Читать книгу IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy - Mark B. Borg - Страница 13
ОглавлениеAnatomy of Irrelationship Anatomy of Irrelationship
Consider the following relationship descriptors. Do any of them resonate with you?
• Do you think you can save, fix, or rescue the person you are drawn to?
• Do you hope that person can fix, save, or rescue you?
• Is your idea of love mostly about taking care of your partner?
• Is your idea of love mostly about your partner taking care of you?
• Do you feel a lack of empathy or reciprocity when you are busy doing things for the person you love?
• When you show you really care, do you feel drained, used, or depleted instead of invigorated?
• Does your relationship often feel like more work than play and more unspoken discomfort than joy?
• Do you feel your relationship is ultimately not enriching your life?
If you answer yes to any of the above questions, it suggests that you may build relationships for all the wrong reasons. But stay with us: you are building awareness, which is an important first step. Also, don’t blame yourself for this kind of behavior; this is a pattern you’ve come by honestly. The fact is, our culture supports one-directional caregiving. It is considered virtuous and makes us so-called good family members, good neighbors, and good citizens. But chronic, one-directional caretaking is actually a dysfunctional pattern learned as infants or small children in the earliest months and years of our relationship with our primary caregiver, usually a parent.1 In this pattern, we sought to elicit behaviors we needed in order for us to feel safe. These formative transactions were the beginning of a life-long pattern of interactions whose purpose was, and continues into adulthood to be, to manage relationships so that they sustain feelings of safety above all else. Irrelationship is a straitjacket built for two that does not allow a flow of spontaneous loving, but it does protect, at least superficially, against feelings of anxiety. Irrelationship is the ultimate defense. And the attempt to feel safe and anxiety free can trump any kind of authentic loving. However, no matter how much we want to love, over time, the underlying hidden anxiety pushes us to repeat the pattern chronically, so that we never learn how to form real relationships of genuine intimacy and reciprocity. Instead, we live in isolation, even though our lives appear to be actively engaged with others whom we regard as our closest associates, friends, partners, or spouses.
Yet, isolation has a pay-off; it allows us to maintain a safe, non-vulnerable artificiality at the level of emotional investment, free of the risks that come with intimacy. However, the space in which we do interact with others must be filled with something, and that something is called a song-and-dance routine. Briefly, the routine is a set of behaviors, which can be active, passive, or interactive, featuring two people who secretly agree to displace the possibility of authentic interaction between each other. This dynamic of routines—usually designed to resemble caregiving—is, in fact, the opposite of being loving, caring, or giving. By refusing to accept what others around us have to offer, we tend to devalue them. This is an essential marker of irrelationship.
Who Is Who?—The Performer and the Audience
The components of a song-and-dance routine are choreographed to sustain irrelationship. The Performer overtly delivers care to the Audience, while the Audience covertly administers care to the Performer by pretending the Performer’s part in the routine is desirable and helpful. Thus the Performer sees him- or herself as the giver who administers care to the Audience, while the Audience, appearing to accept what the Performer offers, appears to be the receiver of the Performer’s ministrations. The behavior of both, however, is deliberately constructed to block the possibility of a genuine, reciprocal connection. The missing connection prevents the development of shared experience enjoyed in authentic relationships. Each participant’s role devalues the other by refusing to validate anything genuine he or she has to offer. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the irrelationship is that each party experiences isolation and a vague dissatisfaction with the other. Both know on some level that something essential is missing.
Irrelationship as a Survival Tool
Irrelationship is not the result of a failure on the part of either party. In fact, irrelationship is better described as a survival technique that gradually developed in a child who continues to use it in later years. As small children, we experienced the world as unstable, frightening, and sometimes hostile. This experience of instability, however, was actually generated by our caregiver’s emotional state—depression, anxiety, unhappiness, or other negative emotion—and made him or her unable to provide conditions that made us feel secure. To manage our anxiety, we used the skills at our disposal to create a song-and-dance routine that we hoped would make our caregiver feel better so that we could feel safe. Flipping roles, we became our parent’s caregiver: Julie brought ice packs to her mother in bed or massaged her feet; Liam tried to be funny and make his mom laugh; and Stanley listened quietly while his father complained about his boss. We did whatever our parents’ cues told us to do, hoping it would change their mood. When it worked—when their emotional state improved—we felt safe again and could relax.
As can be seen from these examples, the child’s routine may be that of either Performer or Audience, but sometimes it may include elements of both. In any case, the child is providing care that enables the ineffective caregiver to believe he or she is a good parent.
