Unwanted Patterns

There is something uncanny about finding ourselves in familiar circumstances despite our best efforts to make life different. The faces change, relationships begin with renewed hope, and opportunities emerge that were previously unavailable. Yet somewhere along the way, we recognize an old disappointment. We have fallen in love with another person who cannot give us the affection we desire, changed jobs only to encounter another demanding supervisor, or moved away from a difficult family only to discover the same conflicts appearing in our new relationships. Sometimes we begin to suspect that the problem must be us, particularly when we have worked so hard to avoid repeating what has already caused considerable suffering. We may know what we want to change without understanding why something familiar continues to draw us back.

Psychoanalysis has acquired an unfortunate reputation for being preoccupied with childhood, as though the analyst's principal task were to discover an early experience that explains everything happening in the present. The familiar caricature involves someone lying on a couch while being asked endlessly about their mother. Yet the analytic interest in childhood is not merely historical. The past is present in ways we are unconscious of, influencing how we desire, what we anticipate from others, and how we experience love. We do not necessarily repeat the events of childhood so much as the emotional arrangements through which our relationships first became meaningful. What was once endured may become something we anticipate, provoke, or attempt to resolve in circumstances that appear entirely new. The person may have left childhood long ago without having entirely left the relationships through which they learned what it meant to be wanted.

Consider someone who repeatedly falls in love with the same type of person. Their partners may differ considerably, yet each relationship gradually develops around the familiar problem of emotional availability. They long for closeness, become preoccupied with whether they are loved, and eventually feel disappointed by someone who cannot offer the intimacy they desire. Having recognized the pattern, they resolve to seek a more affectionate partner. Yet when they meet someone who is genuinely available, the experience becomes surprisingly uncomfortable. The new partner wants to spend time together, asks about their feelings, and expresses affection without requiring it to be earned. Suddenly the closeness they have spent years pursuing feels intrusive, and they begin wondering whether the relationship lacks passion. The very thing they believed was missing has become difficult to receive.

We want to be close and far away, desired without feeling possessed, and understood without becoming entirely known. The person who fears abandonment may also fear intrusion, particularly when early experiences of love involved a parent whose affection was unpredictable or whose closeness came at the expense of independence. As an adult, the person may find themselves longing for someone who remains distant while retreating from someone who draws near. Anxiety often emerges where these desires become difficult to acknowledge together. The person knows they want intimacy, but the wish to remain separate may be experienced only as a sudden loss of attraction or irritation with someone who has become too interested. The contradiction does not necessarily mean that the relationship is wrong. It may reveal something of the difficulty of desiring another person whose love can never be entirely controlled.

There is another pattern I encounter in people who have spent much of their lives attempting to keep everyone happy. I sometimes call them caregiver kids. These were often the compliant children who became unusually attentive to the emotional lives of the adults around them. They learned when a parent was disappointed, when an argument might begin, or when something needed to be done before anyone asked. Some were praised for being mature, thoughtful, responsible, or remarkably easy to raise. Others discovered that helping could make a tense household temporarily more peaceful. Their goodness may have been sincere, but it also provided something important. By becoming useful, they found a way to become wanted.

We don’t just desire what we need, but we need desire itself. We want to be wanted, and the caregiver kid may discover early in life that being needed is the closest available assurance of occupying a place in another person's desire. Bruce Fink, drawing upon Lacan, helps us consider how the child's desire becomes organized around the question of what the other wants from them. The compliant child learns to anticipate a parent's disappointment, recognize an unspoken wish, and offer something more than obedience. They do the extra, become the good kid, and discover a certain satisfaction in knowing what someone needs before they have even asked. But this arrangement creates a peculiar difficulty because another person's desire cannot be satisfied once and for all. There is always something else the child might have done, another disappointment they could have prevented, or another sacrifice through which they might secure affection.

As adults, these caregiver kids may become the peacemakers in their marriages, families, and workplaces. They apologize first, accommodate conflicting preferences, and remain remarkably capable of understanding why someone else is upset. Friends describe them as generous, while coworkers recognize them as dependable. Yet their relationships can become organized around sacrifices nobody explicitly requested. They may discover that they are always the one who compromises, that others rarely notice their exhaustion, and that resentment has begun to accompany the generosity through which they have learned to secure affection. The peacemaker becomes the martyr, not simply because they cannot say no, but because saying no threatens the position through which they have learned to feel wanted. Their guilt concerns less what they have failed to do than what they imagine they ought to have done to please the other.

This becomes especially visible at work. Someone leaves a position because their supervisor is excessively demanding and seems incapable of appreciating their contributions. They find another job with better compensation, more independence, and a manager who appears considerably more reasonable. For a while everything improves. Yet before long, they have become the employee who accepts extra responsibilities, stays late to finish projects, and quietly assumes tasks that belong to someone else. Their new supervisor may not have requested these sacrifices, but the employee has already anticipated what would make them indispensable. When recognition fails to arrive, the old resentment returns. The person may become convinced that they have encountered another demanding employer without recognizing the ways they have helped recreate the position they were trying to escape.

The difficulty concerns more than an inability to establish boundaries. A person may know perfectly well how to decline another assignment and still experience considerable guilt when they do. This guilt is not always organized around something they have done wrong or a rule they have disobeyed. It may concern what they ought to have done, an expectation that exceeds whatever was actually requested. They ought to have noticed the problem earlier, volunteered to help, or prevented someone else's disappointment. What appears to be an external demand may have become an obligation the person now places upon themselves, often without recognizing the desire that sustains it. They want relief from being needed while fearing what it would mean to become unnecessary.

