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Authors: Ph.D Harville Hendrix

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IN SHARP CONTRAST to the new brain, you are unaware of most of the functions of your old brain. Trying to comprehend this part of your being is a maddening task, because you have to turn your conscious mind around to examine its own underbelly. Scientists who have subjected the old brain to this kind of scrutiny tell us that its main concern is self-preservation. Ever on the alert, the old brain constantly asks the primeval question: “Is it safe?”
As it goes about its job of ensuring your safety, your old brain operates in a fundamentally different manner from your new brain. One of the crucial differences is that the old brain appears to have only a hazy awareness of the external world. Unlike the new brain, which relies on direct perception of outside phenomena, the old brain derives its incoming data from the images, symbols, and thoughts produced by the new brain.
This reduces its data to very broad categories. For example, while your new brain easily distinguishes John from Suzy from Margaret, your old brain summarily lumps these people into six basic categories. The only thing your old brain seems to care about is whether a particular person is someone to: (1) nurture, (2) be nurtured by, (3) have sex with, (4) run away from, (5) submit to, or (6) attack.
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Subtleties such as “this is my neighbor,” “my cousin,” “my mother,” or “my wife” slide right on by.
The old brain and the new brain, different in so many ways, are constantly exchanging and interpreting information. Here is how this takes place. Let’s suppose that you are alone in your house, and all of a sudden, person A walks through the door. Your new brain automatically creates an image of this creature and sends it to your old brain for scrutiny. The old brain receives the image and compares it with other, stored images. Instantly there is a first observation: “This humanoid is not a stranger.” Apparently encounters with this creature have been recorded before. A millisecond later there is a second observation: “There are no dangerous episodes associated with this image.” Out of all the interactions you have had with this mystery guest, none of them has been life-threatening. Then, rapidly, a third observation: “There have been numerous
pleasurable
episodes associated with this image.” In fact, the records seem to suggest that A is someone who is nurturing. Having reached this conclusion, the limbic system sends an all-clear signal to the reptilian brain, and you find yourself walking toward the intruder with open arms. Operating out of your new brain, you say, “Aunt Mary! What a pleasure to see you!”
All of this has taken place outside your awareness in only a fraction of a second. To your conscious mind, all that has happened is that your beloved Aunt Mary has walked in the door. Meanwhile, as you visit with your aunt, the data-gathering process continues. This latest encounter produces more thoughts, emotions, and images, which are sent to the limbic system to be
stored in the part of the brain reserved for Aunt Mary. These new data will be a part of the information scanned by the old brain the next time she comes to visit.
Let’s look at a slightly different situation. Let’s suppose that the person who walked in the door was not Aunt Mary but her sister, Aunt Carol, and instead of greeting her with open arms, you found yourself resenting the interruption. Why such a different reaction to these two sisters? Let’s pretend that when you were eighteen months old you spent a week with Aunt Carol while your mother was in the hospital having another baby. Your parents, trying to prepare you in advance for this visit, explained to you that “Mommy is going bye-bye to the hospital to bring home a little brother or sister.” The words “hospital,” “brother,” and “sister” had no meaning to you, but “Mommy” and “bye-bye” certainly did. Whenever they mentioned those two words together, you felt anxious and sucked your thumb. Weeks later, when your mother went into labor, you were lifted out of your crib in a sound sleep and transported to Aunt Carol’s house. You woke up alone in a strange room, and the person who came to you when you cried was not your mother or father but Aunt Carol.
You dwelled in anxiety for the next few days. Even though Aunt Carol was loving and kind to you, you felt abandoned. This primal fear became associated with your aunt, and for years the sight of her or the smell of her perfume sent you running from the room. In later years you had many pleasurable or neutral experiences with Aunt Carol; nonetheless, thirty years later, when she walks into the room, you feel the urge to run away. It is only with great discipline that you rise to greet her.
