Guest Post: Run Away or Stay and Fight: How Family-Conscious Therapy Finally Helped

Today’s guest post is by Ken Myers, owner of GoNannies, a nationally known nanny recruiting website. He discusses his personal experiences with a therapist who was not very helpful, and contrasts it with his experiences with another one who was.

One of the themes of this blog that he illustrates is that good psychotherapists take into account the behavior of  the patient’s intimates, most especially family of origin members - versus those who think a patient’s problems are basically all in their heads and caused only by their own failings, immaturity, irrationality, or inadequacies in one way or another. Or ones who just offer glib or clichéd advice that does not take into account the difficulties patients confront in trying to follow advice to “just say no” to problematic patterns in their lives.

When I was a young teen in high school I started having some problems with stress. I couldn’t seem to keep up with my studies, having friends, and being a part of the family. It wasn’t anything new, really, but the extra work and pressure of becoming an adult and planning what I was going to do with the rest of my life seemed to be more than I could handle.

I remember that even as a young child I was ‘high strung.’ Always conscientious and worried about others, I was the ‘mother hen’ to my younger cousins and siblings. Even with the adults in my life, I tried to help as best I knew how - sitting quietly and attentively at their bedsides when they were ill or happily pitching in to help with chores and housework. Nearly every morning I would wake up with a stomach ache and, ignoring it most days, did everything I could to not ‘rock the boat’ and to be the very best and most helpful child I could be.

As I got older and became more aware of a world outside my immediate family, my responsibilities grew. I was not only responsible for keeping my little family happy and healthy but, but as a part of my religious upbringing, I was supposed to ‘save’ everyone I came across in my life. I had been taught right from wrong and needed to share, mold, guide and teach that to everyone seeming to lack that knowledge.

Of course, others did not take so kindly to my black and white way of looking at the world. After being rebuffed time and time again by my peers I learned to withdraw. They did not want what I had to give and I did not know how else to interact, so I journeyed into my safe world of books and imagination where everything was firmly under my control.

This mostly solitary lifestyle was broken by a few friends who, like me, saw the world in black and white terms and could not seem to cope with the grey. We cautiously and quietly joined forces in a silent pact to keep a façade of normality in a world that seemed so different than we expected. We went about our lives doing what was expected of us with a kind of robotic frenzy, desiring, as all teens and children do, to be ‘normal.’

However, high school changed all that. Some friends fell away, reviling in the grey and rebelling against the rules in a bid to become their own people. Others stayed mostly the same, diving even deeper into religion and black and white thinking until the rules and regulations drove their every step.

Confused and alone, I dared not ask my family what was going on for fear of rocking the boat. I had no friends left whom I had any confidence in; they seemed even more lost than I. With no other adults I trusted I felt lost. This feeling began to manifest itself physically to the point at which a visit to the doctor ended with a recommendation that I go to therapy.

My parents found a therapist within walking distance from my high school and once a week I would go and talk to her. Coincidentally, she was the mother of a student I had grown up with, a rebellious and popular boy, and as time went on I grew more and more dubious of her ability to help me.

Most of the time she just let me talk. It was a help, in a way, just to have someone to listen to my childish and incoherent fears and doubts - someone who, hopefully, would not correct me or be horrified by the meanderings of my mind. However, after the first few sessions I wanted more. I asked her questions on how to cope with the demands of my life: my family, my religion, my peers, my future.

In return I got the most basic of replies. My family was… well the word abusive was never used but was implied, and she thought I should get away from them as soon as possible. Religion was okay but I ‘shouldn’t worry about it so much.’ I should ‘get involved’ and ‘make friends,’get good grades and go to a faraway school.

Confused and no better off than before, I continued to go to her for a while but learned not to ask questions. After a while I told my parents I was ‘better’ and I learned how to hide my physical symptoms for the most part so that they were not alarmed. I stopped going to therapy and learned to cope by hiding in books and daydreams.

I made good grades, got a job, and went home to help with the chores every night and on weekends. I went to church on Sundays and even on the occasional outing with the teens from my Sunday school group, whose names I never even bothered to learn.

I learned that the fewer people I let into my life the less stress I had. So I closed myself off more and more, learning to live a life of isolation and hard work punctuated by reading stories and having dreams of high adventure.

I did end up going away to college for a year. Nothing changed. Distance didn’t relive my anxiety; it just gave me fewer ways to express it directly. I moved to a closer school, but didn’t live at home. Again, nothing changed.

A disaster at home prompted me to move back in and reassume some of the physical responsibilities I had left behind. Now an adult with devastated and ill family members depending on me more than ever, I shouldered all the responsibility of a home and family. I was botching it at some points due to ignorance and inexperience but was trying my hardest to be whoever they needed me to be.

