IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy. Mark B. Borg

this point, Betty and Hank were so embroiled in arguing that Hank had lost track of the content of their disputes, and he had ceased to even care. This, of course, made Betty feel unappreciated. But Hank had lost the ability to think intelligently and reflectively about what had happened between them.

      In terms of brain activity, comparatively automatic parts of Hank’s brain took over. He was “brainjacked,” so to speak, by areas called the ventral striatum and amygdala. The ventral striatum codes habit-based learning, or conditioned responses. The amygdala activates when strong emotions are present, stereotypically fear. This results in fight-or-flight reactions and fear-based conditioning. When emotions are well-regulated, two areas together balance out this fear-based conditioning: the frontal cortex, which allows for top-down inhibition of strong emotions, letting reason to intervene, and the hippocampus, which works in concert with its next door neighbor, the amygdala, to put fear in perspective so it doesn’t take over. In Hank’s case, caught in the throes of irrelationship, he was on autopilot.

      The result was that Hank was the perfect passive Audience for Betty’s need to be right. Additionally, she was able to amass even more power through her ability to remember every detail about their arguments. From Betty’s perspective, “being right” was the purpose of their relationship. And her ability, as court stenographer, to track their disputes gave her an even greater feeling of superiority.

When Betty and Hank went into couples’ therapy, Betty, who had been a magazine editor in a management position, attempted to occupy the therapeutic process in the same way that she had occupied Hank—going so far as to advise the therapist on how to handle their case. Betty’s need to control was so stultifying that the therapist even sought supervision to assist her with managing it. Through a difficult process, all three participants had the opportunity to see the power of Betty’s need for control, Hank’s bewilderment as Audience, and how entrenched both were.

      Over time Betty was able to see how their song-and-dance routine kept her from realizing how much she valued and relied on Hank. Hank came to see that he acted out his caring for Betty primarily in his choice to be of service to her by becoming incompetent and needing her help. Even when Betty hit bottom, attempting to fix Hank and going to therapy, her need to be right still protected her from her fear of intimacy with Hank, just as Hank’s persona of incompetence allowed him to keep his distance from Betty. Poisonous resentment permeated their irrelationship and over time bubbled inexorably to the surface.

      One day in therapy, Betty asked some deeply honest questions that began to shatter the mold of their irrelationship. “What if I have not been right about anything—ever? What does that mean for us? Is the love I thought Hank had for me just some kind of dream? Did I become his wife and caregiver because I thought his loving me depended on it? Do I believe my being right is what holds us together?” Betty had uncovered a window of opportunity, a real place to begin to see their shared agreement and actually undo it.

      Hank looked up suddenly and said, “Us? There hasn’t been an us for a long, long time, Betty. And now I’m starting to think I contributed to that far more than I could ever have believed.”

      As their work progressed, both were able to see that Hank’s role as Audience allowed them to keep a safe distance from one another, not risking the conscious 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