The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  And my mother? By her own report she did not have enough self to choose life on her own behalf. My mother can now speak eloquently about how the cancer (and a trip to the Grand Canyon) challenged her to be her self and to be for her self. But this came later. Also, focusing on a child (or on any other family member) is another way that we manage anxiety, but at cost to both the self and the focused-on individual.

  Toward More Self

  It is not my intention to portray my family as a neurotic group of nonselves. Quite the contrary. My mother, father, sister, and I were simply behaving as individuals and families behave under stress. Overfunctioning, underfunctioning, fighting, pursuing, distancing, and child-focus (or other-focus) are normal, patterned ways to manage anxiety. One way is not better or more virtuous than another.

  But when anxiety is high enough or lasts long enough, we get locked into rigid and extreme positions on these dimensions. Then our relationships become polarized and stuck, and we may have difficulty finding creative new options for our own behavior. In fact, the very things that we do to lower our anxiety usually just keep the old pattern going, blocking any possibility of intimacy. And the actual sources of the anxiety may be unclear or difficult for us to focus on and process.

  When this kind of stalemate occurs, we need to work on the “I,” and always in the direction of movement toward “more self.” You may already have some idea of what this work entails. We move up on the selfhood scale (and the intimacy scale, for that matter) when we are able to:

  present a balanced picture of both our strengths and our vulnerabilities.

  make clear statements of our beliefs, values, and priorities, and then keep our behavior congruent with these.

  stay emotionally connected to significant others even when things get pretty intense.

  address difficult and painful issues and take a position on matters important to us.

  state our differences and allow others to do the same.

  This is not all that “being a self” involves, but it’s a good start. And it is the very stuff that intimacy is made of.

  In the chapters that follow, we will see how moves toward intimacy always require us to focus on the self as the primary vehicle for change, while viewing the self in the broadest possible context. This is a difficult task in the best of circumstances. When anxiety is high, it is more difficult still.

  4

  Anxiety Revisited: Naming the Problem

  “Anxiety is the pits!” I recently remarked to a close friend. I was having more than my fair share of it at the time. My friend, in her cheerful attempt to add perspective, reminded me that people don’t die from anxiety—and that eventually it goes away. That was not a bad reminder. Anxiety can make you shake, lose sleep, feel dizzy or nauseous. It can convince you that you are losing your memory, if not your mind. But anxiety is rarely fatal. And eventually it will subside.

  Of course, this is not the whole story. The things we do to avoid the experience of anxiety, and the particular patterned ways we react to it, may keep our relationships, and our selves, painfully stuck. What’s reflexive and adaptive in the short run may carry the highest price tag over time. Even over generations.

  The initial impact of anxiety on a relationship is always one of increased reactivity. Reactivity is an automatic, anxiety-driven response. When we are in reactive gear, we are driven by our feelings, without the ability to think about how we want to express them. In fact, we cannot think about the self or our relationships with much objectivity at all. We sincerely want things to be calmer and more intimate, but we keep reflexively doing what we always do, which only leads to more of the same.

  Whatever our style of navigating key relationships under stress—pursuing, distancing, fighting, child-focus, overfunctioning, underfunctioning—we’ll do it harder and with even greater gusto in an anxious emotional field. That’s just normal. The important question is, What happens after that? Reactivity . . . and then what?

  In some circumstances, we may be able to stand back a bit, tone down our reactivity to the other person, and do some problem solving. We can begin to identify our individual coping style, observe how it interacts with the style of others, and modify our part in stuck patterns that block intimacy. Sometimes, however, we cannot tone down our reactivity by an act of will. We need instead to address the source of anxiety that is revving us up. Frequently, our reactivity in one relationship is fueled by anxiety from an entirely different source. Let’s take a look at how such a process can work.

  Anxiety and the Pursuit Cycle

  A couple of years back, my sister shared with me that she was having a terribly difficult time with her steady companion, David. Although Susan felt entirely committed to the relationship, David said he needed more time to work through his own issues in order to make a decision about living together. This was a difficult situation because Susan and David lived in two different cities, making for long and tiring weekend trips. However, this long-distance arrangement (and David’s indecision) was nothing new and had been going on for quite some time.

  What was new was my sister’s sudden feeling of panic, resulting in her pressuring David for a decision he was not ready to make. Because my sister had been working for some time on her pattern of pursuing men who were distancers in romantic relationships, she was able to see her behavior like a red warning flag. She was unable, however, to tone down her reactivity and stop pursuing. By the time Susan called me, she was feeling terrible.

