Loving Him Without Losing You by Beverly Engel Read Free Book Online Page A

physical act), but also extends the involvement of others (if a boy starts to cry, people come around to talk and help). While this involvement would no doubt benefit him emotionally, it is not hardwired into his system, as it is in girls and women.
    A girl, on the other hand, tends to want to get help in releasing her stress and uses the stress as a way of creating emotional connectedness. Women tend to see their partners as potential givers of comfort when they are upset. When the comfort is not forthcoming, many are disappointed but continue to try to get it. This is what traps many women—their false hope that someday they’ll get the comfort they need from their partner.
Women are literally more sensitive than men.
    The female brain is organized to respond more sensitively to all sensory stimuli, including tactile sensitivity. In a sample of young adults, women showed “overwhelmingly” greater sensitivity to pressure on the skin on every part of their bodies.

    The Psychological Reasons
    In addition to cultural conditioning and biological hardwiring, there are also psychological factors that contribute to women’s tendency to lose themselves in relationships. While psychology is biology to a great extent, it is also greatly influenced by environment and warrants its own category.
    The most significant psychological factor has been discovered by some fairly recent research on female psychology. Within the emerging body of literature on differences between women and men, several studies, including those of Gilligan and Miller, suggest that women value connectedness and relationship more than men do. In her study, Harvard professor Carol Gilligan dramatically demonstrated that in making moral decisions women value maintaining connections with others and not hurting others more than men, who base their moral decisions more on general principles. These find- ings were consistent with those found by Jean Baher Miller:
    “Women’s sense of self becomes very much organized around being able to maintain affiliations and relationships. Eventually for many women the threat of disruption of connection is perceived not just as loss of a relation- ship but as something closer to a total loss of self.”
    It is no wonder that most women will do nearly anything to maintain a relationship, including going along with things she doesn’t believe in. To do otherwise is to risk the loss of connection, the very core of what makes her who she is.
    Women Have Thinner Boundaries Than Men
    Women also tend to have what Ernest Hartman, M.D., the author of Bound- aries in the Mind, calls thinner boundaries than men. This is especially significant when it comes to personal relationships. Thin interpersonal bound- aries cause a person to become involved in relationships rapidly and deeply and at times to lose one’s sense of self in a relationship. Conversely, having thick boundaries implies not becoming overinvolved, being careful, and not becoming involved with anyone rapidly.
    According to the results of Hartmann’s boundary questionnaire, there are clear-cut differences between men and women in boundary scores. “Overall,

    women scored significantly thinner than men—thinner by about twenty points, or 8 percent of the overall score.”
    Although women scored thinner on almost all categories of boundaries, the differences in scores were especially pronounced on the first eight cate- gories, what Hartmann referred to as the “Personal Total,” describing personal experiences, feelings, sensitivities, and preferences.
    Judith Bevis, a member of Hartmann’s boundary research group, con- ducted a study in 1986 on groups of evening students at an urban university. Her most prominent finding was that the women in the study tended to value certain aspects of thin boundaries, such as interpersonal connectedness, and to feel comfortable with them, whereas they found certain aspects of thick boundaries, such as autonomy, to be uncomfortable.