Category: Ask Dr. Reality

Love Yourself First?

Dear Dr. Reality,

There’s a phrase I hear so often, and I’m not sure if it’s true. “You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself.” Do you think this is true? I’ve been grappling with this one for a while, and haven’t been able to decide whether it’s just annoying psychobabble, or if there’s validity to it. Being more compassionate toward myself has enhanced my intimate relationships immeasurably, but I’m not willing to accept that I’ve been unloving during periods of self-loathing.

Signed, Skeptical

Dear Skeptical,

Love is an emotion and a definition of a relationship. As an emotion, you can love your partner, the Red Sox, or chocolate; as the definition of a relationship, it means that the other person’s happiness or well-being is a reinforcer of your own behavior. Abusive parents are always going on about how much they love their children, and if they mean how they feel about them, then I have no dispute (or basis of disagreement), but if they mean the definition of the relationship, I have to point out sometimes that their behavior more closely aligns with the idea that they hate their children.

It takes a tremendous amount of vulnerability to allow someone else’s well-being to be a reward. There’s a risk that the other person will decide that their happiness doesn’t include you as much as you want to be included—this is almost bound to happen if the other person is your own child. There’s a risk that we all adjust to the love we think we deserve, so if you love someone else, the other person might start to think better of herself and conclude that she can do better than us. There’s a risk that the other person will screw things up and wreck our source of reinforcement. These are just some of the risks, as I’m sure you know. Think city of Cleveland and LeBron James: they felt the emotion of love, but they didn’t really want what was best for him.

It seems pretty obvious that you can feel the emotion of love regardless of how healthy you are. The emotion of love is what we feel about an intermittent reinforcer. (Do Hawaiians love a nice day as much as New Englanders? I doubt it.) No doubt Hitler loved his dog—and the German Army until Stalingrad.

What relation to ourselves is necessary to support a loving relationship with another person? We’d have to be resilient and generally optimistic about our potential, or else the risks and vulnerabilities would be too powerful. We’d have to have an array of available social reinforcers and skills to obtain them, because we would respond to our lover by trying to control her if she was the only important source of reinforcement. In fact, if she were our only source of reinforcement and she had any autonomy at all, we would hate her. And how do we become people who are resilient, generally optimistic, open, and socially skilled? We get this way if we have been the object of other people’s love.

So the answer to your question is not, yes, “You can’t love someone else if you don’t love yourself.” The answer is yes, “You can’t love someone else if you haven’t been loved.”

Quarterlife Crisis

Dear Dr. Reality,

What do you think of this notion of a quarterlife crisis?

Curious

Dear Curious,

We narrate our lives with chapter headings provided by society, and then we tie our unhappiness to a change in chapters. It’s a pretty close analogy to the way we speak of having a good day or a bad day, a good year or a bad year, but rarely do we think that we just had a good 37 minutes or a bad four-and-a-half hours.

If your chapter headings aren’t working for you, change them. For example, if the dog next door starts barking every night when the nearby saloon closes and the drunks stumble down your street looking for their cars, you will feel every day ends badly if you punctuate your assessments to begin when the alarm clock goes off. You have a choice about this; the Jews, for example, start each day when the sun goes down, not when it goes up (undoubtedly because life begins when the kids go to bed). So start your day when the dog starts barking and end it when your head hits the pillow and you will have one day after another that started rough and ended well. Okay, okay, it’s a bad example. Get the dog one of those collars that’ll shock it when it barks. But you get my drift.

Many so-called life crises occur because we expected something else, something better.

Late life crisis: I wish I had a dollar for every time my 89-year-old father has said of old age, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” This will make for a crisis.

Midlife crisis: If you don’t know that you are going to have to find some new sources of reinforcement after you get good at your job, your marriage turns into chore management, and your salary prospects level out, get smart. Criminy—why aren’t they teaching that in school?

