Unlearning Through Relationships
There are some things I want to mention right off the bat. Relationships aren't necessarily designed to teach us lessons. Their primary purpose isn't to be one more classroom we have to navigate. They don't need to be a means to an end, nor do they need to be karmic, deeply spiritual, or the key which unlocks our path in life. Relationships can be the way we create a home and a life we deserve. Rather than be a challenge, they can be the support we need so we can meet all the other challenges we face in the world. They can be sweet, light, and joyful or rich, tapestried and strong. They can be short or long, committed or casual and everything in between.
So, what I'm going to be talking about isn't a description of every relationship nor necessarily how we should look at, look for, or engage with relationships. However, learning and unlearning through relationships is so very common, it's worth discussing both these variations so we can better understand the process.
Life is experiential so entering into a relationship with another person is going to cause us to learn and become automatically. This is part of the attraction we have in the romantic phase. We are learning much in the same way we did as infants, taking in every little detail with wonder as if we're a sponge while at the same time feeling the intimate joy of being fully seen and loved for who we are. In the next phase we tease people about all the slightly uncomfortable learning we do when we get closer or move in with the other person. There will be behaviors of our beloved which are different from our own or annoying or awkward and we need to learn to adjust as do they.
However, relationships are best known for holding up a mirror to us. They reflect back to us who we are, warts and all, and challenge us to be different. This can happen in positive ways, which in no way implies they are gentle or licked on by kittens. Even positive change can be dramatic, alchemical, and revolutionary. Change is hard and hard is hard so, good-bad-or-indifferent, having to go through the transformation of self we call "growth" using relationship as the catalyst is not for the faint of heart.
These changes can also happen in neutral or negative ways. The fastest way to find out who you truly are is to be put in a difficult, challenging, or even dangerous situation. These liminal moments strip away all of the social niceties, the things we have done to protect ourselves or others, the excuses and the rationalizations. This is why it's called "The Naked Truth" because these are times we're exposed, if only to ourselves.
But however the journey, we end up discovering new things about ourselves. Engaging with these discoveries, whether to accept or deny them, transforms us and moves us forward in our becoming. This is what most people mean when they talk about "What I learned" from a given relationship, mostly after it has ended. It's the silver lining to the situation or the redeeming factor in what otherwise might seem pointless or destructive.
Just as common but less discussed are the relationships where we are meant to unlearn things. Unless you're raised by wolves, and even then, each of us grows up in a family. While we tend to talk about the influence individual members of a family have or had on us, families are also societies. They are like a member's only club with their own rules, traditions, and proprietary information (secrets) which each member must abide by in order to stay in good standing.
Each person in the family is assigned a role. While this can be a very calculated thing it's more commonly something which forms naturally over time as a function of daily life. One child is the smart one, the other the athlete. One is more like Dad, the other like Mom. This one needs to be responsible for the younger ones and this one gets a free pass no matter how horrible they are.
These roles, assigned at such a young age we don't remember it happened, influence our perception of ourselves and therefore form our identity. The rules and (dys)functions of the club, it's specific perspective on the world and its position and/or role in the world are meant to become ours. This indoctrination is what we have to work with when we enter puberty and start learning how to be an individual interconnected with other individuals. For many it's still what they are working with when they enter into their first adult relationships.
What we were taught to be in our family is not necessarily who we are or what is best for us. Something which can be difficult to comprehend, let alone contend with, is the roles we're assigned in our family are not necessarily or even primarily driven from essential truths about us. Instead they are decided on due to the needs of the responsible adults and the family more broadly. They serve a functional purpose rather than providing support and guidance for the best and highest good of the individual.
In fact, those who have survived abusive family situations can be left with wreckage rather than self-esteem. Each will, at a minimum, have wounds, coping mechanisms, and survival traits which are counterproductive to living a healthy life as an adult. Even those who come from healthy families and loving parents can find they struggle with issues of identity because their experience of themselves within the family is not a good match for who they are or who they need to become.
It's not possible for us to change our families, nor can we easily engage with them to heal or transform things when the system is still in place, stable, and fully engaged in its time proven processes. So instead, we seek out a substitute. We gravitate like a magnet to a significant other who is a microcosm of the issues and behaviors we experienced growing up. Hence it is so very common for people to quip that they have married their mother/father.
While this can seem like the old adage, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results", in reality this is changing the situation, hopefully, in our favor. As a child we have little power, authority, or even agency over anything concerning the family. In a partnership, in theory, we do. Both parties are adults with the same ability and rights to manifest the life they want. Which means they both have the right to act when transgressions happen, misunderstandings have negative effects, or various parties are working at cross purposes.
