The “Subtle” Family
Frank Davis is a 35-year-old executive for a large California electronics firm. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of California, worked as a systems analyst for five years and then went back to school to earn an M.B.A. Shortly after landing his first job with his current employer, he met Tina, who was also a student in business administration and who shared many of the same interests as Frank.
By the end of their master’s program, they were married. Three years later they had two small children and one on the way. Tina had decided to defer her career to stay home and raise a family, and Frank’s career took off like a rocket. He and Tina had all of the trappings of the successful young couple —a house in Marin County, summer home at Lake Tahoe, two BMWs in the garage and membership in an exclusive country club. They were regular churchgoers and active in the community. Everyone looked at them as the perfect couple.
Frank’s childhood was seemingly uneventful. The third of five children, he was born as his father’s career as a surgeon was beginning to take off. Frank was a high achiever in school and seemed to take a particular shining to mathematics, which pleased his parents. He was active in sports, attractive and popular with his classmates. Frank’s mother was the perfect surgeon’s wife in those days—beautiful, poised, charming and a pillar of the community in her own right. Although they had a housekeeper, his mother did not idle her days away. She ran Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops, belonged to the hospital auxiliary, and both she and her husband belonged to a study group at their church. They were a successful, devout and highly visible family in the community, and Frank was proud to be a part of it. He knew that his success was in keeping with the family tradition of excellence.
Frank’s father could best be described as “solid.” He was a steady, stable, conventional man and, like many surgeons, was a perfectionist. Sometimes Frank’s mother would laugh at how “predictable” Dad was, teasing him that she could throw away all of the clocks in the house and just tell time by the regularity of his schedule when he was home. They saw themselves as a loving family, although not openly affectionate very often, owing to their Norwegian heritage on his mother’s side and on her father’s side of the family. But no matter. They knew that they loved each other, and knowing it was enough, they said.
Frank experienced success after academic success as he breezed through high school and college. And with each success came more praise and adulation from the family. “You’re a Davis, no doubt about it,” his father would say proudly with each new achievement. By the time he met Tina, Frank had established himself in the world of work and felt up to the task of carrying on the family traditions with his own family. Tina was proud to be a part of it and thrived on the glory she earned as each of the three children was born. At the age of 33, with six years of marriage under his belt and his wife and babies safely at home in the nest, Frank Davis’ life began to change.
The changes were very subtle ones at first. He and Tina chalked it up to the “thirties crisis” they’d been reading about in popular books and magazines. After all, their lives had been a whirlwind of accomplishment and activity almost from the day they married. But the changes came anyway, and they didn’t leave.
It began with an occasional gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach as he drove to work, his mind buzzing with ideas for the new project he was directing. Just as quickly, he would dismiss the gnawing feeling and throw himself into the project with renewed vigor, the thrill of success overpowering the nagging little doubts and fears that occasionally crept into his consciousness. At the end of the day he would share a quiet meal with Tina and then go over his plans for the next day’s work, then shower and fall off to sleep nestled in Tina’s loving arms.
This pattern went on for several months: the nagging little gnawing feeling followed by the thrill of the project, followed by quiet evenings with Tina. Their weekends were usually filled with social gatherings and trips to the lake with the children. But the feelings didn’t go away. And by that fact alone, they began to haunt Frank. His dreams became disturbing. He became distracted. Then he became mildly irritated at times, which really frightened him. No Davis worth his salt let little things irritate him, let alone gnawing little feelings.
Throughout this initial period, Tina maintained the role of the supportive, tolerant wife. She managed the household, stayed involved in the community, acted the part of the charming hostess and quietly nurtured Frank in the evenings. But eventually whatever it was that was eating at Frank, finally began to eat at her, too.
While Frank could not identify the source of his gnawing, Tina could. It frightened her even more so because she could. For months she had shoved the feelings away until she could do it no longer. What she was feeling was resentment toward Frank, and as she told herself over and over and over again, that was unthinkable! And because it was unthinkable, because her marriage as she viewed it was the perfect marriage and all that she had ever hoped to attain, she entered deeper into a trap with Frank, nearer and nearer to the center of the trap where they would together step on the mechanism that was to snap the jaws of the trap around their deeply entwined lives.
She followed Frank’s lead and poured herself into community activities and jaunts and projects with the children and all of their friends. She received praise after praise from friends and community leaders. She was elected to local boards and committees. Her life became a dizzying whirlwind of success, after wonderful success as a parent, friend and innovative community leader.
At last their oldest child, Jason, entered the trap with them. At the age of seven he began to have problems in school. He was bright and both he and the teachers knew it, yet he began to forget to bring home his schoolwork for his mother to see. He started bullying other children and acting up in class. He did lots of things to get attention but very few of them were constructive.
When the school finally contacted Tina, she reacted coolly and calmly, stating that her son wouldn’t be acting that way were it not for insensitive teachers. Within days, she transferred Jason to a private school which was funded in large part by Frank’s electronics firm, and things seemed to be under control.
