Essays on Psychology and Life

Why Can't Some People Maintain Intimate Relationships?

(The fourth in a series on the adult consequences of "voicelessness")

Most of the time it is not trauma that has shrouded the first six or seven years of life. Instead, people built emotional walls early so they could dull the abrasive day to day experience of family life. In these cases, parents never entered the child's world, except in a negative, unempathetic way, and the client retreated to a smaller, safer place that they could somehow manage and control. Incidents and events are not forgotten, they were filtered from awareness at the time they occurred. (A client once told me that her spouse [a software engineer] had sat in another couple's living room reading a book while the hosts were having a rip-roaring fight. She thought he was reading so as not to embarrass the couple. But when she asked him what he thought of the fight, he replied: "What fight?")

It is not unusual for people disconnected from their early childhood experience to be particularly accomplished. They focus all of their energy toward a particular pursuit, and away from everything else that is happening around them. Computer related jobs are often ideal for these people, as are other tasks that require solitary focus and tremendous dedication to the exclusion of other life needs and demands.

Unfortunately, the very same people are often unsuccessful in maintaining intimate relationships. Why should this be so?

The first reason is that these people are still trying to push others away. Their parents took away their "voice" (see Giving Your Child Voice: The 3 Rules of Parenting) so they created a solitary world with its own boundaries and parameters, a safe haven within which they could be effective. The instinct to reduce emotional pain is automatic and powerful: for some children this is a natural method.

Second, intimate relationships require access to genuine, "heartfelt" feelings--feelings that are often rooted in childhood experience and the reaction to childhood events. But in order to protect themselves, these people escaped experiences that evoke strong feelings in favor of a world they could manage and control. As a result, passion and empathy have to be manufactured: they don't come from the "heart," but, instead, are intellectualized. Often, these emotions are simply missing, replaced by "rationality." (Imagine trying to have a long-term intimate relationship with Star Trek's Mr. Spock.) Partners of such people feel alone and frustrated--they complain that their spouse/lover "just doesn't get it." And, they're right.

People who have built such walls jump at intellectual explanations of their problems, but this, by itself, does not help much. Therapy begins as a kind of relationship workshop--where the client begins to rediscover and explore genuine feelings about their past and present. This is hard work, for the walls are very thick and whatever cracks the therapist finds are likely to be quickly "patched" by the client. Initially, the therapist is as much an outsider as anyone else and the client unconsciously tries to keep it that way. However, under the best of circumstances, a benevolent, non-narcissistic therapist ultimately proves that he or she is not toxic and is allowed inside. When this happens, the client discovers for the first time a shared world with all its potential for intimacy.

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