Anger and Abandonment

It has been blustery in Chicago, the reputation as the Windy City well deserved. So blustery that at the end of March, when the weather is supposed to be mild (March comes in like a lion, out like a lamb, every second grader knows this) that we tell frail little people like mother, "Don't go out for lunch. You'll be grabbing onto your walker as the wind carries the both of you away." She goes to lunch anyway.

FD tells the story. He's in a parking lot at Home Depot, returning the cart. A bundled-up middle-aged man with a white beard is holding on tightly to a cart. If we don't hold them tightly, carts will take charge, fly off and hit parked cars. Chicagoans know this.

The man begins to curse as his hat flies off his head and hits the ground. FD, retrieving it, is rightly impressed by the long string of expletives, ef__, es___, d__, ef'in___b, b___, ef___, ef'n___, es-ef___, spewing from the man's mouth. Listening to this, he doesn't say it, but is thinking, Save your expletives for when you break a leg, or lose a house, maybe. Why waste them here?

A few years ago, two men with romantic accents came to see me in one week for anger management. It sometimes happens that two or even three new patients with similar problems come to therapy in the same week. It is as if there is something in the air or the stars are aligned in some special way. This affords the therapist the opportunity to experiment, to do her own little research study, assign homework and see what works and why, and see what doesn't and why not, because there is something of a control, having that second patient with comparable symptoms, comparable objectives.

It gets better. Both tell their narratives fluently, and both are from that continent hailing the new pope, South America. Both are reflecting upon a childhood living with extended family, not their moms or dads. Their parents left southern climes to establish themselves in this country, the United States, a land of opportunity, and called the sons to join them years later.

Years. Later. A long time to miss a parent. Without means, long distance phone service was prohibitive back then, and letter writing, well, there wasn't money for computers and email, and who had time for it anyway?

The child left behind, defenseless, odd-man out among the cousins, abused by drunk uncles and bullied at school, learned to be a very tough human being, so tough that peers eventually realized that to mess with him meant a fist fight that he relished. To beat another human being with his fists felt fantastic. This is where the phrases  sees red, has a hair-pin trigger, and Intermittent Explosive Disorder can meet as one.

Left behind.

Therapists hear about domestic violence, but usually not from the perpetrator, but the victim. The spouse or child tells the story. Here the patient is both victim and perpetrator. As an angry man, however, he doesn't hit his children or his partner, and has learned, as an adult, not to beat other adults, either, unless the circumstances clearly warrant physical violence. To him, they occasionally do, certainly if he hasn't stopped drinking yet.

We don't need advanced degrees to see where it comes from, the anger, and why the expletives become something that will need work, and surely the physical pounding, the rage, the immediate need to redistribute justice and turn things around, has to be channeled productively. One of the interventions I love, one that started with those two-in-a-week, works as follows.

The patient is told that he has to deliberately lose every argument. Every disagreement, every difference of opinion, my bad. He is to tell his partner, dispassionately, "Fine, I'm driving poorly?  I'll work on it." That kind of thing.

"Two weeks, you're an idiot for two weeks. She's the smart one. It's okay. You're really not an idiot. In your heart, in your head, you know that. You do know that, right?!" The therapist asks this in all sincerity. "Keep that in mind at all times. Nobody left because of you. Nothing to prove. Nobody thinks less of you if you are wrong. Your partner will value you more for being human."

It helps to have a partner or spouse in the therapy to reinforce the intervention, someone to look into his eyes, to tell him, "You're the smartest guy I've ever known. I love you. Love me."

And if he can't, there is that possibility, she might leave. Been there, done that.

therapydoc

Work Intimacy: At the End of the Day

People in therapy use expletives to describe their days at work or at school. Some therapists work on self-relaxation with them, others, problem solving. And many of us encourage venting to friends, parents, and spouses, partners.

When the day isn't all that good, it feels good to dump it, source the stress, purge. Others just want to forget about it. And when it is good, we might want to share that, too, brag, ramble on about the good things that happened, right away. Yet others sit and wait to be asked, and if the question never happens, well, they don't share.

It doesn't matter what we do during those waking hours. We could sell cars, drill teeth, study bugs or bring them home, whatever a person does with time, many people, even kids, like to talk at the end of the day. Then there are those of us who don't want to utter word one.

