Breaking Upwards by Charlotte Friedman

Author:Charlotte Friedman [Friedman, Charlotte]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780723471
Publisher: Short Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

How we choose our partners

So many clients have asked me why they have ended up with the sort of partner they have and talk about their fear that, once divorced, they will attract the same sort of person again. They are worried that they are doomed to replicate their past experience and never be free to love and be loved in a more satisfying way.

How do we choose our partners? On the face of it, we choose people who we are attracted to physically and mentally. We like our partners to make us laugh, make us feel loved, and be people who we can respect and think of as clever and reliable. But so much else goes on that we are not even aware of when we start to fall in love.

Sometimes people just turn out to be disappointing, not what they seemed; but more often what happens is that, when things go wrong, we look back and say they were always a bit like that, we just chose to ignore it. When we meet someone, we are picking up signals from him or her and unconsciously calibrating them. The more we pick up signals that are familiar, the more we fall in love. That is fine if what is familiar was a good enough experience, but what if it wasn’t?

If your early experiences were less than satisfactory, for example a neglectful mother or a violent father, you will want to avoid that when choosing a relationship; however, often we end up with someone who is very similar to that dysfunctional parent without realising it.

Roxie said, ‘At the beginning, I thought he was so nice and so different from my father who had affairs throughout my childhood. I see now that he was exactly the same, but how could I have known that?’

By understanding our early relationships with our parents, we are better placed to avoid endlessly re-enacting experiences that will usually get us nowhere. We often unwittingly ‘marry the parent’ that we had the most dysfunctional relationship with in an unconscious bid to ‘fix’ it. If our unconscious has done its powerful job, we will find that we can’t fix it, but are destined to replicate similar painful early experiences within the relationship. Often our partner will be the other side of the equation – not only are they a repeat for us of what we had, but we are a repeat for him or her of their early lives.

In other words, there is a fitting of experience unconsciously set up to suit both people. A perfect, imperfect match. Only it’s a painful way of having a relationship and often ends in trouble.

Georgie was fed up with being in a relationship with a man who blew hot and cold. She didn’t know on a daily basis where she was with him. Sometimes he was critical and cruel, then full of remorse and eager to get back in with her. Although the abusive nature of his actions was intolerable, the loving side always drew her back in.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.