Family Ties That Bind. Dr. Ronald W. Richardson
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is silence. They simply withdraw. They also say, “I don’t know,” as a way of avoiding an encounter with others.
But remember, even though they look very different, the pursuer and the distancer in a relationship have the same basic need for togetherness.
Try the following exercise to see how distancing and pursuing affect your relationships with people.
DISTANCING AND PURSUING
Decide whether you are usually a distancer or a pursuer. Then select a person who plays the opposite role in a significant relationship of yours. For a week, try playing the other person’s role — the opposite of what you are usually like with that person. Try doing a better job at playing that role than the other person does. If you are playing the distancer, be even more distant than the distancer usually is. Take note of what reactions and changes, if any, occur in both you and the other person.
Now do this with a parent or another family member where you tend to have one set pattern.What happens to both of you when you change this pattern?
3. All The World Wants A Mommy
The need for togetherness originates, like everything else, in the family of origin. Somewhere around the ages of six to nine, we begin to realize we are not going to get all the love and acceptance and security we want from our parents. As we get older, we slowly begin to develop a fantasy, which tends to peak in later adolescence, that somewhere out there is an ideal mate who will fill the emptiness we feel. We look forward to a time when we will be “in love” and experience true togetherness. What we didn’t get from our parents, we imagine we will get from our mate.
A major hidden expectation is that this person will provide for us the long-awaited bliss of perfect union. The more starry-eyed among us think this person is “everything I ever wanted in a mate.” The rest of us just think we will be able to turn that person into everything we ever wanted.
Example
Judith’s father had been hospitalized several times with emotional problems. Her mother was a highly anxious person and had little ability to nurture others. As the eldest of three, Judith basically ran the family and kept things going. She dreamed of the day when she would escape and live a more normal life.
After the failure of her second marriage, she sought therapy, wanting to find out what was going wrong. In spite of being an attractive and capable woman, her adult life was turning out much differently from what she wanted.
She discovered during therapy that she had been expecting her husband to give her the good feelings about herself that she never got from her parents. She had been the emotional pursuer, but since she had never really experienced closeness, she was, in fact, uncomfortable with it when it was available. She had chosen men who were basically at the same comfort level of closeness/distance as her family. They were unable to provide what she both wanted and feared. When she dated men who could give it to her, she distanced and did not continue the relationship.
The more children are deprived of nurture and guidance in early years, the stronger their fantasy later that this special person will make everything better. They fall in love with the image of what they think this mate will provide. When the reality strikes, they feel angry, frustrated, hurt, and disappointed. Then they usually try to figure out how to get what they want from the other person.
People usually find fault in someone when they’re not getting what they think they need. If they blame themselves, they try to find out what the other wants and then act on that to win approval or love. They give to get.
If they decide the fault is with the other person, they try various methods of changing that person. These methods may include everything from flattery to criticism to physical attack.
Example
Lela, the oldest of three sisters, had a chaotic childhood involving many moves and times when she lived with relatives rather than her parents. Her parents fought a great deal, and Lela resolved that when she married she was going to have a stable, happy family. She developed the skills and techniques she thought would help make this happen. However, she married Hank, an emotionally remote only child, who did not share her ideas about family. He was basically a loner and did not have much interest in parenting or in family life. He just wanted someone who would look after and admire him. What they wanted from each other was in strong conflict. Each handled the conflict the way conflict had been dealt with in their family of origin. Lela began to sound more and more like the “bitchy” mother she had hated, and Hank was increasingly like his distant father who had many affairs and stayed away from home. They moved a lot and fought a lot. Jani, their 19-year-old daughter, started saying exactly what Lela had said at that age: She wanted a “stable, happy home life.” Yet she behaved with her boyfriends the way her mother behaved with her father.
Both Lela and Hank had developed expectations about how their marriage should be, based primarily on their unfulfilled childhood needs. They got married thinking the other would automatically provide what they wanted; indeed, they insisted and demanded that the other provide it. They blamed each other and demanded that the other change. In fact, neither one was comfortable with closeness, and daughter Jani was the same way.
Too much togetherness can be as threatening in a relationship as too much separateness. It is not uncommon for couples to fight after they have had a particularly good and intense lovemaking experience or some other kind of intimate closeness. This happens because they fear that by becoming too close they will lose their own identity or become too vulnerable. Many people have the misconception that to be close means having to give up their individuality. That can be just as scary as having too much distance in a relationship. The challenge is to learn how to be close, open, and accepting, and still be a unique and separate individual. It can be done, as you will see.
4
You’re Not Better, Just Different — Dealing With Differences
Whom we are related to in the complex web of family ties over all the generations is unalterable by us. Obviously, family members frequently act as if this were not so — they cut each other off because of conflicts or because they claim to have “nothing in common.” But when family members act as though family relationships were optional, they do so to the detriment of their own sense of identity, and of the richness of their emotional and social context.
— Elizabeth A. Carter and Monica McGoldrick, The Family Life Cycle
1. I Say Tomato, You Say Tomahto — Anxiety About Differences
Most people get married thinking their spouse is like them and they both want the same things in life. It doesn’t take long to discover this is not the case. Most of us are lucky if we make it through the honeymoon without a major clash over differences: what time to get up in the morning, where to eat dinner, how to squeeze the toothpaste tube. This is just the beginning of potentially serious conflicts in the relationship. Both partners begin to wonder if they made the right choice; maybe they made a mistake and married Dr. Jekyll. Certainly this person isn’t what he or she first appeared to be. It looks as if the two of them are not going to have the blissful togetherness they expected.
No two people can have an intense, intimate relationship without discovering significant differences between them. This is normal. It’s how we deal with those differences that creates problems. Most of us see these differences as a threat to our ideal of a good relationship: continual harmony between two people who want the same things at the same time.
When differences emerge, most of us try to make our partners more like us. After all, what is an intimate relationship for but to have a like-minded companion walking side by side with us down the road of life? When we find out that it’s not going to be like that, we become anxious. The normal pattern then is to think the