#29. Dynamic behavior

This essay will take you 8 minutes to read

Imagine you’re watching over an evening of Jack and Jill, a couple living together. Your observation doesn’t affect their behavior, you’re a fly on the wall—a perfect, uninvolved witness of their interaction, as it happens “in vivo”. Most of the evening, Jill is preoccupied with her phone. She scrolls Instagram, chats with her friends, looks at memes. Jack is making a few non-verbal attempts to engage with her. You see him walk in the room where she sits and stand in front of the door for a while, looking at her, but she doesn’t lift her gaze. He takes a shower and strolls past her to the kitchen, wearing only a towel on his hips, seemingly casually, but eyeing her reaction, which doesn’t happen. On the way back, he takes the towel off and tosses it over his shoulder—still no reaction. He turns the TV on, asking if she wants to see a movie—“No,” she answers absently, eyes glued to the screen. After three hours of circling around her in various ways, he announces that he’s about to go to bed. “Ok,” answers Jill, smiling at the phone. Jack goes to bed alone and lies on his back, looking at the ceiling for 20 minutes, before falling asleep.

How would you characterize Jill’s attitude towards Jack? How would you characterize their relationship? How did you feel, reading this description? A lot of people, maybe most, at least within the social strata that’s likely to read this, would grow irritated with Jill and see this as a dismissive, borderline contemptuous attitude. Indeed, Jill ignores Jack, doesn’t react to his attempt at engagement, doesn’t show any involvement in contact with him. So far, pretty straightforward. Now let’s make it less obvious.

What would change in your assessment of Jill as a person and her attitude towards Jack, if you continued to watch after Jack fell asleep? Let’s say an hour later, Jack wakes up—still alone in the cold bed, tosses the blanket away, stands up, decisively strolls towards the living room, where Jill is still scrolling through YouTube shorts, walks up to her and calls her by name—four times—until she finally gets distracted from her phone. When she finally looks at him, he says, “Honey, I’ve been trying to reach you all evening. I feel lonely and forgotten. Let’s spend some time together.” And she responds, “Oh, man, sure! Sorry, I was so tired after work today, I completely shut down. Thanks for letting me just turn my brain off for a while, but yes, absolutely, I missed you too, let’s go!” And she stands up, leaving her phone on the sofa, and they have a late dinner, talking about the events of the day, then watch an episode of their favorite series, have sex, and fall asleep, hugging.

Now the situation looks different, right? From “a dismissive woman ignoring her boyfriend to the point of emotional abuse”, it went to “a woman was too tired to engage for a few hours, despite a good relationship with her boyfriend”. But the first part didn’t go anywhere, did it? It became re-examined, re-interpreted, understood differently in the light of the second part. Had we not seen the second part, we’d be stuck with the original impression.

Imagine, however, there was no second part. Not because you didn’t see it, but because Jack never woke up, or if he did—he didn’t go to Jill, or if he did—he didn’t press her until she noticed his reaction to her behavior. Imagine the situation ended when Jack went to sleep the first time. And Jack remembered it exactly the way we saw it, reading this description—as Jill being dismissive, cold, not interested in him. Imagine this happened more than once. Jill gets tired at work, comes home, rests with a phone in her palm, Jack doesn’t reach her—at first, just doesn’t press hard enough, then, under the influence of the impression that that’s just the way Jill wants to treat him (in our example—false impression), he simply doesn’t bother trying. In a while, Jill, feeling a lack of contact with Jack, starts reaching out to him—but by then, he is in a vengeful mood and gives her the cold shoulder. Little by little, their relationship grows worse, they stray farther apart, at first—by a series of mistakes, then—because of the accumulating weight of “evidence” the other party isn’t interested. And at any point in this trajectory, each of them could tell you the sad story of how their relationship is degrading because the other one isn’t open to engagement—and if you heard them, you’d believe it.

So what’s going on here? What mistake are they making that costs them their relationship in that scenario? Sure, we could say it’s Jill spending too much time on the phone, or Jack not having the balls to express how he feels about that. But there will always be something that makes you distracted, and some feelings you’re not ready to admit at a given moment. We can’t expect people to be Buddhas, fully present in each moment, free both from useless fun and reservations about expressing themself. But we still expect people to maintain relationships, despite our flawed nature. So what the mistake that can be corrected? Well, you read the title, you know the answer.

See, yes, on one hand, I, and every other psychodynamic (and not only) psychologist keep repeating that relationships are manifested in behavior. If someone treats you badly—that’s a bad relationship, period. But what we understand by “behavior” is a tad more complex than what laymen might think. It’s not just what people do, however counterintuitive that might seem. It’s how people change their behavior in response to you. Think of it this way: let’s say you come to my house and see a book in my library. Can you tell what my attitude towards that book is? If it’s just standing there, among other books, decently well-protected from moisture and somewhat dusted, can you say which book I like, which I treasure, which I despise, which I don’t care about? You can’t. But if you tell me there’s a fire in my library, and see me running in and out, holding one specific book, now you know that that’s the book I care about. The same thing happens between people. It might hurt your feelings to know that you can just blend with the furniture even in the eyes of your loved ones, but that’s the truth. Unless you’re responsive, unless there’s a reason to notice you, nobody is going to do it until they need you. The best example of it is children’s scream: children are evolutionarily the most precious thing an animal can have, and even they had to develop quite strong and specific audio cues to remind their parents they exist and have needs.

We are taught, and it is considered a sign of good manners not to ask too much, both in the sense of “not asking for big things”, and “not making too frequent requests”, and we are pelted with examples from fairy-tales and romcoms of people, going the extra mile, pushing above and beyond to fulfil a loved one’s wish. And that might even occasionally happen in real life, although usually to a lesser extent and with strings attached. But even then, it can’t be the baseline everyday behavior.

