Intimacy and Desire

A solid sense of self develops from confronting yourself, challenging yourself to do what's right, and earning your own self-respect. It develops inside you, rather than internalizing what's around you.

Our first realization of being a "self" elicits anger and frustration rather than joy and relief. It starts the moment you and mommy are not a single entity. Suddenly there is an 'I' and a 'thou'. Your initial experience of selfhood comes when your parent or care-giver isn't doing what you want. When you're feeling comfortable and nurtured, you're not aware there are two of you.

Borrowed functioning is a way people cope with the fact that our first self is a reflected sense of self. Borrowed functioning is borrowed because it doesn't give you a solid sense of self or the ability to function in lasting ways. It's like your self is a balloon others inflate. While you're inflated, things seem better. You may look better, feel better, and even act better briefly, but these transfusions of "pseudo-self" don't hold up. Even if your partner doesn't deflate you, you 'leak' enough to require further inflation before long.

Normal people depend on others for their sense of identity, self-worth, and security. We do so because we are generally at a modest level of personal development. A reflected sense of self is the first self we have. Many people never develop much of a solid self and engage in borrowed functioning all their lives. But the price of feeling good about yourself because others approve of you is feeling bad about yourself when they don't.

Reading someone's mind means understanding his thoughts, feelings, and motivations by studying his reactions and behavior. Mind-mapping arises from awareness that (a) other people have their own minds, with their own perceptions, beliefs and desires, and that (b) other people's behavior can be explained and predicted by deducing the content of their mind.

If you have a reflected sense of self, being able to read other peoples' minds is all-important. You do it constantly, vigilantly searching for clues about how others think and feel about you. You have to know what other people are thinking to make sure you look good in their eyes. That's what a reflected sense of self is all about, and you can't be sure you've got other people's approval if you can't map their minds.

Actually you are hyper vigilant, scanning for advance warning of the rejection you anticipate. You play three moves ahead. You become an expert at it. It's a full-time job. You don't want to be caught off guard or look like a fool.

Mind-mapping lies at the heart of all social interactions. Manipulating the mental states of others to alter their behavior is a sign of social intelligence. Successful social interactions, straightforward or manipulative, come from recognizing who the players are and what makes them tick. There are usually loads of mind-mapping going on in unpleasant and unsatisfying interactions too, it's just more likely to be inaccurate.

Mind mapping allows you to present yourself in such a way as to get the acceptance and validation you need from others.

Mind-mapping accuracy and benevolence improve when you're willing and able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, including confronting yourself and mapping your own mind. When you're not willing to look at yourself or be truly known, or the most important thing to you is having things your way, you'll map others' minds constantly, but it won't involve empathy.

There is a low desire partner and a high desire partner on virtually every issue and decision in any relationship. One person wants to do something (HDP) and the other doesn't or wants to do it less (LDP). Even if you and the other person want the same thing, one of you will want it more. At every point of contention, high desire partner and low desire partner are positions people take relative to each other. Once there is a conflict, it's clear who fills which position.

There is always a low desire partner and high desire partner in every relationship, romantic or otherwise. Acknowledging this, can change how you feel, whether you are the high desire partner or the low desire partner. It allows you to stop being defensive or feeling inadequate or 'different'. It is a logical view of how problems occur: The LDP and HDP are positions in a relationship.

If you can't regulate your own emotional temperature, you'll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable. Think of a parent who can't control his temper or anxieties. Everyone else in the family has to act accordingly to keep him calm.

Your inability to hold on to your self upsets others' emotional balance. The more your reflected sense of self drives you, and the more you look to others, the more others will feel oppressed and controlled. The more you try to regulate yourself through others, the more you trigger their refusal to submit to tyranny, which is part of human nature.

Enduring anxiety for the sake of growth is part of becoming a mature adult, everything is uncomfortable at first.

All four points of balance are involved in maintaining, caring for, and developing your self. These four abilities are the pillars undergirding your sense of self. These four capacities will help you keep your emotional balance when things get rough.

Do you stay clear about who you are when someone tampers with your sense of self or do you fall apart? Can you calm yourself when you're hurt and upset, or do you need someone else to comfort you? When your partner is struggling, do you overreact and run away from or cling to your partner? Do you accomplish those difficult things that need to be done to meet your goals, or do you give up, bail out, or goof off? These four points of balance determine the strength or weakness of your sense of self.

Innumerable iterations of 'If you love me you will' and 'If you love me you won't ask' enshrine our expectations that our partner should do whatever it takes to make us happy. It inflates your reflected sense of self when she does something for you that she doesn't really want to do, or gives up something she really wants. In truth, you probably expect her to sacrifice her self to support your self. This interaction drives poorly differentiated people's relationships.

