Читать книгу IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy - Mark B. Borg - Страница 10

Introduction Introduction

All the Wrong Reasons All the Wrong Reasons

People love for different reasons, some of which work better than others. We all have ideas about what love and loving are, but where do those ideas come from, and how do they lead or mislead us in choosing a partner? If we ask ourselves what we look for in a mate, we probably answer that we seek passion, empathy, novelty, and security. It sounds sensible and mature and might even be true. But over time, deep down and hidden from ourselves, many of us internalize concepts about love, learned from early childhood, that actually work against finding and cultivating satisfying relationships. Like termites infesting a beautiful old home, these ideas may actually have infiltrated our ways of loving so thoroughly that without realizing it, they undermine our desire for closeness and our ability to accept intimacy. This leads to relationships that can repeatedly leave us feeling disappointed, frustrated, and strangely alienated from those to whom we believe we are closest. Despite our conscious determination that “this time it’s going to be different,” we end up loving, once again, for all the wrong reasons.

Relationship, rather than being a forum for vulnerability, spontaneity, and freedom can, ironically, be used as a psychological defense. The term used to describe this deceptive trap is irrelationship. Irrelationship unconsciously creates false connections to keep others from getting too close, protecting us from the emotional messiness as well as the rewards of intimacy that are part of real relationships. In irrelationship, give and take is perceived as threatening and connections with others are unsatisfying. Expectations and demands are never met because neither party in irrelationship is sufficiently openhearted to be able to receive or reveal their true needs or desires. In this stifling setup, mutually healthy and loving relationships cannot develop.

In their years of clinical practice, the authors have repeatedly encountered patients with histories of tightly controlled, superficial relationships driven by anxiety and fear dating from early childhood. This anxiety was spawned by a childhood environment in which the child’s basic need for security was not adequately addressed by caregivers—usually the parents—who themselves were suffering from long-term, negative emotional states. These negative emotional states resulted in neglect of the child’s needs, prompting the child to unconsciously attempt to stabilize the care environment, usually by trying to make the caregiver feel better, so that the child felt more secure. Therefore, irrelationship is a relational maladaptation. It’s not an illness, syndrome, or pathology but rather a dynamic that the child and parent construct together to circumvent the vulnerability associated with intimacy.

The recovery tools found in this book illuminate the origins and pattern of irrelationship and provide a technique for disempowering it and transforming the individual’s isolation into the ability to form genuine, open, and intimate relationships. In addition, the book provides insight into physiological mechanisms in the brain related to the irrelationship pattern and how those patterns can be altered, creating space and grounding for healthy patterns of relating.

The Birth of Irrelationship

Our first encounters with the world (that is to say, with our parents or caregivers), along with inborn predispositions such as genetic and epigenetic factors,¹ mold our early expectations of relationship. Early childhood survival mechanisms and traumas ultimately shape how we approach every relationship thereafter. These interactions actually become hardwired into how our brain processes information about connecting with other people. Imaging of attachment-related differences in a child’s brain, if done, would likely reveal distinct patterns of activity as a result of different dynamics in the parent-child connection. A child whose mother wants constant attention is likely to come to a different understanding of love than a child whose mother is comfortable being on the sidelines. A child whose every impulse and whim are catered to will be wired to understand love differently than the child who learned to do all of the catering and caregiving on his or her own. Some parents want to control everything their children do, while others leave their children alone so much that they have to make some types of decisions at an inappropriately young age. Whatever the case, children always respond to their parents’ patterns of relating. They exercise little or no conscious choice in this adaptation because they are totally dependent on their parents for survival. They simply do what they need to do to feel safe.

We quickly learn our parents’ relational rules; they are so much a part of our environment that unless the rules are called to our attention, we seldom become aware of them. Some rules—like never asking for anything or always having to feel grateful—may leave us feeling isolated or empty, but we follow them for the sake of emotional safety and to ensure the fulfillment of basic needs. Unwittingly, we shape ourselves to the roles parents assign us and continue acting in these roles in future adult relationships. We call these patterns our song-and-dance routines. Very early in life, we silently agreed to take care of our parents by following their rules so they would take care of us. If our caregiver was depressed, anxious, or unhappy we did what we could to make him or her feel better. This enmeshed caretaking pattern (i.e., irrelationship) quietly became the defining dynamic of how we related to others, ultimately preventing true connection and intimacy.