Humans are somewhat smarter than rats, but the same mechanics work for us. Like rats in Skinner’s cages, learning to push the lever in a specific sequence to get a treat, humans also, consciously or not, find the sequence of actions that leads to something pleasant, and then maintain it. If ignoring you for a while, rather than leading to things heating up into a fight, leads to you leaving someone alone without obvious consequences, then that’s what they’ll learn to do. Not because they don’t love you enough, but because you’ve trained them to do so. “Accidental conditioning” is what it’s called when we describe animal or children’s behavior, but adults can be accidentally conditioned just as easily. This does not mean all neglect is a communication failure. It means that static behavior alone is often insufficient evidence until you test the relationship dynamically.

All of this brings up two questions: what to do then with assessing our adult relationship, and doesn’t it contradict everything counselors usually say about child-parent relationships? Let’s start with the second one.

So, if Jill not paying attention to Jack isn’t Jill not loving Jack, but Jack not insisting on his needs, then why is a mother/father/grandma/any custodian ignoring the needs of a child suddenly considered abuse? Well, two reasons. One—that’s what’s called vertical relationships, not horizontal. A parent, a custodian, much like a doctor, a lawyer, or a pilot, is by default responsible for the well-being of their flock. A doctor can’t shrug off their patient’s death due to medicine incompatibility by saying “he didn’t tell me he took it”. It’s the doctor’s job to ask and to impress upon the patient the gravity of that question, so that they don’t lie or take it lightly. Same goes for the parent: it’s the parent’s job not just to react to a child’s expressed needs, but to find out which needs the child has and, furthermore, to teach the child to express their needs. A child who’s not asking for anything is a silent ask to find out if he’s ok by default. And second, children very much do telegraph their needs. Sure, when they are adults, or even teens, they might be reclusive, reserved, emotionally constrained. But be sure, they weren’t born that way. There hasn’t been a healthy newborn that didn’t scream when he’s cold, hungry, bloated, or in any other way inconvenienced. The transition from a child who’ll make the Martians know he has a need to a teenager who’s silent about the worst emotional turmoil a psyche can handle doesn’t happen by accident or at random. It’s the very same parents, who will later blink innocently and express how hurt they are by accusations of neglect, saying things like “You never told us you felt this way, how could we have known”—they are the people who taught the child not to tell. They are the ones who, once again, probably unconsciously, conditioned the child to keep quiet. By being irritated when he complained; by demanding obscene gratitude for each of their action; by presenting their baseline responsibilities as parents—food, shelter, education, as heroic actions; by outright refusing to react; by saying that complaining makes the child bad, whiny, weak, unworthy, worse than their friends’ children. If I told you that Jack didn’t tell Jill that he feels lonely because every time he did—she trashed the apartment, screaming at him for being needy—that’d be a very different story than just “Jack doesn’t speak up”.

So, what to do with horizontal relationships? In cases where one party doesn’t bear the assumed responsibility for the other. Well, as the title (and previous explanation) implies: make them dynamic. Not just look at what happened once, or happens regularly, but by the same scenario. Make a different scenario. Try a new route. Don’t just assume your partner does things because that’s how they relate to you. Test another assumption: maybe, they are acting in a different relationship because in these ones, you’re not a sufficient stimulus. Maybe you haven’t telegraphed your needs loud enough, or consistently enough. Maybe their not reacting doesn’t lead to visible enough consequences. Maybe the way you react to frustration just pales in comparison to something else that’s happening in their life, so they’re not getting the signal.

There is, however, a catch. There always is, welcome to applied psychology. See, how do you know if you’ve tried enough? Jack did make a few attempts to get Jill’s attention, so maybe he thought to himself, “Well, I tried,” too? My example ends on a happy note: Jack ramps up the tension, Jill reacts. But what if she didn’t? Imagine Jack comes to Jill and calls her—she doesn’t react. He yells—she still doesn’t. What’s next? Should he just rip the phone out of her hands? Break it? Hit her? How far do you need to raise the stakes before you decide enough is enough? When is the “If she doesn’t respond to this, then it’s not just me being quiet, it’s really her attitude towards me showing” moment? Well, there is a problem and a solution in this.

The problem is that this is a very big question, and that’s exactly the snag that prevents a lot of people from separating from codependent relationships. “What if I just didn’t say it right? What if I just need the right phrasing, the right moment, the right phase of the moon?” is exactly what children of abusive parents, spouses of abusive partners, employees of abusive bosses say for years and decades, while staying in the same relationship. So the danger is real. The solution, however, exists, and while not exactly easy, it is simple and sounds absolutely not like what you expect: “go big or go home”. Here’s what this means: if you’re unhappy with your relationship, the one thing you can’t do is nothing. Which leaves you with two options: either keep raising the stakes or leave. That’s brutal in application, but that’s the best way to get unstuck. People in the situation that I described are not just fantasising about their partners noticing their frustration someday; they are also doing what Einstein described as madness: keep repeating the same thing, waiting for a different result. If Jack thinks that his going to sleep alone is a signal enough for Jill to understand it’s not ok to spend the night in her phone, well, he may try it and see if it works. When the next day he sees that it didn’t—he can either quit here, or up the ante. That’s the algorithm: you push your partner, or you pull away. No one can tell you how hard to push: only you decide at which point trying to save this relationship isn’t worth the next logical step. But when that time comes, you need to pull out of this arrangement, and not wait for a miracle.

Until next week,
Konstantin Kunakh

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