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The second way in which your emotional programming affects whom you choose to love is by unconsciously motivating you to complete unfinished emotional business from childhood. Here’s how it works. Every child has two basic instincts, or agendas:

They want to feel happy and loved, especially by their parents.

They want to see their parents happy and loved.

If you go through your childhood and these agendas, or desires, aren’t met, it is as if you have unfinished psychological business that is left hanging. You somehow feel incomplete, as if something is not right. Your mind ‘remembers’ that these desires are important to you, and will create circumstances in your adult life to ‘help’ you accomplish these unconscious goals.

YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND WILL SEEK TO COMPLETE ITS UNFINISHED EMOTIONAL BUSINESS FROM CHILDHOOD BY GETTING YOU TO ‘CHOOSE’ PEOPLE WHO WILL HELP YOU RE-CREATE YOUR CHILDHOOD DRAMAS.

Here are some of the ways in which you may be completing unfinished childhood business:

If you didn’t get the love/attention you wanted from a parent, you might attract a partner who, like your parent, doesn’t give you the love you want and makes you work hard to try and get it.

Or, if you are really angry at that parent, you might attract a partner who, unlike your parent, does give you the love you want, and you reject him, hurt him, or make him work hard to get your love (i.e., retaliation).

ARE YOU FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOUR MOM OR DAD?

Michelle, twenty-nine, is a perfect example of a woman who was unconsciously using the men in her life to complete some emotional business from her childhood. Michelle came to me complaining that she always attracted very critical, controlling men who made her feel she wasn’t good enough for them. She found partners who’d tell her she wasn’t skinny enough, smart enough, or motivated enough. She’d had three long-term relationships in which each of her boyfriends tried to change her into someone else. Michelle even went so far as to have plastic surgery to increase her bust size because her last boyfriend told her her boobs were too small!

I gave Michelle an assignment—to write out a complaint list about each of her parents, and then to compare the list to her complaint list about her boyfriends. Here is what she came up with:

‘I can’t believe this,’ Michelle told me. ‘I’ve been falling in love with my mother.’ Michelle’s mom was a highly critical, caustic woman. Nothing Michelle ever did as a child met her mother’s standards. She was always fussing over her daughter and comparing her to other children, both in appearance and behavior. Michelle’s dad was a real absentee father, but when he was around, he didn’t disapprove or approve—he was just there. Michelle received a lot of attention from her mom, but it was negative attention. Even as an adult, when Michelle calls home with news of a job promotion, or a trip she’s planning, her mother still questions Michelle’s judgment and makes her feel inadequate.

By attracting men who constantly put her down, Michelle is recreating a relationship with her mother in which she tries hard to be smart enough, pretty enough, and good enough. It’s as if a part of her mind thinks, ‘Maybe this time I’ll get him to think I’m beautiful,’ or ‘I know he will love me if I can just be more of what he wants me to be.’ The little girl inside her has never released her need for Mommy’s approval, so she makes poor love choices.

If you suspect that you may be ‘falling in love with a parent,’ complete the exercise I gave Michelle. Make a complaint list about your parents, and compare it to your summary list earlier in this chapter. The similarities can be frightening, but you will definitely gain some insight.

ARE YOU PUNISHING MOM OR DAD?

If you didn’t feel loved as a child, and you have a lot of suppressed anger about it, you might act out a second option—finding a partner like your parent and unconsciously setting out to hurt him. Louisa, forty-one, has been married to Fredric, forty-three, for four years. This was Louisa’s third marriage, and they came to me on the verge of divorce. ‘I feel like I’m seeing the past flash before my eyes,’ Louisa admitted with a frightened look on her face. ‘In each of my marriages, I’ve ended up feeling completely turned off to my husband. The last two times, I’ve cheated on them, and our breakups were ugly. I love Fredric, and when we got married, I vowed I would never make the same mistakes again, but for the past six months I can’t seem to do anything but criticize him.’

The key to understanding Louisa’s pattern lay in her relationship with her father. Louisa’s parents were divorced when she was five. Her father moved to another city, wrote or called infrequently, and visited even less. All through her childhood, Louisa lived for a scrap of love and attention from her dad, and never expressed anything but adoration for him. But the rage she was feeling inside began to manifest itself when she hit puberty and started dating. Louisa became a heartbreaker: She’d find some guy who was crazy about her, get involved with him only long enough to be sure he really loved her; then she’d cheat on him, break up suddenly, or treat him shamelessly. Louisa was ‘punishing’ her father for abandoning her by abandoning all the men in her life. It was as if she were saying, ‘See how bad it feels to be rejected? Now you know what I went through!’

IF YOU ARE STILL ANGRY AT ONE OF YOUR PARENTS FOR HURTING YOU, YOU MIGHT ATTRACT PARTNERS WHOM YOU HURT.

ARE YOU TRYING TO RESCUE MOM OR DAD?

