Relationships Survey #3 Answer

For those of you who have been following the results of my relationship survey, this installment should be fascinating for you. The number 3 most often asked question was basically, “How to we attract the kind of people we attract?” In other words, what are our selection criteria or what ability do we use to pick a partner?

My answer may surprise you. Here is a hint: It has nothing to do with what the two of you “have in common!”

In order to explain this, I have to talk a little bit about what happens to a baby’s brain in the first year of life. Humans, in order to survive, must bond with the mother or some other attachment figure in the first year for the purposes of survival. This means that the relationship with our mother’s is of utmost importance since everything from there on out depends on it.

In order to insure the success of this bonding, the baby develops a highly specialized ability. He or she must learn to read the mother’s central nervous system by looking at her gaze. In many studies, researchers have found that there is a complimentary “dance” that goes on between the mother and her baby. Should anything interrupt this bonding and associated “dance” the baby goes into an attachment crisis and will generate an entire series of behaviors to insure the bond with mom is re-established.

So the baby learns to carefully study the mother’s face as its first developmental task. This means that as humans our first talent is reading faces. We can look at a face and tell someone’s emotional makeup simply with a glance!

Here is the interesting part. This learning, this expertise in face reading takes place in the right orbital frontal cortex. This is an area of the brain that is roughly above the right eye socket. Now my purpose in pointing this out is not to make a brain scientist out of you. However, consider this; the right hemisphere is NONVERBAL!

What does this mean? This means that all of the emotional information we gather looking at a person’s face is nonverbal. So when we read a face we have a vast amount of knowledge about them, but we have no way of telling ourselves what that knowledge is! We know something and we almost immediately know if we are attracted or not. But we cannot articulate what this stuff we know is!

Okay, let’s set that aside for a moment. The limbic system is a primitive part of the brain which is completely wired up before we are five years old. It is the emotional brain. As a result of early childhood interaction with one of our parents we develop emotional needs and one or more strategies to attempt to meet those needs.

Later in life when it is time to select a partner, the limbic system scans the people we meet trying to find someone just like that parent so we can go back to the struggle of meeting our particular emotional needs. How does it, the limbic system, do this? It uses the same face reading ability that we learned as children to select our mate.

Since all of this is nonverbal and since most of us are totally unaware of our emotional needs and strategies, we pick this person claiming that “we have so much in common.” Of course, the sinister truth is that they picked us for the same reason. What ensues is a “dance” of complimentary emotional issues that gradually takes over the relationship leading to disaster!

Next Saturday at 10 am pacific time, I will be exploring this and other relationship issues in my free teleclass - How you can move from Frustration to Fulfillment. Learn the top three qualities of a successful relationship.

I hope you can join us. Click the link to be placed on the VIP list for that class.