When we become passionate about something or someone, we want to hold onto it, tight. We want to super glue ourselves to it and possess it. It doesn’t matter if we are “infatuated” by an object, a habit or a person we the feel excitement and pleasure and we want to take hold of it and not let go.
When we fall in love with a T.V. show we might watch it over and over and with each viewing we feel less gratified. Research shows that our brains crave novelty. So what we were originally hooked on has “worn off,” its capacity to excite us has also “worn off.” Since we are human, we start chasing “the next great thing.” And so on, and so on. Even though we may not completely lose interest in what initially attracted us, over time our enthusiasm dampens.
So, you might asking yourself, how does this play out with our fondness and attraction for a person?
If we become possessive and domineering with a person we are treating them as an object; We dehumanize them and our love enslaves them. Our effort to subdue them and keep them close to us has a lot to do with our childhood wounding in the attachment phase.
This is very early childhood wounding when we did not receive warm, reliable connection from our caregivers. If, for example our Mother suffered depression or was an addict, she would have been unavailable physically and emotionally at times, which caused us to feel abandoned, not good enough and rejected. So when we enter adult intimate relationships this would cause us to be a bit clingy and possessive. This is our experience and how we were socialized.
Consequently, if the other person we are with feels engulfed by how selfish, or dependent we are pursuing them, sooner or later they’re likely to flee. In my case, this happened to many of my relationships.
As a result, the very thing we are afraid of; our possessive and domineering behavior (which has it’s roots in childhood wounding) takes us away from what we want and causes our partner to feel stifled and smothered by us. These behaviors can bring up old feelings of our partner’s childhood caretakers who were possessive and controlling. Unless partners understand how to work with unfinished childhood business, communicate effectively, they will traumatize each other with deep intensity from these unexplored, unhealed, painful messages within about how life, people and love should have been.
We unconsciously attract our intimate partners who have been wounded in the same development phase as ourselves. We do this to heal our inner childhood wounds. The challenge, of course, is that because it is unconscious it can also cause more wounding.
Imago Couples Therapy can help a couple:
- To bring what is unconscious into consciousness;
- To understand themselves and each other better and to ask for what we want.
- Learn how to have the relationship that we dream of.
