Living the Truth: Marriage & Love Stories

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Maggie's Story

Nothing in the human psyche is more powerful than the desire to be loved. And at no time is that desire stronger than in childhood.

One of my patients, a thirty-seven-year-old single woman named Maggie is a good example. She came to see me after losing her job as an executive at a clothing company barely a year after being hired. She'd never been fired before and said she felt "humiliated." The stress of starting a job search with a black mark on her resume, she said, was keeping her up at night and preventing her from concentrating during the day. Her migraines, which she hadn't had since she was a teenager, were back.

"It would be one thing if I'd hated this woman from Day One," Maggie said of her boss Elizabeth. "But I liked her. I trusted her. And she totally used me." She paused. "I thought I knew people. I was really stupid."

Maggie looked genuinely hurt. "How did she 'use' you?" I asked.

"I left a really, really good job at my last company because she recruited me. She was always telling me at trade shows how talented I was and how she'd love to work with me. Then she made me an offer. I took it. I poured my whole heart into her company. I definitely put in more time than I ever had before--eighty, ninety hours a week, traveling to Europe and China and everywhere else. It was non-stop for thirteen months. And then all of a sudden she's like, 'This isn't working out."

"Did she say why?"

"Ridiculous stuff," Maggie said. "My attitude. Shipping glitches, which I had zero control over." She paused. "From what I hear, this is just Elizabeth's thing. It happened to two other people who had the job before me. One lasted a year, the other one a year-and-a-half. She gets nervous someone will take over or something."

"When did you find out about these other people?" I asked.

"People at the company told me before I signed on," she said. "I just thought it would be different with me."

"Why?"

"She said they acted like landing the job meant they didn't have to be hands-on, anymore--like they could just sit back and delegate. And I pride myself on never asking anyone who works under me to do more than I do. Plus, I had this connection with her. Or I thought I did."

"What sort of connection was that?" I asked.

"She seemed to want to help me get to the next level," Maggie said. "I've never worked directly for a woman before. I've always thought it would be the best situation for me." She sighed. "Dumb."

"Not dumb," I assured her. "You wanted a mentor."

She shrugged. "I've just never felt completely comfortable with the men I've worked for. Maybe it's the glass ceiling thing. Or maybe it's me. I don't know. It's been hard for me to trust men."

"Why is that?"

"Because my dad was an asshole."

That sounded pretty straightforward. "How so?"

"The usual way," she said. "He screwed around on my mother."

"Did they divorce?"

"When I was eleven. But that was after putting my mother through hell for years."

"You knew about your dad's infidelity?" I asked.

"My mother and I don't keep secrets from one another."

"She told you?"

"I knew the minute she did. I remember her screaming at him that he couldn't come to my seventh birthday party because she'd found a girl's number in his pocket." She smiled. "Sandra."

"Why are you smiling?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I just think it's funny I never forgot her name. The others are a blur."

The fact that Maggie had never forgotten the name of her father's first known lover isn't funny at all, of course. "You're not angry about what happened?" I asked.

Her smile disappeared. "At him, nobody else. I hardly speak to him."

That made sense. At that age, Maggie would have been attached to her father in complex ways, including (at least according to Sigmund Freud) unconscious fantasies about becoming the sole focus of her father's affections, in place of her mother. The fact that she had had to acknowledge, at the age of seven, that her father was apparently passionate about a third woman--a stranger--would have made her feel jealous and enraged.

But Maggie's words told me more than that. She seemed intent on my hearing that she was angry "only at" her father. And that didn't make sense to me. It felt like a barrier she was constructing to keep herself--and me--from the truth. After all, two people had hurt Maggie: Her father had done it by being careless and callous enough to disclose his sexual indiscretions. Her mother had done it by sharing highly charged information with Maggie when she was clearly incapable of understanding it. From the moment her mother learned of her father's infidelity, she had apparently used Maggie as a pawn to get back at him, barring him from showing up at her seventh birthday party.

But Maggie couldn't have allowed herself to feel angry at both her parents. That would have made her feel too alone. Knowing that her father could leave for another woman, she would have needed to believe that someone would protect and love her forever. She turned to her mother, even though it didn't sound to me like her mother had earned her confidence.

"You're very close with your mom?" I asked.

"She's my best friend," Maggie said. "We've been through everything together."

It turned out, in fact, that Maggie had signed on with her mother for war after war. There were her father's repeated infidelities. There was her parents' divorce. Then there were the half-dozen or so tumultuous romances her mother suffered through, each of them ending with the discovery that her boyfriend was either married or addicted to drugs or seeing other women.

In turn, Maggie's mom had come to her defense each of the times Maggie chose a man "unworthy" of her trust or affection. And that happened a lot. Even at work her male bosses always seemed to be egotists, predators, or frauds. And her mother was always there, a shoulder to cry on.

I knew that challenging Maggie's belief that her mother was beyond reproach would connect her with early and intense feelings of fear and betrayal. I would be asking her to feel all the pain she would have felt at seven had she admitted to herself that neither her father nor her mother was able to put her first, that she wasn't that well-loved by anyone. To a child, that would have felt like the whole world could fall apart at any time, that her very survival was in question. And part of Maggie was still that child.

I also knew, though, that Maggie had come to therapy after her female employer disappointed her. And she had come to me--a man--for help. That told me she might be ready to abandon the gender stereotypes and family myths that were keeping her from seeing the true nature of her predicament as a child--and moving beyond it.

"Why wasn't your mother more careful to keep what she found out about your father to herself?" I asked Maggie during our next session.

She squinted at me in disbelief. "You're joking, right?"

"Not at all."

She stood up. "This is ridiculous. How can you be taking his side?"

"I'm not," I said. "I'm taking yours."

She started toward the door.

I wanted to make sure Maggie understood that I believed her leaving would be a form of denial. "You can't avoid the truth forever," I said.

She turned back to me. "It was her job to cover for him?" she seethed.

"That's not what I'm saying," I said gently. I motioned toward Maggie's seat, hoping she'd take it again.

She didn't move.

"It was her job to protect your relationship with him, even after he violated theirs," I said.

"There was nothing to protect."

"Maybe not," I allowed. I paused. "Do you remember anything about your dad from when you were, say, five or six?"

"Nothing good," she said.

I nodded, but stayed silent. Several seconds passed.

"What are you getting at?" Maggie asked. "I mean, he took me to the park and stuff. What father doesn't? But when it came to ..."

Plenty of fathers don't. "What sort of park?" I asked.

"A park. I don't know. It wasn't anything special. It had this really high slide and swings and rides, or whatever."

"What did you like to do there?"

That was a simple question, but it opened up memories that Maggie had shut down in order to maintain a version of her life story that was partly fiction: that her father was the enemy and her mother was her only ally.

She rolled her eyes. "I don't know why this matters."

"Tell me, anyhow."

She sighed. "The slide, okay? You went up a ladder that must have had about twenty steps and . . ." She stopped herself. "What does this have to do with . . .?"

