Why We Pick The Mates We Do, Our Unconscious Match Maker
Anne Teachworth has a book, Why We Pick The Mates We Do; also, Youtube videos explaining how to use her book's self-assessment form. Her system offers deep insight into the unconscious patterns leading us to repeat unresolved dysfunctional intimacies.
These patterns are in part genetic patterns. However, the healing of any patterns you wish to upgrade are achieved primarily by:
- Willingness to heal,
- conscious choice and
- understanding.
Q: Where does my Unconscious Match Maker come from?
A: Our first three years of life.
Why? Because we ignore and discount the reality of our own early experiences, age 0-3.
Language and thinking have yet to get in the way. The emotional life of the very young child is most powerful; it's kinesthetic and sensory experiences are paramount, all they have to work with.
Our early feeling-sensory experiences are many times more powerful than any later rational experiences, after puberty, from the neck up.
Conscious waking Self likes to forget our earliest experiences and habits can be a driving force in some areas of our life. Why? Because conscious waking self has so little control over these drives directly.
If I ask you, "What is your reference point for greatest intimacy in your life?" it turns out this is a trick question. Unless you can remember back to age 1, 2, 3--and few can--you won't be able to recall what were probably your peak high and worst relationship experiences.
Our later memories or relationship wins and losses as teens, etc, overlay our earlier memories. They are more cognitive we understand them better than our pre-verbal memories, right?
Our post-verbal memories of successful intimacy-marriage are only one of several layers, several "operating systems" for intimacy and marriage active in our Habit Body.
To our child within, to our Habit Body, to who we were birth to age three, the love we felt; or the loneliness and neglect we felt--are many times more powerful-influential than loves and losses later in life, strange as this may sound.
This is why in Healing Toolbox we talk so much about the Habit Body. It's estimated by at least two psychologists we learn 95% of all our habits in our first three years of life.
We acknowledge this later in life only in speech accents. Ways of saying words we learned as child, before age three, are quite difficult to become aware of and change. These are so deep, a speech coach is required to change a British accent to an American one or vice versa, as any actor can tell you.
What is your "accent" when it comes to dating and looking for a marriage partner?
The subconscious and unconscious world we lived in between birth and age three, was focussed on adult caregivers. As infants, we get most of our needs met thru adults. Ideally, not until around age five are we autonomous to separate from our mother and go to kindergarten.
Our emotional "goods" and "bads," "wins" and "losses" will never be stronger or more powerful than in our first three years. Out mind has not yet arrived to get in the way of what we feel.
Before language and thinking get in the way, our emotional life and relationships with adult caregivers is many times more powerful than any relationships later in life, strange as this may sound.
Second, the very young child does not have many relationships to work with or compare. It's relationships begin and end with Mom and Dad. How Mom and Dad do--and do not--get along is a matter of physical survival to us; this is by design. What was working between Mom and Dad was joy for us. What wasn't working between Mom and Dad was hell for us. Later in life our child within remembers the goods and feels early un-met needs as still active and unresolved.
It's challenging for all of us, myself included, to pick partners based on who is beneficial for me now. Mostly we are picking partners who re-stimulate our "wins," "losses" and roles we saw acted out when Mommy and Daddy were "playing house."
Anne suggests each of us, unconsciously, reinvent our early family pattern of belonging--no matter how dysfunctional. Why? Because our unconscious Habit Body holds our strongest feelings of belonging and rejection, even if conscious self has forgotten these.
Ann's counseling program facilitates resolutions to intimate relationship problems between couples. Part of this is done by family archeology, uncovering trans-generational patterns. This is her approach to couples and parenting therapy.
Anne's ideas are related to Transactional Analysis, especially Scripts People Live, which Anne has a strong background in. Anne also has strong background in Gestalt and NLP and has taught together with Richard Bandler on relationship issues.
Q: I was raised an orphan in an orphanage.
A: Think experiences with caregivers—good and bad—between birth to age three.
After age three we will never have more powerful experiences of being cared for and loved; nor, of how a man and a woman do or do not cooperate in giving us care.
When later, as adults, we wish to marry, our unconscious wishes to feel again the feelings it felt age three or younger, or improve upon them.
No other internal reference point or later reference point for intimacy will or could ever be stronger. All other, newer learning about intimacy and compatibility—from the neck up—can’t match the intense, non-verbal, archetypal experiences we had before most language developed. Archetypes perceived by us between birth and three are hard to replace with lesser impressions.
When as an adult we look for a partner--left unmonitored--our unconscious wants to reproduce the intense feelings of safety and intimacy, it had as an infant, between birth and three years old. This is our Unconscious match-Maker.
“What I want in a spouse…” becomes in the unconscious, “I want to reproduce and feel again, the intimacy and belonging I felt when I was very young." What we need then is a partner who will play one of the two roles of mommy or daddy; while, I play the other role of mommy or daddy. Then we re-create the possibility of feeling what we felt back then.” This is our Unconscious match-Maker. Who's in charge, you or it?
