Stuck

The Comfort Trap: or What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?
by Judith Sills, Ph.D.

(Page 4 of 6)

"I'm stuck," said the shiny man sitting across from me. His hair, product-tamed and light-reflecting, matches a remarkable pair of gleaming loafers. I get a first impression of a glossy hardback novel squashed between classy bookends.

The man between these bookends is Jack and he has come to see me because he is sad. Unremittingly, and worse, work-inhibitingly sad and stuck, since his girlfriend of five years left him last month. Jane left because Jack won't marry her, and he's come to see me because he fears that this time - the third time she's left - she might not come back. This time he fears that if he wants her, he will have to take a step forward. And the fact is, he can't.

Jack is deeply attached to Jane, loves her, longs for her, and doesn't want to face life without her, or so he explains to me at his first visit, going on in some detail about the wonders of Jane until he is reassured that I understand the problem is not with Jane, nor is it with love. The problem is something else, something he can't quite grasp, although it is costing him dearly.

Jack is caught in his comfort zone and marriage is on the other side of his mental fence. When Jane keeps him company where he is, Jack is a wondrously content, shiny man. But when she insists, for reasons of her own, on moving the relationship forward, he is emotionally unable to follow. So Jack mourns his loss and pursues Jane with passion, desperate to pull her back to where he is stuck. Twice before he has been able to do this, albeit only temporarily.

This time Jack has come to me looking for a way out of his conflict, although he frames his request differently. "I need to make a decision," he says. "I love Jane, but I don't see myself married. Well, maybe someday, but not now, not yet."

I squint. Jack is forty-one. I don't think timing or age is the issue.

Jack continues. If he's so uncertain about marriage, doesn't that perhaps suggest that Jane is not the right woman, that certain shortcomings of hers, too trivial to mention but irritating nonetheless, may be true emotional barriers? Perhaps it's best that he let Jane go or she him? Perhaps, if love is this hard, it really isn't love?

I glance at my watch. Good. In twenty-five minutes we have gone from "it's not about Jane" to "could it be it's all about Jane?" Jack is open, expressive, and we may be able to move fairly quickly to the part that has to do with Jack.

He begins to talk about marriage - the wonderful marriage his parents had and what was awful about it, the tedious marriages of his friends and what he dreads from those. Finally, at the end of our first meeting, Jack shared with me his personal vision, the internal image he treasures.

"Maybe I actually saw this man, or maybe I made him up," Jack said. "But I call him the Man in the Black Mercedes. He is the man I've always wanted to be. He lives alone in a small, elegant house filled with art. He has a houseman who handles the maintenance and a housekeeper who tends to his personal chores. He dates exotic women, loves one or two, enjoys his work, and makes enough money to afford this life because, after all, he's only spending it on himself. He has a hundred friends, entertains them lavishly, gets invited everywhere.

"The Man in the Black Mercedes treats the woman in his life very well, but he doesn't live with her. He maintains a certain boundary. If you ask him why he doesn't marry, he'll say, 'I'm single not because I want to sleep with many women, but because I want to be free to sleep alone when I choose to.'

"If I marry Jane," Jack concludes, "I'll never be the Man in the Black Mercedes." By holding on to his long-standing reluctance to marry, Jack is making an old, familiar, comfortable choice. But now it doesn't offer the old familiar satisfaction.

In my twenty-five years as a psychotherapist I have met the Man in the Black Mercedes many times, in many forms. He is an internal icon of perfect, static contentment, the universal fantasy that everything and everyone we need is inside our magic circle and none of them has conflicting needs of his own. We are at once perfectly safe and perfectly satisfied.

But Jack is no longer perfectly satisfied. Now he is only safe.

Jack's safety is hard to enjoy without Jane to love and be loved by. It's painful safety, too, because he's threatened with the loss of Jane and that will be a genuine heartache. But in order to follow her, Jack has to leave the safety of his comfort zone, his carefully constructed, well-defended, emotionally even life.

To move forward toward satisfaction, Jack would have to risk his safety with no guarantee of how he'll feel in the future, despite Jane's many reassurances. He would have to launch himself on the dangerous raft of attachment and navigate the white waters of marriage and family. What if she is the wrong person? What if he wants off later, when it's too late? What if something permanent happens - a child, a joint bank account - to put the Man in the Black Mercedes out of reach forever? Forward is too dangerous. Staying here is too sad. Stuck.

Jack's paralysis might be familiar to you. Perhaps the air in your own life has grown stale, or worse. What was once motivating has turned mysteriously flat, done with. Your life has run out of soul and there is no obvious refueling station.

You cannot see your way out of a situation and you can no longer bear to be in it. Something is missing or the world is too much with you; you have profoundly disappointed yourself or you don't feel much of anything at all. There is a next step forward, you've been assured, but you can't see it. Or perhaps you can see it, but getting there is another story.

This dead end takes so many forms:

It's the job you can't leave, though it's sucking your life dry, because where else are you going to make this kind of money?

It's the alcoholic or rageoholic or shopoholic mate you can't leave, because you are too afraid of being alone.

It's the club you can't join, the trip you can't take, the success you can't enjoy, because the new people seem so different from your old friends.

It's the parallel lives you and your mate have constructed to avoid each other, because you don't feel you can confront the issues in your marriage.

It's any important relationship - friend, parent, sibling, adult child, lover, spouse - whose demands exhaust and infuriate you, but any attempt to insist on reciprocity threatens to end the connection.

It's the person who is never going to love you back the right way, though you keep imagining how good it would be if he or she did.

It's the job you won't try for, the clothes you won't wear, the sport you wouldn't attempt, because you feel inadequate.

It's Mr. or Ms. Nice, to whom you cannot commit because it would be settling, but whom you cannot leave because what if this is your last chance?

It's the perilous balance you are trying to maintain between the affair you cannot abandon and the marriage that forms the scaffolding of your life.

It's the employee you can't fire, the raise you can't insist on, the credit you can't claim, because you're too uncomfortable with confrontation.

It's the necessary condition - financial stability, weight loss, promotion, falling in love, getting organized - that must occur before you can get what you want, but you can't seem to achieve that necessary condition.

It's your obsessive preoccupation with your ex or some other past injury that interferes with your ability to focus on or take pleasure in the present.

Finally, it's an inner numbness. When your days feel like long jogs on the hamster wheel and you can't see your way off, you're stuck.

When you are loitering at one of these dead ends, think of yourself as being locked into a comfort zone. That's the first step toward making a break for it.

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Judith Sills, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist who for the last decade has appeared regularly on such national television shows as Oprah, Sally Jessy Raphaël, and NBC News. She is a contributing editor to Family Circle, the largest-circulation women's magazine in America, and also writes for O, The Oprah Magazine.