Barriers To Relationship Intimacy “Avoid the Dirty Dozen”
Author: Jan Stephen Maizler, MSW, LCSW

The following twelve areas are pitfalls in any relationship, that if allowed to flourish will cause that relationship to degrade and suffer. Therefore to keep your relationship healthy and alive, avoid the dirty dozen.

#1. Insufficient shared information creates a relationship vacuum and promotes guessing, projection, and suspicion.

Healthy relationship choices are the outcome of thorough relationship evaluations, which are based on the receipt of thorough, accurate information. You must fully know the data that you aim to process.

It is a psychological maxim that data and information “hook” a person’s logic, provides structure, support healthier ego functioning, adaptation, and planning. Conversely, no data isolates you and throws you into an intra-personal world full of hunches, suspicion, and inner mental meandering.

The early experiments of people put in isolation or sensory deprivation chambers caused them to regress, hallucinate, and grow psychotic. These extreme examples indicate that true interpersonality and the facts attached to it, support reality testing.

What you share with your partner is a germane consideration as well. You best criterion for what is asked and what is answered is that information should be relevant and helpful, but never hurtful and damaging. As an experienced “relationship choice maker” you soon learn to know what is necessary and essential and what is more than you or your partner need to know.

#2. Incomplete pre-relationship work creates a flood of unfinished business.

Nothing complicates a new relationship more than the unfinished business of an individual. As discussed elsewhere in this book, the three major elements that a person needs to “finish” (in a work-in-progress sense) are:

* a sense of completeness;

* fulfillment of potential;

* ability to take care of oneself.

All of these features are your pre-relationship work. This means that these three areas should be basically “taken care of” in large measure before entering a relationship.

The personal unhappiness that stems from relative incompletion of these three spheres will cause significant disturbance and will slowly poison an unfolding relationship.

A healthy relationship is not composed of two halves, but rather two wholes.

#3. Fear of closeness creates distance and isolation.

The fear of closeness and intimacy has reached epidemic proportions in relationships. Why would someone be so afraid of becoming close to another person? The answer would reveal that the sufferer must be believe that closeness and intimacy must be dangerous and threatening to their well-being. A possible origin of this fear might be that the person may have suffered a traumatic loss of a loved one or someone’s love. Alternatively, the person may have witnessed their parents fighting and quarreling so often that they have concluded and believe that closeness is dangerous. While it is understandable that such a conclusion is reached, it is also premature and prejudicial: all relationships are not dangerous.

Fear of closeness is a phobia-driven illness, and its “cure” lies in progressive attempts to safely and methodically get closer to another person who is capable of doing the same. No relationship can survive in a healthy fashion when the fear of closeness exists in any measure.

Pursuing and attaining closeness with a loved one should proceed while facing the inevitable fact that you will ultimately lose them. It is the reality of impermanence that makes the pursuit and attainment of intimacy and closeness even more meaningful, worthwhile, and necessary.

#4. Resentment and begrudgement invites wounding and sniping.

Resentment is an angry feeling towards another who you judge has significantly mistreated you. Resentment can go from a pre-occupation into an obsession that last for a lifetime. Resentment can also grow into begrudgement, which is a focus of ill will that objects to the good fortune of another. At worst, it is a wish for the suffering of someone who has hurt you.

When people in a relationship harbor resentment for each other, their “emotional field” becomes a hot zone with ongoing risks of flare-ups, arguments, and enmity. Minor problems become enlarged fights because the pre-existing resentments and begrudgements find a foothold and ignite into a firestorm of controversy.

Just like cigarettes, resentment and begrudgement are poisons. They should be prevented or extinguished as soon as possible. The best way of preventing these poisonous feelings is through the use of effective relationship skills. The best ways of extinguishing them is through a effective conflict resolution.

#5. Unwillingness to take behavioral ownership creates scapegoats and destroys a partnership.

In my recent work with a gay couple, one partner claimed to feel free to flirt with the waiters in the cafe’s of South Beach, right in the presence of his” significant other”. When that significant other spoke up and voiced his discomfort over the flirting, he was chided as being narrow-minded, possessive, and insecure. The flirting partner took no responsibility for his behavior. Where is the basis for a healthy trusting partnership?

#6. Too much historical baggage creates relationship cynicism and distorts the present moment.

One of the worst caricatures of this barrier is the multiply divorced person who is lost in a fog of chronic bitterness towards the opposite sex. They appear unable to “see” truly new experiences. All they can offer are generalizations that prove to meager, clumsy, and incorrect in navigating the world of relationships. If they can “see” their baggage and “dump it”, they can lead freer lives.

