The New Marriage - Part Two of Four
When we fail to get the response or connection with our partner
that we want, perhaps we should stop and look at our own
thoughts and behavior. It may remind us of frightful tigers from
our past stalking the room. Sometimes a calm and collected
exterior hides demons lingering from childhood. But how do we
uncover the real person underneath our sophisticated facade? We
climbed that mountain so long ago; the path we took may be lost
in the undergrowth.
Our ascent of the First Mountain begins at birth. The learning
we undergo in our early childhood is intense and shapes our
experiences of love and adolescence when we are further up the
mountainside. The ways in which we perceived things as children
affected our neurological connections and influenced our later
behavior in relationships. Modern research on the brain has
revealed how critical early learning affects the way we behave
with and perceive the partner of our mature years.
Very early in my career a couple came to see me who had been
arguing for the last year over where to store the dishes in
their kitchen. Each held a Ph.D. and both were academics--yet
they were completely unable to solve this problem.
I made the mistake of trying to help them at a concrete level,
when obviously if the problem was practical two such clever
people could have readily dealt with it themselves.
I then realized that their problem had to do with the learning
they had brought with them from their childhood. Each family
household had been managed in different ways and they felt
disloyal to their family of origin if they diverged from what
they'd learned, since internalizing the family's patterns of
behavior is a child's way of feeling he or she belongs. Once
this internalization has happened, questioning the behavior,
even in adulthood, can cause anxiety about one's identity and
self-worth. The couple were at odds because of the behavior they
each had internalized many years before their marriage.
This realization was important in my journey as a
psychotherapist. I started to look more deeply for answers as to
why couples maintain destructive interactions--interactions that
seemed so obviously pointless and damaging. There were still
many questions: Why, after all, did all the learning and
intelligence these two academics had acquired since childhood
appear to count for nothing in their relationship? Why was the
learned behavior of their childhood so pervasive in their
personal lives and so absent from their professional ones? Why
was there this division? Then, I began to do some research and
found...
Copyright 2005 Linda Miles Ph.D