The Runner-Chaser dynamic: Why we run from love
“To fall in love is a peak experience, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace. We should all be so lucky!” Jason Silva.
Love. Romantic infatuation. Ecstasy. We all want it. We crave it. We dedicate poetry and novels to it. We celebrate it in movies and music. We spend lifetimes looking for it. And yet when we finally find it, when we’re finally standing face-to-face with that awe-inducing, heart-rending emotion, our immediate reaction is rarely one of surrender and bliss. We mostly tend to want to flight. Our primal survival instinct kicks in and instead of running into our lover’s arms, we run the other way. Often causing great havoc on our way out. You’d think that when we find it, after all that search and heartache, we’d fall to our knees thanking whatever deity that we believe in for having bestowed us with this gift — but, no! More often than not — the opposite happens. The stage that follows the initial infatuation is not union; the stage that follows infatuation is Denial (the same as with grief).
Denial, the second stage of love
Instead of seeking out unification with the object of our affection, what we seek is evidence that what we are starting to feel is not real. We suddenly become extra active on Tinder; the beautiful faces that we’ve seen and ignored on Happen before now suddenly become increasingly appealing; our dating prospects now suddenly seem to multiply; the fish in the sea appear infinite and extra glistening and even that one person that wasn’t quite right for us before, now suddenly becomes a perfect, viable candidate to quell our carnal urges with.
“What harm could this possibly cause? It’s just some meaningless acts after all, and if love is meant to last it will not be harmed by this anyway, right?”
Wrong! Everything that we do, that is not in the name of love, (or in this case, in the interest of love) we do against it.
Think of a baby. Now imagine that you neglect it and feed it irregularly. You may not be actively harming it, but your lack of focus and care to it, is harmful. You may not be actively abusing it, but your actions are abusive. The chances of such a baby to survive are low at best. The same with love. Everything we don’t do in the name of it, we do against it. This denial stage can be very destructive even if its brief. It’s the stage when we start to build a wall around ourselves — a wall that will ensure that love stands no chance. A “like” on Tinder is not a harmless act but a brick you lay between you and love. Every message on Happen — a layer of concrete.
So why is that? Why do we feel the need to build walls around ourselves from the very thing we desire the most?
Love is madness
Think back to that moment, the moment when your lips met, your eyes submerged into your lover’s gaze. Time and space collapsed from underneath your feet. For a brief time you may have left this place — this reality — and entered a sacred realm, a metaphysical, numinous experience. You and your lover become something together…. for that brief but momentous snapshot in time, you become one…(Become ONE with what?)
And that’s it! That’s the scary part. The abandonment of self; the shedding of your individuality; the loosing of control… That’s what makes us fright and flight. We’re falling …in love. And “falling,” we have always been told — “is painful”. So we fight against it. We struggle to prevent it.
Why does responding to that fire in the belly feel like you’re about to get burnt?
The answer is simple, but it requires some unpacking to truly absorb its full potency. We can’t consider love without considering neurochemistry.
“The meeting of two personalities,” Jung wrote, “is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Most of the act of falling in love is a process that evokes sensations and feelings that we are not consciously aware, or in control of. Certain neurotransmitters increase and others drop. Cortisol levels and the stress hormone spike up while oxytocin increases, a process which causes us to feel both nervous and amorous at the same time. Testosterone goes up in women, while dropping in men. And so on. How much of any of this is conscious? How much of this are we really in control of? How many of us can claim to have the ability to regulate that? Similar to this biochemical battle which renders processes in our own body out of our control, another battle is taking place which is equally, if not more, maddening — the battle between our conscious and unconscious awareness.
The impostor Hero
We often think of the conscious and the subconscious minds as antagonists. The vocabulary we use to describe them delineate the two as separate planes that are at odds with each other: “Uncover your shadow,” “defy your limiting beliefs,” “take a walk on the dark side,” “discover the repressed, denied and hidden parts of you”. All these linguistic descriptors, sketch an image of the Unconscious as the “Villain” — a beast, and the Conscious as the “Hero” — the knight in shining armor on an eternal quest of saving lost parts of itself from the beast; A Hero, eternally marked by the mission of reclaiming all bits and pieces of self that this beast has snatched away and now keeps hostage in the depth of its horrifying, dark chambers.
But, the good news is: this Hero is only an impostor.
