Manchester Psychotherapy

Counselling in Manchester

“I Love You But I’m Not In Love With You” Explained

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I love you but im not in love with you“I love you but I’m not in love with you” is a common phrase that I hear from couples contemplating coming into couples counselling with me. It’s a phrase that I hear so often I feel compelled to write a post about it. The aim of this post is to shed some light on what this phrase probably means and to help you to understand how this is normal. I will also give some suggestions on what you can do about these feelings within your relationship.

Let’s break down the phrase a little. “I love you” indicates that you have strong feelings and feel close and at home in your partners company. It sounds as if there is real potential within the relationship if only you knew how to free the energy from the stuck place it seems trapped in. The second part of the phrase “but I’m not in love with you” initially suggests that there is something wrong with the relationship and the love that you have for your partner is not enough. I disagree. I would like to translate this phrase for you as I see it.

The phrase to me indicates that the initial phase of the relationship has come to an end. In Imago Relationship therapy terms we call this the romantic phase. This is where you meet your partner and think that they are the most wonderful person on the entire planet! It’s characterised by the following key features:

Familiarity and timelessness:

You meet your partner and it’s as if you have known them forever! “Haven’t we met before?” you may ask. The answer in many ways to this question is yes, and no! You may not have met this individual before but you will most probably be very familiar with lots of their traits and characteristics because this person will fit with your imago. Your imago is the image of the person you need to be with to resolve your unmet childhood needs. It will be constructed from the good parts, and the bad parts of your parents, caregivers and significant people as you grew up. Yup, you fancy your Mum and Dad and with good reason (shudder at the thought)!!

Completion:

With your new partner you feel complete. They are your true “other half”. Again, this is kind of true according to Imago Relationship Therapy Theory. If you are quiet, you are likely to be attracted to someone who is a bit of a shouter, if you are a “feelings” person, you may well connect yourself up to a “thinker”. The theory states that we choose a partner that will offer us the most opportunity for growth.

Necessity:

This is the feeling that if your partner were to leave or be beamed up by aliens that happened to be passing by, you would simply collapse into a pile of useless Jelly on the floor. It’s as if you suddenly cannot comprehend your partner not being there.

Love drugs

Added to these four key parts of the romantic stage of the relationship is a heady cocktail of drugs. You are literally high as a kite, stoned on love. Your brain is pumping out endorphins, dopamine and other chemicals that are triggered even if you just think about your new love. No wonder we love love, we are off our face on love drugs!

I’m sorry to say, you know what’s coming next….the crash. When you have been in the romantic phase for long enough to form a strong bond with your partner you will enter the next phase, the power struggle. The drugs cannot be pumped out forever (shame as it may be) and you start to notice that other side of your Imago that you are not so keen on – all of those issues that you have with your caregivers that you need to resolve.

Common responses to the power struggle

It makes sense for you to try to recapture that love that you had in the romantic phase of the relationship and so that throws up a few choices for you. You can:

Bully your partner into being the perfect individual you saw them as when you chose them – bring on the arguments;

Dump your partner and go get another one – getting to go through the romantic phase all over again (I bet you know some serial monogamists who have a series of partners but never seem to make any relationship last?)

Have an affair – research has shown that the chemical buzz from the endorphins and other love drugs is enhanced by perceived risk;

For any of the above options you may find yourself saying “I love you, I’m just not in love with you”.

A different way

All of these choices are pretty rubbish and are unlikely to get your needs met,  they are also likely to bring with them a great deal of pain and upset for you and your partner. But there is another way. Commit. Commit to your relationship and work towards deep love with your partner.  Have a conscious relationship. By doing this the childhood wounds you set out to heal with your partner can be healed. You can grow and you can enable the growth of your partner too. But how do you do this?

The “how”

I guess the easiest way is to work with an Imago Relationship Therapist to guide you in the process but I think you can do it without this help, although it may be a little harder.

