The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (6 page)

Judith already knows (though she hasn’t fully accepted it) that her memories are distorted. But she also needs to see that there is a disconnect between what she wants to achieve—a connection with her kids—and what she is doing—driving them away. Judith wants her family to be together, but she isn’t creating togetherness; she’s merely forcing her own flawed fantasy down the throats of her children.

When Judith is pressed to be more specific about her beach memories—How did it look, feel, smell? Who was there, what was everyone doing?—she begins to understands that her screen memory is so vivid because it was her last-ditch effort to see her family as a unit before it got torn apart by divorce. She knows rationally that everyone was off in his or her own private world—her mom talking with friends, her dad reading or snoozing. Judith and her brother were playing by themselves, blissfully ignorant of any marital tension—or perhaps escaping it. This version of her family was what she wanted, not what she had. She must acknowledge that
what she wants
(a family connected and communicating) won’t happen precisely because of
what she is doing
(forcing them to spend their weekends at the beach). Once she does, she can get out of the basement and back to her family room in the present, where connections happen.

If Judith can hear what her children are asking for, she may very well end up getting what she really wants: quality time with them. After a quick negotiation, maybe at the kitchen table, they may agree that they will do alternate weekends at the beach, and her kids can bring friends if they want to. Everyone gets what he or she wants, and everyone is more attuned to one another’s different notions of leisure time. That is the real
connection
Judith is seeking.

In Judith’s case, taking the journey to the basement makes her wiser
about her entire house. “It took being a totally misguided parent to make me understand my childhood,” she says. “Exploring my basement made me confront the fallacy in my memories. I learned that you can be sitting on a beach towel in the most beautiful setting next to someone you love—and not be connecting.”

So by facing the mess in the basement, Judith now has created a cleaned-up family room with people who are talking, smiling, and laughing. It may not be at the beach; it may be at the mall or in line at the movies, but she should be happy that she is connecting with them anywhere. Connect, don’t control. The goal is to connect everywhere and anywhere—in the car, an elevator, while walking the dog. Even while sitting in your cramped family room.

Arianna is a makeup artist who believes in the transformative power of makeup and hair styling to help you be whoever you want to be every day. And yet she doesn’t allow herself that luxury, at least not on the inside. All her life she has felt like the black sheep who could never do the right thing, never make the grades, and certainly not live up to her mother’s version of being the perfect daughter.

In high school she skipped class, hung out with all the wrong people, and got into drugs and an alternative rock scene. One day she jumped on
a bus for New York City and started doing makeup for bands there, and she never went home again. “I thought, fine! I might as well rebel, since that’s how they see me anyhow.” Her sisters and brothers (all older, since she was the last baby her mother would ever have) all made good, worked in the local community, and raised families. But Arianna stayed single and, in her mind, was forever the rebellious teenager.

But now she wants to grow up and move on and have kids. “I’m thirty-five and it occurs to me that it’s now or never, and though I’m happy, I think I could be happier if I started a family. I have the kind of business that would be ideal for a working mother. So how do I get to the ‘mother’ part of the picture? My mom and I don’t really talk anymore.”

It’s clear she is stuck in her childhood and needs to stop reacting to what her mother told her all those years. Catherine says that as long as she believes she is that teenage “black sheep” she will be stuck. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, but she can stop it at any time.

First she needs to recognize the unconscious patterns and look carefully at the screen memory playing over and over in her head. Arianna is feeling both angry and guilty and no longer wants to let these memories define her role in the family or the world at large.

There are several ways for Arianna to tackle this issue. Perhaps she could consider her mother’s perspective and what it was like to nearly die. Her mother’s fear and inability to cope with that scare may be why she kept “joking” about it, unwittingly hurting Arianna’s feelings. Or perhaps, on some level, her mother did blame Arianna.

But what happened was
not
Arianna’s fault, and she needs to believe that. One method to reprocess this traumatic experience is called rescripting, giving new language to old events in order to make sense of them. She can tell herself, “What happened was not my fault. I was a newborn baby and I didn’t mean to hurt my mother.” Additionally, Arianna has to stop trying to change her mother’s view of her as “the problem child” and focus on why she allowed others to define her this way. As she thinks about it, she needs to realize that guilt played a major part in this family dynamic. And rebelling completed the picture.

Arianna’s key process is the relationship equation: A + B = C. She has to realize she’ll never change her mother but she can change herself, thereby changing the outcome.

Catherine explains that although Arianna was just a baby when this trauma occurred, she has taken on the responsibility for what happened to her mother. Once she decides to move on, she can pack away those memories and get out of the basement. Arianna, like every woman, gets to define or transform herself, be who she wants to be, and make her life her own. Her challenge will be to figure out who that person is and what makes her happy.

Always a tomboy and fiercely independent, Maxine grew up thinking that she never wanted to play the traditional role of wife and mother. Her mother was never appreciated by her dad, who bullied her. He ordered everyone in the family around; the only person who ever stood up to him was “Max,” since she was the oldest and felt like her job was to protect her mom and little brother and sister from big bad dad.

