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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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SO FAR IN this chapter, we’ve talked about two factors that fuel the power struggle:
1.
Our partners make us feel anxious by stirring up forbidden parts of ourselves.
2.
Our partners have or appear to have the same negative traits as our parents, adding further injury to old wounds and thereby awakening our unconscious fear of death.
Now there is a third and final aspect of the power struggle that deserves our attention. In the previous chapter, I talked about the fact that many of our joyful feelings of romantic love come from projecting positive aspects of our imago onto our partners; in other words, we look at our partners and see all
the good things about Mom and Dad and all the good but repressed parts of our own being. In the power struggle, we keep the movie projectors running, only we switch reels and begin to project our own denied negative traits!
In chapter 2, I defined these denied negative traits as the “disowned self.” If you will recall, I talked about the fact that all people have a dark side to their nature, a part of their being that they try to ignore. For the most part, these are creative adaptations to childhood wounds. People also acquire negative traits by observing their parents. Even though they may not like certain things about their parents, they “introject” these traits through a process called “identification.” A father’s judgmental nature and a mother’s tendency to belittle herself, for example, become traits passed on to the children. But as the children become more self-aware, they recognize that these are the very traits they dislike in their parents, and they do their best to deny them.
Now, this is where it gets interesting. Not only do the children manifest these negative traits themselves—although disowned and thus out of awareness—but when they grow up they also look for these traits in potential mates, for they are an essential part of their imagos.
The imago is not only an inner image of the opposite sex; it is also a description of the disowned self.
A case history might help you understand this curious and complex psychological phenomenon. I spent many years working with a young woman named Lillian. Lillian’s parents divorced when she was nine years old, and her mother gained custody of both Lillian and her twelve-year-old sister, June. A year after the divorce, her mother married a man who did not get along with June. The stepfather yelled at her constantly, punishing even the smallest transgression. Several times a week his rage would escalate, and he would take the girl into her room and spank her with a belt. Lillian would stand outside the door, listening to the blows from the belt and shaking
with anger and fear. She detested her stepfather. Yet, to Lillian’s dismay, when she was left alone with her sister, she began to treat her with almost equal disdain. She would even call her some of the very same hurtful names she heard her stepfather use.
The fact that she was capable of hurting her sister was so painful to Lillian that she repressed these episodes. It was only after a year of therapy that she could remember those times, and it was even longer before she trusted me enough to tell me about them. When she did, I was able to help her see that it was human nature for her to absorb both the positive
and the negative
traits of her stepfather. He was the dominant influence in the household, and her unconscious mind registered the fact that the person who was most angry happened to be the most powerful. Anger and derision, therefore, must be a valuable survival skill. Gradually this character trait wormed its way into Lillian’s basically kind nature.
When Lillian grew up and married, it was inevitable that she would fall in love with someone who had some of her stepfather’s characteristics, notably his violent anger, because this was the part of him that had been so threatening to her. In fact, the reason she came in for therapy was that her husband had physically abused her.
After two years of therapy, she was able to see that the anger she had found so detestable in her stepfather was one of the unconscious factors behind her attraction to her husband, and—even more alarming—was also a denied part of her own personality. This particular imago trait, therefore, was not only a description of her husband but also a description of a disowned part of herself.
I see a similar tendency in virtually every love relationship. People try to exorcise their denied negative traits by projecting them onto their mates. Or, to put it another way, they look at their partners and criticize all the things they dislike and deny in themselves. Taking a negative trait and attributing it to their
partners is a remarkably effective way to obscure a not-so-desirable part of the self.
Now we have defined the three major sources of conflict that make up the power struggle. As the illusion of romantic love slowly erodes, the two partners begin to:
1.
Stir up each other’s repressed behaviors and feelings.
2.
Reinjure each other’s childhood wounds.
3.
Project their own negative traits onto each other.
All of these interactions are unconscious. All people know is that they feel confused, angry, anxious, depressed, and unloved. And it is only natural that they blame all this unhappiness on their partners.
