The Road to Reconciliation: Cheap Pardon

Most of what passes for forgiveness is actually a cut-rate imitation, an easy, breezy amnesty that you extend, not because it’s earned, but because you don’t want to deal with it. It preserves the connection you have with the person who offended you. You don’t have to fight, express your feelings, or watch anyone squirm. You don’t have to prolong the awkward scene of your partner, down on his knees, asking forgiveness, or the equally uncomfortable situation of having to explain the offense to one who is clueless, defensive, and in denial.

You might feel good about yourself, offering grace at discount prices. You think you turned the other cheek, gave the shirt off your back, and welcomed the prodigal sinner. You did what you thought you were supposed to do. The problem is, by rushing the process, neither you nor the offending party took the opportunity to fully assess the situation. You may not have defined the problem, acknowledged the injury, or confronted your own complicity. You wiped the slate clean before anyone got to read what was written.

Cheap pardon may preserve the relationship, but it prevents you from achieving a more intimate bond. Magic happens when partners see each other naked, in all their ugliness, and decide to love anyway. That is very different from turning away from the ugliness or pretending it’s not there.

Easy forgiveness lets the offender off the hook, while you still have to deal with the offense. It’s a self-inflicted injury on top of an injury. It gives him a green light while you are still waiting at red.

An addict in recovery, for instance, does not need cheap pardon. It doesn’t help him. For instance, right in the middle of the Twelve Steps are seven that have to do with taking a moral inventory, admitting wrongs, and being ready to make amends and remove shortcomings. A recovering addict working his program goes through those steps slowly, carefully, and thoroughly. When you let your addict breeze through them, they’re skipping important aspects of their recovery. Don’t be surprised then if they fail to stay clean or, even if they do abstain, remain the same selfish son-of-a-bitch they were, back when they were using. No, you’re not at fault, but you have not helped the matter when you let him off the hook.

How do you know when the forgiveness you are offering is too easy? How do you set a price for pardon? I’ll go into this in much more detail, as I describe the road to genuine reconciliation; but, for now, ask yourself the following questions:

Do I deny the violation when others see it clearly?
Do I beat myself up and blame myself when he mistreats me?
Do I make excuses for the offender before she gets a chance to?
Do I accept apologies without restitution?
Do I say I forgive an incident, but get angry or bring up that incident again?
Do I reflexively repair relationships despite how I feel?
Do I even know how I feel?

It’s easy to get into the habit of granting cheap pardon. If you know someone, anyone, long enough, a million things will come along that annoy you, or concern you, or make you uncomfortable. Learning to live together involves learning to overlook things, to go with the flow, to not make a big deal about nothing. However, when you find that you are alienated from yourself, don’t know your own feelings, or continuously act against your own interests, you are not properly learning to live together; you are chopping off pieces of yourself to make room for him.

We all know people whose feelings are easily hurt, who wear their hearts on their sleeves, are enraged when others don’t follow their agenda, and are hypersensitive to anything that wounds their pride. These people feel injured continuously. They’re always looking for apologies so they can get others under their control. You don’t want to be like that. You’re afraid that, if you don’t grant cheap pardon, you’ll turn into that guy: narcissistic, entitled, and embittered. Therefore, you grant amnesty easily, sometimes before it’s even asked.

The thing is, even if you are a person who is easily wounded, cheap pardon would still not be the way to go. It’s enough that you feel hurt, that your girlfriends say you’re hurt, that your best buddy doesn’t believe the things she’s done to you. Whenever there is any indication of harm, no matter how ill-founded it may be, you still need to get on the difficult road to real reconciliation and not take the shortcut of cheap pardon. As with many things, it’s the journey that’s as important as the destination.

The Shrink’s Links: Consumer Affair’s Guide to Online Dating

Dating when you’re single can be confusing. Getting back to dating after loss or divorce can be terrifying. Dating while you’re still married is a recipe for disaster.

No matter what your marital status is,  you need guidance, especially if you’re using online dating sites. Consumer Affairs has a free publication that helps you sort out the choices.

Yes, these are the same people who rate consumer items from refrigerators to cars. No, they’re not rating the prospective dates for you, they’re just rating the dating service.

Click here to go to the site.

