Misguided Attraction in Romance
“She’s the one. It has to be her. I won’t give up. I’ll convince her.”
These are thoughts that I have had many times throughout my life in pursuit of romance. But as I look back on these thoughts now, I must say these thoughts do not strike me as belonging to a healthy and secure man. Can you relate? I imagine many men and women can.
Western culture is littered with romanticized depictions of how lovers come together. It’s in our TV shows, movies, novels, and music. Nothing else drives us as crazy as love. But is this really love as we have been conditioned to believe it?
In the book, A General Theory of Love, Lewis, et al (2000) distinguish the difference between loving and falling in love:
“Loving is limbically distinct from in love. Loving is mutuality; loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved’s soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy, the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul.”
I like to think of it as a distinction between two people committed to peeling away at the layers of the onion vs two people relying on the initial spark of chemistry loaded with subconscious projections of their greatest hopes and fears. To me, the energy of the former is more stable and rooted whereas the energy of the latter is frenetic and volatile.
The truth is most people on the earth are approaching relationships and romance from a largely unconscious place. Relationships are not looked at from the standpoint of “what is real,” but instead, “what I wish would be/what could have been.” Why is this?
We only know ourselves in the context of the environment we grew up in. In our early years as infants, we are completely helpless and dependent on our primary caregivers. As we advance into toddlers, this dependency continues to stay with us. While we possess our unique thumbprint of who we are, our brains are shaped by the input we receive from our environment.
“Emotional experience begins as a derivative; a child gets his first taste of his feelings secondhand. Only through limbic resonance with another can he begin to apprehend his inner world. The first few years of resonance prepare this instrument for a lifetime’s use.”
Practically, this looks like the formation of a specific belief system, a specific attachment style, and a specific nervous system blueprint. If you grew up with parents who saw you as inadequate, you’ll carry an underlying sense of “not good enough.” If you grew up with parents who were dismissive of your emotions and experience, you may develop an avoidant attachment style and withdraw yourself from the world. And if you grew up in a chaotic household filled with violent arguments and unpredictability, you will likely carry a nervous system patterning where you are constantly scanning for threats and unable to relax when things are actually going well.
These areas are all governed by the limbic brain which exists in all mammals. This part of the brain is responsible for the processing of emotions, memory, behaviors, and social connection. It is said that between the ages of 5-15 is when a person’s working model of the world as well as their own identity is solidified. We carry this working model with us as our personal roadmap for navigating the world. This roadmap literally imprints itself onto our physical brain and the way in which our individual brain folds are shaped.
The problem here is that this roadmap is based on one focal point of experience in time. The coping skills and the styles of relating that we develop serve to guarantee our survival based on that single point of reference. Our limbic brain stays frozen developmentally well into adulthood. Our bodies may be bigger, but our limbic brain stays the same because it only possesses one filter of experience. This is what keeps people stuck in cycles of relationships and attraction that are unhealthy because they are relying on outdated patterns.
Lewis, et al (2000) refers to these patterns as Attractors. Think of it as pattern recognition, but applied to romance and attraction. This is almost always subconscious. “I don’t know why I’m attracted to her, but I just am.” We can’t explain our magnetism to someone, so we romanticize it. We call it things like a soulmate, a twin flame, or whatever other term we’ve developed for it in our vernacular.
What is usually happening in these scenarios of strong attraction is limbic resonance. Your limbic brain, with all its patterns and melodies, is harmonizing with the limbic brain of the person you are attracted to. And harmonizing only happens when the frequencies of the melodies are the same. This is where we get the phrases “trauma-bonding” or “misery loves company.” Like attracts like.
“A child tunes in to the emotional patterns of parents and stores them. In later life, if he spots a close match, the key slides in the psychobiologic lock, the tumblers fall home, and he falls in love. The accuracy of limbic architecture astounds. In a city of 5 million people, in a country of 270 million, in a world of 6 billion, people pick partners emotionally identical to their predecessors and swoon.”
