The need for approval
There were times when the need for my parents’ approval became so dominant that I wasn’t sure whether I was doing something for myself or my parents’ approval. For example, I earned a doctorate degree and became a college professor partly to please my mother. I literarily handed her the original parchment after the graduation ceremony and she gladly accepted it.
I wanted to become a jazz pianist but my parents quickly convinced me that it “was no way to make a living.” “Better you should be a professional,” my mother kept repeating. I resented taking her advice and years later resented that she was right.
In 1977 I rented a one-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village around the corner from Bradleys and the Knickerbocker, which were two neighborhood bistros which featured live jazz every night. I loved listening to Ron Carter, Buster Williams, Tommy Flanagan, Kenny Barron, and Sir Roland Hanna, but also appreciated the thought that by not becoming a musician I didn’t have to perform every night from 10 P.M. to 2 A.M. or have to play when I didn’t want to.
After reaching some of my professional goals as a psychologist, I began feeling validated, but from others more than my parents. After I became a college professor, my mother asked, “Is this what they pay you after all those years in school? I know Herricks High School teachers who make more money.” After I left academia and began making “good money,” my father’s favorite expression, he added, “You’re doing well but you work so hard.”
When I published articles in psychology journals, I sent reprints to my parents. I was hoping to hear something like, “We’re proud of you.” I would have even settled for them attaching my articles to the refrigerator door the way they did with my kindergarten masterpieces.
After reading a reprint, my mother said something polite which I knew from the tone of her voice she didn’t mean. Then she quoted something from Reader’s Digest which contradicted my research findings.
Here I was publishing original research in a refereed professional journal, and my mother was casually disqualifying my work by quoting Reader’s Digest. In our house, past issues of Reader’s Digest were neatly stacked next to the toilet. So my original scientific contributions were being disqualified by bathroom literature. I was incensed.
I never stopped longing to hear my parents say something simple like “That’s terrific.” Nothing complicated. My mother endlessly boasted about my accomplishments to her friends and later on would tell me, “Were your ears burning?” which was her generation’s way of saying that others were impressed with my deeds. But bragging to others had more to do with her need for approval. It was for my mother. Not me. And certainly never expressed directly to me.
I felt trapped in an endless cycle of longing for my parents’ approval and not receiving it. “The most painful thing in life is to go through it unnoticed,” wrote Camus. Instead of giving up on seeking their validation, I simply tried harder. Maybe I wasn’t working hard enough. Or the right way. Or achieving things that my parents valued.
The therapist in me knew that after my parents finally validated me the way I wanted them to, I’d emotionally move a little away from them since I wouldn’t need their approval as much. And in some small way they may have known that too. This idea is supported by my mother telling me as an adult about my parents’ quiet disappointment when they received rave reviews from my kindergarten and first grade teachers during the annual parent-teacher conferences.
“There must be something wrong with him. He’s not perfect you know,” they’d protest to Miss Schactnow, my kindergarten teacher whom I adored. By the time I was five years old, my parents were beginning to sense that they were losing me to a larger world that went beyond our little family.
One way out of this dilemma was to give up on my need for their approval–no easy undertaking. But it happened nevertheless in 1984 after I returned from Europe where I had just given lectures in Geneva, Rome and Belgrade. I felt flattered when I was first invited to train European psychotherapists, since as a group I find them more well read and thoughtful than American therapists. American psychotherapists, on the other hand, impress me as more creative and bigger risk takers than their European counterparts.
So I was quietly feeling proud over my recent “European tour,” and thought my parents would be equally impressed when I called them after I returned home.
“Thank God you’re safe,” they began. “We were so worried about the terrorists.”
“What terrorists?”
“You know, what’s happening between Iraq and Iran?”
I sarcastically thought to myself that I didn’t know my parents were following the Iraqi-Iranian conflict that closely.
“What does that have to do with my trip to Geneva?”
“Well, these terrorists are all over Europe and you never know.”
I felt deeply hurt as I hoped to hear something like, “That’s wonderful,” or at least, “We’re proud of you.” Not “We were worried about the terrorists?”
I suppose you could argue that they were being protective of their little boy on his red tricycle crossing the George Washington Bridge. [This tricycle is mentioned in an earlier chapter, “Returning Home.”]. On the other hand, it became clear, like never before, that I was not going to get validated by these people. What more did I have to do from them to acknowledge me? How many sons and daughters earn doctorate degrees, become college professors, publish books, and get invited to lecture in Europe?
Suddenly, I began smiling to myself as I grandiosely predicted how my parents would react if I was awarded the Nobel Prize. First, my mother would question whether Alfred Nobel was a Nazi. “No, Ma, he was Swedish.” Then, she’d wonder whether the award ceremony would deliberately be scheduled smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holy days. And finally, my father would seriously wonder how much money accompanied the award and whether I thought the prize would further my career.
I remember the joy and pain I felt when my first book was published. My mother was touched when she saw my name (and her last name) in print and kissed me when I handed her an autographed copy. My father said nothing which deeply disappointed me. I was in psychotherapy with Ian Alger at the time, and he began to giggle and explain that showing my father my book was like asking Abbott and Costello to check out the Apollo shot before it was launched.
In effect, Ian was telling me that my father was so overwhelmed that he didn’t know what to say. Maybe he was speechless, but I still wanted to hear something positive, even if he didn’t mean it like “That’s terrific” or “I’m proud of you.”
My father couldn’t put into words what he felt or thought, and lacked the social skills to say something appropriate even if he didn’t mean it.
Years later, I wondered whether my book made him feel competitive with me. I knew he was proud of me, but I never dared to think of the competitive part. I assumed that he saw my accomplishments as his own–as if I was raising the family’s prestige with my deeds. But, I never considered the competitive side because it was too frightening. I couldn’t understand back then how he could love me and be competitive with me at the same time.
From time to time, I also wondered how he felt about having a high school equivalency diploma and me a PhD. Or what his reactions were when my mother referred to him as “a working man” (particularly when I asked my parents to help me with college tuition) and her expecting both her sons to become professionals.
Being a professional was my mother’s idea. Being successful was his. I didn’t know how he felt because I never asked and he never offered. But had I asked, I suspect he would have paused for a very long, awkward moment, and then said something that he didn’t mean. Seldom did he say what he really thought or felt because he didn’t know how or because he chose not to. So he’d blurt almost anything out to quickly change the subject and take the focus off him and what he really thought and felt.
It was ironic that after I received my PhD–my “union card” so to speak to call myself a psychologist in New York State–my father suggested that I continue paying my monthly dues to the Sheet Metal Workers Union Local # 28, “just in case.” He got me this union card when I was a high school senior, and it helped finance my college education by letting me “make good money” while working summers in the building trades. How good? Six dollars an hour back in 1962.
Either he didn’t trust higher education or have the confidence that I’d be fine with my new Ph.D. Or maybe, just maybe, he was continuing to be protective of me because that’s one of the ways he showed his love.
