Introduction
1. Everyone faces life crises that test our resilience and resolve as individuals and couples. Those occasions increase the risk for activating irrelationship dynamics. In fact, Terror Management Theory (TMT) and the related idea of mortality salience provide a vocabulary for reflecting on how and why we sometimes use maladaptive defenses to cope in crisis rather than deliberately setting out to make better choices. According to TMT, serious threats will even cause individuals to shift their worldview in order to maintain self-esteem during a crisis. Such life events include
• illness of oneself or loved ones;
• financial problems;
• issues related to having children, such as whether to have or how many; infertility; loss of a child or fetus; and illness in a child and others;
• infidelity;
• sexual dissatisfaction;
• career changes, such as forced to consider relocating for one partner’s job loss, failure to realize professional goals, and other job-related disturbances.
2. The concept of “third entity” is inspired by Thomas Ogden’s concept of the analytic third (Ogden, 1994, pp. 3–4). This refers to a third subject, unconsciously co-created by therapist and client, which seems to take on a life of its own in the interpersonal field between them. This third subject stands in dialectical tension with the separate, individual subjectivities of analyst and analysand in such a way that the individual subjectivities and the third create, negate, and preserve one another. In an analytic relationship, the notion of individual subjectivity and the idea of a co-created third subject are devoid of meaning except in relation to one another, just as the idea of the conscious mind is meaningless except in relation to the unconscious.
3. Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 69.
Although renowned for his pessimistic view of human psychology, with humans being at odds with each other and ourselves, at one point Freud himself acknowledged the thoroughly relational and interdependent nature of human existence: “The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology, which at first glance may seem full of significance, loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely. It is true that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first, individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justified sense of the word, is at the same time social psychology as well.”
4. Fromm, The Art of Loving, 18–19.
5. The development of the concept of brainlock relies, most especially, on neuroscientific research conducted by Gaetan de Lavilléon, Marie Masako Lacroix, Laure Rondi-Reig, and Karim Benchenane, 2015, pp. 493–495; Klimecki, O. M., Leilberg, S., Lamm, C. & Singer, T., 2013, pp. 1552–61; and Allan Schore, 2008, pp. 9–20.
6. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, 22.
Harry Stack Sullivan, the founder of interpersonal psychoanalytic theory, observed that human beings have an in-born motivational system to be a care-seeker and heal the wounds of those who provide us with comfort and security. As wounds are relational, so must the healing process be. Sullivan wrote, in what is referred to as the One-Genus Postulate, “Everyone is much more simply human than otherwise.” Sullivan believed that there is no human experience that is beyond comprehension, and with enough understanding—specifically to the social circumstances underlying our problems—just about anyone could be helped. Sullivan was, in many ways, suggesting that we co-create mental illness and mental health.
7. Carnes, Laaser, and Laaser, Open Hearts, 98.
8. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Though,” 150.
Freud states that “the patient remembers nothing of what is forgotten or repressed, but … he expresses it in action. He reproduces it not in his memory but in his behavior; he repeats it, but without of course knowing that he is repeating it.”
9. Searles, “The Patient as Therapist to His Analyst.” 95
10. Bowlby, “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother.” 354.
11. Johnson, Love Sense, 38.
12. The 40-20-40 Model has been developed to be used as a kind of couple’s inventory, but it was adapted from work done earlier by Dr. Borg in a community revitalization/empowerment program from what we called Group Process Empowerment (Borg, 2001, 2010). We found that it is an extremely effective means for helping people during difficult times in their relationship, to hit pause, establish a peaceful, safe place, and account together for where it was that things went off the rails. The 40-20-40 is an opportunity to get it back on the rails together. It is a way to re-establish peace in a relationship. In this work—though couples won’t necessarily have the active and overt participation of “the world”—they still believe they can use the 40-20-40 to establish safe places for themselves to come to terms with what in the world, in their lives, they can and cannot do something about (Borg, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2010).
Chapter 1
1. Žižek, Žižek’s Jokes, 47.
2. The joint compassionate empathy and intimacy exercises throughout this book are inspired by and adapted from Mindful Self-Compassion Program (MSC) by Chris Germer and Kristen Neff (in Singer and Bolz, Compassion: Bridging Practice and Science, 365–396).
3. Germer and Neff, “The Mindful Self-Compassion Training Program (MSC),” 367.
Chapter 2
1. Mitchell, Can Love Last?, 91–92.
2. Ainsworth, “The Development of Infant-Mother Attachment,” 11–13; Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 353.
