How Childhood Experiences Impact Our Choice Of Partner
Our childhood experiences can have a significant impact on various aspects of our adult life. Parts of our life that we thought or wished we had left behind, influence many of our most meaningful choices, including our choice of a life partner. This often happens outside of our awareness, especially when we grow up in an environment marked by chronic neglect, rejection, abuse, or misattunement. The traces of those painful experiences are often less apparent, more complex, and harder to identify.
How does it happen?
The paths our mind takes to transform childhood experiences into adult decisions are complex. We learn, very early on in our life, what we can anticipate from others in relationships and how our needs and emotions will be responded to. Much of this process happens pre-verbally and outside of awareness, often in subtle interactions with the people around us, and sometimes impacted by traumatic experiences. This gives shape to unconscious conflicts, wishes, longings, and feelings about ourselves and others. For example, these experiences may impact how we come to feel about closeness, intimacy, vulnerability, and dependency on others.
Our internal world becomes populated by our experiences of others, as we internalize aspects of our early relationships with meaningful people, especially our parents and caretakers. These early experiences shape our internalized images of self and other, which can elicit a number of conscious or unconscious fears, anxieties, hopes, and dreads, which will then influence our interactions with others in general, and our choice of romantic partners in particular. We might seek out partners who mirror or complement aspects of our early experiences and these internalized relationships.
The process of internalization can take different forms and be very complex, involving ways in which we identify with those internalizations and ways in which we seek to feel safe and deal with anxiety. For example, an individual who experienced emotional neglect as a child may develop an ambivalent relationship with closeness, being both a wish and a source of anxiety and fear. As a result, they may seek out partners who are emotionally distant or unavailable, which would allow them to feel safety keeping distance even if at the same it leads to a familiar sense of loneliness and disappointment.
The role of attachment
Attachment theory places less emphasis on the unconscious world we create through our development, but focuses on how our early experiences with caregivers shape our ability to form and maintain relationships throughout our lives. Based on this perspective, we develop four primary attachment styles: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant.
It is important to note that these are not necessarily “labels” that can be applied to how we face all our relationships. Relationships with different people will elicit different parts of ourselves, based on the world of internal representations discussed before. As a result, different aspects of our attachment system might be activated, so that we might feel more securely attached in some situations and more, say, dismissive in others.
For example, an individual who experienced neglect as a child may develop an anxious-preoccupied attachment style, seeking constant validation and attention from their partners. They may be drawn to partners who are emotionally unavailable or dismissive, as this reinforces their belief that they are not worthy of love and attention. They may, however, also be motivated by an unconscious attempt to “right a wrong,” demanding -sometimes with intense anger- that their partner provides that which they did not receive, but needed, during childhood.
How can therapy help?
The process through which childhood experiences, in particular traumatic experiences, shapes and defines who we become as adults and the choices we make, is very complex. Most of it happens outside of our awareness and is embedded in difficult emotions that we have worked hard to ignore, deny, or distance ourselves from.
Psychodynamic therapy can help us examine our early experiences and identify the patterns that may be impacting our current relationships. Exploring someone’s experiences, feelings, dreams, and fantasies can help us start gaining insight and understanding into our unconscious motivations and conflicts, so that we can make sense of how our past is influencing our present choices. Another important way in which therapy can help, is by exploring our defense mechanisms: unconscious strategies we use to protect ourselves from painful or threatening thoughts and emotions. We all rely on defense mechanisms to function in the world, and they are embedded in our most meaningful decisions.
As we move through the process of recognizing and accepting the impact of the past, we might be able to make different choices conducive to growth and change. Therapy can be a space where we mourn the losses of what we never had, process difficult thoughts and feelings, and confront fear, longing, or shame in the presence of a non-judgmental other. This experience can help us create a new space in our mind and in our heart to make choices that feel more authentic to who we want to be, and close to what we can now hope is possible to experience in relationships. If you are experiencing any issues in your interpersonal, romantic, or family relationships and would like to schedule an appointment to discuss these relationship challenges with one of our Chicago therapists, please contact us today.
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Photo credit: Andrik Langfield