Playing House together
Anne Teachworth suggests adult-mate-choosing is highly colored by unconscious desire to find a suitable “playmate” to role-play one of the two parental roles from age 0-3, while we ourselves play the complementary role. Our unconscious is willing to "play house" with any partner who will play either one of the two roles.
This behavior is visible in pre-school and kindergarten in how four and five year olds play house together. Two boys may play mommy and daddy, two girls may play mommy and daddy, boys may play mommy, girls may play daddy. This is how it is in our unconscious. These patterns are overlaid by later experience yet can remain very active as well.
Why do I keep marrying the same person?
Original to Anne is the observation, reported by multiple clients of Anne's, in her book, how in a sequence of marriages, the same adult can go back and forth between the role their father played 0-3 and the role their mother played 0-3.
Anne offers much insight into the commonly observed pattern of the same man or woman, in multiple marriages, choosing “the same partner.” She modifies this to say: our unconscious wants to play either one of two parental roles learned in 0-3 years. As adults our unconscious uses these TWO reference points, two roles, it thinks "two."
The suggestion is our early unconscious absorbs habits, behaviors, roles and patterns equally from BOTH parental roles, no matter how dysfunctional one or both are now "in the light of day."
The relationship observations forming the basis of Psychogenetics were first described by Teachworth in her chapter "Three Couples Transformed" in Bud Feder and Ruth Ronall's ''A Living Legacy of Fritz and Laura Perls: Contemporary Case Studies'' (1997). Anne’s counseling method for this is described in depth in, ''Why We Pick The Mates We Do'', first published in 1997, now in its Seventh edition, revised in 2007.
Counseling sessions focus on uncovery of the early parent roles by way of guided self-analysis. The goal is realigning unconscious memories of parent relationships demonstrated by each partner's actual parents in early childhood.
Genetic aspect
Also in Psychogenetics is the idea not only are mommy's and daddy's relationship style and habits imprinted on our unconscious; it's also possible and observable, to find the mommy-daddy habits of earlier family generations imprinted on an individual's unconscious. This wisdom is also active in Family Constellation Therapy.
Psychogenetics theory references and incorporates several complex, now-academic 20th century psychological jargons; such as, hidden Introjected Interactional Patterns (IIPs). These appear non-essential to the thrust of the theory and observations above.
Anne’s printed chart-template-guide and videos how to use it
Anne’s book makes all the above more clear. A poorly edited intro video is here. Skip to minute 5:30 and watch to 7:10 to get a taste of her insight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zziOdW_-PB4
About halfway thru the book is a complex paper form permitting deeper more detailed self-healing. Neither I nor a friend could figure out how to do the form from reading the book. Fortunately five videos exist from a class, where she explains how to fill out the form. The Psychogenetic System PART 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yj2BDgOYFv0&list=PL3IQB63AI3DqAHxa6jw-X1NMpk036yg6h
The videos are a relaxed, precise walkthrough of how to use the pencil-paper exercise from the book. Instructions here are 100 times more clear than the book.
To Learn More
While much else from Gestalt and Transactional Analysis has been subsumed into NLP, muscle testing and spiritual topics, this legacy of early Gestalt and TA activity has NOT dated nor been duplicated, to my knowledge.
* Anne Teachworth. (1997) ''Why We Pick The Mates We Do''. Gestalt Institute Press. ISBN 1-889968-53-6
* Bud Feder and Ruth Ronall. (1997) ''A Living Legacy of Fritz and Laura Perls: Contemporary Case Studies''. Bud Feder Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9663109-0-0
Threes Selves version
From the neck up, the conscious waking self, our rational “light of day” part, wants to pick mates who are beneficial for and compatible with us.
But our habit body, from the neck down, is the one who assess “chemistry” and says Yes or No. Hence our conflicts between head and heart in picking mates. Our unconscious is much more likely to pick a mate recreating the unresolved relational disturbances of our mother and father. You can see this role-playing behavior, surfacing unresolved drama, when four and five year olds play house together with props.
If you read up on George Kelly and Rudolf Dreikurs, from the 1950s, our naive scientist, our child within, shops and hunts for a mate very much like the producer of a play hunts for an actor or an actress to play a part. We know we ourselves can play one role, mommy or daddy. We simply need someone to play the other role.
If your Unconscious Match Maker is urging you towards a partner you know is trouble for you, who represents “drama,” this is your unconscious trying to cast the other role in what you saw of family and intimacy between birth and three.
Reviewer Health Intuitive Bruce Dickson can be found at http://www.healingtoolbox.org He writes on Best Practices in Energy Medicine and Self-Healing (20 books) available http://www.amazon.com/Bruce-Dickson-MSS/e/B007SNVG46
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