Those of us who have loved more than once know that there is often a peculiar kind of consistency to our romantic lives, and particularly to the ways in which we get hurt. There are patterns and emotional scenarios that we tend to repeat over and over again, even when we make a conscious decision to avoid them. We may begin a new relationship confident that we will be able to sidestep familiar traps. And we may be determined to implement new ways of resolving tensions so that, no matter what happens, we will not find ourselves disrespected or trampled on in the same ways as we have been before. We may even choose our partner based on the assessment that he or she will allow us to do things differently. Yet it is often precisely when we believe that we have finally freed ourselves of a pattern or a relational configuration that we once again find ourselves repeating it.
The fact that past patterns return and repeat in the present implies that, whatever our past holds, it animates the present: the present is always infused by the energies of the past. In this sense, there is no such thing as a present that is completely liberated from the past. While this is the case in all aspects of our lives, it is particularly relevant in the context of love. We always bring our entire history of longing to our love affairs. And it is very difficult for us to cope with the realization that the yearnings we carry from the past may not be any more likely to be fulfilled in the present than they were in the past. We hope against hope that our present love can compensate for the devastations of the past. Or that we will finally find a means to redeem the mistakes we have made over the years. It is all the more distressing, then, to face those moments when we realize that the past has managed to catch up with us even though we have done our best to resist its power.
Some of love’s repetitions are relatively easy to comprehend. We may, for instance, be more or less deliberately trying to find a substitute for a special love that we have lost. We may be looking to reiterate a past passion that we are having a hard time leaving behind. We may choose a new lover based on the fact that something about him or her reminds us of the person we once loved. We may even be aware that our current lover is merely a pale reflection of our past partner. We may know that we are attempting to reincarnate a lost love whose memory lingers within our emotional landscape. In such cases, repetitions hardly come as a surprise. However, most of the time when the past returns and repeats, we do not understand why. And, most times, we are far from being thrilled at the sudden reappearance of old demons.
It was Sigmund Freud who gave us the tools to understand why our lives—and especially our love lives—exhibit debilitating repetitive patterns. He recognized that our earliest childhood experiences, particularly ones that are somehow traumatic or distressing, leave a permanent imprint in the unconscious recesses of our interiority. And he argued that the rudimentary outlines of our personality congeal around this imprint so that the patterns of relating that we internalize at this formative period are the ones that keep resurfacing in our lives. No matter how we later choose to conduct ourselves, no matter what kinds of conscious decisions we make, or what kinds of experiences we undergo, these patterns remain engraved within our private universe. Their power is in fact so immense that they determine the basic design of our emotional lives. Regardless of how many layers of complexity we add to our personality in the course of our existence, a trace of this design remains lodged in our psyches.
We start our lives in a state of utter vulnerability in relation to those who care for us. These early relationships of care can be more or less competent, more or less nurturing. Some are characterized by an abundance of love; others are deficient or outright abusive. Either way, the care we receive as infants and young children gives us a blueprint for human relationships, teaching us how to love and be loved. Because the young child’s desire for love is invariably larger than what can realistically be provided, infantile experiences are never entirely satisfactory. Indeed, part of what we need to learn at that stage in life is how to cope with the disappointment of not always getting what we want; we need to come to terms with the recognition that our demand for love will not be consistently met. Nonetheless, some forms of care are obviously more conducive to the development of a satisfactory emotional life than others. In this sense, a great deal depends on the cards we are dealt at birth.
Our early experiences of care teach us what to expect from those who love us (or are supposed to love us). We learn the boundaries of acceptable behavior. We develop a sense of the emotional scenarios that we are able or willing to endure. And we find out what kinds of actions are (or are not) effective in interpersonal situations. We, in short, adopt an unconscious set of assumptions that governs the way in which we approach our relationships. Some of us believe that the world is an inherently generous place and that the relationships we form will be loving and sustaining. Others, in contrast, imagine that the world is intrinsically disappointing and that other people are likely to treat us unkindly or even ruthlessly. Those of us who are hugely unfortunate learn that love is always coupled with abuse so that we come to associate it with suffering and do not think twice about it when this is what our relationships deliver.
