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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
