he had missed as a child. Now that this void had been filled, he longed to use his adult skills on his own behalf. He realized that for years he had put aside his own career in order to focus on Deborah's growth. After she walked out on him, he bounced back with remarkable swiftness. With venture capital borrowed from a business colleague, he started his own foreign car dealership.
Why did Marie and Neil's relationship end? When their fights became too frequent, they entered therapy, and it was there that they realized they were each simply repeating the roles they had played in childhood. Marie realized that in order to be loved by a man she didn't have to repeat the pattern of absorbing criticism and put-downs that had been the hallmark of her relationship with her brother. Neil contacted his feelings of resentment about women, which he had handily delivered to Marie. They were both able to acknowledge these things, to reveal them to one another, and to realize that their relationship had been of tremendous value. Through the repetition of the emotional configurations of their childhoods, they were each able to feel, express, and identify feelings that had long been buried. But after this task had been completed, they found that their relationship really had no life—no common ground, no shared interests, not even a similar set of values. Their parting was sorrowful but gracious.
As these examples show, relationships can end gracefully when the developmental process is complete for both partners. But when the completion is not simultaneous, endings are particularly painful. It may be clear to you that you have completed your developmental task, and you may be aware, at the same time, that your partner has not. That's where guilt comes in.
If you find yourself in this situation, it is important to remember that you can't necessarily make the completion happen for the other person nor must you feel guilty if the other person hasn't finished his or her task. Our developmental tasks are our own responsibility. If we don't complete them, that's our own problem.
An example of this is Sally and Paul. After seven years of marriage, Sally was totally frustrated with Paul's inability to talk, his unwillingness to fight, his refusal to seek counseling, and his general and long-term depression. After a year of therapy herself, she ended the marriage in a unilateral decision that devastated him.
Between the time she decided on the divorce and when it actually occurred, Sally was overcome with guilt. She was worried about her daughter, who had a close relationship with Paul, and she was afraid that there might have been some opportunity for reconciliation that she had overlooked. Perhaps if she pleaded more strongly, somehow he would be willing to change so they could have a workable marriage. But no matter what she suggested, he refused. “I'm happy with the way things are,” he said. “If you're not happy, that's your problem.”
When he said this, she realized that there really wasn't any hope and proceeded with the divorce. Paul continued to “not understand” what had happened: “You've made up your mind; there's nothing I can do,” he said. “I never wanted this divorce; I'm just your victim.” Years later, when his second marriage was ending (as he explained, “for all the same reasons”), Paul finally entered therapy himself. He was finally able to tell Sally what he was learning about his deeply buried anger at his mother and how he had applied it to every woman in his life. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I loved you; I just didn't love myself, at least not enough to learn what I needed to in order to keep our marriage alive.”
What this story shows is that sometimes the lessons are very long in being learned. It wasn't until fifteen years later that Paul's second divorce finally caused him to discover the unconscious blueprints by which he had conducted his life. Finally, at almost age fifty, he was completing his emotional developmental task.
What happened to Paul is an example of what tends to occur when people fail to understand what they were doing in their relationships: they keep on repeating the pattern until they learn its lesson. That's why so many people who get divorced and remarried find themselves having the same fights, the same dynamics, and the same disillusionments a second or even a third time. They never figured out what they were trying to accomplish in their first marriage and so they had to do it all over again.
Not every relationship changes every person to an equal degree. For many people, relationships are simply a resting place, a “holding tank,” where not much significant forward development is accomplished, but in which a certain state of being is allowed to continue uninterrupted. Sometimes this uninterrupted state of being is a kind of growth in itself. As one man said at the end of his relationship, “Ruth was disappointed because I wasn't ambitious; but I couldn't be ambitious then. I'd been through so much in Vietnam that what I really needed was a quiet place. I needed the same person to come home to every night. I needed reality to be unruffled and boring. I needed to cool my heels and get my bearings. In a sense, that was her gift to me: she gave me a place to vegetate for a while.”
Relationships also end when the developmental process gets out of joint. A relationship can continue for only as long as the two people in it are either in a parallel or similarly focused developmental process. But when one partner wants to change the agenda and the other prefers the status quo, there's trouble.
For example, Mike and Karen, both high school dropouts, met when they worked at an electronics factory. They were both movie fanatics and played on the company softball team. Since they had grown up in poverty, each dreamed of owning a home. After a two-year courtship, they got married. In order to save money to buy a house, Karen supported Mike while he went through training to become an electrician. They pooled their resources, and within four years they bought their first house.
After three more years they had two children, and Karen began to be discontented. Now that she was at home with the children, she missed the stimulation that in the past her work had afforded. She also realized that for most of her life she had been pressed into the caretaker role. As a child, she had had to take care of her sick grandmother, an experience that now caused her to resent staying home with the children. She realized she wanted to go back to work, but when she discussed this with Mike, he became irrationally enraged.
Mike was from a broken home, and it was very important to him to be the provider for his family. He'd been willing to have Karen work while they were saving to buy the house. But now that it was theirs, he believed her place was in the home. He wanted his children to have a stay-at-home-mother, the way he never had.
At this point, Mike and Karen's process began to be distinctly out of joint. They no longer had a common purpose. When they were both working toward buying a house, they were the perfect partners for each other. But as Karen pressed forward with her psychological need to develop her own capabilities, Mike's dream of a traditional family was threatened. After a year of discussion, bargaining, and pleading, Karen delivered an ultimatum: whether he liked it or not she was going back to work. Declaring that she was an unfit mother for the children, Mike took the two boys and moved out.
What I am trying to show in all these examples is the profound impact of childhood on adult relationships. Without realizing it, we often choose partners who will help us trace back through the dark woods of our childhood, like Hansel and Gretel, picking up the scattered crumbs of our identities along the way. It never ceases to amaze me how little most people know about their own childhoods by the time they reach adulthood, the altar, or the divorce court. For all of us, childhood is the archaeological site from which all the important information about ourselves can eventually be excavated: our hopes, our deficits, our expectations, our personal myths about love and sex, our beliefs about the opposite sex, our sense of self-worth, our feelings about our bodies, and all the thousands of other perceptions and beliefs that form our self-concept.
Most of us move into adulthood essentially uninformed about ourselves, unconscious about all of the influences, persons, and scenarios that have shaped us. As a result, we try to design the experience of adulthood on a conscious level, but also, and more importantly, we try to design the experience of childhood on an unconscious level, in such a way
