LetTheShowBegin
“At the end of our marriage, all I could think about was how much she had always done for Vicki. It never occurred to me—it never occurred to me—that she would ever do anything for me, or that she could do anything for me.”
People love for different reasons, and some of those reasons work better than others. Everyone has ideas—conscious and unconscious—about what love and being loved are; but where do those ideas come from, and what role—conscious and unconscious—do they play in our search for and choice of a partner?
If we ask ourselves what we’re looking for, we might say we want affection, empathy, security, and maybe even renewal. That sounds reasonable and mature, and it may be true.
But over time, under our radar, many of us have internalized notions about love that we learned in early childhood that work against finding and cultivating fulfilling relationships. These ideas, like termites invading a beautiful old house, creep into our ways of loving so thoroughly that they undermine our ability to embrace true intimacy without realizing it. This results in relationships that repeatedly leave us in a state of unjustified frustration and strange detachment even from those we think are closest to us. Time and time again, despite our conscious determination that “this time will be different,” we are attracted to the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Glenn’s description of the first time he met Vicki when they were in high school is quite dramatic:
“It felt like something hit me on the head and pulled me into a kind of fantasy love that I had stopped believing was possible. It felt ‘so right.’”
The images and ideas from popular culture about what love looks like—or is supposed to look like—make Glenn believe he has found the perfect partner, the person with whom his life will be “complete.” The impact was so profound that he often asked himself what it was about Vicki that made him feel so intimate and why it was “so easy to be with her.” Although he spent a lot of time examining his feelings, it never occurred to him that his response to Vicki had been programmed into him since he was a little boy—that it was his history and his mind that was hitting him in the head!
Glenn’s troubling relationship with his mother as a young child had taught him to distrust intimacy. Even in those very early years, his response was to begin to develop a habit of protecting himself from the vulnerability that is a natural part of genuine, caring relationships. Informal relationships are the perfect mechanism for simulating a relationship with another person while, in effect, removing the unpredictability of spontaneity, the give-and-take that necessarily forms part of attachment to another, independent person. In some ways, informal relationships look like genuine contact between two people; in fact, they are more like two-way streets with no detours, and strict rules that severely limit where one can go. These restrictions remove the risks associated with the feelings and crises that must be dealt with and negotiated in genuine intimate relationships.
The psychoanalyst Harold Searle believed that the child’s first function in life is to be a therapist for his primary caregiver (usually his mother); and that the child understands that his survival depends on how well he fulfills this role. In the non-relationship model, the techniques a child uses to “please” his or her mother are known as song and dance routines. As noted above, once a routine is established and found to be successful, the child will move further in life and continue to use song and dance to manage situations that he or she perceives to be crucial to his or her sense of security, if not to his or her actual survival.
Parents’ needs and expectations of their children vary, of course. One parent’s anxiety or depression may cause her to want her child to distract her by actively performing for her through pranks, clowning, or other means. Another stressed parent may want his or her needs met by a child who denies his or her needs and quietly disappears into his or her room or other secluded space.
When two people with a background in parenting meet and are drawn to each other, they immediately begin to assess whether their needs are complementary. If the right subconscious signals—emotional, verbal, and behavioral—are sent and received, they will begin to create a song and dance together in which each person plays the role—performer or audience—that the other is looking for in a partner. The non-relationship has begun.
Later, Glenn was able to look back and evaluate what had led him into and out of his disappointing relationship with his wife: “For a brief period, we thought we were in love. But at the same time, we were doing everything we could to protect ourselves from the very things we thought we wanted from each other. The truth was that our constant denial of our needs and feelings eventually caught up with us as we entered the final crisis in our marriage.”
TheShowMustGoOn
“I started noticing that something wasn’t right when we went to visit my family for the holidays. In a somewhat indirect way, I started to remember feeling a distance developing in our relationship. I didn’t know what it was; I had this feeling that there was a missing piece. I started to feel it first in our kisses. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but somehow, I felt like Vicky wasn’t there.”
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“It was unsettling – almost unsettling. I was so invested in the idea that Vicky was the ‘love of my life’, but I started to feel – well, looking back, I realize that there had always been a ‘mystery’ about her existence, but now she seemed to disappear completely.
