What the Hell is This?

After Nate’s Fisher’s unexpected demise during the final season of Six Feet Under, Nate’s wife Brenda lashes out at Maggie, Nate’s onetime lover, snarling that Nate never loved her — he was just good at making women believe that — and that Nate always went after women who “made him feel like a better man than he really was.”

A bitterly pessimistic assessment of the show’s central character by a cerebral, cynical materialist (in the scientific, not consumer sense) who was forever attacking or picking apart her less intellectual husband for looking for a greater meaning in life and for becoming fascinated with various spiritualities, like reform Judaism or Maggie’s Quaker faith. (His final insult to her, or so she imagined, was his choice of a mystic Rumi ode for his burial.)

George Sibley, Nate’s stepfather, and a man of science himself, was far more generous, and perhaps more accurate, at Nate’s funeral. “Nate was an idealist,” George mused soberly but kindly to the assemblage, “and he struggled, all through his life, to be a good man. He wasn’t perfect — but then who among us is? — and he never gave up on himself, the people he loved, or even love itself — in all its vexing, beautiful forms.”

This reduced me to tears. I loved the character of Nate, because he didn’t have answers, but was always trying to find them. He made mistakes, and he made a fool of himself, but he did try to do the right thing, even as he let himself be pulled in the direction of his longings. He behaved as if growth and change were both desirable and possible. (Even Brenda, despite her know-it-all cynicism, was forced to admit she needed help with her compulsive behavior, and her decision to pursue a career as a psychotherapist showed some kind of belief in the necessity of growth and change.)

**

Maybe I’m an idealist like Nate, running after the latest glimmer of promise, but a couple of weeks ago I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Not because anything external changed — Sam is still incomunicado (though I do have news of him), and I’m still laboring away in a punishing job I now unequivocally hate — but because I decided to listen to someone whose email dispatches have been trickling in over the past six months, whose approach has been the first in ages to make any sort of new and unexplored sense to me.

My falling-out with Doc was a gift, in a way, because over time I’d become passive, pretending I was making progress when I was clearly just spinning my wheels. Of course he had been working with me pro bono, and of late his own health issues had become his overarching concern, so he was distracted and could probably have used this break from me as well.

In the interim, because of some other personal-development email list I was on, I had been encouraged to sign up for Lisa Lane Brown’s newsletter, so I had. Lisa is a former ringette champion who plowed her way through all kinds of programs, courses, books, and psychological whatnot to try and figure out why she often “choked” at critical moments — during games and otherwise.

Normally I don’t go for the “motivational jocks,” those former basketball players et.al. who morph into successful business owners and write peppy bestsellers, but what I noticed about Lisa’s newsletters was that she wasn’t parroting the same-old, same-old about positive thinking, getting in The Zone, or self-discipline. She wasn’t talking about “attitude” or “the law of attraction” or any of the usual buzzwords. She was talking about things that had resonated powerfully with me before (like Martin Seligman’s work on learned helplessness, which I mentioned in this post) as well as some things I’d never considered before that resonated powerfully with me now. When you’ve ingested as much self-help gobbledygook as I have, to come across something you haven’t heard yet is nothing short of remarkable.

During my two-month bender, I made up my mind to try her special-offer 30-day downloadable course once I’d finished drinking and wallowing and watching the entire series of SFU. If nothing else, I reasoned, she might be able to help me move out of my dead-end, draining chore of a job. Her words were the first in a long time to ignite a flicker of hope about my future.

**

My main intention was to tackle my lack of motivation, confidence, and competence as it related to work and vocation. (Thus far, I’ve completed the first exercise and gotten some excellent feedback from Lisa — she provides personal email support.) But Lisa also supplied, as part of the package, a downloadable CD on relationships. I listened to it immediately, the same night I received it, while sewing up holes in my threadbare socks. (You can see why I need a new job.)

Lisa used a visual image that suddenly made sense, for me, of a multitude of situations — from my extensively chronicled difficulties with my mother, to my various obsessions with elusive men, to my blowout with Sam. Without making me defensive.

Draw a circle, she said. Put the other person’s initials within that circle, and yours outside it. As long as you stay “outside the circle,” the other person will want to be around you, will appreciate you, may even pursue you…but insert yourself inside that circle, and he or she will want to evade or get away from you, may get angry with you, and may even forcefully push you away. It’s very important, in relationships, to stay outside of the other person’s “circle.”

