Embrace Your Selves – How to Respark Romance and Passion?

Research shows that you are not one self, but many, and the way your selves interact with those of your partner creates a host of issues.

Learn how to transform your relationships – and life – by embracing your disowned personalities.

Many relationships get to a point where the passion is no longer as intense as it once was. This can lead to the belief that your relationship is no longer working or that either you or your partner is to blame in some way.

The accepted wisdom about this common problem is that it is caused by over-familiarity, various life stresses, hormonal issues or having children – or simply that it’s a natural consequence of staying in a relationship long term.

But there is another reason, not known to many people and which, if understood and acted upon, would save many relationships and enrich many more.

This reason is to do with the nature of your psyche, of your personality, of your sense of who you are.

 

 

Psychological research over the past few decades, in particular the work of Dr. Hal Stone and Dr. Sidra Stone, two psychologists from the US, shows that who we are is not as simple as we have presumed.

When you dig beneath the surface of your personality, you discover that there exist various parts of yourself, known as sub-personalities, energy patterns or selves. So you are not one self, but many.

And these selves, and how they interact with the selves in your partner, are the reason so many couples experience diminished desire and a host of other relationship problems.

Just picture how this might work in your relationship. The different selves that make up your personality are dominant in you at different times in your life, even at different times each day.

You might have a responsible self, a perfectionist self, an inner critic, a needy inner child, a playful inner child, a pleaser, an adventurer, a caretaker and a rebel. And your partner has his or her inner family of selves.

All these selves have their own rules, values and desires and their particular way of communicating. They all play a role in your relationship, some being dominant and running the show while others take a back seat.

At the beginning of your relationship, it might have been your inner independent, adventurous and sensual selves that were around (which meant fun times together, with plenty of passion and sex) but after a few years, maybe after your first child, your inner responsible mother or inner responsible father took over and became your primary self.

And all your other selves – especially those not interested in parenting and the routines of family life – were either pushed aside or locked away permanently, or maybe they were allowed to “break out” occasionally.

It is often the case that one partner in a relationship accuses the other of having changed, of no longer being “the person I married”. And this is exactly what has happened!

Bonding Patterns

The selves within you bond with the selves in your partner in particular patterns that restrict your behavior, feelings and desires.

These bonding patterns are natural psychological blueprints for how we humans give and receive love and affection and also for how we express negative feelings toward one another.

They are based on the initial parent/child bonding we experienced as infants.

There are two types of bonding pattern: positive and negative.

Negative bonding patterns are so called because the feelings experienced when you are in one are negative.

Negative bonding patterns can range from the mildly irritating type, such as when you are the tidy person in your relationship and your partner is the messy person, to the full-blown world-war type of pattern where you wish you had never met your partner and can’t imagine what you ever saw in them.

Positive bonding patterns, on the other hand, are when the feelings are positive: good, caring, loving. But both types of bonding pattern place limitations on how fulfilling a relationship can be.

The negative ones lead to arguments and worse, while the positive ones lead to stifled self-expression, lack of passion and boredom.

What Causes Bonding Patterns?

The power of bonding patterns depends on you over-identifying with some parts of yourself, disowning other parts and not dealing with your vulnerability.

It’s a bit like standing on one leg and having your partner, also using only one leg, to balance you so you don’t fall.

This can feel safe and familiar (a positive bonding pattern) but it requires that each of you stays put to stabilize the other. If one leaves, you both fall.

You then blame and accuse each other (a negative bonding pattern) and angrily hobble around until you reunite in a new positive bonding pattern or, in extreme cases, with someone else.

In a negative bonding pattern, each person’s primary self (the part of yourself that you present to the world and identify with, as opposed to the parts of your psyche you disown or don’t express) is in a state of judgment about the other person’s primary self.

The judgment occurs because there is vulnerability in both people that they are not attending to.

This vulnerable feeling is uncomfortable to your primary self, who knows no other way of dealing with such feelings but to push them far away to where you won’t feel them so that you can feel powerful and in control again.

The more identified you become with your primary self and its perspective, and the more you push aside your other selves, the less you can see things from any other perspective, particularly your partner’s.

This is a common defensive reaction in all types of relationships.

It’s like you’re glued fast to one end of a seesaw and you can’t move towards the middle where you might have access to other viewpoints.

At your end of the seesaw, the world looks a certain way and this is the one and only right way. Your partner experiences the same righteousness but on the opposite end of the seesaw.

In close relationships between men and women, it’s usually the inner mother self in women (sometimes nurturing, sometimes responsible and at other times angry or frustrated) that bonds with the inner needy son or rebellious son or guilty son of her partner.

And the father self in men bonds with the woman’s inner pleasing daughter, needy daughter or mischievous daughter.

The problem with bonding patterns is that, when you become stuck in one with your partner, over time your relationship, although close and friendly and loving, loses its spark.

The sexuality disappears, usually more so for women – probably because women still do most of the caring/nurturing at home and so the mothering part of their psyche is more strongly fixed.

Most relationships stagnate or end due to these bonding patterns.

Couples who stay stuck in a positive bonding pattern will usually become like very good friends rather than lovers and they will suppress any feelings that might rock the relationship boat.

