The Marriage Conference: How to Understand What's Happening in Your Marriage #4

 Owning Your Story: Navigating our Attachment Wounds (middle age)

Pascale Wright 

"Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity, and love. What seems non-adaptive and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through." -- Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction 

Let's talk about mid-life and marriage right now. Kids are gone. Now what? The connection they desire feels insufficient to calm them. If we are not connected to our primary emotions, what we will do is we will demand that our wives soothe our secondary emotions. And that becomes overwhelming to your partner. Because what they begin to sus out in mid-life is something greater is going on. 

1. The places where attunement and attachment got us is good. We needed to enter marriage and have a re-do of sorts. We needed to be cared for in the hands of our partner. The younger self needed something of that to help us grow. But there is something in you that needs to be soothed yourself before you can reattach from your partner. Somewhere in mid-life, we have to connect with our vulnerability and ourself apart from our partner's soothing on our own. Yes with our partner by our side but primarily with ourselves. 

To be continued ....