Connecting to what we want: Part 2 – Relationships

Reclaiming your birthright: The power of desire

Recovery involves not just grieving the harm directly done to us in our childhoods (through abuse or neglect) but also finding a way to reclaim the things that were taken from us. One such thing is a birthright that every child has – to be nurtured around what they want and through that to discover a sense of who they are.

Being in touch with what we want is a big part of knowing who we are, and when we are able to connect to ourselves, we can start to access this knowledge. Knowing what we want and what we don’t want is a significant part of having a sense of self. And that knowing is not so much an unchanging set of facts (I want a specific thing, and not another), but rather a sense – we can detect in ourselves where the pull of our desires is leading us and are able to distinguish between shallower and deeper desires. We can distinguish between an internal yes and an internal no.

The core problem: Where boundaries blur

So, what does any of this have to do with relationships?

It’s not easy to connect meaningfully to another person when our own sense of self is poorly defined. When that’s the case, we can’t tell where we end and other people begin! So it’s no wonder that we’ll then experience all sorts of issues with boundaries.

When trying to have any kind of relationships before starting work on my childhood trauma recovery, I would always run into a very similar set of struggles with boundaries. These struggles tended to be more pronounced in romantic relationships, but they presented surprisingly similarly in close friendships, too. I simultaneously yearned for close relationships, and when I found myself in one, very quickly felt a range of impulses and feelings that caused me distress and made it hard to have a relationship with the other person:

• Claustrophobia: I felt like I was being smothered by my friend or partner. I would feel an intense need to spend time physically away from them and even ‘forget’ about them for a bit. In terms of boundaries, this was like the feeling that I was being absorbed into the other person, and I needed to get away to feel separate again.

• Criticism: There were things about my friend/partner that I believed needed to change in order for us to be closer. It might be an opinion of theirs or lifestyle preferences, or even their style of relating. The need to criticise or change the other person was a way in which I was crossing boundaries in order to try to feel safe.

• Emotional control: I often felt this way because I believed that if they felt better (less stressed, or happier perhaps), they would have more emotional space for me. I wasn’t yet connected to my sense of needs and wants, and so I was looking for a caring, connected person to know my needs and wants for me. If I could have verbalised it, I might have said, ‘I’ll take care of your feelings, and you can take care of mine.’ It seemed easier to see how somebody else was feeling than to know how I was feeling.

How parental immaturity shapes us

When I was doing these things in relationships, it wasn’t because I was lazy or demanding or because I didn’t genuinely want healthy, loving relationships. I was just acting out the ways in which my own parents were disconnected from themselves and me as a kid.

I didn’t learn how to connect what I wanted and needed with the healthy actions that it might take to fulfill those needs and desires. They didn’t model for me what a secure, self-aware person was like. Instead, they showed me that people got their needs met by controlling the people around them. Both of my parents were immature in different ways and sought to be taken care of co-dependently in a way that resulted in a battle of wills between them and their kids.

Here are some of the ways this kind of parenting might have looked in your family:

• A parent has a bad day at work and takes it out on you and/or your siblings in various ways when they get home. They really don’t know how to self-regulate after upset.

• Neither parent knows how to maintain friendships beyond perhaps colleagues or drinking buddies, and they don’t seem to have a desire for more than that either. Parents like this may long for deeper relationships but have given up on believing in them when they take work and don’t just happen magically.

• A parent who shares inappropriate emotional content with you as a kid instead of seeking out healthy resources that are within their power to access (therapy, a support group, a 12-step group). Kids will often naturally want to be there for a struggling parent and it’s the parent’s job to protect their child from this overwhelming and inappropriate demand.

• When one or both parents lament their powerlessness over ‘oppressive’ circumstances, which they could actually have power, as adults, to face, question, or reframe. These might be challenges of operating in society, within the law, or within the dynamics of their own family. This might look like complaints about ‘This country is going to the dogs!’ or ‘Your mother’s family always think they’re better than everyone else’ that serves as an excuse to not try some new behavior or act as evidence that there’s ‘no point’ in striving for better in life.

Reacting vs engaging

When our parents acted out in ways like this, it revealed how they didn’t connect to their own power over their lives and lacked the skills and maturity they needed to direct the course of their lives. They might have become people who required others to behave in specific ways so that they didn’t lose control of their emotions. They may have lacked a sense of self-efficacy and, as a result, failed to develop into people who were capable of having dynamic, fun, and reciprocal relationships but instead always seemed to be on the back foot, reacting to life rather than engaging purposefully in it.

To have a relationship with someone like that is not enjoyable or fulfilling because you end up not engaged in mutual interests or joys but constantly bogged down in the morass of their difficulties or walking on eggshells around potentially explosive issues. We might have picked up from them either a tendency towards codependency ourselves or the belief that the kinds of relationships we were good at were ones in which we care-take difficult people. This can make relationships exhausting and really not seem at all like an enjoyable part of life!

Developing your self-efficacy

So what does a healthy sense of self around being in touch with and fulfilling our desires look like?

Part of it is knowing that life should be mostly enjoyable, even though periods of difficulty and struggle are normal. When we know this, it becomes possible to take our own suffering seriously and take action to find our way to a more fulfilling and centered way of life.

It’s okay to suffer and to experience difficulty, but if this is the defining quality of our lives then we need to get help to find meaningful change. It is possible to do this. In fact, if you’re reading this, chances are that’s exactly what you’re doing. You are already engaging in the process of defining your self-efficacy. When we are able to seek out the help we need to take care of our happiness in a good enough way, we create the space to have relationships which are based on mutual interests and sharing positive experiences.

The relationship piece of childhood trauma recovery is, without a doubt, the most challenging part. However, it can be helpful to realise that there is an understandable process around this, too – our relationships with others are not just about others; they begin with us and how we were taught to relate to our desires and interests.

Learning to be emotionally vulnerable is important in relationships too, and that much we may already know; what can be harder to realise is that interest, purpose, and enjoying the experience of being ourselves is hugely attractive to the kind of people who will like us for who we are, not for what we can do for them.

The ultimate work: Learning to enjoy life

The struggle that many of us experience with codependency and the kinds of relationship patterns we were taught were valuable or acceptable growing up is an intense and often demoralizing experience – however, there can be some relief and a different approach in learning to enjoy things that interest us in a deep way.

The enjoyment of life was not a priority growing up, and it may have even been derided as unimportant, but it is far from that. In fact, it is the connection to self, and following what makes us feel intrigued, piqued, or alive can be some of the most important ‘work’ we undertake in learning to be ourselves. And it will attract those who will delight in that, and in whom we may also delight.

As featured in Patrick Teahan's Healing Community.

Further reading: Connecting to what we want: Part 3 – Career.