5
I Never Want to Be Hurt Like That Again
In a recent “Don’t Take It Personally!” therapy group, we made an intriguing discovery. Several group members kept three or four tubes of lip balm handy—in the kitchen, in the bathroom, in the bedroom, in the car. The group figured out they all seemed to be using lip balm as a protective barrier against feelings, including feelings of rejection. One man explained, “One way I know I’m having a feeling is when I reach for the Chap Stick!”
Protecting ourselves from feeling rejected becomes a primary mission in life because we will not risk experiencing that kind of hurt again. Yet at the same time, we keep expecting rejection just around the corner. So we avoid asking for what we want or need; sharing warm, loving feelings; meeting new people; becoming involved romantically with someone; seeking new jobs or promotions. Yes, we expend great amounts of energy protecting ourselves from the possibility of pain. In order to do to this we muster every coping skill we can, often building armor or erecting walls. Frequently we invent ways to dull pain by shutting off feelings. Some people use drugs or alcohol or work. Some people use Chap Stick. All of these ways can help us to emotionally survive when the environment doesn’t feel safe.
Expecting the Pain
Not only do we protect ourselves by presuming rejection is out there waiting to happen, but sometimes by magnifying the drama of it as well. Perhaps if we worry about it we won’t be caught off guard. Maybe by expecting the worst, whatever happens won’t seem so bad. It’s as if we’re rehearsing what to do in a difficult predicament. Psychology books call it catastrophizing but I like the term one of my clients uses—awfulizing. By looking at all the awful things that can go wrong and being prepared to avoid them, we try to feel safer. This behavior becomes automatic, without conscious awareness. But you can see how much energy it takes to be always on the lookout, always prepared. Not to mention the energy it takes to deal with the worry and anxiety that goes along with it.
Expecting emotional or physical pain to accompany love is a common experience of many clients. One woman summed it up, “We were the little kids and our parents were supposed to be taking care of us. But sometimes the grownups didn’t do their job very well. In fact, sometimes they were nasty and unpredictable, so when my parents told me, ‘No one will ever love you like we do,’ I got so confused. What can I expect from anyone else?”
Even though parents may have nurtured their children in some ways, at the same time the children may have felt abused, betrayed, or abandoned, and came to believe, “Those who love me also hurt me.” These contradictory messages caused immense confusion back then and led to great anxiety in relationships both then and now. It’s not a question for them of if they’ll get hurt, but rather, when it will happen. So, since childhood, they’ve been wary, on guard, just waiting for it to happen again. (Chapter 6 will address how the origins of these messages are rooted in children’s attachment styles.) One man told me, “I can’t give up the hurt. The hurt substitutes for love—it fills up the space. There always seems to be room for more hurt, but I don’t seem to be able to let love in.”
Expectations of rejection are further complicated when we interpret behaviors of others in the same negative ways we recognize from the past. For example, we tend to hear or see only the parts that support what we already believe, reinforcing our negative expectations. We see things as if we’re looking through wavy lenses—there’s an element of distortion here and these preconceived notions from the past affect our perceptions in the present.
Misperceptions happen all the time, especially when we have some sort of preconception. If we expect people to be hurtful and if we expect to experience rejection, we just might miss a loving, caring message. Recently I scooped up my cat, Rufus, into my arms while I was talking to a friend. I commented on how he’s so standoffish, and tends to push me away when I hold him and that he’s been that way for fourteen years. My friend said, “Elayne, just look at your cat. He’s absolutely melted into your arms. He doesn’t look at all standoffish to me.” And sure enough, Rufus was relaxed and content and purring. I looked down at the cat in my arms and realized I was holding on to history. How long have I been presuming he’s so unfriendly? When had he changed? How had I missed that? My perception was truly lagging behind reality.
Sometimes when we expect that other people will disappoint us, they are all too willing to oblige. It’s as if we are equipped with radar that seeks out folks who’ll let us down, and they are not hard to find.
Sometimes our perception lags behind reality.
