Home | Herb Goldberg Column 3 |
|
|
|
| Written by Herb Goldberg, Ph.D. | |
| Monday, 12 June 2006 | |
|
Women’s Addiction to Fusion (Women Call it “Intimacy”) and Men’s Addiction to Disconnection (Men Call it “Freedom”) The most distressing and painful dialogues in relationships are about women’s feelings of not getting the closeness they need, and men’s desire for space. In relationships, men’s need for distance and women’s need for closeness emerge from their denied gender process and are not needs that can be controlled or even moderated without a profound level of self-awareness, a realization of the unhealthy and self-defeating nature of these compulsions or cravings, an understanding of how they are expressions of one’s gender conditioning plus the willingness and courage to go through the anxiety and threat to one’s gender “comfort zone” as one works to break through these powerful inner process pulls. Left alone and without fully conscious effort they turn out to be bottomless and create a vicious self-fulfilling spiral. As the need increases in one partner, it triggers the equivalent opposite in the other. This leads to polarized conversations in the nature of “You never want to be close” (her), and “I feel like I’m being suffocated” (him), or “I always feel you’re distancing me” (her), and “I never feel I can satisfy you or make you happy” (him). If a woman’s traditional need for intimacy, or a man’s traditional need for freedom or space were anything close to what it is alleged to be, or simply a conscious, controllable preference, men and women would have little problem understanding and trying to satisfy those needs in each other. However, what each gender senses in the other is that the euphemisms of “intimacy” and “space” are covers and rationalizations for a bottomless, rigid, and defensive pull that emerges from gender defenses and produces pain, frustration, resentment, and ultimately a sense of hopelessness in one’s partner who believes it can be changed, or at least modified if the genuine desire and good will to do so was only there. That’s where each partner’s anger comes from. “You wouldn’t distance me if you really loved me and wanted to be close” (her), or “I have to constantly prove myself and my love to you. I feel like I’m not really enough for you and it makes me feel like giving up” (him). Inevitably, they come to be polarized by what initially seemed to be understandable and acceptable demands. What brings the relationship to its knees until it finally collapses in utter frustration and hopelessness is the inability of each partner to see their own part in this mutually reinforcing and accelerating cycle. Specifically, each pull away from him produces an equivalent desire for more closeness from her. Her pursuit of more intimacy produces a reciprocal self-protective and defensive withdrawal from him. The defensive nature of each is denied by the person themselves, though it is painfully obvious to their partner. When women talk of intimacy, men know either directly or intuitively, that it is a need they can’t fill; something that they will fail at and then be blamed for. Similarly, women know that the buzzword of “space” disguises an impenetrable wall that becomes more deeply entrenched and forbidding when it is gratified. Initially, each tries to give what the other wants. “Trying” only highlights the hopelessness of the quest. Without “trying,” hope for change can continue to spring eternal. However, when he announces that he is trying to work on his “closeness problem” or she deliberately works at giving him more space in order to please him, the forced unnatural nature of their efforts only makes everything feel that much worse. So much for the prevalent psychological belief that all behaviors can be negotiated. These deep needs can’t simply be negotiated away. A show of trying will only highlight the hopelessness of the situation until one or the other finally announces that they can’t take it anymore or undermines the relationship totally by going outside of the relationship for relief from the tension. It would be a constructive beginning, however, if women acknowledged the toxic fallout they produce by being closeness and intimacy addicts, where it’s never enough, and if men acknowledged the toxic fallout they produce by being disconnection or separateness addicts, unavailable for genuine personal connection. So what are men and women in relationships supposed to do? Foremost is the importance of not denying or attacking the experience and perception of one’s partner. Secondly, it requires the ability to recognize the defensive gender pull in oneself and acknowledge it. “I think I know that what you’re always telling me is true. Yes, I can feel myself doing exactly what you’re saying that I do. Please keep pointing it out to me because I love you and don’t want to lose you. I’ll find a way to get on top of this thing one way or another because I really don’t like what it is or how it affects you. If I don’t work through it with you I know that I’ll just do the same thing with my next partner, and maybe worse. I don’t want to be one of those deluded beings who thinks that the answer to this is ‘out there’ somewhere with another partner who will ‘understand my needs’ and ‘love me for who I am.’ I know this is my dysfunction and I don’t want to find some co-dependent who will tell me that I’m perfect as I am.” Denied and defensive gender process and the many ways in which it distorts and filters men’s and women’s experience of reality and themselves is, I believe, the next frontier for gender transformation in the so-called gender revolution. Its ramifications go far beyond the relationship between men and women and it is exhilarating to envision a world in which these distorting prisms no longer discolor and toxify human experience. One can barely imagine what life would look like once the polarized defensive realities of men and women no longer controlled us and produced the self-destructive compulsions that are at the core of so much of life’s mysteries and tragedies. Herb Goldberg, Ph.D. is a practicing clinical psychologist and professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. He is the author of several landmark books on gender including Creative Aggression, The Hazards of Being Male, The New Male-Female Relationship, and What Men Really Want. He can be reached by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it |
|
| Last Updated ( Thursday, 10 August 2006 ) |
| < Prev |
|---|