Why You’re Likely to Marry Your Parent (and what you can do about it)

This is not a podcast about being broken, although you may have been. This is a podcast about strength for women who find themselves in difficult relationships, including that sometimes difficult one with yourself. We'll look at your relationship through a lens of psychology, faith, and a little dash of my own kind of feminism. We're not fixing them. We're fixing you. And that changes everything. Welcome to Stronger in the Difficult Places. Save yourself, heal your relationships. Listen in. Hey there, it's Dr. Zoe. I'm your host, and I'm so glad you're here today. Today's topic is why many of us marry our parents. But first up, my win and my fail. My win is that I got my proposal to my agent. I think I talked about that last week, maybe as a fail, but I got it to her, and now We're going to be subbing out probably in January. I will have my book sold, my memoir sold, and so now I feel like I have this creative space to start thinking about my next book, the next book after this book, which is exciting. So it's a win, absolute win. My fail is that I procrastinated ordering a new oven for our kitchen, and I'm hosting Thanksgiving this year, and only one of our double ovens is working. I know maybe that's a first world problem, but I'm I've never hosted Thanksgiving with only one oven, so I don't know what I'm gonna do. But I've been meaning to order a new one for months, and it somehow only dawned on me, as it so happens in the world of procrastinators, that I'm out of time. So I did quickly order one, and now I get to live with the tension of will it or will it not arrive before Thanksgiving? Dun dun, stay tuned. So on to the good stuff, why most of us marry our parents. I'm sure you've thought or you've heard someone say, I married my mother, or I married my father. Well, there's a lot of truth to this. Despite our inability to recognize it, we really do tend to, or often marry someone that's like our mother or our father. Why? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. First and foremost, we confuse familiarity with attraction. I've probably talked about this on the podcast before, but of course we're attracted to what we know. Secondly, and most importantly, unless you've done a lot of work on yourself prior to coupling up with your spouse, most people marry or partner with someone that has a characteristic that's similar in some way to our mother or our fathers. And the reason why is because we're unconsciously attempting to resolve old conflicts and feelings that are left over from our early experiences in childhood. That was the first place we learned about relationships. Now at 46 years old, I can look at my husband with the knowledge that I have now and all the years of therapy that I've been through, and I can clearly see what some of those characteristics are. I might talk about them later, but I couldn't consciously see them 27 years ago, although my unconscious mind picked up on them immediately and said, oh, here's an opportunity to fix this. I'm going to choose him. It's amazing how smart, how How clued in our unconscious mind is. It's our conscious mind that kind of messes us up. But the good news is it's not a bad thing. Imago therapy, and I'm going to talk more about that, says that the healthiest thing we can do as a couple is to repair these wounds through a healthy, loving relationship. So basically, almost everyone does this. And it's not a bad thing because we can use our past pains, our past negative experiences, our past issues to work on actually repairing them in this, current relationship, which was what your unconscious mind was trying to do all along. Remember, our parents have this profound and long-lasting effect on us. Even absent parents have a profound and long-lasting effect on us. Our experience of our parents' love is the mirror through which we learn to see ourselves. So if you mostly had a positive, encouraging, supportive mirror, then you probably grew up with healthy self-esteem. If that mirror was predominantly judgmental, critical, unsupportive, or disinterested, then your self-worth is probably not so great. So what can you do about this? You can take some of the skills developed by Dr. Harville Hendrix and Dr. Helen Lackley Hunt and apply them to your relationship. How? I'll show you. So first, what is Imago Relationship Theory? That's what I talked about earlier. It's otherwise known as IRT, and I kind of fell in love with this whole concept, oh gosh, maybe 20 years ago when I started to learn about it and see a lot of it reflected in my own marriage. So this was developed by Dr. Hendricks and Lockley, and they are also the authors of the bestselling book, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. The Latin word imago means image, and it refers to the unconscious image of familiar love. Think about that, unconscious image of familiar love. Your unconscious goes, oh, that feels familiar, and then it thinks it's attracted to it. And it includes all the good and the bad traits of our caretakers, who are our first sense of what love was, And it creates a blueprint of the person that we ultimately seek out as a partner. Boom, kind of mind-blowing. Elena Bahar, in her article Imago Therapy: How Can It Heal Relationships, said that the relationship with our primary caregivers in the most formative years of our life, between 0 and 36 months, shapes a template with which our body and brain have encoded care, love, and family. Now, She's talking about really early development. I would go even further than that and say, you know, that foundation, yeah, it begins in that first 0 to 36 months, but it's laid throughout our childhood. And so we can have a different experience in 36 months. And if we have a more reparative one later, as long as the 0 to 36 wasn't super, super neglectful, because then we're looking at attachment disorders and things like that, we can have a different experience. So. Yeah. I don't want you to think, oh, by 36 months, all of this is formed. No, but it certainly starts the foundation. And most people also don't have significantly different parenting from 0 to 36, all the way up through adolescence. So that is what she says. And I agree with it, but there are some caveats to it. But anyway, she says it shapes the template for which our body and brain have encoded care, love, and family. And I would go on to say, like I said, it's a longer period. So how our primary caregivers treated us and one another, especially during those early formative years, it leaves a huge neurobiological imprint on our nervous system and directly impacts how we take in sensory information in the world around us, and from that, we develop what will be our adult attachment style. That's real. So it's important to remember that much of this process happens when we are in a preverbal stage, right? Or like I said, even into our early verbal stage of development. Regardless, we lack a level of sophistication in understanding what's happening and an ability to communicate our needs. So what ends up happening is that later in life, we're likely to unconsciously pick out partners whose characteristics resembles a parent's traits, both positive and negative. And that's why it feels so familiar and comforting when we find someone who feels like the one, because it's our way of trying to heal certain painful experiences and we're searching out a way to kind of deal with that unfinished business from the past so that