A couple I know found this to be a problem in their relationship. He craved time to himself and liked to take off alone for the day. She felt left out and hurt when he went off by himself. When these emotions amplified into feelings of rejection and abandonment, she started feeling a desperate need to protect herself and would threaten to pack her bags and leave. He could tell by the terrified look in her eyes that this wasn’t only about him taking off for the day. This was about something old. Where did this overwhelming reaction come from? When had she felt this desperate before?
When she was young, her mom used to tell the kids, “If you don’t like what I tell you, you can just pack your bags and leave.” She joined with her sisters in making a joke of it, chanting, “PYBAL, PYBAL, PYBAL,” short, of course, for “pack your bags and leave.” But it’s not a joke anymore. The expectation of abandonment is as real for her now as when she was thirteen years old, imagining herself being cast out into the world, struggling to carry a suitcase with all her belongings. Where would she go? Where would she sleep? How would she eat? And now, twenty years later, she lives out this fear almost every day. Except now she tries to stay in control of the situation by threatening to pack her bags and leave her partner—before he can leave her.
We tend to overlook positive input from people, too, because it doesn’t conform to our expectations of rejection. Sure, we want acceptance and nurturing, but it’s so scary to risk the unknown that we often find ways to avoid this risk—especially if we believe the pain of rejection might be lurking out there somewhere.
Taking Pains to Avoid the Pain
With repeated experiences of rejection, abandonment, or betrayal all of our energy goes into avoiding this excruciating pain at any cost. Many of us learned this skill as children. Children of divorce become especially sensitive to being disappointed by one parent or another, and learn to protect themselves. For example, it seems that twelve-year-old Jason has been “busy” with his friends whenever his frequently busy father tries to make plans to spend the day with him. And his dad gets hurt because Jason is so involved with his friends all the time. But Jason is only protecting himself from the pain of past disappointments, when his dad has canceled or postponed their plans because of a “work emergency.” Jason may grow up to find ways to protect himself from possible pain of relationships by staying “busy” all the time.
Children like Jason not only grow up avoiding relationships, but they often avoid having children, not wanting to expose children to the same pain they experienced as children. Adults who were abused as children are especially sensitive to this issue because they want to end the cycle of abuse. “I don’t want to have children. I’m so afraid that I’ll treat them the same way I was treated,” Rachel told me. What was she most afraid of? “That I’ll get out of control and rage at them. That I’ll see them cringe the same way I used to cringe. I don’t want them to grow up with the same kinds of problems I have.” I reminded Rachel that she has already done something important about ending that cycle—she is investing in the future by reading books for adults who were abused as children and by initiating therapy. It’s a great start.
This is also an issue for adults who grew up in homes where there was violence between the parents. One man gets upset with his mother who likes to say, “Well at least you weren’t an abused child. Your father and I never laid a hand on you.” He was livid as he told me, “What about all the nights I cowered in my room, worrying that one of them would kill the other? That felt like abuse to me. I’m afraid of getting into a long-term relationship with anyone who wants to have children.”
Then there’s the avoidance practiced by adults who felt scarred by their parents’ divorces when they were young. They come into psychotherapy in their thirties or forties wanting to talk about how their parents divorce has affected them all these years. “I don’t want to get married—I’m afraid it won’t last, I would get hurt, my children would get hurt. I can’t take that chance.”
The story I hear most often has to do with issues of loyalty—feeling obligated to choose one parent over the other. These children would feel disloyal if they spent more time with one parent and would worry about how the other parent might get upset, resulting in constant balancing, constant worrying, constant juggling. It was especially complicated when one or both parents remarried—what would happen if the child actually liked the stepparent?
Another often-told divorce story involves the parent who moves out of the house and tends to pretty much “disappear” from the children’s lives. There is often little or no contact. It’s especially heartbreaking for children who had a pretty good or even great relationship with that parent before the divorce—then all of a sudden, Poof! Maybe there’ll be a few phone calls but few or no face-to-face visits. Children can’t understand what happened and, of course, blame themselves. Most likely, the fact is that the departing parent misses being a part of the family so much that he or she can only deal with their pain by avoiding contact altogether.
