Читать книгу IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy - Mark B. Borg - Страница 15

Chapter 3 Chapter 3

Short-Circuiting the Possibility of Love Short-Circuiting the Possibility of Love

Irrelationship is a psychological defense system that drives counterfeit connections and, on the surface, looks like real relationship.

The child Performer was driven to always be “on.” Conversely, the child Audience was always driven to be “there,” to be attentive. The budding, compulsive caregiver is always ready to create and sustain the delusion of self-sufficiency. The initial benefit of this pattern is that it allows the individual, now an adult, to make a deal with anxiety. However, the long-term effect is that the adult has unknowingly borrowed against future security, creating emotional debt without knowing how high the principal and the interest are going to be. But this isn’t the type of debt that, once paid off, disappears from the ledger. Instead, the borrower goes through life locked in irrelationship with every new encounter.

To shield themselves from awareness of this conflict, people caught in irrelationship use a powerful psychological defense known as dissociation. Dissociation protects us from the awareness, but not from the effects, of traumatizing experience. Pain, although numbed, or dissociated, doesn’t go away. Unfortunately, the effects of dissociation go even deeper; avoiding pain (or conflict) becomes a primary characteristic of how we live our lives.

The song-and-dance routine is a visible aspect of this encoding and becomes our unvarying means of relating to the world. A comparison can be made to a neurological disorder that causes constant, involuntary physical movements or to a puppeteer pulling our strings and forcing us repeatedly to act out the role of Performer or Audience.

Participants in irrelationship threaten each other with the risks inherent in empathy, intimacy, emotional connection, and emotional investment. To manage this threat, Performer and Audience jointly create brainlock, a state that excludes the possibility of give-and-take or sharing of experience.

By taking a look at Glen and Vicky’s story, we can better understand how anxiety and delusion can underlie irrelationship.

Glen and Vicky’s Connection

Glen met Vicky in graduate school. As Glen described their first meeting, he said, “I felt something knock me on my head, throw me over its shoulder, and drag me off to the land of love that, by then, I’d come to believe could only exist in a fantasy. It just felt so right.”

Certainly our culture’s take on romance set up Glen for thinking that he found the right person. At last, his life would be perfect. He often wondered to himself what it was that made Vicky feel so familiar. He would say, “It’s just so easy to be myself when I’m with her.” He had no way of knowing he’d been kicked in the head by his own brain, which had been programmed for this kind of delusion when he was too young to understand what was happening.

According to Glen, their dating began with a blaze of rewarding and intense sexual attraction and bonding. Their hormonally mediated excitement shielded them from the less pleasant aspects of their relational reality. Soon they were swearing true love to one another, something Glen had done repeatedly at the beginning of his relationships with women. For both Glen and Vicky, however, this was the real deal. Passionate lovemaking, adventurous travel, and visits to their families—pleased that they had finally found someone—confirmed their devotion, along with shared dreams.

Why wouldn’t Glen love Vicky? She laughed at his jokes and told him he was brilliant and made her feel happy. Listening to his stories, Vicky related to the struggles that led to Glen’s choice of a career in clinical psychology, which was also her profession.

And why wouldn’t Vicky love Glen? He understood her, was sensitive and patient, and went to great lengths to reach her when she was emotionally distressed. They had so much in common that it was easy to see how they were deceived into believing each had found a lost part of themselves.

Glen enjoyed seeing Vicky as an emotional labyrinth that he alone could navigate. Somehow, he knew he could fix her—whether or not she felt that she needed fixing. Being with Vicky made Glen feel secure, powerful, and irreplaceable. And Glen made Vicky believe that she could finally feel alive. What could be wrong with this picture? In roles so well paired—he the Performer and she the Audience—why wouldn’t they be a match made in heaven? Wouldn’t their complementary roles lead to a durable, exciting marriage that provided fulfillment to both of them?

The truth, however, proved to be something quite different; they were building and feeding irrelationship, quickly moving from a simulation of intimacy to a chilly isolation. Ultimately they found themselves at odds, firmly defended against what the other offered.

