Focusing Tip #439
“How do our emotional hurts and wounds affect our relationships?”
I was asked:
What are the typical emotional hurts and wounds that people suffer in their lives and how do they affect our relationships specifically romantic relationships?
Here is my reply:
Really this is THE question! 😉
From my own healing journey, and from working with many people over many years, I have come to the conclusion that the earliest hurts in our lives cast the longest shadow. You probably don’t remember being a baby, and how the people around you treated you then, but your body does remember.
Researchers have studied parents and babies and followed them over many years, and have come to the conclusion that healthy development as a person — physically, mentally, and emotionally — depends on whether the parent can be emotionally attentive to the baby. The parent doesn’t have to be perfect — luckily, because no one is! — but at least most of the time the parent needs to relate to the baby with real contact, for example with smiles, funny faces, a loving gaze. When the child hurts, the parent pays attention. Crying isn’t shamed, it’s soothed.
When this doesn’t happen — or, worse, when abuse happens instead — even at that very early stage we decide that there must be something wrong with us, and something inside shuts down. A layer of hurt and sadness is installed deep inside us, a kind of frozen neediness that feels like a shameful secret. “Never let a guy know how much you need him!” is an absolute rule.
When this deep level of hurt is unhealed, all adult relationships and especially the romantic ones are colored by the hurt child inside who is on a hunt for what was missing. The thrill of feeling special… the wonder of being adored…the amazement of someone who wants to know everything about me…These get their extra zingy charge from the hurting baby who didn’t get this at the time it should have happened.
This bleeding of past needs into present relationships is a big problem. Romantic relationships are being asked to carry the extra burden of meeting the needs of the inner child, and this almost always goes really badly wrong.
“The needy child cannot be satisfied…”
Why? Because the needy child cannot be satisfied — at least not in this way. So what feels deliciously good at first soon feels like not enough, and the child keeps wanting more: more adoration, more closeness, more utter and complete devotion. Any lapse in the completeness of the romantic attention sinks us into a pit of despair, and the child’s feelings of unworthiness and unloveableness come rushing up.
Real relationships between two adults can be thrilling, playful, deep, full of life and joy. We can take a childlike glee in each other — and there is not a problem with that. But when the unacknowledged hurts of a needy child hijack the adult relationship to try to meet a child’s needs, it’s not good, because the present time connection cannot happen with the potential that is here now.
Once I had learned the Focusing process, which is my favorite way to do emotional healing, I was able to turn toward the patterns of longing and possessiveness that were attempting to play out in my romantic life. I could have an “inner relationship” with the needy child in me, and begin to really heal the incompleteness and the feelings of unworthiness. Over time, that not only changed how I showed up in relationships but it even changed the kind of people I was meeting!