Emotional Detachment - The Hard Lesson Of Letting Go Of Fear

Let it go, man. Just let it go.

I actually hate that advice (regardless of how true it may end up being), because it downplays the effect things have had on someone, and it doesn’t do anything to actually help anyone. If it was so easy for that person to let go of, then they ALREADY WOULD HAVE! Who on this planet ever heard someone say “Don’t worry about it” or “Just let it go” or “Don’t let it get to you” and went “Oh cool. All better. Thanks!”? Apart from saying it with sarcasm, I mean.

There have been so many things in my past, connected with relationships that would have been so much easier on me if I had actually had the presence of mind to distance myself from the overwhelming emotional reactions. But I couldn’t figure out how to “just let it go.”

It’s like every challenge needed to be met and overcome. Why did the anxiety of a situation overwhelm me? Why couldn’t I just have let something slide?

Some believe it’s because I’m a guy and guys just have to fix stuff. Trust me: a whole lot of women do too. So I don’t think it’s just that.

Some think it’s a Virgo thing. Like there aren’t any other control-freak signs in the zodiac?

Some think it’s because I have a disorder. I actually do, probably more than I have discovered. But I let so many things in my life just go on by. Somehow in close relationships it’s different.

I didn’t need to fix each situation. I needed to fix the person, and each issue that came along seemed to be yet another crack that needed patching. It wasn’t that I was trying to be mean about it. In fact, I thought I was being a good, helpful, dutiful partner.

“I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah? So at what point did I inform you that I needed your help?”

Ouch, that’s the hard truth right there.

It’s funny, because I was busy proving the truth of the Biblical admonition: don’t be trying to focus on removing a tiny splinter from someone’s eye when you’ve got a big old honking roof support beam in your eye. My cracks were the ones I should have been working on patching up. But of course, without the perspective of distance, I couldn’t see that.

Here are some examples of moments I wish I had had this Perspective Distance:

The Other Person Is Angry!

The comedian Louis CK made a perfect observation when he was talking about how men nowadays don’t really know how to be in a relationship. He mimicked a young man who was so stressed over the fact that his girlfriend was angry with him.

“Well, later she won’t be!”

So this is almost like a hiccup in the philosophy of being Present, living within the moment. In this case, the person can become myopic, short-sighted, only aware of what’s happening right in front of him without having the insight or understanding that moments pass. “The moment” should never be interpreted as being how things will be forever.

I don’t think I assumed that a girl would be forever angry at me once she started being angry at me. But I did see her mounting frustration or sharp edges during moments of anger as a threat to me and the relationship. I saw her anger as being the harbinger – the herald – of Relationship Armageddon. If she was angry, it meant the End was Nigh.

Totally ridiculous, of course, but that’s how I felt. And now I understand why.

My mom and dad.

Kids (and many adults) sometimes see things in a very Cause-and-Effect way. In fact, it’s how superstitions and misunderstandings start.

“A crow flew into Mabel’s house, and the next morning she was dead.”  Never mind that Mabel had a heart condition, her arteries were so congested that they were featured on local traffic reports, she had an undiagnosed and untreated medical issue, or that her family had a history of heart failure at a young age. All we know for sure is that one does not experience a crow flying into one’s house every day. Since that very unusual event was observed the day before Mabel passed away, it follows that the two “were connected.” So, stay away from crows!

All your cattle died, so start looking around the village for the girl with the unusual birthmark, wart, or hair color. Burn her as a witch, and then all will be restored to normalcy. Never mind that the cattle’s water or feed supply was tainted, or they got hoof-and-mouth. It was all a witch’s fault! And if the tainted water that killed the cows was partly due to the drought that caused your crops to wither, maybe there are two witches!

A kid walked into his school one day and killed many of his classmates, and he had been listening to that awful heavy metal/rap/rock and roll/whatever. Obviously we need to protect our impressionable youth from such demonic music. Never mind that the kid had an undiagnosed chemical imbalance (because “no kid of MINE has a problem like that!”), his parents never spent any quality time with him (“Yes we did! We drug him to church every Sunday like good families do!”), he felt estranged from his friends as he grew in a different direction from them, or he simply succumbed to a mental or emotional tipping point and fell into the abyss. Nope, it had to be the music he was listening to. Granted, the music may not have helped and may have contributed to the problems, but he was probably now listening to music that mirrored how he felt rather than listening to music that influenced him.

Cause and effect. Of course, in my case, I see it now: Mom and dad used to be happy around me, then they started being unhappy around me, then they were angry at each other, and then they split up. Let’s see, they were together when they were happy, and they split up when they started being angry and yelling all the time. Anger = family and relationship break-up.

It totally did not help me that my parents tried to hide it all from me. I know that it’s not great to fight around your kids, but there’s no reason for them to grow up with this ideal that married couples always smile and get along and are just happy all the time. When that kid grows up and he doesn’t experience that fairy tale that was so carefully placed around him during childhood, he might well wonder what’s wrong with him, or more likely what’s wrong with his partner.

So it would have totally helped me if I could have had some perspective about anger within relationships. Maybe I could have stepped back and seen that the issue was the other person’s. Maybe I could have seen that it was not only her problem but also her responsibility to deal with whatever the problem was and get over being angry.

