Hellobee

Hello friends! It feels great to be writing here again.  I’m looking forward to catching up with everyone!  I thought I’d start back with a few reviews of books that have meant the world to me.

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while now, but a recent anonymous (and amazing, gut-wrenching) post about divorce motivated me to finally share about my own experience working on my marriage, thanks in part to a wonderful book: Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger.  I’m so enthusiastic about this book that I’ve been giving copies to family members, and I wanted to share it here for anyone who is not familiar with Lerner’s work.

But before I dig into this review, let me back up a bit and explain where I’ve been for the last year, and why I was looking for some help in my marriage. About a year ago, I was struggling. My son was two years old, but I was still having difficulty adjusting to my not-so-new role as a stay at home parent. In 2014 I also suffered a miscarriage. Although I wasn’t sure what would help me, I decided to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall in the hopes that something would stick. I curbed my social media use (so I wouldn’t be bombarded with other people’s highlights while I worked in the cutting room), put my son in daycare, started graduate school, went back to work part-time, and downsized our home. These changes did me a world of good. A few months into this new normal, I fell pregnant. And though I had done a ton of emotional work since my last pregnancy, I was anxious that the birth of my second son would cause many of my issues to resurface. This time I vowed not to let my sadness and anger go unchecked.

In spite of these improvements, one part of my life went chronically underaddressed: my marriage. Although I was comfortable taking proactive steps to improve my career, my self-esteem, and my relationship with my kids, I let my marriage go untended. The biggest problem was that we could never come to consensus on anything.  We were divided about the division of chores and shared standards of cleanliness, and how to make time for our family of four while also staying connected to our extended family. We had a difficult time prioritizing our competing interests: his full-time work vs. my full-time school and part-time work (it didn’t help that after years of playing the support spouse, I had built up a tremendous amount of resentment around this issue). We debated fruitlessly about future plans. Even little matters–birthday parties, weekend plans– left us stuck on opposing sides. No matter how much we talked about these issues, we never came to any conclusions. Planning our lives together felt like a struggle instead of a pleasure.

Once I was back at home full-time with our second child, the divisions between us grew. As a family of four we were great, but as a couple we were flatlining. I decided to be proactive. A few weeks later, reeling after anothing fruitless discussion, I googled around for advice. I saw The Dance of Anger recommended on a MetaFilter page, and ordered it on a whim. What I read inside made my jaw drop. It completely described my life with my husband and extended family!

The Dance of Anger is all about changing the patterns in relationships. The book explains why relationships are circular dances, with each person playing a part to which the other responds. This means that when one person changes the dance, the other person in the relationship is likely to change as well. And although we cannot predict how a person might change, we can maximize the opportunity for the best possible changes.

For example, my husband and I were stuck in the classic “pursurer/distancer” dance. This is a common cycle in relationships.  I would get anxious about an issue, bring it up to my husband, and be surprised when his interest in the subject didn’t match mine. This would lead me to believe that he didn’t care. I would get angry and he would respond by being defensive. We would assign blame to each other, and the conversation would peter out with no consensus reached.

What Lerner taught me was that I manage anxiety by pursuing issues, and my husband manages them via avoidance. The extent to which I pursued any issue in our family life– from big decisions to chores– directly mirrored the extent to which he did not focus on them himself. In effect, by spending so much energy on these issues, I was giving my husband an out. Lerner talks about “overfunctioners” and “underfunctioners.” I was overfunctioning in the area of home life planning, and as a result my husband was underfunctioning in this area.

Lerner taught me was that I was overfunctioning in order to mask a serious problem: I had problems in my own life that I needed to manage. I still waver on key issues, like when I want to go back to work now that my second son is here, or if I am open to having more children. I also have a hard time being assertive with my family. Putting effort into other things — like planning birthday parties, or worrying about kindergarten when my son is only two — allowed me to divert energy away from these more pressing, difficult questions.

