Healthy Relationships (Homayoun Shahri, PhD, MA, LMFT)

Why do so many relationships end up in breakups, separation, and/or divorce? Why is it that in many situations when we love our partner, they don't love us; and when they love us, we don't love them? Why is it that every relationship promises to be different, but it ends up being very similar to the old relationships? Why do we repeat our patterns – like a broken record?

Neurochemistry of Love - Testosterone and Estrogen are the primary sex hormones. Adrenalin is a  hormone that is released in the body of a person who is feeling a strong emotion (such as excitement, fear, or anger) and that causes the heart to beat faster and gives the person more energy. Dopamine – The dopamine system is strongly associated with the reward system of the brain. Dopamine is released in areas such as the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex as a result of experiencing natural rewards such as food, sex, and neutral stimuli that become associated with them. Serotonin is one of love's most important chemicals that may explain why when you’re falling in love, your new lover keeps popping into your thoughts. Oxytocin (The cuddle hormone) is a neurotransmitter in mammals. Oxytocin is normally produced in the hypothalamus and stored in the posterior pituitary gland. It is the hormone of Love! Vasopressin is another important hormone in the long-term commitment stage and is released after sex. Oxytocin and Vasopressin are attachment and bonding hormones.

Neuroscience of Love - When a person falls in love, at least 12 areas of the brain work in tandem to release euphoria-inducing chemicals such as dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline and vasopression. The love feeling also affects sophisticated cognitive functions, such as mental representation, metaphors and body image. Other researchers also found blood levels of nerve growth factor, or NGF, also increased. Those levels were significantly higher in couples who had just fallen in love. This molecule involved plays an important role in the social chemistry of humans. You can just be a loving person for your brain/body to function this way, albeit to a lesser extent!

Prerequisites for healthy development of an infant – D.W. Winnicott wirtes: “The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother’s face and finds himself therein . . . provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears and plans for the child. [Otherwise] In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother’s face, but rather the mother’s own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain.” Winnicott in this quote tells us why we seek partners who seem to “approve” us and make us feel “good”, “desirable”, and “wanted”, but we are never satisfied and/or our seeking ends in failure.

​Psychology of Love - A Child (Infant) must experience predictable presence of primary care taker to feel safe and protected. Child (Infant) must experience unconditional love, acceptance, empathy, and nonjudgmental presence of primary care taker to feel that he is worthy of love, he is worth it, he is good, and he is OK. He then believes there is benevolence (goodness) in the world, and people are generally good. The infant splits the object toward whom both love and hate were directed, in two. The good object (idealized) representation is important and is necessary to go on in life. The bad (frustrating, repressing) object is further split into two, namely the repressive object, and the exciting object. Ego identifies with the repressive object (anti-libidinal self), and keeps the original object seeking drive in check. Ego also identifies with the exciting object (libidinal self) and seeks exciting objects in the world. It is the idealized object that many seek initially in their relationships (infatuation stage), which is soon replaced by power struggle (acting out of anti-libidinal self). Some are lucky enough to transcend the power struggle stage and enter the “co-creativity” stage.

Fear of Intimacy - Love is not only hard to find, but strange as it may seem, it can be even more difficult to accept and tolerate.  Most of us say that we want to find a loving partner, but many of us have deep-seated fears of intimacy that make it difficult to be in a close relationship. Fear of intimacy begins to develop early in life. As children, when we experience rejection and/or emotional pain, we often shut down. We learn not to rely on others as a coping mechanism. After being hurt in our earliest relationships, we fear being hurt again. We are reluctant to take another chance on being loved. If we felt unseen or misunderstood as children, we may have a hard time believing that someone could really love and value us. Or if we do believe they love us, we find all kinds of reasons why they are not the “right” person for us.
It is painful to love someone when they don't love us. This is more familiar to us, but painful nonetheless. This is about re-experiencing the pain of deprivation from early contact and holding. It is much more painful to be loved – to open ourselves to love, be vulnerable, and let go of our defenses. This is about re-experiencing the pain of heartbreak (if we risk going there). Our defense mechanism may respond with rejection (rejecting the loving object). This is also much harder to perceive and imagine. There may be a tendency of wanting to pull back and go away, to feel weird in your body, to feel shame, to contact in our chest, etc.

A Neuroscience Perspective - Brain is shaped by experience. A new experience results in formation of many neural connections that result in adaptation and response to the experience. Thus our brain is formed (wired) by our experiences starting from our early formative years. Every time a given experience is repeated the corresponding neural networks are strengthened. This statement is a direct corollary of Hebbian axiom which says that the neurons that fire together wire together. Brain can be thought of as an information processing organ (an organ of compare and contrast), in the sense that when faced with a stimulus, it performs very fast correlation-like operations with what it has stored in memory to find the closest match to the stimulus just encountered. The correlations are performed with stored events that are more emotionally significant. Emotional significance is marked by Amygdala – an almond-shape set of neurons located deep in the brain's medial temporal lobe (one in each hemisphere), very close to Hippocampus which manages organizing, storing and retrieving memories. In humans and other mammals, this subcortical brain structure is linked to both fear responses and pleasure. Amygdalae therefore assign emotional significance and information to stimuli. Once the closest match is determined the emotional response will essentially be the same as the response corresponding to the past experience (existing wiring in the brain) with some modifications. This is how we repeat our past. Freud called this phenomenon “Repetition Compulsion”, or the compulsion to repeat past trauma.

An implication of the above assertions is that we unconsciously seek to repeat what is known to the brain. Thus we unconsciously seek similar relationships to the ones we have experienced before. And what is even more astonishing is that even if the relationship is inherently different, our behavior will resemble the past relationships (activation of the same neural pathways), thus changing the new relationship, in essence, to be similar the ones we have experienced in the past. After all, that is all that our brain knows! In psychological terms this is known as projective identification. It means that we may project the image of a past relationship onto our current relationship and the partner may identify with the image and act it out – resulting in repetition of the past! This happens since brain will try to compare the current relationship to what it has stored in its neural connections, and respond in the same way. Projection identification then is brain's attempt to adapt to a new experience based on what is learned in the past. This is the reason why our relationships turn out to be very similar to the old ones, as much we try not to repeat our pat “mistakes”!

Donald Kalsched (Trauma and the Soul) writes: The act of loving is a terrible risk for everyone, and especially for people who have grown up in emotionally impoverished environments. To really love someone (without symbiotically attaching to them through identification), is to risk losing them, precisely because we live in an insecure, unpredictable world in which death, separation, or abandonment is an ever present reality.
 
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving) writes: Infantile love follows the principle: I love because I am loved! Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love! Immature love says: I love you because I need you!Mature love says: I need you because I love you! Fromm also writes: Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love. This is the case since if one has the ability to be alone, one will not seek love in order to fill a void due to early deprivations, but will seek it in order to live a more fulfilled and a more pleasurable life.

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