Already Free

by Bruce Tift

  In its neurotic aspects, the energy of connection may be characterized by a lack of boundaries, an avoidance of conflict, and a tendency to compromise integrity in exchange for approval, love, or security. The extreme expression is that of the victim, where someone puts relationship as such a high priority that they lose touch with themselves. The stance of the victim is the perfect complement to that of the perpetrator—it says, “I need you, so it doesn’t really matter how you treat me.”

  In both cases, the neurotic expression of each style arises when there is a fundamental split—a disconnection from the opposite energy. As discussed above, this sense of a dissociative split comes out of our unconscious efforts to not acknowledge the inherent tension and disturbance of all relationships. Neurotic masculine arises when there is a disconnection from the always-present experience of empathy and connection, from the experience of other. Neurotic feminine arises when there’s a disconnection from the always-present sense of basic aloneness and separateness, from the experience of self.

  To experience the sane expression of either the masculine or the feminine, we must learn how to lead with one energy, without losing experiential contact with the other. Sane masculine energy arises when we can assert our separateness, have conflict, set boundaries, and know that we are alone in some fundamental way—all the while still keeping our heart open. We can feel connection and empathy with others, knowing that any conflict between us is most likely there because they’re so important to us. Sane feminine energy leads with connection, communication, support, and empathy—all the while maintaining boundaries and personal responsibility. We understand that no relationship will work well if we lose touch with our fundamental aloneness and compromise our integrity.

  In relationship, I find that it usually works best to lead with our experience of connection when things are friendly, going well, cooperative. Knowing that this relationship is not going to “save” us—that we will always have differences to deal with—we can still focus on our commonalities in the moment. We can let irritations slide, rather than keeping score. When both partners are leading with connection, it’s the time for sharing our vulnerabilities, risking discussions about sensitive issues, exposing aspects of ourselves that we usually keep private. Healthy feminine energy allows us to stay present in our vulnerability precisely because we remain responsible for our own safety and integrity. When we’re in conflict with someone, however, it seems to work best if we lead with the energy of separateness. We know we care about this person and that this person cares about us, but that’s not what’s being focused on right now. Conflict is the way we deal with our differences, after all, and that’s really what differences are—evidence of our separateness. You can’t have intimacy without conflict, because you’re two separate people getting very close to one another. Conflict, by itself, is not a problem in relationship; problems arise from unskillful conflict. Healthy masculine energy can experience conflict without apology—working with the truth of interpersonal differences—precisely because we can feel our care for the other. We know that, paradoxically, the purpose of this conflict is to help us keep our hearts open. A lack of healthy masculine energy is one way in which many couples get into difficulty. They’re having conflict, while unconsciously trying to reassure themselves of their connection. The refusal to keep it simple and just have “clean conflict” actually arises from a lack of confidence in our connection and contributes to the “sticky conflict” characteristic of codependent dynamics.

  BALANCING RELATIONSHIP STYLES: FROM UNCONSCIOUS TO CONSCIOUS

  Tamara and Allan had been married almost twenty-five years, and their three girls were all finally away at college. They’d come to see me for the same reason many couples do. One of the partners—and it’s usually the woman, but about a third of the time it’s the man—is in pain because they believe they want more connection in the relationship. During our first session, Tamara went through a long list of efforts she’d made to get more emotional intimacy with Allan. She’d tried to schedule more time together, planning date nights and getaways. She had signed them up for a meditation class in hopes they’d discover a shared interest. She’d tried talking to him about his feelings, to no avail. In fact, it seemed that her attempts were resulting in the opposite response she desired. Allan seemed to get moodier and spent more and more time in his study, reading books and surfing the Internet. Finally Tamara had decided they needed outside help; a friend recommended they come see me.

  As is often the case, my first suggestion did not land well. I suggested that rather than trying—unsuccessfully—to promote more connection with Allan, Tamara might use this difficult situation to explore and accept her experience of feeling alone and separate. Every balanced relationship, I suggested, includes both togetherness and separation. As long as Tamara was the voice of connection, there was no need for Allan to make any attempt at connection himself. Allan, like most (but not all) men, had a stylistic tendency toward wanting to feel separate. Tamara’s emphasis on connection meant he could take as much space as he wanted, unconsciously aware that she would ensure there was closeness, so he did not need to exert himself to connect.

  So many people who desire more intimacy and closeness with their partners would actually benefit from stepping back and getting comfortable with feeling alone. Naming what they want, yes, but not doing the work for both people. Tamara, like many partners who are holding the energy of closeness, had a habit of doing 90 percent of the work of connection. She was going overboard, continually trying to make things work even when she was feeling hurt and exhausted.

  I have the view that a healthy, intimate relationship is one based on equity, with each partner making roughly the same amount of effort. Each will get what they want about half the time, and each will not get what they want about half the time. But if we have the habit of doing 90 percent of the work of connection, who are we going to find as a partner but somebody who specializes in doing just 10 percent? So one of the experiments I suggested to Tamara, which anyone in her situation might make, would be to step back to the 50/50 mark and see what happens.

