Monday, April 2, 2012

The Myth of the Pelican & the Truth About Humans

 

There is an interesting bit of information about pelicans circulating among bird lovers. It holds that because of their diving into the water from heights up to 60 feet and at high velocity,
they eventually go blind from the accumulated damage done to their eyes when they
hit the water. In other words, some of the very things that serve their survival—their keen eyesight and diving ability—lead to their demise. Now I have discovered this is not true. It is a myth. First of all, not all pelicans dive for prey. Some of them paddle along the surface and do quite well catching dinner
from a sitting position, thank you very much. Those that do dive have protective sacs that cushion the
impact on their eyes. Pelicans have been around for roughly 40 million years without significant change in their anatomy, from what we can tell. So the design seems to work. Individual pelicans also live up to
forty years, which puts their diving scores far beyond those of any human Olympian.
So this is a myth, but we have many myths in human culture. They are not true on the surface, but they are true at the depth. An obvious example is the myth of Superman, which I have written about extensively (my first book, The Superman Syndrome, 2000, Authorhouse). When is the last time you saw a man flying around your city in blue tights with red boots? No, there is no superman, no superheroes, no X-men, no Prometheus giving fire to man (if you want to go all the way back to the Greeks). Nonetheless, a careful examination of these myths teaches us some valuable lessons. The preeminent one for me is that all these superheroes have some kind of terrible wound visited upon them. In the case of Superman, his entire planet exploded with his family on it when he was merely a baby. He had to endure a long solitary journey to his new home on earth. He grows up to be the Man of Steel. But there is something very interesting about this man. He doesn’t feel very much. He’s not the sensitive type. If he has any feelings, they seem to be a kind of detached amusement or righteous anger. But the deep truth is conveyed to us when we discover that in order for him to be in love with Lois Lane, he must give up his super powers. In other words, steel and feel don’t compute.
The myth is repeating to us a basic human truth. That when we undergo trauma in childhood, we tend to shut down. The capacity to feel, to yearn for connection is there under the surface but we are not fully in touch with it. We become grandiose. We become world-shakers, masters of the universe in business and politics, figuratively or literally insane artists who create magnificent paintings, sculptures, poetry, film roles, or athletic stars--all to feed the public hunger for someone to instill hope that we can triumph in the end.
But, like the teaching within the myth of the pelican, what we discover is that while being able to disconnect from feeling has allowed us to survive through the traumas of the childhood of our species and our individual childhoods, in the long run, this dampening of feeling puts us at risk of vanishing.
We seem to need crises to awaken our deeper sensibilities—like global warming today, or the suffering of our fellow man paraded before our eyes on evening TV such as happened during the Viet Nam war and the Civil Rights Movement or more recently, the devastation of Katrina on the people of New Orleans or the brutal suppression of human rights in so many countries around the world. But reacting to crises is a risky strategy at best. We are always trying to catch up. We don’t seem capable of grasping and acting on the essential truth by asking the core questions: why would humans treat each other this way? Why would humans treat the planet that has given them life this way? How could we be so insensitive to the evidence that surrounds us?
Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard neurologist who suffered and recovered from a left hemisphere stroke has written: “Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel, biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” (Her italics). Yes, we are birthed and experience are first most vulnerable years of life with our sensing and feeling brains (brainstem, right hemisphere, right limbic system), and have to wait for more than two decades for the left hemisphere “thinking brain” to completely come online. But it would probably be more accurate to say that we are feeling creatures that disconnect from our feelings under certain levels of trauma and stress, but that the feelings from which we disconnect to not vanish from our biological system, only from our conscious awareness. Then they exert tremendous influence on the further development of our entire physiological system, including how and what we think about later as the left hemisphere does develop. We are, in many ways, at war with ourselves—a heightened feeling capacity being “told” by other parts of the brain that it does not or should not feel so deeply. As long as we obey those messages which are delivered by life in general and often our quite specifically by our original caregivers and instructors as agents of a disconnected society, we will increasingly be at risk. As individuals, a lack of feeling will lead us toward less than best-case decisions, at the least. As a nation and a species, we will not feel danger until it is upon us—until we are nearly blind from the impact of so many dives in our frenzied pursuit of what we have come to believe is the real sustenance—material possessions, status, money, power. Even political freedom, while a necessary precondition, does not guarantee psychological freedom from this cycle of reinforced suppression of feeling.
So, do we ultimately perish from using the same strategy over and over again as the myth ascribes to the pelican? Is this a fatal glitch in our design—that in order to survive we must disconnect from our deep feeling nature, and that disconnection will render us incapable of responding to the very crises it impels us to create?
The jury is still out, out on the question of whether or not enough of us can see this and change
However, the jury is not out on how we make it through. Nowhere is it more exquisitely stated than by Martin Prechtel in his luminous book, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: For me, true initiations would be impossible until the modern world surrenders to the grief of its origins and seeks a true comprehension of the sacred.” He goes on to discuss the perverse hunger that is the result of being disconnected from the simple feeling truths of everyday life: “…hunger for entertainment that hopes to fill the spiritual void of individuals and a whole culture with talk shows, corn chips, movies, dope, fast cars. That hunger is an emptiness that should be wept into, grieved about, instead of blocked and filled up” (my italics). What an irony. The teaching here is that, like the pelican, we have protective "sacs" near our eyes--tear ducts! The pelican has been here 40 million years. Homo sapiens has only been here 150,000. Our survival repertoire is still largely untested. Still, it is a sad measure of the breadth of repression that there are still large numbers of people in the psychological community that not only fail to give grieving its due importance as a healing process, but actively denigrate it.
As is so often the case, artists and soul-adventurers like Prechtel know better than so many of the people who purport to be experts on healing the human heart.. There will be no true transformation into the centuries-old longing for peace and collaboration among humans without our first feeling the brutal and sorrow-filled episodes of our origins—as a species and as individuals. No feeling, no tears; no tears, no truth; no truth, no vision; no vision, no potency to manifest what lives beyond political freedom—psychological and social freedom that cherish, respect and mobilize our essential nature as brilliant feelers.
C 2012 Bob

