You Be Me Instead of Me (Part 1 of 2)

A couple we will call Dana and Marcus came in already certain about who the problem was. Dana described Marcus as careless with money, secretive about spending, forever needing to be managed. Marcus described Dana as controlling, cold, impossible to please. Each of them had a tidy theory of the other, and each theory left the speaker innocent. What neither of them could see, at the start, was that they were running the same wound in opposite directions, and the relationship had become a way of keeping that wound out of sight.

Underneath Dana’s control was an exile that believed, from very early, that she was financially helpless, that without constant vigilance everything would come apart. Her manager had built a whole life around proving that belief wrong, tracking every dollar and organizing every decision so the helpless part would never be exposed again. Underneath Marcus’s secrecy was the same exile and the same belief, that he was financially helpless, protected this time by a firefighter that spent in secret and then hid the evidence, because being seen as incompetent with money was the one thing it could not survive. Two people, the same buried shame, two opposite strategies, and a pull toward each other that neither could explain.

We had been watching this pattern in financial therapy for years without being able to name it, and Martha Sweezy’s work on shame in Internal Family Systems gave us the language. Shame is close to unbearable for the part that carries it, and one of the ways a system manages something unbearable is to get it out, to place it somewhere other than inside. In a couple, the most available somewhere is the other person. Sweezy has come to call this move “you be me instead of me,” what she also describes as “tossing the hot potato” of shamefulness. You hold my helplessness, my incompetence, my not-enoughness, so that I do not have to. Dana needed Marcus to be the financially incompetent one, because as long as he carried that, she did not have to feel it in herself. Marcus needed Dana to be the controlling one, because as long as she was the problem, his own helplessness stayed hidden, even from him.

This is what made the attraction so strong and so hard to leave. On the surface they looked like opposites who should never have matched. Underneath, each had found the ideal partner for the work of not feeling their own shame. Dana’s manager got a living demonstration of financial incompetence to manage, which kept her own helpless exile off the screen. Marcus’s firefighter got someone controlling to rebel against, which let him experience his secrecy as a reasonable response to her rather than as the shame-driven hiding it really was. Each was tossing the hot potato to the other, and it worked, in the sense that the shame stayed buried, which is exactly why the relationship kept hurting.

The trouble with this arrangement is the trouble with every protector strategy, which is that it does not heal anything. This is the Protector Paradox: our protectors, more often than not, create the very thing they fear. Shame handed to a partner does not leave the person who handed it off. It goes quiet for a while and then it gets louder, because the partner who is now carrying it begins to resent the role, and the resentment reads as confirmation of the original wound. When Marcus failed to be managed, as he always would, Dana’s helpless exile stirred anyway and her control intensified. When Dana pushed harder, as she always would, Marcus’s helpless exile stirred anyway and his hiding intensified.

The bond this couple built to keep the shame out of sight became a steady source of more. Each partner felt increasingly ashamed over time, not less, and each was more certain than ever that the other was to blame.

READ Part 2 of this article here.

By Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, and Kristine Anthis, PhD