The Road to Reconciliation

You’re wounded and angry. Someone close to you, who should be loving you, hurt you instead. You don’t know what to do. Should you stay or should you go? Put up with the shit, or give it right back to him? Retaliate or bury your feelings? If neither choice seems very good, it’s because neither choice is very good. You wish there were another way. Some way that affirmed your experience as a victim, but didn’t leave you weak and vulnerable. Some way that facilitated change and showed mercy, without opening you up to more disappointment. Some way to be firm, but not rigid.

Luckily, there is a way. The road to reconciliation can be a long, long road, often not well marked. The choices are confusing, but I’ll show you the route.

You’ve done something wrong. You have not been as good as you could be. You hurt someone you love, someone who doesn’t deserve it. You want to do better, but you don’t know how. You’ve apologized, maybe a hundred times, but you can’t get past it. You know that your action, even though it was wrong, was not the whole story. There were precipitating factors. It’s complicated, you’d like to explain, but you can’t talk about it without it sounding like you’re making excuses. You wish there were another way between groveling and pride. You’d like to learn from your mistake without losing your dignity and voice.

There’s a way for you, too; a way to repair what was damaged.

Both of you, the offender and the offended, have to travel the first part of this route by separate paths. You each have to do your own work before you come together. You each have a part to play before you can arrive at full, genuine reconciliation. Not everyone is up to it. Not everyone makes it all the way. Your partner will not make it to the rendezvous point exactly when you do. Your partner may not make it at all.

Total, genuine reconciliation requires collaborative effort that some people cannot do; cannot or will not. Both parties have to take responsibility for their share of the situation. If you have a partner who won’t do his share, you will not make it all the way to Reconciliation. Luckily, you can make it pretty far down the road without your partner’s help. You can make it all the way to Personal Peace, which is on the road to Reconciliation. Personal Peace is a pretty nice place.

How can you come to peace with the things that have happened? Well, I’m going to show you; but you don’t do it just by reading about it. You have to take the steps to get there.

The Shrink’s Links: The Road to Reconciliation

Beginning this Friday, I will be posting chapters of a new weekly series, The Road to Reconciliation. This is a writing project I’ve been working on that spells out the process couples take to put old injuries and disappointments behind them and move on to a more functional, satisfying relationship.

On this website, I will be posting one new chapter a week. In time, as you read it, the chapters will appear in reversed order. If you’d rather read it the usual way, from beginning to end, click here and read it on the publishing platform, Medium. There, I am the entire project posted, at least as far as I’ve written.

Getting Help

We’ve been seeing what happens when addiction takes over a relationship. The people in the relationship disappear and the needs of the addiction consume everything. If you’re the person with the addiction, your job is to recover. If you’re the other person, your job is to recognize the diseased portion of the relationship, stay connected with the healthy parts, and get help.

Once addiction begins to take over a relationship, never try to take care of your sick partner yourself. It’s too dangerous. It took possession of your loved one and now it’s coming for you. You need someone objective, preferably someone who understands addiction and its effect on relationships. Someone who isn’t afraid to tell the hard truth, but also someone who can say it delicately so people can listen.

It might be obvious that an addicted person needs a doctor, but when addiction is in charge, they don’t go. Addiction doesn’t like what doctors have to say. It would rather she be in a state of denial, so that it can work its evil in secret. (Although there are some special conditions like addiction to prescription medication that try to enlist doctors in the pathology.) You can tell how much your loved one has succumbed to addiction by how cooperatively he works with the people meant to help him. If it seems like he’s always fighting with them, it’s really the addiction trying to defend itself.

If the addicted person is working with a doctor, then the non-addicted partner needs to, also. The non-addicted partner needs to understand the illness and treatment. The doctor may need information about the condition that only the non-addicted partner can provide. You, your partner, and the professionals need to form a team that works together, not in isolation from each other.

There are several factors that get in the way of a treatment team effectively working together.

The first is when the people who are supposed to treat illness fall under its spell. Anyone who has ever been around an anxious person knows that anxiety is contagious. People dealing with the depressed often fall into despair. It’s easy to get inflexible when you try to cope with a rigid person. Wives will wait on a husband hand and foot when he is supposed to get up and be active himself. Husbands of addicts have been known to score drugs for their darlings, to keep them safe. Divisions are created between the people who are attempting to treat the illness and the ones facilitating it.

