| I then had to ask myself, ‘Aren’t I more than Tod’s wife? April 1, 2008 I have many notes to take from The Wizard of Oz… much to learn, and much to decide for myself. It explains what I’ve struggled with since I finished therapy… since I became aware my feelings and the imbalances in my relationships—since I had begun attempting to address them. I’m sad as I don’t know what’s real. Would it have been better to see my life as an unfolding of consequences …we reap what we sow? But then it is me who has broken my own heart, destroying the love of my life. Which is easier—a diminished guilt, which means a lack of control and, hence, the power to affect the future by committing to changing myself… or validation, which siphons promise for a future with the man I love? Need I answer? I’ve already accepted that I am to blame. I choose to be the problem. Sadly, though, I am the problem. And he is the problem. Regardless of my future, I must amend what is mine to amend. I have ahead of me the work of learning “to be,” an effort that must be made whether or not I have a home and a husband to return to. Recently life’s calamity has put the question to me—‘What is wrong with you that the loss of one person’s love would cause you to want to die?’ I then had to ask myself, ‘Aren’t I more than Tod’s wife? Isn’t my life about more? Aren’t I capable of coping, adapting, of being content within myself? Of starting over from scratch and finding joy in the adventure of this life that is uniquely mine to live?’ The answer to these are ‘yes’. And so, no, my life is not dependent on one man, no matter what his role in my life has been, no matter how much I love him. I am strong enough to grieve… strong enough to dream dreams that are mine… strong enough to believe in tomorrow… strong enough to pursue my own welfare… and strong enough to grow simply because it is pleasant to be free. Dorothy and The Wizard A sense of conscience is based on the ability to recognize that the rights—feeling, needs, and freedom—of others are equal to those of our own. For both Dorothy and the Wizard, this recognition is impaired by degrees, with Dorothy undervaluing her rights, and the Wizard overvaluing his. “THE WIZARD”— He’s charming and self-contained, perhaps reserved, but always self-confident and in control, frequently taking on the persona of a helper, humanitarian, expert professional, or misunderstood artist. He may show disdain for the spotlight with an aloof or indifferent demeanor, but deep inside he believes he is unable to command center stage without costume and makeup. Believing this, he abandons who he is and becomes, instead, what he is doing and who he is connected to. This outer image is projected with consistency because it’s motivated by an unconscious and all consuming drive to feel good enough. In other words, he is completely unaware of having significant problems.
The avenues of experiencing his sense of self are dependent on praise, recognition, acquiring control, power, status, and thusly, he feels entitled to special considerations. He craves attention and will accuse you of abandoning him if distractions fail to keep his emptiness at bay. Should sources for recognition outside of the relationship ebb, you must up your efforts to quell his anxiety, which, otherwise, turns to anger and self-pity. The underlying result is a discontent and feeling of deep inner unhappiness. The brittle defenses which protect him from the inner wound of his unconscious experience of self cause him to be acquisitively sensitive to the slightest possibility of criticism, being overlooked, or having his wishes dismissed.
[Passage reminded me on something he said on our 20th anniversary—“I believed that if I had tried hard enough you would think me ‘the greatest man alive.’” It struck me as ironic at the time because that’s precisely what I thought. As he was leaving me earlier that year, I reaffirmed how deeply I treasured him (on several occasions), saying that I was listening and willing to change, that he had so much grace with me. He asked why and I explained who he had been in my life. His response was to say that I didn’t know him—in other words, I apparently viewed him as a better man than he considered himself to be. Nonetheless, he continued on our 20th anniversary, explaining how I was fatally unresponsive. He said, “I believed that I had failed and yet I knew I tried my hardest and so I gave up… Why wasn’t I enough to be received by you?”]
