A Couple's Guide to Sexual Addiction (21 page)

The Past Is Affecting Your Relationship

Neither partner has come to this relationship as a blank slate. You bring everything you have learned about love and relationship both consciously and unconsciously with you into the relationship. We all bring the past to life in our present relationships. We can’t help it.

Ordinarily, your first relationship was with your parents. Your mother was probably your primary caregiver during your most formative years. The nature of that relationship has been shown to set the template for your unconscious expectations, especially in your closest, most intimate relationship. You are quite likely unaware of the ways that past influences can invade your intimate partnership. Present experiences appear as a version of the past returning so that you can redeem or rework the unfinished business. You return to what is familiar precisely because it is known rather than unknown. Even an uncomfortable known interpretation feels more “natural” than an interpretation that is unknown, potentially threatening, and thus scary.

Your intimate relationship brings these past influences into the present in a way that, try as you might, you cannot ignore. When you re-experience a desirable quality of relationship from the past, your current relationship is enhanced. However, when your past (and early) unfilled needs for trust, control, or self-esteem are activated by a current situation, you have the opportunity to recognize the experience for what it is—and then learn from it. That allows you to reclaim and rework these past difficulties. The container of relationship allows you to bring new awareness to situations that seem to be a replay of something from the past. The information and feedback that is available in undefended truth telling with your intimate partner brings with it the capacity to reveal your blind spots, the conclusions from your past that you cannot recognize are acting as your filter of how you view the world.

Steven and Emily’s Marriage

During the first years of Emily and Steven’s marriage, the focus was on their growing family and their three little boys. Steven devoted much of his time to earning a good living, while Emily was dedicated to being a good mother. Emily felt that Steven was not as connected to her as he used to be. He seemed so focused on becoming successful that he didn’t seem to notice the times that Emily tried to get his attention, made a special dinner, or attempted to engage him sexually.

Both Steven and Emily later recalled moments during these first five years of their marriage when they wanted to talk, but the other seemed preoccupied with either job or family. Steven recalled a moment of rushing home to tell Emily he had landed a big new account, but when he got home that day all three boys as well as Emily had bad colds, and Emily was not available to listen to him.

Emily had her own memories of Steven’s unavailability. She recalled cooking special birthday meals for Steven on nights when he ended up not coming home until very late. He had been so focused on his work at the office that he had forgotten the birthday meal. Each of them could recall moments big and small when they had experienced disappointment and disconnection. Both had given up on reaching out to the other for companionship.

The moment of Emily’s discovery of Steven’s online activities was a moment of collision for their marriage. Emily was ready to leave the marriage, but they both felt the pull of that original connection to each other. They felt there was something here to save. This required Emily and Steven to each be 100 percent responsible for the success or failure of the marriage.

The first step was for Steven to commit to ceasing any sort of sexual activity outside of the marriage. He was deeply aware that those ventures lacked intimate connection. Using terminology from the financial field in which he worked, he told us how his investment in that type of activity did not have the payoff he ultimately desired.

Steven and Emily both agreed to look at their unseen past influences to see what might be driving their feelings of distance and protection. Steven was able to understand his desire to protect himself from the hurt he felt whenever he reached out to Emily and she responded in a way that he thought was angry or disapproving. His dislike of feeling rejected by Emily caused him to be constantly on guard, and his first impulse was to blame Emily for “making him feel rejected.”

Then Steven was able to remember how he had that same feeling as a boy when his stepfather would go away and his mother would speculate that he might not come back. He could remember deciding as a young boy to never allow anyone to abandon him. He concluded that he could take care of himself by meeting his own needs. His mother’s example of looking for men outside of the marriage had become Steven’s model of how to act inside of a marriage. He saw that now, as an adult, he had the opportunity to make a different choice.

When Emily reached back into her past, she clearly saw how she felt she needed to protect herself from her mother’s invasiveness. She began to see how angry she had felt about it and how she still had that anger. She saw how she had chosen to make herself “good” rather than have to experience what she thought was bad—being angry with her mother. She began to see how she had felt angry with Steven for what she perceived as his abandonment of her. Rather than openly expressing her anger with Steven, however, she had gotten busy doing what she knew how to do. She became good. She became the best mother she could be, focusing her attention on making sure her children were cared for while withholding her attention (and anger) from Steven.

She began to understand how she had walled herself off from Steven. With this knowledge, she then recognized that in her relationship with her husband, she no longer needed to repeat the past by recreating the wall she had built to protect herself from her mother. She really did not want to keep Steven away.

Emily had to clearly experience and speak with Steven about her anger. And Steven had to listen to Emily’s anger and tell her how he understood why she was angry with him. Steven’s willingness to hear her anger, and his sincere regret at having hurt her, created a new experience for Emily. She was able to see how she did not have to be “good” to be loved. Steven began to see that he was not being abandoned by Emily. Even if Emily was unhappy with him, he did not have to relive the abandonment of his father walking out. As a result of their realizations about the past and making new choices in the present, Emily and Steven’s behavior was forever changed.

