Ask Dr. Rosie
October 12th, 2010
Ask Dr. Rosie: The Constraints of No Boundaries
It’s not uncommon for children to grow up not knowing their own beautiful thoughts and feelings and their essential needs and wants. You might be asking “How can that be?” Well, it’s one of the ravages of families and the individuals inside them. They are at war with themselves with no one to mediate a peace treaty.
In some ways we have no choice in the matter when it comes to which family we arrive into as infants. I don’t know a single soul who asked to be born into violence, depression, poverty and sickness. But here we are, thousands of years of cultivating intelligence within societies and cultures and we still have children arriving in families that just don’t know any better than to fight, implode, lack and ache.
So, I’m going out on a limb here and assume that many who are reading this know what I’m talking about. All of us are refugees of families to one degree or another. All of us struggle with who we are as individuals in relation to the world around us. All of us are persons in exile, either from family and friends, and quite often from ourselves.
When, as children it comes to surviving, the majority of us choose to choose survival and belonging rather than choosing to be a lone wolf. Somewhere, somehow our little choice-maker whispers in our ears “don’t think that; don’t feel that; we don’t need that; and soon, we forgot that we could want!
“Just tell me what I’m supposed to want.” My client Andrea shares. “I don’t know how to know what I want. I think I want a relationship but when I get close to someone I get scared and want out! I don’t know – I just don’t know what I want.”
Andrea is a successful Lawyer in New York City. She’s very competent in every aspect of her life, except when it comes to personal relationships. How can that be?
Growing up in a family that looks as normal as any family in her community, Andrea’s grandmother would shame her when she came home with A’s. “What are you, some kind of a smarty-pants?” When Andrea came home with B’s, her grandmother would say “What are you, some kind of an idiot?” Whatever Andrea did she was made to feel guilty or shame for doing what she did and being who she was. Neither her mom nor her dad sheltered her emotionally from the barrage of insults. They each contributed in their own ways to Andrea’s dilemma of not knowing her own thoughts and feelings, wants or needs.
Andrea, like so many of us, gave up her self-respect and dignity for the sake of shelter and food, knowing that someday there would be freedom from all of this.
Enmeshment is the word used in Marriage and Family Therapy for the process of losing one’s self in support of family culture and for survival. Though I believe that early on, we do know that this doesn’t feel good, after awhile we forget and try to find hope and peace amongst the fragments of life that we’ve come to consider “normal.”
Enmeshment occurs not only in families, but in religions, corporations, and our educational institutions – anywhere and everywhere we are not allowed to know what we want or need, or what we think or feel. It occurs anywhere and everywhere we have to choose to silence our own thinking, our creativity, our sense of integrity and personal accountability. Is there any place that is safe?
This is really important, because it’s not like we can point our fingers at Daddy or Mommy or Grandma, for that matter. Each of us somehow plays a role in wanting people to want what we want, how we want it and when we want it. Any of us in a position of authority has the power to decide how we want others to respond to us. How we be with our authority and how we use our authority is the question at hand. None of us gets immunity for acts of unkindness that in the end burdens others with our unresolved anger, sorrow and fears.
In my studies, at first I was appalled with the concept of enmeshment. It meant that most families were just big balls of emotions, which no one could know about or talk about. But through my experience as a therapist it began to make perfect sense. Now as a transformational coach a great deal of my work is about empowering clients, like Andrea, to realize their own wants and desires and their own thoughts and feelings. What they are finding is that there is freedom that comes with making choices – choices that are in right-relationship with their own truths, not necessarily in alignment with the emotional needs of potential partners, co-workers, friends and most importantly those individuals who have authority over us. Like Andrea, they are learning to create boundaries based on what’s true for them. This can get really squirrelly for a lot of us who can see that maybe we want two opposing things at the same time. And, we want the sense of emotional clarity that comes when we’ve made the “right choice.” Looking to others to tell us if we’ve chosen correctly keeps up using childhood ways that really don’t work in a grown up world. Really – they don’t work!
For Andrea, she wants partnership, romance, security, connection and belonging. She also wants safety, freedom, independence and respect that who she is, is all she needs to be. At 49 years of age, she’s afraid she’ll never get it. My experience tells me that the more clear she becomes with who she is; the more clear she can speak up to those she’d made into authority figures (we do this a lot with our bosses, our partners, even with our children) the more freedom she will experience to create a relationship that includes all the good things that come from being able to speak her truth. We actually create better relationships with people when we can know our thoughts and feelings, know our needs and wants and speak authentically from this place of knowing. Isn’t this what we are all wanting?
It’s a fascinating juxtaposition that boundaries, made by free choice, create freedom. Who would have ever guessed?
Dr. Rosie
July 29th, 2010
What if I’m Wrong?
In the course of any choice-making process, whether its regarding career, relationship, health, finances – you name it, there is that underlying whisper gnawing at you taking that first step, or even the 59th step: “What if I’m WRONG?” Do you know what I’m talking about?
This past month I had a difference of opinion with an associate of mine. The conversation, as far as it went, didn’t satisfy my sense that we would be working this out in a way that would rebuild lost trust and connection. I severed the tie, I burnt the bridge and said goodbye. Then, self-doubt arose; what if I’m mistaken? What if the way I’m perceiving this is wrong? What if he comes to decide that I, Dr. Rosie, am not all that kind and compassionate stuff I seem to be?
For the majority of my life I’ve made thousands of choices in service to avoiding this question. To be wrong can feel catastrophic to that part that only has ONE interpretation of what it means to be wrong: I’ll be HUMILIATED!
Now, this part that fears humiliation is normally a very one part of each of us, who has been shamed, guilted and embarrassed. I don’t know if you remember what that feels like – that first conscious experience of being wrong, but basically, it’s unbearable and something to be avoided at all cost.
Many time I’ve stayed in relationships and in jobs, in locations etc, far too long, just to avoid the possibility that my choice may be the wrong choice and the consequences would be unbearable! At some point though, suffering the consequences of being wrong outweighed the staying; the scales were tipped and, well, I took that first step not knowing if I would survive.
Survive I did, yet, I’ve never gotten completely comfortable with making those choices that creates separation from another person. There’s always two sides to the story and distinguishing the who’s right and who’s wrong always gives me the heebie-jeebies. One of us is going to fall short in this conversation, one of us will be the bad guy, one of us will have to eat crow – you get the picture. In my first marriage, to avoid these conversations and the potential anger from my husband (fear of anger is right up there with fear of being wrong), I’d capitulate, I configured in my head how I was WRONG, I said I was sorry and the whole conversation would get dropped. I saved us both from long heated battles. That was how I avoided vulnerability. That may sound backwards, but sometimes that’s what we do.
Taking the Leap
Today, taking that leap by saying goodbye to this individual, I still feel that vulnerability to the potential consequences of being wrong about him or the circumstances. However, this time I’m willing to risk the consequences, feeling the vulnerability – actually being vulnerable to . . . .
When we make choices about what we want to do with our lives, our jobs, careers, etc, so often that questions what if I’m wrong hold us hostage.
Even now that feeling of being wrong is excruciating. I hate feeling the piercing emptiness, the blow of defeat to my ego. However, weighing this possibility against the integrity and dignity of being me, makes me step into my life with a straighter backbone, with more courage to face the possibility that I may be wrong, and if I am, I know that I’ll be learning something from the situation.
I’ve come to understand that it’s the learning that’s more valuable than maintaining safety from making mistakes.