Your experience with him will be determined in large part by how he sees you supporting or not supporting his unconscious agenda for self. He has an exhaustive need for appreciative support. othe.info
When your behavior deviates from his expectations, he often becomes upset with you as he would be if his arm or leg were no longer under his control. As your self-esteem withers and your confidence in discerning between you diminishes, you gradually concede more power and control to him. You find that your relationship operates more and more on his terms. He expects an automatic compliance with his expectations.
He may never openly show anger or display his unwavering control in tangible ways. Instead, he may cheerfully acknowledge your wishes and desires, but cite forgetfulness in his inobservance of them. You chalk it up to misunderstanding, but the pattern is consistent. Year after year the cycle repeats, and as he is not culpable of anything more than forgetfulness, you have nothing to grieve. You abandon your desires because his show of affection is on his terms. The underlying difficulties of your relationship are generally never seen by anyone else. This causes you to continually doubt yourself since you rarely receive outside validation of what you are going through.
With him, the general rules of reciprocity are not at work. He has a sense of entitlement, expecting to receive without the need of return. This is most easily observed in celebrations, though it pervades every level of exchange. Perhaps you mark his special days giving your all, but when the calendar roles around to your dates, he’s too busy, has forgotten, or claims that you didn’t leave him adequate clues. When occasionally he celebrates someone other than yourself, it’s your turn to be found dumb. Do you approach him with your petty feelings? He won’t reflect on the investments you’ve made on his behalf over the years, nor will he have empathy for how you’re feeling. He hears only criticism; your attempt to discuss your needs is an attack. The offense is your doing, causing you, also, to question why you raised the subject.
You will remember that his need for attention, power, etc., is primarily an avenue of experiencing himself as self. Therefore, money is frequently experienced as a self-object, meaning that for all practical purposes it’s as important to him as an arm or a leg. This is not to say that he doesn’t shower others with attention, gifts, or favors. Indeed, he may, but the ultimate goal is usually to foster a certain image or to earn recognition. You, of course, would like to believe you received the gift because you are cared for and valued, but if the status he expected to acquire is insufficient, he will become angry and complain that he ‘can’t earn your love’. He may accuse you of requiring him to pursue what’s been made unattainable to him. The message, then, that comes with the gift is that you are defective.
Because he does not truly recognize his needs, preferences, and rights, he requires you to lose yours. If you diverge from his expectations to venture towards self-care, he may openly encourage you, depending on the inarguable validity of your situation, but his encouragement is a temporal statement of his image of himself. Rather than connecting with his obscure agenda, he will hint at his discomfort with contempt towards you. If this contempt should be addressed and/or you go forward with your self-care, he will attribute the discrepancy between his words and actions to a convincing default or lack on your part. Intimidated by his history of consequences, you begin to defer to him, preferring the harmony of conciliatory behaviors to the fullness of living with an internal harmony that is yours alone. Inevitably, his authority in the relationship renders you unable to take care of your needs. Your increasing starvation for a sign of love and acceptance likewise contributes to your inability to act and make decisions that will benefit you.
In other conflicting desires, he may resort to the power differential in deciding the matter between you, drawing authority from his stature, particularly his money, which is not jointly yours. He holds the reins of ‘administration’… decisions large and small, the wallet, and validation for your individual and joint emotional experiences. The result of being subjected to this treatment becomes an inability to act of your own behalf. Particularly, if you should have the opportunity to make a monetary decision, you will find yourself an emotional hostage, fearing the denial of his approval even if the decision had been made for his pleasure or gain. Your self-esteem has waned to the degree that you’re uncertain of your rights. Neither of you believe yourselves to be equal. (the LA Trip)
When you fail to provide sufficient admiration and attention, he will invariably employ a number of defense mechanisms, such as the double-bind: You are too strong, you are too needy, etc.. Conflicting grievances strip you of logic and either way, you fall short and have caused his pain. Another example would be to admonish you for not communicating your thoughts and feelings; then, when you do, meeting them with fault-finding and outraged that you could think such things. He does not see his double standard, nor does he see his devaluing of you. He insists, in fact, that it’s the other way around, that you devalue him, that in your world he is invisible. To quiet his discontent requires excessive attention and deference.
