get your money’s worth,” he said with a sexy grin.
I’d seen the Dude a few times, and Charlotte was right, he had a killer smile. And while I didn’t know the first thing about him, something in me sensed danger for Charlotte. Given her history with men, I had a feeling the whole thing would end badly—and two weeks later, Charlotte walked in with an update. The Dude had come to his session with a woman.
Of course, I thought. Unavailable. Just Charlotte’s type. Charlotte, in fact, had used that same expression every time she mentioned the Dude. He’s so my type.
What most people mean by type is a sense of attraction—a type of physical appearance or a type of personality turns them on. But what underlies a person’s type, in fact, is a sense of familiarity. It’s no coincidence that people who had angry parents often end up choosing angry partners, that those with alcoholic parents are frequently drawn to partners who drink quite a bit, or that those who had withdrawn or critical parents find themselves married to spouses who are withdrawn or critical.
Why would people do this to themselves? Because the pull toward that feeling of “home” makes what they want as adults hard to disentangle from what they experienced as children. They have an uncanny attraction to people who share the characteristics of a parent who in some way hurt them. In the beginning of a relationship, these characteristics will be barely perceptible, but the unconscious has a finely tuned radar system inaccessible to the conscious mind. It’s not that people want to get hurt again. It’s that they want to master a situation in which they felt helpless as children. Freud called this “repetition compulsion.” Maybe this time, the unconscious imagines, I can go back and heal that wound from long ago by engaging with somebody familiar—but new. The only problem is, by choosing familiar partners, people guarantee the opposite result: they reopen the wounds and feel even more inadequate and unlovable.
This happens completely outside of awareness. Charlotte, for instance, said that she wanted a reliable boyfriend capable of intimacy, but every time she met somebody who was her type, chaos and frustration ensued. Conversely, after a recent date with a guy who seemed to possess many of the qualities she said she wanted in a partner, she came to therapy and reported: “It’s too bad, but there just wasn’t any chemistry.” To her unconscious, his emotional stability felt too foreign.
The therapist Terry Real described our well-worn behaviors as “our internalized family of origin. It’s our repertoire of relational themes.” People don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you. Often they project negative expectations onto the therapist, but if the therapist doesn’t meet those negative expectations, this “corrective emotional experience” with a reliable and benevolent person changes the patients; the world, they learn, turns out not to be their family of origin. If Charlotte works through her complicated feelings toward her parents with me, she’ll find herself increasingly attracted to a different type, one that might give her the unfamiliar experience she’s seeking with a compassionate, reliable, and mature partner. Until then, every time she meets an available guy who might love her back, her unconscious rejects his stability as “not interesting.” She still equates feeling loved not with peace or joy but with anxiety.
And so it goes. Same guy, different name, same outcome.
“Did you see her?” Charlotte asked, referring to the woman who came to therapy with the Dude. “She must be his girlfriend.” In the quick peek I’d gotten of the two of them, they were sitting in adjoining chairs but not interacting in any way. Like the Dude, the young woman was tall with thick dark hair. She could be his sister, I thought, coming with him for family therapy. But Charlotte was probably right; more likely she was the girlfriend.
And now, in today’s session—two months after the Dude’s girlfriend became a fixture in the waiting room—Charlotte has pronounced again that I’m going to kill her. I run through the possibilities in my mind, the first of which is that she slept with the Dude, despite the girlfriend. I imagine the girlfriend and the Dude sitting in the waiting room with Charlotte, the girlfriend unaware that Charlotte has slept with her boyfriend. I imagine the girlfriend gradually getting wise to this and dumping the Dude, leaving Charlotte and the Dude free to become a