The circle, of course, as I recognized, symbolizes the other person’s boundaries. All at once I saw that this principle isn’t about learning to play games, it’s about learning to respect boundaries. Over-pursuing, the way my mother does with me, and the way I’ve done with Tony and Sonny and so many other men, is one way to violate another person’s boundaries and make him or her want to get the hell away from us.

With Sam, who generally ran toward me with equal or greater force, my fatal mistake lay in the way I came on so strong about the brakes situation, trying to take over and tell him what to do (I also then proceeded to call him too many times about it). As Lisa points out, attempting to control other people violates their boundaries just as surely as over-pursuit does.

So I got inside Sam’s circle, all right, but not via the route one might (and one reader did) expect.

Intuitively, I already knew this principle. But these realities of boundary-dynamics had always been framed in such strategic or manipulative ways before that I considered any advice about navigating them to be nothing short of exhortations to inauthenticity. Lessons on How to Play the Game, instead of on How to Effectively Cultivate Your Connection With Another Person. Lisa’s presentation, however, was clear-eyed, authentic, and somehow empowering. She outlined what we often do wrong, as well as how to “get outside of the circle” — essentially by backing off, and in some cases owning up to our errors.

As you well know, I’ve said why, why, why for two whole months, and marinated in confusion and utter helplessness about Sam’s absence and silence. It was actually a relief to accept some responsibility, and to pinpoint an unidentified dynamic I’d actually set in motion that probably resulted in his craving for distance. I am not, after all, the boss of him. (Even if he was briefly the boss of me.)

**

According to the laws of boundary-dynamics, the only damage control you can perform when it seems your loved one no longer wants you is this: to accept it.

I wrote to Sam one more time, owning up to my controlling behavior, and accepting that he no longer wants to be in the relationship. No more pleas, just an indication of what I would prefer (I’d still prefer to be with him)…as I go on with my life. Plus an invitation to tell me where else I went wrong, for future reference.

After this, I leave him alone.

Relieved of all the pressure (and “no one responds well to pressure,” observes Ms. Brown) Sam has more freedom to respond — or not — but in the meantime I’ve gotten outside of his “circle” and started acting like a self-respecting adult who can function without him.

**

It’s not that I’m disowning my desire to be connected to Sam…in fact, one of the things I like most about Lisa is that she emphasizes that we not disown our desires. Too many other approaches take the sour-grapes route, resulting in the suppression of inconvenient feelings and desires (e.g. “He probably wasn’t the right guy for me anyway.”). She doesn’t think we should “just get over it,” or “relinquish attachment,” or distract ourselves with TV, or work, or substances, or exercise…or even, I would venture, yoga. I’m pretty sure I’ve known people who used yoga to avoid inconvenient or painful feelings. I may have even worked for one or two. (By the way, did I mention that my old friend Ingrid abruptly left the studio, in a mysterious exodus not unlike mine?) The more we try to suppress those feelings, even when it’s in favor of things like affirmations, forced “positivity,” or the “fake it till you make it” philosophy so popular among fitness professionals, the more we alienate ourselves from ourselves.

No, Lisa encourages us to fully feel and accept our desires and our longings, even the ones that we feel helpless to fulfill. What we need to unlearn, she explains, is psychological leaning. That unconscious tendency we all have to put pressure on other people to validate and approve of us, unwittingly invading their “circles,” without making clear or direct requests.

So I’m trying to implement the practice of “self-acceptance,” accepting my feelings without judgment. Even when I feel like hell. Which I have for the past several weeks, between dreading getting on the phones at my job (just to get yelled at by “donors”), and dreading the visit of my uber-religious parents during this depleted time (my mother, of course, will invade my circle — and try to bring Jesus with her). And then there’s what I found out about Sam from Rob on Friday.

**

Yes, I finally approached ole Rob, Sam’s good-lookin’, man-lovin’, very politic and ambitious buddy, whom I never quite trusted (and who lately seems always to be chatting up the comeliest boychiks among the new hires, alleviating some of my anxieties from the last post). Ever since Obama announced he was sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, I’ve been beside myself, thinking about what escalation could mean for civilian contractors. Bombs. Landmines. Snipers. So I bit the bullet and swallowed my pride and asked Rob point-blank if he knew where Sam was. Was he somewhere where he could get blown up?

“He’s not overseas,” said Rob, to my astonishment. When it was clear I wasn’t going to probe, and instead told him gently that I didn’t mean to put him on the spot, he divulged even more information. Sam was back working in his home state. He never made it through the screening, so he never took the job. Up until a couple of weeks ago, he and Rob had been communicating regularly via phone.

