From 'You Complete Me' to 'You Get Me': Exploring Healthy Love and Self-Identity
Permission to feel ♥️love♥️
*record screech. Aaaah Jerry. Jerry Jerry Jerry, as much as your line feeds in to the well-worn happy ever after narrative, it’s a tad problematic.
Shall we go there people? Shall we delve into love? For it is the feeling of the week, so I guess we’d better.
Where to begin? Bear with me as I warm up to the subject. I wasn’t sure how to write about this feeling because it is SO huge, so I put it out there as to what you’d like me to cover and Martin came back with a request to write about healthy love. Thanks Martin for answering my call out - here you go!
When talking about healthy love I think that we need to cover:
Having a healthy sense of self
Trust
Escaping the drama triangle
Healthy communication
The importance of rupture and repair.
Crikey, I feel like we went in for a quick snack and we’ve found ourselves confronted with a whacking great tasting menu. I’m not going to get this all covered in this essay/blog/newsletter (what shall we call these missives?!)
Let’s have a nibble at having a healthy sense of self, and I can come back to the other elements later.
There’s a LOT of talk about toxic relationships and unhealthy love, and that often gets the headlines for its drama and intrigue.
I’ll be honest, thinking about writing about love makes me nervous, because my experience of love doesn’t fit in with the fairy tale idea of love. Nor does it fit in with the idea of cancel culture toxic love either. It fits in somewhere in between.
What I am sharing with you today has been learnt as much through personal experience as text book theory.
In the ‘ideal world’ of healthy love, people with secure attachments come together and have an interdependent relationship; where each person is comfortable being by themselves (i.e. being alone means solitude rather than isolation), AND they experience joy and happiness when they are together.
Ya what now? Basically healthy love is less ‘you complete me’ and more ‘you get me’.
These lucky souls are able to have an emotional connection where emotional intimacy means IN-TO-ME SEE. Argh, ok, a bit cheesy (or maybe I have just been around circles where that is quoted ad nauseum), but a good short hand to remember what emotional intimacy is all about.
Healthy love involves emotional intimacy, but in order to have emotional intimacy we have to have a healthy sense of self.
As Dr. Brad Reedy shares in his book, ‘The audicacity to be you: Learning to love your horrible rotten self’:
‘Our clarity about our truth is key to our capacity to see others.’
So what are the blocks to this? Well, to talk about that, we have to talk about what happens when people do not receive an inheritance of a secure attachment.
Let’s just do a catch up on what I mean when talking about attachment.
In the 1970s Dr Ed Tronick did an experiment known as ‘The still face experiment’. He filmed a mum with her one year old baby and asked her to interact as normal: cooing, talking baby talk, mirroring what her child was doing. He then asked her mum to turn away and turn back with a complete stone face - no expression whatsoever for 2 minutes.
At first her child looks confused, then she starts some engaging behaviour to her mum, pointing, clapping hands, screeching. The baby becomes increasingly stressed and turns away from her mum, squirming in discomfort in her seat until she then starts to cry. After the experiment, the mum returns to cooing and engaging with her daughter, who quickly adjusts back.
What this shows is how vulnerable we are to the emotional and non-emotional reactions of those around us. Stephen Porges coined the phrase ‘neuroception’ which describes how our brain is wired (through neural circuits) to ascertain whether situations are safe or dangerous.
Due to the way we have evolved as a species we are primed to have defence systems for our survival - the fight, flight or freeze response.
Only when we feel safe enough does this system get inhibited and pro-social behaviour gets to take front of stage.
Specific parts of the nervous system pick up on the way in which people’s faces move, the tone of someone’s voice and their bodily movements in order to figure out whether it is safe or not.
This is why the baby started crying when her mum’s facial expression was so blank. Even at that early stage with an underdeveloped brain, the child could pick up a sense of threat just from the facial expressions of her mother.
So if we don’t have that very simple sense of connection, we feel unsafe and become hyper vigilant and stress sets in.
The trouble is, if you had a sense of danger growing up for any reason (this could be emotional neglect as easily as it could be overt aggressive behaviour) then the body is primed to read and interpret other’s behaviour as threatening - even if their behaviour has nothing to do with us and to an objective observer would not be viewed as threatening.
Attachment to our caregiver is vital for survival when we are young. So even when the connection with the caregiver may be threatening, the infant will adapt their behaviour in order to maintain connection. Just as the baby in the experiment screeched (protest behaviour) and then turned away (avoidant behaviour) over time these patterns of behaviour can become automatic in order to try and maintain connection.
This is when you get different attachment styles. And these attachment styles stay with us in romantic relationships because we seek familiarity; the familiarity of this kind of relationship is already laid down in our neural pathways, and as our brain likes efficiency it means that relationships which replicate our primary attachment may be an unconscious go-to.
This can make it REALLY tricky to connect and have healthy love. Just because it’s familiar, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy. If we have an attachment style that’s insecure then we may run a mile when someone tries to get close to us; or alternatively never be satisfied when someone declares their love for us.
Whilst when we talk about love we may think of romantic relationships, the building blocks to healthy love are the same whether that is love for a partner, child or friend.