One man talked about being five years old when his parents divorced. He had clothing at both houses, and separate sets of toys, but he felt he belonged nowhere. He had a succession of stepmothers as he watched his father remarry several times. And what kind of message did he learn? Well into his forties, he’s afraid of getting married because, “What if it doesn’t last? I don’t want to be like my dad. And if I made a mistake and married the wrong person and had children, I couldn’t stand causing them the kind of pain I experienced.”
As adults we may try to avoid pain by numbing ourselves with overwork, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol, or cushioning ourselves with overeating. Or we might put out our antennae, trying to spot rejection from a distance, presuming that everything out there is a potential source for rejection or abandonment, trying to sidestep it before it can hurt us.
When we’re afraid of the possibility of rejection, we just won’t put ourselves out there. This is not only true about personal relationships, but of job-related situations as well.
For example, a woman I know has not applied for a job since she was fired five years ago. She cringes at the idea of actually submitting a resume and having a face-to-face interview. So to avoid this anxiety, she works for a temp agency, taking a series of jobs.
Asking for raises or promotions is another area ripe for avoidance. All kinds of anxieties abound here, especially authority issues. The very thought of approaching a supervisor or manager makes many people cringe. It’s easier to not ask for anything and hope somebody will notice the good work you do.
Then there’s Darryl, who was always so afraid to ask his boss to clarify things, that he pretended he understood how to approach a task or project when he really didn’t have a clue. The reason? He was petrified someone would think he was stupid if he asked questions. He avoided asking questions because it seemed safer and easier, but spent enormous amounts of energy trying to figure things out and worrying about how he might screw up.
A woman who was psychologically abused by her father can’t stand being around her manager. “I don’t know what it is about her but I have a strong reaction to her—there’s a nastiness about her that reminds me of my father. I use the woman’s restroom on another floor, just so I won’t have to run into her and feel cornered. A couple of times I’ve even walked down the stairs because I was afraid I’d have to ride the elevator with her.”
Sometimes fear of rejection squashes our creative abilities. We’re so worried about what others will think that we create something such as a painting, poem, or short story, and never show it to anyone. So it sits on a shelf somewhere or is stashed in a closet. A man I once knew confided that he’d completed a novel several years earlier but had never shown it to anyone. I asked him why not. He responded quietly, “What if no one likes it?”
This dynamic of avoidance is pervasive. It can start in infancy but becomes entangled in our adult relationships. That includes relationships with national pastimes such as baseball.
After the year-long baseball strike of 1994 ended, the question on everyone’s mind was, “Where were the fans?” Sportswriters scratched their heads and speculated about why the stadiums were only half full. Were the fans angry? Was it a retaliatory “I’ll show you” attitude? Was it a case of “out of sight, out of mind”?
I think the fans were taking it personally. Perhaps they felt betrayed by both management and players and felt manipulated by something they had trusted. They did not want to get hurt like that again so they stayed away.
Baseball has been a longtime companion to many people. Play-byplays have provided a comfortable backdrop while working around the house or in the yard or driving a car. Baseball is good company if someone is alone, and it’s always been a great reason to get a group of people together.
For many people their relationship with baseball was comfortable and secure. They trusted it would always be there for them. They never dreamed this cozy relationship would end. But then the strike happened. No baseball. It evaporated from their lives, leaving an empty space that nothing else could fill in the same way. When you get right down to it, it felt a lot like an abandonment. Trust was shattered. People felt hurt, rejected, betrayed. Quite a few took it personally.
Is it any wonder that fans were cautious about letting baseball back into their lives? They didn’t throw open their arms and say “It’s okay, I forgive you.” No way. They were tentative. Even though they loved the sport so much, they avoided reinvolving themselves with it. Perhaps they were avoiding the emotional pain of another rejection.