Years later, after a cycle of unhealthy codependence had formed, I woke up - almost literally. I had little memory of what I had been doing with my life. I had just been moving from day to day and functioning enough to survive and keep my family afloat. I was depressed and isolated. I needed help.

I decided to try psychotherapy once again. I went for three sessions to another woman with similar tendencies to the first. However this time I was an adult and could change to someone else. I dropped her and looked again. I finally found a male therapist I had confidence in.

The first session was a revelation. It did not seem that different, in all honesty, from my earlier experiences.  I told him about my life and he listened. But it was his responses that shocked me. Instead of pat answers and wishy-washy platitudes, he asked me a question.

“If you had a magic wand that could change everything, what would you like your life to be like?”

I sat back and blinked. I had my reasonable expectations of eventually living on my own somewhere nice; maybe having a garden and a pet. But what he asked was more than just what I hoped I could realistically achieve.

As I pieced together my answer I started to cry. I had hopes! And dreams! And aspirations! It had been so long since I had thought beyond survival and making a life for those I cared about.

After several sessions he helped me to see that I was not responsible for the other adults in my life. No matter how helpless they acted or how much they ‘needed’ me, they were fully capable of taking care of themselves. He helped me to learn the boundaries between myself and others; to point out that I was not responsible for making others happy or satisfied or complete. I was not responsible for making anyone else happy but me, as I was the only person I had any control over.

“You can lead a horse to water…” he liked to say, pointing out that no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t make people do what was best for them.

By dealing with the real issues instead of hiding from them or trying to run away from them, I gradually learned to let go of responsibilities I had taken on and let others take care of themselves. I became capable of having friends without feeling responsible for their happiness, and I even started dating.

The thing I look back on with the most regret is that I did not get that guidance in high school. What would my life have been like if I had learned about healthy boundaries then? If I had learned how to interact with others in a way that was good for all of us?

It all started with my family. My natural inclinations were used, unconsciously but harmfully, to compensate for my family’s shortcomings. If only someone could have helped me to understand earlier the connection between my stress and my family’s behavior, it would have helped me a lot.

Ken Myers is a father of three and passionate about great childcare. He’s always looking for ways to help families find the support they need to live fuller, richer lives. Find out more about expert childcare by checking out @go_nannies on Twitter.

Let Go and Let God

Al-Anon is a well known 12-Step program that branched off from Alcoholics Anonymous.  It, along with Alateen for adolescents, is a self-help group for the relatives and spouses of alcoholics.  It considers the people who often live with Alcoholics and who either try to "fix" them or cover for and protect them to be "enablers" or "codependents."

Wikipedia defines co-dependency thusly: "It is a tendency to behave in overly passive or excessively caretaking ways that negatively impact one's relationships and quality of life. It also often involves putting one's needs at a lower priority than others while being excessively preoccupied with the needs of others."  In a sense, the co-dependent is addicted to dealing with relatives and romantic partners who are themselves addicted to alcohol.

The alcoholic hides the bottle; the co-dependent finds it and tries to hide it somewhere else.  In almost all cases, the bottle is somehow found anyway.  (This is one of the limitations to studies that try to employ animal models of alcohol addiction.  No one has ever been able to find rats who hide bottles).

Alanon's basic message can be summed up in one phrase, "Let go and let God."  What this is supposed to mean is that co-dependents, like their alcoholics, are too willful.  They wrongfully think that they should, and are powerful enough to, take  responsibilty for the problem drinker.  Hence, they need to "let go" of this need to be powerful, and surrender their will to a higher power.  They need to "let go" and leave their alcoholic's problems for God to take care of, one way or another.

This is actually helpful advice, but not for the reasons advanced by 12 step programs.  12 step programs are based on Protestant techniques that are used to convert others to that religion.  While there is psychology involved, it is a phenomenon that would be most appropriately studied by social psychologists, and sociologists, since it involves group dynamics.

On the surface, "Let go and let God" seems to be advice to not do anything about the alcoholic's self destructive behavior, but to leave it in other hands.  The paradox, however, is that by not enabling, they are in fact doing something - something, in fact, that is completely different.  As I described in my post, The Mother Teresa Paradox, if you constantly try to protect people from themselves, you interfere with their motivation for taking responsibility for themselves.

But it goes deeper than that.  If you compulsively rescue alcoholics, then they and everyone around you will start to think that rescuing them is something you need to do.  Why, if you did not have an alcoholic around, they tend to think, you would not know what to do with yourself.  The alcoholic will not deprive you of this role, so he or she will continue to drink - just so you can keep performing it!

