Relationship: Friend or Foe?
Relationship is a commonly used word in our vocabulary yet seemingly ambiguous in practice. If we were each to pause and ponder on our own interpretation of the word and then focus on how we feel in response, I’m curious if everyone would reach the same point. Probably not.
Recently I became aware of the knee-jerk reaction I had developed to the very mention of the word. It was time for me to mindfully analyze what a relationship means to me.
A relationship is essentially the way in which two or more people are connected; it’s the state of being connected. Which appears to be a pretty basic and clear definition though I suspect most of us have differing views and beliefs around it. Much of what we humans subconsciously learn about relationships is experiential, with our earliest teachings coming from our primary caregiver(s). During these first years of our life is when we develop our sense of existence, self-identity, and our ability to relate to others based on how attuned and attached our caregiver(s) was to us; ideally building a secure attachment which later transforms into our ability to find safety within while connecting with others.
My family’s teachings were that as a woman marriage should be my ultimate goal, with my identity and value in our society being dependent on who I chose.
The relationship our caregivers have with their own Self is a prerequisite of sorts in determining how they show up in the relationship with us, their children, which ultimately teaches us what connection feels like. If our primary caregiver(s) were disconnected with an insecure sense of identity and/or worth then their ability to attach to us in a secure manner would have been limited, or possibly non-existent. Ultimately constructing a foundational belief during our infancy and early childhood that relationships are not safe, resulting in a child with a more avoidant styled attachment who ultimately gets spooked when deeper connections start forming; or that we need others in order to feel safe forming a more anxious style of attachment in the child who desperately grasps for connections as a means for survival—or of course, a variation of the two.
My original baseline from childhood fell on the anxious side of the attachment spectrum, in which I believed that I needed to be rescued through relationships. That the relationship you had with your significant other outweighed the relationship you had with yourself. I was raised to believe that in order to be a successful woman you needed to marry a successful man; that my role in the relationship was to follow him anywhere while sacrificing any dreams I might have had. That those sacrifices were the ultimate act of love. I married quite young, a successful man whom I was incredibly proud of, and his dreams became my dreams. Except I never felt successful.
Relationships are like an ecosystem, and our individual health and emotional maturity equally affects the overall growth of the relationship, which should be nourishing in the ways needed to offer safe spaces for personal discovery, growth, and confidence in who we are as separate beings outside of our relationships. Which in turn allows us to confidently show up authentically within the relationship. Yet for many of us our earliest relationships are where we experienced confusion, pain, and dysfunction, teaching us to shut down and hide our authentic selves in order to be accepted. Furthermore, if we were raised in a highly volatile environment or with parents who were unpredictable, short-fused, and critical we learnt that chaos within relationships is what results in the connection we innately desire. Except connection through chaos is not nourishing, and instead of releasing the love hormone oxytocin, our bodies released high levels of the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol; subconsciously priming us to gravitate towards dysfunctional, high in conflict, controlling tactics (or people), and/or an imbalance of power-dynamics as our fix in finding connection in lieu of a secure bond as our base understanding of relationships.
We cannot offer another emotional nourishment until we nurture our own inner wounds. We will be offended by others embracing their authenticity if we are not confident in our own. And we can only connect to others to the depths in which we are capable of connecting to ourselves.
During our youth as we continued to grow and develop, our foundational understanding of what a relationship means to us plays a major role in how we interpret and absorb the ways in which relationships show up outside of our families of origin, i.e., our society’s teachings of which types of relationships are acceptable and considered important; our cultural teachings and how we are treated as individuals within it; what our religious affiliations preach; how our friendships and teachers interact with us; with a sneaky but extremely influential leader in shaping our personal understandings of relationships being media (movies, tv, news, magazines, books, social media, etc.).
I can’t say that I lost myself in my marriage, as I didn’t really know who I was to begin with; but I eventually awoke from the patriarchal slumber I had been raised in and decided to start working on my own healing, self-discovery and most importantly my relationship with myself. However, my idea of a marriage, especially as a military spouse, was still in keeping the focus on being a homemaker and supporting the active-duty member’s career… until it wasn’t anymore. I changed, my focus changed, and my dreams could not be ignored any longer. I wanted my own achievements outside the home, I wanted to make a difference in the world. I eventually shed the belief that it was my role to only support others in their dreams and I decided to pursue my own.
I presume that our lived experiences, the different relationships we have over the course of our lives, and whether or not we consciously put in the effort to deconstruct and heal our [insecure] attachment styles can all influence changes to our perception of what relationships mean to us over the course of our lifetimes. In my own personal experience, my understanding of the word has shifted, healed, evolved, and even regressed at various points in my life.
A divorce, no matter how amicable, is like pouring salt, vodka, and fire all at once into your deepest attachment wounds. Add on the pressures and disapproval from our families and society’s teachings as well as the Bible Belt opinions I was marinated in, and divorce feels like a failing of some sort…even if it was mutual. So many of our core wounds are formed through perceived rejection, and divorce is the ultimate rejection. We invest our love, our time, our energy, our sense of identity, and our plans for the future into one single human- being only for it to come to an end before you reach the “forever”.
So, I’m shedding my old beliefs that a relationship equates to self-sacrifice; marriage is no longer an agenda of mine but rather it is something that can organically happen if it makes sense to both parties involved. I am going back to the basis of the definition of the word and focusing on the concept that a relationship is the state of being connected to another. Which allows me to appreciate the other types of connections I have in my life, like my daughter, my dog, my friendships, and work colleagues; while removing the pressure that if I should find myself in a romantic relationship once more it doesn’t have to be all or nothing but rather, ever evolving, nourishing, authentic, and formed from deep friendship.