Reciprocity is a beautiful thing. But if your relationship hinges on it, you're in trouble. Many couples temporarily establish a high level of intimacy through reciprocal validation and disclosure, but invariably they can't maintain this level once borrowed functioning collapses. Relationships built on other-validated intimacy crater when one partner won't accept and validate the other or disclose in kind.

Your dependence on acceptance, validation, and empathy from your partner – and feeling entitled to it – cause emotional gridlock. In long-term love relationships, other-validated intimacy is inherently time-limited.

Gridlock is universal, occurring all around the world. But gridlock is always custom tailored because you and your partner co-construct it. Your pattern of gridlock says a lot about who you and your partner really are.

Conflict in love relationships is inevitable. You can't avoid it with premarital education, communication skills training, or psychotherapy. Mind mapping limits the utility of communication skills and empathy training, because no matter how nicely you say something, your partner is tracking your thoughts, emotions, and motivations. Gridlock comes from good communication: successful mind mapping. Your partner usually knows what you really want (or don't want).

Gridlock is not an inherent weakness in love relationships. Gridlock is testimony to their elegant design. Emotional gridlock is a normal and natural development in the evolution of a relationship and the people within it. Going through emotional gridlock creates anxiety, anger, frustration, feelings of rejection, and emotional pressure. Gridlock is nature's survival boot-camp for adult-wannabees.

When misunderstood and mishandled, gridlock leads to divorce. Given that gridlock is usually misunderstood and mishandled, it is arguably the greatest single cause of divorce around the world. It is commonly misunderstood as irreconcilable differences, or communication problems, or falling out of love. But gridlock isn't caused by lack of communication, so more communication won't resolve it. When people are unable to resolve gridlock with a communication-based approach, they wrongly convince themselves their problems are irreconcilable. If they depend on a reflected sense of self, they feel unloved and become unloving.

Conflict avoidant couples often keep everything rigidly equal to prop up their reflected sense of selves.

Other validated-intimacy is synchrony personified, the Holy Grail in our never-ending quest to find our perfect soul mate. Synchrony means one partner discloses and the other accepts and validates and/or discloses in kind. The importance of emotional synchrony is well known: Potential partners court through synchronized behaviors, mirroring each other deliberately or unconsciously. In dating situations, when one partner crosses his legs, the other crosses hers. When one leans inward, the other does too. When one tells a joke, the other one laughs. Research indicates dating couples are less likely to have sex if they don't establish high levels of synchrony.

However, in the last several decades child development experts have studied what happens when infants and mothers get out of sync. Scientists no longer view "time out of sync" as lost time for attachment and bonding. "Time out of sync" is just as important as "time in sync." They are two different halves of a whole relationship.

So getting out of sync isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it's important: To resolve gridlock, you have to deliberately get out of step and dampen negative reverberations in your relationship. You have to stop responding in kind and author new behaviors.

It's easier to tolerate the inevitable tensions, deprivations, and conflicts of a relationship when you stop seeing them as conflicts with your partner. They arise from two different sides of your self, your reflected sense of self and your solid sense of 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.

The more important your partner is to you, the greater the challenge to your selfhood, especially if his/her immediate response is not warm and fuzzy.

When your partner becomes more important to you than your four points of balance, problems arise. If you're desperate for your partner's validation, all it takes is you knowing he or she wants things to be different. When your partner becomes more important than your four points of balance can handle, you are confronted by a set of choices you don't want. The way marriage works there are four possibilities: a) dominate your partner, b) submit to your partner, c) withdraw physically or emotionally from your partner, d) strengthen your four points of balance.

We want closeness and connection and freedom and self-direction. Imbalance either way causes our self to feel impinged upon.

Choosing is an exercise of autonomy. When we feel we have no choice, desire often fades. But when we won't choose, to avoid responsibility for shaping our lives, this kills desire as well.

Autonomy doesn't mean you do whatever you want and fuck everyone else. You have no autonomy and no self-direction if you can't control your fears and soothe your emotions, 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. People that 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.

Normal couples have desire problems because of forced choice decisions built into love relationships called a two-choice dilemma. A two-choice dilemma is when you want two choices but only get one. It's like wanting to eat your cake and have it later too.

People often improvise a solution: They steal their partner's choice, this way they get two choices. It's like having an affair but not telling your partner because if you did she would leave. Or saying 'I still can't decide' in order to avoid a difficult conversation and still keep your partner around. Dodging your two-choice dilemmas is another example of borrowed functioning that creates emotional gridlock.

Two-choice dilemma's exist because choices are finite in love relationships. In emotionally fused relationships, your choices decrease as your partner starts to develop a more solid flexible self.

The worst in you can (and probably often does) run the show. There's a side to all of us that's primitive, petty, vindictive, and punitive. The more you and your partner are emotionally fused - the more likely you and your partner engage in normal marital sadism.

