Every choice has a price, something you gain, and something you lose. One choice we can always make is to do nothing. To decide not to decide. To keep on going the way we are. At the other extreme, Marina could decide to leave the relationship and file for divorce.
“You don’t have to be stuck,” I told her. “You don’t have to sit there in a bad situation.” However, I cautioned, a divorce can be an extreme way of continuing to do nothing. “What do you gain from a divorce? It gives you a piece of paper that says you’re now free to marry someone else.”
Divorce doesn’t resolve the emotional business of the relationship. It just gives you legal permission to repeat the same pattern with someone else! It doesn’t make you free. Whether Marina decided to leave her husband or stay in the marriage, her work was the same: to uncover the needs and expectations she brought to the marriage, and to heal the wounds she had brought with her, that she would keep carrying for the rest of her life until she dealt with them.
We examined her expectations first. “Did you know about your husband’s anger when you married him?” I asked.
She shook her head vehemently. “He wins hearts,” she said. An accomplished actor, he knows how to make his audience fall in love with him. Before they were married, she only saw this side of him—the charmer, the philosopher, the romantic. “Now the shoes fly.”
“So what keeps you there?” I asked. As I’ve said, every behavior satisfies a need. Even an imprisoning and terrifying situation can serve us in some way. “Do you need the financial security? Or maybe you need the fighting?”
“I’m scared to be alone.”
We all carry a fear of abandonment from infancy. But as she described her childhood in Western Europe, it was clear that her fear of abandonment had been compounded by outright neglect. When she was fourteen, her father said he could no longer stand to live with her mother, and left. He never once came back to visit his children—he didn’t even call to check in. Marina’s mother was too distraught to cope with the needs of the family, so Marina stepped in to fill the role, putting the younger children to bed, staying up late to bake bread and prepare food for the next day.
A year later, when the Berlin Wall came down, her mother made her own devastating announcement. She’d met an East German man through a newspaper ad. She was moving to former East Germany to be with him, taking the younger children with her. Marina would stay behind. She’d have to fend for herself. She handed Marina the rental agreement for a room in a house and left the next day. She didn’t so much as call for more than a year.
The fact that Marina survived at all is a huge testament to her inner strength and resiliency. She stayed in the rental house for a few months until new tenants moved in, including a father who tried to seduce her, coming to her room at night with a glass of wine. She broke her lease, left school, and moved from town to town throughout Western Europe, working multiple jobs, house-sitting for people away on vacation, at one point living on an artists’ commune, another time staying at a rehabilitation farm where people in recovery came to take care of horses. She developed a dangerous eating disorder, convinced that she must be a terrible person to have been left by both her parents, thinking that if she could make herself disappear, maybe her parents would finally notice she was missing. When Marina was sixteen, the owner of the rehab farm, herself an active alcoholic, turned Marina out. She stood on the street with a suitcase in each hand, homeless and alone. In despair, she called her mom and begged for help. But her mother was still steeped in her own struggle and refused.
“From that moment on, I knew I was completely alone in the world,” Marina said.
In her early twenties, she moved to Berlin in search of better work opportunities, and through connections began to train with a performance group, living in an old trailer in the backyard of her school. It wasn’t an easy life. The trailer was unheated. She froze her way through the fierce Berlin winters, endured rigorous training. But the new life suited her. While dancing, she felt strong and free. She couldn’t starve herself and detach from her body anymore, and for the first time, she no longer wanted to. She had discovered passion and purpose: the joy of moving her body, the power of movement and expression.
She fell in love with another performer, who’d grown up in East Germany during the Cold War. It was difficult for him to communicate his emotions, to show love.
“Like my parents, I guess,” Marina said ruefully.
Two years after they broke up, he died by suicide. Intellectually she knew his death wasn’t her fault, that even if they’d stayed together, she couldn’t have saved him. But the loss hit her hard.
“They found him a week or two after he died,” she said. “He was completely alone.”
We all go into relationships carrying messages we learned in childhood. Sometimes it’s a literal phrase someone repeated—like when my mother told me, “A bad husband is better than no husband.” Sometimes it’s something we gleaned from others’ actions or the home environment.
“Honey,” I told Marina, “I’m hearing that you carry a message inside—that if you love someone, they’ll leave you.”
Tears sprang into her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself as though the room had suddenly