3. Bowlby, “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother,” 362.
4. Bowlby, “The Nature of the Child’s Tie to His Mother,” 362.
Chapter 3
1. This exercise is inspired and adapted from Chris Germer and Kristen Neff.
Chapter 4
1. Fairbairn, An Object-Relations Theory of Personality, 145.
The object-relations psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn designates the full development of emotional health as the stage of mature dependence. Healthy adults are emotionally interdependent upon each other.
Chapter 5
1. Žižek, Žižek’s Jokes, p. 47.
Chapter 8
1. What is an acting-out behavior? Actually, it is just about anything we do that somehow communicates something we are feeling without our awareness of what we are feeling. Truth be told, our minds know that we do not need to actually feel absolutely everything we feel. There is much that is going on within us emotionally that is allowed to bypass our actual awareness—even our experience—of it.
2. Resentment seems to be the feeling that bridges the gap, the feeling that is most consistent in both the Performer and the Audience. It is the feeling that most effectively covers up the isolation, and the feeling that simultaneously makes the isolation so easy to acknowledge, to deal with, to treat.
3. Sunk cost fallacy: Because sunk costs are already spent and cannot be recovered, it is irrational to consider the value of sunk costs when considering alternative actions. Future actions cannot reverse past losses. Economics and business decision-making recognize sunk costs as the costs that have already been incurred and which can never be recovered to any significant degree. Economic theory proposes that a rational actor does not let sunk costs influence a decision because past costs cannot be recovered in any case. This is also called the bygones principle; let bygones be bygones. This recognizes that you cannot change the past. The fallacy of sunk costs is to consider sunk costs when making a decision. Sound business decisions are based on a forward-looking view, ignoring sunk costs. Unfortunately human beings continue to value a past investment of money, effort or some intangible quality (e.g., “credibility” or “face”) independent of the investment’s probability of paying future dividends. The irrelevance of sunk costs is a well-known principle of business and economics, but common behavior often ignores this fallacy of trying to undo the past. For example, revenge is an attempt to recover the sunk costs that represent some past and irrevocable harm or loss. People falsely reason, “I have too much invested to quit now” when it is rational to only look at the future prospects of the activity. Arguing, “we must continue to fight to honor those who have already died” is another tragic but appealing fallacy of sunk costs.
4. We act-out in all kinds of ways, all the time. The term acting out gets a pretty bad rap in our society, but really, by the time we are telling our husband or wife or kid that he or she is acting out (i.e., drinking too much, taking drugs, checking out an abundance of internet porn), we usually mean that he or she is either doing something (1) destructive (to self and/or other) or (2) we think is wrong. That’s usually all there is to it; therefore, in its general use, the term does not only cover the vast array of ways in which acting out can be utilized to express things that are too bothersome, painful, terrifying (or, most importantly, that we think make us look like “bad people” in the eyes of others) to contemplate or are simply too insignificant to be registered consciously.
Chapter 10
1. When we wrote to “Olivia” to ask for her permission to include her story, she wrote back with her consent and said, “I’m 50 now, sober 19 years, and in that ‘A’ love that you told me about—the 10 out of 10.”
Chapter 11
1. The social psychologist and social psychologist, Erich Fromm believed that “All are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual” (Escape From Freedom, p. 101). This is a guiding principle for understanding interactive repair and a reminder of why we must continue to grapple with the pain and uncertainty of working through irrelationship—to find each other and to find ourselves.
2. Tronick, “Emotions and Emotional Communication in Infants,” 112–119.
Chapter 12
1. Rappaport and Seidman, Handbook of Community Psychology, xiii.
2. Winnicott, Collected Papers, 186.
3. Borg, “The Avalon Gardens Men’s Association,” 347.
4. Borg, “Heist-ing the Analyst’s Penis (at Gunpoint),” 77.
“Character is the sum in each of us of the need to seek security and the need to avoid anxiety.”
Chapter 13
1. Gottman, The Marriage Clinic, 68.
2. Gottman and Gottman, 10 Principles for Doing Effective Couples Therapy, 18–19.
3. The earliest writings about the “Dirty Dozen” were in Thomas Gordon’s book, T.E.T: Teacher Effectiveness Training (1977). He called them “Communication Roadblocks.” Many authors have picked up on Gordon’s list, as we have, elaborating and clarifying them, and adapting them to specific situations (e.g., management, relationships, etc.).
Chapter 14
1. Carnes, Laaser, and Laaser, Open Hearts, 98.
Conclusion
1. Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, 164.