Irrelationship
How to Stop Using Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide From Satisfying Ones
Mark B. Borg, Jr, Ph.D., Grant H. Brenner, MD, & Daniel Berry, RN, MHA
Irrelationship, the defensive mechanism many couples use when the prospect of true intimacy begins to show itself. It can easily manifest in sex and sexual behavior.
What happens when sex brings us too close to the very things that it's ostensibly supposed to: intimacy, empathy, emotional risk, and investment?
Irrelationship is a jointly created state of insanity made visible in the mutual acting-out of the anxiety of being vulnerable, intimate, empathetic and invested in one another.
Dependency is a bad word in our culture. We cling to our fears of empathy, intimacy, emotional risk and investment and label anything that smells of dependency an illness.
It is sometimes the case that the gifts of love become more important (and are certainly more safe from the risks and anxieties of love) than love itself.
Everyone knows that "history" causes problems in romantic relationships. It's equally true in business relationships, as this case so pointedly illustrates.
It is the awareness of the most mundane threats to our hearts that irrelationship most effectively protects us from—how emotionally close we are to those in our everyday lives.
Brainlock is our way of describing the neurological/physiological-meets-individual/social/contextual factors that underlie and sustain irrelationship.
What is a relationship's personality, and how does it protect itself? Defect and defense can be seen as interchangeable terms—both pinpointing the existence of irrelationship.
Dysregulated relationships have a hard time surviving the transition from the passion of the honeymoon period into a mature, profound, and sustainable commitment to reciprocity.
Sex can be used to build intimacy. But when a relationship is in trouble, sex can be used just as easily to maintain distance. In that case, sex stops being about sex.
There is nothing so valuable as having what we offer to others taken, made use of, and experienced as having value and being useful and helpful. Irrelationship blocks this.
When bottoming-out in irrelationship, it can be a painful moment fraught with terrifying insights into how wrong so much of what previously felt right about the relationship is.
Learning how to relate is extremely complex—more so when, very early in life, a child’s parents aren’t effective caregivers.
What we regard as the transience of love is really risk management. Love can endure, if only we become aware of our self-destructive efforts to protect ourselves from its risks.
When we assume that conflict in a work situation means there's a problem, we create a problem by losing an opportunity for learning and growth. Here's how to do communication well.
If we think of intimacy as taking a chance on letting ourselves become known and accepted as we really are, “intimacy” can apply to relationships that develop in the work place.
The day-by-day sharing of space and tasks makes the workplace a powerful incubator for routines of irrelationship.
Irrelationship allows us to interact with each other to maintain mutual unawareness of the threat of getting what we (think we) want in long-term love: intimacy, for instance.
Generosity and altruism are, of course, wonderful qualities. They are also the sheep’s clothes of irrelationship, allowing us to hide our anxiety about being close to others.
We don't know what your lives are like, but we're hoping that you can muster up six minutes to communicate effectively—to experiment with listening and being heard.
Community character, as a function of irrelationship, is a group defense that people in groups unconsciously establish/maintain to protect them from being overwhelmed by anxiety.
Understanding avoidance, especially avoidance of awareness of the threat of intimacy, requires understanding how betrayal in childhood leaves its mark on adult relationships.
Being well or unwell in relationship and in irrelationship are both two-person processes.
Intimacy in our everyday lives is about our working through—together—our fear of accepting each other as we are: allowing ourselves to accept and be accepted, love and be loved.
Irrelationship is not a self-against-the-world defense against the anxieties of every day life. It is a dynamic—a defense system that we co-create and co-maintain with others.
Valentine’s Day provides an opportunity to test the waters and see what it might be like if we allowed the intimacy and vulnerability of our partnership to happen every day.
Labeling the other person as pathological to justify leaving them is one way to avoid intimacy. We don’t see how we repeatedly transform each other into what we don't want.
Valentine’s Day is a day that can be fraught with and weighed down by expectations. Perhaps we can mitigate potential problems by prepping for it together.
Without realizing it, do we think about relationships in outmoded 20th Century terms? How can we adjust our thinking to accommodate the array of options available now?
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