Loving Him Without Losing You (22 page)

Remember that most men are not taught to be vulnerable, especially to women.

Even though men are often unaware of their own emotional state, unable to communicate effectively about their emotions, and sometimes refuse to be vulnerable out of fear of losing their masculinity or their appeal to women, don’t try to
pull
emotional responses from your partner.

Most men automatically go into a defensive stance when women call them on their issues. While we all silently believe that there is something wrong with us and are just waiting for our partner to discover this, the male ego is especially delicate. Therefore, temper your comments with loving care.

Give your partner a lot of acknowledgment for the positive things he does and for any attempt he makes at changing the way he treats you.

By keeping the seven commitments to yourself you can stop losing yourself in relationships. You will also be far more likely to attract the kind of partner who will respect your need to maintain a separate self instead of merging your life with his.

Interestingly, the very actions I’ve encouraged you to take to avoid los- ing yourself in your relationships are the same things men need in order to feel free to be vulnerable and loving. By going slowly and taking the time to get to know a man you inadvertently allow him the space and the time to ease into the relationship more comfortably than he would feel if he were being pressured. By telling the truth about who you are and how you feel, you help a man with his issues of trust and encourage him to be more vulnerable. By maintaining your own separate life you let a man know that you have no inten- tion of entrapping or engulfing him. By staying out of fantasy and in reality you let a man know that you see him and the relationship for what it really is, and this will also help him to build trust. By not allowing a man to change you, you send the message that you are not going to try to change
him
and that you can share a love in which you both accept one another the way you are.

By choosing a man who is your equal you bring out the best in him since he is more likely to treat you with respect. Finally, by speaking your mind you encourage him to do the same.

If women are really going to become equal with men we need to find a way to work with our innate nature, such as our tendency to be nurturers, so we can remain the loving, compassionate people we are while at the same time minimizing and alleviating our tendency to lose ourselves. The work you have done so far has been a beginning.

In the next part of this book we will focus on how to make deeper life changes, such as finding your authentic self, finding your voice, and learning ways to express the creativity that will help you develop a stronger sense of self.

P A R T I I I

B
ECOME A
W
OMAN OF
S
UBSTANCE

Developing a Self and a Life That Satisfies You

I

n this part of the book I offer strategies that will work from the inside out, ways to begin thinking and feeling that change not only the way oth-

ers see you but the way you see yourself. Some of these strategies can be incorporated into your life fairly easily, while others are life changes that will take more time to create. Some will be fairly painless and may bring almost immediate feelings of autonomy, strength, and independence, while others will be rather painful, and the payoff will be long in coming. Throughout, it is important that you keep your goal in mind—that of becoming a woman who is seen, heard, respected, and honored for who she is, a woman who has such a fulfilling life that she is unwilling to sacrifice it for a relationship, a woman who will be respected by the kind of man she most admires—a man who is dynamic, interesting, loving, and independent.

Because the women who are reading this book are on very different

173

levels in terms of their personal growth—some are just starting out, while oth- ers have been focusing in this direction for a long time—some of you will find the information I share with you to be extremely relevant to where you now are, while others will find that some of the information is not new to you. At no time is it my intention to talk down to you but to offer the greatest num- ber of women information that can and will change your lives. On the other hand, you may feel threatened by some of the things I suggest. If this is the case, please don’t feel pressured to do anything you are not ready to do.

12

Find Your Authentic Self

You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know of yourself.

B
ERYL
M
ARKHAM

It all starts with self-reflection. Then you can know and empathize more profoundly with someone else.

S
HIRLEY
M
AC
L
AINE

My life is such a cliché. I worked to put my husband through school and dedicated my life to him and my kids, always trying to be the perfect wife and mother. Then last year my husband left me for a younger woman and my kids are all off to college. Not only am I all alone, but I don’t even know who I am.

C
ONNIE
,
AGE FIFTY
-
ONE

The phrase “finding your authentic self ” has been overused. But for Disap- pearing Women there is no better way to describe the process of self-discov- ery that you must go through in order to stop losing yourself in relationships and become a Woman of Substance.

Many of you have become so lost in your attempts to find completion with or through a man that you will literally need to find your way back to yourself again.

175

Others have spent so much time taking care of others that you got lost in the process. In
Revolution from Within,
Gloria Steinem called this being “empathy sick,” meaning that she had focused so much of her time and atten- tion on helping others and meeting their needs that she had lost touch with herself and her own needs. She had spent so much time relating to others that she knew other people’s feelings better than her own.

Ten years ago, I, too, was forced to acknowledge that I had spent so much of my time and energy helping my clients and pouring my soul into one relationship after another that I had lost touch with my own needs. I, too, became burned out physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Both my physical and emotional health were suffering, and I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to get back to myself.

This is a typical scenario—not just for those of us who are committed to social change and the betterment of others, but for all women. We focus so much attention on caring for others, on being empathetic to their needs, that we lose track of our own.

As Carol Gilligan wrote in her book
In a Different Voice:

The differences between women and men . . . center on a tendency for women and men to make different relational errors—for men to think that if they know themselves, following Socrates’ dictum, they will also know women, and for women to think that if only they know others, they will come to know themselves.

