The Nice Girl Syndrome (20 page)

Aaron continued to help Jasmine in numerous ways and to listen to her problems regarding her boyfriend, with whom she eventually broke up. Ever so gradually, Jasmine came to depend on Aaron for advice and companionship, and eventually she began an affair with him.

As you read this example, you most likely knew where the story was going. You probably realized that all along Aaron was intending to become sexually involved with Jasmine. But interestingly, Jasmine did not know this. In fact, when I suggested it to her, she scoffed at the idea. “I really don’t think you’re right about that. I think he just wanted to be a friend to me . . . and a mentor. Our romantic and sexual feelings for each other just grew out of our friendship.” Jasmine was being naive.

The truth is that it is very difficult for most men to put their sex- ual attraction for a woman in a box. They may try to be “just friends” with a woman they are attracted to and turn off their sexual feelings, but it usually doesn’t work. Aaron likely decided that being Jasmine’s friend was the way to get close to her, and he had hopes that it would turn into a sexual relationship. Because he was much older than she was, he probably realized he needed to use the “friend and men- tor” card to get her to pay attention to him. Then once they became friends, he used the fact that he was successful to his advantage to impress her.

The extent of Jasmine’s naïveté went even further. Even though Jasmine knew that Aaron was married and he was almost twice her age, she believed that they were meant to be together and that he would eventually leave his wife. Three years into the relationship, Jasmine sought counseling because she gradually came to the con- clusion that she was just fooling herself.

It’s Time to Come out of Denial

Still another way that women commonly play gullible and naive is in their refusal to accept that their partner and/or their children are capable of doing bad things. Some women continue to turn a blind eye to the misbehavior of their partners because coming out of denial would mean they would have to do something about their sit- uation. I can’t tell you how many women I’ve worked with who put up with inappropriate, abusive, or even illegal behavior from their

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partners because as soon as they admitted the truth to themselves, they would have to end the relationship.

My client Christina was a perfect example of this. Christina’s husband owned his own business and had always worked long hours. But in the past three years, he had started working even longer hours, often not coming home until ten or eleven at night. He explained that he’d had a dinner meeting with a potential client. Christina told me that she didn’t have any reason not to believe him; after all, he’d always been honest with her in the past. Then she started noticing that his shirts often had lipstick on them and smelled like perfume. She brought this up to her husband and he explained that sometimes his clients were women, and sometimes they hugged him when they said good-bye. “What do you want me to do?” he protested, “Push them away?”

These comments always made Christina feel silly. After all, her husband was an outgoing, friendly guy. Everyone loved him. It made sense that female clients would want to give him a hug to say good- bye. That was just the kind of guy he was.

Then Christina started getting phone calls in the evening and the person would hang up. This went on for about two months. Finally, one night she dialed *69 after the call, and a woman answered. Christina asked the woman if she had just called her house. The line went silent, and then the woman said, “Yes, I called.” Christina asked who she was and why she had hung up. Again, there was silence for a few minutes before the woman said, “I was calling to talk to your husband.” The woman said that she had had an affair with Christina’s husband for about six months but that he had dumped her for another woman. She was angry with him and was calling to tell him off, but Christina was always the one to answer the phone.

Christina was horrified to hear this about her husband. Her first inclination was to tell herself that the woman was lying. Her hus- band had probably rejected her advances and she was doing this to be spiteful. She was probably just a stalker. But then Christina started to wonder if it could be true. After all, her husband was out late nearly every night, and he certainly had ample opportunities. Plus, she had smelled perfume on his shirts and found those lipstick stains. So Christina confronted her husband when he came home that night. He immediately became angry: “I can’t believe she would

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call my home like that! What an asshole. I never touched that woman. She was always coming on to me, and I was just trying to be nice to let her down easy. I should have told her what I really thought about her. I told her I was married and to leave me alone. Boy, am I going to give her a piece of my mind!”

Then he focused his anger on Christina. “And how dare you believe her! Is that how much faith you have in me? Do you really think I’d break my marriage vows like that? What kind of a husband do you think I am?”

Christina felt about two feet tall. “I’m so sorry I doubted you,” she said. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have listened to her. I don’t even know her, but I was willing to take her word over yours.”

Her husband remained angry for several days, even though Christina apologized many times. He finally started talking to her again and reluctantly told her he forgave her for doubting him.

She told me, “I can’t believe that I apologized to
him
for doubt- ing him. I had every right to question him. He turned the whole thing around and made me the bad guy when
he
was the one who was doing something wrong!” As it turned out, about two months later Christina was forced to finally face the truth about her hus- band when another woman called the house. This one didn’t hang up but asked to speak to her. The caller told her that Christina’s hus- band was in love with her. She thought Christina should let him go because they wanted to get married. Christina couldn’t continue to remain naive about her husband any longer. The jig was up.

An experience like this can make a woman grow up fast. I’m happy to report that after several months of therapy, Christina did just that. First she allowed herself to grieve the loss of her husband and, equally important, to grieve the loss of her fantasy husband. Then she allowed herself to express her anger. Finally, she looked honestly at the reasons she had remained so naive. At our last session she told me, “I’m finally able to see people for who they really are— not as I want them to be. It’s still painful sometimes. I still find myself wanting to pretend that people are all good and that they don’t have any negative motives, but I catch myself in the act and come out of my fantasy. I’m not the naive person I was before my marriage and that gives me a sense of power and strength. Now I know I can face the truth about a person or a situation and still take care of myself.” Brava, Christina.

