Tag Archives: emotional intimacy

Baring Your Soul, Bearing Your Stress

Social support is often crucial for bearing our stress, yet baring our souls is necessary for that to happen. Unless we open up, others cannot hear our pain and provide the needed comforting, encouragement, and understanding. This post explores how the Serenity Prayer offers guidance for choosing among these three listening approaches:

The saying suggests strategies for handling different types of stressors.primary guideline of this article for handling stressors
The Serenity Player offers guidelines for addressing different types of stressors.

A Personal Approach to Pain and Stress

Few people relish the idea of embracing emotional pain. If we can avoid dealing with it, we often do. With repeated avoidance, our residual feelings – anger, sadness, resentment, shame, etc. – accumulate over time. As the various feelings get lumped together, they lose their definition.  We forget the events that evoked them, as well as their meaning for us. Thus, we experience tension or discomfort,  yet without a readily identifiable source or an obvious remedy.

Defining our Terms

Often, we have difficulty describing, or even naming, this vague condition. Here, we can borrow from health science the general term, “stress.” We can further specify “emotional stress” as the accumulated feelings which were not sufficiently processed and resolved. (I have at times referred to this as my trash compactor model of stress.) Additionally, we can define “stressors” as the particular events that triggered the feelings that make up the emotional stress.

General Stress Reduction

We have various outlets to relieve stress, in the areas of exercise, recreation, and relaxation. These approaches, though, are quite general. They do not address the specific stressors and feelings that contributed to the overall stress. And just where does that relief get you, if you continue accumulating stress? When similar situations occur (and they will!), these events will only evoke more distressing feelings. This may lead to a “revolving door,” where we encounter the same challenges, day after day.

A More Targeted Approach

Thus,  we need to supplement our stress reduction efforts with a focus on the stressors behind the stress. This would involve recognizing the various feelings contributing to the accumulated stress. Then, we can identify the stressors triggering those feelings. At this point, the Serenity Prayer can help us sort out what we can change and what we must accept. Thus, an effective long-term approach to stress would include sorting out the various emotional components of the accumulated stress, identifying the stressors that trigger each of them, and working toward resolving them one at a time.

 Developing Stress Tolerance

An approach to stress that addresses the various stressors at their source recommends not only strategies to reduce tension, but also methods for enhancing our stress tolerance. While tension-reduction techniques are certainly helpful for coping with stress, the active exploration of the stressors requires a willingness and a capacity to tolerate the related emotional pain. This is particularly true when we encounter complicated situations which require time to resolve: we must be able to bear the tension to see this process through.

Stress in Modern Times

Our modern society complicates this process further: our greater range of options carries a price of increased complexity and ambiguity. (This feature is explored in greater detail in my post, Muddling down a Middle Path: Wading through the Messiness of Life.) Interpersonal conflict complicates the matter further, as our differing values lead us to view various situations and issues differently. This complicates our task of negotiating, collaborating, and compromising to achieve mutually agreeable solutions. Thus, in a society such as ours that values individuality as well as community, we experience a greater pressure on our ability to tolerate stress.

On the Origins of Stress Tolerance

How do we increase our ability to endure emotional pain? To answer this question, it is helpful to consider how we developed this capacity in the first place. While some aspects are no doubt innate, we initially depended upon the tending and comforting of our caretakers to ease our distress. Without the ability to fend for ourselves, we required our parents to read our distress signals and to tend to our needs. Later, they helped us to label our various need states (e.g., hunger, thirst, fatigue, etc.), so that we could ask for what we want and need. While they tended to our needs and protected us from the objects of our fears, their calming and comforting presence soothed not only physical pain and discomfort, but also emotional distress.

As we grew older, our parents, teachers, coaches and mentors aided our independence by teaching us how to take care of our own needs, rather than our depending so much on others to meet them. They guided us in our efforts and encouraged us to take risks according to our abilities, building our confidence and countering our fears, distress, and anxiety. As we matured, we internalized these functions of comforting, understanding, and guidance, so that we could provide these functions for ourselves when our caretakers were unavailable.

The Legacy of “Dysfunctional Families”

Unfortunately, not all the concern from our caretakers helped us to tolerate stress. This is particularly true if we came from so-called “dysfunctional families.” In fact, the attention may have cultivated stress intolerance. For example, our caretakers may have been uncomfortable dealing with the pain, regardless of their actual verbal response. In this case, their obvious distress may have amplified our pain. Or our helpers may have avoided acknowledging the suffering by reassuring us that “everything will be all right.” If so, we may have felt all the more alone, feeling that no one really understood us. Or they may have admonished us to be strong, not weak. This may have encouraged us to suppress our pain, sending it underground, to be dealt with alone.

