Diary of a Recovering “Bad” Wife

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I got this email from a self-described former “bad” wife, and I’ll let it speak for itself:

Dear Dr. Laura:

Some people are recovering alcoholics.  I am a recovering bad wife.  I don’t know much about the 12 step programs, but from the little TV I watch, I recall that the first step is to recognize that you have a problem, so here I go:

 My name is S., and I am a bad wife.  My addiction is not alcohol.  My addiction is the “blame-it-all-on-the-husband” or “take-it-all-out-on-the-husband addiction.

I know you’ve described all of my symptoms much better than I can and much more eloquently in “The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands,” and that you’ve also given me the solutions to become a better wife, but I think my first step needs to be acknowledging my problem.

I acknowledge that I have too much on my plate, and that I cannot do it all well, and that my husband’s needs and desires have been at the bottom of my priority list for a long time.  People will tell you I am a really nice person, always ready to help, and yet the one person I should be caring about the most (my husband), does not get the respect, the love, and the care that he deserves.

As of today, I am no longer a bad wife.  I am a recovering bad wife, and I vow to be the girlfriend and wife my husband deserves.

Thank you, Dr. Laura, for hammering good sense into my head.

S.

Resisting Irresistible Impulses

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I always look for patterns in callers’ questions, because I’m interested in what that pattern means in terms of what folks have come to believe…and why.  A persistent thought seems to be that impulse is irresistible.  That means, if you feel like a burger or a cigarette or a roll in the hay with someone you know you shouldn’t be with, then you have some kind of addiction, which means a disease, which means out of your control.

That’s a darn good rationalization…but it ain’t true.  The only irresistible impulse is one which hasn’t been resisted, and that is most definitely (but not simply) a choice.

I say “not simply,” because resisting impulses is difficult and sometimes painful.  Generally, such inappropriate behaviors have the purpose of 1) immediate gratification of feelings, and 2) hiding you from other emotionally distressing thoughts and feelings.  That means that, if you resist the impulse to drink, eat, or have a sexual fling in the office stationery closet, you will be left with the anxiety or sadness that resides within.

It is clear, therefore, that the emphasis should be on dealing with the not-so-well submerged anxieties and sadness.  For example, a man called recently to say that he is mean to his wife, criticizing anything he sees around the house.  I immediately suggested that he saw the cluttered kitchen counter as a sign his wife didn’t love him.  Now, you’d think that was a ridiculous leap, but it was “spot on.”  He (after some nagging from me) offered that his mother had not been, well, “motherly” and loving.  To this day, he has his wife do things to prove/make up for the lack of affection and attention he missed as a child.  Did he know he was doing this and why?  Yes for the “doing;” no for the “why.”

I suggested he go home with a flower in hand and tell his wife that he needed her to hold him.  I told him that’s what “his woman” was for.  You can always hire a maid, but you can’t hire someone to really love and care about you.  He was treating his wife like his mom, when he really needed her to be a wife with loving kindness.

You get love by being open to it, and by being loving in return.  You do not get love by eating that cake, smoking that joint, drinking that beer or overpowering those who care about you. 

Resist those impulses.  Yes, it’s painful and difficult, both physically and emotionally, but the ultimate reward is the very thing you’ve been trying to get (just all in the wrong way), and that thing is LOVE.

The Sad Tale of Steve McNair and Sahel Kazemi

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I get calls all the time from young, emotionally hungry young women (girls, actually), who think that an older, often married, man really loves them.  It makes me so sad in my heart to hear these young women denying reality and setting themselves up for hurt.

20 year old Sahel Kazemi thought she had it made in the shade, because a celebrity, a former NFL football star, Steve McNair, took her partying in VIP rooms and on vacations for eight months.  She believed him when he got her on his condo bed for sex that he was going to leave his wife of twelve years for her.  He didn’t.

And then, one day, she saw some other young thing – probably another girl believing she was the one who was special to McNair.  So, one night, when McNair was sitting on his sofa, likely asleep, she shot him twice in the head and twice in the chest.  Then she sat down next to him, positioning herself so that she would fall into his lap, and shot herself (according to FoxNews). 

Here was an attractive young girl (she had just turned twenty), a teenager, a high school dropout who had moved with a boyfriend at age 17 to Nashville from Florida.  When she was 9, her mother was murdered, and, born in Iran, she and her family were persecuted for their religious faith.

