Intimacy & Desire: Awaken the Passion in Your Relationship (16 page)

Let’s put this together with what you learned in
Part One
: Your brain function shifts from infatuation and romantic love to attachment, where your sexual desire drowns in pools of vasopressin or oxytocin. But many couples don’t last long enough to have this problem. Very poorly differentiated people (who have very weak Four Points of Balance) don’t make it past infatuation without breaking up. Your differentiation determines whether your brain gets the opportunity to shift over into attachment or not. If you get that far, your level of differentiation plays a key role in keeping sexual desire alive in a long-term marriage. Differentiation
operates concurrently with the lust, romantic love, and attachment processes in your brain.

Differentiation takes different forms in different species. For humans, differentiation boils down to your Four Points of Balance, the four abilities that support and develop your sense of self: Holding on to your self while your partner pressures you to adapt; regulating your own anxiety; staying non-reactive
and
engaged; and tolerating discomfort so you can grow. These four abilities, or lack thereof, shape your destiny and your sexual desire.

These four incredible human adaptations work together, creating a larger and more wondrous process that happens inside you, and goes on between you and other people. Understanding why and how this happens can radically change your desire, your sex, your marriage, and your life.

Differentiation is a tangible
interpersonal
process that goes on between you and other people moment-to-moment. It is also a powerful
individual
process that shapes your thoughts, feelings, and behavior throughout the course of your life. “Differentiation of self” is the technical phrase, but “holding on to your self” describes what it feels like in practice.

In my own mind, I use “differentiation,” “maintaining balance,” “Four Points of Balance,” and “holding on to your self” interchangeably.
⁹⁵
Differentiation is your ability to maintain your emotional balance. You can substitute the word “balance” for “differentiation” at any point, and you’ll be right on track.

When I refer to your “level of differentiation,” I’m referring to the strength of your Four Points of Balance. Sometimes when I use the word “differentiation,” I suggest you stop and apply the Four Points of Balance before you read further. Each Point plays a role in holding on to your self: Keeping clear about your goals and self-worth in the face of adversity, soothing your heartache and licking your emotional wounds, not overreacting when
your partner acts crazy, and tolerating hard times and doing difficult things to get where you want to go. After a while, you’ll think of differentiation as a “whole” (a process) and as “parts” (Four Points of Balance), and as something inside you and between you and your partner.

This gives you a “one-two-three-four” strategy for handling difficult situations in your relationship: First, identify your situation as a differentiation process. (I’ll show you how to do this shortly.) Second, recognize you are losing your emotional balance. Third, break down your problem in terms of your Four Points of Balance. This shows you where you’re having difficulty and what you need to do. Fourth, use your mantra to keep yourself focused when things get tough: “Hold on to your self!”

As I talked with Randall and Carol about emotional gridlock, Randall was alert and attentive. No longer defensive, he was encouraged by the idea that he and Carol were going through a process he never imagined. What he didn’t know—and what he still worried about—were the implications.

“So what does this all boil down to, Doctor? Are you giving us a fancy label and a scientific explanation for why we’re screwed? Is gridlock hopeless?”

“No, you’re not screwed. That’s your problem, not your prognosis.”

It took a moment. Then they started laughing.

“Gridlock is resolvable—if you do the hard work of getting a better grip on yourself. It’s not impossible, but it isn’t easy. Gridlock isn’t hopeless.
You feel
hopeless, because you’ve gotten nowhere solving a problem you didn’t know you had. Fortunately, your feelings are not the final authority about what’s going on.”

“I am pretty hopeless about fixing this, Doctor. We are constantly at each other’s throats. Sometimes I wish I was single. Other times I can’t stand to be away from Carol, and the thought of divorce breaks me up. I’m like that old phrase, ‘Can’t live with ’em, and can’t live without ’em.’”

Carol felt as if she had just been put down. “I feel the same way about Randall, too!” Fortunately, Randall didn’t react.

“There’s a reason for that old phrase, and you both are living proof of it.”

Randall ventured, “You mean we’re competitive and ambivalent about each other?” Randall was smarter than he came across. I saw he could be thoughtful, observant, and collaborative.

“Yes, you’re ambivalent about each other and very competitive, but there’s a lot more going on. You are playing out humankind’s two most basic drives. You want a relationship, and you want to chart your own destiny and control your own life. At your stage of development, it feels like ‘Can’t live with ’em, and can’t live without ’em.’ If you stay together and work through gridlock productively, this will change.”

Perhaps you’ve heard the idea that people get divorced for the same reason they got married. Poorly developed Four Points of Balance drive you into and then out of love relationships. Your Four Points of Balance are as critical to stabilizing and developing a relationship as they are to developing and maintaining your self. Without these four abilities, it’s difficult to survive and thrive through the rigors of marriage.

It’s hard to keep your emotional balance when you’re juggling two fundamental human drives: We want closeness and connection
and
freedom and self-direction. Imbalance either way causes our self to feel impinged upon. (The lower your level of differentiation, the less it takes to perturb you.) When relationships feel confining and your partner seems demanding, your refusal to submit to tyranny kicks in and low sexual desire is the result. When your relationships feel distant (even when you’re emotionally fused), sexual desire is often similarly diminished.

