“Chemistry” Can Be a Protector Part (Part 1 of 2)

A client we will call Maya had ended four relationships in six years, each of them with a man who seemed at the start almost too good to be true. He was generous and financially established, quick to pick up the check and quick to talk about the future, and the pull she felt in those first few weeks was overwhelming, the certainty people describe as just knowing. Each time, within a year, the same thing happened. The closeness curdled into something heavier, she found herself feeling small and managed rather than loved, and she left, baffled at how she could have been so sure and so wrong.

We have both spent years watching this pattern (in our offices and in our own lives). We have come to believe that the experience most people call “chemistry” is often a protector at work. It is less a feeling that arrives from nowhere than a recognition. A protective Part scans a new person and identifies in them the possibility of a do-over, soothing a wound it has been guarding for a very long time, and the jolt of certainty that follows is that part saying, in effect, this one could finally fix it.

For an Internal Family Systems practitioner, this changes what a first date actually is. We tend to think of dating as a search for connection, and it is, but it is also a meeting of two protective systems, each running a likely unconscious assessment that the conscious Self never authorized. Maya’s manager was not looking for a partner—in the way she thought she was—but for someone whose visible financial strength might quiet an exile that had learned early (and painfully) that security could vanish without warning. The man who could pick up the check without flinching was not chosen for who he was, but for what he represented to a Part of her that had been frightened for 30 years.

This runs against the way attraction is usually understood, even by people fluent in Parts work. We are comfortable saying that our protectors shape our reactions and our defenses and our conflicts; we are far less comfortable noticing that they also shape our desire. The exile does not stay quietly in the basement while we date. It becomes a compass, orienting the whole system toward whoever seems most likely to offer relief—protectors translate that orientation into the felt sense that we experience as pull (“chemistry”). What feels like the heart recognizing its match is frequently a manager scanning for someone who can provide a corrective experience or a firefighter spotting a quick route to relief; both of these protectors valiantly attempt to quiet the exile but can eclipse the clarity about who is truly compatible.

The financial dimension is where our two fields meet. It shows up more often than most couples realize. Money is one of the most reliable carriers of exile material we have come across, because so many of our deepest beliefs about safety and worth and belonging were laid down in childhood through money—who had it and who did not, what was said about it and what was not. A person can carry an exile that equates wealth with safety, or one that equates being provided for with being loved, or one that learned somewhere that money always disappears and so does everyone attached to it. These exiles do not announce themselves. They lean on the protectors instead, and the protectors go scanning.

So the deprivation exile draws its system toward partners with money, reading abundance as what will finally make it safe. The exile that absorbed a belief of not being enough steers away from anyone successful enough to expose that wound. The exile formed in financial chaos feels an unaccountable pull toward partners whose finances are unstable, because instability is what love felt like at home. In each of these cases the protector is doing something loving, trying to bring the exile the one experience that might heal it. Yet it is looking in the wrong place.

READ Part 2 of this article here.

By Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, and Kristine Anthis, PhD