Glen sought psychoanalysis for himself, partly because he was considering adding psychoanalytic training to his credentials. Having hit a wall in his practice, he hoped the analytical process and training program would help him to discover the reason for his growing sense that his clinical practice was stagnating. He was beginning to resent that his patients weren’t getting better, although in some cases they seemed increasingly dependent on him even though they disparaged both his work and himself personally. He was beginning to wonder if his patients were punishing him for trying to help them get well, or, passive-aggressively, by not getting well. Reflecting on this a few months into his marriage to Vicky, Glen remarked, “I’ve sometimes felt the same way about my wife.” Neither spouse acknowledged how brittle their relationship had become but were brainlocked into maintaining it, even though each felt a deep trepidation about it.

As Glen explored his history of playing the Performer for his wife and others in his past, he began to articulate the dynamics of what he came to understand as irrelationship—his taking on the role of caretaker in his professional role and in his marriage. But his assuming the caretaker role began years before when Glen, the young Performer, treated his mother’s extreme sadness and disappointment by playing the young jokester, attempting to lift her spirits whenever he could.

Glen described his mother and father as “children of the ’60s,” and they were married very young. When Glen was born, they were both eighteen years old. His mother came from a wealthy family while his father was a “boy from the wrong side of the tracks.” A premarital pregnancy and their marriage were provocative and taken as insulting to his mother’s family, who expected children to be seen and not heard. Soon after their marriage, Glen’s father enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam where he found alcohol, heroin, prostitutes, and post-traumatic stress. During the same period, Glen’s mother found born-again Christianity. Notwithstanding Jesus, Glen’s mother became deeply depressed. Her depression was the impetus for Glen to learn his basic song-and-dance routine of slapstick humor, jokes, and tricks that seemed to relieve the cloud that hung over the household.

When Glen’s father returned from Vietnam, the marriage fell apart quickly. His mother fantasized that she would be able to fix her husband with religion, but he left instead. This pressed Glen into increasing his caretaking of his mother. Always “on,” he maniacally performed for her, doing his routine anywhere he could. And it often worked. All through school he continued his song-and-dance routine, becoming known as the class clown. He was undeniably popular and people apparently liked him, but he never felt significantly connected to any of his classmates. They might enjoy being around him, but close friendships eluded him. In fact, the closer he seemed to come to anyone—especially women to whom he was romantically attracted—the more easily he would resent them. And the feeling became mutual. At the end of his unsuccessful romantic relationships, his girlfriends uniformly complained that he didn’t really seem to value them, which Glen found confusing and unfair.

Perhaps the best example of a romantic partner (and soon to be Audience) whom Glen ultimately devalued was his wife Vicky. When they met in graduate school, Glen’s routines seemed to make Vicky feel better. The reason is easy to understand; early in their relationship she revealed details of her childhood that motivated her to become a therapist. But her song-and-dance routine, which she originally devised to treat her mother and father, was the opposite of Glen’s routine. Through her childhood, Vicky created ways to make her neglectful parents believe that they were good parents—although she actually believed her mother was unbalanced and her father incompetent.

The darker reaches of Vicky’s backstory were quite different from Glen’s. Her mother married the high school football star in their small southwestern town. The fact that he was a bit of a cowboy made it even better; her mom had grown up romanticizing the Old West. Unfortunately the starry-eyed days were short-lived, and her football-star husband ended up in the unromantic job of a car salesman, while Vicky’s mother started her own successful business. Two children were born, a boy and Vicky, who learned while still very young to be their mother’s Audience. Vicky’s earliest memories were of listening to unending stories in which her mother was “star of the show,” but as she got older, her mother’s behavior became increasingly bizarre and destructive. Vicky, meanwhile, continued to pretend that her mother and father were good parents—a farce Vicky’s brother refused to validate. She continued the charade but when time came for her to go to college, she fled the Southwest for New York City.