His unexpected criticism and cold detachment cause you to do some soul searching. You appeal to him to look at his behavior, hoping he will see and acknowledge his demeaning treatment, but his defenses prevent much awareness for his deeper feelings as well as the feelings his behavior evokes in others. At times, you are incredulous that he seems so oblivious to your increasing hurt and estrangement from him. When you attempt to talk about it, he accuses you of neglecting him and his needs—of doing the very things he has been doing. In this, he successfully creates an impasse, barricading himself behind a self-erected wall designed to protect his dimmed sense of self.
One of his most powerful abilities is the way he projects the illusion that his logic and analysis are airtight as he astutely points out your weaknesses and problems. Before you realize it, your back is to the wall trying to defend yourself. Perhaps you lose control routinely, perhaps you’ve held out for months on end. When your discussions escalate into your loss of control, he will label you as ‘hysterical’, a buzzword used to diminish the validity of your perspective and to tip the scales in favor of his agenda. When you reflect on your behavior, you shrink back in shame. These episodes intensify your fear that you are, indeed, substantially without the wholeness required for individual and relational health. His capacity to appear cool and in control reinforces the appearance of his superior faculty for ‘objective truth,’ and you respond by further abdicating your needs and feelings and the boundaries that define you.
He finds fault with you as he becomes frustrated and pressured by your need of him, and will escape, sequestering himself in work responsibilities, justifying these escapes with regular rebukes of your ‘neediness’ and/or unrealistic or unfair expectations. These complaints trigger deep feelings of inadequacy in you. Uncertainty of where you stand with him, you feel disempowered and fear further confrontation. For a time, you each fortify your defense strategies: he demands more, and you sacrifice more as you try to please him. Your quarrels and escalating fights are most likely generating underlying feelings of fear and inadequacy in both of you. It is here where the painful erosion of your relationship becomes evident to you, though it is hidden from the outside world, family, and friends.
In the aftermath of a crisis, he will have extreme resentment towards you, often refusing to speak about the incident. He may shut you out or leave the relationship entirely. These dramatic episodes demonstrate his inability to acknowledge you as a person with independent feelings and needs and rights equal to his own. He can see only one side of your interactions—his. Unable to recognize the impact of his behavior creates a disorienting confusion for you. His ability to project his problems on you is so powerful you have come to believe you are the cause of both his and your unhappiness. With your self-esteem in full retreat, you probably feel angry, guilty, self-doubting, longing for his acceptance, and the return of the role you played in his life, regardless of its cost to you.
In an ironic twist, he projects some form of his inabilities on you, accusing you, perhaps, of not being understanding, emotionally generous, or supportive. Although you may think you can see through such false statements, your actions to defend yourself only increase your sensitivity to his accusations. After all, giving to and caring for others may be a primary strength, therefore an important source of self-esteem. In an effort to prove him wrong, you strive harder and harder to be giving and supportive.
Regardless of the pain you feel, you concede to his claims, hoping to open a door to negotiation. When this does not happen, you internalize his assessments, taking to heart what you know does not stand up to reason. Despite your show of effort, ownership, or compromise, the breach in your relationship is no closer to being breached. Ask yourself: If what he claims actually represented his grievances, wouldn’t he respond to your readiness to meet him in his pain. Unfortunately, the source of his pain is as unclear to him as it is to you, and a moving target is hard to hit.
His profound denial of the emotional reality of others prevents him not only from recognizing your attempts to signal your discouragement and isolation, but also from being able to recall your conversations in future references. He simply will not remember the contents of such discussions. This is particularly upsetting when you might have felt that you finally got through to him, making positive progress towards your mutual enjoyment of each other.
