Article - Understanding Relationships

Understanding Relationships - Bonding Patterns

Explaining the nature of attraction and bonding patterns, and how bonding patterns affect our relationships, this article is a must if you wish to know why you attract into your life the people you do, and how to understand your relationships with people, particularly with those close to you.

We all conduct our relationships with other people using our personality. Our personality, however, is made up of various parts, which can be called subpersonalities or selves. So when we relate with others there are quite a few different selves involved in our relationships. This is why relationships are never simple or easy. It is rather like there are two families or two groups relating, and not just two people. This is why sometimes we feel caring towards our partner and at other times we want to be cared for; it is why sometimes we admire a quality in our partner tremendously and at other times we see that same quality as a fault; and why sometimes something our partner does amuses us and at other times that same action irritates us.

The selves which constitute our psyches include parental selves, child selves, rational selves, emotional selves and many more. We all have selves which we identify with and call ‘me’. These are our primary selves. We also have selves that we have repressed, which are our disowned selves. These disowned selves affect our actions, feelings and relationships as much as our primary selves do. In fact, they also strongly influence what kind of people we get into relationships with.

(For a detailed explanation of what primary and disowned selves are and of how they develop, go to the page titled How your personality develops.)

So it is important to gain an understanding of who your primary and disowned selves are if you wish to understand and enjoy your relationships fully and if you wish to be in relationship with the people you actually choose to be in relationship with.

How do you know who your primary and disowned selves are? The qualities that you admire excessively or overvalue in others, and those qualities that you really judge in others, give you a good indication of who your disowned selves are. So if you really admire someone who is an artist and you think that they are better than you because of their artistic ability, then you have probably disowned your own artistic self and you might have as a primary self a very logical, practical self. And if you really can't stand someone who is blatantly selfish and you judge them for being selfish, then you have probably disowned your selfishness and have as a primary self a giving self.

What you have disowned and what is primary in you, also gives you a good indication of what kinds of people you will be attracted to and enter into relationship with.

The two main scenarios are:

1. You will like people who have similar primary selves to you, and you will dislike people who’s primary selves are your disowned selves. You will usually choose as friends those people who's primary selves you like.

2. You will be attracted to people who carry your disowned selves, either the positive ones or negative ones. Usually we will enter into quite intense relationships with people who carry our disowned selves.

For example, Mary is a warm, kind, giving sort of person; she is artistic and kind of flows with life. One evening at a party, Mary meets John. John is powerful, self-contained, confident and successful. He is a lawyer. They are introduced to each other and begin to talk. Mary is impressed by John’s strength, focus and powerful energy. John is attracted to Mary’s warmth, relaxed attitude and lightness, and her different way of seeing things. They start seeing each other and a relationship develops.

Soon they fall in love. They find each other perfect. Mary feels completely accepted, as John loves her totally, and the same with John. They both feel safe with each other so their defences go down - their primary selves relax a little. This enables them both to have access to modes of expression or selves they previously didn’t have access to. John finds that he can enjoy going to the art gallery and lazing around on Sunday, when previously he’d work all day. Mary finds access to her power and focus and starts taking action with organising exhibitions of her artwork. She even sells her paintings when previously she would give them away for free. Nothing could be better.

Eventually they move in with each other, but after some months things change. Those qualities that John had found so attractive in Mary - her easy-goingness, her relaxed attitude to everything, her tendency to always be available to friends when they need her, now annoy him. And those things Mary loved about John, his strength and focus and organisational ability, now seem to be too stifling and hard.

One day, John has had a really bad day in court and he comes home feeling awful. He walks into the house and sees mess everywhere - paints, brushes, canvasses, and Mary with an old shirt with paint splattered all over it. He gets annoyed and criticises her for the mess. She gets defensive and tells him he’s too tidy and that he should loosen up a little. But then she becomes apologetic as she can see he’s angry and really upset. He then feels guilty about telling her off. But then she gets angry at him and yells at him.

Does this sound familiar? Can you see that Mary’s disowned selves are John’s primary selves and vice versa? They reflect each other. John judges in Mary what he has disowned in himself and Mary judges in John what she has disowned in herself. At first they liked the opposite qualities in each other, in fact it was the opposite qualities that attracted them to each other in the first place. This is what happens when you disown some part of yourself - you are attracted to it because your psychological system wants to become whole. So you’re drawn to it outside of yourself if you don’t acknowledge it inside. But as soon as a stress occurs in this type of situation, as with Mary and John when John had a bad day, the attraction to the disowned self in the other person stops, as your defences come up, and your primary selves become dominant again. They then judge what is unlike them in your partner. This leads to what is called a negative bonding pattern.

Bonding patterns occur in all types of relationships. A bonding pattern is like a blueprint for how we interact with others. Bonding patterns are based on the initial parent/child bonding we all experienced as infants. They activate a parental self in one person and child self in the other. In male/female relationships, a daughter part of a woman will bond with a father part of the man and vice versa. Bonding patterns are fluid; we kind of flow from identifying with a parental self to identifying with a child self and back again, and so does the person we are bonding with.

