Marrying your parents?

Yesterday Debbie sent me a talk she had heard online about relationships.  (Actually it was a sermon, but kind of interesting all the same.)  The pastor mentioned several theories about how we choose the people we fall in love with, one of which was that we choose people who are like one of our parents.  The explanation had to do with healing the traumas of childhood, but I wonder if it isn’t simpler to say just that these are the personality types we grew up with, so we understand them and feel at home with them?

As I listened I thought about myself and decided that this is a pretty easy case to make for me: Wife and D are both like my father (loud, opinionated, narcissistic, always the center of any gathering, outwardly domineering but with a surprising lack of self-confidence beneath the surface), while Debbie is a lot like my mother (quiet, comfortable in silence and solitude, deeply ethical in an unobtrusive and tolerant way … they even look alike physically).  So when I called her later and we talked about it, I explained this and asked if it is true for her too.

At first she wasn’t sure.  She easily pegged her second husband as being a lot like her mother: no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, emotionally cold, and severely critical.  Then I asked, “OK, how about me?”  She said, “I’m not really sure. What comes to me first about you is your emotional warmth, and I don’t know where that fits in.”  I reminded her that she had described her first husband as emotionally very warm as well, not to mention a couple of boyfriends.  She continued to sound puzzled about how to fit this data into the theory about marrying your parents – indeed, about whether it fit at all – until I asked, “You haven’t told me much about your dad. What was he like?”  I knew he was an alcoholic while she was growing up, but what else?

And I swear as I am sitting here typing this that the first words out of her mouth were, “My father was emotionally very warm.”

“Go on.”

“Also he was curious, interested in things, … a lot more open-minded and open to the world than my mother ever was.”

“Yes?”

“And he was very passive – almost to the point that he couldn’t answer a question like, ‘Do you want a ham sandwich or a turkey sandwich? Do you want a sandwich or soup?’ He let my mother run everything. I actualy think that’s where his drinking came from later – that he felt trapped in his life, that he was suffering, and that he didn’t think he had any choices. He didn’t think he had any way out.”

Now let me pause here and ask: does everybody else see what I see?

“Debbie, dear heart, you’ve just described me. OK, maybe I’m not that passive any more, because I have worked hard at overcoming it. But when Wife and I were first married one of her running lines was, as she put it, ‘Chocolate or vanilla, Hosea? Pick one!’ And it was very hard for me to do. Plus, about ten years ago when the boys were a lot younger, there was a period of time when I ate and drank far more than I do now. I was probably seventy pounds heavier than I am today and I put away a fair bit of alcohol … all for exactly the same reasons. I was unhappy with my life and didn’t think I had any options because I was responsible to the boys and I had given marriage vows to Wife. So I ate and drank to insulate myself from it all. It’s true that I backed away from the precipice: I didn’t have a heart attack [knock wood] and I never fell into full-fledged alcoholism. Gradually I figured out how to make small positive changes in my life … disentangling myself from the net one strand at a time. And as I did those things, I gradually ate and drank less, and the weight began easing off me. But I totally get why somebody could end up in the place where your father did, because that could easily have been me.”

She was very thoughtful at this.  Apparently she hadn’t seen the comparison before.  Then she asked a few more questions, and we talked for an hour.

I don’t know if I’m sold on this theory as a general rule, just because it seems to apply in two cases (out of billions).  But it was an interesting evening.  If you’ve got a minute with nothing else to do, let me know if you think it works in your case too ….

Scars, a fairy tale

The Sangha that Debbie introduced me to typically does a "Dharma reading" along with the meditation ... some book relevant to the practice that people read aloud to each other for half an hour and then discuss.  Lately the book has been Tara Brach's True Refuge.  And a couple nights ago they were reading a chapter about PTSD.  I found it really interesting -- especially the explanation that someone suffering from PTSD often feels ashamed or guilty or broken, and that when they react to stimuli as if they were still in the middle of the traumatic event it can make them feel all the more broken.  In other words, they may not be able to do anything about the recurrent flashbacks -- but they can be self-aware enough to know that their reactions are not "normal" and the knowledge just makes them feel even worse.  It just digs the hole even deeper.

So I started wondering if this could be true of Wife ... if maybe this is part of why she just can't get over reacting to the people around her the way she learned to react to her family as a child?  And is it possible that she really does see how bizarre her behavior is, but is just powerless to stop it?  It's an interesting thought.  So after a while I sketched it out in a little fairy-tale, as follows.