I thought of my own daughter, six years old at the time. I could picture her at the top of a slide like the one Maggie had described, half-excited, half-petrified. "Did he tell you you'd be alright sliding down?" I asked Maggie. "Did he wait for you at the bottom?"

She just looked at me. Her eyes filled with tears. She wiped them, then shook her head. "Why are you doing this?"

I pressed forward. "What else did you two do together?"

A tear rolled down Maggie's cheek. "He drove me to school every day."

"Did you like that?"

Another tear. "Stop," Maggie said. She finally sat down.

I did stop, but her tears didn't--for half a minute, maybe more.

During our next meeting I pressed Maggie to remember more of the good times she had had with her father. I also started helping her more realistically evaluate her mother's behavior. "Did you think your mom had bad luck choosing men?" I asked. "Or bad judgment?"

"How was she supposed to know if some guy was a loser?"

"Guy after guy?"

"She's supposed to be a mind-reader?"

"No, just a mother. And that means being careful who she includes in her daughter's life."

Maggie looked me straight in the eye, as if deciding whether she could really trust me. "I guess I would have been more careful if I were her," she said, finally, just above a whisper.

It didn't take more than a few hours for Maggie to make the connection between her mother having selected one damaged man after another and her own habit of doing the same. Not only was she deprived of the love of her father from a young age, she never learned how to include a worthy man in her life.

I remembered Maggie telling me her reasoning for thinking that a female employer would be the right fit for her. I've just never felt really comfortable with the men I've worked for.

Is that any wonder? Having seen her father unmasked as a philanderer and then portrayed as a pure scoundrel, then having witnessed the predictable results of her mother continuing to favor broken, unreliable men, was there any chance that Maggie would come to any conclusion other than that all men were untrustworthy, even her male employers? Why would she have ever looked to one of them for nurturance or mentoring?

I didn't even have to ask Maggie the question most directly related to her having misjudged the character of the woman who hired her away from her prior job, encouraged her to work 90 hours a week, then summarily fired her, apparently for no good reason. Maggie asked that question herself. "You know, I never even considered believing that Elizabeth had fired two other people for no reason. Do you think," she wondered aloud, "that wanting to see my mother as perfect meant I couldn't really see Elizabeth for who she was?"

The key word there was couldn't. Maggie couldn't let herself see the truth about Elizabeth because it was linked to core truths she was denying about her mother. "It feels to me like you wanted very badly to believe a woman would protect and nurture you, because that's what you wanted to believe as a little girl."

The unconscious life story link between Maggie's childhood and adulthood was the reason her being fired had kept her up at night, rekindled her migraines, stolen her concentration, and made her feel humiliated.

Now, as an adult, Maggie could finally afford to see that truth, to feel it and to stop limiting herself by trying to avoid it.

She stopped thinking of her mother as her only friend and beyond reproach and began seeing her as a complex person with both strengths and weaknesses. And while that caused a temporary rift in their relationship, it made it real and laid the foundation for it to grow in even more honest directions in the future.

Maggie's next position was as a vice president at a clothing company with a man at the helm. But unlike every other man she had worked for, she checked his reputation for integrity extensively before signing on. She told him she was looking for more than a job, that she wanted a mentor. She guarded against her predictable tendency (rooted in her childhood experiences) to write him off as duplicitous, insincere, or arrogant. And she found what she would have sworn didn't exist in the world: a man who actually ended up coming through for her.

Her luck in romance eventually changed, too. Knowing that she might unconsciously choose men with character flaws (because they were the kind of men she had watched her mother date) she intentionally slowed down her next few relationships until she could feel more certain she was with someone reliable--or she'd walk away. She actually avoided one man who was very handsome and had led a very exciting life (and had been married twice before) because, as she put it, "I'm mesmerized by trouble--at the beginning. Later on, it's a nightmare." And she met someone who initially bored her, but eventually won her heart by being passionate, yet trustworthy.

The stereotypes of her father and mother that Maggie had clung to like a life raft as a child had become an anchor weighing her down in adulthood. Now, having let go of them, far from drowning, she found herself free. Back to top

Nicole's Story

Four months before she came to see me, Nicole, 46, would have said her life was very nearly perfect. She had been married nineteen years and had a healthy daughter, 17, and son, 14. She worked part-time as the office coordinator for her husband Grant, a successful realtor. She was in close touch with her sister, 40, and both her parents. She had friends, a dog, two cats, and a Volvo SUV.

Sure, she sometimes wondered whether drinking a glass of wine or two to get to sleep could be a problem, but plenty of people didn't sleep well and plenty of people enjoyed their wine. There was also the way she went on shopping sprees to lift her mood when she felt down for more than a day or two, but a few extra dresses or pairs of shoes didn't seem like the end of the world. Even the fact that she didn't have much interest in sex anymore didn't seem so weird. After all, she'd lived and worked with the same man for nearly two decades--not exactly the ultimate recipe for passion.

Then, shortly after her daughter Kelley was accepted to a nationally recognized design school, Nicole's mood really started slipping. She was thrilled to see Kelley pursuing her dream, so she couldn't understand why she wasn't on Cloud Nine with her. She remembered feeling the same way after her wedding, when the ceremony and celebration and honeymoon were over.

However, her mood continued to slip. Despite Kelley's growing excitement about going to college, Nicole found herself tearful at times. She felt exhausted and couldn't concentrate at work. She began arguing more with her husband, especially when he bothered her about her drinking. She was up to three glasses of wine at bedtime. She had no sexual desire, whatsoever. In dark moments after midnight, she even doubted whether life was worth living.

She began to wonder whether her real problem might be her marriage. She certainly didn't feel anything like romantic love, anymore. She probably hadn't for many years. But she didn't want to think about it.

By avoiding the pain in her life, Nicole was no different from most of us. Human beings have a reflex reaction to psychological pain no different from our reaction to physical pain. We withdraw from it. We try to avoid thinking not only about the painful aspects of our lives today, but those in the past, all the way back to childhood.

We accept the notion that the mind uses many "defense mechanisms" to distance us from bitter realities. Chief among these mechanisms is denial. Denial can make us "look the other way" in the face of evidence that our spouses are unfaithful or our children have turned to drugs. It can make us immune to feedback from friends and loved ones who warn us about our addictions or other self-defeating behaviors.

Nicole might never have come to see me, in fact, were it not for her fourteen-year-old son Nathan. Nate was a high school football player and all-around jock, not one to talk about his feelings, so when he got choked up and told Nicole he felt like he had "lost his mother," she decided it was high time she tried to "find herself."

The first time we met I could see Nicole wasn't just well-put-together; she was perfectly-put-together. Everything was in its place--her designer clothes, her jewelry, her makeup, her hair. She was physically fit and looked younger than 46. But she also looked worried. She avoided eye contact. And more than once, she clenched and unclenched her fists, as though to wring the tension from her hands.

I nodded at them. "You're having a hard time," I said.

