In Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix illuminates how this process works. He maintains that in searching for the perfect mate, if you’re like most of us, you’re guided by “an unconscious image of the opposite sex” that you’ve been forming since you were born.11It’s an image, he explains, that both resembles your caretakers and compensates for the repressed parts of yourself. 12He calls this mental picture, this image that resides deep in your subconscious, the “imago.” It represents a detailed composite of the positive and negative traits of the central people in your early life—parents, caretakers, siblings—and the experiences you had with them. According to Hendrix, the most powerful memories incorporated into the imago are the negative ones. Every time you meet a potential romantic partner, he asserts, you’re sizing him or her up unconsciously against your imago. And when you experience that instant attraction, that thing we call chemistry, it’s because you’ve found a match for your imago.13
I believe that chemistry takes a number of forms in these unconscious relationships. It can be a gut feeling that you’ve found the missing parts that are going to make you whole—your other half, as Patti Scialfi described it. Or it can be the recognition of the imago—the composite of your most intimate family histories coming to life, as Hendrix describes it. Or it may be that you experience a familiar dynamic with a romantic partner that you’ve had with your parents or, in some cases, haven’t had—a missing piece that was never realized in your relationship with your parents. Any way you look at it, it’s all about completion, and it’s all about conditioning.
Let’s say, for example, you’re a woman who didn’t feel safe, loved, and protected by your father. Without being aware of it, you might be looking for someone who makes you feel safe, loved, and protected, because, unconsciously, a part of you is missing those qualities and those feelings. Or maybe you’re a man whose mother couldn’t express her emotions, including affection. In response to your conditioning, you might be drawn to emotionally aloof women like your mother, thereby replicating your family dynamics, or, on the other hand, you might be attracted to affectionate, loving women who make you feel lovable and worthwhile. In either case, you’re creating potential problems, because you aren’t attracted to either of these women for who they really are—you’re attracted to them based on an unconscious, hidden agenda driven by the past.
In romantic relationships, opposites tend to attract. Two people come together to fill the voids in each other. But such attractions are often problematic. Consider this example: Mary goes out with her friends on a Friday night and meets Brian. Outgoing and friendly, Brian is a world traveler with a high-powered sales job and a magnetic personality. He’s a dashing, interesting, charismatic person. They share a few drinks and a little conversation. She thinks he’s fabulous and can’t wait to see him again. Brian feels the same way. Mary is a nurse practitioner who has worked at the same hospital and lived in the same condo for ten years; he sees her as a solid, secure, dependable person. Just the kind of woman I need, he thinks. Someone caring, giving, stable—someone to keep me grounded. Mary, on the other hand, sees Brian as dynamic and exciting. He seems so worldly, so wise.
Mary is introverted, conservative, and security-oriented. Brian is eclectic, a bit of a Renaissance man, extroverted, and impulsive. At their first meeting, chemistry sparks. So they start a relationship, and over time, those very characteristics that initially attracted them to each other become sore points, sources of conflict. Mary starts telling her friends: “I don’t trust Brian. He’s always flirting with other women.” Or “Brian can’t hold down a job; he keeps hopping from one thing to another.” Or “He’s so irresponsible.” They argue about money, about how they’re going to spend their time. Their values are as different as their personalities. Over time, Brian starts to find Mary boring. “She has no spontaneity,” he complains to his friends. “She’s uptight.” “Where’s your sense of humor?” he asks her so often it becomes a running joke—only it’s not so funny anymore.
Opposites attract for a reason—the very same reason that those relationships tend to fall apart. When a relationship is driven by conditioned patterns, when it’s built on an unconscious need to replicate or compensate for your childhood experiences, it produces anger, resentment, disillusionment, and alienation. It erodes self-esteem. And it can lead to emotional and physical exhaustion because it takes a lot of energy to deal with the conflicts that arise again and again. Sometimes these relationships can go on for years, particularly if they represent a low level of dysfunction. Say two people marry at a young age because each embodies the other’s lost parts. They strike a happy balance, finding a harmony that works. Maybe, despite their differences, they share similar values or enjoy the same close-knit community or derive pleasure from raising their children together. Then one partner hits a midlife crisis and it topples the precarious balance, or one partner dies. As a result of such unions, people can find themselves alone at some point, with big gaps in their lives—and in their selves.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s quite possible for a couple to work through these issues within the context of a relationship, to learn and grow. When couples come to me for relationship coaching, I encourage them to work together to bring an unconscious relationship to a conscious level. But it’s not easy. Both partners have to be committed to the process. Many people are ill equipped to handle the conflicts that arise in relationships because they’ve never learned how to communicate effectively. I attribute the high divorce rate to issues such as these. If you’re not currently in a relationship, here’s the good news: you have the opportunity to start from scratch to create a conscious, healthy relationship with yourself and to emerge whole—and better prepared for the possibility of a healthy, conscious relationship with someone else.
