The Psychology of Relationships

The Key To Why They Work . . . And Why They Fail
By Earnie Larsen

When we talk about the psychology of relationships, we mean all types, not only sexual ones: relationships with your kids, parents, friends, any type of relationship. The psychology is the heart and soul of relationships. Many of you might be familiar with it, but it doesn’t hurt to go through it again and get to where you know it so well you can teach it.

The little diagram I often use with relationships is a tightrope. The point is this—the rope cannot be stronger than the poles. The first issue in a relationship is not the rope; it’s how strong the poles are. What if one pole is made out of iron and buried in ten feet of concrete, and the other pole is cardboard and buried in four inches of sand? How much weight can the rope hold? If you put any weight on that rope relating to in-laws, to sex, to money, or to kids, then it caves right in. You can go to a counselor and spend a million dollars talking about the issues, but that’s the wrong place to start. The only way a relationship gets stronger is if both people are willing first of all to look at themselves.

We are going to go through six words which relate to relationships. They are the key to what makes a relationship work and what makes it fail.

Both

A relationship cannot be healthier than both people. First of all, both must want the relationship to exist. Because you are in the relationship does not automatically mean that both of you want the same kind of relationship. Do you have teenage kids? What if you want an honest, caring, sharing, loving, wonderful relationship with your teenage kid and they want to have a place to eat and sleep and a place to take off from? Then you don’t want the same kind of relationship. It doesn’t make any difference what you want. It can’t be any healthier than what both people want.

You may find that somebody you are in a relationship with wants to be a hermit. “I want to have a place to stay; don’t bug me; I’ll just sit here and read my paper and drink my beer, watch TV; don’t hassle me.” Yet, you may want something more like a community.

Another example could be a relationship with your parents. You may be fifty years old, and what your parents want in a relationship with you is that you be bonded. “I don’t want you to curl your hair. I want you to sit up straight at the table.” You probably want different things. The first issue from a counselor’s standpoint is to clarify what it is that both people want. You often find that both people want different things.

Willing

How willing are both people to do what it takes to make the relationship better? Not just willing to do what they, themselves, want. That’s not the issue. The issue is willing to do what it takes. If what it takes to make your relationship healthier is for you to be quiet and listen, are you wiling to listen? If what it takes for your relationship to be healthier is for somebody to talk straight, are you willing to do that?

How willing are you to do what it takes to make the relationship better? If either one says, “I’m not going to do anything. There’s nothing wrong with our relationship except you anyway. If you weren’t so nuts, everything would be fine. Maybe you’ll get yourself fixed and everything will be all right.” If both people aren’t willing to do it, you’ve got a lot of trouble.

Those of you who have started a journey toward growth on a program without the other person, are going to have a lot of hurt in your life. Imagine two pimples with bubbles on top. If one person starts growing and starts moving, knowing what friendship is, what sharing is, what support is, what talking straight is, what happens? If you start growing it means you are growing further and further apart from the other. There are only three things which can happen. The best is that the other person has a conversion experience and starts changing and comes along with you. That can happen. Another thing that can happen is this person who is growing can’t stand up to the pressure of the other person saying things like: “I remember when you used to be a good mother; I remember when you used to be nice before you got brainwashed.” When this happens they often tend to give up their recovery and go back to the way it was. But you can never do that. Once you know the difference, you can never go back. You can try, but it won’t work. The third thing which happens is that sooner or later, the bubble breaks. Relationships are living things just like people, and any living thing can die. When relationships are dead, they are gone and they are never going to come back because they are dead. I see a lot of people trying to do what seems like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation for a corpse. When it’s dead, it’s over. What it dies from is lack of trust, lack of trying, lack of wanting. Some of the saddest stuff I have found in my twenty years of working with this kind of thing is somebody played with the relationship so long that it died.

Then, once a relationship dies, the other person who was not willing to try before ahs the conversion experience. Then he sits in my office crying. “Tell me what I can do!” And, of course, there is nothing he can do. “I’ll read your books.” “Wonderful!” “I’ll take you out to a movie.” “Super! I don’t want to go out with you.” Tears come down and the guy or lady knows that it is gone, that they played with it too long and it died.

