Disentangle. Nancy L. Johnston

an inability to do anything different. Her healthy self states that one of her therapy goals is to find her own identity, to be able to say, “This is me, and I’m okay with me.”

      And then there are also teenagers working on these same issues in counseling. Many have surfaced over the years in my private practice work, but one case in particular has been with me through the development of this disentangling work and is rich in details of lostness and growth.

       Rebecca

      Rebecca is a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school. She is a pretty, petite young woman who is bright and articulate. We have been working together for two years. Rebecca first came to see me after being raped by an acquaintance while on a beach vacation with her parents. She was very depressed and convinced that “it was all my fault.” She was being “harsh” on her self about what happened to her. She was tearful, moody, and having some flashbacks from the rape. Just prior to our first appointment, she made a suicidal gesture of cutting on her wrist with a razor. I facilitated her hospitalization, which stabilized her in a matter of days, and she returned to our community and began her therapy work with me.

      Rebecca’s work over these two years has helped her greatly with exploring and starting to form her identity. She has become more stable in her moods and more accepting of her self. She continues to work on relationships, particularly intimacy. She knows she has a tendency to jump in with both feet really fast, and in so doing scares others away. She can be too open, allowing her self to be vulnerable often to the wrong people. She has come to know that she can too easily “self-sabotage.”

      And she often describes her self as “an extremist,” meaning that she goes from one extreme to the other, and that she is all-or-nothing no matter what the situation or relationship may be. “Extreme in everything I do,” she says. “My grades have to be perfect, and everything has to be up to my standards of everything-is-under-control. I can’t stand to not be understood or for there to be a problem. I have to solve things immediately.”

      Today Rebecca is struggling with the ending of her relationship with her first real boyfriend. She has been with Ben for a year and a half. The relationship has been relatively stable and supportive, tender, and kind. This fall, however, Ben moved with his family to their new home about four hours away. After one month there, his relationship with Rebecca began to fall apart as their lives took different directions. Over the month of November, they have been struggling with what to do with their relationship now. Ben has expressed his wanting to end it; Rebecca wants to keep it.

      Today Rebecca tells me she has received a letter from Ben saying, “I’ve fallen out of love with you. . . . Give me some space.”

      Rebecca is distraught. “He never loved me. I’m absolutely baffled with life. I haven’t even grasped it. It hurts like a bitch!”

      She is depressed and consumed with this problem. “I missed the PSATs on Saturday because I was arguing with him. I’ve missed lots of classes and am behind on my work. And I don’t want to get high, but I’m weak now and probably will.”

      And she goes further: “I can’t deal with this. I feel like I have no control. I never realized how obsessive I am. My thoughts always drift to ‘it’s not worth it.’ I get in these fits. If I had sleeping pills, I would be dead.

      “This whole thing with Ben is driving me crazy. I want him in my life.”

      “It’s just good common sense.”

5

       The Big Picture

      The problem was clearly laid out before me. I had experienced entanglements for years, and now some important pieces of how to untangle my self were all starting to come together. I had been gathering them for my self in random ways, but my work with my clients pushed me to get down to some of the nuts and bolts of “how to,” to pull together these important pieces in a way that would increase all of our chances of finding our self again and of increasing peace and serenity in our lives.

      The themes of entanglement issues were clear:

       What is wrong with me?

       Am I doing something wrong?

       Who am I separate from this other person?

       Do I know who I am?

       Do I know what I think? feel? know? believe? want?

       Can I survive having more emotional distance from this other person?

       If I back off, will he or she leave me?

       If I back off, will he or she survive?

       If I back off, will I survive?

       How much of the problem is me?

       What should I do about his or her problem?

       What should I do about my problem?

       How much do I want to put up with?

       What do I do when I’ve had enough?

       Suppose I don’t know if I’ve had enough?

       What do you mean, “What do I want?”

       What do you mean, “What’s good for me?”

      And so I wrote a draft of ideas on how to disentangle. I compiled ideas from the many areas that had influenced me and taught me over the last ten years. I added in ideas drawn from my own experience, strength, and hope. I wrote a draft, rewrote it, and rewrote it, adding, revising, editing. It is still a work in progress, always organic, always subject to new ideas, always subject to revisions of the old. As I move along on this journey, I continue to see old things in new ways, to see how what I perceive and understand today may be altered by a new insight tomorrow.

      Even though this list of ideas is subject to constant revision, it has also remained essentially the same at its core. Revisions allow increased depth in our work. The core list, entitled Ideas on How to Disentangle, reads as follows:

       Ideas on How to Disentangle

      Our illusions keep us attached and entangled.

      Facing our illusions, detaching, setting healthy boundaries, and developing our spirituality can help us to disentangle.

       Facing Illusions

      * Find the truth about your situation.

      * Work with your self to accept the truth you find.

       Detaching

      * Become aware of who and what entangles you:

      • Who do you get entangled with?

      • What entangles you with them?

      • What parts of you get entangled?

      • How do you act and feel when you’re entangled?

      * Learn to separate out what is your problem and what is the other person’s problem.

      * Don’t