THIS STORY ILLUSTRATES an important principle about the old brain: it has no sense of linear time. Today, tomorrow, and
yesterday do not exist; everything that was, still is. Understanding this basic fact about the nature of your unconscious may help explain why you sometimes have feelings within your relationship that seem alarmingly out of proportion to the events that triggered them. For example, imagine that you are a thirty-five-year-old woman, a lawyer in a prestigious firm. One day you are sitting in your office thinking warm, loving thoughts about your husband and decide to call him. You dial his number, and his secretary informs you that he is out of the office and can’t be reached. Suddenly your loving thoughts vanish, and you feel a surge of anxiety: where is he? Your rational mind knows that he’s probably calling on a client or enjoying a late lunch, but another part of you feels—let’s be honest—abandoned. There you are, a sophisticated, capable woman, and just because your husband isn’t available you feel as vulnerable as you did when your mother left you all day with an unfamiliar babysitter. Your old brain is locked in an archaic perspective.
Or let’s suppose that you are a middle-aged man, a middle manager in a large company. After a hectic day at work, where you manage to placate important clients and put the finishing touches on a multimillion-dollar budget, you drive home, eager to share your successes with your partner. When you walk in the door, you see a note from your partner saying that she will be late coming home from work. You stop dead in your tracks. You had counted on her being there! Do you recover from the disappointment and relish the time to yourself? Do you use the time to do a final check on the budget? Yes. But not before you head straight for the freezer and consume two bowlfuls of bland, sweet vanilla ice cream, as close a substitute for mother’s milk as you can possibly find. The past and the present live side by side within your mind.
Now that we’ve spent some time pondering the nature of the unconscious mind, let’s return to our original discussion of mate selection. How does this information about the old brain
add to our understanding of romantic attraction? The curious phenomenon I noted earlier in this exploration was that we seem to be
highly selective
in our choice of mates. In fact, we appear to be searching for a “one and only” with a very specific set of positive and negative traits.
What we are doing, I have discovered from years of theoretical research and clinical observation, is looking for someone who has the predominant character traits of the people who raised us. Our old brain, trapped in the eternal now and having only a dim awareness of the outside world, is trying to re-create the environment of childhood. And the reason the old brain is trying to resurrect the past is not a matter of habit or blind compulsion but of a compelling need to heal old childhood wounds.
The ultimate reason you fell in love with your mate, I am suggesting, is not that your mate was young and beautiful, had an impressive job, had a “point value” equal to yours, or had a kind disposition. You fell in love because your old brain had your partner confused with your parents! Your old brain believed that it had finally found the ideal candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional damage you experienced in childhood.
CHILDHOOD WOUNDS
Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
WHEN YOU HEAR the words “psychological and emotional damage of childhood,” you may immediately think about serious childhood traumas such as sexual or physical abuse or the suffering that comes from having parents who divorced or died or were alcoholics. And for many people this is the tragic reality of childhood. However, even if you were fortunate enough to grow up in a safe, nurturing environment, you still bear invisible scars from childhood, because from the very moment you were born you were a complex, dependent creature with a never-ending cycle of needs. Freud correctly labeled us “insatiable beings.” And no parents, no matter how devoted, are able to respond perfectly to all of these changing needs.
Before we explore some of the subtler ways in which you may have been wounded and how this affects your love relationships, let’s take a look at what you were like when you first
came into the world, because this state of “original wholeness” contains an important clue to the hidden expectations you bring to your partner.
THERE HAVE BEEN no miracle babies born with the ability to reveal to us the dark mysteries of life before birth, but we do know something about the physical life of the fetus. We know that its biological needs are taken care of instantly and automatically by an exchange of fluids between it and its mother. We know that a fetus has no need to eat, breathe, or protect itself from danger, and that it is constantly soothed by the rhythmical beat of its mother’s heart. From these simple biological facts and from observations of newborns, we can surmise that the fetus lives a tranquil, floating, effortless existence. It has no awareness of boundaries, no sense of itself, and no recognition that it is encased in a sac inside its mother. There is a widely held belief that when a baby is inside its mother’s womb, it experiences a sense of oneness, an Edenic experience free from desire. Martin Buber, a Jewish theologian, put it this way: “in fetal existence, we were in communion with the universe.”
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This idyllic existence comes to an abrupt end as the mother’s contractions forcibly expel the baby from the womb. But for the first few months, a developmental stage called the “autistic period,” the baby still makes no distinction between itself and the rest of the world.
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Early in the second year of our marriage, Helen and I became parents again, and we have clear memories of when our daughter Leah was in this stage. When all her physical needs were taken care of, she would nestle in our arms and look around her with the contentment of Buddha. Like all babies, she had no awareness of herself as a separate being and no internal divisions between thoughts, feelings, and actions. To our eyes, she was experiencing a primitive spirituality, a
universe without boundaries. Although she was immature and utterly dependent on Helen and me for survival, she was nonetheless a vital, complete human being—in some ways more entire than she would ever be again.