The second most common barrier is put up by partners who attempt to protect the sanctity of their marriage. They believe it’s a betrayal of their partner to get help, a violation of boundaries. To be sure, some addicted partners will see it that way. He may be angry if you tell on him. However, the sanctity of the marriage has already been violated when the addiction moved in and refused to leave. You’re not telling on him, you are informing on the addiction. You’re not betraying your loved one; you’re protecting him from a common enemy that has him bamboozled.

If your addicted partner will get help to combat his addiction, that’s very good. If she won’t, then that should not stop you from getting help yourself. Remember, you’re next in line to succumb to the madness. Meet your friend for coffee, unload to your family, make an appointment with that counselor, if only so you can keep things straight and stay in contact with a rational world.

The Shrink’s Links: Self Directed Search

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

Even if you’re, like, forty-three years old and don’t know what you want to be when you grow up, you can discover your bliss with the Holland Self Directed Search.

Being unsure of one’s vocation actually happens far more often than you think. The average person these days has multiple careers. If you think you are at the end of the one, if it’s no longer satisfying, if your field has changed in ways so you no longer recognize it, it may be time to pull the plug and reset.

The Holland Self Directed Search asks you about your interests, experience, and abilities and offers some new directions. It’s easy.

Click here to get started on a new path.

Calibrating your Compass

Take a perfectly functional compass and put it in a room with an electromagnet and it will forget which way is north. It’ll point to the magnet because the magnet is exerting a force that it cannot ignore, far more powerful than that exercised by the distant, measly north pole.

When addiction enters a relationship it exerts a force every bit as compelling as that magnet. You can do nothing without taking a look in its direction. It will alter your attitude, change your course, and make you forget yourself and your values. You can do nothing without checking with the addiction first.

You must get free of that interference and recalibrate your compass.

If you’ve ever recalibrated a compass, you’ll know that, for a minute or two, the needle will spin around aimlessly until it finds magnetic north. You’ll be lost if you try to use it then and confused if you rely on it for direction.

When people free themselves of the effects of addiction, for a minute they feel similarly lost and confused. When they discern the addiction, starve it, get help, create Addiction-Free Zones, take care of themselves, and take steps to their own growth, they feel as though they have lost their bearings. They don’t know what’s important anymore because they’ve been separated from their values for so long. Many go back to having their lives dictated by the addiction. It is more familiar and comfortable.

To remain free, it’s important to stay with the process long enough to get your bearings straight. Reconnect with your values as you might find them in your religious faith, spiritual practices, the story of your life, the way you find meaning and purpose, or the things you told yourself you would never do.

The process my cell phone goes through to calibrate its compass gives us hints as to what this is like. Your cell phone compass probably works the same way as mine. In order for it to be correct, you have to tilt it this way and that. As you do this, a graphic in the phone helps you cover each direction completely. You fill up a circle as you tilt it every which way.

The process you will go through as you recalibrate your own internal compass is similar. You have to tilt briefly in every direction. Take a look around before you charge forward or go back. Take stock. Take inventory, first, before you move on.

The Shrink’s Links: NYS Department of Health, Bureau of Managed Care Division

Bringing you the best of mental health every week.

Having no health insurance can kill you, but having insurance can frustrate you half to death.

Many of the calls I get from prospective clients are people with insurance, but, for whatever reason, their insurance will not cover them to see me. Every other therapist I know finds the same thing. It has nothing to do with qualifications, skills, or experience.
It’s the game insurance companies play to keep you from spending their money.

Blue Cross/ Blue Shield/ Excellus may be the worse offender. They have the largest market share in the Rochester area and allow the smallest number of mental health providers into their network. Just try getting the help you need when you have that insurance.

Twenty-seven states don’t have this kind of problem. They have “Any Willing Provider” Laws that allow members to chose any mental health provider, rather than only the ones on their insurance company’s list. “Any Willing Provider” was written nationally into law under Obamacare, but in language that is impossible to enforce. The result is that, in New York State, you do not have the freedom to chose your provider. The result is that mental heath care is often inaccessible.

