The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  A Conservative Policy

  While my own associations to the word “conservative” are not great ones, this word best describes my attitude toward personal change. Just as we strive for change, we also strive to conserve what is most valuable and familiar in our selves. And in a society where we are constantly being pressured to improve, actualize, and perfect our selves, it is probably wise to question why we should change at all and who is prescribing the changes.

  Often we wish to get rid of some part of our selves—as we would an inflamed appendix—without recognizing the positive aspects of a particular “negative” trait or behavior. Few things are “all good” or “all bad.” I recall a meeting of my women’s group many years back when we had a little too much to drink and went around the circle sharing what we liked the very best and the very least about each other. Interestingly, what was labeled “the best” and “the worst” for each person turned out to be one and the same, or more accurately, different variations on the same theme. If least liked was one woman’s tendency to hog the group spotlight, what was most liked was her energetic and entertaining personality. If least liked was another woman’s failure to be straightforward, direct, and spontaneous, what was most liked was her kindness, tact, and respect for the feelings of others. If another’s sense of entitlement and “Me first!” attitude pushed the group’s buttons, it was her ability to identify her own goals and “go for it” that was most admired. And so it went. That evening I began to have a renewed appreciation for the inseparable nature of our strengths and weaknesses. Far from being opposites, they are woven from the same strands.

  This experience also reinforced a direction I was moving in professionally. Early on in my career as a therapist, I deemed it my job to help my patients rid themselves of certain qualities—stubbornness, silence, demandingness, oppositionalism, or any other trait or behavior that seemed to make their life (or my work) especially difficult. Or perhaps I wanted them to be closer to their fathers, more independent from their mothers, or more (or less) ambitious, self-seeking, self-disclosing, or assertive. I discovered, however, that I could be far more helpful when I was able to identify and appreciate the positive aspects of what was seemingly most negative. Paradoxically, this appreciation was what left my clients freer to get on with the business of change.

  Problems Serve a Purpose

  Later in my career I began studying families, and came to further appreciate how negative behaviors often serve important and positive functions—even when these behaviors push others away or antagonize them. Let’s consider the following example.

  Seven-year-old Judy is brought into therapy by her concerned parents because she has temper tantrums and stomachaches and is demonstrating a whole variety of obnoxious misbehaviors. She is labeled “the problem” in the family—the patient, the sick one, the one to be fixed. Judy’s parents hope that I can change Judy and rid her of her disruptive and self-defeating behaviors.

  Upon careful questioning I learn that Judy’s problems began soon after the death of her paternal grandfather to whom she was quite attached. The family is not processing or even talking much about this loss. In addition Judy’s father has become increasingly withdrawn and depressed since losing his dad. His growing distance from both his wife and his daughter—as well as his obvious depression, which no one mentions—has everyone quite anxious. Judy’s mother, however, does not openly address her concern about her husband or her distant marriage. Instead, she has increased her focus on her daughter.

  When specifically does Judy act up and act out? From what I can piece together, this occurs when her father’s distance and her mother’s anxious focus on Judy reach intolerable proportions. And what is the outcome of Judy’s troublemaking and tantrums? Distant Dad is roped back into the family (and is helped to become more angry than depressed), and the parents are able to pull together, temporarily united by their shared concern for their child.

  Judy’s behavior is, in part, an attempt to solve a problem in the family. It also reflects the high level of anxiety in this family at a particularly stressful point in their lives. More frequently than not, what we label “the problem” to be changed or fixed is not the problem at all. As Judy’s story illustrates, it may even be a misguided attempt at the solution. And the “solution” we or others apply (which for Judy’s parents involved increasing their focus on Judy and decreasing their focus on their own issues) just evokes and maintains the very problem we are trying to repair.

  Small Changes

  A conservative approach to personal change also means that we proceed slowly—and with the understanding that our moves forward will be accompanied by inevitable frustrations and derailments. Thinking small provides us with the opportunity to observe and check out the impact of each new behavior on a relationship system, and to sit with the benefits and costs of change. It also militates against our natural tendency to move in with a big bang and then drop out entirely when initial responses are not to our liking.

  When an acquaintance of mine announced she was going to approach her father during the holiday vacation to try to “get close” to him by “breaking through his brick wall,” I suspected she was doomed to failure. While I didn’t know exactly what “breaking through his brick wall” might entail, I was not surprised when she returned home feeling grumpy and defeated.

  The outcome might have been different if she had been less ambitious—if she had planned one specific move toward her goal. For example, she might have requested some one-to-one time with her dad, perhaps for coffee or a short walk. Because she and her father never had “alone time” in the midst of family visits, this in itself would have been a significant change, even if they had talked about nothing more than the weather. And had he resisted her efforts, she would then know she needed to begin with a smaller move still.