The Ecstasy of the Agony
One of the most popular ways of protecting ourselves is to cling to old ways of being. It’s like a Greek drama: we end up seeking out the very forms of rejection we try to avoid. We may fear rejection, but we seem to welcome the comfort of its familiarity at the same time. How can such uncomfortable behavior feel so comfortable? Earlier in the book I made the point that something that’s known feels more secure than something that’s unknown. This is because the unknown is scary. Rejection feels especially secure because it’s so familiar—after all, didn’t we learn it in our families? The words “familiar” and “families” even have the same origin.
Just as we did when we were children, we may still wish with all our hearts someone would be there to soothe the hurt, to comfort us. Yet, ironically, it’s the soothers and the nurturers that we tend to avoid. We choose the distancers instead because it feels safer, it’s known, it’s familiar. We may not know exactly what we want or need, but whatever it is, the people we choose sure aren’t able to give it to us. How many times do we have to knock our heads against the wall of rejection, before we realize it only leads to sore heads?
Familiarity is one reason we tend to repeat behavior and relationship patterns, but there’s a second explanation as well: the challenge of mastering the behavior. Some part of us seems to believe if we repeat something enough times we’ll finally get it right. Hopefully we learn to recognize our patterns sooner or later—maybe even acquire some objectivity about them. That’s when we can begin to notice that we are doing some things differently, that something seems to be working.
Building Barriers
One man goes into work every day, sits at his hub, and focuses on the work in front of him. Office mates have tried a few times to be friendly, but since he wasn’t responsive, they gave up. “I watch as the others walk together, talk together, go to lunch together, but I just stay to myself. For a long time I told myself I like being alone, but you know, sometimes secretly I wish I could join them. I’ve stayed to myself so long now, that they just sort of ignore me, so it seems that will never happen in a million years.” Joining the group seems like such an overwhelming thought to him, but what about a small step? Is there maybe one person he finds himself wishing he could get to know a little better? He thought a few minutes. “Well, there’s a woman who has a great smile. She actually reminds me of my favorite aunt. Sometimes I wish I could smile back.” Would he be willing to try a little smile the next time she smiles? He said he’d think about it, but probably not. Within a couple of weeks, though, he did smile back and she smiled even more broadly. “It wasn’t easy but it was sure easier than I expected. Maybe I’ll say hello to her sometime.”
One woman is so afraid that any leave-taking may be final that she freezes up, becomes distant, and abruptly turns away with a curt goodbye. Her boyfriend doesn’t know what to think when she switches so quickly from warm to cold. He thinks it’s something he did or said or didn’t do or say. He has no idea her coolness to him is to protect herself from being hurt, because a part of her believes that when she says goodbye, she may never see him again.
Another woman also learned to avoid pain at great cost to herself. She grew up in a steel mill town. As early as she could remember she heard townspeople say, “You can’t hurt steel.” While her mother raged, she would chant silently to herself, “You can hit me but you can’t hurt me ’cause you can’t hurt steel! You can’t hurt my spirit ’cause you can’t hurt steel!”
And steel she became. “I developed a steel plate of armor around myself; I steel myself against any kind of hurt. Trouble is, I armored myself so well that no one can get close to me. I jump to conclusions and inflate situations in my mind until they become huge. Now I see why I reacted so strongly to my partner’s plans to go alone to a reunion and reacquaint with old friends. I presumed I wasn’t wanted and felt terribly left out, just like when I was a child.”
She had a tendency to awfulize, too. “Before I knew it, I found myself thinking, ‘Okay, the relationship is over. Which one of us will move out? How will we divide up the stuff?’ Now I realize how I steel myself from hurt—‘You can’t hurt my spirit ’cause you can’t hurt steel.’”
When taking a “tough” stance gets carried to the extreme a person may engage in rageful or bullying behavior. This, too, is a way of protecting oneself from feeling too vulnerable. While the person on the receiving end is fearful of the bully, it would probably help to remember that under that aggressive exterior of the bully is someone who is also scared or hurting. Blustery behavior is usually a cover for emotional pain and helps keep people away.