You're a normal marital sadist if you frequently: a) need to "get even", b) hold grudges, c) can't control your temper, or d) feel justified and entitled to attain retribution when your feelings are hurt. You deliberately hurt your partner.

There is one benefit of accurately labeling normal marital sadism: It hurts to see yourself inflicting pain on others. Hopefully this creates internal conflict and crisis. But if you refuse to confront yourself, then concepts like normal marital sadism are worse than a waste of time.

People who grow up with anxiety hope and pray that in a good marriage they finally won't feel anxious, or insecure, or vulnerable. Unfortunately, trying to get your security from your spouse leads to perpetual insecurity. The more you try, the more vulnerable and insecure you become. The ensuing clutching and grabbing for your partner encourages her to move away, creating a downward spiral that destroys many marriages. Ultimately, the only security you can really count on is your relationship with yourself. Your security lies in developing your four points of balance.

Constant efforts to keep things safe and secure lead to long-term marital instability. But when instability is actually the result of battles of self-development, conflict and upheaval can lead to stability and peace. Conflicts arising in a relationship are often a godsend if you focus on becoming more emotionally balanced within yourself.

When your four points of balance aren't well developed, there are real limits to how much intimacy you can handle.

Self-confrontation is a core part of intimacy. The more you reveal to your partner who you really are, without masking or misrepresentation, the greater your experience of intimacy will be. Conversely, the more your disclosures involve self-presentation, rather than self-confrontation, the more intimacy will seem superficial. If you want to increase the meaningfulness of intimacy, let your partner map your mind while you take a good look at yourself.

In other validated intimacy the Low Desire Partner controls intimacy but in self validated intimacy, the High Desire Partner controls its timing, frequency, and depth. Self-validated intimacy gives control to the partner who wants it the most. When you have a solid flexible self and can soothe yourself, you are able to validate your own disclosures and can say anything you need to. Your partner no longer controls you or the level of intimacy in your relationship.

Just because intimacy is an intersubjective state, that doesn't mean both people feel it equally. If you heed these guidelines, and your partner doesn't, then you will have a profound experience, and your partner won't. This will involve more self-validated intimacy for you, because you'll have to validate your experience when it differs from your partner's. It takes two to create intimacy, but only one partner may feel it.

Your four points of balance don't blind you to attractive people who catch your eye. Because of our origins, even the most highly differentiated person will be sexually attracted to others. Becoming well-differentiated doesn't eliminate the inner tensions this creates. Your four points of balance help you tolerate the sexual tension and handle it cleanly. You keep your reflected sense of self on a tight leash.

The best in us wants monogamy for good reasons. Many of us prefer to have sex with just one person we love, particularly if this doesn't involve sexual martyrdom. If we have a choice about having great sex and intimacy, we'd rather stay home than go out. A lot of time and energy is wasted looking for clandestine romance, and many of us don't need the extra complexity. Intimacy is difficult at best. We don't want any additional things standing in the way of the deepest possible connection with our partner. As people strengthen their four points of balance, they decide extramarital affairs aren't worth it.

It turns out that your brain is more changeable throughout your life than scientists ever imagined, more like soft clay than carved stone. Your brain strengthens through repetition, like a weak muscle. There's also increasing evidence your brain can rewire itself, even in the face of catastrophic brain damage and emotional trauma.

Think of relationships having two distinct cycles. One is the comfort/ safety cycle, where your relationship remains familiar and anxiety is low. The comfort/safety cycle gradually becomes the avoidance cycle. The other is the growth cycle, where your relationship changes and anxiety is higher.

The weaker your four points of balance, the more you need to be pushed into the growth cycle.

Integrity is more than an abstract principle, it is a core human experience. Integrity is your sense of internal consistency. When you violate your integrity and you scrutinize yourself, you feel dishonored, ashamed, and diminished. Self-confrontation obviously plays a critical role. To the degree you are dishonest with yourself and you won't self-confront, you lack integrity because your self is poorly defined. But if you lie to yourself about who you really are, this won't bother you much.

The lower your differentiation, the more you lack integrity.

You don't have to give yourself up, or do whatever your partner wants – in fact, you do the exact opposite. Stop operating like you're giving yourself up and have the courage to choose what's most important to you. Be straight up with your partner.

As I said, collaborative alliances require working on mutual goals, even when they are anxiety-provoking or personally disadvantageous. When you misrepresent yourself, you've dropped your alliance. When you mask your mind from accurately being mapped, you've done it again. Some of us couldn't carry a collaborative alliance if it was given to us wrapped in a box.

Our self mobilizes itself by allowing itself to want. What we want eventually involves becoming more than what we are. Rather than being driven by discomforts and deprivations, our sense of 'unfulfilled destiny' drives us forward.