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Do you know the difference between a wound mate and a soulmate?
In a soulmate relationship, you want to support each other’s souls and be each other’s safe place to land. With a soulmate, you take each other further on your own emotional and spiritual path of growth than either of you could go alone.
With a wound mate, you are locked into a defeating pattern where you bond with each other through your mutual wounds, trauma, and pain. That’s why people who misuse substances are often attracted to each other and to other “wounded birds.” Or, yet again, you get involved with a narcissist who can manipulate your self-doubts and vulnerability, which draws you in.
Many of my patients mistake a wound mate for a soulmate or soul friend. They marvel at finding someone just like them. This can feel intense and intimate, whether it’s a romance or any potentially close relationship. But actually, they confuse intensity with intimacy, and control with caring.
Having empathy for someone’s difficult past doesn’t mean you accept their current abusive behaviors.
In my book, The Genius of Empathy, I write about a patient who described her painful choices in romantic partners.
She said, “I feel I have more in common with people who’ve had a difficult childhood since I had one too. We ‘get’ each other.” With such seeming rapport, she was baffled about why the relationships failed. She didn’t understand that the same emotional wounds could prevent a partner from showing healthy intimacy. Nor did she grasp that the sizzling chemistry that can come from having a common history can’t always be equated with love.
It often turns volatile and abusive with wound mates. So, in therapy, my patient started to accept that she was choosing wound mate relationships, which were unhealthy and painful. As she explored her own emotional patterns, such as needing to overgive to win someone’s love, she became attracted to potential partners who were more capable of intimacy.
If you identify with being a wound mate, you can begin to heal this pattern in psychotherapy, as my patient did.
As a result of her emotional growth, she was able to become a caring partner who is more capable of intimacy. Participating in a twelve-step recovery group for codependency, such as CODA, can help you choose healthier people too. However, if you haven’t done this healing work, you could easily be drawn into these destructive relationships again, so be cautious.
The first step to healing this pattern is to be aware of it.
Gently explore any beliefs that keep you repeating harmful relationships.
Record them in a journal.
Common ones are:
“I only connect intimacy with pain,” or “A loving family yells at you because they care.”
Tenderly replace these beliefs with more healing ones, such as: “Love means mutual respect,” or “Healthy intimacy feels comfortable and nurturing.”
Have empathy for the beliefs that drew you to wound mates in the past so you can stay open to more emotionally available partners now.
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