The German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788-1860) had a fable that Deborah Luepnitz in her entertaining book of psychotherapy case stories paraphrases like this:
“A troop of porcupines is milling about on a cold winter’s day. In order to keep from freezing, the animals move closer together. Just as they are close enough to huddle, however, they start to poke each other with their quills. In order to stop the pain, they spread out, lose the advantage of commingling, and again begin to shiver. This sends them back in search of each other, and the cycle repeats as they struggle to find a comfortable distance between entanglement and freezing.”
Finding the right distance between ourselves and other people is something we spend a lot of time working on in therapy. We need to find the distance where our need for intimacy is met but at the same time where we preserve our independence and maintain our boundaries. If we don’t get the distance right we end up feeling either smothered or lonely and isolated. As the clinical psychologist Robert Akeret says: “One of the hardest things for all of us to learn is the balance of maintaining a close relationship with others while still retaining our own individuality, so that separation is not isolation, and togetherness is not symbiotic.”
To add to the confusion is that fact that the optimal distance for intimacy will wary not only depending on the individual and his and her place in your life but is likely to change for the same person over time. Thus the perfect distance is something we continuously need to readjust.
Schopenhauer ends his fable by saying: ”Those with a great deal of internal warmth preferred to stay apart from the group, and so caused and encountered the least trouble.”
I believe that a significant goal of therapy, whether stated explicitly or not, is to help people cultivate more “internal warmth” so that they can approach a relationship from a place of strength rather than a place of desperate need. If we come to a relationship with the desire to find an equal partner with whom to share life we will have different expectations to those who need their partner to make them feel worthy, lovable, exciting or alive.