Coping with the Unavailable Caretaker

This resolution runs the risk that the pain later gets acted out in anger towards others, rather than being discussed with others or processed internally before being expressed appropriately. The rage reaction is all the more likely if our caretakers reacted with anger, either to their own frustrations or to ours. Unfortunately, we tend to learn these bad habits as well as the good ones. Such experiences leave us mistrustful and reluctant to express ourselves to others later in life, making the needed emotional support all the more unlikely. Not only does this limit our external support, it also thwarts our internalizing the functions of comforting, understanding, and encouragement, which are needed to develop our own capacity to bear pain and tolerate stress.

Letting Ourselves Receive Support

Even if our caretakers didn’t foster our capacity to endure pain, it’s never too late to work on it. As in our youth, this process works best with the caring support of others. Granted, the act of “pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps” may appeal to our pride. Still, this approach likely fosters a stoic manner, with its often undeveloped spontaneity, vitality, and compassion. It may indeed be rather humbling to depend upon others for emotional support when we figure we ought to be able to handle the situations for ourselves. On the other hand, such humility may grant us better appreciation of our common humanity through sharing our pain and suffering with one another.

Besides, such self-reliance may not be all that independent. It might just represent compliance with earlier messages from critical parents (e.g., “Be a man.”). The irony is that such pride in independence may have its roots in unquestioning conformity to parental authority.

 Getting the Support We Need

Just how can others help us with bearing our pain? What makes their attention effective at comforting our distress? Here, there is no single answer, yet the Serenity Prayer can help us to understand the various components of a supportive approach. The prayer asks for “the serenity to accept the things [we] cannot change, the courage to change those things [we] can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” For each of these three personal qualities there is a complementary role of the listener who witnesses our pain: for serenity, soothing and comforting; for courage, guidance and encouragement; and for wisdom, understanding.

The Soothing Role in Attaining Serenity

Serenity, the first of these functions, involves a soothing and comforting that allows us to tolerate our pain. In contrast, distress or worry about the pain that we face amplifies our experience of the pain. Often, it is not the pain itself that is unbearable. Rather, it is our distress over dealing with or avoiding the pain that feels intolerable. A sense of dread or apprehension about the outcome of the painful episode is one possible aspect of this distress. Another is the sense that the events that evoked the feelings are unjust,  violating some implicit rules we live by. Yet another is a sense of shame for our involvement in the events surrounding the pain. Here, we assume much of the blame and guilt for the happenings. This low self-worth may lead us to isolate ourselves from others whom we assume will judge us harshly.

Developing Acceptance

Here the supportive presence of others can do much to ease our distress and low self-worth. Their acceptance of us despite our shortcomings can bolster our self-worth that has been challenged by our stressors. They can give us a sense of their continuing support and caring regardless of how the surrounding events unfold. Our supporters can help us accept the current circumstances as a challenge to grow, despite the unfairness of the situation. Or they can guide us toward coping with what is, rather than complaining helplessly about how it should be. Our supporters convey their messages not only through the meaning of their words, but also by their style of delivery. A soothing voice, a gentle embrace, or an accepting gaze goes beyond words in conveying their caring.

Tolerating Loss and Adversity

While these supportive functions do not resolve the stressful situation, they reduce the associated distress that often makes the pain unbearable. When the events surrounding the pain are irreversible, as in the case of death, or unresolvable, as with a divorce from an intractable marriage, the tolerance for the pain allows the grieving to proceed and the healing to begin. In other instances, in which there is some potential for problem-solving or conflict resolution, the tolerance for the pain allows us to face our dilemma and plan how we are to deal with it. In either case, the comforting function is often an essential step in allowing ourselves to face the pain so that we can understand it.

The Understanding Role in Fostering  Wisdom

By understanding pain, we discover its meaning. Meaningful pain is generally more bearable than meaningless pain. We give it a name, we define it, and in the process we limited its scope. Thus, understanding is a second important function in developing our capacity to bear pain.

Pain as a Warning Signal

Through this process we come to view pain not as a feeling state to avoid. Rather, stress  serves as a signal that all is not right in our world. It calls out that something needs adjustment. That change might be internal (e.g., grieving a loss or adjusting our expectations). Or it may be external (e.g., confronting a task or addressing a conflict with another). With such an outlook, we face our emotional hurts, determine the events which caused them, explore our perception of these events and our expectations surrounding them, identify our characteristic style of response to them, and to decide whether that approach is the most helpful. This process is one of redefinition and discovery of ourselves as well as of our personal worlds, whether the changes be related to some loss or gain or a reorganization of our lives.

