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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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BOOK: Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed.
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TO SOME DEGREE, we all use denial as a coping tool. Whenever life presents us with a difficult or painful situation, we have a tendency to want to ignore reality and create a more palatable fantasy. But there is no time in our lives when our denial mechanism is more fully engaged than in the early stages of our love relationships.
John, a man in his thirties who came to me for counseling, was particularly adept at denial. He was a computer programmer who had designed a software program that was so successful he used it to start his own company. For the first ten or fifteen minutes of each session, he would talk about his company and how well it was doing. Then the conversation would grind to a halt, he would avert his eyes, and he would get around to the real topic of conversation, which was Cheryl, the woman he loved. He was utterly bewitched by her and would
marry her in a second if she would only say yes. But Cheryl kept refusing to make a commitment.
When John first met Cheryl, she appeared to be everything he wanted in a woman. She was attractive, intelligent, and delightfully sensual. But, a few months into the relationship, he began to be aware of some of her negative traits. When they went out to dinner, for example, he noticed that she always complained about the food or the service, no matter how good it was. He also noticed that she would complain endlessly about her job but would do nothing to improve her working conditions.
To avoid being put off by these negative traits, John engaged in strenuous mental gymnastics. When he went out to dinner with her, he would focus on her discriminating tastes, not on her complaining attitude. When she ranted and raved about her job, he thought about what a trooper she was to put up with such terrible working conditions. “Other people would have quit long ago,” he told me with a note of pride.
The only thing that really bothered him about Cheryl was her unavailability. She always seemed to be pushing him away. The situation worsened after they had been seeing each other for about six months, when Cheryl demanded that he not see her during the week so that she could have “a little breathing room.” John reluctantly agreed to her terms, even though he knew that one of the reasons she wanted this time off was so that she could date other men. She made it clear to him that he had no choice but to grant her more freedom.
As compensation, John started spending time with a woman named Patricia, who was very unlike Cheryl. Devoted, compliant, and patient, she was crazy about him. “She’d marry me in a minute,” John told me one day, “just the way I’d marry Cheryl in a minute. But I don’t care that much about Patricia. Even though she’s nicer to be around, I never think about her when I’m away from her. It’s almost as if she doesn’t exist.
Sometimes I feel that I’m taking advantage of her, but I don’t like to be alone. She fills up the hole.” Meanwhile, unavailable, critical Cheryl occupied his every waking moment. “Whenever I’m not thinking about work,” he told me, “I’m dreaming about Cheryl.”
Why was John so immune to Patricia’s charms and so willing to overlook Cheryl’s faults? It should come as no surprise that John’s mother had a critical, distant nature, very much like Cheryl’s. A worried look would often come over his mother’s face, and she would tune him out. John had no idea what was going on in her mind. Like all children, he had no knowledge of—or interest in—his mother’s subjective state. All he knew was that she was frequently unavailable to him and this filled him with anxiety. When he recognized that distracted look, he would become angry and strike out at her. She would push him away and send him to his room. If he became very angry at her, she would spank him and not talk to him for hours.
Eventually John learned to suffer in silence. He has a vivid memory of the day he learned to adopt a stoical attitude. His mother had yelled at him and spanked him with a hairbrush. He doesn’t remember what had made her so angry. All he remembers is that he felt his punishment was unjustified, and he ran sobbing to his room. When he got to his room, he went into his closet and closed the door. The closet had a mirror on the inside of the door, and he remembers turning on the light and staring at his tear-streaked face. “Nobody cares that I’m in here crying,” he told himself. “What good is it to cry?” After a while, he stopped crying and wiped away his tears. The remarkable thing is that he never cried again. That very day he began to cover over his sadness and his anger with an unchanging mask.