#7. Mockery and devaluation of your partner kills love.

Couples want to be esteemed by each other. There is no excuse whatsoever for diminishing your partner. Mockery and devaluation are inevitably symptoms of anger, resentment, personal insecurity, fear, personal unhappiness, or pathological narcissism. If you feel the urge to put your partner down, refrain from it, and try to find the source of this impulse. This will generally involve some unfinished personal ore relationship business. Giving in to the impulse to mock and devalue your partner will eventually cause their love for you to wither away and die.

#8. Addictive behavior creates damage, mistrust, and pain in a relationship.

This topic has been discussed elsewhere [special conditions in relationships] yet it will help to repeat some basic facts.

* no relationship can ever attain health in the presence of active addiction;

* anyone who knowingly pairs up with an active addict is as sick and “crazy” as the addict;

* addiction is incurable, but manageable when the addict is involved in some form of 12 - Step program. At a minimum, this requires going to meetings, getting a sponsor, “working the Steps”, and doing service. You should also be aware that psychotherapy alone as a treatment for addiction is woefully inadequate.

#9. Hypersensitivity and emotional bingeing create a lack of control in a relationship.

Hypersensitivity can be defined a a “disorder” of feeling too quickly hurt, affected, and/or resentful in response to the events and discomforts of everyday life. Hypersensitive people are emotionally affected more easily and quickly than the vast majority of their peers. Hypersensitivity can arise from inherited constitution, depression, active drug and alcohol intoxication, and many other sources. Hypersensitive people have something “wrong” with them that they need to face, fix, and manage.

Emotional bingeing, in contrast, refers to manipulative behavior under conscious control which overplays emotions regarding a given situation. Emotional bingeing reveals that the overdramatizing or exaggeration of feelings about a situation or an event - such as an affront - is an attempt to “purchase” a secondary gain such as feeling like a wounded victim or martyr. People who emotionally binge need to control themselves and be more responsible, because the flooding and prolongation of excessive emotion in the couple eats away at the logic, intellect, and “science” that lays at the foundation of healthy relationships.

#10. Poor needs negotiation creates conflict.

You recognize that all people are different and that even the most compatible couple will have individual needs that differ at times. Effective management of differing needs takes a problem-solving approach that uses compromise and negotiation as its tools. Partners in a relationship who compromise often feel a sense of pride in modifying a need “downward” when they know it will satisfy and stabilize their partner and the relationship itself. Mutual giving flourishes in an atmosphere of cooperation.

When any of the above elements are absent, by conscious choice or by lack of awareness, the satisfaction of individual needs in a relationship becomes more conflicted: a relationship loses its health when it becomes a battleground.

#11. Reactivity creates run-away fighting and arguing.

A famous directive from Alcoholics Anonymous instructs you to “exercise restraint of tongue and pen”. In contrast, reactivity is a mindless, thoughtless reflex and involves the least evolved, most primitive parts of yourself and your animal origins. Restraint is equated with thoughtful, conscious self-control and indicates better ego functioning. Soccer match riots epitomize the reactivity that leads to run-away fighting and even murder. A group becomes a mob. Restraint of reactivity minimizes the likelihood of rioting in a relationship.

#12. Litigious behavior changes the relationship into a courtroom.

Litigious behavior stands alongside psychoanalyzing one’s partner as the newest form of “verbal violence” in a relationship. Specifically, litigious behavior is a deeply neurotic relationship dynamic in which one partner sets out to prove they are right and the other partner is wrong. The goal and method is inevitably one of competitive domination. Litigating in a relationship is different from mindless immature bickering. Litigating can hook a couple into an addictive, competitive battle in which victories sought through the intellectual and strategic conquest lawyers often use in court.

Litigating is to be avoided at all costs. Not only does it damage the goodwill in a relationship; it also creates the illusion that there is only one right way. Do you want to create a courtroom out of your relationship? Certainly not.

Jan S. Maizler, MSW, LCSW, ACSW, is a long-time contributor of articles on clinical skills to NASW. He can be reached at WWW.RELATIONSHIPHANDBOOK.COM or 305-940-1564






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Jan Maizler is a veteran psychotherapist and author. He lives and practices in Miami, Florida. He has over one hundred articles and seven books published. He specializes in a psycho-educational approach in his work with couples, families, individuals, and large seminar groups.

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