Too Much, Not Enough: Isabelle and Roger
Isabelle and Roger consulted me about their relationship. Isabelle owned a line of French beauty products. She was a French model before she began to produce her cosmetics, which immediately made her a self-made millionaire. She met Roger when she was 48 and he was 63. They both have children from previous marriages.Roger is a mystery writer of some note and had been a bachelor for some time when he met Isabelle.Isabelle moved to the U.S. and Nashville specifically to spend more time with Roger. She is a gregarious person and loves an audience, but here she feels isolated, especially since she sold her business.Roger has always treasured his alone time. He needs quiet time to compose his characters and the plots for his novels. He also enjoys his time alone just to rejuvenate himself. He feels like people are always after him to interview him or to tell him their troubles. He has always been a great listener. This is how he gets his ideas for dialogue and characters, by listening, but listening exhausts him. Sometimes listening to Isabelle exhausts him. When he asks for time alone, she feels rejected. He doesn’t mean to reject her, but he can’t seem to change how she feels no matter how much he tries to reassure her.He wants her to develop friendships and have a life beyond him. Their relationship is too intense for him.She constantly professes her devotion. Instead of feeling complimented, he seems to feel burdened or obligated, almost guilty for not matching her need to be loved by him with his need to be loved by her. To him her words, “I love you and I want to spend time with you” feels like he’s being forced to love her.This is something he doesn’t want to admit to himself. He wants to use their differences as a descriptive for why their relationship doesn’t work. He says the old break-up line to her of “We’re just different. We have different needs. You are a good person. I just need space and you need more attention.”Her implicit response is “If you loved me you would want to be with me. Marry me.”“I can’t marry you” is his answer. “We don’t need to get married. We are beyond having a family.”So this is the scene that presents itself over and over in all their discussions and certainly in therapy. As I watched this repetitive script spiral around me, I believed that I had some ideas or paradigms that would help them disentangle their mess. We agreed to meet once every two weeks.Two paradigms created a polar dichotomy for me here. They come from the origin stories in Genesis. One story portrays humans as created in the image of God and that, basically, at their core, all humans are good. The second creation story is the Adams and Eve story which describes the original sin in all humans. This story portrays humas as flawed and constantly in need of redemption. In other words, all humans are a work in progress. All life is the building of self-awareness and accountability.Both of these points of view seem to be useful to therapists. The first, that people are basically good, but just different and differences do not create a better than less than caste system, this idea is helpful developing acceptance and tolerance in a relationship and a community. It is the basis of Enlightenment values and the 1776 Declaration of Independence.The we-all-have-work-to-do opposite paradigm is the therapeutic challenge issued by most religions and many therapists to inspire growth and change.Isabelle had no problem admitting that she had work to do and if Roger would give her any character challenge except the “give me space and be patient” assignment, she would climb mountains to please him. She was ready to work on being a better person, an easier to love person.Roger didn’t embrace this principle of everyone has work to do as enthusiastically as Isabelle. He gave it some lip service. His mantra continued to be “We are both equally good, just different. I don’t want you to change for me and I don’t want to change for you.”It should be noted that I was very impressed by this couple’s collective intelligence. Isabelle was a fast learner, eager to have new ideas about how she might grow and she used the ideas I gave her, e.g., avoid “yes but” and use “yes and;” don’t use pejorative labels, create a scheduling contract providing times to be together and apart. Her willingness to experiment and her ability to learn encouraged me.Roger was one of the most emotionally intelligent people I had ever met. Certainly, he was my equal in his ability to listen empathetically. This talent served him in developing characters for his novels and made him a good friend to many people, including Isabelle. She often praised his ability to diffuse conflict. “I love him” she would say “because we never fight. I’ve never been in a relationship that was easy like this one.” By this she meant that Roger had a talent for oiling relationship friction with his listening skills like a good therapist. I don’t think that, if pressed, she would say that this relationship is easy.With Isabelle’s eagerness to learn and Roger’s emotional intelligence, I felt therapy with them would be successful. I really liked them both and I was always excited to consult with them. I felt I had so much to contribute to the success of their relationship. I was eager to impress them with my ideas. I thought that once I “spit in their soup” (an Adlerian expression meaning exposed the ego games they played inside their spiraling scripts) they would have immediate “Ah Ha” moments and would be relieved to work out of their self-imposed prison cells.First, I shared with them my five diagnostic relationship types. Some of these types seemed to me very applicable to them. The five types are:
Distancer/Pursuer
Paragon/Screwup
Giver/Taker
Maximizer/Minimizer
Hero/Damsel
