Odysseus, Relational Heroism & Imaginary Crimes

Despite the cultural pressure to stay emotionally hidden or react strongly to perceived injuries to your sense of self, you probably know of remarkable exceptions. Exceptions in others and exceptions in yourself. Every day, men are heroes – not only in the conventional sense of rescuing people from burning buildings or making tough decisions in the workplace, but also by behaving in relationships in ways that are profoundly counterintuitive. For many men, good relationship behavior requires a tremendous act of will, and choosing the counterintuitive behavior is truly heroic.

To help you understand this concept of heroism, let me introduce the term relational hero from Terrence Real’s 1997 book I Don’t Want to Talk About It. Real defines relational heroism this way:

Relational heroism occurs when every muscle and nerve in one’s body pulls one toward reenacting one’s usual dysfunctional pattern, but through sheer force or discipline or grace, one lifts oneself off the well-worn track toward behaviors that are more vulnerable, more cherishing, more mature. Just as the boyhood trauma that sets up depression occurs not in one dramatic incident, but in transactions repeated thousands of times, so, too, recovery is comprised of countless small victories. (277)

Odysseus the Hero

I find it very valuable to use the story of Odysseus as a parable about personal maturity and relational heroism. Not the whole story, of course, for reasons of time management, but one particular episode from Odysseus’s long journey homeward after fighting the Trojan War. After his success as a warrior in the Iliad, Odysseus spends ten years making his odyssey navigating his ship through troubled waters, enduring hardship and adventure. In this classic Greek tale of man’s search for self-discovery, Homer’s Odyssey, each challenge makes Odysseus stronger and wiser, fostering his development as an evolved and mature man. He is forced to develop as a psychological hero after his many years as a physical hero in the Trojan War.

Odysseus and his men encounter the sorceress Circe, a female creature with enticing and evil powers. She has the power to cast a spell over any man. She welcomes Odysseus’s men and offers them wild pleasures, then turns them into swine. However, she takes a liking to Odysseus and spends a year frolicking with him on her island. When they finally realize that it is time for him to resume his journey, she offers him a gift. This is a gift of knowledge that will save the lives of Odysseus and his men. She warns him of the next island that he will encounter, the island of the Sirens.

Like Circe, the Sirens are capable of enticing men. The sound of the Sirens’ music is so alluring to men that they can never resist heading toward the source. The Sirens, however, with bodies of birds and heads of women, tear apart any men who succumb to the sounds. Odysseus and his men would be prime candidates to succumb to the Sirens, except that Circe has warned Odysseus. As they approach the island of the Sirens, he orders all of his men to plug their ears with beeswax so they cannot hear the sounds. Odysseus, however, the ambitious seeker, wants it all. He insists on hearing the Sirens himself, so he does not put wax in his own ears, but he demands that his crew tie him to the mast of the ship so that he cannot yield to the seduction. He cautions his men not to release him under any circumstances, no matter how desperately he pleads, cries, or threatens. Thus prepared, Odysseus and his men continue successfully on their epic journey. His men note his writhing attempts to become free (although they cannot hear his words) but, following orders, continue to row until they are out of range of the Sirens. In despair, the Sirens kill themselves – proving that if you do not succumb to destructive temptations, they wither away.

The moral of the story is this: If you are aware of what temptations or struggles lie ahead, you can transform them, or at least meet them head-on. If you have no context or understanding, then you are doomed to simply react. Be a hero, like Odysseus. Get conscious. Prepare yourself for situations that you know may seduce you into destructive behaviors, and come up with a plan to handle them differently. If you know that hearing your kids arguing makes you start criticizing your wife, come up with a plan to prepare for this so you do not go there. Be a hero, man!

Acts of Relational Heroism

Remember Rick from chapter 2, who passed on the legacy of emotional cruelty to his son? Rick was the man who kept hearing the mantra Nobody ever brought me fucking lunch when I was a kid! whenever his son needed something from him.

Rick’s past gripped him and insisted that he withhold from his son. He couldn’t bear to offer Stephen more than he himself had received. In fact, offering more to Stephen would only serve to highlight the pain that Rick had endured; keeping the legacy going allowed Rick to pretend that he himself had not actually suffered much.

But when Rick’s wife asked him to bring lunch to Stephen, Rick found a way to go counterintuitive. In making that decision, Rick entered the Hall of Fame for relational heroes. And there was nothing earth-shattering or dramatic about his actions. No newspaper would ever report it and no real Hall of Fame would ever take note. Rick simply brought Stephen lunch. And he did it with a positive attitude. Stephen looked at him, shocked and pleased, and gave Rick a look of appreciation he did not quickly forget. Rick told me, “After I did it, I felt really good about it!”

