Interpreting the Love of Another
By Sheryl Aronson, LMFT
A CALL TO LOVE SERIES (Part 2)
How do each of us respond to our partner’s call to love? How do we interpret the actions and words of another? As I pointed out in my previous article, we all have an inner landscape which is our emotional operative system that has been constructed by the experiences we have had in our families of origin plus our interactions in relationships. This emotional operative system then gets triggered by our partner’s actions and reactions to us.
When we find ourselves arguing with our partners, it usually means that they have disrupted our inner emotional system and our belief about what loves means to us in this situation. Our response might be hurt or anger, it might even be feeling rage. However, when this happens, we usually lose the ability to tap into our emotionally mature self and fall into behaving like a hurt child. At that moment, we ARE a hurt child or a hurt younger version of our mature selves. For most of us, we are carrying around a lot of unhealed emotional baggage, so even though our physical selves have matured throughout the years, our emotional self might be stuck underdeveloped.
Harville Hendrix, PhD, best- selling author and founder of Imago Therapy for Couples wrote about this theory in the book, Getting the Love You Want. “Our partners help us to find those places within us that need healing. Don’t underestimate your choice in a mate. It’s no mistake that you are with the person you are with. The person you choose is ideally suited to help you finish off the unfinished growth of your childhood. We always choose the perfect person to help us grow into our highest selves. However, it’s hard to grow. And so, we resist. We don’t like to change.” Exactly. We usually choose to love people who are very different than us because initially we are attracted to the differences, but then those differences become what really annoys us about our partner. Many times, we choose a person who recreates our hurts from the past and we can’t get beyond the hurt feelings.
It’s imperative we develop our emotional, mature selves. When we are feeling hurt by our partner because we feel they are not showing us, love, the first action to take is a self-examination of our feelings. What are you feeling, what exactly is your partner doing that is causing that feeling? We instantly take the position, “I’m right, you’re wrong,” (it doesn’t matter what the subject is) and the argument goes on and on without anything being resolved. Why? Because at that moment we have two people who are not displaying an emotionally mature attitude toward the other. Instead of taking the position one is right and the other is wrong, the best position to take is… right now my partner is giving me very important information as to who they are in the world and I should pay attention to their feelings. My partner is sharing with me their emotional response to my behavior. When we step out of ourselves and truly listen to what our partner is saying, we gain a lot of information to handle the situation. So instead of getting ready to fire back an insult or telling the other person what they did wrong, you actually get the underlying feeling or thought the person is expressing.
When two people can listen and validate the other’s feelings the communication now takes on another dimension. We create a setting for love and respect, instead of hurt, anger, regret. Remember, our inner landscape of what love means to each of us is usually very different than our partners. So instead of making the other person wrong for what they are feeling or for what they want to happen to feel loved by you, respect the differences, celebrate the differences, get out of your inner landscape and work together to create beautiful new places where love can flourish.
Don’t make your partner wrong. Be open and accepting. It takes two people to do this, not just one! Understand why your feelings get hurt, understand why your partner’s feelings get hurt, share those realizations with one another. When your partner is brave enough to share their feelings with you, don’t dismiss them, don’t reject them, accept and validate them. The reason this is so hard to do is that we are not in our mature emotional selves when these interactions are happening. We are in our child-self or adolescent hurt self and can’t get beyond that inner landscape. We have to practice checking inside and seeing what part of us is responding to our partner’s needs.
Practice! Practice! Practice! I have given you some tips and awareness to help you understand better how your call to love is answered inside of yourself, how it might be heard by your partner and what you both can do to create a positive, loving atmosphere for love to grow.