Every couple of years I take a week to look at my own life to reassess what is working and what isn’t. I then compare what I am doing to what I say that I want do. Sometimes the comparison highlights the areas that need adjustment. This time I have traced where I am back to the relationships that I created. I use the word created because relationships don’t just happen for me. Of course, there is conscious creation and unconscious creation.
All of us enter into relationships with an unconscious need for connection. I am sure that you have heard about the study on children in orphanages that did not thrive due to lack of connection. All of their physical needs were attended to save the need for attachment. Researchers, using electroencephalography (EEG), found that children in Romanian orphanages did not have the same brain activity as the average child. Many of the orphans had disturbingly low levels of brain activity. "Instead of a100-watt light bulb, it was a 40-watt light bulb," Charles Nelson says.
So we know on some level our early childhood affects how we respond to others in relationship. Yet many of us judge ourselves harshly if we have what we deem as relationship failures? Instead of judging, wouldn't investigating the whys be a better approach? That normally opens up new possibilities and sometimes closes others.
Incidentally, there are no failures. We only think of it that way because it did not turn out the way we wanted it to.
What if we weighed our relationships like we shop: should it be this car or that car? I offer this as an alternative to repetitive patterns that do not work anymore. It can feel uncomfortable to think in a new way and that is ok; in this case discomfort is good.
When I have to reboot or re-evaluate a relationship, I start with a series of questions. What need is the relationship filling? How does the person mirror my shadow side? What am I learning? Is this a default relationship or one that I have consciously chosen for myself?
A default relationship is one that happens when you don’t actively choose it, like the default printer setting on your laptop. It is what you have always done to get your needs met. The problem is that as you grow and change, what used to work stops working. Frustration and anxiety take center stage. Some try harder, some give up and others just settle.
It is important to be awake and conscious to what your needs are so that you can choose the most effective and healthy way to meet them. What is healthy and effective is relative for each person and changes over time. Here is the caveat. If you have unmet needs from childhood, those needs will trump any new ones. It is like if you are thirsty and hungry, you are not going to be too interested in much of anything else, but taking care of the thirst and hunger.
So let’s say I need a lot of affection, but my parents were not affectionate. My default would be to choose people that replicate my childhood in hopes that I change myself enough to make my parents give me what I need. As a child, I would learn that people pleasing would get me the affection I needed. As an adult, it would keep me from growing to my full potential.
So what to do? Know yourself. Know what you need, then devise systematic method(consciously choose) to get what you need. If you need affection, don’t date people that are uncomfortable with giving it. If you need community, don’t marry an only child whose parents are also only children. I am stretching it a bit because I want to illustrate that we often are attracted to the opposite of what we say we need.
If I were left to my own devices, my closet would be full of black clothes. They look good and I look good in them, but come on, I am settling because it is my default. So I force myself to explore and see what else fits. If you decide that your default is in your way of finding satisfaction in relationships, look into IMAGO Theory. A great book on that subject is Keep the Love You Find by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D.
Previously posted on Practice This Life.
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