Oarah, a thirty'five-year-old restaurant owner, has just broken up with a man she had expected to marry:
At first I couldn’t believe it, and then I was incredibly pissed off when I found out Ed was actually leaving on this business trip he’d threatened to take. He knew how important it was for me that he be around for this holiday. I spelled it out for him: I explained that I wasn’t just being sentimental, it’s that the restaurant is going to be a nightmare that weekend and I needed his support. He knew I’d flip if he were to leave me now. . .but apparently that’s not important enough to him.
I guess he felt he just had to let me know who’s in charge. Well, if that’s so vital to him, fine, that’s it. But I feel totally betrayed... So we had this huge fight, and finally I told him to just get lost, to get out of my life. . .Lovely way to wind things up. God, I feel like such a fool.
Three months ago, even a month ago, I had a totally different picture of this guy. I thought he was solid as could be. And sensitive and emotional and available. We had practically decided to get married. I was feeling like we were made for
each other. It seemed like he had everything I wanted and I had everything he wanted and it was going to be, I don’t know, perfect. Or at least workable.
Maybe I just lose my mind when I see somebody who seems right, maybe I can’t see straight. But I really thought I could trust him. And then to make matters worse, I was talking to Judy, this friend of mine, explaining the situation to her, and I couldn’t believe it! She was totally unsympathetic... She said she thought I had blinders on when it came to my relationships . . . that my last relationship, with Matthew, had ended on exactly the same note... According to Judy, I wasn’t seeing my role in this thing. . . My role! Do I have a role? Do I control whether he goes on a business trip or whether he can be trusted? It’s not something I have the slightest control over.. .in any case, he obviously can’t be trusted. Isn’t that what he’s just demonstrated?
Maybe in these crises you find out who your real friends are.. .1 mean, Judy, of all people, should be able to understand ... She just broke up with her boyfriend. .. Doesn’t it ever occur to her that this might simply be the way men are?. . . She thinks Ed is different? That’s ridiculous. He’s turned out to be a ringer for my father: Mr. False Promises, number two.
I hate the fact that this whole thing seems so cliched... but I guess cliches reflect reality, and the reality here is the man makes commitments, makes promises he doesn’t live up to, and the woman gets screwed... I’d love to trust men, but guys like Ed make it totally impossible.. .You’re supposed to trust people, if you don’t you’re paranoid. .. But I don’t feel paranoid, I feel like a fool.
Like Sarah, all of us confront disappointments in our relationships. But Sarah’s reaction is particularly intense. Her disillusionment, anger, and fear of abandonment all reflect vulnerability in her capacity for integration. It is possible to fall in love without integration, but remaining in love without it is nearly inconceivable.
The Capacity for Integration a 161
Falling in love is a kind of honeymoon, but like every honeymoon this one ends. Idealization always wanes, and when it does we confront our partner’s limitations, and often our own as well. Whatever our hopes may have been for perfect love, now we feel frustrated and disillusioned to one degree or another. How we deal with these feelings depends on the extent of our capacity for integration.
The challenge is to reconcile our positive and negative experiences in love. Integration is crucial here because it helps us see the big picture and thereby protects us from confusing the part with the whole. Without integration, love is either positive or negative: with integration, it can be both.
Integrating what is “good” and “bad” in our experiences of ourselves and of our partner lets us sustain empathy and affection even as we confront imperfection and disappointment. The capacity for integration means that we can be angry with someone we love and love someone with whom we are angry. In short, integration enables us to feel ambivalent and still proceed in the relationship.
On the other hand, by allowing us to be aware simultaneously of the positive and the negative, integration also enables us to thoughtfully evaluate a relationship and to leave it when there is good reason to do so.
FROM AMBIVALENCE TO ACCEPTANCE
The advantages that integration brings to a relationship include, but go well beyond, the tolerance of ambivalence, that is, the ability to live with our mixed feelings. With integration, our view of what love is and what love can be is far deeper and more complex than if this capacity were lacking.
With integration, our appreciation of our partner becomes both more real and more dimensional, as if our map of present love now has topography: we can see in greater detail the peaks and valleys, the graduated slopes and curves of the romantic landscape. Without integration, our view of our partner and of ourselves
162 a MappingtheTerrainoftheHeart
will always remain limited, like a picture in black and white, with no shades of gray. When the world of love is black and white, yesterday’s hero can become tomorrow’s villain, depending on whether he or she continues to gratify us. Where relationships are concerned, this is a very unstable kind of world.
Integration stabilizes love, but it can also deepen it in a number of ways. In making use of this capacity, we mobilize a larger sense of self. We take our experience of merging with our partner a step farther. And we have the potential to explore dimensions of intimacy that might not ordinarily be available to us.
At its most rudimentary, integration may allow us to stay in a relationship while still sitting on the fence, withholding real commitment. When integration is more fully developed, however, we experience acceptance. In this reconciliation of our “good” and “bad” feelings, we stretch emotionally to embrace what is difficult about our partner. We don’t deny or ignore what we don’t like. Instead we seek a point of balance. By embracing the polar opposites of contradictory emotions, we even out the intensity of either extreme.
Integration also encourages a more mature and larger sense of ourselves. To accept aspects of our partner that feel alien to us, our personal identity must stretch. Suppose, for example, that we are intolerant of anger. Then it will be hard for us to acknowledge our angry feelings—and hard, at least initially, to accept our partner’s anger. But to the extent that we can accept our partner when he or she is angry, it often becomes easier to accept ourselves when we’re angry. In this way, our sense of self becomes larger.
Integration gives us the potential, as partners in love, to come to terms with our differences, accepting and sometimes even celebrating them. Gradually, more of what each of us finds difficult in the other can be accommodated. And with more freedom to be ourselves, shared closeness can be heightened. In this way, integration takes the capacity for merging a step further, for we can now bring to the relationship a greater range and depth of emotional experience.
Integration also affects our inner map. When our capacity for integration is poorly developed, our map paints relationships in black and white and describes a very limited spectrum of options, as if love could only follow one or two paths. Sarah, for example, could think only of betrayal when her lovers failed to live up to her expectations. When they frustrated her, these lovers became villains—rather than individuals with needs of their own that might sometimes conflict with hers. Like Sarah, we are confined to a very restricted terrain in love as long as our capacity for integration is limited. For then we see our partner in all-or-nothing terms: he or she is either all good (“Let’s get married”) or all bad (“What am I doing here?”).
By contrast, once integration allows us to accept our partner as he or she really is (good and bad), we open up a range of possibilities in love that might otherwise have remained inaccessible. Even when these aren’t always the possibilities we would have chosen, they have the potential to deepen our capacity to love.
Consider Joe, an unmarried man in his late forties who fell in love with Cheryl, a single mother involved in struggles over parenting with her ex-husband. Prior to meeting Cheryl, Joe’s map of intimacy did not include stepparenting, much less battles with a difficult ex. Yet now he finds that his deepening acceptance of Cheryl, which also means acceptance of some responsibility for her child, is showing him parts of himself that he never expected to see.
Joe had to alter his ideal image of himself in love, and all his expectations of his future, so that his image might include a stepchild. He needed to open his heart to loving a child who was not, by blood, his own. He had to face, and learn to tolerate, the sacrifices that having a child imposes on the romance of the couple.
As our mapping of expectations and possibilities in love becomes melded with the map of our partner, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Joe’s experience of the pain and conflict— as well as the joy—of making his new family “work” was like an unexpected, undesired trip to a foreign country. His growing capacity for acceptance, however, turned it into a life-transforming and deeply satisfying journey.
LOVE WITHOUT INTEGRATION
Intimacy without integration is a series of emotional roller-coaster rides. When integration fails, feelings become intense and out of control. Disappointment turns to hopelessness, anger becomes rage, and the fear of rejection escalates to a terror of abandonment.
How can you disappoint me so? How can you let me down? How can you expect me to care for you when I feel I’ve been misled? How can I still love you when it turns out you’ve got these problems and weaknesses? These are the kinds of questions that come up when our capacity for integration is problematic. Without integration, we may have plunged into the relationship when it felt good, but now we’re tempted to run for cover as soon as the slightest difficulty arises. These are the consequences of an inner map with images of love that are overly simplified.
STRENGTHENING THE CAPACITY FOR INTEGRATION
As is true with all the capacities in love, we can place our capacity for integration on a continuum ranging from experiences of deficient or missing integration to experiences of successful integration. When we grapple with the ambivalent feelings that inevitably arise in love, then integration continues to develop. But if we always respond to ambivalence as a signal to abandon ship— if we automatically tilt toward an awareness of the negative and act on it—then this capacity may remain dormant. Of course, our response would be just as “unintegrated” if we persistently ignored the negative side of our ambivalence—and stayed in a relationship regardless of the cost.
Integration can evolve when we choose to persevere and confront problems in love rather than engage in wholesale retreat. Every such predicament can be an opportunity to exercise (and strengthen) this capacity: to see the whole rather than the part, to take into account the rewards of the relationship as well as the difficulties that currently seem to plague it.
But integration can be a struggle. When we feel hurt or let down, it may seem easier to push away from the person we believe to be the source of our pain. “I hate you,” said in the midst of a fight, may be both an exclamation of frustration (not to be taken at face value) and a momentary statement of fact. But if we allow ourselves to be driven by this hatred, then the relationship will be finished. Integration can help us pause before acting on our immediate feelings. If we give ourselves this interval between emotion and action, we may find ways to grapple with the relationship’s difficulties.
There were many times when Joe felt he couldn’t tolerate the conflict between being a stepfather (who had to set limits with Cheryl’s son) and a lover (who wanted to stay in Cheryl’s good graces). In moments of frustration, when the tension between these roles seemed almost unbearable, he had been tempted to bail out. But each time, he managed to struggle through his difficulties by using integration; to him this capacity meant recognizing the importance of his choice to stay or go. Appreciating all the implications, positive and negative, he was able to get a grip on impulses that threatened to overwhelm his judgment. As a consequence, he felt more aware of his own strength. He also felt more loving toward Cheryl. And this translated into a change in his inner map: more and more he was able to see himself as someone with the ability to stay in a relationship, even when confronted with considerable difficulty.
The crux of the matter is to keep the whole picture in mind: the depth of our love as well as our feelings of hurt or anger. When we use the capacity for integration, we can avoid being pushed around by our momentary impulses and globally negative judgments. In so doing, we reach a higher level of understanding and acceptance not only of our partner but also of ourselves.
HOW NOT TO BECOME A COUPLE: SARAH’S BLIND SPOTS IN LOVE
The capacity for integration opens the door to the second stage of intimacy—becoming a couple. When the idealization we associate
with falling in love begins to fade, integration helps us deal with our disappointment. We may face the loss of the high hopes and wishful fantasies that we’ve projected onto our partner. We may find ourselves waiting in vain for the changes we expected love to bring. At this crucial juncture, integration is an indispensable resource.
Integration can make possible a comfortable acceptance that differs from merely “settling.” It can help us feel content with our chosen love and enthusiastic about deepening our involvement. If there is a single capacity that enables us to remain in love and become a couple, it is integration.
Sarah, whose story opens this chapter, entered therapy feeling desperately unhappy about the state of her relationships with men. Nothing seemed to last. Sarah saw herself as unusually at' tractive, intelligent, and successful. Given these advantages and her intense desire to settle down, it was a complete mystery to her why she was still alone. It was less of a mystery to her friends.
Originally Ed had impressed Sarah as having everything she was looking for in a man: sexy good looks, emotional sensitivity, intelligence, self-confidence. At forty, he was a successful clothing designer. After the two of them slept together for the second time, Sarah made up her mind to marry him. Falling in love had never been her problem.
Sarah easily idealized Ed. In her eyes he was the perfect man and together they made the perfect couple. Ed was almost as full of admiration for Sarah. His thrill at finding such a woman made it easy for him to push his own needs, and his differences from her, into the background. For Ed and Sarah, the future together looked very bright and very certain.
Three months into the relationship, however, Sarah became disenchanted. She couldn’t forget her feeling that a special bond between the two of them had been forged the second night they slept together. Lying in his arms, Sarah had confided to Ed that a childhood of neglect and unpredictability had left her with a terrible fear of being abandoned and a strong need to feel in control. Impressed with her openness, and wanting to take care of
her, Ed had responded reassuringly. He promised he would always try to make her feel secure and be sensitive to her needs for control.