Our emotional composition is fortunately so elaborate that it would be impossible to draw any direct causal link between our early experiences and the unfolding of our love lives. Nevertheless, if we are not careful, the set of expectations that we bring to the world can have a tremendous impact on the ways in which we interact with others, as well as on the ways in which others respond to us. It is hardly surprising that a person who approaches others with the assumption that she will be treated with respect and compassion will elicit a different response from one who expects—and therefore perhaps also to a certain extent tolerates—ill-treatment.
The fact that our earliest modes of relating leave a lasting trace in our unconscious lives clarifies why we tend to reenact certain emotional scenarios while finding others extremely difficult to achieve. The patterns of passion that we repeat involuntarily, against our will or better judgment, as it were, indicate that we are often motivated by an uncanny faithfulness to unconscious emotional intensities that may have little to do with our conscious inclinations. Freud demonstrated that this unconscious “compulsion to repeat” can be so commanding that we get the impression “of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some ‘daemonic’ power.” In other words, even though the repetitive configurations that burden our existence originate from our own psyches, we experience them as a mysterious hand of destiny that determines how our lives will turn out. We feel that we are in the claws of some impersonal or automatic entity that brings us to the same spot over and again despite our ferocious efforts to arrive at a different destination. Yet it is our own unconscious that keeps spinning the wheel of our fortune.
Most of us are familiar with the idea that the unconscious contains special forms of wisdom and deep insight. We know, for example, that creativity calls for a fluid interchange between our conscious and unconscious lives. For some of us, dreams—which, according to Freud, give us a privileged access to the unconscious—are a significant source of inspiration. Many of us also understand that our unconscious communicates hidden desires that constitute an essential component of our identity. However, Freud’s point about the repetition compulsion is that our relationship to our unconscious may sometimes be entirely passive, complacent, mechanical, and uncreative. Whenever this is the case, the unconscious ends up shaping our lives without our conscious consent.
Even the most distressing of our past experiences can be worked with—or, to borrow Freud’s terminology, “worked through”—as long as we recall them on the conscious level. In contrast, traumas that remain repressed (kept below the surface of our consciousness) cannot be worked through, with the result that they erupt in unconscious repetitions that cause us, time and again, to relive the pain of the past. We may in fact end up reenacting traumatizing events so consistently that we gradually become more and more firmly trapped in unyielding patterns of relating and self-understanding. And we are particularly liable to do so in the realm of romance for the simple reason that our formative experiences of care—the experiences that gave us our elemental blueprint for loving—take place so early in our lives that they are not reachable through conscious memory. The initial sediments of our emotional lives are so thoroughly buried that they cannot easily be accessed in adult life. From this point of view, we are to a certain extent destined to repeat the mistakes we make in love.
What is especially tragic about such repetitions is that they represent a desperate attempt to right the wrongs of the past. That is, they occur because we are unconsciously trying to “master” a traumatic interpersonal dynamic that has caused us pain in the past. We are driven to a given repetition because, on a fundamental level, we believe that this time things will be different, that this time we will not get wounded. We are persuaded that repeating an agonizing scenario one more time will allow us to modify its outcome and therefore to transcend those aspects of our history that weigh us down. Unfortunately, as long as we stay within the repetition—as long as we trust that reenactments lead to inner transformation—we will accomplish little, save deepen the injuries we are endeavoring to mend.