Parenting From Depth, Part II: Children Should be Seen and...

 

Early in our Imago Parenting Course--Connected Parents, Thriving Kids--we give a quick survey of how parenting styles have changed over the years. For hundreds of years,
parenting was parent-centered, authoritarian, "because I said so", "children are to be seen and not heard." You really have to shake your head on how this approach dominated for thousands of years. Why didn't we as a species see the terrible limits of this approach sooner? Well, that will be a discussion for another day. Suffice it to say that parent-centered parenting did a lot of damage on this planet, some mild and some on the level of holocaust--children treated as slaves, property, brutalized and even killed because "father knew best"in some way. Finally, after the World War II, there was a gradual shift towards child-centered, permissive parenting. "Cchildren are to be seen and not heard" gave way to, "Children are to be seen, heard and given whatever will support their 'self-esteem'". Being a baby-boomer, my experience is that I and my cohort grew up with a sometimes confusing blend of authoritarianism and permissiveness. I think this conflation of the two styles dissipated gradually over the balance of the 20th century and into the 21st.
In the last few years, a lot of parents and professionals in the field of child development have arrived at the conclusion that child-centered parenting has frequently gone too far, indulging children, allowing their scheduled activities to run the life of the household and generally being unwilling or unable to leverage a "positive no" that actually can give children a clear boundary and nurture in them a greater sense of responsibility, a sense that there are other people in the world besides themselves and a mature person makes room for those others. Now what we see, and what we in the Imago community are working towards, is parent-child centered parenting; parenting that emphasizes the relationship between the two, that sees both as catalysts for each other's growth and enrichment. Toward that end, children are to be seen, heard, felt and responded to in ways that are appropriate to the need and the developmental moment, but not over-indulged. As our workbook states: "I am in healthy connection with my child when I'm emotionally available to learn what he/she needs from a parent who is willing to take charge." One obvious example: Conscious parents know that four year olds need about a dozen hours of sleep and are best served by a bedtime around 7 in the evening, not nine, ten or eleven. They also know that it's a good idea to make sure kids burn off a lot of energy about three hours before that bedtime so that they are ready for the quiet enjoyments of bath and reading and gentle play.
My own mnemonic device for this parent-child centered approach is the Italian word cara,which means dear. I set it up this way:
C
=Consistenly (consistency across situations, not constancy which is impossible)
A=Attuned, (meaning emotionally available to "get" our children's reality)
R=Responsive, (in a timely manner to the present and long-term needs)
A=Appropriate (to the developmental moment the child is experiencing)