“Although I tried not to think about it at the time, I now know that it was the beginning of the end. At first, I thought I had lost trust in Vicky herself. But I realized that it wasn’t Vicky: it was the relationship that couldn’t be trusted – in fact, there was nothing there! It’s hard to explain, but somehow I realized that neither of us needed the other’s actual physical presence in our marriage!”
When Glenn and Vicki met in graduate school, they were inseparable. Without hesitation, they slipped into roles that were “perfectly right,” in which they could “be themselves” with each other. Vicki came from a deeply dysfunctional family that left her suffering from an unresolved and sometimes debilitating depression. Glenn’s mother and father’s marriage had been shattered by the effects of the Vietnam War, which led to Glenn being cast in the role of caregiver to his depressed mother shortly after his father’s passing.
These strangely complementary stories prepared Glenn and Vicki for the roles they played for each other. In Glenn’s case, the role was to perform an almost constant “routine” designed to make Vicki feel better. But Vicki’s seemingly passive role was just that: her role was to make Glenn believe that his “feel-good” routine was working, whether it was working or not.
Glenn’s expectations of romantic relationships were created by Hollywood, by the messages he received from family and peers, and by his fantasies about finding the perfect partner. He believed he had found in Vicki the person who fit those expectations. Ironically, he had unconsciously harbored the feeling that making her feel better would make him feel better—that having someone to fix him would fix him. Vicki’s parents were so absorbed in their own needs that they were unable to provide anything resembling nurturing care for their children. As a young child, Vicki learned that to manage this emptiness and ensure that she and her brother’s basic needs were met, she had to validate her mother and father, in effect becoming their caregiver. In this way, she successfully manipulated their mother and father into providing the bare minimum for their children.
As we can easily see, Glenn’s need to fix his partner fits neatly into Vicki’s routine of validating her caregivers. At first, their “bonding” took off spectacularly. Glenn described their first summer together as a “fire of passion,” of blinding attraction, sexual excitement, and bonding. Their time together was filled with laughter, romance, and building dreams of a home together. Because they shared the same profession, they also shared a whirlwind of travel to professional conferences and seminars all over the world. It was a life that many would envy. What could go wrong?
The truth was that nothing could go wrong. The setup was doomed from the start.
Although their stories were strikingly different, Vicki and Glenn played roles that were strikingly similar in purpose: each was deeply invested in putting on a performance that would reassure the other, that would make the other “feel better.” In both cases, the need to perform arose from childhood experiences in which inadequate care left them with a deep-seated fear that their caregiver would not—or would not be able to—care for them. For the young child, this experience is primal and disorienting, tantamount to the fear that without intervention, the world itself will become uncontrollable and chaotic. Since the child herself is the only force she knows besides her caregiver, she undertakes to handle the ensuing chaos herself.
Both Glenn and Vicki brought into adulthood not only their experience of anxiety but also the adaptations they developed to deflect that anxiety. In both cases, they shut down their fear. Glenn did this by creating performances designed to first defuse his mother’s depression and, later, the negative feelings of those around him, especially the women with whom he was romantically interested. Vicki processed her fear with performances designed, first, to deny the impact of her parents’ neglect and, later, to deny the pain and isolation caused by others, including romantic interests, who were oblivious to her real emotional needs.
Behind the Scenes
Glenn sought psychoanalysis because he saw psychoanalytic training as the next step in his career development. He also hoped that the training and analytical process required of candidates would help him overcome his growing sense of being stagnant as a clinician as well as “stuck” in his personal development.
He was aware of a growing resentment toward patients who seemed not to be improving at a pace that suited his professional pride. Some of them had become increasingly dependent on him, while at the same time speaking increasingly contemptuously of him as a doctor and as a person. Glenn interpreted this as a kind of passive-aggressive punishment for his attempt to help them recover.
As he was thinking about this during a private analytical session one day, he recalled similar feelings of resentment toward his wife, Vicki, a few months into their marriage. Vicki, who had been severely neglected as a child, had been in therapy herself for several years. Over time, Glenn was able to articulate that for most of their married life, they had both felt deeply uncomfortable and fearful about their relationship. Yet they were strangely bound by an unspoken commitment to maintaining the status quo without ever broaching the subject of the fragility of their marriage.