A Little Attachment Theory Goes a Long Way

While high-functioning people may appear emotionally sturdy and secure with themselves and others, in reality, the effects of irrelationship have so locked down their emotions that all they have achieved is a sustained effort to conceal an insecure attachment style, a term used by psychoanalysts and researchers to describe categorical patterns of how people relate in intimate settings. Attachment theory correlates adult-relatedness with developmental experiences with primary caregivers, describing various attachment styles.² The façade created by people affected by irrelationship often proves to be an overcompensation intended to deflect attention—theirs and others’—from anxiety they’ve suffered all their lives as a result of ineffective parental caregiving. As one might expect, the façades created by irrelationship are usually exposed for what they are and lead to concrete problems that necessitate more effectively addressing the underlying anxiety.

According to attachment theory, we learn how to relate to the world based on the contact we had with our closest caregivers—usually our parents—when we were very small. We bring how we related with them into future relationships so that our manner of relating becomes a product of how our caregivers related with us, i.e., their own attachment style, which developed when they were young in relation to their caregivers. The greater the demand for intimacy in adult relationships, the more crucial the operation of our attachment style becomes, depending on how intensely and in what ways our early attachments resonate with adult situations.

Attachment styles are generally classified as either secure or insecure (i.e., avoidant or anxious), depending on the quality of caregiving that occurred between child and caregiver; the innate factors with which the child is born; and the fit between the child and the caregiver’s attachment styles.³ People with a secure attachment style develop an inner base early in life that allows them to remain essentially grounded during emotional disruptions or even during severe life crises. They’re able to allow themselves to feel emotions and upsets without becoming deeply disturbed and resume equilibrium relatively quickly.

In contrast, the person with insecure attachment style will often find the normal ups and downs of life so anxiety provoking that he or she can manage them only by either dismissing or avoiding them. People with insecure attachment style fall into a few subtypes, including those who avoid or dismiss connection, those who become anxious and preoccupied about connection, and those who have a disorganized mixture of attachment styles.

We can easily see how attachments can snowball rapidly. For example, if a person with an avoidant way of dealing with intimacy gets involved with someone who is anxious and preoccupied, the avoidant person will retreat from the other’s advances, evoking a worried pursuit from the anxious person. This makes the avoidant person withdraw even more, setting in motion a cycle that continues until a dramatic resolution—usually unpleasant—occurs. Similarly, a deadening of relationship can develop if two avoidant people meet but leave long-standing dissatisfactions unresolved for extended intervals. In such situations, disappointment and resentment give way to chronic deprivation and suppressed contempt. If communication fails to improve, deep feelings of sadness and grief are added to the mix.

Since one can’t necessarily pick and choose the parts of the emotional spectrum to be kept at a distance, the blocking of distressing emotions frequently results in an inability to tolerate any type of spontaneous emotional experience, positive or negative. This includes the ability to experience empathy, live compassionately, and fall in love.

Is our experience with early caregivers the last word? Are people living in irrelationship doomed to a life of keeping others at a safe distance and never sharing an intimate relationship?

That’s not what attachment theory and the authors’ clinical practice seem to indicate. An earned secure attachment is entirely attainable if we’re willing to look at our history and do the work of clearing away our confusion about others and ourselves, which allows us to learn how to think more deeply about our emotions and others’ feelings and needs. Handling so many moving parts at once is difficult at first and can be an anxiety-triggering deterrent, making irrelationship seem like a more attractive option. But people who make the ongoing choice to address relationship difficulties do make progress that they find gratifying on multiple levels.