As adults, we seem to have a fleeting memory of this state of original wholeness, a sensation that is as hard to recapture as a dream. We seem to recall a distant time when we were more unified and connected to the world. This feeling is described over and over again in the myths of all cultures, as if words could lend it more reality. It is the story of the Garden of Eden, and it strikes us with compelling force.
But what does this have to do with marriage? For some reason, we enter marriage with the expectation that our partners will magically restore this feeling of wholeness. It is as if they hold the key to a long-ago kingdom, and all we have to do is persuade them to unlock the door. Their failure to do so is one of the main reasons for our eventual unhappiness.
THE FEELING OF unity that a child experiences in the womb and in the first few months of life gradually fades, giving way to a drive to be a distinct self. The essential state of unity remains, but there is a glimmer of awareness of the external world. It is during this stage of development that the child makes the monumental discovery that its mother, the gentle giant who holds it and feeds it and makes such comforting sounds, is not always there. The child still feels connected to its mother but has a primitive awareness of self.
When babies are in this symbiotic stage, development psychologists tell us that they experience a yearning to be connected with their caretakers. They label this the drive for attachment. The child’s life energy is directed outward toward the mother in an effort to recapture its earlier sense of physical and spiritual
union. A term that describes this yearning is “eros,” a Greek word that we normally equate with romantic or sexual love but that originally had the broader meaning of “the life force.”
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A child’s success at feeling both distinct from and connected to its mother has a profound impact on all later relationships. If the child is fortunate, he will be able to make clear distinctions between himself and other people but still feel connected to them; he will have fluid boundaries that he can open or close at will. A child who has painful experiences early in life will either feel cut off from those around him or will attempt to fuse with them, not knowing where he leaves off and others begin. This lack of firm boundaries will be a recurring problem in marriage.
As a child grows older, eros is directed not only to the mother but also to the father, siblings, and the world as a whole. I remember when my daughter Leah was three years old and wanted to explore everything around her. She had so much vitality that she could run all day long and not be tired. “Run with me, Daddy! Somersault!” She twirled in circles and got so dizzy that she would fall down and laugh and laugh. She would chase fireflies, talk to leaves, swing from her knees on the monkey bars, and pet every dog she saw. Like Adam, she enjoyed naming objects, and developed a keen ear for words. When I looked at Leah, I saw eros, the full pulsation of life. I envied her and yearned for what I had lost.
Helen and I strive to keep eros alive in Leah, to sustain the brightness of her eyes and the thrill of her contagious laughter. But, despite our best intentions, we do not meet all of her needs. Sometimes it seems as if life itself is making her turn inward. Once she was frightened by a large dog and learned to be wary of strange animals. One day she slipped in a pool and developed a fear of water. But sometimes Helen and I are more directly to blame. We have five other children besides Leah, and there are times when she feels left out. There are days when
we come home from work too tired to listen to what she is saying, too distracted to understand what she wants. Tragically, we also wound her by unwittingly passing on our own childhood wounds, the emotional inheritance of generations. We either overcompensate for what we didn’t get from our parents or blindly re-create the same painful situations.
For whatever reasons, when Leah’s desires are not satisfied a questioning look comes over her face; she cries; she is afraid. She no longer talks to leaves or notices the fireflies darting about the bushes. Eros is blunted and turns in on itself.
LEAH’S STORY IS my story and your story. We all started out life whole and vital, eager for life’s adventures, but we had a perilous pilgrimage through childhood. To one degree or another, we were all wounded by our caretakers’ intrusiveness or neglect. In fact, some of that wounding took place in the first few months of our lives. Think for a moment about the ceaseless demands of an infant. When an infant wakes up in the morning, it cries to be fed. Then its diapers are wet and it cries to be changed. Then the baby wants to be held, a physical craving as powerful as its need for food. Then the baby is hungry again and once more cries to be fed. A bubble of gas forms in its stomach, and the baby cries out in anguish. It signals distress the only way it knows how—with an undifferentiated cry—and if its caretakers are perceptive enough, the infant is fed, changed, held, or rocked, and experiences momentary satisfaction. But if the caretakers can’t figure out what is wrong, or if they withhold their attentions for fear of spoiling the baby, the child experiences a primitive anxiety: the world is not a safe place. Since it has no way of taking care of itself and no sense of delayed gratification, it believes that getting the outside world
to respond instantly to its needs is truly a matter of life and death.