In this week’s shrink’s links I have for you the webpage of the New York State Department of Health, Bureau of Managed Care Division; just the place you would want to contact if you have a grievance against your insurance company. I’ve filed two complaints last year, winning both, regarding insurance companies that failed to honor their contracts.

Click here to go to the page.

You can also call 800-206-8125

Create Addiction Free Zones

If addiction has taken over your relationship, there’s plenty that you can do other than succumb to its evil yourself. Just because your boyfriend wants to get piss-drunk every time you go out, doesn’t mean you have to clean him up. Even if your girlfriend picks fights with everyone, doesn’t mean you have to make excuses for her. So your wife is hung over and hasn’t gotten up yet, that doesn’t mean you have to wait. Get out a little, be healthy, let your partner clean up his or her own mess. Create an Addiction-Free Zone.
You can create an Addiction-Free Zone in all kinds of places. If your wife is hung over and bedridden, the Addiction-Free Zone can be the whole rest of the house. Remove all the bottles, the glasses, the shakers, all the stuff involved with the addiction and confine it to just the spot where it needs to be.

If your husband never seems to come home because he’s out with his addiction, you have the house to turn into an Addiction-Free Zone. Redecorate it into an area of vitality. Put pictures on the walls and things that are involved with your interests, activities other than waiting for your missing husband.

Pursue your interests. Go to your yoga class, play softball with the guys, stay connected with family as you would cling to a lifeline. Even more importantly, confine the attitudes of the addiction. Close the door on the hopelessness, the irritability, the dependence to where it has to be and don’t let it invade everywhere else.

If your addicted wife doesn’t want to be alone with the illness, confined to the room just as she is, then you’re very lucky. That’s a sign of health on her part, an indication that her whole personality has not been taken over by the addiction. If your missing husband comes home from the track upset to find his barcalounger in the basement, new curtains on the windows, and the house filled with your bridge club, then that’s good, too. He’s showing an interest in something other than the horses. They, too, can create an Addiction-Free Zone where their drug is not allowed to invade.

Addiction-Free Zones can be created in time as well as space. Play chess with your addict, watch shows together, let him take care of you sometimes. Restrict actions related to addiction to certain times of the day. Ban the cigarettes from your presence, exile alcohol from date night. Lock up the illness, shove it in the basement, wrap it up in duct tape, and free the person.

You might have to be inventive about establishing Addiction-Free Zones. Addicted spouses tend to make messes and spread their madness everywhere they go. In that case, go somewhere they don’t go; somewhere they would never go. Most alcoholic husbands wouldn’t be caught dead at a tea party, so acquire a taste for having tea with your friends. Angry partners are apt to dislike therapists, so find a therapist and create a zone in that office where you can be yourself. If your husband does blow in the bathroom whenever you go out with him, don’t go out with him. He can go himself, while you go to your tea party. If your wife embarrasses you in front of your family, suggest she does something different on Thanksgiving.

Creating an Addiction-Free Zone is really very easy, though it might take some imagination. It’s all about knowing the difference between sickness and health and drawing lines between them. It might look like a selfish thing to do, but it makes you a better caregiver and a more loving spouse. An Addiction-Free Zone will ground you and nourish you so that you can better defeat the addiction and maintain your relationship with the person you love.

The Baby in the Room

You know what it’s like when there’s a baby in the room. At best, the baby is delightful and everyone is cooing and coddling the cute little tyke. At worse, the baby’s screams prevent anyone else from saying a word or even thinking a complete thought. If the baby is upset, then everything must stop until the baby is happy. If the baby is happy, then you must keep the baby happy or there’ll be hell to pay. You’re not even off the hook if the baby is asleep, for the baby must stay asleep. Be careful how loud you talk or how hard you walk, or you’ll wake the baby.

You excuse babies for being baby-like because they don’t know any different. Besides, they’re just so gosh-darn cute. You were a baby, too, and kept your parents up all night. They forgave you, so, it’s OK. Part of growing up is not being grown up, being irresponsible, crapping your pants, saying rude things, not understanding, and wanting everything your way, right away.

Here’s the thing, though. There are many babies in many rooms who are not actually babies; they’re full grown adults, acting like babies. They’re being irresponsible, understanding nothing, saying outrageous things, wanting everything their way, demanding everything right now, and shitting all over everything.

