was also handsome and powerful.
Marie was always trying to get in her brother's good graces, to have him admire and adore her in the ways a father would. But by the time she arrived on the family scene, her brother had already coped with three other sisters. He was bored with being a brother, and, according to him, his pack of younger sisters was a nuisance. They were “into girl things.” They were trouble.
Since Marie was the youngest, she received the brunt of his irritation. “Your dolls are in the way again,” he would yell. “When will you ever grow up?!” The whole time she was admiring him for being big, grown-up, and handsome, he was putting her down for being little and a girl.
Interestingly enough, Neil had also been an older brother to a series of younger sisters. Neil's sisters had all been spoiled by a mother who always told Neil to set aside his own needs on their behalf. “Just remember they're girls,” his mother would say. “They can't help it.”
What Marie discovered in therapy was that her relationship with Neil was a replay of her relationship with her older brother. In fact, in their relationship, both Neil and Marie had recreated the roles they had played in their families. Neil became impatient and overly critical; Marie felt victimized and complained that he was always picking on her. Without knowing it, Marie recreated the role of the little sister who absorbed all the negative comments and criticisms of her irritated older brother (in this case, played by Neil, her irritated husband), while Neil was venting his years of buried resentment about the special privileges of women, as first exhibited by his three younger sisters.
This example shows how, consciously or unconsciously, sooner or later, most of us make sure that we watch the movie of our childhood. As one of my woman clients said, “I can't believe it, but my father was an alcoholic, my first husband was an alcoholic, and lo and behold, I've just discovered that my second husband is an alcoholic too.”
Another client, a man, said, “My father was an intractable bully, and so is my wife. I was always in a power competition with my father—which I could never win—and now I'm in a power competition with my wife. I can't win this time either. It floored me to realize that I'd married someone just like my father.”
As this story illustrates, relationship dynamics don't always follow conventional gender lines. For example, Liz realized that in her husband, she had married a man who behaved exactly like her mother. “My mother was in charge of everything,” she said. “She wore the pants. I married a man whose strength I admired, and then I realized that, just like my mother, Bob had to be in control of everything. He had to know my every move, had to make all of my decisions, had to make sure I never had any power of my own. I always thought women married men like their father—but my father was so gentle that I could never understand why I always felt so oppressed by my husband. Then, one day I realized that in marrying Bob I had married my mother!” These are all examples of people living reruns of their childhood movies and finally seeing the information they contain.
As the examples of John and Deborah and Marie and Neil demonstrate, whether or not we are aware of it, we form relationships to accomplish our developmental tasks. It follows naturally that relationships will often end because these developmental tasks have been completed.
In the case of John and Deborah, their relationship ended because their emotional wounds from childhood were finally healed. John served as a parent to Deborah, helping her incorporate the skills of adulthood into her life. Gradually, she became a capable, functioning, and self-sufficient adult. The more she applied the skills she learned from John to the pursuit of her own goals, the farther away she moved from him. In time, she began to resent his control. In fact, it became clear that aside from his parenting function, which was now becoming irrelevant, John and her had little in common. Indeed, their worlds scarcely overlapped, and like any other well-reared adolescent, after she'd learned the skills of adulthood, Deborah wanted to leave home.
As for John, he finally received the love he needed in order to know that he was valuable in himself. Being doted on, adored, and spoiled by Deborah filled a longstanding emotional deficit of his. He finally got a crack at the emotional indulgence 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.