Life
in conversation with mark
borg, PhD, grant brenner, MD
and daniel berry, RN
author of “relationship sanity”
why did you write
relationship sanity?
We wrote Relationship Sanity because readers,
clients, colleagues and friends asked for a handson,
pragmatic approach for couples to learn
how to move beyond obstacles to intimacy and
to learn how to enjoy satisfying relationships
with one another. While many people can
understand how childhood patterns interfere
with and undermine adult relationships, it
is more difficult to understand what to do
to transcend these often-thorny problems.
Relationship Sanity solves this problem by
spelling out a process couples can work through
to go from irrelationship —the dysfunctional
process of using relationships to avoid intimacy
while appearing to be trying to work things
out—to relationship sanity. The ideas behind
Relationship Sanity began years ago when the
three of us got together to discuss what we saw
as an epidemic of “compulsive caregiving” that
was interfering with reciprocity and intimacy in
our society. We call that dynamic “irrelationship”
(which is the title of our first book and our blog on
Psychology Today). The book was well received!
And then we received innumerable requests for
a solution, generally stated as: OK, now that we
know about irrelationship, how can couples work
through it? Relationship Sanity is the answer.
why do we resist loving
others and being loved
ourselves?
The resistance to loving and being loved—as
expressed in irrelationship—is a carry-over from
a childhood developmental dynamic where, for
whatever reason,
p a r e n t s we r e
unable to provide
appropriate,
ef fective, safe,
trustworthy
parental care.
W h e n t h e
development of
necessary trust between the child
and her or his world (that is, parents) is broken,
when the parents are unable to provide safety and
a minimal level of care, the child turns the tables
on caregiving and does what she or he can do to
ensure that the parent is well. Well enough, that
is, to provide the minimal level of care. When
this dynamic comes into adulthood, it makes it
all but impossible for a person to join the process
of reciprocity—of giving and receiving, and,
ultimately, of loving and being loved.
why do we often discover
that we don’t want what
we think we want?
It is human nature—normal, as it were—to
discover that we don’t always want what
we think we want, because life is a series of
approximations. There are few people, especially
those coming up in homes with psychological and
emotional dysfunction, who are deeply in tune
with who they are and what they want. Instead,
we adopt various personas in order to survive.
As it is, sometimes these survival choices overlap
with what we find we want when we get to know
ourselves better in adulthood. Sometimes these
choices are enough to barely get us to where we
need to be to turn the page on a new chapter. So
26 WomanToWomanMagazine.com
/WomanToWomanMagazine.com