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Remedies

Childhood is a time for innocence. It is a time for fairy tales and magical thinking. But you are no longer a child, and the time for magical thinking and illusions is over. Although those illusions pro- vided a sense of comfort and protection when you were a child, if you don’t dismantle them you will remain a prisoner of childhood. You must give up the futile search for the security, trust, and uncon- ditional love you longed for as a child. You must peel away the illu- sions that stand between you and reality.

Now is the time to face the truth about life—to create a shift in your thinking from magical to realistic. The truth is that no one is perfect—not even parents. The truth is that no one tells the truth all the time. People distort the truth, manipulate, and out-and-out lie to get what they want. We simply can’t take people at face value. We must look under the surface. We must look for discrepancies, for exaggerations, for half-truths. This doesn’t mean we need to become paranoid—just realistic.

You must come to realize that your unwillingness to face the truth about people and the world in general is putting you in danger. The danger may be that you will continually be fooled or conned by others or that you won’t be able to recognize it when someone you love is cheating on you, or that you actually put your life in danger because you foolishly trust someone’s word or naively trust that peo- ple are good. By facing these essential truths, you will be well on your way toward giving up your innocence, naïveté, and gullibility.

• You can’t expect anyone else to take responsibility for your welfare. You are the only one who can take care of you.
  

• The price you pay for looking to someone else to take care of you is dependency, the loss of self, and, ultimately, the inabil- ity to control your own life.
  

• It is human to look out for our own self-interests. It is part of our survival instincts. This means that when a stranger approaches you and is nice to you—especially when that stranger is a man—you need to at least
  consider
  the possibility that he or she wants something from you—probably sex or money.
  

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• Just because someone
  seems
  to be a nice person doesn’t mean you can trust him or her. Con artists can be very charming people.
  

• Just because someone loves you doesn’t mean that he or she is incapable of deceiving you or betraying you.
  

• It is
  not
  safe to overindulge in alcohol or to take drugs when you are out at a club or a party—even when you are with a group of friends. You
  cannot
  depend on your friends to protect you.
  

• Men are capable of controlling their sexual desires and feel- ings. Don’t let any man convince you that he has “blue balls” or that he is physically harmed in any way because you won’t have sex with him.
  

  Remedy #2: Come Out of Denial
  

  Like Nina, you may have an investment in avoiding the truth about your childhood. As long as you remain in denial about any painful or traumatic events that happened to you earlier in life, you will probably remain gullible and naive and thus risk continually being used, conned, or even abused by others.
  

  For example, it can be quite painful to admit that you were abused or neglected as a child. You may experience tremendous pain as you remember how it felt to be treated as you were, and you may become extremely angry at those who abused or neglected you. You may feel a deep sense of loss as your idealized picture of your child- hood or your positive image of a parent, another family member, or another adored caregiver is tarnished forever.
  

  When you finally do face the truth about what happened to you as a child, you may become overwhelmed with sadness and anger. Allow yourself to feel these emotions. Don’t try to fight them off. You’ve probably been doing that for too long. Allow your emotions to flow out of you. Cry for the little child who was mistreated in such terrible ways. Get angry at how the little child you once were was used or abused by adults who should have known better—adults who were supposed to protect you.
  

  Unfortunately, most people who were neglected or abused box
  

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  off their pain and try to put it out of their mind. But this never really works. Experiences of neglect and abuse continue to wear you down emotionally, insidiously whittling away at your self-esteem.
  

  Many people who were neglected or abused stay stuck in anger or in pain and never move through their feelings. Instead, they turn their feelings of anger on themselves and become depressed or rid- dled with unnecessary (and unhealthy) guilt and shame. Some pun- ish themselves by being self-destructive (for example, smoking, driving too fast, provoking a fight with someone). Others numb themselves to their feelings and are unable to access their feelings of anger and pain from the past.
  

  Emotions that go unexpressed often lie dormant inside us until someone or something reminds us of our past and triggers a mem- ory—and the feeling. When this happens, we can become depressed and self-critical or lash out at those closest to us when our real tar- get is someone from the past—someone we were likely afraid to express our emotions to at the time.
  

  It can be frightening to lift the veil of denial. The scariest part is experiencing the intense feelings that lurk just below denial’s sur- face. You may need professional help in dealing with all these strong emotions. For now, allow yourself to experience whatever it is that you are feeling and remember the following:
  

• Even though it may feel like it is happening in the present, it will help if you remind yourself that what you are feeling are memories of the feelings you had as a child. These things are not happening to you in the present. You have already sur- vived your childhood and the painful things that happened to you.
  

• It helps if you breathe into an emotion. As it is with physical pain, if you breathe into the emotion, it tends to decrease and become less overwhelming.
  

• As powerful and overwhelming as emotions can be, they are actually positive forces intended to help you process an expe- rience.
  

• As long as you don’t allow yourself to become overwhelmed by them, your emotions will help you come out of and stay out of denial.
  

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• Allowing yourself to feel and express your hidden emotions from the past will help heal you from the past.