by Chris G Moon
Since adult relationships have a marvellous way of bringing old pain up to the surface, you will discover in your relationship that childhood15 behaviour that you thought you had left behind is still with you, albeit in a much more sophisticated form. As the resentment from unsatisfied expectations arises, you will also begin to re-experience the discouragement that you faced as a child around those same unmet needs. This will lead you to react with the same misguided behaviour you attempted when you were young. Misguided behaviour is actually an attempt to manipulate your partner, and signals that you are trying to stave off disillusionment by controlling him or her. If he or she will not meet your needs freely, then you will just have to trick him/her into it. If the first two behaviours fail you can always resort to revenge in order to at least level the playing field. As a last resort you can simply give up and withdraw into a phlegmatic or melancholic shell, where you may experience a certain degree of discontent, but where the real pain cannot reach you.
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ATTENTION GETTING
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When you watch the antics of a couple trying to control each other,16 and you look at it from the perspective of misguided behaviour resulting from early childhood discouragement, you begin to realize that Roy Harper was right: grown-ups are just silly children. But as long as we want to remain beguiled by illusion, we will use adult logic and reasoning to justify our manipulations (if we dare examine them at all!). We will persist in acting so as to draw special attention from our partners. We will act sweet, nice, capable, strong, funny, intelligent, wise, tolerant, brave, afraid, weak (in a cute, sexy sort of way, of course), spaced out, with it, cool, hot… and the list goes on. There are numerous ways to attract our partner’s attention, with more variations on the theme being thought up every day.
However, there is no manipulation so effective that your partner will never get tired of it and begin to feel the pressure of expectation lurking beneath it. After all, if your partner sees the same thing every day, s/he will very soon stop noticing it, and become more aware of the manipulations behind your behaviours. When you realize that you are not being noticed or appreciated, the discouragement increases, and you may find yourself moving into the second mode of manipulation…
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POWER STRUGGLE
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“When the fighting starts, Hell puts out the welcome mat.”
—Anonymous
I call it a Power Struggle because there is an effort made by both sides to be seen as powerful, and therefore significant. As the relationship continues, however, it becomes more than that. As the sense of discouragement grows, the Power Struggle becomes an attempt to gain control over the direction of the relationship, with each person trying to change the thoughts, words, and behaviour patterns of the other.
Those quirky little idiosyncrasies that you used to find so cute in your partner now become petty annoyances that soon lead to outright disgust.17 His loud laughter which was an amusing novelty now grates on your spinal cord. Her once-fascinating stories now set your teeth on edge and make you want to scream from boredom. You’ve now begun to get on each other’s nerves. At this point, your choices seem to be: 1) change—by force or coercion—your partner’s habits, speech mannerisms, clothing style, length of hair, etc., (2) learn the tolerance of a saint, or (3) get rid of your partner and find a more appropriate one. Most adults, for various reasons, choose number 1, and thus the Power Struggle begins in earnest!
We often think of Power Struggles as taking the form of loud arguments that can sometimes involve throwing objects at each other or maybe even the exchange of gunfire. But the manipulations of the Power Struggle can take on many other expressions, which can include cold silences, mutual avoidance, caustic sarcasm, or the simple exchange of mean, angry looks. I can always tell when a certain couple I know is fighting as soon as I enter their house; it’s as quiet as a graveyard, but as tense as the climax of a horror movie. Yet my two friends are unbearably polite with each other, never breaking the façade that hides a personal conflict of nuclear proportions. Whereas I know another couple who, when fighting, will scream themselves hoarse, their faces sometimes only inches apart from each other’s. Between these two extremes are innumerable methods of engaging in Power Struggle—all equally dangerous to the success of a relationship, and all with an equally incredible potential for bringing us a vision of True Partnership.
Being confronted with disenchantment with your partner brings you face to face with the process of disillusionment. When you fight, you are only trying to remain blind to what is behind the curtain of fantasy. But when you tire of trying to maintain a false sense of control, you can peek behind it. What lurks behind that curtain is the beginning of the journey in earnest.
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OF CARROTS, WATERMELONS, AND PAIN
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“There was a faith-healer of Deal
Who said, ‘although pain isn’t real,
If I sit on a pin
And it punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel.’”
—Anonymous
It is amazing to see the change in couples once the Power Struggle stage begins. They may have begun their relationship with smiles of pure excitement and pleasure on their faces, and stars in their eyes whenever they looked at each other. But when the sense of disillusionment seeps in, the smiles are replaced by frowns, and the stars in the eyes become fires of anger—sometimes even hatred. So what happened? Why do we treat our partners like our greatest enemies? Let me illustrate what I believe is the cause of this unhappy change in the relationship.
Many people I know, myself included, carry the negative childhood memories of being forced to eat some kind of food that we didn’t want to eat. For me it was boiled carrots.
My parents bought very few fresh vegetables. The kind I had to eat had already been overcooked and packed in a can, only to be brought into our house, poured into a pot and boiled again! There was a rule in our home, which stated that no one could leave the table until they had eaten everything on their plate; give my parents full marks for commitment, they made sure that rule was followed to the letter.