The issue of being validated became even more pronounced ten years later when my second book came out. After Fishing for Barracuda: Pragmatics of brief systemic therapy was published by W. W. Norton in 1985 I mailed autographed copies to my parents who were now living in Florida.
My father, who usually called me only on Sunday afternoons before 5PM when the phone rates were the lowest, phoned me in the middle of a Wednesday morning to say that he just finished the book and thought it was “disgusting.” He was upset over some cute stories I wrote about growing up in my family. They were not embarrassing or humiliating and were written for professional psychotherapists who hear these stories every day. But that didn’t matter to him.
A few months later, my parents began seeing a marital therapist in Florida.
“You wouldn’t be related to Joel Bergman, the New York psychologist?” the counselor asked.
“We happen to be his parents,” my mother answered proudly.
“What a coincidence,” exclaimed the therapist. “I’ve been trying to get a copy of Fishing for Barracuda for the past month and can’t find it in any of the local bookstores.”
“Don’t worry,” said my big shot father “I’ll get you a copy.”
That day, I could see him tripping over himself as he ran home to order a copy of my book on Norton’s toll-free number. So when speaking to me, the book was disgusting, but when talking to his therapist, he bought her a copy. Go figure. Like my mother, he was seeking validation for himself.
Over the years, I had grown weary over the need for my parents’ approval. It wasn’t an either/or situation. They could have sought recognition for themselves and validated me at the same time. But that didn’t happen.
To keep my parents from continuing to use my achievements to validate themselves in the eyes of others, I “poisoned” small parts of the book while I was writing Fishing for Barracuda. Since my father was so secretive about his family, I included some funny stories about our family. Then, if he wanted to turn my accomplishments into his, he’d have to become less secretive. I’m not sure whether my poisoned pill worked, but I suspect that his need to hide his family’s “secrets” was stronger than his need to take credit for my book.
Since the need for my parents’ approval played such a major dynamic in my life, I’ve given a great deal of thought to the possible reasons why my parents didn’t validate me. Or didn’t give me the recognition I needed. This is what I have discovered so far.
First, my mother had trouble admitting that I knew something that she didn’t. If she openly acknowledged that she didn’t know everything, that admission might make her feel insecure or stupid. Her lack of self-confidence kept her from saying, “I’m impressed that you know that.” Sadly, my accomplishments lessened her in her own eyes. To say something praiseworthy to me meant she was unpraiseworthy. Try squeezing approval out of a relative who is not feeling too good about themselves.
Another reason my parents didn’t validate me was because it would have changed the definition of our relationship. If they openly admitted that I knew something they did not, in their minds, they would lose the familiar, omniscient position they held as parents to young children. If they lost their historic stature and position, how could they now relate to me as an adult son?
Losing power, status, and control is hard enough. However, validating me would have forced them to connect with me as an adult instead of their infant child. It was “simpler” to continue relating to me as their young child than recognize my adult status and accomplishments.
Another reason my mother didn’t recognize my achievements was because of her own need for validation. She never stopped seeking everyone’s approval. My mother would have felt snubbed over not being invited to a cocktail party hosted by Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.
She would effortlessly redirect all conversations back to herself. The joke goes, “Enough about me. Let’s talk about your thoughts about me.” She didn’t validate me because she was too focused on her being validated by others.
My mother did finally acknowledge me ten years after Fishing for Barracuda was published, and ironically, it was on Mother’s Day. I was giving a weekend training workshop in Fort Lauderdale at a hotel near my mother’s home. I invited her for lunch that Sunday at the hotel where the workshop was being held. After lunch, she asked whether she could sit in on the afternoon session. One hundred and fifty family therapists in the audience got a big kick out watching the presenter’s mother in the audience and crowded around her during the coffee break. They thought she was cute and were touched that the workshop leader took his mother out for Mother’s Day. She was a celebrity that day and we both enjoyed it.
After the workshop, I was struck by the genuine interest she showed in my workshop presentation. She asked the kind of astute questions smart therapists ask. She didn’t give me a hard time the way she did in the past by pretending that she was also a trained, experienced psychotherapist. She didn’t question why I asked this and not that. Instead, she said that she always knew I was a good teacher and therapist, but that she didn’t actually witness it until that afternoon. She went on to say that she enjoyed the workshop and was proud of me. And this time I believed her.
Why did she validate me that afternoon after 40 years of not validating me? Perhaps, in part, because she was acknowledged. As a mother on Mother’s Day. As the lecturer’s mother. Only after she felt validated by my audience could she validate me. I had sought as an adult her approval without thinking about the acknowledgement she needed from me. I was looking for a “freebie.” It just didn’t happen. What I learned that day was that the more I acknowledged her the more she could validate me.
After a lifetime of looking for recognition from my parents, I finally felt it. And, of course, when it finally happened, it no longer had the same meaning it might have had five, ten, or twenty years earlier. On the other hand, I was pleased my mother said what she did without us having to wait for the melodramatic deathbed scene for it to happen.
As a child, I felt validated. There was lots of hugging, kissing, holding, and kvelling. “Look at that little momser climbing out of his crib at nine months old.” Alternatively, I’d hear, “Gotenyou (Oh, my God), is he gorgeous” from my mother and her neighbors. Actually, the only criticism I remember receiving was being teased because I couldn’t skip. I could run, walk, and hop, but my skip always quickly deteriorated into a hop.
As a boy, I remember the scratchy feeling of my father’s beard against my cheek when he kissed me. I hated the sandpaper but loved his kiss. The validation stopped when I felt I was too big to kiss. And it continued to be a problem throughout my adolescence and adult years because my parents and I couldn’t find an adult version of picking me up, holding, hugging, and kissing me the way they did when I was little.
When Boundaries Are Violated
When I ask myself what was the most painful part of growing up in my family, I’d say it was the feeling of helplessness. Seeing my parents as having all the power and the children none. Yet there were options available to me which I wasn’t aware of at the time and therefore never acted upon. Had I chosen some of them, I would have felt less helpless and humiliated over feeling that I had such little control over my life.
Two metaphors from my childhood capture what it felt like growing up in my family. I remember baby-sitting for my younger brother Butchie and convincing him that he was adopted. When our parents came home that evening they found him sobbing. “Joey said I’m adopted and showed me pictures to prove it.”
Back in those days I kept tropical fish which I treasured to the point that when one died I chanted the Jewish prayer for the dead, and held funeral services in our backyard using little wooden match boxes for coffins. Years later when we were in our thirties, Butchie confessed to me that when he got angry with me when he was little, he’d flush one of my delicate angel fish down the toilet.
The teasing that went on between the two of us was metaphorical. One of the more painful issues in Butchie’s life was his sense that he was adopted, and my biggest hope growing up in my family was to be treated with the same respect I gave my tropical fish.
We didn’t share our thoughts or feelings with each other or with our parents because we didn’t know how to. And if we had, I suspect it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I could imagine my parents’ reactions:
“What are you talking about?”
“I never heard of such a thing.”
“You’re just too sensitive.”
