What can we do?

Kris Rosenberg

In this essay Kris Rosenberg examines the turf upon which men and women walk, relate upon and fight over. The real turf is not the kind one plays football upon; her turf is all in the mind and is as complex as the complications of character, personality and intelligence can make it. Many of her suggestions can be generalized to society and on to the world at large in the interest of peace. Shiela and Nate are pseudonyms. [Ed comments]

What if you listen to him just as I've guided you to do and he will not listen to you, makes no effort to learn how to reciprocate? What if he talks and all he expresses is rage—you have fallen into a bottomless pit of fury, you can't find your way out, and all you can think of is how to shut him up? Perhaps he is justifying himself, becoming more defensive than ever by laying all his rage on you. His expectations of you could be malignant.

Life is a series of trade-offs and pay-offs. It doesn't really matter how another woman might respond to what your man is doing. If you feel your integrity is assaulted, you need to make a change.

What if you can no longer effectively listen to the material he is pouring out? How can you recognize when a man is seriously disturbed, has a problem too severe for you to deal with alone? Here are some clues which should send you for help:

• People who know you and love you keep telling you that things are worse than you think;
• Your children are afraid, are being physically or emotionally abused;
• You dread going home or having him come home;
• You don't think he makes sense, but you doubt yourself because he keeps telling you you're crazy;
• He manifests signs of abnormality or denies events that you are sure did happen;
• He has repeated bouts of alcoholism, loss of jobs, heated arguments or fights with others, affairs;
• He embarrasses you or consistently hurts you with behaviors that may seem small but bother you a great deal, such as always paying more attention to other women at a party than to you;
• He tries to make you feel inferior--criticizes you;
• He refuses to discuss problems, may pout for days or longer; this one needs therapy;
• He insists that you do things that feel embarrassing or shameful to you or that you just don't want to do;
• You feel that you do not have any power in the relationship;
• He keeps promising to change, cries, is contrite, then repeats the behavior and takes no steps to change it;
• He blames you for everything you do and everything he does, too;
• Abrupt personality changes;
• Bizarre behaviors.

If you've done your best and the problem remains, don't get used to it. Intervention can help you see yourself and your mate more clearly, strengthen you for whatever path you decide to take, help you change what you can change and confront him with things you cannot change by yourself.

Even if neither of you has a deep emotional problem, how can you be sure when you need outside intervention with your relationship anyway? You need it when your best efforts have not taken you where you need to be, where there's more pain and confusion than joy and fulfillment, whatever that means to you.

Therapy isn't—shouldn't be--a last ditch effort when you're drowning and exhausted. An able therapist can point out that one of you is behaving pathologically or can help you both to work on the problem. The right therapist can set you back on course if you do your part, with pay-offs that far outlast the sessions.

[Of course, therapy doesn't work among nations. But it can work within one nation, just as it does with a person. If a person has a particular hang-up, say bully behavior, that served a purpose early in life, but no longer does, that person may decide to change his/her behavior. Therapy, whether by group, individual, or self, can make a difference, a critical difference on the world stage. The starting point is understanding and acknowledging the hang-up. Once there, needed behavior change becomes possible. --Ed.]

For sensing when there might be a problem, see:

• Forty-One Defensive Male Responses

Most of these defensive responses are gender insensitive. Several of these,

• Master of Snow Job,
• Ready to Explode,
• Evasive Type,
• Filibusters,
• Everything is Fine in Face of Disaster,
• Incurably Pessimistic,
• He is Self-Sufficient,
• Lives in Fanatsy Land,
• He Hands You a Quick Solution, and
• He Insists on Setting the Rules

are apparent in various national leaders.

For a long-term fix on both the personal and society level, see:

• External Locus of Control,
• Internal Locus of Control,
• Little Boy Saved,
• Activate Your Potential,

For things to guard against, see:

• Enamor Trap,

A success story, by Kris herself: [Ed.]

• Even a child Can Do It,

Many women say they see for the first time in the initial therapy session just how impossible their men are.

Some relationships that are stale become exquisite after major breakthroughs. Some men need only a chance to learn.

