Repair

The One Strand You Can Actually Reach

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  8 min read

The urn in the church hall takes eleven minutes to boil, and Delphine has learned to start it before the last hymn. Half past eleven on a Saturday: her aunt was eighty-eight, the service was fine, and forty people stand around a trestle table of sandwiches in a smell of coffee and floor polish.

Her uncle says something about her cousin’s boy — a joke, in the voice he uses for jokes, about a course the boy dropped, said in front of the boy’s mother, who has not been sleeping. The room goes thin. Not silent. Thin, the way air goes before weather.

Delphine is already moving, three steps into a crossing of that hall with a tray she did not need to pick up and a sentence assembled — it has a laugh near the end, it takes four seconds, and it converts the whole moment into nothing. She has done this since she was nine.

She sets the tray down and does not cross.

Four seconds go by, and they are long. Somebody says something about the parking, badly. That is the entire event, and driving home she was not thinking about her uncle, which after thirty years was itself the news.

Two sentences that both know too much

People in her position get told one of two things, usually by somebody who loves them. That anybody can change, with the right therapist and enough patience. Or that people like that never change, so stop hoping.

The optimistic one is cruel in a quiet way: it makes the outcome a function of your effort, so that if six years have produced nothing, somebody has not loved correctly, and there is one candidate. The pessimistic one sounds tough-minded, which is a costume. It closes an inquiry nobody conducted.

Here is what is actually on the shelf. Igor Weinberg and Elsa Ronningstam, reviewing the treatment of narcissistic personality disorder, report that no psychotherapy and no medication has ever been tested for it in a randomized trial. Not tried and found wanting. Not tried.

And close to two thirds of patients with that diagnosis leave treatment early, so the encouraging findings describe the third who stayed — and that third is not a random third. Whatever keeps a person in a room where uncomfortable things get said about him is probably the same quality that lets him improve.

So this article will not promise you change, and will not tell you change is impossible. Nobody has earned either sentence.

What is established is duller and more useful. Personality moves across a life — Brent Roberts and colleagues, pooling ninety-two long-term samples, found people are not finished at thirty — but in that same analysis agreeableness, the dimension opposite the antagonism these articles are about, moved reliably only in old age. Antagonism moves least and latest, on a scale of decades rather than of a program with a start date. Which is not the same as fixed: strong family loading and real modifiability have never been in conflict.

Exposure, then reckoning, then repair

That order matters more than anything else here, and the middle cannot be skipped or hurried.

Consequences are not punishment. A boundary is not abandonment. Both are information arriving at a system built to keep information out — which is why, further along the continuum, they produce a reason instead of a reckoning.

Nearly everybody uses somebody now and then, and almost none of it is planned. It shows up on the days there is nothing left over: the friend who gets called only when the call is needed, the person at home who turns into a list of tasks for a fortnight. Point at it and something shifts, unevenly, a month later. Where it is the standing arrangement rather than the bad fortnight, pointing at it shifts nothing — the apology arrives on time and beautifully made, and the following Thursday is the same Thursday.

Which is why one test sorts almost everything, and it applies to saints. Behavior produced while somebody is watching tells you nothing about behavior after the watching stops. Picture a speed camera on a road you drive daily: for two hundred yards every car travels at the limit, and the camera knows nothing about the mile after.

Growth that is imposed is compliance wearing growth’s clothes, and it looks better than the real thing for about a year and a half.

The strand made of learned material

Four things braid together in a family pattern. Three of them are not available to you this evening. One is.

A household rule, said plainly: something you learned about what people are for, before you were old enough to know you were learning it. Picture a house where the porch light switch is inside the hall closet, behind the coats. Everybody raised there reaches in without looking, in the dark, while guests feel along the wall. You do not experience a rule as an opinion. You experience it as the layout of the world.

Rules show up as speed rather than belief. You will not find yours by asking what you believe about relationships; what you believe was assembled later, and is mostly your good opinion of yourself. You find them where you had already acted before deciding. The tray was in Delphine’s hands before her uncle’s sentence finished.

And a rule is enforced by shame rather than argument. The first several times you do not do the automatic thing you will feel rude, cold, selfish, lazy — notice how fast the vocabulary arrives. That is not evidence. It is the rule’s alarm going off as designed.

Hers took six words: a woman who stops managing the weather stops being necessary. Look how sensibly that was learned. In a house where one adult made the weather, the child who could read the sky got a role for it — and a role is a way to be loved that is available when the other way is not.

Her interruption is small, and the size is the design. At her mother’s table, on Sundays, she has stopped providing the second sentence — the joke, the redirection, the she only means. Not at work, where she says she needs it. One table, one day of the week, four times in eleven weeks, twice badly. She does not know whether it holds, and nobody has followed people doing this for ten years.

What you cannot reach

The other half of the honesty costs more. You cannot change another adult’s account of himself. You cannot manufacture the consequence that would strain it, because one handed over from inside the relationship arrives through the same door and collects the same summary on the way in. And you cannot love somebody into looking at himself — the most decent wrong idea in circulation, held most tightly by the kindest people I meet.

Trying anyway costs about a decade. I have no study behind that figure; it is what I have watched. Friendships gone quiet, because explaining was exhausting and not explaining made them thin. Professional competence, spent at home. And the fatigue of having become an expert on one person, so that when somebody asks what you would like to do on Saturday there is a pause. The people who spend that decade are not the passive ones. They are the most conscientious member of the family, and if you have spent it, this is not an accusation.

Stopping is also a loss rather than a relief. A woman who stops trying to produce insight in her husband is burying a future, the one where he understood and said so, and nobody will understand why she is sad now that things are calmer.

An hour, most Thursdays

Delphine is fifty-six, which matters only because the window does not shut. The oldest person I have watched begin something like this was seventy-four: when his granddaughter tells him something, he asks a second question instead of telling the matching story about himself. It has not repaired his son, and nobody has studied whether it alters a family line. What it altered is about an hour, most Thursdays.

That is the size of the thing on offer, and it needs nobody’s agreement. If you have read this recognizing your own hand already on the tray, that is not a verdict on you. It is the ordinary version, all of us run it, and the sting is your attention working.

Delphine is a composite. She is not a person; she is a pattern that recurs often enough to be worth describing.

One plain note. Where a situation involves control over money or movement, sexual pressure, somebody’s documents or keys or medication held by another person, being followed, or fear in your own house, none of this is a matter for patience and duration. That is work for a domestic violence advocate, an attorney, or a therapist who has handled it before, and asking one of them a question is not an accusation and commits you to nothing.