Unconscious patterns can be stunningly tenacious and narrow-minded. While our conscious lives show an awareness of personal history, of the ways in which our past, present, and future fall on a continuum that accounts for the overall development of our character, the unconscious preserves archaic passions in an unchanging form. It is characterized by a “timeless” loyalty to antiquated relational designs that can be radically at odds with the demands of our ever-shifting interpersonal contexts. It resurrects past conflicts and ambivalences in a stubbornly frozen fashion, frequently hauling us into modalities of thought and action that are entirely inappropriate to the situation at hand. For example, we may under- or overreact emotionally, aim our love or wrath at individuals who merit neither, or drastically misjudge what really matters in a given scenario. In such cases, our unconscious revives our past within the present in awkward and counterproductive ways.
If we do not find a way of processing our unconscious patterns, they can over time determine what we find imaginable in our lives. As the contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear puts the matter, unconscious expectations that organize our lives in obstinately repetitive ways are “world-structuring” in that they present a confining set of life possibilities as though they were the only ones we have. Because we treat our customary world as the only plausible world, we have trouble envisioning viable alternatives. We come to expect certain outcomes and, sadly, these are more often than not exactly what we receive. We find ourselves drawn to certain kinds of situations, behaviors, and relationships while viewing others as inherently inconceivable. In this way, what we unconsciously conceive to be the limits of our experience curtails the range of our life options.
Our compulsion to repeat can therefore direct us to hollow and insipid existential paradigms. Because it can make us feel as if our lives were lived by some entity other than ourselves, we can end up becoming the passive spectators of our own experience. Alternatively, the repetition compulsion can set up the conditions of our chronic romantic disappointment. It can, for instance, cause us to ask for love in ways that are destined to fail or backfire. Or it can induce us to select lovers who increase our desolation by treating us in ways that resonate with past experiences of trauma. We may gravitate to uncaring or forbidding lovers while avoiding others who might be able to care for us in more satisfying ways. In this manner, we close off potentially rewarding relational opportunities before they have had a chance to materialize as real-life possibilities.
The reverse of this is that unconscious repetitions can encourage us to have unreasonable expectations for our relationships. They can prompt us to make unrealistic claims on our lovers, so that we end up insisting that they conjure away our past discontents or help us locate the purpose of our existence. Even worse, they can drive us to read others through a simplifying lens that flattens their character, thereby making it difficult for us to approach them in genuinely open-minded ways. Rather than appreciating the distinctive cadence of their spirit, we come to treat them through categories of experience that make sense to us for the simple reason that they are familiar to us from the past. This may ease our discomfort in the face of relational complexity. However, it can also make us extraordinarily intolerant, for we are seldom as ungenerous toward our lovers as when we engage in such unconscious reductions.
Because unconscious repetitions replicate the past in a predictable fashion, they offer us an illusory sense of continuity: they make the future appear foreseeable. The fact that they tend to provide a continuity of sorrow rather than of joy is counterbalanced by our conviction that at least we know what to expect. Over time, repetitions can even make us reconciled to our “fate” in the sense that we begin to imagine that things happen in certain ways because it is our particular lot in life to continue living as we always have. We may even come to view ourselves as being uniquely cursed in relation to specific types of experiences, as if we were condemned to a life of recurring misery. Yet we may also take a secret pleasure in the idea that alternative possibilities remain mere possibilities—that their fulfillment is infinitely postponed. After all, an unrealized possibility by definition persists as a tantalizing potentiality. This, though, in no way alters the fact that our psychological limberness has been compromised; it does not change the fact that we suffer from a strangulation of our emotional lives.
None of us are free of psychological trigger points. This is why Freud maintained that there is no such thing as a completely healthy or well-adjusted human psyche: all of us are in one way or another pathological. What varies are the kinds of pathologies we exhibit and how serious or debilitating they are. Given that this is the case, and that all of us are prone to the compulsion to repeat, it is useful to be patient with both our own patterns and those of others. Indeed, it might be a good idea to aim for a kind of solidarity of vulnerability in the sense that we recognize that, all of us, without exception, are likely to miss our step once in a while. It may even be helpful to recognize that our compulsive patterns are an important part of what makes us unique. As painful as they may be, they are also, in a sense, what allows us to feel “at home” with ourselves. In other words, what we most care about on the unconscious level can be as crucial a part of us as are the things that we consciously choose to do; it molds us into the sorts of persons we are.