Here’s another way in which we often unconsciously finish childhood business:

If your parent wasn’t happy and loved, you might:

Attract a partner just like your parent to love, regardless of whether he is good for you or not, to ‘prove’ to Mom or Dad that you do love them, even if their spouse didn’t.

Attract a partner like your parent and try to fix or rescue him, to try to make that parent happy.

Attract a relationship that isn’t any better than your parents’ marriage, in order not to be any happier than Mommy and Daddy.

CASE #1: HOW TAMMY TRIED TO RESCUE HER FATHER

‘I am so sick of falling in love with alcoholics!’ Tammy complained to me. ‘Why do I keep finding these guys with addictions and staying with them?’ Tammy was a bright, thirty-two-year-old advertising executive with lousy taste in men. No matter how hard she tried, she attracted one addictive man after another. Even though she didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs, she somehow managed to fall in love with men who did. Her current boyfriend, Todd, was typical—a charming, successful business owner with a big ego and a big drinking problem.

Tammy’s pattern wasn’t hard to figure out. She’d grown up on a farm, the youngest of three girls, Daddy’s favorite. Tammy’s father was a hardworking, affectionate man and an alcoholic. Though no one in Tammy’s family ever used that word, everyone knew that living with Dad meant accepting his ‘crazy times.’ Tammy spent her childhood watching her mother try to cover up for her husband’s problem, and watching her dad suffer financial loss and eventually severe physical disease—all brought on by his drinking. Tammy felt helpless—she loved her daddy so much, but didn’t know how to encourage him to stop hurting himself. As a little girl, she used to hide his liquor bottles under the hay in the barn, hoping he wouldn’t find them, but he always did.

Soon after Tammy moved away from her home state to a large city, her father was diagnosed with liver cancer and died. Tammy was devastated. Inside, she felt as if somehow she should have been able to prevent his tragic end. At about this time she began falling in love with alcoholics, all of whom she desperately tried to heal. Todd was her latest ‘case.’ ‘I know you are going to tell me to leave him,’ she told me, ‘but he really needs me. He had the worst childhood, and I really believe if I’m just there for him, he will finally stop.’

To Tammy, leaving Todd would be like abandoning her father and her mission to save him. Tammy was trapped in a self-destructive cycle. Like all people who have an unconscious emotional program to save Mom or Dad, or to make them happy, she was a prisoner of her past, and her love choices weren’t based on who was good for her but who she could help.

CASE #2: HOW JEREMY MARRIED HIS MOTHER

When I first met Jeremy, a forty-five-year-old plumbing contractor, he seemed like a really nice guy. Married for twenty-four years to Becky, Jeremy was in turmoil because he didn’t feel in love with his wife but couldn’t bring himself to leave. ‘I’ve known Becky since college,’ he told me, ‘and she’s the sweetest person in the world. She’s a wonderful mother to our four kids, and a devoted wife. If I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that I’ve been unhappy with our relationship for most of our marriage. It’s not that she does anything wrong, because she’s perfect, but I’m not attracted to her as a lover, and except for the children, we have very little in common.’

As I worked with Jeremy to understand how his childhood may have affected his relationship with Becky, he began to see why he had been willing to sacrifice his own happiness in order to keep his wife happy for so long. Jeremy’s father had deserted his wife and children by running off with his secretary. Jeremy’s mother was devastated, and felt totally inadequate as a woman. She never dated or married again. Jeremy was eleven at the time, and the only boy in the family. Though he didn’t understand all the details of the scandal, he was sensitive enough to know that his mother felt insecure and rejected. At that point in his life, Jeremy made several unconscious decisions: to prove to his mother that she was good enough by trying to fill her emptiness with his love, and to prove to his father that he had been wrong to leave by never leaving a woman himself.

When Jeremy met Becky in college, he felt instantly drawn to her: She was insecure, vulnerable, and afraid of men, just like Mom. From the first, he felt a profound sense of responsibility to protect Becky and make her feel loved. This feeling grew until he asked her to marry him. Only after years of thinking about what made Becky happy did Jeremy finally begin to admit to himself that he wasn’t happy. But his emotional programming didn’t allow him even to consider doing anything that would hurt Becky, so he stayed in the relationship, feeling more and more trapped with each passing year. To Jeremy, the idea of leaving Becky was unthinkable: It would make him just like his father, and he would be saying to his mother, ‘Dad was right to leave you because you didn’t fulfill his needs, just as Becky doesn’t fulfill mine.’

I pointed out to Jeremy that it wasn’t his love for Becky that was keeping him a prisoner, but his anger at his father and his protection of his mother. His unfinished childhood business had held him hostage for almost thirty years. Jeremy hadn’t ever fully been in a relationship with his wife, because he was still emotionally bound to his mother.

Give yourself permission to have a wonderful, loving person in your life.