Although their stories are strikingly dissimilar, Vicky and Glen clearly shared a major trait: They were highly invested in helping, i.e., fixing, curing, or rescuing those who were significant in their lives, whether or not these figures were seen as loved ones. Glen’s song-and-dance routine was a series of performances directed at making his depressed mother feel happy. Conversely, Vicky’s song-and-dance routine was to play the Audience, pretending her mother and father were good parents.

Neither of their caregiving compulsions ended when Glen and Vicky left their families of origin. They took their unconscious need to be “help-a-holics” into many or most of their future relationships. By chronically repeating this caregiving pattern, they were unaware that they were motivated by their desperate need to keep the world from falling apart. When Glen and Vicky met and became one another’s new family, they recreated their old family dynamics with some minor adjustments, while retaining the destructive dynamics.

Glen and Vicky are two textbook examples of loving for all the wrong reasons. In both their cases, keeping the world from falling apart was the reason for loving. But, their marriage pact had nothing to do with love; it was an unspoken agreement to marginalize the possibility—and risk—of genuine investment in one another. Instead, they proceeded through life in silence about either of their unmet needs, thereby eliminating the possibility of thriving and change.

Even though Glen and Vicky told their stories to one another, this paradoxically (and deceptively) failed to establish intimacy between them. Vicky retained emotional reserve and made no explicit claims upon Glen as to her place in his life. Their stories remained separate. Brainlock prevented the possibility that each could function in the other’s life other than how they had always functioned. Neither Glen nor Vicky could listen to or empathize with the other, which made it impossible for them to create and share a life together.

Vicky’s caretaking performance for Glen—similar to the care she administered to her parents—was simply to accept Glen’s treatment. For his part, having come to experience Vicky as cold and sexless, Glen redoubled his song-and-dance routine. And for a time it seemed to work; Glen got the same satisfaction he received from making his depressed mother smile. Deep inside, however, Glen knew that the whole relationship was a ruse; he was not happy and became aware of a vague anxiety about the future.

A couple of years after they were married, the reality behind Glen’s expectations of his irrelationship with his wife became clear. While he and his analyst uncovered the dynamics in his caretaking role, Glen attempted to share his crisis with Vicky, appealing to her for support and empathy, but she withdrew—emotionally at first but ultimately to the point where Glen realized he was living with someone who was not just unavailable but unknown to him. He was forced to face the reality that Vicky had no interest in being a companion in any of his life crises. From Vicky’s side, the agreement to be Glen’s Audience included the unspoken proviso that if the going ever got rough, she would get going, just as she did when she left her childhood home.

Through this turn of events, the nature of the irrelationship became clear to Glen and to his analyst. His connection with Vicky was isolating, stultifying, and filled with resentment. Vicky’s bright-eyed receptivity to Glen’s routine was revealed as her fantasy-based routine. At that moment, Glen woke up and began the process of finally looking seriously at his history as a Performer, facing how he had unconsciously depended upon his song-and-dance routine to short-circuit any approach of closeness in relationships.

Deeper Analysis and Some Brain Science

As we can see again in Glen and Vicky’s story, the behaviors associated with irrelationship are designed to defend against anxiety. But just what is anxiety? Anxiety is the initial reaction of a sensitive system that is wired to keep us vigilant to danger and to protect us from harm.¹ Everyone experiences anxiety and finds ways of managing it. When anxiety is managed well, we function better and are happier. But when anxiety is handled in ways that diminish awareness of our feelings, but not the feelings themselves, we lose the guidance of our emotions. This puts us at risk for unhealthy and even dangerous emotional situations. As our denial of anxiety grows and deepens, we are at an ever-increasing risk of being overwhelmed by tidal waves of apparently unintelligible feelings that seem to come out of nowhere.