In the absence of a relationship, each partner believes that they are doing all the hard work, either giving, accepting, or accommodating. Sooner or later, this cannot fail to create simmering resentment and distress on both sides. This disconnect is the result of each partner continuing as adults to play the roles they assumed toward their caregivers as young children, specifically, undertaking to meet the caregivers’ emotional needs. This pattern of caregiving continues into adulthood and ultimately serves as a smokescreen to prevent them from confronting and addressing the true needs and desires of their romantic partners. Instead, they treat their partners with the behaviors they created as children to use on their caregivers. When two such individuals become involved in a potential romantic relationship, these behaviors allow them to avoid acknowledging each other’s true needs, and thus escape the vulnerability that comes with investing in each other. Thus, in the isolation that each of us experiences from the other, intimacy and empathy are not remote possibilities.
Take a moment to think about the following descriptions of disengagement, and listen for anything that sounds like something you may have noticed or experienced:
When starting a new relationship, do you focus on listening for ways that you might need to help or fix the person you’re in a relationship with?
Do you start new relationships hoping that a new friend or boyfriend will be able to help you with your needs?
Is your idea of being with someone mostly about caring for your partner or being cared for by him or her?
In your relationships, do you sometimes feel disconnected from your partner even when you’re “doing things” for him or her?
Does “showing that you care” sometimes leave you feeling overwhelmed or unsatisfied—and that caring always goes in only one direction?
If any of the above descriptions are true for you, it may indicate that you are unconsciously seeking disengagement, a relationship that requires attention and effort but is safe from the risk of becoming intimate.
Recognizing this tendency is not an easy task because it represents a pattern we learned in early childhood. It’s a pattern we learned for good reason: As children, we needed to feel safe, but our caregivers didn’t meet that need because of their negative emotional states. So we took it upon ourselves and did whatever we thought we needed to do to make the caregiver “feel better” so we could feel better.
As adults, however, this strategy hindered the building of genuine, reciprocal relationships. It turned into a strategy for avoiding intimate connections. And when two people who seek to separate come together, the effects are even darker. Driven by fear of the “cost” of intimacy, these couples lock themselves into silently agreed-upon roles as caregiver and care receiver—also known as “performer” and “audience.” This arrangement not only keeps the scary parts of intimacy at a safe distance, but it also prevents spontaneity or any change in the roles they agreed to assume with each other. The net result of this carefully structured way of relating is that it prevents the development of true love, both in its costs and in its joys.
Now, what does this have to do with Glenn and Vicki?
As Glenn explored his history of playing the role of performer to his wife and others in his past, he began to see that their marriage—indeed, their entire history—was based on a non-relationship dynamic with himself in the role of caretaker/performer while Vicki “consumed” his care as his audience.
Glenn began his career as a performer when his mother became depressed after Glenn’s father left the marriage when Glenn was a young child. Glenn pushed his role as a performer forward not only in his relationships with girls and women (including Vicki) but also in his career. As in all non-romantic relationships, the payoff for Glenn was that this arrangement allowed him to maintain a safe and unquestionable distance from the risks that are part of intimacy with another person.
Now, with all this “keeping distance,” something must fill the gap between the actors that allows each to believe they are “engaged” with the other. This “something” is called the “sing-dance routine.” The singing-dance routine is a set of behaviors—active, passive, and reactive—that the couple engages in together to deflect the possibility of a genuine sharing of feelings and needs. Although singing and dancing may in many ways seem like caring behaviors, singing and dancing marginalize authentic interaction. They also prevent the exploration of each other’s personalities and needs, making it easy for each partner to devalue the other by blocking out any encounter with the positive qualities in each other. Ever since Glenn met Vicki, her value to him has been entirely in her response to his “performance.” When they met in high school, she was fascinated by his performance routine, which seemed to make her “feel better.” But her passivity in this role-playing was not accidental; it was the same technique she had developed with her mother and father as a child. Having suffered severe neglect from her parents, Vicki decided that her safety depended on maintaining a distance between them. She did this by becoming an audience whose role was to make her mother and father believe that they were good parents. This created a safety zone from her mother’s narcissistic antics and her father’s incompetence, thus allowing them to believe that they were good parents to the point where she did not need much attention from them. By incorporating the same mechanism into their marriage, Vicki’s perceived value in Glenn was derived from his belief in his effectiveness as a performer.