  Even though Allan was in the masculine energy position of wanting more separateness, I suggested he look to see if he also genuinely wanted connection. His answer was yes, but that Tamara’s efforts were too much. She was so demanding, he said, that he needed to sneak away to his study just to be able to breathe. Tamara was always supplying the energy of connection, so Allan never had to. In fact, to maintain his own inner balance, he felt that he had to emphasize his separateness. He had not considered the possibility that by acting in such a separate way, Tamara never had to experience her need for separateness. Like a lot of people who hold the energy of independence in a relationship, he felt he had to withdraw in order to get the space he needed. What Allan didn’t understand was that, as he withdrew, Tamara’s impulse to close the gap between them and maintain a sense of connection got even stronger. And as she made more efforts at connecting, Allan would withdraw even more. This potentially escalating cycle is called “distancer-pursuer” dynamics in Western therapy.

  Counterinstinctual as it might have been, what I suggested was that Allan experiment with initiating more contact with Tamara, just as I had invited Tamara to step back. I suggested he might suspend the thought that Tamara was trying to control and smother him and that perhaps she simply wanted the reassurance of connection. Over time, as Allan became more willing to initiate contact, Tamara reported feeling more willing to step back when he wanted some time to himself. And as Tamara was willing to allow Allan more time alone without conflict, he found that he could join her with less anxiety about feeling trapped or losing himself in her needs.

  From the Western developmental point of view, our relationship styles originate in childhood. As we’ve discussed, they develop as part of our strategy to take the best care of ourselves possible, given our circumstances, gender training, and families of origin. There are many different scenarios, but ver
y commonly, an adult who is identified with the energy of separation will have grown up with a parent with whom feeling connected was a problem. The parent may have been smothering or invasive or may have pushed away any attempts to be close. There are many possible situations and conditions, but the child’s ongoing experience is that life works better as the child learns to take care of herself and not count on anyone being there for her. All children have to cue off of their parents. They are profoundly dependent, still very immature, and basically powerless. So very similar life circumstances can lead to very different strategies, depending on the parent’s basic emotional stance.

  In Allan’s case, it wasn’t a surprise to learn that he had a history of experiencing his mother as overinvolved, smothering, and controlling. To protect himself—his emotional integrity—he had to withhold relationship, but in a way that avoided obvious boundaries that his mother would attack. So he tended to overtly accommodate and agree in order to avoid conflict, but then he would not follow through. Instead, he would just disappear. This style of separateness was necessary for Allan in childhood because his mother claimed that she wanted closeness, but it was clear to him that it was about her needs, not his. Another child might learn a style of separateness from parents who didn’t want to feel burdened by parenting or who were working long hours and came home exhausted. This child may have been rewarded for independence and self-sufficiency and, as an adult, be very proud of having a separate style. Of course, as children, we are profoundly dependent. So our strategy of wanting to feel only separate will never actually work. As an adult, we may find a “connecting” partner, as Allan did, to continue this drama of “trying” to be separate.

  When an adult is strongly identified with a connecting style, that person usually will have grown up with parents with whom feeling separate was a problem. This is often the case when a child has experienced emotional neglect or has been through significant abandonment events. This may mean a parent who is overtly negligent, who is working three jobs because they’re in poverty, or who got very sick and went into the hospital. Perhaps this child’s parents got divorced and were very absorbed in that process, so they didn’t have as much attention for the child. Whatever the reasons, when a child has a parent who’s not emotionally engaged, it’s very common for that child to learn to make the connection. If the child wants relationship—and, of course, as dependent young beings, we must have relationship—then that child will have to make it happen. Such a child is trained to connect, to be the one responsible for the connection. When no one is really available or interested in the child, the last thing that child will do is to assert any separateness. The child won’t develop skills with boundaries or feel able to express anger and won’t learn to assert needs effectively. As an adult, this person might mysteriously end up with a partner who is emotionally unavailable—because that’s the kind of relationship the adult knows and understands.

  Tamara is a good example. She was the only daughter of four children, whose parents divorced when Tamara was about eight years old, after several years of bitter conflict. She unconsciously responded to her own needs for security and love, which in fact were not being met, by taking on the role of being the family’s caretaker. No one was there for her, so the best she could do was to be there for everyone else. She was trained to believe that relationships were about her doing all the work—about her making the connection. She “hired” Allan because he specialized in being emotionally unavailable and thus allowed her to play her familiar role as the never-really-successful connector.

  Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to go back and bring alive one’s parent–child relationship in order to grow and transform through therapeutic work. But for many of us, it can be helpful to see the historic origins of our style in order to appreciate how deeply embedded our patterns may be. So I’m always curious about parent-child dynamics. But I can usually find in the present situation enough evidence to understand the basic themes of a client’s history. Thus, if a client is not interested in, or is resistant to, exploring past relationship experiences, I don’t find that to be a problem. Of course, my clients’ histories do come up as context. And it does seem almost always the case that the style we bring to our adult relationships was the survival style we learned in our families of origin. These are not wrong styles—developing our coping strategies was the most intelligent, healthy thing we could have done, given our circumstances at the time. But now we’re adults, and our style is now several decades out of date. We’re still trying to take the best care of ourselves possible, but we’re doing so ineffectively.

