All in the Name of Honesty

How many times has each of us received an emotional wound followed by the justification, “I’m only being honest!” “Honesty” is like other sacrosanct words like “love”, “unselfish”, and “caring” that have the ability to put people’s forebrains to sleep. The mere utterance of the word has the ability to rationalize many behaviors that would otherwise not stand up to close scrutiny. If you are trying to learn how to better defend your privacy and stand up for yourself, then honesty is something you had best get real clear.

The biggest reason to get this concept clear is that if you don’t, it will be used against you! How? By implying that if you don’t tell all, then you’re being dishonest. It’s always amazing to me how many of my clients struggle with feelings of disloyalty to others because they harbor feelings that they haven’t shared. I don’t know how the myth has been propagated but it seems that it’s something of a sin if you haven’t shared all of your feelings. If sharing feelings is being honest, then not sharing your feelings is dishonest, right? Wrong. Or at least more often wrong than right. Not sharing your feelings may be tactful, or considerate, or maybe just plain careful. Here’s something that may help. Honesty is not the same thing as openness. Suppose you see something that reminds you of an old relationship while you’re with a new partner. Suppose you know your new partner is a bit insecure and somewhat prone to jealousy. You have several choices. One possible choice would be to tell all about your feelings for the previous relationship. That wold be both open and honest. Another choice would be to make up a small “white lie” like nothing was going on with you, even though your partner has noticed a difference. That would be closed and dishonest. However, a third choice might be to say that you experienced some old feelings that had nothing to do with the present relationship but that you don’t feel ready to share them. That would be closed but honest.

To confuse honesty with openness is to deny that third option for yourself. It’s that third option of being honestly closed that allows you to set necessary limits in many relationships. It’s also sometimes referred to as maintaining your privacy. For some reason, I find that this is especially hard for some people to keep clear in relations with their parents. For many young couples, not telling their parents details about their present romance may seem like a form of dishonesty. I usually get much resistance when I counsel that they can be closed about many details without being dishonest. Perhaps it’s because they don’t want to risk rejection if they’re honest about maintaining a separate private life.

Of course it’s possible to be closed and dishonest as well. If you secretly break an exclusivity agreement by having an affair, that’s a clear example. Sometimes the agreements haven’t been so explicitly negotiated and then we get into the gray areas…but that will probably have to be the subject of another article.

Another reason to learn to keep some feelings private is so that you can be less tempted to share your feelings as a weapon – all in the name of being honest. If we’re truthful with ourselves, all of us can remember times when we’ve hurt or manipulated another by sharing our “honest” feelings. You know how it’s done. First act like something’s on your mind but only vaguely allude to it. Then when your partner asks you what it is, you tell them that you really shouldn’t have said anything in the first place and it really isn’t anything important. That double message will really hook ‘em. Finally, when their curiosity has swelled to a feverish pitch, they’ll really press you. You finally have all the license you need and …SOCKO! Then share you feelings (and a lot of opinions about their shortcomings). “But you’re ooooooonly being honest!” If I sound a bit sarcastic, let me temper it a bit by saying that I don’t exclude myself from the ranks of the guilty.

A good word to remember in conjunction with honesty is “tact.” Tact implies consideration for the other in what you’re doing. It means you have to think about how you’re doing something and the consequences that might ensue. Is it really safe for you to “let it all hang out” or is this a situation where privacy can protect? Do you really want to give that person so much access to your vulnerable feelings? Have they demonstrated that they won’t manipulate those feelings to bully you in the future?….OR…Are you going to share information that will likely hurt the other? Will the benefit from the other’s knowledge outweigh the pain that it will bring? Are you thinking of a compassionate way to share the information? Have you looked at your own anger and your desire to punish? These are all questions to help formulate tact. With tact, we have to exercise more choices. We don’t let our unconscious lead us to impulsive action while we rationalize it as being honest. We can have tact and we can have honesty too. We just need to be clear that honesty is not the same thing as openness and that the latter is a personal choice involving our privacy.

            If you would like to hear my recommendations to people who have written in about their various relationship problems, go to my website at www.carycounseling.com/door/Prototype/marriagehelpfak.html .

Beyond Equality

There is a useful term that one hears relative to investments but is rarely mentioned when discussing relationships. The term is “equity.” We more often hear people discuss “equality” in relationships. Unfortunately, equality is not nearly as constructive a concept for guiding a couple to creative solutions. When people discuss equality in a relationship, they usually ignore a basic reality: people are not equal. They are not equal in that needs and desires usually differ. If a couple focuses too much on trying to make things equal, they will miss opportunities for trading off their differences for mutual gain. Instead of equal responsibilities and equal opportunities in a relationship, a couple is better off strategizing complementary trade-offs:

Jack Spratt could eat no fat.

