Jackie told Tommy she liked the family aspect of the idea, Mike said it sounded interesting, “goodnights” all around, and that was that.
Two days later, Tommy called Mike at his successful seventy-five person travel agency. He’d gotten Mike’s number from the woman who introduced them, and he was following up on the “business discussion we started.” He wanted to have “just a brief meeting. I could stop by today. Ten minutes is all I need. I promise.” Rather than hurt his feelings, Mike agreed. “Two o’clock?” Two o’clock.
Mike was on a long-distance call at two o’clock, so Tommy was kept waiting a few minutes. He seemed a bit put out by this: “I thought we agreed to two o’clock.”
“Oh yeah, sorry, I’ve been working on a forty-person Africa excursion…” Why am I making excuses to this guy, Mike wondered. It was a good question. The ten minutes Tommy requested turned to twenty. He had put together some material on his idea and it was actually impressive—not so much the quality but the quantity; he had obviously put a good deal of effort into it.
Tommy said, “When we really clicked on this the other night, I got to thinking…” and then his drop-by visit became a formal proposal: He would take a leave of absence (from? Mike never did hear where Tommy worked) and he’d organize some father-son package tours to Yosemite. If it didn’t succeed, Mike would pay him nothing, and if it did succeed, Tommy would get a percentage.
When Mike told him he didn’t normally work with outside agents, Tommy said he understood: “I can join the team full time.” When Mike told him there wasn’t an opening, Tommy said, “Oh, I can start anyway, and then we’ll formalize it when something opens up.”
Persistent, Mike thought. Mark of those who succeed. Indeed, it was the mark of something, but not success. It was refusing to hear “no,” a clear signal of trouble in any context.
Forty minutes into the meeting: “Listen, Tommy, my best agent, Marlene, might be leaving in the next few months—she’s getting married—and if that happens, I’ll call you and we can re-visit the matter.”
Tommy was disappointed that there wasn’t a more concrete result but said he’d be in touch to explore ways to move “into the next inning.”
He called a week later and asked if Mike had made any decisions. (Decisions about what?) “Nothing’s really changed, Tommy. Marlene and her fiancé haven’t set a date yet,” and brush off, brush off.
Tommy ended with “Well, say hi to Jackie.” This call gave some clues to another feature of those who don’t let go: projecting onto others commitments that were not expressed and are not present.
The next day Marlene asked Mike a bit hesitantly if he had a friend named Tommy. He had called and was wondering about her marriage plans! He had asked if she had “even a ballpark idea” of when she’d be leaving because “Mike and I are trying to get to the next inning.”
Within five minutes, Mike had Tommy on the phone: “Listen, you’re a nice kid, I know you’re just excited about the business, but I have to be clear with you: If we ever want to pursue your idea, and IF it fits into our plans, I will call you. There’s no need to call me anymore, and I certainly don’t think you should have called Marlene. Understand?”
Tommy didn’t seem at all dejected. “Oh, I understand completely, sorry for the confusion. I just thought I should get a time frame from her so I’d be ready to come to work, that’s all, no big deal. I won’t bug her again.” It sounded as if he had gotten it until he added: “She said about eight weeks, so I’ll plan for that.”
“Um, well, listen, Tommy, don’t plan for anything. The travel business isn’t like that; you never know what might happen. I hope our paths cross sometime, and I wish you all the luck in the world, and thanks again for your suggestions.”
Finally, that was that. What a persistent guy, Mike thought, but I’m sure he got the message.
About three months later, Mike came back from lunch to find three messages from Tommy on his voice mail. Mr. Persistent. Before Mike got around to calling him back, Tommy was on the line again. He seemed agitated: “That was really kind of a surprise, Mike, and not a good surprise—more like a shock. When I called this morning to touch base, they told me Marlene had been gone for two weeks. Two weeks! We had an agreement, you know, so I was a little disappointed. I can’t believe we lost two valuable weeks. I’m very committed to making this idea work and I’ve put a lot more time into it, refining things. It’s really come a long way. I sure hope you haven’t hired anybody to replace Marlene.”
Mike felt bad for the guy because it obviously meant a lot to him. How to let him down easy? “Well, first of all, Marlene’s position is not filled yet (Why’d I say that!?), but, uh, that’s not the point. We didn’t have an agreement. We had a chat, really.”
“Well, maybe that’s what you think it was, but I’ve put my heart and soul into this thing. You know, I thought you’d have the kind of commitment it takes to stick with something, but maybe you don’t.”
An opening, Mike thought. “Maybe I don’t, Tommy, so let’s just agree to go our separate ways and chalk it up to experience. I’m sorry you went to so much trouble.”
Mike hung up.
The next day, Tommy called again, twice, but Mike didn’t return the calls. One of the messages said it was urgent, but what could be urgent with somebody you hardly know?
Tommy left five more messages that week, and Mike finally discussed it with his wife. “I don’t feel like I led him on, but obviously I must have said something or done something that gave him all these hopes. I don’t know what else to tell him and I can’t just not return his calls. I don’t want to get him angry.”
