How Memories Make or Break Relationships
Difficult times seem the most difficult when they’re in your face. Examples could be death, facing homelessness, sudden poor health news, or maybe job loss. Fires and other natural disasters. Other epic events.
Some people look on such times with a silver lining, a glass half-full attitude that surely things will work out. Others have faced enough negative experience that they are skeptical of improvement. They’d rather think realistically than hope for something better.
The well-respected Gottman marriage research team names bad memories as one predicting sign of divorce. Along with several other signs, including the infamous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling), and flooding, which I think should maybe be a Fifth Horse, but it doesn’t allow Four Horsemen to sound as ominous, and a few other predictors, I can vouch for bad memories in the therapy room and in real life being a strong factor.
In and of themselves, bad memories really are a matter of perspective. When couples are in the midst of challenging times with each other, it may be easier for them to remember negative things in their relationship, because negativity is so front and center. When life together is not as challenging, it could be easier to put the past behind and focus on the positive.
If challenge is repetitive enough, circumstances may seem overwhelming, or it may feel like it has never ended. Sporadic difficulty may transform in one’s head to constant difficulty. The memory of past events may feel worse now upon reflection than they felt in the then present. The only reality is now.
Those familiar with adventure storytelling friends and relatives can recall the one story that keeps getting more dramatic upon the next telling. The same can happen with negativity, as partners nit-pick past offenses and highlight the injustices done to them.
Sometimes, it’s not so much the dramatization of something, but the isolation of negative verses positive incidents that seem to emerge. I can remember in my own marriage highlighting a few things that were said that were blows to my ego, tales of injustice I wrote in my head that had no excuse, but called only for repentance. Never mind the saintly acts of courage my then wife might have endured to do her best by me.
Revisionist history can aid a claim to victimization that justifies an end that one or both partners want. Focusing on the negative possibly makes the pain of what joy and happiness that was shared less painful to endure and heartache easier to bear. If someone is the villain of the story, most everyone wants them to lose and the righteous to prosper.
In the therapy room, I’ve found that negative stories contribute to more built-up walls and a sense of guardedness between partners. Those with such walls have more of a challenge in dropping their defensiveness toward one another and being willing to reach out in empathy or connect with the other perspective. They feel the attack of the other more quickly and assume the worst.
It’s not that they are incapable of managing egoic defenses, but that their negative belief systems about their partners have been so influenced by the negative stories that have been written that much of the data about their world they take in supports the story of a troubled relationship.
It’s my belief that partners who have become violent or abusive in some way toward their partners have the most distorted view of their relationships of anyone. If the way one sees his partner or relationship fuels his need to react so drastically, he has conjured an ego that sees a demon behind every corner that needs to be destroyed where no demon really exists.
Until such an ego is managed, his partner would do well to steer clear of him. It this type of a situation the abused partner may feel bad memories but might be attempting to normalize them but realize doing so is foolish.
In other cases, a partner has lied to one another about relationship agreements that have been broken and the couple is in therapy because of a disclosure that has exposed one person’s good memories as false, and that person is fighting a sense of “crazy” because she truly has entered the twilight zone. She is faced with sorting out positive from negative memories, but because of deception must rewrite her story and make sense of what really was happy and what was just a lie.
Most partners in such a case that make it as far as therapy have already decided they want to stay in the relationship if they can. It just depends on what happiness they can create for themselves in the newly disclosed reality.
And that’s really the point of the Gottman use of bad memories as a predicting factor. If partners can use therapy as a tool to create the happiness of positive memories, they are more likely to stay in the relationship to do so. If on the other hand the direction continues to be a negative one, such memories are just one factor on a canvas of a painting that tells the story of a relationship that didn’t work.