And this is what happened with Mary and John. When John came home from work after losing his case, he felt vulnerable. His whole identity as a successful lawyer had been threatened. But instead of admitting to himself and to Mary that he was upset and needed some support, which is really admitting responsibility for his Vulnerable Child self, he, in order to maintain his self-protection and to not feel vulnerable, fell into his main primary self. From here he judges Mary for her opposite characteristics. Then, when she felt that her primary self was judged and criticised by John, she became defensive. Her Vulnerable Child felt awful about being criticised, but because she is also not aware of its existence, she fell into her primary self, which is judgmental of John. (We fall into our primary selves automatically when our vulnerability is threatened because when we were infants the reason our primary selves developed was to protect our vulnerability.)

So the bonding pattern here can be described as follows: when John came home from work, his Critical Father self bonded with Mary’s Defensive Daughter self, and then Mary flipped into Angry Mother self and John into Guilty Son self.

This is a negative bonding pattern because the feelings activated are negative. Negative bonding patterns occur because we identify with only a part of ourselves and they are triggered when we feel vulnerable. When you’re feeling vulnerable, what do you do? You get defensive, and you attack the other person. If you don’t attack them, then often you feel self-righteous about your point of view. Either way, the other person flips into defensive mode also and it is usually in some way opposite to what you are expressing.

Now all this is going on at the subconscious level of your mind. All you’re aware of is that uncomfortable feeling, which you try to get rid of, and then you feel defensive, angry and judgmental toward your partner. You both keep arguing from your individual perspective and nothing is resolved. It’s almost like the more you argue the more both of you are pushed into opposite extremes.

It’s like a see saw. If one of you goes all the way up, the other goes all the way down.

There are also positive bonding patterns. With the example of Mary and John, the Responsible Father self in John looks after Mary by providing her with a space and materials so she can paint. He supports her and encourages her. He is bonded with her Pleasing Daughter self who tries to paint the best artworks she can, to please him. Then the pattern switches when as a thankyou for his support, she cooks him fantastic dinners and eagerly waits for him to come home so she can feed him and look after him. When she is in this Nurturing Mother self, he goes into Needy Son self and enjoys her attentions. This is a positive bonding pattern because the feelings are good.

Bonding patterns are our primary way of making contact with others; they are the way in which we are able to give and receive nurturing, just as in the above example, and as in the original infant/parent bonding. However, when we are in a bonding pattern we lose some of our vitality and spontaneity. Because they are like a blueprint, they force us to behave in ways that are only a part of our being. We are compelled to act in a certain way. Positive bonding patterns, even though they feel so good and loving, dampen passion in a relationship. When you’re a Needy Child, for instance, how can you relate with your partner in an adult way? There’s nothing more anti-passion than one of you being in a Nurturing Parent self and the other in a Needy Child self - you can give an receive affection but little else.

This is one of the most common reasons why long-term relationships fail. How often have you heard people say that they have basically become good friends but there’s nothing else left? They still love each other but only in a parent/child or good friends manner.

Another example of a bonding pattern in a non-argument situation is as follows: Let’s say that I tend to be more tidy around the house than my husband. He’s not really messy usually, but generally has a higher tolerance level to mess than I have. But the tidier I become, or the more I start to act as though my way of being is right, the more messy my husband becomes, messier than he usually is. When I’m in Tidy Mother self, he bonds with me is Messy Son. The more I want him to be tidy and the more I judge him for not being tidy, the messier he becomes.

Yet, when I visit my mother, I play the messy role. As she is more identified than I am with being tidy, I go into the opposite and bond with her in Messy Daughter self. And she judges me for being messy from her Tidy Mother self.

This illustrates that bonding patterns force us into acting in a certain manner, and that this manner is not necessarily the way we are. It illustrates how strong the pull is between two people when there is no awareness in the situation. This leads to repeated arguments and it is almost as though we have no control over the argument.

The wonderful thing though, is that we do not have to be stuck in bonding patterns. We can learn to separate from our primary selves and step back from our bondings with others. This involves becoming aware of our primary selves as only a part of us and not as all of who we are. And it means developing an ego that can be aware of the totality of our being.

You can work on your bonding patterns using Voice Dialogue either individually or as a couple. Being facilitated individually will give you an understanding of yourself and will help you to understand your role in your relationships with others. If you are interested in working on your relationship as a couple, you can both participate in a Voice Dialogue session with a facilitator and together work on your bonding patterns using this technique. Both options will be invaluable for your relationships.

(The type of ego referred to above is called an Aware Ego. An Aware Ego allows us to acknowledge our Vulnerable Child and to see what our disowned selves are. What is usually referred to as the ego in traditional psychology is in most cases a primary self. An Aware Ego can separate from a primary self and is able to embrace opposite selves. For more information about the Aware Ego go to the What is Voice Dialogue page.