Go From Now To Then, How To Back Up Your Life
Not long ago I was reading a list of traits common to co-dependent people, and more of them fit me than I wanted to admit. What struck me was how simple it felt to look backward and trace where those traits came from. I've always wanted the people who read what I write to do two things at once: name the trouble they're sitting in right now, and also follow the thread back to its beginning. That second part is the one that actually changes how a person behaves.
Being co-dependent, I tend to put what everyone else wants ahead of what I want. I'll go a long way to keep someone from getting upset when they don't get their way. One result is a running list of restaurants I never managed to visit. Some of that is practical: I'm disabled, and getting me in and out of the car, dropping me at the door, re-parking, then walking back takes time most people would rather not spend. It really is quicker to leave me out of it.
So when the rest of the family starts talking about going somewhere and I feel the pull to say I'd like to come along, I hear myself as the person who'd ruin it. I don't want to be that person, so I say nothing. Out on an outing, when the group is picking a place to eat, I might be quietly hoping for a particular kind of food, maybe somewhere I've never had the chance to try, and I keep quiet anyway. There's usually one person in the group who expects to get her way and is sure her pick is the sensible one.
If the people around me are unhappy about something, I catch it like a cold. Part of me assumes I'm supposed to feel whatever they feel. Another part worries that if I don't fall in line and agree their way of feeling is correct, they'll be angry, or feel worse, because I failed to back them up. The truth I keep relearning is that I'm allowed to feel what I feel. I'm even allowed to feel nothing at all.
Everybody is built differently. Inside families especially, speaking your own mind can get read as being wrong, or as a withdrawal of support. Parents hold the authority, and some expect their children to reflect them back. A child who disagrees gets treated like a discipline problem rather than a separate person.
I didn't grasp how controlling my mother could be until a trip where she and I shared a room. Her snoring kept me awake, so I got up, went into the bathroom, and read magazines to pass the time. I thought I'd managed not to wake her. She must have woken anyway and found my bed empty, because she threatened to kill herself over it. Apparently I was meant to lie there and pretend to sleep. It frightened me.
The pattern seems to go like this: forceful, demanding people get their way, and co-dependents grow up around them. Co-dependents, in turn, learn to be sneaky, to steer clear of the demanding ones. That slides easily into a kind of lying by leaving things out. As a kid I'd be handed notes from the teacher to carry home to my parents, and I simply never delivered them. Confrontation was something I dreaded, sometimes to the point of real fear. I was afraid of the sheer force those adults could summon.
Here's another story about my mother and how demanding she could be. Four years into my first marriage I decided I had to ask for a divorce. I was so miserable that I was sick nearly all the time, and a doctor I saw told me plainly that divorce was the only remedy he could see.
When I called my mother, shaking, to tell her, she got angry and informed me that nobody in our family had ever divorced, and ordered me not to either. After we hung up I cried so hard that I went and stood in the shower with the water running and sobbed until I was empty. I did divorce my first husband. It was mutual. I moved away afterward, though not back to the town where my mother lived.
Early in my current marriage I found out I was going to be fired, and I never really learned the reason. Did I cry and shake? Yes. The man held a lot of power, and part of it, I suspect now, was that I held a PhD and he held an Ed.D. For those who care about the distinction: my doctorate was in clinical psychology and his was in educational psychology. I didn't look down on him for that. He once told me he'd sat the licensing exam to become a psychologist without studying and passed it.
After I left that clinic I spent six months going back through my doctoral exam notes from graduate school before I sat and passed the licensing exam myself. It was brutal, and a few years out of school I don't believe I could have passed without that preparation. Looking back, I can't help wondering whether he was setting me up for something. Staying submissive doesn't protect you, at least not when the person across from you is a narcissist with no conscience.
I can also be talked out of things. I'm not always wrong when I give in, but people are so forceful that I start to assume I must be overlooking some flaw in my own reasoning, so I fold. Some people who land in authority, as bosses or teachers or parents, decide that being in charge means always being right, either by the power of the seat itself or on the logic that they'd never have reached it without knowing everything.
I had one professor in my clinical program who was a star in her field thanks to her published research, and who could not teach to save her life. After each of her classes the whole group of us went straight to our books and references to figure out the real answers to the questions she'd raised in the room. We once did so badly on a test of hers that she held us after the session to drill the correct answers into us, which left us with a choice between staying put and showing up late to our next classes.