Quarterlife crisis: If you thought life was going to be one long T-ball game where everyone gets a gold star just for trying and then you discovered that only the scions of wealthy families and really hard workers who are gluttons for feedback are living in swanky apartments in major cities while those looking for their gold star just for trying are living in their parents’ basement, and if this discovery makes you whine to your parents so you can get yet another gold star from them, and if they help you manage your desuetude by inventing a malady called a quarterlife crisis for which the treatment is, you guessed it, more gold stars, why, then you are going to have a quarterlife crisis. But don’t come crying to me when you go to see a therapist for help with your quarterlife crisis and it turns out that your therapist doesn’t know a damn thing about therapeutic change because she went into the only field on earth where you can rise to the top getting gold stars just for showing up.

Dr. Reality — Sistery Mystery

Dear Dr. Reality,

I have a dilemma about managing relationships. My sister has been in an on-again-off-again relationship with a man for the past 4 years since her divorce. My family and I have tried to get to know him and give him several chances, but we have ultimately reached the conclusion that he is a self-centered jerk who does not treat my sister very well. We are not a hard group to join with, but he has made no effort at family get-togethers to ingratiate himself or get to know us. After several of us shared this perspective with her she did break up with him and move out from cohabitation with him, but slowly his name crept back into conversations until she finally made clear they were on again.

Now I am stuck with how to manage my relationship with her. Since she lives in another state I only see her a few times each year. I want to take my husband and kids to visit her, but I really do not want to have to spend time with the boyfriend when we go. Can I ban him or at least request limited contact? Is there anything I can do to get through to her about this relationship? I love my sister dearly and want so much more for her, but I know that it is her life with her choices. How can I have a relationship with her and not have to deal with her dreadful boyfriend?

Sincerely,
Sistery Mystery

Dear Sistery,

One of the great humblers is the knowledge that you can’t choose your family members’ mates. I have been wildly fortunate in this respect, but I have had enough near misses to know how vulnerable we all are. You can’t choose who takes your classes, moves next door, becomes your boss, or seeks your services. You can’t choose your children either (unless you adopt them when they’re older), but you can help create them, so you really owe it to yourself to create someone you like. In fact, pretty much the only people you can choose are your lovers, your friends, and your employees.

Before you let your sister date, you should have set up a screening service: background check, complete physical workup, and psychological testing. Oh wait, you could not have compelled her to use it.

As in all conflict resolution, we can try to understand what needs of hers she is meeting and whether there is some other way for those needs to get met. I can tell you without meeting him that those needs are not companionship and sex, so you can forget all about visiting her more often and buying her a vibrator. I know this because no one would endure a narcissist (I accept this at face value) just for companionship and sex. I don’t know, of course, but my guess is that his lack of ingratiation helps her separate from her family, and your reluctance to see her in his company is good evidence that this is the desired effect.

Why would she not want you to visit? Because you still have a husband, and kids to boot. Her boyfriend is a walking advertisement against the cult of love, family, and stability. She would rather drop out of that particular college than walk around its campus with her C average.

What to do? Strategically, you can try to break them up. You don’t break up an ambivalent relationship by insulting the guy, as you have discovered. Your insults activate her compliments. Instead, you compliment him, and this reminds her of her balancing impressions. But frankly, I don’t think he’s bad enough to justify this strategy. While I’m on the subject, you could also start criticizing your husband to her, to dismantle the yardstick that finds her wanting. (If you do this, tell him first and agree to use only criticisms he can live with.)

You can shrug, understand that life is long, take things as they come, and go on about your life. This means sacrificing your fantasy of an all-inclusive family and visiting her either alone or just with the kids, either of which makes it sensible not to include him in everything. You could visit her city with your whole family but pre-program a lot of child-centered activities that leave you only with patches of projected family time. Or you could stop visiting her altogether, which is not nearly as drastic as it sounds what with the internet and the telephone and all.