  From a more conservative standpoint, it may have been premature for my acquaintance to make any new move until after she had taken time to get a calmer, less blaming perspective on the distance between herself and her dad. Perhaps she set up a confrontation that she unconsciously knew was doomed to fail, because she herself needed to reinforce her own distant position from her father, as well as her perception of herself as the one who could be close. In any case, breaking down someone’s brick wall is hardly an example of moving slow and thinking small.

  Substantive change in important relationships rarely comes about through intense confrontation. Rather, it more frequently results from careful thinking and from planning for small, manageable moves based on a solid understanding of the problem, including our own part in it. We are unlikely to be agents of change when we hold our nose, close our eyes, and jump!

  Reassuring Sameness

  Of course, it would be nice if we could make major changes quickly—or would it? Babies and small children have such an extraordinary capacity for change and growth, we may well wonder why grown-ups can’t hold on to it. When my younger son, Ben, was six years old and my first book finally made its appearance, I overheard him exclaim to a small friend, “Do you know that my mother worked on her book for my whole life!” It was true enough. And while I had accomplished a great deal during that time, what had Ben done in the same number of years? From a scrawling, barely formed self with the most limited repertoire of language, movement, and understanding, he had transformed himself into a distinct six-year-old personality who was knowledgeable about some of the innermost workings of the New York publishing world. Now that’s change!

  Later that afternoon a friend and I were musing about how incredible it would be if adults could retain that extraordinary capacity for learning and change. Actually, it would be a total nightmare, if you really stop to think about it. Our very identity, our sense of continuity and stability in this world, and all our key relationships depend on our maintaining a high degree of sameness, predictability, and non-change. If we visit our father after a three-year absence, we count on him being pretty much the same person he’s always bee
n, no matter how loudly we may complain about the sort of person he is. In fact, we may count on this so much that we fail to validate and credit some real changes he has, in fact, made.

  At the same time, change is inevitable and constant. No matter how effortfully we resist, no matter how hard we try to hold the clock still or attempt to view our world in static terms (“Someday I’ll have my house/job/body/personality exactly as I want it and then I’ll relax!”), we are always evolving and forever monitoring our steps in that complex dance of change. It is indeed a slow dance that we do with ourselves and others: moving back and forth between our will to change and our will not to change, between other people’s desire for us to change and their anxiety and protest about our doing so, between our own wish for closeness when anxiety about isolation sets in and our need for distance when “togetherness” gets too sticky or suffocating.

  When Relationships Are Stuck

  The challenge of change is greatest when a relationship becomes a source of negative energy and frustration and our attempts to fix things only lead to more of the same. It is these times that we will pay special attention to in the examples to come. These stuck relationships are often “too intense,” and/or “too distant,” precluding real intimacy.

  Too much intensity means that one party is overfocused on the other in a blaming or worried way or in an attempt to fix or shape up the other person. Or each party may be overfocused on the other and underfocused on the self. Too much distance means that there is little togetherness and real sharing of one’s true self in the relationship. Important issues are pushed underground rather than being aired and worked on. Many distant relationships are also intense because distance is one way we manage intensity. If you haven’t seen your ex-husband in five years and can’t talk with him about the kids without clutching inside, then you have a very intense relationship.

  Once a relationship is stuck, the motivation to change things is not sufficient to make it happen. For one thing, we may be so buffeted about by strong feelings that we can’t think clearly and objectively about the problem, including our own part in it. When intensity is high, we react (rather than observe and think), we overfocus on the other (rather than on the self), and we find ourselves in polarized positions where we are unable to see more than one side of an issue (our own) and find new ways to move differently. We may navigate relationships in ways that lower our anxiety in the short run, but that diminish our capacity for intimacy over the long haul.

  In addition, we may have a strong wish for change but be unaware of the actual sources of anxiety that are fueling a relationship problem and blocking intimacy. We are banging heads in one relationship, but the source of the problem is something we are not paying attention to, or do not want to pay attention to. We become much like the proverbial man who had too much to drink and lost his keys in the alley, but looked for them under the lamp post because the light was better. In Judy’s case, for example, her behavior was defined as “the problem,” but the anxiety in the family was actually evoked by an important loss. All family relationships had become distant because the grandfather’s death could not be talked about and processed.

  If we are going through a particularly painful time in a relationship, that is what we want to talk about and change. Our desire to focus where it hurts makes sense and sometimes we need to go no further. Frequently, however, a problem in one relationship is fueled by unaddressed issues—past and present—in another arena. Sometimes you can’t become more intimate with your husband or boyfriend until after you have addressed something with your father, taken a new position with your mother, changed your part in an old family pattern, or learned more about the death of Uncle Charlie.

