ABSTRACT
Our first job in life is to provide psychotherapy to our primary caregivers in order to enhance their sense of well-being, thereby ensuring our own survival. As a consequence, many people continue as adults to feel driven to make significant others “feel better,” trapped in a pattern of compulsive caretaking. This is abetted by cultural attitudes that affirm one-directional caregiving as altruistic and praiseworthy. When carried into adulthood, these old relational patterns become rules that function not as dynamic personal defenses but as obsolete, stifling scripts enacted by partners together. The authors call this dynamic irrelationship. Irrelationship is structurally distinguished from other types of relational defense in that irrelationship is a two-person enactment that keeps anxiety at bay at the cost of forgoing learning the skills associated with intimacy – hence precluding all attempts to create and maintain passion. Most people’s human interactions include at least some areas of irrelationship in which interactions are conditioned by scripted reenactment that obviate more open and rewarding styles of relating. This chapter follows a couple as they work through co-created defenses jointly enacted, maintained, and enforced in their attempt to master early and overwhelming survival fears at the cost of feeling connected with each other – and ultimately, themselves.