One night a week for many years found me staring at those sickly orange cubes that I was sure were scientifically designed to make little boys gag and/or vomit—taking a few thousand brain cells or a vital organ in the bargain. I tried everything to avoid putting those carrots down my throat! I thought of holding my breath, stuffing them into my mouth, and casually walking to the bathroom to eject them into the toilet. I tried to feed them to my dog. I smuggled some tissue into the kitchen and, when my parents left the room or weren’t looking, I would slide the things off my plate and onto the tissue paper in my lap to gather them into a soggy, pulpy mass. I would even try to spread them around the plate to give the appearance of “a few scraps” remaining. But the schemes rarely worked more than once, if at all. I was usually caught in the act, and thereby left with the sickening task of trying to digest the carrots that were now not only soggy and disgusting, but cold and mushy as well.
Then something changed. It was one of those nights when, after a good hour or so of delay, I finally wrestled the last awful chunk of overcooked vegetable down my throat, and sighed in relief that it didn’t reappear in a more disgusting form. Afterwards a huge piece of chocolate cake was placed in front of me. It was rich and moist with a thick chocolate icing, and it weighed about a pound. This kind of dessert was as rare as gold in our house. Then my mother spoke the most beautiful words to a kid’s ears: “There’s seconds if you want more.” The cake was gone in less than two minutes, and the second piece didn’t take much longer. My father smiled and asked me, “Why can’t you eat your carrots that fast?” The answer I had then, but was smart enough not to say out loud was “Well Dad, I never see you put any
food you don’t like on your plate!”
My answer to that question now is that it is a basic human tendency: we will struggle to avoid, delay or reject an unpleasant experience regardless of its inevitability. I even chose to suffer the lesser discomfort of being stuck on a hard chair for hours in the vain hope that the carrots would miraculously disappear form my plate, rather than face the harsher reality of letting those repulsive orange things anywhere near my lips.
We follow the same principle in our relationships. We enter the Power Struggle with our partner in order to avoid, delay, or reject an unpleasant feeling that is surfacing from within us. From where did this pain originate? To understand this, we must return once again to the issue of childhood needs. In Chapter One I stated that as children we were driven by two major desires: the need to belong (the need for inclusion), and the need to feel important. When these needs were not met, we experienced great pain, sometimes to the point of heartbreak. In order to save ourselves from the hurt, we had to distance ourselves from whatever or whoever seemed to be causing it. “My mother is not making me feel important. This hurts a lot. I have to push this pain away and make it disappear.” In the process of trying to distance ourselves from the pain, we also distanced ourselves from the perceived source of the pain—in this example, Mom. And so there we were: discouraged, isolated from the most important people in our lives, and trying desperately to push away the heartbreak.
But the pain does not disappear. It rarely—if ever—does until we deal with it properly. This was the hardest thing for me to understand in my earlier relationships—that my partner was merely making me aware of some pain I had been carrying inside me for a very long time, and trying not to feel. What I am most amazed by is the subtlety of my denial of the pain’s existence. It takes an exceptional person to be able to catch the first signals that some old pain is coming up, and an even more exceptional one to choose to face it responsibly, without pushing their partner away from the intimate space they had been sharing. This is an important point: very often a conflict will arise immediately after a period when the couple was enjoying a time of intimacy. They may have felt very warm towards each other, the sex may have been especially intimate, there may have been more humour, or tenderness than usual. It is as if the love we experience in those moments of intimacy gives us the strength to unconsciously call up the unfinished business or unhealed wounds of our past, so that they can be given the loving attention they did not receive at that traumatic time. Therefore, it is a call to transformation which is the prelude to a serious conflict or relationship crisis. Before I realized this, I had four different explanations regarding why fights got started in my relationships.
EXPLANATION #1: There is a conflict here because you started it. Therefore I am not fighting; I am merely protecting my boundaries which you are so thoughtlessly invading.
EXPLANATION #2: There is a conflict here because, although it may look like I started this one, all I was doing was pointing out some inappropriate behaviour on your part, and while I was pointing it out, I just happened to think of a few more areas in which you needed some correction, such as how you behave on or close to your period, etc. You just can’t take constructive advice—you call it criticism, but I’m being as nice as I can be, considering your mood.
EXPLANATION #3: There is a conflict here because you are wrong, and too pigheaded to admit that I’m right about this issue. Now I am forced to get angry, because it’s the only way to make you understand how wrong you are.
EXPLANATION #4: There is a conflict here, not because I’m hurt—I’m just upset. Anyone would be if you talked to them the way you talk to me! You call it constructive advice, but it sounds like heartless criticism to me.
