the authors’ clinical practice seem to indicate. An earned secure attachment is entirely attainable if we’re willing to look at our history and do the work of clearing away our confusion about others and ourselves, which allows us to learn how to think more deeply about our emotions and others’ feelings and needs. Handling so many moving parts at once is difficult at first and can be an anxiety-triggering deterrent, making irrelationship seem like a more attractive option. But people who make the ongoing choice to address relationship difficulties do make progress that they find gratifying on multiple levels.
Our Song-and-Dance Routines
Why is irrelationship so difficult to identify, let alone repair? Why can’t being kinder, more generous, or more forgiving eliminate the distress? The answer is that irrelationship reinforces childhood patterns, our original song-and-dance routines, in which we innocently tried to defuse perceived crises by making our caregiver feel better by being good—showing appreciation, being funny or entertaining, showing how smart we were, being as helpful as we could, or simply vanishing from our caregiver’s sightline—in short, by applying whatever behavior we could to the crisis to make our caregiver feel better and ourselves feel safer. And it seemed to work; it resulted in a greater sense of peace, or at least less anxiety, allowing us to feel more secure.
Performing jokes for the caregiver may have made things feel lighter, but that isn’t the whole story: the child’s performance behavior released brain chemicals that gave the child profound feelings of safety and security. After habitual repetition, the song-and-dance routine became the child’s signature pattern of relating to others, both behaviorally and on the level of biological brain activity, which is carried into adulthood. Any challenge to this pattern would alarm the child because a change risks short-circuiting the feeling of safety the child worked so hard to create, leading back to the fear and anxiety he or she sought to escape.
A Little Brain Science Also Goes a Long Way
Our ways of relating are more than habits of thinking. Experiences with our first caregivers literally become translated into brain activity that molds the brain’s physical structure, and intertwined patterns of network activity reveal themselves in our bodies’ physiologic functions and in our behavior. A child will figure out that behaving in a particular way will lead to feeling better. The physical reality underlying this “feel better” behavior the child has learned to deploy triggers recurring patterns of chemical reactions in the brain that are, in fact, the physiologic basis of feeling better. When negative consequences have impressed upon the child the cost of infractions against the rules, the child feels worse, deliberately shaping his or her behavior to agree with parents’ expectations. To address the ongoing need for security, the child will enact these roles in virtually all relationships, so that behaving that certain way becomes addictive. An individual can live a lifetime unconscious of how invested he or she has become in these ways of behaving.
Of course unsatisfying adult relationships are the key to recognizing something isn’t right. Identifying that one is in irrelationship then becomes the ticket out. In would-be intimate relationships, two people with long-standing anxiety and complementary needs for security will jointly meld into irrelationship and will create a mutual song-and-dance routine. Their routine becomes a technique for managing their insecurity while at the same time taking the place of intimacy. The song-and-dance routine is a ruse that both parties have tacitly agreed to maintain in order to prevent distress.
The Key Players: The Performer and the Audience
There are two key players or roles in the song-and-dance routine that seem to promise connection but actually create a false sense of partnership or intimacy. One is the Performer, the overt, apparent caretaker. This person tries to be of service but is often motivated by a need to fix someone out of unconscious reasons. The other is the Audience, the individual who subtly takes care of the Performer by needing to be taken care of and craves to be cured or saved but ultimately doesn’t want to be fixed at all. The results of this odd partnering is a form of mutual deception. The so-called connection is a form of mutual deception and sadly eliminates any possibility of honest communication or human relatedness. The results are usually that both Performer and Audience feel isolated, devalued, misunderstood, and angry.
The following is a story that spotlights one of the infinite versions of the irrelationship trap. Note that John plays the Performer, and Greta is the Audience.
John and Greta’s Irrelationship Storyline
Greta was almost absurdly careful to tell her husband John how much credit he deserved for the trouble he took to make their lives enjoyable. She would gush with pride to John and their friends about his amazing creativity in planning outings. She would go on and on about how carefully he put together guest lists, confirmed reservations, and made sure no detail was overlooked. However, Greta made the mistake of offering to help John with planning their next vacation. John immediately exploded with anger and then caved into hurt and disappointment. He even accused Greta of not appreciating or loving him anymore. In a flash, John revealed a side of himself that Greta had never encountered.
Greta immediately and apologetically took back her suggestion, reassuring John of how much she appreciated everything he did. Greta had gotten a taste of what the consequences would be if she didn’t stick with their tightly scripted song-and-dance routine. Although John’s burst of anger left Greta feeling frightened and unhappy, she hurriedly retreated back into the carefully, yet unconsciously, constructed status quo of being the Audience, assuring John, the Performer, that nothing had changed. She hoped all of the anxiety would disappear and things would work again.
When sensing danger, the Performer becomes so depressed, anxious, or angry that the Audience fears he or she won’t be taken care of, prompting the Audience to fall back into the tried and true song-and-dance routine, hoping to bring the Performer back to the reliable script of irrelationship. Greta’s brief attempt to flip their roles provoked such an agitated response from John that she quickly retreated to her Audience role to restore calm. However, the experience left her feeling uneasy, isolated, and depressed. Nevertheless, she did what was necessary to allow John to feel secure again. The brain chemistry that allowed Greta and John to feel secure with one another, although temporarily disturbed, was restored.
John’s reaction and the unease Greta felt afterward are clues to the fragility and costliness of the security binding them. This brief disturbance also illustrates the fragility of a relationship that requires an imitation of love that cannot accommodate spontaneity or fluidity. The willingness to accept this type of tenuous agreement mirrors the delicacy of the early childhood bargain John and Greta made with their parents to manage the uncertainty of the environment into which they were born. The tragic outcome of this pattern is that we accept a false kind of love—love that has no flow, no reciprocity, and no room for empathy or compassion. Equally unsettling, we learn that being taken care of is shaky and unreliable and even expect what we call loving relationships to be a series of crises.
People compelled to seek this kind of delicate relationship have an uncanny ability to find their complementary counterpart. When a prospect is identified, hopeful conversations follow as they assess each other’s commitment to a carefully defined but static irrelationship role. Ironically, their excitement builds if each person starts to feel that the other can be depended upon to avoid the cardinal sin of looking for mutuality, spontaneity, intimacy, and emotional investment.
So when we seek romantic relationships as adults, our childhood survival routines can cause serious trouble. As Greta learned in her transaction with John, one party is expected to take what the other gives; one is to be the leader while the other accepts the role of follower. One performs and the other must applaud. One saves and the other allows herself to be saved.4 Love, mutual and intimate, cannot grow under these conditions.
But, what happens if either partner begins to sense a need for something different? What if one individual starts to crave intimacy and
