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The Dance of Connection
By Harriet Lerner, PhD
HarperCollins
255 pp $25

When it comes to relationships, an extraordinary number of sophisticated people base their expectations on myths served up in fairy tales, film studios, and romance novels. Human love involves an incredibly complicated and volatile mix of chemistry, psychology, and just plain luck -- yet we somehow expect it to be easy, and feel cheated when it is not. While we deeply desire human connection, we'd like it to simply happen. Few of us are willing to do the difficult work involved in getting it right.

Psychologist Harriet Lerner wants to help. In the first lines of her book, The Dance of Connection, she identifies her goal: "To help people speak wisely and well, sometimes about the most difficult subjects." This includes asking questions, getting a point across, clarifying desires, beliefs, values, and limits. Lerner believes that success in human relationships -- whether romantic, platonic or professional -- requires that both parties involved be committed to personal growth and development, no matter how difficult and threatening that may be. Lerner has returned to this theme repeatedly in books such as her bestselling The Dance of Anger, as well as The Dance of Intimacy, The Dance of Deception, and now this latest volume.

In The Dance of Connection, Lerner focuses on the need for each of us to find our authentic voice in our closest relationships. She brings a therapist's insight to these connections, explaining that she has seen first-hand the countless ways intimate relationships can turn sour. At the same time, even the most troubled relationship can offer a valuable learning experience. "The self is continually reinvented through our interactions with others," Lerner writes. "Every relationship is a laboratory in which we can practice using our voice in new ways and observe the results of our experiments. Some of us need practice voicing our strength. Some of us need practice voicing vulnerability."

That doesn't mean blurting out your unvarnished feelings. "Letting it all hang out" and telling the other person exactly what you think may be satisfying, but anger and criticism actually let the other person off the hook, because such reactions allow him or her to stop listening and exit the dialogue altogether.

Take, for example, a young woman who has recently reconnected with her father many years after her parents' bitter divorce. The woman wants her father in her life, but is put off by the crude comments he frequently makes about women. Lerner points out that an angry outburst could well drive her father away again. Therefore, Lerner counsels the young woman to express her discomfort clearly but cautiously, to tell her father her genuine feelings but not make him feel attacked or belittled. This seems to work -- her father stops his vulgar behavior almost entirely, thereby salvaging their fledgling reconciliation.

Or take a man caught in an emotional triangle between his teen-age daughter and his new wife. He had no voice within the triangle, and his passivity was distorting the dynamics of the household. The man had always deferred to his first wife on parenting matters, and after his divorce he simply expected his second wife to take on much of the day-to-day responsibility for his daughter.

This scenario, however, didn't work out as he had supposed. The daughter and the new wife had fallen into the stereotypical roles of "evil stepmother" and "incorrigible teen" and were thus in constant conflict. In this man's case, achieving an authentic voice meant not only developing his own parenting skills and assuming more responsibility for his daughter, but also demanding that his daughter treat his new wife with respect.

Certainly, these are important points, and Lerner presents them in clear, readable prose. She herself has an energetic, humorous, and self-effacing writing voice. You can't help feeling she'd make a great friend and a wonderful therapist.

Ultimately, however, The Dance of Connection is a disappointment. Lerner has reworked here many of the themes she introduced in The Dance of Anger, but the presentation is less focused and incisive. The friendly, accessible tone that worked so well in the earlier book often becomes chatty and longwinded here. Anecdotes are too frequently personal or even beside the point.

Lerner once told an interviewer that she had published her earliest work in scholarly publications and was reluctant to step into the self-help arena because she was afraid it would undermine her authority as a psychotherapist. She wrote The Dance of Anger despite these reservations, and the response she received convinced her that self-help books can have a tremendous impact on people's lives.

The author's latest offering, however, suggests that Lerner has now become a bit too comfortable in the self-help niche. The Dance of Connection has a rambling, flabby tone; there is no pretense of scholarship or research beyond her own experience. Perhaps it is too much to expect citations from scientific studies in a book on relationships, but Lerner would have benefited from corroboration from other researchers or studies. Instead, it relies on her own life and professional practice to illustrate each point, which ends up giving the book a subjective and claustrophobic feel.

The Dance of Connection also demonstrates the danger of returning to the same formula too often, no matter how well it may have worked the first few times around. One cannot help suspecting that Lerner wasn't driven to write this book out of a burning desire to explore a new idea, but that she (or her publisher) caught the blockbuster bug (if Dance I, II, and III were successful, why not one more?). Some friendly advice for the author: sit out the next dance.

Still, this is a warmhearted, hopeful book, and Lerner should be applauded for grappling with one of the thorniest aspects of our human experience. "Only connect," E.M. Forster admonished in his book, Howard's End, "for without connection, human existence is too lonely to endure." But that doesn't mean it will be easy.

-- Connie Matthiessen is a San Francisco-based freelance writer who has covered health topics for Hippocrates and helped produce health documentaries for PBS.

Last updated August 21, 2009
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