She looked down at her hands and let out a long breath. "I never thought I'd be saying this," she told me, "but I think I may need something."

"You mean, a medicine?"

"My sister's on Zoloft. She says it helps her."

I knew why Nicole was asking for Zoloft right off the bat: Part of her was still searching for some way to cover up the trouble in her life, instead of getting to the bottom of it.

"Zoloft might be part of the answer," I told her, "but I'd have to understand much more about you and your life to know."

She clenched her fists, again.

I leaned toward her. "Tell me what's wrong," I said.

That was enough to make her eyes fill up. "Nothing," she said. She twisted her engagement ring back and forth. "My marriage. The way I am around my kids . . . losing my temper. I'm a complete mess."

"You're a person," I said, "That's always messy."

She looked directly at me for the first time.

"What's happening in your marriage?" I asked.

She smiled at the same time as a tear escaped her eye. She wiped it away. "Not a lot--which is kind of the problem. We're . . . existing." She shook her head, as though trying to stop herself from saying more. The impulse to keep one's truth--especially one's pain--secret is among the most common, powerful, and toxic elements of human nature. "Grant is a wonderful person," she said. "He's been a great provider for almost twenty years. He's never hurt me."

If all my years as a practicing psychiatrist have taught me one thing, it's this: Listen for what people do not say. All Nicole could say at the moment about Grant was that he made money and wasn't abusive. That left out a lot of other desirable qualities.

I knew Nicole needed permission to tell me what she was really feeling. And since she had already hinted at her reality, I gave her an opening. "He's wonderful, but...," I said.

"But I'm bored to tears," she said flatly.

"And have been for how long?"

"Honestly?"

I waited.

"Probably since I've known him."

Nicole had come in asking for a prescription, maybe thinking that she had slid into a depression over the course of a few months, and we were already journeying back twenty-three years, to when she first met Grant. "What did you think of him when you met him?" I asked.

"That he was a real gentleman," she said. "That he would make a good husband and father--even if he was pretty, well, predictable. I'd been through a really bad breakup just before I met him," she said. "I wanted someone stable."

"Who had you broken up with?" I asked.

"Oh, God." She laughed and actually blushed--over twenty years later. So much for those who would deny the power of the past. "He was a complete mess."

A complete mess. Those were the same words Nicole had used to describe herself just moments before. And that was no coincidence: Listening carefully to Nicole had led me to my questions, which had led directly to the unconscious connection she now felt with her lover from decades before. "What kind of mess?" I asked.

"The worst kind," she said. Her expression brightened, and she suddenly looked ten years younger. "A troubled artist. Your typical bad boy."

"'Bad,' meaning ...?"

"You know: Wine, women. Not to mention the fact he was broke."

"You weren't about to go there," I said.

She chuckled, shook her head. "I'd already been there."

"How so?"

"With my dad."

Nicole had come in for what she thought would be a quick fix--Zoloft--and come face-to-face with unresolved feelings about her father. We had traveled thirty or more years in about thirty minutes.

"Your dad?" I asked.

"Ancient history," she said. She looked away, again.

"Doesn't sound like it," I said. "Here we are talking about him."

"What can I say? He was a lot more interested in his scotch, the track, and other women than he was in my mother, my sister or me."

Nicole told me the rest during a few more sessions. Her father would disappear for days at a time. Other women would call the house, setting the stage for screaming matches and occasionally even physical fights between her parents. Sometimes, her dad gambled away everything he made as a laborer, leaving the family without food.

Once I knew that "ancient history," I knew why it seemed so important to Nicole to look perfect. She felt anything but perfect inside. Part of her was still the little girl whose father might be sober one night, drunk the next, smiling and generous when he came home from the track a winner, violent when he had lost everything. No wonder Nicole would have traded passion with a troubled artist for the predictability and stability Grant offered. And that's one reason she would have felt somber after exchanging marriage vows; those vows were motivated partly by fear. They were partly about living life and partly about avoiding it.

"It doesn't help anything," Nicole said, "that I work with Grant and live with him. We're together twenty-four, seven."

"Why did it turn out that way?" I asked.

She shrugged. "He needed the help, and I didn't have much of a plan," she said. "I mean, I had fantasies about interior design or whatever, but I had no training or anything." She laughed. "I figured I'd at least know where he was all the time."

"Unlike your father," I said.

She stopped laughing. "I suppose," she said.

"Did you ever pursue your love of design?" I asked.

"Just stuff in our house," she said. "I'll leave the rest to Kelley."

My skin turned to goose flesh, as it does whenever the past becomes palpable in the present. It was clear to me now why Kelley leaving for design school had triggered Nicole's depression. Kelley was living out dreams that Nicole had once had for herself, dreams she had buried in order to create the safe family life she craved. Now, with her daughter off to design school, where she might even fall head over heels for an artistic, romantic, unpredictable man, Nicole was feeling the loss of what she had given up in exchange for stability--pieces of herself.

I wanted to bring Nicole face-to-face with the truth she had run from her whole life. Only that kind of reckoning with the early chapters in her life story could leave her free to imagine, and then live, wonderful chapters in the future. "So what do you think your dad loved more," I asked her, "the gambling, girls and booze . . . or you?"

She sat in silence for several seconds. Her eyes filled with tears, again. "Not me," she said finally. "I guess I never really wanted to admit that. I mean, I was the one by his bedside every day for six months after he was diagnosed with cancer. I think I just wanted to hear him say ..." She stopped herself.

"...that he loved you," I said.

Tears ran down her cheeks.

"Had he ever told you that?" I asked.

She swallowed hard. "No," she said. "And he never did." She looked down, as though ashamed.

I let several seconds pass. "You know the worst part?" I asked Nicole.

She looked at me.

"Part of you still thinks he was right--that you're not lovable. That's what part of any little girl would think growing up with a father incapable of caring about her. And that's the same part of you, by the way, that tells you that you have to keep tabs on your husband to keep him honest, instead of challenging him to grow if he wants to keep you around. It's the same part of you that won't express your passion for design. There's always that little voice at the back of your head saying maybe you're not worthy of love--not even your own."

"So how do I get that voice to stop?" she asked.

I smiled. "By listening to absolutely everything it has to say."

Only by hearing out the little girl inside her saying that she was never worthy of her father's devotion could Nicole, now an adult and a mother, nurture herself as she might a child--by finally focusing on the truth that she was born to a man who never made her feel worthy. And only by truly grieving that misfortune could she stop blaming herself for it. Back to top

Anne's Story

When we deprive ourselves of the truth, we not only limit ourselves, we limit how much of ourselves we can bring to our relationships, including our marriages. Living the Truth restores our potential for genuine, loving connections. Anne’s story is a good example.

Anne was twenty-nine when she came to see me and in tears within a minute of sitting down. "I'm torturing myself," she told me.

"How so?" I asked.

"I think I'm just about the worst person in the world. I feel guilty constantly."

"About what?"

"I can't even believe I'm sitting here." She wiped away her tears. "I'm having an affair."