The first stage is reckoning. You see, though you probably were unable to believe without a therapist or a text similar to this one, which has shed light on the inexplicable occurrences that have been baffling you. Your confusion shifts to a new source of shock—the inherent imbalance in your relationship, an imbalance that has always been there, though this crisis in his passage has brought it to the forefront of your reality. Still, you vacillate with uncertainty about who is responsible—you for not communicating clearly, or him for being unable to comprehend.
The second stage is accommodation. You have learned who is in control and you negotiate your way around the land mines of his critical attacks by avoiding interaction and refraining to communicate what you fear will cause conflict. Perhaps the tempest of his behaviors calm when you back off and lowered your expectations of the relationship. Your feelings probably fluctuate between intense longing for him and resentment that the relationship has become one-sided.
The codependent side of this relationship brings complementary defenses to the situation, causing you to abandon your responsibility to assert your needs as equal. You vacillate between a pattern of conceding and releasing your hurt in emotional outbursts. The latter episodes are followed by feelings of despair and humiliation as he characterizes you as hysterical. Perhaps you buy into this notion after many exhausting scenes of escalated fighting.
The Wizard externalizes his flaws outside of himself and defends against the self-reflection that would develop empathy requiring him to give away what is his. Similarly, Dorothy is the person who internalizes the flaws of others onto herself and defends against recognizing her need to develop self-assertion and self-care. While the Wizard has created Oz, a place where he can reign, Dorothy forever seeks the love and security of home, an intimate circle to which she can belong. In this dichotomy of complementary drives, Dorothy was fated to become entangled with the illusions of Oz. Unless she discovers that he is an imposter and finds the courage to confront him, she will never discover that she has always had the power to be home. YOU HIM · Wants Approval · Focused on the needs of others · Gifts of generosity and empathy · Wants Admiration · Focused on the needs of self · Gifts of leadership and achievement · Cannot take a stand for self or assert her needs and feelings · Invests trust and resources too easily · Fear Driven: represses feelings of anger, unworthiness, fear of abandonment · Cannot identify feelings to know his inner truth, and empathize with others’ feelings · Suspicious of others, withholds resources · Anger Driven: represses feelings of inadequacy and fear of humiliation RELATIONSHIP CLUES— · Look at the power differential, which should be 50:50, maybe 60:40. If you don’t have equal power in a relationship, there’s a problem. · Look at ownership of difficulties. Is he able to acknowledge wrong doing and its consequences? · Can he tolerate anything perceived as criticism or oversight? · Does his behavioral empathy reflect his verbal empathy?* · Do his needs and wishes require martyr-like concessions to stave off dissatisfaction? · Are you in the primary giving position?
Ask yourself, “What do I get from this relationship? What self-initiated expressions communicate his love to me? In what ways does he give to me? Does he respond to the things I desire or need? If you cite concept rather than concrete, you are rationalizing his behavior and idealizing the relationship. Your need-tolerance allows you to substitute reality with ideals.
Pain & Empathy*
In a classical example of pain, such as grabbing a hot spoon handle, the burning pain shoots into temperature receptors on your skin, through nerves, up your spine and into your brain. Some regions of your brain process information such as where the pain comes from and how hot the spoon really was. Other regions of the brain process how unpleasant you felt the pain to be. Thus, how much the burn hurts and how bothersome this pain is differs for each situation and depends, among other things, on what else is going on in your head and the environment. If you are involved in a serious car accident, your survival system is so busy that you hardly feel any pain even though you are severely injured. If, however, you’ve been exposed to someone with chicken pox, the slightest sensation on your skin may feel like the itching pain you are expecting. Researchers have found that empathy activates the same regions of the brain that process these context-dependent aspects of pain, including the anterior insula and anterior cingulate. Though bypassing the sensory receptors, knowing your loved one is in pain excites the affective pain network, thereby mediating the empathic response. Empathy truly is experiencing someone’s pain as your own.
