Sometimes they are obvious. There may be a recent stressful event, a negative or even positive change we can pinpoint as a source of anxiety that is overloading a relationship. If we miss it, others may see it for us (“No wonder you’ve been fighting more with Jim—you moved to a new city just a year ago and that’s a major adjustment!”).
Sometimes we sort of know a particular event or change is stressful, but we don’t fully appreciate just how stressful it really is. For example, we may downplay the emotional impact of significant transitions—a birth, a child leaving home, a graduation, a wedding, a job change, a promotion, a retirement, or an ill parent—because these are “just normal things” that happen in the course of the life cycle. Other people may even appear to breeze through. We fail to appreciate that “just normal things,” when they involve change, will profoundly affect our closest ties.
In other cases we may simply not link anxiety from source A to stuckness in relationship B, or we may minimize or ignore the key events in our first family that raise intensity elsewhere. My sister, for example, was initially unaware that her reactive position with David was driven by the emotionality from her family visit, although one followed right on the heels of the other. Our narrow focus on one intimate relationship obscures the broader emotional field from our view.
A Look at the Emotional Field
Consider Heather, who found herself suddenly “swept away” by a married man named Ira and vulnerable to extreme highs and lows in response to Ira’s alternating hot and cold attitude toward her. She felt so buffeted about by the intensity of her feelings that she called me to begin psychotherapy.
According to Heather’s report, “nothing else was happening” in her life at the time her relationship with Ira heated up. That is, she believed that the beginning of their affair had occurred in a calm emotional field. When I inquired carefully, however, I learned that Heather’s passionate attachment to Ira began shortly after the death of her maternal grandmother. Because this grandmother was a distant figure in Heather’s life, this loss did not seem to Heather to be of particular emotional significance.
But such was not the case. Heather’s widowed mother and grandmother had been extremely close, spending much of their time together. The grandmother’s death raised uncomfortable issues for Heather concerning her mother’s well-being and also evoked Heather’s worry that she was next in line to fill up the empty space in her mother’s life. It also stirred up strong feelings about the earlier loss of her own dad. As Heather was to learn, our distance from family members is by no means a protection from strong emotional reactions to their deaths.
The underground emotionality surrounding her grandmother’s death created an anxious emotional field in which Heather’s painful attachment to Ira took hold. Her reactivity to Ira’s every move was sky-high. Yet from Heather’s perspective, “nothing else was happening” when their steamy affair began.
Sometimes the source of anxiety or intensity that is fueling a current relationship problem is from an experience long past—incest, an early loss, or any number of “hot issues” in our first family which were never processed or resolved. The trauma, or the problem in the family that could not be talked about, might be from five years ago or fifty-five. The connection may be relatively easy to make (“I know that my problem with being intimate with Sam has something to do with my history of sexual abuse”). Or we may be unable to make a connection at all.
Consider, for example, Lois and Frances, two sisters in their late forties who barely speak to each other since their mother’s death six years ago. Lois is still furious at Frances for not doing enough for their mother at the time of her greatest need, and Frances believes Lois made unilateral decisions about their mother’s care without consulting her. The two sisters are locked in a mutually blaming stance, heading for a total cutoff that will likely continue in successive generations. Each considers “the problem” to be the fault of the other. Neither sister is aware that the intensity in their relationship (managed first by fighting and now by distance) has as its source the high level of anxiety surrounding their mother’s terminal illness and death.
Staying angry and distant protects both Lois and Frances from the full experience of their grief which they would meet head on if they truly reconciled and drew together. It also protects Lois from experiencing her anger at her mother, who left Frances more than half of the inheritance because Lois had a wealthier husband. Their stuck position blocks them from successfully mourning the loss of their mother, processing the issue of the inheritance, and affirming their important bond as sisters.
Six years after losing their mother, Lois and Frances have not yet moved out of their reactive way of relating to each other. Perhaps at some future time a crisis, or some other transforming life experience, will allow one of them to take the first bold move toward connectedness. If this occurs, it will surely constitute a courageous act of change.
Thinking About Anniversaries
Our closest relationships are like lightning rods that absorb tensions and anxieties from whatever source and from however long ago. Anniversary dates will always kick up anxiety, whether we are aware of them or not. For me, hitting my forties presents a challenge because my mother was diagnosed with her first cancer in her late forties—and her mother died at age forty-four. I trust the fifties will be easier, all other things being equal, which of course they never are. If a crisis hit your family when you were age six, you can be certain that you’ll be operating in a more anxious emotional field when your child turns six and when you reach the age your mother was at that time.