But as she grew up, being stubborn and willful cost her, in terms of relationships, success at her jobs, and also her happiness. She knows she wants to change but doesn’t know how. “I trust no one as much as myself, and I don’t want to—as I say in my own childlike way—let anyone be the boss of me!” The screen memory she will never forget is when her dad came
at her mom in a rage and Max flew to her mother’s defense and stood up to him. “I swear to God he would have hit her had I not been standing there. It was like he knew I was as tough as he was.” From that moment, Max decided that being tough was a good thing.

But she never lets herself be vulnerable, and she’s sick of not moving ahead in her relationships. She knows she could have a family and feel better in all aspects of her life if she could allow other people to take the lead occasionally and really listen to their advice. Instead she tunes them out. With her, it’s
my way or the highway
, and eventually her love interests choose the highway.

Catherine says Max is stuck in the basement, and all her other rooms, especially the bedroom and the office, are affected because she can’t have a relationship and gets in trouble at work for not playing office politics artfully.

Her unconscious process may be that in her screen memory she has now traded places with her dad, which is clinically known as “identifying with the aggressor.” She has inadvertently and unconsciously become the intimidator, and she is now trapped in her own pattern of trying to be as tough as she perceives the men around her to be. She wrongly feels she has to bully back, in order to be “equal,” but now she’s jousting imaginary foes because the people around her are not trying to fight or hurt her.

Maxine needs to get out of her basement and into the bedroom, where she can begin to have a healthy, adult relationship. She has already recognized the source of her behavior. Once she realizes that she is constantly reacting to old memories, Maxine can short-circuit that behavior and tell herself to “act, not react.” First she can ask: What is the best way to be the authentic me? She can start fresh and decide to change her future, even if she can’t change her past. Screening, it turns out, does not have to be defining. Catherine would tell her that she can evolve, once she makes the decision to do so. “Go or grow” is her pearl, meaning she can go along as is, not changing, or she can grow and evolve and see her life improve. Once she is aware of the choice, it’s clear what she needs to do.

It turns out that Georgia’s mom was nervous too. “We called her ‘nervous Nelly’ and would laugh about her crazy antics, like calling our friend’s house if we were five minutes late, and standing on the porch with her arms crossed, looking angry when we pulled in. When I learned to drive, I thought she was going to blow a gasket waiting for me to bring the car home…as if I would surely have died! It made me nuts, but I love her.”

Georgia’s family has a long history of people feeling anxious, and no one thinks twice about it. But she knows she got this from her mom, even if she spent her twenties doing daredevil things like hiking in Nepal, biking across the United States with her girlfriends the summer after college, and riding on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle.

As Georgia thinks about it, her nervousness really came to light when she had her own babies. “I remember thinking that my newborn baby girl was so precious and fragile that I wouldn’t let anyone hold her for weeks. Even my husband couldn’t do it right, and I would never leave her with a babysitter. I was nervous about everything: SIDS, vaccines, even someone reaching into the stroller and kidnapping her. Then as she got older it was swine flu and the like. As she leaves to go to school I now worry about abductors and rapists, and realize I have become my mother, despite all my efforts not to. What happened to the world-traveling motorcycle-riding twentysomething that I was? Then on some level I think that worry equals love, and I know I love my daughter so much because I worry about her. Well, that’s what I tell myself.”

Georgia is feeling bad about her anxiety and is worried that her daughter will pick up on it. Now that her daughter is six it’s getting harder to hide these neurotic tendencies, or to keep them in check. “I feel like Debbie Downer because when Mia tells me she wants to go swimming, my first comment is, ‘Never dive in unless you know how deep the water is!’”

Catherine says it’s common for women, and especially mothers, to do what’s called “catastrophizing,” jumping to the worst thing that can happen, almost as a defense against the actual danger involved. So a mom will hear “skateboard” and think broken arm. Many mothers have these fleeting thoughts and worries, but they typically don’t paralyze them or ruin their relationship with their kids. (If they do cause distress and significantly interfere with your daily activities, then there may be a bigger problem to treat.) But for Georgia and most women, she can have these thoughts and still go ahead with her plans—the key is to learn to enjoy them without catastrophizing.

To break the pattern she has to get out of the basement and into the kid’s room, or suffer the consequences. At the playground she hovers, and she won’t let Mia go on a class trip to a water park unless she goes along. Catherine says Georgia doesn’t want to do to her daughter what her mother did to her. But anxiety runs in the family, so she may be working against her own DNA. That’s called “genetic loading,” a term for when traits are passed down through generations. Anxiety tends to have a heritable component, just as depression does, and despite your best efforts you can’t always will it away.

Georgia is going to have to act the part of relaxed parent, even if she doesn’t feel that way. Sometimes this is enough to unlock new paths of thinking, and other times Catherine asks a patient to do what is called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which basically means trying to change how you feel by changing how you think. You learn to rescript, by identifying automatic thoughts (
Something bad could happen!
) and replacing them with new, more constructive phrases (
She’s gone out with her friends before and she was okay then, so she will be okay this time. Plus I need
to let her do this!
). Georgia might say, “Be careful, honey!” but at least she can manage to make sure they’re not the first words out of her mouth.