LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

and a half later, Sara and Bill broke up. Within two weeks, Sara finds herself beginning to meditate again. “I can’t believe how much I missed this,” she remarked.

      Emily has always loved to dance. She took ballet and jazz when she was growing up, and enjoyed going dancing on the weekends with friends. Dancing makes her feel alive, graceful, and free. When Emily was 29 she met Andrew, 31. They began dating, fell in love, and got married two years later. I recently bumped into Emily at a department store, and after asking her how she and Andrew were doing, I mentioned dancing. Emily looked uncomfortable and replied, “Well, I don’t do much dancing anymore.” When I asked her why, she explained: “You see, Andrew has never really liked dancing. He’s always felt like a klutz, and in the beginning I would drag him to clubs with me, but he’d just sit there all night and refuse to get up on the dance floor. It wasn’t fun seeing him sulk, so we stopped going. He encouraged me to go dancing without him, not to sacrifice on his account. I went once or twice with some friends, but I felt guilty leaving him home alone. I guess I miss dancing, but it’s no big deal, really.”

      These women are doing what many of us do – giving up our own interests and hobbies because they are not important to the man in our life. We don’t even realize that we are making these sacrifices. We convince ourselves that we aren’t really missing anything, that it doesn’t matter. But it does. Often we become aware that we have made our own choices and activities second best only after the relationship has ended, and we find ourselves taking up those interests again. Then we remember how much we used to enjoy meditating, or dancing, or gardening, or cycling, or whatever it is that we gave up because the man in our life wasn’t particularly interested in it.

      2. We give up friends or family members our partner doesn’t approve of. JoAnne, 26, was a beautician, who met her boyfriend, Lawrence, a 50-year-old antique dealer, on a blind date. JoAnne was bubbly, clever, and vivacious, and even though she’d never gone to college, she had good common sense and was doing well. Lawrence had graduated with honors from an East Coast Ivy League university, and considered himself an intellectual. The problems between them began the first time JoAnne took Lawrence to a friend’s birthday party. JoAnne was having a wonderful time until she looked over and saw Lawrence sitting by himself, “What’s wrong, honey?” she asked.

      “I don’t really feel comfortable here,” Lawrence answered with a scowl. “I really have nothing in common with these friends of yours.”

      On the way home in the car, JoAnne and Lawrence argued about the party. “I hate you thinking my friends aren’t good enough for you,” JoAnne yelled. “So what if they didn’t go to college – they’re really good people.”

      “Look, if you want to spend time with them, that’s your business,” Lawrence replied. “Just don’t expect me to participate.”

      JoAnne was furious at Lawrence for his superior attitude, but she secretly wondered if he was right, if her friends weren’t good enough for her. She was afraid of what would happen if she continued to see them. Would Lawrence break up with her? Over the next few months she began to spend less and less time with her old friends, until she stopped seeing them entirely. She felt lonely – but after all, she had Lawrence.

      Jackie’s parents had never approved of Mike when Jackie dated him in college, and they were even more upset when the couple decided to move in together. Mike was a heavy drinker, and even though he claimed he could stop any time he wanted to, he never seemed to want to. Jackie loved Mike, and knew he loved her, but was afraid to really confront him about his drinking. Jackie had always been very close to her parents, since she was an only child, but all that began to change once she and Mike started living together. Each time Jackie would mention that she’d spoken to her mother or father, Mike would start complaining that Jackie was still depending too much on her parents, that she was acting like a little girl, and that she needed to break away from them and be her own person. Jackie loved her parents, but she didn’t want to lose Mike, so she began to taper off her phone calls and visits with them, until she hardly had any contact with them at all. Mike told Jackie that he was proud of her for being so “strong.” But Jackie drives by her parents’ house every week, parks the car across the street, and cries.

      If I asked you, “Would you reject a friend or family member if a man asked you to?” you’d probably answer with a resounding “No Way!” And yet many women do just that. They turn their backs on people who are important to them rather than risk the loss of a man’s love.

      Why do some men try to separate you from people who care about you?

       MEN WHO ARE INSECURE WITHIN THEMSELVES WILL TRY TO CUT YOU OFF FROM YOUR SUPPORT SYSTEMS

      There are men who need to feel they have total control over their partner, who are frightened of being controlled themselves. One of their tactics for exerting that power over you might be to cut you off from those people and groups who love and support you – your family, your friends, your church or spiritual group. This can have two results.

      1 You become more dependent on the man for love, since you’re getting less of it from other sources.

      2 Your relationship becomes isolated from the scrutiny of the people who love you, thereby protecting your partner from possible criticism and negative feedback about his treatment of you.

      3. We become “emotional chameleons,” walking into the relationship like a blank slate, and becoming whatever the man wants us to be. One of the most common ways women put themselves second is by being willing to sacrifice who they are, and become whatever their man wants them to be. I call this being an “emotional chameleon,” willing to change yourself, your looks, your behavior, and even your beliefs in order to fit your man’s image of his ideal woman. I’ll be the woman of his dreams, we decide, and we proceed to mold ourselves into someone else’s picture of what is lovable.

      Here’s a true and sad story about how one woman sacrificed her entire personality for a man. Janice, a 32-year-old singer, walked into my office full of bitterness and rage. She’d just ended a three-year relationship with Tony, a telephone repairman. “Do you know what I did every weekend for three years?” she asked me. “I went to wrestling matches. Not to a movie, or the theater, but to goddamn wrestling matches. And when we were home, what do you think we watched on TV? Wrestling. I knew every wrestler. I knew who hated whom, I knew all the moves.”

      “I don’t understand,” I replied. “You still haven’t told me what the problem was.”

      Janice looked at me with daggers in her eyes and growled, “I hate wrestling! In fact, I hate sports. But Tony loved it, and whatever Tony wanted, I did. I became a wrestling groupie just to please him. I even convinced myself that I liked it. I thought of it as a love sacrifice.’ Now, whenever I think about it even for a second, I want to throw up. I am so pissed off at myself for being such an idiot.”

      Janice had walked into her relationship with Tony a blank slate, willing to alter her personality in exchange for love. Living in Los Angeles, I often meet women who are making this unfortunate mistake in extreme ways, to the point of altering their physical appearance with plastic surgery because the man they’re involved with wants them to look different. I’ve counseled dozens of women who were “instructed” by their men to have their breasts enlarged or their backsides lifted, went ahead with the surgery, and are now dealing with their feelings of rage and humiliation.

      4. We give up our own dreams, in order to help a man make his dreams come true. The wife who drops out of school to support her husband while he becomes a doctor, and realizes, fifteen years later, that she forgot about her own dreams of teaching retarded children …

      The woman who quits her job in a major corporation to help her boyfriend with the bookkeeping for his import business, only to realize when they break up three years later that she did it for him and not for herself, and that now she has nothing to show for it…

      I’m sure that if you haven’t done this yourself, you know a woman who has. It’s so sad that as women we are so willing

Скачать книгу