Sue and Johnny (not their real names) have been married for 12 years. When they met, Sue was extremely excited about having met Johnny at a mutual friend's party. "He's so handsome; he made me laugh...and he's got a great job", her friends remember Sue saying. Johnny, on the other hand, was equally enamored by Sue. "She's beautiful; she is working on her doctorate degree...and she's totally into me!"
After about a year of dating, Sue and Johnny married. It wasn't until year five of their marriage that Sue came in to see me. "He's obsessed with money!", she exclaimed, "....nothing matters more to him than how much we're making...how much I'm spending...and how little we're saving." Sue went on to say that Johnny also suffered from unpredictable and explosive outbursts of temper, was extremely judgmental, and socially isolated himself (and them) from others. "I feel like I'm married to Jekyll and Hyde", she cried. "He'll put on a good front once in a while for others and in public...but when it's just us, he's more often negative, hypercritical, and angry." Eventually Johnny came in and had a very different take on their marital situation. "Sue never shuts up about Sue", Johnny remarked. "She is so fixated on her own problems at work and with her brothers and father, she could literally talk about them 24/7 if I allowed it." Johnny added that Sue was also extremely irresponsible about how she spent her time and money in the context of their marriage. "Sue is into rescuing greyhounds like nobody else on earth does it", he said. "She has spent thousands of dollars over the course of the past 12 years on these damn dogs that come and go out of here like a bustop."
Clearly, seeing Sue and Johnny independently from one another opened my eyes to some of the lifetraps and lovetraps each of them struggled with.
Both Sue and Johnny grew up in homes where getting their own needs met was a hit and miss endeavor. Both had one abusive and explosive parent. Both also had a detached and generally uninvolved "other" parent/parent figure. For Sue, her father and stepfather were both this way. For Johnny, his mother was often "busy" and focused on anything else but Johnny and his siblings. In the end, both Sue and Johnny grew up believing (the lie) that anyone each became close to would either abandon them (emotionally or otherwise) or betray them (significantly). Given their respective childhood experience(s), Sue and Johnny developed a schema (pattern of thinking) which taught them how people can't and won't be there for you (literally and/or figuratively)...even when they are your parents. Beyond that, they also learned that love and betrayal went together like fish in water. To make matters worse, no one could predict exactly when the betrayal or abandonment would happen...it just did. It always did.
Needless to say, Sue and Johnny had a lot of work to do as it related to just "one" of their respective lifetraps; a specific lifetrap (schema) having to do with disconnection and rejection...