So, being a C.A.R.A. parent means we would respond to a crying infant by picking it up, comforting it and attuning to learn what it need: Just the comfort? A diaper change? A warmer/cooler/quieter/more-or-less stimulating environment? Food? Etc. We would understand that an infant can't meet its own needs and certainly cannot regulate its own emotions. She needs us to do that for her just as she needs us to walk for her because she can't walk and speak for her because she can't yet speak and make decisions because the left side of her brain where decisions largelyt get made is, for all intents and purposes, not at all functional. But an appropriate response to a crying teenager might look very different. It might mean that we would mirror his feelings: "Oh, I can see that you are really hurting over this." Or, "You seem really angry about this. Is that what you're feeling?" It might mean we offer hugs. It might mean we let him know we're available if he wants to talk, but empower him to work it through on his own if that's his choice. Your get the picture. The bottom line is to be Consistently Attuned, Responsive and Appropriate...which includes our own needs, thus the parent-child relationship. Sometimes, especially with smaller children, it IS appropriate to drop what we're doing and come to their aid. But as a child matures, we have more choices about our proximity to her and her issues. It's important for kids to gradually get through living examples that their parents are "others" and have needs themselves and those needs will sometimes preclude an immediate response to their own. For an infant, the experience of an unmet need can be catastrophic. For a four year-old, far less so. For a fourteen year-old, still less--IF the parent has been consistent over the years in balancing (based on the child's developmental stage) the child's needs with their own. Children ARE to be seen, heard, felt, "gotten" and responded to with appropriate loving behavior; but parents are people, too, and also need to be seen, heard, felt and "gotten"...mostly by their life partners and other adults but, over time, by their children, too. When kids get that their parents are separate people, they grow up to be much more responsible contributors to culture. So there is no danger of children becoming narcissistic if they are truly seen, heard and gotten by parents who intuit or have learned through study what is appropriate at a given moment.
In my book, Real Fatherhood, there are a number of examples of good moments...and bad ones that I tried to correct as quickly as possible. Our Imago Faculty has called such errors, "beautiful mistakes" to remind us all that none of us can be perfect. In one such situation, my son was eight years old. I had been giving him an allowance of $2.00 a week, for which he did certain chores. He got very money focused because there were things he wanted. Suddenly I realized that it was a significant error to pay him to do things. After all, he and I were a family (I was a single dad at the time). We were a team. To pay him changed his status. He became an employee. Kids are not our employees. They are family members and what was appropriate for Ben was to bear his weight as a family member.
Obviously, there were chores he could not do, given his developmental moment. But he could help prepare meals, do dishes, wash the car and do yard work with me. So I self-corrected by telling him that I would no longer pay him for specific chores. He would still get his $2.00 a week so he could learn to manage money--which was the real and right purpose of an allowance. His initial reaction was to pitch a fit. "How will I make more money?" he cried at me. I held steady and let him know that he really couldn't right now. Eventually he'd be old enough so he could perhaps do things for neighbors or have a paper route. I let him cry it out. He was mad at me and he had cause. I was correcting a decision that was less than attuned to the situation at the time. He had a right to his frustration and tears. But the whole thing was over in about a half-hour. That was one of the best half-hours I ever invested in his character...and mine. Parent-child relationship!
C2012 Bob Kamm

Your Child's Emotional Tuning

 


