Most of us would love to be able to relate with our intimate partner or close friends with deep compassion, understanding, temperate emotions, and the ability to maintain the flow of love in spite of disturbance, misunderstanding, conflict, or disconnection.
But that doesn’t take into account that we usually bring with us into any significant relationship, a host of emotional baggage that can easily get triggered.
Once, triggered, we may react in ways that do not fit with the loving, compassionate, and caring image that we may have about ourselves.
We can even have habits of aggressive or distancing behavior toward those close to us that don’t even need to be triggered. They can happen automatically and often unconsciously.
There is a place inside most of us that carries so much shame, humiliation, and sense of impotence and helplessness that when these feelings are triggered, it feels insufferable to tolerate and we want to retaliate.
When Max senses that his girlfriend, Mary, becomes clinging and demanding, he cuts off without saying anything and often does not talk to her for several days. It reminds him of his intrusive and overbearing mother and he feels enraged that Mary can be so insensitive of his need for space that he thinks it is fully justified to behave the way he does.
It is hard for him to see that the intensity of his reaction is coming from the rage for feeling so helpless to defend himself against his mother’s constant intrusions. He wants to punish Mary and all women. But, as is usually the case, Mary has her own rage/revenge story.
When she senses Max pulling away even if it comes from his needing to put more time into work, she becomes infuriated, rages at him for being disconnected, unavailable, and closed. It reminds her, unconsciously, of her father who was absent and unemotional and her unpredictable, suicidal mother.
Louisa was sexually abused by her father. As a beautiful woman, she easily can attract men. She keeps her relationships on a superficial sexual level because she is confident in her sexuality but scared to go deeper with a man because she doesn’t feel safe to be vulnerable with them. If a man does not live up to her expectations of being confident and experienced sexually, she shames them as collapsed, and not “man enough for her” and moves on. It is hard for her to see that this behavior is motivated by her desire to take revenge on men for what happened with her father.