Derived from the Greek word meaning ‘physical affection’, empathy is more than a verbal acknowledgement of another person’s outlook or emotions. It is an affective response , meaning, to empathize is to physically respond or to share. A person does not empathize in words or even in emotions unless he actively shares what he has with one who has not…. In feeling what others feel, we empathize when we do for them what we would do for ourselves if we had the means to ease our pain or remedy our condition
Eventually, Dorothy awakens to a life without color, a life that seemed so promising on the surface, yet hard and cold inside—a life without vitality and nourishment. Her journey through Oz begins as she is knocked unconscious in a storm and wakes in her bed with no awareness of how she got there. A wonderful metaphor for the unconscious state of early adult life, the goal for Dorothy and us is to find our way home to claim our true selves. Agonizing over which road to take, Dorothy encounters one set of difficulties after another and sets her hopes on the grand illusion of Oz. Her innocence and lack of vigilance cause her one delay after another, and she becomes more vulnerable to the dangers of evil doers. She is as they say—“an easy mark.” “DOROTHY”— You read the introduction of this book and wondered if it was you who is the Wizard, and he the Dorothy. That’s an almost certain indication that this book was written for you and not about you. Like Dorothy who believes that the Wizard is the only one who can help her, you try harder and harder to please your partner. Your involvement is characterized by an ever-increasing effort to please and gain approval, accompanied with an ever-decreasing ability to validate your perceptions of reality. You demonstrate a pattern of tolerant, forgiving passivity and list his “exceptional husband” qualities to anyone who will listen, even in marriage counseling when he recounts the crime scene where his true self was murdered by you.
If you get past your own self-doubt about who contributes what to the problems, you may simply be convinced that no one will believe you, not even a therapist.
Children require nurture to feel positively about themselves, but on the continuum of nurture and neglect, your childhood was spent somewhere in the range of survival. You may have tried to ask for nurture or communicate your needs in response to the environment, but you were overcome by those who were unable or unwilling to provide for you. Essentially, you were told that your feelings were wrong. You learned, then, to distrust your perceptions.
Because you could not trust your perceptions, you abandoned yourself and developed a substantial tolerance for not getting your needs met. Still unable to trust your perceptions, you question what is fair and are unable to discern with confidence. Fearing to err, which you assume would be on your behalf, you’ve built in a buffer, a skewed sense of justice which governs your reality and allocates resources unevenly, somewhere between 70:30 and 95:5 in the other party’s interest.
It is difficult for you to feel equally deserving in the natural exchanges of support, attention, and priority regarding your needs. Every human being has needs, however. Either you try to suppress yours, denying their fulfillment by denying they exist and are so successful that you idealize your partner and relationship; or you are met with a terrific anxiety as you attempt to assert what you need. When your partner challenges your perceptions, you are unable to maintain self-trust and confidence. His confrontation compounds your insecurity with its objections, corrections, accusations, false claims, and minimizations, thus invalidating you when you made yourself vulnerable. The groundwork has been laid for you to internalize responsibility for the conflict, leaving you to believe on some level that you got what you deserved.
Venturing into negotiations for yourself is the most terrifying necessity of life, one that you dread and put off as far as humanly possible. You know, though, that these painful encounters are inevitable in that a person can only deny their needs for so long. You’re aware of the conflict that awaits you if you attempt to bridge the gap, aware of your apprehension, and are probably even aware of your tendency to abandon yourself mid-ordeal. The potential anxiety of this dynamic is boundless. With the deck persistently stacked against you, even should you suppress your needs, you are never free of the underlying stress and disillusionment that nag at the edges of your consciousness, reinforcing your lesser position and requiring optimum energy to be excellent, autonomous, and to gloss over the callousness of your partner so you can live in an idealized world with an idealized version of him.