When an infant calls for help and her parent is consistently available and responsive in a
way that meets the child’s need, that child is implicitly learning that it is good to express need
because it will be satisfied in a timely manner. She can’t think at this age, of course, but her
body knows at the cellular level what is happening. This is the ground floor for emotional
balance in adulthood.
A child who experiences such emotional attunement and response from
her parents doesn’t have to escalate her expressions to magnum crying, screaming and flailing
to get mom and dad’s attention. Consequently, as an adult, she is likely to be able to do
without rapid escalation to bring attention to her needs in an intimate relationship but also in
friendships and the workplace. This truth debunks the old idea of letting children cry it
out…which we now know stresses the child’s system with large flows of cortisol and other
stress hormones that can actually do damage to her hippocampus—a part of the brain that is a
building block of IQ because of its key role in creating long-term memory.
Our degree and accuracy of responsiveness is what we might call “emotional tuning.”
Indeed, the entire neurological and hormonal system, of which the brain is the most obvious
component, is an instrument for sensing and feeling in the early years, not thinking. It is being
tuned by caregiver interaction as certainly as a piano is tuned by a piano master. This
emotional tuning determines which emotional notes, note sequences, chords and reaction speeds will
become the most common in the life of the individual. You can continue the metaphor by imagining what kind of parent interactions will lead the child to produce Wagner-like reactions rather than, say, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven or, in today’s terms, the quiet and contemplative music of Michael Hoppe or the blaring, machine-gun like emanations of metal rock and rap…as well as all the possible variations along that continuum.
Unfortunately, we parents are not perfect and there are plenty of times when we either
miss our children’s cues or are simply unable to satisfy them due to outside stresses pulling at
us—a bad economy, a catastrophic act of nature, ethnic strife and war, just to name a few of
the possibilities. So, many of us will pass through our critical and highly dependent first four or
five years experiencing something between inconsistent emotional attunement and response
from our parents to very little at all. When we arrive on the shores of adulthood and find
ourselves drawn into an intimate relationship, friendship or important workplace issue, it is
natural that these old deficits come with us and do a lot to shape the dynamics of those
relationships. The good news is that through the right kinds of courageous emotion-based
work in adulthood, those old tunes, as deeply written as they are, can gradually be rewritten
into a more harmonious musical score.
C 2012 Bob Kamm

Love Complete

 

for Annie
When I arrive
shipwrecked
on your shores--as I do from time to time--
and the love I haul from the waves
is soaked
barnacled
and cracked…
the cause is in me
and me alone,
my darling,
for you
are perfectly loveable
and deserve
a fleet
with full sails
flags flying
fresh paint
and a cargo of love
complete,
intact,
delivered onto the docks
with gloved hands.
I have been at sea
too long
yet also long enough
to know
you have, too.
It is my prayer
and my intention
now
to keep land beneath my feet
to witness and adore you
in each of your many moments
…every
shift of wind
on the surface of your eyes
the smallest movement
in their depths,
the subtle telling of your own long voyage
that words can’t touch.
No part of you
should be left behind
dismissed, neglected or
partially embraced.
That was done
by others in your past
so that you buried the full treasure of your heart
under dunes, driftwood
and these stones
that, for all the hiding
over many years,
still held sunlight
captive
in dark flecks
like waves at night
do moonlight.
So, we will
go together now
in day and darkness
you and I
digging
carefully
with our hands
until every chest is open
and every jewel revered

The Rug

 

for Annie

I've always liked this rug
since you first showed it to me.
Its reds and blacks call
to the heart and the will
as clearly as a native American dance
before a great journey,
hunt or battle.
I see men
stomping the earth
around a fire
encouraged by their ululating women.
But then
the patterns pull me away
from the night and human noises
into big spaces
--mountains rising above mountains,
diamonds sparkling on high waters,
crosses pointing to the four directions.
Within these patterns
more colors emerge
... white, beige and at least five shades of gray.
I particularly like the latter,
as if some medicine man
collaborated with the weaver
to remind us
not to be so quick to judge
but rather
to welcome subtlety, nuance, uncertainty
and contradiction,
to walk in the world as if
either danger or wonder
could confront us
beyond the next rock or tree,
to be steady, strong and fully awake
as we place each foot forward,
to be ready and willing
to live whatever
there is to live.
So, yes, my darling, I like this rug very much.
It's the placement I've had a problem with
as you know...
here in the kitchen
where it gets walked on
kicked and
dirtied up with dog hair and vegetable cuttings.
Still
you want it here.
You
don't want it hanging on the wall.
It's sturdy. You're not worrying over dirt.
I usually defer to your taste
but this is a loose rug that slides and folds.
It has felt like an accident waiting to happen.
It has also felt disrespectful to the weaver
and the poem in the patterns.
Part of me wants to dig in and fight this out.
But I have decided
to embrace the placement of the rug
for one reason.
Because it makes you feel good
to have it under foot,
to see it when you enter the kitchen,
to make sure one of us engages
in a weekly ritual of cleaning.
I want you to feel good.
You deserve to feel good.
We will dance together around the symbolic fire
woven in the reds.
What could matter more?
So if you or I trip, I will not go to "I told you so".
I will not allow this rug to become a field
where our two inner children skirmish
over whose needs are more important.
I embrace the placement of the rug
fully
and, as the saying goes, without reservation.
With this commitment
I entertain another possibility
--that I might not have paid so much attention
might not have seen the pictures and heard the stories in the rug
were it not constantly under foot.
Just as, now,
standing in its middle, looking down,
I wonder at the white twinings that extend from each end of the fabric
...reaching forward and back
as if the rug itself
is a sacred between
connecting past with future
earth with sky
water with wind
love with learning
all shades of gray
with each other
and, most important,
me
with you.
C 2011 Bob Kamm

