Kirshenbaum, Mira - Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

You’ve got to watch out for one of the slipperiest ways people refuse to acknowledge their problems: they get hurt. Your asking for acknowledgment makes them sad, discouraged, desperate. It seems to make them feel so bad about themselves, it’s such a blow to their ego, that you start getting the sense that even mentioning the problem makes things worse, not better. But what these people are really doing, consciously or unconsciously, is using emotional blackmail to convince you that night is day and that not dealing with a problem is a more effective way of handling it than dealing with it. Actually, they’re using a form of off-the-table-itis to prevent you from asking them to acknowledge their own problem.

Regardless of how he does it, if your partner can’t even recognize what he’s doing and the impact it has on you and the fact that it makes the relationship too bad to stay in, how can things possibly improve? One person out of touch with reality is bad enough; two people like this are an insane asylum.

STEP #16: WILL HE BE WILLING TO CHANGE?

Okay, there you are in a terrible state of relationship ambivalence. And let’s say that the problem your partner has that makes you think about leaving is something he acknowledges. That’s good. Acknowledgment delivers real hope.

But now let’s take the next step. Yes, he acknowledges the problem, but is he willing to do something about it? Is he at least willing to try? Let’s say (because the story coming up is about this) that the problem is that your partner is too fat. This is a politically incorrect issue, but inside our relationships political correctness flies out the window. And my job is to talk about the real things people deal with on the level they deal with them.

And a huge problem for people in relationship ambivalence is what happens after their partners admit they have a problem. They may admit it but they’re too often not willing to change. Here’s the question that’s helped a lot of people get out of their ambivalence:

Diagnostic question #16. Is there something your partner does that makes your relationship too bad to stay in and that he acknowledges but that, for all intents and purposes, he’s unwilling to do anything about?

The key is that word “unwilling.” It might sound simple, but like the iceberg that sank the Titanic it’s ten times bigger than it seems and most of it is submerged. For every person who comes right out and admits they’re unwilling to change, there are ten people who won’t say they’re unwilling to change and yet they’ll fight you every step of the way to prevent change.

Jim’s Story

Let me go back to the case of the man whose partner was too fat for him. I know you probably hate him already, but let’s look at his side of things for a bit.

Jim was a fitness coach for a professional sports team. Being in shape and looking in shape was his life and livelihood. When he’d first married Peggy she’d been a dancer and was in terrific shape. They’d shared a focus on the body. Just the way two really smart people might come together with the understanding that they’ll spend their lives enjoying each other’s intelligence and that if one of them should start acting stupid it’s all over, it was like that for Jim and Peggy with respect to having beautiful bodies, at least from Jim’s point of view.

By the time I saw them together, Peggy weighed 290 pounds. Here’s the impact this had on Jim. Sex was physically uncomfortable and unsatisfying, but even more than that he simply didn’t desire Peggy any more. He was ashamed of being embarrassed by her, but he was embarrassed nonetheless. Most of all, perhaps, Jim went around in a constant state of rage inside for what Peggy had done to herself and to him.

I checked carefully and as far as I could see Jim had done everything possible to convey to Peggy the full import of how he felt and what things meant to him. Peggy knew that for Jim her being fat was a violation of the unwritten spiritual contract that had brought them together. Peggy knew that as Jim weighed the pros and cons of staying and leaving there was a 290 pound weight in the balance on the side of the relationship’s being too bad for Jim to stay in.

Jim’s ambivalence came from all the things on the other side of the balance, like the fact that he still loved Peggy and the part of him that felt guilty about making appearance such an important issue.

Let’s check in with Peggy. Acknowledgment wasn’t a problem : she knew she was fat, she knew it was unhealthy she knew it was unattractive, she even knew it depressed her, and, most important for our purposes, she knew it was driving Jim away.

But this is where we have to face the issue of what real willingness to change means. It would have been clearer if Peggy had simply.said, “Yeah, I’m fat, and I know you find it obnoxious, but I like myself this way and I don’t want to do anything about it.” But Peggy was a textbook illustration of how people who state a superficial willingness to change actually convey a real unwillingness to change, regardless of what the particular problem happens to be. Here are some of the things she said:

• “Of course I want to lose weight but I don’t make it the be-all and end-all the way you do. It’s more important that I eat healthy food and concentrate on my work and most of all eliminate stress from my life.”

• “It’s not for you to tell me what to do. In fact, your telling me what to do makes me not want to do it.”

• “It’s wrong of you to want me to change. You’re supposed to accept me the way I am.”

• “Every time you complain about this it makes me depressed and I just put on more weight.” (People who aren’t willing to change always say that expressing your need makes them dig themselves deeper into the problem.)

Then there’s the ultimate expression of unwillingness-hiding-in-seeming-willingness:

• “I want to lose weight, too, but I’ve got to do it for myself, not for you, and I’ve got to do it in my own time and in my own way.”

You might be wondering what’s wrong with this last statement. Aren’t we supposed to believe this? Well, it’s certainly the kind of thing therapists like me have tried to get people to believe, because it’s important that we own our own lives and do things for ourselves. But there are two completely different possible translations of Peggy’s last statement:

• The first translation is “I want to do it and I will do it, but it’ll only work if I do it my way.” And that’s good if it’s sincere.

• The second translation is “I’m unwilling to do it, and you can hang around and watch if you want but I’ll never do it, and when I say ‘my way’ I mean if it happens without my making an effort, fine, otherwise too bad.” And that’s not good.

The second translation is what Peggy really meant. She was saying she was willing when she was really unwilling. Here are the facts. Jim had made his feelings clear to Peggy for many years. Peggy had said she’d lose weight “in her own time and in her own way” for just as many years. But her body exhibited her unwillingess to change.

So let’s see if we can be a little more sympathetic to Jim. Sure, he should have been a more noble, more spiritual person. But he never pretended to be a different kind of guy than he was. And he’d made it very clear to Peggy what was at stake. By her saying in a dozen ways both directly and indirectly that she was unwilling to change, she was in effect giving Jim permission to end the relationship. The gap between them was just too big.

If your answer to question #16 is yes, here’s the guideline: