Mutuality
Mutuality is the technique, the purpose, and the culmination of relationship sanity. All the work in this book is directed at becoming able to value one another without a construct or overlay of inequality or feelings of inequality. In Mutuality, we give and receive love, caring, and trust with unconditional acceptance without giving in to the temptation to downplay or devalue our partner when we’re feeling anxious about our needs or our position in the relationship. When we make mistakes—even huge blunders that sometimes destroy relationships—relationship sanity provides space to fail, get back up, and try again, all without a fear of being made to pay for our failures forever. Relationship sanity is messy because life often is messy. It’s painful and costly because pretty much everything worth having requires putting aside our immediate wants. However, having read up to this point, you’ve already gotten the message that how things were is far less desirable than the pain and the messiness of relationship sanity.
Let’s briefly revisit the phases of dependence identified by Carnes, Laaser, and Laaser, which appeared in the Introduction.1 In the process of developing a sense of ourselves in the context of relationship, we generally develop a sense of identity by passing through phases of dependency; that is, from our life experience, we infer how much we can depend on others for help when we need it.
1. Dependence: We need and want help.
2. Counterdependence: We need help but resist it.
3. Independence: We’re self-sufficient and don’t need help.
4. Interdependence: We’re able to give and receive help.
By these definitions, interdependence can be seen as, perhaps, the most consequential component of relationship sanity. Irrelationship is its opposite. The parties invested in irrelationship have unconsciously made a decision to step away from relationship sanity, choosing instead to act out their intimacy-related anxiety through a process psychoanalysts call enactment. In irrelationship terms, the enactment is the song-and-dance routine that partners use to protect themselves from getting too close by enacting one or more of the GRAFTS behaviors. These behaviors look a lot like Carnes, Laaser, and Laaser’s first three phases of dependence and are a way of blocking, or dissociating, our need for help from others, especially from a would-be intimate partner. Conversely, the path of relationship sanity is a process of reassociating our feelings of anxiety and our need for others.
Compassionate empathy creates the mutual acceptance that allows balanced giving and taking, caregiving and accepting care, and loving and being loved—in other words, Mutuality. The hallmark of relationship sanity is the continually-maturing product that is Mutuality, which is the natural outcome of sustained use of the 40-20-40, the Self-Other Assessment.
Exercise: Interdependence and Relationship Sanity (Individuals)
Healthy interdependence is an essential part of relationship sanity. To break with irrelationship and deliberately build relationship sanity, we need to understand how we learned our own individual pattern of depending and not depending on others for support. As fleshed out in Chapter 2, our particular irrelationship song-and-dance routine is an outgrowth of how we were treated by our primary caregiver(s) as small children.
The following is an individual exercise that is designed to examine your relationships with the people most likely to have had a significant impact on you as a child and how they were present, as well as how they were absent. Either can drive a child’s willingness to disclose or conceal the need for help. That pattern of willingness or unwillingness is usually taken with you into adulthood and shows how willing you are to be candid about your vulnerability and ability to rely on others.
Below is a list of persons who are often or usually the most consequential in a child’s life.
• Parents/Primary caregivers
• Siblings/Other family members
• Teachers
• Friends
• Employers and coworkers
• Other adults
Make notes about how each affected your willingness to let others see your feelings, especially negative feelings, such as anger or sadness, and to ask for help when you needed it. Include how you remember each person responding or reacting when you made mistakes or otherwise did something wrong. Were they patient? Critical? Were they helpful and supportive as you learned to correct mistakes, or did they do and say things that made you feel bad?
In your notes, include specific feelings and experiences that you associate with everyone on the list. The persons suggested on the list may not include everyone who had a significant effect on you as a child, so add to your list as appropriate.
Finally, for each person, say something about the impact your interactions with that person had on you in the longer term, perhaps even up to today.
After completing your writing, take turns sharing your answers with your partner.
Exercise: Attitudes Toward Accepting Care from Others (Individuals)
Our ability to care and be cared for is shaped one relationship at a time, over several years. Similarly, clearing away old habits of isolation to make space for Mutuality will take time. But each change and breakthrough will feel like you’re putting down a burden and is likely to make you breathe a sigh of relief.
Experiencing others’ care for you is liable to expose uncomfortable attitudes and feelings that many of us feel a need to keep under wraps. Nevertheless, being able to name and clarify those attitudes is an important piece of building relationship sanity. The following exercise will help.
Our attitudes toward giving and receiving care fall broadly into several categories:
• Quid pro quo: I provide care with the implicit or explicit understanding that I’m entitled to expect repayment.
• Nonemotionally-involved care: care that does not involve any kind of personal connection. Such care may be provided by professional caregivers or may be between people who know each other but avoid emotional investment in one another.
• Care involving exaggerated personal or emotional investment: caretaking administered in an essentially (or apparently) one-way transaction that doesn’t take into account the authentic needs of either person involved.
• Minimal care: caretaking, sometimes entirely impersonal, that’s usually administered out of a sense of obligation and may be accompanied by feelings of guilt, resentment, or other negative emotions. Meanwhile, the person targeted by the caretaking experiences little to no benefit and may even be unaware that it’s occurring.
• Accepting care: Caregiver and recipient authentically and unconditionally accept their respective roles vis-à-vis one another and are able to maintain openness to changes in their roles.
Now write about experiences of caregiving that have involved you as giver or receiver, or that you have observed in others. Don’t worry about whether or not your scenarios seem to correspond to these five categories.
Many of us have, in the past, experienced care given by others that has conditioned or even interfered with our ability to accept care and services we need in our lives today. This can include anything from care needed during convalescence from illness to emotional support during a life crisis to requiring government services after losing a job.
Now write about experiences from your own life in which you needed the support of other people or service agencies. What happened leading to your needing those supports? What was it like for you to be in that position?
Looking back over your life, especially early childhood, reflect on and write about experiences you had with two or three caregivers.
• Which of their personal qualities had an impact on your experience of having them take care of you?
• What common characteristics do you see among these people?
• Can you recall instances in which the manner that others offered care or assistance made you hesitant or uneasy about revealing your need or willingness to accept their help?
Now repeat the exercise using the same questions, but this time look at a caretaking experience you had with someone who is either part of your life currently or someone you were connected with only temporarily or briefly. It may be a romantic interest, a caregiving professional, or even a casual acquaintance who did you a favor.
Reflect on and write about personal qualities this individual brought to your interactions and how you felt about that person in the course of your acquaintance.
From this exercise, you can glean a lot of information about what it’s like for you to need and either accept or reject the assistance of caregivers within and outside your intimate circle. Discuss your findings with your partner with an eye toward identifying common or complementary experiences using the same questions.
• Which of their personal qualities do you recall having an impact on your experience of them taking care of you?
• What common characteristics do you see among these people?
• Can you see instances in which the manner that others offered services made you hesitant or uneasy about revealing your need for care?
Taking Stock
The previous exercises elucidate what it’s like for you to be in the orbit of another person while taking care that you don’t come close enough to allow meaningful interaction. The exercises also help explain why we manage connection with others so cautiously, as well as helping us to understand that the price we pay for keeping ourselves so safe is the forfeiture of meaningful connection and healthy interdependence.
In sane relationships, loving and being loved is a free, open dynamic between people. In irrelationship, however, loving and being loved, or, more accurately, giving and receiving caretaking, are deliberately constructed roles used as walls to keep out unscripted, spontaneous connection with others. If we’re confronted with the real possibility of open, dynamic caring, many of us are unable to resolve the conflict between the need for genuine connection and the need to keep ourselves safe.
This scenario is equally true for the caretaker as for the person on whom her or his energies are spent: continually giving without allowing the recipient to respond or reciprocate is as much a protective wall as the one created by the person who refuses to allow others to care for her or him. When repeatedly rebuffed, the would-be caretaker is likely to become resentful, angry, and even contemptuous of those who refuse to validate what a great person she or he is. In either event, both parties are living in hardened silos designed to be impregnable against the threat of love and the vulnerability that comes with it. Astonishingly, some couples actually live in loneliness and isolation within relationships configured along such lines for years or decades.
One day during therapy, Alexa asked wistfully, “Now that it’s over, do you think I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life?”
Alexa, a savvy, attractive middle-aged woman had just broken up with a man who was fifteen years younger than herself.
“I doubt it,” her therapist answered. “Too many wounded guys out there want exactly what you offer: help with their lives with no strings attached. No intimacy, no expectations, and no heavy-duty demands—in fact, no demands at all.”
“Is that really what’s going on?” Alexa asked, her voice trembling.
“Are you kidding? It’s all that’s been going on in your so-called relationships since you’ve been coming to me! You control the guys you date by insisting on doing all the giving. And that’s what makes it entirely reasonable for you to be the one who calls all the shots about everything that happens between you—including how close you’ll let him get and when. Even the sex has almost nothing to do with actually getting closer, as far as I can tell. And that’s a good way to keep a guy from getting too important to you. You keep that nice, safe distance, and neither of you has to know how deep your feelings are—and how that scares you.”
Intelligent as she was, Alexa was surprisingly naïve about her own feelings, and not just about men, but about pretty much anything. Although it smarted a bit each time one of her relationships unraveled, she actually felt even more relieved, though she wasn’t about to admit that to herself. Instead, the therapy session following each breakup was spent complaining about how she keeps picking the wrong kind of guy.
Alexa’s consistent pattern in her so-called relationships was to connect only with men looking for a caretaker rather than a partner. So, naturally, she consistently found herself with men who, at least for a while, were willing to play the Audience to her caretaking role, until they grew tired of being kept out of any decision-making in the relationship. So her repeatedly getting involved with the wrong kind of guy was actually her strategy for protecting herself from intimacy-related anxiety. But she came by this strategy honestly.
As a small child, Alexa took on the role of making her depressed mother feel better, although, ironically, her mother’s depression was the result of her lack of success at making her daughter feel secure. Thus began the song-and-dance routine Alexa shared with her mother: Alexa was a precocious child who was able to make her mother feel that she, Alexa, was self-sufficient as well as clever enough to find ways of changing her mother’s mood, or, at least, making her laugh. When her mom’s mood seemed to lift, she was better able to attend to Alexa’s needs, which lessened Alexa’s anxiety. An added benefit for Alexa was that she came to believe in her own ability to make herself more comfortable by manipulating and controlling her environment. The downside was that she had to be constantly vigilant to make sure that she kept things under control.
As an adult, Alexa took her song-and-dance routine into virtually every type of relationship in her life, but it was especially consequential in would-be intimate relationships. Her self-protectiveness became a straitjacket in which she sought to fit herself and her boyfriends, so she wouldn’t feel any emotional vulnerability that’s a normal part of getting close to another person. Then Dylan showed up, and her therapy abruptly changed directions.
“I’ve never been with a man who wasn’t, well, mostly absent. But Dylan—I don’t know what to do with him—how to even talk to him! At first I thought I could do this. But he really wants to know me! He asks me about myself as if he’s interested in, well, me—what I think, what I care about, what makes me nervous about dating—things I never talked about with anyone, boyfriend or not! It’s so different. I can already tell he’s not the guy to just let me decide all the whens and wheres of what we do together. He knows I like him, but he’s already picked up that I’m not a hundred percent comfortable—and it’s okay with him: he just keeps calling and showing up.”
Will Alexa find her way out of her irrelationship pattern and into relationship sanity?
What’s Driving Compulsive Caregiving?
As noted earlier, compulsive caregiving develops out of a child-caregiver role-reversal in which the child becomes caretaker for her primary caregiver. Ultimately, this pattern, once established, is carried forward into adulthood and applied unconsciously to any and all types of relationships.
Some of the unstated, and often unknown, rules of compulsive caregiving require ignoring and repressing pain. This was the case for Alexa, who learned early on the “never ask for anything” rule in order to avoid placing any demands on her mother. This was as much a part of her Performer role as were her precociousness and apparent self-sufficiency. But it all added up to her being a human antidepressant for her mother. And because it was apparently successful, Alexa carried the role over into her relationships with others, especially would-be romantic relationships: she felt compelled to make boyfriends feel better, regardless of their actual needs or emotional state; although as her therapist shrewdly observed, she had a knack for finding men who were looking for just such a caretaker (this is why Dylan was such a curveball). Playing those roles was how Alexa had controlled her world and kept things from falling apart—especially her own sense of safety—since she was a small child. She had no developed aptitude for relating to a boyfriend in any other way.
For his part, Dylan had been forced into deluding himself into believing that his parents could do no wrong. As an adult, however, he’d begun to realize how neglectful his mother and father were, preoccupied as they were by their own unhappy relationship; and he began to confront the impact this had had on his relationships with others. An outcome of this was that he learned that give-and-take is a normal part of any sane, adult relationship and a vital ingredient of true intimacy. He now wanted to put behind him the isolation forced on him by pretending everything was okay—that is, by playing the amused Audience. His relationship with his parents had, in fact, left him feeling angry and ignored. He was now looking for connection, love, and intimacy.
Alexa’s mother’s depressed mood drove Alexa to take on the task of cheering her up. As Dylan’s parent’s marriage went on the rocks, he created an “I’m okay, I can take care of myself” performance routine that allowed him to keep his distance from his own fear as well as the acted out rage his mother and father spent on each other. This included Dylan’s taking on self-care tasks inappropriate for a small child. In response to his father’s failure to provide a stable household environment, Dylan suppressed his need for an adult on whom he could rely to keep him safe and instead let his father off the hook by allowing him to believe that what care he could supply was as much as Dylan needed.
Obviously, Dylan and Alexa’s caretaking routines could have intersected dangerously and led to yet another disappointing “wrong kind of guy” experience for Alexa or a reprise of Dylan’s experience with parents who were unable to be present authentically for their son.
Building Relationship Sanity
Alexa’s interest in a man all but required him to be willing to bow to whatever she determined was good for him and allow her to administer her caretaking as she saw fit. She had never reflected on what she actually wanted from a man beyond his acquiescence.
But Dylan was a game-changer. Unwilling to be put off easily or contorted into a role that didn’t fit, he was clear with Alexa from the start that he was interested in her—not what she could do or give him to solve his problems or to make him feel better—but who she was, what she was interested in. And he took this so far as to actually ask questions that showed he really wanted to know about her.
Alexa’s first reaction was near panic. She felt, rather than knew, that if she didn’t get rid of Dylan, her accustomed way of life generally, and treating men particularly, would be jeopardized. Fortunately for her, the work she had been doing in therapy had begun to expose both her role-playing and the history driving it. Or, to put it another way, she now knew too much to simply dismiss Dylan as a poor match; plus she knew her therapist wouldn’t let her get away with the excuse that Dylan was too scary. Moreover, she’d pretty much swallowed the bitter pill that her way with men was not only absurd and delusional but—and this was the kicker—the way she treated men is what was keeping her isolated and lonely. She had even begun to understand that her need to control romantic relationships was a leftover from her childhood survival pattern.
In time, Alexa’s therapy showed her how badly her anxiety about intimacy was causing her to treat herself. This, however, didn’t immediately explain her feelings for and about Dylan or fully explain how she’d treated men she’d known in the past. More time would pass before she realized that her anxiety and other feelings, sidelined since childhood, were the reason why she denied herself the excitement and the challenges of intimacy.
What Happened to Dylan?
From earlier relationships, Dylan had learned about romantic partnerships that involved the Performer/Audience roles—relationships in which the caretaker expected the target of the caretaking—himself—to reassure her that her caretaking was effective or fixed him.
Like Alexa, however, Dylan had come to realize that the role of Audience left him frustrated and lonely with no sense of sharing life-experience with another person. After several such busts, Dylan realized he didn’t need to be fixed. From the time he was able to let that sink in, he made a conscious determination to never be cast in that kind of role again.
Role-play: Alexa and Dylan
Alexa discovered that she unconsciously but deliberately chose men who needed fixing. As a rescuer, fixer, or helper, she was on the lookout for men who would be the Audience for her Performer role. In return, she expected the men who she was involved with to acquiesce to her need to be needed by accepting and appearing grateful for the solutions she devised for their problems. Her partner was also expected to let her know that, thanks to her ministrations, he felt better about himself and his life.
Both parties are highly invested in maintaining this song-and-dance-routine. Designing and stepping into the song-and-dance begins at the couple’s first encounter with one another. Each has learned over time to listen for certain cues when they meet someone new. If the right cues are given and received, the first conversation becomes an opportunity for scoping each other out as a potential “dance partner.” If this initial contact provides sufficient reason for each to believe the other may be useful in meeting their needs, a silent contract is initiated based on the Performer-Audience paradigm. An irrelationship song-and-dance routine is born.
The participants appear at first to have different roles—one active, one passive—however, they’re equally invested in creating a routine in which they feel safe. This careful scripting disallows spontaneity, unpredictability, or deviation from agreed-upon roles. Any infraction or deviation from roles would likely by viewed as betrayal, possibly warranting termination.
The anxiety-driven irrelationship dates from a person’s earliest years, and, without intervention, doesn’t diminish over time. Ultimately, both Alexa and Dylan figured out the isolation created by their song-and-dance routines was a higher price than either were willing to pay.
Alexa Chooses to Work with Instead of on Her Partner
Insight into past relationships finally motivated Alexa to take a risk. She could see in Dylan an opportunity to change and felt a release of tension when she consciously chose to give it a try. This soon translated into a new willingness to share experience: Alexa invited Dylan to try the 40-20-40 as she began to develop a sense of life as something shared rather something they do to or for one another.
The sheer novelty made it daunting at first. Alexa’s old alarm system warned her constantly against letting Dylan get too close. But over time, his openness to her and his willingness to tell her about himself undercut those old alarms. They came to feel that they could safely tell one another about feelings around past romantic relationships and even about their experiences as children. Simply sharing those things aloud was strangely empowering for both and gave them real hope that the way things had always been wasn’t how they always had to be.
Alexa had also learned in therapy that the only real way of dealing with anxiety is to look it in the face and keep walking. Sharing the truth about her fear with Dylan and then, in his turn, hearing him come clean about his own apprehension, blunted a lot of her apprehension, making it possible to go further with each share. She even began to realize that telling the truth about herself didn’t jeopardize her survival, and it made her feel lighter and lighter, and closer and closer to Dylan. This, they later learned, is compassionate empathy in action and creates relationship sanity.
Though the 40-20-40 process is simple, partners seldom find it easy to adopt without resistance—both initially and along the way. Nonetheless the 40-20-40 can and generally does provide profound relief; but incorporating it into a shared life necessarily involves rough spots, stumbles, and sometimes even complete collapse. But the willingness to try again no matter how badly a particular attempt may blow up will yield new benefits every time.
What made Alexa and Dylan’s relationship sane?
1. Willingness to put oneself into a reciprocal relationship with another person
2. Development and commitment to using those tools to cultivate a process of sharing equal responsibility for what happens in the relationship (the 40-20-40)
3. Cultivating compassionate empathy, which helps both parties learn to share loving and being loved in a relationship
4. Allowing themselves to feel loved and loveable in a measure that makes possible placing their hearts at risk for experiencing intimacy, empathy, and vulnerability
Exercise: Reframing Issues as Ours (Couples)
In the following exercise, return again to the issue you’ve been treating in the course of learning about the DREAM Sequence, paying particular attention to the Repair and Empowerment stages; only this time, refilter the issue through the lens of Mutuality. Scan for changes in how you perceive the issue once you see it as something you and your partner work on together as opposed to something you have to fix yourself.
Compare how you view the issue now with how you viewed it when you first started treating it with the exercises in this book. Use the following questions for your analysis, first individually and then sharing your responses as you’ve done in previous exercises.
• What differences do you now see in the part each of you plays?
• How do you now see each of your parts in the issue fitting together?
• What’s different now in your overall perception of the issue?
Now comment on the following statements and questions.
• Unconditional openness to what each of us brings to the table improves our relationship and our ability to solve problems.
• What are my feelings about keeping my distance from my partner in the identified issue and in other parts of our relationship?
• How can what I’ve learned from doing the exercises change how our relationship functions overall?
• What specific attitudes and behaviors can I make part of my life to reverse and repair the harm I’ve caused my partner and our relationship? In other words, how can we build Mutuality into our everyday life together?
After you’ve shared your individual responses, pause to reflect on the idea of us-ness—what it means to see yourselves as us and how it changes sharing both day-to-day experiences and the inevitable rough spots that come with being together.
Use the following questions to explore how your understanding of the word intimacy has changed.
• How did your identified issue allow the two of you to avoid anxiety-provoking parts of your us-ness? How does buying into the idea of us-ness change that?
• How does the idea of us-ness change how you perceive the idea of taking care of your relationship? How do you feel about that?
• What attitudes and behaviors can you put into place jointly to cultivate us-ness—in other words, to nurture Mutuality?
Exercise: Mutuality (Couples)
The following exercise further develops a shared appreciation of Mutuality. Reflect upon and discuss the following questions.
• What is it like to see and feel yourselves choosing together to work through an issue that has had a long, significant impact on your shared life—or on your feelings about your shared life?
• How does it feel to commit to problem-solving as a couple as opposed to being left to cope with problems individually as best you can?
Before continuing, take this opportunity once again to use the Joint Compassion Meditation Exercise in Chapter 1.
• Set the timer for three to five minutes and relax in a seated position, bringing your attention to your breath while observing without judgment the stream of thoughts passing through your mind. Then return your attention to your breath.
• Remember that this is not about good/bad or right/wrong: it’s only for becoming aware of what your mind does and cultivating the practice of stepping back from it.
• Now write down your thoughts, feelings, and insights. Be sure to include aspects about which you remain unsure or are not quite comfortable with: feeling that you can put those on the table safely is arguably the single most important aspect of practicing relationship sanity.
• Finally conduct a 40-20-40 based on your reflections on Mutuality as a problem-solving and relationship-grounding practice.
Staying on Target: Apart versus Together
Now, with a single focus that you’re creating together, you can—one breath, one thought, and one task at a time—DREAM your way into a joint process of Mutuality that accompanies you every day in every part of your lives.
Key Takeaways
• We embrace the vitality of unpredictability and even the downsides of life as it “really is.”
• We allow the giving and receiving, the helping and being helped, of reciprocal relationships.
• Self-Other Assessment is becoming part of our daily life—especially in our sharing and accountability
• We continue to grow as individuals and as collaborators in building relationship sanity.
Relationship sanity is, necessarily, dynamic and interactive. Understanding it so reveals it both as the labor and the fruit of the labor. Compulsive caretaking routines, on the other hand, protect couples from the things they both want and don’t want. Irrelationship carefully keeps this tension, this ambivalence, below the radar so that you’re protected from confronting your hope and dread.
Think of us-ness as mature adults who want and need care and affection while striving for synergy generated by healthy reliance, interdependency, and reciprocity—in short, Mutuality.
Now, once again, sit in a comfortable position, upright and relaxed. Look at each other long enough to get a sense of where your partner is or might be emotionally as you continue on the road of relationship sanity. The joint meditation process now focuses on Self-Other experience as means of creating Mutuality in which you exchange needed, desired, and effective care.
Next, using the free association tool, discuss any thoughts or thought fragments, feelings, and reflections on where you’ve been and where you’re going on the road of relationship sanity.