All this time, Sam had been here, in the States, fully capable of communicating. “I think he just wanted to cut the cords, you know?” Rob offered helpfully. I knew. But he was going to cut the cords with people like you, Rob, I thought, not me. I recalled the part in Crossing the Unknown Sea where David Whyte points out that the root within the word humiliation is humus, earth, or ground. I had been brought straight to the ground after believing I’d be the exception.

But Sam had led me to believe I’d be the exception. That was the worst of it: when Sam told me he was leaving, my immediate reaction was to prepare for the end. “Well, I’m really glad we did this,” I started to say, already calculating mentally how I might best ready myself emotionally to part with him. Sam interrupted my train of thought, protesting that he would only be gone a few months, that we’d be in communication. Nothing was going to be over. It was he who cranked up the intensity, wanting us to learn as much about each other and spend as much time together as possible in the time remaining. I was so reassured that he intended to be around long-term that I divulged to my mother — my mother! — that I was in a relationship. Big mistake.

Now I’ve really complicated their Christmas visit, at a time when I don’t feel like taking questions.

**

“Anger is desire contaminated by helplessness,” says Lisa. When I finally got home from work that day, I cried. And I raged. What was my helpless desire? There was that same desire, as always, to be connected to Sam…but there was also the desire to be treated as a person of value (who deserved communication, consideration, and at the very least closure) by this person who had been of such inestimable value to me. He had treated me that way in the past; obviously, it wasn’t happening now. And there wasn’t much more I could do about it, now that I’d put myself “outside of the circle,” except to accept my anger, and the thwarted desires underlying the anger, intolerable as they might feel.

The pain and weight in my chest, when I allow myself to feel the grief of Sam’s disconnection and/or loss, seems crushing to the point that I can hardly breathe. The other night I opened the window in single-digit weather; I thought I was suffocating. It’s a different order of suffering than my longing for the various guys I never got the chance to really be with, even those I slept with or dated. In those cases, I was missing something that had not yet come into existence (and, as it turns out, never did).

“In some ways, I feel like he was my first love,” I wrote to my closest friend of twenty-three years, who has heard literally everything about my more successful relations with men as well as my many fruitless obsessions. She knew León, that catastrophic college beau, as well as Max Vujevic. She had listened to me moan about a guy named Greg Schmidt for six years.

“I feel like he was your first love, too,” she wrote back.

**

In my more lucid moments I also realize that much of my suffering comes from “psychological leaning” — obsessing about whether he hates me now, how love could turn to hate (or worse, indifference), what he thinks of me now, and going over and over happier memories. (I just deleted a whole long, unnecessary paragraph of reminiscences!) I want Sam to go back to thinking I’m okay.

The obsessing itself, as Lisa astutely points out, is, indeed, another form of escape. Out here, I experience helplessness about the situation; in my head, I make an attempt to gain some semblance of control. I’ve retreated into my head all my life, the way other people might retreat into things like TV or shopping. The biggest problem is that whatever you achieve in your head doesn’t have much to do with “out here” unless you know what to do “out here” about the helplessness. Which is why I decided to listen to someone else who sounded like she had a clue.

When I stop “leaning” for a second, I know I still want (and deserve) word from Sam. But I also remember that he was twenty-one, and that his life here had already become unbearably chaotic — even more so than usual for such a differently abled and gifted human being. It was like inserting Powder into the middle of a tangle of competing electromagnetic fields. I don’t even know that we could have survived, that I could have stayed with him amid the chaos, if things had continued on the way they were. I’m actually glad he got out the hell out of Dodge. Maybe the only way Sam knew how to simplify his landscape was to torch every bridge (Rob’s simply being the last to burn).

I’ve done all I can, anyway, by putting myself beyond his boundary and relieving any pressure. As much as I’d rather avoid moving forward (still looking over my shoulder), I still have the same life dilemmas waiting for me, about how to make my way in the world, make a living, maybe even make a difference. Believe it or not, that’s the primary thing I’m working on now, with help from Ms. Brown. Having the guidance of someone who actually knows something firsthand about success, and understands how things like learned helplessness and boundaries work to hinder or assist us, gives me a little more confidence that I might yet be able to make constructive changes. Even at my advanced age.

After all, just seven months ago I would never have believed I’d have the most amazing, if brief, love affair of my life with that supervisor guy Sam.

It could never have happened had I not been able to truly change.