Fabri and Cinzia love each other very much but their relationship has been a source of pain for both for some time, they can no longer communicate without arguing or there are long silences between them.

From their story we can gather that: Cinzia was an unnoticed and precociously adultized child, she was not allowed to ask for help and had to self-regulate her emotions in times of difficulty.

Fabri, on the other hand, was a very complacent child, very obedient and completely unaware of his needs and fears.

Cinzia fell in love with Fabri’s ability to listen and his enormous availability, Fabri finally felt seen and important because Cinzia recognized his skill to take care of her. Finally, someone made him feel useful and capable!

But at a certain point the spell was broken.

Cinzia continued to demand constant attention from Fabri who in turn began to feel increasingly inadequate with respect to his partner’s requests.

It was a crescendo in which the behaviour of one partner impacts the behaviour of the other and enhances it.

Cinzia needed to satiate her hunger for love that has ancient roots and appeared increasingly in need of attention. Fabri didn`t feel up to Cinzia’s expectations, was frightened by her requests and began to distance himself.

The more Fabri distanced himself, the more Cinzia felt the so-called “attachment anguish” and insistently sought him out.

Cinzia said that she doesn’t like this always chasing Fabri, she doesn’t like to feel so needy. But at the same time, she feels like she has no way out: she can’t help but be so demanding of Fabri while feeling so inadequate when she does.

Fabri in turn said he feels overwhelmed by Cinzia’s requests that come to him like a tsunami, and he too feels he has no way out: on the one hand he would like to respond to his partner’s requests, but he does not feel able to satisfy her. On the other hand, he feels that, if he acquiesces to all the need for love that Cinzia throws at him, he risks annihilating himself and losing himself. By only dedicating himself exclusively to satisfying his partner’s desires, Fabri is afraid of losing his needs, his boundaries: just as it happened to him as a child when he no longer knew what he wanted and who he was because it was more important to please others than to listen to himself.

What can we deduce from this couple`s relationship? The separation anguish that Cinzia feels derives from the assessment that Fabri is inaccessible. It is feeling Fabri far away that activates her fears and her search for closeness. As S. Johnson writes in the book Introduction to Attachment, A Guide for Therapists on Primary Relationships and Their Renewal:
“When an individual is threatened, either by traumatic events, or by negative aspects of daily life such as illness, or by an attack on the security of the attachment bond itself, it happens that a strong emotionality manifests itself and that attachment needs for support and connection become particularly salient and urgent, and consequently attachment behaviours are activated,  such as the search for closeness”.

Attachment theory says that the sense of connection with a loved one can be considered a primary mechanism of intrinsic emotional regulation, and that attachment to significant others is our “primary protection against feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness” (McFarlane & Van Der Kolk, Traumatic stress: The effects of overwhelming experience on mind, body, and society. The Guilford Press.1996)

This is what happens to Cinzia who explicitly says that if she senses Fabri far away, she can no longer regulate her emotions.

When Cinzia and Fabri lose their emotional connection, they not only lose the sense of being a couple but also the sense of themselves and their own value as individuals. It is no coincidence that, when the connection is lost, depression is a natural response. In the same way, even the response of anger, which both Cinzia and Fabri express, when they feel distant, can be considered “an attempt to re-establish contact with an attachment figure considered inaccessible, unresponsive”. Finally, speaking of anger, according to Bowlby, in the context of separation from the attachment figure we can distinguish two types of anger: the “anger of hope”, which manifests itself as protest and agitation during the protest phase, where the child or adult gets angry, cries and is hyperactive in an attempt to recover his attachment figure; and the “anger of despair”,  which is not necessarily explicit anger, but a distressing pain linked to the failure of attempts at rapprochement and the painful acceptance of loss.

With Cinzia and Fabri, finding the reason hidden behind Cinzia’s requests and behind Fabri’s silence was decisive. Their problematic interactions were seen by both as an expression of their underlying vulnerabilities and had attachment significance. Each partner took responsibility for their own actions and by giving a meaning to the reactions and the position taken by their partner, Cinzia was able to say to Fabri: “When I ask you not to neglect me, I understand that you no longer feel in a safe connection with me and you withdraw. I thought your withdrawal meant you didn’t care, now I realize it’s just your way of surviving your own fears when you don’t know what else to do. It’s your way of protecting us.”

And equally Fabri was able to say to Cinzia: “When I withdraw, I understand that you don’t feel connected to me and you feel frustrated, lost and abandoned. I thought your frustration meant I was failing, now I realize it’s just your way of surviving your own fears when you don’t know what else to do. It’s your way of fighting for us. You think that staying silent and not speaking will only make things worse.” (from Altera Pagani2020)

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Couple in crisis, photo by yanalya, from Freepik
(www.cittanuova.it – Autrice: Lucia Coco)