we can restore that early childhood sense of joyful aliveness that we had when we were kids. So because a lot of this process happens unconsciously, we tend to reinjure ourselves throughout the process in an effort to heal. So think about this. If you have to reinjure yourself along the way to heal, But you don't actually know that you're doing that, then you end up perceiving your spouse as the perpetrator of that hurt, and you're the victim. And then you're intermittently, or maybe even constantly being triggered and responding from actions far, far ago. Yes, this goes kind of deep. So Imago Theory says that the only way to heal this is to make the unconscious conscious and build awareness of the agenda that you bring into the relationship that was created and colored from your childhood. So you want to move towards a more conscious relationship. But of course, like all things, this takes work. It means walking through fear. It means being consistent. It means being dedicated. So if you're feeling brave, I encourage you to share this episode with your partner. If your partner's unwilling, you can do these exercises by yourself. Or if you're not partnered at the moment, you can kind of think of your last relationship because working through these issues now is going to be beneficial to you in your next relationships. So when I say working, working through them, on your own, you can use somebody who's not your partner. You can use a friend, or you can use maybe somebody, you know, that you're just casually dating, or sister, or, you know, somebody you're in a relationship with. So I'm going to ask you to practice an Imago technique called intentional dialogue process. It may sound simple, but it's profound because it runs counter to the way most of us communicate, especially when we're feeling hurt. There's something so powerful about feeling heard for humans. It's one of the reasons why therapy is so therapeutic. To have someone give you undivided attention that is all for you, a human being who is listening and not defending, is pretty darn powerful. Ultimately, what we needed as children, what we've carried with us into adulthood, is a powerful need to be seen, Heard, loved, and accepted and valued for who we are unconditionally. And listen, whatever childhood issues you have, they're usually hanging around in this arena. So what intentional dialogue does is it asks you to do 3 things when communicating with your partner. 1, mirror. 2, validate. And 3, empathize. You'll find that no matter how angry or upset someone is, when you validate their anger, it completely diffuses. When you ignore, defend, or express a lack of understanding, it magnifies. So basically, with intentional dialogue, you're holding space for your partner's experience, even if you disagree. Yes, you do not have to agree with them to practice this skill. In fact, you really only need this skill when you are in disagreement. So what does mirroring look like? When your partner expresses a concern, you mirror or parrot back to them what they said. If I'm hearing you correctly, when we have to leave the house at a certain time and I'm not ready, you feel like I don't care about you. I can see how you feel that way. That makes sense to me. Okay, maybe it doesn't make sense to you. Maybe it's the dumbest thing you've ever heard. Of course you being late has nothing to do with him or how you feel about him. You have trouble managing your time everywhere, probably, if this is your issue. Or maybe if he would help with the kids instead of only focusing on getting himself ready when you have 3 people to get ready, and he only has to get himself ready, maybe you'd be able to get in the car on time. I get this. You're right too. Remember though that our Imago evokes deep emotional reactions in us that causes us to react disproportionately to the events in our present. So you're not just reacting to him about that thing, you're also reacting to him about all the past history you have with being blamed or, or not considered, things like that. So what I want you to make sense of isn't his reaction, But a knowing of what it feels like to feel uncared for and disrespected, that makes sense. And this helps you with the next step, empathy. So empathy looks like, I can understand how you feel like I don't care about you when I'm late. That sounds like a painful experience. That's it. That's empathy. This simple response creates a sense of safety in your relationship that opens the doors for more communication, because when you say that, He doesn't have anything to defend. He has no reason to get more angry. He all of a sudden, he feels heard. A second skill that Imago therapy teaches is a behavior change request. You've probably already figured out that criticizing your husband and detailing all his wrongs doesn't really result in more positive behavior. I know we keep doing it and, you know, we do— what is that definition of crazy? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different response. That's not the clinical definition, but it is a definition. So the behavior change request teaches you to clearly Clearly express a single specific frustration, such as feeling ignored, and offer your partner 3 potential options for changing the behavior. So for instance, you know, you can let your partner know, I'm feeling ignored. I'm going to give you 3 options for how to maybe help me with this. One is call me once a day during work to check in. 2 is leave your cell phone in the other room during dinner. 3 is ask me how my day went when I come home from work. So then your partner has the freedom to choose one action to try. And if both of you guys are doing this with each other, it's called stretching. So if each of you guys are making a declaration and each of you guys are picking something, it's called stretching because both of you are learning to make a small change to better meet your partner's needs. So those are just 2 skills that I wanted to share with you guys, and I just wanted to point out this whole concept of Imago therapy, and maybe it's something you're recognizing in your relationship. So if you're interested in maybe seeking out your own Imago therapist, I am not one, although I'm very interested in the training. I just haven't taken the time to do that. Click the first link in the show notes and go to the website and scroll down to find an Imago therapist near you. If you live in the United States, it's going to be the first link, United States or Canada. If you live outside the United States or Canada, love you guys. I know I have listeners in I forgot how many countries, but if you live outside the United States, click on the second link. Yes, there are Imago therapists. Understanding how your childhood significantly influences your choice of a partner and then the resulting relationship that you have may feel a little daunting. I get that. Essentially though, I'm just putting a label on something that you already experience, so it's nothing new, but now you have a few tools to tackle it. I can't fully explain Imago and Imago therapy in one session, of course, so if I've piqued your curiosity, I encourage you to seek out more education regarding it. I'm so glad you're here. You've got this. Thank you for listening to Stronger in the Difficult Places. New podcast episodes go up every Tuesday. Please subscribe, share the episodes if they're helping you, and I would love for you to leave a review. It helps other people find my podcast as well. Have a super week.