How We’ve Lost Ourselves

Some women have lost themselves by constantly trying to be what others expected them to be. They haven’t given themselves the time and the oppor- tunity to discover what pleases them or to become the person they want to be. Because all their lives, people have told them who they are and what their motivations are for doing the things they do, they haven’t focused enough attention on discovering who they really are or on discovering their real motivations.

Still others have become lost through years of trying to “become” some- one they aren’t. Many women spend their lives trying on the identities of oth- ers they admire. It may be a boyfriend, a teacher, a boss at work—any person who seems to embody the qualities they themselves would like to have. This is how Lorraine described it:

“I’ve come to realize that I don’t know who I really am underneath all my playacting. I’ve finally reached a point in my life where I want to find out.”

And some of you had such neglectful or abusive childhoods that you never developed a fully autonomous self in the first place and will need to lit- erally develop your true self.

This was the case with Drew Barrymore, the actress who became drug- and alcohol-addicted by the time she was fourteen. In her autobiography
Little Girl Lost
, she wrote:

Someone once explained to me what the word
veneer
meant. Gloss. A shiny surface that’s supposed to protect an inferior material underneath. That’s me exactly. Whenever I’d look in the mirror, I’d think, “You’re lost. Totally lost. How can anyone like you? You don’t even like yourself.” Those moments when I realized how estranged I’d become from myself, not to mention the rest of the world, sent me spiraling into a depression.

How We Find Ourselves

No matter what your situation, finding yourself will involve time, a great deal of focus, and a willingness to put aside all your preconceived ideas about who you should be, how you should act, and how you should feel. Instead, the focus will be on discovering who you really are, how you really behave, and how you really feel.

Beyond all your fantasies of who you want to be and the expectations of who you should be lies the real you. Underneath your public self and your false self, underneath your masks and facades, there is a core—your authen- tic self. Each of us travels through the journey of life with only one constant companion, and that is ourself. How sad if your closest companion is some- one you don’t even know.

You’ve been hiding from yourself by getting lost in one relationship after another. Now you need to take some time to put your life in perspective, to heal from your past relationships, and to do some deep inner reflection.

Now is the time. There is absolutely nothing as important as taking time out for self-discovery.

We cannot be intimate with another person until we are able to be intimate with ourselves, which includes establishing our own identity and discovering what we feel, prefer, and desire. As you no doubt experienced while reading chapter 6, if you don’t know these things about yourself, you cannot share them with another person.

There are a number of ways by which you can begin your journey toward self-discovery. In this chapter I will suggest some of the most effective ways—paths that women, including myself, have found to be most effective and most rewarding.

Find Yourself through Solitude

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude.

To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours . . .

R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

T
ILLIE
O
LSEN

I am happy to be alone—time to think, time to be. This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and

I feel stupendously rich to have it.

M
AY
S
ARTON
,
J
OURNAL OF A
S
OLITUDE

A good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude. . . .

R
AINER
M
ARIA
R
ILKE

One of the most effective ways of discovering your true self is to face and embrace solitude. As frightening as the prospect of this may seem, you need time alone to discover who you really are, to learn to rely on yourself, to learn to like your own company, and to break your tendency to merge completely with others.

Spending time alone with yourself will help you develop your own per- sonality, retrieve or establish a stronger sense of self, and find your own indi- vidual lifestyle instead of automatically conforming to society’s pressures.

The time you take alone now may be the only time you have ever stood alone, not depending on anyone else to help hold you up. Your fear of being alone has likely propelled you into continually seeking relationships or stay- ing in unsatisfying or even destructive ones. You need to know that you can be alone and find completeness within yourself. In that way you will never be in a relationship again out of fear of being alone.

For those of you who have a history of unfulfilling relationships, taking time to be alone will help you gather the courage to avoid unfulfilling, unequal, or abusive relationships in the future and to face issues that you’ve avoided by focusing on others. From this position you will be less desperate to immediately attach yourself to someone in an attempt to avoid yourself.

Most important, instead of looking to others to validate you, keep you company, entertain you, or fill up the emptiness inside, solitude will help you discover that you can do these things for yourself. This will, in turn, make you a stronger, more complete woman who will be far more interesting to the kind of man who will truly appreciate you.

More Than Being Alone

Solitude is much more than just being alone with yourself. It is a time for self- reflection, soul-searching, and self-discovery. It is a time for reaching inside yourself for answers, for solace, for inspiration, for healing. It is a time to dis- cover your inner voice and your inner wisdom.

Practicing solitude needs to be an important aspect of each major stage of our development as individuals. It is the development of the capacity for isolating oneself from the environment that helps adolescents begin to indi- viduate in a more clear and evident way.

When Cameron was an adolescent she sought solitude by disappearing into the attic, where she would sit in an old rocking chair by the window. There she would write in her diary, read, and stare out the window. This was the only place where she felt like she could have her own thoughts, dream her own dreams, experience her own feelings. When she was not in the attic, her mother, a very domineering, possessive woman, watched her like a hawk, constantly monitoring her behavior. If she felt pensive her mother would say, “What have you got to feel sad about? You’ve got it made.” If she felt angry her mother would yell, “Wipe that scowl off your face or I’ll wipe it off for you!”