There is nothing wrong with you if you are having the sudden, and often times uncomfortable, realization that you are the common denominator in all of your previous relationships. This is how the technology of our limbic brain works. We are drawn towards what is familiar and avoid that which is foreign. None of this means that you are fated to suffer and have dead-end relationships. It just means you are only able to see what is familiar and have a subconscious desire to repair your past. There is a tragic beauty to this dynamic. It is as if part of our wounded inner child believes, “if I keep repeating this, then hopefully I can figure out what went terribly wrong and fix it. Maybe then I can feel whole again.”
The quotes below capture this dynamic of the wounded child:
“He becomes a victim of repetition, looking to women reminiscent of his mother for the things he never got from her, as if he would make up for some terrible emotional wound. If he needs tenderness he will not look for a sweet, gentle woman, but rather for one who is cold and reserved; then he can win her over and finally bring out the gentleness in her.”
“You can’t tell someone with faulty Attractors to go out and find a loving partner – from his point of view, there are none. Those who could love him well are invisible. Even if the clouds parted and a perfectly compassionate and understanding lover descended from heaven on a sunbeam to land at his feet, his mind would still be tuned to another sort of relationship; he still wouldn’t know what to do.”
So what does one do once they realize this?
If you want change and truly desire a loving relationship, then you must start with yourself first. The focus should never be on getting someone else to be how you want them to be so that you feel better; doing so repeats the same trauma you endured growing up. The focus should be on becoming the person your younger self needed. As you heal and reshape your limbic brain patterning, you make yourself available to healthier relationships. It is in these relationships where you will experience the depth of healing you never thought possible.
Lewis, et al (2000) recommend psychotherapy as a tool for this process of limbic revisioning. And this requires connection with another person. As stated by existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, “it’s the relationship that heals.”
“In a relationship, one mind revises another; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love, as our Attractors activate certain limbic pathways, and the brain’s inexorable memory mechanism reinforces them. Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
”Helping someone escape from a restrictive virtuality means reshaping the bars and walls of a prison into a home where love can bloom and flourish.”
”The neocortical brain collects facts quickly. The limbic brain does not. Emotional impressions shrug off insight but yield to a different persuasion: the force of another person’s Attractors reaching through the doorway of a limbic connection. Psychotherapy changes people because one mammal can restructure the limbic brain of another.”
At a certain point, we learn to take in another person’s experience of us. In psychotherapy, we learn to take in how the therapist experiences us. Many clients, myself included, will find that overtime they begin to become like their therapist. Where they once believed their own inner dialogues about not being good enough, they now begin to question, “When did I first learn to speak to myself in this way?” After a period of time, I started to tell my first therapist, “I’m starting to think like you now.”
But make no mistake, this process takes time. And it will trigger you.
“An irony of the therapeutic process (and one unpopular with patients) is that successful therapy cannot avoid triggering the same Attractors it seeks to disarm; the patient cannot escape reliving the emotional experiences he most wishes to rid himself of.”
“The neocortex rapidly masters didactic information, but the limbic brain takes mountains of repetition.”
As stated by my Qigong teacher, “You must feel in order to heal.” Much of what ails us is our commitment to holding onto pain versus actually feeling it and letting it go. To experience the reality you say you want requires that you relinquish the one that you have been holding onto. As you begin to experience healthy limbic revisioning with a therapist, healer, coach (e.g. a neutral observer), you will find that the people you were once attracted to no longer hook you in the same way. Instead of subconsciously looking at a romantic partner from a lens of who they could be for you (or who you could be for them), you begin to look at them from the lens of who they are. And your ability to do so is a direct reflection of your capacity to see and love yourself.
We don’t attract what we want, we attract what we are and what we know. So really get to know yourself deeply. When you know yourself more deeply, new possibilities will present themselves to you. People who were once invisible may come into your field of awareness as potential partners.
You might just experience this saying attributed to Buddhists: “Buddhists say, if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak… that’s not the one. When you meet your soulmate, you’ll feel calm. No anxiety. No agitation.”