His wife could eat no lean.

But in betwixt the two of them,

They licked the platter clean.

We all know that men are usually better at fixing tires and women are usually better at mending clothes. However, much more creativity and imagination are required to negotiate trade-offs such as different vacations or job relocations. The concept of equality has some connotations that do not encourage one to make strategic sacrifices. You make a strategic sacrifice when you willingly defer or give up a lesser interest of yours in order to enable your partner to pursue a major interest of his or hers. If you work it right, you can get your partner to make a similar sacrifice in the future that benefits one of your more important interests. In this way, both you and your partner come out ahead. Looking for constant equality in a relationship tends to limit one’s focus to the immediate situation. It also tends to limit one to advocating for self-interest alone, as if the relationship is a zero-sum game. The most useful connotation of equity is one involving time. You sacrifice and invest in the present so that you can profit at a later time. The concept of equality has no such connotation.

No doubt many readers of this article will abhor the notion of sacrifice after having felt victimized in past inequitable relationships. If you’re one of those people, please consider that what probably went wrong had more to do with faulty implementation. I have found that most people are very poor at explicitly negotiating reciprocity and would rather assume it. Unfortunately, if you only assume that your partner will reciprocate without getting an explicit commitment to do so, you will set yourself up for disappointment and resentment. Many people often will a) not remember when a partner is sacrificing a self-interest for one of theirs and b) not remember when a partner made a sacrifice in the past to benefit them. For these reasons, assuming your partner will notice and remember on his or her own is often naive. Establishing equity can require hard negotiating and bargaining. If you’re willing to relocate with a partner for his career move, it would be wise to extract an agreement that the next move after X number of years will be yours. If it’s not a reciprocal career move that you want, you can negotiate for something else. Maybe you want the next car. But get the agreement up front! If you don’t, it may be assumed that you went along with his move because you didn’t have much of a preference. In other words, your sacrifices (investments) will be minimized.

Of course, when we talk about sacrifice, we are talking about necessary sacrifice: the type that is required for either you or your partner to get something you want. For those of you who sacrifice yourselves with only magical notions that somehow it will benefit someone, there is a much more fundamental problem involved. If so, it would be handled best in a 12-step recovery group such as Codependents Anonymous or Adult Children of Alcoholics.

            If you would like to hear my recommendations to people who have written in about their various relationship problems, go to my website at www.carycounseling.com/door/Prototype/marriageadvicefak.html .

 

When Empathy Becomes Codependence

    There’s a joke I once heard about codependence: How can you tell if a drowning woman, is codependent? Answer: Someone else’s life passes in front of her eyes. Of course, the female gender holds no monopoly on codependence but I report the joke as it was told to me by a “recovering” person in AA. I tell that joke a lot when doing therapy, not out of disrespect but for its illustrative albeit exaggerated truth. Like drowning people who can’t think of themselves first, many people focus on their partner’s feelings and needs to the exclusion of their own.

    Recently, it seems I have been seeing more clients who complain about losing their boundaries when another person is in acute pain. Many of these people also have trouble establishing boundaries in the face of anger but the real killer seems to be pain. It’s almost as if, when the other person is hurting, no legitimate choice exists other than to assuage his suffering. This may involve reestablishing an unhealthy relationship, granting undesired sexual favors, or sacrificing independent interests in a far from healthy empathy. It involves identifying emotionally with the experience of pain but not assuming the responsibility for managing it.

    Adult children from dysfunctional families have exceptional difficulty in distinguishing between healthy empathy and unhealthy responsibility for pain. In their original families, most were taught inadvertently to cross the empathy and responsibility wires. When a parent who is suffering emotionally depends on the child for support, the child eventually will learn to assume responsibility for mollifying the parent’s pain. Children do not have clear psychological boundaries from a parent, and the sense of responsibility becomes ingrained before the child establishes those boundaries. Later on in adult life, it is quite natural for the grown-up child to repeat the feeling of assumed responsibility when presented with a partner’s suffering. It then feels tremendously disloyal to ignore someone in pain. .

    In therapy, I have told many of my clients that feeling disloyal often is an indication of growth during the recovery from codependence. The reason is that loyalty to the original parent often is what keeps the codependent response in place. When one begins to consider one’s own welfare first, it actually may conflict with the implicit parental rule: “You are responsible for tending to my pain first.” To reject that rule, you may be implicitly rejecting the way you originally attached to your parent. You may have originally bonded with him or her through a sense of responsibility for “earning” his presence. To reject responsibility for managing another’s pain, you may subconsciously have to push away your old “internalized parent.” That’s pretty heavy stuff and guilt is understandable.