Butchie and I connected with each other over the mutual pain we felt about growing up in our family. A major source of this pain stemmed from our boundaries being violated. For example, our mother might tell us what we were thinking or feeling. “You don’t really mean that.” or “I know how you feel deep down inside.” In the sixties, some of the leaders in the human potential movement called this “mind fucking.” “Wouldn’t you like to call Grandma?” “You don’t really dislike Aunt Louise, you just think you do.”
Had an impartial observer point out to our mother that telling her sons what they were feeling would play havoc later on with our sense of integrity and dignity, she would have been horrified and stopped. But there were no observers around to say such things.
Butchie and I longed to be raised in a more democratic and generous family. One that offered more say in decisions that involved us. We wanted to be seen first for who we were instead of who our parents wanted us to be.
Our parents assumed that our feelings, needs, and wishes were identical to their own, which may have been true to some extent when we were very little. But as we grew older, instead of finding new ways to deal with our differences, they became bones of contention. In our parents’ mind, anytime we disagreed with them meant that there was clearly something wrong with the children’s thinking.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Who taught you that?”
“Is that how a college man talks?”
Butchie and I eventually kept our personal thoughts and feelings to ourselves. We assumed that speaking up wouldn’t make a difference, and that assumption placed us deeper into the “Victim Theme Park” we were unwittingly building for ourselves.
We became obedient children who deeply resented our parents’ authority, particularly when their decisions seemed arbitrary. We were enraged without knowing why. It took me over twenty years, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and seven post-doctoral years of training in family therapy, to figure out why I was so angry. Only then did I begin to connect the dots so I could understand and therefore reduce my rage, which was beginning to infect my work and personal life.
Butchie and I continued as adults to assume that speaking up wouldn’t make a difference. This was a serious mistake because we were no longer helpless children, even though we felt like ones. The world beyond our parents would prove more responsive to what we said in a way our parents did not.
When we became teenagers, Butchie and I placed three separate locks on our bedroom door, and that still wasn’t enough to keep our mother out. Sometimes, she politely knocked on the door after she opened it. Or she’d drift into my room while I was doing my homework.
“Ma, what are you looking for?” I’d ask nicely.
“I need something,” she’d mumble and begin rummaging through my closet. I pretended to do my homework as she rifled through my clothes. It was her house, which gave her the right to come in, but it was also my room, and that meant she didn’t have license to barge in whenever she pleased. Because she never said, “Excuse me, I need to find something,” I was left feeling run over and unseen. No different from when our parents walked into and out of rooms without acknowledging our presence with a look, a smile, or by just saying, “Hi.” They didn’t know you were supposed to acknowledge people when entering or leaving rooms.
Still, I colluded with these invasions, allowing her to fiddle in my closet because I didn’t speak up. I didn’t say, “Ma, please get what you need so I can finish my homework,” because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Speaking up that way would have produced an argument, and back in those days, I avoided confrontations at all cost because I was afraid that they would escalate and I’d eventually be thrown out of the house.
Why it was her house and not our house is another story. My mother took extraordinary pride in the ways she furnished and decorated our home. The house was more an extension of her than it was to the rest of us guys. It was a role commonly assumed by women back then.
Cleanliness for her was more important than comfort, so all the sofas and chairs in the living and dining rooms were covered with a thick, transparent vinyl which stuck to your thighs when you wore shorts during the summer. The living room was decorated in Wedgewood blue with antique white streaking. The joke was that if you lingered too long in that particular room you’d be antiqued white yourself. The living and dining rooms were “strictly for company” and completely off limits to the family.
But there were more important reasons why it felt more like her home than ours. There was little privacy or space I could call my own. My room and closet were open to random searches, not unlike what happens in prisons. I was taught never to lie or keep secrets, so I had little privacy or any space of my own in that way too. The house was hers and I felt like a guest who might be asked to leave if she became upset or disapproved of my behavior.
Why was my mother rummaging in my closet? She was lonely and wanted to connect but didn’t know how. Instead of engaging in small talk, she’d pretend to be looking for something. I could have chatted with her but didn’t want to because I was terrified of what felt like her bottomless neediness. An emotional vacuum that could drain all the love, care, and empathy out of me if I exposed myself to her for too long. Given the slightest prompting, my mother could effortlessly expand any small conversation into a major soliloquy about herself, and I never knew how to stop her without hurting her feelings. Physically backing away didn’t work because she’d follow me, even into the bathroom. So I learned to cut short most casual chatting to avoid feeling trapped that way. Now as I look back at my thinking during those adolescent years, my self-protective “solution” only increased her loneliness and need for attention.
My father violated boundaries as well, but differently. For example, when I gave Butchie a wedding present in the form of a check, he never stopped asking me to tell him the amount.
“Why is this so important?” I’d ask.
“I want to make sure it was a nice present.”
“Pop, it was a very nice present.”
“How nice is very?”
“Nicer than you think.”
“How nice is that?”
“That’s my business.”
“No, it’s my business too.”
My father went nuts not knowing something that Butchie and I kept from him and we enjoyed this little bit of power we held over him. Privacy was absolutely allowed in our family, particularly on the children’s side. Every year after my brother’s wedding, almost like an anniversary, my father would try to tease out of me the size of my gift, using a new approach each time.
“Come on,” he’d say, “tell me how much you gave him.”
“I will not. Besides, why are you so obsessed with this?”
“I’m not obsessed, I just don’t want to be embarrassed,” he’d answer slyly.
I’ll never know whether he feared being ashamed of my gift or that his gift was less than mine. Or maybe he was just being a yenta who couldn’t tolerate not knowing this little “secret” that was kept between his two sons.
What he really wanted to ask was, “How much do you love your brother?” But he’d never raise this question because that would have been too personal and direct for him.
How indirect was my father? With a straight face he once said, “Let me ask you a hypothetical question. If there are two sons in a family and one earns much more money than the other, how do you think the parents should divide their assets in their will?”
“Fifty-fifty, Pop,” I answered. “Straight down the middle.”
My father equated money with love. Whenever Butchie and I took our parents out to dinner to celebrate a birthday or anniversary, he’d always want to know the cost of the meal.
“Let me see the check so I can leave the tip,” he’d argue.
“Sorry, Pop, everything has been taken care of.”
I hoped over the years that by refusing to show my father the restaurant tab, he’d eventually stop equating money with love. But that didn’t happen.
My parents struggled with relinquishing control over us and letting us go. A perfect example occurred on the day following my brother’s wedding reception. At nine o’clock on that Sunday morning, my parents came knocking at the newlyweds’ door. Butchie hadn’t been married twenty-four hours before our parents arrived with the Sunday newspapers, bagels, lox, and cream cheese.
They claimed that they were just being loving and I can’t totally disagree, since intrusiveness is subject to cultural interpretation. I quietly giggle to myself when I hear my Jewish patients long for WASP parents and my WASP patients wishing that they had Jewish parents. Some Jewish patients misinterpret WASP parents’ reserve as respect for emotional boundaries, while some WASP patients misinterpret Jewish parents’ intrusiveness as love. What both fail to realize is that reserve is not necessarily respect nor intrusiveness love.
