alienated from those to whom we believe we are closest. Despite our conscious determination that “this time it’s going to be different,” we end up loving, once again, for all the wrong reasons.
Relationship, rather than being a forum for vulnerability, spontaneity, and freedom can, ironically, be used as a psychological defense. The term used to describe this deceptive trap is irrelationship. Irrelationship unconsciously creates false connections to keep others from getting too close, protecting us from the emotional messiness as well as the rewards of intimacy that are part of real relationships. In irrelationship, give and take is perceived as threatening and connections with others are unsatisfying. Expectations and demands are never met because neither party in irrelationship is sufficiently openhearted to be able to receive or reveal their true needs or desires. In this stifling setup, mutually healthy and loving relationships cannot develop.
In their years of clinical practice, the authors have repeatedly encountered patients with histories of tightly controlled, superficial relationships driven by anxiety and fear dating from early childhood. This anxiety was spawned by a childhood environment in which the child’s basic need for security was not adequately addressed by caregivers—usually the parents—who themselves were suffering from long-term, negative emotional states. These negative emotional states resulted in neglect of the child’s needs, prompting the child to unconsciously attempt to stabilize the care environment, usually by trying to make the caregiver feel better, so that the child felt more secure. Therefore, irrelationship is a relational maladaptation. It’s not an illness, syndrome, or pathology but rather a dynamic that the child and parent construct together to circumvent the vulnerability associated with intimacy.
The recovery tools found in this book illuminate the origins and pattern of irrelationship and provide a technique for disempowering it and transforming the individual’s isolation into the ability to form genuine, open, and intimate relationships. In addition, the book provides insight into physiological mechanisms in the brain related to the irrelationship pattern and how those patterns can be altered, creating space and grounding for healthy patterns of relating.
The Birth of Irrelationship
Our first encounters with the world (that is to say, with our parents or caregivers), along with inborn predispositions such as genetic and epigenetic factors,1 mold our early expectations of relationship. Early childhood survival mechanisms and traumas ultimately shape how we approach every relationship thereafter. These interactions actually become hardwired into how our brain processes information about connecting with other people. Imaging of attachment-related differences in a child’s brain, if done, would likely reveal distinct patterns of activity as a result of different dynamics in the parent-child connection. A child whose mother wants constant attention is likely to come to a different understanding of love than a child whose mother is comfortable being on the sidelines. A child whose every impulse and whim are catered to will be wired to understand love differently than the child who learned to do all of the catering and caregiving on his or her own. Some parents want to control everything their children do, while others leave their children alone so much that they have to make some types of decisions at an inappropriately young age. Whatever the case, children always respond to their parents’ patterns of relating. They exercise little or no conscious choice in this adaptation because they are totally dependent on their parents for survival. They simply do what they need to do to feel safe.
We quickly learn our parents’ relational rules; they are so much a part of our environment that unless the rules are called to our attention, we seldom become aware of them. Some rules—like never asking for anything or always having to feel grateful—may leave us feeling isolated or empty, but we follow them for the sake of emotional safety and to ensure the fulfillment of basic needs. Unwittingly, we shape ourselves to the roles parents assign us and continue acting in these roles in future adult relationships. We call these patterns our song-and-dance routines. Very early in life, we silently agreed to take care of our parents by following their rules so they would take care of us. If our caregiver was depressed, anxious, or unhappy we did what we could to make him or her feel better. This enmeshed caretaking pattern (i.e., irrelationship) quietly became the defining dynamic of how we related to others, ultimately preventing true connection and intimacy.
A Little Attachment Theory Goes a Long Way
While high-functioning people may appear emotionally sturdy and secure with themselves and others, in reality, the effects of irrelationship have so locked down their emotions that all they have achieved is a sustained effort to conceal an insecure attachment style, a term used by psychoanalysts and researchers to describe categorical patterns of how people relate in intimate settings. Attachment theory correlates adult-relatedness with developmental experiences with primary caregivers, describing various attachment styles.2 The façade created by people affected by irrelationship often proves to be an overcompensation intended to deflect attention—theirs and others’—from anxiety they’ve suffered all their lives as a result of ineffective parental caregiving. As one might expect, the façades created by irrelationship are usually exposed for what they are and lead to concrete problems that necessitate more effectively addressing the underlying anxiety.
According to attachment theory, we learn how to relate to the world based on the contact we had with our closest caregivers—usually our parents—when we were very small. We bring how we related with them into future relationships so that our manner of relating becomes a product of how our caregivers related with us, i.e., their own attachment style, which developed when they were young in relation to their caregivers. The greater the demand for intimacy in adult relationships, the more crucial the operation of our attachment style becomes, depending on how intensely and in what ways our early attachments resonate with adult situations.
Attachment styles are generally classified as either secure or insecure (i.e., avoidant or anxious), depending on the quality of caregiving that occurred between child and caregiver; the innate factors with which the child is born; and the fit between the child and the caregiver’s attachment styles.3 People with a secure attachment style develop an inner base early in life that allows them to remain essentially grounded during emotional disruptions or even during severe life crises. They’re able to allow themselves to feel emotions and upsets without becoming deeply disturbed and resume equilibrium relatively quickly.
In contrast, the person with insecure attachment style will often find the normal ups and downs of life so anxiety provoking that he or she can manage them only by either dismissing or avoiding them. People with insecure attachment style fall into a few subtypes, including those who avoid or dismiss connection, those who become anxious and preoccupied about connection, and those who have a disorganized mixture of attachment styles.
We can easily see how attachments can snowball rapidly. For example, if a person with an avoidant way of dealing with intimacy gets involved with someone who is anxious and preoccupied, the avoidant person will retreat from the other’s advances, evoking a worried pursuit from the anxious person. This makes the avoidant person withdraw even more, setting in motion a cycle that continues until a dramatic resolution—usually unpleasant—occurs. Similarly, a deadening of relationship can develop if two avoidant people meet but leave long-standing dissatisfactions unresolved for extended intervals. In such situations, disappointment and resentment give way to chronic deprivation and suppressed contempt. If communication fails to improve, deep feelings of sadness and grief are added to the mix.
Since one can’t necessarily pick and choose the parts of the emotional spectrum to be kept at a distance, the blocking of distressing emotions frequently results in an inability to tolerate any type of spontaneous emotional experience, positive or negative. This includes the ability to experience empathy, live compassionately, and fall in love.
Is our experience with early caregivers the last word? Are people living in irrelationship doomed to a life of keeping others at a safe distance and never sharing an intimate relationship?
That’s