"How long have you been married?" I asked.

"Three years," she said. "And here's the really weird thing: I love Matt, my husband--at least I think I do. I know for sure I don't want to leave him."

"Tell me about him," I said.

"He's smart, handsome, and supportive. I run a gallery that hasn't always made a lot of money, and he's been there for me from the minute we got engaged. I have this incredible safety net because of him, which only makes what I'm doing that much worse."

"Are you attracted to him?" I asked.

"We've always had phenomenal sex," she said. "That hasn't changed."

"What has?"

"Nothing has, actually. All we have is a physical connection. I don't think we connect emotionally, at all."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because since I met Jason I feel like I have a soul mate. I've never felt that with my husband."

"How did you meet Jason?" I asked.

"He bought a painting from me," she said. "My favorite one in the whole gallery. We started talking about the artist, then about art in general, then about . . . everything. We've really never stopped."

"Why do you think you married a man you didn't connect with, emotionally?" I asked Anne.

"Got me."

"Is there anyone else you feel connected with, other than Jason?"

"My mom, if that counts."

"The two of you are close?"

"To put it mildly," Anne said. "We talk two, three times a day."

"Have you told her about him?" I asked.

Anne blushed. She looked embarrassed, more like a little girl than a woman. "He's the only thing in my life she doesn't know about," she said.

As I talked longer with Anne I realized that that was literally the truth. Her mother knew everything else about her. She checked in with her mother to tell her what she was wearing, how her day was going, if she made a sale at the gallery, if she and Matt argued, if they made up, what they were having for dinner at home or where they were going out. It had always been that way, as long as Anne could remember. The close emotional bond between her and her mom had, in fact, made it very difficult for her to transition to college, where she had experienced severe anxiety about being away from home. It had made it impossible for her to attend the graduate school in Paris where she had been admitted to study art history.

"Does your mother approve of your husband?" I asked.

"She loves him," Anne said. "She thinks he's the perfect man for me." She paused. "Jason, she would hate. She's always said how she can't stand men who ask a million questions about what you're thinking and feeling. She likes the strong, silent type."

"That describes your husband?"

"He's a rock."

That made sense. It sounded to me like Anne's mother liked having Anne to herself. She would approve of anyone who demanded no part of her daughter's soul.

"Do you see yourself leaving your husband for Jason?" I asked Anne.

"I've thought of it. But I don't think I'd go through with it."

"Why not?"

"I just worry he could end up being really high maintenance, emotionally."

"And you don't have that kind of bandwidth available," I said.

"It doesn't feel like I do." She paused, looking confused. "Why is that?"

Over time, Anne was able to answer that question herself, partly because her mother kept demanding to know what Anne was talking about in therapy, then made it plain she thought it was a bad idea for her to be in therapy at all. She literally became jealous of Anne's relationship with me.

"What's her problem?" Anne asked me a few sessions later. "It's like she's trying to get inside my head."

"No," I said. "It's worse than that. She's already there. That's probably why you never thought you needed an emotional connection with a man. You were already taken—by her."

Anne was silent for several seconds. "Which is why I was satisfied just to be with Matt physically?"

"Until now," I said.

"But why now?" she asked.

"Maybe because you haven't really liked feeling alone in your own home these past three years," I said. "Or maybe because another man snuck up on you at the gallery and climbed inside your head when you weren't really looking."

Eventually, Anne lowered the shield covering her relationship with her mother, looked into the mirror reflecting her life history, and saw that her mother hadn't ever been purely a source of warmth and security. Her mother was using her to feel less alone. Seeing that complexity took courage, because it made her feel angry at her mother even though she still thirsted for her mother's love. And while that conflict may have been impossible for her to resolve as a little girl, now she could.

Anne slowly began breaking free. She limited her calls to her mother and cut back on the information she shared about her marriage. She decided to find out how her husband Matt would respond to her sharing more of her thoughts and feelings with him, instead. And she learned that he wasn't just someone she liked having sex with; he was actually someone she liked talking with.

As Anne's interest in her marriage grew, her interest in Jason waned.

"I'll always feel something special for him," she told me, "but I can't keep seeing him."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because I'm married," she said.

"You were married when you met him," I said.

"Yeah, but, for the first time, I really feel like I am." Back to top

Richard's Story

About two years ago a forty-year-old highly successful CEO named Richard came to see me. A year before he had begun experiencing symptoms exactly like those of a heart attack. All of a sudden, he would feel nauseated and lightheaded. His chest would tighten, his pulse would race, and his skin would get clammy. Convinced he was dying, he would call 911 and be rushed from his apartment or his office to the emergency room. But each time, his EKG and lab studies would prove he hadn't suffered a heart attack at all.

When a stress test and angiogram both came back normal, Richard's cardiologist correctly diagnosed him with panic disorder--the symptoms of which can be indistinguishable from cardiac disease--and wrote him a prescription for Paxil.

Everything was fine, for about three months. Then Richard's symptoms returned. His cardiologist increased his Paxil and added some Klonopin, a tranquilizing medicine. That bought him another nine months. Then, at the leading edge of winter, his mood slipped dramatically, he lost all motivation and he began to feel like a "complete fraud." Everything he had achieved had been, he said, a fluke. He had no real intelligence and no genuine leadership ability.

Richard's cardiologist increased his Paxil yet again--but this time, to no avail. Richard's mood continued to plummet. When he broke down in tears at a business meeting, his cardiologist referred him to me.

The first time I saw Richard, he looked like a deflated super hero. His longish blonde hair, which I could imagine elegantly styled, was a mess. His suit needed pressing. His green eyes were bloodshot, with dark circles beneath them. The way he leaned forward, his shoulders hunched, made it seem like he literally needed help standing up.

I added a second antidepressant to Richard's regimen in order to help him cope with his symptoms, but I told him from the beginning that those symptoms were being fueled by earlier chapters in his life story he had been loathe to "read." Without opening them and learning what had set the stage for his suffering, no medicine would be powerful enough to keep his anxiety and depression at bay forever.

Toward the beginning of our first meeting together, I asked Richard essentially to take the Living the Truth Pledge, to assure me that he would do everything in his power to continue exploring his story, rather than run away from it. He agreed.

It wasn't until nearly the end of the hour that he mentioned that when his symptoms began two years before, he had just broken up with a woman.

"I really thought she was the one," he said. "But she threatened to throw me out, and I don't respond to that kind of thing."

Again, I noticed that Richard showed no emotion. He didn't seem sad and he didn't seem angry. "How long had you been living together?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Oh, we weren't living together. I just meant she threatened to dump me."

Odd turns of phrase often have real meaning.

Richard seemed to be saying that his girlfriend's threat to break up with him felt like being "thrown out" of his home. I kept that at the back of my mind.

He sighed. "She told me I either had to marry her or take off. She was thirty-five. That whole biological clock thing."

"How long had you been dating?"

"A little over six years."

"You weren't ready to get married?"

