The problem of “object lack” in our lives is that it gets all mixed in with our own conclusions about ourselves as rejectable. And it activates our own deep shame over who we are. This creates a kind of fusion between the barriers towards towards the primary other we deeply need and the sense that our own badness/undesirablenessis is the reason for our being rejected or not responded to. This combination of factors makes it highly likely that trying to work past our issues with our primary other will result in activating defensive negative cycles rather than create healing. This is why couples therapy, such as eft, is so often needed to help couples disentangle their fused reactivities to enable truly connecting healing, conversations.
There is a notion in psychodynamic psychotherapy of “primary object;” in essence, the caretaker who held/nurtured us/made us safe in early childhood. The one, commonly the mother, sometimes the father, who we emotionally invested in and turned to in need. The relationship that forms the foundation of our attachment world. The contact with this person is literally life-giving when we are young. It is in this relationship where we first learn about love. And where we become awakened to the fuel that drives our lives.
To a degree, it is this same kind of feeling that drives us latter in life in our love relationship with our primary partner/spouse. Consciously, often unconsciously, we seek that same life-giving supply with that person. This morning, I am reflecting upon how totally painful it is, how much we suffer, when that emotional access to our partner is blocked… when we cannot make our way to the fuel supply of contact with the person we love. This is, inherently, a situation of powerful suffering. And, for some of us, an almost an unbearable repeat of what happened in our traumatic childhoods.
My reflection this morning is on this suffering… caused by blocked, unreachable, scared off, self-rejected, or minimized connection. Of course, for many of us, these feelings are hardly ever felt… they are warded off by powerful defenses, displacements and addictions.
This morning, however, I am in touch with how much pain we carry inside when the life-giving connection cannot be made, no matter how much the defenses or distractions operate. That the pain is too much, and how many of us… we numb ourselves – to survive!
Not uncommonly, my work has taken me into contact with extreme marriage-of-opposites contrasts. One such contrast is when a highly cultured intellectual person is paired with someone who primarily operates from their gut. Often, what I call here, “the over-regulated civilized”, is attracted to the aliveness and emotional heat ushering from their partner who functions from raw impulses or emotions. The, what I call here, “under-regulated primitive” is often attracted to the apparent cultural success/value evident in their refined, often highly educated partner. One person feels like they win because they are emotionally warmed up, the other because they have affiliated with someone who carries high currency in the larger society.
I am thinking today that it would be a valuable exercise for each partner in the marriage to fill-in a detailed picture for their partner of their own vision of how a particular conflict situation would come to resolution, totally from their own point of view, from inception to conclusion. This would be done in a turn-taking way, so that while one is describing their vision of the situation the other is simply listening and taking the picture in. The task is not to solve the situation. The task is to see how the other person sees it. To walk in the others moccasins. Objections are saved for latter. Often we do not stop to actually take the other person in on their own terms. To actually be with them as they are. This is an exercise meant to increase both the experience of connection and empathy with ones partner.
This experience of empathy/connection is necessary for each in a marriage to feel that their partner “gets them.” This is a necessary foundation to feeling that we “have our partner’s back.” That we are “there for them.”
Related to our mammalian/primate evolutionary roots, core attachment in the home base is typically the place of safety from the threats in the outer world. And psychologically this is probably our deepest longing towards our primary partner… that with them we will be emotionally most safe. But there is a complexity inherent in this process, because our very vulnerable reaching to our primary partner for safety can itself be fraught with its own feelings of deep threat. In order to come home to the safety of our partner, we must first heal our fears about reaching for home with our partner. Something well worth doing.