I showed this to Debbie and she liked it.  I have not showed it to Wife.  Maybe I never will.  But I do kind of wonder what she would say ...? 

I had better clarify that while I have the external events pretty well right (if simplified), I can't vouch for my representation of her inner states.  That part is just guesswork.
__________

Once upon a time, long ago in a kingdom far, far away, a little Girl grew up under terrible conditions.  Many of her family were cruel or indifferent to her.  Her father had two personalities, one of whom tried to kill her when she was young.  Her mother would act protective, coach her, and shield her in crises, only to betray the Girl’s trust by turning unpredictably violent … and, far more insidiously, by cutting her deeply with words calculated to wound the Girl, stabbing deeply into her most vulnerable places, playing relentlessly on her weaknesses and fears.  Indeed, the mother did this with all her children, and also set them regularly at odds with one another, subtly encouraging each child to hate, fear, and resent the others and then loudly (and publicly) bemoaning it when they didn’t get along.  But this story is about the Girl and not her mother.

The Girl lived under these terrible conditions for many years until she grew to adulthood and finally left home.  By the time she left home these conditions had left deep scars on her.  In the most harmless circumstances she would find herself reliving the emotional intensity of her childhood; friends would say the most innocuous things to her and – occasionally, but unpredictably – she would respond as if she were still under hostile fire at home.  At the same time, she could not rid herself of deep feelings of guilt and shame, feelings she could not root out even when she knew they were wrong … even when she knew they were based on lies.  She could also see her own reactions when the memories came back to grip her, see the dark confusion on the faces of her friends when her emotional triggers made her react in ways that they didn’t understand.  She tried to explain, but nobody could get it who hadn’t lived there too.  Since she was determined to seek out safer places to live, this meant that nobody around her had been through the same kind of trauma; and so nobody around her could understand.  And when she saw herself react in ways that left her friends baffled – when she saw how the memories gripped her like iron, and how she was helpless to react in any other way – it just made her guilt and shame all the deeper.  So every day she lived out, in her memory and her emotions, the nightmares she longed to escape.

Nowadays we know that her experience has a name: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  And we have learned something about its treatment.  But back then nobody in this faraway kingdom had heard of PTSD, or at any rate nobody thought to wonder whether it might be what the Girl was suffering from.  Even the people who had heard of it usually thought of it as something that afflicted soldiers, and the Girl was not a soldier.

In time the Girl met a Boy, and they fell in love.  The Boy had a lot of compassion but no common sense, and he believed that if only he could love the Girl hard enough she would be healed.  Of course he was wrong: no matter what sentimental popular songs will tell you, love by itself isn’t enough.  You have to know what you are doing and you have to know something about the ailment before you can heal anybody of anything.  Think of pneumonia: no amount of love is going to cure the patient, unless the love is helped along by antibiotics.  And likewise with PTSD.  So in the end the Boy failed, fell out of love again, and left the Girl.  But this story is about the Girl and not the Boy.

The really interesting fact about the girl’s experience is that over the years she saw a lot of therapists … and yet none of that therapy desensitized her emotional triggers or made the memories in her head stop screaming at her.  But we know there are some kinds of therapy that truly can make a difference with patients suffering from PTSD: maybe they don’t all get completely better, but many of them can get somewhat better.  Only not the Girl.  Why not?

One possibility is that nobody ever diagnosed her explicitly with PTSD.  Doubtless this was part of it.  And yet, it is a known fact that some of the therapies which she did undergo included elements which would also have been used for patients suffering from PTSD, and yet they never worked on the Girl.  Even without a formal diagnosis, you’d think that using the right therapy would help, but it didn’t.  So again, why not?

Nobody knows for sure, but remember that for any therapy to work the patient has to trust the therapist.  If the patient feels hostility or antagonism towards the therapist, nothing is going to change.  And the Girl had learned a profound lesson in childhood – at her mother’s knee, so to speak – that when you trust people and let them get close to you, when you make yourself vulnerable to them, they betray you with malice and sadistic cruelty.  Certainly she felt that way about the Boy.  In some ways she let him get closer to her than almost anybody, and yet all the while she was sure that he was about to betray her for the sheer cruelty of watching her suffer.  For years she expected it as something imminent, something that he would do tomorrow.  Sometimes she even thought that he had done it, while he scratched his head with puzzlement and tried to figure out what was going on.  So maybe it makes a kind of sense that she came to think badly of most therapists, that she condemned most therapies as stupid and their practitioners as charlatans.  Maybe there was never any way she could feel safe trusting a therapist with something so fragile and vulnerable as healing.

