The Rollercoaster of Relationships
Do you select partners who cannot make a commitment? Fear abandonment and fall obsessively in love? Are relationships a rollercoaster to you?
If this is a pattern that repeats in your life, read more to learn what may cause it and how to build a lasting relationship.
Clients often come to me wondering where these patterns come from and how to change them. I will explain to you where this may come from and how you can create change in your life.
Let’s start from the beginning...
What causes me to repeat these same relationships over and over?
Our emotions, beliefs and patterns of behavior are based on schemas that we have about the world. A schema is a pattern or theme that runs through our life. It has memories, emotions, beliefs/thoughts and bodily sensations attached to it that cause us to behave in ways that make sense when we understand the schema behind them. These patterns are often self-destructive and self-perpetrating. They are familiar and powerful in shaping our life decisions. Jeffrey Young, in his marvelous book Reinventing Your Life, aptly describes schemas as lifetraps. They are views of the world that are deeply ingrained in us and haunt us incessantly.
If any of my questions at the beginning of this page sounded familiar, then there’s a good chance that there is a lifetrap, a deeply held schema, that is controlling your behavior. Some of us hold the sense and experiences that significant people in our lives will not continue to be there. We believe that the important people in our life will be emotionally unpredictable, unreliable, die or more leave us for someone else. This is a schema known as abandonment/instability.
Clients sometimes ask me what causes them to develop this schema. I believe the answer is multifaceted. Some of us have a natural biological temperment that pre-disposes us to this experience. You can often see this watching infants. Some infants have a very strong reaction to separation, while others less so. Additionally, our life experiences can lead to this. A parent who died or left home during your childhood, loss of attention from a parent in a significant way when you were younger, such as if the parent was depressed or a workaholic. On the flip side, if as a child you were so protected and close to your parents that you did not have the opportunity to learn to deal with life’s difficulties alone, you may now find yourself struggling with it as an adult.
How might I act as a result of this schema?
In my work I’ve noticed that there are generally two different ways people experience this inner sense of abandonment. For some of us, we believe that we cannot survive without the other person. We believe we need a strong figure in our life to guide us and direct us. If someone important leaves we will quickly find another dependent relationship.
Sometimes we experience fear of emotional abandonment to the extent that we simply avoid relationships. We can tolerate being alone for long periods of time, and find ourselves withdrawing from close relationships out of fear of being hurt again. For us, the process of loss is more devastating that the discomfort of being alone.
This schema will usually cause intense anxiety that your partner will leave, depression when your partner does (“after all, I knew this would happen. It always happens and I will always end up being alone”), and intense anger at the partner for leaving.
Sometimes this fear and expectation of abandonment will cause us to feel that we need to do whatever the other person wants in order to prevent them from leaving us. This may cause me to give up on my own needs and desires, because the need to keep my partner there is feels most important. It may cause me to feel incompetent, and wonder how I will function on my own if my partner leaves.
There are three different reactions one may have to this schema. Some people respond by surrendering to the schema, by avoiding intimate relationships out of an underlying expectation that these relationships anyhow won’t last. Other people avoid their feared situation by selecting partners who will not be emotionally committed, thus avoiding the presumed inevitable. They will usually experience intense chemistry with emotionally unavailable partners, falling obsessively in love. Finally, there are people who will try to overcompensate, clinging to their partner in a desperate attempt to prevent the dreaded experience of the partner leaving. He or she may attack their partner for even minor separations, and constantly look for signs that their partner may leave them.
If I have this schema, what are the goals of therapy?
The most important goal of therapy for someone with this schema is to learn who reliable partners are, and to learn to trust in their reliability. You will learn to select significant others who are there for you and emotionally available. You will be able to be alone without becoming anxious and depressed, and without feeling an intense need to reach out and connect immediately with others. And as you feel more secure in your relationships, you will no longer have the same need to control, cling to, and manipulate others, thus resulting in both you and your partner feeling more happy and secure in your relationship.
What to expect in therapy?
There are a number of different approaches that I use with my clients to help them confront and heal this schema.
Cognitive strategies, questions and exercises that help you identify and challenge your thoughts and beliefs. This can help you alter your view that all people are unreliable and that temporary separations are catastrophic. This will be hard at first, but you will find yourself getting better at it over time. You will learn new ways to accept other people’s need for space without feeling abandoned.
You will plan ways that you can choose partners who can commit. You will learn to stop acting in ways that are clingy, jealous or controlling that have sometimes driven your partners away.
I will likely use imagery and other reflective questions to help you remember and identify previous experiences of abandonment, both in childhood and adulthood. You will use the new beliefs you are developing to re-examine those experiences with the wisdom of a healthy adult.
If the patterns I’ve described here sound familiar to you and have been getting in the way of you living the life you would like to live, I invite you to give me a call and discuss whether therapy will be right for you. Therapy can be a scary process at first, especially when relationships and deep connections are an emotion-wraught experience. I always recommend coming in for a session or two to give yourself a chance to see how therapy feels and if you think it will be helpful to you.