Rick had grabbed himself by the collar, thrown himself against the wall, and told himself that there was something bigger at stake and that he had better avoid just slipping into his default behavior. He sucked it up and became a hero. His son noticed, although few others would. The payoff for Rick was that the new behavior actually felt good and made him feel proud of being a different kind of man. As a footnote, Rick told me that he had been sick recently. Stephen, very uncharacteristically, fixed him a bowl of soup and took care of him. Rick told me, “In the back of my mind, I wondered if he was treating me generously because he remembered the time I brought him lunch, and maybe a few other nice things!”

Another story from chapter 2, of Luke confronting his father, also moved me to tears and qualified for Hall of Fame consideration. I watched Luke, usually so composed and slick, crying, snot running from his nose. Yelling “Fuck you!” at his father, revealing long-repressed emotions – and his father taking it. Not only taking it, but obviously moved by it and even encouraging it. Even when he did not have the right responses (he would give advice, he would slip into platitudes), Luke’s dad was open to this feedback about what his son needed from him. I did not know who was the greater relational hero, Luke or his dad! They were co-MVPs. When Luke’s dad, in response to what must have felt like bitter condemnations and resentments, started talking about what a son of a bitch his own father had been, and how he had tried (with moderate success) to offer Luke something different, I did not hear a man trying to escape responsibility, but rather trying to take it. He wanted Luke to be able to tell him these things, which he never would have been able to say to his own dad. I think he wanted to model for Luke how a stand-up guy can take the truth and learn from it. When the dust had settled, I told them both, “If this trend continues, with each generation trying to be even more evolved than the one before, Luke’s son is going to be one hell of a man!”

In one of my men’s groups, Brantin described another one of those Hall of Fame moments that the casual observer might not notice. He and his wife had separated after months of tension and discord. By mutual consent, she had taken their six-year-old daughter with her to stay with her family in another state for a couple of months. She and Brantin decided they were ready to give the relationship another try.

When his wife and daughter arrived back in town on a Greyhound bus, Brantin met them at the station. His little girl came running up to him, yelling “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” with the kind of gusto that only little kids can generate. He swept her into his arms and hugged her tight, then turned to his wife, who was walking more slowly toward him, to embrace her. She turned away and said she was hurt because she should have been the one he hugged first.

Brantin’s self-talk? To put it as he told me, What a bitch! What am I supposed to do, not hug my own daughter? I can’t believe this shit! But instead of retaliating or pouting, he chose to react differently this time. He stayed calm. He told his wife that he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to hurt her feelings, and that he was really glad to see her. He reassured her that he really loved her, really happy to see you!”

She paused for a second, then smiled and said okay. She reached out for him, and it was over. He had passed a test. Maybe she shouldn’t have tested him like that, but that’s the reality of it. Sometimes your wife or girlfriend, like you, will be insecure and will do something to check out whether or not you really care. You can either dig in your heels and tell yourself that you’re not going to put up with it, or you can try and find some way to soothe her. Brantin found a way, and it brought out the best in both of them. He was a hero.

Preston, another man I worked with, was in the midst of a very rocky period in his marriage when the future was very much in doubt. He began talking to his wife about a vacation he was hoping they could take almost a year later. She looked at him and said, half-joking and half-serious, “Well, you’re assuming a lot, aren’t you?” Preston’s commentary about his own reaction was this:

Sharice made that crack about how I was assuming too much, and I just shut down, like I always do. I just felt so hurt. Same old stuff. But it didn’t take me too long before I turned to her and told her that her comment had really hurt me, and I asked her, sort of nicely, why she had said it. And we actually had a conversation about the whole thing.

I guess that’s sort of the relational hero thing we’ve been talking about, isn’t it? I guess I’m doing pretty well.

Rob, the main character in Nick Hornby’s 1995 novel High Fidelity, is another man who becomes a relational hero. He has a long history of failed relationships and a long history of selfish, neurotic, immature behaviors that contribute to these failures. He makes a practice of preparing compilation tapes of carefully selected songs for each woman he is interested in, but his tragic flaw is that he selects songs based on his own very snobbish criteria of what the woman should be listening to. He always misses the mark, because he is never able to see her as she really is, only as he wants her to be.

Finally, after more and more errors and grief, he matures and has a breakthrough. About the love of his life, Laura, he says, “I start to compile in my head a compilation tape for her, something that’s full of stuff she’s heard of, and full of stuff she’d play. Tonight, for the first time ever, I can sort of see how it’s done” (323). The task is so simple, yet it took him years to prepare for. And again, the actual behavior is not bold and dramatic to the outside observer, but bold and dramatic nevertheless.