Having learned as children that our song-and-dance routines worked, we took them forward through our lives and used them whenever necessary to make those around us feel better and ourselves safer. Relating to others in this way is a project doomed from the start; it sets up situations that allow only emotionally guarded interactions that are neither open nor spontaneous and leave no space for sharing, closeness, or intimacy. In fact, the routines stifle awareness of actual human needs and prevent our learning how to meet those needs. Ironically, these routines establish and sustain a defensive dynamic—irrelationship—between parties that does not address the deep, perceived lack of safety, even in close relationships. Whether we’re acting as Performer or as Audience, neither touches the other meaningfully to relieve that unease.
Part of the deception of irrelationship is that it feels right, which is a clue that something is badly wrong. It’s comfortable because it’s numbing, although it looks real from the outside. The participants have unconsciously, but deliberately, chosen to protect themselves from participating meaningfully in the lives of one another. Therefore, use of irrelationship results in a “no winner, no loser” situation.
In abusive relationships, one participant exercises more power than the other, resulting in a winner and a loser. In couples affected by irrelationship, neither participant wins; both participants’ anxiety keeps them emotionally locked down. The joint investment in this mechanism is called brainlock. Brainlock is an emotional logjam in which nothing gets in and nothing gets out. Both participants selectively ignore the same things together. Most significantly, they ignore the fact that they are using a false connection with one another to defend against intimacy. It can be compared to two people who bury a treasure and then forget where they’ve buried it.
This doesn’t mean that when Performer and Audience interact nothing is going on between them. Their defensive constructs are interlocked so firmly that when they go into recovery, their most challenging task is to step back far enough from their anxiety to allow them to see that the song-and-dance routine they’ve created has been a stand-in for genuine caring behavior.
Sam and Claire’s Irrelationship Storyline
Two wannabe stars, Sam and Claire, met one another under the bright lights of New York’s Broadway theater world. Each of them sought to escape the unhappiness of failed former relationships. They were immediately attracted to one another, sharing a sense of familiarity and instant comfort. They joined their lives to love and support each other as they made their way toward stardom—at least that is what they thought. And it partly worked.
Sam succeeded in making it on Broadway. Claire’s less dramatic success in Off-Off-Broadway productions meant keeping her day job while continuing to struggle on the periphery of show business. After a short time, they began to question their love. They became uneasy with one another and began to act out an obvious song-and-dance routine. The question was, who would be the Performer, the overt caretaker, and who would be the receptive Audience? Before long, the exciting promise of healthy connection slid into the abyss of irrelationship. And because they were actors, their song-and-dance roles became exaggerated. Eventually, they sought couples’ therapy.
From the first session, Sam came on larger-than-life as the Performer. He ranted and raved, rarely sitting down. He expected Claire to play the role of adoring Audience, watching him strut on stage, which was their silently-agreed upon script. Sam bragged about how much he did at home and at work—paying the bills, organizing activities and, generally, catering to Claire’s every need. In therapy, he made it obvious that he believed all the heavy lifting was necessary to keep their relationship on track.
Claire seemed to be an unappreciative and even disrespectful Audience. She mutely, but ostentatiously, knitted during session while Sam congratulated himself. When Claire remained quiet during Sam’s pauses for breath, he’d shout accusingly, “You just don’t get it, Claire!” and redoubled his performance, finally shouting, “What about me?” Claire, still knitting, would admit that Sam took care of her and thanked him for it, but she remained withholding and passive.
What was going on? Clearly, Sam was driven, but, just as clearly, Claire never affirmed that Sam’s actions contributed anything of value to their shared life. This continued for some months, until one day their therapist told Sam, “You need to stop being so selfish.”
Sam was aghast—speechless. The therapist continued, “Yes, it’s true—you give and give and give until it hurts you and everyone around you. You give with a vengeance without allowing anyone else to contribute—to do anything that has an impact on you. And the message is simple: No one is allowed to believe that anything he or she has to offer is worthwhile—especially Claire. And it’s all because down deep you believe that if you don’t hold things together, the whole world will fall apart. Living this way has put you in an isolation that neither Claire nor anyone else can penetrate.”
Sam was caught red-handed in his song-and-dance routine. Fortunately for both him and Claire, the road to recovery began that moment. Sam was so burned out that he was ready to accept what he was told. He could see and admit to both controlling and suppressing all Claire’s attempts to care for him. This enabled him to take the first steps in the frightening but rewarding process of creating a relationship in which he and Claire could trade places, take risks, and learn to care for each other.
