Why am I bothering?

This week one of the couples I have just started working with made me think of one of my favourite quotes below...

They have been together just over a year and have been having difficulties communicating without arguing. 

The man said in the session, 'I don't even know why I'm bothering.' 

So I asked him directly, 'Why are you bothering?'

What he said next was really touching. 

He paused for a while, smiled and said simply, 'Because I love her, I do...and I know that deep down in there is a lovely person.'

That choked me up!

All the battling between the two of them was really just an attempt to reconnect with each other, to feel safe enough to love each other and be the vulnerable lovely people they are without fear that if they let down their guards and trust again they will be hurt, let down, disappointed, abandoned or betrayed.

‘One of the most striking, and perhaps encouraging, things that psychoanalysts have discovered is that people never give up trying to put things right for themselves and for the people they love…what appears to be the most desperate and useless behaviour can be understood as an attempt to get back to something that was good in the past or to put right something that was unsatisfactory. Over and over again people come back to their failures in an attempt to remedy them, even if they cannot help repeating the same failure over and over again.’ 

- Balint, E. (1993:41) Unconscious communications between husband and wife. In: Ruszcynski, S. (ed) Psychotherapy with couples. London: Karnac