The feelings we get when trapped by our own illusions are that the image was the real person and rejected us. We are less likely to say, "He wasn't what I thought," then, "He changed; what did I do wrong?

We get into the heavy part and remember the beginning chapters of our relationship, feel the contrast between the way things are and the way they were or seemed to be. Our sadness and bewilderment deepen. We wonder where we have gone wrong and despair of ever having anything half so good as it was...or as we remember it.

Very often we are confused and honestly do not know whether we are tolerating beyond human limits or going to the other extreme by being too critical. Your partner might say that all your relationship problems are your fault, that you are the one who is angry or confused. With no one observing your couple communication, you are inclined to buy into this. Of course, you may be the one who is angry and confused, but that doesn't mean you are to blame for the turmoil. Your feelings are your feelings--you have a right to them, with no blame.

Women often ask, "Am I expecting too much? Is he really OK as men go?" Or, "Is he treating me badly as it seems to me he is?" As men go implies that they are all pretty bad.

Of course, men are different from women, but you must not excuse any of your partner's behavior simply because you think other men are prone to it, too. There are wonderful men just as there are wonderful women. Maybe you are not much of a doormat as women go; nevertheless, you might be pathologically passive. Generally speaking, in order of probable sequence, your broad categories of choice are:

The strategies for freeing him, encouraging his opening up, are not like using a can-opener on his psyche; there are several eventualities which leave you in a position of deciding what comes next:

• You need outside intervention when your best efforts have not taken you where you need to be, where there is ongoing pain and confusion and little or no joy and fulfillment, whatever that means to you.
• Are you seeing patterns in your own life which indicate you may be contributing to what is wrong in the relationship? Do you suspect that you attract men who cannot relate—that you're a mark unaware?
• Or do you relate to healthy men and yet find yourself ruining your relationships? You may need individual psychotherapy.

Some encounters are like quicksand—the more you struggle to extricate yourself, the deeper you sink.

Since so many of us are programmed to think of what our behaviors do to others, rather than to ourselves, we usually have to be convinced that allowing our mates to treat us badly, to make too many demands, is not only awful for us, but also the worst thing we can do for them. (Myth). Many women are unable to get unstuck for their own sake, because they have long ago lost perspective on their own needs, but in most instances those same women can act if they are convinced that leaving is also best for their unbending partners or others in the family.

If you find you are doing all the work, taking all the chances, forgiving all the hurts, maybe you will choose no longer to beat your head against your partner's wall. His wall may be thicker than your head.

Once you get yourself turned around, know that you are not loving too much in any pathological sense, that you care about yourself, then you can afford to give plenteously. Loving healthily, you can take care of yourself and still choose to consider the needs of your partner, without fearing that you're suffocating your own spirit.

Signs that you are through can sometimes set off new motivation in a partner. Ironically then you might find that the expression of who you really are, which you have previously feared to reveal, actually injects life into the relationship. By then it may be too late.

He may play Rip Van Winkle through the preliminaries, refusing to listen to your requests for communication, then say, "I've changed. I should have another chance." That may inspire even more bitterness in you: you wanted so much to hear those words before. Now it really is too late—you doubt that insight under duress will lead to permanent change.

Often in counseling I have heard women say, "If I had had the nerve to say all this to him a few years ago, maybe it would have changed things. Now he really seems to want me. But I don't care anymore." She was running faster and faster in the wrong direction. Until, at last, there was nothing left to lose. Then she did what she should have done in the first place—let go with expressions of anger and hurt.

What she had always seen as a way of ruining any chance of intimacy was actually what she needed to do to make it possible! So if you are nearing the end of your efforts to re-establish your relationship, perhaps you should go ahead and say whatever you might say at the end—and see what happens.

On the other hand, you may be the type who never gives up. One thing that keeps some of us locked in, unable to give up, is that we are afraid we will stop just before the dawn. We are afraid we will do injustice to our partners. We think perhaps these men are the only ones who really know us and tell us our flaws as no one else would—after all, no one else lives with us. We snatch at the promise of something lovelier to come and believe that quitting is the worst failing in the human character. If you think that quitting is cowardly and a shame, erase the old don't-be-a-quitter tapes, make new tapes that say, "Never finish a bad start."

