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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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WE HAVE NOW explored one important feature of the vast hidden world I call the “unconscious partnership,” and that is our storehouse of unmet childhood needs, our unfulfilled desire to be nurtured and protected and allowed to proceed unhindered along a path to maturity. Now we will turn to another kind of childhood wound, an even subtler kind of psychic injury called “socialization,” all those messages we receive from
our caretakers and from society at large that tell us who we are and how we have to behave. These, too, play a compelling but hidden role in your relationship with your partner.
At first it may seem strange to equate socialization with emotional injury. To help explain why this is so, I want to describe one of my clients. (As is true for most of the people I mention in this book, names and certain identifying characteristics have been changed to preserve anonymity.) Sarah is an attractive, personable woman in her mid-thirties. A main concern in her life is her apparent inability to think clearly and logically. “I can’t think,” she has told me over and over again, “I just can’t think.” She is a lower-level manager in a computer firm, where she has worked diligently for fifteen years. She would have advanced much further in the company if she were an effective problem-solver, but whenever she is presented with a difficult situation, she panics and runs to her supervisor for support. Her supervisor gives her sage advice, reinforcing Sarah’s belief that she is incapable of making decisions on her own.
It didn’t take much probing to discover part of the reason for Sarah’s anxiety. From a very early age, she received from her mother the explicit message that she was not very intelligent. “You’re not as smart as your older brother,” her mother would say, and “You’d better marry a smart man, because you’re going to need a lot of help. But I doubt if a smart man would marry you.” As blatant as these messages were, they didn’t fully account for Sarah’s perceived inability to think. Amplifying her mother’s message was the prevalent view of the 1950s that little girls were sweet, pretty, and compliant, but not especially bright; the girls in Sarah’s grade school dreamed of being wives, nurses, and teachers, not executives, astronauts, and doctors.
Another influence on Sarah’s problem-solving capacity was the fact that her mother had very little confidence in her own reasoning ability. She managed the house and took care of her
children’s needs, but she deferred all major decisions to her husband. This dependent, passive model defined “womanhood” for Sarah.
When Sarah was fifteen, she was fortunate enough to have a teacher who recognized her natural abilities and encouraged her to work harder on her schoolwork. For the first time in her life, Sarah came home with a report card that was mostly As. She will never forget her mother’s reaction: “How on earth did that happen? I bet you can’t do that again.” And Sarah couldn’t, because she finally gave in and put to sleep the part of her brain that thinks calmly and rationally.
The tragedy was not only that Sarah lost her ability to reason, but also that she acquired the unconscious belief that thinking was dangerous. Why was that? Since Sarah’s mother had strongly rejected her intellectual capabilities, she believed that if she were to think clearly she would be defying her mother; she would be contradicting her mother’s definition of her. She couldn’t risk alienating her mother, because she was dependent on her mother for survival. It was dangerous, therefore, for Sarah to know that she had a mind. Yet she couldn’t fully disown her intelligence. She envied people who could think, and when she married she chose a man who was exceptionally bright, an unconscious ploy to make up for the psychological damage of childhood.
Like Sarah, we all have parts of ourselves that we have hidden from consciousness. I call these missing elements the “lost self.” Whenever we complain that we “can’t think” or that we “can’t feel anything” or “can’t dance” or “can’t have orgasms” or “aren’t very creative,” we are identifying natural abilities, thoughts, or feelings that we have surgically removed from our awareness. They are not gone; we still possess them. But for the moment they are not a part of our consciousness, and it is as if they do not exist.
As in Sarah’s case, our lost self was formed early in childhood—largely as a result of our caretakers’ well-intentioned
efforts to teach us to get along with others. Each society has a unique collection of practices, laws, beliefs, and values that children need to absorb, and mothers and fathers are the main conduit through which they are transmitted. This indoctrination process goes on in every family in every society. There seems to be a universal understanding that, unless limits are placed on the individual, the individual becomes a danger to the group. In the words of Freud, “The desire for a powerful and uninhibited ego may seem to us intelligible, but, as is shown by the times that we live in, it is in the profoundest sense antagonistic to civilization.”
