Micro-separations: How to traumatize your partner on a daily basis
We’re talking death by a thousand cuts. We’re talking frog in boiling water situations.
In my last post I wrote about the capacity to be alone. Once I wrote about that, I started seeing the issue everywhere, both in myself and in my patients and friends.
I just came across an article by Brett Kahr, a prolific psychoanalytic writer, titled, Micro-separations: how to traumatize your spouse on a daily basis.
Basically, our reactions to smaller separations experienced inside of a romantic couple are linked to our childhood separations and misattunements from our parents/caregivers.
Kahr lists a great deal of research showing how toxic of an impact a depressed, deceased, and/or very preoccupied parent can have on their child. A parent who leaves to go to the store and never comes back, a parent who emotionally neglects their child’s need and vulnerability saying, “___ is so independent. He really takes care of himself.” Those parents negate the needs of their child, and the child goes on to be quite sensitive to feeling dismissed and disregarded or forgotten.
‘Separations’ are described in four different categories:
Traumatic Micro-Separations: “Two members of the couple become separated, both physically and psychologically, for merely a brief period of time, albeit with profound consequences.”
Finding your partner masturbating/watching porn. The author calls this ‘infidelity via sexual fantasy’.
Of course, not everyone will feel disturbed by that. For some, it’s a big issue, even it only happened once. They may have an issue with their partner having sexual thoughts about others, and it takes quite a psychological toll on them.
Like for someone who happens to be having a bout of insecurity, it could be the thing that sends them into further depths of despair.
They know that in that moment, they weren’t the person on their partner’s mind, and that affects us all differently and sometimes quite significantly.
Justifiable Micro-Separations: But many micro-separations don’t involve anything overtly sexual. This might be in a couple where one person travels very frequently for work — maybe it provides a great deal of income for the family, but the partner feels resentful of the time left alone. The constant travel might be OK for a month or a year or more, but the separations accumulate, as does the trauma from it.
There are so many missed moments if one is traveling constantly. You start to feel like you know less and less about each other and your ability to track each other’s feelings and states of mind starts to decline greatly, which leads to an atmosphere of disconnection.
Example: A woman was in a very healthy relationship overall. During a stressful time in the relationship, however, she and her partner were deciding about the lease on their car which would soon end — they had to choose whether to continue with the same model or choose a different make and model. There were six months left on the lease, and they were in disagreement over what car to choose, so they were taking a good amount of time to research.
Suddenly, the husband tells the woman, “Hey, I just located one of those cars we thought looked good, and I’m going for a test drive.”
Woman says, “Uh…I can’t go right now. I have to work. You’re doing that without me?”
He says, “Yeah, but it’s just a test drive. If I like it, we can go back together and check it out.”
She says, “OK. Just take a lot of photos and take a video of the inside.”
Husband sends one photo of the exterior and says it’s cute. Wife agrees but says it seems small. Husband gets home and announces he actually purchased the car.
She becomes very angry in response but still holds out some hope that once she sees it, she’ll be happy he did it. In the meantime, however, her anger grew. Her awareness of how she’d been dismissed and disregarded and excluded created rage within her, and it brought up all the old feelings of being unimportant and invisible, her thoughts and opinions ignored.
They worked their way through the issue, but that feeling didn’t leave her for quite a while. For months she was hyper-aware of being forgotten, ignored, or taken for granted.
Anticipated Micro-Separations: Sometimes just knowing that you and your partner are going to be separated (a work trip; a solo adventure; etc.) at some point in the future starts to really weigh on you.
It’s like if you know you’re moving in 6 months, maybe you start to pull away from your surroundings and the people in your life a bit. You start preparing yourself to feel distance with them, to need them less. While completely understandable, it means you miss out on more heartfelt time with the people and place you’re leaving behind.
Same with a couple — if you’re anticipating distance, you start to prepare yourself accordingly. Some couples start to fight when they know a separation is coming — feeling angry feels easier than feeling the pain of parting.
Invisible Micro-Separations: This is best described through an example, so I’ll get right to it.
A patient I treated had a very neglectful and cruel mother. Miraculously, he ended up in a very healthy and enduring marriage. However, he finds that he at times can become quite sad and detached the more he reaches for his partner only to be met with someone who’s totally absorbed in their phone.
He asks a question, partner doesn’t respond or responds minutes later. It got tedious and hurtful over time.
What this means for you: Most of us do not set out to hurt our partners, yet we are all capable of inflicting these little tiny hurts that accumulate over time.
My take on the topic is that all of us need to take the small tears in the fabric quite seriously. It’s often these small, unnoticed or unspoken items that lead to bigger problems and bigger relationship traumas down the road.
It’s also important that we learn how to tolerate more of our feelings of separateness, aloneness, loneliness, and isolation in order to have a stronger foundation that buffers against these micro-infractions.
And…I guess all of us have to decide at some point whether it’s worth it to keep going, or maybe there’s a way to build a bridge between the two separate beings?