Barriers to Relationship Intimacy, Part 3

9. Hypersensitivity and emotional bingeing create a lack of control in a relationship.

Hypersensitivity can be defined a disorder of feeling too quickly hurt, affected, and/or resentful in response to the events and discomforts of everyday life. Hypersensitive people are emotionally affected more easily and quickly than the vast majority of their peers.

Hypersensitivity can arise from inherited constitution, depression, active drug and alcohol intoxication, and many other sources. Hypersensitive people have something wrong with them that they need to face, fix, and manage.

Emotional bingeing, in contrast, refers to manipulative behavior under conscious control which overplays emotions regarding a given situation.

Emotional bingeing reveals that the overdramatizing or exaggeration of feelings about a situation or an event - such as an affront - is an attempt to purchase a secondary gain such as feeling like a wounded victim or martyr. People who emotionally binge need to control themselves and be more responsible, because the flooding and prolongation of excessive emotion in the couple eats away at the logic, intellect, and science that lays at the foundation of healthy relationships.

10. Poor needs negotiation creates conflict.

You recognize that all people are different and that even the most compatible couple will have individual needs that differ at times. Effective management of differing needs takes a problem-solving approach that uses compromise and negotiation as its tools. Partners in a relationship who compromise often feel a sense of pride in modifying a need downward when they know it will satisfy and stabilize their partner and the relationship itself. Mutual giving flourishes in an atmosphere of cooperation.

When any of the above elements are absent, by conscious choice or by lack of awareness, the satisfaction of individual needs in a relationship becomes more conflicted: a relationship loses its health when it becomes a battleground.

11. Reactivity creates run-away fighting and arguing.

A famous directive from Alcoholics Anonymous instructs you to exercise restraint of tongue and pen. In contrast, reactivity is a mindless, thoughtless reflex and involves the least evolved, most primitive parts of yourself and your animal origins. Restraint is equated with thoughtful, conscious self-control and indicates better ego functioning. Soccer match riots epitomize the reactivity that leads to run-away fighting and even murder. A group becomes a mob. Restraint of reactivity minimizes the likelihood of rioting in a relationship.

12. Litigious behavior changes the relationship into a courtroom.

Litigious behavior stands alongside psychoanalyzing one's partner as the newest form of verbal violence in a relationship. Specifically, litigious behavior is a deeply neurotic relationship dynamic in which one partner sets out to prove they are right and the other partner is wrong. The goal and method is inevitably one of competitive domination.

Litigating in a relationship is different from mindless immature bickering. Litigating can hook a couple into an addictive, competitive battle in which victories are sought through the intellectual and strategic conquest lawyers often use in court.

Litigating is to be avoided at all costs. Not only does it damage the goodwill in a relationship; it also creates the illusion that there is only one right way. Do you want to create a courtroom out of your relationship? Certainly not.