Our Song-and-Dance Routines

Why is irrelationship so difficult to identify, let alone repair? Why can’t being kinder, more generous, or more forgiving eliminate the distress? The answer is that irrelationship reinforces childhood patterns, our original song-and-dance routines, in which we innocently tried to defuse perceived crises by making our caregiver feel better by being good—showing appreciation, being funny or entertaining, showing how smart we were, being as helpful as we could, or simply vanishing from our caregiver’s sightline—in short, by applying whatever behavior we could to the crisis to make our caregiver feel better and ourselves feel safer. And it seemed to work; it resulted in a greater sense of peace, or at least less anxiety, allowing us to feel more secure.

Performing jokes for the caregiver may have made things feel lighter, but that isn’t the whole story: the child’s performance behavior released brain chemicals that gave the child profound feelings of safety and security. After habitual repetition, the song-and-dance routine became the child’s signature pattern of relating to others, both behaviorally and on the level of biological brain activity, which is carried into adulthood. Any challenge to this pattern would alarm the child because a change risks short-circuiting the feeling of safety the child worked so hard to create, leading back to the fear and anxiety he or she sought to escape.

A Little Brain Science Also Goes a Long Way

Our ways of relating are more than habits of thinking. Experiences with our first caregivers literally become translated into brain activity that molds the brain’s physical structure, and intertwined patterns of network activity reveal themselves in our bodies’ physiologic functions and in our behavior. A child will figure out that behaving in a particular way will lead to feeling better. The physical reality underlying this “feel better” behavior the child has learned to deploy triggers recurring patterns of chemical reactions in the brain that are, in fact, the physiologic basis of feeling better. When negative consequences have impressed upon the child the cost of infractions against the rules, the child feels worse, deliberately shaping his or her behavior to agree with parents’ expectations. To address the ongoing need for security, the child will enact these roles in virtually all relationships, so that behaving that certain way becomes addictive. An individual can live a lifetime unconscious of how invested he or she has become in these ways of behaving.

Of course unsatisfying adult relationships are the key to recognizing something isn’t right. Identifying that one is in irrelationship then becomes the ticket out. In would-be intimate relationships, two people with long-standing anxiety and complementary needs for security will jointly meld into irrelationship and will create a mutual song-and-dance routine. Their routine becomes a technique for managing their insecurity while at the same time taking the place of intimacy. The song-and-dance routine is a ruse that both parties have tacitly agreed to maintain in order to prevent distress.

The Key Players: The Performer and the Audience

There are two key players or roles in the song-and-dance routine that seem to promise connection but actually create a false sense of partnership or intimacy. One is the Performer, the overt, apparent caretaker. This person tries to be of service but is often motivated by a need to fix someone out of unconscious reasons. The other is the Audience, the individual who subtly takes care of the Performer by needing to be taken care of and craves to be cured or saved but ultimately doesn’t want to be fixed at all. The results of this odd partnering is a form of mutual deception. The so-called connection is a form of mutual deception and sadly eliminates any possibility of honest communication or human relatedness. The results are usually that both Performer and Audience feel isolated, devalued, misunderstood, and angry.

The following is a story that spotlights one of the infinite versions of the irrelationship trap. Note that John plays the Performer, and Greta is the Audience.

John and Greta’s Irrelationship Storyline

Greta was almost absurdly careful to tell her husband John how much credit he deserved for the trouble he took to make their lives enjoyable. She would gush with pride to John and their friends about his amazing creativity in planning outings. She would go on and on about how carefully he put together guest lists, confirmed reservations, and made sure no detail was overlooked. However, Greta made the mistake of offering to help John with planning their next vacation. John immediately exploded with anger and then caved into hurt and disappointment. He even accused Greta of not appreciating or loving him anymore. In a flash, John revealed a side of himself that Greta had never encountered.

Greta immediately and apologetically took back her suggestion, reassuring John of how much she appreciated everything he did. Greta had gotten a taste of what the consequences would be if she didn’t stick with their tightly scripted song-and-dance routine. Although John’s burst of anger left Greta feeling frightened and unhappy, she hurriedly retreated back into the carefully, yet unconsciously, constructed status quo of being the Audience, assuring John, the Performer, that nothing had changed. She hoped all of the anxiety would disappear and things would work again.

