We long for a relationship that lasts through the ages, but are often disappointed. We fall in love, things go well for a while, then we hit the difficult times. Some of us work through these changes and come out stronger on the other end. Others separate and divorce. Most of us don’t give up and marry again, but often we find the same problems we had in our first marriage. Many have become fearful of “marriage” and look for a healthy long-term “relationship” without “typing the knot.”
But here too, many are disappointed. I recently read a blog post, “Why I Left,” written by Joelle Pittman. Like many of us, Ms. Pittman was looking for love, but found abuse and heartache instead. Like most us who have been through a rough relationship, she wondered what had happened. “l have a great job, I have my Master’s degree, I live alone in my own home, I travel all over the world, I have wonderful friends and a loving family, I compete in horse shows, and I volunteer for the Humane Society. Looking at these factors, I never expected to be ‘that girl.’ But I am ‘that girl.’ I fell in love with someone who treated me like a punching bag for his problems.”
This isn’t just a problem for women. I know many men who feel the same way. For more than 40 years I’ve been helping women and men find the love of their lives and teaching them how to keep their relationship alive and well through time. But to be honest at the outset, you should know that I’ve been married three times. My present wife, Carlin, and I have been married 35 years and we have every reason to believe we will defy the odds of third marriages and make it to the end totally in love and successfully married. Here’s what we’ve learned thus far.
- We all want love and respect, but more often find heartache and pain.
No one goes into a relationship expecting that we will be hurt. If we’re older than fourteen, we’ve all experienced the heartache and pain of a relationship that ended. But love is such a strong need that we try and try again. But when we look around us, we see more relationships that start out good, but turn bad. We rarely look deeply at why that may be so. That’s a big mistake.
- Our desires for love come from our conscious minds, but relation realities are driven by the subconscious.
Most of us have a pretty good idea of the qualities we look for in a mate. I’ve looked for someone who is loving, nurturing, attractive, kind, intelligent, caring, and self-aware (I call it the “A” team). But when I look back on the qualities in the relationships I’ve actually been in I find they are often fiery, frightened, angry, attractive, uncompromising, wounded, and worried (I call it the “Z” team).
After two failed marriages and numerous dysfunctional relationships, I took some time to delve deeply into the question, “If I want someone from the A team, why do I keep choosing women from the Z team?” I also had to ask, “If I want to express qualities of the A team, why do I slip into expressing the qualities of the Z team?” What I came to understand was that my A team desires were coming from my conscious mind, but my Z team choices were driven by my subconscious mind.
- Be it ever so shitty, there’s no place like home.
Our conscious mind is like a homing pigeon that searches for home in the arms of love (the A team). However most of us come from dysfunctional families where we suffered some degree of abuse, neglect, or abandonment (the Z team). When I looked back at the family I grew up in, I realized that my mother was frightened and worried. My father was fiery, angry, and uncompromising. Both were deeply wounded from their own past. Although my conscious mind sought the A team, my subconscious sought what was familiar, the Z team.
- Conscious Mind–Score 1. Subconscious Mind–Score, 1,000,000. Guess Who Wins?
George Miller, Ph.D, is one of the founding fathers of modern cognitive psychology. According to Dr. Miller, the conscious mind puts out on average between 20 and 40 neuron firings per second, while the subconscious puts out between 20 and 40 million firings per second. In other words, in measuring the activity of the subconscious mind as compared to the conscious mind, we’re looking at a factor of about a million to one. No wonder we find ourselves looking for love in all the wrong places.
- Our subconscious mind wants to heal old wounds.
The subconscious mind works largely by association. It connects things to other things. In other words, it pays attention to resonances and it is always working in the background. It’s why we’re drawn to people who reverberate with feelings from the past. We long to heal the father wound and find the love and support we often didn’t get from our Dad. We hunger for the nurturing and unconditional love we didn’t get from our Mom.
Our subconscious mind seeks the same dysfunctional emotional conditions in which we grew up. Without our conscious awareness it’s saying, “I’ll find someone who is like the father who ignored me or the mother who smothered me (or whatever pain patterns we experienced growing up), but this time I’m going to make them love me.” However, the subconscious mind doesn’t have the skill to heal us. It knows about fear, but is clueless about love. So we repeat the process of seeking and creating hurtful relationships over and over again.
- Most marriage counseling addresses the conscious mind, but neglects the subconscious.
The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, helped us understand the power of the subconscious. But analysis was a poor tool for healing and was too time-consuming and expensive for most people, and has fallen out of favor. Modern marriage counseling focuses on things like communication, problems solving, and cognitive changes in what we think and believe. However, the high divorce rate continues and many people feel disappointed.
Our conscious mind learns all the rules for a successful marriage, but we never seem to be able to put the rules into practice. Joelle Pittman found that out when she sought out a counselor. She writes eloquently and openly about her experiences in her blog, I Spent 15% of My Salary on a Relationship “Coach” & All I Got Was a Lousy List.
- We need a new form of marriage counseling that unites the conscious and subconscious minds.
In their wonderful book Code to Joy: The Four-Step Solution to Unlocking Your Natural State of Happiness Clinical psychologists George Pratt and Peter Lambrou, offer this insightful story about the relationship of the conscious and subconscious mind.
Once upon a time there was a flea who believed that he was king of the world.
One day he decided he wanted to go to the beach for a swim. But the western shore was many miles away, and on this own, the flea could travel only inches at a time. If he was going to reach the shore during his lifetime, he would need transportation.
So he called out to his elephant. “Ho, there Elephant, let’s go out!”
The flea’s elephant came to his side and kneeled down. The flea hopped up and, pointing to the west, saying, “That way—to the beach!”
