Soon after Tammy moved away from her home state to a large city, her father was diagnosed with liver cancer and died. Tammy was devastated. Inside, she felt as if somehow she should have been able to prevent his tragic end. At about this time she began falling in love with alcoholics, all of whom she desperately tried to heal. Todd was her latest ‘case.’ ‘I know you are going to tell me to leave him,’ she told me, ‘but he really needs me. He had the worst childhood, and I really believe if I’m just there for him, he will finally stop.’
To Tammy, leaving Todd would be like abandoning her father and her mission to save him. Tammy was trapped in a self-destructive cycle. Like all people who have an unconscious emotional program to save Mom or Dad, or to make them happy, she was a prisoner of her past, and her love choices weren’t based on who was good for her but who she could help.
CASE #2: HOW JEREMY MARRIED HIS MOTHER
When I first met Jeremy, a forty-five-year-old plumbing contractor, he seemed like a really nice guy. Married for twenty-four years to Becky, Jeremy was in turmoil because he didn’t feel in love with his wife but couldn’t bring himself to leave. ‘I’ve known Becky since college,’ he told me, ‘and she’s the sweetest person in the world. She’s a wonderful mother to our four kids, and a devoted wife. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I’ve been unhappy with our relationship for most of our marriage. It’s not that she does anything wrong, because she’s perfect, but I’m not attracted to her as a lover, and except for the children, we have very little in common.’
As I worked with Jeremy to understand how his childhood may have affected his relationship with Becky, he began to see why he had been willing to sacrifice his own happiness in order to keep his wife happy for so long. Jeremy’s father had deserted his wife and children by running off with his secretary. Jeremy’s mother was devastated, and felt totally inadequate as a woman. She never dated or married again. Jeremy was eleven at the time, and the only boy in the family. Though he didn’t understand all the details of the scandal, he was sensitive enough to know that his mother felt insecure and rejected. At that point in his life, Jeremy made several unconscious decisions: to prove to his mother that she was good enough by trying to fill her emptiness with his love, and to prove to his father that he had been wrong to leave by never leaving a woman himself.
When Jeremy met Becky in college, he felt instantly drawn to her: She was insecure, vulnerable, and afraid of men, just like Mom. From the first, he felt a profound sense of responsibility to protect Becky and make her feel loved. This feeling grew until he asked her to marry him. Only after years of thinking about what made Becky happy did Jeremy finally begin to admit to himself that he wasn’t happy. But his emotional programming didn’t allow him even to consider doing anything that would hurt Becky, so he stayed in the relationship, feeling more and more trapped with each passing year. To Jeremy, the idea of leaving Becky was unthinkable: It would make him just like his father, and he would be saying to his mother, ‘Dad was right to leave you because you didn’t fulfill his needs, just as Becky doesn’t fulfill mine.’
I pointed out to Jeremy that it wasn’t his love for Becky that was keeping him a prisoner, but his anger at his father and his protection of his mother. His unfinished childhood business had held him hostage for almost thirty years. Jeremy hadn’t ever fully been in a relationship with his wife, because he was still emotionally bound to his mother.
Give yourself permission to have a wonderful, loving person in your life.
I believe that we all have some unfinished emotional business from childhood, but if you aren’t happy with your relationship choices and suspect you may still be held hostage by your childhood feelings, spend some time thinking about all you’ve read and look for some connections between your past and your present.
FEAR OF INTIMACY
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be affected by the third way in which your emotional programming can determine your love choices: it gives you a fear of intimacy.
ITS NOT INTIMACY WE FEAR, ITS THE CONSEQUENCES OF INTIMACY.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say that, as a child, someone with whom you were intimate, such as a parent, sibling, or relative, hurt you in some way. Maybe you loved your mother and she died when you were a child. Your mind makes an association between intimacy and that painful experience.
Intimacy = Loss or Intimacy = Shame or Intimacy = Pain
In other words, you associate intimacy with a negative consequence.
Years pass. You consciously tell yourself you want a loving, intimate relationship with a partner, but your emotional programming associates intimacy with something undesirable. So your unconscious mind makes choices in partners who will ‘protect’ you from intimacy because they are either unavailable or uncomfortable with intimacy themselves. ‘Why can’t I attract someone who will give me the love I want?’ you complain. The answer: Because you don’t want to be loved that way. You don’t trust it. It caused you pain in the past, and you are afraid it will again.
Suzanne is a thirty-eight-year-old graphic artist who attended a women’s seminar I gave. ‘My biological clock is running out,’ Suzanne told us. ‘All I want is to find a husband, settle down, and have a family. I’ve been looking for the right man for years, but I keep finding the wrong ones—married men, men who don’t want kids, men who are afraid to feel. Why aren’t there any good men out there?’
I listened to Suzanne complain about her love life, and had a feeling there was something else to it. A few hours later, after an emotional exercise, I found out what it was. ‘I’ve never realized this before,’ she began with a shaky voice and tears in her eyes, ‘but I don’t think I ever forgave my father for leaving me and my mother. My parents got divorced when I was three years old, and my father moved to another state. I only saw him a few times after that. I remember my mom telling me that we were better off without him, and I think I convinced myself that she was right. I’ve tried for years to block him out of my mind, to tell myself his leaving didn’t affect me, but I know it must have. Ever since I walked into this workshop, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and I’m tired of pretending that it was okay. I’m tired of feeling so numb.’
Suzanne continued to attract unavailable or unsuitable men into her life because she was petrified of intimacy. To Suzanne, intimacy meant loss, fear, mistrust, pain, and disappointment. Consciously she wanted a man in her life, but unconsciously she was emotionally programmed to avoid intimacy at all costs. Before she could have a healthy relationship with a man, Suzanne would have to purge herself of the pain she had avoided feeling for so long, and create a new, positive picture of intimacy.
Exercise: Write down any negative words you have associated with intimacy. Think about why you may have made those decisions about what intimacy means, and ask yourself if those decisions have been affecting your choices in partners.