But now two things had occurred. First, Ed was beginning to chafe at Sarah’s need always to be in charge. Second, Ed took a business trip at a time when the pressures of Sarah’s restaurant made her feel she could not bear for him to go.
When Ed was no longer content letting her plan their time together, Sarah felt that he was betraying his promise to respect her need for control. And his leaving when she wanted him to stay left her convinced she could never rely on him again. Suddenly the “emotional sensitivity” that had drawn her to him began to look like immaturity. If he could betray her and prove unable to appreciate her needs, then he was plainly incapable of mature intimacy. If he could leave her as he had, it must be because he was unable to be close—or worse, he no longer cared about her.
Sarah’s tendency to think and feel in black-and-white terms, to mistake the part for the whole, made it nearly impossible for her to tolerate the frustrations and disappointments that are unavoidable in love. In short, her problem with integration undermined her feelings for a man she had initially seen as perfect.
To protect herself from the rejection she believed was coming, Sarah destroyed her love for Ed. All at once, she could barely remember anything she liked about him. She decided that, like so many before, he just couldn’t pass the test. He had betrayed her, and was really a hurtful, immature, and “neurotic” man. As an act of revenge, she was tempted not only to stop seeing him but also to tell him that she was already seeing another man. What she believed were his lies would be met by a final lie of her own.
Of course, Sarah was defining their problems as Ed’s problems; she was only an unfortunate victim. People with a poorly developed capacity for integration usually respond to a failed relationship not only with disappointment but also by feeling intentionally victimized.
Ed was shocked by Sarah’s all-or-nothing view of their relationship. His own real difficulties with intimacy, and his trouble
handling her sensitivities, were overridden by his need to protect himself from the barrage of her blaming and projection. He felt trapped, controlled, and unable to negotiate. He was at a loss to understand her sudden and total depreciation of him. When she accused him of being unresponsive and needing to control her, he was furious. The more frustrated and angry he became, the more Sarah believed her judgments of him were accurate. In fact, she had provoked the fulfillment of her own prophecy.
Sarah’s example illustrates how problems with integration emerge as intimacy deepens. When we are falling in love, two factors—our idealization and our collusion with our partner to avoid conflict— combine to generate a feeling of relative safety. When we become a couple, however, we may no longer be on our best behavior, muting our differences and deferring to the needs of our partner. Now we must begin to trust (as Sarah could not) that someone we love can really “be there’’ for us, even if he or she sometimes acts on the basis of needs that differ from ours. We must begin to trust that someone who is not perfect can still be reliable, can still empathize, can still be a dependable source of love.
Yet this necessary trust develops in a difficult new context. We know more about our partner now, which usually means knowing more about his or her limitations. And we are also known better by our partner. In addition, our feelings are more mixed— and so are those of our partner. We are aware of our differences and must accommodate them within a more complex view of the couple.
What is required at this phase of love is an expansion of our inner map—for the journey now taken by two partners together almost never follows the routes described in the map of one partner alone. Now we are compelled to take into account not only our own images of love but also those of our partner. Without integration, this is nearly impossible to do. For integration is the only capacity that can turn a world of “either-or” into the world of “both.”
As Sarah’s experience shows, when we believe that there’s only room for one, we will have a hard time remaining in love. With
out room for two, for an integrated view of the couple, our partner’s differences and separate needs can become a threat. Then love (if it lasts at all) is either submission, domination, or a neverending battle.
SPLITTING AS A
DEFENSE AGAINST INTEGRATION
Once we see our partner as a threat, the logical course of action is to protect ourselves. When we lack a well-developed capacity for integration, this self-protection usually takes the form of a defense that psychoanalysts have called “splitting.” This defense divides (that is, splits) a whole experience or image into two contradictory parts.
Splitting divides our world into heroes and villains—and usually others are the villains. When we use splitting as a defense, we make a resource out of a liability. The liability is our shaky grasp on integration; the resource is our determined, rigid separation of good and bad in the interest of self-protection.
If we are good and others are bad, our esteem suffers less when a relationship fails. If we are good and others are bad, we don’t have to envy them for what they possess and we lack. If we are good and others are bad, then we don’t miss them when they are gone. Splitting also simplifies the world of relationships: “if they’re not with you, they’re against you” and “if they’ve got liabilities, dump them” are some of the harsh conclusions that flow from splitting.
Above all, when we use this defense, we absolve ourselves of responsibility. We believe we are responding justifiably to the treachery or inadequacy of our partner. We may blame, exaggerate, or use all-or-nothing thinking (and feeling) to clinch the case against our former beloved. But while splitting protects us, the price we pay is that love never lasts.
The longer we make use of this defense, and the attitudes and behaviors that go with it, the more we distort the actual emotional reality of our intimate relationships. And the distortion
is often dramatic and extreme. The target of splitting, the partner, may be seen as monstrous, while we usually see ourselves as hapless and innocent.
When splitting turns someone we’ve loved into an enemy, we may feel confused. If on the other hand, we’re on the receiving end of this defense, the experience can be bewildering—and sometimes infuriating. To be seen as we are not by someone who matters to us is intensely disturbing, particularly when what is “seen” is so negative.
Sarah’s previous love relationships had all been dominated by her use of splitting. With Ed she used the same defense—and she went one step further. Once she decided that Ed had betrayed her, she began to treat him in such a way that he became unclear about what he really felt. Under the onslaught of Sarah’s accusations, Ed found it increasingly difficult to connect with his feelings of love and concern for her. As Sarah raged at him about being uncaring and hurtful, he found himself identifying more and more with the image that she was projecting onto him. He began to feel very much like the angry, uncaring lover she accused him of being.
In this interaction with Ed, Sarah was making use of an additional defense, one that often compounds the problems associated with splitting. Psychoanalysts call it “projective identification.” In this form of self-protection, we induce others to identify with the images we project onto them. Through enlisting Ed to play the role in which she cast him (the lover who breaks his promises), Sarah brought the external reality into line with the images of her inner map. In this way, she reconfirmed her suspicion that men were not to be trusted. She also reinforced her attitude that if a relationship failed, she was not the responsible party.
Sarah’s revenge, in telling Ed she was not only disappointed in him but also involved with someone else, was a way of ensuring the finality of their breakup. In acting out her vengeance, she left no room for him to consider or understand her feelings, for now he had to contend with feeling betrayed himself. Without the modulating influence of integration, Sarah’s feelings had an all
or-nothing quality; when feelings are felt this strongly, action often takes the place of words.
Like many of her other suitors, Ed believed at first that he’d found a woman who sincerely wanted her relationships to work. She was bright and successful. She gave the impression of being both curious and knowledgeable about her own psychology. Later he was amazed to discover how little she understood about her patterns in love. She explained away her undistinguished relationship history as a run of bad luck, a reflection of the times, or a consequence of men’s inability to commit themselves. Her own rather obvious emotional extremism was never factored into the equation.
INTEGRATION, SPLITTING, AND EARLY PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
The capacity for integration has its roots in the toddler’s learning to contend with, and eventually finding a balance between, loving gratification and painful frustration in relation to his or her parents. There is no such thing as “perfect” parenting. Rather, what we hope for are “good enough” family environments that provide adequate emotional resources for children. These are families where good experiences predominate over bad ones, and where parental love is, for the most part, predictably available. Compare this to families in which the parenting is more likely to be unpredictable, overly aggressive, and excessively frustrating. In these families, the bad times may overshadow the good. Coming from such a family can leave a child with an abundance of anger, and considerable anxiety about love.
Margaret Mahler’s work has suggested that between roughly fifteen and twenty-four months of age, the toddler begins to develop the capacity to bring together (that is, to integrate) the all-good and all-bad images of himself or herself, as well as the all-good and all-bad images of important others like mom and dad. Prior to this, the child can only react as though each parent were really two parents: the all-good parent who gratifies and the all-bad
parent who frustrates. And the child’s own emotional states (blissful or angry) seem to reflect a comparably divided self-image.
This difficult period, which Mahler called the “rapprochement phase,” is critical for the child’s development of the capacity for integration. The child’s task is particularly challenging because he or she is struggling during this period not only with integration but also with the disturbing realization that the psychological umbilical cord has been cut. Now the child no longer feels magically connected to his or her parents. It is a very early kind of existential awakening.
Parents know this phase well, for it is marked by difficult, often contradictory behaviors: one moment the toddler is very clingy and dependent, the next he or she is rejecting the parent, as if asserting independence. The wish for reassurance seems to vie with the need to push away and say no. This period has been called the “terrible twos,” partly because it’s difficult for the child, but also because it’s difficult for the parents.
If during our earlier development we were adequately nourished and cared for, both physically and emotionally, then the rapprochement phase presents challenges that can be largely resolved. We learn to accept that our parents are both good and bad, and that we cannot completely control their responsiveness to our needs. Parents empathize with our feelings, give in and let us have our way some of the time. But they also set limits as to how far we can push them around. This is valuable role modeling, for we are going through an intense phase of learning about how to cope with our contradictory feelings about ourselves and those we love.
During rapprochement, we learn to deal with ambivalence for the first time: we want to be close, but we also want to be separate. When mom and dad respond evenhandedly to our contradictory impulses, it helps us integrate our images of ourselves: we are both dependent and independent. This evenhandedness also helps us integrate our images of our parents. They seem like the same parents whether we cling or push away; their relative consistency works against our earlier tendency to see them as all good when they gratified us and all bad when they didn’t. Ideally, these early
experiences set the stage for us to tolerate the whole range of complex feelings that will later confront us in our intimate relationships.
While the critical period for developing the capacity for integration is the toddler years, integration can continue to evolve throughout our life. As adults we experience a variety of situations that challenge our ability to tolerate, empathize with, and understand mixed feelings. As the children of “good enough” parents, what we learned—but probably still have not finished learning—will be put to the test again and again.
When, however, our earlier experience with our parents was not “good enough,” the developmental tasks of rapprochement are experienced as traumas rather than as manageable challenges. In difficult family settings, our wishes for comfortable merging with our parents are often frustrated. Our hunger for mirroring and admiration can go unsatisfied. Instead of trusting that we will be loved, we may be overwhelmed by fears of abandonment. With too much aggression in our relationship with our parents (or in their relation to each other), we can feel intensely insecure and, frequently, full of anger. If our parents’ responses are erratic, we can be anxiously uncertain about which of our behaviors result in loving attention and which lead to punishment or neglect. With too much frustration and unpredictability, and too little love, our imagery of intimacy will reflect a preponderance of painful rather than pleasurable experiences. In this unhappy context, it is emotionally disastrous for us to put together—to integrate— our all-good and all-bad images of ourselves and others. Why should this be so?
Imagine that a child’s positive and negative experiences are represented by white and red paint, respectively. When childhood intimacy was troubled, it’s as though the child is left holding a little touch-up jar of white paint and a gallon can of red. If the two were mixed, the white paint would simply disappear. When our bad experiences outweigh our good ones, and bad images outnumber good images, the only possible outcome if we combine them is to lose touch with the good—and so we don’t combine
them. To preserve hope, to salvage a sense of goodness, integration is avoided and splitting becomes the defense of choice. The advantages here are considerable. With good and bad kept apart, whatever goodness there is now can be felt to belong to the self, while the badness can be banished to the realm of the hurtful, sadistic other. But the disadvantages are also considerable—for without integration, sustained intimacy becomes impossible.
REAL, IDEAL, AND FEARED IMAGES
Integration has a profound impact on our real, ideal, and feared images of ourselves and others. With a healthy capacity for integration, we can see ourselves and others reasonably clearly. Our real images (those that reflect our view of actual reality) are fairly stable and faithful to the facts. Our ideal (or wished-for) images, though they reflect our ambitions and desires, are earthbound rather than spectacularly grandiose. Our feared images, though they reflect our anxieties about ourselves and others, are neither overly exaggerated nor paranoid.
With such images it’s possible for us to have healthy self-esteem, because our real and ideal self-images are not worlds apart. With such images it’s also possible to trust others, because our feared images of them are not overwhelmingly frightening nor are our ideal images intimidatingly grandiose.
In part these balanced images are the legacy of early childhood experience that was “good enough.” In part they are the result of the subsequent influence of integration, which tones down the extremes of experience by combining them.
Sarah’s view of herself was at odds with how she was seen by friends who knew her well. Sarah’s real self-image had gaping holes in it. She was aware of her strengths, her attractiveness, and her competence, but she was blind to the most damaging aspects of her personality. Friends could see how her suspicion and anger doomed her relationships; she could not. In her view she was greatly deserving, but unlucky in love.
Sarah’s “real” images of others (particularly men) were no less distorted than her image of herself, though the distortion was in the opposite direction. Sarah believed that all men were immature, untrustworthy, and emotionally unavailable. If they appeared otherwise, it was only an illusion that time would dispel.
Sarah’s greatest vulnerability—and that of most of us for whom integration is a problem—was that she so easily confused her exaggeratedly ideal or feared images with reality. At times she could see herself as very nearly extraordinary: smarter, more beautiful, more successful than almost anyone she knew. But at other times, she felt hopelessly fearful, doomed to abandonment and loneliness, poisoned by her mother’s rage and her father’s unfulfilled promises.
In just the same way (that is, unstably), she could see someone like Ed as virtually flawless, a dream lover. But before long the same man would become identified not with her ideal image but with her feared image: now he was only a boy disguised as a man, a breaker of promises, like every other man.
All of Sarah’s relationships were initiated by her wish to bring her ideal images to life. To the extent that she could feel special, and be loved by someone special, she was protected from her fears. But her solution was untenable. Her exaggeratedly ideal images of herself and her partner always proved impossible to sustain in the crucible of an ongoing relationship. When the ideal images faded in the face of routine or, more often, exploded in the face of conflict, they were invariably and completely replaced by her feared images. And these feared images, unmodulated by integration, were overwhelmingly intense. Looking for ideal love, Sarah repeatedly found betrayal.
Why were these extreme images so difficult to give up? For Sarah, like many of us, unmodified ideal images represent a promise of salvation. The fantasy of a perfect self and a perfect partner can look like a kind of emotional oasis in what might otherwise appear to be a desert. If we can just get to the oasis, we’ll feel the comfort of closeness, and relief from our fears about ourselves. Beckoning like a mirage, our ideal images indicate a direction in
which to go. Even when experience teaches us that going in this direction leads nowhere, it’s hard to give up hope of reaching the oasis. Moreover, the very pursuit of the ideal is itself a kind of boon: it distinguishes us from the ordinary masses who are willing to settle for less.
We can be just as attached to our feared images, no matter how unrealistically threatening they may be. Feared images function as a kind of early warning system that can protect us from pain. So long as these images of danger remain in place, they can steer us away from situations that might hurt us again as we feel we were hurt in the past. The problem with these images, to put it lightly, is that “once burned, twice shy” becomes “once burned, never enter a house with a kitchen.”
Giving up (or modifying) our ideal and feared images requires awareness, mourning, and courage. Understanding that these images of ours are not realities is itself a giant step. Then we need to mourn, for mourning is the natural human process by which we come to accept painful reality and loss. When we lose the ideal images, in a way we lose a hope for heaven on Earth. But giving up the feared images also represents a loss, for these images always reflect interactions (though painful ones) with people who have mattered deeply to us.
Giving up our ideal and feared images takes courage: without them, we are in uncharted territory. Relinquishing a big part of our inner map can be wrenching. We all try to keep our map intact in an effort to maintain consistency between the past and the present, between our internal view and our external experience. Doing so, we stabilize our sense of identity. This can mean holding on, psychologically, to a distorted map simply because it is our map.
The courage to let go of our unmodified ideal and feared images need not come all at once. We can relinquish these images slowly, detail by detail. But relinquish them we must, if our relationships are to last. With unintegrated ideal and feared images, it’s possible to fall in love but impossible, as Sarah’s experience confirms, to remain in love.
REVENGE AND OTHER REWARDS
Splitting, like other defenses, has hidden payoffs that make it even harder to relinquish than we might expect. First, splitting helps justify revenge. Second, it simplifies our choices in an ambiguous, complicated world, which can be reassuring.
Once Ed was no longer the hero of Sarah’s romantic dreams, he became the villain. As the embodiment of her feared, rather than her idealized, image of a partner, he was now a legitimate target. Sarah felt that he was only the most recent in a series of men who had betrayed her. The first was her father, whom she scornfully referred to as “Mr. False Promises.” Now, however, she would take her revenge: turning the tables, she would make sure that Ed felt the pain of abandonment as much as she had.
Sarah’s wish for pleasure had shifted from the erotic to the aggressive in relation to Ed. Having felt victimized, she found it satisfying to strike back—in fact she relished the opportunity. Her anger at men and her frustration with relationships that always seemed to disappoint her could now be expressed without a trace of guilt.
This guiltless impulse to take revenge frequently accompanies splitting. If our former partner has become all bad, there is an emotional logic that seems almost to compel revenge. This logic has been called the law of Talion: “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Without integration, we can experience a persistent pressure to exact our pound of flesh for misdeeds committed against us in the past. Now whenever an opportunity arises that justifies the expression of our anger, we may seize it with pleasure.
A second subtle payoff in splitting is that it simplifies our choices. A computer engineer felt that his mother and sister had both been unpredictably cruel to him. Now he thinks it’s wise always to assume the worst about the women he’s involved with. Rather than give his girlfriend the benefit of the doubt, and feel anxiously uncertain about the outcome, he prefers to assume that she can’t be trusted. At a certain point, this engineer realized that some of the initial appeal of computers for him had been their “on/off, yes/no” logic. This was part of his dawning awareness
about how deeply he could be reassured by the either-or of splitting. Through simplifying the alternatives, this defense protected him from ambiguous situations that he considered potentially dangerous.
At the cultural as well as the personal level, we can see the broad appeal of this simplification through splitting. Ronald Reagan’s vision of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” (juxtaposed against an idealized view of the USA) struck a responsive chord among millions of people. Apparently the splitting that separates “us” from “them” is a comfort to many. In a similar vein, the success of such films as Star Wars , which enable us so readily to identify the good guys and the bad guys, may derive in part from the appeal of the split view of complex human reality.
But this kind of comfort comes at a high price, whether in relations between lovers or nations. Once we have a more integrated view, we can become aware of the distortions splitting imposes: we can see that the “other” is rarely as “bad” as we believed and that we are not often as “good” as we might wish.
Giving up the defense of splitting means losing some of the impulse, and a lot of the justification, for revenge. It also means sacrificing the comfort of a simplified view of relationships. Integration, by contrast, makes possible some very complicated experiences in love including empathy, acceptance, and forgiveness.
THE DANCE OF DEFENSES: COLLISION, COLLUSION, OR COLLABORATION
The idyllic honeymoon that distinguishes the first stage of love is fertile territory for the kinds of collusions we would expect when there are problems with the capacity for integration.
When the thrill of falling in love is amplified by splitting, for example, we indeed “fall hard.” Splitting renders irrelevant whatever might conceivably trouble us about our new beloved, while whatever is good feels all the better. Recall that for Sarah and Ed, falling in love felt like a fantastic, potentially perfect romantic journey. Unfortunately, in colluding to deny the possibility
of present or future difficulty, both partners set themselves up for disappointment. But their collusion took another important form as well.
Sarah’s lack of integration inclined her to an either-or view of relationships. Either her needs would be met or his would, either her will would be expressed or his would, either she would have control or he would. Sarah stressed this point with Ed early in their relationship when she made explicit her need for control: If there was room for only one, that one had to be Sarah. Ed’s collusion was in submitting. Because he had his own problems with integration, he shared her either-or view. In a sense it was a perfect fit, for Ed was accustomed to playing the role that complemented hers. He had learned to yield control to his partner as an indirect route to meeting his own needs.
But this collusion could not be maintained. When Ed’s “betrayal” of Sarah exploded her dream of perfect love, her disappointment was almost too painful to bear. In large part this was because her new view of him contrasted so profoundly with the idealized image that splitting had helped her maintain for the previous three months. Now her intense anger toward Ed protected her from tremendous feelings of inner loss, for she was losing not only a lover but also her hopes for love as well. After all, Sarah had been convinced that she and Ed were “made for each other,” and now, in spite of that, she was alone again.
Sometimes the feeling of being “made for each other” reflects a collusion like Ed and Sarah’s. Perhaps, as a rule, it is more realistic to say “made for each other at this moment” or “made to work it out with each other.” Collusions of splitting, in which difficulties are denied, are inherently unworkable and unstable.
There are, however, certain relationships that appear to be stabilized by defensive collusions. The most common example are those skewed partnerships that have come to be called “co-dependent.” Here the tacit agreement between two partners is that one will support the other’s dependency, in order that both are protected from discomfort and change. An alcoholic and a “coalcoholic” partner, for example, will collude to avoid dealing with
their individual pain. In these couples, integration is stalled because each partner provides the other with something that he or she is missing inside: two halves now form a very problematic whole. As long as neither partner complains too loudly nor demands real change, these relationships can last a lifetime. But the psychological development of both partners may be frozen. Integration, in particular, will remain a dormant resource until one partner or the other confronts the “co-dependent” pattern.
When what has been hidden by collusion is revealed, collisions can be expected to occur. Sarah and Ed collided in such a way that her defenses obliterated any trust she might have had in him. At first Ed’s defenses led him to withdraw and disengage in response to Sarah’s attack, but eventually he became angry. And the more he used his anger to shield himself from the impact of her furious criticisms, the more convinced Sarah became that he was the dangerous trickster of her catastrophic fantasies: a man like her father who would manipulate her with false promises.
When we have significant limitations in our capacity for integration, our collisions with our partner will always be complicated by splitting. Splitting provokes a heightened emotionality and patterns of “fight or flight” characterized by angry blaming or cold withdrawal. This defense is especially likely to dominate conflicts that involve issues of commitment, separation, or loss.
Recognizing splitting as a problem is critical to containing, and ultimately resolving, the conflicts couples face when their defenses collide. Once we are able to take responsibility for using splitting as a defense, we are on the road to diminishing its devastating impact. Then it may be possible to resolve through collaboration the conflicts that collision has revealed.
Psychotherapeutic work with couples has shown that enabling partners to empathize with each other becomes the crucial turning point in modifying or resolving their defensive collisions. One partner’s initiative is all it takes to lead the dance of defense in a new direction.
Let’s imagine how this might have occurred between Sarah and Ed. Upon being confronted by Sarah, instead of mounting a
defense against feeling criticized, Ed could have tuned in to Sarah’s feelings of hurt and betrayal. He could have tried to understand her experience. He might have asked how his words or behavior had led her to feel so hurt. He could have tried to grasp the emotional logic, from her side, that left her feeling abandoned by him. In receiving this quality of empathic attention, Sarah might have been able to feel less threatened and less vengeful. And then she might have become more receptive to Ed’s version of their experience. Recall that empathy is a way of listening to our partner in which, emotionally speaking, we put ourselves in their place, with the aim of understanding their point of view. Empathy doesn’t require that we agree with their point of view, only that we take it in: in particular, we’re not required to agree with their point of view about who we are.
Now let’s look at how Sarah might have encouraged empathy and collaboration by responding differently to Ed. Suppose she had noticed that her fears and concerns about Ed were taking on an all-or-nothing quality. This could have been a signal to her that, if she didn’t change course, she’d soon be feeling overwhelmed and, potentially, explosive. She might then have tried to contain her tendency to overreact. If she were able to do so, she could then consider what was provoking such intense feelings and try to open a discussion with Ed. She was certainly entitled to let him know how much pain she was feeling, and how grave her concerns were about their future together.
Containing our most extreme reactions does not mean denying our feelings or concerns. In muting the intensity of these reactions, we are simply trying to increase the likelihood that we will be heard and understood. Ideally, even in communicating our anger, hurt, or disappointment, we can also convey our love for our partner and our desire to resolve shared problems.
Often the first five minutes or so of any conflict establishes a blueprint for the rest of the interaction—and the outcome will be either constructive engagement or a battle. When we express concern and take some responsibility for our own role, we enhance the odds in favor of resolving the conflict. In effect we’re using
our capacity for integration. Even when we’re upset, integration can help make it possible for us to see that our relationship with our partner is worth protecting. Regardless of our feelings of hurt or anger, integration can sustain our desire to collaborate.
