Saving The Ones You Love!
A phrase keeps resonating in my head.
I don’t know if it’s something I heard somewhere, in a course or a conversation or a therapy session or a movie. Or whether it’s just something I’ve realized after a lot of painful experience.
But it’s this:
“You cannot protect people from the consequences of who they are.”
I spent a great deal of my life trying to do that with people I love or like or simply had to work with.
Do you know what I mean?
In other words, you cannot protect people, especially those you love most, from the consequences, collateral damage and fallout from the things they do and the way they are in the world.
We all know couples where the grumpy, opinionated, abrasive one (usually the man) has a spouse who is always apologizing and smoothing things over, “Carlos doesn’t mean that.” “Carlos actually loves kids, it’s just his way.” “Don’t mind Carlos, he’s really very nice. He just had a bad experience with an immigrant.”
I had an Uncle who was like that. And his wife spent her entire life watching him, with a look of worried sympathy, ready to smooth over the rough edges of whatever chunk of coal came barfing out his mouth. It was horrible to be around. My poor Aunt’s life consisted of running damage control for her big-mouthed hubby. She was good at it. Practice makes perfect.
There are other interesting versions of this ‘enabling.’ As parents we do it constantly. And it’s counter productive. It stunts their growth if they never get pushed to their limits.
For me, as a comedian, as someone who wants to make people laugh and cheer them up and make sure no one is sad and no one is left out, I found myself falling for women who were in some way or another sad. My idea of sexy was a woman who looked sad, or cool, or distant. I knew I could make her happy. I could cheer her up.
Wistful. I was totally drawn to women who were wistful.
Small wonder that I ended up, like many other ‘nice guys’ before me and since, listening to women I desperately wanted to sleep with as they regaled me with all the horrible things their boyfriend had done to them. “Poor you,” was basically my contribution to the conversation. “Poor, poor, sweet, wonderful, misunderstood, unappreciated you. If only you had a guy who appreciated you. Like, well, ahem…” But they never saw how wonderful their life could be if they’d only realized that here I was, right in front of them, and completely single! And desperately horny. Or hornily desperate.
Funny that.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if at some point I’d said, “Listen, I get that it’s upsetting, but you’ve been saying this same stuff for two years! And let’s face it, you clearly love it on some level for some reason! Either leave him or marry him! But let’s talk about something other than the fact that the guy you sleep with is a complete jerk-wad! Cause I know he’s a jerk-wad! Rather than ask why is he like that, maybe ask yourself why you stay with him?! Cause that makes you just as much of a… Hey, where are you going? What? What did I say?”
Anyway, you can’t save people from the consequences of who they are being and how they behave. No one could save me from my crap.
All you do is prolong it for them. If enough people had called my uncle on his crap, rather than bit their tongue as my dear, sweet aunt smoothed things over, I wonder how soon he might have stopped spewing his crap on everyone.
We can’t save each other from the consequences. The consequences are the feedback we need and in some ways deserve.
What we can do is be there to listen, and suggest a better way.
Cause my Uncle wasn’t born a narrow-minded, racist, bully. Babies aren’t born that way.
So who he really was, under all that bluster and bombast… well, we never found out. Cause he never had to let go of his bluster.
I don’t blame him.
I don’t blame my aunt.
It was just the dynamic of their relationship.
Just as my dynamic was to always find the ‘sad girl’.
Nothing changed until I saw the pattern and decided it wasn’t working. Not that I deserved better. Just that this wasn’t working. I can’t make sad people happy. Only they can choose that. And some do. At some point, I chose it as well.
That’s when I fell in love with Ava.
6 Responses to “Saving The Ones You Love!”
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Does this ever sound familiar! I was the one being stepped around and my ex was the mood reader. I’m not a raging, or any other type for that matter, alcoholic — just a socially inept ADDer who was suffering from depression at the time. I found out about this only when it came out in therapy with my (not quite at the time) ex.
I realise now how unfair she was being at the time because I hadn’t a clue what was going on and therefore had no opportunity to change my behaviour. I’m sure she thought that she could fix me somehow but she couldn’t. That was my job and a little help in identifying the problem would have been nice.
