We all suffer from one of them, and most of us suffer from both. Growing up though one of the above was the pervasive message we received. We were either mired in too much of something or the lack thereof. And the whole course of the rest of our lives can be tracked back to this place where as young children we didn’t get enough or we got too much.
And sometimes we got very conflicting messages from our families of origin - we had one parent who gave us too much and the other who didn’t give us much at all. And so we developed both an anxious attachment and an avoidant...seems unfair I know.
I have been doing a lot of reading lately, on attachment theory, Jung, this idea that we spend the second half of life getting over the first...and it is all kind of melding together in some very productive ways. I see my own childhood with new eyes. I see myself in a new way, and I see the whole early childhood experiences freshly as well.
What struck me most was this “magical thinking” component of development. This self centered childlike view that everything in the world revolves around me and that I “cause” a great deal of problems in the world.
Let me explain...
All children, not just me, think early on in life that we are responsible for the way we are treated. Mom is sad today, it must be our fault. Our dad is short with us it is because we did something wrong. It never occurs to this early child brain that maybe mom is sad because a friend died (we don’t have this information because we are very young children and the adults seek to spare us some of life’s pain in this early stage of life) or dad is short with us because he is tired and had a shitty day at work. We think it is our fault. We caused it. And thus magical thinking becomes a working part of the mind.
For most people, at around age 5, they discard this magical thinking and begin to grow their minds into new ways of thinking, considering other options as possibilities for our parents and others behavior.
But some of us, we get stuck and this magical thinking becomes the way we think. Add to the mix a person who is highly emotionally intelligent and astute about reading the room, and you have a recipe for personality and relational disasters. The magical thinking person cannot discern the nuances of relationship. We think that we are always the cause of the issue, the other person is doing this or that because of us. And thus the codependent is born. Now every interaction going forward is a reinforcement of this primary idea that we are to blame for pretty much everything.
Now carry that forward for about 30 or 40 years and you can see why so many of our relationships are a fucking mess. Magical thinking supplanted normalized adult thinking and so we have quite literally been living life with the mind of a 4 year old.
While this strategy of living is very self oriented it is equally self defeating. Everything that everyone does to me is a function of some failure on my part. I wasn’t happy enough, quiet enough, good enough, whatever the fuck your little child mind might dream up and then quite inadvertently that is what you become...
And then add on top of that magical thinking this receiving too much or too little, you have the main reason, in my opinion, as to why we as a society are having so much relational trouble.
I am on a couple of relational Facebook groups. One is for divorcing women and the other is about dating. And let me tell you both sites have a parade of relational dysfunction every single day...all day long, all the fucking time. And it is the same shit. Over and over again. People attempting to love another person and it all coming out wrong, bad and destructively.
And what I see, every single day, is the magical thinking played out over adult relationships from people who either suffer from lack or excess. And we all go about attempting to fix both in ways that assure us that we will never, ever get what we want.
It pains me. My own ridiculousness and watching others. I see so much of it in my practice, both in coaching and as an attorney. Sitting at the edge of love’s demise for almost 30 years, definitely underscores some relational patterns.
So what to do about all of this?
For me, I have to acknowledge and then accept that I engage in the magical thinking of a four year old. That part of my brain just never grew up. I am now hard wired to think that the way you treat me is because I am flawed, bad, wrong, unworthy or to blame. And this colors everything I do, say or attempt to relate to. It is childish, immature and hard to own. But it is true.
And like everyone else I take this shit that my head comes up with and then I spin amazing stories from it. And I BELIEVE them. 100%. Well, at least I did until recently. I have begun to dismantle the magical thinking, and the easiest way to do it is to just admit that you do it. And then you begin to see that you are the problem, this self centered way of thinking causes you to create narrative that not only doesn’t serve you, it absolutely sets you up for heartbreak, loss and devastation.
Then when you add the got too much or got too little on top of this magical immature thinking, you really can see how and why relationships are so fucked today.
Now I want to give a nod to those who are in functional, loving relationships. I mean there are those people out there. But I would argue that there are great many of those people who are just kidding themselves and they will be posting on the sites I belong to in short order about their own domestic explosions of epic proportions.
As I am finding out, the best thing one can do to get a better loving relationship with another is to do your own inner work. Ferret out all the places you are warped and sagging and reeling and unhealed, then endeavor, to the very best of your ability, to work to eradicate those issues within yourself. Then, search the world over to find another who has done the same work and is committed to continuing the work, and then you have the ingredients for a successful and happy relationship.
It is my experience that you can only experience joy and happiness with another person to the degree you have healed yourself. I am a living example of this. I look at the way I have behaved and lived for, well decades, and it doesn’t surprise me at all really, now that I can see my fundamental problems. AND I am willing to deal with them.
I am not spending any more time attempting to not own them or pushing them away. I am just allowing them to surface, hit me hard and sometimes below the belt, but I am allowing them to surface so that I may heal that which is mine to heal. And I believe, that I will attract another who is doing and has done the same. And if we (the mythical we that exists hopefully somewhere in my future) stay committed to doing our own inner work, then we are capable of having a very loving, real, honest and wonderful relationship.
When we acknowledge our own wounds of too much or too little, we can begin to heal those things. But so long as they remain buried...well, what remains buried grows. And it is much harder to right that which we remain largely ignorant of.
We all have wounds of too much or too little. And I think, given my review of relationships both professionally and personally, there are a great many of us who never got past the magical thinking of a young child...addressing all of this might just help us move on to a better relational future. Of course, we must begin with ourselves. The best thing we can ever do to create a move loving union with another, is to ensure that we have done the inner work on ourselves, first. And we must remain committed to this cause once The Other arrives if we ever want to keep them.
Again, still.
Sigh.
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