John’s childhood experiences help explain his mysterious attraction to Cheryl. When Cheryl ignored his advances by going out with other men or by asking him not to call her for a few days, he was filled with the same primitive yearning for closeness that he had experienced with his mother. In fact, there
was so much in common between the two women that on an unconscious level he could not distinguish between them. Cheryl’s coldness activated in him the same intense longing he had felt for his mother. As far as his old brain was concerned, Cheryl was his mother, and his efforts to win her favor were a grown-up version of the crying and yelling he had done as a child to attract his mother’s attention. The psychological term for this case of mistaken identity is “transference,” taking the attributes of one person and overlaying them on another. It is especially easy for people to transfer their feelings about their parents onto their partners, because, through a process of unconscious selection, they have chosen partners who resemble their caretakers. All they have to do is exaggerate the similarities between them and diminish the differences.
John had other reasons to be drawn to Cheryl besides her resemblance to his mother. Another source of his attraction was that she had an artistic flair. Since he was a rather “dull businessman” (his own words), her refined sense of aesthetics opened up whole new dimensions to him. “We’ll be driving in the car and I’ll have my head full of business plans,” he told me, “and Cheryl will draw my attention to an interesting building or a beautiful tree, and it will suddenly materialize before my eyes. I wouldn’t have seen it at all if she hadn’t called it to my attention. It’s almost as if she creates it. When I’m alone, my world seems gray and two-dimensional.”
Something else about Cheryl that attracted him—though he would have vehemently denied it—was the fact that she had a caustic, critical nature. This dark side of her personality appealed to him for two reasons. First, as we’ve already discussed, it reminded him of his mother, who was an angry, emotional person. Second, and perhaps more important, Cheryl’s bad temper helped him get in touch with his own denied emotions. Even though he had just as much anger as Cheryl, he had learned to mask his hostility behind a compliant, accepting manner. In childhood this had been a useful adaptation, because it
protected him from his mother’s temper. But now that he was an adult, this repression left him half a person. Without being able to feel and express strong emotions, he felt empty inside. He discovered that, when he was with Cheryl, he experienced a much-needed emotional catharsis. He didn’t have to be angry himself—that would have aroused his superego, the parent-cop inside his head, which carried on his mother’s prohibitions. Instead he could have the illusion of being a whole person once again just by associating himself with her.
“PROJECTION” IS THE term that describes the way John took a hidden part of himself—his anger—and attributed it to his lover. He projected his repressed anger onto Cheryl’s visible anger. Like John, we project whenever we take a part of the disowned self or the lost self and send it out like a picture onto another person. We project all the time, not just in our primary love relationships. I remember one time in Dallas, when I was sharing a suite with a psychiatrist whose first name was James. We had an extra room, and we were looking for another person to share the rent. James had a friend who had finished medical school and was going into private practice, so he suggested that we consider him for a suite mate. Since that sounded fine to me, James agreed to invite his friend over so I could meet him.
A few days later, I opened my office door and happened to see a man walking down the hall. He was walking away from me, so all I saw was his back, but there was something about his walk that I found extremely irritating. He was swinging his hips and his head as if he owned the whole world. He sauntered instead of walked. “That has got to be one of the most arrogant men in the world,” I told myself. “I wonder who that is. He must be a client of James’s.”
I went back into my room and forgot about the incident. A little while later, there was a knock at my door. It was James, and with him was the very man I had seen walking down the hall. “Harville,” James said, “this is Robert Jenkins. He’s the psychiatrist friend that I told you about who would like to rent the extra room. I thought that you and he might like to go out to lunch together.”
I took a look at Robert and saw a man with a smiling, pleasant face. He had neatly trimmed hair, a well-groomed salt-and-pepper beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and large brown eyes. He reached out his hand to me. “Hello, Harville. I’ve heard so much about you. I hear you’re involved in some really interesting things. I’d love to talk with you about it.”