If we're lucky and our verbal skills get better and better as life gets more and more complicated,, some of us want to talk more and more. Maybe not everyone, but enough of us get into this, I can't wait to tell you place. It becomes such a drive that we resent when the other won't let us get a word in edgewise. In couple's therapy it can look like this.

YOU WON'T LET ME GET A WORD IN EDGEWISE, THAT'S WHY I DON'T TALK

another variation of Why does it always have to be all about you?

Maybe it's a basic human need to want to talk about our day, especially if it was a particularly good or bad day. I should think especially with the bad ones.

Why? When a person talks about something bad, it disappears, or at least loses some of it's drama, importance, maybe just a tiny piece, maybe all of it. You drop it off, you give it to the person you've told it to. It's a gift, of sorts.  This is the psychological equivalent of procrastinating an obsessive negative thought, or worry. It loses a bit in the process, and we need to do that, lose the negative.

Sometimes I thank people for sharing in therapy, and get funny looks sometimes, but mean it. It isn't a THANKS FOR SHARING sarcastic.  I feel it is a gift when someone trusts me enough to tell me personal things, even if one of the covert rules of the relationship is that they're paying me to listen.

When we're in a relationship—that can be any relationship—friendship, sibship, parent-child, spouse-spouse, lover-lover—boss-employee-if we have that talky-sharing thing going, if it is on-site, we're really lucky. There is another person who ostensibly is willing to listen to us (for free, even).

So if you're in a relationship, then there shouldn't be a problem. The willing ear is built in.

Take an adult married, or domestic partner situations.

A person comes home, someone's already there. One of the two begins to talk and the other is trapped.

Now, this other might have something important to say, too, or might want NO WORDS AT ALL at that moment is still working on something else, using the brain or the body in some way and can't defocus. Pretty soon they're either fighting a covert fight over who gets to talk or one of them isn't listening and wishes the noise would kindly end.

There's a lot to be said for winding down differently at the end of the day. If one of us needs to change clothes, work out, watch TV or eat in silence, then there's something to be said for that. Finding the balance, obviously, is the ticket.  But we're talking about the importance of intimacy, work intimacy, to be precise, talking about our day at the end of the day.

The key, when getting our psychological space, is not allowing so much that one of us is alone in a relationship, or absolutely wanting.  This happens in the workplace, too, between supervisors and employees. The mentoring process can be too distant, but we all have our jobs to do. Yet job satisfaction often hinges upon that relationship. Both the supervisor and the supervisee need to make time for one another.

But that isn't about feeling lonely (although a sense of abandonment might follow). That is about the yin yang of work relationships-- talking to people, yet getting the job done and doing it well.

Certainly being lonely when we're supposedly in an intimate relationship, when we're living with someone else, the whole emotional unavailability issue comes up. My cousin, the psychologist and rabbi, Peter Rosenzweig, wrote a book, Married and Alone.  Not the best feeling.

But all we're talking about here is waiting an hour before the sharing begins at the end of the day, before the discussion of what happened that day begins, what we're calling real work intimacy.  That availability generalizes to on the job intimacy, sharing work issues with those that can solve them at work. It astounds me, when a patient is discussing a work problem, when it has never been brought to the attention of people on the job who can help.

The relationship lesson your mother never taught you: Try to be second in a relationship when it comes to dialogue. It's probably impossible, of course, to always completely sublimate our need to communicate, to let a partner or friend's need to talk come first, but it is a virtual guarantee that the other will be grateful and more willing to listen to us a bit later. At some point it is worth discussing to see if the dominant position can be switched up a bit.

In a mature dyad (any two people), there is a point where it becomes a polite power struggle about who HAS to go first.

There's an old joke about social workers and why they never get home from a conference. They're all in a meeting room and there's one door, and they're all ready to file through. But the people closest to the door are arguing:

YOU FIRST.
NO, YOU FIRST
NO YOU FIRST.

It's funny, and it's about being co-dependent (some say) but it's really a nice way to be co-dependent.  Sublimating that desire to talk first is the best way to build one of the five kinds of intimacy, work or school intimacy.

How does the relationship at home matter in the work place?  Many of us assume that we are capable of close relationships, even though these are best left at home, and in many work places it is preferred, no friendships on the job.  But we are judged if we don't know about the significant people in our lives. When we're asked, maybe even on a job interview, So what does you spouse/partner/significant other/brother/sister/father/mother do/study?  We probably need to do better than I don't know.

Copyright 2006, TherapyDoc