Getting Support for Self-discovery

This self-discovery can at times be an exciting process, yet often is a humbling one. Either way, it is quite difficult to conduct by oneself, as we have difficulty stepping outside of ourselves to get an overall perspective on a situation that includes us in it. Others can help this process along by sharing their perception of us, revealing to us what is hidden by our own blind spots, what is out of focus, and what is distorted, whether positively or negatively. They can help us to discover how our response styles impact others and affect the problems we face. We can then decide whether that effect is likely helpful or harmful.

When Understanding Reinforces Acceptance

The understanding function does much to amplify the supportive function. By seeing the overall perspective we may not be quite so harsh in blaming ourselves. With a clear view of what is, our distress may not be as aggravated by our sense of what should be. We may better appreciate our values and principles as useful guides for living, rather than as universal laws upon which we can stake our security and well-being. We may view the problem more positively, as a potential growth experience, not an obstacle that blocks our path.

Cultivating Emotional Wisdom

Understanding helps us develop insight into ourselves and our world, yet without compassion it remains an intellectual exercise. We can experience our world and ourselves in subtle complexities. Multiple perspectives gives our world depth. We can see not just in black and white, but in various shades of gray.

Coloring our World

But what about color? This is where feelings have a second function: besides the role of signaling a disruption in our lives, they also enrich our experience. In an earlier article, I use the analogy of a prism to describe the process of sorting out the various emotional components of stress: that this exploration separates out the “white light” of stress into the various emotional hues. In fact, our idioms for our emotions have often assigned colors to various feelings – the red heat of passion, the yellow of cowardice, the blues of sadness, being “green with envy.” This process helps us to recover a more colorful picture of ourselves than presented with the general description of being tensed up or stressed out. This colorization of our experience with feelings enriches our lives and complements the definition and articulation provided by our intellectual understanding and insight.

From Physical Feelings to Emotional Feelings

Yet it is primarily through body sensations that our experiences attain their distinctive emotional tones. In connecting our various tactile, visceral, and kinesthetic responses to the events, interactions, expectations, and relationships that arouse them, we convert physical feelings into emotional feelings. Having your “hair stand on end” in fear, being “sick to your stomach” in disgust, and “getting all choked up” in sadness are more than mere figures of speech: they refer to emotions deeply felt in our bodies. A variation of the parental “tell me where it hurts” can help us to recognize the emotional components in our reactions to stressors. Thus, understanding from others helps us to associate our feelings states with the events and relationships in our lives in a way that colors and embodies our experience, making our lives richer and more meaningful in the process.

 The Encouragement Roles in Fostering Courage

The functions of compassion and understanding outlined above help us to adjust to our world. We do so by accepting the limits of our influence in this vast world we encounter. Yet we not only respond to our environment, we exert influence over it. Understanding not only deepens our appreciation of our world, it helps us act on our surroundings. We can get what we need from it, and reduce or eliminate threats from it. Insight does not produce such changes per se: it must be put into action to effect change.

Managing Risk

Yet such actions come with a risk: if they did not, then the warning signals of our emotional reactions probably would not have gone off. Usually there is some conflict involved – we balk at pursuing our desires because of some real or potential cost. Understanding can help to put these risks in perspective, but they do not eliminate them. Insight may suggest to us what we need to do to improve our lives, but we still need courage to make these changes, and the encouragement of others can be helpful here. Others are helpful when they stick by us, continuing to urge us on when we balk, retreat, or simply get stuck. The motivational function primarily encourages us to take the necessary, often risky and unpleasant steps required to resolve a conflict or problem causing us stress.

 Balancing the Three Supportive Functions

The Serenity Prayer suggests the importance of finding a balance among the three supportive functions of soothing, encouragement, and understanding. An excess in any one element can be harmful to overall functioning. An overly soothing approach without understanding the issues or encouraging action can foster helplessness and dependency. This is particularly problematic in facing (or avoiding) situations for which action is required. An emphasis on understanding without adequate soothing may foster an intellectualized approach similar to Mr. Spock’s demeanor on Star Trek. An accompanying lack of encouragement may lead to an intellectual immobilization involving worry and rumination, similar to that dramatized by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

A encouraging role may lead to action which lacks an appreciation for the subtleties of feelings, whether one’s own or those of others. It further is less appropriate in those situations of loss for which there is no adequate remedy except acceptance. These various examples of imbalances of support should show the need for a balanced approach that fosters thought, feeling, and action in response to emotionally tinged situations.

