The words were staring at me, printed in a huge, gaudy screaming pink font on the cover of some woman’s rag that was also headlining a story about poor Sandra Bullock’s cheating husband.
“50 Guilt Free Desserts and Other Indulgences,” it said.
Of course, the smart ass in me almost expressed relief that they had actually found something women can feel guilty about. After all, I have known more than one woman that would all but self flagellate after eating a candy bar, but could stare a judge straight in eye, lie through her teeth about her husband being abusive, and then walk from the court room sporting a movie star smile.
Before the “not all” police show up to remind me that not all women are like that, consider the point stipulated. Still, It’s an occurrence that is common enough to have made it into modern musical lore. A snip from Don Henley’s “If Dirt Were Dollars,” tells it pretty well.
Lookin’ like a beauty queen
Loyal as a wife
She raised her little voice and testified
“I’m a good girl. I’ve been one all my life”
But her virtue was as swollen as her pride
She should have had the Oscar
She must have been miscast
Her fifteen minutes went by so fast
I said, “Now, baby, have you got no shame?”
She just stared at me, uncomprehendingly
Like cows at a passing train.
It is hard to follow that. Well, unless you’re Dr. Paul. And that little moment at the grocery check out did take me back a few years and spurred some reflections on my previous life as a counselor. It also reminded me of some discoveries I made about women and guilt in the course of that work.
I was in the trenches of treating alcoholism during the glory days of self help gurus. Robin Norwood was all the rage, as was Susan Forward and a host of other know nothings that made millions promoting and then exploiting women’s resentments toward all things male. They were so successful at it that the lines between self help and clinical treatment became as blurry as a wino’s night vision. Their crappy books became standard issue on employment (and on admission) at most drug treatment facilities. Many mental health providers began to ride the popularity of these books and began basing their practices on them.
Who needs an education or training when you can buy counseling skills at the half price book store?
Of all the books that did well, the most wildly popular in my time was Melody Beattie’s “Codependent No More.” It became the bible of treatment industry efforts to counsel the spouses, OK wives, of alcoholics and drug addicts. And primary among Beattie’s volume full of misguided ideas was the notion that women felt guilty about everything under the stars and lived a life of over responsibility as a result.
They were victims of their own goodness, and of course Beattie’s answer for that was for them to care about no one but themselves. Did I say “wildly” popular? I meant feverishly, frenetically, orgiastically popular…on meth.
I’ll leave you to your own conclusions about why the idea of pathological self interest was so well received.
But there was a real problem with Beattie’s thesis. It was an utter fail in the real world. And more importantly, it was an utter fail in the realm of treatment. The latter is attributable to the fact that Beattie, likely because of her sex, didn’t understand the nature of women’s guilt. She failed to grasp that food guilt is just a function of narcissism and vanity, and that much of the remainder is actually a lack of appropriate guilt.
Let me explain by example.
Mary is a composite of many wives I counseled over the years. She is a nurse or office manager, maybe a teacher. She has two young children with her husband John who is in residential treatment with us because he has been drinking chronically for eight of the ten years they have been married. He has lost several jobs, became violent and has refused treatment till a recent arrest for DUI. His court case is pending.
I have Mary in group with seven other wives, and one husband. Most all of them are in more or less the same boat.
Mary: (sniff, sniff) I just don’t know what I did wrong. I tried doing everything to help John get sober, but nothing worked. I pleaded, begged and prayed but he just wouldn’t stop. I feel like such a failure.
Another wife: You are taking too much responsibility. You need to learn that you can’t control his drinking! (several knowing nods and one “uh huh” pass though the group like a mini wave. The home team just scored!)
Me: That is right, Mary. You can’t control his drinking, which I am sure you discovered before too long into his eight year binge, so why don’t we talk about what you could control? (Mary nods in affirmation, and for some reason the tears just stop. But the look of anguish is still on her face)
Me: You said that John had become violent and raging in the home on many occasions? (Mary nods again) So….then….where did you take the children?
Mary: (looking nonplussed) I am not sure what you mean.
Me: Your children were in the presence of a violent drunk. What did you do to protect them? Where did you take them?
Mary: Well once I took them and spent the night at my sisters. (Mary’s affect has changed considerably at this point. There is something different in her expression. It looks kind of like anger.)
Me: Once? You got your children out of that hellish situation once? Why didn’t you do more to protect them?
Mary: (and now Mama is really not happy) What? You’re blaming me? He’s the drunk! It wasn’t my fault!
Me: Well, you seemed to struggle with that idea just a minute ago.
Mary: (silent, fuming, and the home team looks very nervous)
Me: Here’s how it works. For you to do the work you need to do here you have to come to terms with the fact that you were the only sober adult in that house, and rather than take care of your children you left them exposed to a raging drunk. So, Mary, you are just as much of a problem as your husband.
Mary: (all pretense to playing the wounded wife is now gone, and Mary’s true nature is on display) This is bullshit! I didn’t come here for this. I just want you to sober my husband up so he can come back home. If you won’t do that, I will convince him to leave, right fucking now! (her eyes were bulging and little bits of projectile spittle issued from between her tight lips)
Me: So, if you have to work on your problems, then treatment for John is out?
I didn’t really care if Mary tried to get her husband out of treatment or not. His motivation to be there was not for her, but to impress on the court that he was getting help for his drinking. And we got paid for his being there, not hers. Sad but true.
The point in all of this was that it demonstrated exactly why Beattie missed the mark by such a wide margin. Mary didn’t have any real guilt about anything she had done. Perhaps it was there, buried under the stifling weight of sociopathy, but that is too deep to fish for. And so what remained was just a show for sympathy, and to make sure that everyone knew that he was the real problem. The women I encountered during all those years of doing treatment, and more than a few in the “real world,” weren’t much different. They displayed guilt pretty much in two fundamental ways.
The first one was the most common. They expressed guilt over things that no reasonable person would assume they had any control over, e.g. someone else’s alcoholism. In other words, they expressed guilt only about things for which the could not be held accountable. But once their actual mistakes were revealed and they were held to account, they became as denying and hostile as a drunk that is not ready to put the bottle down.
The second way they experienced guilt was just an extension of the first one. Guilt was used to manipulate their way into a pass on whatever they had done.
Twenty years of working with drunks and I saw many more of them sober up than I ever saw their enablers ever get really accountable for their actions. It just wasn’t in them, and Melody Beattie was full of shit.
It was well known in the treatment field that as high as recidivism was for men, it was even higher for women with substance abuse problems. Many of the gurus that gave us work like Beattie’s attributed this to the presence of men in treatment centers (no, I am not kidding) so we set about segregating treatment by sex for the sake of women, who continued to fail at a higher rate than men just as they had before.
That left a lot of people scratching their heads, except for those who understood that the only real ingredient for successful treatment was accountability. And that accountability does not exist where it is not driven by a healthy sense of guilt.
What is your experience with women and accountability?