What makes the repetition compulsion so tricky is that we cannot spot it ahead of time. We cannot predict in the beginning of a new relationship whether or not it is going to activate the compulsion. And we cannot even begin to anticipate the specific manner in which the past might resurface. Even when we cautiously look for signs that our new lover might have certain familiar characteristics, and might therefore end up treating us in ways that we would prefer to avoid, we are unlikely to interpret the situation correctly. An obvious reason for this is that we cannot immediately know another person well enough to make an accurate assessment of his or her character; it takes time for our lover to reveal the details of his or her personality. But an equally powerful reason is that how others behave toward us is always conditioned by our expectations and reactions.
The way we approach our partner may bring out attributes and modes of behavior that are not particularly typical of him. He may be as surprised as we are when he injures us, makes us feel insignificant, or instigates emotional scenarios that we thought we had put to rest a long time ago. There is something profoundly disconcerting—both for us and for our lover—about the moment when archaic childhood feelings flood back with a devastating intensity. By the same token, it can be distressing to recognize that, despite our best efforts to forge a loving dynamic, our present relationship is replicating the humiliation of past alliances. Though it is always possible that we have chosen a malicious partner, or that he possesses a fundamental character flaw that has nothing to do with us, it may also be that there is something about the way we interact with him that is setting off his defenses and hidden aggressions. As a result, he no longer meets us from a place of benevolence, but rather from the most withholding and condescending parts of his being.
I want to be careful here. I do not mean to say that we are to blame for our partner’s hurtful behavior, or that our partner should not be held responsible for his or her unkind actions or statements. I am in fact deeply distrustful of contemporary popular psychologies that are premised on the idea that, no matter what others do or say to us, we are solely responsible for our own feelings. These psychologies usually draw a distinction between the actions of others and our interpretation of these actions, alleging that whenever we get hurt or angry, it is because we are interpreting the situation in ways that are painful or infuriating to us. The basic idea is that it is our own mental processes, rather than the inconsiderate actions or statements of others, that unsettle us. For instance, Marshall Rosenberg—the architect of the otherwise astute popular psychology of nonviolent communication—boldly claims that “the cause of anger lies in our own thinking,” adding that, if we are to contribute to peaceful relating, we must learn “to divorce the other person from any responsibility for our anger.”
I understand that the objective of this kind of reasoning is to empower us so that we do not hand over the control of our emotional welfare to others. And it is designed to teach us to empathize with the deep needs and feelings of others, so that we come to understand that their hurtful actions are often motivated by their own pain. At the same time, anyone with even a modicum of awareness of how power functions in both social and intimate relationships will recognize how easy it is to twist this outlook to condone abusive behavior. When accountability resides with the recipient rather than the perpetrator of malicious deeds or statements, it is all too easy to evade responsibility by blaming the injured party. This is in fact one of the oldest stratagems of both racist and misogynistic hegemonies. Consequently, if the Ku Klux Klan burns a cross on my yard and I get angry, I am not going to accept the idea that I am the sole cause of my own anger. If my boyfriend beats me, my date rapes me, or my husband ridicules me, I am not going to let anyone tell me that my interpretative processes are fully responsible for my hurt feelings. There are circumstances where others—including our loved ones—behave cruelly and callously. Carrying the responsibility for their actions and statements in such cases would only play into the hands of power structures that have historically rendered some lives agonizing while simultaneously justifying various social and intimate atrocities.