I have no idea how Butchie kept our parents from inviting themselves along on his honeymoon. Who knows? Maybe the four of them went on his honeymoon without telling me.
I didn’t know I had the right to speak up for myself, disagree, or have any personal privacy of my own until I was in my mid-forties. Slow learner? I believed that the helpless, passive position I assumed as a child would continue into my adult years.
I also gave my parents added power because of my need to please them and receive their approval. I was a very “good boy,” not unlike Portnoy’s friend in Portnoy’s Complaint, who pinned a phone message for his mother to his shirt pocket before he hanged himself. Portnoy’s friend valued being a good boy over life itself.
My mother cautioned me never to lie and I naively obeyed her. Had I learned how to white lie, I could have done more of what I wanted to do as a child without risking my parents’ disapproval. I would have also felt less helpless. A “secret life” might have reduced feeling so vulnerable to my parents. I also didn’t believe as a boy that I could get away with lying. I learned how to lie in my mid-forties from a Serbian girlfriend who lied like a trooper. Only after I watched her lie and get away with it did I begin to see the importance of white lying, and how it could help to fortify a sense of identity and dignity.
My father liked calling me early Sunday morning, assuming that I woke up at six o’clock the way he did. You’d think the sound of my sleepy voice would eventually lead to calling me later on in the day. No way.
While chomping on a bagel, he’d begin, “Hey, Yussel. This is your dada. What’s happening?”
One Sunday morning, after becoming weary over these unsolicited wake-up calls, I decided to become concrete and said, “Well, Pop, actually I’m right in the middle of making love, but I’d be more than happy to continue talking if it’s OK with you.”
The chomping sounds abruptly stopped, and after a very long pause, he decided to call back later.
I wondered why my father frequently called me with food in his mouth. Was he so excited over what he was eating that he suddenly became sociable and decided to call me? Or was it the other way around, that he became so excited about talking with me that he grabbed a bagel? Or did he need more emotional control and distance during our phone conversations by chomping on a bagel and annoying me? Or didn’t he know any better?
When I was around forty years old, my girlfriend at the time taught me the expression, “I have plans.” I became excited the moment I heard it because I thought that I could use this expression to draw more boundaries with my family without offending them. I was wrong.
My mother began one phone conversation: “Why don’t we get together for dinner this Friday?”
“We’d love to,” I answered, “but we have plans.”
“What kind of plans?”
“We have dinner plans with friends.”
“Which friends?”
“Friends!”
“Which friends are they?”
“Ma! Isn’t saying we have plans with friends enough for you?”
“Not really. I’d like to know what plans and with which friends.”
“Ma,” as I raised my voice, “you’re a yenta. In most families, saying we have plans would be enough.”
“Which families are you talking about?”
“Bye, Ma.”
What I have concluded after forty years of trying to set boundaries in an enmeshed family like my own is that you can’t perfectly define emotional boundaries with needy relatives, since they will be offended by most boundaries that are drawn. And that part of growing up involves learning how to draw emotional boundaries in enmeshed families and caring less about how needy relatives react to the limits that are placed on conversations and relationships.
The strongest connection to my brother was the mutual contempt we felt over the way we were raised. We shared the same sense of rage, helplessness, powerlessness, and humiliation when our boundaries were violated.
In 1959, our family moved to a newly constructed, red-shingled, split-level house on Long Island’s North Shore. It was on 65 Crest Road, two miles south of the Long Island Expressway, and midway between Shelter Rock and Searingtown Roads in North New Hyde Park. My mother called it Manhasset Hills. Butchie and I called it Auschwitz. And our parents Nazis.
It was fun calling them Nazis. As children, we felt allied against a fascist regime that was never intentionally cruel or sadistic but which we experienced as heavy handed, dictatorial, and arbitrary. Our parents didn’t know how to delegate authority with grace or any sense of justice. They didn’t know about giving small children choices so they could participate in minor decisions that affected them. Giving us choices, even when superficial, might have preserved some sense of dignity.
Our parents automatic “No” in our minds paralleled the stiff and reflexive “Sieg Heil” salute. Arbitrary and specious answers were given when we asked why we couldn’t have things. “Your father is a working man, not a professional.” “Your father doesn’t make that kind of money.” We were asking for Mallomars, not Jaguars. Their knee-jerk answer was a mindless “No” rather than “Maybe,” “Why not” or, God forbid, “Of course.”
When we objected to our mother’s uninspired cooking, she’d say, “If you don’t like this hotel, check out.” They entertained little discussion, conversation, or interest in our opinion. It simply was their way or the highway and they were in the driver’s seat in case there was any doubt. “Children should be seen and not heard,” was how they were raised and they expected the same with us.
Being five years older than Butchie, I wanted to be there for him the way we hoped our parents would be there for us. How I’d protect him from the same fascist regime I felt equally subject to was another question. Maybe by just being there and agreeing that we could have been raised more respectfully.
My parents were mostly oblivious to my brother’s feelings. All they knew was they couldn’t reach him, so they’d call me.
“Did you speak with Butchie?” my mother would begin.
“No, I’ve been busy.”
“You should call him to see how he’s doing.”
“Haven’t you spoken with him?” I asked.
“He hasn’t called,” she answered. “We thought maybe he called you.”
“He hasn’t called me. Why don’t you call him? He is your son,” I sarcastically reminded her.
“We would, but he listens more to you.”
In my parents’ mind, the point of calling my brother wasn’t connecting or saying “Hi.” It was giving and receiving orders. “Orders from the Waffen SS,” Butchie and I used to joke.
The British have coined the expression “being dragged up” to describe raising children in heavy-handed ways. Butchie and I felt like bunkmates in the same concentration camp, and our strongest bond was knowing what it felt like to being raised with little control or dignity.
In 1974, I moved back to New York City from Massachusetts and asked Butchie whether we could find new ways to connect with each other besides bad-mouthing our parents. It was fun and funny trashing them, but it was also a false connection, and I wanted to feel closer to Butchie beyond sharing a mutual enemy. In my heart, I never believed that having a common enemy made you my friend. Besides, they weren’t exactly enemies–they were our parents.
I made this request a year after I began my own personal psychotherapy and a post-doctoral training in family therapy, so I was feeling less angry toward my parents in general than I did in the past. Connecting with Butchie over our mutual contempt no longer worked the way it did in the past.
My affection for Butchie never waned. It was impossible to pass each other on the same dance floor without exchanging brotherly pinches in unmentionable places.
When we were little we fought like brothers. Once, we were quietly doing homework in our separate bedrooms and Butchie began screaming out loud, “Ma, Joey is beating me up.” My mother yelled at me and told me to leave my brother alone. I couldn’t believe my ears. Butchie was entertaining himself as the younger brother.
I also remember facing Butchie as I sat on top of him, pinning his shoulders to the floor with my knees and drooling while trying to retract my spit before it reached his face. Sometimes there were miscalculations and couldn’t retract my spittle in time. That’s how I entertained myself as the older brother.
