TRANSCRIPT
I was thinking back to a couple of years ago when I was living with two friends of mine. They were fighting a lot. They were arguing with each other, not physically fighting, thank God, but really arguing with each other. And it would get really nasty. Both of them would get their feelings hurt terribly, and it was like their tone would go up, their emotion would come out, and it was just like this constant ongoing battle. It was always about different issues, fighting about different people, fighting about this one said this and you hurt me and you hurt me, this kind of thing, and going on and on.
Then they would make up, and things would go on. They really liked each other, even loved each other in a lot of ways. Then they would fight again, maybe it would be three days later, a week, two weeks, but it was like this ongoing thing that would happen. I was living with them, and I would walk out. I would leave, but sometimes I would just observe it and reflect on what it brought up in me: pain, anguish, fear, sometimes a lot of anxiety, a desire to fix it. Often, I didn’t really fix it very much. I didn’t have much to do to fix it.
As I looked down, I just saw a frog jumping by at the edge of the forest where I am right now, a little alley in my world. Well, what it brought up for me at a most fundamental level is how often my parents did this for my whole childhood. But I especially remember it when it was most profoundly painful to me, when I was as early as I can remember, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven years old. My parents having these horrible screaming fights and yelling at each other, pleading with each other, trying to convince each other, and trying to share their individual perspective.
“Understand me, listen to me, honor me.” “No, you don’t understand me!” And screaming, “You’re selfish!” “No, you’re selfish!” “No, you don’t hear me!” “You better listen! You know, you better listen to me!” And raised voices and yelling and rage, and people storming out of the room and coming back. And me going in my room and feeling terrified, crying, feeling like my family’s gonna end, my parents are gonna divorce.
Then suddenly, an hour later, we’d all be having dinner, and it would all be like normal, and everything was fine, and they were getting along. They’d worked out some resolution, and then it would happen again two weeks later or a month later or three months later. Often, like I, and now I don’t, I really don’t even remember what they were fighting about.
I think what they were fighting about, the overt, ostensible stuff, very similar to these friends that I lived with a few years ago, what they were fighting about on the surface, what they thought they were fighting about, what they said they were fighting about, was not the relevant thing. That’s not what they were fighting about. They were fighting about something very, very different.
When I really figured out what this was all about was when I was a therapist, and I was working sometimes as a couples therapist with couples: husband-wife, husband-husband, wife-wife, boyfriend-girlfriend, girlfriend-girlfriend, boyfriend-boyfriend, all combinations thereof. Sometimes they would fight right in front of me, but sometimes, often, they were fighting, which is why they came to therapy—to have some referee, someone who can make sense of it, someone who could help them work it out.
But when they fought in front of me, and I got to know the people well, I started realizing there was a pattern that I saw again and again and again and again with couples that were fighting like this. Then I realized it totally applied to my parents and applied now to my friends a couple of years ago. People in these relationships are children with unmet needs. They look like adults, they live like adults, they have bodies of adults, they’re physiologically adults. They do adult things. They live, they work, they support themselves financially, they have sex, they make children, sometimes they even have grandchildren.
And yet underneath it, on that emotional level, the level at which they’re fighting, they are children—needy, hurt children—who from their own childhoods didn’t get enough of their needs met. They have a lot of unresolved sadness, rage, loneliness, frustration, fury, jealousy. And they have entered this couple relationship, this partnership that they’re in, with an unconscious expectation that their partner will become the fantasy parent that they never had.
Their partner is going to rescue them and make them happy and comfort their little wounded child. Sometimes even the partners try to do that. Sometimes the woman tries to be that for her partner, the guy tries to be that for his partner. They try to be the nurturing one, the caring one, to make up for this horrible childhood that the other one had. Often both of them had it. Sometimes they even both try to be the parent for each other.
Sometimes it even seems to work for a while, and sometimes, actually, I have seen it where they can actually nurture each other and help themselves grow. Though it doesn’t seem to be very common, a lot of times it doesn’t work that well, which is part of why I liked individual therapy so much better and why I even more than that believe in self-therapy—that it’s an internal job. It’s each person’s individual responsibility to heal those ancient childhood wounds and to figure out how to get our own emotional needs met in our relationship with ourselves.
When people played this out as couples, so often, so, so often, starting with my parents, my first example, it was a setup for hell and failure and fighting and friction. So when my mom was saying, “You don’t understand my point of view about politics, science, religion, philosophy, this and that,” what she was really saying is, “You don’t take care of me! You don’t love me! You have a responsibility to love me!”
