The recent arrest of the actor, Charlie Sheen, on domestic violence charges will make for a very brief, very important post.
I have no idea if Mr. Sheen is guilty of these charges, or what actually happened during this incident. I only mention it in order to raise the vital issue of domestic violence. Violence between partners and families happens. It is all too common, and it can devastate lives.
Here’s what you do if someone with whom you are in a relationship turns violent towards you:
Leave.
That’s it. Pack your things and go. Or kick him out and change the locks. It’s over.
If you need to, call the police, or request an order of protection to prevent this person from returning to your life.
Sound harsh?
Think about it. You deserve a partner who treats you like gold – who cherishes you and celebrates you and adores you.
No one – NO ONE – deserves to be violently assaulted.
If someone has assaulted you violently, that person is in no place in his life to be in a relationship with anyone, least of all you.
He might be ready sometime in the future, but he needs to find the help he needs to change. That will take time, and that is his job, and he will have to tackle it on his own. It is no business of yours.
You cannot change someone from within a relationship. You can stay or you can leave. That’s it.
With something as serious as domestic violence, you must leave.
If you feel an urge to blame yourself, or explain it away, or return to a relationship with an abuser, there is a serious problem that must be addressed in your own therapy. It could be a return to feelings you had during previous abuse, during your childhood. I don’t know – that will have to be explored.
But you cannot return. You must leave, and stay away, and not look back.
Okay. That was easy. Shortest post yet.
And one of the most important.
Dear and Brad and Angie and Madge:
The testing child is also distrustful. If his own birth parents disowned him, why should he trust you? So he tests you. If you claim to love him just as much as your birth children, then how will you react when he smashes a toy, or refuses to obey you? He wants to know if your love is real – if it is the truly unconditional love he needs so badly. He may attempt to drive you away in the process of testing your love. There could be some tough times ahead as you struggle to enforce boundaries in a way that communicates love and safety.
A patient told me she couldn’t get over a guy she’d been seeing.
Adult love is very different from child love. It begins with loving yourself.
3. You respect him. The best relationships contain a note of mutual awe. You think your partner is pretty darned terrific – and he returns the compliment.
The other day a patient posed a simple, but troubling question: “What am I supposed to do with all this anger?”
There’s an interesting documentary, from 2006, called “Forgiving Dr. Mengele.” It’s about Eva Mozes Kor, a woman who, as a child, was tortured by Josef Mengele, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, during hideous experiments he performed on prisoners.
We don’t often own this truth. But pay attention when you hear that something bad happened to someone you don’t like. You’ll catch the corners of your mouth pulling up. You are smiling – a primitive simian indicator of pleasure. Unconscious sadism is a powerful force. Smashing things is fun. Violent movies are fun, too. Most of us are angry most of the time, about something. Anger co-exists with other emotions, and it doesn’t have to have a logical explanation – it just is, and it gratifies you.
Groucho Marx once said he would never join a club that would have him as a member.
This week a patient complained he wasn’t sleeping well. He said he was feeling like a hypochondriac – obsessively worrying about his health. He’s young, and perfectly well, but suddenly every little ache and pain was bubonic plague.
Consider what truly scares you. It isn’t just scary monsters. It’s scary monsters jumping out of nowhere and saying “boo!” What scares you most isn’t what you’re expecting – it’s what you aren’t expecting.
The clip at the bottom of this post is a performance of an excerpt from the Art of the Fugue, by Johann Sebastian Bach.
In Lennon’s case, it isn’t difficult to see the basis for the pattern. All Lennon fans know the familiar facts:
The pattern is hard to miss: abandonment to nurturing to abandonment – back and forth and back and forth. Lennon lost his father, but had his mother. Then lost his mother. Then had his mother again. Then lost her again. She adored him, but couldn’t keep him – so back he went to Aunt Mimi. Then she adored him again, but died suddenly, leaving him utterly bereft and as afraid to trust love in any form as he longed for the love he’d once cherished.
The borderline pattern is usually handed from parent to child. The parent exhibits this switch from one extreme to the other, and the child, attempting to adapt in response, begins to gyrate, too. In Lennon’s case, the events of his childhood were extreme, involving actual abandonment and the sudden death of a parent – so his pattern was particularly pronounced. By all accounts, John could be a very difficult person to deal with. His son Julian makes that clear in describing his few memories of his father, and even Sean, who barely knew his father, described him as having a strong temper and behaving unpredictably – affectionate sometimes, cruel and angry at others. The man who wrote “All You Need is Love” was indeed warm and loving and sincere and idealistic. He could also be vicious. That was the fearful child in John, fighting, unconsciously, to survive in a world fraught with the peril of abandonment and betrayal.
If I worked with John Lennon, I would seek meticulously to be the same stable object each and every time he saw me. I would let him know I welcomed his anger just as I welcomed all his emotions, so long as he put everything into words instead of going into action on unexplored feeling. I would make certain he never received a response from me other than acceptance and support. The goal at all times would be to flatten out the gyrations – to offer a Middle Path, the path of the Buddha, the path of moderation.
I would make sure Lennon knew I wasn’t like the people in his childhood. I would be there, the same old People’s Therapist, each and every time – offering support and understanding.
The People's Therapist 