There is a common pattern of misalignment, common in young first marriages, but also found to a lesser degree in older marriages. The pattern is this… One or both in the marriage are in great fear/anxiety and agitation over anticipating failure if they reach for the partner of “their hearts desire.” So they avoid and don’t reach. Over time they identify another woman or man to approach that feels much safer to them, and with this other person they find a way to engage. However, they cannot help but think… “i am settling for someone who is less than I wanted.” Hence, they both feel badly about themselves in their partner choice, and often devalue their new partner as “less than.” Hence the joy of finally having found someone wonderful and safe to love is now complicated by their own feelings that the new relationship is evidence of their own failed worth. (to be cont.) 

It has taken me many years to get past the individualistic bias of Western psychology and classical psychoanalysis to be able to see this simple fact; we are dancing in human connection, all the time, whether we know it or not. From the cradle to the grave. It is the exengencies of western culture, which require so much emphasis upon making our own individual way, a particular adaptation to the world, that makes it so hard to discern the underlying drama of how we are in an attachment story always, from one moment to the next. 

For years as a therapist, I had no idea. I was highly sensitive to the dynamics of individual inner life, and to the pain of existential delimmas in modern isolated life, but I accepted the individual backdrop of life as simply reality… sometimes joyful, sometimes tragic. It was only after I embarked on studying modern attachment research, followed by extensive training in attachment-based couples therapy, followed by many hundreds of hours of actually doing attachment-based therapy, that I finally began to tune-in to the drama of “people needing people” all the time. And that when it is not obvious on the outside, it is happening internally through inner dialogue or fantasy… all the time! And when it is denied, it is still happening. 

One of the most common shame situations is how we shame ourselves for not accomplishing goals we have set for ourselves. This is where we blame ourselves, and relentlessly undermine our self-esteem, over our failures to accomplish… and do not stop to truly consider the real psychological causes for why we cannot complete our goals. That there are reasons for why things turn out the way they do, that true patterns of causality live within our psychologies that are every bit as “objectively real” as occur in the world of physics. 

Actually we fight facing into “the real” about ourselves in terms of goals not reached. It can feel like a kind of giving up. This resistance can be hugely powerful because of the ways that the goals we set for ourselves our tied to our ideal sense of ourselves. The problem here is that our ideal goals are often compensatory of imagined inadequacies that we harbor towards ourselves deeply inside; they do not do justice to the “whole picture” of who we really are inside, or even outside! 

There is an error in judgment that so many of us at the beginning of relationships make. That is, one or both in the relationship get so lined up with the big picture fit, the way the the two fit together from an outside world perspective, that they do not sufficiently pause to feel into the realm of the deeply personal fit of the relationship. The two can be so lined up in terms of education, backgrounds, intentions to have children, values, athletic interests, outdoor activities, shared community of friends, etc. that they overlook how emotionally connected they actually feel with each other. For months, often years, the shared outer-world enthusiasms can carry the couple… but in my experience, the empty feeling of not having established a deeply connected safe inner connection eventually asserts itself in various forms of marital unhappiness. The challenge at these times is either to becomes emotionally acquainted with each other, or risk a chronically painful marriage or a marital ending. Of course, this is the hopeful task of emotions focused couples therapy. 

So many of us seek the solution to our life’s pain and meaning by going off on a personal journey alone. The intention can be a desire to remove ourselves from all that in social life that invites phoniness and superficiality. To boil ourselves down to what is most essentially who we are.

(to be cont.)