A client asked me this week a very interesting question. If both her and her partner wanted the same things, that is to be loved, understood and make the relationship work why doesn’t that ‘want’ alone make it happen. Surely if two people desire the same things it should be easy to create the perfect relationship. And yet they are still in conflict. Still in upset and stuck in an endless cycle of pain, blame and frustration. Why is that?
The more I learn about the phenomenon that is love, the more I realize that it has very little to do with whether or not either of you want love in your lives or not. It has little do with the fact that both of you may have the same needs, emotionally or physically. It has more to do with the fact that relationships are imperfect and always will be for a very special reason.
Relationship is a place we come together to grow. In relationship our partner (after an obligatory honeymoon period which often lasts up to two years), will eventually present us with our biggest challenge. They will behave in a way that triggers our fears, and we will do one of two things. We will either withdraw and leave or we will stay and fight. What our partners do, quite unconsciously, is manifest behaviours that remind us of our earliest experiences of similar behaviours towards us. What remains hidden is the awareness of how we adapted ourselves to stay safe and cared for by the people who were manifesting these behaviours. For most people, that would be your parents. One or the other of them behaved in ways that, if we had not been able to find a coping mechanism in ourselves, would have threatened our survival. Literally.
For example, lets suppose a baby girl cries a lot at night. Perhaps she feels the disconnection from her caring parent. Perhaps she feels alone, and feels scared. But perhaps her hard working father needs his sleep. One mother I know had this situation. She would take the little girl from her cot, put her in a pram and shut her in the dining room where no one would be disturbed by her cries. Both parents needed their sleep. It made sense to them to do this. The small infant quickly learns how to soothe herself. She realizes that the crying thing doesn’t work. She is not going to get her needs met to be held and comforted, so she learns some resilient techniques to cope.
As an adult those resilient techniques show up in her never being an emotionally needy partner. Perhaps she attracts men who need to be put first or who seem to be unemotionally unavailable and/or more emotionally needy than her. She somehow automatically knows how to turn down the volume on her own emotions and adapt herself to his needs. One day though something important happens for her. She wants to share this ‘something’ with her partner but he completely forgets that he has agreed to support her and she feels let down, unheard and pushed away. On this occasion her normal strategy does not kick in. She cannot find the resilience to cope. It’s so painful that she comes to couples coaching searching for reasons why every time something is important to her, he is unavailable. And even more than that, she wants to know why she let it happen over and over for umpteen years.
Her pattern was created at a very young age. The small infant who learned how to comfort itself would never seek out the type of partner who would be there emotionally for her – it would be too unfamiliar. Instead she attracts a partner who is not so concerned with her emotional needs most of the time – that’s much more familiar. And all the vibes this ‘grown up’ version of the little girl puts out to the world, makes it look like she doesn’t have those kinds of emotional needs. By the time the adult ‘little girl’ comes to see me she realizes that her strategy does not work anymore because she keeps finding herself back where she always is, ‘crying’ out for support and not being heard.
She may as well be back in her pram in the dining room.
In Imperfect Relationships (which is what all relationships are) the job of our partners is to trigger this exact experience in us. However bizarre that may sound, all day long their job is to trigger our pain, however buried, inside us. Because it’s only in relationship that we can grow ourselves and heal our own wounds. When we can see our patterns showing up with our partners we have stepped on the first rung of the ladder of awareness of ourselves. The fact is that relationship is not specifically about what our partners can provide for us. It’s more about what our partners can trigger in us that we can learn from. Their job is to awaken us to that hurt lost part of ourselves that we had hoped, probably unconsciously, that they would heal. But, we can only be healed by our understanding of what our wound is and what we made it mean about what we deserve and what we accept.
Your partner is there to reflect this learning to you. The more conscious you are that you have been looking for validity of your worth and for healing of your wound from them, the more aware you become that it’s not possible for them to heal what has long since past. We mistakenly believe that if we just love them enough, if we are quiet enough, funny enough, generous enough, and every other adaptive behaviour we have created to stay safe, that they will love us in the way we want to be loved. But they don’t and we stay hurt. Their specific job is to continue to ‘disappoint’ until we can articulate, in a way they can understand, what their behaviours remind us of and how these behaviours (albeit with no intention of doing so) can hurt you to your core. At this point, once you have expressed it and its out in the open, the behaviours of theirs that triggered you so easily, begin to diminish. That is the phenomenon of the process I use.
People who work with me learn in the first session exactly what their wounds are and where they come from and how their ongoing behaviours keep those wounds from ever healing.
Our Imperfect Relationships are the perfect relationships to teach us what we need to learn about love. When I can see that you can never hurt me, that you would never wish to hurt me, but I am hurt by what I make up your behaviour means about me, I can see you and our relationship for what it really it is. I can see that all you want to do is love me but I may need to let you know how to do that instead of withdrawing from you, blaming you or critisising you for something you have no idea was causing me so much upset. And it goes without saying that I need to do the same for you.
The dialogue process that my couples engage in provides an entry point to understanding so much more about the other. Beginning from a place of imperfection its possible to create a new way to love that would seem unimaginable given the amount of pain being experienced by both partners.
Our Imperfect Relationships are perfect. Imagine if that were true? Imagine if it were possible that its only some very old beliefs and fears that keep us from experiencing each others real essence, that keep us from experiencing perfect love with each other.
If the above resonates with you, then you are ready to work with me. Call me for a preliminary chat; I’ll be waiting to hear from you.
Love Francine