This is a lot of turmoil and chaos and hurt for a young girl, and it is sad that so many family members and family friends tell this upbeat story about her, surprised that she would do such a thing.  She was clearly emotionally tortured and vulnerable, needy, and naive.  Her life began and ended in violence.

Men like McNair make me sick.  I am sicker still, reading sycophants talk about his actions on the football field, as though the admiration he earned for running a ball around a field should count for more than the human lives he betrayed.  He had a wife, with whom he had two sons, and two more sons from I don’t know where and I don’t know by whom.  He was a 36 year old man who had been given great opportunities and huzzahs for his accomplishments. His response was to cater to his childish needs to “do” young women who (without question) would simply adore him. 

It is sad that this ended in death for him and a naive and needy girl who believed that without him, there was no purpose in life. 

It is sad that, as I speak, older accomplished men in business, politics, clergy, academe, and medicine are doing the exact same thing, in order to fulfill their needs to receive a naive reverence, to feel youthful and important in the reflection of a young woman, or because they feel entitled to spoils because of their celebrity or wealth or power.

I warn young girls every day to live a life of integrity and modesty with morals, so they won’t be used in such a way.  Sometimes, though, a girl is so damaged that shortcuts seem the only way.

This time, it resulted in death seeming the only way.

Divorced, But We Get Along

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As you’ve heard on my radio program, sometimes when people get divorced, they can’t stand to be in the same room with each other.  This week, I got a question with a slightly different twist:  should divorced parents (who aren’t constantly in “battle mode”) get together occasionally for family dinners?

Or watch other videos at youtube.com/DrLaura.

Read transcript here.

The Emptiness of Internet “Friending”

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Either directly (e.g., sadness about not having a relationship with a parent or sibling) or indirectly (e.g., having trouble being intimate), more and more callers to my radio program report a sad sort of alienation from close, loving relationships. Yet the numbers of people deeply invested in “virtual” relationships via Internet “friending” social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, is growing exponentially. We are involved more in frivolous levels of intimacy and less invested in warm, caring, loving, involved relationships.

The pseudo meaningfulness we imagine as we add our names and faces to someone’s Internet site is addictive, yet ultimately vacuous. There isn’t really anyone out there who cares enough to hold your hand when you are in pain.

The Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of California reported last week that 28% of Americans interviewed last year said they have been spending less time with family members. That’s nearly triple from the numbers in 2006.

In the old days when television was young, families watched together in one room. Now there are TVs in every room of the home, with 500 or more channels, and the family is dispersed, with each “doing their own thing.” The Internet is a one-on-one, non-family experience also – breaking down the cohesiveness of family dynamics, parenting, sharing, and plain old caring.

The problem is that people are, by nature, gregarious. That means we need company. When we spend our time with the technology that minimizes the intimacy of company, we forever alter the ability of individuals to actually experience pure intimacy in a positive, ultimately satisfying manner. And the experience of having lots of so-called “friends” on the Internet is beguiling, but empty — -in effect, a distorted form of solitude.

There is no wonder that so many people have a deep problem with being able to love – they mostly want to be satisfied by flattery, freedom from reciprocal responsibility and the reality of obligations and responsibilities, much less sacrifice for the general good or the benefit of another.

Technological advances in “communication” have actually increased the number of people you can interact with, but have more importantly diluted out the meaningfulness of those same interactions.

Think of families together at dinner, and a whole town helping rebuild your barn. Compare that to what you have now in your life. Which is better for quality of life?

Not Everything Can Be Fixed

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It’s funny what stays in your mind – one shot of light in the darkness of memory.  One of the more important “shot of light” memories is from my days in the Marriage/Family/Child Therapy program at the University of Southern California.  I was being supervised during my training and displaying lots of frustration over one particular client.  I couldn’t figure out how to fix, or help the client fix, the problem for which the client came in to get help.

My supervisor, a well-known and talented therapist said five words which reverberated in my head – the head of a “Type A,” over-achiever mentality person that I was (or am).  He said, “Not everything can be fixed.” 

I was shocked and horrified.  To even think that there were limits to what any human being could do, to think that there were no remedies for certain circumstances, to think that I couldn’t “lay on hands” and make all better every person I tried to help – well, all of this was unthinkable.

As I matured, however, I realized he was right.