Of course, the particular demands of a situation will recommend emphasis of one approach over another. Some call for valor, others for compassion and sensitivity, and still others for restraint and deliberation. Another factor concerns the personal style of the person needing support. Here, it is often helpful to “play to the person’s weak suit.” This approach encourages balance by supporting the function that is typically underutilized.

Internalizing the Three Supportive Functions

Of course, we can’t always count on others to be by our sides as we deal with  our stress. Nor should we expect that. Throughout our lives, we developed our own abilities to resolve our stresses. Much of this we accomplished by internalizing the supportive functions provided by others. First, we learned to comfort ourselves by conjuring up the supportive demeanor of our caretakers in their absence. Second, we gained perspective on situations by asking ourselves how our mentors would have viewed them.  And third, we mustered our courage and took risks by imagining the urging of our coaches. We can now conjure up these presences consciously and deliberately. And even if we don’t, they still remain a potent voice in the background as we face our challenges.

When Doing Less Is Doing More

Others can help us to internalize these functions by not doing too much for us. Sometimes doing less is actually doing more. Our supporters may ask us how we can comfort ourselves in the meantime rather than coming over at 2 a.m. They may simply provide a sounding board to bounce off our own ideas, rather than defining the situations for us. They may ask us to consider our options, rather than giving us direct advice. Often we simply need someone to bear witness as we bare our souls in order to bear our pain.

Finding Balance in Interdependence

By internalizing the supportive functions of comforting, understanding, and encouraging, we cultivate our serenity, wisdom, and courage. We can better cope with our various emotional challenges with greater self-reliance and confidence. Still, it is not necessary, or even preferable, that we become totally self-sufficient. Rather than pursuing the ideal of independence, perhaps interdependence is a better goal, involving mutual support with others. We can still rely on others who may be farther along. And through their limited support, we can further develop our own capacity to bear our pain and stress. And in turn, we may serve as mentors, comforters, coaches, teachers, and parental figures for others.

The Intimacy of Reciprocal Support

Yet it is when the support is reciprocal that the special treasure of emotional intimacy unfolds. We then expose our private fears, doubts, and feelings to the caring of others, and care for theirs in return. This reciprocity offers depth, meaning, and strength to our lives in a way that total independence cannot achieve. On the broader scale, this mutuality of support fosters a sense of family, fellowship, and community. The balance between self-care and mutual interdependence with others promotes a healthy balance between individuality and belonging. This strengthens both our personal identities and our ties to others.

Escaping the Victim Role

The current post identifies features of the Victim role and explores strategies for escaping this role. This draws upon the vicious cycle patterns addressed in a previous post, including Steven Karpman’s Persecutor – Victim – Rescuer cycle, cited in Games Alcoholics Play, by Claude Steiner. Most people are probably familiar enough with the Victim role so that it needs no introduction. If you haven’t fallen into that role yourself, you no doubt have encountered others who have. Or perhaps you have been cast in the complementary role of either the Oppressor or the Enabler in dealing with the Victim role. Of course, your familiarity with the subject won’t stop me from sharing my ideas about it.

Defining the Victim Role

The Victim role represents a particular response to suffering. This might be described through the questions, “Why is this happening to me, of all people?” and “What did I ever do to deserve this?” Implied in such questions is an assumption that life should be fair, and that we should get our just desserts without having to struggle for them. This sentiment is so common that Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote an entire book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, to address it.

The Victim Role in Relation to the Oppressor Role

While the Victim role is sometimes adopted in reaction to events such as illness, accidents, and natural disasters, more often it is a response to the actions of others who are seen as intentionally abusive or unjust. This frequently involves establishing relatively enduring interaction patterns between the Victim and the Oppressor, as discussed in my page, Vicious Cycle Patterns in Relationships 2.0. Below is a diagram illustrating a common interplay between the Victim and the Critic, a relatively benign variation on the Oppressor role.critic-victim-cycle1

Here, Victims view their Oppressors as powerful and controlling, and in turn see themselves as powerless, helpless, and hopeless. These perceptions often serve as self-fulfilling prophecies, as they encourage Victims to practice avoidant and accommodating styles of dealing with conflict in relationships. In the process, other styles for dealing with conflict get neglected, resulting in a deficit of assertiveness and conflict-resolution skills: if you don’t use it, you lose it. In turn, the lack of such skills makes one all the more vulnerable to oppression by others.