But even though our parents often had our best interests at heart, the overall message handed down to us was a chilling one. There were certain thoughts and feelings we could not have, certain natural behaviors that we had to extinguish, and certain talents and aptitudes we had to deny. In thousands of ways, both subtly and overtly, our parents gave us the message that they approved of only a part of us. In essence, we were told that we could not be whole and exist in this culture.
ONE OF THE areas in which we were most restricted was our bodies. At a very young age, we were taught to cover our bodies in gender-specific ways and not to talk about or touch our genitals. These prohibitions are so universal that we tend to notice them only when they are broken. A friend of mine told me a story that illustrates how startling it can be when parents fail to pass on these unspoken taboos. A friend of hers named Chris and her eleven-month-old son happened to drop by her house one day. Soon my friend and Chris and the baby were sitting out on the back deck, sipping ice tea. Since the May sunshine was pleasantly warm, Chris took off the baby’s clothes so he could sunbathe. The two women chatted while the little boy
crawled around on the deck, happily digging his fingers into the warm soil of the flowerpots. After about half an hour, the baby became hungry, and Chris put him to her breast. My friend noticed that as the baby nursed he developed a miniature erection. Apparently nursing was such a sensual experience that he felt pleasure throughout his body. Instinctively, the little boy reached down to touch his genitals. Unlike most mothers, Chris did not pull his hand away. Her baby was allowed to feel the warm sun on his naked skin, nurse from his mother’s breasts, have an erection, and add to his pleasure by holding on to his penis.
It is normal and natural for an infant to want to have those good feelings, but we rarely allow it. Think about all the rules his mother was breaking. First of all, society tells us that women can nurse their babies but that if they do so it should be discreetly, so that no one might catch a fleeting glimpse of a naked breast. Second, infants should be clothed at all times—at least in a diaper—even when they are outside and the day is mild and sunny. Third, little boys and girls should not experience any form of genital arousal, but if for some reason they do they should not be permitted to enjoy it. By allowing her baby to revel in all of his senses, Chris was violating three potent taboos.
It is not my purpose to attack or defend society’s prohibitions against bodily pleasure. That would be an entire book in itself. (Nor do I want to simplify the problem that having a body, much less enjoying it, has been in the Western world.) But to understand the hidden desires that permeate your relationship, it’s important to know this simple fact: when you were young, there were many, many times when limits were placed on your sensuality. Like most children growing up in this culture, you were probably made to feel embarrassed or guilty or naughty that you had a body that was capable of exquisite sensation. To be a “good” boy or girl, you had to psychologically cut off or disown that part of yourself.
YOUR EMOTIONS WERE another prime candidate for socialization. Some feelings, of course, were not just permitted, they were encouraged. Oh, how hard your parents worked to get you to smile when you were an infant! And a few weeks later, when you laughed out loud, everyone had a marvelous time. Anger, however, was another matter. Temper tantrums are noisy and unpleasant, and most parents try to discourage them. They do this in a number of ways. Some parents tease their children: “You look so cute when you’re mad. I see a smile coming on. Give us a smile.” Others discipline them: “You stop that right now! Go to your room. I’ll have none of this back talk!” Insecure parents often give in to their children: “OK. Have it your way. But the next time you’d better behave!”
It is the rare parent who validates a child’s anger. Imagine a little girl’s relief if her parents were to say something like this: “I can see that you’re mad. You don’t want to do what I ask. But I am the parent and you are the child and you need to do what I say.” Having her anger acknowledged would contribute to her sense of self. She would be able to tell herself, “I exist. My parents are aware of my feelings. I may not always get my way, but I am listened to and respected.” She would be allowed to stay in touch with her anger and retain an essential aspect of her wholeness.