This does not mean we will feel more anxious at an important anniversary date. When your daughter reaches age nine, the age you were when your parents divorced, you may not even remember that fact. Instead you may feel more critical of your husband, or perhaps feel more clingy and insecure. Or instead you may find that you and your daughter become quite distant—or that you fight with her daily about her school habits or choice of friends.
What we see most frequently at anniversary dates is the outcome of high anxiety, those predictable patterned ways in which people move under stress that rigidify and polarize our relationships. Some people do make the connection (“I notice I’ve wanted to leave Joe since I’ve been approaching the age of my mother’s breakdown”). Most of us don’t. Instead we just shift into a reactive gear and a particular relationship may take a downward spiraling turn. Or we just get reactive all over the place. Our boss criticizes our work and a cloud of depression settles over us all day. A boyfriend seeks more space and we feel panicky. We’re just more vulnerable to automatic, intense reactions from whatever source.
Of course, none of this is exactly new. We all know there are multiple sources of stress that impact on a particular relationship at a particular time. And of course we are aware that anxieties and unresolved issues from our first family get us into trouble today. Thinking about key sources of anxiety, however, is a big challenge. Working on them is a bigger one still.
What Is the Problem?
Most of us confuse the outcome of high anxiety with “the problem.” For example, I was viewed as “the problem” at the time of my mother’s cancer diagnosis and I was sent to therapy. It would have been just as likely for anxiety to be managed by severe marital fighting or distance, in which case a “marital problem” might have been the diagnosis. In another family, Dad might have hit the bottle or Mother might have developed a severe depression with other family members getting organized around it in an unhelpful fashion.
When anxiety overloads a family beyond their resources to manage it, they will come to therapy naming the problem in one of three ways:
Child-focus: A child is seen as the problem and everything else may be viewed as OK.
Marital fighting and/or distance: “The marriage” is the problem.
A symptomatic spouse: One spouse is underfunctioning or has the symptom.
When one person or one relationship
is labeled “the problem,” other issues get obscured from view. For example, if my sister saw David’s distancing (or her own pursuing) as “the real problem,” she would have missed the point. On the one hand, it was helpful for her to observe and modify her own part in a pattern of distance and pursuit that was only bringing her pain. In that sense, the pattern was the problem. On the other hand, it was equally important that she widen her focus to include additional sources of anxiety that were fueling her reactivity.
Maintaining a broad perspective isn’t easy. Naturally we want to focus where it hurts and we want to steer clear of other areas. For example, if we bring our child to therapy, we want the focus of treatment to be on the child. Our concern for our child is genuine enough. However, the last thing we want is to look at our own reactivity toward the child’s father or stepmother, or how we are currently navigating our own relationship with our mother.
We want to look where we want to look. And the higher the anxiety, the more extreme our tunnel vision and the greater our vulnerability to be swallowed up by painful feelings. Yet, as the next chapter continues to illustrate, we cannot work on intimacy problems if we stay narrowly focused on one relationship or on any one definition of “the problem.”
5
Distance and More Distance
Adrienne called me for an appointment with the goal of working on her marriage. She summarized the problem in these words: “Frank and I got along fine for the first few years. But after our second child was born, we began to fight a lot. And when we both had enough of that, we just stopped relating to each other and became like roommates sharing an apartment. I was devastated when I discovered he was having an affair, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was looking at another man, too, even though I wasn’t acting on it.”
If not for the painful discovery of her husband’s lover, Adrienne might not have come for help. “I knew the closeness had gone out of our relationship, both physically and emotionally,” she explained, “but I wasn’t that upset about it. Maybe I was denying the problem, but I figured it was just life. A lot of couples I know aren’t intimate after they have kids. Every now and then the distance really bothered me, but at the same time I didn’t take it that seriously. I suppose I got used to it.”
When Adrienne first sought my help, she viewed distance as the problem in her marriage. Earlier, she had viewed marital fighting as the problem. Distancing and fighting, however, are not “the problem” between any two people. Both conflict and distance are normal ways of managing the anxiety that is freighting an important relationship.
Given sufficient time and the inevitable stresses that the life cycle brings, we can count on periods of reactive fighting and distance in even the most ideal partnerships. The fight-or-flight response is present in all species, our own included. The degree of trouble we get into in a particular relationship rests on two factors. The first is the amount of stress and anxiety that is impinging on a relationship from multiple sources, past and present. The second is the amount of self that we bring to that relationship. To the extent that we have not carved out a clear and whole “I” in our first family, we will always feel in some danger of being swallowed up by the “togetherness force” with others. Seeking distance (or fighting) is an almost instinctual reaction to the anxiety over this fusion, this togetherness which threatens loss of self.
The specific way we get into trouble has to do with our own particular style of managing anxiety and the dances we get stuck in with others. Adrienne’s story will allow us to take an in-depth look at one common, if not universal, way of managing anxiety that can get us in trouble over the long haul in any close relationship: emotional distance and cutoff.
