Understanding Your Wiring for Managing Relationships

Healthy Parenting

In healthy parenting, a child relies on the parent for their emotional and physical needs and they get them met.

Attachment Style: Abandonment

Abandonment, in this context, means there is an absent parent (physically), or when a parent is emotionally absent. They don’t show love or don’t show emotions. In abandonment, a parent is not there to meet your needs, whether emotional or physical.

Abandonment in your childhood, typically leads to you fear abandonment in romantic relationships later on. You will typically be needy, crave the attention of your partner and do not like when your partner is spending time without you (e.g. with friends, at work, etc.). You will continuously suspect that your partner is considering leaving you and will constantly try to find evidence confirming this. You will accuse them of not caring about you, being with you and asking about you. This neediness and attention craving will, typically over time, lead your partner to feeling choked, which further leads to feelings of resentment. Eventually, this typically leads to a break-up, which you will find to confirm your deep-rooted fears of being abandoned, not realizing, admitting nor internalizing that it was actually your own behavior that lead to the break-up.

Attachment Style: Enmeshment

Enmeshment is the opposite of abandonment. Enmeshment is when the child’s role is to meet the parents needs. An example could be a parent who is really depressed and as a child you are trying to cheer the parent up or take care of them as a grown-up caretaker. The sign of abandonment is that you feel sorry for yourself. The sign of enmeshment, is feeling sorry for the parent e.g. a highly anxious parent.

If a parent is saying come home at this time because they feel like that’s a good boundary to set. That’s healthy. But some parents say come home at this time because I’m going to worry about you. That is making the parent’s worry into being the child’s problem, which is unhealthy. A highly anxious, or highly depressed parent, can end up making their child a surrogate therapist. The parent is coming to the child with their complaints, talking about their life and the child is filling the role of a therapist or of an emotional partner.

As part of an enmeshment situation, a parent may also make their child their best friend, or they make the child something that is reflected on their self-esteem such as “daddy’s little girl,” or “mommy’s little man.”

Enmeshment in childhood, typically leads you to being forced to grow up too soon and take care of a parent. You are filling the caretaker role. In some cases, you can (as a child) see your role as managing a divorce between your parents and take on a role of making peace in the family. In all cases of enmeshment, it results in the child losing a part of their childhood. Thus, when you are experiencing love again (as an adult), it feels like a familiar pattern and you are afraid to not be free/feel free in that relationship. Consequently, people who are/have been enmeshed, find it hard to have relationships because they see their role as to help and fix. So, they date “projects“. They date people they can help and fix, as they tend to think “because if I can’t help and fix you, what good am I? That’s my role“.

What happens after a while is that they realize they can’t help and fix their partner. They feel that their partner is too needy (as they typically date someone that mirrors the enmeshing partner from their childhood), and they get resentful and they start to break away, or potentially cheat or act out in some other way.

How to Unwind Abandonment or Enmeshment in Adult Life?

1. Self-awareness
   First you need the self-awareness. Understand that this is how you were raised. This is how you typically respond in various situations.
   • Self-awareness is the hardest step, because when you are self-aware of the issue, you usually keep doing it and just beat yourselves up afterwards.
     
2. Release and Accountability
   Then, you need some sort of release and accountability. Some sort of deep therapeutic work where you just release that energy.
   
3. Reparenting
   Work on yourself to change your behavior patterns and re-wire yourself.
   
4. Forgiveness
   Forgiving yourself, forgiving the other person and letting go of that energy.

Reflections

As someone who’s a huge fan of being the author and architect of my own direction, and then realizing that there’s these patterns, and maybe even pre-verbal things that you can’t remember, that are marionetting you, is really hard to internalize. Actually, you are less free and have less agency than you first thought. How can this be..?

The marionetting strings are parental, cultural, genetic, ancestral. You could view one of the goals of life to be to recognize the strings and cut them, to be truly free and have full agency.

When you are truly free from your strings, authenticity also comes more naturally to the forefront of your being. Authenticity is basically acting in a way such that who you are presenting on the outside, is who you are on the inside, with appropriate boundaries.

Connected Detachment

To better understand others we can use the tool of connected detachment.

Connected detachment means that you are connected in a way that you care and you are relational with the other person, but you are detached from whatever your thoughts and opinions are. You are detached from the way you think things should be. Detached from your own internal commentary, and in full listening mode, trying to stay fully connected to the other person in a mode to understand. You stay connected, but detached from all the layers of stories that we typically tell ourselves.

It is easy to just simply detach. You may feel that you don’t know, so you do not want to get involved. With connected attachment you really care, and whatever the outcome is neither of us know, and that’s fine. Whether it is good or bad.

A Way to Think About Our Wiring

A way to think about trauma and a way to think about behavior is that we are born with certain genetic predispositions and a lot of gene expressions are turned on and off by the environment itself. You may have the gene for e.g. being a sociopath, but maybe some trauma has to happen to switch that on. We are born with certain predispositions and resilience, growing up in our family our brains’ neurons starts wiring connections at a really rapid rate. A lot of this happens prior to our conscious memory, but the pattern remains the same with the upbringing with our parents. For instance, when we are in bed as a child, and our parents have e.g. a “let the child cry out and fall asleep by itself”-philosophy, meaning we are crying and we are hungry, but our needs are not met. After a certain amount of time, it becomes a pattern which can translate into “no one’s going to meet my needs, so I need to meet them myself.” They typically grow up being afraid to ask for help.

For about, say, the first three years the brain is putting these neural connections together at a rapid rate. After that, a process called pruning takes place where the connections you don’t need start disappearing. The remaining connections in your brain now becomes “the prison” you live in. You can start to recognize that this thought / this belief / this behavior you have, was wired in because of certain patterns in your childhood.

Now you can make the choice of going back to agency and control, and consider how you can rewire your neural connection with the above-mentioned tools (re-parenting). However, these were your wiring for maybe 17 or 18 years, so you need to realize it is going to take a little while to get the new behavior going, and sometimes you will slide back into old patterns. Thus, you need to be compassionate with yourselves. The way to be self-compassionate is talking to yourself like the parent you needed, not the parent that you had.

“Self-compassion is talking to yourself like the parent you needed, not the parent that you had“

Neil Strauss

If you are patient with yourself and you are consistent, you can really change your beliefs about yourself in an impactful way.

Allegory About the Eagle

In closing, as some food for thought, let me leave you with this allegory about the eagle:

By the age of 40, the eagle’s claws become too long and supple, and it cannot grab its prey with it. Its beak becomes too long and curved, preventing it from eating. The feathers on its wings and chest become too thick and heavy and prevent it from flying. The eagle is now faced with a choice: either death, or a long and painful period of change, lasting 150 days.

The eagle flies to its nest on the top of a mountain and beats its beak against a rock surface for a long time until the beak breaks and comes off. Then, it waits for a new beak to grow and tear its claws out. When new claws grow, the eagle pulls out its over-grown and heavy plumage on its chest and wings.

After 5 months of pain and torment, with a new beak, claws and plumage, the eagle is reborn and can live for another 30 years.

Very often, in order to live, we have to change, sometimes this process is accompanied by pain, fear, uncertainty and doubts. We get rid of memories, habits and traditions from the past. Only freeing ourselves from the burden of the past, allows us to live and enjoy the present and prepare ourselves for the future.

No matter what stage of life you are at, I wish you courage and strength to continuously change and improve.

📚 Sources and References

• The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships by Neil Strauss
• Modern Wisdom podcast episode: Why The World’s #1 Pickup Artist Left The Game Behind – Neil Strauss (1h 48min 48sec)