The First Step: Creating a Loving
Relationship with Yourself
I first met Jenna when she came to me for relationship coaching. Her goal: to find a life partner. She was in her late 30s and desperate to fall in love, marry, and have a family. After the first couple of sessions, however, it became clear that before she could create and sustain a healthy and fulfilling relationship with another person, she first needed to develop a healthy and fulfilling relationship with herself.
Jenna’s father had abandoned her family when she was two years old. An only child with no extended family, Jenna was raised by a highly critical and self-centered mother who controlled every aspect of her life—how she dressed, how she wore her hair, how she behaved, her school work and activities, what and how much she ate, and who she could and could not see. With no other relatives or friends to either support or serve as a buffer between them, Jenna and her mother developed an unhealthy, codependent relationship that revolved almost exclusively around each other.
Given that her mother exerted a high level of control and made all the decisions for her, Jenna became extremely dependent and was terrified that her mother, too, might leave. As is common among children who are abandoned, Jenna grew up believing that her father had left because she had been a bad daughter, and so she worked very hard to be perfect so her mother wouldn’t leave too. Despite her vigilance, however, nothing Jenna did ever seemed good enough, and she was constantly subjected to her mother’s criticism.
As a result, Jenna adopted the role of the Lost Child and became a classic people-pleaser. Driven by an ever-present fear of rejection and abandonment, she became a master at anticipating and meeting other people’s needs as a way of keeping them in her life. At the age of 16, she began a series of brief encounters with men, a pattern that continued into her 30s. She sought their approval by acceding to their wishes, essentially playing the role of doormat again and again and again. By the time she came to me, she was not only trapped in this pattern of unsatisfying relationships, but she was living dangerously—having unprotected sex with men, many of them married, on a routine basis. Her core beliefs: I’m worthless. I’m powerless. And if I don’t do what ot
hers want, they’ll reject or abandon me.
The work that Jenna and I did together involved helping her identify her core limiting beliefs and override her fears. She began to transform into an independent, assertive, self-confident woman able to meet her own needs. But the cornerstone of that transformation involved changing her relationship with herself. Because she had never experienced unconditional love within her family of origin but had experienced the deep loss associated with abandonment, Jenna was driven to self-destructive behavior that centered on her relationships with men. Because she didn’t love and respect herself, she didn’t treat herself well.
Very few of us survive the conditioning process with our self-esteem intact—truly loving and appreciating ourselves. How do you restore a loving relationship with yourself? By activating your Inner Nurturing Parent. An Inner Nurturing Parent is someone who stands up for you, who loves you unconditionally, who comforts you, and who treats you with care and respect. It’s the parent many of us never had, and it’s a powerful way to silence the voice of the Inner Critical Parent we may have internalized from childhood. In my practice, I’ve found this to be a powerful tool to help my clients learn how to love and trust themselves.
Activating your Inner Nurturing Parent is also like having a loving life partner inside of you—a part of you that appreciates who you are, a part that stands up for you and doesn’t allow others to mistreat you, a part that honors and nurtures you. Jenna, in effect, needed someone in her corner, and she had to find that someone inside. I believe we all can uncover that someone within ourselves and begin to treat ourselves in ways that we would want an ideal partner to treat us. When you do the next exercise, you’ll be taking an important step toward mastering the art of aloneness.
Exercise: Developing Your Inner Nurturing Parent
To begin developing your own Inner Nurturing Parent, close your eyes and see yourself as a small child. If you have difficulty remembering what you looked like when you were little, then instead of closing your eyes, look at a photograph of you as a child. Imagine that this child is your own child, a child you love and feel tenderly toward. Someone is talking to that child using the harsh words of the inner critic. Your job is to protect the child. What would you say to the child to protect him from the hurtful words of the critic? For example, if your critic tells the child, “You’re stupid and incompetent,” then you, as the nurturing parent, may say, “You are a very capable person and you can do anything you put your mind to; I’m here to support you and help you every step of the way.” If the inner critic says, “You should be spending more time at work; you’re not working hard enough,” the nurturing parent would say, “It’s good and important for you to take time to rejuvenate yourself.” Whenever you feel your inner critic surfacing, step back and ask your Inner Nurturing Parent for love and support.
Another way to activate your Inner Nurturing Parent is by making a habit of asking yourself: What do I need? Then take action to meet those needs. For example, if you’re feeling lonely and disconnected from people—if you feel you need human connection—you might go and get a massage. That’s a wonderful way to experience the comfort and nurturance of another’s touch. If you’ve been working hard or just met a difficult deadline at work, maybe you need a special treat. You can love and nurture yourself by sending yourself flowers along with a loving card, cooking yourself a favorite meal, taking yourself out to the movies, or preparing a luxurious, candlelit bath for yourself. Think about how you would want to be treated by a loving partner and instead of waiting for someone else to do those things for you, start doing them for yourself on a regular basis.
