“If you have something to prove, you’re still a prisoner.”
As her husband took a seat and moved his eyes over the framed diplomas and photographs on my office walls, Ling, in a perfectly tailored skirt and blazer, her makeup expertly applied and her hair carefully coiffed, perched neatly on the opposite end of the couch. “This is the problem,” she said without preamble. “My husband drinks too much.”
In my 40 years as a clinical psychologist, I’ve treated many patients who’ve struggled with substance abuse and addiction of all kinds. I don’t minimize the pain experienced by people who are addicted — or by the people who love them.
Ling told me that she was worried about Jun’s health. She was also lonely: She was concerned about how the distance and deteriorating intimacy between them were affecting their two children. She wanted my help convincing Jun — for his sake, for her sake, and for the sake of their marriage and family — to stop drinking.
Yet in this couple I didn’t see only an addiction story. I saw a rigidity story. I saw people who were more married to their positions than they were to each other. Ling believed Jun drank too much, and Jun believed Ling nagged too much — that he drank to avoid the sting of her constant and oppressive criticism.
I call this the see-saw. One person’s up, and one person’s down. Blame is the pivot that keeps the two seats joined.
In blaming each other for their unhappiness, Ling and Jun both avoided the responsibility of making their own joy. In wanting Jun to stop drinking — in wanting something for someone else — Ling escaped having to know what she wanted for herself. And in rationalizing his drinking by saying it was Ling’s fault, Jun gave up the authority for his own choices.
Why did they each need the other to be bad so they could be good?
As the session continued I could see that while Jun may have been the one with a drinking problem, they were both addicted to the see-saw. If they wanted to bring peace to their marriage, they needed to look less at the perceived causes of the conflict (the drinking, the nagging), and more at the maintainers. Every behavior serves a need. Why did they each need the other to be bad so they could be good?
I can relate to the temporary but intoxicating high of feeling justified, of feeling right. For years after surviving Auschwitz, while I hid the truth of my suffering from my three children, I harbored elaborate fantasies of confronting Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who had killed my mother, and shaming and berating him for his deeds. I imagined how I would find him in Paraguay, how I would pose as a journalist to gain access, and then assault him with my fury. He would have to confront his crimes. I would make him. I wanted the upper hand and the last word. I thought my healing depended on it.
But if you have something to prove, you’re still a prisoner. Freedom comes in letting go of the need to be right.
“You can be dead right,” I told Ling and Jun toward the end of their first session, “and you’re still dead. So do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?”
For Ling, letting go of the need to be right meant changing her behavior in the moments after Jun got home from work, when she often felt angry and vulnerable and frightened. Would he be drunk? How drunk would he be? She had learned to manage her fear by trying to exert control. She would sniff Jun’s breath, make accusations, pull away.
I introduced her to a different approach: to greet her husband the same way whether he was sober or drunk — with kind eyes and a simple statement: “I’m happy to see you. I’m glad you’re home.”
If he was drunk, and she was hurt and disappointed, she was allowed to talk about those feelings. She could say, “I can see you’ve been drinking, and that makes me feel sad because it’s hard to feel close to you when you’re drunk” or “That makes me feel worried about your safety.” And she was allowed to make choices for herself in response to his choice to drink. She could say, “I was hoping to talk to you tonight, but I can see you’ve been drinking. I’m going to do something else instead.”
But no more accusations and recrimination. In fact, no criticism, ever. Criticism only invites defensiveness, and then you’re in a power struggle. A tug-of-war for dominance. Don’t accuse. Don’t defend yourself against a crime you never committed. Don’t pick up the rope.
My ballet master in Hungary taught me that strength and flexibility are inseparable. When I practiced the splits, spine straight, abdominal muscles tight, legs reaching apart, breathing into the places where I felt stuck, I pictured my body expanding like the strings on my sister’s violin, finding the exact place of tautness that makes the whole instrument ring.
Often we react to powerlessness by reaching for control. Yet true power has nothing to do with brawn or domination or superiority. It means you have the strength to respond instead of react, to take charge of your life, to have total ownership of your choices. You are powerful because you’re not giving your power away.