Of course, my mom and dad were angry at their partners prior to their breakup. Because they were so wrapped up in their own heads and trapped in the straight-jacket of how they were raised to believe relationships worked, they just knew that they were both angry and it was the other person’s fault.

So instead of having the distance, it followed in my head that if she is angry, I must do whatever I can to reverse that, for her sake, my sake, and our sake. It didn’t help when she was angry at me particularly, because that’s what I learned as a kid:

Step 1) Mom is angry at dad

Step 2) Mom ends up kicking dad out.

True, I couldn’t have grasped my parents’ problems, so having them sit down and explain it all to me would have been a waste of time. This is especially true since I’m pretty sure they never understood why the train was so severely off the tracks for them to begin with. They knew down to the tiniest detail what the other person was saying and doing that was so frustrating and wrong, but they didn’t know where the problems really were. They saw symptoms, not the disease.

But that doesn’t mean it was fair to keep me, the child, completely in the dark. When my marriage was on the brink, my kids totally saw it. Hard as it was on them, they saw the stress all over me and felt it in the house.  So my wife and I sat down with the kids together and separately to explain things as best we could. By not springing the separation and eventual divorce on them as a total surprise meant (in our case) that the children were prepared and somewhat armed with the ability to deal with it.

So now I need to step back and examine a woman’s anger with understanding. I understand now:

·         A mood will pass.

·         Anger is an emotion, not a reality. No, not even when you’re “really angry.”

·         My parents split up because they worked to control each other instead of resolve their issues.

·         My parents were angry because they would not behave the way the other one wanted them to.

·         My parents had unrealistic expectations of each other, so disappointment was inevitable.

·         My parents could not accept each other as they were, could not force the other to change (even through violence), and could not escape the prison of what they believed “relationship” really was.

·         My partner can be angry, even with me, and she has the right to her emotions.

·         If my partner is angry, I do not have the right to try and “correct” her mood. The same holds true of she is sad, happy, or anything else.

·         My relationship does not have to suffer like my parents’ did, because while a child is shaped somewhat by his or her parents’ example, he or she is not condemned to repeat it. We have choice.

Knowing that a mood will pass, even a bad mood is valid, and just because someone is angry with me does not signal the end – this allows me to have the distance to see the mood as a thunderstorm; a lot of wind, a lot of noise, a lot of stress. But it will pass, birds will chirp again, and blue skies will return.

Alcohol.

All I can say is alcohol was a primary factor in shaping my early life and views. But since it loomed so large in the bad things that I remember early in life, it took on a mythic stature. It was the fabled monster lurking in the darkness, waiting to bring you to ruin. So it became my policy to avoid alcohol studiously. I convinced myself I was allergic to it, to the point that I had a terrible reaction to even tasting it.

The only problem for me was that I had no objective viewpoint. I did not understand that alcohol in moderation was not something to fear. Mostly I didn’t understand that because there was no such thing as moderation, from what I saw. People drank to get drunk. Drunken people did bad things.

When I found myself in a relationship with women who did not have the same problematic past with alcohol abuse in their families, they did not really understand my panic over the notion that they wanted to occasionally drink socially. And crud, did I ever panic over that! Remember what I said about anger being the herald of the end of a relationship? Well, alcohol was the catalyst of that end.

Wine coolers in the house caused me to scowl every time I looked in the refrigerator. How many nights did I spend lying awake waiting for someone I cared about to leave a bar or club, after all the anxiety I felt upon finding out that was their plans for the evening in the first place? Not to mention that some family friends used to pity me mightily because I did not partake. They actually hoped one day I could have the freedom to drink. Yuck!

It didn’t matter if these people in my life explained that they would be fine with their alcohol consumption. My mom said she was fine after she drank all morning then crossed the median into oncoming traffic as she drove me to a book store (I was too young yet to drive). Drinkers lied a lot, I learned early on. They could not be trusted. Therefore if I cared about a woman and she had plans to drink socially, I automatically got angry because my insecurities teamed up with my past experiences to tell me I could no longer trust this person.

Children of alcoholic parents have a lot of these issues. They can also find themselves in failed relationships, co-dependency, or even trapped in a bottle (alcohol or pill) themselves. Again, what I grew up with was the only reality I had access to as I grew up, so I internalized the idea that that was how things were for everyone everywhere all the time. It’s sad, as cosmopolitan as I was in many ways, I was so backwards and ignorant in many others.

I have two people whom I can credit with helping me come to grips with my fear of alcohol: my psychologist for explaining how alcoholic parents shaped my viewpoints, and a certain young woman who proved that even if she got very inebriated, she was still a mature and responsible person whom I could trust.

I still cringe around alcohol. But I have the emotional distance now to realize that it is a reaction to deeply-rooted trauma in my past and not a reflection of reality in every case. So if someone I care about wants to go to a club and have some drinks with friends, I no longer stay up fretting. She isn’t going to behave badly, she isn’t going to abandon her morals or common sense, and that margarita isn’t going to bring everything I care about to a painful end.

But I’m still going to stick to water or soda.

In large part, my fear of anger and alcohol has been moderated because someone helped me have faith that my past experiences aren’t the only experiences. So it seems only logical that we turn our attention to the pillar of Mindfulness that might make folks a bit wary: Faith.