Learning with Dr. Harriet Lerner

Dr. Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Intimacy (Harpet & Row, 1989) is a guide for women to help find balance in their relationships-how to be close to someone while still retaining a "self." She deal with a number of relationship issues, such as anxiety, distance, fighting, differences, overfunctioning, hot issues, and triangles. Based on the work of Murray Bowen, Dr. Lerner's book emphasizes the eternal struggle of closeness and autonomy, or in Dr. Bowen's terminology, the process of individuation.

Dr. Lerner starts by defining an intimate relationship as "one in which neither party silences, sacrifices, or betrays the self and each party expresses strength and vulnerability, weakness and competence in a balanced way" (p. 3). She sees this relationship as a dance, where both parties are able to interact with grace and courage, one leading while the other is weak and the other taking over when the first gets tired. It is a delicate intertwining of strength and weakness, of competence and failure, and the acceptance of each partner's best and most vulnerable assets. Finding the right balance can be a constant struggle.

Many couples go into counseling at the wife's insistence because they are "stuck," they find themselves endlessly repeating the same unhelpful behavior patterns and getting further and further from any real solutions. There are many such patterns that can bring couples into therapy. The distancer-pursuer, for example, is a pattern where one person distances from the other, especially in times of stress, causing the other to pursue relentlessly. Or there is the overfunctioner-underfunctioner relationship, where one person takes on the lion's share of the responsibility, so the other does not have to be bothered. There are also triangles, where a person takes their frustration with one relationship to another person, adding a third person into the original relationship and causing power, control, and communication imbalances throughout.

Dr. Lerner looks at all these stuck relationship problems and offers advice to women looking for a more workable solution. Whether the dysfunctional relationship is with a husband, a mother, an in-law, a sister, a boss, or a friend, Dr. Lerner encourages women to take the energy spent on fretting about the relationship and focus it instead on defining the self. She believes that creating a stronger self can add balance and grounding to all relationships because it means taking more self-knowledge and less anxiety in for the other person to deal with. If women know who they are as individuals, they are more comfortable in their relationships. As Dr. Lerner says of this work:

We move up on the selfhood scale (and the intimacy scale for that matter) when we are able to:

• present a balanced picture of both our strengths and our vulnerabilities.

• make clear statements of our beliefs, values, and priorities, and then keep our behavior congruent with these.

• stay emotionally connected to significant others even when things get pretty intense.

• address difficult and painful issues and take a position on matters important to us.

• state our differences and allow others to do the same (p. 35).

To accomplish the goal of more selfhood, Dr. Lerner suggests a number of strategies throughout the book. First and foremost, she encourages women to take their time on this journey. She recognizes that rushing in too soon with too many or with complex changes will not fix the underlying relationship problems. She instead stresses that women move slowly, especially with very hot issues or long-standing family secrets. She helps women think through the possible consequences of their actions, to consider what will happen if she tells her husband she wants to go back to work, or confronts her best friend about her alcohol problem, or asks her mother about a brother who died in infancy. Moving quickly in any of these instances can cause more relationship problems, or the other person's resistance to the change may seem overwhelming, resulting in arguments, hurt feelings, and isolation.

Dr. Lerner also recommends that women create a genogram, an in-depth family history that offers an interesting visual map that can generate understanding about the family and the self. Adding dates to the genogram can help bring out important anniversary dates that are felt but not consciously acknowledged. It offers women information in a new format, to bring forward patterns that otherwise might remain hidden.

Although the book is a fairly quick read (less than 250 pages), Dr. Lerner encourages women to take their time and to focus their energy on themselves-on their own values, their own life plans and goals, their own family issues-and to use that strong sense of self as a base for finding the intimacy they want in their relationships. It offers them choices they may not have considered before; the choice, especially, of going slowly may seem like revelation knowledge to someone whose elevated anxiety levels cause them to rush in to complex situations without thinking things through. She writes with a friendly, supportive manner, in which there is no shame or embarrassment.

We are all alike, she asserts, with successes and failures, and there are times we all need help. To illustrate, she is even willing to share stories from her own family's struggles. This is a book that women can relate to and learn from. And because Bowenian theory holds true for almost any family or personal issue, her advice can be used in most circumstances, with issues that suggest therapeutic intervention as well as those that may not require professional involvement.

However, her focus is primarily on women. Although she states through the book that men could also find the advice helpful, she talks specifically to women, she addresses concerns that primarily affect women, and all of her examples reference women. A man reading this book could easily be put off, feeling like an outsider in her world. Normally, I would not harp on an issue such as this, especially since the author states in her subtitle that she has written "A Women's Guide to Courageous Acts of Change in Key Relationships" (emphasis mine).

On the other hand, Dr. Lerner makes no apologies for being a feminist throughout her book. To the layperson, a feminist is someone who believes in standing up for women's rights. But to the psychologist, a feminist is someone who believes in standing up for the rights of the oppressed party. This does not always refer to women. And, whereas men have historically held most of the financial power, the physical power, and the leadership positions in relationships, it would seem that the one power that women have consistently held in relationships is the emotional power. Women have always been considered to be the heart of the relationship, the ones who could access and control the emotional aspects even when she had no other power, while men could only stand aside and scratch their heads in ignorance. Under these circumstances, it would seem more beneficial to offer this advice to men, to help them discover the knowledge that has eluded them for so long, or at least to offer the advice in a more gender-neutral way so that men would not be intimidated or bored by the book. Her advice is important, and it needs to be presented to both sides of the relationship for it to do the most good.

Dr. Harriet Lerner wrote The Dance of Intimacy to offer women insight into their relationships through the therapeutic concepts of Dr. Murray Bowen. His research into family systems has offered us a new way of conceptualizing our closest relationships and for making repairs to them when they become damaged. Dr. Lerner has taken his theories and blended them with her experience and compassion to help women discover their best selves. Women wanting advice on how to improve their relationships will find important advice and a caring therapist through the pages of the book. However, men wanting that same advice might feel the desire to look elsewhere.