Dylan Farrow, Woody Allen, and conflicts with no resolution
I think it’s fair to say we all read the letters. First
there was daughter Dylan’s painful missive,
the anguished confession of a 28-year-old young woman still dealing with
unspeakable (and yet spoken) trauma she allegedly endured at the hands of a man
she should have been able to trust most—her father. Who happens to be
famous. Extremely famous.
And then Woody Allen’s response—a
self-serving, selfish missive also filled with too much information, his active
hatred of Dylan’s mother Mia Farrow still evident in every line of indignant
prose (See Gawker for the most recent missile fired in this ugly skirmish).
I’m not sure why either of them decided to air this painful
trauma in public. I’m even less sure why Nicholas Kristof and the New York
Times decided this was news fit to print.
It sure got our attention. And plenty of people weighed in,
supporting Dylan, supporting Allen, resurrecting the painful divorce that made
scorching headlines so many years ago.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have been guilty of
writing letters like Allen’s in the past. They have now been hidden from this
blog, where some of them were originally published, because I have realized
that I was wrong to write what I did and to share it in a public space, even
though I thought I was doing so anonymously, and even though I felt justified
at the time. My divorce six years ago was unexpected, traumatic, and continues
to be high conflict, much like Mia Farrow’s and Woody Allen’s—and the people
hurt the worst in those kinds of divorces are the children. That is undoubtedly
true in Farrow and Allen’s case, and it is undoubtedly true in mine.
I learned over several years to disengage by honestly assessing my own behavior
and realizing that I was wrong to air the gory details in public. This does not
mean that I agree with my ex-husband—we disagree about everything from the
reason for our divorce to what kind of socks our children should wear (I wish I
was exaggerating, but I am not). But the fact that we disagree does not mean he
is an evil person—far from it. We are just really, really not supposed to be
together.
I’m now taking a Conflict Management course in my Ed.D.
program, and I’m finally starting to understand why conflagrations like these
can continue unabated for so many years, and why they can flare up so viciously,
even years after the initial event.
When everyone is still a victim, there can be no resolution.
When narratives continue to compete, there can be no happy
ending.
In these situations, I sometimes doubt whether the
participants are looking for resolution at all. They actually seem to want the
conflict—and the drama—to continue. Commentators on the Dylan Farrow/Woody
Allen road accident wanted to know who was right, and what was true. I would
argue that this is not a useful question. The real question to ask is, “How do
we move past this?”
One thing that definitely doesn’t help is rehashing the
whole painful thing in public. I’m speaking more to Allen here than to Dylan.
Sharing her story may serve the greater good of helping others to confront the
pain of their own childhood abuse, to speak their truth, and to move past it
toward healing. But ultimately, now that Dylan is an adult, she is responsible
for her own happiness, no matter how traumatic her childhood was. I know this
statement seems harsh. But plenty of people move past horrific victimhood to
embrace happy, productive lives as adults. I hope this becomes Dylan’s story.
And I hope we never have to read any of it in the New York
Times again.