When Glenn began to realize that his relationship with Vicki was drying up, he made the “mistake” of deviating from the agreed-upon norms, the song-and-dance routine of their relationship. Realizing that their marriage was in crisis, Glenn confessed to Vicki how vulnerable he felt, and asked her to be there and support him. When he violated the “prenuptial agreement” by admitting that he needed more emotionally than Vicki was giving him, Vicki wasted little time in fleeing their marriage.
Performer: Human Antidepressant
“I think I was a human antidepressant to Vicki in the same way I was to my mother.”
Glenn had been thinking about the breakdown of his parent’s marriage when he was a young boy. He described them as “children of the ’60s.” When they married, they were practically children: they were both 18 when Glenn was born.
His mother was from a wealthy, respectable family, while his father was not: he was a boy from the wrong side of the fence who had become pregnant with his mother, who had fallen completely in love with him. Their decision to marry was no less provocative and humiliating to her family than the pregnancy.
Shortly after their marriage, Glenn’s father joined the Army and was sent to Vietnam as a helicopter pilot. Like many of his peers, he dealt with the war with alcohol, heroin, and prostitutes. Like many of his peers, the war left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. During the same period, Glenn’s mother fell into a deep depression, which she found unsuccessful in treating through born-again Christianity. At this point, Glenn took charge, treating his mother’s depression with what became his song-and-dance routine—a collection of silent comedy, jokes, and hilarious antics designed to ease family tensions by making his mother feel “happy.” When Glenn’s father returned from Vietnam, the marriage quickly fell apart. His mother initially imagined that she would be able to ease the devastating effects of war trauma on her young husband. Instead, he left her. This apparent failure on his mother’s part prompted Glenn to redouble her efforts to make her feel better. Glenn would perform his songs and dances like crazy, no matter the occasion or circumstance. And he seemed to succeed more often than not.
As he moved from school to school, Glenn would accompany him to every situation, until he became known as the class clown. He was undeniably popular: people seemed to like him and wanted to be with him. But he never felt connected to anyone around him, no matter how much they enjoyed his performances. He had a genius for knowing how to make others “feel better,” but he was equally careful not to let anyone get too close to him. Whenever anyone got close or tried to get close to him—especially his girlfriends—it was easy for him to resent them.
Soon, the resentment was reciprocated. It was most painful in his relationships with his girlfriends, who, after a while, almost always had the same complaint: Glenn didn’t care about them or even respect them as people.
This recurring theme completely baffled Glenn. Glenn had been through many years, of relationships, and therapy before he began to realize that the “feel-good” routine he was dispensing to others had the paradoxical effect of devaluing them—leaving them feeling that he was making them feel like they were of no value to their relationship.
The basic agreement that underpinned Glenn’s relationship with Vicki was her willingness to be an audience for Glenn’s performances. For Vicki, this meant that Glenn had to agree not to deviate from the role of the performer (her antidepressant) or the deal was off. While this initially seems disingenuous—as if Glenn the compulsive performer had more power than the two of them—Vicki’s demands on Glenn were equally strict and inflexible. Their implicit agreement was a straitjacket designed for two.
The roles they each played were designed to prevent pain in him or herself. As the terms of the agreement began to erode, Glenn became unable to recognize the need for change even within himself—let alone communicate openly with his wife. Thus, when Glenn found himself in an emotional crisis of his own, he was not only unable to express his need for support to his wife: but the pact on which their relationship was based did not allow him to reveal his vulnerability. As noted earlier, when Glenn unsuccessfully tried to share honestly with Vicki how he was feeling, Vicki immediately withdrew and ran away. For Glenn, this was disturbing and confusing. He had been deeply invested in his own belief in his ability to solve other people’s problems—indeed, ever since he first used that “power” on his mother. This belief became increasingly obsessive as he grew older and used the mood-fixing technique on others. But ultimately, his “successes” reinforced behaviors that proved undesirable in the long run: intrusive attention to others, encouraging them or “fixing” their problems, rather than learning to listen to their real needs; failure to observe appropriate boundaries; and even lashing out when his desires were not immediately met. Needless to say, an individual who works this way does not learn easily from his mistakes.
