Irrelationship by Mark B. Borg

Author:Mark B. Borg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942094012
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC
Published: 2015-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

What Is Intimacy?

As seen in Bonnie’s conversation with Matt and the ongoing empathic connection between Dr. Smith and Joe, intimacy is the emotional connection between two people that allows sharing what we feel, think, and do with someone with whom we are in the process of actually living our lives on a committed, regular basis. Intimacy is a felt and lived experience of closeness with another person, so that to a significant degree they are involved in one another’s private world. It allows sharing of the admirable, the reprehensible, and the humiliating. But intimacy is not what happens as a result of rapidly telling the intimate partner everything; it’s the unfolding and sharing of life that comes about as partners learn the gradually and vulnerably revealed truths about one another, staying and growing together through that process. Intimacy transcends the individuals in a relationship and becomes a form that relationships settle into after a long and circuitous process.

Relationships created from the defensive posture of irrelationship have no room for intimacy because intimacy threatens the stability of the irrelationship pattern. So for all the energy put into a song-and-dance routine, the only gratification it can deliver is relief for the participants from being asked to examine themselves and each other too closely. This leaves the irrelationship participants prey to feeling ripped off by each other, which is a setup for blaming—either oneself or one’s partner. This is one reason why compassion and empathy are important; they provide tools that can help eliminate the need for retaliation. On a deeper level, research has shown that compassion improves the ability of the brain to reconfigure itself to more positive modes of conflict resolution,1 although empathy without the more rational guidance of compassion carries risks of its own, as will be discussed in a later chapter. This reconfiguration is reflected in changes in patterns of brain activity as well as in reorganization on the cellular level, including, in some cases, increased size of the areas of the brain associated with mindful and compassionate functioning.

As suggested earlier, the isolation and dissatisfaction that arises from irrelationship paradoxically results from using words and gestures that pass for empathy while the user of these gestures keeps a safe emotional distance from the object. Everybody believes they’re trying to do the right thing but nothing’s working, and nobody knows why.

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