This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This “Ask Jane” is a continuation of one that came out a few weeks ago called “My wife has gone off the deep end.” I’m describing the continuing journey of a client who is dealing with a very difficult situation at home. (Real names are never used.)
William was saying his wife is more irrational than ever and it is a living hell for him, and nothing seems to help her. He has no personal space in their home. Whenever she wants to ask or tell him something, she interrupts him or just starts talking. It doesn’t matter if he’s sleeping in the middle of the night or if he’s working in his office. She just barges right in. She tries to hang up the phone when he’s talking with someone she doesn’t want him to talk with. He’s making plans to work outside of his home so he can get some work done, but he feels bad for her spending the whole day alone by herself, probably in bed. She keeps thinking she has everything wrong with her and gets into panics about it, such as thinking she has diabetes when she doesn’t; she believes she isn’t breathing, when she is. And so he tries to demonstrate to her that she is in fact breathing, and so on. At times when she gets more rational, he thinks things are getting better. And then she goes off the wall again. He’s generally a person who is unemotional and never cries, but he’s been feeling so stressed he finds himself crying frequently.
William: I don’t know what a loving person is or does now.
Jane: This is not about doing the right behavior. I make suggestions to you, but that’s not necessarily what you should do. What’s more important than taking certain actions, or changing your behavior in relation to her, is changing your insides. This situation is causing you to have to deal with your own unhealed issues, and is breaking through your own emotional defense systems. I can’t necessarily tell you what the right thing to do is, because I’m not in your situation. But I can help you find where the emotional triggers and the limiting decisions are in you. We clear them and things shift in you; and then the way forward becomes clear.
Right now you’re supporting your wife’s insanity to some degree. A good example of this is when she is convinced there is something wrong with her, when there clearly isn’t. And then you get upset and try to convince her there isn’t. When you’re trying to convince her or change her, it’s because you’re leaning on her to define what reality is. You’re triggered by her irrationality, and are trying to get her to be rational. Any place you’re emotionally triggered by her and therefore coming from that triggered place, you’re supporting her insanity. You’re supporting the reality paradigm she’s living in. She’s in a power-struggle with you, and you’re in a power-struggle back, and feeling controlled by her. But what your power-struggle actually is against are the emotions that are coming up in you that are triggered by her.
The best thing you can do to help her is to come into reality yourself, and relate to her from that place. As you clear the limiting decisions in you and come more into reality, you’re connecting from a real place, from your heart to her heart, in the real world in relation to her. You’re holding the real truth of what’s really true between you and her, despite the way she’s acting, which is outside of the reality of what is true. And then you’re not being controlled by the insanity that’s coming from her. And you’re also coming from a compassionate place, which includes compassion for you. It includes you in the picture. And so you’re no longer letting her insanity rule the situation between you.
Who knows — this could be the best thing anyone could do for your wife right now — to be actually going through the process with her, and coming into reality and relating to her more and more in reality. It could perhaps bring her into reality.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
William: “My wife has gone off the deep end. She’s become very anxious, and is not willing to do the things that would help her. She has become completely reliant on me for everything, and needs constant reassurance. She is upset if I do anything without her. I am reaching the end of my rope. What should I do? I’m afraid she might harm herself if I don’t do whatever she wants me to do that she feels reassured by. I only see two choices: Either go along with her — or don’t and feel responsible for the state she gets into as a result, including that she might harm herself.”
Jane: “The bottom-line is if your life is appearing to not work, there are one or more limiting decisions you have that are distorting your experience of reality. And when they are cleared, the way you are looking at things will shift and a way forward will become apparent. The reason you see only those two choices is because the ground you are standing on is limited and structured by limiting decisions that filter in only the information that supports the limiting decisions, and not anything that doesn’t.”
When we discussed it further it turned out that how William was experiencing his wife was virtually identical with how he felt with his mother when he was a child. His mother was very anxious about life and felt to him to be very unstable. He felt responsible for her emotional state, and that what he did or didn’t do determined whether she felt OK or not. He thought he had married someone who was strong and the opposite of her, but now it turns out that underneath that apparent strength was someone who was actually very weak, and now he is right in the middle of the very thing he thought he had escaped.