Just the week before they read my chapter describing these types, I had a session with another couple on the same subject. This couple, in my mind, wasn’t nearly as psychologically open and aware as Roger and Isabelle and they found these types and their roles inside these types to be very challenging and helpful. Now that they saw the roles each played and how these roles confined them, they had a more difficult time sustaining their old scripts. And that’s what I thought would happen here with Roger and Isabelle.When they began the discussion of types, they understood immediately that Roger was the distancer and Isabelle was the pursuer and that Roger needed to approach and reassure more and Isabelle needed to create more space between them and learn to enjoy her alone time.“Okay,” I thought to myself, “this is going to be like helping a child learn to ride a bicycle. Once they get it, they will just ride off.”But the next type, Paragon/Screwup, was not at all obvious to them while it was so clear in my mind. Isabelle played the role of Screwup, ADHD, often impulsive, creative but not emotionally well regulated. Roger seemed to me to definitely be the Paragon.Isabelle quickly saw herself as the Screwup and recognized that she needed to be more composed and less impulsive and she was eager to have examples of when she might practice reining herself in.Roger strongly resisted the idea that he was a Paragon. He didn’t want to use this construct. He didn’t want to label Isabelle as a Screwup either and he seemed unwilling to take the step of identifying his character flaw and confessing that he too was a Screwup.“Why does anyone need to be labeled a Screwup?” he asked.“Because we all are,” I said. “If Isabelle will stop making so many messes, learn from her mistakes, really make changes. That would be a start. Instead, she currently uses the fact that she is loved by you, such a good nearly perfect man, as a validation of her worth. this exempts her from changing and growing. Then you might join her with your version of undoing this script by identifying the character flaws you might have, leave the Paragon pedestal, join Isabelle in the human moral mud. The moral mud, this is the place where intimacy thrives, where two people confess, apologize and pledge to become easier to love.”Roger looked skeptical. I saw that I was getting nowhere, so I changed types. I thought that discussing the Hero/Damsel type would appeal to Roger. After all, in that system I found Roger to be the Damsel being bullied by the Isabelle Hero.Theirs was not a typical Hero/Damsel relationship in which the Hero saves the Damsel and then expects to be honored and obeyed. The damsel then feels oppressed, bullied and helpless.In this version Isabelle uses the righteousness from her suffering from his rejection and the strength of her unrequited love as a guilt lever to manipulate Roger to return her desire. “But Roger, I love you so.” Every time she tells him how much she loves him, he wants to get more distance from her. He doesn’t understand this himself, but I thought that when I showed him this dynamic, he would get it and feel less guilty and less oppressed. I think Isabelle will see that her slavish devotion is not required nor wanted and it is not helping her cause. Guilt never inspires love.I thought this explanation would be especially appealing to Roger. But I was wrong. Roger refused to acknowledge feeling any guilt. He refused to admit that he felt leveraged or pushed to return Isabelle’s love. He would not let me cast Isabelle in the role of suffering hero or bully. The whole notion of the roles in this typology bothered him.“We don’t have to think of each other in these pejorative terms,” he said. “I don’t like labels or stereotypes. We’re just different. We just don’t fit well together.”That’s when I lost it. I raised my voice, “This is the famous break-up line people use when they want to end the relationship and its disingenuous. You are not blameless here. You have a part in this mess. Love doesn’t mean never having to change for another and accepting each other as you are. Love means that you are willing to change because you hurt the person you love and you want to stop hurting them. Relationships are a constant challenge to adapt, grow and change. Love is what inspires this change. If you insist that neither of you has to change, you are saying that you don’t care enough to discover your contribution to this relationship’s problems. All relationships have problems. No two problems fit. Relationships are where we learn about who we are and they teach how and where we need to grow. They are our best teachers. We all need them to develop our character and spirit.”When I finished, I realized that I sounded angry and I guess I was. I wanted so badly to help them and I wasn’t. This is no excuse for my intensity. In this case my piercing eyes and passion were not my friends nor were they helpful to Roger and Isabelle. I apologized for raising my voice.Roger didn’t say anything.I asked him if he had a response. As was his way he said, “I’ll have to think about it.”Our time was up. I asked him if he would return and tell me his thoughts. He said he would.But our two-week rhythm came and went and I heard nothing from either Roger or Isabelle. I was sad because I admired them both so much. I too aspire to be a novelist like Roger. I have a draft of one in my computer. I identify with Isabelle. In my relationships, I have always been the pursuer, screwup, and overly devoted dependent mate – doing too much for love, like her.I felt terrible. I feel terrible that I messed this up. I pushed too hard. I was in love with my paradigms and believed they were magic. I think maybe in this instance, the original sin paradigm may have been the wrong one. Maybe with Roger and Isabelle, Roger was correct. Their levels of maturity, their difference in age and place on their life development path was too much of a chasm to span.Roger was older and didn’t have the same passion for a relationship as Isabelle. His sex drive was less than hers. His current life task for his age was to put more emphasis on his spiritual life and prepare for death. This was an aspect of human life that Isabelle was not currently facing.Isabelle was a great, lovable, wonderful, human being, creative, fun-loving, well-meaning. Roger was a kind, gentle man, a good companion and friend who had a monastic side to his personality. Perhaps all my boxes of types and ideas were not helpful. Perhaps I was too confident in my ideas and I needed too badly to sell them to Roger and Isabelle. Perhaps I wasn’t listening.I don’t know, but I regret not being able to work with them so that Isabelle could learn about the secret power of listening and how helping doesn’t help and how to self-regulate and all my other brilliant ideas, none of which are a substitute for my listening and caring with composure. Clearly that would have been more effective than my ideas.