On the other hand, couples who break out of a positive bonding pattern without awareness of what is going on will end up in a negative bonding pattern.

This can lead to long periods of unhappiness in a relationship or to the relationship ending.

The Gifts of Negative Patterns

Feeling negative and critical about your partner is an opportunity to become aware of and connect with more of yourself.

It is an invitation to grow into a more whole version of you, where you can embrace all your selves.

Negative bonding patterns reveal which part/s of your psyche you have become identified with and the parts you have disowned.

The reason you are in a negative bonding pattern in the first place is because you have disowned parts of yourself – and these disowned selves are staring you right in the face through your partner!

For example, if you’re angry with your partner because he leaves his socks and underwear on the floor wherever he’s stepped out of them, that’s because you have become overly identified with your everything-must-be-put-in-the-right-place self and have disowned your wherever-I-put-things-down-is-fine self.

If you take on the challenge of reconnecting with your own inner messy self, which will involve handling your tidy self’s anxiety about this, the negative feelings in your relationship will disappear.

And your messy partner will seemingly magically start to own some of his inner tidy self.

Both of you will be able to move from your perches on the seesaw toward the middle.

This doesn’t mean that you will switch roles or simply compromise – all kinds of creative solutions become available to you when you step back from your position and experience the world through a greater lens, one that incorporates more than only the viewpoint of your primary self.

Three Steps to Breaking a Bonding Pattern

There are three steps you can take to ensure you don’t become permanently stuck in either a positive bonding pattern that stifles your relationship or a negative bonding pattern that may end it.

1) Look at which parts of your psyche have become dominant in you

These could be nurturing mother, pleasing daughter, workaholic, responsible father, withdrawn father, critical mother, caretaker etc. If you can’t work this out yourself, ask your partner to help.

They are likely to have some insight into which part of you has become the main “you”, just as you probably know which of their selves have become dominant in them.

 

2) Determine exactly which parts of your psyche have been left out over time

It will help to think of interests you had early in your relationship, even before it, such as when you were a teenager or younger child.

Remember the things you enjoyed doing that made you feel alive.

Some of these selves might include a sports enthusiast, skier, dancer, skateboard rider, photographer, theatergoer, hiker, meditator, magical child.

This simple exercise will help you to determine both your primary and disowned selves:

Write down the qualities in other people you judge or overvalue. To give some examples, you’ll probably find that if you judge:

– Messiness, then your primary self is tidy.

– Loudness, your primary self is quiet.

– Wildness, your primary self is sensible.

– Selfishness, your primary self is generous.

– Flirtatiousness, your primary self is more reserved.

– Irresponsibility, your primary self is responsible.

– Laziness, your primary self is a doer.

– Emotionality, your primary self is rational and impersonal.

– Ordinariness, your primary self values specialness.

If you are in awe of:

– Sportiness, then your primary self is probably someone who’s not so skilled at sport.

– Intellectual ability, your primary self is probably more of a feeling person.

– Glamorousness, your primary self is probably more practical.

– Artistic ability, your primary self is probably more rational.

– Serenity, your primary self is probably quite stressed.

– Popularity, your primary self is probably more introverted.

– Rebelliousness, your primary self is probably more careful.

3) Reconnect with these missing selves

Find a way of reconnecting with the qualities you judge or overvalue in others. But don’t do anything that makes you feel too uncomfortable. This is a process that takes time.

You have to honor and consider the feelings and values of the self you have become – there is always a reason that particular selves become primary and a reason that we disown other parts.

Think of it as a journey you’re embarking on; you want to take the time to explore any new territory in a way that feels safe.

You could do an activity a missing part would enjoy, meet up with an old friend who knew one of the “old” parts of you and see if you can reignite that energy, enroll in a workshop, watch a film you normally wouldn’t in your current primary self, read a genre of book different from one you have recently been choosing, wear an outfit you haven’t worn for some time or buy a new one.

If you normally plan outings in detail, try going somewhere spontaneously; if you usually take responsibility for everything, hand over responsibilities to your partner or children; if you normally take time to get ready for work, go out with something you’ve quickly thrown together; if you are always sensible, try doing something a little bit wild.

 

 

Reclaim Your Passion

When you start to integrate the disowned parts of yourself, your whole life transforms.

You’re able to communicate better because you have greater understanding of and compassion for others; you can more easily find solutions to relationship problems such as an acceptable level of mess in your home; and because you are in touch with more of yourself, you’re able to make better choices.

The more you develop in this way, the less often you’ll end up feeling negative and angry at your partner and you’ll be able to connect with your partner from a more enriched sense of who you are.

When you embrace more of your selves, you become more whole.

And when you become more whole, you have a greater awareness of yourself and are more easily able to recognize when bonding patterns have formed in your relationship – and they will continue to form, because it’s impossible to be human and to be conscious of all our selves at any given moment.

There will always be parts of you that are primary and other parts that take a secondary role or that you simply lose connection to. That’s normal – it’s human.

The level of passion and sexuality in your relationship is a wonderfully accurate barometer of whether you have become stuck in a bonding pattern.

If it’s lacking, then there’s work to do. That’s not a bad thing – every relationship goes through stages, ups and downs, and is affected by various major life events.

But instead of seeing lack of desire as a problem, you can see it as an indicator of where you are at.