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It is a rather inconvenient truth that what seems to get a romantic relationship going – namely attraction as well as other things like shared interests and similar backgrounds – is not really what draws two people together. That’s just on the surface. What’s going on underneath the surface, and really motivating two people to come together – is an unconscious dynamic that I call “recruitment.” And recruitment is a process that generally doesn’t end well.

 

You can think of a recruitment much like what a movie director will do in casting for characters of a script. The director is searching for the actor whose innate qualities, characteristics, tone and overall look and feel will match what the director is attempting to achieve in the script. The director needs to find the actor who can embody the script and play it out – in nuanced and convincing detail.

 

The human mind works in a similar fashion. The script we carry around is a psychological narrative that has been organized and refined. By young adulthood, every person has a well-formulated script – an unconscious fixed perspective on who one is, who others are, and who one is in relation to others. Also contained in the script are the remnants of all past hurts, injuries and rejections.

 

But these remnants remain “alive”, if you will, as they are never fully resolved – and they seek continued expression in the person’s ongoing narrative, in their life as it unfolds.

 

And so, by young adulthood, a person is unconsciously programmed to be with particular people and have particular kinds of experiences that match the script, that promote an ongoing film with essentially the same scenes playing out over and over again.

 

When seeking actors to play the roles of one’s script, a person will unconsciously identity, target, and engage with individuals who are good candidates to play the role they are being recruited for.

 

How unconscious recruitment occurs resulting in the scenes of the same film getting played out over and over is uncanny and many people often believe it is “fate” or some higher power acting in their lives. I don’t believe these explanations so much as in the power of the unconscious forces that are being manifested.

 

For example, a woman who was severely criticized by her narcissistic father throughout her development may find, as she begins to date and have romantic relationships, ….. partners who themselves exhibit narcissistic tendencies or suffer from severe narcissistic issues.

 

Even after extensive psychotherapy, many patients who are able to intellectually recognize a particular idiosyncratic pattern operating in their life in which they are drawn to people who treat and injure them in ways they have been treated and injured before, often tracing back to their parents, cannot stop the pattern. Many of these people even stay in negatively or highly damaging relationships long after they’ve realized their partner is essentially a kind of fill-in or surrogate for their caregivers and others figures in their lives who’ve traumatized them.

 

So, in summary then, we seem to be unconsciously motivated to formulate a narrative early in life in which a plot line involves us being negatively treated or even traumatized in very specific ways by those we are close to or seek to be close to. We go forth in life recruiting actors to play out this script again and again.

 

This dynamic is termed “enactment” or “re-enactment” in the psychological literature and there are numerous perspectives as to why it seems so ubiquitous. Evolutionary theorists believe that the human mind craves familiarity and routine. Even though a romantic partner, a boss, or a friend may treat us in negative ways, we are at some level content or satisfied with the stability of this well-patterned experience because we know it, and know ourselves in it.

 

Other theorists including many Freudians argue that re-enactment is an unconscious strategy designed to set up opportunities to rectify or resolve previous relational injury. For example, if a woman was severely criticized as a child by her narcissistic father, this view would argue that in each romantic relationship she is resurrecting the experience with her father in order to finally overcome him, defeat him, and defeat all the pain he (and men who have been similar to him in her life) has caused her. This attempt of course does not seem to work – even if a person can learn to combat being treated negatively by others in contemporary life, by doing so does not heal the scars left by others throughout one’s personal history.

 

A final thought on recruitment: just as you may be unconsciously recruiting a new actor to play a role in the script of your ongoing repetitive film, so too are you likely being recruited by others to play roles in their films. In a future podcast, I will describe how this process unfolds – how you may insidiously be recruited and gradually transformed to be an actor in a role with a script that is not your own but that you end up embodying.