Maybe there are some people reading this under duress. You think it is stupid, and you’re doing it to appease somebody. Realize that someone really wants you to read this because they are hungry. If they get hungry enough, long enough, you’ve lost that relationship.

Able

To make relationships work it takes skills. Good-will is not enough. Lacking the skills, it just won’t work. There are a million examples of this. You understand that all the time in the business world. If you were the boss of a computer place and I came in and wanted a job, you’d say, “Do you know about computers?” I reply, “No, I don’t know anything about them, but I want the job.” You say, “Are you willing to learn?” “No.” “Well, then you don’t have a job.” I’d say, “No, you don’t understand, I just want to work.”

Somebody’s saying, “I really want you to be able to talk.” You say, “I talk to you all the time . . . get me a beer; what’s on TV?; set the alarm for six.” If you are not willing to learn and to work to gain the skills that it takes, give it enough time, it will fall over dead.

Trust

I suggest to you that the only issue I think there is in any relationship is trust. A relationship cannot fail except if trust fails. The only reason a relationship ever dies is because of no trust. People talk about communication. Communication is trust in asking. You cannot have a failure in communication until first of all there is a failure in trust. When games start, trust ends. That’s what causes lack of trust—somebody starts playing a game. Maybe they don’t know any better. Maybe the only way they know how to deal with conflict is to get mad. They don’t know how to say, “I don’t understand.” They don’t know how to say, “I have a different opinion.” All they know how to do is get mad, scream, yell, and intimidate. It’s a game.

Screaming and yelling may be the way you learned, and the only way you know, but it isn’t good enough. How willing are you and I to deal with the kind of games we play? Ordinarily when you talk about trust, people think about one or two things—sexual fidelity or not stealing money. Trust means more than that. That’s the bare minimum. When I talk about trust it is where I really know you care about me. Trust means that you have proven to me you will express your caring in ways which count to me. Not in the things that count to you. I can only trust you if you have demonstrated you care enough about me to be present to me in a way which is important to me.

Communication is trusting. The only way two people can build trust is that I take responsibility for myself in learning to be more trustworthy. The first commitment in a relationship is not to the relationship; it is the commitment that both people are willing to bend back and look at themselves.

The question here for each one of us is: what do I need to change in order to become a more trustworthy partner in this relationship? If both people are willing to bend back and look at themselves, and say, “What do I need to change? What do I need to deal with? What do I need to become in order to be a more trustworthy partner?” then there is no end to how much love, trust and grace you can have in this relationship. But if neither is willing to do it, or if only one person is willing to do it, you will continue to have a sick relationship.

Growth or Change

The point is, our task is to grow, in order to become more trustworthy, so that there is more trust in the relationship.  If both people are doing that, it just grows and grows. But are you willing to grow? Willing to do some changing? Let me give you an example of this.

The man in this relationship comes from a family of 17 children. The way he came out of his childhood is that any time there is any emotion, he wilts. Whether anger, joy, no matter what—any time there is a lot of emotion, he wilts and goes away. He married a lady who was a child from an alcoholic family whose father left when she was six. She has an enormous fear of abandonment. Any time she feels abandoned, which is almost always, she gets angry and attacks. Let’s look at this pattern. She feels abandoned, gets angry and attacks. He responds by wilting and goes away. The further he goes away, the angrier she gets. So she attacks. He goes away. What does she do? Attacks even more. They have been married 27 years and have seven kids. I don’t think they have had one happy year together!