I once heard comedian Robin Williams poignantly describe what it was like to finally get to know his father. The quote went something like this: “It’s like in The Wizard of Oz. Don’t look behind the curtain—behind it is a terribly fragile man.” I immediately was transported back to my childhood and how scared I was during the movie—with that huge booming voice and the billowing bursts of smoke—a smoke screen.
There are a number of “stay away” messages we may put out in order to try to protect ourselves from the anxiety of friendships or romantic relationships. But, if we guard ourselves against contact with others we may not establish relationships at all. So what do we do? We tell ourselves we don’t want any relationships. And a big part of us really doesn’t because we might get hurt again. A frequent refrain is, “I don’t want to get involved with anyone right now. It’s not worth the pain it might bring.” If we do allow ourselves to take a step or two toward romantic involvement, we hold back from taking that leap because we don’t feel secure enough. As one man says, “I want to run because I don’t know how to stay. I’m afraid to depend on anyone because I know they’ll let me down, so when a relationship warms up, I bolt.” In the name of safety we’ll hold back from displaying vulnerability or showing trust.
Oh yes, trust. So fragile. So tentative. So important. So complicated. Part of us wants to trust other people and part of us expects them to fail. That old familiar belief wins out again—if we trust someone we could feel hurt, rejected, betrayed, maybe even abandoned. It’s especially difficult to restore trust if it was injured in childhood. Throughout life, even small disappointments seem like betrayals, and acts of betrayal can seem like the end of the world. So we learn to test the water before jumping in, but the testing never seems to stop. We don’t really trust that others will pull through for us so we set up situations where they’re supposed to prove to us that they’re trustworthy. They usually fail because they have absolutely no clue it’s a test. Remember the woman in chapter 3 who set up a timetable when she met a man she was attracted to, telling herself, “If he’s interested in me, he’ll call by Tuesday”? And the man who expected his partner to call from meetings to prove she was thinking of him? These kinds of tests are one way of saying, “I’ll show you how rejectable I really am—I’ll reject myself before you can reject me.” Just another way of avoiding the pain of rejection by others.
One of the most frequent problems couples face is how to regain trust once it’s been damaged. If there’s one predictable repercussion from rejection or betrayal, it’s damaged trust. Is it repairable? Can it be mended? Is there hope? It depends.
Sometimes it helps if the person who broke the trust can find a mutually acceptable way to “make amends.” Amends can take many forms ranging from washing the other person’s car weekly for a specified length of time, to performing a least favorite chore, to paying for a series of special dinners, to saying “I love you” on a regular basis. They can be serious or whimsical, but each form has one thing in common—each one represents an act of caring.
A few years ago a couple came to see me after a crisis occurred in their relationship. He had a one-night liaison with another woman two months earlier and had just told his wife about it. She was hurt and didn’t think she could stay with him because her trust had been so badly damaged. She felt he had been “living a lie” from the time the event occurred. She felt betrayed.
I suggested making amends. What could he do for her so that she’d feel cared about? She decided to ask him to make her lunch every day for two months. This necessitated his getting up fifteen minutes earlier than usual and he isn’t a morning person. But he did it, with love. Some days he even tucked little notes into her lunch bag.
When good friends have a falling out, amends might be just the thing to get the relationship back on track. Penny got involved in some political projects and didn’t have much time for her friend Martha. Penny was so preoccupied that she wasn’t even aware that her friend was upset. Martha, who tends to be pretty passive, didn’t tell her, until the day she blew up and said some hurtful things. When they came to see me to try to work things out, I suggested creating amends that each could do—little acts of caring. Penny wanted Martha to take her to lunch at a new, pricey restaurant. Martha wanted Penny to call her twice a week for three months, which is the amount of time she felt ignored by her when she was working on the political campaign. And what was Penny to say on the phone? “Hi, I’m thinking about you.”
Amends can also be a creative way to deal with teenage discipline without having to resort to the usually nonproductive measure of grounding the child. Because teens need peer support in times of stress, cutting them off from face-to-face or phone contact with friends is often counter-productive. One fifteen-year-old came up with the idea of mowing the lawn or weeding the garden for an amend. The parents were receptive and had other suggestions as well such as cleaning out the garage or washing the car.
