The Dance of Intimacy

by Harriet Lerner

  It was an important first step for Adrienne to recognize the high stress she had been under since the birth of her second son, and to more clearly identify the key events that helped fuel the growing distance in her marriage. These were:

  the birth of a new baby, Joe, which evoked deep(although unconscious) feelings in Adrienne about her own retarded brother and his place in the family.

  the diagnosis of her father’s terminal illness. Adrienne’s own career concerns and her difficulty formulating personal goals.

  It was also reassuring for Adrienne to recognize that when anxiety and stress get high enough, or last long enough, marital distancing and/or fighting is one common way that it gets expressed.

  From Insight to Action

  As Adrienne looked carefully and objectively at how she negotiated other important relationships under stress, she began to observe that distancing was a long-standing pattern for her and other members of her family. It was, in fact, her familiar and preferred way of moving under stress, especially with men. In her first family, her relationship with two important males—her dad and her retarded brother—had always been distant, with her mother in the middle, conveying information between parties. Through therapy, Adrienne began to recognize that there was some connection between her distant position from the men in her first family and the dramatic distance that now characterized her marriage.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if “insight” automatically led to change? Typically it does not. Understanding the roots of a problem is not the same as knowing how to solve it.

  As Adrienne learned more about herself in psychotherapy, she tried to move back into her marriage in a new way, hoping to achieve a deeper level of closeness. Some of what she did differently was ultimately productive. For example, she told Frank that psychotherapy was helping her to become aware of her own contribution to the distance in their marriage, which she was working to change. She also took a clear position that his extramarital affair was not acceptable to her and that he would have to end it in order for her to stay in the marriage. This he did.

  But much of Adrienne’s efforts to “push closeness” only interfered with its attainment. She became preoccupied with intimacy as a primary goal, keeping it in the forefront of her discussions with Frank and insisting that he join with her in the pursuit of it. The more she pursued Frank for greater closeness, and the more she focused on his lack of warmth, interest, and attentiveness, the more distant Frank became. And the more he distanced, the more Adrienne pursued.

  What happened when Adrienne was able to break the pursuit-distance cycle? She accomplished this by de-intensifying her critical focus on Frank and by giving him more space, without returning to her earlier position of cold withdrawal. In response, Frank did make some tentative moves toward her. At this point, however, Adrienne responded negatively—she just wanted to be left alone. “To be really honest,” she reflected in psychotherapy, “maybe it’s too late. Or maybe I really don’t want to be particularly close with him. But I don’t want to lose the marriage.”

  Adrienne gradually recognized her own allergy to intimacy, which helped her to realize that she needed to make changes in her original family relationships before she could move differently in her marriage. This gave Adrienne the courage to go “back home” again. If she chose to remain cutoff from the males in her first family and failed to process emotional issues in that arena, then her marriage would remain overloaded. And Adrienne would continue to respond to the overload by distancing or with conflict.

  “Dad, I’m Going to Miss You”

  How did Adrienne move against the distance in her own family? First, she made a significant effort to connect with her dad directly about his illness rather than hearing all the details via her mom. The typical pattern was that Adrienne always began her visits with her dad by asking, “How are you?”—to which he responded with a superficial reply (“About the same”) or with a somewhat loaded joke (“The doctors tell me I’m so healthy I could drop dead any minute”). Adrienne would then change the subject and they would chat about the weather or the grandchildren.

  Adrienne made a big advance when she was able to cut through her father’s distance (which was his attempt to offer Adrienne the protection he thought she needed) and ask him directly, “Dad, what are the doctors telling you about your cancer? I’d really like to hear the facts from you.” When he gave his usual superficial and uninformative response, she let him know directly that although his cancer—and her awareness that she might lose him soon—was painful for her, she would feel much better if she knew the facts and was kept informed. When he said, “Mother will keep you informed,” Adrienne responded, “She does, Dad, but I’d also like to hear it from you.” This brief conversation was a big step for Adrienne in dealing more directly with her dad’s impending death. It was also the first time that the word “cancer” had been used by any family member in her father’s presence. He reacted awkwardly at first and then later with relief and greater openness.

  Of course, there were times when Adrienne’s dad did not feel like talking about his illness, and Adrienne was sensitive to his moods. It is of questionable virtue to push someone into discussing something because we think it is good to do so. But often we confuse sensitivity with an anxious “protectiveness” in which the lines of communication shut down in a family because everyone operates on the assumption that the other person doesn’t want to hear it or can’t handle it.

  Initially, Adrienne was convinced that her father chose not to discuss his own dying (“He can’t deal with it”) and that bringing it up was intrusive. This notion was reinforced by her mother, who insisted that Adrienne’s father “could never deal with reality.” Yet Adrienne herself was not asking her father questions that made clear her wish to keep the lines of communication open. Adrienne made a courageous change in her own relationship with her dad when she began to calmly and clearly ask questions.