The performer’s song-and-dance routine is primarily driven by a need to distance himself from his anxiety and pain. He often develops into a good person, a rescuer, or a hero, but these roles are acquired from childhood, and typically arise from one (or more) of the following patterns:
The performer attempts to change the caregiver’s mood and behavior toward him.
The performer changes his behavior to please the caregiver.
The performer avoids contact with the caregiver to avoid confrontation with his poor caregiving skills. (This may include implicit self-blame for the caregiver’s negative emotional state.)
The performer ignores his own needs to avoid confrontation with his anxiety. Again, the caregiver is spared from consideration of his caregiving skills. It also allows the child to believe he is a “hero” by not making his needs a “burden” on others.
As a child, the performer does not understand his interactions with his mother beyond his need to change her emotional state to reduce his anxiety. But even when he acts out the same need as an adult, he is likely to remain isolated from the reality behind his caregiving and what it costs him. He had long since lost touch with the need to feel safe that drives his singing and dancing routines. Instead, he unconsciously clings to the idea he developed in childhood that by making his mother feel better, he could keep the world safe and comfortable for himself by making everyone around him feel better.
Audience: Helping the Helper Help
In the session, Vicki described how it was when she first met Glenn.
“I couldn’t believe it: I was finally in love! And from the way Glenn took care of me, I just knew he was the one from the start. He always seemed to know what I wanted and what I needed even before I knew him. It was uncanny and made me feel hopeful about the future. He seemed to be right about everything. I knew that with Glenn I would never have to worry about being alone—and that he would never disappoint me.”
As Vicki thought about it, she described how she had reached a point where the dynamic with Glenn began to feel disconcertingly familiar. “As crazy as I was about Glenn, there was something about being with him that reminded me of being with my family. And that certainly wasn’t good. In my family, I always felt like I had to make my mother think she was a good mother—which she wasn’t. I had to make her think I was ‘fine’ so she wouldn’t think, well, she had to worry about me—so she would leave me alone.”
Life in her family of origin was the beginning of Vicki’s role as an audience. The artificial role she took on for her mother taught her how to be the perfect audience for Glenn’s performance as a nurturer. And it worked: it worked for both of them—for a while. But the unconditional acceptance of Glenn’s constant performance wore off after a while. When Vicki was able to be completely honest about it, Glenn’s constant diagnosis and “fixing” of her “defects” often seemed to cross the line into his criticism of her. Still, Vicki was essentially grateful for Glenn’s apparent concern for her well-being, even though after a while it became exhausting, and in a strange way, exhausting.
Vicki’s backstory couldn’t be more different from Glenn’s. She came from a small town in the Southwest where her mother married a boy who was captain of the high school football team and was also a bit of a cowboy.
Their marriage and fairytale romance soon gave way to the football star’s unromantic career in sales, while Vicki’s mother continued to own her own business. They had two children. Vicki and her brother learned early on to be the audience for their mother. While this may have been relatively harmless at first, it became less pleasant as Vicki grew older: her mother would shamelessly share with Vicki stories of adventures and frank relationships with other men—adventures that sometimes got her into trouble. Looking back, Vicki can see that her father was equally incompetent, both emotionally and as a parent. Still, Vicki took on the role of the uncritical audience and pretended that nothing was wrong and that her parents provided her with everything she needed. Despite the chaos of her family life, all she wanted was to be allowed to remain on the sidelines. When it came time to graduate from college, she ran away to New York City, where she stayed for graduate school and never looked back. When she met Glenn, Vicki found a new purpose for her role as an audience, just as Glenn found in Vicki a satisfying purpose for his performance. As with Glenn, as their unrealistic relationship grew older, Vicki felt increasingly unrealistic and began to erode, making Vicki feel uncomfortable. She began to feel resentful because she increasingly felt that her needs were not being truly met; and that the only value she had for Glenn was being the object of his care. In addition, there was a vague sense of loss: what they had both invested in with a spirit of adventure and excitement at the beginning had given way to a flat, unsatisfying routine that held little promise of discovery and growth. The song-and-dance routine had hit a wall. But the deeper problem was that Vicki and Glenn had invested so much in the lack of relationship as a means of buying anxiety that neither dared to expose vulnerability or dissatisfaction by expressing what they were feeling. In Vicki’s case, the card she always had up her sleeve was to keep her distance from her performer’s emotional state, just as she had done when she had been marginalized from family life as a child. She played this card again when she left for New York without even thinking about missing her family. Finally, as we have already noted, when Glenn confessed to Vicki that he needed her to support him and be there for him, she took off without missing a beat.