For the longest time I did not understand that I fought with someone to protect myself from feeling a very old and serious pain that I had been carrying inside me, unhealed and unnoticed. The other person’s behaviour simply caused that old pain to reach my awareness. I also did not understand that what I said or did could cause those same reactions in my friends and partners. It may be important to remember that we often choose to fight rather than face our pain because it is simply easier to be angry than it is to feel heartbroken. Don’t forget that discouragement arrived immediately after the hurt—when you consider looking at what’s behind the conflict, you face a discouraging voice telling you the pain is too big for you to handle. This reminds me of another story:
A landlord of mine once told me that he grew up in the area I was moving into. He said it was mainly farmland when he was a child, and that his father grew watermelons. He bragged about how big the melons were, and spread his arms to indicate that they were about four feet long. A while later I realized that to a boy of about seven, an average watermelon would seem enormous. As he grew bigger, the size of the watermelon in his memory grew as well.18
You can apply the same logic to childhood pain. Sure, it must have seemed enormous when you were young—maybe even overwhelming. But it is possible that growing up brings with it the capacity to see the pain from a different perspective. The pain may not be quite so overwhelming as it once was. A more conscious and mature approach to Power Struggles will give you the chance to not only face your old wounds, but to free yourself from their damaging consequences. And what are those consequences? They are the limitations of our…
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BELIEFS: THE WATERMELONS OF THOUGHT
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“Sow a thought and reap an action. Sow an action and reap a habit. Sow a habit and reap a character. Sow a character and reap a destiny.”
—Dan Wells
The above quote has stuck with me ever since I first heard it. It states that, once you catch a thought and give it a home inside you, you set off a chain reaction with wide-ranging, and long-lasting, results. In his book “Having it All,” Arnold Patent states that the average human being has about fifty thousand thoughts a day, most of them “old thoughts.”19 A lot of them began from childhood and have been hanging around ever since. It’s like having a tape recorder in your head with an endless reel, repeating the same thoughts over and over again. Thought is a key ingredient of belief. If thought is the seed, plant it, and you will reap the watermelon of a belief.
Supposing you had a painful experience as a child. For instance, say your father promised to take you camping, and it was something you really wanted to do. Then it didn’t happen. Maybe dad got very busy at work and had to give up his vacation. Maybe he got sick, or maybe he just forgot. Since most children don’t have a very expanded view of the world, it wouldn’t much matter what reason your Dad gave you. You would probably experience a degree of disappointment. In the pain of that disappointment, thoughts would come into your mind to interpret your experience. What if one of those thoughts was, “Dad doesn’t care about me!”? What if another thought tagged along for the ride, something like, “Nobody loves me.”? If similar disappointments took place, those thoughts may well turn into a belief that you are basically unlovable. If that belief is played over and over in your mind for years, you might come to take that belief as fact. What is a person who believes she or he is unlovable likely to experience from time to time in her/his close relationships?
From this perspective, it is evident that past trauma does not simply disappear as you grow up. At the root of each limiting belief is a painful experience that has not gone away. We are all Dr. Frankensteins, having created monster beliefs that rampage through our lives and wreak lesser or greater degrees of havoc. There is not one belief that you have about yourself or this world that is true. Nor do any beliefs serve you if they encourage perceptions of yourself as small or bad. Yet many people harbour such beliefs, never knowing their source and rarely understanding that these beliefs are just houseguests; they do not have to be permanent residents. A helpful step may be to find out where these beliefs are living.
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THE GHOSTS OF OUR PAST
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“The past is left, but right behind,
lingering, haunting shadows.”
—C. G. Moon
About a year and a half into my marriage, when my wife and I were fully entrenched in a Power Struggle, I realized that I made a huge mistake with my wedding vows. Su Mei and I each created our own vows and spoke them in front of hundreds of witnesses. They were full of promise, poetry, and loving intentions. Tears fell from my eyes as I sincerely promised to love Su Mei unconditionally, to honour and respect her through good times and bad, and to allow no pain to come between us. They were sincere commitments that I had every intention of keeping. The problem was, as beautiful as the sentiments were, they were neither realistic nor practical. In other words they were not promises that I could keep. If I really wanted to keep my word, my vows would have sounded more like, “I promise, that in the process of learning to love you unconditionally, I will push every button you’ve got, cause you to feel more pain than you can presently imagine, induce you to say things to me that would shock a New York taxi driver, and make you regret the day you met me. Also, when you do the same to me, I will respond to you with all the maturity of a three year old, with petulance and tantrum as my two main weapons. I will constantly forget that we are two human beings simply doing our best. I will regularly fall into the trap of expecting you to be my absolute source of happiness. Eventually I will grow up and learn the true purpose of our relationship, but until then, all I can say is that it’s going to hurt, and I’m sorry.” Now those are vows that I would have no problem living up to!
When we enter any relationship, we bring to it all the old pains, traumas and unfinished business of our past. Whenever we were hurt as children, and the pain was not healed—which is often the case—we buried the pain so that we didn’t have to feel it all the time. Why? Well, besides the fact that we simply don’t want to feel pain of any kind, the truth is that some of our childhood pain is so great that sometimes when we were hurting, we thought the pain would kill or disable us unless we somehow got rid of it.
