How Can I Forgive You? Part 15

"I can never forgive my mother for ignoring what was going on,"

Sharon told me. "But I can finally understand and accept her silence as her way of coping with her own childhood trauma. As for me, I'm still trying to overcome the feeling that I'm unlovable and not worth being cared for."

Another person may overcompensate for his own early experience of mistrust and abuse by identifying with the person who mistreated him and treating you in equally hurtful ways. Sickened by other people's vulnerability, which mimics his own, he may prey on someone like you who needs his love or approval. The injuries he suffered as a child may trigger a destructive sense of ent.i.tlement that in his eyes gives him permission to inflict similar damage on you.

A forty-two-year-old patient, Peter, fit this model until he looked back over his life and realized the harm he was doing to himself and to his teenage kids. As a child, he had been victimized by a father with an explosive temper. As a parent, he repeated the pattern, walling himself off in impenetrable silence and then suddenly blowing up at his sons in restaurants and other public places.

"When they refused to spend Thanksgiving with me," he told me, "I finally woke up and realized what a bully I was-intimidating them, disgracing them, just as my father had done to me, and his step-father had done to him. It was horrible but fascinating to see how everything was connected. When my father felt threatened, he thought he could come cras.h.i.+ng down on me with that disgusting tone of voice of his, and that I'd still respect him and want to be friends. I'm doing the same s.h.i.+t with my kids. Of course they don't want to get near me."

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Appendix Seeing these intergenerational patterns helped Peter challenge the idea that his father had singled him out for abuse because he deserved it. Reminding himself that his father was a victim, too, pummeled in his youth by his step-father, made Peter feel less emotionally battered and more able to accept his father for who he was- a man with faults, responding to his own frightening childhood experiences. Armed with these insights, Peter worked to embrace his kids and let his father back into his life-not fully, but in a limited way that worked for him. Peter learned that he didn't have to repeat unhealthy patterns. "The violence stops here, with me," he told me.

"I'm not going to pa.s.s it down to another generation."

Emotional Deprivation If the person who hurt you grew up without nurturance (warmth and attention), without empathy (understanding and sharing of feelings), or without protection (direction and guidance), he may carry into adult life a sense of loneliness and disconnection. Not made to feel special as a child, not valued for himself but treated simply as an object to glorify a narcissistic parent, he may feel cheated of love and expect you to fill in the blanks of his childhood.

As an adult, this person may cope in various ways. Surrendering to the past, he may seek out a partner who is as cold and aloof as his parents were, a strategy that allows him to feel just as unloved as they made him feel. Seeking to avoid the trauma of the past, he may withdraw from you rather than risk being hurt again. Or overcompensating, he could veer in one of at least three directions. First, he could become self-indulgent, spending exorbitantly on material possessions to make up for the human connection he never received.

Second, he could become what Young and Klosko refer to as an "ent.i.tled dependent"2-someone who feels deprived and therefore ent.i.tled to have you take care of him. Whenever he perceives you as not there for him, he's likely to feel mortally let down and turn on you. Third, he could compulsively seek your love and attention to compensate for the emotional deprivation he endured as a child.

Nothing you do is likely to be enough.

Appendix 221.

Rick discovered this neediness in his wife Jan when he peeked through the open bas.e.m.e.nt door late one night and found her glued to the computer-in a black teddy. "I could only guess who she was writing to," he told me. "I said nothing, but my confidence went down the drain. I wondered what this guy gave her that I didn't. I always thought we got on well together s.e.xually-now I couldn't even get an erection. This sounds funny, but I almost bought myself some v.i.a.g.r.a. I wondered, 'How could I have screwed up the most important relations.h.i.+p in my life?' I confronted her finally, and she told me about her ritual-bathing with oils, putting on s.e.xy lingerie, and pouring her heart out to this guy, someone who called himself a priest. She found the whole thing incredibly arousing."

This revelation threw their marriage into crisis, but it also forced Rick and Jan to talk honestly for the first time in years. Jan admitted how empty and lonely she felt. Rick listened and confronted his own complicity. "I know I'm partially to blame," he told me. "I'm off in my own world sometimes, too. She needs more from me-more attention, affection, and understanding-and I'm willing to work on that. But I also know she's felt alone her whole life, with a worka-holic father who was never home and a manic-depressive mother who blamed the kids for making her life unbearable."

Rick realized that he alone hadn't created Jan's neediness, that it was triggered at least in part by her unnurturing parents. This relieved him from some of the burden of blame and allowed him to feel adequate again as a husband. It also helped him accept Jan's longing for connection, while rejecting its inappropriate expression in on-line chat rooms. "I'm not your mother or your father," he told her. "And I'm not a bad husband. When you're lonely, I'd like you to come to me, not to some stranger on the Internet. Give me a chance to be there for you."