Performers are always on the lookout for a work-in-progress to focus on—preferably indefinitely. For Sam, Claire’s behavior and passivity was like job security. Claire’s non-stellar theater career was full of frustration and disappointment that Sam could fix without having to examine what was going on between them. Sam’s enthusiasm for caretaking blocked his self-awareness, giving Claire opportunity to enjoy the passive-aggressive pleasure of playing victim while denying Sam the gratification of successfully fixing her. This careful arrangement satisfied their need to ignore how emotionally distanced they had become from one another.
At first, all Claire had to do was passively act as if her partner’s routines were helping her. Although their song-and-dance routines were strikingly dissimilar, they shared a major trait: both were highly invested in fixing, saving, or rescuing someone important to them.
Sam first learned his routine as a child when he devised a series of performances for his depressed mother to make her feel better. Conversely, Claire’s routine was to act as if her detached mother and father gave good performances as parents. Both performances were designed to relieve household anxiety. Unfortunately, neither of their caregiving compulsions ended when they left home. Instead, they took their unconscious need to be helpers with them, chronically repeating the pattern, unaware of being driven by a need to keep the world from falling apart.
Once Sam and Claire shared their storylines with one another, they felt as if they had shared intimacy for the first time in years. They began to see how they administered the same treatment to one another that they had used on their parents.
Although the story of Sam and Claire may seem extreme, partnerships like this are common. With some couples, when conflict develops, one partner becomes increasingly convinced he or she is the injured party while the other feigns passive innocence. Angry but unopposed, the active partner begins to make a noose for the passive partner but at the last minute hangs him- or herself after being rejected by the other as a failed caregiver. The Audience’s investment is so deep that he or she practically kicks the chair from under the gallows and sits back to enjoy the spectacle.
Claire maintained her safety by letting Sam be her hero-rescuer who would take responsibility for everything in their relationship. That way, no matter how messy things got, fingers could be pointed only in his direction.
But Claire’s posture was no less isolating than Sam’s fix-it routine. When at length she became unwilling to pretend that Sam’s performing did her any good, the show devolved into dreary melodrama. Claire wasn’t aggressive: she merely refused to invest herself or to validate Sam. Consequently, the anxiety their song-and-dance routine was designed to circumvent surfaced with a vengeance. By the time they started therapy, Sam saw himself as an almost abusively unappreciated caregiver, while Claire had completely lost interest.
As their therapy went forward, Sam and Claire unfolded the backstory of their fear of intimacy. As they did so, they were surprised to find themselves recovering the excitement of their early relationship. Piece by piece, they disassembled the anxiety that caused them to invest in irrelationship and began building a life of genuine intimacy.
Where Have You Been All My Life?
Irrelationship brings people together in interlocking, scripted roles for all the wrong reasons. Primed by histories created by irrelationship, they learn to identify one another by unconscious pattern recognition and set themselves up to fall almost instantly into a song-and-dance routine. Instead of a measured but exciting courtship, the two partners meet, fall for one another, and “mate for life” in the space of a few days. Early sexual contact elevates bonding hormones for both parties—either driving them apart, resulting in a series of one-night stands, or abandoning or cementing the relationship prematurely. Before either can stop, consider, and perhaps, separate, they jump in with both feet almost instantly. This causes the couple to miss red flags seen by others—or perhaps by themselves. What they’re attracted to in each other—commitment to the song-and-dance routine—ultimately becomes their undoing. Burdened with unrecognized or unnamed dissatisfactions, resentment builds. Esteem is undermined by refusal to allow mutual contribution. Intimacy is thwarted, making the entire construct liable to collapse under the right stressors.
Irrelationship becomes effective between persons who, even before they meet, agree to be “exactly who you need me to be” provided “you will do the same for me.” But how do they find one another in the first place? Many people complain that they experience the same relationship disappointments repeatedly, finding a partner who will act out the sought-after role-play until it burns out. This addictive pattern continues to rule their choices until they become able to identify it and the part they play in it.
Across a Crowded Room
As you read this scenario, look for anything that might look or sound like your own experience.
I see you across the room. I sense, I feel, in my heart some special unfathomable, for-my-eyes-only, X-factor that distinguishes you from all others. Chemistry. I’m already forgetting myself. I’ve promised myself I would not meet someone this way again after what happened the last twelve times. But I want you. I don’t know why, but I am driven toward you. I need to know who you are and find out if you, at last, are who I’ve been looking for.
