The fear of pleasure and other stuff

"People believe that separation opens their eyes to their self-defeating behaviors and gives them an opportunity to resolve those problems with a new partner. But unless they understand the unconscious Desire that motivated their dysfunctional behavior in the first relationship, and learn how to satisfy those desires with the new partner, the second relationship is destined to run aground on the same submerged rocks."

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"But there are other, subtler reasons the exercise works so well. One is that it helps people erode the infantile belief that their partners can read their minds. During romantic love, people operate out of the erroneous belief that their partners know exactly what it is that they want. When their partners fail to satisfy their secret desires, they assume that they are deliberately depriving them of pleasure. The romanticizing exercise prevents this downward spiral by requiring couples to tell each other exactly what pleases them, decreasing their reliance on mental telepathy."

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"Random reinforcement, one of the principles of behavioral science, is the idea that a pleasurable action loses its effectiveness if it's repeated with predictable regularity.
[...] A behaviorist would say that the reason routine gifts aren't as exciting is that the " psychoneurological system has become desensitized to predictable, repetitive pleasure. " [...] A curve ball needs to be thrown in now and then to pique their interest. "

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"I knew that when couples have fun together they identify each other as a source of pleasure and safety, which intensifies their emotional bond."

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"On a conscious level, we go to great lengths to seek happiness. Why, then, should we be afraid of it? To make sense of this reaction, we need to remember that the sensation of being fully alive is deeply pleasurable. When we were young children, our life energy was boundless and we experienced intense joy. But some of our pleasure was curtailed by our caregivers so that we could be safe and conform to social norms: " Girls don't yell and run." "Don't jump on the couch." "Be careful! Come down from that tree." "You're making too much noise." But our fun was also cut short because it threatened the repressed state of our caregivers. [...] As these limits were imposed on us, sometimes in punitive ways, we began to make an unlikely association between pleasure and pain. [...] On an unconscious level, this negative stimulus triggered the fear of death. Eventually we limited our own pleasure so that we could reduce our anxiety. We learned that to be fully alive was dangerous.
However, applying the strange logic of children, we didn't blame our parents or society for equating pleasure with pain; it simply appeared to be our lot in life. We told ourselves, "My parents limited my pleasure, so I must not have been worthy of it." It was somehow safer to believe that we were intrinsically undeserving than to believe that our parents were incapable off meeting our needs or had deliberately diminished our happiness. Gradually we developed a built-in prohibition against pleasure. "

Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want