Dr. Deb Hirschhorn

Dr. Deb

The Fear of Being Vulnerable

By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.

I’d been working with this couple for a while. (This couple is not Jewish, lives elsewhere, and all identifying information has been changed.) The wife had gone out of the marriage for a period of several months twenty-five years ago. Her husband never recovered.

Yet, they stayed together.

The husband – we will call him Pat – was the nicest guy. Last year, he sent me a large bag of Godiva chocolates for the seasonal holiday that comes around this time. But he was also thoughtful and considerate of his wife. He wouldn’t, for example, embarrass her in front of her family so they never knew about her, let’s call it, situation.

But Pat, like so many of us, has been ruled by fear: If I let down my guard and stop blaming her, stop brining up old stories, stop questioning her closely about what happened in November twenty-five years ago, then maybe I will get hurt all over again.

That’s child’s logic, the logic of a child part. This is a hugely irrational, illogical approach because he was hurt all over again! Every day in every way, he re-traumatized himself by bringing up the ordeal he went through twenty-five years ago, with all its anxiety, pain, and horror.

After I studied Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems this past September (when I was in bidud, quarantine, in Israel before my grandson’s bar mitzvah) and I worked intensively with Pat since then using it, he understood that it was his suspicious part that was ruling him. Well, the suspicious part combined with the critical part, the blaming part, the frustrated part, and the angry part.

Pat also learned how to quiet himself, to take on a short meditative state in order to free himself from these dominating parts and just be his own rational self. He learned how to gently thank his parts and reassure them that he could handle the situation.

Except for one thing.

He didn’t seem to be able to sustain it.

Let me back up a bit. There were sessions that we had in which Pat abandoned the chains he’d bound himself with. He laughed and joked and assured me he wanted to be in Self. The old Pat would start a session almost shaking, as if he had just discovered the awful truth five minutes earlier. But we had gotten to a much better place. He was clear on who his Self was.

Pat’s wife, Mary, made enormous progress as well. She came to understand how her own family-of-origin history affected her, how it taught her to block her own pain and her own feelings so that empathy would be an impossibility. She realized that she had not been raised with empathy, either.

Mary came to recognize the awfulness of what she had done to her husband. Her knee-jerk reaction to his grilling her had always been to defensively skirt the issue, retreat, or just shut down. But she learned to recognize that these were only the behaviors of young parts that had no other coping skills at their disposal. She consciously chose to be in Self, which meant she would no longer retreat into defensiveness and escape. She learned to value the pain she felt for her husband rather than to only think of herself. She wanted to help him heal – just as she needed to also heal from her own childhood.

All would seem to be good. Except for the many, many times when Pat would return to his anger and blame, his cross-examination and unwillingness to see progress in his wife.

So, I did the only logical thing. I told them that the indecision and backsliding had to be over by their seasonal holiday last month. December 31 would be the time for each of them to choose to be in Self. Or, at least, to take a moment to get back

into Self energy (as Schwartz calls it) when they forget and get ruled by parts that aren’t helping any. That is, if they wanted my freebie.

See, I was launching my beta test of the expanded Love Yourself Love Your Marriage program. They’d already taken the 12-week LYLYM program, and I’d given them many extra months because I hadn’t been satisfied with the results. I wanted them happy. That was my goal. Then, when I discovered Schwartz, I had a winner. I had the vehicle to get couples quickly to a place of choosing Self energy and going there at will.

Then the expanded version of the program, The Marriage You Want, would be one year of putting icing on the cake: serious communication skills, friendship building, and intimacy. And because I was just launching it, it would be completely free to this couple and two others that had started with them. That’s a bargain. So I created an endpoint for their blame-and-defensiveness game, the game played when one person is taken over by a part so the other person’s part jumps in to take charge.

But when I made my announcement, I saw their faces go white. I saw the panic.

“Well, you don’t have to. You can stay the same, arguing and fighting every day. But I don’t want to be part of that. If you want to join my program, all you need to do is commit to moving back into Self when you get taken over by a part. And you are very good at that, now. I’ve seen it over and over. You can certainly do it,” I told them.

“So, what do you want to do?” I asked.

“Of course, I want to be in Self,” Pat replied, “But my suspicious part protects me,” he sighed.

“He doesn’t,” I pointed out. “You’re miserable when he takes

I gave a lot of thought to their white, panic-stricken faces.

over.”

I gave them the month to think it over, and we kept meeting for regular sessions on me because that’s how I am.

I gave a lot of thought to their white, panic-stricken faces. I realized that they were afraid of being vulnerable to each other. Pat was afraid to show his pain to Mary, and Mary, although she said many times, “I know I hurt you and I’m sorry,” there was a tone to her voice that still bore a sizeable dollop of defensiveness.

By putting an endpoint on their staying in suffering, I was offering the chance to choose to step out of it. But oh, how difficult that choice is. Fear of being vulnerable is actually more scary than living a life of constant fighting.

Such an interesting ethical question: Let the client be in charge of continuing to suffer or take the suffering away by insisting on an endpoint.

I chose the latter, and they did, too. Now we will see what happens as their story unfolds.

Dr. Deb Hirschhorn is a Marriage and Family Therapist. If you want help with your marriage, begin by signing up to watch her Masterclass at https://drdeb. com/myw-masterclass.