Strengthening your Four Points of Balance makes it easier to balance these two fundamental biological drives. I drew a diagram like this for Carol and Randall to help them get the picture:

Notice I called one side
self-regulation
instead of autonomy. I wanted to make clear that autonomy doesn’t mean you do whatever you want and to heck with anyone else. You have no autonomy and no self-direction if you can’t control your fears and soothe your emotions, or give measured responses, or make yourself do what you need to do. When your Four Points of Balance are weak, you have no freedom, nor do those around you. In the last chapter we discussed that people who can’t control themselves control the people around them.

Autonomy promotes stable attachments. When you’d like to unload your frustrations on your partner, and he or she deserves it—but you don’t do it—that is real autonomy. That is also incredibly hard to do.

In lectures around the world, I ask, “Does anyone in the auditorium not understand about ‘refusal to submit to tyranny’ in marriage?” The response is always belly laughter and knowing nods.

In
Part One
, we saw how the LDP understands tyranny: He feels oppressed, pressured to want sex and have sex, badgered by his mate’s higher desire. The HDP understands tyranny too: She feels pressured to have sex when and how it’s available, because opportunities may be few and far between. She has to settle for “getting lucky” instead of being wanted, and act grateful for mediocre sex. But on top of this, add in the many people who lack Solid Flexible Self, Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, Grounded Responding, and Meaningful Endurance. This is why the
Devil’s Dictionary
defined marriage as a state of slavery involving two masters and two slaves.
⁹⁶

What if humans only had one leg and crawled to get around?
⁹⁷
It wouldn’t be long before people figured out they could put their arms around each other and stand up. As animal adaptation goes, this would be a pretty neat achievement. But, being who we are, it wouldn’t be long before one wanted to walk somewhere the other didn’t, and the other would complain,
“Why are you trying to control me? Don’t tell me what to do!”
Still, going it alone wouldn’t be satisfying, because it would mean
giving up a higher level of functioning. The resulting tension is the human condition, especially for poorly differentiated people who have a weak sense of self.

Difficulty maintaining your own balance makes you feel oppressed by others. (Your narcissism turns them into oppressors in your mind.) That’s another reason why love relationships turn into tyranny and oppression. It’s a low level of differentiation that makes it happen.

Looking for someone who has the leg we need, and needs the leg we have, doesn’t work because the balance has to come from your self not from the relationship. Yes, holding on to your partner lets you stand taller (function at a higher level) than you can alone. But your partner’s life is no longer her own if you won’t give up standing tall, or learn to maintain your own balance. You’ll demand she be there to support you, and this is borrowed functioning and emotional fusion.

Now imagine two people trying to become whole individuals. Each tries to balance his attachment and autonomy needs within himself. Picture each one standing alone, wobbling as he learns to balance and coordinate his legs. This is probably what you and your partner look like at this point, trying to get your autonomy and attachment needs into better balance.

Then take the next step: Visualize what happens when these two people get together. Barely able to maintain their own balance, they put their arms around each other for support. They try to keep themselves and each other from falling down, wobbling all the while from their own lack of balance. Both partners greatly disturb and upset each other as they sway back and forth, unwilling to let go and find their own balance. As clumsy and inept as this may seem, I’m describing an elegant process: This is how we co-construct each other. This is how we co-evolve.

From what I’ve said, you might picture us forever at war with our attachment and autonomy drives. When you’re not very differentiated, that’s the way it feels: Attachment and autonomy seem mutually incompatible and impossible to reconcile. Your need for others, and your drive to belong to yourself, seem like opposites tearing you apart. But attachment and autonomy are two sides of the same coin (differentiation). Each needs the other in order to exist. Attachment and autonomy
are actually two forms of one incredible biological drive to evolve a personal self.

As you strengthen your Four Points of Balance, your need for others and your need for solitude feel less at odds with each other. (
Both
needs actually increase.) It’s easier to tolerate the inevitable tensions, deprivations, and conflicts of marriage when you stop seeing them as conflicts with your partner. They arise from two different sides of your self. The tensions within you, and between the two of you, drive you to develop your Solid Flexible Self, to have a Quiet Mind–Calm Heart, to achieve Grounded Responding, and to put forth Meaningful Endurance.

Like most poorly differentiated people, Carol and Randall were emotionally brittle. Things often broke down between them. When they did, their reflected sense of self cratered, and their anxieties went sky-high. Because they were emotionally fused, they overreacted to what the other one did or said.

Differentiation is the opposite of emotional fusion. Emotional fusion is togetherness (attachment)
without
separateness (autonomy). Differentiation is togetherness
with
separateness. The lower your Four Points of Balance, the greater the emotional fusion and borrowed functioning with your partner.

Your personal differentiation goes hand in hand with emotional gridlock. The speed and intensity of your gridlock is related to your Four Points of Balance. A lower level of differentiation means:

1. Gridlock shows up quicker.

2. Gridlock is more intense and pervasive.

3. Gridlock is more complex and harder to resolve.

4. Gridlock is harder to tolerate.

Seeing this tight connection may help you accept that emotional gridlock is not a sign of something going wrong. Gridlock is the ripened fruit
of emotional fusion. Gridlock is a natural development, a hallmark of (limited) differentiation in human relationships.