For most of us, this kind of collaboration represents an ideal, a standard to aim for but not always to reach. Partners can have the best intentions in the world and still find their desires to collaborate overwhelmed by intense emotion or the drift toward familiar patterns of collision and collusion. With time, however, couples can learn more about their defensive interactions and can recognize them before they get destructively out of hand. Hopefully, as love deepens, so does the capacity for integration. As our experience loses its all-or-nothing quality, we can become more capable of tolerating our own intense emotions, instead of feeling pushed around by them. In the same way, we can also become more capable of bearing the emotions our partner expresses toward us. With a greater capacity for integration, we can look beyond, rather than feel dominated by, the impact of any particular interaction in our relationship. Then, even in the heat of conflict, rather than feel overwhelmed, we will be able to sustain our desire to collaborate.
Couples who have gone through conflicts, and not only survived these struggles but also deepened their involvement, often feel they know the territory of love better than those who seem to have had it easy. These are couples who are likely to have worked hard on evolving and making use of the capacity for integration. And indeed, with such persistent effort there is a sense of wisdom gained, a knowledge of what it really means to fully accept one’s partner.
Deepening our capacity for integration not only enables us to remain in love over the long run but also strengthens our confidence in our ability to meet love’s challenges. The result is a larger, stronger, more expansive view of love and of ourselves.
PSYCHOTHERAPY AND INTEGRATION
A few weeks before she broke up with Ed, Sarah began to feel anxious. Their relationship was then the center of her life and
it seemed to be going just fine. So what could possibly be bothering her so much? She felt almost panicky.
It was this feeling that led her into therapy. In trying to understand her anxiety, she wound up talking with her male therapist about her relationships with men. Though her relationship with Ed looked as if it had a future, she was insecure. She had learned that men couldn’t be trusted—or was it just the men she picked? Perhaps Ed was different; she hoped so. But for her, bitter disappointment followed high hopes: this was the pattern she couldn’t seem to escape. Before long, it became clear that Sarah’s anxiety reflected her terror that the old pattern was about to be repeated.
Early in the relationship, Ed had reassured her with his empathy. He had seemed to understand her need to feel in control. But now there were disturbing hints that he wanted to exercise more authority. Very quickly the tension in Sarah’s relationship escalated. And then the relationship was over.
In therapy, Sarah gradually began to understand how the eitheror quality of her emotional extremism could generate an incomplete and inaccurate picture of her relationships: at the start by erasing whatever was problematic; at the finish by attributing all the problems to her partner. And then, not surprisingly perhaps, the pattern was repeated in relation to her therapist.
Initially Sarah’s feelings about her therapist had seemed entirely positive. But then an emergency made it impossible for him to meet with her at their regular hour. An appointment was scheduled for later that week. When they met, Sarah was hurt, mistrustful, and angry. Her therapist couldn’t really be concerned about her needs. Perhaps she’d been foolish in letting herself rely on him. Maybe therapy itself was an empty promise: it got your hopes up but then your therapist let you down.
The therapist empathized with Sarah’s feelings, reflecting how hard it must have been for her to feel that he couldn’t always be relied on to meet her needs. As the two of them discussed the meaning of her distress, Sarah saw how vulnerable she was to feeling abandoned—and how easily her angry suspicions could be aroused when she felt threatened or hurt. She found it disturb
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ing, but also illuminating, to see herself playing out the old scenario with a man like her therapist, whom she had no obvious reason to mistrust. Just beneath the surface apparently, requiring only the slightest disappointment to bring it to light, was her attitude that men were guilty until proven innocent.
As her problem with integration began to be clarified, Sarah started to monitor responses in her relationships that until now had been automatic. Her therapist supported her growing disinclination to take her feelings unquestioningly at face value. Over time, it became clear that when Sarah was disappointed by a man, she experienced one of two alternatives: either she angrily blamed him, sometimes jeopardizing the relationship, or she blamed herself and felt worthless. Choosing the lesser of two evils, she had always sacrificed love to salvage self-esteem and hope.
The way out of this unhappy dilemma was to open up the emotional gray area between the extremes of black and white. This meant being aware of her love for a man even when she was disappointed in him. She also had to recognize that she could be at fault, that she could be flawed—and still be lovable.
Slowly Sarah began to make a major shift in her self-image. Taking responsibility for her part in what had gone awry in her past relationships was both very painful and very healing. It let her see that she could have an impact on her life in love, rather than believe that if she loved, she could only wind up the victim. She had regrets about the past but also began to believe that her future was largely hers to create.
This transformation in Sarah’s attitude about future relationships reflected a shift in her understanding of the past. For years Sarah had been angry about her mother’s unpredictable rages and her father’s empty promises. Now she was able to mourn the past and to understand its impact on the present.
Mourning and Integration
As Sarah’s feelings and images lost their all-or-nothing quality, she was able for the first time to grieve over the shortcomings of her relationship to her parents. When that relationship was
no longer experienced as all bad, what was bad about it could be tolerably grieved—and what had been good could be missed.
Once we mourn we usually discover that what we feared would overwhelm us is tolerable. Sarah learned that she could tolerate her feeling of disappointment in relation to her parents. This meant, in turn, that love’s disappointments could be tolerated: they no longer needed to be quarantined or split off; they could instead be integrated.
SELF-APPRAISAL: THREE PROFILES Helen: Integration as a Resource
At fifty, Helen has been married for nearly three decades to an intense, charismatic, somewhat volatile attorney. Leonard, her husband, has long been regarded as a charming, but difficult, man. Both of Helen’s parents were stable and supportive but restrained emotionally. When Helen looks back at the twenty-one-year-old she was when she married, she sees a young woman superficially serene and full of love but also very unsure. She had looked to Leonard’s brash self-assurance to compensate for her own insecurity; she had hoped the example of his confident expressiveness would help her overcome her inhibitions. From Helen’s point of view today, the growing strength of their relationship over the decades can largely be understood as the reflection of her evolving capacity for acceptance.
During the first years of their marriage, Helen felt as if she were riding the waves of Leonard’s moodiness. When his cases were going well, he was extraordinarily loving. When they were going badly, he acted as though Helen were responsible. Her self-esteem rose and fell with his moods and the quality of his attention to her. With the birth of their first child, however, all this changed.
