me up for unsatisfying adult relationships?
• What would be the risks and benefits of abandoning my song-and-dance routine?
The DREAM Sequence helps you grow beyond your contrived song-and-dance routine into free, loving relationships. You’ll uncover your irrelationship storyline and the role you play in your song-and-dance routine. This will help you understand:
• why being with you partner feels like a struggle;
• why you often feel as if you’re on the outside looking in; and
• why this seems to happen every time you get involved with someone.
Another discovery you’ll make is that irrelationship distances you not only from anxiety but also from all of your feelings, which makes you unable to enjoy most of the good things relationships have to offer. But the DREAM Sequence will show you that what you’ve always done doesn’t have to be the last word.
Using This Book Using This Book
As you may have already noticed, the words “Performer” and “Audience” have been capitalized throughout the text. This has been done purposely to maintain clarity in analyzing the irrelationship dynamic.
The book has five sections that build on one another, so they should be read in order to prevent confusion.
• Part One: Irrelationship on Stage—Your Song-and-Dance Routine introduces the basic anatomy of irrelationship and helps you build acceptance and patience with yourself as you explore the ways you undermine your chances at love and intimacy.
• Part Two: Getting to Know You—Spotlight on the Performer and the Audience profiles the key players of irrelationship. It explores how anxiety drives the players into their song-and-dance routine and reveals the isolation and frustration of trying to maintain safety inside a dysfunctional system.
• Part Three: Backstage—The Inner Workings of Irrelationship delves into the core reasons irrelationship developed in the first place and discusses familiar pitfalls that result from staying stuck in the irrelationship pattern for long periods.
• Part Four: Raising the Curtain on Recovery—From Irrelationship to Real Relationship introduces the DREAM Sequence of recovery, outlining the five-step process of recognizing and escaping irrelationship.
• Part Five: Encore—Cracked Open for Love offers guidance and support for staying on track in recovery.
Each chapter is followed by a series of exercises called Toward Positive Change. These exercises include reflection on your own experience and questions designed to help you apply the ideas in the chapter.
Use a blank journal for writing your reflections and answering the questions. Taking quiet, unhurried time for the work is vital for using the material effectively. Your written answers and reflections are useful for tracking changes in your thinking and behavior.
Create a list of the parts of the book, citing the page number, that resonate with your experience and irrelationship storyline. You’ll find validation, relief, and even laughter as you identify with the people and stories presented. Identification of this type is a powerful mechanism for healing, so savor and reflect on it. Whenever you have doubts about the value and direction of your work, revisit earlier parts of your journal to reorient yourself about where you’ve been and where you’re going.
Welcome to recovery! Get ready for a leap into a process of learning how to live a life of fulfillment and true connection with others.
Irrelationship on Stage Irrelationship on Stage
Your Song-and-Dance Routine Your Song-and-Dance Routine
Anatomy of Irrelationship Anatomy of Irrelationship
Consider the following relationship descriptors. Do any of them resonate with you?
• Do you think you can save, fix, or rescue the person you are drawn to?
• Do you hope that person can fix, save, or rescue you?
• Is your idea of love mostly about taking care of your partner?
• Is your idea of love mostly about your partner taking care of you?
• Do you feel a lack of empathy or reciprocity when you are busy doing things for the person you love?
• When you show you really care, do you feel drained, used, or depleted instead of invigorated?
• Does your relationship often feel like more work than play and more unspoken discomfort than joy?
• Do you feel your relationship is ultimately not enriching your life?
If you answer yes to any of the above questions, it suggests that you may build relationships for all the wrong reasons. But stay with us: you are building awareness, which is an important first step. Also, don’t blame yourself for this kind of behavior; this is a pattern you’ve come by honestly. The fact is, our culture supports one-directional caregiving. It is considered virtuous and makes us so-called good family members, good neighbors, and good citizens. But chronic, one-directional caretaking is actually a dysfunctional pattern learned as infants or small children in the earliest months and years of our relationship with our primary caregiver, usually a parent.1 In this pattern, we sought to elicit behaviors we needed in order for us to feel safe. These formative transactions were the beginning of a life-long pattern of interactions whose purpose was, and continues into adulthood to be, to manage relationships so that they sustain feelings of safety above all else. Irrelationship is a straitjacket built for two that does not allow a flow of spontaneous loving, but it does protect, at least superficially, against feelings of anxiety. Irrelationship is the ultimate defense. And the attempt to feel safe and anxiety free can trump any kind of authentic loving. However, no matter how much we want to love, over time, the underlying hidden anxiety pushes us to repeat the pattern chronically, so that we never learn how to form real relationships of genuine intimacy and reciprocity. Instead, we live in isolation, even though our lives appear to be actively engaged with others whom we regard as our closest associates, friends, partners, or spouses.
Yet, isolation has a pay-off; it allows us to maintain a safe, non-vulnerable artificiality at the level of emotional investment, free of the risks that come with intimacy. However, the space in which we do interact with others must be filled with something, and that something is called a song-and-dance routine. Briefly, the routine is a set of behaviors, which can be active, passive, or interactive, featuring two people who secretly agree to displace the possibility of authentic interaction