Disentangle. Nancy L. Johnston

      My doubts about being married remained and grew. Over time I saw that there were important differences in the way my husband and I liked to spend time, in the company we would keep, and in some of our values. We decided to end our marriage.

      I had no idea then that I was working on finding my self. Looking back on it now, I can see that a voice in me that hardly knew any words wanted me to know that I could not simply keep following external expectations, whether they were real or imagined by me. I was mindlessly living my life.

      I had no idea I was mindless. If you had asked me, I would have thought I was rather focused and purposeful. I had always been a successful student, worker, and daughter. I tried very hard to please many people and seemed to succeed at that. I was rarely “in trouble.”

      My life looked pretty good, and in many ways felt pretty good, as I reaped benefits from my successes. But inside me, things were feeling confused and unsettled. I needed to do something different.

      So I finished my master’s degree and moved to the Shenandoah Valley, about three hours away from my childhood home. A new job took me in this direction. I was aware that I wanted to get out of the city and into the country. What I wasn’t aware of then was that I also wanted to get some physical space for my self.

      It wasn’t until this time in my twenties that I realized how much I was influenced by my desire to please others. I cared so much about keeping my parents, my teachers, my friends happy with me. I feared their disapproval and their anger. I hated having anyone mad with me. It meant feelings of being bad and wrong. So I almost always tried to be good and to do things “right.”

      “Right” meant doing things according to the books, according to spoken and unspoken shoulds. “Right” meant “Do as I say.” Certainly “right” also means doing things that are moral and ethical, and I am comfortable with that. It’s just that my actions, my decisions, my behaviors were governed by watching those people whom I was trying to please and selecting a response or course of action that seemed to be what they wanted. And I mean I literally watched. I watched their faces and their behaviors for clues about how I thought they were feeling toward me.

      I can still watch people. Even now, if I am feeling anxious and worried in my relationships with certain people, I will regress to my watching behavior. I look outside of my self and to others. I watch what their faces are showing me and listen carefully to clues in their speech or behaviors that tell me if they are disapproving or mad with me. I wonder what they are thinking and feeling. I want to know what they want from me, what would please them, what would make them happy, what would keep them from being angry with me.

      To begin my escape from this pattern, I came to live in the Valley. I was moved to this action by a small, internal voice/ feeling that said this would be something I would like to do. And I was blessed by my ability to do so.

      One of the good things about this rather random move was that it put me in a community in which I have been very happy. When I moved here, I told my self that this would be for at least two years. Two years have turned into thirty-three. This is now home to me.

      Another good thing about this move was that I met the man who was to become my second husband and to whom I am still married. Through my years in a twelve-step program of recovery for the family members and significant others of people who suffer from addiction, I have come to understand what people mean when they say, “I’m glad I’m married to an alcoholic.” They mean that this brought them into the program that has transformed their lives. The program has brought them to a level of peace and acceptance that they never knew possible. The program has helped them to focus on their own lives and to greatly enhance their spirituality. In this same way, I say it is good that I moved out here and met my husband, for my relationship with him led me to yet greater depths of “lostness in the other” and, subsequently, to finding my way out.

      “Are you mad at me?”

3

       The Second Twenty-or- So Years

       “If only I knew what he wanted from me.”

      For the first eleven years of my life here in the Valley, I frolicked in my insanity unknowingly. By day I worked as the psychotherapist-of-delinquents. By night I took ballet classes, danced with a small dance company, and acted in summer stock theater. I fixed up my home, socialized with new friends, and enjoyed my cats. In many ways the times were good and just what I needed for autonomy and identity development. Granted, we know of those tasks as belonging to the adolescent phase of development. But there is no doubt in my mind that I did not really work on those developmental tasks until I was in my twenties. Prior to then I had appeared independent, but there was little independent thought and substance to me. I was driven by my needs to please others, to avoid conflict, and, as my work supervisor described me, to be “obsessively over-responsible.”

      In the context of Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, as a result of having delayed the identity formation task of adolescence until my twenties, I was “behind” in my development related to the next stage—the cultivation of healthy intimate relationships. So during the first four or five years of living in the Valley, I dated some men and threw away one or two potentially good, loving relationships with seemingly stable men who cared about me. One in particular asked me to marry him, describing a lovely, festive wedding in our quaint community. This was more than I could bear. So I left him for another. I can only imagine that he must have wondered what the hell was wrong with me. It has taken me a long time to find out.

      The man I left him for was the man who became my second husband. And this has been the most challenging relationship of all for me. I felt off-balance almost from the start. I was instantly attracted to him the first time I met him. He came into the building that housed my work office inquiring where he was to go to work for the evening shift. He was a new, temporary employee. I gave him the information he requested, and he went on his way. I wondered who he was and where he came from.

      Within a short period of time, I gathered that information and started to get to know him through mutual friends. I learned bits here and there about him. The facts revealed that he had temporarily come to this area to live with a friend who had also recently moved here; he had previously lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a commune; he had worked in a psychiatric hospital in Boston; he was thirty-seven years old and had held twenty-five jobs; he liked to have a six-pack of cheap beer at the end of every day.

      And to these facts I added all sorts of bits and pieces of my own about who I thought he was. I thought he was a charming intellectual of New England descent. I thought he was brilliant, worldly, and sophisticated. I was fascinated by him. I thought he had fabulous ideas that put mine to shame. I thought he was deep. I thought he was exotic. I thought I was simple and plain and unexciting. I thought he was wonderful and I was not. I thought he could not possibly like me for who I was.

      And so I became very attached to these illusions and to my desire to have him like me nevertheless. And so I created a sort of hell for my self that went on for years.

      Recently, my husband and I were reviewing the names of the presidents of the United States in the twentieth century in response to some question by our daughter. My husband had the encyclopedia in his hands, and I was trying to recall them in order. When I thought I had successfully finished the list, my husband said, “That was all right except that you forgot Ronald Reagan. He was president for the first eight years of our relationship.” He paused, and with a knowing smile he said, “I guess you missed that one because you thought I was president then.” We laughed. I knew exactly what he meant.

      The insecurities and self-doubts I put my self through during the first years of our relationship were awful. I remember consciously asking my self, “Would he like me if I looked like that?” “Would he think I was more interesting if I was like her?” I was constantly searching for what I could do to be appealing and interesting to him. I was sure I was not.

      And small