IMAGO COUNSELING

It was probably downright amazing - until it wasn’t. Maybe it was moving in together, maybe when you got married, or maybe when you just decided to make your fling official, it takes the brain two hours to two years once a serious commitment is made in the relationship for those endorphins to stop producing and those feelings of romance to fade - things feel as though they’re changing. But why does this happen? What is our psyche trying to achieve here? When we are born, we are in a state of wholeness, and if our caretakers are attuned to our needs, we remain psychologically whole, or rather, in a state of ‘aliveness’. However, even in a highly nurturing environment, there are the demands of society’s behavioral expectations and there is no such thing as a perfect parent or caregiver. They are not able every minute of every day to nurture precisely each demand and need. Perhaps they are stressed from everyday life, they need to go to work and leave us in the care of another, they are emotionally distant or incredibly protective. Whatever it is, even when intention is good, we cannot sustain perfection. Our parents are human too. Our unmet needs create pain and fear, and during these experiences as a child we aim to sustain our connection with our caregiver, even at the sacrifice of ourselves. Parts of ourselves die in order for the connection to survive. Maybe that meant learning to be quieter because mom was so stressed, maybe it meant withdrawing to avoid reactivity, maybe they were so busy working to provide us with our needs and security that you found yourself alone. Perhaps you learned to work really hard at school or in sports because you received love and praise when you achieved something, or maybe you had so much freedom that you had to figure things out for yourself. Whatever our experience, we denied and repressed some of our own needs and developed coping mechanisms in order to protect our connections, to feel a sense of belonging, and experience some sort of approval. This left our ‘wholeness’ and ‘aliveness’ with lost parts of ourselves that our parents or society found unacceptable or unloveable. As adults, we do our best to live fully, but the unconscious agenda of our psyche is to restore the parts of ourselves that we lost or diminished as children and return to wholeness. If we learn to minimize and express less as a child, you find attractive and fall in love with someone who is expressive and opinionated. If we learned that we needed to stay close to our caregivers to stay safe or were told not to touch that, don’t go there, climb down from that, we fall for someone with a deep sense of adventure. We will fall for someone who embodies the part of yourself that you lost, that died. You feel alive! We feel whole, like we’re truly ourselves again. We feel safe, sexy, nurturing and nurtured. It feels like things are falling into place. You’ve bonded - you cannot imagine life without this person. Sooner or later, this magical human in front of you starts to change. They start annoying you in ways you never anticipated, you start to feel your needs aren’t being met, or that sense of safety and security has been shaken. Even the parts of them that we were attracted to start to bother us, their sense of independence starts to feel like avoidance, their ability to express themselves starts to feel ‘too much’… Old pains, fears and traumas feel reignited and our partners cannot seem to love and care for us the way they promised. We start to feel like we are surviving in the relationship, or sweeping things under the rug to avoid the conflict. We make demands or beg for compromise in order to restore feelings of love, safety, and needs being met. We are now in a power struggle. This continues until we separate, cheat, or live in a silent uncomfortable divorce still beside each other. You may think otherwise, but you’ve found your perfect healer! You’re exactly at the point where your psyche is trying to move towards wholeness. “Conflict is growth waiting to happen.” Maya Kollman The subconscious will always choose a mate who appears at first to be able to give us what we lost in our childhood. This is your Imago. They are very much irresistible. But in fact, this person later starts to feel as though they have similar traits to the ones that wounded us in childhood. It’s painful, shocking, disappointing and sometimes unbearable. They remind us of these caretakers. And in this way are providing the opportunity to heal what was wounded before. For example, if you are a shyer and quieter person and prefer nights at home, you end up with someone who is outgoing and expressive. When you meet them you feel like these parts of yourself feel alive again! You feel social and chatty. But in time, it feels like they’re out all the time, giving you less attention or overpowering you. You tell them they’re ‘too much’, need more attention than you have to offer, or are too emotional. If you found them spontaneous they’re now irresponsible. Rather than moving towards our wholeness and embracing more of these very things that we learned to minimize as children, we start to seek sameness, and the parts of our partners that we once loved become parts that we want them to minimize - as you did as a child. Once you are aware of the agenda of your unconscious, you can start taking the first steps away from compromise (a denial and suppression of the self) and towards becoming whole in a deep, nurturing, passionate connection again. Conflict is an expression of needs trying to be met. Romance is supposed to end. Being ‘in love’ is not sustainable, but being in deep, loving connection is.