Early experiences are extremely influential in our lives. The attitudes and feelings you developed in childhood—and in relationships with family, friends, and lovers—are bound to carry over into new relationships. Some of these attitudes and feelings are helpful; others are not. Common “leftovers” that cause problems in adulthood include an unresolved need to rebel against prior constraints (such as parental rules) and power struggles over control. Recognize the valuable leftovers, so you can keep and nourish them; work at changing those that get in your way.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
—Saint Paul (1 Cor. 13:11)
We are well over halfway up the mountain now, and it’s time to make a careful inspection of our packs before we proceed on the climb. Many of us may be carrying extra, unneeded weight. Bob remembers his first backpacking trip, when he carried a quart of water to the campsite at 11,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. When he arrived at the top, he realized that he had been carrying an extra two pounds of water while climbing through five miles of snow!
Are you lugging an unnecessary load of leftovers from earlier days? You may have extra weight from your past marriage or perhaps from relationships with parents, school friends, or others while you were growing up. It’s time now to put away those unneeded burdens. In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the most common leftovers, where they come from, and how to deal with them.
We’ve observed that most divorced people don’t recognize the importance and power of these four key leftovers from the past: (1) family of origin issues; (2) influences of childhood experiences; (3) the confusing period of rebellion; and (4) the frustration and hopelessness of the power struggle. These factors often contribute directly to the ending of a primary love relationship.
The four influences overlap and are difficult to separate from one another, but we can divide them roughly this way: Events that happened in your parental family before you were born are family of origin influences. Events that happened from the time you were born until you moved away from your parental home are childhood influences (these include events happening outside of the home, such as at school, at church, and in society). Your attempt to find an individual identity separate from the expectations of family and society is the period of rebellion. The power struggle is a combination of all of the unresolved issues from all of these areas.
Your family of origin is the family in which you grew up. Your parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—all were important influences shaping your view of “how a family should be.” Most of the ideas you gained during those years were probably healthy; some were not.
Now think about the beginning of your own love relationship. If you could imagine the bride’s “significant parent” married to the groom’s “significant parent,” you would have an idea of what your marriage would be like in later years. (For example, Bruce imagined his father married his ex’s grandmother. They never met, but if they had, it would have been disastrous!) There is hope: we can grow beyond our family of origin patterns of interaction. But some of you will be able to see that it’s your parents in you and your partner who are divorcing.
Bruce asked people from many different countries, “How many of you would like to have a marriage basically like your parents’ marriage?” Less than 5 percent raised their hand. So, if we don’t want a marriage like our parents’, what kind of marriage do we want?
Some of the family of origin influences are easy to see and understand. We tend to belong to the same political party as our parents, to join the same religious organization, to live in the same community. Some of us rebel, striking out on our own and choosing a completely separate path. Even in rebellion, however, the family of origin is an important element.
There are many other subtle influences from the family. Bruce observed: “My love partner came from a family of powerful females; I came from a family of powerful males. One of our family of origin issues was to make a compromise as to which gender was going to be the boss. (She says I won, and I say she won.)”
Another issue is how you handle money. Again, here’s Bruce’s experience: “My mother came from a family where the males were very irresponsible in handling money. She learned to be the saver and controller of money. She, of course, lived out her family of origin influences by marrying a man who was, like the men she grew up with, underresponsible in handling money.” Many people marry thinking they are escaping family influences only to discover they have perpetuated them.
“That doesn’t seem to fit,” you may say. “If the father was the dominant and stronger personality, why was the mother the one who controlled the money?” The answer shows up in sociological studies of families, and may have been true in your house as well. The “woman of the house” was often more powerful than it appeared, but she exercised her power in a subtle and indirect manner. In other words, Dad appeared to be in charge, but Mom held the purse strings.
It can be confusing—thinking you married the father or mother you didn’t have, then ending up playing the role of father or mother to your spouse. Do you recall the explanation for this in our discussion of adaptive behavior patterns in chapter 4? Most of us learned to adapt when we didn’t get all of our needs met in the formative childhood years. Often the adaptive behavior was to become a “father” or “mother,” which resulted in giving to others what we were hoping to get ourselves.