Rick also understood what Jan was never able to grasp-that if their relations.h.i.+p was going to survive, she would need to tolerate a degree of loneliness that no one could ever fill. After catching her in several cybers.p.a.ce affairs, he accepted her behavior with equanimity, and left.

222.

Appendix A Sense of Personal Defectiveness The person who hurt you may have been damaged by parents who were exceedingly critical or demeaning and made him feel unvalued and unlovable. As a child, he may have been compared unfavorably with a sibling, or he may have had a neurological problem such as ADD or dyslexia that made him feel incompetent. As an adult, he may continue to feel shame about who he is and be afraid of exposing his inferiority. He may perceive his flaws as internal ("I'm boring; I'm stupid") or external ("I'm not much to look at; I'm socially inept"). If he could articulate his feelings, he might tell you, "I'm an imposter. If you really knew me, you couldn't possibly like me."

A person who grew up in such d.a.m.ning circ.u.mstances may treat you in a number of dysfunctional ways. He may surrender to criticism that reinforces his negative view of himself, as my patient Lois did. "My parents used to refer to my brother as the one with all the brains," she lamented. "Compared with him, I always felt stupid.

The truth is, I did better in college than he did because I killed myself to get good grades, while he skipped cla.s.ses and got messed up with drugs. But to this day, my parents talk about his intelligence and my 'sense of style,' as if I'm a less capable human being. The sad thing is, on some level I still believe them."

People like Lois who succ.u.mb to feelings of unworthiness are unlikely to say or do anything to harm you, but their insecurity may wear you down. Those who resort to avoidance tactics, suppressing their genuine thoughts and feelings in order to hide from your critical eye, are also unlikely to hurt you. But you'll need to watch out for someone who overcompensates for feelings of defectiveness by projecting his fragility and insecurities onto you. This person is likely to lord over you, trying to make you you feel stupid, incapable, never good enough. Acting in arrogant and superior ways, he may a.s.sume an air of perfection, s.h.i.+elding himself behind a hard, crusty exterior that prevents you or anyone else from knowing him. feel stupid, incapable, never good enough. Acting in arrogant and superior ways, he may a.s.sume an air of perfection, s.h.i.+elding himself behind a hard, crusty exterior that prevents you or anyone else from knowing him.

Brad's mother knew him too well to expect much from him, least of all empathy. Brad bludgeoned everyone, including her, with his Appendix Appendix 223.

belief that he was smarter, cleverer, more successful than just about anyone else in the world. What he didn't realize was that he was profoundly disliked. His mother still accepted him, however, because she understood where his self-esteem problems were coming from. "His father's a self-made man and pretty grandiose himself," she told me.

"Brad was our first born, the one who inherited his father's booming business and his grandfather's pitted skin. His younger brother looked like Mr. Universe-athletic, muscular, handsome. Brad couldn't help comparing himself with the other two men in the family and coming up short. He still has a chip on his shoulder. No matter what he accomplishes on his own, he never feels like a winner. So when he's mean to me, or condescending, I try to remember how much sadness there's been in his life, and let him be."

Social Exclusion A person who is snubbed or ostracized as a child because of his economic status or race may grow up feeling anxious and inferior in social situations. As an adult, his response to you may vary. Someone who surrenders to memories of rejection may believe he's indeed inferior and behave toward you in a submissive or obsequious manner. Someone who tries to avoid rejection may distance himself from social situations altogether. Others overcompensate-trying to be so beyond reproach, so flawless in everything they do, that no one could possibly find fault with them. Or they may do everything they can to draw attention to themselves, then fight their antic.i.p.ated rejection with rejection, and ridicule others the way they were ridiculed themselves.

One patient, Carol, had to deal with this pattern in her husband, John. It wasn't easy for her to suffer his abuse.

John's father had walked away from him when he was two. His mother remarried a pedigreed Bostonian named Randall. John wanted desperately to fit in, but his half-brothers treated him like a pariah. He took up lacrosse, though he hated it, to ingratiate himself with his stepfather, who had been a lacrosse star at Princeton. His cla.s.smates poked fun mercilessly at his last name-b.a.l.l.s. John 224 Appendix wanted desperately to adopt his stepfather's name, but when he got up the courage to ask, Randall said, "I'll think about it," and didn't mention it again for seven years. When he finally extended the offer, John said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

"It was typical of him, saying no to something that meant so much to him," his pregnant wife, Carol, told me. "He's been doing that all his life. His family shunned him. Now he ignores me. They made him feel like a second-cla.s.s citizen. Now he treats me with contempt. The one time he spoke to me at a party last night, he called me Orca the whale-in front of my whole family."

