Two women clients last night, both struggling with the same issue: the balance between belonging and being a separate self. There’s an axis:
Belonging <——————–> Self
The question for each of these women, in very different contexts, was how to find the comfortable place on that axis.
The first woman is in a long-term marriage that often hurts her, because her really nice husband keeps changing his mind and can’t cope with anything that feels pinned down. His autonomy apparently feels jeopardized with the slightest breeze of long-term planning. He says yes, but the next day he reneges.
The second woman is in a job with a supervisor who has poor boundaries. They’ve taken on more work; the supervisor is pushing hard and wants this woman to do the same. But this woman has a family with elementary school aged children; she wants (and needs) to get home. Her plate is already full-to-overflowing. She’s beginning (?) to resent her employer’s expectations, but is scared to say anything.
I made the therapeutic mistake of pushing her — telling her what she could say to her employer, why it mattered, and so forth. We did touch on what held her back (which was interesting), but I could tell I was bullying her.
This morning I woke up realizing why I’d become so vehement: my poor mother was needy (as was this second woman’s), and both of us had held ourselves back to keep Mom company — because each mother needed it, because we each loved our mothers, because we needed it to be OK with Mom for us to move on, and it wasn’t.
Her mother was from Central America, latina, where no one of that generation pulls too far away from the family (especially females). And she was unhappily married. My mother was just traumatized, frightened, and dependent. And unhappily married. How do you leave that behind, when you love someone? And what love is stronger than the mother-child bond?
The horrible, unpalatable truth (for both of us) was that staying back with Mom made no objective difference in Mom’s life. Let’s take me. I didn’t take care of myself physically, refused to become attractive (also because of a history of sexual abuse), and was the Snow White her stepmother would have wanted — not attractive, no threat. I listened, I provided emotional support. Like this second client, I made her feelings and needs more important than my own. But that changed nothing! She wasn’t any happier the next day. I threw my life away (for too many years) for a lost cause. When she finally did get happier, it was because she had some good-enough therapy. My energies had only helped her in the moment — I was depleted, neglecting myself, angrier by the episode, and I hadn’t really been helpful.
Although…and here I get stuck: I had helped her in the moment (the thousands of moments when she confided in me, leaned on me for reassurance, etc.). Is that worth enough? It’s “enabling” but it did help her. She was drowning and I pulled her to shore. The next day she fell in the water again, and I pulled her to shore. What does a child know about telling her she should learn to stop falling in the water?
When I lived in Bolivia, people were very much members of their group, their family, their city. It was amazingly peaceful, not struggling with this “individual” stuff. Maybe you didn’t like some of the people in your group; maybe you hated having to go to Mom’s house for Sunday dinner every week; maybe you felt too constrained. But you didn’t wonder who you were.
If, like me, you’re aware of both pulls, I guess you have to find your place on that axis, or maybe walk back and forth to the appropriate place for different parts of your life.
The latina client was surprised to consciously recognize that, working with gringos, she couldn’t count on their thinking about the effect of their behavior on her. She, as part of a group (in her sense of self), was always careful of other people. Her employer was going after what suited her and the organization. She wasn’t being careful about how this affected my client. If she had been, she’d have reduced the work load (because the organization couldn’t afford to hire another person, and both she and my client were already stretched).
What I felt this morning in a rush of tears was that my mother had been an emotional cannibal. She’d taken, and taken, blindly, in the throes of her own need. It happens.