by Celia Coates

In the last WINN, the one about love and the meaning of life, I wrote that we need to begin with loving ourselves and that that would be a subject for a future post. It surprised me when the future arrived quickly and became this week and this post. I’ve been clearing out boxes of old papers and notebooks and came across an idea from the 1980s that might be useful now. Although it is only a small start, it is a place to begin.

What I found in one of those boxes is an exercise that I learned from Chuck Simpkinson, a generous friend and skilled therapist. It had been created by another psychotherapist, a woman who practiced in Maryland, but I never learned her name. (If you happen to know who she was, please let me know.) We learn about love  – about loving ourselves and loving others  – from the people around us when we are young. Most importantly, we learn from observing our parents and experiencing how they relate to each other. We don’t realize how early the guidelines are drawn in our own lives as we reach conclusions about love, conclusions that usually remain unconscious.

Sometimes this quick and seemingly simple exercise can reveal our old, basic decisions about loving. You can use this as a short thought exercise just filling in the blanks mentally, but it might be more useful to find a pen and some paper and take 15 minutes to write a few things down.
Please do not over-think it – quick responses, or even guesses, can be most useful.

To begin, find a piece of 9 x 12 paper and fold it in half lengthwise. Holding it horizontally, open it up and across the top write the words  –

“Mother”       then      “Response”      then      “Conclusion”

On the lower half of the piece of paper, do the same with

“Father” and “Response” and “Conclusion”.

You will now have six “zones” in which to write your answers to three questions, one zone at a time.

Under the heading Mother ask yourself what your mother was like and quickly write several words that describe her.
Then move down to the lower half of the paper and think about your Father and write several words to describe him.

Return to the top of the page and under Response, first for your mother and then for your father, jot down how each of them responded to what their partner was like. (These were the days when marriages included only “husbands” and “wives.”) How did this husband (your father) relate to this wife (your mother)? How did they treat each other? How did your mother love your father? How did he love her? Did you feel that they appreciated each other? How did they manage the issues of power and security and intimacy? Where did children fit in their relationship? Was there appropriate separation between the roles of parent and child?
Just sketch in your first impressions. This is not the time for an in-depth analysis.

For these two questions, for example, this is what was written down by someone on one of the pages I found:
Under Mother they wrote: intense, anxious, loving, lost, searching, and dependent.
And under Father: gregarious, curious, inappropriate, manipulative, generous, and fickle.
Under Response this person wrote that the mother treated her husband fairly well, and the same was true for how the father treated his wife. This is rare. The marriage was summed up as fun and vibrant but distant and fake, superficial, and disconnected.

For the third zone, Conclusion (at the right hand side of the page), jot down your thoughts (under both Mother and Father) about the lessons you learned from observing these two people and their relationship. You may not have realized that you had come to any conclusions, that you had taught yourself to make life choices based on what you saw with the ways your parents lived their lives. But especially if unrecognized – unconscious – this was formative for you.

In doing the exercise the person who saw that their parents had a vibrant but shallow relationship, realized they had decided while young to find a partner who was genuine and capable of true intimacy. (This person had felt loved by their parents – they were fortunate that there was no major difficulty in loving themselves.) It is unusual to have a single “conclusion” as this person did. Most people come to separate conclusions from having observed how their mother and their father dealt with love. Then we create a hybrid conclusion created from their behavior with each other and the nature of their partnership. Another person decided from observing their mother that they did not want to be near anyone who had a bad temper, and from their father that one partner had to be the giver and peace-maker.

This has been a chance for a very brief exploration of what you learned about loving and being loved early in your life. This short and simple quick sketch might reveal other questions you want to explore further at some other time, in some other way. And, if you did not grow up in this standard form of family, perhaps you can adapt the questions to fit the significant people who were in your life.

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The fractal image that leads this post is from Pixabay and pinterest.com

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