  EMBRACING THE CONTRADICTORY ENERGIES OF SEPARATENESS AND CONNECTION

  As we have discussed, all of life can be understood as requiring a never-resolvable interplay between two basic qualities: the truth that everything is separate and the truth that everything is connected. We can’t really have life without these qualities, which appear contradictory but are obviously inseparable parts of the larger nature of reality. Given that, it also seems extremely likely that we can’t have healthy intimacy without these apparently contradictory qualities. To translate into practical terms, healthy intimacy requires that we value not only our sense of connection with our partner but also our sense of separateness. Most of us genuinely want to give and receive love, to share our life with someone, to go to depth, to have companionship. And it’s also true that our partner is not on the planet to understand us, much less take care of us. The closer we get to anyone, the more we’re guaranteed to feel hurt, off and on. Most of us don’t really want to compromise our lifestyle to accommodate a partner. Most of us, I think, are cautious about trusting anybody on the planet with our core vulnerability. So to me, healthy intimacy requires this never-resolvable dance—a tension or friction—between the deeply contradictory feelings that we genuinely want to be close to our partner and we genuinely don’t want to be close to our partner.

  In our culture, however, most of us are taught that “intimacy” is synonymous with “closeness.” So if a person says, “I want to be intimate with that man or woman,” that person almost always means, “I want to be close to them.” In fact, there is very strong pressure on couples to only be close. It’s so strong that publicly, most couples try to present themselves as only happy, warm, supportive, and enjoying their relationship. They save their conflict for the privacy of their own homes. What I’ve discovered through my work is that there’s a certain type of shame that many couples feel—shame that they’re not meeting the cultural expectation that intimacy is supposed to only be positive and happy. Such couples carry the secret burden that they’re not as close as they think they’re supposed to be.

  There are many pressures to only feel connected, most of which are not consciously articulated. Pressure to only want to be close to one another and nobody else; to always like each other; to be happy together; to be sexually passionate. This leaves most of us, as couples, in a type of dilemma—we have to deal with our truth of separateness, but we must do so unconsciously. Being separate persons in relationship is not negotiable. In fact, healthy intimacy requires a conscious relating to the truth of separateness. Yet as couples, most of us are left to deal with our need for separateness in an unconscious, often symptomatic way.

  Because we consciously try to only be close, we unconsciously create a variety of symptomatic behaviors to put distance between us. Some very common distancing dynamics include chronic conflict that never gets solved, even though the issues are really not difficult to work through; miscommunication, even though we could really understand our partner if we tried; a loss of sexual intimacy, even though we still find our partner attractive; parent-child roles between partners, even though we know we’re both adults; living parallel lives as we raise children, even while we claim we want more engagement; and so on. Many of us use some combination of these apparent problems as a way of regulating the dynamic balance of feeling connected and feeling separate. When we are feeling stressed o
r vulnerable or anxious or just want to be left alone, we will unconsciously call on one of these patterns as a sure way to get some separateness. That’s unfortunate.

  I think it’s possible to have agreements that if we want to be close, we communicate and behave in that way. If we want to be separate, that’s how we communicate and act, without needing any justification, blame, or apology. But in my experience that idea is not supported by our culture, and most of us experience feeling separate from our partner as evidence of some problem that needs to be fixed. So, many couples come to therapy believing that the difficulties in their relationship are being caused by a lack of closeness.

  In over thirty-five years of private practice, I’ve worked with at least several thousand couples. I can only recall a handful of couples that have come in asking for help in being more separate. Probably nine out of ten couples want help in being closer. Other than a few who want help with parenting or the like, almost all the couples I see have the idea that there’s a lack of closeness that needs to be fixed. Most haven’t yet considered the idea that the problem is actually an overemphasis on closeness and a lack of consciousness that they are separate people and that sometimes feeling distant is natural and necessary.

  This cultural pressure is also supported by the fact that as children, almost all of us had to put connection as a higher priority than separateness. We had to put the security of our relationship with our parents as a higher priority than our integrity. As a child we couldn’t say, “No, I fundamentally disagree with you. I think I’ll go find some other parents.” Little children have to do whatever they must so that their parents will love them, protect them, nurture them, not abuse them, and not abandon them. As a result, from the time we are very, very young, we’re all trained to compromise our integrity to purchase security. We enter adulthood with that training very powerfully conditioned. In my experience, it’s usually not until we’re in our thirties or forties that we actually have enough life experience, emotional resilience, and confidence in ourselves to consider putting our own integrity ahead of closeness. This transition is quite disturbing, of course, because most of us associate intimacy with closeness, and asserting our integrity makes the fact that we are different from others very clear. It’s difficult to acknowledge the truth of separateness. It feels like we’re risking loss of the relationship. But the separateness is already there; it’s actually nothing new. What’s new is that we’re starting to work with it consciously.