The DHX: The Doughtie Houses Exchange

Kathy and I haven’t always been friends. We haven’t always thought of each other as sane or trustworthy.

Now we are friends. Now we do think of each other as sane and trustworthy.

How did we get from there to here?

We were talking one night last week over tea and crackers about showing a little more of our dirty laundry here so we don’t come off looking like goody-two shoes sitting here giving advice when we never really grappled with the difficult stuff ourselves. Because we did. We so did.

It’s why I flinch when I hear people talk about the mom or stepmom in their lives as “crazy”. We’ve seen each other that way. And I’m not saying there aren’t some people with real medical problems out there. I’m just saying crazy is a word that gets used a lot about moms and stepmoms. And it can be a way of dismissing the other person’s extreme distress, strong feelings, different perceptions, and serious concerns as not worth understanding — it can be a way of dismissing the other person all together. At least it was for me.

When we were talking last week, we learned for the first time that we’d both been working on our perceptions of each other at the same time before we took steps toward reconciling. Neither one of us had known that the other was working hard on herself and on reexamining the way she saw the other woman.

The trigger for me was an emotional conversation with one of the kids about something we disagreed over, and in which he listened to me, repeated back in his own words what he thought I was saying to make sure he understood, and let me know how he felt about what I was saying — all under the pressure of a lot of emotion, but all with poise. I was very impressed with him. It was an “Aha!” moment. I remember realizing that if Kathy was actually as messed up as I’d been telling myself she was, these kids would be at least somewhat messed up, too. And they weren’t. They were great. I realized at that moment that there had to be a lot more good things than I was allowing for in my mental model of her.

The was the beginning of spring coming back into my life. It was the first crack of the ice in my misery.

There’s a lot of freedom in seeing ideas that don’t fit crack and break down.

For me, the Arbinger Institute books were the tools that helped me most to tear my broken old ideas all the way down and start building a new mental model of Kathy, our relationship, what I should do, and how things should be. I read a review of The Anatomy of Peace in a business book blog, and realized I had to read it. That led me to Leadership and Self-Deception and Bonds that Make Us Free. (Both of those links are to free versions of both books online at Meridian Magazine. Ladies, I’m an atheist, and even though Meridian Magazine is an LDS — aka Mormon — magazine, these books don’t push God or the Mormon faith or any religion at all. I loved them.)

At the same time, I started thinking about triangulation, which I’d learned about years ago when my therapist recommended Harriet Lerner’s books to me. I started to think about what I stood to gain from thinking of Kathy as “crazy” or “bad”. (I hate to even type those words now.) If she was crazy, I didn’t need to try to understand how she saw things, and I did not need to work hard to address her concerns or to help her understand where I was coming from. If she was crazy, there was no point. It wouldn’t be my fault at all that we didn’t get along. I’d be free of blame. Also — and this is a big one — seeing her in that light made me feel closer to my new partner. It made me feel less vulnerable to the possibility of my relationship with him crumbling — if she was “crazy” or “bad” I had nothing in common with her and so there wouldn’t be any danger that my relationship could end up the same way hers and his had. Seeing her as a dangerous force outside our partnership made me feel closer to him in a way — that’s where the triangulation came in.

I started to realize I had a lot of incentives to see her as a bad guy — incentives that wouldn’t hold up under conscious examination or daylight, but that if never really looked at or thought about could — without my knowing it — sway me toward seeing her that way.

And finally, I don’t remember how I came across this exercise, but I think it was in one of the stepmom books. It walked me through imagining that I had just given birth to a baby. I was holding it. I felt joy and love and protectiveness. Then it walked me through imagining that Kathy came to visit and asked if she could hold my baby. Now remember, this was still when we weren’t getting along — even though chinks in my ideas were starting to appear. But my reaction was “NO WAY IN HELL!” And then — and this still gets me — the book told me that I had to let her hold my baby. That this was what she had to do every day she sent her kids to my house. I think I cried. I don’t remember. But I remember feeling waves of empathy for the first time. Empathy for everything she ever did that I interpreted as “crazy”. I would be such a crazy bitch if I had to send my kids to some other woman. (And I’m not saying Kathy was. I’m saying if I was in the biomom shoes, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s so painful to imagine.) Yes, I’m sure I’d reign it in for the sake of the kids. But all of a sudden, I understood. I knew I had to do things really, really differently. Chris and Jack were not just G’s beloved sons. They were Kathy’s babies. Oh my God. She had to send her babies to a house with a woman who saw her the way I did — to a woman who she wasn’t sure would love them or take care of them right, and who she might have even thought of as an enemy. She had to let me hold her babies over and over and over.

That was what snapped it for me. That, and an anniversary of September 11. There’s been too much violence in the world. Here I was working on a Bloggers for Darfur website, but not doing the actual work of making peace in my own life. I vowed to make peace — to do whatever I had to do to make things right — for September 11, for the kids, for Darfur, for the world, for the future, and for my own happiness. And I started looking for baby steps to take in that direction.