There is a well known statement in relationship coaching and therapy, that if you don’t deal with your trauma your relationships will. What this means is that if you ignore working on healing your trauma it will come up in the container of your relationship because we trigger each other all the time. What this opportunity for healing offers us in relationships, is the chance to create a relationship where we make conscious choices all the time rather than letting our unconscious wounding, mostly from childhood and early adulthood relationships, run our adult relationships.
I don’t know about you but I don’t believe that our childhood or early adult parts of ourselves have any places making decisions in mature adult relationships.
I chose to work in the midlife space coaching people in relationships because this is often where the great unravelling of relationships happens. It is the time in our lives where our psyche throws up all our wounding on a platter and says ‘sort this out’. Most of us are ill equipped to deal with this rite of passage and what it throws up to us to examine. The unfortunate downside of this is many people ignore it, this is easy to do. This is easy to do when we have been ignoring our unconscious messaging for years because we don’t have capacity in our nervous system to deal with the overwhelming sensations and feelings, we have been feeling. We have created a survival response and adapted behaviour to deal with it. The outcome of this is projection outward and this often results in relationship disintegration.
Why does it all come out in midlife?
Well in truth, for some people it happens earlier. You can skip a few lessons in school but you cannot skip the lessons of life. Whatever we don’t attend to developmentally will keep coming around until we do deal with it. By midlife most of us are ready to learn. We have the life experience, knowledge and perspective to examine our life and work out what is our stuff and what is others. Our psyche is calling us from deep within to heal our wounding from our childhood and early adulthood, so the emergence of your authentic self can come through. The pain of personal growth is the crucible we often need to help us grow. You get a choice at midlife, the path of victimhood or the path of the hero/heroine. Or maybe we can say the phoenix rising up at last?
Growth is hard and by this point in life most of us have been hurt, had our dreams die, our aspirations not arrived at and often we are disappointed about where we are at. Remember the developmental challenge of midlife is radical honesty, be truthful about who you are, where you are at and what is going on for you right now. It is the rare person who arrives at midlife and has not been hurt or disappointed by life. The grief so many of us at midlife experience makes sense, there is often a lot to let go of. The hungry ghosts of regret are there to be examined. When we don’t examine our pain, our wounding, it can become pretty toxic to our life and this can derail the relationships in our life.
For many of us we get to this stage and feel like we are running out of time. Time to do all the things you wanted to do. We have been focused on the future for a long time and then all of a sudden out future becomes our present. We have arrived at that place and the dreams have not become a reality. Our sense of our own mortality hits us in the face. How do we stretch out time?
I will let you in on a little secret I learned when I went through cancer treatment. You stretch out time by staying in the present. Life happens in the present moment, it is the right now. When we stay deeply in the present we see the world differently, we see options and choices we didn’t realise we had because we were moving too fast to notice them, choosing busyness to avoid dealing with our right now.
So all of this can take a toll on our relationships when we don’t attend to it because we often project our discomfort with what we are experiencing onto our partner, our platonic relationships, our work relationships. We can, if we are not careful, develop pretty sophisticated avoidance strategies. Our ego loves to do this because it feasts on pain, delivering evidence of other people’s wrongdoing, injustice. It is really easy to look at other people’s issues and avoid your own. Our ego also hates change and will cling to familiar safety, even when it is actually not safe.
Dianne Poole Heller the well known psychotherapist, somatic experiencing practitioner and attachment specialist has this great saying. “We are always attracted to our unfinished business”. What this means is we are always attracted to qualities in others that we are yet to embody ourselves. We are attracted to qualities in others that we need to heal for ourselves. That is the amazing thing about relationships and the possibility they offer us for growth. When you are willing to do inner work on your own relational trauma, you offer yourself a huge possibility for learning, and the other person will learn by default to a degree whether they do the deep work because of the way our interpersonal neurobiology interacts. Ultimately we all seem to get there at some point because the lessons keep coming around time and again until we do. Attracting the same type of person all the time? There is something to explore there in your own wounding. We are attracted to unfamiliar chaos over familiar safety.
People are drawn to people they can learn from and true intimacy offers really deep learning.
Only you can do your healing and give yourself what you need, when you do this you are able to see the wondrous beauty of other people. Why? Well when you can see it in yourself you then you have your eyes opened to seeing the beauty. multi-dimensionality and complexity in other people. You can also see their wounding. When you develop compassion for your wounded parts, you develop compassion for those wounded parts of others.
Relationships require implicitly a contract for emotional growth. That contract is something like this; I will let you grow, you will let me grow, we will learn together, from each other and grow together. This is not an easy contract and many of us don’t enter into our marriages with this implicit agreement. I often feel at midlife the growing pains we experience are significant and to hold space for each other is incredibly hard. It is like being squeezed through a tube of toothpaste at the same time and hoping like hell that we come out at the same time. Chances are pretty high that we will not.
At midlife we are going through a cycle of death and rebirth, our soul really wants to grow and expand. We express this as wanting places in our life where we can truly be ourself, or we want more meaning and purpose in our life. There is a feeling there is something bigger out there, a deep sense of knowing that there is more to life than what you have experienced so far. There is, the soul calling you to be yourself. Your midlife transition is an initiation, if you can set boundaries so that you can have your own psychic space and claim that for yourself within the context of your relationship, the chances of your growth happening together is enormous. The other option, which is often leaving the marriage may not give you that opportunity.
Sometimes, we simply outgrow each other or grow apart, we have maxed out of opportunity to learn in the relationship. Sometimes, we expect our spouses to provide for us what we need to learn to provide for ourselves. When you do this you miss the opportunity to show yourself the real you.
All relationships have something to offer us when it comes to personal growth. As the poet Brian Chalker said of relationships ‘some people come into our lives for a reason, a season or a lifetime’. I have experienced that the opportunities for growth and creating deep connection can be experienced in a short three day interaction with someone at a far deeper level, than someone we have known for thirty years.
We are all hear to learn from each other and that is why I know that when we do our own deep healing and are conscious in our interactions with each other, the opportunities for personal growth and deep connection with each other are profound when we do it together. We are mammals, we are wired for connection. We are not meant to do life alone.