In spite of feeling strongly connected over the mutual contempt we felt when our parents violated our boundaries, there were major differences between the two of us.
I felt attached to my brother but never close. There was warmth and affection, but also distrust. In order for me to trust, others have to be as open with me as I am with them. Butchie played his cards very close to his chest. It was too dangerous for him to talk from his heart because he’d get hurt. He never understood how protective I felt toward him. But that wasn’t enough for him to be more open with me.
His rage actually frightened me. I knew most of it had to do with our parents, but you never know. His anger was like our fathers–unexpressed fury that quietly simmered inside over the years. And when it could no longer be contained, he’d let it loose with periodic explosions of radioactive steam that sprayed all over the place.
I, too, felt enraged with our parents. Angry over feeling helpless as a child. Over being demeaned, provoked, and manipulated. But my anger came out differently. I argued, disagreed, and openly fought against my parents’ controlling ways throughout my teenage years and twenties.
For example, we’d quarrel over a painting that they bought me for a birthday present because it suited their taste more than mine. They didn’t know how to say, “We’d like to buy you a painting for your birthday. Come with us and pick out something you like.” Instead, they assumed that I liked what they liked because they assumed I was identical to them.
During weekend visits from college, we’d argue when I was accused of running around with my friends and not spending enough time with them. “If you’re going to use our home like a hotel, you might as well not come home at all.” My parents hoped I’d spend the entire weekend with them and do nothing except gaze lovingly into their eyes. And their eyes only. I was supposed to make up for the loving parent they felt they never had and still needed.
Butchie avoided our parents instead of arguing with them. He didn’t believe in psychotherapy, so little got worked out there. Instead of addressing his childhood pain with a friend or directly with our parents, he kept most of it to himself and sealed it in a hundred-and-fifty extra pounds of rage that he carried around inside him.
There were other reasons for Butchie’s fury besides what we shared as brothers. My mother confessed to me when I was an adult that when Butchie was first brought to her as a newborn in the hospital, her initial reaction was that he wasn’t hers. She so desperately wanted a baby girl that at first she may not have accepted him. The wrong sex was something he could never change or get past.
Butchie wasn’t my father’s favorite either. One child would have been enough for him. He competed with Butchie for my mother’s affection. Butchie also negatively reminded my father of his brother, Uncle Gonif, who was the youngest and most spoiled son growing up in his family. Not being my mother’s or my father’s favored child only increased Butchie’s rage even more. And my guilt.
Some of Butchie’s fury came out by embarrassing our parents with his obesity. He overate for personal reasons as well, but I think he enjoyed seeing them squirm. Our parents craved approval from the outside world, and Butchie relished being seen publicly with our parents so others would witness what they didn’t do for him. Like love him enough.
Butchie’s fury sometimes leaked out in my direction, but he knew there was little risk of losing me. He didn’t need my approval the way he needed our parents’, because I think he felt my love.
At first, I was confused by his anger toward me. For example, he’d pressure me into attending one of his annual B`nai Brith weekends that were held at different Catskill Mountain resorts. Then he’d ignore me for the entire weekend. I don’t mean not have time for me. I mean ignore, as in “snub.” After that happened a few times, I declined future invitations. Then he’d complain to my mother, who reproached me for not wanting to be closer to my brother. When I told her how Butchie snubbed me, she accused me of being oversensitive.
She never understood his little setup until the same thing happened to her on one of those Catskill weekends. Since Butchie couldn’t openly show his rage, he acted it out by inviting me and my mother to weekend events and then ignoring us.
My brother’s manipulativeness also kept me from feeling closer to him. He didn’t believe in his heart that he could get what he wanted by being open and direct. After I told him I wouldn’t attend any more of his Catskill weekend events, he “innocently” asked me six months later why he hadn’t received my deposit for an upcoming weekend. I always suspected that if he brought in enough hotel business under his name for his organization, the hotel would comp him a free room.
“I told you I wasn’t going.”
“No, you didn’t. You said you’d think about it, but you didn’t emphatically say no.”
“I distinctly said, ‘No.’”
“No, you didn’t”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did not”
“Did so.”
“Not”
“So.”
This was a phone conversation between a forty-year-old and his thirty-five-year-old brother. From then on, whenever I declined future “invitations to be snubbed in the Catskills,” I mailed him a follow-up memo confirming my regrets in writing.
Nothing makes me feel crazier than when somebody insists that I said something I never said. It’s another form of mind-fucking, like when our mother told us what we really thought and felt when we were little.
What I have learned to do over the years when someone insists that I’ve said something I never said is to calmly tell them to stop. Then I’ll politely ask them not to insult my intelligence or embarrass themselves by talking that way.
Sensing that Butchie was not cherished by either parent made me feel sorry for him. It’s not that I experienced that much more love than him, but we both knew he got less, and that was enough to make me feel guilty.
At extended family gatherings, often in front of Stevie and Jerry, our two favorite first cousins from my mother’s side, Butchie would matter-of-factly announce, “Joey is the smarter one,” and I’d defensively counter by saying that his IQ was higher. Or he’d insist that I was better looking or our parents’ favorite, and I’d refute him point for point. But no matter how much I protested, he could easily make me feel guilty.
Eventually, I discovered how to stop him. After he insisted that I was smarter, I learned to agree with him and take it a step further on my own by adding, “I’ll never know how anyone as limited as yourself has done as well as you have.” Or when I’d be accused of being our parents’ favorite, I’d agree and say, “How could anyone love someone as ugly as you?” Very brotherly, very grown-up stuff. After I learned how to counterattack and take it a step further on my own, Butchie stopped his public guilt trips. The reason he could provoke my guilt in the first place was because I allowed him to by taking the hit and not fighting back.
Once we were having lunch in my apartment and he told me that he might be sterile. When I asked for more details, he said he wasn’t sure about the particulars, but that his doctor told him that I might have the same thing too.
“How long have you known this?” I asked.
“About five years,” he answered.
“Why didn’t you tell me five years ago?”
“I was afraid you’d get upset.”
“What’s your doctor’s name and phone number?”
“I’ll give it to you when I get home.”
“No, I want it now,” I insisted.
Then, right in front of my brother, I called his doctor and introduced myself. I asked him to repeat what he told Butchie.
“Your brother has an extra allele,” the doctor began.
“Is it X?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered, “He’s an XXY but don’t tell him.”
“How do I know I don’t have it?”
“It’s called Kleinefelter Syndrome, where you lack certain secondary sexual characteristics like body hair. And your testicles don’t exceed two cm.”
“Is that on the large or small axis?”
“The large axis.”
When I put the phone down, Butchie asked whether I had the same thing. I told him I didn’t think so. Unlike Butchie, I shaved each morning and did have hair on my arms and legs. But those balls of mine, I wasn’t sure about them at all. Besides, who walks around knowing the size of their testicles in centimeters?