Helen saw that Leonard’s behavior toward their daughter could be just as inconsistent as his behavior toward her. While this disappointed and infuriated her, it also freed her: Leonard was apparently a capricious man, there was no way around it, but she
certainly didn’t have to be overly preoccupied with her role in provoking his moods.
Over the course of several years, as her own self-esteem stabilized, Helen’s estimate of her husband sank. Once she no longer held herself responsible for Leonard’s emotional comings and goings, she became angry and exasperated. Working out his moods was like trying to pick up mercury with a fork. She began to regard his unpredictability as adolescent.
But she never stopped appreciating him. No one else excited her as Leonard did, either physically or intellectually. When he was present, she felt a depth and passion to his love that never failed to move and comfort her. He encouraged her ambitions and was supportive when these led to a career managing political campaigns.
Because Helen never felt any need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, she began not only to be less tolerant of Leonard’s moodiness but also to set limits with him. This seemed to take the edge off the worst of his withdrawal and irritability. Over time, Helen’s ability to be both angry and loving— that is, her capacity for integration—wound up enhancing his. He grew to meet her.
What she called her capacity for acceptance enabled her, much later, to weather Leonard’s near-fatal heart attack without despairing. And when there was a painfully prolonged conflict between Leonard and their teenage son, she could empathize with both of them while taking sides with neither. The evolution of Helen’s capacity for integration generated an upward spiral in her relationship with her husband. For this couple, integration made possible an atmosphere of acceptance in which both conflict and intimacy could be aspects of love.
Andy: Integration That Is Compromised
A lively computer engineer in his early forties, Andy is on the verge of marrying a woman with whom he has been living for almost five years. Their relationship has been stormy, punctuated
by several separations, but now the two of them seem to have settled in.
At times Andy has seen Lorraine, his pretty wife-to-be, as a fine match for him. At these times Lorraine has impressed him as a woman of substance. The editor of a small magazine, she is bright, creative, and caring; she is, he asserts, at least his equal.
But at other times, Andy has become very angry at her, and suspicious. He has easily been convinced that her interest in him had to do only with her need for a man to father a child. Her desire, at least in his mind, has been a function mainly of what he could or couldn’t give her. At these times he no longer saw her as powerful or competent. She became instead someone who’d use her considerable allure to exploit him, because she couldn’t take care of herself.
But as time has gone on, Andy has bounced back more quickly from these episodes of angry worry and devaluation. In the past his dramatic shifts of feeling in relation to Lorraine had led to fights between the two of them—and several separations. Now Andy understands that his shifting reactions have much more to do with his own fears than with Lorraine’s character. He trusts her more, and usually believes that they can weather their conflicts together. He feels less need to cling to his wariness, to his secret suspicion that women are a threat. Yet when there is too much stress in their life together, his angry suspicion still briefly emerges. But he feels it with far less conviction than in the past.
His old way had been to assume the worst. If Lorraine were sometimes an angel, sometimes a vamp, then the safest course was to decide that even when she appeared to be angelic, she was only a vamp in disguise. Eventually he understood this need to protect himself as the legacy of his growing up with an absent father, and a tyrannical mother and older sister who treated him, he felt, like a male version of Cinderella: underappreciated and overexploited.
Andy’s strengthened capacity to integrate his loving and his angry feelings toward Lorraine came about in large part through their separations. Initially, in keeping with an all-or-nothing style
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of thinking, Andy had felt that when the two of them separated, one or the other was always to blame. If Lorraine wasn’t at fault, then he must be—and so, to protect himself, he felt compelled to blame her. But with each successive separation, he was more aware of missing her, and more aware of her caring for him. Through these experiences, he learned as an adult what he hadn’t learned as a child: that emotions need not be either-or. He could be angry at Lorraine and also love her; she could be angry at him and still miss him.
Raphael: Integration as a Struggle
Raphael, a strikingly handsome park ranger in his mid-thirties, has been involved with many women but has never lived with one. He has a disturbing awareness that when he makes love to a woman, she always feels more than he does. The relationship means more to her. He’d like to be able to feel for a woman what he thinks certain women have felt for him. But there’s a kind of emotional barrier when he’s with women that separates him from them, and separates him from his feeling. At times, he thinks that the barrier is fear, that he’s afraid of being hurt or rejected. At other times, he thinks that if only he met a woman with the right combination of qualities, then he could break through.
Raphael suspects that his problems with women are a carryover from his past. His father, alcoholic and usually remote, beat him angrily on many occasions, and beat his two younger brothers as well. His mother seemed relatively uninterested in children: Raphael recalls that her attention was expressed mainly in her desire to keep the children clean and to maintain their appearance. His parents fought frequently, and once their three sons had left home, they divorced.
Raphael’s most recent romantic involvement, his longest, lasted for nine months. Karin appealed to him in many ways, but he was eventually frustrated with her because she wouldn’t join him on a trip around the world that had been a dream of his for years. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He had been in
love with her only briefly at the start of their relationship, and if she couldn’t share his dream then the relationship might as well be over.
This last involvement ended in much the same way as those that had preceded it. Typically Raphael would be quite taken with a woman, but only briefly. Then he would find fault with her, or she would frustrate him in ways he found intolerable: she’d be critical because he wanted to smoke, or she’d demand that he stay overnight. He didn’t like to feel controlled. He’d rather be alone.
Sometimes in the course of these unhappy endings (unhappy primarily for the women involved), Raphael would become angry, feeling that he was being “guilt-tripped.” His notion was that everyone was free to make his or her own choices. No one was beholden to anyone else. He could understand a woman being disappointed, but it was outrageous that he should be held responsible for her feelings, as though he had committed some kind of crime.
When Raphael was alone, he could become very depressed. He started to wonder if there was something very wrong with him, something that would always keep him feeling incomplete and unfulfilled. But then, once he was with a woman, it was like being in the sun again after a cold gray winter. His concerns about himself would quickly fade. And he could usually find women with whom to become involved.
He wasn’t lonely, exactly. Given his parents’ example, he had no burning desire to be married. Yet Raphael couldn’t stop asking himself why he had such difficulty making a relationship last.
CHAPTER FIVE