Chapter 1
By Definition
Disentangle: To find your self when you are lost in someone else. To create enough emotional space between your self and another person so you are better able to see the realities of your situation and make healthier decisions about it. To not necessarily leave/divorce/end a relationship but rather create enough space and establish a stronger self so you can then decide what to do about the relationship in which you are entangled.
When we are emotionally over-involved with another person, we lose our self and our way. Our thoughts become focused on that other person whether we want them to be or not. Sometimes we may justify those thoughts, believing that if we don’t worry about them, fix things for them, plan their lives, or do what they ask of us, then things will just be terrible. Sometimes those thoughts become paralyzing. We feel that we can think of nothing else, that we must immediately do something to be in contact with that other person to impact their lives (and our lives of course, though we do not necessarily see that at first). We feel awful. We are nervous, anxious, agitated. We set aside important work. We set aside important people. We set aside our self.
As the entanglements progress, we lose our way out. Our interactions with the other person become more complicated, more confusing, more frustrating, more angry. We believe that more of this same behavior on our part of trying to explain and resolve a given problem will produce the results we desire. So we continue on and on. And things get worse for all. Everyone is upset and no one is getting what they think they want. We are entangled.
Entanglements can happen in various relationships. We may be entangled with our spouse, our parents, our children, our bosses. We can become entangled with clerks in stores and telephone operators for insurance companies and other businesses. An entanglement occurs with anyone with whom we lose our centeredness in our interactions with them. We don’t have to be related to the person, or even know their name, to all of a sudden be emotionally attached to making our point, to defending our self, or to getting them to do something we think they should do. And often we can’t seem to let go of these thoughts and feelings. Our focus narrows and our blood pressure rises.
This book is about ideas on how to stop this self-destructive process of entanglement, how to retrieve our self when we are sliding into an interpersonal tangle or worse yet are already quite caught in its web. It describes a process for people who want to break free emotionally from relationships that are unhealthy for them. The roots of this process are based on what we have learned about people living with addiction, and I will be mentioning this relationship with addiction, one manifestation of which is alcoholism, throughout the book. The issues which are present in relationships in which there is addiction are, however, very often the same for those living in other unhealthy relationships whether addiction is an overt factor or not. This includes people who:
* are dealing with codependency;
* are adult children of people with addictions;
* love too much;
* are being emotionally or physically hurt in their relationships;
* want to fix others;
* want to get out of a relationship and can’t;
* feel they have to be in full control of everything;
* take care of others more than themselves;
* mold themselves according to how they think others want them to be;
* focus more on the external than the internal;
* are unable to say “No.”
The evolution of this book is itself a product of my own work to Disentangle. It has developed as I have. What I write of in this book comes from my personal history and from my work as a psychotherapist. My personal journey brought me to these issues first, and the substance of this book would be sorely impoverished and somewhat dishonest if I did not share that history first.
Chapter 2
The First Twenty-or-So Years
“They care about me so much. I hate to disappoint them.”
In 1964 I was in the 7th grade. I remember liking two boys who were the trouble-makers of the class. They were cute and funny. They would call me at home at night, and we would hang on the telephone for hours, not saying much. I was so glad they would call. I was charmed by their rebelliousness and lack of caring about their behavior. I never got in trouble with them. They never asked me to. I just vicariously enjoyed their “wildness” while I made straight A’s and held class offices.
By the summer before my 9th grade year, I started dating a guy who I would marry eight years later after I graduated from college. We dated all those years. On a few occasions we broke up briefly. During those times, I went out with the notorious school trouble-maker who showed little to no respect for me and whose attention I deeply desired. His values had seemingly little to do with mine; his life goals seemed to be headed in a much different direction than mine. He was frequently drinking or under the influence. Neither my family nor I drank alcohol at all, but I sure liked this guy and made decisions to please him that still come to my mind in a troubling way.
The young man who I dated for eight years and subsequently married was very devoted to me. He worked hard and gave me nice things. For many years it was “safe” for me to be with this person. My family loved him as did my high school and college friends. He was a very sociable guy with a good sense of humor. By dating him, I did not have to deal with the multitude of decisions, rejections, and disappointments of dating other people. I did not have to think about me, about my values, my identity, my beliefs. I was able to mindlessly be in a relationship that was respectable and pleasing. I thought I was happy.
I thought I was happy until my senior year in college.