I asked Carol why she stays with him. "Because there are times when he owns up to his issues and reaches out to me," she said. "He'll tell me, 'My whole life I've wanted to be accepted. Sometimes I do things that are stupid and immature just to get attention, even if it's negative attention. Sometimes I put you down when we're out with friends because I'm feeling insecure. I try to be funny, thinking people will like me, but then I go over the top and say obnoxious things, and people don't like me more; they like me less. I don't know how to be myself around others. But I'm trying. Please give me a chance.'"

Living with John was like living in a combat zone. What made it easier for Carol to accept him, and preserve her dignity and self-respect, was knowing that he had brought his prepackaged, damaged self into the relations.h.i.+p, and that his issues did not begin, or end, with her. That he, he, too, understood this opened the door to forgiveness. too, understood this opened the door to forgiveness.

CORE EMOTIONAL NEED #2: AUTONOMY,.

COMPETENCE, AND A SENSE OF IDENt.i.tY.

As children, we all need to be encouraged to explore, to learn from our mistakes, to develop a clear sense of ourselves independent of our parents or caretakers. If the person who hurt you was overpro-tected or made to feel inadequate, he may have grown up doubting his ability to survive on his own and make a success of his life. Carv-ing out a future in such an uncertain world may seem fraught with danger and likely to end in disappointment.

Appendix 225.

A person with these doubts and fears is likely to relate to you in one of the three ways we discussed above. First, he could surrender to the way he experienced himself in the past and rely on you for everything.

Second, he could try to avoid these childhood feelings by refusing to face new challenges. Anything-planning a vacation, getting a leaky faucet fixed-may seem too much. Third, he could overcompensate by disavowing his early feelings of dependence and becoming "counterdependent."3 Trying to appear less weak or frightened than he felt as a child, he may never ask for anything and treat you as superfluous.

CORE EMOTIONAL NEED #3: THE FREEDOM TO.

EXPRESS VALID NEEDS AND EMOTIONS.

We tend to flourish in an environment in which we're free to express our legitimate needs and emotions. The offender who was reared by authoritarian or needy parents may learn at an early age to stifle self-expression and be overly responsible.

People who surrender to or avoid these familiar patterns are unlikely to do anything that requires your forgiveness-in fact, their modus operandi is to behave in ways that increase the chances that you'll appreciate them or at least get along with them. Never knowing what they really think or feel-they themselves may not know either- you are more likely to find them annoying or boring than troublesome.

You may detect a basic inauthenticity in your relations.h.i.+p and may find it hard either to like or to dislike them. You may not realize that although they project an air of selflessness and sacrifice, deep inside they resent you for making them feel as marginalized, as subjugated, as they experienced themselves as children-a response you never intended.

The third way in which an offender may cope with childhood patterns of repression is to overcompensate. If he was m.u.f.fled as a child- coerced into being someone other than himself, someone his parents needed him to be-he may as an adult fight back in maladaptive ways, with you as the victim. To extricate himself from the role of the good, compliant child, he may do something totally out of character, totally selfish and reckless, such as having an affair or tras.h.i.+ng you.

226.

Appendix CORE EMOTIONAL NEED #4:.

SPONTANEITY AND PLAY.

We all need times when we can give in to the moment, go with our natural inclinations, and have fun. If the offender grew up in a home that imposed strict rules, valued impulse control, and conveyed a need for perfection, he may never have learned to value "nonproduc-tive" activities that promote happiness, creativity, and intimacy- like s.e.x or socializing with friends.

A person who surrenders to his parents' unrelenting standards may not hurt you-after all, his compulsive behavior punishes him as much as it punishes you, and his criticism is likely to be directed mostly at himself. But life with him is likely to be tense and dry.

Another person, growing up in the same punis.h.i.+ng environment, may overcompensate by becoming punitive himself, constantly criticizing you for not living up to his impossibly high standards, and making you feel inadequate for being your own unique, imperfect self-in other words, for not being him. Believing it's his job to teach you a lesson and shape you into a "better" human being, he may try to recreate you in his image, leaving you feeling devalued and oppressed.

CORE EMOTIONAL NEED #5:.

REALISTIC LIMITS AND SELF-CONTROL.

If the offender's parents taught him to be responsible, respectful, and empathic, he is likely to grow up learning to balance his personal rights against his obligations to others. But if he was spoiled by indulgent parents-if no one set appropriate limits on his behavior or taught him the importance of reciprocity-he may grow up thinking that he is privileged and above the dictates of common decency. He may act superior, not because he is, but because he needs to feel powerful and exert control over you. A stranger to the word "no," he's likely to have an inflated sense of ent.i.tlement and an exaggerated sense of his importance to you and to the world.

Appendix 227.

As we have seen, people respond to the same damaging influences in various ways. If the person who hurt you grew up without self-control or realistic limits, he may surrender to feelings of grandiosity and behave toward you with the same disrespect that he displayed toward others as a child. Unable to control his actions or emotions, he may expect you to wait on him and lash out at you when you threaten to puncture his inflated sense of self.

