The Genius Zone by Gay Hendricks PH.D

Author:Gay Hendricks, PH.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Completion in Relationships

Katie and I met in 1980 and have been together ever since. I’m very grateful I didn’t meet her until I was in my thirties, because during my teens and twenties I made just about every relationship mistake possible. I still wince at some of those memories, such as having a secret affair or the teenage humiliation of begging my first love not to dump me.

It took me a long time to realize that many of my incompletions reached far back into childhood. In other words, I discovered that conflicts in my present-day relationships were replays of childhood dramas. For example, several years before I met Katie I was in an on-again, off-again relationship with a woman I’ll call Nora. We really cared for each other, but we also really hated some things about each other. For example, she was perpetually trying to quit smoking cigarettes. I had gone through the unpleasant experience of kicking cigarettes cold turkey several years before I met her, and like many former addicts, I had become militantly judgmental on the subject.

When Nora would fall off the wagon and greet me with cigarette breath, I would freak out or storm out or lash out with verbal criticism. At the time, my mother was dying of emphysema caused by fifty years of heavy smoking. Every whiff of Nora’s Marlboro breath triggered anger and sadness about the way my mother’s addictions had consumed so much of her life.

Nora’s freak-out pattern involved my travel. My first book came out just after we met and became a surprise bestseller in the field of education. It led to speaking engagements and invitations to present seminars all over the country. At the time, I was an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, earning thirteen thousand dollars a year. Within a few months after the book’s publication, I found myself often making more in a month than I did all year in my academic job. I was still carrying a burdensome chunk of student loan debt from my Stanford years, so I very much appreciated this unexpected, good turn in my fortunes.

My newfound abundance and fame were great for me; I was flying all over the country, having the time of my life. Nora, not so much. Her father was a traveling salesman whose travels often involved cheating on Nora’s mother. Because he was on the road two weeks out of every month, her father’s affairs were a constant source of uproar in the family. Finally, after years of apologies and promises to do better, he gave Nora’s mother a beating and never came back.

It was a perfect setup for conflict between Nora and me: two interlocking patterns that reached back into the most painful corners of our childhoods. We were each using our relationship to complete issues that were decades old. The real problem, though, was that neither of us had the slightest clue that we were being run by those ancient patterns. We just mindlessly repeated the same arguments month after month.

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