After we cleared the limiting decision “he is responsible for the existence of the woman he’s dependent on,” William said he felt a huge weight had been lifted off of his shoulders.
He was standing on the new ground of realizing that he really didn’t have the power to determine his mother’s well-being and stability, no matter what he did or didn’t do; and so he was also now realizing that about his wife as well. He realized that he doesn’t have the power to personally solve the problem for his wife, and that nothing he can do will make any difference about it, as the source of it is only in her; and that he’s been enabling her to not find a real solution. And therefore he is no longer feeling hostage to her, or that her life depends on what he does or doesn’t do.
And so, because of this, he realized that there were, in fact, other options than the unacceptable ones he had felt locked in by. He can now relate compassionately to her, from standing on this new ground, making clear to her what he can and can’t do, and therefore no longer being co-dependent with her. He had felt imprisoned by his wife’s dysfunction, but what he had really been imprisoned by was his own.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Lucy is a woman in her 40′s who has never been married, although she’s been in many relationships. She has been afraid of commitment, and generally has been in relationship with men who are also afraid of commitment.
Because of the work we’ve done clearing Limiting decisions in TimeLine sessions, Lucy is now in a committed relationship with a man I’ll call Alan. They are living together and seriously talking about getting married and having a baby. But some fears are coming up for both of them. They are thinking of making a pre-nuptial agreement in case they end up divorced, as many people end up doing. Lucy recently talked with a married friend of hers who was talking about how unhappy she is in her marriage. She talked contemptuously about her husband, and said “Just wait, 10 years down the line after you are married, you’ll see what I mean.” And another woman who was there agreed that was also how she felt about her marriage. Lucy said she was afraid that will end up happening to Alan and her.
Jane’s response: Up until fairly recent times, more people stayed married than got divorced. This was because of the social stigma about getting divorced, and perhaps even more so because women depended on their husbands to support them. Now, as women have come increasingly more into their power, this is no longer such a constraint.
To many people, marriage is a kind of a fantasy about home, and stability, and being loved forever, and safety against the trials of the world. They believe that in order to make marriage work, each partner has to sacrifice and compromise themselves to whatever degree is necessary. And this is a part of what defines love. Out of fear of losing this security, people lock themselves into a particular form, rather than paying attention to and evolving whatever is really true between them, as well as growing and evolving themselves. People, in general, don’t believe life will work if they follow the truth of what it actually is.
What is holding this is place are limiting decisions. If there are limiting decisions in there that cause you to lean on the marriage as a fixed form, in order to compensate for whatever is unhealed in you, it will get in the way of a true relationship between you — unless you recognize and deal with the limiting decisions. In fact the relationship form can be used to substitute for actually relating to each other. Examples of limiting decisions that result in this are decisions you can’t take care of yourself, you’re not good enough, you aren’t safe in the world, you can’t succeed in life, emotional intimacy is weak or dangerous, people can’t be trusted, other people’s needs are more important than yours. Using your relationship to compensate for these will ultimately cause one or both of you to attach yourself to each other, put huge pressure on each other to be other than who you are, create a sense of emptiness or meaninglessness, and probably cause one or the other of you to pull away from the relationship.
As conflict or pressures come up in the relationship that seem to get in the way of being true to yourself, it’s an indication of a limiting decision* distorting your perception of how things really are. And so it’s necessary to face and deal with the limiting decisions* — or you end up forfeiting a piece of yourself. You end up compromising what matters to you. And that’s what kills relationships. But that’s what people do all of the time, because they don’t make personal transformation an essential ingredient in their relationship. It’s never the nature of life or relationships that’s the problem. It is unhealed issues distorting your experience of reality that causes life to appear not to work.
* Limiting decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
Below is a response Fellow Healer in New York had to a previous “Ask Jane” Q & A. For the original Ask Jane Q & A with Sally that this response is about, click here.
Fellow Healer in New York: YES.. and integrity means wholeness with self …watching the game may just be more in Integrity for this man, then following a promise he in retrospect will prob. not make again!