Oops—Too Close for Comfort
What happens if we do allow ourselves to get close to someone? For many of us, because we fear getting hurt again, anxiety builds. We learn to avoid the anxiety by creating distance. Picking fights, blaming, screaming, and slamming doors are all ways of pushing someone away. Other ways include retreating to another room, leaving the house, and withdrawing by freezing out the other person. Instead of expressing our feelings to the other person, we act them out through these distancing behaviors. (There’s more about acting out in chapter 3.)
Danielle and Greg were experts at these behaviors and came into therapy to try to find a place they could come together instead of battling so much of the time. “I don’t want to do this fighting anymore,” Danielle said during the couples session. “I want to learn about my part in it.” But Greg wasn’t hearing her. He was still smarting from the anger she had just unleashed on him. Only a few minutes earlier, he’d tried to acknowledge his own role in the fighting. But she was so fired up about blaming him for never taking any responsibility for their clashes, she couldn’t hear him. Neither Danielle nor Greg were feeling heard by the other.
How did Danielle’s childhood experiences contribute to her belief that he couldn’t hear her? She described what it was like growing up: “The truth was always disguised in my family. My side of the story never got heard and sometimes I was beaten for trying to tell it. With Greg I feel just as powerless as I did in my family. When I feel blamed, I feel trapped—like there’s no way out. I believe if I make one little mistake I’ll be punished, because when I was a child my parents’ anger was so unpredictable. They didn’t always explode at me, sometimes they’d freeze me out with long silences. But sometimes at the end of those silences I’d get hit. Now, whenever someone gives me the silent treatment, I think they’re angry at me, and I can hardly stand the tension, the not knowing. When Greg walks away and retreats to his room, I freak out. I try to remember to tell myself, ‘Silences don’t have to mean anger, Danielle,’ but waiting makes me nervous. I need a response right away.” Danielle’s early family experiences have been re-created in her marriage. She expects to be hurt instead of heard.
I watched Greg struggle to take in what she was saying, but he seemed to space out when some things were hard to hear. Danielle, quick to presume she wouldn’t be heard, zeroed in on the few moments he wasn’t able to hear her. She became indignant, “See, you never listen to me, you don’t understand me.” This is her old behavior pattern and she recognized it, “When I think he’s not listening to me I scream at him or slam doors to make myself heard.” And what did Greg do when Danielle raised her voice like that? He seemed to disappear—it was as if he folded in and over himself.
Why does Greg need to protect himself like that? “My parents always wanted something from me,” he remembers. “They were always in my face. I had a sick, needy mother and a demanding, authoritarian father. No one paid attention to my needs. I tried so hard to do things the way they wanted, but I always seemed to disappoint them. My mother was like a huge cavity, nothing I did for her seemed to be enough. And my dad would always say, ‘All I ask is one little thing from you and you can’t even do that.’ The pressure to be perfect was so great. I always felt so ashamed, so defective—like a huge failure. As the pressure built, I’d get anxious and withdraw because I felt trapped. I had a desperate need to escape, so I’d go into my room and go inside my head for a rest. I find myself doing the same thing now in my marriage. I just want to bury myself in my cave to sort things out and digest them.”
Danielle was astounded, “You mean you run off to sort things out? All this time I thought you were trying to get away from me.” Now she was able to see why he needed some space, but what could she do when her own anxiety built up as she waited for a resolution? So they made an agreement that might help in the interim. Before Greg retreated to his study, he’d try to remember to first validate her concerns and feelings and then set a time for when he’d return to continue the discussion.
Then we went to work on diagramming the reciprocal nature of their pattern together. We arbitrarily chose a place to start, looking at which behaviors came before and which came after. We selected an interaction—a moment when they had both felt close and connected. They were both able to acknowledge how difficult it was for them to trust that moment. Greg experienced pressure building from the intimacy. As it built he felt like a bubble about to burst and started pulling back. Danielle, sensing him pulling back, blamed him for not hearing her. He became more anxious and she misinterpreted his anxiety as anger, expecting him to explode at any moment. Greg, uncomfortable with the rising pressure, tried to create some breathing room for himself by picking a fight with her. She, in turn, tried to protect her hurt feelings by lashing out. When she angrily accused him of not hearing her, he perceived this as blame and himself as inadequate. His old “never good enough” issues were triggered and he felt trapped by her demands. In his eyes she inflated and he diminished.