Selecting a partner who is an example of the dysfunction we have experienced in childhood, often but not always a slightly less egregious or simplified version, allows us to potentially heal wounds and redress wrongs by creating a different and better outcome. At least that's the subconscious, instinctual intention. Of course, nothing about relationships is linear, simple, or straightforward even with the simplest of things. With something so deep, identity connected, and world view bending, the process can be bewildering and even devastating. It's not uncommon for people to experience negative effects from these attempts such as:
• Repeated relationships which seem to be stair steps of decreasing dysfunction, but never end up being healthy or life affirming.
• Repeated relationships which are exact replicas of the abusive or dysfunctional family system creating a living Ground Hog's Day.
• A partner who is a mirror but steadfastly maintains their role in the dysfunctional family rather than leaving it and even seeks to draw their spouse in with them.
• A relationship which entraps the person financially, physically, and emotionally so it is almost impossible to disentangle.
• A relationship which successfully convinces the partner they are the role they have been assigned in their family and destroys their desire to be anything else.
The most common question I get about relationships of any kind is "What am I meant to learn from this?" When it comes to relationships where we are recreating dysfunctional family issues in order to heal them, my answer has two parts. First: beyond what the person has already learned/realized/become they need to learn when enough is enough. Whether this means escaping, standing up for themselves, confronting or refusing to confront, the point is to be done. When something is too hot to hold, we put the item down, sometimes rather forcefully. If something large is going to walk/run over us, we move out of the way. If we notice an animal preparing to take a nip out of us, we block them from doing so. Engaging this ability in relationships can be more complex, but we come into this life capable of doing so just as readily as we are able to spit something out when it's "yucky".
Second: The deeper issue is not what we are meant to learn from this experience, but what we are meant to unlearn. While our childhood was the time when our identity first formed, we aren't cement which is unyielding once it has set. We are not doomed to carry the imprints of our parent's and sibling's perspectives, desires, and fears. What we have been taught to experience as "just who we are" is often not the case and we can track back to when we learned to be this and unravel it from the tapestry of our suchness.
One of the easiest ways to start finding these threads is in the things our parents or siblings "always" said about and to us. The way we were told we were smart rather than pretty, athletic rather than smart. That we were the quiet, patient one rather than the sibling who was needy. Or we were constantly antagonistic and demanding in comparison to our sibling who was perfect. That we had to be perfect because our parent was needy, or we needed to be a parent because our mother/father couldn't.
Most of us can come up with a short list, Top 5, of these types of things. Some can come up with 25 or more and some families develop for us a New York Times 100 Best Seller list of roles and attributes we learn to accept in order to survive. However large or small your list is, each is a lesson about yourself which you can unlearn.
The easiest way to start is with something we've all done a million times in our lives: daydreaming about "What if?" First create a scenario where you are a child, but in a situation which is neutral. Think of someplace you liked or where you felt supported. This could be school, church, with a friend's family, or at the home of an extended family member. Imagine you are in this setting, but not yet interacting with the people there. It's a neutral space with just you. Then imagine this lesson you are meant to unlearn, this part of you which is supposedly essential to your soul or personality. With it firmly in mind, say "What if?" What if you weren't like this? What if this way of being wasn't expected of you? What would you do if you weren't like this? What would happen next?
This can cause a flurry of emotions and reactions at first. Some go through fear or denial which can be very physical. Others could feel relief and joy. It can feel as if a part of who you were is being reclaimed or even returning. Some people experience the surprise of memories surfacing which show them a time when they weren't this role. That they were actually free of it at some point and this feeling is still in their body so they can access it in the now.
This "What If" process can be repeated for each role, each thread in the tapestry. It can also be used to explore just who we can become when the role is removed. Like "If this is who I was before ____ happened to me, then what can I be now if I release the negative lessons and welcome back this more essential sense of myself?" Which can be an antidote to the bewildering "What now?" which inevitably arrives when we start doing this level of deep healing and transformation.
And it's worth noting while what I've described is a mental or even intellectual process with defined steps, our soul level internal processing of self is no more linear and logical than the relationships we create. It's better to think of us as engaging consciously with a process of unfolding. Like a fern or a rose bush, we put out leaves or fronds which are intricate in themselves and yet part of a greater whole which is in itself unfolding and has various stages and processes at work. The leaf my not be aware of the rose bud, but facilitates its blooming. The frond carries seeds on its underside which will eventually go on to create new lives.
Unlearning who we have been taught to be reveals who we truly are, the foundation on which we can build the life we are meant to have.