"I thought I was a few times," he said. "I even bought a ring once. But I couldn't go through with it."

Richard hadn't said he didn't want to get engaged. He'd said he couldn't. "Why not?" I asked.

"Who knows? Maybe I can't love anyone, or maybe I'm unlovable. I don't know anything, anymore."

That gave me hope. Not knowing was a good place to start. "Let's figure it out," I said. "Is there anyone you can say with certainty does love you?"

"My parents, that's it," Richard said immediately. "God knows where I'd be without them." He was silent a few moments, then sighed again and checked his watch. "I think we're running over."

Running, maybe. "I'm okay for time, if you are," I said.

"Sure," he said, tentatively.

"So tell me how you knew your parents loved you."

"I was an only child. They did everything for me," he said. "Best prep school in the country, best college. They always believed in me. Right after I graduated college my dad actually let me run the London office of his consulting company. Eighteen employees."

"Which prep school did you go to?" I asked.

"Andover Academy, in Massachusetts."

"Quite a school," I said. "Did you grow up nearby?"

"No, Syracuse," Richard said. "There really isn't anything like Andover anywhere near there."

That disclaimer--that Richard's parents had had no choice but to send him hundreds of miles away for his education, beginning in the ninth grade--brought me to my next question. "How did you feel going away to school?"

"Overwhelmed. It was the best."

Overwhelmed was another curious choice of words. "You didn't miss home?" I asked, as offhandedly as I could.

"I was homesick, sure," he said. "But everybody adjusts, right?"

Everybody wasn't in my office. Just Richard. "What was the adjustment like for you?" I asked.

The way Richard described feeling "homesick" sounded a lot like depression. He couldn't concentrate on his work, lost interest in the sports he loved, had trouble sleeping, dropped ten pounds, and suffered with vague physical symptoms like transient headaches and stomach aches. It went on for months. "Sounds really tough," I said. "Did you have to go back home for a while?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Not an option."

"Why's that?"

"My dad had to bail out a company in Paris for four months--until right after Christmas. My mom went over there with him. They left right after I did."

Being homesick is one thing. Being without a home is another. As I talked with Richard during our next few meetings, the latter seemed closer to the truth. Starting in ninth grade, his parents had sent him away to very prestigious schools, but they had never really welcomed him back. Even when he finished college and planned to move back to Syracuse to work in the "home office" of his father's consulting company, his dad had another plan: He sent him off to run the London office instead. His mother didn't object.

I thought of the way Richard had described his girlfriend's ultimatum that they either get engaged or end their relationship after six years. She threatened to throw me out. "Were you upset about being sent to London?" I asked him.

He shrugged. "How could I be? Talk about a kid in a candy store. There I was at twenty-two, running a company."

That didn't sound like pure fun. It sounded anxiety-provoking, too. "You were alone," I said, "thousands of miles from home."

"I was a pretty clingy kid when I was little. Its better they made a clean break of it. I probably never would have."

I felt I had a pretty clear sense why Richard's relationship with his girlfriend had ended the way it had. Unable to believe she truly loved him (because he had never truly felt loved by anyone, including his parents), he had been too frightened to give her the commitment she needed to feel secure, the love she needed to feel at home. And when she threatened to leave, he had taken that as proof that he had been right to doubt her devotion.

Trouble was, he didn't really buy that logic himself. Somewhere deep inside, Richard knew he was just using his girlfriend as a stand-in. He was blaming her for abandoning him, rather than admitting that his parents had.

My skin turned to goose flesh. The past was making itself known in the present. "Why would your parents ever want a 'clean break' from you?" I asked Richard.

"I didn't mean it that way," he said.

I kept looking at him.

He looked away.

I reminded him of the pledge he had taken to search for his truth, even if it hurt.

He sat in silence for twenty or thirty seconds, a very long time without words. Then his lip began to quiver, and his eyes filled up. It was the first gut-level emotion he had shown in my office. He was rejecting the fictional life story he had settled for decades earlier. "They had one another," he said. "I'm really not sure I ever had either one of them."

It didn't take more than a few more meetings for Richard to realize that he hadn't been able to get engaged because he hadn't trusted his girlfriend to stay with him, to create a true home with him.

"So what are you going to do now?" I asked him.

"It's not like she'd ever take me back," he said.

"How do you know that?" I asked.

"I just do."

"You think you do," I said, "because your parents never took you back. That doesn't mean it's true this time."

He called his girlfriend that very day, an act that required tremendous courage. To do it, he had to accept that his parents (not his girlfriend) had failed to give him a sense of security that they hadn't made him feel genuinely cared for. He had to admit that loving them without being convinced they loved him had left him wary of putting his heart on the line ever again. Then he had to do just that.

When you are willing to hurt in order to heal, people respond to your bravery and honesty. Your pain becomes your power. Richard's girlfriend not only took his call, she listened to what he had to say and took him back. She said she would give him the time he needed to trust her. And in doing so, she gave him the very thing his parents had failed to: the certain knowledge that he could go home again. Back to top

Dennis' Story

Too often, the lives we lead, including the work we do, are an accommodation to expectations that others had of us, not ones that grow from heartfelt goals. And when we live our lives in service to the needs of others, we can't be fully present in the lives of those we love, including our husbands and wives. Living the Truth makes gives us authentic self-esteem and makes us authentic in our relationships. Dennis' story makes that point.

Dennis was a 34-year-old high-profile attorney. But he had become an attorney only because his parents had pressured him to give up his real dream of becoming an architect. They were intrusive people who had also convinced him to marry someone of his own faith, when the only woman he had ever really loved was of another religion. Now, he was constantly worried and distracted, felt depressed, was losing legal cases he felt he should have easily won, and was thinking that he wanted out of the marriage (which--no surprise--was to an intrusive, controlling woman, like his mother).

"I feel like a baseball without any cork at the center," he told me. "I'm just tightly wound string, hollow at the core. And I think people can tell."

"More important," I said, "you can tell."

His eyes filled with tears. "I just don't know what a person does when he has nothing inside him, when he's invented himself the way I have. I don't think you can ever get over that, can you?"

"But you don't have nothing inside you," I said. "You just haven't ever really looked."

What Dennis was missing was his back story. He had never been willing to go in search of the early painful chapters around which so much of his life still revolved. So he felt empty.

It turned out there was plenty inside Dennis--rage at being controlled by his parents, feelings of weakness resulting from the fact that they had been able to control him, a sense of betrayal that they had done it while professing their love for him, and even feelings of shame that he hadn't done more to stop them.

Once I helped Dennis confront these feelings, he began to feel much less anxious, less depressed, and a lot angrier. He realized that as a young person he had always been afraid to say what he needed or wanted for fear that being his own person would make his parents stop loving him. And that realization helped him summon the determination to free himself from that fear as an adult.

One of the ways Dennis moved toward, then, through, and, ultimately, past the painful chapters of his life story was by deciding to scale back practicing law to three-quarters time so that he could begin studying architecture. That meant confronting many fears, including whether he would be "worth" as much if he didn't make as much money for several years, whether he had only been fooling himself into thinking that he had talent in the area that moved him, and whether his marriage could withstand him investing more in himself and less in his lifestyle.