When I propose that we may sometimes unwittingly trigger behaviors in our partner that are not typical of him, I am therefore not in the least bit implying that we should shoulder responsibility for his insensitive or thoughtless conduct. And I am not suggesting that we should allow him to shift the blame and hold us accountable for relationship problems that may be generated by his own lack of compassion, responsiveness, sincerity, or emotional maturity. I am not saying that we should tolerate our partner’s arrogance, or meekly acquiesce when he treats us in patronizing or disrespectful ways. I am merely pointing out that it may at times be difficult for us to read the situation accurately and to determine why the repetition compulsion gets set in motion. It may be impossible for us to draw an interpretative link between our present lover and the people, including our parents, we have loved in the past.
Under these conditions, our best course of action may be to concede that when two individuals come together in a romantic alliance, they are more or less guaranteed to arouse each other’s deep-seated unconscious patterns. And the more intimate the relationship, the more likely this is to happen. After all, the person we most love is also the person we let closest to ourselves. He or she is, by definition, someone who wields considerable power over us, and doubly so if we are hoping for some sort of redemption. From this perspective, the idea that we could somehow escape the repetition compulsion might be largely unrealistic. A more prudent approach might be to acknowledge that the compulsion is likely to complicate matters at some point. It might be wise to see it as an emotional “given” that we are bound to confront if we want our relationship to endure. That way, instead of wasting our energies on fighting the inevitable, we can focus on building a romantic rapport that is flexible enough to ride the turbulence caused by the compulsion. I am in fact tempted to say that those who expect their relationships to remain completely harmonious may inadvertently be setting themselves up for disillusionment. In contrast, those who see moments of disharmony as an intrinsic component of love increase their chances for genuine intimacy.
Because the manner in which two psyches and life histories intermingle remains opaque at best, we cannot explain why some people bring out the best in us, whereas others bring out the worst. And why some relationships flourish against all odds whereas others fall apart despite our most sincere efforts is an enigma that we will never be able to fully penetrate. Unconscious repetitions can lead to inexplicable relationship failures, malfunctions, and confused endings. Lovers can, for instance, be perennially out of sync with each other or with the timing of their emotional openness. One party arrives at an emotional junction, awaits the other with an escalating degree of impatience, and finally departs so as to salvage his sanity and self-respect. When the other, having gathered the necessary courage and clarity, at long last arrives, she will find no one waiting for her. While the first party misses out on love because he acts too fast, the second misses out because she acts too slowly. Neither is to blame. Yet both are responsible.
It can be difficult to decide how to proceed when we are faced with such repetitions. If a relationship is causing us distress, is it best to admit defeat and call for a swift separation so as to prevent further damage? Is the most constructive course of action to protect our integrity at all costs? Or does our commitment to our partner demand our willingness to work through repetitions in the hope that we may eventually reach a clearing beyond them? Does love ask us to stay present to relationship dilemmas even when we feel (re)traumatized by them? Or does it entail knowing when to cut our losses and move on?
It is impossible to give a definitive answer to such questions. There is no romantic relationship that is entirely devoid of crises. Consequently, much depends on the strength of devotion between the lovers, as well as on the composition of the problems themselves. Certain issues are worth addressing because we sense that on the other side of them reside growth and increased aliveness. Others present only energy-draining and mind-numbing cul-de-sacs. And what makes things doubly confusing is that it is frequently not possible to tell the difference between a problem that merits our time and effort, and a situation, or a lover, that is toxic and destructive. It can, in other words, be hard to distinguish between an opportunity for mutual enrichment and an abusive or codependent relationship.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that the repetition compulsion can drive us to irrational efforts to control our relationship. Particularly when we have not yet learned to handle the repetition, it can be tempting to try to contain it by manipulating our partner’s actions. For instance, when we find ourselves confronting circumstances that remind us of some prior catastrophe, we might attempt to prevent its recurrence by restricting our partner’s freedom. Or we might seek to defuse an ominous scenario by imposing boundaries on it. The more something in our psyches screams that we do not, once again, want a particular outcome, the more likely we are to erect artificial limits that are intended to foreclose that outcome. Unfortunately, our efforts are typically futile. Even if we manage to fend off the dreaded conclusion for the time being, it is likely to materialize at a later point. A contrived solution—one that does not reflect the reality of our relationship—will only hold temporarily. All of our exertions will therefore not guarantee the outcome we want. They will merely postpone (and thereby add sting to) the one we do not want.