They
haven’t changed—they’re the same people they used to be! It’s their partners who have changed!
IN DESPAIR, PEOPLE begin to use negative tactics to force their partners to be more loving. They withhold their affection and become emotionally distant. They become irritable and critical. They attack and blame: “Why don’t you … ?” “Why do you always … ?” “How come you never … ?” They fling these verbal stones in a desperate attempt to get their partners to be warm and responsive—or to express whatever positive traits are in their imagos. They believe that, if they give their partners enough pain, the partners will return to their former loving ways.
What makes people believe that hurting their partners will make them behave more pleasantly? Why don’t people simply tell each other in plain English that they want more affection or attention or lovemaking or freedom or whatever it is that they are craving? I asked that question out loud one day as I was
conducting a couples workshop. It wasn’t just a rhetorical question; I didn’t have the answer. But it just so happened that, a few minutes before, I had been talking about babies and their instinctual crying response to distress. All of a sudden I had the answer. Once again our old brains were to blame. When we were babies, we didn’t smile sweetly at our mothers to get them to take care of us. We didn’t pinpoint our discomfort by putting it into words. We simply opened our mouths and screamed. And it didn’t take us long to learn that, the louder we screamed, the quicker they came. The success of this tactic was turned into an “imprint,” a part of our stored memory about how to get the world to respond to our needs: “When you are frustrated, provoke the people around you. Be as unpleasant as possible until someone comes to your rescue.”
This primitive method of signaling distress is characteristic of most couples immersed in a power struggle, but there is one example that stands out in my mind. A few years ago I was seeing a couple who had been married about twenty-five years. The husband was convinced that his wife was not only selfish but also vindictive. “She never thinks of me,” he complained, listing numerous ways his wife ignored him. Meanwhile, his wife sat in her chair and shook her head in mute disagreement. As soon as he was through, she leaned forward in her chair and said to me in a strong and earnest voice, “Believe me, I do everything I can to please him. I spend more time with him; I spend less time with him. I even learned how to ski this winter, thinking that would make him happy—and I hate the cold! But nothing seems to work.”
To help end the stalemate, I asked the husband to tell his wife one specific thing that she could do that would make him feel better—one practical, doable, measurable activity that would help him feel more loved. He hemmed and hawed and then said with a growl, “If she’s been married to me for twenty-five years and still doesn’t know what I want, then she hasn’t been paying any attention! She just doesn’t care about me!”
This man, like the rest of us, was clinging to a primitive view of the world. When he was an infant lying in the cradle, he experienced his mother as a large creature leaning over him, trying to intuit his needs. He was fed, clothed, bathed, and nurtured, even though he could not articulate a single need. A crucial lesson learned in the preverbal stage of his development left an indelible imprint on his mind: other people were supposed to figure out what he needed and give it to him without his having to do anything more than cry.
2
Whereas this arrangement worked fairly well when he was a child, in adulthood his needs were a great deal more complex. Furthermore, his wife was not a devoted mother hovering over his crib. She was an equal, with—much to his surprise—needs and expectations of her own. And although she wanted very much to make him happy, she didn’t know what to do. Lacking this information, she was forced to play a grown-up version of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey: “Is this what you want? Is this?”
When partners don’t tell each other what they want and constantly criticize each other for missing the boat, it’s no wonder that the spirit of love and cooperation disappears. In its place comes the grim determination of the power struggle, in which each partner tries to force the other to meet his or her needs. Even though their partners react to these maneuvers with renewed hostility, they persevere. Why? Because in their unconscious minds they fear that, if their needs are not met, they will die. This is a classic example of what Freud called the “repetition compulsion,” the tendency of human beings to repeat ineffective behaviors over and over again.
Some couples stay in this angry, hostile state forever. They hone their ability to pierce each other’s defenses and damage each other’s psyches. With alarming frequency, the anger erupts into violence.