But such is not the fate of most children. The other day I was in a department store and happened to witness how abruptly a child’s anger can be put off—especially when it’s anger directed at a parent. A woman was doing some clothes shopping while her little boy, about four years old, tagged along. She was preoccupied, and the little boy kept up an insistent monologue in an effort to get her attention. “I can read these letters,” he said, pointing to a sign, “M-A-D-E.” He got no reaction. “Are you going to try on more clothes?” he asked. No response. The
whole time I was watching, she gave him only a few seconds of attention, and when she did she sounded annoyed and depressed. Finally I heard him say loud and clear to a store clerk, “My mommy was hurt in a car crash. She got killed.” This pronouncement got his mother’s instant attention. She shook her son by the shoulders, spanked him, and forcibly shoved him down on a chair. “What do you mean? I wasn’t killed in a car crash! Stop talking like that. Go over and sit on that chair and be quiet. Not another word out of you.” The boy was white-faced and sat without moving until his mother was done with her shopping.
Inside his head, the little boy’s anger at his mother had been transformed into a vengeful fantasy in which she was killed in a highway accident. He hadn’t been the one to hurt her. At four, he had already been taught to disown his angry thoughts and feelings. Instead he imagined that she had simply gotten in the way of a car driven by somebody else.
When you were young, there were probably many times when you, too, were angry at your caretakers. More than likely, it was a sentiment that got little support. Your angry feelings, your sexual feelings, and a host of other “antisocial” thoughts and feelings were pushed deep inside of you and were not allowed to see the light of day.
A few parents take this invalidation process to the extreme. They deny not only their children’s feelings and behaviors, but the entire child as well.
“You
do not exist. You are not important in this family. Your needs, your feelings, your wishes are not important to us.” I worked with one young woman I’ll call Carla whose parents denied her existence to the point where they made her feel invisible. Her mother was an immaculate housekeeper, and her instructions to her daughter were to “clean up after yourself so well that no one can tell you live here.” Plastic runners placed on the carpets determined where Carla could walk. The professionally landscaped yard had no room for tricycles or swings or sandboxes. Carla has a strong
memory of sitting in the kitchen one day when she was about ten years old, feeling so depressed she wanted to die. Her mother and father walked in and out of the kitchen numerous times without even acknowledging her presence. Carla began to feel that she had no bodily reality. It is no wonder that when she turned thirteen she complied with her parents’ unspoken directive to disappear and became anorexic, literally trying to starve herself out of existence.
IN THEIR ATTEMPTS to repress certain thoughts, feelings, and behavior, parents use various techniques. Sometimes they issue clear-cut directives: “You don’t really think that.” “Big boys don’t cry.” “Don’t touch yourself there!” “I never want to hear you say that again!” “We don’t act like that in this family!” Or, like the mother in the department store, they scold, threaten, or spank. Much of the time, they mold their children through a subtler process of invalidation—they simply choose not to see or reward certain things. For example, if parents place little value on intellectual development, they give their children toys and sports equipment but no books or science kits. If they believe that girls should be quiet and feminine, and boys should be strong and assertive, they only reward their children for gender-appropriate behavior. For example, if their little boy comes into the room lugging a heavy toy, they might say, “What a strong little boy you are!” But if their daughter comes in carrying the same toy, they might caution, “Be careful of your pretty dress.”
The way that parents influence their children most deeply, however, is by example. Children instinctively observe the choices their parents make, the freedoms and pleasures they allow themselves, the talents they develop, the abilities they ignore, and the rules they follow. All of this has a profound
effect on children: “This is how we live. This is how to get through life.” Whether children accept their parents’ model or rebel against it, this early socialization plays a significant role in mate selection and, as we will soon see, is often a hidden source of tension in married life.
 
A CHILD’S REACTION to society’s edicts goes through a number of predictable stages. Typically, the first response is to hide forbidden behaviors from the parents. The child thinks angry thoughts but doesn’t speak them out loud. He explores his body in the privacy of his room. He teases his younger sibling when his parents are away. Eventually the child comes to the conclusion that some thoughts and feelings are so unacceptable that they should be eliminated, so he constructs an imaginary parent in his head to police his thoughts and activities, a part of the mind that psychologists call the “superego.” Now, whenever the child has a forbidden thought or indulges in an “unacceptable” behavior, he experiences a self-administered jolt of anxiety. This is so unpleasant that the child puts to sleep some of those forbidden parts of himself—in Freudian terms, he represses them. The ultimate price of his obedience is a loss of wholeness.

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