Before you undertake any solution, however, I must encourage you to ask yourself if you didn’t take a little encouragement from her divorce. I define love as the state of a relationship in which, when something good happens to the other person, you’re just happy for them; conversely, it implies that when something bad happens to a person, you’re just sad for them. This is extremely difficult to achieve in a sibling relationship. If you are harboring competitive feelings (and how could you not be), then being auntie to your children is a status of failure. Can you imagine telling her that you had a few secret moments of triumph when she was getting divorced?

Abusive relationship

Dear Dr. Reality,

I just don’t understand. I grew up with an incredibly supportive father, a semi-nurturing (somewhat verbally volatile but also loving) mother. Things weren’t perfect, my father definitely enabled my mother’s selfishness and my mother took advantage of his kindness. Though this resulted in some consequences within our family dynamic, we were also loving, supportive of one another, and generally happy.

How is it that I became involved in a emotionally abusive and ultimately physically abusive relationship? This person controlled me for several years (I was often afraid to go out with friends, to not answer his phone calls, to not do what he told me to do). Then, when I finally (thank god) caught him cheating on me, I finally was able to break up with him. After not talking to him for three months, I started it up again. Subsequently, he became jealous and flipped. He became violent, he grabbed my wrist to the point of bruising, dumped water on my head, whipped me with hangers, held me down by my neck.

How does someone like me forgive this so easily? How can I still talk to him on a daily basis, tell him I love him, be anxious if I miss his calls?

I’m not dumb, uneducated, ugly, desperate for a relationship, etc. Why can’t I stop talking to him? Yes, I love him. Yes, I worry about him. Yes, I crave his support. But still, what am I doing?

Sincerely,

how-does-this-happen?

 

Dear How Does This Happen,

With all due respect, and I mean that, “how does this happen” is the wrong question. The right questions are whether all things considered you are glad you are with him, whether there is a way to make things better, and, if the answers to those questions are in the negative, why you stay. I’m not sure whether you want to be in an “emotionally abusive” and physically abusive relationship. There’s pretty strong evidence in your letter that you do: you may not have known what you were in for when you met him, but you certainly did when you re-upped. Also, there’s a subtle way you downplay his violence (by pairing “whipped me with hangers” with “dumped water on my head”). I imagine many people, including your saner self, would react with horror and try to push you out of the relationship. This allows you to export the negatives about the relationship and to defend it. When other people, including you, shout that you should leave, it makes you think, it’s not that bad. So I refrain.

Perhaps you feel so guilty about sex that you can only enjoy it if you are being punished for it at the same time? It’s just a guess, but it fits the data.

When you say your father was “incredibly” supportive, methinks the lady doth protest too much. Maybe you’re really angry at him and you’ve paired up with someone you feel less guilty about getting angry at and protect your father from your anger by idealizing him. Maybe you got the idea that an incredibly supportive father needs a daughter in trouble so he can stay incredibly supportive. Again, these are just guesses.

The only way to tell if the relationship can be improved is to start acting like the kind of girlfriend you want to be, instead of like an abuse victim, and see if he can respond in kind. Explicit rules can help about what is and is not allowed, but the rules have to be enforced.

You say you aren’t dumb, uneducated, ugly, or desperate. I doubt, in your heart of hearts, that you really believe you are particularly appealing. It sounds to me that in your heart of hearts you believe you’re a slut (this would explain why you tolerate being treated like a slut—monitored, pushed around, and only really aggravated by his cheating). Are you a slut? If not, stop treating yourself like one; if so, stop being one, or stop complaining about it; these all require close relationships with people who think you’re not a slut to bolster your sense that you’re not one. One way to find out what you really think of yourself and also to find out whether that self-image is correct is to enter a relationship where everything possible is done to allow you to know yourself. That’s called psychotherapy when it’s done right.

Finally, I want to say that if you substitute the word, meth, or cocaine, for his name in your thoughts, it might help clarify things.

I hope you find your way.

