Understand the strange kickback that happens when love goes south
When Love Turns To Hate. What Gives?
The painful delusion that somehow we are in charge must be dropped
Have you ever noticed that a peculiar reversal kicks in sometime after that wonderful relationship with ‘the one’ graduates from its blissful honeymoon phase?
I bet you have. It is one of the starkest corollaries in life: that person you loved the most is often the one you hate with equal passion when things begin to slip away from you.
Peculiar isn’t it? After all the fanfare, newness, celebratory — and often revelatory — sex that kicks things off, catapulting you into an altered reality, things can go awry. And how.
Most of us scratch our heads at this point, baffled as to why things that were so good are suddenly so bad.
The couple that couldn’t wait to get their hands on each other now have backs turned in bed, refuse to help each other with the most basic requests, and seem to resent those very qualities that were so appealing on first meeting.
But what is the reason for this dramatic volte-face in which one or both of you turns into an unrecognisable, evil monster?
The answer is not as complicated as it first appears and once we understand this devastating reversal, we are in with a chance of romantic restoration.
All of us have parts of ourselves that we repressed or split off in childhood after the painful discovery that we could not exist in this fallen world as our full selves.
We learn painfully and quickly after our first honeymoon — blissful union with mother when we and mother are one, or appear to be — that we are in fact separate beings.
But as if that wasn’t enough, we then find out that not all of our being is acceptable, either at home or in society. Perhaps it is our anger our family cannot tolerate, or maybe our sensuality.
Sometimes, it is our grief at being born into a world that doesn’t seem to recognise the grandness of our souls.
Ever had that feeling you were born on the wrong planet and landed in the wrong family?
Many of you are nodding now. There are literally legions of us who feel this way. Our response at the extraordinary behaviour and attitudes of those around us — and the system, starting with school, that conditions us — is to hide.
You may as a child have hidden under tables, behind sofas or in your room, or you may have developed a healthy camouflage to keep from further injury. Perhaps both.
I always begin by telling any client that my belief is that everything we do has a reason and one common reason we humans share is a need to protect our innate dignity.
We shroud ourselves, first creating a false self to replace the one we had to give up, then we disown the parts of the false self that others don’t like.
One of my own masks was — and still can be — to refuse to play life’s game. It’s a kind of fuck you! If you don’t get me and can’t see me, you just ain’t worthy of me.
But as with all of us, living with a lost or hidden self, a false self and then a disowned self is incredibly painful.
We survive on this basis but the question is, are we living? And who are we living as?
Throw in severe childhood trauma, neglect, and abuse — let alone the normal pains of growing up in a healthy family — and we may spend a lot of time just getting by, protecting the sensitive soul within.
When it comes to the choice of partner, you look at serious, sensible reasons to join with another but your unconscious has another agenda, entirely opposed to what your ego is saying.
Forget the multi-millionaire with the Ferrari and fridge full of champagne. Your primitive, animal brain sees him or her as a good provider, but your deeper self couldn’t give a fig.
It has only one agenda and it is the most important one on Earth. It is your evolution. If the whole universe is on a drive towards wholeness, that includes you.
And life doesn’t give a damn how much you have to suffer to get you where it wants you.
Try and turn things around and see the truth. You thought you were in control and living your life. Forget it. Life is actually living you and has its own purpose for you.
Relationships also have their own purpose and if we are brave enough to follow heart and soul rather than head, we will discover, often painfully, they are for our healing.
And that’s where falling in love comes in. Yes, it is a genetic adaptation to ensure the survival of the species, but it is also a device to get you well.
Love hits us hardest when we meet someone who fits most neatly with our early blueprint of what love looks like. If what you saw and experienced growing up was volatile and unpredictable, that will likely feel like love to you.
Daphne or Donald walk down the other side of the street or appear at a party and wham! We are in Kismet City, the twin soul has arrived and they are going to restore us to a symbiotic pre-birth nirvana before everything turned to rat shit.
Now, we don’t know any of this consciously, of course, it is all happening below the radar, but something in us really knows.
Finally, we have come home, found the one, all our troubles fall off us like fresh spring rain from a well-oiled mackintosh. And for a while it really is wonderful, isn’t it?
But what we don’t realise after drinking the love potion and falling under its spell is that the one we love is rather too like mum and dad, and therefore will likely injure us in the same ways.
If dad was withholding and avoidant, guess what happens with Donald after the spell fades? If mum was smothering and obsessive, guess how Daphne appears as time goes on.
Life has set us up and like the babies that we still are deep down, we are hoping for a blissful merger between Him Inc and Her Inc, where love once more is effortless.
We have arrived back in Heaven, or at least the nearest we can get to it here on Earth.
But Heaven, the Garden of Eden itself, is short-lived and like Adam and Eve, we are sent off into the wilderness to find our way.
We are in fact being forced to grow up, learn life’s painful lessons and not expect an easy ride. We are not here to leech off each other it seems. It is why most of us don’t like entitled people.
But the answer to the question that started this piece is this: we have chosen partners — or rather our unconscious has — because they match our love map, but also because they seem to embody the very qualities that we were forced to reject.
We are deeply drawn because our beloved appears to represent our chance at once more being whole, just as God intended.
By that simple love merger we will be restored to our very own infantile, omnipotent God-like status.
However, we have forgotten something key in our rush to wholeness. The very qualities we are drawn to and need returned to us, we rendered taboo for a reason.
Now, suddenly, our partner’s aliveness looks annoyingly flirtatious, and stirs some pretty deep anxieties, which soon make us angry.
Our red-alert starts flashing. It is not safe, it says. They are not safe. In fact, rather than making me whole, they are only going to fragment me further.
It’s all been a dreadful mistake!
Most of us know how the story ends. Without significant interventions and raising of consciousness in both people, a hefty dose of willingness and sleeves rolled up, the writing’s on the wall.
Love, as the psychiatrist M Scott Peck said, is effortful.
© simon heathcote
