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Relationships
Recognize Your Relationship Patterns
Awareness of your patterns can help you override compulsion and disappointment.
Posted September 12, 2022 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Romance and sexual passion are connected in a very real way to the deepest patterns of your childhood, those relationship patterns that you experienced with your mother and father from the earliest stages of childhood development.
Parental bonds
The way your parents cared for and bonded with you, as well as the way they related to you emotionally, established early patterns of interaction that many, as adults, seek in their own relationships. In fact, those familiar and early patterns create the emotional charge many interpret as passion, sexual arousal, and love.
However, the source of those feelings is not the outer world—it is not about freedom, adventure, or even provocative experiences. Rather, it reflects the inner patterns of desire projected onto a target of familiarity, replicating the familiar patterns of early childhood.
For example, if your father was a controlling person, as a grown woman you may gravitate to a controlling man. He turns you on because he is tapping into early experiences you recognized as love.
Relationship patterns
You know how to do that, after all, you are used to it: you related to male dominance for most of your life and you understand how to work that pattern. As time moves on, and you change and mature, you may no longer need that controlling or dominant behavior to make you feel the heightened state of romantic, sexual attraction. You may start to lose that passion for the other.
What is happening is that you are taking back your projection and integrating it into your unconscious. As a result, you no longer need that other person to help you work out your early childhood patterns—the ones you are still trying to get right. If, in fact, you can integrate the patterns, then you will no longer need to bring into your sphere the controlling, dominating person that reminds you of father.
If you do not successfully integrate your early childhood patterns, then you are doomed to act them out again and again. Therefore, you might find yourself looking for that pattern, or need… over and over again, gravitating socially to a controlling male rather than the partner you think you want.
Inner work
The work of integration is inner work. First, you must find out who you are: Know yourself and the difference between your wants and your needs. If the controlling male excites you, you will reach for him repetitively, as if compelled. If you recognize the source of that need in your own early patterns, you can learn to override that compulsion, consciously recognize the red flags in that behavior, and turn to the direction of your wants.
Sabotaging intimacy
If control is what you need, you may find that controlling men often have problems with intimacy. They typically fear the loss of control that accompanies the vulnerability of intimacy. Such a person may initiate a fight after an intimate experience, re-establishing control through the distance of anger,
Consciously moving forward
There are no quick fixes. To know yourself and your partner and what drives you both emotionally is to move forward toward consciousness rather than projection. It breaks the cycle of early patterns.
The intimacy of relationship can occur only from the recognition, acknowledgment, and integration of self-knowledge. This will give you a relationship that is mutual and loving, rather than shallow and empty. A loving relationship that is both conscious and intimate holds the deepest feelings of attraction and love, affording the greatest opportunity for consciousness and thus individuation.
The real aphrodisiac
Intimacy reaches the nonverbal and emotional cues of trust, value, respect, and validation that enhance desire and spark sexual interest. Intimacy occurs when you find the person you want, rather than the person you need. It takes self-knowledge and inner work. But it holds the real aphrodisiac that keeps desire, love, and passion alive.
Insight breaks the cycle of need that occurs when the relationship pattern is unconscious. There are no instant cures and no substitute for inner knowledge.
Healthy relationships are built on mutuality, empathy, communication, and a lifelong and exciting journey of learning about you and your partner’s emotional worlds.