Another person may cope through avoidance, perhaps drifting from one job or one relations.h.i.+p to another, or succ.u.mbing to immediate gratification through s.e.x, alcohol, or illicit drugs.

A third person may overcompensate, becoming excessively responsible or disciplined, always forfeiting his own agenda to tend to yours. This person is obviously not likely to hurt you, unless he resents his subordination and makes you pay for it.

Two sisters, Becky and Laura, coped with their parents' fractious divorce in dramatically contrasting ways. Pampered and uncon-strained, Becky manipulated her parents, knowing that she could get away with anything. As an adult, she surrendered to these same egocentric impulses. Laura, in contrast, overcompensated, putting her needs aside and taking care of everyone but herself.

Thirty years later, Laura, the older sister by four years, came into therapy. "My sister has used me all my life," she told me. "I'd like to see what I can do to make peace-if not with her, then with myself."

Laura told her story. "When our parents split up, we got shut-tled from Mom's house to Dad's every few days. Becky was good at playing the child-of-divorced-parents game. She'd make up excuses for staying home from school, and Mom, who was petrified that we'd love Dad more, would let her. Becky would forget her lunch or track shoes, and Mom would dash off to school with them, like she had nothing else to do. Dad's the opposite. He's an expert at not feeling guilty about anything. He'd leave us home with cash and baby-sitters. Becky would invite her friends over and trash the house, and the poor baby-sitter, who was frightened to death she'd lose her job, would clean it all up. It didn't take long to figure out that if we did something wrong in Mom's house, Mom was too 228 Appendix needy or depressed to punish us, and that if we did something wrong in Dad's house, by the time he found out-well, we'd be back home with Mom."

Laura brought the story up to the present. "Becky still has no trouble hitting that 'me' b.u.t.ton," Laura told me. "To this day, I've never met anyone so totally self-absorbed. Her motto is, 'What can I do for myself today?' She's great to have fun with, but I don't think anyone really matters to her-except herself. When I tell her it hurts that she never calls on my birthday, that she gets in touch only when she needs something-like my clothes or my apartment so she can shack up with her boyfriend-she just gets defensive and tells me I shouldn't call her on her her birthday either. It's so maddening. She doesn't understand that I'd like us to be closer, but I need to feel I matter to her first." birthday either. It's so maddening. She doesn't understand that I'd like us to be closer, but I need to feel I matter to her first."

To break down the barriers between them, Laura combed through their lives, trying to understand the factors that had shaped them-their age difference, their personalities, the impact of the divorce. What she came to realize was that "Becky was Becky" and would probably always put herself first. Laura could accept this or not, but it wasn't going to change her sister. It could, however, change Laura.

"I'll never be as close to Becky as I'd like," Laura told me, "but she's my sister, my only sibling, and I'd rather have some relations.h.i.+p with her than none at all. When she's thoughtless and demanding, I remind myself, 'It's not like she's out to get me; she's the same way with everyone, and has been from Day One'-and I try to let it go.

I'm still unhappy with the way she treats me, but I don't let it crush me anymore."

It's hard not not to feel crushed when someone expands to fill the s.p.a.ce you're in and leaves no room for you. But if you can step out of the picture and see the degree to which the offender's behavior is a statement about him, not you, you will be better equipped to stay centered, maintain your self-respect, and rise above the violation. to feel crushed when someone expands to fill the s.p.a.ce you're in and leaves no room for you. But if you can step out of the picture and see the degree to which the offender's behavior is a statement about him, not you, you will be better equipped to stay centered, maintain your self-respect, and rise above the violation.

Notes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

1. Safer (1999), p. 166.

INTRODUCTION: IS FORGIVENESS GOOD.

FOR YOU?.

1. My grat.i.tude to Rabbi Israel Stein for telling me this story; it can also be found in Kushner (1997), p. 108.

2. Smedes (1996), p. 91.

3. A. Beck (1999), p. 8.

4. Schnur (2001), p. 18.

5. Enright and the Human Development Study Group (1996); p. 108.

6. Smedes (1996), p. 45.

7. Patton (2000), p. 294.

8. Herman (1997).

PART ONE: CHEAP FORGIVENESS.

1. Emmons (2000), p. 159. See also Roberts (1995).

2. Horney, in Paris (2000), p. 266.

3. Gilligan and Brown (1992).

4. Wetzler (1992), p. 34.

230.

Notes.

5. Wetzler, p. 95.

6. Young, Klosko, and Weishaar (2003), p. 248.

7. Karen (2001).

8. Woodman (1992), in Gordon, Baucom, and Snyder (2000), p. 212.

9. Katz, Street, and Arias (1995); in Gordon, Baucom, and Snyder (2000), p. 224.

10. Th.o.r.esen, Harris, and Luskin (2000), pp. 258259.

11. Temoshok and Dreher (1992), pp. 3839.