"She married a guy who made partner in a law firm two years after we tied the knot," Dennis told me. "I start backing off of taking as many cases that might mean I end up in a solo practice, making half as much. That's not exactly what she bargained for."

"She married you," I said. "If that's not really what she bargained for, it might be time to let her know."

"Easier said than done," he said.

It was, of course, easier said than done. What I was asking of Dennis was that he confronts his fear of being unloved by his parents and unlovable by anyone else. I was asking him to risk being rejected by his wife, which would transport him to his childhood and make him feel very much like a little boy rejected by his parents--alone and exquisitely vulnerable in the world. The difference was that he wasn't little and powerless, anymore. It just felt that way.

"Is it easy pretending you're a lawyer?" I asked. "You're already distracted, losing cases you believe you should have easily won."

"It's torture," he said.

"Is it easy pretending your wife loves you, when she doesn't really know you?"

He shook his head. "We haven't been together physically for a while. Emotionally . . . probably ever." He thought to himself, and then nodded to me. "When it comes right down to it, I guess I have nothing to lose."

"And everything to gain," I said. "Like feeling solid for the first time, even if what you feel is sadness from learning your wife doesn't really love you. Because it would be your sadness. It would be genuine. And you would find out you can survive it and demand more for yourself."

Dennis took the risk. And he learned something he never could have if he hadn't. He learned that his wife loved him more than he knew. She loved him enough to tell him that his leaving the law scared her, but that it didn't scare her nearly as much as the thought of his leaving her.

"The only thing is," Dennis told me, "she isn't up for me cutting back to three-quarters time."

I took a deep breath and let it out; starting to feel the disappointment I imagined Dennis must have been feeling. How could anyone expect a person to begin building a new career with less than 25 percent of his time?

"She wants me to cut back to half time," he said. And then he smiled the widest smile he ever had in my office.

I smiled, too. "You were worried she wouldn't love you if you told her who you were," I said. "I think you got your answer."

Dennis had the courage to search for the source of his low self-esteem and to ultimately pursue a craft that spoke to his soul. And that journey had also substantially strengthened his marriage.

Two years later, Dennis left the law entirely to study architecture full-time. He has become a superb and highly sought after architect. That's for two reasons: He loves it, and it's what he was meant to do. Back to top

Paula's Story

One of my own patients, a 39-year-old woman named Paula, proves that people can orbit the same buried pain again and again.

Paula finally faced her own demons when her third marriage ended, like the prior two, in disaster. When she first came to see me she was trying to cope with the suicide of her third husband, which had left her nine-year-old daughter fatherless. She felt terribly sad, but also extremely guilty.

"I should have done something," she said, through tears. "He told me once a few months ago that he didn't want to live. I just never believed he'd actually do something crazy."

"I can't help feeling I'm somehow responsible," she said. "I mean, he was fine when I married him."

"Depression strikes all kinds of people," I said. "It isn't something you would have been able to predict."

She shook her head. "This isn't the first time a man has fallen apart around me," she said. She paused. "It happened to my other husbands, too."

It turned out that each of Paula's first two marriages had ended when her husband fell victim to a debilitating mental illness. In the first case, it was alcoholism. In the second, it was depression and addiction to narcotic pain relievers. And each man ultimately left her, not the other way around.

Wondering whether Paula was reproducing a dynamic she had witnessed in her parents' marriage, I asked her to tell me about them.

"They're still together," she said. "Forty-five years. They still hold hands. To this day, my father says my mom's his 'little guardian angel.' He still calls me his 'princess.' It's like I grew up in a fairy tale."

I have learned by now that when people tell you straight out that their lives are make-believe, you should believe them.

I went looking for the part of Paula's life that was fiction. "Did your father need a guardian angel?" I asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Did he need your mother to take care of him or protect him?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Not even close," she said. "He's the exact opposite of the men I married."

"In what way is he different?" I asked.

"He's just . . . commanding," she said. "He was captain of his college football team, a captain in the Army, head of a law firm. He's a take-charge person. I don't think he's ever fallen apart."

"Did he take charge of your mother?" I asked.

"Without a doubt. She pretty much lives for him," Paula says.

"More than for you?"

Paula fell silent for several seconds. "My father always took up a lot of space in a room," she said.

The truth was that Paula's father hadn't given anyone enough room to breathe. He had insisted on a regimented home life. He expected his "little guardian angel" wife to serve dinner at the same time each evening, to keep the house white glove clean and to keep Paula and her older brother from disturbing him as he worked at home late into the night. He expected Paula and her brother to meet his standards in terms of their academic performance, the appropriateness and neatness of their dress, their commitment to athletics, their choice of friends, even what they ate.

That didn't sound exactly like an "ideal marriage" or "fairy tale" home life. "It seems like you, your mom, and your brother spent a lot of time satisfying him," I said.

"I've honestly never thought of it that way," she said. "I never considered not satisfying him. None of us did."

Whether or not Paula thought much about it, having lived like a soldier taking orders from her "commanding" father, she might not have been up for "re-enlisting" with another powerful man. I wondered whether she had unconsciously chosen her husbands because she intuited they were broken in some way and in no position to exert control over her. "How did you meet your first husband?" I asked her.

"College," she said. "We dated all of junior and senior year. After graduation I went to work for a public relations company in New York, and he stayed in Boston to start law school. We really missed each other. He proposed within a few weeks."

"And then you moved to Boston?" I asked.

"No. He moved to New York four months later."

"He transferred to another law school?"

She shook her head. "Law school wasn't going well for him, anyhow."

"Meaning?"

"He really missed me," she said. "I think he got a little depressed and started drinking. He ended up withdrawing from school and coming to New York. I got him a job as an assistant to one of the executives at the company where I was working."

The fact that Paula was downplaying such a significant event in her first husband's life--depression or alcoholism or both--made me wonder how accepting she was of him being the weak one in the relationship. "Was that the same sort of position you had at the company?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I was in the management training program. He was kind of like . . . well, a glorified secretary type, I guess."

That didn't sound very glorious. It sounded like working at least a few rungs beneath your fianc� in a job that has nothing to do with your goals, after dropping out of law school. "Did he stop drinking?" I asked.

"For a little while. But then it got worse."

"Were you worried?"

She shrugged. "I always figured he was strong enough to beat it."

Paula's first husband wasn't strong enough to get sober, of course. He was weak and struggling. He had felt so alone that he popped the question within a few weeks of her moving to another city. He had missed her so much after their engagement that he started to drink and dropped out of law school. He had seemed happy enough to take the job she got him as a "glorified secretary" at the company where she was training to be an executive.

After his alcoholism accelerated, and after he lost his job at the public relations firm, and after he finally entered AA and started seeing a psychiatrist who treated his underlying depression, he left her. He told her his alcohol counselor believed she was enabling his illness and that his recovery required him to stand on his own two feet.