Managing unconscious repetitions is difficult and other professional help is required. However, it may be possible, under auspicious conditions, to slowly fashion a better relational configuration. To borrow from Lear, we may over time be able to forge a space for “the possibility of new possibilities”—for life directions and emotional scenarios that might have formerly seemed untenable to us. A litmus test for whether a particular relationship is worth an investment of this kind might be the eagerness of both partners to work through the repetition. A one-sided state of affairs where one partner is seeking change while the other is obstinately digging in his or her heels may not deserve the same dedication as one where both are devoted to bringing about a more gratifying reality. But even here, the line is blurry because it may be exactly the stubbornness of the reluctant partner that is most in need of being worked through.
It is not possible for any of us to entirely break our repetition compulsions. Because our present is always influenced by the experiences of the past, none of us can escape the fate-defining power of our history. But this should not prevent us from developing a more judicious relationship to the recurring patterns that haunt our existence; it should not keep us from doing our best to decode the ways our present actions and responses are propelled by the persistent phantoms of the past. After all, we can begin to modify our patterns only if we first develop enough self-awareness to accurately identify their distinctive profile. We unfortunately cannot accomplish this overnight, for transforming our unconscious patterns into a more resilient emotional constellation is a slow and at times torturous process. Indeed, it could be said to be a life-time occupation—something we can diligently work at but never definitively attain. But this does not mean that it does not warrant our earnest effort.
Working through unconscious patterns is worth the trouble because the more familiar we are with such patterns, the better we are able to pinpoint the part we play in the crafting of our emotional destinies. Rather than feeling perpetually persecuted by a brutal or uncaring world, we come to accept a measure of responsibility for the contours of our lives. As I have already stressed, in saying this I do not wish to discount those instances when the world actually does treat us in a brutal or uncaring fashion. Such instances are by no means a figment of our imagination. Nevertheless, it is helpful to identify the myriad ways in which we contribute to our destiny, if only by consistently selecting lovers who are unable to appreciate what we have to offer, or by accepting interpersonal dynamics that are not good for us. In short, being cognizant of our unconscious blueprints allows us to make more informed relationship choices, thereby leading to a higher degree of self-responsibility.
A greater familiarity with our unconscious patterns also helps us treat others more responsibly. In the same way that I am not going to concede that my anger at someone else’s hurtful behavior is entirely my own doing, I am not going to claim—as someone like Marshall Rosenberg would prefer me to—that I am not in any way responsible for the feelings of others. The fact that the feelings of others ultimately arise from their own mental processes rather than from my actions does not alter the fact that, as an adult, I have enough emotional intelligence to be able to anticipate the impact of my actions. Even though I can never predict the responses of others entirely correctly, and even though I may at times be completely off the mark, in most cases I am able to make a ballpark estimate of how my actions are going to percolate in the inner life of others. If I cheat on my partner, I may not be able to foresee whether he will feel angry or sad (or both). But I will know for sure that he will not feel happy, loved, pleasantly surprised, or appreciated. If I tell my son that he is incompetent, disparage my friend, make a racist comment to a colleague, or say something mean to a student, I may not be able to guess at their exact sentiments, but I will know that they will not be feeling great or cared-for. And to the degree that I too do these things despite my understanding that they will wound others, I am fully responsible for their feelings. To pretend otherwise is to fall into bad faith.
