I’ve been re-watching SATC to remind myself of what happened with Carrie and Big and as a reminder of the other characters too. Just this morning I watched the demise of round 2 of Carrie and Big, and her subsequent trip to a therapist, followed by the girls talking about their ‘patterns’ whilst having lunch in the park.
Miranda’s pattern is apparently that she is attracted to angry guys, Sam doesn’t believe she has one (say what?!)
The girls tell Charlotte her pattern is that she, “waits on a perfect guy to ask her on a perfect date, and when he does you project this huge fantasy on him, setting up these enormous expectations, which promptly blow up in your face.”
Charlotte is taken aback, “that’s a horrible pattern”.
Carrie narrates whilst typing her article, “I wondered, were we all just victims of conditioned responses doomed to repeat the same unconscious relationship patterns or were we in fact just dating the same person over and over again?”
Yes. Yes we are. Well, some of us are. Until we know that we can change those patterns.
So let’s emotion coach Charlotte’s pattern, as it may be one that many young, and older women can relate to.
The pattern is what we need to see, in order that we can identify the behaviours that need to change. The behaviours behind Charlotte’s pattern are that she will dismiss anyone who doesn’t fit her ‘perfect’ guy persona, or who can’t take her out on a perfect date. And she also has the behaviour that when she does date she does exactly what Carrie does and projects what her hopes are for the future onto this man in front of her that she doesn’t know yet.
So those are her behaviours. She could try and unravel why she is like this but she can also just use the steps of emotion coaching to realise that she is always let down by these experiences, therefore she has to do some problem solving on her relationship patterns to figure out:
ways to stay present;
that she might want to start saying yes to men she normally wouldn’t;
to let go of the idea of the ‘perfect guy’;
to get to know the man in front of her and not try to fit him into her idealised version of her future.
We get to see how all of this plays out when she meets the perfect guy, in the perfect way, who takes her on a perfect date, and then they have a perfect wedding. Except that it’s not all perfect because, “Trey can’t get it up”. She decides to have the perfect no-sex-before-marriage approach, until the night before. Her perfect marriage crumbles when they cannot agree on having children.
And then, by some strange coincidence, (maybe she emotion coached herself!) she meets a bald, uncouth divorce lawyer. Harry thinks Charlotte is wonderful. After a few meetings and the finalising of her divorce, Harry and Charlotte end up having great sex as Harry seduces her whilst showing her around his friend’s apartment that is up for rent. Charlotte can’t believe that she could be with a man like Harry, and tells him that it’s just sex and nothing more. But then she falls in love with the imperfect guy, has an imperfect wedding where she spills wine on her dress, Miranda’s speech goes on fire, and the best man gets extremely drunk. They have a great marriage, adopt a baby and Charlotte eventually falls pregnant too.
Charlotte’s is a great story for all women (and men!) who need to break a pattern.
To peace and prosperity,
jaxx x
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