He was right. Paula had always been ready to catch him when he stumbled. Because whenever he did, it reminded her she was stronger than he was, that he needed her and that she was at no risk of being overwhelmed by a powerful man like her father.

Paula was introduced to her second husband by her brother Ted, himself a former cocaine abuser. He introduced Paula to his sponsor in Narcotics Anonymous, a man sober from narcotic pain relievers (like Percocet and Oxycontin) for more than ten years.

"Your first husband was an alcoholic," I said to Paula. "Then you started dating someone who'd been addicted to drugs. Did you worry about that?"

"He'd beaten it," she said. "Isn't that a sign of strength?"

Beating an addiction requires great strength, but addiction and its psychological roots are very powerful, too. That's why addicts relapse so frequently. "How long did he stay sober after you got married?" I asked.

Paula took a deep breath, let it out. "A little over eight months," she said. "I did everything I could to help him. When he started using again, I even told him he should just leave his job and focus on getting well. He was V.P. of a printing company, and the deadlines were totally stressing him out. I was making enough to take care of both of us."

What Paula was really telling her second husband was that she was strong enough for both of them. He didn't need to hold himself together enough to hold down a job. He had the leisure to use drugs as much as he liked. And the unconscious payoff for Paula was that she would be the one in charge again.

"Why did he leave you?" I asked.

"His company wouldn't take him back when he was ready to start work again," she said. "He found another job two hours away, but I just couldn't stand him being gone all the time, out the door at five in the morning and not home until ten at night. We argued about it a lot. He got paranoid and started accusing me of trying to sabotage his career. Then he moved near work and told me he'd be back on weekends. We drifted further and further apart after that."

When a recovering addict finds a job that motivates him enough to commute four hours a day roundtrip, there's only one thing to say: "Congratulations. You're on the right road." But for Paula, the fact that her husband was back on his feet was good news and bad news. What guarantee did she have that he still needed her and wouldn't try to control her?

When Paula met her third husband, he was recently divorced, like she was. He felt abandoned, like she did. And since his ex-father-in-law had fired him, he was out of a job and short on funds. He needed someone to help him out. And that need was nearly irresistible to Paula.

Why? Paula had been hurt as a little girl by her father--a powerful, controlling man. She had never expressed her sadness or anger about that fact and had, instead, comforted herself with the fiction that her parents had the "perfect marriage" and that she had a "fairy tale" existence as her dad's "princess." And since that fiction kept her from facing her pain, she could never move beyond it. She felt as vulnerable as a seven- or eight-year-old.

The pain Paula had experienced living with a father who did not allow her to be a person had stayed buried for decades, then been reborn as the pain of two divorces and a third marriage that ended with her husband's suicide.

What terrible poetry it is that a woman with unresolved rage about growing up in her father's home would play a role in creating a fatherless one for her own little girl.

It bears repeating: The attempt to keep your pain buried will, in and of itself, lead you to resurrect it, in one form or another, again and again.

During our next session, I began digging for Paula's. "When was the first time you screamed at your father?" I asked Paula.

She smiled. "Never. That wouldn't have gone over very well."

"You never yelled at him? Not even as a teenager?"

"No."

"What would have happened?"

"I have no idea. I wouldn't want to find out."

Paula hadn't used the past tense to express her fear--as in, I . . . wouldn't have wanted to find out. Her comment was in the present tense. She was still frightened. "Well, let's think about it together," I said.

She shrugged.

"Would he have yelled back at you?" I asked.

"Probably."

"Grounded you?"

"Like, forever."

I nodded, waited a few moments, then asked: "Hit you?"

"Maybe," she said softly, sounding more like a child than a 39-year-old woman.

She looked as though she had more to say. "What else?" I asked her.

"You don't get it. He'd have absolutely killed me." A nervous laugh. "Literally."

Exactly right. To a child, trying to appease a powerful, military-minded, emotionally distant male authority figure could certainly feel like a matter of life and death. And Paula might "literally" have spent her childhood struggling with unconscious anxiety (irrational as it may have been) that failing to follow her father's rigid demands might just get her killed. The problem was that she had never faced those childhood fears and overcome them. And that meant she was destined to continue seeing any strong man as the gravest kind of threat.

That story made sense to me. It had internal consistency and seemed to explain the events that had unfolded in Paula's life story. It seemed true. And that gave me the confidence to predict that Paula would come to see me as a threat, too. After all, as her doctor, I was an instant authority figure.

It was only a few sessions later, in fact, that Paula accused me of "bullying" her by pushing her to tell me more and more about the times her father had lost his temper. Those times, it turned out, had occasionally included him using a strap on her and her brother.

"I swear, you just like to hear about people's pain," she said.

"I like to hear people's truth," I said.

"Well, it feels like being strong-armed."

If Paula were confusing me with her father, that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. She could vent her underlying feelings toward him in the safety of my office, using me as a stand-in. I decided to push her. "My office, my rules," I said.

"I'm paying the bill," she said.

"You're always free to go somewhere else."

"Maybe you could just try backing off a little," she said.

"Or maybe I could just start drinking or using drugs so I'm not too much of a threat."

"Don't bother. You don't scare me."

"I'm just wondering what I need to do for you to feel comfortable."

"You want to make me comfortable?" she seethed. "Drop dead."

There. That comment felt like it was mined directly from Paula's reservoirs of childhood rage. "Is that what you wished?" I asked. "That he'd die?"

"Who?"

"Your father."

She stared at me for several seconds.

"I promise I've heard a lot worse," I said.

She looked away. When she looked back at me, her eyes had filled up with tears.

"Just tell me," I said.

A minute or so later, she did. "When I was little, like seven or eight, I remember praying he'd just get sick and die," she told me. "I haven't thought of that in . . . forever." She started tearing up, again. "Who would think such a thing?"

A little girl might. A really frightened little girl. And that little girl was in my office. She was the one who had tried to find adult love with broken men who would do her no harm. She was the one who had finally come out of hiding, with all her sadness and guilt, after one of those men actually did get sick and die.

"The kind of person who would think that kind of thing," I told Paula, "is someone who felt like her own life was at risk--at least, emotionally. Was it?"

That question opened up a discussion that lasted many more weeks, as Paula explored her early feelings of trying to please a man who was never pleased, trying to comply with rules designed more for a soldier than a child, trying to pretend she was a princess in a castle when she was more like a prisoner of war.

Paula's grief and guilt both slowly resolved. About a year later, she called me as she was beginning to date again. "I'm trying to screen out all the basket cases," she said. "The trouble is, the men who seem to have it together are all so boring."

Nothing can compete energetically with the demons we have stored away since childhood; we remember them, after all, with a child's heart and mind.

"You may not gravitate naturally toward stable men," I told her. "What you went through with your dad was very charged psychologically. If you look for something as powerful as that, you're likely to end up with something just as complicated and, ultimately, just as painful. Let yourself be bored for a little while. See if it develops into something else."