So, if you buy into the Alanon philosophy, and you quit trying to rescue the alcoholic, you take away his or her motivation to keep you "satisfied" in this peculiar way.  Now of course this does not guarantee that the affected alcoholics will for sure stop drinking.  They may decide to leave the relationship and find another enabler, or start destroying themselves without any help at all.

However, by changing their approach in this manner, the "co-dependent" is increasing the odds that his or her drinker will change for the better.  By not doing something, they are doing something: employing one of the most effective interpersonal strategies that exist. 

Final Destination: The Net Effect of Behavior

Continuing some of the themes of two of my previous blog posts, (Mad, Bad, Blind or Stupid from 7/27, and Is It Live or Is It Memorex: the Actor’s Paradox from 8/7 about the repetition compulsion, I would now like to discuss two other concepts. I refer to them as the Net Effect of Behavior and the Principle of Opposite Behaviors.


In the previous post, I brought up the question of why people would continue with the same disastrous behavior patterns over and over again with the exact same disastrous results if they are not mad, bad, blind or stupid. To answer this, we first must figure out exactly what the self-destructive or self-defeating behavior patterns are designed to accomplish. I previously used the example of narcissists who continues to make most other people think they are assholes. They seem to feel entitled and superior to everyone, but that may be a manifestation of just how good actors they are, because of the Actor’s Paradox.

To answer the question, one must look at the end result of their repetitive behavior. It is usually something that is absolutely obvious to everyone but them and the people who form intimate, romantic relationships with them. The spouses, lovers, etc are, I submit, co-conspirators, who continually make lame excuses for the seemingly nonsensical behavior of their partner. This idea is analogous to the AA concept of the co-dependent.

The fact that their excuses are so obviously lame – again to everyone outside of the couple – tells me that the co-conspirators are also engaged in the repetition compulsion, because I believe that they too are neither mad, bad, blind, or stupid.

The upshot, if you will, of seemingly irrational behavior is what I refer to as the behavior’s net effect. If the net effect of the narcissists' behavior is that most everyone thinks they are assholes, and if they are not mad, bad or stupid, then that must be what they are trying to accomplish. They must want, at some level, to be thought of that way.

Actually, in therapy we always find that they are in fact ambivalent about the net effect of their behavior. They seem to compulsively act in ways that produce the desired final result, but at the same time the results make them miserable, and they are well aware of that as well!

So why would anyone want to be thought of that way? Are such people masochistic? Actually, I do not really believe in masochism either, and would add masochism to the list of things that people are not, in addition to mad, bad, etc. Pain is meant to be a warning device that should in most circumstances lead to a decrease in the behavior that caused it. For pain to be pleasure in some people is not only Orwellian doublespeak, it makes no sense from the standpoint of evolution.

In order to answer the question of why compulsive repeaters act in seemingly masochistic ways, I would have to discuss the whole concept of kin selection, which I do in my books but will have to save until some later post to discuss in this blog.

First, a little more about the counterintuitive conclusions one must draw if one follows this line of thinking. In western cultures where other options are available, if a woman stays in an abusive relationship, or moves from one to another to another, at some level she is aiming to produce this result. OOH, how non politically correct of me! This does not mean, however, that it is all her fault that she is being abused, or that the abuser should get a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. It just means that it is also not true that she has nothing at all to do with her plight. Yes, of course the abuser may stalk and even kill her if she leaves, but he may also kill her if she stays. The longer she stays in the abusive relationship, the higher the risk.

I recommend listening to the lyrics of the Eminem/Rihanna song I Love the Way You Lie, a link to which is posted on my Facebook fan page.

A corollary to the Net Effect of Behavior is something I refer to as the Principle of Opposite Behaviors. One can accomplish the net effect of behavior using a wide variety of different strategies. There is always more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. Some of these strategies may on the surface appear to be completely opposite or contradictory. For instance, if you are trying to make sure that other people never give you what you need from them – the mark of counter-dependency – you can accomplish this by never asking anyone for anything. That way no one really knows what you need from them, so you never get it.

You can also accomplish the exact same net effect or end result by asking for way too much, way too often. If you are a bottomless pit who is constantly demanding the moon from others, they get angry with you. When they are angry like that, they will run from you, unless they are prone to being co-conspirators. That way, you never get what you need from these people. The exact opposite behavior produces the exact same net effect.

Well, what about the co-conspirators? Does the counter-dependent get what he or she needs from them? A third strategy to not get what you need from others is to ask for what you want from people who are unable to provide it for you: alcoholics, deadbeats, sociopaths etc. Oh, and narcissists! These people do not end up giving you what you need either; hence, once again you have accomplished what you have set out to do: not get what you need from others.

This dynamic may be what is behind a common type of couple seen by couples therapists, the narcissistic male married to the female with borderline personality disorder. But that too is a subject for another post. Watch this space.