The Tarnished White Knight

The tarnished white knight wants to be loved and appreciated. He seeks to compensate for, and repair, the ineffectual sense of self that he developed in childhood. When this white knight was a child, he may have teased or shamed his peers in order to disguise his self-contempt. When he is in a relationship in which he is adored and idealized, the tarnished white knight feels powerful and potent. He behaves in ways that disguise his vulnerability, fear of abandonment, and feelings of shame and inadequacy.

Seeing herself as sexually powerful and skillful is extremely important to the tarnished white knight. Glamorizing her partner and eroticizing their relationship enables her to glorify herself. Sometimes her need for validation is greater than her partner can provide, which frequently leads her to have affairs outside of her partnership.

The tarnished white knight often chooses partners who have some trait that, by ordinary standards, creates a tangible disparity between himself and his partner. At other times, he has an unrealistic or inflated sense of who his partner is or should be (that is, he exaggerates his partner's talents).

The tarnished white knight will go to great lengths to achieve admiration in an effort to heal her past. Unfortunately, this kind of healing rarely works, because the tarnished white knight has an emotional hole within herself that cannot contain whatever new love and admiration is given to her, thus leaving her perpetually needy and frustrated. The following case, a composite of many individuals, illustrates some of the ways this emotional damage plays out in the relationships of tarnished white knights.

Tom
Thirty-three-year-old Tom came for therapy after Nicole, his wife of four years, filed for divorce, stating that Tom was "too needy." Tom had heard this criticism from other women before, and he decided to seek help in understanding his partners' reactions to him.

Tom had an unspecified learning disability that had set him apart from his intellectual biochemist parents and his two high-achieving older brothers. When Tom was a child his father had spent countless hours drilling him on facts and concepts and then screaming at him when Tom could not absorb the lesson. Eventually, his father gave up, calling Tom "an embarrassment." Tom's mother had often humiliated him further by publicly criticizing his teachers or arranging for his special classes in an abrasive manner.

In middle school, Tom excelled in sports which gave him a high status among his fellow students and accolades from his older brothers. His parents, however, thought that sports were a waste of time. Because of Tom's skills as an athlete, he was accepted at a local college where he completed a degree in physical therapy. He then was hired at a clinic several hours away from his hometown. Tom joined the county's baseball and soccer teams, and quickly became a local hero.

Most of the women Tom dated were physical therapy patients at the clinic where he worked. Often his girlfriends were athletes and, when their injuries had healed, Tom wanted to attend their practices and provide additional coaching, which the women found controlling and stifling. His complaints, criticisms, and inability to let them lead their own lives eventually led to the dissolution of the relationship.

Tom met Nicole at a party. She had been in an accident that had left her with severe knee pain. They dated for six months and then married. Nicole, an administrative assistant at a local newspaper, was proud that her husband was such a stellar athlete, and she spoke to her editor about writing a weekly column on the local sports teams. The editor agreed, and Nicole's column became a hit.

Nicole 's new job required her presence at many games, and Tom began to resent the attention the other games demanded from her. As a result, he became overtly critical of her and made derogatory comments about her column. One day, Nicole showed up unexpectedly after one of Tom's games and found him kissing a fan. He told Nicole that this behavior was due to her lack of attention to him and her disregard for what he found important. After a number of quarrels about these issues, Nicole filed for divorce.

In childhood, Tom's learning disability, together with his parents' self-centered responses to that disability, had significantly contributed to Tom's sense of shame. His father's dismissal of him as an "embarrassment" and his mother's well-meaning but clumsy intrusions had confirmed Tom's feelings of inadequacy and taught him to blame others for his difficulties.

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Tom's tendency to have relationships with women needing physical therapy represented his wish to be in control, needed, and admired. But Nicole had her own agenda, which at times took precedence over Tom's. Tom's fragile sense of self, self-centeredness, and shame made his perception of being second in Nicole's life intolerable, and caused him to treat her in the same manner as his father had treated him-with criticism and humiliation.

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