You’re At The Mercy of His Childhood

One falls in love, and then learns, for the duration, that one is at the mercy of someone else’s childhood.” – Hanif Kureishi

When you were growing up, did you have a caregiver who:

• Delighted in you
• Was admirable to you
• Stayed emotionally steady when you were upset?

That’s the trifecta of good-enough parenting, according to Heinz Kohut.

We need a caregiver we can make smile with our childish antics.

We need a caregiver we can look up to as someone we want to be like someday.

We need a caregiver who isn’t afraid of our emotions and chaos, but simply handles them as a normal part of the nervous system maturing.

When I say “we,” I don’t just mean we women.

I mean ALL of us, men and women both.

When men don’t have those things – when they have a problematic relationship with the people who raised them – we’re the ones who pay the price.

Our relationship becomes difficult in precisely those areas that were problematic for him in childhood.

A man whose caregivers couldn’t handle his emotions may shut down when yours appear, because his nervous system learned early that big feelings are dangerous.

A man whose caregivers never delighted in him may pull away in discomfort when you show playfulness or excitement to see him, because that kind of attention feels foreign and almost threatening to him.

A man who grew up with an alcoholic parent may overreact to your moods, because his childhood trained him to be hypervigilant.

You may want to fix him, but you can’t. Healing is an inside job.

Let me ask you this:

If he never changed – if he always had these triggers – could you find a way to cope with them and not let them bother you?

Or do they trigger your own wounds in a painful and familiar way?

It’s not an easy question.

Relationships are the one place we should feel emotionally safe. But for many of us, they don’t. Our relationships give us so much stress and anxiety.

What would it look like if our relationships felt like a sanctuary?