Skeptical about family of origin influences? Here’s an exercise you’ll find helpful: Make a list of the ways your most significant parent dealt with various human emotions: anger, guilt, rejection, loneliness, fear, intimacy. Then make a similar list for yourself. When you compare the lists, you’ll have a better idea of just how independent you are from the influence of your significant parent. Until we question and grow beyond the influence of our families of origin, we tend to deal with emotions in much the same way as our most significant parents.
Incidentally, when people who’ve made such a list are asked to identify their “most significant parent,” those who are in the process of divorce quite frequently list an adult other than mother or father. When one parent was not there physically or emotionally, many of us found a “pseudoparent” to compensate for the loss.
Those of us who didn’t receive enough good parenting tend to make our partners responsible for making it up to us. There is a part in each one of us that wants our love partner to provide the parenting we didn’t receive from our mothers and fathers. For some, this part is large; for others, it is small. When this happens in a love relationship, it often contributes to the demise of the relationship. Few love partners are happy to make up for the parenting we didn’t receive when we were little.
Family of origin issues are, of course, extremely complex and pervasive in our lives. A full discussion is beyond the scope of this book. Such issues as birth order, scapegoating, boundaries, family triangles, rituals and traditions, secrets, substance abuse, and many others are powerful influences on who we are and how we relate to our love partners. For now, let’s agree that we all need to wake up to the important effects of these family of origin leftovers and learn how to deal with them in our future relationships.
Linda offers one typical example of an unresolved family of origin issue. When she began to realize she married Noah because he was like the parent she had not finished making peace with, it was the beginning of the end of the relationship. This concept can be expressed in one of two ways. Linda might have married someone like her disliked parent because that relationship was comfortable and familiar, even though it was stressful and painful. Or perhaps she did not marry someone like the parent, but when she began the process of healing that parental relationship, she put Noah on the stage so she could work through the unfinished business. She told him, “You’re always telling me what to do, just like my father did.” It may not be true, but her old anger at her father for being so domineering made it seem to her as if Noah was bossy also.
When one or both partners begin waking up and realize the marriage is much like their parents’ marriages, they have a problem. Either they have to accept their parents’ marriages (instead of disdaining them), or they have to change their own marriage into what they want it to be. Without one or the other, they’ll probably feel their marriage is a failure. (Actually, the marriage didn’t fail; the process of healing family of origin influences was not successful.)
In the first years of life, we adopt many beliefs about ourselves, about the world, and about relationships. We learn how we feel about ourselves and our self-worth. We learn whether the world is safe and whether we can trust the people around us. We learn to feel loved, and when we don’t feel loved enough, we learn to adapt. We may develop fears of rejection and abandonment. We learn if we are “okay” or “not okay.”
Have you ever tried to compliment a not-okay person, one with low self-esteem? It usually goes like this:
“I like your hair.”
“Oh, I just washed it and can’t do a thing with it.”
“That was a nice thing you just did.”
“No, no, not really. Anyone would have done the same thing.”
Complimenting such people causes them discomfort because their inner child does not agree. They’ve adopted, at an early age, a belief that they are “not okay.”
At some level in your adult relationships, you will attempt to grow through any part of your growth and development that you didn’t complete during your formative years. People who learned low self-worth at an early age want to improve their feelings of self-worth in their marriages. But they prevent learning what they want to learn because they don’t believe the partner’s positive view of them: “You tell me you like my hair, but you’re just saying that to make me feel good.”
It takes more than a few compliments to change a person’s “inner child” beliefs. If low self-esteem is a central theme of your inner child, we hope you paid special attention to chapter 11. You may want to go back to that point in the trail and do some more work. (And we urge you to carry out the homework assignments.)
Another example of a lasting childhood influence is the emotional bonding that ideally takes place in the first year of an individual’s life. Parents who are comfortable being intimate and who are able to continually hold their babies closely and look them in the eyes help their children learn to be intimate. Those who didn’t learn early to bond emotionally often are attempting to finish the process with adult love partners. But they may not even be aware of what emotional bonding is and may actually distance partners who attempt to become intimate. They want intimacy, but they “check out”—one way or another—when they begin to experience it.
