After years of being unemployed, he took a job working in the mail room of the post office. He took that particular job, even though it was “beneath him,” because it allowed him to have as little contact as possible with coworkers whose minor slights and rejections he took so personally that after arriving home after a day’s work, he began to brood about who said, meant, and did what to him. Unable to sleep at night, he was too tired to function effectively the next day and so unable to fully concentrate on his work. As a result, he became so distraught that he called out sick the day after, only to become so guilty for calling out sick that, once again, he was unable to sleep at night and had to call out sick the day after that, as well. Eventually, he became a secretive, isolated, sullen, and uncooperative worker who was diagnosed as having “burnout” and put on temporary disability leave. In response, he quit his job so that he could once again be able to live the lonely, completely isolated life he really had always dreamed of for himself.
A patient manifested a fear of commitment in his occupational life as a dreamy restlessness and desire for change whenever things were going well professionally so that he quit one perfectly good job after another and moved on, rationalizing his behavior as “for more money” or “for better working conditions”—ultimately illusory. A doctor, he kept many licenses in different states in case he wanted to relocate, and for a long time wouldn’t buy the house or apartment he wanted, and instead rented one so that he wouldn’t be tied down to one spot. Whenever he did move, he found that the old job he had left behind was as or more worthy than the new one. Though he recognized this after the fact, the recognition had no effect on his future behavior so that he continued to look at ads and apply for new positions. Of course, with each new job, the same difficulties arose, for his avoidant tendencies reasserted themselves, and he felt a new urgency to move on.
In his personal life, he suffered from a severe fear of commitment that took the form of intense object love alternating with a consuming desire to “get away from them all.” One night, he had the following dream. After waiting in a restaurant for his take-out order, and noting with mixed pleasure and envy the many generations all working under the same roof in splendid cooperation, he heard himself begging his wife to “throw him out” so that he could be alone. In his waking life, he had mixed feelings about his wife and their marriage (he was later actually to get a divorce). These took the form of an obsessive fear that his (consciously) beloved wife would get into a fatal car crash. Associated were a series of escapist distancing fantasies and behaviors involving shopping alone; going alone on vacations to exotic places or to a remote shack in the woods with a warm fire and steamy kettle; reading escapist books on exploring the Antarctic; traveling Through the Looking Glass and going “Over the Rainbow”; wandering alone through the seaside mists listening to the fog horn; taking trains by himself north, to isolated places, or to distant stations at the end of the line, not because of the pretty, interesting, or welcoming things he might find there, but because there, in his private, remote Oz, he would be as far away from home base as possible; taking fantasized trips in time to an imagined better past or future; and taking fantasized trips in person assuming another identity such as that of a troubadour in the Middle Ages playing ancient music alone in the woods, or that of an archaeologist who uncovered the past, not so that he could study, but so that he could live in it.
He once decided to actually buy a shack in the woods. He couldn’t wait to go there every weekend, and even went in winter, using as his excuse, “I have to water my plants.” However, when he got there, he promptly panicked because now he was all alone with nothing to do. So he called all his friends in the city just to make contact with other human beings and drank in local bars just to be where other people were, although he hated drinking and disliked the people in the bars as well as the contact he had with them, for as he saw it, they were “all predictably superficial and limited.” So he sold the lonely country shack and bought an apartment in the city, only to find that he constantly dreamed of the splendid times he had when alone in his house in the wilds—of the pleasures of getting into his car in the middle of winter, the cold snow everywhere; driving to the bars with their warm, welcoming lights, sounds, and people and wonderful, body-strengthening food and soul-building drink; and of the times when he was isolated, in his “beautiful digs,” with its beautiful furnishings, “living in sin” (as an acquaintance once put it) “with the wall board.”
A woman lived at home with her parents, being the good, dutiful, but resentfully compliant daughter who drew a magic circle around herself, letting the family in, keeping a few friends whom she saw occasionally, and having an occasional blind date, but accepting no close intimates into her life. She mainly filled her days with impersonal interests such as collecting things and attending craft shows. While sometimes she complained about being lonely and isolated, at other times, she insisted that she was enjoying her life fully because she was living it exactly the way she believed she wanted to. When she tried “to fight the good fight attempting to relate,” she was only able to do so with difficulty and deficit. Thus she occasionally went to singles bars, mixers, and parties, only, once she got there, to function below par, standing off completely by herself or speaking only to the person she came in with. She might complain that she was dissatisfied with the narrowness of her life, but would then regularly add that however hard she tried to change her luck, she could never seem to do any better and truly “get lucky.”
She feared starting and maintaining intimate relationships because she was highly fearful of rejection. Partly this was because she was a perfectionist, who, when it came to relationships, failed to accept that any rejection was part of life’s give-and-take, and otherwise expected too much positivity in a world full of negativity. Partly it was because her self-esteem was extremely low so that she would anticipate rejections that might never arise and take those that actually occurred much too seriously—because for her, a rejection meant that her greatest fear had come true: that no one could ever love her because she was completely unlovable. Often even a mild rejection led to a catastrophic reaction, where she panicked, pulled back, gave up, and cried, “Never again.” A doctor once diagnosed her as having a depersonalization disorder. Fearing acceptance because it could only lead to rejection, when faced with the “danger,” as she saw it, of being embraced by other people and getting close to them, she would go into a trancelike state that reminded her of a rabbit freezing in the headlights of a car, so that her trance, meant to be protective, instead turned out to be self-destructive. For in her trance, she shrugged men off with a “yeah, sure,” put them off by acting silly and giggly, or drove them away by becoming preoccupied and remote—her mind wandering to other things, even (perversely) going from a present satisfactory contact with a real person to a future affair with a mysterious stranger. Particularly when introduced to someone she really liked, she became defensively hazy, actually fainted, or even called on one of her multiple personalities to save her—one of the alter egos she reverted to temporarily at times of danger—created by suppressing parts of her old personality, by borrowing new personality parts through identification with someone she admired, or by becoming once again like her old self: the rebel she had once been but was no longer. Only later, after she had eliminated any possibility of a serious involvement, did she come to her senses, wonder what she was thinking about at the time, and “kick herself” for allowing the one that got away to escape. Then she pressured herself to “go out and meet someone new,” only to start the entire pathological cycle once again.