First lady sets the record straight

[owner-smartmarriages]

from: smart marriages

This piece features Shirley Glass who presented on preventing infidelity 
at the July
Smart Marriages conference in both a keynote and workshops and who is at 
work on two books on
the topic.  -diane 
_________
 First lady just set the record straight 

Though some questioned Hillary Clinton's motives in speaking about her 
husband, a clinical psychologist sees truth in her words. 

Thursday, August 05, 1999

By Sally Kalson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Writer 

When Hillary Rodham Clinton said her husband's philandering stemmed from 
abuse during his childhood, she may have been looking to neutralize his 
behavior as a campaign issue. Or she may have been making a naked play 
for sympathy, casting herself as the wounded wife.

Either way, her statement in a recent magazine interview may have raised 
more questions than it answered.

Chief among them: Does this theory have any validity? 

She said her husband had been caught in a tug of war between his mother 
and grandmother, two women who disagreed over how the boy should be 
raised. That, she said, was the source of his "weakness." 

Critics have called the statements "pop psychology" and "psychobabble." 

But Shirley Glass, a clinical psychologist from Baltimore who has been 
researching infidelity for 25 years and treating couples in the grip of 
it, finds the theory plausible, although hardly an excuse for what the 
president did.

"You sometimes see in people who are unfaithful a childhood history of 
triangles," Glass said

"When adults do not have a united front, then the child has these 
conflicting loyalties. He feels he has to protect the adults from each 
other and learns to split his loyalty, to be careful about not carrying 
tales back and forth because that would only add fuel to the fire.

"You see this in a lot of divorce situations, where the child learns to 
please both parties and not displease either one. That can be re-enacted 
in an extramarital triangle, where the affair partner and the spouse have 
to be kept separate but satisfied."

But doesn't that imply that Bill Clinton was placing his wife and a White 
House intern on equal footing? And if so, why would he do such a thing?

"It's very interesting that the woman he married appears to be a very 
different type of person than his mother," Glass said. "When they were 
first married, it was a very intellectual kind of bond. Yet the women he 
has affairs with are more flirtatious and seductive, as his mother has 
been described.

"I don't know much about his grandmother," she added. "Maybe she was more 
serious, like Hillary." If so, it would replicate the triangle of his 
childhood. 

But even if all that were true, Glass noted, "In looking at childhood 
vulnerabilities, I wouldn't call them reasons" for his behavior. 

Both the president and his wife said as much yesterday. Responding to a 
storm of criticism that his wife was making excuses for him, the 
president made his first public statement on the matter:

"I don't believe that anybody could fairly read the article [in the 
upcoming issue of Talk magazine] and think that she was making any 
excuses for me," Clinton said. "I have not made any excuses for what was 
inexcusable, and neither has she, believe me."

Hillary Clinton said she did not mean to imply in the interview that his 
childhood problems were to blame for his infidelity.

"Everybody is responsible for their behavior and I am a very strong 
proponent and believer in personal responsibility, so I hope that people 
will take that message away from this," she said.

Some biographies of Bill Clinton have reported that Clinton's 
grandfather, whom he adored, was a philanderer. That, Glass said, could 
be a factor as well. 

"For men particularly, observing a respected male figure engaged in this 
kind of behavior can strongly influence their attitudes. It's not all 
about [a man satisfying his] unmet needs. Some of it has to do with 
attitudes and values.

"There's a transgenerational pattern here," she said, much as there was 
in the Kennedy family. President John F. Kennedy was a philanderer, much 
like his father. Yet the charge was never leveled against the president's 
brother, Robert. That would demonstrate while certain factors may 
influence behaviors, they do not preordain them. 

"Infidelity has multiple causes," Glass said.

A lot has been said about Bill Clinton's capacity to compartmentalize, to 
keep these parts of his life separate.

"He could go to work and run the country while other, very distressing 
things were going on. He could be a strong advocate for women and at the 
same time relate to some of them as sex objects."

Hillary Clinton's interview drew fire from critics impugning her motive. 
They said she was making a play for sympathy while campaigning for New 
York's U.S. Senate seat. 

Glass claims no inside knowledge on that score. But there's nothing 
unusual about talking about a spouse's infidelity, either.

"In a case like this, where there's been a history of repeated 
philandering, someone can be traumatized each time it happens or come to 
expect it as part of the other person's behavior. Then it's not 
traumatic. It's only distressing."

If a wife knows her husband had a problem, confronts him, and they agree 
to work on it together, then they're a team. 

Glass finds it significant that when Hillary Clinton attributed her 
husband's cheating to a root cause, it had nothing to do with her.

"She sees it as a weakness on his part, not an inadequacy on hers. So 
it's not as much a blow to her self-esteem. It's not about whether he 
loves her or they have a good marriage, it's about something that 
happened long before she knew him. 

"So if you want to know the payoff for her going public, I would say it 
addresses all the rumors that he does it because they have a terrible 
marriage.

"People on the outside look for reasons to believe that the same thing 
won't happen to them," Glass said. So they may have a tendency to blame 
Hillary for the affair, in effect saying "It must be her fault because 
she's not woman enough."

The reaction is similar to when someone has a heart attack, and people 
say it's because he smoked and was overweight. But when someone like the 
famous runner and author Jim Fixx has a heart attack, "it's like, Oh, my 
God, this can happen to anyone," she said. 

"You want to believe in a just world where bad things don't happen in 
good marriages," Glass said. "But they do." From Hillary Clinton's 
perspective, Glass said, "she was setting the record straight."







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