Why we suck at relationships
Based on the current divorce rate, we’d put our money on love. So, why don’t all 16-year-olds get a mandatory course? Consider this article the first step in your relationship education.
1/2 of the population has a secure attachment style, while 20% are anxious, 25% are avoidant and 5% are disorganized.
40% of Canadian marriages end in divorce.
2/3rd’s of American daters say that dating is ‘not going well’
Manifest Wellness counsellors can help develop healthier relationships.
Change the story
When our relationships go south, most of us have a story we tell ourselves. “I’m too fucked up for marriage.” “People can’t be trusted.” “When I finally get honest, she leaves.”
The story convinces us that we’re destined for heartbreak and solitude—to repeat the same brutal pattern over and over again.
That story is a load of bullshit.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – Carl Jung
It’s a psychology cliché to blame everything on your parents. When it comes to relationships, the cliché holds true. If you look closely at the pattern you’ve been repeating in relationship after relationship, you’ll probably see some similarities with the way you were raised. Sometimes, the pattern goes back to experiences we can’t even remember.
The beginning of relationships
In your first 18 months of life, the most significant nerve pathways in your brain were all laid down and those pathways impact your relationships for the rest of your life. Babies look to their parents for answers to basic yet critical questions: What do I need to live? Am I important? Can I rely on others? How do I cope?
Some of us had healthy relationships with our parents where they were well attuned to our needs—walking the line between caring and overwhelming, supportive and distant. A healthy parent-child relationship doesn’t mean the child experiences no trauma. It means the parent could provide a safety net for the child to fall back on during tough times, while also giving them the confidence to explore. This is called a ‘secure attachment style’.
For those of us who were not so lucky, our relationship with our parents fell into one of three ‘insecure attachment styles’—anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. Maybe when you were a baby, your parents were very busy and you had to cry endlessly to get their attention. As an infant, exaggerating your pain helped you survive. This is characteristic of anxious attachment and that pattern carries right into adulthood. For an anxiously attached person, when a fling doesn’t text them back, their subconscious will go right back to that early experience of abandonment.
On the other hand, if your parents were overbearing and controlling, you might be the one taking weeks to respond to someone you care about—an example of avoidant attachment. Avoidant people learned early on that the only people they can rely on are themselves. Their greatest fear is to lose their independence—to be engulfed.
Disorganized attachment is much less common and characterizes survivors of childhood abuse who vacillate between anxious strategies and avoidant strategies.
You’ve no doubt a completely different person now than you were at age 2. However, you might still view your relationships today through that same lens you applied to your parents in childhood.