  What sorts of questions? Adrienne’s questions conveyed her interest in the facts of his illness as the doctors saw it (“Did you get the results of the test back?” “What is your doctor telling you about your prognosis and the course of the cancer?”). Her questions conveyed her interest in her dad’s own perspective (“Do you agree with the doctors or see it differently?” “What’s your own sense about this cancer and your prognosis?”) And her questions conveyed her interest in her dad’s thoughts and feelings about death.

  When, through her questions and the sharing of her own reactions, Adrienne convinced her father of her genuine wish to know, he turned out to value the opportunity to talk about his terminal condition. A week before he died, Adrienne’s father shared his “philosophy of death” with her and they did some crying together. Later that week Adrienne told me, “It was a good kind of crying—not a depressed crying, but just an emotional crying.”

  As Adrienne put her emotional energy into connecting with her family around her father’s impending death, she experienced great sadness but also felt as if a load had lifted from her marriage. She became less preoccupied with “lack of intimacy” as a root difficulty in her marriage, and paradoxically, she became better able to achieve it. As her marriage became freer from the emotional overload of an important mourning process, Adrienne also became freer to share with Frank what she was going through as her dad was dying. She was able to focus more on how she was managing her own issues, and less on whether Frank was responding to her self-disclosures in just the “right way.” As a result, she and Frank shared more instances of genuine closeness.

  “My Brother Means Nothing to Me”

  The most distant relationship in Adrienne’s life was with her brother. She treated it as a “non-relationship” and did her best to render Greg invisible in her mind. It is not possible, however, to have a “non-relationship” with a parent or sibling. Distance and cutoff only cause intensity to go underground and resurface elsewhere.

  For a long time in psychotherapy, Adrienne could not think about her bro
ther, Greg, much less contemplate a visit to the institution where he resided. Each time I asked a simple factual question about Greg, or inquired about how his retardation and institutionalization affected the family, Adrienne gave the same predictable response: “I never knew him—he’s too retarded to relate to—he means nothing to me.”

  Adrienne had not seen Greg for over a decade, and prior to that her contact with him had been minimal. His status as an “invisible” family member was more than apparent. Adrienne’s older son, who was five, did not even know that his mother had a brother. Frank had never met Greg or seen a photograph of him as an adult. Adrienne herself might not have recognized Greg if she had run into him on the street.

  Adrienne talked about her lifelong distance from Greg as if it reflected nothing more than disinterest (“I simply can’t think of any reason why I’d go to the trouble to see him”). She was totally unaware of the underground feelings that threatened to surface if she made any move to reconnect. “This may sound callous,” she would report blandly, “but I just don’t consider him a member of the family.”

  We commonly confuse distance or cutoff with a defect of the heart. We hear this confusion in everyday talk, and even in the pronouncements of mental health experts. Labels like “unloving” or “uncaring” may automatically be applied to a mother who relinquishes or takes flight from her child, to a father who abandons the family and never looks back, to a brother who cuts off communication with his sister after she enters a psychiatric hospital or becomes ill.

  It is important to understand that distance and cutoff between family members have nothing to do with an absence of feeling, or a lack of love or concern. Distance and cutoff are simply ways of managing anxiety. Rather than reflecting a lack of feeling, they reflect an intensity of feeling. The feeling may surround hot issues that have evolved over many generations and that cannot be processed or even mentioned easily.

  Adrienne learned the true meaning of intensity only after she telephoned the institution where her brother lived and set up a date for the long trip to a neighboring state to see him. The week before the visit, she was unable to sleep well, had terrifying and violent nightmares, and experienced her first full-blown panic attack on the bus to work one day. For reasons she could not articulate, she felt unable to tell her mom about the visit, so kept it a secret.

  These dramatic reactions to Adrienne’s planned visit forced her to recognize that seeing her brother was no small emotional matter. Still, it was only after she visited Greg that she could begin to identify and process the underground feelings that the distance and cutoff had held in check.

  Fallout from Change

  After so much anticipatory anxiety, Adrienne found the actual visit to Greg reassuring. Their meeting stayed on a calm note, and although Adrienne was convinced that her status as a sister went unappreciated, Greg seemed pleased by her presence. Having the chance to actually see Greg, to be with him, to observe the setting he was in, and to meet a few staff members who had daily contact with him made Greg into a “real person” for her, and allowed her to replace fantasy with a more realistic perspective on her brother. What made the deepest impression on Adrienne, though, was that one young staff member at the institution was obviously fond of Greg, a feeling he apparently reciprocated. “It never occurred to me that anyone could actually become attached to him—or vice versa!” Adrienne exclaimed during her next therapy session. “I mean this guy seemed to have a real affection for Greg, like they had a real relationship.”

  Because Adrienne initially found the visit reassuring, she was unprepared for its emotional aftermath. Several weeks after she shared the news of her visit to Greg with her mom, Adrienne came to therapy nearly hysterical. Her mother, Elaine, was acutely depressed and had shared suicidal fantasies with her, although she had no plan to act on them. The following week, I saw Adrienne and her mother together.

