The present cannot help but awaken these “restless ghosts.” When this happens, we go looking for what we missed out on or lost during childhood, desperately hoping that this time we can get it from the partner/spouse with whom we have built a home as an adult.It happened to me when I was writing this post and started to tell Yael about it when she interrupted me, saying, “I’d love to hear about it, but I have to go now.” My “restless ghost” (abandonment and loneliness) washed over me like an aria from “Madame Butterfly” and I felt 5 years old again … scared and abandoned. I know that this doesn’t only happen to me; I see it in my work with couples too.
A lot of us use our intellect to try to figure out why these feelings are happening and attribute it to something our partner did or didn’t do, or as a sign that something is wrong with our relationship. Rationalizing our feelings keeps us from truly understanding and healing the pain and frustration that is often driving our reactivity. So, it’s important for us to wake up in the midst of our reactivity and not let it run the show (at least not for any significant amount of time).
When I have an intense reaction to something Yael says or does, such as the exchange I mentioned earlier in this post, I know that 90% of what is going on within me is the restless ghosts from my past, and 10% is the relationship. In her defense, Yael scratched a wound that has been there since I was a little girl. However, I chose her (unconsciously, of course) just so that we have the unique opportunity to recreate the emotional environment of childhood with only this time she and I will meet these challenges with the power of an adult to a healing and growthful outcome.
I’m talking here about moving beyond the boxed in, individualistic psychological slant of personal therapy whose philosophy or premise often reads as some variation of, “You can only change yourself.” There is some truth in this but, taken out of context, it can be and often is destructive to relationships because we are all wounded in relationship and – we are only healed in relationship. Marriage is the most potent relationship for healing.
Most of us have been changing ourselves for a long, long time, but we don’t know how to change the way we are in our relationship. Individualistic methods of healing can help us feel whole, aligned with ourselves, grounded, present, authentic and calm. But being aligned with oneself when one is alone is completely different from being so with a partner. Some of us fall into a kind of self-righteous, entitled attitude towards the stretching and challenge to our personal serenity that our relationships bring, seeing our partner as an intruder into our newfound sense of bliss. Bottom-line folks: our individualistic coping mechanisms are destroying our relationships.Want Your Relationships to Last? Get Out of the Box of Individualism and Entitlement.
Unless partners do something different in their interactions, they will never get beyond the difficulties they’ve already had. The emotional intimacy, presence, grounding and authenticity that I experience with Yael today evolved through changing how we interact with each other on a daily basis. In other words, I had to learn how to … align with self and other … be present with self and other … feel authentic with self and other, and most importantly lose my self- entitled, self-righteous, individualistic, egocentric attitudes and behaviors toward the person I loved. A lot of those methods fell short in helping create a relationship that could last.
So I asked her for a VISIT where I was able to take responsibility for how I felt and described about fear of abandonment and loneliness lives in my body … the confusion I feel when I’m in it, the darkness and shame that come over me when she said she had to go, along with some deeply embedded “recollections” around the hurts endured in my closest childhood relationships. This kind of vulnerable truth-telling requires safety, which is embedded in the structure of the VISIT.
Having this conversation this way was powerful because, where I struggled alone as a terrified little girl, I was now healing at a relational level as an adult through the loving presence and eyes of my wife in the present, and that past scenario was now an integrated event. And you know what else is so beautiful with the Visit, Yael gained a deeper understanding of the impact of her leaving at that moment, without feeling guilty or blamed for doing what she needed to do for herself. We experienced healing in connection.
Paula M. Smith, M.Div., MFT
Certified Imago Therapist
Marriage Builder
401-782-7899
P.S. If you are in a committed relationship or married and want to learn to learn how to change the way you interact with each other click here for the The Power of Two Couple Program