The beloved as mirror: recognizing that which you admire about your partner within yourself

By Isa Gucciardi

I often hear from clients who are working on a relationship with a life partner that one of the things that drew them to their partner has now become the cause of their problems:

"I always admired how personable Jake is and how easily he makes friends. But now all of my friends are through him and through our relationship and I don't have friends who share my interests." Or "Personally, I can't even balance a checkbook but Susan has always been great with finances. But now she makes all the household decisions about money and I have no say." Or "Jonathan is so talented and I used to enjoy riding his coattails but I want to do more with my life than support him in his career and be his audience all the time. But his work does support the family." Etc.

When this kind of relationship dissatisfaction arises it is actually great news, as it contains rich potential for positive transformation. It would be possible for me to engage partners in a series of negotiations around their fairly evident interpersonal power dynamics—so that, for instance, Susan can still manage the finances but her partner (let's call him Rich) has some say and feels better. To take this approach alone, however, would be to ignore something very important: The relationship issue has something to teach both Susan and Rich about themselves that will help them grow and potentially have an even more satisfying relationship than could be achieved by simply resolving the surface issue.

Rich may have admired Susan for knowing how to do something that he was not good at, but over the years he abdicated all responsibility for himself in this area and then found Susan making all the decisions. Eventually, when Rich can't stand Susan deciding what he spends money on, he must learn to manage his own money. He can ask Susan for help and advice in this area, but he is responsible and ultimately he is a more whole person.

There is nothing wrong with asking someone to take care of you. There is something wrong with asking someone to take care of some aspect of yourself that you are not willing to take care of. When you take responsibility and do whatever is needed to fill any place within yourself where you feel like you need caregiving, then you are in a position to receive care and assistance from another person without being dependent on that care. The result is a relationship where giving and receiving are not open to domination and manipulation dynamics because one cannot withhold from another in order to gain power and one cannot flood the other in order to gain power.

Most of us come from birth families where there were manipulations and power imbalances and we made deals with ourselves and closed off parts of ourselves in order to survive the situation. Later relationship dynamics actually help us correct these things. So problems in relationships later in life are a good thing. They help us go back and re-pattern these things and understand how we have moved away from our deeper selves and universal flow.

FEEDBACK: CLICK HERE to email comments and feedback. Please note the title of the article or the author's name. Include your own name or type "name withheld" by request. Thoughtful responses will be published in our next edition.