ABSTRACT
In Chapter Four, we showed how it is the relational process with the parents that enables the self to develop, and with it the child’s capacity for connection, attunement, trust, autonomy, and love. In Chapter Eight, we examined how these relationships and others can go awry and generate disorders or temporary derailments of the self. Now I want to explore other reasons why relationships are vitally important throughout the lifespan. We have seen how their quality is critical for security, self-formation, and our experience of our lives as being meaningful. These early beginnings determine our capacity for relating as adults, and we continue to depend on others—though not to the same degree—for development and maintenance of the self, for meaning, and for feeling safe. The attachment system, which evolved to keep the child safe by remaining close to the parent, is subsequently transferred in later life to a spouse or partner who will also improve our chances of surviving and reproducing. Evidence that a supportive relationship diminishes our perception of threat comes from an experiment on a woman subjected to electric shocks who showed reduced activity in the worry and discomfort neural circuits when her husband held her hand (Coan et al., 2006). Indeed, emotional connection with at least one other person provides resilience and protects individuals against the 196long-term effects of chronic social risk (Werner, 1993). We have a lifelong need from others for mirroring (Lessem, 2005), to tell us who we are, and we continue even in adulthood to look to others for their emotional response to tell us how we “should” feel and react (Pearmain, 2001). We also derive existential meaning, in the form of love and belonging, from intimate relationships; and as we shall see in the next chapter, the question of meaning is central to depression. These relationships can be with spouse and family, but also friendships in which we share values and interests and can be true to ourselves. A study on married couples who moved to a new home found that they were distressed at losing their old neighbourhood groups despite retaining the intimate relationship with their spouses (Weiss, 1982). Community is important in providing an extended sense of self as part of something larger (Cruwys et al., 2014). The downside of our dependence on relationships is that anything that is so important to us is inevitably bound up with anxiety. For we can lose relationships through fate—disease or accident—or we can be abandoned or rejected. Or, we may find others so difficult to deal with that we deny our need for them.