“He’s already angry,” Jackie said wisely. “He was angry the moment we didn’t become his best friends and go into business with him. I don’t think anything you can say will be heard by him the way you mean it to be.” Jackie, like most women, had much more experience than Mike in dealing with unwanted persistence. She knew that “maybe” is sometimes perceived as “definitely,” that “like” can be taken as “love,” and that people who don’t hear you don’t hear you. You get to the point that it doesn’t help to keep trying, in fact, it makes matters worse, because it encourages attachment when you are seeking detachment.
If Tommy could read a life-long partnership into almost nothing, then a response could be taken by him in who knows what way. Contact is fuel for the fire, and Tommy was someone who didn’t need much fuel.
“I’ll give it another week, and then if it doesn’t stop, I’ll call him back and lay it on the line.”
“But Mike, you did that,” Jackie reminded him. “You told him point-blank not to call you again. You said, ‘Let’s go our separate ways.’ That all seems pretty clear to me.”
Jackie was right. If you tell someone ten times that you don’t want to talk to him, you are talking to them—nine more times than you wanted to. If you call him back after he leaves twenty messages, you simply teach him that the cost of getting a call back is twenty messages.
For two weeks, there were no calls, and Mike was glad it was finally over. But then another message: “It’s urgent I speak with you immediately.” Mike felt that he really had to put a stop to this now. At each step, he was making predictions about how Tommy would respond, but he was doing it by applying his own standards for behavior. Mike reasoned that not calling back would be insulting but that somehow calling back and being insulting would make things better, and that’s what he decided to do:
“What is it with you? You flake! We aren’t going to be working together, period. Do you hear me? That should have been clear, but you don’t listen. I don’t want to talk to you about it anymore, okay?”
Tommy reacted in a way Mike hadn’t predicted. He said he was just calling to apologize because he didn’t want to burn his bridges behind him. “I still think we can hit a home run with this thing someday,” he added.
“No, Tommy, you should move on to something else. If I hear of any interesting opening
s, I’ll let you know. (Oh, god, why’d I say that?) But this will be our last call, okay? Can we just leave it at that?” Mike was asking, not telling.
Finally, finally, Mike thought he had gotten through to the guy. That night he told Jackie, “I called that guy back today, and it turns out all he wanted to do was apologize.”
Jackie said, “Good, and I hope that’s the last call you ever have with him.”
“Of course it’s the last call. He has apologized and it’s over.” Until a week later, when there was a Federal Express envelope from Tommy. It contained a note requesting that Mike sign an enclosed letter of reference, which Tommy said would help him at his bank.
Even though Mike had assured Jackie that he’d made his last call, he decided to respond to Tommy’s request. To Mike’s relief, he reached an answering machine and left this message: “I don’t feel comfortable signing the reference letter you sent, but I wish you the best of luck.”
People who refuse to let go often make small requests that appear reasonable, like Tommy’s letter of reference, though the real purpose of such requests is to cement attachment or gain new reasons for contact. Within a few hours, Tommy left a message for Mike: “I’m not surprised you didn’t have the courage to talk with me directly. You know, it would have taken less time to sign that letter than it did to leave me your condescending message. No wonder you’re in the travel business; everybody wants to get away from you. Please mail the unsigned letter back to me.” Unfortunately, Mike had thrown the letter away. Now Tommy had another issue to chew on.
The next day there was another message: “No need to call back, I just thought I’d let you know you are an asshole. I want that letter back!”
This was too much for Mike. He felt he had to take some real action now. It is at this point in these situations that a fascinating thing happens: The pursuer and the victim begin to actually have something in common: neither wants to let go. The pursuer is obsessed with getting a response and the victim becomes obsessed with making the harassment stop.
What the pursuer is really saying is “I will not allow you to ignore me.” He’ll push buttons until one provokes a reaction, and then as long as it works, he’ll keep pushing it. Guilt is usually first, then harassment, then insult. Each works for a while, and then doesn’t. When victims participate in this process, threats are not far behind.
But Mike wasn’t going to just sit around and do nothing. He called the person who had introduced them, told her the whole story, and asked for her help. “Maybe you can get through to him and get him to leave me alone.”
The next day Mike’s voice mail had three messages from Tommy, one of them left at two A.M.: “Now you’ve ruined one of my best friendships, asshole! I don’t know what lies you’re spreading about me, but I demand an apology, a written apology. You are on notice.”
Two days later, more messages, including one saying that Tommy was going to make a formal complaint, whatever that meant. Then a message saying, “I’m going to book twenty bogus trips with your agency every month. You won’t know what’s me and what isn’t. Then you’ll learn not to make promises you never intended to keep.”
Jackie convinced Mike to keep the voice mail messages but otherwise ignore them. The following week another message came in saying that if Mike would call and apologize, Tommy might accept that, “but we’re getting to the point that an apology won’t be good enough. I like Jackie, and I’m sorry for all the trouble your stubbornness is going to bring her.”