The conscious mind according to C.G. Jung, represents the ego and is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity. It comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. But we already know, that our conscious is only 2% of our awareness. What about the remaining 98%? And which is more likely to contain our true self — the 2%, or the 98%?
The real Hero
So if the conscious mind is the Ego (and an impostor Hero), what then is the unconscious and (who is the real hero)? What is this thing that we are so committed to protect but are equally afraid of?
Jung called it “The Undiscovered Self”. The undiscovered self is in Jung’s terms, both, the personal unconscious and the collective (or transpersonal) unconscious. This comprises a multitude of elements. From the collection of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and repressed childhood experiences, to aspects of personality and ancestral and evolutionary past. Your archetypes, your shadow, your anima and animus….Your soul, if you like.
The purpose of life is individuation. Individuation is a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious are brought into consciousness to be assimilated into the whole personality. This process, is the birth of the real Hero. It is a completely natural process necessary for the integration of the psyche. This can take a few years, or a lifetime to occur (depending on how brave and commited to our growth we are) and it can happen by means of dreams, personal development, active imagination, or … LOVE.
The Call to Adventure: Love makes an appearance
In Joseph Campbell’s terms, Love is “The Call to Adventure” — the first step on any Hero’s Journey:
“(The call of adventure is to) a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, super human deeds, and impossible delight.”
Often when the call is given, the about-to-become Hero first refuses to heed it. There are many reasons for this: fear, insecurity, a sense of inadequacy, or any of a range of reasons that work to chain the person to the status-quo. In this case, where Love opens up the floodgates to the unconscious (the 98%), the refusal of the call is the result of fear, and indeed, a sense of inadequacy, that we don’t have what it takes to withstand the flood that is about to break out.
And this fear is not irrational. It’s accurate. If people indeed, were equipped to navigate the unconscious, we would not be experiencing the epidemic of psychological pathologies — burnout, depression, HSP, disengagement — all around us today (read more about that in my next blog).
It is not called “falling in love” without a reason. All of a sudden our impostor Hero is rendered useless. Prostrate. He no longer has a say in what is being brought to the surface from the unconscious. He is no longer in charge of this transformation. He becomes consumed by the emotion. And as such, the Hero starts to fall…in love… or off his horse. The greater a person’s depth, the deeper his fall. He loses control. He is no longer in charge. The beast takes over.
The impostor is about to become exposed
So what will he do? The only thing that he can do! The only thing he knows best. Fight to maintain control by e.g. finding solace in a third party’s arms, meaningless sex, overindulgence in flirtations text-messages, and Obsessive Compulsicve “Sipe-right” Tinder Disorder (OCTD).
When we meet someone to whom we have an intense response — to whom we are drawn physically, emotionally, intellectually, or (bingo!) all three — the conscious shell — the ego — is punctured. “Cupid’s arrow” is love’s unexpected, bitter-sweet penetration of one’s conscious self — the self we have spent a lifetime carefully crafting and safeguarding.
The act of falling in love is the stripping of the ego and the reclaiming of our soul. The frightening part is that we are not able to predict what the next aspect is that love will choose to re-birth from our “Undiscovered Self”. It’s always a surprise. And this can be nerve-racking.
Love as a “tool” for individuation
Luckily, evidence shows that most of us will eventually heed the call of love. We will eventually realize that Tinder is only a temporarily relief / escape, and give it up in exchange of being consumed by the blaze in our belly. Once we’ve sampled true love nothing will ever compare.
However, the damage we cause in our steeplechase to escape it during the denial phase is real. The wounds we leave in the psychic field of love by cheating, lying, hiding will leave permanent marks; those bricks will build hard walls that will need a lot of tender care and commitement to be broken down again.
So how can we prevent this?!
If you’re the running Hero in this story — understand that there’s nowhere to run. Individuation will catch up with you, for this is the reason you were born. Love, is the quickest route to individuation. Buckle up and brace yourself. Be brave. See temptations for what they really are (side-tracks and delays) and do your due diligence to evade them.
If you’re the chasing Hero — hold the space but do so with grace — not at the expense of self. Eventually, the wall the other builds around themselves can grow too hard to break. Individuation requires courage and is ultimately a personal process and choice. Your job is done. You’ve made the call. You’ve jolted the other awake. If they choose to remain asleep, there is nothing that you can do about it. Learn when it’s time to walk away and see if you can find another Hero, one who’s brave enough to heed the call.
