Thoughts on Therapy
Why are relationships so hard?
Relationships are hard – and they’re meant to be. We typically have a list of characteristics that we’d like to see in a partner. We want them to share our values, have a good job, have similar likes and dislikes and to be sexually compatible. Online dating services devise various profile questions so that we can select a perspective partner with care and optimize a match. Frequently, physical attraction (or lack of it) overrides our response to a written profile. Or, we meet someone in the ordinary course of life – at work, on the street or at a club. It’s love at first sight or we gradually fall in love with a person over time. In cultures where marriages are arranged, wedding first, love later.
We now happily find ourselves in a relationship. Over time, though, difficulties and incompatibilities, large or small, become more apparent. Our partners don’t understand us or we have different approaches to life. We have the fantasy of finding someone just like us, who sees things in a similar way, someone who really “gets” us and shares the same interests like our friends do. But relationships typically don’t work that way. And, psychologically, they’re not supposed to. In a sense, relationships are supposed to be hard. It doesn’t mean that we don’t love our partners or really enjoy being with them or that it’s a bad match. It just means that there are difficulties inherent in intimate relationships that challenge us to expand who we are.
Each of us has an unconscious template of sorts, an inner other, that represents a model of who we’re attracted to. When we meet someone that matches that inner other, there’s an attraction, what we typically think of as chemistry, like a plug that fits into an outlet. That’s the glue that initially holds us together and enables us to tolerate the differences that begin to emerge. Contractual arrangements such as marriage do the same thing. But this inner other (what C.G. Jung termed the anima/animus) typically represents what is least developed in us. For example, one person may approach the world primarily through thinking. That is, they tend to be governed by logic, rational thought and the world of facts and place great value on what is fair and just. Think of Mr. Spock from Star Trek or an economist. On the other hand, a feeling type places relationship over fact, heart over head, focusing on the emotional needs of others and themselves rather than the facts. In some ways, Bill Clinton and Oprah, in their ability to connect to people and be empathic, are good examples of feeling types. In a criminal case, a thinking type might focus on the law that was broken while a feeling type may be more concerned with understanding how the defendant’s upbringing influenced their action. Thinking versus feeling is just one category of difference that is common in relationships and in reality, the division is rarely so pure.
In life, we tend to focus on what we’re good at and ignore what we’re not. Right handed people, for example, typically have difficulty using their left hands so they never work to develop them. It’s the same with thinking and feeling and our other psychological functions. For thinking types, thinking is habitual and dominant and they tend to apply it to all situations, even in situations that call for a more nuanced feeling response. The converse is true for feeling types. The opposite of what we are is less developed in us and we tend to devalue and dislike it in others. It makes no sense to us. You’ve been forced to work late every night this week and your partner is upset that you’ve not been home. Explanation (a thinking approach) does not work and you get upset that your partner is being so irrational. What does work is tending to your partner’s feelings (which might seem unwarranted) and for your partner to have to rationally understand your situation. For each of you, being with the other forces you to have to develop within you what’s less dominant in order to make the relationship work. Being in relationship – all types – mean having to give up what we know is right in order to incorporate another person into our lives. In doing so, we expand who we are as individuals as we grow towards experiencing more of a sense of wholeness in our lives. This is the purpose of relationships and why they are so hard.
Perchance to dream…
In our culture, for the most part, people consider dreams to be meaningless and barely pay attention to them, at most a curiosity when we wake up that fades by the time we brush our teeth. But throughout history and in other cultures, people have found their dreams to be meaningful whether as sources of creativity and inspiration, healing or warnings. Elias Howe, the inventor of the modern sewing machine, for example, hit a wall when it came to figuring out how the needle would work. He then had a dream where he was captured by cannibals who gave him an ultimatum to produce the sewing machine or face death. He couldn’t do it, so they stabbed him with spears. As the spears went in and out, he noticed that the tips had holes in them. He woke up and had his Eureka moment, realizing that the solution to his dilemma was to put a hole in the point of the needle. The 19th century German chemist August Kekule had an image in a dream of a snake biting its tail (which is actually an ancient symbol called the ouroboros). This image, he said, led him to discover the ring structure of Benzene, a breakthrough in the science of the time.
From a Jungian psychological perspective, dreams are meaningful and functional. Our tendency is to see dreams as irrational because we typically do not understand their language which is pre-verbal (for the most part) and symbolic and our current state of consciousness is removed from that more primitive way of thinking, though a picture is worth a thousand words. Dreams have a purpose – they tend to compensate for our conscious attitude. That is, they tell us what we don’t know about ourselves. In his book, The Way of the Image: The Orientational Approach to the Psyche, Jungian analyst Yoram Kaufmann tells us of a person who dreams that they are scuba diving and sees a shark and is fascinated by it and, in their excitement, swims even closer. He contrasts this with a dream of someone who scuba dives and comes upon an octopus and freaks out, the opposite of the first dreamer’s response. An understanding of the language of dreams enables us to see that these dreams depict two very different attitudes towards life. The first dream describes someone who gets themselves into precarious situations and is excited by them. A shark is a dangerous creature – that’s the objective reality to that image. The dreamer may tell you that it was a friendly or beautiful shark, but that only speaks to the extent to which they are not able to recognize danger. The second dream tells us that the dreamer is afraid of what is alien to them even though the situation is not harmful. Octopi are weird and strange, but they are not dangerous, so there is nothing for the dreamer to be afraid of. Paying attention to our dreams and being able to understand their language offers us the possibility of a deeper relationship with ourselves and the chance to enlarge our experience of life. Tending to dreams can also save us from a lot of very hard lessons.
On the eve of his attack on Rome, Hannibal, the 3rd century BCE Carthaginian general had a dream where the god Jupiter sent a messenger to tell him to attack Italy; that a great army would be defeated. To him, that meant all systems go. The next morning, he launched the attack and true to the dream, a great army was defeated – only it was his. Hannibal failed to recognize that Jupiter was the god of Rome. His hubris rendered him incapable of recognizing this fact, so in a sense, the dream was a portent of his defeat and a commentary on his hubris. Recognizing the significance of the dream may have been a defeat for his ego but his army may have remained intact.