Paula's fourth marriage was to someone who was, as far as I could tell, her equal intellectually, professionally, and financially. He wasn't an alcoholic or on drugs. His life wasn't a series of calamities. He also didn't make her heart race every time she laid eyes on him. What she felt in his presence was something very different: She said she felt "at ease." I couldn't help thinking that those were the words officers in the military (like Paula's father) use to let soldiers know they can be themselves--finally.

"He really doesn't need me," she said. "That part's hard getting adjusted to. But there's an upside."

"What's that?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure he loves me. I can't figure out why else he'd want to hang around with me."

That's the point. No recycled, negative drama from the past was holding Paula's new husband in her orbit. Love was. Back to top

Linda's Story

Living the Truth can help defeat psychological disorders, including major depression and panic disorder. Linda's story makes that plain.

Linda was a slight, redheaded, 42-year-old woman who came to see me with symptoms of major depression, including low mood, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and decreased self-esteem. She had tolerated emotional abuse from her husband for several years and said she felt like she had "nothing left to give." She had three sons—4, 7, and 10—whom she was always trying to protect from her husband, literally standing between him and the boys, trying to deflect or absorb his scathing criticisms of them.

"He calls them every name in the book, even in front of people," she said. "He says horrible things like, 'You should never have been born.' And it doesn't have to be for anything major. Even little things set him off, like not taking their plates to the sink, not being friendly when we have people over the house, not wearing the 'right' clothes. But, the thing is, I know he doesn't mean it."

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"He's just burnt out a lot of the time. He works so hard. He's under a lot of pressure. And now, I'm out of commission, crying all the time. And that just makes it even harder for him--and the kids."

Linda was actually blaming herself for her husband being abusive. "What does he do for work?" I asked her.

"He's an EMT. He has to deal with horrible things. Car accidents. Heart attacks. You name it."

Among my friends are surgeons, emergency room doctors, combat veterans, and police officers. They have to deal with plenty of ugliness, too. But I've never seen them lash out at their kids in any serious or sustained way. "He says his job makes it impossible to control himself at home and in public?" I asked.

She shook her head. "He doesn't make excuses for himself. I can just tell that's what's going on for him."

Linda's husband didn't have to make excuses for himself. Linda was doing it for him. "You can tell by the fact that he loses his temper?" I asked her.

"That and other stuff. He gets to a point where he just shuts down. I know he's thinking about everything he's seen. And he drinks a lot more than he should."

We weren't fifteen minutes into our time together, and Linda had already mentioned a second reason her husband might be losing his temper--his drinking. The fact that she was letting him off the hook by blaming his stressful job made me wonder whether she was predisposed to do so by her earlier life experience. "You're very understanding," I said.

She shrugged. "My dad was a firefighter," she said. "He retired five years ago."

"He was under a lot of stress while you were growing up?" I led.

"To say the least."

"How did he deal with it?"

"Not so well."

"Meaning?"

"Let's just say he makes my husband look tame, by comparison," she said.

Whenever people use that phrase--let's just say --they always have much more to say. It just isn't easy to find the words, or the courage. "Your father's temper was even worse?" I asked Linda.

She nodded.

"He yelled at you? Hit you?"

She smiled for the first time since arriving at the office. "He didn't mean it. He did the best he could. He loved all of us so much."

He (or she) did the best he could is another shield of denial people routinely raise. Just because our parents did the best they could, that doesn't mean they did well enough to keep us from harm. And until we're willing to admit we suffered and didn't deserve to, we can't learn from the painful dynamics we lived through. Nor can we avoid reproducing those dynamics in the future.

I wasn't surprised Linda had somehow summoned the energy to smile as she raised her shield of denial. "Did he drink, too?" I asked.

"Only to get to sleep," she said. "He had nightmares. That's what my mom said. We all tried to make it relaxing for him when he got home, but . . ."

"But . . ."

"There's only so much you can do to settle someone down who's been running into burning buildings all day, or waiting to."

We were at the heart of the family fiction that had set the stage for Linda selecting another angry man to marry, and then forgiving his abuse of her and her children. Her mother had suggested that a man who verbally and physically abuses his family isn't to blame, that the family has the responsibility to comfort and coddle such a man, rather than confront him or flee from him, that he can have true love in his heart for his wife and children while attacking them emotionally and physically. Even the theme of alcohol abuse being a defensible way to medicate stress had been written into her life story (and that of her future family) while Linda was still a girl.

Is it any surprise that the home Linda had created was a replica of the one she had come from, where she had been valued for absorbing the rage of a man, forgiving his abuse, and trying to heal him? After all, her father supposedly really loved her, despite screaming at her and hitting her.

"Was your father an angry person before becoming a firefighter?" I asked.

She looked confused. "I have no idea."

"Did he drink before that?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Why do you ask?"

I wanted to be forceful enough with Linda to begin to take down the shield of denial that was her birthright. "You're letting him off the hook for assaulting you and being drunk every night, because he was out all day saving lives. So I just wanted to know if he was a violent alcoholic before he started fighting fires."

"He wasn't alcoholic. He . . ."

"He drank every night."

She didn't respond.

"He screamed at you and hit you."

"But . . . "

I pushed harder. "But he was running into burning buildings. Right. I get it. Just like your husband is scraping people off the pavement, so that supposedly gives him a free pass to level you and the kids with emotional abuse. But guess what? There's no excuse for hurting your wife and kids. So why don't you go and gather some facts."

"Like what?"

"Does your father have any sisters or brothers who are still alive?" I asked.

"A sister."

"Then ask her if he had trouble with alcohol or his temper before he became a firefighter."

"What if he did?"

"If he did, you can stop giving him a free pass on hurting you just because he was helping others. Because he was just using that as an excuse. And you can start wondering whether you chose a husband a lot like him because you don't feel valuable unless you're absorbing a man's violence."

After a lot more encouragement, Linda took me up on my offer. Her aunt told her that her dad hadn't been destroyed emotionally by fighting fires. He'd been troubled as far back as his teenage years. And here's the stunning, but not surprising part (at least to me): His own father--Linda's grandfather--had been alcoholic and violent, too. And his wife had stayed by his side.

Three generations of women in Linda's family had defined their roles as wives and mothers in the same toxic way. Seeing that fact was the beginning of Linda questioning the fiction she had been taught and starting to see her reality, however painful: Neither her father nor her husband ever loved her the way she deserved to be loved--purely, without her having to volunteer for abuse as part of the bargain.

Only once Linda realized this was she able to start standing up for herself and her kids. She didn't begin to hate her husband or suddenly want to leave him, but she did get angry. She gradually made it plain to him that she wasn't going to be his doormat or let him abuse her kids any longer. She told him she would indeed have to leave if he couldn't change, starting with getting help for his alcoholism. And the most wonderful part of the story is that when he did get help, he gave her some real evidence that he actually did value her. She learned that she had the power to insist on a better life for her and her children. Back to top