The interesting thing is that when I finally beat the depression and was a lot nicer to be around, she became distant and cool — she no longer had a project to work on. My guess is that she has found another fixer upper.
Great posting Wolfy!
Wow. That was brilliant about the wistful women. I did that for years too. You can’t fix broken people.
But you also need to recognize that a lot of times they seek you out. It wasn’t always your fault for ending up in those situations.
P.S. I love your blogs and have added it to my growing blogroll over on WordPress. A lot of people are showing interest in ADD/ADHD so I’m hoping they’ll come over and read some of this. The ADDers for obvious reasons but others as well – because I’m sure many who don’t have the condition (don’t know what to call it) can be confused by our thought patterns and behaviours.
Education is a wonderful thing.
Wow. I love this conversation. I had an abusive alcoholic father who was always angry (never did figure out why). Our family’s coping mechanism – and mine in particular – was to learn to read his moods, and to step carefully around him. This translated to being the chameleon in every social situation, listening to what people were saying and then finding the right “mask” (as you so perfectly put it, Rick) to accommodate what they needed to hear and feel.
With the help of a counselor who helped me figure out what I was doing, I was able to come to a place where I stopped. Just stopped. It was time to own some thoughts, feelings and opinions of my own, and man I have to tell you – it was *wonderful*.
So now when I’m speaking with an enabler – the one who complains bitterly about her messed up life, her messed up boyfriend or the husband who treats her like crap, I’m able to actually vent (politely of course, always politely) my disagreement with her approach. It’s not tolerable anymore to listen to someone who clearly isn’t taking ownership of their own problem and finding ways to do something about it. As you say, Rick, sometimes people gravitate toward these dysfunctional relationships because something inside them wants or needs them. Not my job to figure that out for them; it’s theirs.
I’ve found that if you lovingly and carefully put up a mirror to them to show them what they’re doing, they at least won’t bite your head off. *laughing* And if they truly value loving and supportive honesty, they’ll even sometimes think about it too.
I remember being in a fascinating course and a woman talking about how no one really knew her, no one really understood her, how her parents had no idea who she really was, and neither did her friends or boyfriends. She lived behind a mask, a front. And three minutes later when someone talked about her parents and what they might be able to do to support her, she said, “Oh, I know my parents. I know exactly what they’d say.”
And it never occurred to her that her parents were also hiding behind masks, just like her, putting up a front, pretending they had it handled, but behind the public persona they were just as lonely as she was, feeling the exact same thing, “No one knows the real me.”
We think we’re the only one’s with the mask up.
Everyone has a mask. We create different personalities for when we are with our friends, our grandparents, someone we are romancing… complaining to coworkers, then two seconds later smiling warmly for the boss…
7 Billion people walking around every day, banging their various masks into other people’s masks, and wondering why life doesn’t feel satisfying. Wondering why they are exhausted. (Masks are heavy, and switching masks requires skills.) Wondering why they feel so alone.
Oh, Rick…
I saw a show called “Art” at the Bluma, the other night. In it, one character (Yvan) is very sweet, and always trying to smooth things over, to the point where he doesn’t seem to have his own point of view on anything. The other two characters finally turn on him and call him an amoeba and ask him when he’s going to grow a spine.
Yvan has been seeing a psychiatrist for several years, and the psychiatrist had told him something so profound that he wrote it down, in order to remember it:
“If I’m who I am because I’m who I am, and you’re who you are because you’re who you are, then I’m who I am, and you’re who you are. But if I’m who I am because you’re who you are, and you’re who you are because I’m who I am, then I’m not who I am, and you’re not who you are.”
(Makes sense, though it’s rather long-winded.)
That speech follows shortly after Yvan’s show-stopping 4-minute rant about the hellish difficulty his mother, stepmother, and fiancee are causing him in making plans for his upcoming wedding. What a monologue!
There’s a lot to laugh at in “Art”, and a lot to psychoanalyze, if you’re into that sort of thing. Me, I just felt really jealous that there’s not a version of the play for 3 women instead of 3 men. It’s so well written, and would just be so much fun to do!