  In thinking about my sister’s situation, I was particularly struck by the timing of the problem. Susan’s sense of desperation and her heightened reactivity to David’s wish for more time and space followed a trip we took to Phoenix to visit our parents and to see our Uncle Si, who was dying from a fast-moving lung cancer. Si’s diagnosis was a shock to us, for he was a vibrant, strapping man we had assumed would outlive everyone. Visiting with him was also a reminder of past losses, impending losses, and some recent health scares and downhill slides in our family tree. Of all of these stressors, the closest to home for Susan and me was an earlier diagnosis that our father had a rare, degenerative brain disease. Because my father surprised everyone by regaining considerable functioning, this devastating diagnosis was replaced with a more hopeful one.

  During our phone conversation, I asked Susan if there might be a connection between her anxious focus on David, and all the emotions that were stirred up by our recent visit to Phoenix. This made intellectual sense to her, on the one hand, but on the other, it seemed a bit abstract since Susan was not experiencing a connection at a gut level. Indeed, any of us may have difficulty appreciating that key events in our first family—and how we respond to them—profoundly affect our current (or future) romantic relationships.

  Soon thereafter, Susan came to Topeka for a long weekend and decided to consult with a family systems therapist during her visit. As a result, she began to more fully appreciate the link between recent health issues in our family and her anxious pursuit of David. Simply thinking about this connection helped Susan to de-intensify her focus on David and reflect more calmly and objectively on her current situation.

  Susan was also challenged to think about the pursuer-distancer pattern she was stuck in. It was as if 100 percent of the anxiety and ambivalence about living together were David’s. It was as if Susan were just 100 percent raring to go—no worries at all, she said, except how they would decorate the apartment. Such polarities (she stands for togetherness, he for distance) are common enough, but they distort the experience of self and other, and just keep us stuck.

  Finally, Susan confronted the fact that she was putting so much energy into her relationship with David that she was neglecting her own work and failing to pay attention to her short- and long-term career goals. On the one hand, Susan’s attention to this relationship made sense because ensuring its success was her highest priority. On the other hand, focusing on a relationship at the expense of one’s own goals and life plan overloads that rel
ationship. The best way Susan could work on her relationship with David was to work on her own self. This kind of self-focus is a good rule of thumb for all of us.

  Having a Plan

  Insight and understanding are necessary but insufficient pieces of solving a problem. The next challenge for Susan was translating what she had learned into action. What might Susan do differently upon her return home to lower her anxiety and achieve a calmer, more balanced relationship with David? By the time Susan left Topeka, she had formulated a plan. Whenever we are feeling very anxious, it can be enormously helpful to have a clear plan, a plan based not on reactivity and a reflexive need to “do something” (anything!), but rather on reflection and a solid understanding of our problem.

  Breaking the Pursuit Cycle

  This is what Susan did differently upon her return home. First, Susan shared with David that she had been thinking about their relationship during their time apart and had gained some insight into her own behavior. “I came to realize,” she told David, “that the pressure I was feeling about our living together had less to do with you and our relationship, and more to do with my anxiety about some other things.” She filled David in on what these other things were—family issues related to health and loss. David was understanding—and visibly relieved.

  Susan also told David that perhaps she was letting him express the ambivalence for both of them, which probably wasn’t fair. She reminded David that her own track record with relationships surely provided her with good reason to be anxious about commitment, but that she could avoid this pretty well by focusing on his problem and his wish to put off the decision.

  This piece of dialogue was hardest for Susan, because when we are in a pursuer-distancer polarity, the pursuer is convinced that all she wants is more togetherness and the distancer is convinced that all he wants is more distance. Sometimes only after the pursuit cycle is broken can each party begin to experience the wish for both separateness and togetherness that we all struggle with.

  Finally, Susan told David that she had been neglecting her own work projects and needed to put more time and attention into them. “Instead of driving up next weekend,” Susan said, “I’m going to stay at home and get some work done.” For the first time in a while, Susan became the spokesperson for more distance, not in an angry, reactive manner but rather as a calm move for self. Indeed, when Susan began to pay more attention to her work, she became quite anxious about how she had neglected it.

  The changes Susan made were effective in breaking the pursuer-distancer pattern that was bringing her pain. If we are pursuers, such moves can be excruciatingly difficult to initiate and sustain in a calm, non-reactive fashion. Pursuing is often a reflexive reaction to anxiety. If it is our way, we will initially become more anxious when we keep it in check.

  From where, then, do we get the motivation and the courage to maintain such a change? As one colleague of mine explains, we get it from the conviction that the old ways simply do not work.

  Moving Back to the Source

  Before Susan left Topeka, she considered another option aimed at helping her to calm things down with David. Whenever Susan found herself feeling anxious about the relationship and slipping back into the pursuit mode, she would contemplate sitting down and writing a letter to our father instead, or calling home. This may sound a bit farfetched at first, but it makes good sense. If Susan managed her anxiety about family issues by distancing, then she would keep her anxiety down in that arena but she would be more likely to get intense with David. If she could stay connected to the actual source of her anxiety, then she might become more anxious about our parent’s failing health, for example, but the anxiety would be less likely to overload her relationship with David. Indeed, learning how to stay in touch with people on our own family tree, and working on key emotional issues at their source, lays the groundwork for more solid intimate relationships in the present or future.