But the elephant did not go west. He rather felt like taking a stroll in the forest to the east, and that is what he did. The flea, much to his dismay, could do nothing but go along for the ride, and spent the day being smacked in the face by leaves and branches.
The next day, the flea tried to get the elephant to take him to the store to buy salve for his face. Instead, the elephant took a long romp in the northern mountains, terrifying the poor flea so badly that he could not sleep that night. The flea stayed in his bed for days, beset by nightmares of thundering along mountain roads, certain he would fall to his death, and awoke each morning in a cold sweat.
After a week, finally feeling well enough to rise from his bed, the flea beckoned the elephant to his side, clambered up, and said, “I’m not well. Please, take me to the doctor.”
But the elephant merrily trundled off to the western shore, where he spent the day swimming. The flea nearly drowned.
That night, sitting by the fireplace and trying to warm himself, the flea had a thought. He turned to the elephant and said, “About tomorrow…um, what are your plans?”
What’s the moral of the story? If you are a flea riding an elephant, before you make any plans, you might want to check out what your elephant has in mind.
“This point is more important to your life than it might seem,” say Pratt and Lambrou. “The flea of the story represents your conscious mind which includes your intellect and power of reason, your ambitions and aspirations, your ideas, thoughts, hopes, and plans. In short, everything you think of as you. And the elephant? That’s your subconscious mind.”
If we really want to have a relationship that lasts through time, we have to bring together the conscious and subconscious mind. That’s what my wife, Carlin, and I have learned and what we practice in our counseling with men and women.
This is positively the best blog post or any other writing on couples relationship analysis. Our conscious mind is not really ‘driving the bus’ in a lot of areas of our lives, but rarely do we stop to realize this. If there is one thing many women wonder is, “why do I keep doing the same thing that doesn’t work?” whether it’s the same marriage or a series of relationships. I believe men may very well wonder this same thing, too, although it might not be acknowledged as easily or framed in the same language. Men and women struggle to over-ride their default settings. Life is far easier as an adult partner in a relationship of course if you grew up in a happy, functioning household. That’s a luxury too many people don’t have, unfortunately. I believe that if our conscious minds recognize their folly and give the unconscious mind a seat at the table…we CAN heal and rise above old inherited patterns of ‘loving’. Thank you again for bringing this to light.
Dianne, thanks for the kind words. I’m glad you found the article helpful. Too often we find ourselves looking for love in all the wrong places, but don’t know why. We want to fall into the arms of love on the A team, but find ourselves suffering in pain on the Z team. We promise that “next time I’ll find someone who can give me the A-type love I desire,” but we find ourselves ignoring a potential A-type partner because the “chemistry” isn’t right. We are sure that our damaged family relationships growing up could not still be influencing are choices as adults, but they are.
The good news is that with a better understanding of the “flea” (conscious) and the “elephant” (subconscious), we can “get our head together” and heal our present, unhappy relationships, or if we’re not in a relationship we can find one that will work, and then learn not to let our subconscious mind ruin something good.
I’m working on a new book that will guide people and continue to do counseling for those who want help now.
I’ll post more articles in the coming months.
One thing I learned from my work career is that people hate change. I never thought about it applying to my personal life. I always wanted things done my way – to be in control. I’m not sure if this is my subconscious mind, the way I was brought up by my parents. But this is interesting because I have ruined so many relationships I am disappointed in myself. I’m starting to think maybe I was meant to be alone. But, if there is further reading on this topic I would be most appreciative. Trying to heal, and very fearful of relationships.
Sampson, you’re right, people often resist change, but at the same time, we repeat old patterns even when we’re not aware of them. Most of us have poor relationships because we had some degree of dysfunction in earlier relationships and our subconscious mind keeps bringing us back again to the same old situations. But we need to learn new ways to deal with them. Lots of other articles on my website. I also recommend the resources I cite in the article. In addition to that I offer counseling by phone or in my office here in California.
I love it, Jed. So true what you write down here. Unfortunately for me, it took me a long time to realize that things that you have absorbed unknowinly in your young years, influence so dramatically your choices in life. In a certain way it makes me happy I do not have children. At least, I cannot blame myself for laying the pattern of their mistakes and hardship in future. And I certainly do believe in the fact that, as long as you have not worked out these things, you will always attract the same kind of person. This is maybe why I have stayed so long in an abusive relationship. Why stop this relation and stumble on the same kind of relation later on. Why not try to work it out within the relation. I thought it would be possible. But unfortunately it was not. Now, I am alone and know that I will remain alone for a long time as I am afraid I might repeat the same pattern and be hurt again. Still too young to be alone. Wasted time, in past and future.
EvaMaria,
I know that fear of repeating painful relationships keep a lot of people from trying again. I’ve found the book Code to Joy that I mention in the article is a good resource for healing old traumas so that we can move on and create relationships that are healthy.
Good reminders, Jed. Thanks!
This really points out the importance of each of us “knowing our own stuff.” That can be a scarey thing at first. But knowledge is power, always.
Funny, that theme of self knowledge keeps repeating over and over and over, again. The carvings on the walls of the ancient site of the Oracles of Delphi say “Know thyself.”
I also find that meditation is an incredible gift that can help us stay centered and keep all our various parts – so to speak – aligned and sinked. When that happens, we tend to stay more in touch with our personal “A Teams,” as opposed to those dreaded imps over at the “Z Team.”
Rebecca, Well said. Knowing ourselves isn’t easy, but worth the effort so that we can learn to love more deeply and well, starting with knowing and loving ourselves fully and unconditionally.
p.s. I know that it’s synced not sinked – but too soon foolish, to late smart. Now I’m just s-u-n-k with my spelling. Namaste’