Fierce Attachment III, Couplehood, the Final Frontier

 

I have an old friend who is passionate about our founding father, Thomas Jefferson. He speaks of him with the adoration and devotion of a young boy for his dad. As I write this on the morning of October 6, 2011, many people across the world, myself among them, are mourning the loss of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. He might well be seen as the founding father of a new age. Never in the history of human business and culture have so many people been so enamored of a corporate CEO and the brand he birthed. I use the word "enamored" with intention. In its core, you see "amor"...meaning love. Between Jefferson and Jobs, we could identify a very long list of public figures who have been the objects of enormous affection on the part of huge numbers of individuals. This is just more evidence of the centrality of fierce attachment in human existence.
I have been very fortunate in my life to learn at the feet of some very smart, wise and talented people. I will readily admit to you that I am fiercely attached to these beloved mentors. Given that I am sixty-four years old, you might think I am done seeking mentors and am busy being one. Maybe there are a lot of people smarter than I am. I am aware of still having a lot to learn and I cherish people who can bring something new, potent and truthful to me. Most recent in that category are Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the husband and wife team behind Imago Relationship Therapy, as well as Bruce Crapuchettes and Francine Beauvoir, the senior faculty members of Imago Relationships International, under whom I have done most of my training over the last three years. What have these four people brought to me in my sixties that is so valuable? Since this is a blog post, not a book, I'll be brief, at the risk of understating their gifts to me.
I went through a lot of individual therapy when I was younger...a key moment of which I shared in my last post. The process of regaining my capacity to grieve over childhood hurts literally helped me save my life and grow into adulthood.
Harville and Helen brought a major new insight to the therapeutic process. I don't think it's a stretch to call them the true founding father and mother of transformational couplehood. They have shown us that no matter how much work we do one-on-one with a therapist, there will be wounds that will never be addressed, can never be addressed until and unless we are in a love relationship in which both of us are committed to help each other heal. As intimate as is the one-on-one patient-therapist relationship, as capable as it is through the process of transference of stirring up old feelings for healing, there is no relationship that more closely resonates with the vulnerability of our first connections in life with our primary caregivers--usually mom and dad. In the womb, in infancy, in early childhood and all the way into adulthood, we are at our most dependent and sensitive. Templates of the basic dynamics of relationships are being imprinted in us. As adults, with our lover, we are as open as children once again, hopeful, joyful, ecstatic and dependent. So old early hurts that have managed to lie dormant for decades can be suddenly triggered when our partner seems to ignore us, or talk to us with edge in their voice, or give us a cold shoulder or forget to do something for us. There are just some layers of feelings that only a lover can trigger and make available for processing--not a boss, not a friend, not a therapist, not even a child.
Not only have they shone a bright light on a key truth about human existence. They have presided over the training of thousands of therapists in specific practices that couples can actually learn in workshops and in therapy sessions. Those practices constitute a comprehensive toolkit that has been tested and honed. It is very user-friendly. It is the iPhone of couplehood.
You might be thinking that Harville and Helen's insight naturally raises a question about the limitations of a solitary wisdom path such as meditation. That would be right. Notwithstanding that there is genuine value in the practice of meditation, the iconic journey away from civilization is not, for me, the optimal or even most heroic.
The final frontier of human development is not on a mountaintop in Tibet or in an ashram in Massachusetts. Couplehood is the final frontier. But it is not "out there." It is "in here" or "down there." It is the ultimate site for personal and relational archaeology. Couplehood unearths what has remained hidden in spite of serious efforts through many other methods and moments. Without couplehood, we cannot fully become whole, and unless we become whole, we cannot fully experience couplehood--a challenging, yet sweet and virtuous loop.
Through the application of Imago practices I have repeatedly seen people discover things about their own life journey that were utter epiphanies for them and brought transformational energy. In my own practice with my darling wife, I have processed and learned things that shaped my consciousness from my first breath, things that were still hidden from me as I entered my seventh decade of life, in spite of a great deal of inner work. I have been called to new levels of consciousness, honesty, courage and understanding. The power of these revelations is self-affirming. I'm convinced that it literally reorganizes brain synapses...making us into a qualitatively different human being, more feeling, more compassionate, more curious about our partner, more honoring of their otherness and, above all, more capable of being attached appropriately as adults, rather than caught in the co-dependence that results from being over-burdened with unconscious injuries from our earliest years.
For the insight of couplehood as the final frontier, for the practices to help us navigate that realm and for the sweet, steadfast and patient teaching I have received, I celebrate my fierce attachment to my Imago mentors. Above all, I whole-heartedly celebrate my fierce attachment to the woman who brought me to the Imago well to drink, my true partner, the amor of my life, my Andrea.
C2011 Bob Kamm

