Your Inner Voldemort
Accountability. It’s a word I hate, especially when other people are lecturing about it. It sounds so…stifling. I’m a particularly moody person and I don’t like my family getting in my space, asking me to do things, creating distractions galore. (There it is. I said it. It’s the truth.) When I hear people talking about accountability I start feeling guilt and a kind of agonized pull in two directions – toward doing stuff for them vs. doing what I want to do. I don’t want accountability. I want freedom.
I’d rather justify my moodiness and selfishness; all others be damned! And I have. I have justified my moodiness in the worst of ways. My method is my Achilles heel. It is my condescension. This tearing down of another person (my husband in these examples) with all the “expertise” (yikes) and eloquence (look out!) of a therapist. “You don’t make me feel fill-in-the-blank…If you would just fill-in-the-blank I could have a happy life.” I was so innocent in my own mind at the time. Early on in our marriage my husband started to really believe the things I’d say through tears and longing (code for manipulation), screaming and yelling (less in code but still manipulation), all of which was colored with my own personal brand of condescension. It went on and on; we saw therapist after therapist, until one day we found one who could tell me the truth about myself – not with cruelty (Dr. Phil style) but with really hard questions.
After several sessions I got a good look at myself. Ugh. That was a tough day…that lasted a very long time…that is kind of still lasting…thank God! That day I not only saw mentally but experienced – felt in my bones – my Inner Voldemort. Yes, that’s right Harry Potter fans, Voldemort is still not dead. He is alive and well. The Dementors are on the loose and no one can find Harry – the boy who lived who might save us all from doom!
Seriously, I finally had an awareness in my marriage that I was the source of my own misery and I was creating the very thing I was trying to avoid. (Yes, of course, he played his part too. No behavior occurs in a vacuum. But I’m talking about me here – the only one I can be accountable for. Damn there’s that word again!)
I come by it innocently enough. We all do. That doesn’t make us any less responsible. But consider this anyway.
The Inner Child Movement (ICM) of the 1980’s has shaped the world of mental health and pop psychology for years now. It’s the idea that we all have this child within us who is vulnerable and most likely wounded from the things our parents did or didn’t do to us. The ICM teaches that it is our partner’s job, then, to be nice to this child – to give it what it needs to feel loved and secure so that we can feel fulfilled in our marriages and in life. “Communicate” more. Have date nights. Have more sex. Use “I” statements. Have more sex. Take 10 minute breaks. Use “I” statements correctly! Have more sex. Etc., etc., etc. I’m going to guess, that if you’re reading this blog, you have tried these kinds of things in your marriage (I know I have) and they haven’t gotten you very far. Perhaps it’s time for a new approach. Perhaps it’s time for us to realize we are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Perhaps it is time for our Inner Children to grow up. That’s what this blog is all about.
I propose a different model that I hope will catch on like a wildfire, waking us up to our true potential as individuals in married life. My hope for these blog posts on marriage is that they will help you see with all the impartiality of the natural world that the Inner Child is not the innocent victim we believe it to be. I propose that, just like me, your Inner Child is really an Inner Voldemort.
For the Harry Potter uninitiated, wink wink, you must read at your own risk; this blog post is definitely a spoiler.
OK. So, you remember the scene towards the end of the last book when Harry “dies”?
He arrives at a kind of heavenly King’s Cross on Platform 9 ¾ and discovers he is not alone. A nasty little creature that has “the form of a small naked child” appears flapping, flailing, and struggling and when Harry first encounters it “he [is] afraid of it. Small and fragile and wounded though it [is].” Harry is torn. He feels like he ought to comfort it and he moves toward it slowly, “ready to jump back at any moment.” But he can’t bring himself to touch it. “…It repulses him.”
The marriage parallel? Early on we may feel an urge to comfort our partners when they are flapping and flailing and struggling (usually with us!), but after time, we begin to be afraid to touch them, so we walk on egg shells, ready to jump back at any moment. We’ve been flailed and flapped at so much that after more time, we become repulsed by them, and generally them us. THEN we go to a therapist or read books that tell us once again to be nice to the creature – try to comfort it – “communicate” more with it, take it on dates, use “I” statements correctly and, yes, have sex with it – when we ALREADY know that this kind of approach doesn’t help, but we don’t know what else to do, so we try again. And things generally get worse.
Back on Platform 9 and ¾, Dumbledore (beloved mentor and headmaster of the school Harry attends to learn magic), arrives on the scene. “You cannot help” the creature he tells Harry. What Harry learns, among other things, is that this creature is what has become of the soul of Lord Voldemort (Harry’s arch enemy, evil power hungry villain trying to take over the world who destroys his own soul in the meantime…See nasty snake looking creature in the picture above). Later Dumbledore restates that the creature is beyond any help that he or Harry could give. Ahhh, the wisdom of Dumbledore. Let this blog post be your own Inner Dumbledore speaking what you already know to be true. No matter how nicely you communicate with your spouse (or they with you), no matter how much sex you have with him (or him with you), no matter how many date nights, you cannot heal his or her Inner Child nor can they heal yours and it is not your job (or theirs). After all, their Inner Child is more truly an Inner Voldemort – and so is yours. It doesn’t need healing. It needs accountability.
If I haven’t convinced you yet that the Inner Child is really the Inner Voldemort consider a few more points:
- Outcome research in the field of marriage counseling is showing that while couples might be “getting along” better, their sex lives are boring or are getting worse.
- After all, who wants to have sex with a child – even if it’s a nice one?!
- Human beings, by nature, crave the familiar and avoid pain. Growing or changing = taking full responsibility for oneself = pain. Yuck!
- Path of least resistance…Need I say more?
- Who here wouldn’t get that little feeling of “Gotcha” when you hit your spouse with their shortcomings and they know it…and they know that you know it?
- Or when their boss finally writes them up for being late too much when you’ve told them about their lateness time and time again? Gotcha!
- Or when your son or daughter talks back to them about something you also disagree with them about in their parenting? Gotcha!
- Those of you who have children – you know when they’re small and cute and throwing tantrums and being totally needy and annoying? Do you want to have to coddle them and meet their every need to get them to be happy all the time? NOT a fun way to parent OR to be married AND if you’ve tried it, you know it doesn’t work.
What do you think of this post? Can you see when you’re coming from your Inner Voldemort or do you believe it really is an Inner Child in need of healing from your partner? Perhaps you can see both sides. Do you disagree? Agree? With what?
Interested in more posts on marriage? Check out some of my more popular posts:
- It’s Not about Happiness
- The Light of the Season (Christmas 2010 post)
- Self-Respect Stinks
- A Worthy Opponent
