Harriet Lerner

And it's also true that an adaptation that once protected you can in a safer season keep you from seeing your partner as he actually is right now both of those are true at the same time there's one more piece that i think is really hopeful even though it doesn't feel that way from the inside for years this wife in this story was living with a man that she couldn't read now he's expressing emotion and that's new It's unfamiliar data, and unfamiliar can register in the body as unsafe, even when it's actually progress, even when it's something we've asked them to do.

Harriet Lerner wrote about what she called change-back reactions.

When one person in a relationship starts to change, the system pushes back to restore the old balance.

Not because anyone wants the old pain, but because the old pattern was predictable and predictable feels safe even when it isn't good.

Like that is family systems.

theory right but there are times where the system reorganizes itself without parts of it right and so this is estrangement and well i was just going to mention you know people that are listening to this and interested in this i was re-listening to uh Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Connection.

I love her Dance of Anger.

I've mentioned that before, but the book Dance of Connection, it's a short book.

And again, this is also a function of the fact that I'm sure you guys have heard of this concept.

I think it originated with Harriet Lerner and Brene Brown popularized it.

But this idea of over-functioning and under-functioning, right? I'm an over-functioner.

I love a crisis.

For this discussion, I want to bring in a book that has meant a lot to me.

It is Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger, specifically the first few chapters where she talks about relationship systems and what happens when someone inside the system decides to change.

Her premise is this, every relationship develops a pattern, a dance, if you will, and both people learn their steps.

They get comfortable with the rhythm, and over time, that rhythm becomes what feels normal and what feels safe.

And then on the other under-functioner side, so I'll use that dynamic, you know, that pattern as the example here.

On the under-functioner side, the question is, you know, will I still be loved if I'm not the one who needs help? Like, is anybody gonna care? Is anybody gonna take care of me, right? Who am I in this relationship if I stop playing my part? Harriet Lerner, who I love, um, she's amazing, and she wrote a very important book.

If y'all haven't read it yet, I always recommend it to pretty much everybody, The Dance of Anger.

So in Harriet Lerner's book, in The Dance of Anger, she described the over-functioner and the under-functioner as a complementary pair, right? I just said this to my husband today.

I was like, we, we were in the middle of a fight, and I said, "We found each other," right? "For a reason." There is a reason why our systems came together, right? We are a complementary pair in our-- not only, like, in what we love and don't love, not only in, like, what we, you know, are good at and not good at, but we're a complementary pair in our wounding, right? We have a system, the two of us, right? We're not two separate people with separate problems.

[chuckles] We are a system comprised of a problem that is very complementary between these two individuals.

You're gonna turn your awareness dial up on any and all resentment in your relationships, okay? And I always say, it doesn't have to be huge.

It can be the tiniest little whiff of it, but you're gonna pay attention, right? And then you're gonna ask yourself again, "Oh, I'm noticing it.

Murray Bowen is the one who created family systems theory, and he called this reciprocity.

And Harriet Lerner brought it to a general audience in her book, The Dance of Anger, in 1985.

The over-functioner is almost always the one keeping the ledger.

And the uncomfortable part of this pattern is this.

Everything you can see is the vulva.

So there is a, a psychologist, Harriet Lerner, and she has some great quotes.

And she's written about this subject and others for years.

So what she says is, um...

I think every book that has to do with female sexual function you will find nuggets and pearls in it.

Yeah.

She Comes First was written by Ian Kerner, and he is a psychologist who really had premature ejaculation, and then he just developed a method of oral sex, of giving oral sex so that his partner was pleasured so that he could then, you know-

Not be, yeah