No Good Need Goes Unpunished

Posted by fxckfeelings on July 18, 2011

People who need people aren’t necessarily the luckiest people in the world (although therapists can count themselves lucky for the business they provide). Just because you need someone or something s/he represents doesn’t mean you wish them well or have the chemistry to be good friends, especially if you’ve latched onto a jerk. Sure, crushes can sometimes be satisfied, but only if you get very good at keeping them from controlling you or influencing the way you make decisions about the important people in your life. After all, one isn’t the loneliest number, and it doesn’t always take two, so sometimes people who think they need people are perfectly fine all alone.
–Dr. Lastname

I have been in therapy for 8 years, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly or less, depending on life events and finances. My goal has always been to find some peace or grace in being me. I told this psychiatrist the first time I met with her that I “pattern like a duck,” meaning that I form strong and sometimes obsessive attachments. My attachment to her started that day and, this many years later, is still fierce and often painful. She is appropriately nonjudgmental and vacillates between thinking that the work for us is in this attachment and suspecting it’s a form of resistance. I can’t seem to focus on anything else for more than a couple sessions. I have read (obsessively) about attachments in therapy..,either to luxuriate in my own, or to get some understanding of what it is that has a hold of me and what it would take to get past it. Am I supposed to “work through it”? What does that look like? Am I supposed to ignore it? The only positive thing about this unspecified longing for her is that I have attached less to other “marks” during this time. Otherwise, I feel stuck. I think about just leaving therapy to get some distance from her and this dynamic, but I would rather just get over it. HELP (and thank you).

If you approach therapy with the goal of finding “some peace or grace in being me,” you’re in for a long, dependent journey with your therapist, mainly because, with a goal as loose as that, your journey has no real end.

This is the point, of course, where we say your goal is actually a wish, an ambiguous feeling not necessarily connected with your priorities or values. It’s a nice notion, but it’s not necessarily something you can control, and not something tangible enough for your therapist–or this therapist—to help you figure out.

Unless you connect your wish to something concrete, I can’t tell whether your duck-patterned tendency to get over-attached to people prevents you from finding good friends or a partner, or just causes you embarrassment and pain that interrupts your desired peace.

Sometimes people in psychodynamic therapy—shrinks and patients both—forget about this connection because the treatment process is interesting and feels fraught with significance. It’s dangerous, however, to lose your way.

Instead of transferring some of your feelings about others onto your therapist in a way that allows you to examine them, you’ll wind up transferring your energy, attention, and engagement, whereupon therapy becomes more important than life. Remember, your shrink is a hired hand, not a life partner; treatment is supposed to help you manage your life problems, not provide a sheltered alternative.

By now, you should also know that a tendency to get over-attached is part of your personality and unlikely to change. After all, if it hasn’t changed in 8 years of therapy, or in all the years of your life up to now, it’s probably yours for life.

So, putting aside your wish to be a different person, ask yourself whether your urge to over-attach is really screwing up your work or relationships, and use that as your new therapy starting point.

For example, if you’re over-attached to someone who is not a good friend, then use your therapy to figure out how to get free. Don’t waste time figuring out why you choose the wrong friends or get over-attached, because that’s just a way of avoiding the pain of doing what you gotta do. Suck it up, do it, and be proud that, whatever your feelings, they don’t control your choice in friends.

On the other hand, if you’re managing your life fairly well in spite of over-attached feelings, give yourself credit for that achievement, declare your therapy a victory, and withdraw your troops.

You might not find your desired peace, but most people don’t. Instead, you’ll have found something much more useful; the point of therapy, or, even better, therapy’s end.

STATEMENT:
“I may never know why I attach like a duck, but I won’t let my feelings prevent me from breaking up with bad friends, finding good friends, and being a good friend.”

I don’t know why I couldn’t stand living with my ex-wife. We married young, but she’s a nice person and we raised a good family for 15 years before I pulled the plug. I think it was something about us both being, well, very attractive people—we were also attracted physically—that made the relationship feel wrong after years went by and I felt I was living with a stranger. Now I’ve got an amicable divorce and am dating a woman I really like, but the other day I got panicked by the idea that the same thing will happen again, and I’ll wind up feeling smothered by having to live with someone I don’t really know. My goal is not to screw up another relationship if I’m really incapable of having one.

Too much love and not enough friendship may have done in your Romeo-and-Juliet marriage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t love or do better the second time around. You’re not telling me that you repeatedly get close to girls and then run away; you’re just afraid it will repeat one more time.

It’s ironic that winning someone you really, really long for is dangerous because, if you want someone that badly, you probably don’t really know them. The fairy-tales rarely cover this part, but if you win your true love, that’s when your troubles begin.

You don’t usually yearn for someone because of who they are, but because something about them triggers your needs. They’re rich or beautiful or make you feel very, very good. Friends, on the other hand, are usually great to be with because they don’t trigger strong needs, so you feel comfortable being yourself. The fact that you’re not feeling too needy allows you to relax and makes the relationship more real.

First, consider your own definition of friendship, and ask yourself whether you can accept this girl when she’s being a jerk and whether she accepts you under similar conditions. Ask whether she’s solid and trustworthy, and whether those qualities are confirmed by what you know about her past, her family, her other friends, and reports from your private detective.

Then see what happens when you have your next closeness-panic. If she doesn’t over-react and you still want to hang out with her after you’ve calmed down, you’ve proven to yourself that she’s good with nervous Nellies and that your attraction to her is stronger than your fear.

If she does freak out, then you’re just a pair of beautiful strangers, and it’s time to look for a new partner whom you like more than you need.

STATEMENT:
“It’s horrible to pull apart a not-so-bad marriage with a decent partner, but I tried hard and didn’t give up easily. Now I’ll do my best not to make the same mistake, and hope that I can find the one additional ingredient I need in a relationship to make it comfortable and lasting.”