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Have You Ever Written An Autobiography Of Your Relationships?
Franco Greco • May 06, 2021
It can help you work out what are the relationship patterns that are holding you back.
People mostly "live" their relationships, gaining the experience but missing the meaning. We also tend to repeat relationship patterns?
There are several factors that contribute to our tendency to repeat unhelpful (and at dysfunctional) patterns.
We repeat whats familiar. Even though we know its unhelpful and not working well for us, we repeat behaviors because they feel familiar and we know what to expect from them.
We repeat what we learned as children.
The schemas that include our beliefs, coping skills, and behavior patterns that we learned in childhood become deeply entrenched because we learned them when we were vulnerable, and our brains werent fully developed. And after years of using them, they are hard to change.
We repeat what was traumatizing with the desire to overcome it.
If you felt rejected, unloved, or powerless as a child, you may recreate experiences and relationships where you feel similarly in an unconscious desire to change the outcome to heal yourself by gaining the acceptance or love of someone or to feel in control. However, we often tend to choose partners and friends who treat us as our parents did and we continue to play our part as we always have and recreate the same outcome not a different one.
Want to find out more about your relationship patterns? You might consider the following exercise, I give to my individual and couples clients with relationships issues for homework.
"Write An Autobiography Of Your Relationships."
This can begin with early expereinces with your parents, the foundational relationship, but also include relationships of "first love" or early attraction, group dating, first kiss, first committed relationship, de facto or formal marriage experiences.
Write it with a focus on the emotional highs and lows and try to get a sense of the repeating patterns.
For example, one of my clients who wrote about their realtionships, was able to track through his relationships and identify the charactersitic ways he reacted to people, such as being suspicious, had contributed to unresolved problems. He also considered his emotional reactivity (getting angry and scolding) and how it dominated some relationships that ended badly for him.
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