This psychological adaptation actually results in changes to the structure of the brain and function of brain networks. Our frontal cortex (the higher brain) gets into the habit of ignoring our limbic system (the emotional brain), resulting in a combination of too much and too little inhibition, plus a poor sense of timing. Because we never learned the skills needed to deal constructively with emotional crises, we use one of two blunt instruments to handle them: either we use dissociation to numb our feelings, or we explode into rage to crush challenges based on our carefully agreed-upon roles. This is known as emotional dysregulation and is essential to maintaining irrelationship. As we saw in attachment theory, two people—who individually have difficulty with emotional regulation within intimate relationships and are emotionally dysregulated—can resort to the mechanisms of irrelationship to create long-term stability.

The bottom line is that no matter how hard we work at convincing ourselves (as Glen and Vicky did) that we are in touch with ourselves, we can, and will, use irrelationship to maintain distance and hide from our feelings. Regardless of the devices we use, our best thinking can’t trick our feelings.

When we blind ourselves to our emotions, responding to them authentically is practically impossible. We may want to present ourselves to another person—especially a romantic interest—as a source of strength and support. But if we’re putting on an act of always looking strong when we’re actually terrified, we’re paying the price of not being emotionally present in the relationship. If we’ve lost a sense of our own emotions and needs, we’ve lost the ability to reflect and make good decisions even for ourselves. On the other hand, if we believe that what we feel is the only reliable indicator of how things really are (called emotional reasoning in cognitive behavioral therapy), we live in a shrunken reality with little space for the joy, excitement, and wisdom that come with spontaneity and space for reflection.

In Glen and Vicky’s life of irrelationship, Glen’s apparent abundant generosity toward Vicky seemed to be a kind of strength, and Glen was gratified by Vicky’s tolerant attention. But Glen and Vicky were trapped by false ideas about themselves and each other that became prisons of isolation and resentment from which both feared escaping.

How Our Brains Make or Shut Down Love

Most people caught in irrelationship have no inkling that anything is wrong until it begins not to work, particularly since it seems to have worked well in the past. Our song-and-dance routines so effectively distract us from our anxiety that we can’t imagine anything needs to change. We have no idea how afraid we are and how our unconscious fear disallows change of any kind. Or, equally destructive, our fear drives us to pursue change compulsively and unreflectively without allowing a new person or situation the chance of proving worthwhile. Unsettling as this may be on some level, and may appear to others, the price of shutting down oneself is willingly paid in order to anesthetize anxiety.

While we’re doing our song-and-dance routine, the brain continues to produce bonding chemicals. Oxytocin, for example, shifts us into a state of unconditional caring appropriate for a mother caring for a distressed child but lacks the erotic potential driven by testosterone and suppresses dopamine, the brain chemical that mediates many of the pleasurable sensations associated with passionate sexual interaction. In addition, studies of the experience of unconditional love demonstrate that while involved in an intense caretaking role, our brain’s capacity for experiencing pain, mediated in the periaqueductal gray matter, is muted.² This can be seen in a mother caring for her highly vulnerable newborn or sick child. When administering such care, as Performer or Audience, the sensibility of one’s own needs and pain are temporarily suspended. Our mind becomes that of the soldier, dancer, yogi, or even the martyr whose single-minded concern is the completion of a task whose significance overrides all other considerations.

Irrelationship thus sidelines large quarters of our emotional life, placing balanced, real relationships out of our reach—whether in business, with friends, or, perhaps especially, with lovers, spouses, or partners. When acting as Performer or Audience, the long-term need to be in healthy, supportive relationships is sacrificed to the immediate imperative of smothering our deep-seated discomfort, thus putting us radically out of balance with others and ourselves. We can live like this for a while, but eventually we crash. At that point, we often become overtly sick and in need of care. The debt has come due and has to be paid back at a high rate of interest.³

Toward Positive Change

1. Looking back at your worst romantic relationship, what made it disappointing or a failure?

2. What role did your song-and-dance routine play in that failed relationship? What was your partner’s part in the routine? How did each of you prevent closeness from developing?

3. Think about your best relationships in the following areas: family, work, friendship, and romance. What similarities can you identify?