Somewhere inside of her complex brain, a tiny little voice tried to speak to Tina. It was the voice of a little girl; an innocent, spontaneous voice. It was clear, and bright as a diamond, but very weak. It kept saying over and over, “Something’s wrong, Tina. Something’s wrong.“
With her friends and relatives and community colleagues loudly praising her accomplishments on the outside, this little voice kept getting stronger and stronger on the inside. It created an internal battle that finally burst forth one Thursday evening as she and the three children sat quietly eating dinner.
Frank walked through the front door, bursting with enthusiasm about the new contract that he had landed just as Jason abruptly and loudly knocked over a glass of milk as he reached to hit his little sister in the shoulder. For a split second, they were in a surrealistic state of suspended animation. Tina’s eyes froze in shock then darted instantly from Jason to the milk, and finally rested in an icy glare, fixed and penetrating, on Frank. Her hands and face flushed with heat as a burst of primitive fury exploded inside her.
All eyes were riveted on her as she leaped to a standing position, picked up her plateful of food and hurled it at Frank, grazing his forehead and splattering a mixture of asparagus and Hollandaise sauce over his suit and the foyer behind him. She screamed with a rage she did not know existed in anyone.
“Don’t ever walk into this house again with that stupid grin on your face!”
For another split second there was total silence, and then Tina simply crumpled into a ball on the dining room floor and began to sob deep heartrending sobs that began in the very center from which the little girl spoke to her and echoed eerily out into the night. She lay there and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed for what seemed like forever, and then she quietly walked upstairs to their bedroom and closed the door, locking it behind her.
The children began to cry in fear and helplessness. It was the first time they had seen either of their parents do more than the occasional snapping that all parents do to each other. Frank just stood there in the foyer in absolute shock and disbelief. The trap had snapped around all of them months before—it was only now that they could all touch the pain. The pain was now real. They could smell it and taste it and see it and breathe it. This was to be the beginning, or the end, and not one of them knew which it was to be.
Frank tried to quiet the children as best he knew how. Then he tried to get into the bedroom to talk to Tina, but the door remained locked the rest of the night. “Please just go away,” she would whimper whenever he tried to get into the bedroom.
He slept on the couch in the living room that night, awakening several times with a knot in the pit of his stomach.
Tina came down in the morning and fixed breakfast for Frank and the children. They didn’t talk at all over breakfast and the clink of the silverware on the china was empty and loud. Frank left for work dazed, tired and feeling lost. The children went to school with a sickness in their stomachs that lingered throughout the day.
Tina cried most of the morning, alone and confused. The child inside of her had turned into a monster and she didn’t know what to do with it. In sheer panic and desperation, she picked up the telephone book and found the name of a psychotherapist. She spent most of the afternoon battling with herself over whether to call or not. But as the time neared for school to be out for the day, she picked up the phone and dialed the number.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she told Frank and the children that evening, “but I’m going to get some help to find out. Something is terribly wrong and I can’t live this way anymore.”
There are innumerable schools of psychotherapy and theories about why human beings run amuck for apparently “no reason,” and the formal diagnosis that Tina’s psychologist put on the insurance form for reimbursement came right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III), but her brief summary notes, which she scribbled on Tina’s intake form, said it best:
Thirty-three-year-old white female, married seven years, three children. Husband workaholic, wife experiencing severe co-dependent rage, depression, guilt and loss of identity following months of compulsive activity and several years of active denial.
Frank was a workaholic, and Tina Davis did the only thing she knew how to do in the face of a loved one’s addiction—she let her own addiction escalate.
At first she was addicted to Frank, waiting up for him when he was continually late at the office, reheating meals she had prepared hours before, nurturing and supporting Frank and his addiction, and denying the slowly-building resentment that at last burst forth in a flash of rage.
In the end, she joined him in his addiction, taking on more and more work herself to try to blot out the frightening feelings that kept coming to the surface, and that she had never been taught how to deal with herself. And it is no coincidence that as the little child inside of her began to speak more clearly, her actual biological child began to speak up in the only way that he knew how—by acting out the unspoken, unrecognized tensions in the family while he was at school and at home.
The fate of the Davis family has yet to unfold fully. Tina has entered into long-term therapy to begin the process of discovery and relearning necessary for her to avoid stepping into her own dependency traps again. Frank and the children, along with Tina, are all in family therapy.
Frank’s awareness of the underlying dependencies in his own life is still very dim, and although he does not say it openly, he still believes that the problem is basically Tina’s. The family rules and bonds that gradually led him into his success-oriented work addiction are seductive and powerful, and the denial system that he took on by living in a family that “knows they love each other” but that has trouble expressing it spontaneously runs deep.
In an addictive system of any kind, every member of the system is profoundly affected. For true health to occur in the new system that hopefully emerges from a crisis such as this, every member must change if the system is to remain intact.
Sometimes, when only one or two members of a system become healthier, their only alternative to maintain their own health is to leave the system.
