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JANUARY 7, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
The Fear of Being Vulnerable By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
I
’d been working with this couple for a while. (This couple is not Jewish, lives elsewhere, and all identifying information has been changed.) The wife had gone out of the marriage for a period of several months twenty-five years ago. Her husband never recovered. Yet, they stayed together. The husband – we will call him Pat – was the nicest guy. Last year, he sent me a large bag of Godiva chocolates for the seasonal holiday that comes around this time. But he was also thoughtful and considerate of his wife. He wouldn’t, for example, embarrass her in front of her family so they never knew about her, let’s call it, situation. But Pat, like so many of us, has been ruled by fear: If I let down my guard and stop blaming her, stop brining up old stories, stop questioning her closely about what happened in November twenty-five years ago, then maybe I will get hurt all over again.
That’s child’s logic, the logic of a child part. This is a hugely irrational, illogical approach because he was hurt all over again! Every day in every way, he re-traumatized himself by bringing up the ordeal he went through twenty-five years ago, with all its anxiety, pain, and horror. A f ter I st ud ied R icha rd Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems this past September (when I was in bidud, quarantine, in Israel before my grandson’s bar mitzvah) and I worked intensively with Pat since then using it, he understood that it was his suspicious part that was ruling him. Well, the suspicious part combined with the critical part, the blaming part, the frustrated part, and the angry part. Pat also learned how to quiet himself, to take on a short meditative state in order to free himself from these dominating parts and just be his own rational self. He learned how to gently thank his parts and reassure them that he
could handle the situation. Except for one thing. He didn’t seem to be able to sustain it. Let me back up a bit. There were sessions that we had in which Pat abandoned the chains he’d bound himself with. He laughed and joked and assured me he wanted to be in Self. The old Pat would start a session almost shaking, as if he had just discovered the awful truth five minutes earlier. But we had gotten to a much better place. He was clear on who his Self was. Pat’s wife, Mary, made enormous progress as well. She came to understand how her own family-of-origin history affected her, how it taught her to block her own pain and her own feelings so that empathy would be an impossibility. She realized that she had not been raised with empathy, either. Mary came to recognize the awfulness of what she had done to her husband. Her knee-jerk reaction to
his grilling her had always been to defensively skirt the issue, retreat, or just shut down. But she learned to recognize that these were only the behaviors of young parts that had no other coping skills at their disposal. She consciously chose to be in Self, which meant she would no longer retreat into defensiveness and escape. She learned to value the pain she felt for her husband rather than to only think of herself. She wanted to help him heal – just as she needed to also heal from her own childhood. All would seem to be good. Except for the many, many times when Pat would return to his anger and blame, his cross-examination and unwillingness to see progress in his wife. So, I did the only logical thing. I told them that the indecision and backsliding had to be over by their seasonal holiday last month. December 31 would be the time for each of them to choose to be in Self. Or, at least, to take a moment to get back