It was the spring of that year, 1974. I was to marry in May and graduate with my class shortly thereafter. I was doing it right by the books. My college friends were to be in my wedding. By the end of June I would have a degree, a husband, and return to live in the city in which I grew up.
My husband-to-be and I were at a sorority dance that spring. Somewhere, somehow it came to me that night that I really did not want to go through with this wedding. Over the course of the evening I tried to explain this to my fiance, and, by the end of the night, I returned my engagement ring. Some part of me was aware that going this route of marriage now just didn’t feel right.
Within a day of breaking off my engagement, my family and friends were asking to talk with me about what was happening. The details of those conversations escape me still, even my feelings at that time. The end result of those conversations, however, I do recall: I changed my mind and decided to reinstate the engagement and proceed with the wedding as planned.
And so we were married in May, and I graduated in June. We lived in the city where I grew up, and I entered graduate school there.
Now to be clear, this story is about me. It is not about what other people did to me or my life. Granted, my life has been influenced by my relationships with others. However, here and now I am describing my fledgling self, a self that was just starting to be heard by me and was trying to speak up. But I was not really aware of this, and so I only experienced much of this as a big mess that I made and I needed to clean up.
We were married two years. My husband remained the fun-loving, generally attentive guy I had dated, and he offered comfort and companionship. I believe, however, that I was just not comfortable with the idea of being married. I was in graduate school during those years and worked in a psychiatric hospital. We lived in a townhouse in an urban area and had some fun decorating it and making it home. But I did not feel quite right with things.
My doubts about being married remained and grew. Over time I saw that there were important differences for me in the way my husband and I liked to spend time, in the company we would keep, and in some of our values. We decided to end our marriage.
I had no idea then that I was working on finding my self. Looking back on it now I can see that a voice in me that hardly knew any words wanted me to know that I could not simply keep following external expectations, whether they were real or imagined by me. I was mindlessly living my life.
I had no idea I was mindless. If you had asked me I would have thought I was rather focused and purposeful. I had always been a successful student, worker, and daughter. I tried very hard to please many people and seemed to succeed at that. I was rarely “in trouble”.
My life looked pretty good, and in many ways felt pretty good, as I reaped benefits from my successes. But inside of me things were feeling confused and unsettled. I needed to do something different.
So I finished my master’s degree and moved to the Shenandoah Valley about three hours away from my childhood home. A new job took me this direction. I was aware that I wanted to get out of the city and into the country. What I wasn’t aware of then was that I also wanted to get some physical space for my self.
It wasn’t until this time in my twenties that I realized how much I was influenced by my desire to please others. I cared so much about keeping my parents, my teachers, my friends happy with me. I feared their disapproval and their anger. I hated having anyone mad with me. It meant feelings of being bad and wrong. So I almost always tried to be good and to do things “right.”
“Right” meant doing things according to the books, according to spoken and unspoken shoulds. “Right” meant “Do as I say.” Certainly “right” also meant doing things that are moral and ethical, and I am comfortable with that. It’s just that my actions, my decisions, my behaviors were governed by watching that person who I was trying to please and selecting a response or course of action that seemed to be what they wanted. And I mean I literally watched. I watched their faces and their behaviors for clues about how I thought they were feeling toward me.
I can still watch people. Even now, if I am feeling anxious and worried in my relationship with someone, I will regress to my watching behavior. I look outside of my self and to the other. I watch what their face is showing me and listen carefully to clues in their speech or behaviors that tell me if they are disapproving or mad with me. I wonder what they are thinking and feeling. I want to know what they want from me, what would please them, what would make them happy, what would keep them from being angry with me.
To begin my escape from this pattern, I came to live in the Valley. I was moved to this action by a small, internal voice/feeling that said this would be something I would like to do. And I was blessed by my ability to do so.
One of the good things about this rather random move was that it put me in a community in which I have been very happy. When I moved here, I told my self that this would be for at least two years. Two years have turned into thirty-three. This is now home to me.
Another good thing about this move was that I met the man who was to become my second husband and to whom I am still married. Through my years in a twelve-step program of recovery for the family members and significant others of people who suffer from addiction, I have come to understand what people mean when they say, “I’m glad I’m married to an alcoholic.” They mean that this brought them into the program that has transformed their lives. The program has brought them to a level of peace and acceptance that they never knew possible. The program has helped them to focus on their own lives and to greatly enhance their spirituality. In this same way, I say it is good that I moved out here and met my husband, for my relationship with him led me to yet greater depths of “lostness in the other” and subsequently to finding my way out.