Maybe starting was your major error—then stopping could be your salvation. If you accidentally plunge your hand into scalding water, you don't try to make the best of it, hoping it will eventually cool down; you escape while you can. In a relationship, however, finding yourself in hot water, you may keep remembering how nice it was before it began to boil, remember with sweet pain the warmth of falling in love and the gentleness and excitement of first romance.

Of course, all of us have faults and every relationship requires compromise and struggle, doesn't it? However, when we find ourselves doing all the hoop jumps, expecting that our behavior will change his personality, when we are bewildered and confused by endless demands, it's time to run for our lives. As Robin Norwood said in Women Who Love Too Much, "When you keep wishing and hoping he'll change," you are loving too much.

Sometimes they realize they must leave their cp men, but having a professional tell them they must is about as effective as having our mirrors tell us we should lose weight. If it were that simple, they could have done without therapy.

If you find yourself married to a cp or if you feel that cp's are the "only ones out there," as women constantly tell me, is there ever anything you can do other than run for your life? Yes, there is. Often a man's commitment phobia can be worked through.

What you can do is understand the dynamic of commitment phobia and learn to use words to ease your cp's fears, giving him a chance to talk about what he really feels. Talking out decreases the likelihood of acting out. If you can free him from his fear of talking about his feelings, he may not need to run.

How to know when to persist, how to persist, when to get outside intervention, and when to give up.

Here are guidelines for confronting issues that are too serious for a couple to handle alone and/or too devastating for the relationship to continue as is; for recognizing when your pain is a necessary and temporary injury, the price for emotional exposure, and when is it a sign of real sickness in the relationship; for identifying the line between being too sensitive to hear the truth and not putting up with being degraded.

Working on yourself: Only when you would choose to be alone in preference to being in a bad relationship are you capable of having a good relationship. It is not possible to know whether you love anyone if you need that person too desperately. Excessive dependency ruins relationships. Your own transformation is basic to transforming your relationship.

Reality is painful. When my young brother was killed, I didn't want to get through my grief and forget; grief was all I had left of him and I wanted to hold onto it. I wanted to have him back. I don't want to eat less; I want to eat more and be thinner. I do not want to grow old gracefully; I want to grow young. I want to leave late and arrive early. In a way we are all like the neurotic who said, "If it weren't for reality, I'd be OK." Yet reality is the only place we have. How can we distinguish actually trying to alter reality from working toward realistic metamorphosis?

We are all cut of one cloth, only the cuts are different:

• How can you recognize where male/female differences and human weaknesses leave off and serious emotional disturbance begins, when a man has a problem too severe for you to cope with alone? Or too severe for you to cope with at all?
• If it is emotionally or physically dangerous to initiate or continue to talk, you must consider leaving the relationship.

Yes, changing your life starts with changing yourself. To have a rich relationship, you have not only to find the right person, you also have to be the right person. We have concentrated on your being, now it's time to assess whether you did the finding.

However, some men like some women are not capable of relating deeply. As you have read and done your best, you may have wondered when the magic would take place, when your man would begin to communicate in a deeper way. And maybe it didn't work.

Here are guidelines for confronting issues which are too serious for a couple to handle alone and/or too devastating for the relationship to continue; for recognizing when your pain is a necessary and temporary injury, the price for emotional exposure, and when it is a sign of real sickness in the relationship; for identifying the line between being too sensitive to hear the truth and not putting up with being degraded.

If your man is unresponsive regardless of your best efforts, how far should you go? If you have tried every suggestion I have made and it doesn't work, if he doesn't open up at all; or if it does work—if he opens up and you hear words you find you cannot emotionally handle; then when is your pain a necessary and temporary injury, the price for emotional exposure, and when is it a sign of cancer in the relationship? When is it time to call it quits?

Under what circumstances do you stay together, just let things be, give up on your efforts to talk, live as peacefully as possible, without real fulfillment? (Quiet desperation, as the poets say>) Each individual needs to achieve maximum positive change and then see where the relationship is.

