The Velvet Rage (25 page)

One of the most difficult things to do when you are struggling with your own internal shame is to deal with someone with whom you have a conflict. Your natural urge is to gather reinforcements about you to help you through the battle. The more effective practice, when shame is no longer the driving issue, is to unlearn this behavior by mindfully keeping a conflict solely between you and the other person. Regardless of whether you resolve the conflict or not, you have not dragged your friends into the fray needlessly and escalated the conflict. In the end, the
conflict stands a much better chance of successful resolution without the involvement of well-meaning bystanders.

Authenticity is difficult when you are galvanizing support from others for your side of the story. The very nature of the task demands that you paint the person with whom you have the conflict in a particularly negative way, and yourself as being somewhat blameless. The motive is often to draw love and support toward you by demeaning the other person.

Authenticity, in contrast, requires that you acknowledge yourself as clearly and wholly as possible, including both strengths and weaknesses. Because most conflicts between people are created by both persons, authenticity requires a certain level of honesty about your own participation in the conflict that isn't entirely consistent with the objective of winning others' support. In short, you slant the story to your benefit in order to be convincing.

Skill
: Always strive to be as honest as possible, even when it may seem to be easier or more efficient to hide the truth. Avoid giving others an inaccurate impression even when you haven't done anything deliberately to create that impression.

Background
: I sat in astonishment. Was I actually hearing what she said? I was attending a meeting of gay and lesbian psychotherapists in the San Francisco Bay area when one of the therapists said, “I'm not always certain that telling the truth is a good idea.”

On the agenda of the seminar meeting were several topics, and this one in particular had to do with couples telling one another about infidelities they had while together. This therapist was voicing what I had once believed: “Better to protect the relationship
if honesty will break it apart.” But for me, it had been years since I believed that honesty could sometimes be a bad idea. I've now changed my mind.

Any therapist who works with men in relationships, and gay men in particular, had better be ready to handle the surprise phone call that sometimes goes something like this: “Hello? Hmmm. I forgot to mention something in our last couples session. Well, huh, I don't know quite how to say this. It will really hurt him (her). I didn't mean it to hurt. I mean, oh well, let me just say it: I've been having an affair.”

After years of patching together couples in therapy and coaching one partner that “some secrets are best kept,” I began to notice something astonishing. The couples who seemed to keep secrets often grew further apart and rarely stayed together in the end. Was I doing them any favors by encouraging one of them to “protect” the other from the truth?

What I've come to see in my practice is that secrets create emotional distance. It's sort of like two parallel lines that are running very close to each other. Suddenly, one changes trajectory by just a fraction of a degree. At first, you hardly notice the distance. In time, the distance grows and the two lines move farther and farther apart. One small, tightly held secret can sometimes be all that it takes to drive two otherwise loving people apart.

If you're like I once was, maybe you're thinking, “But isn't it true that what you don't know can't hurt you?” If that were true in life, HIV wouldn't be a worldwide problem and ignorance of all sorts would be bliss. It just isn't so.

You are forced to view the world through the lens of your own being. You can't escape the truths you know, even if you do keep them from your partner or friends. The very fact that you know something to be true creates an effect on you and your behavior.
In the instance of marital infidelity, you know that you cheated even if your partner doesn't. That knowledge is enough of a wedge to push the two of you apart, even ever so slightly. It erodes your trust in yourself and in the relationship, and it can even begin to destroy your trust in your partner (i.e., “If I'm keeping this secret, imagine what he's keeping from me!”).

Authenticity demands truthfulness. Opinions, passing feelings, judgments, and hunches, when not supported by any facts, are often best kept to one's self. After all, feelings change and hunches are often wrong. But when you know the facts, those never change. Where facts are concerned, absolute and radical honesty is always best.

When I think about the importance of honesty, my mind often wanders back to those old episodes of the
Bob Newhart Show
where he worked as a psychologist and often held group therapy sessions. One character would tell another character that he “hated” her because she gave him a mean look when he walked in. From there, the group would erupt into chaos, and Bob was always there to point out the humor in it all.

Those groups were not honest. They were impulsive expressions of feelings. To understand the difference, you must think of feelings passing over you like waves. At one point in the day, you may be enraged with your spouse for not picking up the dry cleaning, and at another point, proud of him for having earned a great promotion at work. Feelings ebb and flow, washing over you and then subsiding. Only when you have observed a feeling reoccurring consistently over time can you conclude that it is a fair representation about how you “feel” about something or someone.

Honesty is often confused with the dangerous practice of expressing impulsive feelings in the moment. The kind of honesty that is the bedrock of authenticity isn't about impulsive feelings,
rather, it is truthfulness about observable facts and those enduring feelings that are consistent over time. So telling off your boyfriend because he was late to pick you up isn't what honesty is all about. However, telling your boyfriend that you find his consistent pattern of tardiness troublesome is.

Honesty is not an excuse to deliberately hurt others or to express pent-up rage. Saying things like “don't you know that no one likes you” or “everyone thinks you're
way
too bossy” isn't being honest. Statements like these are filled with passive-aggressive intent and are meant to hurt the recipient. Honesty is meant to help the recipient stay more connected with reality, and the only way to achieve this is to “stick with facts.”

The important lesson here is that protecting others from the truth of the facts isn't “protecting” them at all. As I mentioned earlier, when you “protect” another person from the truth, it's more likely that you're protecting yourself and your pride.

The practice of honesty is difficult to start, especially when you grow up learning to hide the more shameful parts of yourself. It feels threatening to reveal that you have made a mistake, taken something or someone for granted, or deliberately done something that you knew was wrong. To say these things brings up vivid memories of shame and a vague sense that you are a bad person and will ultimately be rejected by everyone around you.