Those (Rosenberg included) who advocate the idea that we should not hold ourselves responsible for the feelings of others tend to argue that worrying about how others might feel as a result of our actions or statements is too exhausting—that it does not contribute to our ability to lead an inspired existence. Alternatively, the reasoning is that acting out of obligation rather than out of spontaneous generosity is counterproductive because we end up resenting those we feel responsible for. This line of thinking is quite seductive, for undoubtedly many of us would like to ease the burden of our obligations and to lead an inspired life. But it can also serve as a front for emotional and ethical complacency. It can be used as a justification for egotistical and self-centered behavior, so that doing what inspires us equals doing whatever we happen to feel like doing, regardless of its cost to others.
In addition, the fact that women have traditionally been better tutored at emotional intelligence than men should make us a bit wary of arguments that imply that such intelligence is overrated—that we should stop worrying about how our actions and statements impact others and instead devote our energies to doing only what inspires us. Indeed, one of the most striking characteristics of popular psychological approaches that preach “inspiration” as the pinnacle of enlightenment is that the banal philosophies of life they advocate (“the only person who can hurt you is you,” “you are fully responsible for your own well-being,” “it is your own response, rather than the actions of others, that matters,” etc.) sound suspiciously like the justifications of abusive lovers who do their best to avoid taking responsibility for their wounding behavior. Such lovers habitually try to turn the tables by convincing their partners that they are the root cause of their own pain—that if they learned to better control their reactions, they would not be so devastated. Against this backdrop, the quest for “inspiration” promoted by many popular psychologies can become an excuse for the most brutal conduct imaginable, offering a convenient rationalization for those who like to slide out of interpersonal accountability.
Human life is extremely complicated. It entails aspects that inspire us, and others that do not (as a matter of fact, if we invariably did what inspires us, after a while we would not be able to recognize inspiration for what it is). And it entails responsibilities that are not always easy to undertake, and that we sometimes find awfully exhausting. Working in a factory or a processing plant is exhausting, yet countless people do it. Getting up in the middle of the night to clear the snow off highways is exhausting, yet people (thankfully!) do it. Caring for children is exhausting, yet many people choose to do it. Likewise, worrying about the feelings of others may be exhausting, yet sometimes it is our responsibility to do so. Although there may be some people in the world who are privileged enough to do only what they feel inspired to do, most of us end up doing a lot of things that are not particularly spirit-lifting. And this may not always be such a bad thing. It is life, after all.
One of the most damaging aspects of the repetition compulsion is that the more it absorbs us, the more likely we are to fail at basic emotional intelligence. In other words, the more we ignore the power of the past to speak in the present, the more we risk abdicating our interpersonal accountability; we risk acting out on impulse, without pausing to think about the consequences of our actions. In contrast, when we take an active interest in the ways in which the unconscious guides our behavior, we increase our capacity to adequately care for those we love. This does not mean that we should try to tame or discipline our unconscious, for this would ultimately be a wasted effort. Nonetheless, the more connected we are to our recurring patterns, the more consistently we are able to catch ourselves whenever these patterns threaten to pull us into rigid networks of behavior that injure others; the more we “own” our unconscious as our personal liability, the more responsibly we are able to treat those closest to us. This kind of responsibility does not exhaust us but, quite the contrary, carves a passageway to more inspired relational possibilities. In this sense, there is no contradiction between our responsibility to others and our ability to feel inspired. Instead, the former is a precondition of the latter.
The more curious we are about our unconscious patterns, the easier it is for us to revise our romantic lives so that new relational plots and scenarios become available to us. When we start to amend the manner in which we interact with the world as a structure of interpersonal possibility, we may come to see that we have more options—that the field of possibilities is wider—than we are accustomed to think. When we expand the domain of what we consider emotionally attainable in our lives, we more or less automatically open a space for more ingenuous, authentic, relaxed, and playful modes of relating. Even when we cannot change the external world, we can modify the ways in which we relate to this world, and in this fashion, indirectly, the ways in which the world responds to us. We can over time rewrite the patterns of passion that motivate the choices we make, as well as the actions we take, in our most intimate relationships.