Self-empowerment as an Escape Plan

The above description of the Victim role suggests self-empowerment as a means for escaping the role. This typically involves a willingness to engage in conflict rather than avoiding it or capitulating to the demands of others. Commitment to this approach is only a start – empowerment requires working smarter, not just harder. Not only can we work toward mastering the different interpersonal conflict strategies, addressed in a previous post, but we can also develop our understanding of when each is appropriate. Just as in football, where each side runs different plays depending on the game’s circumstances and the anticipated play of the opponent, strategy counts in conflict resolution. Perseverance counts, too: note that wars have been won even when the majority of the battles have gone to the other side. It is prudent to choose our battles, and to retreat in order to fight another day.

Knowledge is Power

Holding our own in conflicts may well depend upon our understanding not only of our adversaries, but also of ourselves. By understanding our adversaries, their weaknesses as well as their strengths, we can better judge when and where to use leverage effectively, and when and how to propose compromises from a position of strength. Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching notes the risk of underestimating one’s adversaries, such as by viewing them as evil. Such a simplistic perspective may blind us to the complexity of their perspectives and motivations, thus placing us at a disadvantage. Perhaps an even more difficult challenge is understanding ourselves: the Gospels note Jesus observing how it is easier to spot the splinter in another’s eye than to see the beam in our own. It is also quite helpful to understand how our interpersonal styles interact with the styles with others. My webpage, Vicious Cycle Patterns in Relationships 2.0, explores how certain common roles tend to interact with one other in a vicious cycle pattern. It offers some general suggestions for escaping the vicious cycle roles, regardless of the particular role one has assumed.

Shifting the Balance of Fight vs. Flight

Once one understands various aspects of a conflict, one can then put this understanding into practice through active engagement with one’s adversary. Here the motivational factor is quite relevant, with anger and fear being basic emotions involved. Anger charges us up to confront our adversaries, while fear serves to mobilize us to flee to escape danger. In evolutionary terms, our biological system is wired for a Fight vs. Flight reaction, which is appropriate for survival in life-or-death situations, but is excessive for most conflicts in civilized society. As we become more knowledgeable and skillful in dealing with interpersonal conflict, we become better able to stand our ground and assert our claims. Here, intense fear and anxiety can get in the way of this process by supporting old patterns of avoidance and submission. Anger can serve to override our fears and mobilize our active engagement in conflict, yet its intensity can be disruptive to the processes of negotiation and conflict resolution. Like steel, anger must be tempered to be used effectively. One strategy to accomplish this involves the use of meditation or other relaxation techniques to reduce the intensity of emotions from “so mad you can’t see straight” to a more moderate level.

Challenging the Attitudes That Incite Impotent Rage

In confronting our anger, we should recognize that our anger can be incited to rage not only through our more primitive Fight vs. Flight reaction, but also through our more advanced thought processes. This issue is addressed in a previous post, When Thinking Distorts Feelings. The post also presents a strategy for challenging some of the attitudes and underlying assumptions that fuel the fire of emotions, often to the point of their being disruptive rather than helpful (hence the term, “impotent rage”). By putting our anger and anxiety into proper perspective, we are better able to assert ourselves, rather than either going ballistic with rage or capitulating to our adversaries out of fear.

Developing a Positive and Realistic Perspective

There are other attitudes and expectations that often discourage us from asserting ourselves effectively in conflict. For one thing, it is pretty common to get discouraged when we stumble in our efforts to assert ourselves. We may need to remind ourselves that we can expect to make mistakes as we are practicing our newly learned assertion skills. We can reassure ourselves that these are only failures if we give up on the process. Furthermore, it helps to recognize that we can learn more from our mistakes than we can from our successes, unless we are blaming ourselves too harshly. It is also reassuring to know that progress is seldom linear, with it often involving two or three steps forward, followed by one or two steps back. We may also need to give ourselves permission to choose our battles, so that we might “live to fight another day.” We can also console ourselves with the recognition that wars have been won even when most of the battles went to the other side. Strategic retreat can be a valuable tactic, as long as it does not turn into unconditional surrender. Unless we adopt these attitudes, we run the risk of falling into the Critic role with ourselves, thus becoming “our own worst critics.”

How Do You Spell Relief?