But Danielle wasn’t feeling very big. Her pain was overwhelming and she tried to even the score by zeroing right in on his sore spot. She piled blame on him. Now it was Greg’s turn to try to even things up, “When I get backed into a corner I start to pull back and disappear, so I puff myself up and get harsh.” As he became more and more fierce, she perceived him as threatening. In her eyes he inflated and she diminished. At this point they became emotionally entangled, and a struggle for space took place. Before things got out of hand, Greg turned on his heel and left the house (as he often did) “to sort things out.” It took her a while, but after he returned Danielle eventually reached out to him and tried to make peace. Figure 3 illustrates this scenario. This led to an intimate moment or two—and then the cycle began again.
The childhood experiences of Danielle and Greg cause them both to feel trapped in the relationship. Feelings of desperation overcome Danielle when she can’t get into Greg’s private space long enough to feel heard. He sees her attempts at contact as “smothering,” and he panics when he thinks he can’t escape. So he escapes by leaving. She feels trapped if she doesn’t have a “way in,” while he feels trapped if he doesn’t have a “way out.”
Figure 3: The Anxiety Circle
When Danielle and Greg feel threatened like this they both try to protect themselves by fighting. When she felt invalidated, she would fight to be heard. She’d hammer away at him, trying to get his attention. When he felt trapped he’d create distance the fastest way he knew—he’d pick a fight. “Picking fights helps the anxiety bubble come to the surface,” he acknowledges, “I guess I learned to do that at a young age.”
Adults who pick fights with their partners often learned this technique in childhood in order to protect themselves. Many abused children discover how to provoke abuse in order to control it. Waiting for the abuse to happen is so nerve-racking that many children learn to “arrange” for it. This way they feel more in control of the time and place it occurs. Getting it over with alleviates their anxiety because there are no surprises. As strange as it sounds, provoking abuse helps children feel safer in an unsafe world—it makes life more manageable.
Some children learn to avoid anxiety by provoking abuse—that way there are no surprises.
Provoking abuse can be helpful to children in other ways, too. Some families have a rule that expressing feelings is not okay, and the children learn to deaden feelings, to cut them off. So they stir things up by inciting a little trouble in order to feel alive again. Is it any wonder that they continue this behavior into adulthood? Picking fights is a twofer: it not only allows them to feel in control and but more alive, too.
Giving mixed messages is another way of creating more comfortable distance. A fight takes place here, too, but an internal one. The conflict comes from our two opposing voices, the part of us that craves closeness and the part that’s scared to death of it. When this ambivalence surfaces you might find yourself doing “the approach/avoidance dance,” which Lillian Rubin describes so well in Intimate Strangers, giving out mixed messages such as, “Go away a little closer.” It’s as if someone is holding up one hand in a beckoning gesture while the other hand is signaling, “Stop—don’t come any closer.” It’s maddening and it’s hard to say who’s more confused, the sender of the message or the receiver.
Sometimes we assume an “I don’t need you” attitude. One partner may unconsciously pull back, sending the other partner messages like “I’m not willing to emotionally invest in you,” “I’m not sure you’re going to be here for me and that scares me.” When people get scared in a relationship they get very creative about creating distance. One man “called in the troops,” when he found himself caring too much about someone. Perhaps he emitted some sort of scent or sound that filled the air with a plea for help. As if on cue, several old lovers began to demand his attention, day and night. And it worked—it didn’t take long for the present relationship to break up.
Some people operate from a place of “I’ll reject you before you can reject me.” Usually this translates to, “I’ll leave you before you can leave me.” And the “leaving” doesn’t have to be physical. Withdrawing and giving the silent treatment can create a relationship crisis as well. This can be devastating if one or both people have abandonment fears, such as John and Mindy.
