He Completes Me- Happily Ever After- My Soulmate- She’s the Love of My Life- You Had Me at Hello!
The art of partnership is complex. Sometimes we think of bliss, happiness, the best-sex-ever, Snow White, Prince Charming, honeymoons, having families and children, shared bucket-list vacations, and maybe someone who is your best friend guiding you to powerful career choices as the sole part of coupling. Moreover, these moments of false utopianistic pleasures represent social positives ultimately making you a better human being. This discussion of blove (bliss and love) is commercial hollywood romance at its best. Bliss is nothing more than the representation of the easy parts of the union. Positive featured behaviors often create recognizable visual constructs of what made you connected to the Other (The capital O is a connection to the Self as it relates to someone who has stirred your soul; verses,
a small case o meaning a dating or relational partner). The removal of blissfulness creates the nonpublic displayed behaviors that manifest out of past relationships from your youth often reverbed into one’s adulthood. Simply stated, it would behoove you to think twice about your behaviors and how they affect the person whom you have shared bliss, happiness, chandelier sex, honeymoons, future plans, holidays. The article Never Underestimate Your Partner’s Defenses opens the door to your part in conflicts.
So, with complex themes of your partner behaving badly with unauthorized infidelities, or neglect or poor overall behaviors (whether passive or aggressive) the question might not be why did you do this to me and you must be a bad person that I never truly knew. The psychodymanic questions with regards to partnering are: How were my relationships formed as a child; whether with my parent(s), siblings, or community construct? With these models how did I learn to work with anger, conflict, resolution? How did my models or templates formulate in my brain and course my neuronic pathways in relational behaviors. If my father was OCD how am I transferring his childhood relations toward me to my present interactions with significant others? If my mother was an alcoholic and co-dependent how do I display engagement (or non engagement) to my loved ones? If my step-mother was punitive and authoritarian how do I act to my loved one? If my adoptive parent was aloof and overcompensative with an abundance of tangible gifts how do I demonstrate love in relationships? Unknowingly, you might be showing the same actions to your partner that you learned as a child.
How you behave and how your partner reacts might not have anything to do with being a good or bad or morally aware person. It might just be a part of how you learned to interact with special loved ones in your life. So, if one feels this style of communication is not working or promoting unwanted conflict then a change in behavior has to be identified as an option. You might even have positive behaviors such as jokes and abundant laughter from your past causing tension in your current relationships. Modification or adaption might be warranted. This will take work. How often have you been in love but uncontrollably botch it up! The sabotage of relationships when processing through Self growth and relationships with the Other is not just common but in all the best selling books and all the blockbuster movies. How do you make your relationships better? Not by making the other person change. They are most likely the same core person as when you met initially during the best-sex-ever stage.
As one feels more comfortable with the Other the Self comes out of the shell (or cave). That Self is primal, kid-like and demanding and threatened. Thus, it test the closest person it knows. As a couples counselor and marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles working on change is slow and rewarding. Identifying that a partner’s inflicted pain toward you could be your doing is daunting. Embracing and awareness of Self and the Other might allow for fuller relationships.
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