There are many examples of attempts to heal negative childhood influences. A man who has remained childlike and underresponsible may resent his partner’s parental behavior; he finds another relationship or starts having an affair. But when you look at the situation closely, he found in his marriage another mother figure to serve his need for the mothering he didn’t receive as a child. The third-party relationship is not likely the solution for him. The inability to heal the unmet needs of his inner child is where this man needs to focus.
If you’d like to learn more about how family of origin issues and early-childhood experiences influence the adults we become, we strongly recommend Virginia Satir’s classic book, The New Peoplemaking.
One of the most common leftovers we carry from our earlier experiences is the unresolved need to establish ourselves as independent people by rebelling against our parents and their rules for us. If you or your partner carried that particular burden into your love relationship, it may have seriously jeopardized your chances of success.
There is a period of rebellion in each teenager’s growth when the not-quite-adult is seeking an individual identity. Although it is a necessary part of young adult development, it causes a tremendous strain in the family relationship. Let’s take a look at these key developmental stages we all must grow through on our journey toward independent adulthood, which we’ve labeled as the “shell stage,” the two-component “rebel stage” (external and internal), and the “love stage.”
This stage occurs when we are young, conforming and trying to please our parents. During these years, children have the same moral and political values as their parents, follow the same societal patterns, and more or less behave in ways expected of them by their parents. The child in the shell stage is basically a reflection of the parents, similar to the egg that is laid by a chicken, with no identity of his or her own.
Vocabulary in the shell stage is full of inhibitions: “What will people think? I must be careful to do what I’m supposed to do. I should follow the rules and regulations of society. I must conform to what’s expected of me.”
In the teen years (sometimes later), a period of rebellion begins, with the individual breaking out of the shell. This process includes changing behavior patterns, doing what one “should not” do, pushing against the limits, and trying to find out how far one can go. It is a very experimental stage, filled with trying out different kinds of behavior. The little chicken inside is growing, beginning a life of its own, and starting to pick its way out of the shell.
The vocabulary at this point leading up to the rebel stage is “I’ve got to do it on my own. I don’t need your help. If it weren’t for you, I would be able to be the person I want to be. Please leave me alone!” The actual rebellion occurs in two ways: externally and internally.
The rebellion identity crisis usually begins when the person starts feeling overwhelmed by internal pressure and stress—the point at which the burden of carrying around the “shoulds” from family of origin, childhood, and society becomes too great. Having learned such behaviors as overresponsibility, perfectionism, people pleasing, or the avoidance of feelings, the person is like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders: tired of the whole situation. The love partner in the external rebellion stage wants to run away and may act like a defiant teenager, searching for an identity separate from the one given by parents and society.
The behavior of people in rebellion is predictable. (Isn’t it interesting that nonconforming rebellion is so predictable and conforming?) Here are some of the behaviors typical of external rebellion:
If all of this behavior is happening in a love relationship, is it any wonder that the relationship ends? Partners of those in rebellion usually buy into each one of the behaviors above, take it personally, and get bent out of shape emotionally and psychologically. What they need to do instead is sit back and watch the show and become aware of how much change may be taking place in their mates. They need to realize their mates are going through a growth process that has very little to do with them. The rebels are trying to get rid of people and relationships from the past, but they often dump their love partners in the process.
If people in the process of rebelling gain enough courage and insight to take a real look at themselves, they will move into the phase of internal rebellion. This is when they realize that the battle is actually within themselves, a battle between what they “should” do and what they “want” to do. They realize that they are trying to separate from the expectations of their family of origin and society, that their resistance isn’t really against their love partners and other parental figures.
The partner of someone in rebellion often decides to wait the situation out, believing the rebel will “come back to sanity” and that the relationship will then work again. The partner considers the rebel to be a “patient” and doesn’t accept any responsibility for finding a remedy for the difficulty.
On the other hand, partners of rebels can become emotionally drained by their mates’ trying behaviors, assigning the rebels all the blame. They don’t recognize that the love partnership is a two-way system and that they share responsibility for its problems. People who adopt this attitude usually don’t have the courage and emotional strength to do the personal work needed to save the relationship.
