some basic healthy communication skills also facilitate this process of detachment. I also realize that I have cultivated some of my own internal techniques for detaching as I have been working on these issues for my self. And I know how hard it is to detach even if you know ways to do it. It is very hard.
I respond to Elizabeth by verbally offering a list of ideas of ways to detach. This list is coming off the top of my head and is drawing off the resources I just described. I jot this list down very roughly as I say it. I have never put these ideas together in this concrete, pragmatic way before. The information has been developing there for a while, and I have been testing it out, but I have never laid it out for me or someone else in this way.
This feels like a good thing to be doing.
And before my work day is over, I find my self offering this list again and again, enriching it each time. Client after client asks me questions about detachment and similar emotional entanglements that have brought them to therapy. Their stories are each quite unique. Their entanglements involve different relationships. Addiction may clearly be present, or it may not be. Clients may identify them selves as adult children of people with addictions or as abused, or they may not. The way they identify themselves is not nearly as important as is their experience of losing their self in and to another person.
Anne
A few hours later, Anne comes for her appointment. She is in her late twenties, a small woman with sandy brown hair cut short and framing her face. She dresses quite fashionably and is eager to talk. She often has a smile on her face, but an edge of anger runs through much of what she has to say. We have been working together for a good while. Anne first came to see me shortly after she married. She was feeling so upset, confused, and depressed then about the angry and insecure way she felt around her husband. “He pisses me off” is a common sentence to hear from Anne.
Today Anne is focusing on her bad feelings about an important job from which she has been recently released. Anne had been working as the manager for a popular women’s clothing store. She had been very excited about this opportunity for career growth and had taken her work seriously. She had expressed concern to me, but she was not clear about all she was supposed to do and how to do it. She had described feeling overwhelmed at the store at times and feared that her boss was not satisfied with her work. Indeed, today she tells me her fears have come true, and she has been released from the store’s employment completely. She talks about wishing she had more supervision and feedback before they made their decision to ask her to leave. She is feeling angry and oh-so-bad about her self. Her feelings of failure and worthlessness are dominant. She easily recalls messages from her parents that told her that she could not make it on her own, that she should find a husband to support her and become a housewife. She is thinking this may be right after all.
Anne is asking, “Is it me? Was I wrong?” This is also a common sentence to hear from Anne. She has asked this many times as she has sorted through the issues with her husband. It is so easy for her to think it is all her problem. It is so easy for her to believe that everything would be fine if it wasn’t for her.
Now this is a good question to ask our self: “What part do I play in this problem?” And I believe we do need to do this. The problem here is that Anne, like many of us, takes on the majority, if not all, of the responsibility for the problem, whatever it may be. In so doing, we bog our self down completely with guilt, defeat, and hopelessness, which equals depression, so that we can hardly function, much less find our way out of the problem. We are lost to the totality of our self. We see only the dark and inadequate. We exaggerate the dark and inadequate. And we believe that is all there is of us.
Today Anne has lost her self to the store and to her boss with whom she worked. As Anne says, she’s feeling “lousy.” This situation is the singular focus of her thoughts and feelings both in and out of this office.
Charlotte
As Anne leaves, Charlotte arrives. Charlotte is in her thirties. Her shoulder-length hair bounces as she comes in, and she greets me with friendly, sparkling eyes. She is a jolly sort. She smiles and jokes a lot. She makes both of us laugh. Charlotte and I agree that Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse must have had her in mind when she wrote the description for the Mascot role in alcoholic families in her book Another Chance: Hope and Health for the Alcoholic Family. Indeed, Charlotte comes from a large, alcoholic family. Charlotte’s father was an untreated alcoholic who committed suicide two years ago. Charlotte worked as a flight attendant until several years ago when she married. She now lives with her husband and their two-year-old daughter and works part-time for a travel agency.
Charlotte is a relatively new client. She came to me several months ago concerned about her relationship with her husband and her tendency to spend too much money on stuff she does not need or really want. She thought perhaps she was “addicted to Wal-Mart.”
I have learned that Charlotte’s husband works many hours away from home at his job. He gets up early to go to work and returns in the early evening. Many evenings he spends working on their home and yard. When he sits down in a living room chair at the end of his day, he falls asleep. Charlotte wants to talk with him and hear from him about just anything. Often he has little to say. Charlotte struggles constantly with how to handle this relationship that she values and wishes to maintain.
Today, though, Charlotte is talking about her difficulties with her mother-in-law. She is feeling very angry with this woman who she believes wants Charlotte to say and do things the way she thinks they should be done. Charlotte both wants to please her and to tell her to get lost. On one side, Charlotte says, “I feel sorry for her.” On the other side, she says, “She thinks I’m not supposed to go anywhere. . . . Well, I got her number: Her number is she wants to make me feel bad. . . . But I don’t know what to do with it [i.e., her number].”
Then, in her characteristic way, Charlotte adds, “Isn’t that terrible?”
“Isn’t what terrible?” I ask her.
“Isn’t it terrible that I feel this way about her?”
And then, also in a characteristic way, she adds, “What should I do? What should I say? Did I do the right thing with her on the phone the other night?”
Mark
In the evening of this same November day, Mark comes for his appointment after a full day in his office. He is a handsome man in his forties. He has a professional business which he owns. Mark, too, has a clever sense of humor that comes with him as he deals with his deeply troubling issues.
Mark entered therapy after he was left by his wife of many years. That relationship had been happy and vibrant for Mark. They had good times and were carefully planning for their future together. With seemingly little notice, she ended the relationship and quickly got involved with someone else, and today Mark has come in telling me that he has just learned that she is now engaged to the guy and plans to be married as soon as their divorce is finalized.
Mark has already been using therapy time to look at his high tolerance for the emotional instability that was also characteristic of their relationship. “It’s always been a roller coaster . . . always something going on.” He has also been looking at his obsession with her that has come out in thoughts and in writings he has done. He has been obsessed with trying to understand her and to get some answers from her.
Now he is starting to feel obsessed with his anger toward her as well. In talking about her recent engagement, he says, “That makes me mad. . . . I feel anger and disdain.”
In a healthy effort to save his self, Mark adds, “I have to remember it’s crazy.