The same arrangement can make leaving difficult relationships particularly complicated. Someone may finally separate from a demanding partner, distance themselves from a controlling family, or move across the country in the hope of beginning again. These decisions may be necessary and may genuinely improve their lives. Yet after establishing new relationships, they discover that they have once again become responsible for another person's emotional stability. They befriend people in crisis, enter relationships with partners who need continual reassurance, or become the person everyone calls when something goes wrong. There is nothing inherently wrong with caring for others, and the desire to be useful can be a meaningful part of life. The pattern becomes troubling when usefulness is experienced as the condition of being loved, leaving the person exhausted by responsibilities they are also reluctant to relinquish.

Freud approached the problem of repetition in Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, observing that patients did not simply recall the conflicts of earlier life but often repeated them through their present relationships, including their relationship with the analyst. A person may remember a demanding parent perfectly well and still find themselves unable to tolerate disappointing a supervisor. Someone who recalls feeling abandoned may continue pursuing unavailable partners despite knowing precisely how the relationship resembles childhood. Glen Gabbard's writing on transference develops the clinical significance of these repetitions, showing how earlier relational expectations can become active in the present, including within treatment. The past does not simply return as a memory. It becomes part of how someone experiences another person before they fully recognize what they have come to expect.

Repression is often misunderstood for similar reasons. We imagine a forgotten event buried somewhere in the mind, waiting to be recovered through sufficient exploration. Yet what remains unconscious may concern a desire that the person cannot readily acknowledge. Someone who prides themselves on independence may find their longing to be cared for intolerable. The peacemaker who insists they want nothing in return may be unable to recognize how desperately they want someone to notice their sacrifices. The person who fears abandonment may also disavow their wish to escape the demands of intimacy. These desires do not disappear because they have been excluded from conscious recognition. They become apparent through anxiety, resentment, inhibition, and the familiar contradictions of relationships.

There are therapies that help people cope with anxiety, reduce stress, develop healthier habits, and improve their enjoyment of life. These approaches can be enormously valuable, particularly when suffering interferes with work, sleep, relationships, or ordinary pleasures. Yet reducing distress does not necessarily resolve the conflicts through which someone has come to desire. We sometimes speak as though a happy life should eventually become free from stress, although I wonder what such a life would contain if nothing could trouble us. Love, ambition, creativity, and intimacy expose us to uncertainty because something matters that we cannot entirely control. Without stress, or shall we say passion, life might become considerably more manageable while losing something of what makes it worth living.

I do not mean that suffering ought to be preserved or that anxiety is evidence of a passionate life. Someone overwhelmed by panic or continually distressed by relationships may benefit greatly from learning how to regulate their experience. The difficulty is that the wish to eliminate every uncomfortable feeling may become another way of avoiding the desires through which we become vulnerable. Someone may learn to manage the distress of intimacy while continuing to keep others at a distance. The caregiver kid may become skilled at setting boundaries while continuing to feel that every refusal threatens their goodness. Behavior can change while the need to secure love through being needed remains difficult to acknowledge.

This is where Fred Busch's account of developing a psychoanalytic mind becomes especially useful. Analytic treatment does not simply provide another explanation of why a person behaves as they do. It seeks to make unconscious motivations increasingly available for reflection, allowing something previously enacted without much awareness to become an experience the person can begin to think about. The caregiver kid may know that they ought to establish boundaries, yet find themselves unusually concerned about disappointing the analyst or becoming a patient who takes up too much time. Someone who repeatedly fears abandonment may experience the analyst's approaching vacation as another instance of being left behind. These encounters can become important because the familiar pattern is no longer merely something described from the past. It has become present within a relationship where its meaning may be discovered rather than assumed.

In my developing account of Imago Psychotherapy, I am interested in the images through which these patterns have become recognizable. The abandoned child may become an adult who expects abandonment while desperately pursuing closeness. The responsible child may become the indispensable employee whose worth seems to depend upon exhaustion. The caregiver kid may become a spouse who feels profoundly resentful about giving too much, yet remains unable to imagine being wanted without continuing to sacrifice. These images are not simply mistaken beliefs that can be corrected with reassurance. They developed through relationships in which the person learned something about who they needed to become in order to be loved, and they may continue to organize desire even after the original circumstances have changed.

What I have begun calling imago dissolution concerns the possibility that these images might lose some of their necessity without requiring the person to abandon the qualities that remain important to them. The caregiver kid need not become indifferent to others, and the peacemaker need not surrender the capacity for compassion. They may begin to discover that someone can want them without needing them, and that love need not continually be established through sacrifice. The person who fears abandonment may remain sensitive to distance without requiring every separation to confirm the expectation of being left. The aim is not to eliminate the passions through which a life has become meaningful, but to discover whether those passions can be experienced without continually reproducing the same painful arrangement.

Perhaps what makes unwanted patterns so difficult to relinquish is that they offer a kind of certainty even when that certainty is painful. The person who is always needed knows something about who they are through the dependence of others, while someone who continually anticipates abandonment has become familiar with the position of being left behind. Psychoanalysis is not simply about returning to childhood to explain why life became difficult, nor is it concerned with breaking habits until the person becomes free of every contradiction. The past remains present in our desires, but the relationship we have to those desires need not remain unchanged. We may still long for closeness while fearing intrusion, or enjoy caring for others while resenting what has been demanded of us. The possibility of analytic change lies in becoming able to hold these passions within our patterns differently, without continually requiring them to produce the same suffering.