Maggie's Farm

I have been working on ways of talking about personality traits and relationships which avoid all psychobabble, fancy convoluted theorizing, and obscure terminology and latinate or greekified jargon. That means trying to invent better, more intuitive, metaphors. This is just a first draft to help get me thinking about what it is I really want to say -

For 40 or 50 years, Psychiatry and especially Psychoanalysis has tended to view the formation of a person - their pathology and their normality - as being founded in their relationships during development. I do not agree with that premise.

However, as a shrink I am naturally interested in peoples' relationships. It's one of the main topics I listen to, and it is one of the main arenas in which people live out their personality tendencies, for better or worse.

A patient of mine, 59 years old, was married at 21 to his high school sweetheart on their college graduation. He comes to me because he has let himself fall in love with a younger co-worker in his office, and feels torn up with the conflicts. So torn up that he cannot work or concentrate. He is an entrepreneur and has built a series of multi-million dollar businesses during his life, some successful, some not.

Naturally, I inquire about his marriage. A picture gradually forms in my mind of a relationship which is frozen in the past. Two young folks, mad about each other, created a romantic relationship template - their manner of relating and interacting at the time - which has neither changed or grown much since then except, of course, a marked cooling of the passion. Meanwhile, everything else in life has changed: raising kids, financial ups and downs, deaths of parents, new activities and new friends and relationships, etc.

The relationship model that worked at 20 didn't do much at 59, but they unwittingly clung to the original template they had formed early on.

Everybody has had the experience of seeing an old friend after many years, and thinking "Gee, we picked up just where we left off ten years ago." Or, even more commonly, "I feel a bit like a 14 year-old or a 16 year-old when I spend time with my parents."

It's neither a good nor a bad thing; it's just a fact that we have a limited number of relationship templates on hand to apply to our different sorts of relationships, and we tend to keep using the same ones.

Often, in Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, this is termed "transference." I just call it recycling of old templates. Mental efficiency, however imperfect.

Sometimes we are forced to form new ones, regardless of our age. Getting a new sibling requires a new one (an evil and unwelcome interloper), becoming a parent requires new ones, as does becoming a grandparent or an in-law. New love relationships sometimes do, but more often tend to draw on past templates, modified a bit, and superimposed on a new relationship. Even a new house dog demands a new template (unless one imposes one of one's human templates on the relationship - as I do. I seem to use my "toddler" template for dogs.).

Sometimes we do things on purpose to create new, more mature or more satisfying templates for our arsenal, or to adjust old ones (relationship templates have wiggle room on the edges). That's one of the purposes of marriage encounter, marital therapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, etc. Much of what can feel sterile in relationships is our clinging to old templates - clinging for comfort and familiarity.

People usually form new relationships on their pre-existing templates, and the lack of perfect "fit" of mental template to reality is what makes for all the fun and challenge and mess. (You can generalize that metaphor to lots of things in life...most of what we do and how we do it is from an existing pattern.)

Humans stick to their patterns most of the time - creatures of habit - and usually prefer venturing outside of them (adventure) to a limited extent - just enough to keep it interesting, depending on where one falls on the timidity-recklessness spectrum.

More later about what our templates are made of...