Exercise: Daily Appreciation

Expressing appreciation is one way to test the waters of relational heroism. No twenty-four hour period should go by without you telling your partner or kids something that you really appreciate about them. It can be something rather trivial, like You really helped me out when you made those phone calls for me, something major, like You are such a great mom! I love watching how you handle things with the kids, or something in between, like Hey, I really appreciate that you left me alone for a while tonight when I was in a bad mood. I really need that sometimes.

Expressing yourself this way is a habit like any other. Couples who are in a good groove with each other just do this naturally. If things are not going well with you and your partner, or if there are ongoing tensions with you and your kids, you may have gotten out of the habit. Starting it up again may feel a little awkward and insincere at first, but it won’t for long if you find things to say that you genuinely feel.

In your notebook or journal, prepare a chart for each day with a column for each family member. At the end of the day, check the spaces for the daily appreciations you have offered. If there are holes in your chart, make an effort to fill them the next day.

A tip: It is almost always helpful to tell your partner that you are doing this exercise. She is more likely to genuinely appreciate your intentions than she is to discount the appreciations because they are “just an exercise.”

And one more tip: Just because your kids act like they don’t care or don’t even notice, don’t be an idiot – they do.

When She Notices

Although it probably shouldn’t matter so much, although your motivation for change should come from within, although you should not require quid pro quo for being a relational hero – it still feels good when your partner notices. We need our mirrors.

Jason, another man I saw after his marriage had unraveled almost beyond repair, began to see the ways in which he was always a little bit controlling, a little bit selfish, a little bit entitled.

Heather didn’t ever want to drive the boat when I was skiing, probably because I was always telling her to do it differently…I used to have this way of half-heartedly offering to make us sandwiches, then she would say that she could do it, and I would say “Oh, okay, sure, great.” And we both knew that I wasn’t really offering, and I was just looking out for myself. I felt like I was entitled to get this.

But one day Jason came in and told me one of those relational hero stories, where the guy discovers that the new way of doing things carries with it rewards that he did not know were possible. Jason had won a coupon for a trip to Cabo San Lucas as a bonus at his job, and he and his wife had planned to celebrate his birthday there together. But now they were separated and very gingerly trying to make the relationship work.

When I finally got back to Heather and told her that she could have the coupon for the trip to Cabo, I told her how hard it was for me. Because I had always associated that coupon with my birthday, and I couldn’t bear to give it up because it would mean that we weren’t celebrating my birthday together. But after I thought about it, I still wanted her to have it. She broke out in a big smile, and I felt the warmest response I have felt from her in a long time. “That’s exactly what I am looking for from you.” And I knew she meant that I was telling her, honestly and vulnerably, what I was feeling and not trying to pressure her or control her. I guess I was “relating.”

It is important here to spend a moment reflecting on the quid pro quo issue. When relationships are flowing normally and respectfully, there is an inevitable and perfectly healthy quid pro quo system in place: I’m fine with him playing poker Friday night with his buddies – I know the guy works hard, and he’s really good about letting me have time to be with my friends when I ask. Or Of course I’ll drive her to work today when her car’s in the shop – I know she’d do the same for me, no questions asked!

But the rules change when one of you has repeatedly wronged the other, when one of you has come home drunk and been nasty, or when one of you has consistently kept secrets that betrayed the trust in the relationship. Quid pro quo no longer applies. Now you are called upon to change simply because it is the right thing to do, and if your partner comes around to appreciate that, it’s a wonderful bonus. But you never want to communicate the message that she should be really grateful that you’re not drinking to excess anymore or that you are no longer yelling at her in front of her family.

Almost Heroic

Here’s another story of a man who walked right up to the precipice of being a relational hero. This man, however, knew what he should do to be the hero, but could not bring himself to do it. In Wally Lamb’s 1998 novel I Know This Much Is True, Dominick and his wife have lost their three-week-old baby. Sometimes at supper or up in bed, Dessa would try to talk about her feelings. Talk about Angela. Not at first. Later. Three or four months afterward. “Uh-huh,” I’d say. “Uh-huh.” She’d want me to open up, too.”What good would it do?” I told her once. ‘We’ll talk and cry and talk some more, and then she’ll still be dead.’ I stood up and walked out of the room – got the fuck out of there before my fucking head exploded (215).

In self psychology, one of the central forces that generates a solid internal structure is the twinship selfobject. We all experience a drive to find others who are like us. This connection offers us self-cohesion through an identification with others, a sense of being like others. Dominick could not bring himself to pull out of his emotional shell and just be a normal human enduring an extremely painful experience with someone he deeply loved. He could not engage in the twinship experience that Dessa so desperately needed and that he could have used to pull himself out of the emotionally dulled pit that he had fallen into.

Dominick describes another scene of being an almost-hero.

Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear Dessa in the baby’s room, sobbing. One night I heard her talking to Angela – murmuring baby talk down the hall. I sat up and listened to it, telling myself that only a complete and total son of a bitch wouldn’t get out of bed, go down there and hold her, comfort her. But I just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t quite make my feet hit the floor, no matter what basic human decency was ordering me to do. So I sat there and listened to her, like she was a ghost of what we’d had and lost, the ghost of our life the way we’d planned it out. I’ve wondered a million times since then if we could have salvaged things at that point – if I’d just gotten out of bed and gone to her that night I heard her talking to the baby. (216)

The most tragic theme in this scene is that Dominick was neither ignorant nor out of touch – he just couldn’t bring himself to make contact with Dessa, because that would have accessed too much of his own pain. He even knew that he was behaving like a “complete and total son of a bitch.” Dominick did not make it to the Hall of Fame, although everything he learned from these bad moments led him to heroic acts later on.

In Jonathan Larson’s 1996 Broadway hit musical Rent, Roger is a young musician who is HIV-positive, emotionally burned out from the suicide of the love of his life, who discovered that she had passed on the virus to him. He is withdrawing from everyone in his life, bitterly waiting to die, when he meets Mimi, who sparks an unexpected wave of love and passion in him. He feels himself drawing closer to her, but he cannot bring himself to tell her his story. He cannot tell her that he has the virus, and the virus is a metaphor for all of his life story – his previous drug habit, his broken heart – that he cannot bring himself to reveal.

Roger is like so many men in emotional pain who have been trained (or perhaps even genetically hardwired) to hold it all in. His pain, and our frustration in watching him, pulsates through the story. It looks so simple from the outside: Just do it! Just say what you are feeling! It’s so simple, and so much will change.

Roger suffers from what Terrence Real (1997) would call “covert male depression,” or what Jungian psychologist John Sanford (1980) calls a “male mood.” This mood takes over, like a dark cloud, sinking you into a state of gloom, indecisiveness, and projection of blame. You can become enveloped by a mood when your feelings get hurt or when you’re having a feeling you can’t understand or explain. If you find a way to express these feelings directly, the mood will likely dissipate and you and your partner will feel close instead of alienated.

Sanford uses the term related anger to describe the positive way of expressing difficult feelings in a relationship. He advises men to engage in an honest expression of genuine feeling, to relate. He cautions that if a man expresses anger without communicating his feelings or establishing a connection, he will do harm by creating a bad atmosphere. He will act hurt and perceive himself as being deeply and unfairly injured. On the other hand, if he expresses anger in a related way, he will clearly and respectfully tell her just what it is that is upsetting him. You and I both know, of course, that this does not always lead to happily ever after, but if you are a relationship hero, you are simply trying to increase the likelihood of a better outcome. And you at least can walk away knowing that you took care of your side of the street.

The dark mood of Rent’s Roger governed his ability to relate. The tragic part of his story is that the escape route out of the mood was so fundamentally simple, yet so difficult to activate.

The cure for the male mood is intimacy: expressing feelings directly in a related way. This requires recognizing the mood for what it is and making a determined effort not to take it out on others. Like Will from Good Will Hunting and Dominick from I Know This Much Is True, Roger eventually summons up the courage to do it, but not without pain and failure along the way.

Action Plans for Real Men

Soft Underbellies

Even some men with the most gruff and hypermasculine exteriors are capable of extraordinary acts of tenderness and vulnerability. You may recognize this in yourself. This is the soft underbelly that many men long to express, and it is essential to recognize this tenderness and nurture its emergence whenever possible. Men who act cold and embittered with their partners often break down in tears when they recognize pain they have caused their children. I am always stunned by the deafening hush in the room when a man realizes that he has not only been behaving badly toward his wife (which he can often justify) but has modeled this behavior for his kids – something he swore he would never do.

Some men have soft underbellies which are plainly visible; for others, even those who may at times act badly in relationships, these tender spots are buried deeper but still sometimes emerge.

If you want to get better at this life task of relationships, you have to identify, celebrate, learn from, and build upon these moments when your soft underbelly is exposed. The man you would like to be already exists, and it is your job to recognize this and build on what already exists. No lobotomies or major psychosurgery required!

One angry and emotionally guarded man, a man who had me pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to help him soften his relentless criticism and projection of blame onto his girlfriend, came in for an individual session with me. He hadn’t been making much progress with couples counseling, and I decided to try asking him to come in alone. He came in with a single rose. A single rose as a gift to me. He told me about his rose garden and his green thumb for red roses. It’s the only place where I really feel at peace and the only thing I do that I know is good. I wondered who had died and come back in his body. And I wanted you to know how much our work together has meant to me, so I wanted you to have this.

