The Magnetics of Love

“For two personalities to meet is like mixing two chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.” -- Carl Jung

THE MAGNETICS OF LOVE

by Jen Kleiner

As the saying goes, "opposites attract."  In forming our romantic relationships, we all respond to mates like magnets. Each of us must have opposite magnetizing properties to come together, polarizing energetically to form a complimentary bond. It's the joining of opposites to experience the balance of the whole.  

I recently interviewed Dr. Harville Hendrix, family mentor and co-founder of Imago Relationship Therapy. He teaches the psychological specifics on how opposites attract in his series of best-selling books, Getting The Love You Want & Keeping The Love You Find.  Dr. Hendrix explains that each of us is somewhere on a spectrum between minimizing and maximizing. Just like sexual preference is on a continuum, so is adaptation personality (aspects of personality affected by outside stimulus). So when we come together with a significant 'other,' one has a natural adaptation toward minimizing and the other, toward maximizing. 

MINIMIZERS

If you tend towards the minimizing side of the spectrum, it means that you minimize emotions or reactions; that of others and yourself. Naturally contracting rather expanding, you pull in and wall off like a turtle in a hail storm if the threat of an emotional confrontation is near. In fact, when intense emotions fly, you try to contain them like a firefighter would to a wildfire. When feeling threatened, wounded or overwhelmed, mini’s tend to shut down, disconnect and stop engaging. Looking cool and collected on the outside, minimizers secretly struggle with managing uncomfortable feelings on the inside. Anger is the easiest to access if you are pushed to express yourself. Public vulnerability, however, is much more difficult to achieve and requires the cultivation of safe space to express vulnerable thoughts and emotions without feeling punished in some way from sharing them.

The archetype of the minimizer is the outsider. The core wound is the experience of not being understood and feeling as if there is no room or safety to share your emotional experience.  Most likely when you were growing up, you learned to believe that expressing emotion would have negative repercussions; either damaging the people you care about or causing them to react with upset; misinterpreting, criticizing, blaming, shaming, or embarrassing you for sharing your feelings. Maybe they just didn’t have the capacity to listen, instead only talking about themselves. Either way, you grew up internalizing the belief that here is no room for your emotional experience and therefore have a hard making space for not only your own, but your significant other’s emotions as well.

MAXIMIZERS

If you tend towards the maximizing side of the spectrum, it means that you maximize emotions or reactions, that of others and yourself. You tend to exaggerate when speaking and embellish details to emphasize your point, fearing that people might disregard what you are saying unless doing so. Like the peacock, who expands its feathers when threatened or when posturing, maximizers expand on their thoughts and feelings, often over-sharing or dominating conversations in an effort to feel seen, valued and respected. They may also have difficulty with boundaries, over-focusing or feeling dependent on others for a sense of connection and well-being.

The archetype of the maximizer is the invisible one, and the core wound is the experience of repeatedly feeling unseen, unheard or disregarded. In childhood, Maxi’s often experienced caregivers who were unable to be consistent with their attention, so they learned that over-engaging or getting 'big' (or even sick) could help achieve a sense of being seen, valued and adored. 

THE PAIN OF POLARITY VS. THE JOY OF UNITY

 The reason we seek the opposite in relationship is because we crave, lack or dis-own aspects of the ‘other’ in ourselves. Maximizers deeply desire the ease of containment natural to minimizers. And minimizers deeply crave the ease of expansion natural to maximizers.

Once you’ve figured out which side of the magnetic spectrum of love you hang out on, you can begin to claim your archetypal mini or maxi wound as a 'sacred' wound, described by close friend and teacher, Katherine Woodward Thomas in her book, "Calling In The One."  When you choose to see your wounds as sacred, then they can become a profound teacher instead of an extreme tormentor.  So whether you share the wound of “the one who is invisible" or “the one who is an outsider", you can start to approach the pain associated with it from a place of compassion and understanding. From there, the now ‘reclaimed’ wounded part has a chance to let up its control over your entire being out of the sense of feeling witnessed and embraced.

