We often hear: “Relationships are work.” At first glance, this message seems correct: it’s important to be attentive and caring, compromise, listen well, and try not to destroy what’s been built. But if you look a little deeper, it turns out that all this is almost useless. Our psyche is designed in such a way that we always, either directly or indirectly, replay childhood scenarios in our relationships with our partners. And then this popular phrase should be followed by the following: “Relationships are work… on yourself.”
A relationship begins with choosing a partner. This choice is influenced by all our relationship experiences, but primarily by our relationships with significant adults in early childhood. There’s a stereotype that a woman chooses a man who resembles her father, while a man seeks a “mother” in a woman. But usually, it’s much more complicated.
We choose each other on a subconscious level, and early conflicts with our first love object—our mother—influence how our relationships with our partners develop. Does this mean that a woman who was rejected as a child will choose a neglectful man? Not necessarily. But even if her partner is warm and accepting, a woman may unconsciously seek opportunities to experience the same rejection she experienced as a child in her relationship.
Our internal locator seems to be tuned to what we’ve experienced before and unconsciously strives to relive. In a couple, two people touch each other through cracks and hollows—and this process occurs unconsciously. If a person desires a harmonious and accepting relationship, but such a relationship doesn’t meet their unconscious fantasy, it won’t last long.
Psychoanalyst Henry Dix said that successful relationships are built on each partner’s ability to regress freely to childhood dependency, easily reversing roles—without censorship or loss of dignity. Each partner is confident that the other will accept and, like a good parent, tolerate their “little needy ego.” Many people fail to cope with this task without anger, blame, anxiety, and disappointment. And it’s not their fault.
Relationships with a partner, marriage—especially first and early ones—often almost entirely recreate the parent-child relationship of the couple. Or rather, specific childhood experiences—they color all subsequent relationships. It turns out that instead of correcting the dysfunctions, we reproduce them and hurt each other. Why is this?
No matter how much we want to be accepting partners, each of us has, at one time or another, felt helpless and dependent on our parents. And now, when someone else experiences similar experiences around us, we inevitably identify with the helpless child within, or with the strict parent who cannot tolerate weakness.
It can be difficult to stay in touch with our partner and their most difficult and fragile feelings because they highlight our own experiences. Thus, our partner’s weaknesses can confront us with our own vulnerabilities and evoke feelings of resistance, judgment, and awkwardness. Most of these difficulties lie in the “blind spots” of the psyche, which are impossible to explore consciously. This is why working on relationships from a conscious perspective is often ineffective.
What about awareness?
The unconscious has a lot of power over our feelings, choices, and behavior—and that’s why mindfulness practices often don’t work. You can try as much as you want to consciously control your relationships and yourself within them, but it won’t make a big difference. Change happens not when we start behaving differently, but when we start feeling differently. When we reexamine deep-seated needs, resolve childhood conflicts, and stop replaying unconscious fantasies in reality. Therefore, mindfulness in the realm of the unconscious, alas, won’t help. But in the realm of the conscious, it certainly can’t hurt.
What can be done?
Reflecting on your reactions, feelings, behavior—in short, taking an interest in your inner life, in how we’re structured. This is very different from the popular “stop it” mentality: stop being offended, arguing, asking, hoping, and so on. Stopping something doesn’t solve the problem; it just means temporarily relegating it to a deeper place.
How does psychotherapy help?
Psychotherapy offers the opportunity to transform feelings—to make them more bearable, to connect them with experience, and thus neutralize their powerful charge. But to begin to feel differently, you need to experience the new relationship several times—only then will it become a stable pattern. This is done in consultation with a psychotherapist.
Psychoanalytic therapy helps people understand what they seek in relationships on a subconscious level and why their conscious desires fail to materialize. The therapist analyzes what kind of relationship the client is trying to recreate and what kind of contact and response they unconsciously invite from others.
But understanding alone isn’t enough. In therapy, a person not only reproduces habitual patterns of behavior but also learns new ways of building relationships with others and with themselves. Therapy is a unique space. The psychologist is close enough, yet maintains a distance that allows them to maintain an observer’s perspective. They have no relationship with the client other than the therapeutic one.
In psychotherapy, the stability of the relationship is ensured by fixed rules and payment. Finally, the psychotherapist is a specially trained specialist who has worked through their own “cracks” and “pitfalls” in personal therapy. Their empathy and inner sensitivity allow them to subtly perceive changes in a person’s emotional life and respond to them from an objective therapeutic perspective.
