THAT'S MEN:Be wary of relationship triangles
EVER BEEN in a triangle? The answer is almost certainly yes. Triangles are everywhere, especially in families. Here are a few examples:
Husband and wife sit together giving out about teenage son. In this triangle, husband and wife are together – they are the most strongly connected points – and teenage son is on the outside point.
Then, wife has a hissy fit over something the husband has done, and son happens to be in the doghouse at the same time. Father and son ruefully sympathise with each other. Now it is they who are most strongly connected, and the wife who is on the outside.
Then, during the holiday in Spain, father gets drunk, breaks son’s mobile phone, tells wife to eff off. Now mother and son moan about father. They are together and he is on the outside.
All good, clean fun so far. Sometimes, though, the triangles become toxic. Permanent triangles can be like that.
In a recent article on psychiatrictimes.com, Dr Jerry M Lewis writes about a mother and son who formed an alliance against the father. By failing in sports, school and in his social life the boy could really hurt the father, and the mother encouraged this by making excuses. Years later the son was still failing, with the support of the mother, though the father was now dead.
At a more extreme end, I have come across alliances of father and daughter against mother, or mother and daughter against father, with the outsider suffering serious physical abuse.
Then there’s the triangle made up of Golden Boy and his mother against Golden Boy’s unsuitable wife. Or Golden Girl and her mother against Golden Girl’s unsuitable husband.
But back to the “triangulation”, as counsellors would call it, of children. In other words, one parent recruits one of the children in his or her battles with the other parent. Dr Lewis says that when counselling teenagers he sometimes has to extricate them from these triangles. The teenager who sees himself or herself almost as an extension of one parent has to get free and adopt an individual identity.
The family systems theory of Dr Murray Bowen tells us of four other ways people manage their emotions in families: distancing, cut-off, over-functioning, under-functioning. See if you recognise yourself in any of these:
Distancing includes silences and non-communication, throwing yourself into work or hobbies to the exclusion of everyone else and avoiding family members.
Cut-off is the extreme version of distancing. You get out of the family and have nothing at all to do with them.
Over-functioning is doing way too much for the other person. This includes taking complete responsibility for the other person, doing everything for them, worrying about them endlessly and so on.
Under-functioning can involve irresponsible behaviour, dropping projects and goals, and relying on others to make decisions and to give help that should not be needed.
Most of us can recognise other people from the description above. But where are you in it? I probably belong in the distancing and under-functioning ballparks, as some of my old bosses could testify.
Dr Bowen would say that the antidote is to take responsibility for our own happiness and not to drag other people into our games. That may sound vague, but how would you apply it in a healthy relationship? I have no bullet point answers. Think about it, though – it’s worth it.
Clue: Dr Lewis says we need to “agree on how much separateness and connectedness are to prevail in the relationship”. I would add that the first thing to do is to take responsibility for our own selves in our relationships. Not easy but, again, worth the effort.
If you want to learn more about this, I recommend a book called Extraordinary Relationshipsby Roberta M Gilbert.
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@ireland.com) is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His mindfulness newsletter is available free by e-mail