Maureen E Hosier

About Maureen

I realized at the age of 38 that I needed help to understand what was happening in my relationships. I wanted to know what was “wrong” with me that I kept looking to the outside for someone new while I was in a relationship.

Almost immediately I was shocked to learn that I had not been “growing” emotionally. I had been stuck emotionally doing the same thing over and over again.

This realization felt so right to me.

As I grew, and my self awareness took hold, I was again shocked to realize that I was looking outside my relationship to find someone new in order to get “something” that I was missing inside of me. I didn’t know that I’d been looking for… a person, who would “make me” feel good about myself.

Then I learned, in truth,I had really been looking for me in the relationship.

That was when I also decided to change my career path and go back to school to obtain a Master’s Degree and then a PhD in Psychology. I wanted to understand how to help people who lacked self-confidence and self-esteem, like me, to gain whatever it was so that those critical internal parts for living a comfortable life, which I believed had been taken away in childhood, could return to them.

I focused on parent-child relationships because I believed the answers to be found in those interactions. Then, I realized that I could see those same childhood relationship dynamics, in the love relationship between the couples who came in and were “in it”, either silent or angry.

And I saw that couples who came in to change the way they related together often spoke about the similarities of their partners to their parents or to one of the parents, or to a brother, sister, relative or friends with whom they’d had traumatic experiences with at home or at school.

I understood too, that often, one person in the relationship had been looking to the relationship and to their partner to give them validation, understanding, nurturing, and the support to feel good about themselves and to grow emotionally stronger.

That person was doing anything for their partner to make them happy and to “make” the relationship work, hoping (without their awareness) that by giving “unconditional love” as best as they could, they would change how their partner loved them and finally get what they needed emotionally.

Not realizing they had chosen someone they loved desperately, but with whom the relationship just wasn't working.

Without their awareness, they had chosen someone who did not want to relate in that way or, like them, didn’t know how. Often that person just wanted the relationship to work without wanting to talk about it. And just wanted to do their own thing in the relationship.

My life’s efforts have been to explain this process so people could understand that there was nothing “wrong” with them, and that they could learn to refocus back toward themselves, their feelings and needs, and use their emotions as cues to become aware of their own behaviors, especially when they became aware of the emotional pain they were experiencing in the relationship.

My sister, Berta Hosier Conger, and I have written two books, You’ll Do Anything for Her and You’ll Do Anything for Him, which explain what happened in the past and what is happening in the present in a relationship and why one person may give up themselves to make their relationship work.

We also explain how individuals can work to become self-aware and then find out if their relationship can work for them or not.