Dr. Reality

 

Holiday Stress

Dear Dr. Reality,

My husband never does enough for the holidays. It’s like he doesn’t care. He knows how upset this makes me, but for Valentine’s Day, he’ll just pick up flowers and candy on the way home. Last V-Day, he didn’t even do that! Halloween is approaching and he hasn’t said a word about our costumes (we’re going to a party). It seems like we always have a fight, but he never changes.

Signed, All Dressed Up and No One to Go With

 

Dear All Dressed Up,

When you try to control your spouse by exploding with anger or tears when he disappoints you, you become like a valley filled with landmines. In a landscape like that, expect cautious, small steps, and a lot of anxiety that interferes with thinking about other people (that is, about you). When you try to control your spouse by acting like a drill sergeant, you will get a mask of compliance (“Yes, dear”) and find that he is reserving his joy for other situations. It’s fine to want to control your spouse; it’s monstrous to attempt it. One of the few things we know for certain in psychology is that aversive control never produces actual control but only the mask of obedience; it also produces anxiety and stress. My advice is to dig up all your landmines and replant them around the perimeter—only get angry if your partner violates a basic boundary of the relationship. Otherwise, enjoy the fact that he is not a slave to other people’s expectations, even yours. Try to make coming home, even on a holiday, something he looks forward to doing. If you’re feeling unappreciated or uncelebrated, talk about it with him. But don’t turn into Nero, singing for people who were afraid of him and demanding applause. And don’t turn into my grandmother, who responded to occasional letters with remonstrations about not having written longer and more frequent letters. Instead, find out what he likes about you and do more of that. And if he is moved to reciprocate, don’t become one of those nieces who ignores Uncle Harry and just wants to know what he brought her.

Dr. Reality

 

Can’t he spend his own money?

Dear Dr. Reality,

I loaned my brother $500 and asked him not to tell my wife. My wife found out and got mad at me. Shouldn’t I be able to lend my brother some money?

Signed, Confused

Dear Confused,

Your wife wasn’t mad about the money. She was mad about your having a secret with your brother that put her in the position of the person from whom the secret was kept.

You don’t have to tell your spouse everything to sustain true love, but you can’t have an understanding with anyone else that leaves your spouse in the dark.

Conversely, true love needs some secrets between the spouses that leave other people in the dark.

[I’m going to use spouse to refer to the person you’re committed to in love, whether married or not, gay or straight. It’s a good word because it’s gender neutral and it doesn’t mean any other kind of relationship. Lover applies to any encounter, partner applies to business and card games, and so on. Not all spouses seek true love, but I’m assuming you do.]

The implicit rules of any relationship define the relationship and protect its functions. The functions of true love include romantic bonding (the feeling of being loved and in love), sexual intimacy, and friendship; typically, living as housemates; financial partnership or at least interdependence; and, often, co-parenting. Owning pets jointly can go under housemates or co-parenting, depending on how you feel about the pets (fish versus dogs).

The intimacy required for true love (as opposed to friends and housemates, which is where many relationships end up—or just housemates) demands openness by both spouses, and this in turn demands intense trust that your intimacy will not be betrayed. Without the trust, you won’t reveal yourself. But what exactly are you trusting your spouse to do or not do?

Whenever a third party is involved, true love requires the third party to be treated as the third party, and the lovers as a dyad. A spouse can be in a dyad with another person, but not if the spouse is cast in the role of the third party. You can be in multiple dyads, and you can even be in several intimate dyads, but you can’t be in multiple dyads that turn your spouse into a third party and expect to reap the benefits that come from spouses putting each other first.

Also, you need to make sure you both agree on the rules about spending money without consulting each other. Generally, you should each keep some discretionary money as your own, even if it’s only a few dollars, and you should agree on some amount above which you will not spend joint funds without consulting each other. If you are rich, you could easily have amassed $500 of your own money to spend as you wish (if only you don’t alienate your spouse in the process). “Rich” is the term for couples who, when bills come in, just pay them. (“Middle class” is the term for people who have to get up and work; “wealthy,” “unemployed,” “artistic,” and “poor” are some of the terms for people who don’t.)

Dr. Reality