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