So how can we take steps towards developing a more secure attachment style if that has not been our inheritance?
Find support.
Healing happens in relationship with others.
This could be working with a therapist who understands attachment styles and helps you to feel seen, safe and soothed (the prerequisites for a secure attachment).
I’m also an advocate of 12 step recovery. No, it’s not a religious cult, although they mention the word GOD a lot. It’s a spiritual guide which basically means they have a way of helping you get out of your own way, right size yourself and your problems, and realise that we are part of something so much bigger and greater than any one of us.
The 12 step meetings which could help with this type of thing would be codependents anonymous, love addicts anonymous, adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families anonymous or recovering couples anonymous. The aim of the work is to:
Remove substances or processes which you have used to mute your emotions and alleviate your discomfort.
This will most probably bring up a whole bunch of emotions.
Some of those emotions will lead to the horrible realisation that you don’t know how to do relationships and you feel about X age (that age is likely to correlate to the age that you started to pick up aforementioned medicators).
Recognise other emotions which are linked to sleights, resentments, disappointments, hurts and worries that you picked up during you childhood.
Process these emotions through ‘step work’ in the 12 steps or inner child work and somatic work such as EFT tapping with a therapist.
We can ‘connect’ whether we feel safe or not, whatever our attachment style, but healthy love and emotional intimacy needs each person to have a healthy sense of self which means that they feel good about themselves and the world around them, something known as a ‘secure inner working model’
If you didn’t inherit a secure attachment (because let’s face it, it is a kind of parental inheritance) then having a healthy sense of self can be tricky. Whilst your mixture is particular to you, know that having such a cocktail is part of our human tricky experience and just means that you may have a few additional challenges to negotiate.
A healthy sense of self is the first step to healthy love.
Shall we have a poem about this?
‘Once upon a time’ was a washed up hag,
Her face all raw, her boobs all sagged.
‘Happy ever after’, her faithful beau,
Exposed as a fraud (it had all been for show).
The audience gasped, afraid, distraught.
‘What’s left now?!’ Was their collective thought.
‘I’ stood up in the eye of the storm,
Around her collecting a funny new norm.
She picked up her pen and wrote out a note,
I’ll try to repeat it here by rote...
'No magic, no spells, no witches no potions
It’s time to get rid of these fanciful notions!
No heroes, no knights,
No valiant fights
It’s time to get rid of these usual sights
We’re in a dismantling
Destructing the old
A complete departure from
The tales we were told.
We won’t find our answers
In fighting the ‘other’
The secret key to loving each other
Is the lonely journey into the self
(You won’t find this story on your fairy tale shelf)
Stalk your dragons within and slay them down dead!
That is what’s needed for the times ahead.
There is no beginning, the ending’s not sure
Just hold onto the present to stay secure.
Whisper this truth to those who can hear.
Take hold of your faith, take hold of your fear.
And know that each stumble, each footstep you take,
Is how we rebuild, is how we remake.'
Ah, the lonely journey into the self!
If you have a secure attachment style then that journey into the self won’t feel lonely. You will be connected with various aspects of yourself: the vulnerable part with needs, for example, or the assertive part that rises up when a boundary has been crossed. This is because when you were a child and felt these things, they were recognised and addressed by your main caregiver.
When that’s not the case, you will have adapted in various ways. Instead of recognising and addressing your own needs you may try to manipulate others through people pleasing, lying or hiding this vulnerable part. Instead of being in touch with your assertive self, you may have a defiant teenage-y part of yourself that’s ready to hit the F**k it button when things don’t go the way you want.
Our work is in the unlayering of these defences, and recognising what needs they are trying to address. The objective is not to ‘fix’ those aspects of yourself which you may have denied or hidden, but to accept them, understand them and learn to address their concerns and needs.
Ok, in the poem I do talk about ‘slaying’ them down ‘dead’, but, ya know, poetic licence and all that.
When we can recognise our needs and can work out how to address them, then it is highly likely that we will need boundaries, because boundaries help to teach other people how we need to be treated.
This feels like a little mini-series on love and relationships, so I’ll write on the other elements which I listed at the beginning before I move onto another feeling.
I’ve quite a few poems on love, but I’ll leave you with this one which I wrote for some friends who were getting married.
Love is touching toes under the cover of night. Love’s letting go when you want to hold tight; The wind of the soul, can’t be touched, only felt, An anchor, a compass, at times a life belt. Love is sublime and also mundane. There’s nothing better… but it’s also a pain. Makes you look at your baggage, your inherited stuff. Yet Love is a promise for when times are tough. Love is taking the bins out when it’s not even your turn, But Love is also something you don’t have to earn. Love is silly dances to make your partner smile. Love is what makes living all the more worthwhile. Each landscape of love, a unique discovery. A place for hard work, but also recovery Love is a mystery, that works in mysterious ways I wish you both love ‘til the end of your days.
Do you have any questions about attachment styles or love? If so let me know, I studied it in depth as part of my thesis on Facebook addiction and love chatting about it!
That’s it for now,
‘Til next time!
Jacky x