Why mothering or fathering our partners perpetuates dysfunction.
Relationships are where we get wounded.
Relationships are also where we have the potential to heal.
When our partners act in a mothering or fathering way, it activates our feelings of being loved. And that can seem healing.
Since we bring our attachment wounds into our romantic relationships, we feel loved when our partner’s behavior compensates for the deficits of attention or care we experienced in childhood.
The problems arise when we come into a relationship with the expectation (and demands) to be soothed and healed.
When we expect a change in our felt experience to come from outside, we disconnect ourselves from the source of our power, and create unequal power dynamics in our relationships.
When we anoint someone on outside of ourselves as responsible for our wellbeing, we put our wellbeing at risk.
Frequently we expect our partners to soothe us and make us feel loved, without clear understanding what it would take for us to feel soothed or loved. Many of us mistakenly believe that if our partner truly loved us, they would know what to do to make us feel good.
When our partners are not able to magically change the way we feel, we conclude that they withdraw love from us on purpose, to punish us, thus polluting our adult relationships with our childhood dynamic.
It is this fantastical thinking about the purpose of relationships that prevents many of us from enjoying them, because of the unrealistic expectations that it sets.
Whichever of our needs were not filled in childhood, we’ll be in pursuit of filling them throughout our lives and certainly in our relationships.
And sometimes it may feel as if it works.
That was the case of the first fifteen years of my marriage.
For many years I believed that my husband saved me from a life that felt hard. It felt as if I went from a life of sacrifice and hard work, little pleasure and no permission to play, to ease and playfulness and fun. For the first time in my life someone doted on me, shone his attention on me and spoiled me with gifts.
I felt loved, I felt secure, and I adored him for it.
Through my gratitude and adoration my husband was getting his validation and worth.
In fact, we both used each other to feel worthy.
And it worked for a very long time: we both felt very happy and in love. Our relationship really felt like a fairy tale for a while.
Until life created a series of circumstances where I no longer could hide behind my husband’s back (nor he behind mine).
We both needed to wake up and grow up (because that is the whole point of life and the reason we come here anyway!)
Except I’d forgotten what adulting feels like. My husband’s doting fathering enabled me to lose myself. I completely disconnected from my power, from my inner resources, and quite frankly I disconnected from reality.
When my husband was no longer “filling” some of my needs for protection and security, I became scared. I felt helpless and incapable to face life spinning out of control, just like I did when I was a child.
I hated to experience those childhood feelings of helplessness, so I started resenting my husband for “doing this to me”. I also felt betrayed by him and unloved. To “punish” him for no longer meeting my needs, I started withdrawing my love from him.
I did not see then that in our dynamic of father and child there was no space for my husband to be human, to make mistakes, to fail, to have life happen to him. Only recently I learned that by using my husband as my need fulfiller, I dehumanized him. He was “mine” and there was no space left for him to be his own sovereign human being, who had the right to exist outside of me and my needs.
The outsourcing of my needs to my husband enslaved him and disconnected me from myself. I did not even see how and when I have given up on myself. Looking back on it now, I see that I simply repeated the familiar relating dynamic from childhood: I continued betraying and neglecting my needs to maintain my relationships.
I had no idea what my needs were, nor how to start meeting them.
That is the danger of “fathering,” or saving anyone: it dehumanizes and disempowers both the savior and the saved.
Sometimes a woman may “mother” her partner, because she gets her sense of worth from being needed. And he – if not well nurtured in childhood – may feel like he finally gets the love and care he always longed for as a child.
But overtime she gets depleted and resentful, and he gets entitled and lazy.
Because childhood dynamics are not sustainable in adult relationships overtime.
Mothering or fathering in adult relationships stunts individual development and growth, because it keeps us in our inner child – disconnected, helpless, disempowered, overwhelmed.
The re-creation of old patterns from our childhood is what usually creates the hook of attraction between two people.
Then we have two choices:
– We can either awaken to the pattern, decode it, and heal ourselves through reparenting our inner child.
– Or we perpetuate childhood dynamic, expecting our needs to be met by the parent substitute.
If the parent substitute is reluctant or does not have the capacity to meet our needs, we project on our partners the qualities of the parent who abused, neglected or abandoned us.
If our wound is betrayal, we’ll show up to our relationships with an expectation that we will be betrayed. That means we will survey all behavior of our partner for clues of evidence that would support our belief and expectation.
Sometimes the betrayal feels unexpected. We are shocked, because he/she may be the only person we’ve ever trusted! And now that he/she betrayed us, we can never trust again.
The fact is that capacity to trust has little to do with outside events, and more to do with our relationship with ourselves.
When we give up our power and sense of safety to our partner – we are becoming the betrayer.
So while we vigilantly watch for betrayal from outside, we actually betray ourselves for not sourcing our power and safety from within.
In last week’s Be Your #1 we spoke about anxiety as a sign of self-abandonment. When we look to control the outside factors, which are often completely outside of our control – we betray and abandon ourselves.
In my observation, our relationships are laboratories for growth. They call us to wake up to who we truly are, not to continue going through life on automatic survival march.
Yes, we can also heal in relationships.
But not through fathering or mothering of our partners.
We heal through the mirror of another, through our triggers which bring our attention to our feelings, through decoding of our pain, through reparenting of our inner child, and through learning to relate as adults.
For that to be possible, we have to be willing to let go of all the expectations, roles, and “shoulds.’
Rather than nit-pick, blame, project, demand, mature adult conversation looks more like this:
Here is what I want. What can you give? What are you available for?
Instead, most of us come from unspoken expectations that look like this: This is how it should be! You need to change!
We are responsible for how we engage in our life and in our relationships.
We are also responsible for doing the work necessary to cultivate healthy relationships based on equality and mutual respect, so that all participants can thrive.
PS: Be Your #1 – Self-love Intensive, currently in its last week, is where we are focusing on healing our relationship with ourselves, so we can create healthy relationships with others.
Inspired by the conversations we’ve been having in the group, I am now creating a program devoted to learning what it takes to build meaningful relationships with other adults.
None of us were modeled what healthy relating between aware sovereign adults actually look like. We do not know what adult conversations sound like if there is no blaming and projecting involved.
We’ll begin in June and run for 3 months, meeting twice a month.
Beyond the online programs, those eager and willing to take this work even further are invited to my in-person retreat in October in Mexico. Bring a friend or a partner!
I am so excited for this!
Stay tuned for details.
Or feel free to email me any questions.