Once the gay man has tackled and diminished the toxic shame in his life, he is better equipped for the practice of honesty. He is no longer scared of what the truth might reveal about himself to others. He is presenting his true self to everyone, and there's no shame in it at all.

Authenticity builds relationships that are satisfying and emotionally fulfilling. Any relationship that is riddled with secrets and omissions will not be emotionally fulfilling.

Skill
: Always seek to allow others the space to be imperfect. And when others disappoint you, avoid the temptation to keep an accounting of such disappointments.

Background
: When I hold resentment toward another person, it is almost always rooted in my fantasy of who I believe that person should be—and my own resistance to accepting him or her as is. When I fully accept another person, I do my best to see him with a clear lens, one that isn't fogged by my own expectations, beliefs, and projections. When I resent another person, I am holding rigidly to my own expectations and fantasies of that person as if to say, “You shouldn't be the person who you are.”

You may believe, for example, that your neighbor is terribly arrogant and unfriendly because he rarely speaks or acknowledges you on the street. If, however, you find out that your neighbor's partner recently died and then a month later he lost his job, you might think differently, right? Accepting others is all about allowing someone else the space to be who they are without you layering judgments and interpretations on top of their behavior. Your neighbor may act unfriendly, but he also has some very understandable reasons for being withdrawn and quiet.

Jamey came into therapy with his partner, Andrew, because he was concerned that he wasn't more sexually interested in his partner, whom he loved dearly and to whom, at least intellectually, he was attracted. Jamey just never felt the urge to be intimate with his partner and even had some feelings of repulsion toward sex. Jamey's partner was tired of asking for sex and being turned down, so their sex life had dwindled to nothing more than cuddling for almost a year. Andrew had been very kind and understanding about this situation but in recent months had become
very concerned that Jamey wasn't attracted to him—not to mention frustrated that he hadn't had his own needs met in quite some time. Andrew, convinced that something deeper was wrong with the relationship—even that Jamey was having an affair—had privately decided to move out of the house if things didn't improve. Jamey hadn't been willing to talk about his low desire for sex with Andrew, and likewise, Andrew, fearing rejection, hadn't been willing to bring it up, either.

As part of my assessment of this couple, I requested that Jamey have his testosterone levels measured, and as I suspected, his testosterone was so low as to almost be immeasurable. Within days of Jamey starting testosterone supplementation therapy, his sex drive came roaring back. Needless to say, Andrew was surprised, pleased, and a bit confused, as he had convinced himself that Jamey was no longer attracted to him.

What Jamey and Andrew experienced holds great wisdom for the rest of us. There are good reasons for our behavior even when we don't know what those reasons are. In Jamey's case, he suffered from a deficit in the male hormone that fuels sexual interest, and not, as Andrew had imagined, a waning love for his partner. Thankfully, the couple hadn't broken up and came in for help, just in the nick of time. The story we tell ourselves about other people's behavior, much like the story Andrew had created, may have little connection to reality; and yet we can become utterly convinced of its accuracy. Forgiveness, as a skill, is deeply rooted in our ability to let go of our most treasured fantasies and accept reality as it is, and not as we wish it to be. When we truly and radically accept reality, we loosen the commitment to the story in our heads and, instead, embrace the facts without judgment. As in the case of Jamey and Andrew, our stories about other people are often full of errors, omissions, and exaggerations.

Defaulting to forgiveness means that we accept that other people have good reasons for their behavior, even when we may not know those reasons or agree with them. Each of us is just trying to get through life as best we can, and forgiveness is the essence of allowing others the space to follow their own inner voice even when we disagree with it.

Forgiveness means that “I allow you to not live up to my fantasies”; it does not mean you continue to allow someone to hurt you, take advantage of you, or repeatedly invalidate you. Defaulting to forgiveness is also not the same thing as allowing that person back into your inner circle of intimacy. Forgiveness is all about my willingness to accept the truth about you without expectations or judgment. As Marianne Williamson often says in her lectures, “Just because you forgive someone doesn't mean you're going to lunch together anytime soon.”

Skill
: We rarely, if ever, feel just one way about virtually anything in life. You and I are ambivalent creatures—we naturally have competing feelings. Allow yourself permission to hold competing feelings without denying or forcing feelings that are inconvenient or unpleasant for the sake of premature clarity.

Background
: Our modern culture, with its emphasis on immediate gratification, often demands that you feel only one feeling about most anything in life and discourages any mention of ambivalence. Even simple things, like a customer satisfaction survey, require that you rate your satisfaction with one number, versus expressing ambivalence such as “I enjoyed the meal very much except for the salad, which was bland and uninteresting.” When it comes to the big things in life, like relationships, ambivalence
is not only discouraged, it's often seen as a sign of relationship failure; so we subtly learn to not express contrary feelings and to keep them private.

Who hasn't felt both love and anger toward the same person? Boredom and excitement? Frustration and pleasure? The reality of our emotional landscape is that it is full of competing feelings. When we fail to fully embrace and allow for ambivalence, those feelings we hide don't disappear, and sometimes they even grow until we can no longer hide them. When this happens, we can hurt other people by seeming to suddenly change how we feel about them, when in fact, the change wasn't sudden at all but rather something that we hid from view until we were no longer able to suppress it.

When you begin to feel uncomfortable with a relationship, perhaps as if the other person no longer really knows you, it's often because of your failure to fully express your own ambivalence. Over time, ambivalence that isn't embraced causes two people to pull apart. The more we hide and “clean up” our feelings for the benefit of another person, the greater the distance between us grows.