DETOXIFYING YOUR RELATIONSHIPS: THE GEOMETRY OF TRIANGULATION

by Steven Goldsmith MD

DETOXIFYING YOUR RELATIONSHIPS: THE GEOMETRY

OF TRIANGULATION

by Steven Goldsmith MD

Why are our family’s relationships a mess? Why can’t we communicate? Why are we always fighting? Why is our child so troubled? How did we lose the intimacy in our marriage? These questions suggest varying scenarios of interpersonal pain. Yet if we examine their causes we can detect the fingerprints of the same culprit in each.

1. Since Roger’s birth eight years ago, George and Martha have spent much of their time together arguing about their only child.

George: “Why did you punish him for watching the videogame?”

Martha: “He hadn’t done his math homework yet.”

George: “One lousy videogame to relax. Jesus. For that you sent him to his room?You’re too damn strict. You’re always blaming him for everything.”

Martha: “Someone has to set limits. You’re at the office until all hours. And when you finally waltz home, you’re such a pushover with him. He twists you around his little finger.”

George: “No wonder he smokes all that pot. Maybe he should be on an antidepressant or something.”

Martha: “Over my dead body. He doesn’t need a drug, he needs a father.” . . .

Sometimes their arguments disperse them into separate bedrooms for the night. Not that such consequences hinder physical intimacy as they rarely indulge anyway, the aftermath of George’s cheating with his secretary during Martha’s pregnancy. At the time, Martha voiced upset over his transgression but decided to remain with George for financial security. They never discussed the matter again.

ANALYSIS: In order to sustain their marriage and not destroy their family, George and Martha address their relationship only obliquely, through their son. Their disputes about Roger represent disguised attempts to both express and distract from the unaddressed conflicts in their own relationship, which they are unable to express more directly with each other. But their arguments about Roger keep them together. Without Roger to focus upon (as when he finally leaves home), nothing will distract them from their joint misery, with eventual divorce likely. Meanwhile Roger, distressed over his parents’ strife about him, relies on cannabis to tune out the turmoil.

In family systems, triangulation is the insertion of one or more people into a two-person relationship in order to stabilize or save that relationship. As it deprives those two persons of the opportunity to directly resolve their problems and instead detours the expression of those problems through other people, triangulation solves nothing and instead creates more distress, especially among those triangulated like Roger, while obscuring the original reasons for it.

2. Fourteen-year-old Vicki Adams (fictitious name) lives in a perfect family—parents, younger brother, and two Labrador Retrievers. Everyone gets along; no one ever argues, let alone disagrees. They do everything together—shopping, movies, hikes. The only crack in this facade is Vicki’s anorexia nervosa, on which her parents focus daily. Evincing concern and caring, they scrutinize her daily diet, monitor her weight, and inquire often about how she is feeling and how her therapy is going.

ANALYSIS: The Adamses exhibit a pattern common to families with a troubled child, especially an anorexic: pseudomutuality. The family concord is fake. Inasmuch as they tolerate no conflict, no one is allowed to be a unique individual separate from the family. Therefore they cannot experience genuine closeness or solve interpersonal tensions, which remain submerged so as not to threaten family unity. Vicki unwittingly shoulders the burden of maintaining family stability through her eating disorder. Her parents do not address with each other their own relationship and lack of genuine intimacy but instead interact only around Vicki’s eating. In other words, her parents have triangulated her.

What if Vicki or her whole family receive effective psychotherapy? As her anorexia improves so her parents can focus less upon it, tensions between the parents will increase, perhaps threaten their marriage unless they address those tensions directly.

3. Triangulation often contributes to other childhood psychiatric disorders—depression, anxiety disorders, addictions—as in the film Ordinary People. In it teenaged Conrad Jarrett suffers from suicidal depression, PTSD, and survivor guilt following the accidental death of his brother Buck. His parents, tiptoeing around the topic of Buck’s death, maintain an outwardly harmonious and comfortable relationship even as Conrad’s angst has insinuated itself into their marriage, functioning as a daily reminder of their loss. It is when a therapist helps Conrad to begin healing from the loss and regain his will to live that his parents’ marriage falls apart. With Conrad improved, they must confront the disappearance of love for each other, and they separate.

When faced with a disturbed child, then, a therapist must consider whether that child’s symptoms are serving, through triangulation, to stabilize the family in order to spare it from disruption. Such situations are common and usually not helped by a clueless psychiatrist (also common) prescribing drugs for the symptomatic child without understanding the underlying family dynamics that perpetuate the symptoms. Triangulation prevents the solution of interpersonal problems and makes people sick, often without their understanding why. Many troubled families communicate with each other almost entirely through triangulation, thereby compounding their dysfunction. In such situations children are the most vulnerable as they are captive audiences, unable to escape their sick families.

Why not suppress the troubled child’s symptoms with a drug, perhaps an SSRI? First, because drugs don’t work as well as touted and have side effects. But largely because the family dysfunction will continue. Only now, like a giant mutant blob, the parents’ interactions will incorporate the new information. They will now focus incessantly on their child’s medication, argue about it, explore alternative drugs, obsess together about its effects, and through these behaviors continue to triangulate their child so the child remains ill.

4. Triangulation occurs not only in families but within any set of relationships.

Your mother: “Don’t say anything to your father, but I’m thinking about divorcing him.”

Your friend: “I know he’s your good friend and all, but why do you hang around with Lester? I heard him badmouth you the other day.”

When a friend/relative A shares confidences about your friend/relative B or asks you not to share certain information with B, you will likely feel uncomfortable. Being triangulated, placed between A and B, has that effect as it contaminates one or both of your relationships. At the same time, A is triangulating himself into your relationship with B—same effect.

Solution: don’t collude with invitations to triangulate; say you are uncomfortable with such confidences or requests and that friend/relative A should work out the relevant issues with friend/relative B, not with you as you value both relationships. Do this and you will spare yourself trouble.

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Be well.