The true gift, for me, was that I was now more able to see, and feel, this man’s soft underbelly. I saw some way to reach him, saw the humanity beneath the layers of embitterment and defenses. And I also began to understand what his girlfriend saw in him. She didn’t stay with him just because she had low self-esteem or because she was overly dependent on him; there was something to love about him.

In Lamb’s I Know This Much Is True, Dominick describes an encounter with one of his longtime best friends, Leo. Leo is portrayed as a selfish, coarse, opportunistic sleazebag. Just as Dominick is about to leave after visiting Leo at work, Leo calls to him and tells him that he wants to be on the list of people allowed to visit Dominick’s twin brother Thomas, who is schizophrenic and has just mutilated himself. Most people don’t want anything to do with Thomas.

“Hey, Dominick!” he yelled. “Hold up!”He came running toward me, that fancy suit of his fluttering in the breeze. He bent down to the window. “Hey, I was just thinking,” he said. “You know that visitors’ list you were telling me about? How many visitors did you say your brother gets?”

“Five.”

“Well, tell him he can put me on it. If he wants to. I wouldn’t mind going down there, seeing how he’s doing. Saying hello. I mean, what the hell? 1969, you said? I go back a few years with Thomas, too.”

I nodded – took in the gift he’d just given me. “I’ll mention it to him,” I said. “Thanks.”

“No problem, man. Later.”

See, that’s the thing with Leo: he’s sleazy and he’s decent. He takes you by surprise. I drove away, one hand on the wheel, the other wiping the goddamned water out of my eyes. Leo, man. The guy’s a trip. (1998, 195)

Even Tony Soprano has panic attacks, which reveals a soft underbelly if anything does. And even Leo the sleazebag has his moments.

In the 2001 movie Life as a House, a marriage is breaking up. Robin, now married to Peter, finds herself irresistibly drawn back to her ex-husband George. Peter comes across as shallow, self-centered, and attached to an unrealistic image of domestic life. As he senses his wife withdrawing from him, he eventually leaves her.

He shows up weeks later, facing kids who don’t act like they have missed him very much and a wife who is elsewhere emotionally. He has grown a beard, and he looks softer and more vulnerable than before. The dialogue is simple but powerful. Robin says, “I hardly recognize you with a beard.” Peter answers, “That was my plan…to be hardly recognizable to you as me.”

Exercise: Catch Yourself Doing Something Right

Most of us spend our time worrying about what is going wrong and what is missing. This seems to be unavoidable. Often, however, a different approach is needed to accelerate the self-discovery and change process. If you feel stuck and frustrated, it is very effective to embark on the project of catching yourself doing something right. This means noticing when you acted in a way you are proud of, when your best self seemed to emerge.

To do this, you will need to develop a clear picture of who you would like to be in the future. You already know how to be him! You already know how to be the mature man in your vision of yourself – it’s just that you forget a lot, and you can’t always remember how to find him. That’s our job together: to help you get better at finding the good guy in there who already exists.

1. Visualize yourself at some future time (three months, six months, or a year from now) as a man who has moved forward. In this vision, many of the struggles and behavior patterns that you now face have faded from view, or at least have faded into the background.

2. Pay attention to a very specific piece of behavior – internal or external – that signals that you are different. For example, you know that you would like develop closer male friendships. You are looking for a specific clue that would confirm that your future self is doing this. In your vision of the future, if you could observe that your future self had at least one conversation in the past week with a male friend, speaking openly about your marriage, or your worries at work, or your struggles to be a better dad to your kids, then you have a clue.

3. Now make a list of several other clues that you have become the man you want to be. For example:

I am spending more time at night playing with my kids, and it makes me feel more connected and valuable.

I worry less about what other people think. I am taking chances in my work that make me feel excited about what I am doing.

When I am in a bad mood, I stop and ask myself, What am I missing right now? rather than blaming my wife or anyone else.

4. Bring yourself back to the present.

5. In your notebook or journal, write each of your specific clues at the top of a page. Each day, keep a running list of any moments when you catch yourself acting the way you have visualized your future self acting. Even if it’s just for a moment, or if it’s one small example, make a note of it.

6. Keep this list for several weeks, then add some new clues as you move forward.

7. Keep reminding yourself that you already know how to do many of these things. You already know how to be a different and more fulfilled man. It’s not that mysterious. You just need to act on the knowledge that you already have.

Imaginary Crimes

Sometimes unconscious guilt or shame is what leads good men to behave badly. According to control-mastery theory, children grow up believing that they have committed some crime against the family or that they are at risk for doing so (Weiss and Sampson 1986, Engel and Ferguson 1990). The perception of having committed these crimes leads them to feel shame. And shame, as we know, rarely leads to anything good. More often, shame generates rage, projection of blame, self-destructive behavior, and defensive reactions.

