Loving Him Without Losing You (3 page)

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How Do You Disappear?

To begin the change process it is important to recognize exactly how you lose yourself in your relationships.

• Make a list of all the ways you disappear in your relationships with men. While your list will undoubtedly have some of the items I’ve listed above, after spending some time reviewing your past you’ll likely be able to come up with some other ways as well.
  

• Keep your list handy as you continue reading this book. This will be particularly helpful if you run into resistance at some of my sug- gestions.
  

The Four Truths You Need to Know

Over the past twenty-four years I have worked with thousands of women who entered therapy with a variety of complaints. What has been surprising to me is that no matter what their initial complaint, most women eventually get around to dealing with the issue of losing themselves in relationships. Along with this awareness, I came to recognize four truths:

Truth 1: Women have a tendency to lose themselves in relationships with men no matter how old or how young the women are.

In my practice I’ve been appalled at the treatment very young women are willing to put up with from their boyfriends—everything from infidelity to emotional and physical abuse. On a recent
Oprah!
show on female teens who are being abused by their boyfriends, it was revealed that
one in four teenage girls will be victims of dating violence before they leave high school
. In fact, the rate of violence against teenage girls has escalated in the past ten years.

It seems that young women today who are just starting out in relationships with men are clueless when it comes to the most basic information concern- ing codependency, boundaries, self-esteem, and abuse. Many enter into rela- tionships that resemble servitude. An example of this is the current trend among some young men to buy their girlfriends a pager to keep track of them and to make sure they aren’t with another boy. No matter where the girl is or what she is doing, she is supposed to answer his page. If she doesn’t, he becomes enraged and accuses her of being unfaithful.

Many of my young female clients tell me that they’re afraid that if they don’t allow their boyfriend free rein he’ll leave them and they couldn’t bear it. They say they’d rather put up with even the cruelest behavior than to be without a boyfriend.

The story of one of my clients was particularly poignant. Amber is sev- enteen years old and has already been in two serious relationships. She started having sex when she was fourteen with her first boyfriend, Charlie. They were together for two years, during which time Charlie had sex with at least four other girls. As Amber explained it:

“Each time I’d find out he’d been with another girl I’d get really hurt and really angry. I’d confront him with it and of course he denied it. The first time it happened he was so convincing I ended up believing him. But then several of my friends told me they saw him making out with another girl. After that I stopped confronting him. I knew he wouldn’t tell me the truth and I figured that as long as he came back to me I’d better just keep my mouth shut.”

When I asked Amber why she didn’t break up with him and find another boyfriend she said, “What was the point? I figured they all do the same thing. All my girlfriends have the same experience. It’s just how guys are.”

As it turned out, Charlie left Amber for another girl and she was heart- broken. She remembers crying her eyes out for weeks. After that she became so seriously depressed that she missed several weeks of school and even con- templated suicide. She was convinced she’d never get over Charlie. Three months later, she got involved with Kevin.

She and Kevin were very happy for about six months. Then she found out that he, like Charlie, had been with another girl. She was devastated. Unlike Charlie, Kevin freely admitted his infidelity. He told her he’d done it because she wouldn’t do the kind of things he wanted to do sexually. So to keep Kevin, Amber agreed to do whatever he wanted sexually, even though some of the acts were repulsive to her and some caused her tremendous physical pain.

This is finally what brought Amber into therapy. She wanted to know if there was something wrong with her because she couldn’t enjoy the kinds of sex acts her boyfriend liked. It had never crossed her mind that Kevin was wrong to insist on her performing these acts or that she had a right to refuse him.

If you are young and have had similar experiences in your relationships with boyfriends, you have much to feel optimistic about. The younger you are when you begin addressing the problem of losing yourself in relationships, the better chance you have of overcoming it before it becomes too deeply ingrained and becomes a pattern.

Unfortunately, many of you reading this book have a long history of los- ing yourself in relationships. You’ve spent your entire life becoming involved with one man after another, losing parts of yourself in each relationship until you have little of yourself left.

This was the case with Marta. At fifty-two she had finally reached her limit. “I just can’t continue on this way. I need some help. As soon as I get into a new relationship I start changing my life. In the past ten years I’ve moved twice, quit three jobs, and lost several friends. All because at the time I felt it was more important to please the man I loved. But I’m getting too old. I need some stability in my life.”

Despite the women’s movement, even older women, women we expect to have learned to maintain their sense of self in relationships, still tend to give their power to the men in their lives. If this applies to you, even though it will be more difficult for you to break this pattern of behavior after so many years, it certainly is possible if you are committed to change and to regaining your sense of self.

Truth 2: Even women who have never lost themselves in relationships before are at risk.

Some women are astonished to realize that they have a tendency to lose themselves with a man, since they never were this way before. Patsy, forty- two, a highly successful chiropractor who had been seeing me to clear up some issues with her childhood, shared with me how surprised she was at her own behavior ever since she started dating an accountant in her office build- ing.

I haven’t dated for more than ten years, since I got my divorce. I just didn’t feel like it, what with the kids to raise and my business to estab- lish. But Frank is so sweet and we’ve become good friends over the past several months. It just felt natural that we would begin dating. That’s why I’m so surprised at how I’ve begun to act—like some schoolgirl with a crush!

