Oh! so that explains it.

[Burgbud]

The Passion Trap is the book the OM in my sitch recommended my XW read when they first started communicating so she could better understand him. That information was in one of the emails I read when I first discovered the A. So naturally I went out and got the book.

I think he's dead on in how he describes power imbalances in an R and how they affect the R. I think he's a little too willing, however, to look at one aspect of relationship dynamics and assign the entire gamut of R dynamics to that single aspect. Many of his readers have fallen into the same trap if you put any stock in Amazon.com reviews ("This book describes every relationship I've ever been in!").

One reason I believe this approach is so seductive is because it's great in retrospect. He says power imbalances cause trouble in Rs. When you go back thru your Rs and find a trouble spot, it's very easy to come up with a power imbalance to explain it because determining who's one-up and who's one-down is so subjective. Especially when you add in the concept of the "hidden one-up/one-down". When you find a stich where it seems a person was obviously one-down but they up and left, you now say "well, they were the hidden one-up" or even "they were one-down but couldn't take it any more so they pursued the only path they could find to becoming one-up".

My wife did this for me at one point fairly early on. She went back thru our dating and marriage and matched the major trouble spots to who was one up and who was one down. If I had wanted to I could have gone back and made a case in every instance for why the other one of us was really one-up. It's a very malleable concept. Lil provides a great example...she says her bf is one-up in attractiveness but she's one up in financial stability (and general "being squared away-ness"). It's easy to see how Heather's H was one-up in the beginning of their R but did he eventually become one-down? When he was doing all that drinking did he see himself as powerful and one-up or weak and one-down? As Heather grew more resentful and contemptuous, was she seeing herself as one-up for being stronger than him or one-down for putting up with it? So in these sitch's, who's really the one-up? In hindsight it's easy to determine, just look at what happens and decide from there.

In a lot of ways the theory isn't very predictive or helpful. There are reasons given for the one-up to stay in the R and reasons given for the one-up to leave. What should be done about it? If we accept that Heather's H punishes her because it makes him one-up, what can she do about it? By definition he can't be one-up unless she's one-down. If he's not willing to meet her in the middle what should she do (assuming she's unwilling to be one-down her whole life)?

I feel like I'm muddling thru my explanation and not being clear. My basic point is that it's easy to assign one-up'ness based on outcomes. It's much more difficult to do useful things with the concept. You might see an R in which one person is obviously one-up and decide that person is in danger of bailing from the R because they're becoming resentful and contemptuous of the one-down. Then, lo and behold, the one-down is the one who bails. Then the motivations get assigned to meet the theory: the one-down left because they felt the need the seize power and become one-up.

It's like the concept of "momentum" in sports. One team scores a few in a row and the announcers point out how much momentum that side has. Then the other team comes back and evens the game. Now the momentum has switched, because momentum doesn't really exist in sports, it just gets assigned to whichever team is doing well at the moment. That doesn't mean that good results don't feed into subsequent good results on the sports field, it just means there are a lot of additional factors that determine the final outcome.

P.S. The Passion Trap is also manna from heaven for commitmentphobes. "Look," they say, "you wanted this more than I did so I was one-up and of course you lost your attractiveness to me." Yeah, the person who wants the R the least is one-up. The Passion Trap can explain the symptoms of the commitmentphobe but doesn't do much to explain the cause or the solution.