Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. by Ph.D Harville Hendrix
Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix
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bland, sweet vanilla ice cream, as close a substitute for mother’s milk as you can possibly find. The past and the present live side by side within your mind.
Now that we’ve spent some time pondering the nature of the unconscious mind, let’s return to our original discussion of mate selection. How does this information about the old brain
add to our understanding of romantic attraction? The curious phenomenon I noted earlier in this exploration was that we seem to be highly selective in our choice of mates. In fact, we appear to be searching for a “one and only” with a very specific set of positive and negative traits.
What we are doing, I have discovered from years of theoretical research and clinical observation, is looking for someone who has the predominant character traits of the people who raised us. Our old brain, trapped in the eternal now and having only a dim awareness of the outside world, is trying to re-create the environment of childhood. And the reason the old brain is trying to resurrect the past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion but of a compelling need to heal old childhood wounds.
The ultimate reason you fell in love with your mate, I am suggesting, is not that your mate was young and beautiful, had an impressive job, had a “point value” equal to yours, or had a kind disposition. You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood.
2
CHILDHOOD WOUNDS
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
WHEN YOU HEAR the words “psychological and emotional damage of childhood,” you may immediately think about serious childhood traumas such as sexual or physical abuse or the suffering that comes from having parents who divorced or died or were alcoholics. And for many people this is the tragic reality of childhood. However, even if you were fortunate enough to grow up in a safe, nurturing environment, you still bear invisible scars from childhood, because from the very moment you were born you were a complex, dependent creature with a never-ending cycle of needs. Freud correctly labeled us “insatiable beings.” And no parents, no matter how devoted, are able to respond perfectly to all of these changing needs.
Before we explore some of the subtler ways in which you may have been wounded and how this affects your love relationships, let’s take a look at what you were like when you first
came into the world, because this state of “original wholeness” contains an important clue to the hidden expectations you bring to your partner.
ORIGINAL WHOLENESS
THERE HAVE BEEN no miracle babies born with the ability to reveal to us the dark mysteries of life before birth, but we do know something about the physical life of the fetus. We know that its biological needs are taken care of instantly and automatically by an exchange of fluids between it and its mother. We know that a fetus has no need to eat, breathe, or protect itself from danger, and that it is constantly soothed by the rhythmical beat of its mother’s heart. From these simple biological facts and from observations of newborns, we can surmise that the fetus lives a tranquil, floating, effortless existence. It has no awareness of boundaries, no sense of itself, and no recognition that it is encased in a sac inside its mother. There is a widely held belief that when a baby is inside its mother’s womb, it experiences a sense of oneness, an Edenic experience free from desire. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, put it this way: “in fetal existence, we were in communion with the universe.” 1
This idyllic existence comes to an abrupt end as the mother’s contractions forcibly expel the baby from the womb. But
Now that we’ve spent some time pondering the nature of the unconscious mind, let’s return to our original discussion of mate selection. How does this information about the old brain
add to our understanding of romantic attraction? The curious phenomenon I noted earlier in this exploration was that we seem to be highly selective in our choice of mates. In fact, we appear to be searching for a “one and only” with a very specific set of positive and negative traits.
What we are doing, I have discovered from years of theoretical research and clinical observation, is looking for someone who has the predominant character traits of the people who raised us. Our old brain, trapped in the eternal now and having only a dim awareness of the outside world, is trying to re-create the environment of childhood. And the reason the old brain is trying to resurrect the past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion but of a compelling need to heal old childhood wounds.
The ultimate reason you fell in love with your mate, I am suggesting, is not that your mate was young and beautiful, had an impressive job, had a “point value” equal to yours, or had a kind disposition. You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood.
2
CHILDHOOD WOUNDS
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
WHEN YOU HEAR the words “psychological and emotional damage of childhood,” you may immediately think about serious childhood traumas such as sexual or physical abuse or the suffering that comes from having parents who divorced or died or were alcoholics. And for many people this is the tragic reality of childhood. However, even if you were fortunate enough to grow up in a safe, nurturing environment, you still bear invisible scars from childhood, because from the very moment you were born you were a complex, dependent creature with a never-ending cycle of needs. Freud correctly labeled us “insatiable beings.” And no parents, no matter how devoted, are able to respond perfectly to all of these changing needs.
Before we explore some of the subtler ways in which you may have been wounded and how this affects your love relationships, let’s take a look at what you were like when you first
came into the world, because this state of “original wholeness” contains an important clue to the hidden expectations you bring to your partner.
ORIGINAL WHOLENESS
THERE HAVE BEEN no miracle babies born with the ability to reveal to us the dark mysteries of life before birth, but we do know something about the physical life of the fetus. We know that its biological needs are taken care of instantly and automatically by an exchange of fluids between it and its mother. We know that a fetus has no need to eat, breathe, or protect itself from danger, and that it is constantly soothed by the rhythmical beat of its mother’s heart. From these simple biological facts and from observations of newborns, we can surmise that the fetus lives a tranquil, floating, effortless existence. It has no awareness of boundaries, no sense of itself, and no recognition that it is encased in a sac inside its mother. There is a widely held belief that when a baby is inside its mother’s womb, it experiences a sense of oneness, an Edenic experience free from desire. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, put it this way: “in fetal existence, we were in communion with the universe.” 1
This idyllic existence comes to an abrupt end as the mother’s contractions forcibly expel the baby from the womb. But
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