In irrelationship terms, this scenario means, “I am drawn to you because you have that secret neediness that I was born to fix, just as I have the type of neediness that draws you to me. Somehow, on an intuitive level, my brain knows. That small child’s habit learned long ago has hijacked my will, leading me eagerly to my doom like the Siren’s song, enticing sailors toward the rocks.”
And so, I feel this desire as I come toward you. I reach out and introduce myself. And, while I feel that I want you, that I must have you, I also sense an unbridgeable gap between us.
Research into gambling behavior has shown that near misses increase the drive behind a gambler’s compulsive, reward-seeking behavior.2 This happens via brain mechanisms that measure external situations and produce activation in the ventral tegmental areas of the brain and other areas related to pleasure and decision-making.3 For example, when playing slot machines, four out of five cherries makes a person more likely to continue playing than hitting only three out of five cherries, thinking, Damn it. I almost got it that time! Just one more round! Just one!
Psychologically, almost getting it makes people think—incorrectly—that they have a better chance of getting what they want if they keep trying because, after all, last time they “almost got it.” In the emotional and reward-based reactions, they lose touch with the ability to see that the chance of winning has nothing to do with the previous outcome. Similarly, connections driven by irrelationship delude us into believing that a near miss improves the likelihood that “next time will be different.”
I reach for you—and you slip through my fingers (even though you may be playing out a similar scenario in your head). My heart aches for you. I ask you for a date. Even if you say yes, our union is impossible—it has to be. I reach and I reach for you. My desire is unbearable—and the game itself, while killing me, is also thrilling me. But if I get what I think I want, if I succeed, my desire will drain away. I must have you. I must fix you or you must fix me—and, no matter how much you try to convince me that you are mine, I somehow don’t catch you. And anyway, what would be the fun in actually catching you? No, I want this cat-and-mouse game to go on indefinitely. 4
The entire dynamic for this scenario is fueled by the notion of drive rather than mere desire. Something drives the irrelationship process: the need for security, the need to believe that we live in a safe world, a world that is not falling apart. Deep within the anxiety driving irrelationship is the terror that we will not be able to maintain safety unless we keep the world stable. And this drive will continue indefinitely.
I’m drawn to you—driven to repeat the irrelationship pattern with you. Both of us are possessed by the same need that took shape when we were children. We’re conspirators dancing a routine that will protect us from the dangers of the world—especially the threat of intimacy and unbridled feelings that each represents to the other. So instead of risking reality, let’s dance—all night if we have to.
Rocking the Boat
Do you find contact with loved ones and others to be enriching, flowing, and vital? Or, are you troubled by a vague feeling that something isn’t right about your connection with others—perhaps even that true connection is completely missing?
Are you in a relationship in which you are either a Performer like Sam or an Audience like Claire? Maybe you’re vaguely aware of using a song-and-dance routine like theirs to meet unspoken needs, remaining detached as you go about your business, afraid to rock the boat and risk disturbing the balance between you. No matter who you are in the song-and-dance routine, both parties are trapped by a need to exclude give-and-take, ignore ups and downs, and, above all, hide vulnerability.
The detached “non-feeling” of irrelationship is usually experienced as depression. But the depression is actually a cover for a psychological defense known as dissociation—a state in which all experience is whitewashed so everything feels much like everything else.5 This is another aspect of the protective function of irrelationship that keeps us safe from exposing our hearts to the risk of losing someone we perceive as valuable. The depression-like dissociative state short-circuits any anxiety connected with the risk of loss. Many of us have begun relationships that looked like they worked until they disintegrated, sometimes in terrible ways. And yet we do it again and again, seduced by romantic stories and images from movies, television, literature, songs, and opera, all promising that just the right fit is out there. But once again we find out that Mr. Right wasn’t so right, and Ms. Perfect wasn’t so perfect after all.
Toward Positive Change
Open your journal and let’s get started.
1. List ways in which you have acted as a caregiver for your parents, both as a child and an adult. Write brief descriptions and details from specific episodes.
2. What did you believe you accomplished by helping your parents as a child? How did success feel at the time? Did success last or did you have to step in repeatedly?
3. Think about ways in which you have acted as a caregiver for other significant people in your life—other family members, coworkers, friends, and past lovers. Describe each briefly, including what the person needed and what you did to help.
4. Do you have a connection in your life—romantic or otherwise—that seems to have the characteristics of irrelationship? Looking back on your acquaintanceship with that person, explain what initially drew you to that person. Then describe what didn’t work out as you had hoped.
