Hugo Schwyzer

Over the holidays, I met with one of my former youth group kids. Miguel is at university now, doing very well. He’s in a steady relationship with the same girl he’s been seeing since the start of his sophomore year, a year and a half ago. And while talking with Miguel, something popped into my head which I haven’t really dealt with explicitly on this blog: the vital difference in relationships between self-soothing and self-medicating.

Miguel and I — and a lot of folks — are cut from the same cloth. We are prone to bouts of anxiety in our romantic relationships. For me, one of the most difficult lessons I’ve had to learn over the years is how to manage that anxiety, particularly when my partner is distant or preoccupied, or when we are going through a quarrel. My wife loves me very much, and I don’t doubt her love. But she is also a woman with interests besides me and our marriage (thank goodness), and she is the sort of person who, like most of us, has her periods of wanting to be close and then wanting to withdraw. Miguel’s girlfriend is apparently very much the same. And in the early stages of my relationship with my wife — and with many previous relationships as well — maintaining my own calm and sense of well-being when she was more distant or simply “elsewhere” was a very great challenge. My mind would rush immediately to the worst: “She’s unhappy and wants to leave me”. Of course, the “worst” always revolved around my fears about the relationship; rather self-centeredly, I far too often assumed that my partners’ moods were usually a response to my behavior, neglecting the reality that there would always be other causes of happiness and worry in their lives.

It’s not just folks with the common “Borderline” diagnosis who have trouble managing anxiety in relationships. I’ve noticed that a great many people, particularly in the early stages of serious love affairs, have a tremendously difficult time coping with a partner’s withdrawal or distance. This has come up before on this blog, particularly in terms of disparate sexual desire (most recently and briefly, here.) Leaving aside the specific issue of whether sex can ever be obligatory, there’s little question that when it comes to that issue — as well as many others — few couples ever go through their lives in perfect harmony. Whether it’s affection or conversation, it’s very common for one person to want “it” more than the other. This can fluctuate, and roles can even be reversed, but the general rule is that some degree of uneven desire for something important will be present in almost every longterm relationship.

I’m concerned today with how the higher-desire partner manages his or her frustration and anxiety. And here’s where that distinction between self-medicating and self-soothing becomes so vital. Self-medicating is about more than turning to drugs or alcohol, though those are classic self-medicating devices. Self-medicating means dealing with anxiety by doing something that provides a temporary rush of excitement sufficiently strong to distract one from focusing on the relationship. Using pornography addictively, overeating, overexercising, compulsive shopping, disappearing into a marathon “World of Warcraft” session — all of these can be strategies for self-medicating. Flirting with others to relieve the sense of dependency on one partner, and infidelity itself are also famous self-medicating strategies. Self-anesthetizing might be a better term; while some medicines do in fact heal, the kind of self-medicating I’m talking about here involves the use of a temporary analgesic to mask the pain and anxiety.

The problem with self-medicating, besides the obvious ones inherent in infidelity and most compulsions, is that it does nothing to deal with the root cause of the anxiety or to bring about healing in the relationship. Like masking a chronic injury with painkillers, self-medicating in response to feeling unwanted only delays dealing with the problem until a later date. Self-medicating does nothing to address the root problem in the relationship, which is sometimes not the disparate desire itself but the anxiety that that lack of equilibrium causes. While it’s enormously tempting to look for a quick fix when one isn’t getting what one wants from a partner, common sense tells us that what we end up doing when we self-medicate is exacerbating the problem. When we are reactive or compulsive or simply numbed, we are almost always going to end up appearing less desirable and less appealing to our lovers in the long run.

So how is self-soothing different? It’s a difficult distinction for some to grasp. There are similarities to self-medicating. Both involve the deliberate effort to refocus one’s energy away (temporarily) from the relationship that is triggering the anxiety. As long as the focus is relentlessly on the other person (”Why won’t she talk to me?” “Why is he so distant” “Why doesn’t he want sex anymore?”), then the higher-desire partner can neither get relief or deal with the core cause of their own fears. But while self-medicating involves taking up a strategy for numbing oneself against the pain that another person can cause, self-soothing is focused on doing deliberately loving actions for one’s own self. Self-medicating is reactive; self-soothing is proactive.