That afternoon I couldn’t wait until Butchie left my apartment. While he was there, I kept obsessing over whether I had a metric ruler in my apartment. All of these self-centered thoughts only increased my guilt. My brother had just informed me that he was sterile, and I was obsessing over the size of my balls. After he left, I was relieved to learn that they exceeded two cm in length–on the long axis. But my guilt increased even more. Guilt over being the favorite, smarter, better-looking, and now the sole keeper of the “family’s jewels.”
When I shared my story with Ian Alger, my therapist, he wisely suggested that the only way I could absolve my guilt would be to have my testicles surgically removed without telling a soul. My guilt feelings lasted less than forty-eight hours after that.
I rented a house for seven years in Amagansett every August and invited Butchie and Amy for long holiday weekends. By the end of the fourth summer, I was becoming resentful over my guests’ sense of entitlement. They never brought wine, pastry, flowers, or ever make an offer to make or take us out for dinner. No one even helped clear the dining room table.
The “King and Queen of Bayside” had arrived in Amagansett and expected nothing less than royal treatment. Since Butchie was convinced that our parents loved me more than him, he felt entitled. I was supposed to take care of him with little reciprocity expected from him. I was to compensate for what our parents still owed him.
In early May of the fifth year, Butchie asked which weekend was free for the royal couple to grace Long Island’s East End. I gave him a date but told him to bring food for that weekend. I felt awkward making this request, since it’s not how I was raised to entertain house guests. Yet I knew that if I said nothing, my resentment would only increase. I couldn’t openly discuss this with him because he’d deny that he felt entitled. That weekend he brought food for an entire week.
When my mother accused me of not wanting to get closer to Butchie, I’d become defensive and list all my initiatives like: attend his charity weekends in the Catskills; initiate most phone calls and lunch invitations; invite him to dinner at my home in Manhattan; call him on his birthday; buy birthday presents; attend his fund-raising dinner dances; invite him for long holiday weekends in the Hamptons; and proudly attend many of his organizational functions that were honoring him.
After spending two weeks with Butchie in Israel, my mother finally admitted to me that her two sons were indeed different–something I had repeatedly claimed for thirty years. What made her finally conclude that her two sons were different? When I asked, she couldn’t answer.
I looked forward to a time when Butchie would eventually work out his childhood rage and move on with his life. Once free of his old baggage, I could see him losing all his excessive weight and have a normal life. I never dreamed he’d die with all that anger still inside him.
When he passed away, I lost my only witness. No one understood what it was like growing up in our family more than him. And I, of course, was his witness. We were intensely connected this way and maybe that was enough.
I finally felt close to Butchie the last month of his life. His health had deteriorated from the diabetes that developed from his obesity, which had been diagnosed in his teens. Like our father, he magically believed that his doctors and medications would save him.
Butchie was anxious about an operation that was scheduled to take place and openly talked in ways I always hoped he would. He was frightened, vulnerable, and spoke from his heart. I don’t know whether I felt close to him because he was dying, or because he was open, or both. I was in Iowa at the time conducting training workshops in family therapy, and I called every morning at six a.m., knowing that the hospital woke him up early, so we had many good hour-long talks.
In one conversation before a surgery to amputate his foot, he asked me in a very self-pitying tone, why this was happening to him? My immediate response was to comfort him. But later on, after the call ended, I thought to myself, “You stupid, irresponsible son-of-a-bitch. How can you overeat the way you did, become a hundred fifty pounds overweight, and then ask me why this was happening to you?”
Butchie also asked me that if he didn’t survive the surgery, I’d make sure that he was buried with his amputated foot. I promised that I would make sure that happened. Later on, I learned from Amy that they both had planned to have him cremated, amputated foot at all. So asking me to have his foot buried with him was my little brother reflexively jerking his big brother around one last time.
My last two weeks with Butchie ended a twenty-five-year-old journey to feel closer to him. I still don’t know why impending death was necessary for my brother and my father to frighten them enough to become more open and express the love they felt for their family.
The issue of how violating emotional boundaries in childhood can lead to postponing one’s identity and dignity in adulthood became quite apparent when I began seeing a patient who presented the most bizarre symptom I ever treated. James, a professional violinist, came to me unsure that therapy could help, but he was in a panic, which is why he called.
“Well, I’m here for a couple of reasons, but what scares me the most is my girlfriend leaving me. I’m afraid that she’ll come home one afternoon when I’m not expecting her and get so freaked out by what she sees that she’ll leave me.”
“What will she see?”
“I’m ashamed to tell you. I’m afraid you’ll laugh.”
“I only laugh when something is very funny.”
“Well, it’s not funny at all. In fact, it’s rather weird and I don’t understand it but I can’t help myself.”
“Try me.”
“OK. I’ve hidden a box of women’s clothing on the top shelf of my bedroom closet, and when my girlfriend Jennie isn’t in the apartment, every once in a while I dress up as a woman. I put on panties, a bra, a skirt, makeup, my blouse, earrings, perfume–the whole bit.”
“And then what?”
“I pretend I’m this gorgeous babe and prance around the room and admire myself in the mirror. The problem is, I take it a step further and become even more aroused by tightly tying myself up into a chair.”
My eyes smiled. I hear wonderful stories every day in my clinical practice, but this one was new. At the same time, I wondered whether it was physically possible to tie yourself up tightly into any chair.
With a straight face I continued, “So what’s the problem?”
James threw an indignant look my way and began to raise his voice.
“What do you mean, what’s the problem? If she walks in and finds me tied up in a chair wearing a dress, she’ll think I’m nuts and just leave me.”
“So why don’t you lock the bedroom door while you’re doing your thing?”
“Then she’ll ask why the bedroom door was locked.”
“Why don’t you tell her that you’re tied up for the moment and will be with her shortly?”
We both laughed. James expected me to react the way he feared Jennie would–with revulsion and rejection. But I was more curious about his “little compulsion” than anything else, and I began to think about what additional questions I had to ask in order to understand his problem.
As I gathered more family history during the first two sessions, James’ compulsion slowly began to make more sense. I also uncovered other issues that were even more pressing than his fear of losing Jennie.
James is a very gifted violinist, a prodigy in fact, whose natural talent, hard work and an ambitious mother led to him enjoy a distinguished musical career.
“From as far back as I can remember, I’ve been the sole focus of my mother’s life. She wanted me to become a great concert violinist. I was her only child and she doted on me. She sent me to the best conservatories, bought me the finest violins, hired the most gifted teachers, and made all the right decisions which helped advance my career. She still even comes to all my concerts–even the world tours–and remains my biggest fan.
“On a more personal level, she’s been a kind, devoted, and generous mother who has always been there for me whenever I’ve needed her. She showers me with expensive birthday and Christmas presents and surprises me with little gifts that she knows will touch me.”
“Sounds like a pretty terrific mother to me.”
“Well, it wasn’t all terrific. Throughout my childhood she confided in me, and I had to listen to her for hours because no one else did. She divorced my father when I was six and never stopped reminding me about how he ruined her life. I believed most of what she told me until I reestablished my relationship with my father when I was twenty-five.
