Every one of us has things about ourselves that we feel bad about… places of shame, guilt, self-rejection, or humiliation… that we each acquired during our childhood, or even from emotional injuries later in life. We do our best in our lives to compensate or defend against these “feelings of badness,” however they always emerge in some form or another. In particular, they come up in our relations with others, especially with our primary partner in marriage. Whatever is the particular way we judge ourselves inside, it is inevitable that we will have moments where we imagine our partner judging us in the same way. Commonly, over the course of long marriages, these inner self-judgments and the imagined judgments of others become fused and confused. Hence, in situations where we feel threatened or badly about ourselves, we may not be able to to distinguish between our partner actually thinking ill of us from our own thinking ill of ourselves. The two experiences become so intermixed and fused, the experience of one immediately triggers the experience of the other. This process is at the heart of most negative cycles in marriage. It is my experience that this “projective process” is ubiquitous in marriage… commonly silent during periods of secure attachment, but emergent during moments of diminished attunement or mutual support.
About Orin Borders, Ph.D.
Orin Borders, Ph.D, a psychologist in private practice with a long standing interest in the Marriage-Of-Opposites, is the originator on this site.