The truth is, before we can expect a partner on the opposite side of the magnetic love spectrum to successfully tend to our core archetypal wounds, we must first learn what wounds we have and start addressing them from the vantage point of the  “Larger Self”, the one who can witness the emotional storm of our various ‘parts’ from the calmness of the inner eye (“I”) of awareness, as opposed to being thrashed around in the outer banks of swirling emotions experienced by our reactive sub-personalities . The idea of the ‘larger self’ and it’s system of ‘parts’ comes from another family mentor, Dr. Richard Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS).  In a recent interview I did with Richard, he explained that the purpose of his institute, The Center For Self Leadership, is to teach people ways to successfully manage behaviors associated with intense and repetitive emotions that often make us feel stuck on repeat or compel us to take ‘defensive’ or ‘protective’ actions on the seesaw of love that are not necessarily best for the situation at hand.

From a personal growth perspective, this unconscious provocation of primordial wounds by romantic partners is actually in service to healing the pain in childhood associated with believing we were unlovable to our primary caregivers because we a) did not feel important or valuable enough to be given satisfying attention, or b) did not feel connected or safe enough to receive satisfying attention. Finding a way to understand, accept and then foster the style of attention our romantic partners crave without it closing us off to our own world of needs and desires is the goal of the relationship journey. But to get there, each person must build some emotional muscles first. The most important muscle to develop is the ‘yes/and’ muscle, but it begins as an underdeveloped ‘either/or’ muscle. By building our yes/and muscle, we grow the capacity to validate someone else’s reality without experiencing it as a threat to our own. I first learned about the ‘yes/and’ paradigm from my longtime spiritual teacher and guide, Marsha Sheldon. Through her teachings, I have been able to understand that we can transcend the outdated relational model of EITHER I’m right OR you’re wrong, by moving our awareness to the poly-paradigm of YES your experience is valid AND so is mine. As Dr. Harville Hendrix puts it, if you don’t make a win/win, you actually have a lose/lose, because in relationships, there can’t be a win/lose without both people losing a sense of intimate connection to one another. But as we learn to become explorers, using our creative power of curiosity to help us understand how and why our partners behave the way that they do without taking it personally, we can have more rewarding experiences of intimacy and lasting connection.

My brilliant therapist mother, Deborah K. Ward, explains, “the unseen relational challenge is the journey attempted by opposites who's qualities are so appealing at first that we are compelled to think of them as our "better half"; someone who completes us and with whom we "long to belong". As our relational journey passes through the wondrous ‘in love’ stage on it’s way to the ‘authentic love’ stage, we begin to encounter power struggles. Now that the two of us are one… which one? It is here that we realize our oppositeness; differences in beliefs and orientations to life that create a feeling of separation; threatening our sense of identity with the false assumption that the other person feels and thinks exactly the way we do. Our true objective is to learn how to travel back and forth between oppositional realities like curious explorers without succumbing to oppositeness, being overcome by otherness, or loosing our way back to the inner world of our own experience.”

By allowing ourselves to be influenced rather than overcome by the oppositeness of our partners, we can move towards the middle of the magnetic love spectrum and get off the seesaw of intense emotional polarizing in response to our wounds.

When we become conscious of our place on the mini/maxi spectrum, we strengthen our power to choose how we respond to conflict as opposed to having an uncontrollable reaction to it.

Becoming a conscious partner includes providing emotional safety for our significant others by allowing them to show up as themselves, separate from the thoughts, feelings, desires and innate responses of ourselves. It also means ‘talking out’ as opposed to ‘acting out’ wounds and triggers from a more centered place of understanding. If we  stay curious about our partners reactions, (as well as our own), we’ll stay more connected and find it much easier to come back from polarizing experiences.

By embracing the polarity of emotional opposites, we can actually experience the joy of unity that comes from influential forces complimenting one another as opposed to contrary forces opposing one another.

To learn more about Dr. Harville Hendrix, co-founder of Imago Therapy, author of Getting The Love You Want & Keeping The Love You Find, go to: www.harvillehendrix.com

To learn more about Katherine Woodward Thomas MFT, author of “Calling In The One” creator of, “Conscious Uncoupling,” go to www.katherinewoodwardthomas.com

To learn more about Dr. Richard Schwartz, found of Internal Family Systems therapy and The Center for Self Leadership, go to www.selfleadership.org

To learn more about Deborah Kleiner Ward, my magnificent mother and expert relationship therapist, go to www.relationshipcenterofbethesda.com