Such a nice, humble speech, I thought. Could this be the same man that I thought was so arrogant? Robert and I went out to lunch, and we had an interesting conversation. Later that day, I told James that I thought Robert would be an excellent person to share the suite with us. Eventually Robert became a good friend and a trusted colleague. Although he did have his prideful moments—just like me and everyone else I knew—the negative trait that had seemed so intense when I first saw him was really a part of me. I had taken the part of me that is arrogant—the part of me that does not fit with my image of myself as a sensitive, caring therapist—and thrust it onto Robert.
People in love are masters at projection. Some couples go through their whole lives together as if they were strangers sitting in a darkened movie theater, casting flickering images on each other. They don’t even turn off their projectors long enough to see who it is that serves as the screen for their home movies. In just such a way, John projected his repressed anger onto Cheryl. Although she was indeed an angry person, he was also seeing in her a part of his own nature, a part of his being that was “ego-dystonic”—that is, incompatible with his self-image.
IF WE WERE to translate John’s love for Cheryl into dry psychological terms, it could be described as a mixture of denial, transference, and projection. John was “in love with Cheryl” because:
1.
He had transferred his feelings about his mother onto her.
2.
He had projected his hidden rage onto her visible rage.
3.
He was able to deny the pain that she caused him.
He thought he was in love with a person, when in fact he was in love with an image projected upon that person. Cheryl was not a real person with needs and desires of her own; she was a resource for the satisfaction of his unconscious childhood longings. He was in love with the idea of wish fulfillment and—like Narcissus—with a reflected part of himself.
THE ILLUSORY NATURE of romantic love is beautifully illustrated in the myth of Psyche and Eros, an archetypal legend that was first recorded in the second century A.D.
5
According to this legend, the goddess Aphrodite was jealous of a beautiful young mortal named Psyche, and resented the adoration shown her by her countrymen. In a fit of pique, Aphrodite decreed that Psyche be carried to the top of a mountain, where she was to become the bride of a horrible monster (in some versions of the myth, this monster is called Death). Psyche’s parents and the local villagers sadly escorted the young virgin up the mountain, chained her to a rock, and left her to her fate. But before Psyche could be claimed by the monster, the West Wind took pity on her and gently wafted her down the mountain to
a valley that happened to be the home of Aphrodite’s son, Eros, the god of love.
Psyche and Eros promptly fell in love, but Eros did not want Psyche to know that he was a god, so he kept his true identity concealed by coming to her only in darkness. At first Psyche agreed to this strange condition and enjoyed her new love, the splendid palace, and the beautiful grounds. Then, one day, her two sisters paid her a visit and, envious of her good fortune, began to ask prying questions about Eros. When Psyche couldn’t answer them, they planted the suspicion in her mind that her lover might be a loathsome serpent intent on devouring her.
That night, before Eros came to her, Psyche hid a lamp and a sharp knife under their bed. If her lover turned out to be an evil creature, she was determined to lop off his head. She waited until Eros was sound asleep, then quietly lit the lamp. But as she leaned over to get a closer look at him, a drop of hot oil spilled from the lamp onto his shoulder. Eros quickly awoke and, when he saw the lamp and the knife, flew out the open window, vowing to punish Psyche for discovering the truth by leaving her forever. In anguish, Psyche ran after him, crying out his name, but she couldn’t keep up with him and tripped and fell. Instantly the heavenly palace and the exquisite countryside vanished, and she was once more chained to a rock on the lonely, craggy mountaintop.
As with all fairy tales, there is truth to this legend. Romantic love does indeed thrive on ignorance and fantasy. As long as lovers maintain an idealized, incomplete view of each other, they live in a Garden of Eden. But the myth also contains some fiction. When Psyche lit the lamp and saw Eros clearly for the first time, she discovered that he was a magnificent god with golden wings. When you and I lit our lamps and took our first objective look at our lovers, we discovered that they weren’t gods at all—they were imperfect humans, full of warts and blemishes, all those negative traits that we had steadfastly refused to see.
BOOK: Getting the Love You Want, 20th An. Ed.
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