What Lerner suggests is for pursuers to give these little issues up to our underfunctioning partner and focus that extra energy inward. For example, when I’d get frustrated about the division of chores in our home, Lerner would suggest that I articulate a bottom line and stick to it. For us, that meant jointly defining who did what chores and leaving each other to do them, no nagging allowed, no matter how high the dishes (his chore) piled or how deep the laundry (my chore) accumulated. Instead of getting frustrated about chores, I should take that energy and funnel it into something that truly matters to me, like planning the new semester, or reaching out to friends. For me, the thing has been to embrace a sort of selfishness, to assert my needs and to act on them. One small step for me was letting the kitchen stay messy the same day my mother-in-law was scheduled to babysit at our home. My husband hadn’t had the chance to do the dishes that day, but instead of swooping in, I left them alone. I’m very sensitive to how I’m perceived as a homemaker, so this small thing was a big change for me. My mother-in-law watched my little one and I had a great time going swimming with my toddler. Without my intrusion, my husband has since become an expert kitchen cleaner! And I know for certain that nowadays he would rather clean the kitchen than endure another long discussion about the division of labor in our home.

In addition to articulating bottom lines and stopping overfunctioning, I have also stopped pursuing my husband in conversation, especially on touchy personal subjects. This proved to be the most difficult and most impactful change I’ve made in my marriage. I have always heard that the trick to managing distancers is to give them space, but I’ve always resented that idea. Why, I thought,  does my husband deserve space when I’m mired in the details? I’ve always relied on my husband as a sounding board, even though he doesn’t prefer to “talk through” problems. Lerner explains how to break up this dance so that intimacy increases in the relationship. Her book does a great job of affirming both the pursuer and the distancer; she does not judge the pursuer, or call them “needy” or “Type A.” Her perspective is firmly and refreshingly feminist (this could be because the book is twenty years old and hails from a time when the word “feminist” was not as polemic). Lerner isn’t afraid to write from a feminist perspective. Instead of blaming women for being too pushy, or men for being cold, she explains that pursuing and distancing are both ways of managing anxiety, and that these roles are reinforced through gender norms. Basically, both my husband and I were stressed about the same issue, but are managing it in completely different ways, likely due to social influences.

It was such a big step the first time I called my husband one frustrating afternoon to tell him that I needed to leave the house that evening for a breather, and that I needed him to watch the kids during that time. Usually I would have vented to him about how awful my day had been the moment he walked in the door, and would have gotten an unsatisfying response. But instead I headed to the park with a diet coke and a journal, and took my frustration out on its pages. After a few months of this I’m starting to get back in touch with my introverted side. I try not to reach out to my husband for vents. I’ve found that most of my problems are ones he cannot really help me to solve anyway. Instead of engaging him on these subjects, I reached out to my personal therapist.

To my amazement, my new quiet personality quickly had a positive affect on my marriage. My husband even asked me to start initiating conversations again, because he realized that he appreciates my aggressive attitude (that is, until I spin off into ultra-anxiety mode). In spite of this, I still work hard not to pursue. I wanted to change our dance not only to improve our relationship, but to make myself more emotionally self-sufficient. Pursuing someone else for emotional security was draining. Plus, since I’m not pursuing my husband in conversation all that much anymore, we have the emotional freedom necessary to meet each other in new ways. We spend more quality time learning about each other and not talking about our kids, weekend plans, or the five year plan  I now seek him out for advice on how to let the little details go, and find myself thinking: “would my husband let himself get so worked up over something so minor?”

There is more to Lerner’s book than just the dance between distancer and pursuer. Lerner also discusses how we can distance in one relationship while pursuing in another; for example, the extent to which I pursue my husband is mirrored by the ways I put distance between myself and my parents. She also has a valuable chapter on how we bring other people into conflicts in relationships; for example, how partners fight about in-laws, or childcare, etc., as a way of deflecting conflict that exists between the two of them. Truly this book is a treasure.

After a few months of following the advice in this book, I can say that all of my relationships– certainly my marriage, but also my relationship with family– have improved. But I also know now that no “fix” can ever work long-term. When left unchecked, my husband and I slip back into old dances. Every day I have to adapt for what I know about our relationship.  Every time I find myself pursuing my husband in a negative way, I have to stop and ask myself if there’s a better way to approach this, or if I’m deflecting energy away from a larger problem that is mine to solve. Every day I have to ask myself what I need to be the happiest possible person, so that I can be the best possible partner. I’m trying to embrace this as a lifelong struggle. Or perhaps learning opportunity is a better way to term it!

What is your favorite book about relationships?