Jane: Being in integrity with himself is not about the action Sally’s husband (I’m calling Jake) decides to take one way or the other. It’s the process by which he gets there. People often take a stand on one particular action in order to feel in integrity with themselves, in order to hold some kind of boundary. But they only need to do that if there is an unhealed issue that results, for example, in them tending to give up their needs for the sake of the other person’s needs, if they don’t rigidly take this kind of stand. And so doing it that way is a part of an emotional defense system that ends up causing a separation with the other person in order to feel you can have your own needs met. This is the kind of dynamic that often occurs in relationships in which people believe it’s not possible to both be in integrity with yourself, and also be vulnerably and intimately connected to the other person.
The only way around that is to engage in dialog and be willing to explore your own unhealed issues (limiting decisions*), which requires letting go of control, rather than taking control, and results in transformation.
Jake had agreed to go to the event with Sally. But when he realized there was a crucial football game on TV that was really important to him that conflicted with him going to this event, his knee jerk emotional response was feeling forced to go to the event with Sally or she would probably get really upset. And so he emotionally rebelled by blurting out that he wasn’t going, before he could get his conscious mind around what he was doing. So basically his knee jerk response causes a separation, believing this to be the only way he could get to do what he really wanted to do. This is based on the very common belief that if we stay connected in reality with each other when there appears to be conflicting desires, there won’t be a solution. In other words that it’s not possible for life to work out well for all concerned. So Jake caused a separation because he believed that there inherently was a separation between his desires and Sally’s. It feels far less painful to cause a separation from an invulnerable, defended place, then to feel at the mercy of there inherently being a separation between himself and the person he loves, when he’s coming from a vulnerable place. And that is because if that would turn out to be true, it would be evidence that life doesn’t work.
But the truth is — the only thing that could create this situation not to work out well for all concerned are the limiting decisions* each person brings to the table, that causes each to respond from a defended place, rather than being open to a solution.
As it turned out, after they discussed the situation, a friend of Sally’s came to town and Sally asked her to go with her, which worked out well. What was keeping Sally stuck in having bad feelings toward Jake was a limiting decision* in her.
* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
From Sally in Solana Beach: My husband agreed to go to an event with me that was important to me. But a few days before the event he realized that an important football game was playing that night, which he hadn’t known about and he blurted out that he wasn’t going to the event because he wanted to stay home and watch the game. I told him that I had thought he was a person of integrity, but because of how he acted I realized that he really isn’t, if he could just blow off his commitment to me like that. He did realize shortly after his response that he hadn’t behaved very well, and suggested we discuss possible solutions. But I am still seeing him as a person without integrity because of how he acted. He obviously didn’t see me as a very high priority. Don’t you think this shows a lack of integrity?
Jane: I’d say, clearly your husband was coming from an emotionally triggered place — at least in his initial response. But it doesn’t mean to me that this shows he is a person basically lacking in integrity.
I think this brings up something important for you to look at in yourself. Leaning on ridged rules, as you seem to be doing, is a way to avoid relating in the moment, where you reveal where you are at, and engage back and forth about what’s really happening, such as “I’m triggered,” “This is how I’m feeling”, “This is really important to me.” If you avoid relating in the moment, you don’t have to be vulnerable, you don’t have to reveal anything, and you don’t have to engage. It’s just, “This is the rule; you follow it or you’re bad.”
And that’s a place that people often fall into in areas in which they have limiting decisions*, because they don’t trust life to work the way it really is. And I’m guessing a significant limiting decision* was triggered in you by this situation, bringing up emotional responses beyond what the situation really called for. For example, the limiting decision* could have to do with you not feeling valued or that there isn’t anyone you can count on. And you’re projecting the pain of the limiting decision* onto your husband, which is why you are being ridged about it, and why you’re drawing a broad generalization about him.
Since — after his initial knee jerk response — your husband was open to discussing this with you to find a solution, it appears to me that he’s not creating an impossibility. But if you take a ridged stand on a judgment about what this means about his character, you have shut the door to a way forward. When you’re really being present — engaging, revealing, and being vulnerable, you don’t need to have ridged rules, because you are interacting in life, and life does work when you’re really participating in it.
So — you recognize that your husband had a dysfunctional response, you look at the limiting decisions being triggered in yourself and in him, and you work through it. A way forward will become clear, when you are really able to be present with each other.
* Limiting Decisions: Unconscious decisions, usually made before the age of 6 or 7, such as “I am bad,” “I am not good enough.” “People can’t be trusted.” They are always some form of deciding that life doesn’t work, and usually that there is something inherently wrong with you.
