This week I was struck by something a young woman friend said. She said: “I know that my life will always be hard. I’ll always have bad relationships with men.” F., poor soul, is young enough to believe there is something deeply romantic about troubled relationships that end in heartbreak.F. has grown up with grim role models; her father is physically and emotionally abusive towards his wife. In the interests of self-preservation, like many other delightful women, her mother has become a doormat. Where F. is and her siblings are concerned, her father is totally controlling. There is, undeniably, a real risk
of F. repeating her mother’s pattern.
Her boyfriend is demanding, judgmental, careless of her feelings and insensitive. He is also a good enough judge of F.’s character, not to even bother to mask his worst characteristics during the early stages of their relationship. He knows her expectations are so low that he doesn’t even have to pretend to be ‘Mr Nice Guy’.
F. will accept whatever he dishes out, without question, because he’s there, because he has chosen her.
So is she right that she will always have bad relationships with men?
The answer has to be: “Yes, and no.” For as long as she continues to mouth this self-fulfilling prophecy, the chances are that she will be right. She can change the boyfriend in on another one as many times as she likes. But she will still end up with the same lousy relationship. (Does this sound familiar, I wonder?)
Human beings are programmed to repeat learned patterns. F. is programmed to fall over herself backwards to please hurtful, controlling men.
But why is she programmed to repeat learned patterns? Why do any of us do it?
Learned patterns exert huge power over us because we confuse ‘the way things are’ with the way life has to be. The only problem is that we get it wrong. We look through the lens of an abusive relationship, see an abusive world and deduce that what we see is all there is.
Denial plays a key role in this vision. F. knows that she will always have bad relationships in the future, but would never, ever admit to herself that her relationship with her father stinks, through no fault of her own. Her father is a past master of destructive relationships.
Mark Twain famously said: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.” F. knows for sure that she will always have bad relationships.
F. will never be free of her self-fulfilling prophecy until she admits to herself that this relationship, from which she wants and needs so much, is toxic. Until she is willing to admit to herself that the toxic relationship in which she finds herself is not her fault.
I speak to women every week who know that they will always love their abusive ex-partner. (And so they will, until the day they finally dare to ask themselves: “Did I love the way he made me feel worthless? Did I love the way he humiliated me? Did I love the way he made me feel unsafe all the time? Did I love being grateful for the increasingly rare occasions when he made me feel remotely lovable?”)
You ladies out there who still believe that you will always love him, trust me on this, YOU WILL NOT. You are not Whitney Houston! You will not always love him, not least because you probably don’t actually love him now. We both know he’s not worth it. You can try as you may to see the potential in him that might make him worth it, he’ll keep on showing you the dark side that is not worth another minute of your precious life.
It’s just that the hurt and the pain and all the emotional energy you invested in him make for a very powerful tie. And we tend to assume that all powerful ties must be love.
My mother and my ex-husband are both mines of misinformation. Both are blessed with strong opinions about all manner of things. It matters not in the slightest that they may know nothing about what they are talking about. They have always, to my knowledge, confidently proffered their opinion as gospel. And I, poor sap, believed them.
After my marriage ended I spent years eradicating the big, damaging beliefs about relationships and myself that I had learned from them. But I still find I have to winkle out their little ‘truths’ (about Life, the Universe and Everything) that I knew for sure, that just aren’t so.
My question to you is this: what do you know about relationships that just ain’t so that is getting, or keeping, you in emotional difficulties?
