We adults reenact traumatic episodes from our past just like children reenact them in play therapy. Instead of using dolls and sand trays to re-create the family dramas that harmed us, we use ourselves, our partners/spouses, and our children. The reenactment dramas that we create are unconscious efforts to communicate our hurts, and express buried grief. These dramas can happen in the blink of an eye. They are automatic, hypnotic trance-like, unconscious behaviors that we repeat without even knowing or understanding why, and they disturb us just much as they disturb the people we love.
Some of the trance-like, unconscious patterns that we bring into the relational mix are complementary and others create explosive uncontrollable clashes. In my own marriage, I remember incidents where I repeatedly responded to my wife the way her critical parent responded to her, and she responded to me with sweet compliance to my demands, or sometimes she would become stubborn and refuse to give in to my control similar to my parent. “Getting out of the marriage was out of the question!” So we began learning how to interrupt these episodes by opening our eyes to the scenes we were replaying and releasing our buried feelings. Acknowledging and sharing our grief strengthened our personal boundaries. If our relationships are going to evolve and mature we need to grow beyond what we learned as children.
To paint of a picture of what I am talking about let’s imagine that we are a fly on the wall in the home of Adam and Daria a married couple with three kids. Adam and Daria came for therapy after nine years of marriage.
Unconscious Trance-like Pattern #I – Inner Critical Parent v.s. Inner Critical Parent
Adam is nervous about company coming over. Although he is unaware of it, his reenactment is to a visual trigger; a small detail that is out of order—and he sees that as the cause of his anxiety and anger. This little detail causes him to replay his mother’s angry behavior when he created disorder as she tried to maintain as a “picturesque” home.
He and his wife Daria violate each other’s boundaries just as their own boundaries were violated when they were kids. They attack, blame, criticize and judge each other’s boundaries in an unhealthy competition of fighting for the upper hand. Their battle escalates quickly as they try to protect their positions of innocence and rightness and neither owns any personal responsibility for the difficulty exploding right in front of them.
Adam: (Sounding like a critical, exasperated parent) “What will it take for you to fix that cushion on that chair? I don’t know how many times I’ve asked you to do one simple thing. Now we’re about to have people over and it is still sitting there looking disgraceful and embarrassing. You know how hard I work. And you’re here all day everyday. Taking care of the house is your job—I certainly don’t neglect doing what’s expected of me. I don’t know what’s wrong with you?”
Daria (Also adopting a critical, exasperated parental tone) “You have no right to talk like that! You know know what I do, keeping this house running and taking care of the kids and driving car pools and dong all the thousands of things I do everyday that you never notice. And you come along and have the nerve to criticize me because I haven’t fixed that … chair cushion. Just how important can it be in the whole scheme of things! I can’t believe how picky and ungrateful you are. Just because you’re already in a bad mood gives you no right to attack me. Fix it yourself if it’s such a big deal to you. I got plenty of other things to do so you won’t be ’embarrassed’ when we have guests!”
Neither Adam nor Daria is being honest about their real feelings and concerns. Instead of revealing that they respond to each other as they were, at one time responded to, and attacked by their parents. Doing this, Adam and Daria are hiding what they are afraid to reveal about themselves. But if they are to be open and real with each other their conversation might sound something like this:
Adam: You know, Daria I’m feeling a little anxious about having people over tonight and I find myself picking our home apart; looking for anything I can find that might be out of place or imperfect. And … I’m remembering how tense and uptight my mom use to get when she entertained guests. It would be so easy for me to just go off on you right now, instead of owning up to what’s happening with me right now.
Daria: I really appreciate you telling me that Adam. That makes a lot of sense to me because I’m a little scared and tensed too. I know it will be okay and we’re going to have a nice party, but right now, with all there is still to do, I’m wondering if we really will be ready with everything in order by seven o’clock tonight.
A lot of our reenactment, trance-like unconscious patterns are us projecting these old pictures of our parents onto our partners. We see our partners like we saw Mom and Dad when we were children and then we react to what we have projected onto them.
Though our partner may have a lot of traits and behaviors that remind us of Mom and Dad or of ourselves when we were small, they are not the people our parents where or the children we were back then. I remember being so completely convinced of the truth of my projections onto my partner that I did not see her as she actually was, and so I deprived her of the respect she deserved. I also forgot that she knew herself better than I did.
In our trance-like state we forget that our partners are separate from us–hence blurred or no boundaries between us. We also forget that they are distinct from our history rather than replicas.
How to Stop Replaying the Old Pain
The first step in snapping out of the trance is: 1) Identify our entranced behaviors without judging ourselves for them. 2) Snap out of it and then reflect on what just happened. 3) Talk with your partner about what is going on with you, i.e., focus on yourself using the Intentional Dialogue, 4) Address the feelings present and past. 5) State an intention to forgive, heal and release the past.
In Imago, reenactment trances serve an important purpose, they are an unconscious call for help! We use these trance-states to try and work through the pain we experienced when our boundaries were violated in childhood, adolescence or some event in our past that harmed us. These trance states can be a way to resolve in the present, what was hurtful to us in the past, so we can reclaim the energy and lost and denied parts of ourselves. Our relationships offers us lessons to be learned and wonderful healing opportunities even though we may be unaware of it.
Source: Basic Tenet of “Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples” by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D.,
