A wonderful NYT article titled “Why you will marry the wrong person” beautifully articulated a topic l have given considerable thought to. The title of this article seems to be inescapablely true. In all relationships there is always a moment when you will have a thought about your partner that is a version of this title. Even when you make the very best choice and thoughtfully choose your partner, it’s still true! Don’t despair this is not a flawed design. It was pointed out in the article that this fate is cannot be dodged because how we experience love is imprinted on us from our earliest relationships. We all have a flavor of love and our palate developed with the first person we loved and they had their own baggage. Okay, that’s the not so great news. The great news is the purpose of our most attached relationships is to finish our growing up. We are all experiencing arrested development on a certain level and this is impossible to change in a vacuum. We need a special someone to make us feel insane to finish the business of growing up (this doesn’t end, but you a knock some BIG chunks out.) Feeling driven to losing our minds is the beautifully crafted work of our unconscious. Just like you cannot control a dream, yet your mind is creating it, we are still in a type of dream in our waking life. “Oh, shit!” you say, don’t worry, it gets better. You need to be driven nuts to realize you are in a dream and unbenost to you these moments of insanity are your alerts that you need to WAKE UP. Right here, right now you are no longer in the present as an adult, you have been transported back in time. You are now in a relationship with one of the first people you loved and you feel as helpless now as you did then. This is your opportunity to become the hero of your own life and finish some unfinished business. You will be furious and scared. Be kind, but strong with your partner they are in a dream too. This is a ripe moment for change. During these moments of peak intensity you are both playing roles in each other’s scripts and don’t know it. In your mind you will be reliving your past and you now have a chance to change and grow yourself up. Take this great moment to become someone you would admire. How does this moment call on you to be brave and authentic? If you were to summon the most respect for yourself possible, what would that look like? Sometimes being vulnerable and tender is what is called for, sometimes it is to stand our ground. These two positions are often not mutually exclusive. It takes two to tango and when you change the steps you and your partner know so well, they will likely stumble. Allow them to find their footing and grow themselves up too.
therapy
Why not getting what you want is just what you need
We all make wishes on fallen eyelashes or wishbones. We always wish for what we want, the ideal lover or a windfall of money. We have these images in our mind of how life “should” be to make us happy. No one wishes to NOT get what they want, but what if not getting what you want in the way you want it, leads to exactly what you need. The end goal of all wishes….to be free.
We all have goals and desires based on our values and our perceptions of the “right” way to do things that maintain our identity. When something happens in our lives that is a major deviation from what we saw for ourselves, our identity can be shaken to it’s core. Who am l now that this did not work out as l had planned it? What do l make of my life and sense of myself now that l have not achieved this cherished goal?
Count yourself lucky if after a terrible disappointment you have begun to ask yourself these questions because you are on the road to getting what may be greater than your deeply longed for wish. Freedom.
What kind of freedom am l talking about and how could that possibly make up for a broken heart? Well, maybe “make up for”is not exactly how it is experienced. When the door closes in a shockingly gut wrenching way to what you wanted, you will probably find yourself staring at that door for a long time in disbelief. You will go over in your mind the events that lead to this disappointment and desperately try to scramble to make sense of what happened, who is to blame or how to do it better next time to make sure that NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN! Your identity is pretty much bargaining on how to escape changing and what can feel a bit like dying.
As strange as it may sound thinking you NEEDED that wish to come through was the trap. That wish trapped you in conditional happiness along with a huge heaping of self judgement and judgement of others too. After mustering all the compassion you have access to, allow yourself to grieve your loss. You can then begin to embrace the transformation of who you are now becoming. You have lightened your load of perfectionism and maybe the wall between us and them has come down. You feel a greater sense of your own humanity and are more connected to all those other humans who don’t get what they want either. Which is all of them.
amy telsey lcsw 