Someone who wants to self-medicate says “How can I make this anxiety go away NOW?” And the answer, all too often, lies in “checking out” through overwork or drugs or alcohol or flirtation or spending or eating or… you get the idea. Someone who wants to self-soothe asks the question “What can I do right now to remind myself that I am whole and complete, as I am, lacking nothing?” If the goal of self-medication is to anesthetize the pain that comes with feeling so connected to another person, the goal of self-soothing is to focus on loving self-care. The goal of self-soothing is not to provide the illusion that one’s partner doesn’t matter. The goal of self-soothing is to provide the reminder that the self matters first and foremost. That’s a vital distinction, and it drives the choice of strategies to which one can then turn. And those strategies can be nearly as varied as the ones for self-medicating.

One way I was taught to learn to self-soothe rather than self-medicate was to ask myself a question whenever I felt significant anxiety in a relationship, and it was time for me to stop trying to “fix the problem” and “solve” the other person. “What would I be doing for me”, I asked myself, “if I weren’t so focused on this relationship right now?” Of course, the first answers that popped into my head were self-medicating ones! But I asked myself a follow-up: “What can I do right now that’s going to help me feel better about myself tomorrow as well as today, regardless of what my partner does?” The focus was on me, but not just on immediate pain relief. It was on self-care.

And what I found was that I had lists of things I had wanted to do but chose not to for the sake of being perpetually available for the relationship. The books I hadn’t read, the movies I hadn’t seen, the hikes I hadn’t taken, the friends I hadn’t made plans with — it always amazed me (in relationship after relationship) how much self-affirming behavior I had made the choice to forego just so I could “be there” for my partner, wife or girlfriend when she might need me. Most of the time, my partner hadn’t asked me to give these up; resentment would thus be misplaced. Most of the time, I had cut back on doing the things which made me feel good that weren’t directly connected to the woman in my life. So when she needed her space, or when we were quarreling, I had far too little to fall back on that would serve to remind me that my happiness wasn’t entirely contingent on this other person. I figured out, eventually, that the desire to self-medicate, to look for the quick fix, would always come up as long as I didn’t have a support system in place for those times when the focus needed to be away from the relationship itself.

One of the many reasons I got involved in youth ministry a decade ago was because I saw what an excellent self-soothing strategy working with self-absorbed teenagers would be. Mind you, this wasn’t the only reason I went into this avocational work. Altruism and self-interest aren’t as mutually exclusive as we sometimes like to believe. I wanted to “give back” very badly, and I had and have a passion for working with young people. But I knew that I would get a healthy charge from being around teenagers. Though my relationship with the kids would be uni-directional (meaning that they could come to me with their challenges, but I would never burden with them with my problems), it didn’t mean it would be entirely without emotional benefit to me. Focusing on the needs of young people (including those students at the college whom I mentored) gave me a deep sense of satisfaction, and reminded me that I could be useful to a great many folks besides romantic partners. Even when the teaching or mentoring or youth work becomes exhausting, as it occasionally does, I find it soothing because of its capacity to remind me of how much it is I have to give, and that I am called to give to a great many people.

Some less gregarious types might find self-soothing in painting, in sculpture, in getting involved with cat rescues. The possibilities are enormous. But it’s vital, I think, for those of us who are prone to anxiety, and prone to be (at least in some areas) the “higher-desire partner” to have a set of healthy, life-affirming coping tools at our disposal. The fewer self-soothing options we have, the greater the pressure we will put on our partners and lovers. The greater the pressure we put on them, the more they will withdraw; the more they will withdraw the more frantic we will become, and the greater the chance we will turn to destructive self-medicating behaviors in order to cope.

And when in doubt about the difference between self-medicating and self-soothing, and whether one particular action is one or the other, I was taught to ask one more question: “When the high of doing this wears off, will I feel better or worse about myself physically and emotionally?” When I thought about the question seriously and answered it honestly, I found that even crazy old Hugo could usually grasp the distinction and make the right choice.