  Of course, staying connected to family members and working on these relationships is a challenge requiring considerable time and effort. Indeed, this work really has no end but by the limits of our own motivation. Had Susan been in therapy, she might have chosen to continue and deepen this work over time. But a small step can go a long way. For Susan, just keeping in touch with family helped to lower her reactivity to David’s caution and occasional distance. And lowering her reactivity was the key element that allowed Susan to stay on course in modifying her reflexive pattern of pursuit.

  A Postscript on Partners Who Can’t Make Up Their Minds

  What if your partner can’t make a commitment? What if he’s not ready to think about marriage, not ready to give up another relationship, not sure that he is really in love? He (or she) may or may not be ready in two years—or twenty. Does Susan’s story imply that we should hang around forever, working on our own issues and failing to address our partner’s uncertainty? Does it mean that we should never take a position about our partner’s distancing or lack of commitment? Certainly not! A partner’s long-term ambivalence is an issue for us—that is, if we really want to settle down.

  We will, however, be least successful in addressing the commitment issue—or any issue, for that matter—if we are coming from a reactive and intense place. Working to keep anxiety down is a priority, because anxiety drives reactivity, which drives polarities. (All he can do is distance. All she can do is pursue.) Of course, anxiety is not something we can eliminate from our lives. Our intimate relationships will always be overloaded with old emotional baggage from our first family as well as recent stresses that hit us from all quarters. But the more we pay attention to the multiple sources of anxiety that impinge on our lives, the more calmly and clearly we’ll navigate the hot spots with our intimate other.

  A Calm Bottom Line

  Let’s look at a woman who was able to take a clear position with her distant and ambivalent partner, a position that was relatively free from reactivity and expressions of anxious pursuit. Gwenna was a twenty-six-year-old real estate agent who sought my help about a particular relationship issue. For two and a half years she had been dating Greg, a city planner who had had disastrous first and second marriages and couldn’t make up his mind about a third. Gwenna was aware that Greg backed off further under pressure, yet she didn’t want to live forever with the status quo. How did she ultimately handle the situation?

  As a first step, Gwenna talked with Greg about their relationship, calmly initiating the conversation in a low-keyed fashion. She shared her perspective on both the strengths and weaknesses of their relationship and what her hopes were for their future. She asked Greg to do the same. Unlike earlier conversations, this one was conducted without her pursuing him, pressuring him, or diagnosing his problems with women. At the same time, she asked Greg some clear questions, which exposed his own vagueness.

  “How will you know when you are ready to make a commitment? What specifically would need to change or be different than it is today?”

  “I don’t know,” was Greg’s response. When questioned further, the best he could come up with was that he’d “just feel it.”

  “How much more time do you need to make a decision one way or another?”

  “I’m not sure,” Greg replied. “Maybe a couple of years, but I really can’t answer a question like that. I can’t predict or plan my feelings.”

  And so it went.

  Gwenna really loved this man, but two years (and maybe longer) was longer than she could comfortably wait. So, after much thought, she told Greg that she would wait till fall (about ten months), but that she would move on if he couldn’t commit himself to marriage by then. She was open about her own wish to marry and have a family with him, but she was equally clear that her first priority was a mutually committed relationship. If Greg was not at that point by fall, then she would end the relationship—painful though it would be.

  During the waiting period, Gwenna was able to not pursue him and not get distant or otherwise reactive to his expressions of am
bivalence and doubt. In this way she gave Greg emotional space to struggle with his dilemma and the relationship had its best chance of succeeding. Her bottom-line position (“a decision by fall”) was not a threat or an attempt to rope Greg in, but rather a true definition of self and a clarification of the limits of what she could accept and still feel OK about in the relationship and her own self.

  Gwenna would not have been able to proceed this way if the relationship was overloaded with baggage from her past and present that she was not paying attention to. During the waiting period, Gwenna put her emotional energy into working on her own issues, which included, among other things, her anger at her deceased father, who she felt had been unavailable to her, and her related pattern of choosing distant males with poor track records in relationships. Of course, hard work does not ensure that things turn out as we wish. While my sister and David now live happily together, Gwenna’s story has a different ending.

  When fall arrived, Greg told Gwenna he needed another six months to make up his mind. Gwenna deliberated a while and decided she could live with that. But when the six months were up, Greg was still uncertain and asked for more time. It was then that Gwenna took the painful but ultimately empowering step of ending their relationship.

  Anxiety . . . From Where and When?

  Anxiety. We all know it impacts on everything from our immune system to our closest relationships. How can we identify the significant sources of anxiety and emotional intensity in our lives?