Survival dictates that we tend to our needs, and built within our humanity is the propensity to hope. It is a defense mechanism that rallies a fragile and fleeting veneer of faith. For an instant you believe with an adequate dose of confidence that enables you to speak. Nonetheless, your fear is palpable. You stumble on yourself and his ego sounds an inner alarm. He counters defensively and your composure crumbles. The strain is too great. Unconsciously, you attempt to withdraw from the reality you put on the table. You close your eyes and your body becomes visibly rigid. It’s obvious to both of you—you each know who is the stronger of the two and you each feel a twang of disdain for the weaker. Disgusted with yourself, you ask why—what is wrong with me?—though the words that come out of your mouth ask him why he can’t be more reasonable. He then picks up the table and spins it like a basketball on the tip of his finger; you are without rhyme or reason, you are insensitive, opinionate, ill-informed, selfish, and without restraint. You are not only wrong, but incessantly wrong, the cause of much unhappiness. And just when you think he is done, he tells you how you have made him to feel—that he is without rhyme or reason, insensitive, not only wrong, but incessantly wrong. In the end, there is one thing you both agree on, that you are hopelessly to blame.
What is wrong with you? Episodes like this lead into the next attempt you will make. A shot of hope compels you, though your lack of rights and skills has been reinforced, and your fear heightened. Your composure is all the readier to crumble. The partner you idealize is not allowing you to heal and grow.
Choking in the vice of conflict, a battle that is every bit as internal as it is external, and all the while you attempt to cope, the future seeps into your awareness, a future where you will forever lack the ability to be heard. When it becomes evident that you will not escape, your awareness shuts down. His strength rises in the presence of your diminished capacity, and scorning your persistence, he states his biases and comes in for the kill. Although he may appear ever so collected, he is as much in his primitive brain as you are in yours. This is not an intra-species encounter, but the meeting of predator and prey. While he is analogous to a stealthy panther, you are a bird with a broken wing. You put forth a fair amount of noise, but you lack the ability to save yourself. Subsequently, when all is said and done, you both distance yourselves from the eruption with a shared understanding—that his credibility stands and yours does not. While it may be difficult for you to believe that you could have overcome this deeply entrenched pattern in a parallel universe, the truth is that you chose a partner based on the role you played in your family of origin. It is no accident that he tells you your feelings are wrong, causing you to distrust your perceptions and to abandon yourself. Nor is it a wonder that you are unaware, as your tolerance for not getting your needs met is as formidable as ever. If you do not remove yourself from this cycle and find alternate and acceptable ways to meet you needs, you will be reduced by the ravages of anxiety. Ultimately, you will resemble less of an individual and more of a hollow shell.
You must look at your world with an unbiased eye for the concrete facts that evidence the path you are on. Does your life appear like a lifeboat with you afloat in a sea of self-imposed isolation, discarding the relics of your past vibrant self? This is not self-care, but the resigned existence of one who has abandoned her identity and retreated from the possibilities of further pain. Are you unable to affect the problem and unable to leave the relationship?
Your codependent defenses cause a process of self-reflection as you try to continually reassess what you might be doing to create such painful disruptions in the relationship, or how to satisfy or fix your partner. You will notice, though, that this self-reflection consists of ruminations about what your partner might be thinking, often trying to figure out how he thinks and feels, rather than reflecting on your own beliefs and desires. The ongoing depravation of your emotional needs will erode your energy and lead to deeper and deeper depths of depression. Unless you take responsibility for your own defensive passivity, your partner will not take responsibility for his defensive self-centeredness. Your history together has been a honed mutual dependence, a continual reinforcement of each other’s primary defenses. But when you commit to taking responsibility to deal with your passive dynamics and the wound to your own sense of self, your increasing ability to stand up for yourself will surface his willingness and/ or capacity to address his problems.
You must have the courage to interrupt the pattern and expose the charade by claiming the right to a life of authenticity. (And isn’t that where this round of trouble started…with my post-therapy resolutions? In 2003, when I look back at my journal, I see that it was my return to work that interrupted the pattern that lead to our downward spiral.)
WHERE DO YOU GO FROM HERE— · Your capacity to recognize the powerful dynamics of the wizard and to hold your own in the labyrinth of his self-defenses is the first step towards healing and empowering yourself in these relationships. · <
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