Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed. by Ph.D Harville Hendrix Page B

had lost.
    Helen and I strive to keep eros alive in Leah, to sustain the brightness of her eyes and the thrill of her contagious laughter. But, despite our best intentions, we do not meet all of her needs. Sometimes it seems as if life itself is making her turn inward. Once she was frightened by a large dog and learned to be wary of strange animals. One day she slipped in a pool and developed a fear of water. But sometimes Helen and I are more directly to blame. We have five other children besides Leah, and there are times when she feels left out. There are days when
we come home from work too tired to listen to what she is saying, too distracted to understand what she wants. Tragically, we also wound her by unwittingly passing on our own childhood wounds, the emotional inheritance of generations. We either overcompensate for what we didn’t get from our parents or blindly re-create the same painful situations.
    For whatever reasons, when Leah’s desires are not satisfied a questioning look comes over her face; she cries; she is afraid. She no longer talks to leaves or notices the fireflies darting about the bushes. Eros is blunted and turns in on itself.
    THE PERILOUS PILGRIMAGE
    LEAH’S STORY IS my story and your story. We all started out life whole and vital, eager for life’s adventures, but we had a perilous pilgrimage through childhood. To one degree or another, we were all wounded by our caretakers’ intrusiveness or neglect. In fact, some of that wounding took place in the first few months of our lives. Think for a moment about the ceaseless demands of an infant. When an infant wakes up in the morning, it cries to be fed. Then its diapers are wet and it cries to be changed. Then the baby wants to be held, a physical craving as powerful as its need for food. Then the baby is hungry again and once more cries to be fed. A bubble of gas forms in its stomach, and the baby cries out in anguish. It signals distress the only way it knows how—with an undifferentiated cry—and if its caretakers are perceptive enough, the infant is fed, changed, held, or rocked, and experiences momentary satisfaction. But if the caretakers can’t figure out what is wrong, or if they withhold their attentions for fear of spoiling the baby, the child experiences a primitive anxiety: the world is not a safe place. Since it has no way of taking care of itself and no sense of delayed gratification, it believes that getting the outside world
to respond instantly to its needs is truly a matter of life and death.
    Although you and I have no recollection of these first few months of life, our old brains are still trapped in an infantile perspective. Although we are now adults, capable of keeping ourselves fed and warm and dry, a hidden part of us still expects the outside world to take care of us. When our partners are hostile or merely unhelpful, a silent alarm is triggered deep in our brains that fills us with the fear of death. As you will soon see, this automatic alarm system plays a key role in intimate love relationships.
    As a child grows out of infancy, new needs emerge, and each new need defines a potential area of wounding. When a baby is about eighteen months old, for example, it has a clearer sense of where it leaves off and others begin. This is a stage of development referred to as the stage of “autonomy and independence.” In this period the child has a growing interest in exploring the world beyond its primary caretaker. If a toddler had an adult’s command of language, he would say something like this: “I’m ready to spend some time off your lap now. I’m ready to let go of the nipple and wander away by myself. I’m a little insecure about leaving you, however, and I’ll be back in a few minutes to make sure you haven’t disappeared.” But since the child has only a limited vocabulary, he simply climbs down from his mother’s lap, turns his back, and toddles out of the room.
    Now, ideally, the mother smiles and says