__________

I don't know ... just for whatever it is worth ....

Movie meme, 4

Another attempt to pin this down: see also here and here.


Wife: Cate Blanchett, in "Blue Jasmine"

I just saw the movie a couple nights ago.  Who would have thought that Woody Allen would go out of his way to make a whole movie about what Wife was like a year or two ago?  (She's getting more functional, now that -- with the move and the separation -- she has to.)

The Albatross fell off ...

... and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Escrow closed yesterday.  I got my check from the escrow company and deposited it in the bank.  They have mailed checks to Wife and to my parents, and have arranged to pay off the mortgage and the home equity line of credit.

I am finally out of the business of having to worry about a house.

Out of the house

We got all our stuff cleared out of the house last night, except for one carload that Wife couldn’t fit in her van and that she is going to drive back this morning to get.  (The dollies and brooms and extra boxes, etc.)  We didn’t get the place cleaned, but our real estate agent told us not to bother because the buyers are going to redo it all anyway.  The lady across the street took some of the wooden patio furniture we had out back on the deck, and our agent is going to offer the buyers our lawn tools (rake, shovel, etc) if they want.  So we did indeed meet the deadline (escrow closes tomorrow) … strange but true.

Most remarkable is that we got some one to take two huge pieces of furniture I thought we’d never unload: Wife’s hand loom (a behemoth that stands taller than I am, that she bought in a fit of antiquarian mania one day and never ever ever used … not that I’m bitter, of course) and her piano (a heavy, Victorian upright grand with carved hardwood weighing … well God knows what it weighs, but a lot more than you think).  In both case we ended up advertising them on Craigslist for free.  The loom was gone the same day, much to my surprise.  The piano took three or four days: people would express a lot of interest, come take a look, get an idea just how damned heavy it is, and leave again – never to return.  Finally one young couple came prepared with a truck and a dolly and straps – and help – and took it away.  The girl was bubbling over with enthusiasm and gratitude: she said she knows how to do all the servicing it needs to bring it back into tune, that this is something she has really wanted for a long time, that she will treasure it, and Thank You so very very much.  She told her young man, and his father who was there helping, “After helping me with this you don’t ever have to get me anything else for Christmas or birthdays or anything ever again!”  One part of me is glad to have passed it on to someone who seems to know what she is doing and who really wants it.  Another part of me reflects that she sounds just like Wife used to sound back when she was young, with the same infectious enthusiasm that could persuade people (like me) to help her out in launching projects that were totally crazy.  That makes me wonder if this girl will ever follow through with any of her grandiose plans, or if (like Wife) she prefers planning to execution – if, in other words, the piano will be doomed to gather as much dust at their place as it did at ours.  That would be ironic and only fair (I guess) but a little sad.  But hell – it ain’t my problem any more.  Thanks be to God!

We delivered Son 2 to Durmstrang for the beginning of the school year yesterday.  Up till then he had been helping with this whole project.  Several times in the last week he’d launch into “Oh my God school is about to start! What happened to my summer?”  But it would be followed quickly by “And once I’m back at school, all this moving business is your problem, not mine any more!”  Well he was right.  And now it’s pretty much over.

I’m still absorbing that after nineteen years we really are completely out of the house.  It’s a new world out there ….

Wife moved yesterday

The movers came.  They loaded boxes and furniture in the truck.  They drove it to Wife's new place and unloaded it.  Son 2 and I went back for the cats, so I have no idea whether they finished on time or whether (as the team leader hinted he was afraid of) she threw a fit because they went over.  If they went over.  She did have them rearrange things a couple of times and seemed to blame them that the boxes didn't all fit where she wanted them to fit. 

I drank too much last night.

I don't know what else to say.  We have to get our old house totally cleaned by Monday.  Does any of you want a free piano?  I'm not physically all that tired, but I am tired of dealing with it.  Tired of thinking about it.  Tired of having to be in Wife's physical presence, and of her non-stop complaining.  Tired of it all.

But it's almost over.  This part, at any rate.