“My mother would burst into my bedroom when I was little and then politely knock on the opened door. She became incensed after I put a lock on my door and quickly removed it, claiming that locked doors were dangerous since she wouldn’t be able to get into my bedroom in case there was an emergency. What kind of emergencies do ten-year-olds have? Every night she laid my clothes out for the next day because she wanted me to have a certain look.
“She was very critical of my friends, so eventually I stopped seeing them. I became as lonely and as isolated as her. We were the only people in each other’s life, and sometimes it felt more like a husband and wife than a mother and son.”
“When did things change?”
“Things changed two years ago when I moved into my apartment near Lincoln Center and began playing with the symphony. I was twenty-eight years old at the time. Mother became morose, needy and, for the past six months, impossible. Ever since Jennie moved in with me about five months ago, she has turned into a mother from hell. She calls two or three times a week, often in the middle of the night, complaining that’s she frightened or can’t sleep. When she tells me that she has nothing to live for, I panic.”
“Why don’t you ask her to stop calling you in the middle of the night? Maybe gently suggest that she see a psychotherapist.”
“She’s already in therapy and on Prozac.”
“Well, what about telling her that you’re terrified of these middle-of-the-night phone calls?”
“I can’t do that. That would be too selfish and cruel. I’m the only one who cares about her. I’m afraid that if I’m not there for her when she really needs me, she’ll do herself in and then I’ll feel guilty for the rest of my life.”
“What about asking your relatives for help?”
“She does have four sisters who also live in Cleveland, but she’s often fighting with them. Maybe with luck she is talking to one sister but I never know which one.”
“Well, James, I think the next time your mom calls in the middle of the night, the best thing for you to do would be to call your father or her sisters and tell them that you’re frightened and worried and don’t know what to do.”
“I can’t do that! That would kill her.”
“And if you don’t do that, she’ll kill you,” I thought to myself.
By the fourth session, James revealed that the situation was becoming worse and he was feeling more desperate. “No! I didn’t call my relatives.”
At this point, I had to get tougher with the situation, since his mother was clearly raising the ante and might kill herself by accident or on purpose if James didn’t take new steps.
“James, I know that if you contacted your father or aunts after one of these middle-of-the-night phone calls, your mother would eventually stop frightening you. The last thing she wants is for them to know that she’s having a hard time.
“On the other hand, I can also understand that your love and devotion for her has kept you from doing something like this. So at this point, it looks like you’ve got one of two choices. Either call your father or aunts the next time you get one of these suicidal calls, or fly back to Cleveland and do what you’ve been thinking about doing for years.”
“You mean sleep with my mother?”
“Well, you’ve told me how close the two of you are. Ever since your mother’s divorce, you’ve described your relationship as unnaturally intimate. You’ve told me how beautiful and attractive she still is, so maybe it’s time to get all this fantasy stuff out of the way, fly out to Cleveland, AND DO IT!”
I expected James to jump out of his seat, the way I would if my therapist suggested the same thing to me. But James surprised me when he became pensive and began considering this possibility. It made me think of Jack Benny when a mugger shoved a gun into his back and said, “Your money or your life!” Minutes later, Benny replied. “I’m thinking . . . I’m thinking.”
Two days after I gave James this Hobson’s choice, he finally called his father and his aunts after one of his mothers’ midnight calls. Following that, her threats dramatically dropped off. Since then she now calls on Sunday afternoon with a “miraculously new calm” to her voice.
James began therapy because he was terrified of losing his girlfriend through revulsion and abandonment, and his mother by suicide. He was frightened of winding up alone. One of his problems was that he had pseudo-separated from his mother by means of his compulsion. The cross-dressing, and more important, his secret about the cross-dressing, became James’s little island of self, which he marked out as a child to protect himself from being totally enveloped by his devoted yet possessive mother. He never developed an identity of his own, a voice of his own, or a sense of me-ness, or James-ness, which was uniquely his and different from his mother.
He didn’t choose his own toys, clothes, friends, or even his favorite snacks. His mother made all these decisions for him in the name of love. James placed his mother’s need to be needed above his own need for autonomy, choice, space, identity and privacy.
He had survived growing up in his family by deferring to his mother. He didn’t speak up for himself or learn how to say no, or begin rebelling like most adolescents. James had no father or siblings to complain to or collude with against his mother’s intrusive ways. He remembers that when his father spoke up for himself, his parents quarreled, and James thinks that these arguments led his mother to throwing his father out of the house. James was terrified that if he verbally objected to his mother’s ways, they too would quarrel and he’d eventually be thrown out of the house as well.
The cross dressing served several functions. First, the secret was his and only his. No one knew about it but him, and he wasn’t going to surrender it to his mother the way he gave up everything else.
But the secret also served other functions. It gave James a psychological space of his own because he spent so much time with his mother. He never learned how to say, “Mother, I need to be alone for a while,” or “Now I’m going to my room to read” because he feared that his needy, lonely mother would become sad or call him selfish. Instead, he spent as much time with her as she sought but used his secret thoughts about wearing women’s clothing to emotionally separate himself from his mother.
It was too dangerous for James to experience normal adolescent rebelliousness by saying no or by doing the opposite of what his mother wanted. Instead, he rebelled through his secret. James dutifully wore the clothing his mother laid out for him each night. But by wearing women’s clothes in secret, he rebelled without her knowledge. The cross-dressing also protected him from any incestuous fear he might have since he knew his mother would never be sexually attracted to anybody wearing women’s clothes.
Without a clear voice or identity of his own, James predictably got into trouble when Jennie moved into his apartment. He started to lose himself to Jennie in the exact same ways he did to his mother. His passivity, dependency, fear of abandonment, unclear emotional boundaries, and the fear of his mother’s intrusiveness and possessiveness, which terrorized him as a boy, reappeared when Jennie moved in. The cross-dressing had stopped after he moved out of his mother’s home, but reemerged a month after Jennie moved into his apartment.
Asking James to lock his bedroom door or call his father or aunts after his mother’s midnight calls were my attempts to reduce his panic. Once he was less anxious by the fifth session, I could focus on helping him develop more of a voice of his own with Jennie.
“Tell me, James, what upsets you these days the most when you’re with Jennie?”
“Her anger scares me. Jennie gets mad when I don’t do what she wants. If I like tuna on white and she thinks whole wheat bread is healthier, she’ll serve me the whole wheat even though she knows it makes me gag.”
“What would happen if you insisted on the white bread?”
“She’ll get pissed.”
“So what’s so terrible about that?”
“Lots of things. First, I try to avoid conflict and confrontation as much as possible. Second, when Jennie gets mad she stays that way and makes me suffer so long that I end up caving in and doing what she wants. I’m afraid that if she stays pissed for too long, she’ll leave me.”
“James, if you can’t have your way with white bread, how are you going to deal with the really important differences that come up in all relationships like career, money, sex, and raising children?”