Every room has a baby in it. Every family, every couple, every workgroup, every team, and yes, even every Presidential debate has at least one person being a baby and forcing everyone to either meet his terms or devolve down a long ugly descent to deeper and deeper dysfunction and despair.

Wherever you go, look around and see if you can spot the baby. The baby is not necessarily the youngest one in the room, or the least experienced, or least skilled. It’s the person you check first to see if she’s on board. It’s the one you most need to keep happy or no one else is happy. It’s the guy who creates the narrative, sets the tone, puts the ball in play. It’s the one who gets the most attention for doing the least work. The baby is whomever is the best at playing the baby.

If you don’t know who the baby is, it might be you.

Being a baby gives you a lot of power in the way that being angry, throwing tantrums, getting attention or making people do what you want gives you power. It’s limited power. You can’t accomplish anything long range with it; but a baby is not playing the long game; it only wants immediate gratification.

Adults act like babies for a variety of reasons. In some cases, they never grew up. More often, they did grow up, but some kind of stress: physical, mental, or environmental, is causing them to regress and go back to an earlier state. You might remember the last time you had a bad cold. Chances are, you acted like a baby, simply because you didn’t feel well.

I believe this is more rare than assumed, but there are other times when people will act like a baby in a deliberate attempt to get what they want, cause division, and escape accountability. The recent Presidential debates again come to mind, proving you can be quite successful in most regards and still be a big baby.

Babies bring out both the best and the worst in people. If you’re lucky, someone steps up and acts like the adult in the room. Someone does the responsible thing, cleans up, understands, accedes the point, shows patience, and restraint. Certainly, all this grace gets wasted on the baby. You give an inch and the baby takes a mile. It encourages the baby. The baby can go on and be a baby and get its way and someone else picks up the pieces. But, at least everything doesn’t go entirely to hell.

Ideally, the one who had been acting like a baby should be the one to step up and take responsibility. The best possible outcome is for the baby to grow up.

Others can facilitate this by being parents. The task is similar no matter whether the baby is an actual baby or is supposed to be an adult. A good-enough parent discerns what the baby needs and provides for it. This involves assessing the developmental stage of the baby, so that, if the baby has some capacities, the good-enough parent patiently coaches the baby to behave in a more mature fashion.

If your baby has just never grown up, you’re going to have to be especially patient while she catches up to everyone else. You’re going to have to gradually give her more responsibilities as she learns to handle them.

If your adult is a baby because he’s stressed, you may have to help him remove the stress, solve the problem causing it, or learn to cope with it so he can return to his previous level of functioning.

If your baby is acting immature as a part of a negotiation, then you have to increase the costs of adopting that strategy. Make it worth their while and this kind will grow up pretty fast.

One practical tactic is to use isolation, so that the baby doesn’t disrupt everyone else in the house. She can go on having a temper tantrum, but, with no one else paying attention, she only cries herself hoarse. This is why babies, ideally, have their own rooms, so that everyone else can go on living their lives without everything being centered around the baby.

One thing you want to avoid is having a whole room of people competing over who gets to be the baby, each one acting more childish than the last. This starts off when someone tries to get the baby to grow up, so they can be the baby. The baby doesn’t want to grow up, so a fight ensues. There is no adult. There is only dissension and chaos.

When addiction enters a household, there’s a baby in the room. It might seem like the addict is the baby, the one who runs everything. It seems like the non-addicted people are the non-babies; sometimes catering to the addict, sometimes making excuses for him, some other times resenting him. Sometimes the situation devolves into a screaming recrimination match.

If you look a little closer, though, it’s not quite so simple. A lot of the time it does seem the addict is the baby; but sometimes the others are throwing tantrums. Sometimes the non-addicted spouse is just so fed up that he begins to whine and carry on like a child. Sometimes the addicted person steps in and takes care of things. They switch places.

I prefer to think of the baby in the room as the addiction, which sometimes is found in the addict, and, other times, migrates over to the non-addicted partner and takes the form of some other kind of madness. No matter who you are and how mature you can be, you still have a little child inside you. Take care of her, no matter where she shows up, or she will make herself heard, loudly.