
less
we know about our family history, and the
less
we are in emotional contact with people on our family diagram, the
more
likely we are to repeat those patterns and behaviors that we most want to avoid. Remember the old adage “What you don’t know won’t hurt you?” Well, research on families just doesn’t support that one! Rather, it is the very process of sharing our experiences with others in the family and learning about theirs that lowers anxiety and helps us to consolidate our identity in the long run, allowing us to proceed more calmly and clearly in
all
of our relationships. “But my parents won’t talk!” Well, gathering family data is a skill that can be practiced and learned; how you do it determines what you get.
Pick an emotionally loaded subject in your family. The “hot issue” may be sex, marriage, cancer, success, fat, alcohol, or Uncle Charley. If it is a “hot issue” with your mother, for example, chances are you feel angry and “clutch” inside whenever the subject comes up. Perhaps the subject rarely comes up these days because you have taken a strong “I-don’t-want-to-talk-about-it” stance.
Your courageous act is to stop reacting with anger long enough to open up a real dialogue on the subject by
sharing something about yourself
and
asking questions of others.
Your task in questioning is to gain some perspective on what has occurred in the previous generations that has loaded a particular issue to make it “hot.” Only by gathering the broader family picture can you replace your angry responses toward family members with empathic and thoughtful ones. Let us take a couple of specific examples:
Suppose that one hot issue is your single status; every time you go home, your mother gets around to taking a jab at your unmarried state. What is your task?
First, calmly share something about where you stand on the subject. For instance: “Mom, I can see that you are concerned about my not being married. To tell you the truth, there are times when I feel concerned about it, too. At this point, I don’t know if I’m scared of commitment, if Mr. Right just hasn’t come along yet, or if I don’t
want
to get married. I’m not clear about it yet, but I’m working on sorting it out.” If you are an underfunctioner, guard against presenting your problem as if you are just a bundle of weakness and vulnerability; if you are an overfunctioner, try not to make it appear as if you have it all together and don’t need anything from anyone.
Second, open a dialogue with your mother about how the issue of female singleness versus marriage has been experienced in her family.
Block advice-giving and other “fix-it” moves by clarifying that you are not interested in solutions right now but in your mother’s own perspective and experience instead.
You might then ask your mother any number of questions, such as:
“I’ve been wondering, have you ever struggled with the question of whether marriage was right for you? And if so, how did you reach a conclusion?”
“What worries do you have about me if I don’t get married?”
“If you yourself hadn’t married, how do you think your life would have gone differently? What sort of work would you picture yourself doing?”
“What was your mother’s attitude about marriage and how would she have reacted if you had stayed single? How would your father have reacted?”
“How did each of your parents react when Aunt Ruth didn’t marry and worked on her career instead?”
“Who in our extended family has not married, and how have they fared in your eyes?”
Questions like these will allow you to break the old communication pattern, reconnect with your mother in a more mature and separate way, detoxify the marriage issue by getting it out from under the table, and learn more about yourself and your family history. You may also learn about alternatives the family has found acceptable in the past, and prepare your mother for a greater range of outcomes in the future.
Now suppose that the “hot issue” for you in your family is your mother’s ignoring your intellect and achievements and focusing on the successes of your brother. Again, your task would be to share some difficulty you’re having in this area and then to ask your mother to help you out by sharing more about her own experience and perspective. What is most useful is to formulate questions that will allow you to get a picture of how the same emotionally loaded issue was played out a generation back with your mother and her family. For example, write your mother a letter explaining that it is difficult for you to work at succeeding and that the reactions of others are often
too
important to you. Then ask:
“How did your mother and father react to your talents and achievements?”
“Were you seen as smart in your family?”
“Which of your brothers and sisters were viewed as smart or not smart?”
“Did you ever think about going to college? What were your parents’ attitudes about that?”
“If you had started a profession early in life, what career would have been your first choice?”
“Do you think you would have been successful at it? What might have stood in your way?”
“How was it decided that your brother was able to go to college and you weren’t? What were your feelings about that?”
“What was it like for you to have so much responsibility in your family when you were growing up?”