  Over the next several sessions with Adrienne and Elaine, a crucial family theme erupted—a theme that had seethed like an underground volcano since Greg’s birth. This “hot issue” was Greg’s retardation and, more specifically, the unspoken question in the family of “Who was to blame?” What emerged through Elaine’s outpouring of tears and despair was her most profound sense of guilt and self-recrimination for the condition of her son.

  Adrienne’s cutoff from her brother had helped protect her mother from the conscious recognition of these feelings, and protected the family from having to deal with a subject that everyone feared was too hot to handle. At an unconscious level, Adrienne had always appreciated this fact. Children usually do.

  During our time together, Adrienne’s mother was able to share with her daughter the questions about her son’s retardation that had haunted her for decades. Had she caused it? Was it a gene from her side of the family? Was it the bottle of wine she had drunk during that first month when she didn’t know she was pregnant? Elaine also shared her profound guilt about the decision to institutionalize Greg. She told Adrienne, in a voice filled more with despair than blame, “When you kept talking on and on about how much that man liked Greg—and how they seemed to really be good for each other—I thought you were telling me that I was a monster for putting him away!”

  In a way, all this was new to Adrienne. But in a way it was not, for she had always sensed the unnamed tension surrounding the subject of Greg. As Adrienne and her mother were able to share their thoughts and reactions on this difficult subject, her mother’s depression rapidly lifted. At the same time, however, a second “hot issue” emerged, as Elaine got in touch with her previously repressed rage at her deceased husband. Elaine had always felt that her husband’s family blamed her for the decision to institutionalize Greg, and she believed that her husband had not come to her defense. She and her husband had not talked about this directly, but it provided the backdrop for their own growing marital distance. Indeed, after their second child, Greg, Elaine and her husband had drifted into a growing distance, a pattern that Adrienne could now recognize herself repeating.

  Both Adrienne and Elaine found it awkward and difficult to talk openly about these painful issues, but it was ultimately rewarding. As a result of getting things out on the table, mother and daughter shared a genuinely closer relationship and both were freer to stay in more emotional contact with Greg. Elaine’s self-disclosure helped Adrienne to recognize that she too felt guilty: guilty because she had never wanted Greg to come along in the first place; guilty because she had wanted him gone from the moment he arrived; guilty because, in the omnipotent unconscious mind of the child, these “bad feelings” had caused her brother to be extruded from the family; and finally, guilty because her life was so easy and privileged compared to the hardship that Greg’s handicap imposed on him.

  When Adrienne could articulate these guilty feelings, think about them, talk about them with family members, and recognize that they were both natural and shared, her unconscious no longer needed to “do penance” for her sins. Much to Adrienne’s surprise, she found herself thinking more creatively about her work situation, as her own guilt about having a retarded brother was no longer a restraining force.

  Adrienne’s guilt, however, did not derive entirely from early irrational sources. Adrienne also felt guilty because she had rendered her brother invisible and treated him as if he did not exist. Because women are encouraged to feel guilty about everything—and to take responsibility for all human problems—we often have difficulty sorting out when guilt is there for a good reason. By “good reason” I refer to guilt that lets us know we are not taking a responsible position in a relationship: a position that is congruent with our own values and beliefs as we have struggled to formulate them, separate from pressures of family and culture.

  Only after visiting her brother and breaking the old distancing pattern did Adrienne become aware of her strong feelings of guilt for having stayed away. This awareness led to changed behavior, as it should. Adrienne slowly began to stay in reasonable contact with her
brother, and she brought her children and husband to meet him as well. Whether Greg recognized her as family or fully appreciated her visits was not entirely clear at the time Adrienne terminated her work with me. Adrienne had nonetheless decided to stay connected—for her own sake.

  What About Adrienne’s Marriage?

  Adrienne came into therapy with only one goal and only one area of concern: She wanted to save her marriage. She had no wish to talk about her father’s impending death, and the subject of her retarded brother was even more off-limits. “I can’t stand talking about this family stuff!” she would frequently say to me. “What does it have to do with anything?”

  Adrienne’s feelings were more than understandable. Our desire not to focus where it hurts makes sense and should always be respected. This is where Adrienne and I began, and we might not have needed to look further. In most cases, however, couples cannot achieve greater intimacy by staying narrowly focused on their relationship. Because our current relationship problems are fueled by other unresolved issues and affected by how we understand and navigate family relationships, it just doesn’t help to stay locked into a narrow perspective.

  As Adrienne was able to identify a long-standing pattern of distancing in her family (a pattern that had gone on for at least several generations) and then was able to connect more directly with her family members, her behavior with Frank gradually shifted. Rather than swinging back and forth between distance, on the one hand, and “pushing” for intimacy, on the other, Adrienne found a new middle ground. She moved from self-defeating attempts to be closer (like blaming Frank for being a distant person and pushing him to reveal himself) to constructive attempts (letting Frank know that she wanted to spend a weekend together in the city; sharing more of herself with him, without focusing on whether she got the “right” response). By dealing directly with issues in her own family of origin, rather than avoiding them, Adrienne gained the ability to think more objectively and calmly about her marital difficulties.