WHEN YOU ARE immersed in the power struggle, life seems chaotic. You have no reference points. You have no sense of when it all started or how it will end. But from a distant perspective the power struggle can be seen to follow a predictable course, one that happens to parallel the well-documented stages of grief in a dying or bereaved person.
3
But this death is not the death of the real person; it’s the death of the illusion of romantic love.
First comes the shock, that horrifying moment of truth when a window opens and a wrenching thought invades your consciousness: “This is not the person I thought I had married.” At that instant you assume that married life is going to be a continuation of the loneliness and pain of childhood; the long-anticipated healing is not to be.
After the shock comes denial. The disappointment is so great that you don’t allow yourself to see the truth. You do your best to see your partner’s negative traits in a positive light. But eventually the denial can no longer be sustained, and you feel betrayed. Either your partner has changed drastically since the days when you were first in love, or you have been deceived all along about his or her true nature. You are in pain, and the degree of your pain is the degree of the disparity between your earlier fantasy of your partner and your partner’s emerging reality.
If you stick it out beyond the angry stage of the power struggle, some of the venom drains away, and you enter the fourth stage, bargaining. This stage goes something like this: “If you will give up your drinking, I will be more interested in sex.” Or “If you let me spend more days sailing, I will spend more time with the children.” Relationship therapists can unwittingly prolong this stage of the power struggle if they
help couples negotiate behavioral contracts without getting to the root of the problem.
4
The last stage of the power struggle is despair. When couples reach this final juncture, they no longer have any hopes of finding happiness or love within the relationship; the pain has gone on too long. At this point, approximately half the couples withdraw the last vestiges of hope and end the relationship. Most of those who stay together create what is called a “parallel” relationship and try to find all their happiness outside the partnership. A very few, perhaps as few as five percent of all couples, find a way to resolve the power struggle and go on to create a deeply satisfying relationship.
5
 
FOR THE SAKE of clarity, I would like to reduce the discussion in these first five chapters to its simplest form. First of all, we choose our partners for two basic reasons: (1) they have both the positive and the negative qualities of the people who raised us, and (2) they compensate for positive parts of our being that were cut off in childhood. We enter the relationship with the unconscious assumption that our partner will become a surrogate parent and make up for all the deprivation of our childhood. All we have to do to be healed is to form a close, lasting relationship.
After a time we realize that our strategy is not working. We are “in love,” but not whole. We decide that the reason our plan is not working is that our partners are deliberately ignoring our needs. They know exactly what we want, and when and how we want it, but for some reason they are deliberately withholding it from us. This makes us angry, and for the first time we begin to see our partners’ negative traits. We then compound the problem by projecting our own denied negative traits onto them. As conditions deteriorate, we decide that the best way to force our partners to satisfy our needs is to be unpleasant and irritable, just as we were in the cradle. If we yell loud enough
and long enough, we believe, our partners will come to our rescue. And, finally, what gives the power struggle its toxicity is the underlying unconscious belief that, if we cannot entice, coerce, or seduce our partners into taking care of us, we will face the fear greater than all other fears—the fear of death.
What may not be immediately apparent in this brief summary is this: there is really very little difference between romantic love and the power struggle. On the surface, these first two stages of a love relationship appear to be worlds apart. A couple’s delight in each other has turned to hatred, and their goodwill has degenerated into a battle of wills. But what’s important to note is that the underlying themes remain the same. Both individuals are still searching for a way to regain their original wholeness, and they are still holding on to the belief that their partners have the power to make them healthy and whole. The main difference is that now, in the power struggle, the partner is perceived as withholding love. This requires a switch in tactics, and the two people begin to hurt each other, or deny each other pleasure and intimacy, in hopes of having their partners respond with warmth and love.
What is the way out of this labyrinth of confusion? What lies beyond the power struggle? In the next chapter, “Becoming Conscious,” we will talk about a new kind of relationship, “the conscious partnership,” and show how it helps two people in a love relationship begin to satisfy each other’s childhood longings.
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