The greater the love, the deeper the wound
Why are our dearest relationships often the sites of our worst triggers?
It’s frustrating: you’re spending time with someone with whom you’ve fallen deeply in love. Maybe for the first time in your life, you feel safe in this relationship. The person is supportive, patient, kind, and says the sweetest things about you.
So why can’t you stop thinking that they’re out to get you, trying to undermine you, secretly hate you, or just haven’t wised up yet to what a loser you are?
Surely, they’re only tolerating me for now. If they knew who I really was…
They make me feel so alive…if they only knew how dead I feel most of the time.
I know how this goes…as soon as he’s tired of me he’ll leave for someone new.
She believes in me…but that’s okay, it won’t last. Not when I fuck up again.
They’re just too good to be true. I don’t deserve to be treated so well.
If any of these sound familiar…well, you know what I’m going to say. You’re not alone.
Though it wasn’t one of the original 18 principles, one of the most valuable lessons I received in my training was that change happens in relationship, and that the site of the wound is the site of its healing.
What do I mean by that? It took me a long time to figure it out myself.
Change happens in relationship
Change happens in relationship, I thought: cool, okay. That means that it’s difficult to change yourself alone, outside of how you are with others. This idea recalls an essay I wrote some time back about self-isolation as a path to healing. As Rayne Fisher-Quann reminds us, it’s easy to think you’re okay when there’s nobody around to know, nor to be affected by your actions.
I wrote about “the misguided notion that the way to ‘healing’ is away from everyone else, free of pesky conflicts, messy feelings, interdependence, or indeed any need for other people at all.” This first idea reminds us that not only are other people literally the only way we know how we are, but also that relationships are the sites of transformation by their very nature.
The site of the wound is the site of its healing
So what about the second part? If the site of the wound is the site of its healing, does that mean that in order to heal we must always return to the one who wounded us? Absolutely not. In fact I find this idea to be poisonous. The white-light mania for forgiving our abusers, seeking healing from those who harmed us, and so on is a toxic mess. There are times when we can make repair directly with people who have harmed us, but there are many other times when the thing to do is get away from the person causing harm as quickly as possible.
What it does mean, I only figured out much later, is that when a wound remains unhealed, things that viscerally remind us of it will become the best opportunities to heal it.
I may have written here before about disconfirming experiences, sometimes called corrective experiences. As the name suggests, these are experiences that have a similar flavor to something traumatic from your past, but which go a different way this time, a better way, and offer your nervous system a new experience, then a new narrative, about that thing.
Like let’s say you had a really humiliating experience at a school dance, and ever since then, any event involving dancing in front of other people is a total no-go for you. But then you meet someone who really loves to dance, and wants to share that with you and go dancing. You really like them and so you go, even though you’re dreading it and hoping you don’t just freak and run out of the club. But then they invite you to dance with them, help you feel comfortable, and get you expressing yourself a bit. You get through like two songs before you decide it’s enough for tonight. But as you sit catching your breath you realize: nobody laughed, you didn’t die of shame, and actually, you feel pretty great. Your friend comes and sits with you, glowing with exertion and smiles, and suddenly maybe dancing isn’t so bad.
You’ve just had a disconfirming experience, and your body now knows a different set of possibilities for what happens when you get up on a dance floor. Maybe it doesn’t happen all at once, and maybe sometimes your heart still shoots into your chest when you hear house music unexpectedly. But new neural pathways are forming, as your nervous system learns that dancing doesn’t always lead to mortal embarrassment.
The trouble is that where there is the possibility of a disconfirming experience, there is also by its nature the opportunity for a repeat traumatic experience, or at least a site of activation or triggering. The possibility of healing is there because we are close to the site of the wound. By going to the club, you’ve made yourself vulnerable, especially to this new friend, who you’ve risked yourself to get closer to. In fact the word “vulnerable” comes from a root meaning “wound.” You’re open to wounding, and maybe in another scenario a person nearby laughs uproariously for an unrelated reason while you’re dancing, and your body remembers that harm instead of beginning to heal from it. You get triggered, and the potential is there, instead, for that wound to deepen, and the friendship to be damaged.
What does all this have to do with love?
Well here’s the thing. For every one of us, the first way we learn about what love is is from our caregivers. I don’t even mean that our parents give us our model for romantic relationships that we unconsciously follow or very consciously try to avoid later in life, although that’s also true. I’m talking about how our first intimate relationships are with our parents.
Esther Perel talks about this in Mating in Captivity, and in many other places too: the original bond, especially between the mother and infant, but it can be with any primary caregiver. In those early attachment years, our bodies learn a ton about care — whether we will be cared for, whether our needs will be met, what we have to do to get them met, and whether we’re safe to explore within our bond. Later on things get more complex. But these initial attachment phases are where we learn, deep in our bodies, what love is.
When we experience complex PTSD, or at least complicated childhoods, neglectful or interrupted parenting, or other adverse experiences, we also have the tendency to replicate the dynamics we learned once we start having romantic relationships of our own.
That has its own problems, of course. But what happens when, at long last, we instead find ourselves with someone who truly cares for us, who stays present with us, who can make repair with us after rupture, and most of all, who doesn’t treat us the way our caregivers did?
Well it fucks with our heads, is what it does.
Because where would we have learned that we deserved to be treated well — listened to, respected, validated, supported, held?
All we know is that in the past, when someone was intimate to us, when someone was the one who gave us the things we needed, they weren’t somebody we could actually trust to be there, or to not hurt us at the same time, or to not make us pay for whatever they begrudgingly provided.
A lot of us haven’t had a lot of practice with feeling love as an ongoing, careful, deep and dynamic action. We only know that we’ve allowed this person close, and now they’re right up there in the wound.
Luckily, that’s where the healing is.
Dammit, though
Because that’s the other meaning of change happens in relationship: for a wound to begin to move toward healing, we have to risk being harmed again. We have to let the person close, allow them to make us feel good, begin to trust that they’re doing that because they want to, because they love us, and not for some other insidious reason. We have to practice believing that allowing the sensations of care and love into our bodies — allowing ourselves to need — won’t mean that they will leave as soon as they’ve gotten their fill of us, or made us dependent on them. We have to start, like the wild animals we are, to let ourselves be slowly tamed by the gentle coaxing of good love, lest we bolt from the scene, leaving blood in our wakes.
And that, my friends, is hard.
But I believe in you.
Rich thinking here.
If you ever have the opportunity to see Mary Zimmerman's The White Snake, I highly recommend it. She plays off of a Chinese legend about a snake demon who learns to transform into a human, marries a lovely man, and then has to figure out how to be in that relationship. Zimmerman made it about a lot of things, but the message I took away was that we are all secretly scary snake demons and we want the person we love to love us, not in spite of that, but because of it.
The other thing this makes me think of is the opportunity for healing through parenthood. One of the things I took away from Bruno Bettelheim's A Good Enough Parent was the idea that as a parent we get to relive scenes from our own childhood, taking the other role this time, with the choice either to repeat the scene with a new understanding of the parent's position, or to change the script and give what we needed as a child. I find myself coming back to that again and again with my daughter, as I consciously react in ways that my mother never could have.