And my father, when he’s talking about, “You don’t understand my politics! You don’t respect what I have to say! You don’t respect how hard I work and this and that,” what he was really saying is, “Daddy, Mommy, why don’t you love me? Why don’t you take care of me the way I deserve it?”
And then, on an emotional level, in the tone, that’s what it was. They were two little children raging at each other, believing the other person was a parent who had a responsibility to care for them. And they were both doing it with each other at the same time. So it was two little children raging at each other, expecting the other person to be the one who’s a grown-up.
“Grow up and take care of me!” “No, you grow up and take care of me first!” “No, you grow up and take care of me first!” “I hate you! You won’t grow up and take care of me first!” “No, I hate you! You won’t take care of me first!” And it’s going on and on and on.
In the midst of all this, in my childhood as a little boy, me looking out from the bedroom, hoping, praying that one of them will grow up and say, “Listen, I’m sorry I’m arguing with you. This is not what it’s about. Let me hug you.” Or the other one saying, “Let’s just call this a day. I’m so sorry I’m fighting with you like this. This has these are, I’m feeling ancient stuff.”
But they never connected it. It never happened. Never. All that would happen is sooner or later this battle of the wills would end up with one of them giving in or one of them storming off and being alone for a while. Or in the case of my parents, storming off and smoking a little weed. The point was that they would dissociate. They would push down their feelings. They would push down their unmet childhood needs, which they could never get met through this partner.
And then, well, without all that emotion there, they could just go back to normal life. And what it would end up was they’d hug. Maybe they’d have sex afterwards. I heard that a lot from couples in couples therapy. They make up by just having crazy sex, and then…
Everything is forgiven and moves on until that stuff erupts again, and inevitably it would.
Well, also as a therapist, in a totally non-romantic way, when I was doing individual therapy with someone, we would form a sort of couple, a dyad as it were, two people here. A lot of times those people would play out their stuff with me, sometimes the very stuff they were playing out with everybody in their life— their friends, their romantic partners, their parents, their children— unresolved stuff from their childhood, unresolved needs, stuff. And I felt it was often to the benefit of people more than doing it in couple therapy with each other. People sometimes who didn’t have much of an ability to be equipped to deal with it, but sometimes could learn in couples therapy how to fight fairly, or how to not fight at all, or how to realize what is this really about and how to figure out on an individual level how to, within their own selves, meet their own needs.
And how to respect each other’s processes, honor the unresolved childhood traumas, and the other, honor their existence and honor the person’s healing process individually, and not put so much expectation on the other to just fix it or solve it. But I think in that dyad of therapy, in me and this relationship with this client, this person who’s coming to me for help, often they would play that out with me. They would want me to fix them, and that’s where I could be someone who didn’t play into it like everybody else in their life had, or just reject them like many people in their lives had. Instead, turn it back to them, explore what the real need is, what they say they want versus what underneath it seems they really want. Get into the root of it, get into the history of the unmet need and the pain.
And often, so often, especially— well, always when it was working— but it really, when it was working, to see people go into themselves, their eyes would change, their face would change. Sometimes it was an amazing thing to see someone who’s 50, 60, 70 years old getting into a connection with who they were so long ago. Sometimes, most especially when they would really cry in the grieving process, and to see their face change and to suddenly see the little child who they once were and who they still were. And to see people who were 70 years old suddenly look like the five-year-old girl or five-year-old boy they once were. I saw it. It was an absolutely amazing phenomenon, such that I would call it a miracle. I— it was miraculous to see people’s face transformed. It was like the first five, ten times I saw it, it was just like, what is happening? This is a phenomenon.
When people grieve, some ancient part of their history still lives just under the surface, and it comes out. And they suddenly don’t look like an old person anymore or a middle-aged person. So that being the goal for me, that being the goal for myself. And also to end it with saying I’m not immune to this. I’ve been that person. I’ve been that person who’s a desperate crying child in an adult body, wanting someone else to save me and love me and hear me and be there for me and be the parent that I never had, that I’d always wished I had.
And for me, when I have had those feelings and learned what they were, it took time. Now, when they still occasionally bubble up— pretty rarely bubble up— to such that I’m being emotional and expressing unmet needs and wanting the other person to fix me, all in that unconscious way. But now it’s like when I start to see that, it’s like, oh, Daniel, take a step back. Go into yourself. Recall where this is coming from. How does this feel in your body? What memories does it bring up? What— and really ask myself, for me, what do you really want? What do you really want from this other person? What do you want from life? What did you so want from your parents that they so didn’t give you, were unable to give you because of their own traumas, that they hated you for because you wanted and they couldn’t give it or didn’t want to give it because they hadn’t had it given to them? And how can you give it to yourself?
[Music]
Daniel.