“Well, that’s why I’m here, Doc. You see, I’m a pretty easygoing guy who doesn’t really mind that Jennie feels stronger about things than me. I give in most of the time. But I do get upset when she gets angry just because she doesn’t get her way. My mother frightened me the same way.”
“James, what if I told you that it’s not Jennie’s anger that frightens you as much as her tantrums. You wouldn’t buy a box of cookies every time a child has a tantrum in the supermarket, so why give in to Jennie?”
“I never saw her getting mad as having a tantrum.”
“I call them silent internal tantrums.”
“Jennie says that she has to be true to her feelings and that I have to respect what she feels.”
“Of course you have to respect her feelings, but you don’t have to do what she wants. Some people believe that if they feel strong enough about something, then it must be true. Certainly, it’s true for them, but not necessarily for you, or, for that matter, the rest of the world. If you keep getting intimidated by her anger, you’re in trouble.”
“I don’t know how to respect her feelings and have my way at the same time.”
“Get in line, because you’ve got lots of company here. It’s hard to negotiate differences and stay respectful of each other. I’ve learned over the years to expect differences more than similarities between men and women, and to challenge myself into finding more democratic ways to negotiate with the opposite species.”
“Jennie doesn’t do well in democracies.”
We both laughed.
“Well, you haven’t really tried either. If you don’t speak up for yourself, then I’ll bet she thinks you’re OK with some of her decisions. You have to negotiate with her until you end up having your way at least half of the time.”
“Jennie likes having her way all the time!”
“Then you have to learn how to live resentfully in a dictatorship, negotiate differences in a democracy, or find yourself a new girlfriend.”
“But I love Jennie. I want to have my way once in a while and not get resentful over always doing things her way.”
“Then you have to learn how to speak up for yourself, stick to your guns, and negotiate more effectively. You know, binding arbitration, where both sides are forced to discuss their differences until both parties find a compromise that they can both live with.”
For the next few weeks, James spoke up more for himself and the quarreling increased, as I expected. In the past, he had avoided arguing with Jennie in order to keep the peace.
After James and Jennie had a strong disagreement they’d withdraw from each other. When too much emotional distance or silence followed, James feared that Jennie would soon leave him, so he gave into her sooner than he wanted to.
“Doc, I think you gave me the wrong advice. Now we’re fighting more than ever and I can’t take the tension.”
I tried to comfort James with a metaphor. “You know, sometimes quarreling in a relationship is like calcium in the body. The body needs an optimal amount of calcium. If there’s too much, it becomes poisonous, and when there’s not enough, the body can’t grow. Relationships need an optimal amount of conflict, where too much is stressful and not enough is boring. You have to find a workable level of disagreements to realize on a deeper level that Jennie will not leave you. Quarreling, per se, is not necessarily a bad sign. In fact, never arguing is actually a predictor of divorce.”
“How so?”
“Well, never quarreling means a couple is not airing their differences when they arise. It tells me that the partners are quietly storing too many frustrations and resentments to themselves. Neither lets the other know what they really want and where they stand. The relationship has what family therapists call a pseudo-mutuality to it, where what is deeply felt or thought is not shared and things look fine when they are not.
“That often leads to a false sense of security. When these couples can no longer contain their frustrations and differences, they blow up or break up.
“Sometimes it’s hard to resolve these differences, since some couples might have suffered silently for so long that it is impossible to reverse the tide. By the time they get to a therapist or think that they should begin to learn how to share differences or air issues, one or both may have already emotionally left the relationship for good, even though they’re still living in the same space and pretending to be close.”
“How do I find an optimal amount of quarreling?”
“Practice, practice, practice.” It felt ironic telling a concert violinist to practice. “By speaking up for yourself, compromising, negotiating differences, and knowing that you have the right to have your way more often without Jennie leaving you. You also need to learn that when you speak up or disagree you have to do it respectfully. No bullying, coercing, cajoling, name-calling or attacking.”
Since James was now focused on changing his relationship with Jennie more than being abandoned if his cross-dressing secret became revealed, he asked whether he could invite Jennie to come in for one session so they could talk about their relationship.
I expected to be surprised when I met Jennie at the next session and I was. When patients describe how they’ve been done in by their partners, I’m naturally sympathetic to their accounts. However, when I actually meet “the enemy” for the first time, I enjoy discovering how much more likable and charming they are than how they were described by their partner. James’s inability to speak up for himself and feeling victimized by Jennie darkened his description of her.
Since I knew James’s story, I wanted to get Jennie’s version as quickly as possible with the limited time I had. I knew her story would be different.
“Jennie,” I asked, “what’s your biggest problem with James these days?”
“He’s way too passive. He defers too much and doesn’t let me know what going on inside and what he really wants. Sometimes I deliberately wait for him to initiate some plan. I want my man to take charge. [This is a paradox, since if Jennie wants her man to be in charge, then if he follows her directive, she remains in charge.] And then I wait and wait until I can’t stand it anymore and then suggest something out of desperation.”
Since this was a one-time consultation, in order to save time I decided to ask Jennie some questions which went way beyond my usual level of bluntness. I sensed that Jennie could handle my frankness and appreciate my effort to help James, which would ultimately benefit her and their relationship.
“James tells me you can be bossy and that when you don’t have your way, you have fits which terrify him.”
“I know he thinks that way. I’m really not that bossy. As I’ve said, I wait until James comes up with an idea. When he doesn’t I get frustrated. When I can’t wait any longer, I suggest something because I’m afraid that if I wait for him, we’ll never do anything. I react out of exasperation more than anything else. You have no idea how much money we waste on airfares because when he finally decides on something, the cost is twice as much as it would have been had we bought the tickets earlier.”
“What about your anger?” James asked as he turned to Jennie. I felt proud watching James begin to speak up more for himself.
“My anger is over what you do when you’re mad at me. Instead of telling me that you’re hurt or angry, you withdraw and completely stop talking to me. Sometimes you ignore me for days. Then I feel so rejected and alone that I explode. My explosions are what you call tantrums.”
I ended the consultation by suggesting that James practice speaking up more for himself with Jennie and to become more active than reactive in their relationship. Instead of withdrawing from Jennie when he felt hurt, I encouraged him to let her know when and why he was upset.
For the next month, James practiced speaking up for himself and was surprised that Jennie listened. He began to see the connection between speaking up and having his way. Jennie, in turn, became less frustrated because James initiated more plans for the couple, which led her to feel closer to him. Most of Jennie’s anger stemmed from feeling helpless and not connected to James.
“Doc, that was a terrific session we had a few weeks ago. Now I’m speaking up more than ever and Jennie is listening too. This speaking-up stuff really works and I’m surprised it took me so long to get it.”
The entire course of therapy lasted for six months, with James eventually seeing me every other week for an hour. He called with excitement a few months after the therapy ended to announce that the couple had just returned from their honeymoon. James’s mother predictably refused to attend the wedding.
Actually, there were two ceremonies. The public one, where Jennie wore the gown and James the tuxedo, and a private one in their apartment, where the bride wore the tuxedo and the groom the gown.