Rosenthal,Resistent to Love2 (sabotaging a relationship;
walled off)
March 20, 2005 wc: 611
DO YOU FIND YOURSELF
RESISTENT TO LOVE?
Note: This is the second of a three-part series
Why is it that some people block
themselves from giving and receiving love?
Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt explain the process in the book
“Receiving Love” (Atria, 2004) :
- When we are born, openness and receptivity are our
natural state.
- When a caretaker does not properly deal with our
normal developmental needs and functions—by neglecting our needs, invading
our bodies or our spirits, or excessively shaming, punishing, denying or
denigrating us—our self esteem is wounded.
- We deal with that wound by rejecting in ourselves the
same impulses, desires or behaviors our caretakers rejected in us. Every
time we are wounded, we reject more and more things about ourselves, so
that eventually…
- Our conscious (self-accepting) self gets smaller and
our unconscious
(self-rejecting)
self gets larger. Our available pool of
skills and resources is depleted, so we meet life with a limited number of
defensive, angry, critical or mistrusting reactions.
- So now, as adults, we may find ourselves being overly
controlling of our intimate partners—as well as defensive, critical,
demanding, manipulative and
self-absorbed. We do this to attempt to protect ourselves
from further judgment, criticism and rejection.
We may try to micromanage our environment as a way of trying to keep
ourselves safe, or we hold tightly onto what’s left of ourselves as a way of
protecting against further encroachment and self-erosion—and therefore resist or
block our partner’s influence, requests and feelings.
- In addition, we try to make the pain of rejection go
away by denying our needs, natural self-expressions, impulses and desires,
which were the cause of our rejection in the first place. So we resist satisfying many of our
needs. What we wind up with is more
defenses. We try to fill up the
emptiness our defenses cause by grabbing onto food, drugs, alcohol, work,
parenting, gambling, spending, starving, anger, control or other
compensating behaviors.
- Because we unconsciously yearn for the self
expression, desires and needs we have now repressed, we either choose
intimate partners who exhibit the traits and behaviors we have rejected,
or we project those traits and behaviors onto our partner, essentially
assigning our partners the characteristics we don’t allow ourselves to
have. We attribute to our partner a
quality, fault, skill, motive, thought or feeling that actually comes from
us.
- The degree to which we carry this self-rejection is
the degree to which we cannot receive love. It is painful to become aware—especially
when someone appreciates or loves us—of the parts of ourselves that we
have rejected, so we resist the gifts, and sometimes we reject the people
who bring us those gifts. Thus we
unwittingly reject loving and being loved.
Hendrix and Hunt offer an example
from a common interaction that most parents have with their children: laughing and having fun. When a parent reacts with disapproval when
others are “too silly,” then laughing and having fun become painful to the
child—so we eventually reject such
behavior. Then when our intimate partner
offers us something fun, we reject it, or we become critical of our
partner. Soon enough, our partner stops
trying to engage us in laughing and playing, and then we feel hurt and
deprived. It is in this way that our
private personal childhood injuries end up directing traffic in our intimate
relationships.
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Neil Rosenthal is a licensed
marriage and family therapist in Boulder
and Denver. Call him at (303) 758-8777, or e-mail him
from his website www.heartrelationships.com