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This question was asked by a client of mine named Sue:
Sue told me she was feeling lonely and not happy in her relationship with her husband. She felt he spent too much time working or doing other activities he likes to do. And often when he was with her, he wasn’t really focused on her, although he was sometimes. She wanted him to spend more time with her, really focused on her, but didn’t want to stop him from doing the things he enjoys doing, and wondered what she should do.
My response: I think what you’re really wanting is intimacy. And the lack of intimacy in your life is what is resulting in you feeling lonely. The particular amount of time with your husband focusing his attention on you, is just a symbol of that for you. But you not receiving intimacy, has to do with you not having the channels open for receiving it, in other words, an inability to receive it. Intimacy can’t be gotten by controlling another person’s behavior.
This is actually an interlocking issue between you and your husband, because he also doesn’t have the channels for intimacy open. And so the solution is not to have him stop doing what he likes to do and focus his attention on you. Approaching this by trying to get him to focus more time on you is an attempt to control what can’t be controlled in reality, and it is a backwards approach to the problem. The problem is not about what each of you wants being in conflict, but it’s about your unhealed issues distorting each of your experience of reality in a way that proves your limiting decisions to be true. When people make a limiting decision, the unconscious mind gets invested in proving that it is true. That’s what causes people to keep repeating dysfunctional patterns in their lives, doing things over and over again that they know isn’t good for them, or getting into the same kind of dysfunctional type of relationship. In this case, the limiting decision, and what your unconscious is invested in proving, has to do with believing you are not lovable. And so the solution is to transform the unhealed issue.
When the limiting decisions in both of you that are closing the channels for you being able to have intimacy in relationships are cleared, than the issue of how much and in what way you spend time with each other will natural flow in a way that creates intimacy. The truth is that intimacy is something you both want, as it’s inherent in intimate relationships. When you get to the real issue, you find that what each of you wants is not actually in conflict with the other.
*Limiting decisions are decisions made usually before the age of 6 or 7 years old, that are some form of deciding that there is something inherently wrong with you, and/or some form of that life doesn’t work — Such as “I am bad,” “I am worthless,” “People can’t be trusted.”
Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teaching
during Dillon’s NLP TimeLine Therapy Session 8-26-09: (Client’s name is changed to protect their privacy.)
“My particular perspective on the question of marriage (or any committed relationship) is to find out what is really true, the truth between you and the other person. The commitment is about being true to yourself, being true to what really matters to you, which means being true to your emotions in relation to the other person as well, true to what you want in relation to the other person.
It’s not a matter of conforming to ‘This is what marriage is, and now I have to conform to it.’ I believe the reason there is so much divorce right now, is because people have been trying to conform to some external ideal of what marriage is supposed to be, rather than find out what’s really true between the two people. Women, probably more than men, have stayed in unhappy relationships because they thought they were supposed to, and also because they didn’t think they could support themselves on their own. But this is changing, with fewer people willing to stay in unhappy relationships, and women becoming more empowered. People are less willing to compromise who they are in to conform to an old ideal.
That frame-of-reference can work because of the truth that life is meant to work. If you follow what is really true between people who are right for each other, there will be a coming together. If you are true to yourself and doing what’s right for you to do, doing what you’re here on earth to do, and following your own guidance; and your partner is being true to his or her self as well, there will be a way for your paths to join together. And the two of you can be fully empowered, fully true to who you are, and be together in loving connection.
This generally requires personal transformation for it to work. Relying on what’s really true between people, rather than some ideal form, will only work if the unhealed issues that are distorting how each partner relates to each other are worked through. It’s people trying to avoid and manipulate what is true, because of limiting decisions* and the emotional defense systems protecting the limiting decisions, which cause problems in relationships.
This also means working on yourself so that you become more and more true to who you really are. That’s the commitment that enables you to be truly together with someone else. Whatever would cause you to be untrue to yourself, would cause the relationship to not work. People think they have to be untrue to themselves in order to make relationships work, but that’s what actually cause them to dissolve down the line. And the older you get the less patience you tend to have for being untrue to yourself.”
* For a definition of “limiting decisions,” click here.