    If this is your struggle, I would suggest that you not try going it alone. In my experience, people do not let go of what has even marginally worked until they have something with which to replace it. Most people cannot subconsciously push away an “internalized parent” until they have established a more healthy internal ally. This is the job of good psychotherapy. I recommended that you consider this option if you repeatedly cannot be disloyal enough to consider your own welfare first.

            If you would like to hear my recommendations to people who have written in about their various relationship problems, go to my website at www.carycounseling.com/door/Prototype/marriagehelpfak.html .

 

Anger – The Misunderstood Emotion

Anger. Isn’t that the emotion that wrecks relationships? Terrifies children? Provokes violence? How can anyone say anything positive about it? For many of us who have grown up in dysfunctional families, trying to appreciate anger may seem like extolling the virtues of migraines.

Let’s first start by dispelling some misconceptions. Anger is not violence. It is not screaming or yelling, and it is not sarcasm. These are merely mismanaged anger-driven behaviors. Anger is really just a form of emotional energy. It’s energy oriented toward protection and survival and we have it because it has helped our species to evolve. Fifty thousand years ago, it helped us to keep the jackals away from our prey. Today, we’re more symbolic. Anger now helps us to protect our self-concepts from injury. An important thing to know about anger is that it’s always driven by one of two possible emotions. Look under anger and you will always find either fear or pain. That’s useful to understand when you face an angry lover. Trying to understand the fear or pain of your partner can help you avoid the cycle of trading retributions. If anger is energy, then like most forms of energy it can be constructive or destructive. Atomic or electrical energies are highly toxic if unchanneled. Shielded and focused, they are very useful. So how can anger be useful? Do you think you can have a healthy intimate relationship without sometimes saying “No” or “please stop”? Where do you think you get the energy to oppose your partner’s wishes and risk their displeasure when your needs come into conflict with theirs? Many people have a naïve notion that intimate partners should be a perfect fit so that conflict doesn’t occur. That’s not the real world. In the real world, partners have conflicting needs every day and maintaining the relationship is a balancing act. What does useful anger look like? It doesn’t have to look like a rage or a tantrum. One example is when you ask your partner to stop doing something that bothers you. Another example is when you maintain the privacy of a relationship from someone else who is intrusively inquisitive. Useful anger often involves planning. For example, seeking relationship counseling can also be a healthy expression of anger. Working very hard to save a troubled business can be another form. All of these examples involve energy to preserve or defend; to defend personal comfort, to defend privacy, to defend a relationship, to defend a livelihood. Who would deny that it’s healthy to mobilize the energy to preserve or defend our self interests? Many people. Why? Because so many of us have seen unhealthy expression or enactment of anger.

If you grew up in an alcoholic or other kind of dysfunctional family, you probably have witnessed parents who expressed anger in what’s known as a “regressed” form. This means that when they got angry, they tended to become like tantruming children – and that’s very dangerous. Children don’t focus or channel their anger. They act it out without regard to consequence. Fortunately, two year olds don’t have the strength, the means, or the freedom to cause much damage. Try to imagine a highly verbal and mobile two hundred pound two year old throwing a tantrum. That’s what a regressed parent can be like. Those of us who have witnessed an alcoholic parent beat or demean our other parent, shoot the family dog, or leave bloody welts on our legs have probably learned early on that anger is ugly, dangerous, and unhealthy. We may also learn something else: that under no circumstances will we be like our angry parent. And so, we may learn to deny our anger and become as un-angry as possible. But this doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because without our anger we can’t maintain our boundaries during intimacy. It also doesn’t work because if we don’t welcome anger into our adult experience, then we also will experience our anger in a regressed form. There are many male readers of this article who fear that they will become explosive like their fathers. The sad fact is that in order to avoid their anger, they must also avoid intimacy… and do so.

            Instead of viewing anger as necessarily ugly, let me suggest a view that allows the possibility for “beautiful” anger. What is beautiful anger? It’s anger that’s not designed to inflict pain but rather allows you to defend self-interest and thereby to risk intimacy. It’s anger that helps you to mobilize and say “No” when you need to. It’s anger that addresses the needs of that little child inside inside you and gives you the unconscious message “I’ll protect you and keep you safe.” If viewed in this way, anger can be focused and channeled as an expression of self-love. Doesn’t that sound beautiful?

            If you would like to hear my recommendations to people who have written in about their various relationship problems, go to my website at www.carycounseling.com/door/Prototype/marriageadvicefak.html .