Mike and Jackie finally ended up in my office, playing the tapes of the voice mail messages. By this time, they had already been to the police twice. Officers had visited Tommy and warned him to stop, but he actually got worse after that. To understand the police inclination toward direct intervention, one must recognize that in all cultures of the world, the role of police is to control conduct. Police are the enforcement branch of our society, and when people misbehave, it is police we expect to make them stop. That’s usually fine, except in cases in which police contact actually encourages the very behavior it is meant to deter. When nothing else worked, the police told Mike to get a restraining order, but Jackie convinced him to wait until after they had discussed it with me.
Sitting on a couch in my office, Mike made it clear that he was near the end of his rope. He wanted me to “send some people over” to convince Tommy to cut it out (even though that hadn’t worked when their friend did it or when the police did it). He said he wanted me to “explain the facts of life to Tommy in no uncertain terms.”
I told Mike that all terms were uncertain to Tommy.
“But if he knows he can get into trouble,” Mike argued, “it’s logical for him to stop.”
“Tommy does not have a track record for being logical. He doesn’t speak the same language we do, and we can’t teach it to him with logic. If he were reasonable, he wouldn’t have pursued this behavior in the first place. There is no straight talk for crooked people.”
Mike argued more: “I don’t want this guy thinking he can get away with harassment.”
Jackie responded before I could: “If we can’t control what he does, we certainly can’t control what he thinks.”
I suggested, with Jackie’s quick agreement, that if Mike did not respond, Tommy would eventually turn his attention elsewhere. “That may take some time and some patience, and I know it isn’t easy, but efforts to change his mind or to change him are the opposite of what you want. You don’t want him improved—you want him removed. You want him out of your life. There is a rule we call “engage and enrage.” The more attachment you have—whether favorable or unfavorable—the more this will escalate. You see, we know a secret, and that is that you are never going to work with him or be friends with him or want anything to do with him. Since anything less than that is not going to satisfy him, we already know that part of the outcome. He is going to be left disappointed and angry, and he is going to need to deal with that. If you talk to him, what you say becomes the issue. The only way you can have your desired outcome right now is to have no contact. Only then will he begin to find other solutions to his problems, which you can’t help with anyway. As long as he gets a response from you, he is distracted from his life. If, however, you don’t return the calls, then each time he leaves a message, he gets a message: that you can resist his pursuit.”
“Yeah, but the guy never stops.”
Jackie interjected: “You haven’t tested ‘never’ yet, Mike. You haven’t even tried two weeks.”
She was right. I explained that every time Mike called Tommy back or showed any detectable reaction to his harassment, this engaged him. “With each contact, you buy another six weeks.” I explained that the same concepts apply with romantic pursuers who don’t let go, ex-boyfriends who don’t let go, fired employees who don’t let go, and all the other incarnations of don’t-let-go. I wanted Mike to know that though Tommy was annoying, he wasn’t unique.
I asked Mike what he thought Tommy might do next.
“I have no idea. That’s why I came to you.”
I waited.
“I guess he’ll threaten some more.” (An exactly accurate prediction from someone who a moment before had “no idea.”)
Mike faced a type of situation that initially offers two widely different management plans: (1) change the pursuer, or (2) change the way the pursuer’s conduct affects us. Under the first heading are such things as warnings, counter-threats, police interventions, and other strategies designed to control someone’s conduct. Under the second heading are such things as insulating ourselves from hazard or annoyance, evaluating the likelihood of violence, and monitoring new communications. Under the second plan, we limit the impact the situation is allowed to have by limiting our fear and anxiety. We also limit impact on the pursuer by not responding.
In this case, we agreed that my office would conduct a general background inquiry on Tommy, evaluate all the messages and information available thus far, and institute the following
management plan: Mike would get a new voice mail extension. My office would check Mike’s old voice mail every hour and forward to him all of his messages, except those from Tommy. We would review, evaluate, and keep each message left by Tommy. I assured Mike and Jackie: “Between where we are now and his becoming violent, there would be several detectable warning signs. If there is anything that gives us the slightest reason to believe he might escalate beyond phone calls, we will contact you immediately.”
What impact a harasser has is one of the few things a victim can control, and from that day forward, Tommy’s calls would have no impact whatsoever on Mike or Jackie.
In the end, Tommy continued to call for five more weeks. He left many messages, including threats that Mike would have found hard to resist responding to. Mike had predicted that Tommy would only stop if someone “made him stop,” but in fact, the opposite was true. He would only stop if nobody tried to make him stop.
This case could have been very different. Mike and Jackie might have gotten a restraining order, which is really the process of suing someone in civil court to leave you alone and stay away from you. Would Tommy have advanced or retreated? Who had more to lose: Tommy, or Mike and Jackie? Had Tommy reacted favorably the other times Mike tried to put a cost on his conduct (enlisting Tommy’s friend, sending the police)? What would a lawsuit have done to Tommy’s perceived justification?