John remembers his dad as a “cyclone,” devastating everything in his path when he was angry. When John was only seven years old, he’d leave the house and walk around and around the block in order to feel safe, out of the cyclone’s path. Neither parent was accessible to him. The father was often preoccupied in his own workaholic world. His way of making contact with his son was through criticism and anger. His mother did nothing to protect him from his father. He felt rejected and ignored; he began to believe he was worthless and inadequate.
Mindy’s mother was frequently drunk and constantly threatened to abandon the little girl. Her mom would walk out of the house and drive around for hours, leaving a young and very frightened Mindy home alone. She worried that her mom would die in that car because she was so drunk. She took her mother’s actions as a personal rejection, believing she must be so bad that her mother wanted to leave her. She grew up with vivid fears of abandonment that would be reactivated with important people in her life.
Now whenever John and Mindy wanted attention from each other, things snowballed. Mindy often approached him at the wrong time, for example, when he was in the middle of writing a report. John, wanting to escape from her questions, would snap, “Leave me alone now.” She heard this as a reflection of her “badness,” and felt rejected. She got frightened and created distance by raising her voice and escalating the conflict.
True to his old pattern, John reacted to her fury by leaving the house to walk the dog. Sometimes he slammed the door in the process. Her abandonment fears escalated because she took his words and actions personally and felt vulnerable. She dealt with her anxiety by collapsing on the bed and pulling the covers over her head, which reminded him of how his parents also withdrew from him. Then it was his turn to feel rejected.
Sometimes Mindy got enraged at him but couldn’t put words to it so she acted it out by flailing at him. Once she threw a pitcher of water on him. She unknowingly re-created John’s abusive “cyclone” father. It’s no wonder he reacted so strongly either in fury or by needing to vacate the premises immediately.
John developed his expertise at vacating premises in childhood when his family would pick up and move from one town to another without warning. Once he had to sit through Sunday morning church services knowing the family would be moving to another state as soon as services were over. Since he was forbidden to tell anyone of the impending move he sat in the pew next to his best friend, knowing he’d probably never see him again. He was not allowed to say goodbye.
Is it any wonder his adult history with friends and lovers consists of sudden leave-takings, no goodbyes, and truncated relationships? Sudden departures have been a way of life for him. It’s not surprising that he walked out on Mindy because this is the way he has learned to fend off anxiety. This behavior functioned in two ways for him. First, he recognized the need to leave a chaotic environment just as he did when he walked around the block as a little boy. And second, he felt more in control when he initiated leaving Mindy—not like when his family forced him to suddenly leave his friends in childhood.
Although John and Mindy had been together for over four years, they’d never talked to each other about these painful childhood experiences until they began couples therapy. In the second session, Mindy was able to tell John how vulnerable she felt when he left the house. She told him how, when she crawled under the covers, she really wanted to say, “Please hold me. I need you to be with me.” And for the first time, John became aware of her needs and tried to respond. He also learned to put words to his feelings instead of acting them out. He recognizes that while “leaving” is a fine way to take care of himself if he needs a time-out, it’s best to let Mindy in on his experience and his need for some space. So in order not to fuel her abandonment fears, he tries to remember to assure her before he leaves that he’ll be back soon. It’s true that in the heat of an argument it is hard to remember you have the option of taking a time-out, much less to try to reassure your antagonist that you’re not leaving forever! But it works if you can remember.
How does someone with such huge fears of abandonment hook up with someone who threatens to leave? How do couples manage go find each other and make such a fascinating complementary fit? It’s as if they’re wearing a sign proclaiming, “I’m looking for someone to tap into my abandonment fears, my fears of rejection and invalidation. No others need apply!”
John and Mindy triggered childhood feelings of invalidation and rejection in each other. They each interpreted actions of the other as statements of personal rejection, when in fact each of them was on automatic pilot, responding to painful feelings from their own childhood experiences and trying unsuccessfully to avoid those feelings.