The sudden denouement of the song-and-dance routine came when Glenn sought out Vicki for care. But Vicki’s act as Glenn’s guardian was not part of their silent no-relationship contract, nor was it what Vicki was looking for or prepared to provide. When asked to provide active support and care for Glenn, Vicki once again used emergency evacuation procedures and disappeared from the song-and-dance routine. The truth about what their marriage was and was not was revealed indisputably and without any ambiguity.
Cut!
Despite the obvious differences in their backgrounds, Vicki and Glenn shared the vital trait of creating and maintaining a non-love-based relationship: they were both deeply invested in making the people around them “feel better,” especially their significant others. This could be done by helping, fixing, or saving the significant other; Or by making or allowing an incompetent significant other (e.g., a parent) believe that he or she is meeting their needs efficiently and effectively.
But why are disengagements so hard to spot, and why are they so hard to fix once they are identified?
The answer is that the pattern that defines and creates disengagement—the singing and dancing routine between partners—goes back to their early childhood. But it goes deeper than that: The anxiety-reducing effects of singing and dancing stimulate brain chemicals associated with feelings of safety and security.
As singing and dancing become habitual and even reflexive, the brain engages this mechanism, creating stable patterns of brain activity that are 1) far below conscious awareness and therefore difficult to intentionally change, and 2) locked in place by powerful physiological processes in the brain, including related “reward neurochemicals” and “bonding neurochemicals” (such as dopamine and oxytocin) and activation of deep-brain “reward areas,” which “hijack” higher-order brain regions (conscious control areas) into rigid circuits of repetitive brain activity, bouncing around different brain regions and creating a gravitational spiral of brain network activity that is difficult to escape. This double whammy—being deeply ingrained in the brain’s unconscious processes and lost in the sands of time—makes changing patterns of disengagement a daunting task. But the persistence and long-term rewards make it worth it.
Since this way of coping with and treating anxiety begins in early childhood, identifying and uprooting it is a serious challenge. Glenn and Vicki are both psychologists, so convincing them that they were out of touch with their feelings was difficult. And since their “needs” fit together so well, especially the need to feel safe in an unpredictable world, Glenn and Vicki weren’t looking for a way out of disengagement: Disengagement was what brought them together and kept them together.
Part of their deceptive preparation for this was that early in their acquaintance, Glenn and Vicki told each other their backstories in great detail, convincing themselves in the process that they had become “intimate.” But in reality, when Glenn and Vicki shared their history, they were providing the signals they each needed to acknowledge that this person was “perfect for me.” But in this case, “perfect” meant that this person would probably make a good partner for my song-and-dance routine.
Committing to a routine is also committing to what is called “mental closure,” a state in which both parties become so entrenched in a dysfunctional pattern of disconnection that any challenge to it, whether from outside or from within, is an intolerable threat. The “closure” in “mental closure” refers to the basic physiological processes that “close” psychology to the hard reality of how the brain is “wired” (to oversimplify). The flip side of this is that the parties in the disconnection may have no idea that anything is “wrong” until it starts to “not work.” However, breakups often “work” for years, so convincing both parties that there is something fundamentally wrong with their relationship—even that intimacy is completely missing—is not easy.
Vicky and Glenn had begun to feel a vague unease about their relationship even before they got married. But this deep, hidden unease was so easily exacerbated that it remained unspoken and unaddressed until the relational (or non-relational) crisis occurred when Glenn sought Vicky’s support as he entered a critical personal and professional crisis. Until then, both Glenn and Vicky had successfully blocked and suppressed any awareness of how far apart they were from each other. Unable to discover any reason or desire to renegotiate their commitment to their marriage, they agreed to end it.