It’s about talking to each other in a straight way, asking for what you want and sharing your feelings with your partner. Staying away from the four horsemen of divorce and keeping your mouth shut at times when you really want to give your other half a good dressing down. It’s about seeing your partner as another wounded individual who is also just doing their best to heal and get their needs met.

I would also recommend that you read about Imago theory.  I have a fair few posts on Imago so you can read me for free or you can buy the ultimate guide, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples by Harville Hendrix, the brains behind Imago Relationship Therapy.

“I love you, I’m just not in love with you” is a sign post. It says the easy stuff is over and now the more difficult and more rewarding journey has begun. The journey to deeper love.

Read the book!  I Love You But I’m Not in Love with You: Seven Steps to Saving Your Relationship Click on the (affiliate) link to be taken to Amazon.

Do We Choose Our Own Destiny?

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manchester psychotherapy blogScript is often compared to destiny or fate by those who misunderstand this Transactional Analysis idea.  So what does a TA therapist mean by script?

As we grow up, we observe the world and work out how we can survive it. We make decisions when we are young that can stay with us for the rest of our lives unless we challenge these beliefs when we are adults and learn to do things differently.

Script is a central concept in TA.

Script is:

“A life plan based on decisions which limit a person’s ability to problem solve and relate intimately with people” (Erskine, R. 1980).

One of the main roles of a TA psychotherapist is to challenge script beliefs in their clients and help them move towards autonomy.

Many of the decisions that we make about the world are made completely out of our awareness and for good reason. For example, if, as a child, Bob is punished every time he cries, he learns very quickly not to cry or show emotions. He may develop a script belief that men shouldn’t cry and feel uncomfortable around men who show their emotions and find it difficult to deal with his own when things get tough in his personal life.

His script decision has kept him safe as a child and was a great way of surviving, but as an adult he is not in danger if he shows his emotions and his inability to do so may well cause difficulty between him and his partner who feels he is cold and remote from her.

If I was doing therapy with Bob, I  may well bring Bob’s script beliefs around emotions into his awareness where they can both discuss where they originated from and how they can be changed if that’s what Bob wants. The result of changing these beliefs for Bob might be a better relationship with his partner, who feels closer to him, and a reduction in stressful feelings as Bob now realises it’s OK to feel sad and scared and is able to talk about these feelings more easily with people he trusts.

And that’s the key to script – we made the decisions so we can change them. We have that power.

By having our script beliefs brought into our awareness and challenging those that limit us we have the opportunity to lead more spontaneous, flexible and intimate lives.

We choose our own destiny.  Our fate is in our own hands.  A good therapist helps us realise our dreams that bit quicker.

What do you think?  Do you believe in destiny?  Is there such a thing as fate?  Please let me know your opinions and ideas by commenting below.

Erskine, R, Script Cure: Behavioral, Intrapsychic and Physiological. Transactional Analysis Journal, 1980, 10 (2) 102-106.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The Fear Of Boredom – How We Manage Time

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fear of boredom - how we manage timeHow do you manage your time? Are you any good at it? Well, according to TA theory there are six main ways in which we keep ourselves OK when dealing with time. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages. Many of them we do simply to be recognised as an OK human being. Why am I telling you all of this and what does it have to do with the fact that you feel angry/sad/scared/happy about things that are going on in your life at the moment? Well one of the ways in which we manage time is by playing games. Game theory is so interesting and significant in our lives that I’m going to write a post on it all by itself. This post is there to give you the background and explain where it fits in with the rest of the theory.

Time structuring is an important subject in TA and one that I find fascinating and poignant. I’m rubbish at dealing with boredom. I also like to be stimulated by what I’m doing and so when forced to go to meetings that are dull or training courses when I already know the material I get very fidgety. Berne explained this by saying that human beings like to avoid the “pain of boredom”. We have to structure our time to avoid it and he called this “structure hunger”. He went on to say that what we are really after is stimulation in the form of strokes so we have to set up situations so we can get them. A stroke is seen in TA terms as “a unit of recognition”. If you want to read a more detailed blog post about them read Facebook, Twitter and the Stroke Bonanza .

