Love Hurts and Here’s Why!
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006Sometimes when working with a client I share something about my own life, or more specifically about my own struggles. At the end, when I ask them what the best thing was about the call, they’ll often say that it’s nice to know that even I struggle in my relationship.
I recently got to thinking about my work with my own coach, and also about a men’s group that I’m in, and I realised that time and again the most important message I get is that I’m not alone. So if you find that being in a relationship is a challenge you really are in very good company. Those of you that are single and wondering if this article will apply to you had better start paying attention. Being single is not accidental, pretty much everyone I have ever worked with has been in love, it’s staying in love that is the challenge.
My sense of a perfect life is being laid in the shade in a hammock, reading a great book, birds chirping, sound of the surf in the background and feeling totally at peace. In those moments I experience the world as loving, supportive and safe. I’ve had many of these moments (not always in a hammock) and they touch me deeply, but by comparison to really experiencing the connection between my partner and I, they pale.
Our primary relationships are, in my opinion, pretty much the best that life has to offer us. When they are working well and when things are easy there is no finer place to be. However, the moment they stop working so well and we get into conflict they can become hell on earth. At least for some of us. In this article I’m going to talk about why that happens and show you how you can save yourself a huge amount of pain.
In my experience, both personally and professionally, emotional security seems to come down to one thing and that thing is ‘attachment’. John Bowlby worked in an area referred to as developmental psychology and is widely acknowledged as having developed what is referred to as ‘attachment theory’. This is the idea that all of us, in fact all primates, have an inbuilt, biological need to ‘attach’ to our primary caregiver. I’d like to ignore the fact that he tortured baby monkeys to come to this understanding and make sure that their suffering wasn’t in vain by sharing some of the implications of his work with you.
The desire to attach ourselves to our primary caregiver, in most cases our mother, does serve a biological function. In days gone by it’s protected babies from being eaten by predators on the savannah and in more recent times from being left on the bus. Any primate infant that fears it’s about to be abandoned will let you know in no uncertain terms just how he or she feels about that. It’s important that you understand that attachment is directly linked to how loved and secure you feel in the world.
In his book “Keeping the Love you Find” Harville Hendrix explores the developmental stages we move through and their impact. Attachment generally happens between the ages of 0-18 months. In an ideal world your mother is always going to be there for you, your needs are always met and most importantly you never end up feeling abandoned. If that’s true for you then you managed to form what is termed a ‘secure attachment’ meaning that loving and trusting are easy for you.
In what Hendrix refers to as the psychosocial journey of the self there are 4 stages we move through in the first seven years of our life. These are called Attachment, Exploration (18 months- 3 years), Identity (3-4 years) and Competence (4-7 years). This covers the spectrum for self development and ideally we’d navigate them easily. All of us are wounded to some extent in each of these areas but there is almost always one stage that we are particularly stuck in. The bad news, at least for some of us, is that the earlier we got stuck in our development the harder it is for us to grow up as a loving, trusting adult. It’s really not possible to do the chapter justice here and I highly recommend you get the book. It really is one of those ‘change your life in 15 minutes!’ kind of reads.
So in my own life my mother got really sick after giving birth to my younger brother, for the next couple of years she was largely emotionally unavailable. The impact of this in my own life is that I feel abandoned very, very easily. The reason I share this with you is that I know I’m not alone and I want to make sure you know you’re not alone.
The more intimate a relationship is for you, the more predictable it is that you’re going to be re-experiencing huge amounts of emotional pain on a regular basis. This is to be celebrated!!!! That pain is already inside you, you function over the top of it all day long and it can limit your life and every relationship you are in. As an example: for the first three years of my business partnership with Mike I lived in fear of him leaving and would often have to seek reassurance from him. Fortunately Mike is very well attached and my insecurity was rarely a problem to him.
The interesting thing about romantic relationships is that we generally end up with a partner wounded in the same way as ourselves or in adjacent stages. So my wound in attachment means I generally hook up with someone who’s stuck in the same area or around exploration. Even more exciting (read painful!) is the fact that we tend to get with people who use the opposite coping mechanism to our own.
With an attachment wound people are what Hendrix terms either maximizers or minimizers. An infant will either protest at huge volume or go quiet and then take that on as a way of behaving for the rest of their life. This is why leaving your baby to cry itself to sleep would appear to work for 50% of the population. Great you’ve got a quiet baby but there are interesting times ahead. Both maximizers and minimizers are stuck in the pain of love not being safe or trustable, they just deal with it differently. Neither one nor the other is better but if you’re a minimizer you can bet you’re going to have a real problem with your maximizer partner when things get rough.
Let’s just leave it at ‘relationships are very, very complicated!’ - at least for some of us.
If you struggle to get into one or stay in one, it’s not accidental and it’s all fixable. You may be able to figure it out on your own, Hendrix’s book will really help, but more often than not you’ll need outside help. Think highly skilled coach or therapist! It’s taken me about 15 years to really understand how all this plays out both in me and my clients’ lives and as a result my life gets easier, feels safer and contains more love than I ever thought possible.
I’ve included some tips below for how you can immediately start to change how you feel when things get rough. Most importantly though I’d like you to know that whilst some of the bigger emotional messes you get yourself into are not really your fault, they are your responsibility. Even the most perfect partner is never going to fix you. Sad but true.
Best wishes,
Michael.
Tips (Taken from “Keeping the Love you Find” by Hendrix.)
Stop minimizing and start feeling
If you’re a minimizer you may well experience your partner as demanding and all consuming and as a result tend to remain detached, avoid conflict and maintain rigid boundaries. This can leave you hyper-rational, passive aggressive and cold. Your way to healing is to initiate emotional and physical contact more; express your feelings more honestly (hurt not just indignation). You would also do well to increase your body awareness and sensory contact with your environment.
Stop maximizing and let go
If this is your issue then you experience your partner as someone without feelings and unavailable to you. There can be a sense of them never really being there for you when you need them. As a result you can become clingy, demanding and hyper-emotional. Your way to healing is to be willing to let go, start to do more things on your own and learn how to negotiate rather than just demand.
Given Attachment (0-18 months) is so closely linked to the Exploration stage (18 months to 3 years) you also need to know that the two ways people have of dealing with a wound in the Exploration stage. People primarily stuck in this stage either to become an Isolator or a Pursuer. Hopefully you’ll understand below how they relate.
Stop Isolating and dare to connect
If you are an Isolator then you fear being smothered in a relationship and will often experience your partner as insecure, too dependent and needy. This leads you to set limits on togetherness and create distance. Your way of managing conflict will be confrontational and emotionally distant. In order to heal you need to risk initiating closeness, share feelings, increase your time together and begin to integrate the positive and negative traits in your partner rather than avoiding them.
Stop pursuing
If you are a Pursuer then you fear abandonment and feel your partner is distant and doesn’t need you. As a result you will tend to swing between pursuing them and then withdrawing due to feeling you can’t rely on them. When it comes around to conflict you tend to blame, complain and chase your partner as they withdraw. In order to heal you need to begin to initiate separateness, develop outside interests and be able to internalize your partner so you feel connected even when you’re apart.
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