When sensing danger, the Performer becomes so depressed, anxious, or angry that the Audience fears he or she won’t be taken care of, prompting the Audience to fall back into the tried and true song-and-dance routine, hoping to bring the Performer back to the reliable script of irrelationship. Greta’s brief attempt to flip their roles provoked such an agitated response from John that she quickly retreated to her Audience role to restore calm. However, the experience left her feeling uneasy, isolated, and depressed. Nevertheless, she did what was necessary to allow John to feel secure again. The brain chemistry that allowed Greta and John to feel secure with one another, although temporarily disturbed, was restored.

John’s reaction and the unease Greta felt afterward are clues to the fragility and costliness of the security binding them. This brief disturbance also illustrates the fragility of a relationship that requires an imitation of love that cannot accommodate spontaneity or fluidity. The willingness to accept this type of tenuous agreement mirrors the delicacy of the early childhood bargain John and Greta made with their parents to manage the uncertainty of the environment into which they were born. The tragic outcome of this pattern is that we accept a false kind of love—love that has no flow, no reciprocity, and no room for empathy or compassion. Equally unsettling, we learn that being taken care of is shaky and unreliable and even expect what we call loving relationships to be a series of crises.

People compelled to seek this kind of delicate relationship have an uncanny ability to find their complementary counterpart. When a prospect is identified, hopeful conversations follow as they assess each other’s commitment to a carefully defined but static irrelationship role. Ironically, their excitement builds if each person starts to feel that the other can be depended upon to avoid the cardinal sin of looking for mutuality, spontaneity, intimacy, and emotional investment.

So when we seek romantic relationships as adults, our childhood survival routines can cause serious trouble. As Greta learned in her transaction with John, one party is expected to take what the other gives; one is to be the leader while the other accepts the role of follower. One performs and the other must applaud. One saves and the other allows herself to be saved.⁴ Love, mutual and intimate, cannot grow under these conditions.

But, what happens if either partner begins to sense a need for something different? What if one individual starts to crave intimacy and reciprocity? Unfortunately, the carefully constructed roles defined by irrelationship don’t permit flexible responses. Until the individual (or couple) can grasp how his or her relationship choices are shaped by childhood experience, he or she will remain stuck in a pattern that doesn’t support any possibility of trust or genuine love.

The Way Out

Most of us crave authentic, fulfilling relationships free of gratuitous tumult and pain. But to build these relationships requires more than desire; we need a map to help us understand the processes, experiences, and techniques that can free us from the way we’ve always done things and guide us toward recovery and transformative change. This book presents a clear and engaging examination, diagnosis, and prescription for recovery called the DREAM Sequence. Users of the DREAM Sequence become able to see that the problem is not so much choosing the wrong person over and over again but dancing the same dance over and over again with whomever is willing to be a partner. The DREAM Sequence helps us understand why we are invested in repeating the same routine and gives us techniques for learning how to make different choices.

The following questions address some of the basic concepts you’ll explore as you move through the book and represent an overview of the irrelationship-related issues tackled by the DREAM Sequence. These concepts are illustrated in depth with stories, techniques, and experiential processes to help you identify how you’re affected by irrelationship and build a solid foundation of awareness and knowledge for change and recovery.

• What does my song-and-dance routine look like and do for me?

• Am I the Performer or the Audience in my routine?

• Why did I originally create this song-and-dance routine, and what benefits did I get from it?

• How did my childhood song-and-dance routine set me up for unsatisfying adult relationships?

• What would be the risks and benefits of abandoning my song-and-dance routine?

The DREAM Sequence helps you grow beyond your contrived song-and-dance routine into free, loving relationships. You’ll uncover your irrelationship storyline and the role you play in your song-and-dance routine. This will help you understand:

• why being with you partner feels like a struggle;

• why you often feel as if you’re on the outside looking in; and

• why this seems to happen every time you get involved with someone.

Another discovery you’ll make is that irrelationship distances you not only from anxiety but also from all of your feelings, which makes you unable to enjoy most of the good things relationships have to offer. But the DREAM Sequence will show you that what you’ve always done doesn’t have to be the last word.