The “Obvious” Family
Sandy Dorset grew up in a suburb of Boston, the oldest of five children. Her father started drinking heavily soon after he married Sandy’s mother, and by the time Sandy arrived on the scene, he had been laid off from his job in a parts supply house due to financial problems within the company. Although he had a bachelor’s degree from a small state college in the area, his unresolved emotional difficulties and untreated alcoholism kept getting in the way of his finding a decent job.
Sandy’s mother began working part-time as a licensed practical nurse to help ends meet while her husband went from job to job looking for the “right break.”
During the next six years four more children were added to the Dorset household, and the combination of financial and childbearing stresses produced an explosive and draining situation at home. By the time Sandy was five years old, her father had become physically abusive to her mother, and was extremely verbally abusive with the children.
Sandy recalls cowering in the corner of the living room, the younger children huddled around her for protection, as her father screamed and yelled, then hit her mother. These episodes would be followed by a few days, or even weeks of relative calm, then the whole cycle would repeat itself.
Once, Sandy’s mother tried to get help for the family by talking to a friend who was in Al-Anon, and whose husband was making a successful recovery from alcoholism, but this enraged her husband so much that she never spoke to her friend again for fear of what her husband might do to her or the children.
And so the Dorset family remained violently trapped throughout Sandy’s childhood, the periods of chaos interspersed with periods of gut-wrenching silence, with everyone holding their breath and walking on eggshells in hopes that it would get better—but it never did.
Sandy learned to exist in this system by building a protective barrier around herself. When she was little, she played alone in her room for hours and hours, creating a fantasy world of imaginary friends and places in her mind. As she grew older, it became easier for her to block out the pain by staying away from home as much as she could, although this tore her in two directions at once, because a part of her felt the need to be at home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters.
Like many children in alcoholic families, she became a star student academically, and she kept the family secret well. Everyone knew that the Dorsets were poor, but Sandy always managed to have a freshly pressed blouse to wear and she was always polite and eager to please. She never mentioned the horrible events that took place at home. Family honor is family honor, no matter what happens.
In high school Sandy began to gain weight and had difficulty taking it off. By the time she entered the two-year nursing program she was 100 pounds overweight, but she never let it get her down. She excelled in the nursing program and was working full-time only three weeks after graduation.
At the age of 25 Sandy Dorset started dating a young man who she felt must have been sent to her from heaven. He was gentle, caring, even nurturing, and he was attending the university to become a counselor. They never talked about her weight problem, but in the back of her mind she worried that it would eventually turn him off. Nevertheless, they dated continuously for several months, and then decided to get married.
Two years into the marriage, Sandy gave birth to a baby girl. By this time her husband was working long hours as a counselor with disadvantaged youth, so she cut back her nursing duties to half-time to spend more time with the baby. It was also at this time that her husband had an affair with a friend of hers. Although she had sworn from as far back as she could remember that she would never drink any kind of alcoholic beverage, she began to drink to medicate the pain of a life that seemed to be crumbling all around her.
As her marriage deteriorated, she drank more and more to deal with the horror of realizing that the whole pattern of her childhood was repeating itself. She became desperate and suicidal. And she was lucky . . . because the hospital staff where she was admitted after taking an overdose of sleeping pills was able to pick up on her chemical dependency very quickly.
Distraught but relieved to have someone finally take care of her the way no one ever had when she was growing up, Sandy Dorset gladly accepted the hospital’s recommendation that she enter chemical dependency treatment, and it was there that her life truly began.
Her road to recovery has not been an easy one. As with many alcoholics, stopping the alcohol intake itself was not nearly as hard as she thought it might be, but the pain of dealing with the underlying dependencies (co-dependencies as we now call them), with the tremendous amount of relearning that has to take place and of having to face head-on the emotional tortures of growing up in an abusive alcoholic family was at times more than she thought she could bear. Her husband had divorced her by now, and yet she kept on working and struggling and confronting her fears, angers and hurts.
She began attending Adult Children of Alcoholics Al-Anon groups in addition to her A.A. groups and continued her gradual but steady climb out of the depths of despair. With each new step out of the darkness, she seemed to find healthier and healthier friends. Her weight, which had climbed to 150 pounds above normal at the height of her crisis, slowly began to come off. Her daughter was growing up to be a happy, well-adjusted child. For the first few years following treatment, Sandy dated irregularly but never seriously. She had a job and her daughter to look after, and her own recovery to manage. In her early thirties she met a man who truly was different. He was caring without taking responsibility for her problems. He got crabby on occasion but it never went beyond that. They would fight about things but would get them resolved and go on, none the worse for wear. They each spent time alone as well as together. And they each had their own A.A. meetings to go to.
Sandy and her second husband have been married now for 15 years. While they have had their ups and downs as any couple does, the nightmare of her first life has turned into something quiet, comfortable and whole. Although the nightmare will never completely leave her, it has taken a realistic place in her past and serves as a constant reminder that whenever she gets under too much stress, or feels too insecure, or feels like her emotions are overwhelming, there is a healthy way for her to respond. Sandy Dorset is living now.