The six ways in which we manage our time are (from lowest emotional risk to the highest)…….

Withdrawal

We all withdraw at times in our lives and it can be a great way to process our thoughts and work things out for ourselves. When we withdraw we are getting no strokes from anyone else. If we withdraw for too long or too often we can become stroke deprived and this might lead to loneliness or depression. Withdrawal puts no demands on us to be intimate and so there is no emotional risk involved.

Rituals

A ritual is carried out when we exchange strokes in a predictable way. When we walk passed our colleague at work and say “Hi, how are you?” we are engaging in a ritual. Quite often we are not actually enquiring as to how the other person is and they know this, so the exchange may go:

Bob: “Hi, how are you?”

Mary: “Good thanks, and you?”

Bob: “I’m great thanks.”

The exchange will most likely go like this whilst both parties carry on walking and even though Bob is really feeling very worried about the report he has to get in by 5pm that day and Mary has a banging headache that she can’t shake. What they are really doing is acknowledging each other’s existence and exchanging low grade strokes.

A great way to illustrate this is to remember how you felt when you said “hi” to someone and received nothing back. Most of us feel very put out! We ask ourselves “why didn’t she say hello?” and usually spend a few minutes mulling it over. We have given a stroke and the ritual is to get one back. When people don’t follow these unspoken rules it evokes feelings in us.

Rituals are a great way to get maintenance strokes but don’t really give us much more than that. Human beings need higher quality strokes in order to feel OK, so if these are the only strokes someone is getting it is likely that they are going to feel lonely and fed up.

Pastimes

When you go to a party and don’t really know the other people there what do you talk about? There are certain subjects that feel safe and that are easy to engage others with. Examples include politics, sport, music, fashion, or if you’re English, our favourite, the weather! When we pastime we are merely exchanging strokes with others. We are not trying to solve anything. There is a semi-rigid set of unspoken rules in place and if they get broken (for example, one party becoming intimate or thinking about how a problem can be solved) the pastiming stops. Pastiming is a great way to get to know others and it helps us decide who we want to get closer to and who we want to avoid.

Activities

We are carrying out an activity when we are directing our energy towards external sources. I have managed to alleviate my boredom right now by typing this blog post. My hope is that you are avoiding boredom by reading it (though I’ sure some would disagree!). Hobbies, jobs, cleaning the house – these are all activities and they can be a great source of strokes. When we get praise for the good work we have done or that shiny big trophy for coming first in the spaghetti eating competition it feels great! So does being paid at the end of the month. Negative strokes are also available in the form of tellings off by the boss or criticism from our work colleges. Remember the rules of stroking though. Negative strokes are better than none.

Rackets and Games

Berne defines a game as “an ongoing series of complementary transactions which lead to a well-defined predictable outcome”. Games are so important to TA theory that they warrant a post all of their own (click here to read). It’s important to note that when we play games with others (and I ain’t talking tiddly winks) we can produce large quantities of intense strokes. These strokes often start off positive and then become negative as the game progresses and we get our payoff.

Intimacy

Here it is – what we are all after. The most risky and the most rewarding of all the ways of structuring time. Being intimate with another requires that we are open and honest and we exchange strokes with another without any hidden agenda and completely in the here and now. There is no other form of time structuring going on and we are not looking to exploit the other individual or set something up for later. Intimacy can be positive or negative and results in true feelings in the free Child ego state. Sometimes it does not involve words at all and it does not just occur with those that you love. You can be intimate with anyone but it does feel a great deal safer with those that you have built a strong relationship with. Someone who believes themselves and others to be OK is much more likely to be intimate than a person who believes themselves or others to be not OK. Because it feels risky, many people are scared of intimacy and seek their strokes through one of the above methods instead.

There they are then, the six ways in which we structure our time. Which ones do you do most? Do you have any great examples of any of them? Let me know by commenting below.  I also provide therapy in Manchester, if you want to work with me just click on my contacts page and get in touch.