Rebellion is not an accident. The partner of a person in rebellion is usually “parental.” The partner has, at some level—maybe unconsciously—found a mate who needs parenting: “I know what’s best for my partner, if he would only listen!” Their need for control makes it difficult for these folks to accept the rebel when he or she seems “out of control.”
Instead of just waiting for the storm to blow over, the partner of a person in rebellion also needs to look inward, to take this opportunity to experience as much personal growth as possible.
Eventually, rebels begin to gain an individual identity. This leads to being able to make life choices based on love instead of on what they think they “should” do. They feel more self-love and love for others, especially their parents.
The vocabulary of the love stage includes words of acceptance and understanding: “My parents did the best they could. They made mistakes, and many times I was angry and upset with them, but they’ve tried hard and I understand and accept them for who they are.”
This period of adulthood is called the “love stage” because the person now has an independent identity and is capable of loving another person as an adult rather than as someone with childish expectations.
In the shell stage, one does what one should do; in the rebel stage, one does what one should not do; and in the love stage, one does what one wants to do. Many times, behavior in the love stage will be similar to behavior in the shell stage, but the motivation behind it is entirely different. Instead of trying to please somebody else, the person is trying to please himself or herself now.
Figure 12.1 is a summary of the progression through these three stages. The chart shows some typical characteristics of the stages: vocabulary, behavior, and growth steps one may find helpful. Please recognize that these are highly individual. Although some patterns exist, each individual’s experience will be unique.
Over the years in the Fisher seminars, we’ve witnessed many examples of this three-stage phenomenon. Eloise, for example, came to class one night very angry because her ex, Larry, was going through the rebel stage and causing her a lot of unhappiness. Larry had been a school principal when he was in the shell stage; but because he was looking for less administrative responsibility, he’d returned to full-time teaching. He developed a relationship with a woman involving “a lot of communication,” helping him to find out “who he was.” Larry, of course, was very excited about this new relationship. After his young son came to visit, Larry sent him home with a suitcase full of clothes and a note explaining to Eloise how great his new relationship was. Needless to say, this made her extremely angry. As it happened, we were discussing the rebel stage that week in the seminar. Eloise began to understand what was happening with Larry and his attempt to grow up and leave behind some of his old leftovers. She was able to let go of some of her anger as she gained an understanding of what was happening.
Gretchen became very excited as the concept was explained in class. Her husband had been a college professor and had proceeded to run off with one of his students while he was in the rebel stage. The whole thing seemed insane to her, until she heard the shell/rebel/love theory of growth and development. When she recognized that Charles was trying to get free from past expectations and establish his own identity, Gretchen was able to see that there was some sanity in what had appeared to be insanity. (It didn’t save the marriage, but at least she felt she understood what had happened.)
Bill told the group that his marriage had suffered a crisis three years earlier while his wife was going through the rebel stage. When he and Charlotte went for marriage counseling, the therapist put a damper on the rebel stage and pushed Charlotte to “behave as she should”—in effect telling her to remain in the shell stage. Bill said he felt this was a mistake at the time. The marriage lasted another three years until, suddenly, Charlotte’s growth pressures and need to rebel surfaced again, and she became “completely irresponsible,” leaving the marriage and the home without even taking any clothes. Bill did not hear from Charlotte for three weeks. Looking back on those painful events, Bill observed that maybe people need to be concerned about what stage of growth and development their therapists are in!
Many people ask, if so many marriages end when one person is going through the rebel stage, is there any way to have the relationship last when a person is going through the rebel stage? The rebel who can focus inward and realize the internal interaction going on between him or herself and the parental figures of the past may be able to deal directly with the shoulds, the oughts, and the expectations. To talk about one’s rebellion rather than acting it out will be much less destructive to those near and dear in the present.
It is possible for a person to find the emotional space within a marriage to rebel, perhaps by becoming involved in therapy, college classes, community service, recreational or sports programs, or other creative activities. The rebel needs opportunities to experiment with behavior, to try new styles of relating, and to interact with people other than the spouse. If the couple can understand directly what is happening—that the rebel is working on an internal conflict that has little to do with the spouse—it can free the work of growth and development to be done within the person, rather than strain the love relationship.