I believe that we all have some unfinished emotional business from childhood, but if you aren’t happy with your relationship choices and suspect you may still be held hostage by your childhood feelings, spend some time thinking about all you’ve read and look for some connections between your past and your present.

FEAR OF INTIMACY

Do you attract people who can’t make a commitment?

Do you feel frightened or smothered when someone expresses strong feelings of love toward you?

Do you find yourself pushing people away, even when they’re giving you what you want?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be affected by the third way in which your emotional programming can determine your love choices: it gives you a fear of intimacy.

ITS NOT INTIMACY WE FEAR, ITS THE CONSEQUENCES OF INTIMACY.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say that, as a child, someone with whom you were intimate, such as a parent, sibling, or relative, hurt you in some way. Maybe you loved your mother and she died when you were a child. Your mind makes an association between intimacy and that painful experience.

Intimacy = Loss or Intimacy = Shame or Intimacy = Pain

In other words, you associate intimacy with a negative consequence.

Years pass. You consciously tell yourself you want a loving, intimate relationship with a partner, but your emotional programming associates intimacy with something undesirable. So your unconscious mind makes choices in partners who will ‘protect’ you from intimacy because they are either unavailable or uncomfortable with intimacy themselves. ‘Why can’t I attract someone who will give me the love I want?’ you complain. The answer: Because you don’t want to be loved that way. You don’t trust it. It caused you pain in the past, and you are afraid it will again.

Suzanne is a thirty-eight-year-old graphic artist who attended a women’s seminar I gave. ‘My biological clock is running out,’ Suzanne told us. ‘All I want is to find a husband, settle down, and have a fami­ly. I’ve been looking for the right man for years, but I keep finding the wrong ones—married men, men who don’t want kids, men who are afraid to feel. Why aren’t there any good men out there?’

I listened to Suzanne complain about her love life, and had a feeling there was something else to it. A few hours later, after an emotional exercise, I found out what it was. ‘I’ve never realized this before,’ she began with a shaky voice and tears in her eyes, ‘but I don’t think I ever forgave my father for leaving me and my mother. My parents got divorced when I was three years old, and my father moved to another state. I only saw him a few times after that. I remember my mom telling me that we were better off without him, and I think I convinced myself that she was right. I’ve tried for years to block him out of my mind, to tell myself his leaving didn’t affect me, but I know it must have. Ever since I walked into this workshop, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, and I’m tired of pretending that it was okay. I’m tired of feeling so numb.’

Suzanne continued to attract unavailable or unsuitable men into her life because she was petrified of intimacy. To Suzanne, intimacy meant loss, fear, mistrust, pain, and disappointment. Consciously she wanted a man in her life, but unconsciously she was emotionally programmed to avoid intimacy at all costs. Before she could have a healthy relationship with a man, Suzanne would have to purge herself of the pain she had avoided feeling for so long, and create a new, positive picture of intimacy.

Exercise: Write down any negative words you have associated with intimacy. Think about why you may have made those decisions about what intimacy means, and ask yourself if those decisions have been affecting your choices in partners.

LOW SELF-ESTEEM

There’s a popular concept in many metaphysical philosophies that says:

YOU GET WHAT YOU THINK YOU DESERVE.

Not only do I believe this, but I have seen it manifest itself in my own life and the lives of thousands of people I have worked with. For many of us, the problem is that we don’t think we deserve a lot when it comes to love. This is the fourth way your emotional programming can affect your love life: it unconsciously tells you that you don’t deserve the love you consciously think you want.

I could write a whole book on self-esteem, but here’s the important point:

IF YOU WERE TOLD OR CONCLUDED THAT YOU WERE NOT LOVABLE AS A CHILD, YOU MAY HAVE A DIFFICULT TIME ATTRACTING LOVE.

As children we believe what our parents tell us, because we love them and because they are the only authorities we know. So if your parents told you you weren’t good enough, or smart enough, or likable enough, part of you believed them. Even if they didn’t actually use these words, but treated you in an unloving way, you probably still concluded that you were unlovable. When you grow up, you either attract people into your life who can’t love you, or mistreat you, or you have a difficult time finding partners at all.

The big problem with low self-esteem is that you may not even realize you aren’t being treated well in your relationships. People with self-esteem problems typically either make excuses for why their partner isn’t loving them enough or blame themselves for their partner’s behavior.

CASE#1

Craig, twenty-seven, is dating a woman who constantly breaks dates, shows up late or not at all, and doesn’t call to explain. It’s obvious to his friends that she doesn’t really care about Craig, but he doesn’t see it that way. ‘Patrice is just really busy,’ he insists. ‘She is dedicated to her career, and sometimes things come up at the last minute she needs to do.’ Craig grew up with a father who told him he would never amount to anything, and a silent mother who was afraid to interfere. Craig is used to being ignored and treated like he is unimportant, so Patrice’s behavior doesn’t seem strange to him.