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Brandi wrote:
My husband and I have been married 10 months and have a 7 month old daughter. Before we got married I had an embarrassing debt problem which I hid from him. He is so careful with money and credit cards and I was too scared to tell him. Just after we got engaged, I found out I was pregnant and before I know it, we are getting married in four weeks. I was too scared to tell him I owed thousands in credit card debt. Knowing I had a large amount of money pending from a car accident law suit, I decided not to tell him in hopes of this money coming along and "saving me." I continued on these past 10 months not paying payments on my cards, knowing if I did my husband would figure out what was going on. Last week I was contacted by an attorney and told if I didn’t pay, I would be sued...soon. I decided I had no choice but to tell my husband. I wrote him a long letter telling him everything because I was scared to see his reaction. Needless to say, he was angry and hurt mainly for the fact that I lied. To pay off the cards, it has wiped out our entire savings account. Luckily, the lawsuit money of about $20,000 will come in in the next two weeks. Now, my husband is just so hurt and says he's always afraid now that I am lying to him and that I will do something like this again. I don’t know why I conducted this incredibly destructive behavior. I have ruined my credit, hurt my husband, and ruined my self worth. Should we seek counseling?? I don’t know what to do. He says he wont leave me, but I really killed his trust in me.
Thank You So Much,
Brandi
Dr. Einhorn replies
Brandi seems to have been making decisions that are potentially self-defeating, putting her short-term emotional satisfaction on a potential collision course with her long-term well-being. She got into debt in the first place, presumably, by making purchases that she couldn’t afford, then compounded the problem by not telling her husband about it at any point in their relationship, until she couldn't conceal it any longer. Brandi's impulsive decision-making might have extended beyond her indebtedness. She seems to have been surprised to have “found out I was pregnant," and then married quickly. Common sense suggests that Brandi has been making a string of commitments with profound long-term consequences to which she has given so little thought that some kind of underlying psychological issue is at least potentially implicated.
When do the problems of our lives get bad enough that we reach out for help, and start to look at what our own responsibility is for them, and start to take responsibility for living our way, step by step, to a better life? The positive side of the problems that we get ourselves into is that eventually they can force us into taking a necessary look at ourselves. Brandi writes that she doesn’t know why she “conducted this incredibly destructive behavior.” Perhaps it’s time she began finding out the answer to that by starting with her own therapy.
Brandi writes that she ruined her self-worth. Could it be that her self-worth wasn’t all that solid to begin with? Are there feelings that she might have been trying to satisfy or assuage through her impulsive commitments? If so, where do those feelings come from in her personal history and within herself? These are questions that seem more appropriate to individual rather than couples therapy.
There is a set of issues implicit in Brandi’s situation that encompass both psychotherapy and spiritually oriented counseling, which have to do with such questions as what is she here for, whom is she helping and to whom she subordinates herself. There is a lack of a sense of purpose in Brandi’s description of her life, a lack of service, and a lack of a sense of genuine humility, as opposed to shame and beating up on herself, which she seems to have plenty of. These issues are part of what would be explored in therapy, although not necessarily in typically religious language. Perhaps she is ready to put her marriage and family above herself, and maybe that will be a place to start from in her work on herself. We need to have a sense of something higher than ourselves in order to be able to begin our work on ourselves, and that “something higher” can be anything that we truly subordinate ourselves to. It might even be that Brandi’s creation of a marriage--particularly to a husband who is “careful with his money and credit cards”--and family, might reflect an unconscious effort to heal and correct herself. If so, however, she is going to have to apply herself consciously to the task, because the self-correction she might have unconsciously been hoping for won’t happen by itself.
A religious or morally oriented counselor might focus exclusively on this level of counseling, and that might be better than nothing at all, but it would leave out the entire domain of Brandi’s personal history and the structure of her self or personality. In approaching therapy with someone in a situation such as Brandi describes, I would be thinking about an exploration that, in a manner of speaking, combines vertical and horizontal axes. The vertical axis is the review of her developmental history, in order to understand how she got to the points in her life at which her potentially self-defeating behavior made sense. The horizontal axis is the reflection of how her personality or self is structured so as to allow her to avoid acknowledging what she knows to be true; that her decisions are potentially undermining to herself.
In fact, it’s interesting that Brandi still isn’t asking what she can do about herself, but rather what she can do to repair the damage that she’s caused to her relationship. Perhaps she may have to do the first before she can accomplish the second.
Writing seems to help Brandi to be more truthful with and about herself. She wrote, rather than spoke, her confession to her husband, and her question to this column is well written, clearly expressing what happened and how it made her feel. It may be that writing about herself and her life might be a useful part of Brandi’s therapy, perhaps in journaling about events and how they made her feel, and perhaps in writing about her personal history so that she can begin to discern, through narrative, the developmental threads in her life.
I wish Brandi good luck, as I’m sure the readers of this column do also. For some thoughts on selecting a therapist, she might refer to my earlier column on that topic.
Dr. Einhorn
For past questions and columns, go to the archive.