These crimes are truly imaginary, because most reasonable observers would say that it is not fair for the child to take on the burden of guilt. The child victim of sexual abuse at the hands of an adult may blame himself, saying, I must have done something to seduce him or even I kind of got some pleasure from it, so it was just as much my fault. In these examples, it is painfully obvious that the child has developed a narrative blaming himself, but we know this guilt is imaginary or fictional. In fact, it is absurd, but still very real to the child, and it may remain quite real even as the child matures and develops more life perspective.

If you believe that you have committed, or are in danger of committing, imaginary crimes, then you are an ideal candidate for relational heroism. Why? Because it takes such effort to go against the grain and relate to the most intimate and trusted people in ways that are emotionally risky and make you feel emotionally vulnerable.

Crimes of Survivorship and Success: Holding Back

You believe you are guilty of imaginary crimes of survivorship and success when you believe that something good that you have done has turned out to be hurtful to others, or when you have succeeded where others have failed, or even when you have survived where others have not.

Zack, a man in his late twenties committed to staying clean and sober, told me about his conversation with his father about drinking. “I have been trying to stop, because I have seen how much this has messed me up. I’m going to AA meetings. My father has tried this off and on but never stayed with it. He says, ‘How long is this not-drinking thing going to last?’ Like there’s something wrong with it or it’s kind of silly.”

Zack is on the receiving end of some imaginary-crimes messages. His father sees Zack taking charge of his life by controlling his drinking. This serves as a broken mirror to the father, who is reminded that he himself has a problem but has not been successful with it.

So Zack’s father has two choices. He can be thrilled with his son’s success and even use him as inspiration. Or he can demean what his son is doing so that he won’t have to acknowledge that there is something worthwhile in the task Zack is accomplishing.

The second choice is easier, and this is what he does.

Zack unconsciously learns that he can be loyal to his father and keep his father in a better emotional state if he does not surpass or outdo him. Zack may actually believe, at some level, that success with his own drinking patterns is a crime against his father. He doesn’t want to be his father’s broken mirror. It’s not difficult to see how Zack’s guilt over his imaginary crime could lead him to sabotage his own success.

In the 1980 movie Ordinary People, Conrad is the younger of two brothers in the “perfect” American family: white, upper middle class, country clubs, ritzy Chicago suburb. Perfect until the two boys are out on a boat on the lake and get caught in a storm, and Conrad’s older brother drowns. Conrad, plagued with guilt about having survived when his brother died, deteriorates into depression and ultimately attempts suicide.

Conrad’s belief in his imaginary crime of surviving, compounded by the subtle message from his emotionally cold mother that he has failed to replace his brother, makes it impossible for him to succeed. His grades drop, his mood plummets, he quits the swim team. And, most importantly for our discussion here, he becomes entangled in relationships where he is obsessed with protecting others from having bad things happen to them. And, when he is offered a genuine positive opportunity by a girl who likes him, he is paralyzed with guilt and doubt. Like Will Hunting, Conrad hurts her with his emotional withdrawal and never really explains why.

Zack and Conrad struggle with guilt about becoming successful. They fear that they do not deserve their success or that their success will prove harmful to someone they love and care about. The crimes are imaginary. And these imaginary crimes haunt their relationships.

Crimes of Separation: Being Different

You believe you are guilty of imaginary crimes of separation when you come to believe that your own independent choices will do irreparable harm to your parent or someone else who is important to you. In the 2002 movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Toula is a woman in her twenties who cannot bear to separate from her tight-knit Greek American family. Her family makes many attempts to match her with nice young Greek men, and when she finally falls in love with a young man of the wrong ethnicity, her family goes ballistic. Toula struggles with the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between her heart’s desire and her family’s values. This family (which could just as easily be Italian, Jewish, Mexican, or Chinese) has defined a set of crimes which we, the audience, perceive as nothing but imaginary. But she experiences them as crimes because they cause undeniable pain to the people she loves and respects. She must be committing a crime if these people are hurt.

Alex, a man in his early twenties, had recently been traumatized by a nasty relationship breakup when he came to see me. His girlfriend had become fed up with his emotional clinginess. He was never able to stand up to her, despite her frequent emotional mistreatment of him. Alex never felt like he had the right to confront her. He told me, “I can’t be happy unless my partner’s happy. I burden myself with her unhappiness.”

Where does a young man learn to think like this? He explained it to me.

When I was ten, my parents divorced, and (probably like a lot of other kids) I told myself that this was my fault: “There must be something about me that caused this – if only I were a better kid!”

These days, my mother has always complained bitterly about all the sacrifices she has made for me. “I’m doing all this for you! And you have never really succeeded like you could have. And now I have to deal with you being depressed. Do you know how much extra pressure this puts on me?”