I had several calls in the past week that demonstrated that truth — that not everything can be fixed — so it shouldn’t be broken in the first place!!  It’s why I do what I do on radio versus having a private practice.  You all get to hear what decisions, choices, behaviors, and actions put you in a (probably) unfixable place.

There was the 21 year old woman who came on the program giggling about how she had listened to me since she was 2 years old.  Now, with two children out-of-wedlock with a guy who won’t marry her because she hasn’t taken down her Facebook profile after she promised she would, she wanted to know how to fix the relationship and get married.

Since he didn’t marry her before the children, since he didn’t marry her after the first child, since he didn’t marry her after the second child, he probably isn’t going to marry her after the Facebook argument gave his dumping her some legitimacy.  I guess 19 years of listening to the program didn’t do it for her.

The second female caller was about the same age, again with two out-of-wedlock children, living at her boyfriend’s parents’ home.  She was shacking up with him, and wanted to know how to get him to move out so they could be on their own, after he said he didn’t ever want to move out of his mother’s home!

The moral of these stories is that when you insist on making impulsive decisions and act only out of the moment, then you will, at some point, dig a hole that you won’t be able to get out of. 

By the way, I told the first woman to move in with her parents, so the children can have a father (in the form of Grandpa), and she was not to date until they were grown.  I told the second woman to give up her dreams and faulty plan, keep her mouth shut, and just live there, giving the impression of being happy, so the kids don’t have to grow up with a negative mother until the kids are grown.

Of course, women are not the only ones who need to hear this message.  A lot of men marry “damsels in distress,” only to be stuck with… distressed damsels!!  They hope to save them and fix them, but….some things can’t be fixed.  I tell them to stay with a smile until the kids are grown.

I don’t accept any of the “…but what about my happiness?” rationalizations.  The answer is that children matter more than you, and you need to sacrifice and behave properly so that they have a better chance of making better choices in their lives.

Some things can’t be fixed, so don’t do them in the first place.  Consider my radio program a huge emotional and behavioral prophylactic, and take the lessons learned from the pain of others and make the right – even if uncomfortable – choices.

Getting Your Marital Flirt On

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Why should flirting be limited only to single people on a date?    Why do some marriages turn into wars instead of sassy, sexy, and flirty relationships?  One of my listeners actually asked me to offer tips on how to flirt within the context of marriage, and that’s exactly what I do today:

Or watch other videos at youtube.com/DrLaura.

Read transcript here.

Alleged Craigslist Killer’s Fiancee Has It All Wrong

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Philip Markoff, 23, the alleged Craigslist killer, has a loyal, faithful, supportive fiancée.  The big question is….WHY?

Authorities say he trolled Craigslist’s erotic services section, where he met a 25 year old woman and lured her to a luxury hotel in Boston.  Supposedly, he meant only to steal money, but he also had a loaded gun, and allegedly shot her dead, presumably because she fought him.

How’s this for evidence: 
1) the murdered woman’s underwear was at his house
2) the bullet that killed her came from our boy’s gun, and if that isn’t enough,
3) his fingerprints were found on the wall of the hotel room where a stripper was tied up in an attempted robbery.

What does his pathetic fiancée do?  She proclaims her love and support and her complete disbelief that any of this is true, describing him as a loving and caring person.

You’ve heard this story (including women who hunger to marry convicted murderers) way too often.  Why do women do this?

Simple.  Question:  how humiliating is it to be associated with an evil person?  Answer:  Very!  So, if one takes the position that “I only know him as a good person,” some of the humiliation is tempered.  After a little while, the healthiest of these women fade out of sight; the others make their identity “the fiancee OF (fill in the blank).” 

Some women find glory in “standing by an evil man,” because they believe it defines them as truly “good” to sacrifice and have such loyalty, faith, and belief.  Some women believe that their love can and will transform the man – that it will heal him, and then their own lives will have value, and he will be beholden to them, never leaving them and always loving them. Other women are frankly amoral, narcissistic, and/or sociopathic, and they identify with the perp.  That kinship keeps them connected. Still others want their 15 minutes of “reality show fame” and notice, and feel a most distorted sense of value from that exposure.

All in all, this young woman’s response ought to have been:  “I am shocked and horrified that I could not see that this man had two lives.  I am sorrowful for the woman who lost her life and her family and friends.  I regret the harm he’s caused so many people.  This is going to take me a while to recover from, as I obviously had a brush with evil.”

Instead, her family quietly called the wedding hall and cancelled the reception, because Philip was probably not going to be available.