Dealing with conflict is often a stressful experience, and strategic retreats to gain temporary relief can be valuable for sustaining our efforts. Here it is important to distinguish healthy outlets from those that actually “recycle” stress by providing temporary relief while worsening the overall situation. The latter often involve activities such as abusing substances, gambling, compulsive shopping, pornography, and comfort eating. Even when these outlets are pursued for strategic retreat, their emotional numbing and distraction often result in unconditional surrender through subsequent avoidance of the conflict. Furthermore, these outlets often give the Critic more ammunition with which to judge and blame the Victim, thus placing the Victim at an even greater disadvantage. Healthier outlets are available, though, with these generally fall into the categories of relaxation, recreation, exercise, and expression.

The Victim Role in Relation to the Enabler Role

Thus far, the Victim role has been defined in relation to the Oppressor role and its variants, such as the Critic, the Persecutor, and the Abuser. The Victim role is also defined through its interaction with another interpersonal role, that of the Rescuer or the Enabler, with this pattern diagrammed below.victim-enabler-cycle

In this particular pattern, Victims express themselves through complaints about unfair conditions in their lives. They frequently seek out some tangible support or relief. This may not be explicitly stated, and often does not need to be, as Enablers are ready to volunteer support without even being asked for it. The sought-after relief may take many forms: provision of a safe haven, advocacy in defense of the Victims, mediation to resolve the conflict, protection from the wrath of Critics or Persecutors, concealment of mistakes, accidents, or wrongdoings, or completing the Victims’ responsibilities for them. While Enablers practice and develop their own assertion, advocacy, and communication skills in fulfilling these functions, Victims are relieved of this responsibility and thus fail to practice and develop these skills for themselves. This leaves them less competent and all the more dependent on the generous support of the Enablers, as well as more susceptible to the scorn of the Critics.

The Escape: “Please, I Need to Do This Myself”

It should be fairly obvious from the above discussion that one means of escaping the Victim role is to resist seeking support or relief from Rescuers, when we are capable of fulfilling these functions for ourselves. This also involves declining the unsolicited offers of those services, as well. That may require considerable self-discipline: why go through all that hassle when someone else will do it for us? This does not mean that we cannot accept someone’s support, as long as we retain responsibility for our position. Taking this approach provides the practice required to develop competence, earn credibility, and empower ourselves.

Complaints: Communication without Personal Vulnerability

In voicing their complaints to their Enablers, Victims often focus on external circumstances, rather than sharing their own personal experiences. In doing so, Victims claim the moral high ground in focusing on the abusive actions of the Critic, often without addressing their own shortcomings or the legitimacy of some of the Critic’s complaints. They often overlook their own passive-aggressive behavior, avoidance of conflict, and reluctance to challenge the Critic’s authority, all of which feed into the vicious cycle. By focusing on the faults of the Critics, Victims deflect attention from themselves, thus reducing the personal vulnerability involved in sharing their own anxieties, insecurities, and shame.

Beyond Complaining and into the Realm of Relating

We can escape the Victim mindset by sharing how we are feeling and doing, rather than just complaining about external events. This involves focusing on what is, rather than on what should or shouldn’t be. Being open about our fears and insecurities requires both humility and trust. Admitting our limitations may be humbling, but it helps to minimize the humiliation that comes with others recognizing our shortcomings before we acknowledge them. Opening up requires trust both in our confidantes and in ourselves: trust in the other to respect our feelings and honor our privacy, and trust in ourselves to cope effectively with those occasions when our confidantes lets us down in one way or another. While complaining about our situation may bring Enablers to our rescue, expressing our feelings is more likely to elicit compassion from our listeners. In the long run, being cared for is likely to be more beneficial than being taken care of. A further feature of open sharing is the experience of gratitude for the other’s compassionate presence. Not only can gratitude help us not to wallow in the role of Victim, but it can also encourage our confidantes to feel appreciated for their compassion. This, in turn, could help to discourage the confidantes from assuming an Enabler role that is detrimental to our growth. All of these developments help to shift the emphasis of the relationship from using the other for our own needs to that of relating to one another.

Emotional Intimacy Is a Two-way Street

Note that relating to one another is a two-way street. This requires the willingness to listen to others as they recount their struggles, as well as sharing our own. This in itself can be quite helpful for stepping out of the Victim role, as we can come to realize that our own struggle with oppression is not all that special. Furthermore, we may be inspired by hearing others’ accounts of how they overcame instances of abuse, neglect, or unfair treatment. Another benefit is in feeling good about ourselves for our compassionate listening to another’s plight. Yet perhaps the most valuable impact is the development of emotional intimacy, as both we and others allow ourselves to be vulnerable in sharing our personal struggles, which allows for compassion and gratitude for one another.