The Mysticism of Romantic Relationships:

Essay by Terry Real

“Am I overreacting to my partner because of my family of origin history, or is my partner really doing this to me?”

The answer is always BOTH, because you hired them. Generally speaking, we pick people who are enough alike to what we came from, that we get thrown back into the old wound. It is a great disappointment when this happens because we thought they were going to deliver us from that wound, but they are forcing us back into it.

Falling in love means: “With this partner I will not be wounded, with this partner I will heal and feel complete.”

The moment your real relationship starts is when you realize that this partner is exquisitely designed to stick the burning spear into your eyeball. You cannot avoid triggering; you cannot avoid activating your adapted/wounded child. That will occur when what is happening in the present is close enough to what happened to you before, and you get confused. The same neural network in your brain that survived the trauma the first time is reactivated to save you again. That’s what trauma triggering is, you don’t remember it, you relive it. You are suddenly that little person, with that angry/dismissive/neglectful parent, and you are in that place where you never wanted to be in again. That doesn’t necessarily mean you are in a bad relationship, that’s what we call being in a relationship. The issue is what happens after the triggering.

If you are like most people, what happens is that you fight like hell to get from your partner what you thought you should have been getting from them all along; exactly what they are so maliciously not choosing to give you right now. And when that doesn’t work, you get mad. You get mad and you go after them, withdraw, retaliate, resent them, etc.

Here’s what you need to do: give up the dream. Grieve that your partner will never give to you all the things you didn’t get in childhood, someone who will always stand up for you, understand you, comfort you, etc. That will never happen. The perfect prince or

princess would be able to give you what you’ve always deserved, but not the partner that you have.

So when you shift your focus from them to you, and reclaim your own autonomy and power, you stop trying to get them to be different, and you do something different instead. You do something that you as a child could not have done, because now you are all grown up and have skills and resources you didn’t have when you were a child. When you do something different in your response to your partner, your partner responds to that something new by doing something new back. That is what “healing” is. Healing is not that they just give it all to you, healing is that the two of you work it out, because that is not what you were able to do in childhood. You work “it” out, because there will always be an “it” in your relationship, because you are living on planet earth as a human being, not in a childhood fantasy.