Let’s work on understanding this. He kept saying, “Why is she so angry?” and she kept saying, “Why is he such a cold duck?” For 27 years they have been doing that. I bet they have spent $30,000 on marriage counseling. But nobody ever said, “Look Mary, what do you have to do?” Finally, she started working in a program down at the YMCA, and decided what was really fair was for her to stop making her husband responsible to make up for the youth she never had. “That isn’t fair. Because my dad left me, it is not my husband’s fault, and I need to stop getting angry because I am afraid.” The husband got in a program and came to understand, “Because I learned to be afraid of a lot of emotion, it isn’t fair to run away from her. If there is an issue and an emotion, the adult, responsible thing to do is to stay there, talk through it, and work through it, and not act like a five-year-old and run for the train or head for the hills.” So, he started staying home and she stopped fighting. They have a wonderful thing going now. It’s not perfect, but both of them made a commitment, first of all, to grow. Both of them told me in the past that, “I don’t know if we are going to make it, but even if we don’t make it I am going to come out of this a healthier, whole person.” Wonderful understanding of what the relationship is about!

You do not grow for the sake of the other person or for the sake of the relationship. That never works because you are angry at the other person because you have to do some work. The only way it works is if you are willing to go to work and do what it takes because you want to change and you want to grow.

My dad committed suicide, and I don’t want to end up like that. I have to work on my life and I choose to work on my life for me. If something happened to my wife and she wasn’t around, would I still be working for my program? Not if I was doing it just for her. In the course of me working on me, I am better able to function in my relationship.

My wife, Paula, of course, comes to our relationship with her bag of stuff. She’s working hard on hers. One of the biggest problems we’ve had in our marriage had to do with time. Being on time. Her whole belief is, “If I get there before it’s over, I am on time.” If church starts at 10:00 and we should leave home at 9:30, and she is in the shower at 9:28, I feel horrid! I feel unimportant, I feel cheated. I feel angry! Paula’s attitude about time was learned when she was growing up. Paula’s mother is a neat lady, but she is always 15 to 20 minutes late. She is 84 years old, and can hardly walk, but she is going as fast as she can trying to make up time. Paula says she just wants to stay alive. Paula really wanted part of her program to be on understanding time. “If something takes a half hour, don’t say it takes 20 because you are going to be 20 minutes late and it’s 7:30 in the morning and you’ll never catch up.” That has been a horrendous issue in our relationship. It only gets better though, if both people are playing fair enough to bend back and say, “What’s fair?” And that means that probably both people are going to have to do some changing.

Program

Nobody changes accidentally. If there is going to be some growth, there needs to be a program. We need to do the right thing. All programs means is practice . . . nothing serious, nothing mystical. A program need practice. For example, how many of you ladies would like to be married to a man who is really good at sharing, who can express his feelings? A woman says, “I want to share a sunset.” “What sunset? I don’t see a sunset!” But if we are playing fair and doing some work, we kind of wake up and say, “Yes there is such a thing as a sunset. There is such a thing as looking at your kid’s face with warmth. There is such a thing as courtesy.” There are all kinds of wonderful things! But waking up to these things is not automatic.

I belong to a men’s group which meets every Saturday morning. There are a lot of guys in the group whose main objective is to learn to feel. A lot of the time guys don’t share feelings because we don’t know we have any. The second thing is to learn how to share those feelings, which is different from ramming them down somebody’s throat. There are a lot of guys in the group who make a journal every day. Every day they write down one feeling. Isn’t that neat? One guy had a piece of paper in a cellophane bag on the seat of his car. He hates red lights. So every time he is stopped by a red light, he takes his chart out and goes through his list, have I felt this?; have I felt this?; have I felt that? He identifies his feelings. He has changed his life and marriage around in the past eighteen months in a way you can’t believe. He’s working at it. You have to identify your feelings and share them with people. Perhaps resolve: “Every day I am going to share one feeling with one person.” It doesn’t have to be any heavy duty thing. I can go to work and say, “Boy, are my feet cold.” You don’t have to gripe and moan and condemn God. Just say, your feet are cold.

It is just a matter of practice. Anybody can learn any skill they want if they are willing to practice. It is skill, not genes. It’s not what you are born with. It is a matter of practice. And it is never too late to change. Some of us simply start later. We can learn the skill.

-Adapted for print from Earnie Larsen’s seminar on adult relationships. Copyright 1986 by Earnie Larsen; used by permission from Marriage Encounter, November/December 1990 issue, pages 24-27.