  In this book we will be exploring stuck relationships in depth, as we follow the specific steps some women took toward a more solid self and a more intimate connectedness with others. We will see that changing any relationship problem rests directly on our ability to work on bringing more of a self to that relationship. Without a clear, whole, and separate “I,” relationships do become overly intense, overly distant, or alternate between the two. We want closeness, but we become ineffective and fuzzy agents of change, moving in this week with angry complaints and distancing next week with cold withdrawal—none of which leads to anything new. Without a clear “I” we become overly reactive to what the other person is doing to us, or not doing for us—and we end up feeling helpless and powerless to define a new position in the relationship.

  Our society places a great emphasis on developing the “I.” Words like “autonomy,” “independence,” “separateness,” “authenticity,” and “selfhood” are popular if not universal goals. Yet there is much misunderstanding about what these words actually mean, who defines them, and how we can evaluate and improve where we stand on the “selfhood scale.” Because mature intimacy rests so heavily on this business of self, let’s take a careful look.

  3

  Selfhood: At What Cost?

  Messages everywhere exhort us to achieve selfhood—to find and express our true selves. Perhaps a more candid response to this glorification of self in our culture is captured in the following incident. An aspiring young writer had spent long hours polishing up a composition for her sophomore English class, only to receive the grade of C-plus. “Be your self!” her professor wrote in bold red letters, underlining the word self several times. Underneath, perhaps as an afterthought, this same professor penned in, “If this is your self, be someone else.”

  Perhaps existence would be simpler if all the important figures in our lives could be that open and upfront about the contradictory messages they communicate. Most mixed messages are so subtle and covert that we are not aware of sending or receiving them. “Be independent!” is the spoken message we hear from a parent or spouse—but then “Be like me!” or even “Be for me!” may be the disqualifying communication. “Don’t be so clingy,” a boyfriend may tell us, as he unconsciously encourages us to express the neediness and dependency that he fears to acknowledge within himself. “Why don’t you get your life together?” a husband complains, but when we finally make the move to apply to graduate school, he becomes depressed and resentful.

  From the time we are first wrapped in a pink blanket, family members encourage us to be our authentic selves, while they also unconsciously encourage us to express certain traits, qualities, or behaviors and to deny or inhibit others. People need us to be a certain way for their own sake, and for the most complex variety of unconscious reasons. Throughout our lives, we learn that the survival of our relationships, and the very integrity of our family, depend on our being this way or that. We, too, unwittingly communicate such messages to others. Of course, learning what others want and expect from us is a necessary part of becoming a civilized human being. There is no “true self” that unfolds in a vacuum, free from the influence of family and culture. However, it is the unconscious or covert communications—those outside the awareness of sender and receiver—that often carry the most negative power.

  The dilemma of defining a self is a particularly complex one for women. Because we are a subordinate group, our “true nature” and “appropriate place” have forever been defined by the wishes and fears of men. How, then, do we approach the task of carving out a clear and authentic self from the myriad of mixed messages and injunctions that surround us from the cradle to the grave?

  At the simplest level, “being a self” means we can be pretty much who we are in relationships rather than what others wish, need, and expect us to be. It also means that we can allow others to do the same. It means we do not participate in relationships at the expense of the “I” (as women are encouraged to do) and we do not bolster the “I” at the expense of the other (as men are encouraged to do). As simple as this may sound, its translation into action is enormously complex. In fact, any sustained move in the direction of “more self” is a difficult challenge and not without risk.

  For women, the emphasis on selfhood is a rec
ent historical development. Selflessness, self-sacrifice, and service were time-honored virtues for our mothers and grandmothers. In contrast, we are now bombarded with messages that we should be strong, assertive, separate, independent selves, at least in the abstract. (In any specific relationship, such qualities may be less than welcome.) If we now fail to make use of the how-to skills or inspirational messages available to us, we may feel terrible about ourselves. Little attention is paid to the enormity of the task at hand, or even to respecting the good reasons why we may be unable to change. The story below illustrates one such reason.

  “Dear Editor . . .”

  Some years back, this letter to the editor appeared in Ms. magazine:

  It is with much regret that I must ask you to cancel my subscription. . . . Over the years I have enjoyed Ms. immensely, but for the last two months I’ve had to hide the magazine in my dresser drawer. My supposedly “liberal and understanding” husband believes the magazine is changing my personality, making me less flexible to his demands. In an effort to “save” my marriage, I am canceling the subscription. I feel like crying. . . .

  “Here,” I thought to myself, “is a woman with the will not to change.” I clipped the letter and shared it with a small group of psychology students over lunch, inviting their reactions. The first student studied the letter and concluded that the husband was the cause of the wife’s problem. The second student felt angry at the wife for giving her husband the power to make decisions for her—and then blaming him for it. The third saw the culprit as our patriarchal culture—the deep-rooted ethos of male dominance that affects us all. The fourth student chomped on her chicken salad sandwich and remarked glibly, “Well, there’s a couple who deserve each other.”