It’s so embarrassing. All day long I find myself looking out the win- dow to see if his car is in the parking lot or waiting for him to pop in to say hello. When we do see each other I feel light-headed and silly and I say stupid things that I know puzzle him. And you know what I hate the most? I hate it that my mood is so affected by how he acts toward me. If he pops in to say hello and seems very happy to see me I’m set for the whole day. But if he doesn’t stop by, or if we happen to pass in the hall and he seems uninterested, I feel crushed.

I can’t stop thinking about what I might have done to turn him off or whether I’m coming on too strong, or whether he’s decided he doesn’t like me. I just hate it. I don’t remember acting like this when I was younger. I remember always feeling like I could get any man I wanted and I didn’t seem to feel so self-conscious. You’d think I would have gotten more self-confident as I’ve matured, not less.

Truth 3: It doesn’t matter how confident, strong, or assertive you are, you can still lose yourself in a relationship with a man.

Time after time I’ve been struck by the fact that otherwise competent, confident, and assertive women give their wills and their lives over to men. Women who are independent, assertive, or even aggressive in other areas of

their lives, women who don’t hesitate to stand up for themselves and their needs in other areas suddenly begin to disappear into the woodwork and lose their voice when it comes to their private lives. This was the case with Stephanie, age thirty-five, one of the women I interviewed for the book, a highly suc- cessful, dynamic woman who put her husband through medical school.

In the beginning of our relationship, I was considered the strong one. My husband was awkward and shy in public and I was very outgoing and charismatic. I was active in local politics and had a lucrative job as a sales representative for a major firm. I don’t know if you know anything about sales, but let’s just say I always knew how to close a deal.

But everything changed after my husband became a doctor. Sud- denly he was the important one and I was just the doctor’s wife. People who had merely tolerated him because of our friendship suddenly started asking him for advice and began kowtowing to him. And I was expected to view him in a different light as well. He suddenly became more demanding of me, expecting me to run errands for him and answer the phone, even if it was sitting right next to him. When I complained about it he explained that it didn’t look good for a doctor to be answering his own phone, even at home.

I got so angry I told him he could hire a secretary. So he hired a housekeeper who also answered the phone! Before I knew it he and she set up an alliance and began treating me as if I were incompetent and a burden on him. It wasn’t long before I felt displaced in my own home. Things just kept going downhill from there. I eventually bought into the belief that he was better than I was and started treating him like every- one else did. I gained a lot of weight and, of course, this made me feel even more invisible. By the time he asked me for a divorce (because he fell in love with a younger woman, of course) my self-esteem was so low and I was so depressed that I almost committed suicide.

Truth 4: Even extremely attractive, wealthy, and famous women can become Disappearing Women when it comes to relationships.

The problem goes beyond intellect, beyond self-esteem and self-confi- dence. It involves the very core of a woman’s identity. Even some of the most

beautiful, dynamic, famous, and talented women in the world have been known to lose themselves in relationships. This is particularly true of women who become involved with powerful or famous men.

Frida Kahlo, one of the most popular female artists in history, had a flam- boyant but intimate style that earned her an enthusiastic following worldwide. Her life, riddled with suffering and pain, has spoken strongly to women in particular.

On August 21, 1929, the petite twenty-two-year-old Frida married the overweight, middle-aged artist Diego Rivera—the most famous man in Mex- ico. From the beginning Frida was aware that Diego had numerous affairs, but she developed a defense system by pretending to others that she and Diego had an ideal union of unbroken devotion. This defense did not work when she discovered that Diego had begun a relationship with her younger sister, Cristina, who was her dearest family member and confidante. Frida was dev- astated and took an apartment alone in Mexico City for a time, trying in vain to find an independent life.

For all the strength of her personality, Frida felt insecure without Diego to praise her talents, cleverness, and beauty. When he withdrew from her, feel- ings of abandonment overwhelmed her. As she wrote Diego, she “loved him more than her own skin.”

In desperation, Frida returned to Diego and put up with his numerous affairs. Even at the end of her life, after she had gained international recog- nition herself, Frida’s love for Diego was still the major focus of her life, as evidenced by one of her diary entries:

Diego . . . beginning Diego . . . builder Diego . . . my child

Diego . . . my sweetheart Diego . . . painter

Diego . . . my lover Diego . . . my husband Diego . . . my friend Diego . . . my mother Diego . . . my father Diego . . . my son

Diego . . . I

Diego . . . universe Diversity in unity

Why do I call him my Diego?

He never was and he never will be mine. He belongs to himself.

Unfortunately, Frida, like so many other Disappearing Women, did not belong to herself. She did not have the sense of self necessary to walk away and make a life of her own.

As you will see throughout this book, developing and maintaining a sense of self is vital if you are going to stop losing yourself in relationships. By practicing the strategies outlined in this book you will be able to develop such a strong sense of self that you no longer
need
to look to anyone else for self-definition, self-expression, or self-esteem. This, in turn, will help you to stop disappearing in your relationships.