“Did both your mother and father view themselves as smart and competent? Did they view each other that way?”
If you develop your skills in questioning, you will find that family members usually
do
want to share their experience if we first share something we are currently struggling with and assure them of our sincere interest in learning how they dealt with similar problems.
Parents and grandparents do not think to tell us their own experience. Instead, they tell us what they think we should hear or what they believe will be helpful to us.
Unless you are a good questioner, members of the previous generations are unlikely to tell you what it was really like for them.
A final postscript about fathers and mothers: If you take the initiative to move closer to your more distant parent (usually, but not always, your father)—by sharing more about yourself and asking more about him—you may find yourself feeling a bit disloyal to the other parent. For example, the distance that so often exists between us and our fathers may be the source of our angry complaints (“My father has no concern about me whatsoever”); yet we may actively (although unconsciously) go along with our father’s “odd-man-out” position in a family triangle.
Be courageous! Defining a self rests on your ability to establish a person-to-person relationship with
each
family member that is not at the expense of another family member who is in an “outside” position. Also, keep in mind that if a parent reacts with increased distance to your initial efforts to be more in contact, this countermove is an expression of anxiety, not lack of love. Hang in, in a low-keyed way, and stay in touch. Remember, what is important in the long run is not the reactions you get from others but what
you
do—and how you define your own self and your personal ground in relationships.
“Defining a self” or “becoming one’s own person” is a task that one ultimately does alone. No one else can or will do it for you, although others may try and we may invite them to do so. In the end, I define what I think, feel, and believe. We do not define what I think, feel, and believe. Yet, this lonely and challenging task cannot be accomplished in isolation. We can only accomplish it through our connectedness with others and the new learning about ourselves our relationships provide.
Self-help advice can be bad for our emotional well-being if it ends up conveying the message that major changes can be made easily or quickly—that, for example, if only you are motivated enough and follow this book carefully enough, you will achieve the happily-ever-after life. It is my hope that I have provided my readers with new perspectives on old angers; applying even one or two lessons from this book can make a significant difference in your life. But we both know that lasting change does not come about in a smooth, stepwise fashion and many of the women described in these chapters had the benefit of long-term psychotherapy to help them along.
Self-help advice can also be hazardous to our health if a “do-it-yourself” approach isolates us from other women. Throughout this book I have stressed the importance of learning about the experience of family members and sharing our own. Now I want to add that I believe it to be equally crucial for us to connect with the family of womankind, to share what it is really like for us, and to learn about the experience of others. It is through this process of reconnecting and sharing—of learning firsthand how we are similar to and different from other women—that allows us to go beyond the myths that are generated by the dominant group culture, transmitted through the family, and internalized by the self. Before the second wave of feminism, many of us suffered privately with our anger and dissatisfaction, maintaining a single-minded focus on the question “What’s wrong with me?” Together with other women, however, we could stop blaming ourselves and begin to bring the old roles and rules into question.
Finally, self-help advice always runs the risk of fostering a narrow focus on our personal problems, to the exclusion of the social conditions that create and perpetuate them. This book has been about personal anger and personal change, but as feminism has taught us, “The personal is political.” This means that there is a circular connection between the patterns of our intimate relationships and the degree to which women are represented, valued, and empowered in every aspect of society and culture. The patterns that keep us stuck in our close relationships derive their shape and form from the patterns of a stuck society. For this reason it is not sufficient for individual women to learn to move differently in personal relationships. If we do not also challenge and change the societal institutions that keep women in a subordinate and de-selfed position outside the home, what goes on inside the home will continue to be problematic for us all.
I believe that women today are nothing short of pioneers in the process of personal and social change. And pioneers we must be. For as we use our anger to create new, more functional relationship patterns, we may find that we have no models to follow. Whether the problem we face is a marital battle, or the escalating nuclear arms race, women and men both have a long legacy of blaming people rather than understanding patterns. Our challenge is to listen carefully to our own anger and use it in the service of change—while we hold tight to all that is valuable in our female heritage and tradition. If we can do this, we will surely make the best of pioneers.