Conscious Versus Unconscious Relationships
You’re reading this book for a reason. Whatever your innate nature and family history may be, you’ve arrived at this point because of your life experiences. Chances are you’ve had relationships in your life that reflect some of the patterns I’ve described in this chapter. You may have already begun to see the ways in which your own conditioning has influenced your expectations of a mate. Maybe you’ve even played out these expectations in relationships that didn’t work. I believe that most relationships are built on default patterns. Very few people have moved beyond the powerful patterns of their conditioning and the power of the imago that Harville Hendrix describes. I see it all the time in my workshops and in my coaching practice. Here are just a few examples:
• A man tells me he was drawn to his ex-wife because she seemed so independent; he wanted someone who could take care of herself. After they married, she continued to pursue a career but announced that she wanted to have children. That wasn’t at all what he had in mind. His own family had struggled financially, and his father had been an unhappy man with five children to support and a sickly wife. His core belief: Women and children are a burden.
• A young woman tells me that every guy she falls for is a high achiever; they work long hours and travel all the time. Eventually, she exits the relationships because she’s lonely. Her father was the CEO of a major corporation, and he was absent through most of her young life. Her mother, depressed and absorbed in her own problems, paid little attention to her. She keeps replicating her childhood experiences over and over, driven by her core belief: There’s no one there for me.
• A young man tells me he’s unable to be faithful to any woman. He sabotages every relationship he’s in by cheating. His father was an alcoholic and a womanizer. His mother was withdrawn and unhappy. They fought all the time, but they stayed together. He grew up feeling unwanted and unloved. He continually replicates his parents’ conflict-ridden relationship. His core belief: I’m unworthy and undeserving of love.
• A woman tells me that she and her live-in boyfriend argue about money all the time. He grew up in a working-class home where money was an issue; she comes from an upper-class background where her mother stayed home and raised the kids. When she and her boyfriend moved in together, they talked about splitting everything 50–50. She has a great job, but she still resents not being financially taken care of by her boyfriend. Her core belief: I’m entitled to have someone take care of me.
The central lesson of these stories: by reclaiming your wholeness, reintegrating the parts of you that were lost during your life conditioning, and becoming aware of the habitual patterns that drive your relationships, you’ll be in a better position to enter into a healthy, conscious relationship with another person. What is a conscious relationship? It’s one in which both people have reclaimed their innate wholeness and are relating from their authentic selves. They can effectively function independently, but choose to share a relationship where there is a healthy balance between independence and interdependence.
Here are what I believe to be the basic requirements for a conscious relationship:
• The relationship is built on a partnership model versus a traditional model based on stereotypes. That means the partners don’t fall unconsciously into prescribed roles—a pattern, for example, where all the household and child-rearing responsibilities fall only to one person and all the financial responsibilities fall to the other. They share responsibilities in a way that meets each individual’s needs and personal vision. And, like a healthy family system, the roles are flexible and fluid.
• From the very beginning, both partners approach the relationship in a conscious manner. They talk about the kind of life they want to share. Instead of operating from their default modes, they deliberately build a relationship based upon their values, what’s important to each of them, and what’s going to work for both partners.
• Both people have a similar level of self-awareness, self-love, self-respect, and emotional maturity. They’re able to respect each other’s needs, interests, and desires and to honor each other’s differences.
• Each partner has well-developed interpersonal skills. They have the ability to effectively communicate and manage conflict, as well as the capacity for empathy and forgiveness. In other words, they possess emotio
nal intelligence.
• They are equally committed to their own growth and the partner’s growth. They view the relationship as an opportunity for greater learning and development and as a safe place to express their authentic selves.
By referring to this kind of relationship as conscious, I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no romance or chemistry involved. People in conscious relationships still share the experience of falling in love; their endorphins still kick in; they still experience a deep attraction. But here’s the difference: when they experience that initial attraction, they’re aware that they’re not getting a complete picture of the other person; they understand that it takes time to get to know someone. The truth is, at the beginning of any relationship, it’s impossible to see and understand all the dimensions of another person. People reveal different aspects of themselves as a relationship unfolds. When you’re in a conscious relationship, you take the time to get to know the other person and to assess the level of compatibility and fit. That’s how you can get a sense of whether or not the relationship can work. You come to a point where you understand where the similarities and differences lie and whether the differences can be managed effectively. You might discover that the differences between you are deal-breakers—differences that make the relationship unworkable. Or you might find that the differences are ones that are easily managed. If you aspire to a healthy, conscious partnership or marriage, mastering the art of aloneness and becoming the partner you seek are important prerequisites.
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