Their failure to do so is one of the main reasons for our eventual unhappiness
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
Their failure to do so is one of the main reasons for our eventual unhappiness.Inevitably, things start to go wrong In some cases, all hell breaks loose. The veil of illusion falls away, and it seems that our partners are different to what we thought they were. We begin to see traits that we can’t bear; even qualities we once admired grate on us. Old hurts are reactivated as we realise that our partners cannot or will not love and care for us as they promised. Our dream shatters.Disillusionment turns to anger, fuelled by fear that we won’t survive without the love and safety that was within our gasp.
Since our partners are no longer willingly giving us what we need, we change tactics, trying to manoeuvre them into caring – through anger, crying, withdrawal, shame, intimidation, criticism – whatever works We will make them love us. Now we negotiate – for time, love, chores, gifts – measuring our success against a quasi-economic yardstick of profit and loss. The Power Struggle, the natural second stage of every marriage, has begun, and may go on for many years, until we split, until we settle into a more or less satisfactory truce, or until we seek help, desperate to feel alive and whole again, to have our dream back.Central to my work as a marital therapist is this dynamic driven by the old brain. That part of each one of us, our unconscious mind, is seeking situations and people to recreate its original wholeness. It is my belief that it does this by looking for people who resemble the original caretakers in order to replay the situations in which it was wounded, in order, this time, to reach a different ending.Many people have a hard time accepting the idea that they have searched for partners who are like their parents.
Sometimes, on a conscious level, they were doing the exact opposite. What most of us think we are looking for is people with only positive traits – people who are, among other things, kind, loving, intelligent, good-looking and creative. But no matter what their conscious intentions, my clinical experience has shown me time and time again that most people are attracted to mates who have their caretakers’ positive and negative traits; and, typically, the negative traits are more influential.In its search for the perfect partner, our old brain is carrying an image, a complex synthesis of responses to early needs against which it is defended. This image of “the person who can make me whole again” I call the imago (ih-MAH-go).
Though we consciously seek only the positive traits, the negative traits of our caretakers are more indelibly imprinted in our imago picture, because those are the traits that caused the wounds we now seek to heal. In other words, we look for someone with the same deficits of care and attention that hurt us in the first place. So when we fall in love, when bells ring and the world seems altogether a better place, our old brain is telling us that we’ve found someone with whom we can complete our unfinished childhood business. Unfortunately, since we don’t understand what’s going on, we’re shocked when further into the relationship the awful truth of our beloved surfaces, and our first impulse is to run screaming in the opposite direction.And there’s more bad news. Another powerful component of our imago is that we also seek the qualities missing in ourselves – both good and bad – that got lost in the shuffle of socialisation.
If we are shy, we seek someone outgoing; if we’re disorganised, we’re attracted to someone cool and rational. The anger we repressed because it was punished, and which we unconsciously hate ourselves for feeling, we “annex” in our partner. But eventually, when our own repressed feelings are stirred, we are uncomfortable, and criticise our partners for being too bold, too coldly rational, too temperamental.THE POWER STRUGGLEWHEN does romantic love end and the power struggle begin? It’s impossible to define precisely when these stages occur. But for most couples there is a noticeable change in the relationship about the time they make a definite commitment to each other. Once they say, “Let’s get married”, or “Let’s get engaged”, the pleasing, inviting dance of courtship draws to a close, and lovers begin to want not only the expectation of need- fufilment but the reality as well. Suddenly it isn’t enough that their partners be affectionate, clever, attractive and fun-loving.