it be wonderful, as the Audience, to find “the one who understands” you? The partner who is so crazy about you that he or she’s continually anticipating your needs and taking care of them, sometimes almost before you’re aware of them? A partner who always has solutions and is so smart, funny, helpful and fun to be with? When you’re with that person you feel alive and full of hope. Now your life is going to be right. He or she will take care of you forever and will never hurt you. And all you have to do is be yourself. Yes, sometimes it can be tiring; and other times this person is a little quick to tell you about your needs and shortcomings, but nobody’s perfect.
Well, if it’s all that good, why is it falling apart? Come to think of it, haven’t you been here before? Didn’t the last promising relationship come crashing down—and the one before that? In the beginning, everything was perfect: Each of you knew your expected parts and seemed to be excited about playing them together. So what was the signal—who said or did what—that made one or both of you sense danger?
Stopping the Song-and-Dance Routine
Realizing that irrelationship is not the answer is great news because it means love, hatred, fear, and joy are still alive. But this isn’t just a matter of becoming aware of denied or hidden feelings. Mutually collaborative relationships in which both parties feel safe talking about their feelings is usually scary, especially at first. But once the awkwardness passes, it feels right and even good. Rather than distancing from feelings for fear that they will prove to be uncontrollable, exploring feelings together becomes the beginning of true and mutually rewarding intimacy.
Using the schema below, review the dynamics of irrelationship to determine which role, or roles, you play in the song-and-dance routine. You’ll know who you are. Be honest but without self-criticism.
Features of Irrelationship
PERFORMER
Give, give, give—until it hurts.
Characteristics: Builds resentment, anxiety, acting out, and imbalance; has feelings of superiority, emotional distance, and false sense of safety; contrives giving behaviors; devalues others.
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AUDIENCE
Take, take, take—until it hurts.
Characteristics: Impenetrability, anxiety, and acting out; fakes it to make routines appear effective; intentionally foils partner’s efforts to help, fix, and rescue; defends against accepting what others offer.
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IRRELATIONSHIP
Emotional distance or absence, which defends against empathy, intimacy, emotional risk, and emotional investment.
Outcomes: Depression, dissociation, and isolation
Toward Positive Change
The following questions and exercises will help you identify parts of Lou and Laurie’s story that resonate with you.
1. Are you the Performer or the Audience—or do you mix both roles?
2. What personal traits or behaviors give you away as Performer or Audience? How do they show up in your interactions with others?
3. What situations or feelings trigger your song-and-dance routine?
4. What are the benefits of your song-and-dance routine? What is it like to identify and observe yourself performing these behaviors?
5. Now as an adult, what ways can you deal with relationship-based anxiety that you couldn’t as a child?
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