emotional investment that is part of intimacy. Betty’s need to be right had nothing to do with anything important in their lives; it was only an accessory helping to maintain the space between them. In the act of confronting this, Betty realized that always being right meant being alone. Hank realized he used his incompetence to create the safe but lonely place he had lived in for years.
As Betty and Hank learned to see one another again outside their song-and-dance routine, they remembered how much they cared for each other. As they recovered, they learned how to be with each other, as they had never done. And together they learned how to live with and through the anxiety-ridden threat of intimacy without returning to the painful distance of irrelationship.
Wiring the Brain for the Song-and-Dance Routine
Although the Performer may employ a variety of active behaviors, the Audience’s posture makes the entire process possible. As can be seen from the case of Hank and Betty, Betty couldn’t have acted out her need to be right all the time if Hank hadn’t provided space for it. The Performer is emotionally dependent on the willing subordination of the Audience. Hank and Betty’s song-and-dance routine was born decades back when they each tried to induce a desired response from their caregivers. Betty practiced being “right and tough.” Hank was more actively absent, being out of his caregiver’s immediate consciousness.
No matter which behavior surfaces, it is used to allow the caregiver to believe that he or she is a good parent. Once the right song-and-dance routine is formulated, the child can and will use it whenever necessary to feel safe again. The child becomes caregiver to the parent, and the parent accepts the child’s ministrations. This is their unspoken agreement. For the child, however, the agreement is struck long before he or she is developmentally capable of comprehending what’s happening. The agreement is put into play in the right brain years before the child will have developed the left-brain-based skills to comprehend and integrate it. Consequently, this subliminal technique of negotiating personal safety becomes a driving force in the management of future relationships.
The science of how our brains work explains how this happens. The old, habit-driven, automatic mechanisms in our brains (called the ventral system, especially the striatum) dominate our functioning. These mechanisms are simplistic and don’t include the ability to examine our responses and actions. In contrast, the parts of our brains that developed later in human evolution (the dorsal system) are where more sophisticated functions occur—the capacity for self-reflection and flexibility as well as the ability to evaluate circumstances and situations thoughtfully. However, the case of the child’s taking care of the parent is far more complex.
We are born with a rudimentary capacity to empathize, that is, to feel someone else’s pain.1 Without the capacity to analyze and reflect, however, the child is able to react to the pain of others only in terms of how it may impact on him- or herself. As a result, the child is able to interpret the parent’s unhappy emotional state only as a threat to his or her own safety. This suggests that the child’s capacity for automatic empathy, yet undeveloped capacity for reflection, compassion, and self-regulation, makes him or her liable to amplify the parent’s negative emotions. If the parent fails to set healthy boundaries (that is, adhere to the role of parent) the child will be at risk for having unhealthy relationship patterns etched into his or her brain.
The vocabulary of the song-and-dance routine is also determined by the infinite variations in human temperament. But these routines have a lockstep quality in common that excludes discussion or reflection. Once established, the routine unconditionally resists adapting to the complexities of particular relationships. The inability to examine and adapt will cause the affected child to bring this routine into future adult interactions with negative, and sometimes even disastrous, results.
GRAFTS: Variations on Our Song-and-Dance Routine
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