Distancing: The Problem or the Solution?
What is a distant relationship? Adrienne’s description of her marriage to Frank provides a good example. At the time she discovered her husband’s affair, they seldom fought, but at the same time they were not really close and they rarely shared their thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And rather than confront the distance in their relationship head-on, both of them were detouring their emotional energy toward a third party. Frank was having an affair, and although Adrienne was not sleeping with anyone, she had another man under her skin.
In one sense, Frank’s affair—and Adrienne’s affair of the mind—protected their marriage. Adrienne’s erotic attachment to another man ensured that she would not fully experience her dissatisfaction with Frank, and thus the deeper problems in her marriage would not surface with real emotional force. When we look later at the complex business of triangles, we will see how third parties do serve to stabilize relationships and help keep the real issues safely underground. Of course, the solution is also the problem. Adrienne and Frank became so entrenched in an empty-shell relationship that it took a real crisis—Adrienne’s discovery of the “other woman”—to get her to take a serious look at their marriage, and her life.
Most of us rely on some form of distancing as a primary way to manage intensity in key relationships, including those in our first family. For example, we may move to a different city or country as a way to avoid the difficult feelings evoked by closer contact with our parents or other family members. Or we may live in our folks’ house but withdraw emotionally by keeping conversations superficial, by sharing little about our selves, or by avoiding certain subjects entirely. We may even have a sibling we don’t speak to unless we happen to show up together at a family gathering.
Emotional distancing can be an essential first move to ensure our emotional well-being and even our survival. We all know from personal experience that a relationship can become so emotionally charged that the most productive action we can take is to seek space. And if we are in danger of violence or abuse, there is no higher priority than getting out of the situation to ensure that we will not be hurt.
Distancing is a useful way to manage intensity when it removes us from a situation of high reactivity and allows us to get calm enough to reflect, plan, and generate new options for our behavior. Often, however, we rely on distance and a cutoff to exit permanently (emotionally or physically) from a significant relationship, without really addressing the issues and problems. This may be the easiest and least painful way out in the short run—but whatever goes unresolved and unprocessed may cause trouble in our next relationship venture. As usual, it’s a matter of short-term relief in exchange for a long-term cost.
In Adrienne’s marriage the distance was extreme. At the same time, however, the triangles (Frank’s affair and Adrienne’s serious flirtation) stabilized the marriage so that neither partner was pushing for change—that is, not until the cat got out of the bag and there was no way to put it back in.
Back to the Emotional Field
All of us, without exception, have difficulty with intimacy, and over time, we will either move forward or drift backward in this dimension. Why did Adrienne move backward, and why did the distance in her marriage become so extreme?
According to Adrienne, marital problems “just happened” after the birth of Joe, their second son. But conflict in relationships does not “just happen,” nor do people simply, without reason, drift into intractable fighting or distance. What, then, was the broader context for Adrienne and Frank’s relationship difficulties? What was going on at around the time that Adrienne and Frank entered a period of constant fighting and bickering, and then one of unbridgeable distance, lack of communication, and infidelity? “Nothing much,” according to Adrienne. On careful investigation, however, “nothing much” turned out to be a great deal, indeed.
Although Adrienne herself observed that marital tensions surfaced after the birth of Joe, their second son, she failed to associate the two events. Yet the connection was real enough. The birth of any child introduces extra stress into a marriage, and for this couple, the issue of second sons was a particularly loaded one. What made it loaded was the history of “second sons” in the previous generation in each of their own families.
During Joe’s first year of life, Adrienne’s father was diagnosed with stomach cancer that was discovered at an advanced stage. Although Adrienne was terribly upset about her dad’s diagnosis, she managed her feelings by distancing from him. She did not decrease the amount of contact she had with her father, but all her communication about his illness and her reactions to it were through her mother, who took the position that Adrienne’s father needed to be protected from what was happening. When I first met with Adrienne, her father was at the terminal stage of his illness, but she had not yet found a way to even mention the cancer to him, to say good-bye, or to tell him how much she valued him as her father.
At the time that her marital problems intensified, Adrienne was also struggling with career issues. When Joe was born, Frank had managed his own anxiety by distancing into long hours of overtime work. On the surface, Adrienne fought with him about his unavailability, but she was also envious of his ability to lose himself in his projects. In contrast, she was experiencing increasing dissatisfaction with her own job as a lab technician but was unable to generate alternatives or to clarify what she wanted to do. By entering into a strong, erotic flirtation with a man at work, Adrienne put her own career issues on hold and helped to steady the marital boat—while she and Frank grew oceans apart.
The Dance of Intimacy Page 5
