The Center for Relationship
Training and Recovery
Michael H. Borash, LPC, P.C. and Associates
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Getting the Love You Want
by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
Our Unconscious Mind
We all have a high degree of selectivity, and for it to make sense, we need to understand the role of the unconscious mind in mate selection. We organize our thoughts, our days, our homes and our routines into orderly and logical systems. The conscious mind, however, is a thin veil over the unconscious, which is independent, active and functioning at all times.
Scientists who study the brain, especially Paul McLean in his essay on "Man and His Animal Brains" have concluded that the brain stem, which is the most primitive layer, is the part of the brain that oversees reproduction, self-preservation, and vital functions such as circulation of blood, breathing and sleeping. Around the top of the brain stem is the portion of the brain called the limbic system, whose function seems to be the generation of vivid emotions. I use the term "old brain" to refer to the portion of the brain that includes both the brain stem and the limbic system.
We are unaware of most of the functions of the old brain. Always on alert, it constantly asks the question "Is it safe?" Utilizing the fight-flight defenses that come from our animal ancestry, psychologists see the old brain lumping people into six basic categories; its only concern is whether a particular person is someone to nurture, be nurtured by, have sex with, run away from, submit to, or attack. It is not capable of picking up on subtleties such as "a neighbor" or "my cousin." The old brain has no sense of linear time. Today, tomorrow and yesterday do not exist; everything that was, still is. Its memories, recent and very old, inform its decisions about people and situations.
McLean refers to the cerebral cortex, a large, convoluted mass of brain tissue that surrounds the old brain, as the "new brain" because it appeared most recently in evolutionary history. The new brain is the part of you that makes decisions, thinks, observes, recognizes people, plans, anticipates, responds, organizes information, and creates ideas. It is inherently logical and tries to find a cause for every effect and an effect for every cause.
You may recall that you sometimes have feelings regarding your mate that seem alarmingly out of proportion to the events that triggered them. For example, let's suppose that you are a middle-aged man working for a large company. After a hard day at work, you drive home, eager to share your successes with your wife. When you walk in the door, you see a note saying she will be late coming home from work. You stop dead in your tracks; you had counted on her being there! Rather than sitting down to enjoy the evening paper, you head straight for the freezer and eat a bowl of vanilla ice cream, exactly what you would have done thirty-five years ago if you had come home to learn that your mother wasn't home yet. The past and the present live side by side within your mind.
The Search For "One and Only"
So how does this information add to our understanding of romantic attraction? We seem to be highly selective in our choice of mates. In fact, we appear to be searching for a "one and only" with a very specific set of positive and negative traits. I have discovered from years of theoretical research and clinical observation that we are each looking for someone who has the predominant character traits of the people who raised us. Our old brain is trapped in the eternal now and, having only a dim awareness of the outside world, is trying to re-create the environment of childhood. And the reason the old brain is trying to resurrect the past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion, as Sigmund Freud thought. From my observations of thousands of couples have stated they want from their partners, I have concluded that it is a compelling need to heal old childhood wounds.
The ultimate reason you fell in love with your mate is not that he or she was young and attractive, had an impressive job, had a "point value" equal to yours, or had a kind disposition. You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood.
I am not suggesting that each of us had serious childhood traumas such as sexual or physical abuse or the suffering that comes from having parents who divorced or died or were alcoholics. Even if you were fortunate to grow up in a safe, nurturing environment, you still bear invisible scars from childhood, because from the very moment you were born you were a complex, dependent creature with a never-ending cycle of needs. And no parents, no matter how devoted, are able to respond perfectly to all of these changing needs. Tired, angry, depressed, busy, ill, distracted, afraid -- parents often fail to sustain our feelings of security and comfort.
Every unmet need causes fear and pain and, in our infantile ignorance, we have no idea how to stop it and restore our feelings of safety and wholeness. Desperate to survive, we adopt primitive coping mechanisms. We cope as well as we can with the world and our relationships by using the feeble set of defenses born of the pain of childhood, a time when parts of our true nature were suppressed in the unconscious. We look grown up -- we have jobs and responsibilities -- but we are walking wounded, trying desperately to live life fully while unconsciously hoping to somehow restore the sense of joyful aliveness we began with.