What kind of mother would say that to her kid? Of course, at one level, there is emotional truth here. If your child has problems, it makes your life more difficult. But most parents are able to make a distinction between a child who willfully makes their lives more difficult and one who is plagued with some sort of personal burden (physical, intellectual, or emotional) which impacts both the child and the parent. Alex’s mother lost sight of Alex’s independent center of initiative, and could see only how his problems were affecting her.

Which sets the stage for Alex to accuse himself of the imaginary crime of hurting someone he loves. I can’t be happy unless my partner’s happy. Alex could not be more assertive and could not develop a healthy separation. He believed it would be profoundly disloyal to abandon someone in their unhappiness or to cause them even more. Defying this belief system is an act of relational heroism.

Lane had developed a script about his imaginary crime that had stayed with him for twenty years and counting. “I feel plagued with guilt that the last words I spoke to my father when I was seven years old, the night he was hit by that car and killed, were Good night. Why didn’t I tell him that I loved him? Why didn’t I tell him how much he meant to me? I let him down, and I keep doing that to people all my life.”

Imaginary Crimes and Relationships

Imagined crimes actually indicate fundamentally positive qualities in a person: loyalty, sensitivity, concern about the welfare of another, the capacity for guilt and remorse. It is not these qualities that sabotage relationships, but rather the distortions that emerge from these qualities.

Eric, a young man who was in treatment with me off and on for several years, offers us a dramatic and poignant example of how guilt about imaginary crimes can lead to destructive behavior.

Eric grew up in a family that was, to say the least, dysfunctional. When he was in grade school, his mother became addicted to pain medication and alcohol, and deteriorated into a chronic state of substance abuse, irritability, depression, and irresponsibility.

She lied, cheated, stole to get her pain pills. Then she would burn herself with cigarettes because she was so out of it. She still does it. She wrecked her car. Everything in that household was so stressful, and she got so hostile. I was always ashamed – I had to hide this from my friends. It’s really like I had to be the parent to my mother. When I was fifteen, I would drive her around to different doctors to get her different prescriptions. She would give me money to buy pot if I would do it for her. Then I would steal her pills from her and sell them back to her, and she didn’t even know it. It was so sick.

When Eric was about eleven, he started drinking daily, later progressing to almost every street drug I could imagine – and a few I couldn’t. He was arrested (by his count) at least ten times, for vandalism, drug dealing, hit-and-run, robbery, battery, assault. He was in and out of residential treatment centers and juvenile hall.

Eric first came to see me when he was seventeen, after he had hit rock bottom and became clean and sober through twelve-step programs. He was in a very stormy, off-and-on relationship (never violent, but emotionally exhausting for both) with a girl named Danielle, whom he loved passionately but could not get along with well enough to make it work. Danielle was working without a green card, having recently moved to the U.S. from Mexico to flee an abusive father at home.

Eric finally broke up with Danielle. She was devastated, he moved on – until he got some news about six months later. He came in and told me the story.

You know I broke up with Danielle months ago. And I’ve been screwing around with a couple of different girls at this point. But I still couldn’t get her out of my head. A friend of mine told me that he had heard Danielle was dancing again in strip clubs because she was so broke. I went nuts. I stormed over to her place and I started fucking screaming at her, “I’m gonna turn you in to immigration if I ever find out you are dancing again! You’re gonna have to go back to your father and everything he has done to you!” I wasn’t really gonna do it, but I felt like it.

I know I totally lost it. When I get like this, I feel hopeless. Label me suicidal. Nothing mattered.

How can your life be so small that you would kill yourself over that?

Eric is another on my very long list of good men behaving badly. He is a classic example of how imaginary crimes can propel someone to destructive relationship behavior. When Eric lived with his mother, he desperately tried to rescue her from her psychological abyss. He tried to cheer her up. He tried to hide her pain pills. He tried to get her more pills to make her happy. He tried to yell at her to force her to become a real mom.

Eric’s imaginary crime was that he failed to rescue his mother, and he did all he could to escape the pain of having failed her. But somewhere inside, not quite within the reach of consciousness, he had made a decision that he would never let someone down like this again. So when he heard that Danielle was on what sounded like a downhill path (strip dancing), he absolutely could not bear it. It was not jealousy. It was not control or possessiveness. It was actually a deep and tortured concern.

Danielle’s dancing was Eric’s broken mirror, reflecting back to him a person guilty of unbearable imaginary crimes. This time – stupidly, irrationally, destructively – he was determined to do something to rescue the person he loved.

To Eric’s credit, he began to get it. He developed more of a capacity for consciousness and reflection. He knew the story of Odysseus, and Eric learned to prepare himself for situations likely to seduce him into destructive or self-destructive behavior.