The Transformative Power of Relationship

If and when you and your partner can gain even a small amount of perspective about how the past is impacting your present, this awareness has the potential to transform and enhance your relationship. If you simply replay your past without recognizing and understanding it, your relationship will be troubled. Even a small amount of willingness to uncover and look at the beliefs and images, the scaffolding that you have brought to your union, can lead to worthwhile results. The power of your connection, the desire that you feel to be with your partner, can act as a carrot to a horse, leading you to investigate areas that you would otherwise internally label “do not disturb.”

When you allow your partner to really matter to you, you allow new experiences to help you rebuild your relationship scaffolding. You can create a new view. With this view, you can look to the ways you have come together with your partner so you can rework the past.

I’m Not Getting My Needs Met

At times, one partner or the other can become focused on “my needs.” If you are demanding that your partner meet your needs, you are possibly overlooking your responsibility to the relationship itself. The relationship needs to be a container that allows the past to live in the present in a way that encourages the reworking of your negative (and probably unseen) views of how relationships work. If either party remains solely focused on their individual needs, the relationship will stall. The needs of the relationship, as well as the frailties of each partner, need to be held tenderly and put on an equal footing with the needs of the individual.

Being in a relationship requires a balance of placing value and priority on your individual desire for feeling safe, being in control, and experiencing value (self-esteem), while at the same time placing value on providing safety, yielding control, and supporting the self-esteem of your partner. To the extent that you do not have healthy internal structures in one or more of these areas, you may experience the impulse to demand repayment from your partner for internal structures not properly created when you were very young. But your partner cannot rebuild these structures for you.

You can, however, give and receive support in finding the internal strength, courage, and compassion to face what can feel like overwhelming impulses. Some of these may be:

• You may experience an uncomfortable sense that if your partner gets what he or she wants, then you will not get what you want.

• It may be tempting to make your partner wrong, so you can feel right.

• It can be difficult to allow your beloved to just be as he or she is or to allow the situation to just be as it is.

• It can be difficult to allow your partner’s view of reality to be as true as your view of reality.

But it is possible to permit seemingly contradictory viewpoints to both be “correct.” The solution, the way out of a perceived impasse, can come from broadening your perspective to include what seems to be the opposite point of view. As strange as it may sound, you and your partner can both be right; you just have different viewpoints based on the particular perspective of your past influences.

How the Relationship Can Support You

Each partner in the relationship needs to feel honored in a way that he or she feels safe. To get a picture of this primary need for safety, imagine a two-year-old child who is venturing away from mother, and in the next instant turning back for reassurance that mother is still there. In the same way, in our most intimate relationships, we have the need to feel accepted while we also express our individuality. To the extent that your structures of safety, dominion, and self-esteem were not adequately put in place when you were young, you will need to rebuild them now. A relationship is quite often the arena where the absence of these structures becomes uncomfortably obvious. Your partner cannot prevent you from having an experience of vulnerability. Particularly in intimate relationships, all of us can experience a terrifying sense of vulnerability that we try to hide from ourselves, and certainly from anyone else.

In our most intimate relationships, we unknowingly allow our partner to “step into the shoes,” both positively and negatively, of the people, such as parents, who helped formulate our original structures of self-esteem. To the extent that our parents were wounded, incapable, damaged, or just too young, they were not capable of allowing us to safely attach in a way that we could build functional structures of safety, dominion, and self-esteem. This is not an excuse to blame your parents for their shortcomings; undoubtedly, their early life experience taught them how to parent.

When you can see how the past is impacting your present, you have a chance to rebuild your structures of trust, control, and self-esteem. Your intimate relationship is the place you can rebuild, cooperatively, as loving witnesses to each other.

When either partner’s past wounding comes to visit, if both partners can find ways to be especially tender and attentive, healing can occur. This is not to keep the wounded state in place or to coddle it. The intention is to cooperate tenderly with each other, not to meet the unmet needs, but to help each other find internal tenderness.

Generally, we all desire freedom. In intimate relationships, our wounded places can scream out to be met. Willingness from both partners in the relationship can create a tender space for re-examination of early conclusions that have created faulty structures of trust, control, and self-esteem. What is needed is not getting your way or “being right,” but internally allowing the uncomfortable experience of your perceived need to be met with loving kindness and awareness.

A Cautionary Note

Both partners must agree not to use what they have learned of the other’s past as a way to make a point or “win” an argument. Even when you can clearly see an underlying pattern in your beloved, it is not your place to become the therapist. An example of the way you would not want to talk with your partner is, ”Clearly you are seeing me as your mother. If you could just see this pattern as clearly as I can see it, then you would stop treating me so badly.” Without an agreement to refrain from “helping” in this way, each of you will not be able to create the container of safety necessary to venture into the territory of the past with your partner.

In working with wounds from the past, it is important to tread gently and respectfully, with yourself and with your partner. This is not an area to use the force of your will, your sense of knowledge, or any sense of superiority. Neither partner gets to be more “expert” in the relationship. You are finding your way with each other through uncharted territory. By tenderly honoring your partner’s needs, you can help create a ledge of safety from the abyss of past wounds. Judgment, being right, or seeing your partner’s faults and pointing them out does not foster respect and does not create a ground of safety. Sometimes wounds from the past are so tender they need to be protected from the slightest breeze of harsh judgment. Caring and compassion can coax even the most wounded parts of ourselves out of the deep dark cave in which they may have taken refuge.