Understanding the Unspoken Expectations in Your Relationship
Have you ever been in a situation where you feel attacked by your partner, yet have no idea what you did wrong? It can feel disorienting and exhausting to navigate the relational minefield, not sure when the next explosion will occur. Or perhaps you find yourself resenting your partner for constantly letting you down and not meeting your expectations.
If you or your partner ever responded to an accusation with, “I can’t read your mind, how was I to know…?” that is a sure sign that there are unspoken expectations luring around in your relationship. Unfortunately, it is not as simple as speaking these expectations aloud. We must also examine if these expectations are fair or realistic to hold for our partner.
Having unspoken or unfair expectations of your partner can lead to the lack of safety, hyper-vigilance, instability, judgment, and resentment that is common for many couples.
If this is an experience that you are familiar with, rest assured knowing that this does not necessarily mean that you and your partner are incompatible or incapable of having a fulfilling, deeply connected relationship.
To understand where these unrealistic expectations come from, we need to understand our healing fantasies.
What is a healing fantasy?
A healing fantasy is a survival tool that we learn when we lack the affection, safety, or stability we long for. These healing fantasies offer us the hope that our emotional needs will be fulfilled in the future “if only___” (you fill in the blank). These healing fantasies often breed resentment in relationships when we unintentionally or secretly expect our closest relationship to make the fantasy come true. In this way, the fantasies (expectations) can be self-defeating. We long for connection with someone, but our unrealistic expectations create a situation where the other person is destined to let us down.
A healing fantasy often involves:
Changing ourselves (“If only I were less emotional, then…”)
Or changing others (“if only they would…”)
A healing fantasy might sound like…
“If only my partner would ____(i.e. be more emotionally stable, stop drinking, listen to me, etc), we would feel more connected in our relationship.”
Or
“If only I lost 10 more pounds, my husband would stop cheating on me.”
Sound familiar?
Now don’t get me wrong. Your partner being emotionally stable, able to listen to you, or not living in their addiction would be an incredible gift to your relationship and would make significant changes, however, relationships are much more complex than this. They—by definition— involve more than one person. So before you start counting on you losing those ten pounds or your partner being more emotionally stable resulting in a fulfilling relationship, I encourage you to take a moment to pause. Will this truly be the magic wand that fixes everything?
Releasing these unrealistic and unspoken expectations involves a balanced view of responsibility.
How do you contribute to the conflict? How does your partner contribute to the conflict? While a healing fantasy places the burden of the problem on one person (either yourself or your partner), taking accountability and having a balanced view of responsibility distributes the burden and draws you both back into relationship. You become teammates rather than enemies.
Where do healing fantasies come from?
Chances are, you didn’t create these healing fantasies overnight. Healing fantasies may go much deeper than you think.
If you grew up in a family where your emotional or physical needs were not met, chances are you learned to develop healing fantasies as a survival tool. When children don’t get the emotional attention or affection they need, they often cope by creating healing fantasies about how their needs will be met in the future:
“If only I were smarter, my parents would be proud of me”
“If only I put everyone else’s needs before mine, then they would love me”
“If I wasn’t so emotional, my parents would want me around”
The fantasies help you feel safe and make sense of the world. They most likely helped you endure the pain of your childhood by giving you a sense of optimism and hope (even if that optimism and hope were in vain).
How you coped as a child
The type of healing fantasies you have have a lot to do with the way you learned to cope as a child.
Children tend to cope amidst family dysfunction in one of two ways: they either internalize the conflict or struggle around them, or they learn to externalize it.
Internalizers tend to believe that it is up to themselves to make the situation better. As a result, they tend to take on more responsibility for the situation at hand than is realistic. Self-blame is a core experience of an internalizer. They believe that things will be better if they try harder and they instinctively assume that they must be doing something wrong. Internalizers can be self-reflective to a fault. The healing fantasies of internalizers often sound like, “If only I were….things would be better.”
Externalizers believe that it is up to others to change the situation. They tend to be reactive when they experience anxiety and lack self-reflection. Rather than blaming themselves, they tend to blame other people and circumstances for their problems. Core to their experience is a fear of being cut off from the external things that provide them with a sense of security. The healing fantasies of externalizers often sound like, “If only my partner would…things would be better.”
Healing fantasies as an adult
These fantasies carry on into our adult lives and take the form of unspoken or unrealistic expectations in our relationships.
Healing fantasies were attempts to protect you as a child, but as an adult, they are self-defeating. In adult relationships, these healing fantasies show up when we unintentionally or secretly expect our closest relationship to make the healing fantasy come true. They may look like subconscious expectations in our relationships. They may show up when we think that our emotional loneliness will go away if we have a partner who responds to us a certain way. These subconscious expectations are often self-defeating and breed resentment, judgment, and a lack of emotional safety in relationships.
Often couples come to therapy thinking, “if only we had the right communication skills, we would stop fighting.” Communication is important, however, chances are your conflict goes much deeper than this. One source of conflict might be these healing fantasies taking the form of subconscious expectations. It is not enough to simply speak our expectations aloud. The real work involves exploring where these expectations come from. Perhaps your conflict has roots in childhood trauma or family dysfunction. Perhaps there are deep, relational needs that are not being met in the relationship.
Whatever it is for you, there is a path forward. By examining these expectations, uncovering the deeper roots feeding these fantasies, and reorienting the relationship away from the “blame game” and toward a sense of collaboration and teamwork, you and your partner can begin to fight the issue at hand rather than each other.
What fantasies do you expect your partner to fulfill in order for life to be the way you hope it would be?
How can you restore a sense of balance to the way you view responsibility for a conflict in your relationship?
Taking it a step further…
If this resonates with you and you would like to heal the deeper roots causing issues in your relationship, I welcome you to reach out! There are many paths toward healing these deeper issues. If you and your partner would like to work on this together, I would encourage you to reach out for couples therapy. Perhaps you recognize that you personally struggle with healing fantasies and you suspect it comes from childhood trauma or family dysfunction. If this is the case, individual therapy or our group therapy sessions can be an excellent way to pursue deeper healing.
Source:
Gibson, L. C. (2015). Adult children of emotionally immature parents: how to heal from distant, rejecting, or self-involved parents. Oakland, CA, New Harbinger Publications, Inc.