Now, several years later, although Eric is more self-aware, the same emotional challenges continue. He still finds it very difficult to be around a woman in pain, and he has a hard time being empathic. Why? Because it arouses too much despair and powerlessness in himself. He struggles to not get critical, impatient, controlling. Now when I see my girlfriend really upset, I want to do something. When I grew up and I was in pain, I kept it all to myself. Seeing her in pain makes me very uncomfortable and very powerless. I want to make her okay, and I get mad at her when I can’t. But I’m a lot more on top of it than I ever was before.

Like Odysseus, Eric knows he cannot avoid passing by the island of the Sirens. But at least he can anticipate this event and plug up his ears or tie himself to the mast until he knows it is safe for him to be released. So can you.

How Relational Heroes Let Go of Imaginary Crimes

The process of releasing yourself from imaginary crimes involves several steps – and ultimately requires you to perform an act of relational heroism. The first step is for you to call the crime what it is: imaginary. While this is easier said than done, no healing or release is possible otherwise. The next step is to develop a new narrative that explains the event without identifying yourself as the imagined criminal. It is usually not enough, however, to just tell yourself It’s not my fault. You have to find a new narrative that is genuinely credible.

The new narrative is not always obvious, and it often involves implicating someone else for the crime. The someone else may be a person whom you have been determined to protect for years. If you were emotionally or physically abused by your father, it is quite likely that you resolved the cognitive dissonance of being abused by someone you loved by convincing yourself either that you deserved it or that it was ultimately good for you. And if you believe this, you are that much more likely to behave the same way toward your own kids. This new narrative might require you to recognize that your father acted like a son of a bitch. And how can you love, admire, respect, and identify with a son of a bitch?

The experience of shame as a boy often sets the stage for you to become an emotionally cold man, like Will Hunting. It’s a way for you to defend yourself against the potential pain of vulnerability: you can’t take the risk of being humiliated or rejected when someone finds out more about you, so you get cold and rejecting yourself. There is a logic to this, but it is a relationship-killer. Furthermore, if you humiliate and reject others, you model this for your children, who may grow up to repeat the pattern of shame-inducing behavior for still another generation.

How did Will of Good Will Hunting choose a path of release from his imaginary crimes and shame?

First, he is in crisis. For the first time, he really has something at stake emotionally that could cause him pain if he screwed it up or passed it up.

Second, his psychiatrist dramatically tells him that all this stuff in Will’s case file, all the documentation of his history of abuse and neglect, is not Will’s fault. He repeats this mantra, It’s not your fault, until finally Will breaks down, sobbing, and embraces his shrink. Will is tremendously relieved to be able to accept this new narrative: someone else was at fault.

Third, Will is released from his imaginary crimes by his buddy Chuckie. Chuckie challenges Will by telling him that he has something that few others have and that he is just plain afraid to cash in on it. He tells Will that it would be an insult to Chuckie and the rest of his buddies if Will is still in the same neighborhood, doing the same manual labor, in twenty years. And then Chuckie really rattles Will’s cage. He tells Will that his favorite part of his day is when he knocks on Will’s door to pick him up for work – in these ten seconds, he lets himself imagine that Will is gone. Will just wouldn’t be there. He would have moved on. And that would be the ultimate act of loyalty and respect for Chuckie – not sticking around and hanging out with his old buddies, growing old together.

There is probably not a more powerful reframing, guy-talk style, than calling your best friend a wimp for not leaving the ‘hood, going after the girl, and starting a new life.

The final courageous act takes place later. When all this sinks in for Will, it is still up to him – completely up to him – to make a move based on this new information, a move that still carries enormous risk. Not everyone could do it, but he does. He heads out to California to be with Skylar (he hopes), and his plaque in the Hall of Fame for Relational Heroes is inscribed.

And our friend Conrad from Ordinary People is released when he, too, after the crisis of losing a friend to suicide, confronts his imaginary crime of surviving when his brother drowned, and rewrites the old narrative. His psychiatrist challenges him by asking what was the one wrong thing he did. What was his imaginary crime? Conrad blurts out, “I held on!” And then comes the new narrative: Did you ever think that maybe he just wasn’t strong enough?

Again, the breakthrough in self-talk is necessary but not sufficient. Like all potential relational heroes, Conrad is still faced with the challenge of conducting his relationship business differently. And that he does, as he insists on talking to his parents honestly about their feelings and behavior as well as his. As it turns out, his father can handle it and his mother can’t. His mother treats Conrad like he is a criminal, making him feel worse. But that’s the risk you take when you act with integrity: there are no guarantees, and in the end you’ve just got to take care of your side of the street.

 
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