When my clients start dating after being in a relationship with a person with narcissistic traits, they’re usually puzzled by the idea of reality testing. They want to rely on attraction and attachment to decide who to date, and whether or not to stay in a relationship. Often, they want to rush the relationship as much as the new person they’re dating does.
I understand where my clients are coming from. American culture encourages people to rely on attraction and attachment to determine whether or not they’re in love. Unfortunately, there are negative consequences to focusing on attraction and attachment to decide if you want to be in a relationship with someone. Why? Because attraction is feeling physical attraction for someone, and attachment begins by feeling seen and heard by someone. With both attraction and attachment, your decision is based on how you feel.
As therapists are fond of saying, feelings are information, but feelings aren’t facts. As you discover facts about the other person, those facts can change how you think and feel about them. We've talked about how rushing the relationship creates intimacy (physical, emotional, financial, or relational) that makes it harder to end the relationship when you discover those facts in a previous post. Rushing a relationship can also result in consequences (like shared friends, children, or legal ties) that make it difficult or impossible to set healthy boundaries or end the relationship. Too many people have had the experience of saying “What was I thinking?” at the end of a relationship, when the question would be better posed as “What was I feeling?”
To further complicate matters, when you’re rushing a relationship, it’s not just you who’s establishing the relationship based on feelings. The other person is using attraction and attachment to decide if they want to be in a relationship with you. My clients often come in hurt and confused because they’re deeply invested in a relationship, but the other person’s feelings toward them have suddenly changed. If you’ve rushed a relationship, this may have happened to you. Your partner might have found someone they found more attractive than you in some way, or learned something about you that they didn’t like. Because the relationship was grounded in feelings, and the other person’s feelings changed, they wanted to end the relationship with you.
Love, in stark contrast to attraction or attachment, is grounded in what you think. Despite what people believe, love doesn’t begin as a feeling. Yes, you can feel loved and loving. But the experience of feeling love begins with a thought – specifically, the decision to love. It’s then followed by countless choices that reflect back to that original decision.
When love is unconditional, you’ve made a decision to love someone, no matter what.
Think about a relationship you have with someone you care about. No matter how much you love this person, there have been times in your relationship where you didn’t feel loving toward the person. That doesn’t mean your decision to love them changed, but that in those moments, you weren’t feeling loving toward them. If your love for them is unconditional, then no matter what they’ve done, you keep making the decision to love them, no matter how you feel. You recognize that your feelings come and go, but your decision is lasting. (That doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily choose to be in the relationship, of course. Ultimately, I hope the first person you love unconditionally is yourself!)
Many people believe attraction is necessary for love to develop. I disagree. Physical attraction helps, but it isn't necessary. My college physiology professor was far from attractive, but by the middle of the semester, every single woman in the class, and one of the single men, wanted to date him. Why? He was brilliant, kind, and funny, and we all looked forward to engaging with him in class.
Attraction is also subject to change. Turia Pitt had been dating Michael Hoskin for two years when she was caught in a brush fire while competing in an ultramarathon. She was severely burned over 65% of her body and lost 7 of her fingers. Michael proposed to her after her recovery, observing that he fell in love with Turia for who she is, not for what she looks like. (They’re now married, and have two sons.) While Dana Reeve might have been physically attracted to Christopher Reeve when they met, given that she became his primary caregiver after he was paralyzed from the neck down, it’s safe to say she loved him for who he was, not because he was Superman.
These are dramatic examples, but realistically, you and I look different than we did ten years ago, and our faces and bodies will continue to change as we move through the decades. If you’re choosing your partner (or if your partner is choosing you!) based on physical attraction, the relationship is on shaky ground.
And unless you have a healthy attachment style, attachment isn’t a better way to make relationship decisions. If you’re recovering from a relationship with someone with narcissistic traits, you’ll definitely want to avoid rushing your next relationship. Why? There are two kinds of memory – explicit memory, and implicit memory. Explicit memory is what we generally think of when we think about remembering something. Explicit memory is the ability to learn and recall facts and memories. When you learn a person’s name or recall your high school prom, you’re relying on explicit memory.
Attachment style is based on what’s called implicit memory. Implicit memory is unconscious and automatic, rather than conscious and deliberate. As a child, even before you could consciously remember, you learned and remembered the emotional patterns of the people who raised you. Those memories are stored as implicit memories. The relationships you develop throughout your lifetime will reflect those implicit memories. You’ll see this not only in your romantic relationships, but in your friendships and work environments, too.
If you have an unhealthy attachment style, you may be miserable in these relationships, but they feel familiar, and that feeling of familiarity is comforting. And it’s not just that it feels familiar because you’re being treated the way you’re accustomed to being treated. People like to be right, even if what they believe is true is hurtful. If you don’t love yourself, then being in a loving relationship feels uncomfortable. If your self-talk is unkind, you'll feel comfortable around people who treat you the way you talk to yourself. (If you want to learn more about attachment, how it affects relationships, and what you can do to change your attachment style, I strongly recommend A General Theory of Love. If you click on the link and purchase, I earn a small finder's fee on qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate, at no cost to you. You can buy it elsewhere, if you prefer.)
So, if you’re recovering from a relationship with a person with narcissistic traits, how do you go about dating? If you’ve read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, you probably remember the meeting between the prince and the fox, in which the fox explains that it takes time to “establish ties.” The fox and I agree wholeheartedly on the importance of taking time to develop a relationship. It takes time to discover red, orange, and yellow flags. And it takes time to decide if you’re willing to be in relationship with someone, given their orange or yellow flags. It takes time to make sure that green flags really are green, and not a ruse. Rushing a relationship skips over these steps.
Taking time to get to know someone (and letting them get to you know) gives you the information you need to decide whether a relationship is right for you. When you establish a relationship based on what you actually know about one another, and you both like what you know, the relationship has a far greater chance of long-term success. Instead of rushing the relationship, it makes more sense to slow things down, and focus on what you think, rather than how you feel, as you're getting to know someone new.
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