Rebelling love partners need to accept that their process of rebellion is an internal one and not the responsibility of other people. Their partners need to work on healing their own “inner child,” because their parenting and controlling behavior patterns result from unmet needs.
Many couples find themselves arguing over the correct way to squeeze the toothpaste tube and which way to unroll the toilet paper. And the issues they argue over never become resolved, even if they think they do. Each person feels he or she has no power or control in the relationship. Both feel hopeless, helpless, and tired of fighting. The war may be a hot war, with a lot of shouting, anger, and verbal abuse. Or it may be a cold war, with the silent treatment, walking out, pouting, and other such passive ways of attempting to gain control and power.
The two people involved have stopped talking about or sharing feelings. Instead, they send “you-messages” to each other. They have given up on finding any intimacy other than the pseudointimacy they feel while fighting. Neither wants to lose, so both use any method they can to win the war.
The power struggle is like a pot of stew boiling over on the stove. The ingredients in the stew are all of the unresolved issues within each partner that are projected out into the relationship. The heat under the stew is the belief that someone else is responsible for one’s happiness or unhappiness. The two people married with the belief that they would live happily ever after. It worked fine as long as the honeymoon lasted and they were happy. But when the honeymoon was over and they sometimes were less than happy, the person who was responsible for their happiness is now responsible for their unhappiness. They gave away their power when they began to believe someone else was responsible for their happiness or unhappiness.
The power struggle changes into growing pains when each person takes ownership for the unresolved problems within them. These problems may involve the shell/rebel/love stages discussed above, but the unresolved issues can come from anywhere in their lives or their personality. It is truly an internal power struggle projected out upon the relationship. The problems each person is unable to face and overcome become projected out into the relationship, and the pot keeps boiling over.
The power struggle is diminished when:
As with any life transition, this stage of the climb is very uneven and quite difficult. Waking up and understanding why your past relationship died is usually not an easy process. It may even be quite painful: it is much easier for me to see the splinter in your eye than it is to see the log in mine.
When Bruce was a juvenile probation officer, he typically referred one family a week for family counseling. When family members went to counseling to discover what they could learn and change about themselves, the counseling was usually helpful and successful. But when each person in the family went to counseling believing others in the family needed to change, counseling was usually unsuccessful.
Next time you see a person on the trail acting like a teenager, rebelling and always angry at authority figures, you can be understanding. You’ll know that the rebel is trying to grow up emotionally, to gain an independent identity, and to become free from past expectations and controls. Even though you may want to become parental and tell the rebel how to behave, maybe you’ll back off, remain adult yourself, and say, “I think that’s probably the best thing for where he or she is right now.” Indeed, perhaps you are still in the shell stage yourself, needing to start some rebellion of your own to improve your sense of self-worth and to find a better identity.
Do you notice that you are really making progress in the climb up the mountain? The fact that you are able to face and deal with leftovers is an indication that you are getting a much broader perspective of life and yourself. You probably could not have done much about carrying out the leftovers when you were at the bottom of the mountain trying to survive emotionally.
Most children will have some difficulty with their parents’ leftovers: family of origin issues, childhood experiences, rebellion, and power struggles. A child’s view of the actions of others is based on only a few years of life and a limited repertoire of experience.
A very strong influence on children during this process is the feeling of internal pain. Growing children will interact with other significant adults as they learned to do with their parents, until some healing learning takes place. (Children are, after all, going through their own family of origin and childhood experiences.) If a new stepparent comes into the picture, for example, the child will tend to have the same problems with that stepparent that he or she had with his or her natural parent. This will change only when the child learns—perhaps with loving support from understanding adults—how to deal effectively with those old emotions (without destructive adaptive behaviors) and how to develop new ways of relating to adults.
Once you make sure you are ready by responding to the checklist below, go on to the next part of the journey. After a discussion of the importance of open and honest communication, we will take a look at that elusive but ever-present phenomenon, love.