Although you and I have no recollection of these first few months of life, our old brains are still trapped in an infantile perspective. Although we are now adults, capable of keeping ourselves fed and warm and dry, a hidden part of us still expects the outside world to take care of us. When our partners are hostile or merely unhelpful, a silent alarm is triggered deep in our brains that fills us with the fear of death. As you will soon see, this automatic alarm system plays a key role in intimate love relationships.
As a child grows out of infancy, new needs emerge, and each new need defines a potential area of wounding. When a baby is about eighteen months old, for example, it has a clearer sense of where it leaves off and others begin. This is a stage of development referred to as the stage of “autonomy and independence.” In this period the child has a growing interest in exploring the world beyond its primary caretaker. If a toddler had an adult’s command of language, he would say something like this: “I’m ready to spend some time off your lap now. I’m ready to let go of the nipple and wander away by myself. I’m a little insecure about leaving you, however, and I’ll be back in a few minutes to make sure you haven’t disappeared.” But since the child has only a limited vocabulary, he simply climbs down from his mother’s lap, turns his back, and toddles out of the room.
Now, ideally, the mother smiles and says something like this: “Bye, sweetie. Have a good time. I’ll be right here when you need me.” And when the toddler comes back a few minutes later, suddenly aware of how dependent he really is, his mother says, “Hi! Did you have fun? Come sit in my lap for a minute.” She lets the child know that it is OK to leave her side and venture off on his own, yet she is available whenever he needs her. The little boy learns that the world is a safe, exciting place to explore.
MANY CHILDREN ARE frustrated at this crucial stage of development. Some have a caretaker who thwarts their independence. The mother or father is the one who feels insecure when the child is out of sight, not the child. For some reason—one that is rooted in the parent’s own childhood—the parent needs the child to remain dependent. When a little girl wanders out of the room, her insecure mother might call out, “Don’t go into the next room! You might get hurt!” The child dutifully comes back to her mother’s lap. But inside her shell of conformity she is afraid. Her inner drive for autonomy is being denied. She fears that, if she always comes running back to her mother, she will be engulfed; she will be trapped in a symbiotic union forever.
Without the child’s knowing it, this fear of engulfment becomes a key part of her character, and in later years she becomes what I call an “isolater,” a person who unconsciously pushes others away. She keeps people at a distance because she needs to have “a lot of space” around her; she wants the freedom to come and go as she pleases; she doesn’t want to be “pinned down” to a single relationship. All the while underneath this cool exterior is a two-year-old girl who was not allowed to satisfy her natural need for independence. When she marries, her need to be a distinct “self” will be on the top of her hidden agenda.
Some children grow up with the opposite kind of parents, ones who push them away when they come running to them for comfort: “Go away, I’m busy.” “Go play with your toys.” “Stop clinging to me!” The caretakers are not equipped to handle any needs but their own, and their children grow up feeling emotionally abandoned. Eventually they grow up to become what I call “fusers,” people who seem to have an insatiable need for
closeness. Fusers want to “do things together” all the time. If people fail to show up at the appointed time, they feel abandoned. The thought of divorce fills them with terror. They crave physical affection and reassurance, and they often need to stay in constant verbal contact. Underneath all this clinging behavior is a young child who needed more time on a parent’s lap.
Ironically, for reasons I will explore in later chapters, fusers and isolaters tend to grow up and marry each other, thus beginning an infuriating game of push and pull that leaves neither partner satisfied.
 
AS YOU JOURNEYED through childhood, you went through one developmental stage after another, and the way your caretakers responded to your changing needs greatly affected your emotional health. More than likely, they coped with one stage of your growth better than another. They may have taken excellent care of you when you were an infant, for example, but fallen apart at your first temper tantrum. Or they may have been delighted by your inquisitive nature as a toddler but been threatened by your attraction to your opposite-sex parent when you were five or six. You may have grown up with caretakers who met most of your needs, or only some of them, but, like all children, you grew up knowing the anguish of unmet needs and these needs followed you into your love relationships.

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