Their most unreasonable demands, unmet, provoke their greatest hostility. If you are paired with such a person, you may find yourself asking to be forgiven when you have done nothing offensive: "If he is feeling angry, it must be that I have done something." You will then have internalized guilt in all circumstances.

Sheila felt that she had absolutely no private areas in her life. Nate, her husband, called her several times a day to see what she was doing, to ask why she had been late returning from the library, to inquire who she had talked to on the phone, to find out what time she got up. Sheila was not doing anything that she particularly needed to keep secret—it was just that she felt violated by Nate's attitude that he had a right to every nook and cranny of her existence. What made it worse was, if Sheila asked Nate why he was late coming home, he blew up. He would come home, he said, whenever he damn well pleased.

What can you do then? When do you settle for what you have and when should you quit and run? When is enough enough? When is giving up on a relationship the right thing to do? What if you like yellow and he likes blue—does that mean something's wrong with you? No, but if he wants everything blue, then you have a problem.

Permitting an abusive relationship benefits no one, certainly does no favor to the abuser. In the case of the alcoholic's wife, who tells her spouse she can no longer live with him, she is not saying, "You are a bad person. Go." She is saying, "I am a person, too, and I have limits."

Can there be too much to forgive or can you be called upon to forgive just too many times? Which mistakes are beyond redemption? What about those who vow to reform only when caught, becoming penitent at the moment of truth, a sort of death-bed conversion with a second chance?

When you go along with giving your man a seventieth chance, are you being a pushover, allowing yourself to be victimized, or are you an accepting, understanding human being? That's a question most women ask themselves again and again. We frequently don't know the difference between decent acceptance, a nonjudgmental attitude, and being taken advantage of.

We need to consider the fine line between forgiveness and letting someone dump on us. Being a doormat is, of course, detrimental to your well-being and never a favor to the other person.

When giving up or fleeing is the healthiest choice-pony:

• Equating abuse with love: story of woman who thought her husband loved her because he beat her up, related to martyrdom. Where is it?

Therapeutic strategies some men will not respond to our best efforts. These tactics don't turn jerks into princes. Strategies for freeing him, opening him up, are not like using a can-opener on his psyche; if he is terminally resistant, there may be nothing you can do alone. You need outside intervention when your best efforts have not taken you where you need to be, where there's more pain and confusion than joy and fulfillment, whatever that means to you. We read that the average couple (the folks with 1 1/2 children, I suppose) talk to each other about five minutes each day. Are you satisfied with that?

If your efforts do work—if he opens up and you hear words you find you cannot emotionally handle, even with expert assistance, then you need help in making a decision whether to give up and run, call it quits.

Are you seeing patterns in your own life which indicate you may be contributing to what is wrong in the relationship: are you one of those women who think you attract losers? Have you been told that you choose them? Or do you relate to healthy men and yet find yourself ruining your relationships? You may need individual psychotherapy.

You may have young children and no money; no means of earning your own way; be physically unable to take care of yourself; may not yet have developed a support system; be too terrified of him to leave; may feel you are too old; have deep psychological reasons or religious reasons that hold you back.

This is not to say these cannot be worked through.

Each individual needs to achieve maximum positive change, then assess where the relationship is. No relationship is set in concrete. Deciding to stay for the time being does not mean you must never leave; periodically, reevaluate your options.

If you find you are doing all the work, taking all the chances, forgiving all the hurts, maybe you will choose no longer to beat your head against your partner's wall. His wall may be thicker than your head.

Identifying a man who is seriously disturbed, has a problem too severe for you to deal with alone or at all; a list of characteristics of pathology contrasted with a list of characteristics which need attention from an outside professional, but are probably amenable to intervention.

Sequence:

• decide you need outside intervention;
• therapy for both of you individually or together;
• if outcome is negative, another decision—again probably best done with intervention—about which of the two options, staying or splitting;
• whichever option is chosen, therapy for developing a plan for being the most fulfilled you can be with your decision.

First decide if it's time for outside intervention, using criteria listed. Then, if it is,

Plan A:
1. your own individual therapy
2. his therapy
3. couples therapy
4. any combination of these

If that doesn't work, and you need a good bit of time to evaluated the work, then

Plan B:
5. live with it, status quo
6. split/break up