Harmful/Helpful Holiday Gifts and Gratitude to Dr. Harriet Lerner
As a psychotherapist and coach part of my job is collaborating with clients to name achievable goals. What I also typically say is often the best evidence of how effective our work together is will be when they find themselves in a familiar and challenging relational moment, and, instead of feeling flooded and falling back into old patterns they’ll find themselves clearer and able to respond anew. This difference will feel vulnerable, courageous, loving, empowering, healing, healthy, and very adult.
Such a moment happened for me in preparation for the 2019 holiday’s. I was chatting on the phone with someone in my life who I consider an important relationship. The amazing moment happened when they alluded to an excitement around getting me a Christmas gift and without my normal defensiveness I was able to say with sincerity that translated in a heartfelt tone, “I know you like to show love through gift giving. Your relationship with money seems unhealthy and out of control to me though, and, when I get gifts from you it doesn’t feel good. What I need moving forward is we no longer exchange gifts over $5, so like a card or photo or things with a high sentimental value and low monetary value.”
To my surprise when I was able to say this so clearly without a tone of judgment or resentment it went better than I could have ever anticipated. That Christmas was one of the best most connected holiday’s between us!
The next year, earlier this month December 2020, I get an expensive gift delivered to my home from this person along with a barrage of text, phone, and email correspondence about the gift, why I should accept it, along with what seemed to me like an overflow of uncontainable thoughts and feelings about many things. In other words, a forbidden treasure followed by a deluge of offloading: none of which I wanted (to say the least). I felt violated, furious, and justified in my impulse to go on the defensive. As all this trauma/drama was unfolding I felt immense gratitude for the work of Dr. Harriet Lerner and thankful for my own circumstances and ability to study her books, particularly “The Dance of Anger” (a regular reread for me) and her newest “Why Won’t You Apologize” (which I’d fortuitously just finished).
The wisdom of these two books allowed me to widen my perspective to let in understanding and empathy about where the other person was coming from without betraying my own experience, needs, and boundaries. I was able to take time to cool-off and channel that anger energy into a constructive (albeit still painful) choice about how to respond as best as I know how. This wasn’t a dramatic confrontation though did take a strong self-position stance. As Dr. Harriet Lerner elucidates: often dramatic confrontations and/or our defensive strategies of armoring only further cause harm and often serve to protect default dynamics, unhealthy patterns, and even the wrongdoer. Abandoning shame and blame (where we run the risk of self-abandonment), and standing firmly in our own self-worth, self-regard, and self-respect by claiming our needs and boundaries with confidence; is truly a herculean task.
In ending this particular blog post I want to share one of my favorite excerpt’s from Dr. Harriet Lerner’s, “Why Won’t You Apologize,” the section in chapter five titled, An Important Message to the Harmed Party:
The most urgent issues — those where we feel most desperate to be heard and understood — pertain to violations of trust by people we have most relied on. Often, in my work as a therapist, the harmed party wants to confront the wrongdoer, frequently a parent or other family member, in hope of receiving a heartfelt apology — one that would include a clear acknowledgment of harm that was disregarded at the time, and validation for the fact that certain events or communications occurred and were emotionally damaging.
Instead of the longed-for outcome, the harmed party may end up feeling re-traumatized. Most people who commit serious harm never get to the point where they can admit to their harmful actions, much less apologize and aim to repair them. Their shame leads to denial and self-deception that overrides their ability to orient toward reality. No person can be more honest with us than they can be with their own self.
Before you open up a conversation with a person who has harmed you, keep in mind that protecting yourself comes first. Reduce your expectations to zero for getting the response you want and deserve. Speak your truths because you need to speak for your own self — because this is the ground you want to stand on, irrespective of whatever response you receive. A heartfelt apology is unlikely to be forthcoming, now or ever.
No individual will feel accountable and genuinely remorseful — no matter how well you communicate — if doing so threatens to define him or her in an intolerable way. The other person’s willingness to own up to harmful deeds has nothing to do with how much she or he does or doesn’t love you. Rather, the capacity to take responsibility, and feel empathy and remorse, and offer a meaningful apology rests on how much self-love and self-respect that person has available. We don’t have the power to bestow these traits on anyone but ourselves.