Fierce Attachment, Part II

Before my son, Ben, was born, I had tried hard to imagine him as a particular individual with particular features...not just "the baby." But when I saw his face for the first time as the doctor held him up, I realized this was no baby. This was a person, of me, of my family. He was completely recognizable. He looked an awful lot like my Grandpa Sam, my mom's father...except for his creamy blue color. After more than thirty hours of labor, it felt as if the room were tilting and spinning when he finally emerged. My eyes were fixed on Ben but I was falling away in a strange kind of slow motion. I was on the verge of passing out when I felt his tiny spirit lasso and haul me back. I tumbled forward off the cliff of my own breath as he took his first. In an instant, I knew him and he knew me. Our souls collided.
Fatherhood comes upon men in different ways. During the six weeks that followed Ben's birth, I experienced a high beyond anything I'd ever felt. This was not just a new page or new chapter in my life. I had been transported to a new planet. Everyone and everything was different, as if the world itself had just been born. And I had a mission unlike any I'd ever imagined--to protect, nurture and love this person into full flowering. There was no questioning this. It had an irresistible primordial potency. I'm sure millions, perhaps billions of fathers before me had felt this same flooding of the heart...but it was my turn now.
That high felt as if it would never end. I would be the best possible me for the rest of my life, victoriously dueling with the demons of the world to make a sanctuary for my boy. But it did end, almost as if scheduled, right at six weeks. It ended with a bang, not a whimper. Like a lightning strike. I fell into a massive depression. I'm sure I'm not the only man who has experienced "post-partum depression." It isn't talked or written about much, but it happens. We could talk about the crashing of the happy hormone-neurotransmitter pump...but let's not.
The high was followed by a low that matched it. My confidence had flown. I was in the world without any refined skills to make my way and provide the safe-haven Ben deserved. I had just turned twenty-eight. Much of my twenties were spent traveling in Europe, the Middle-East, writing songs and performing. I dreamt of a career as a folk-singer, though I was a few critical years late. That train had left the station. Music was changing. Besides, even when everything is in sync, how many people actually get to live that dream? I went to the local city college and started learning carpentry. I'd have something to fall back on, I thought. But when Ben arrived, I was still in contractor kindergarten. Everywhere I looked, I saw closed doors. Unlimited optimism had turned into unlimited despair and utter paralysis. I contemplated suicide.
Fortunately, there was help available and I grabbed it as fast as I could. Within a few days,
I was on the floor of my therapist's office sobbing my guts out. Initially, all I could feel was that I loved Ben so much more than I had ever loved anyone or anything--yet, I couldn't be the father he needed. I didn't have the skills or the smarts. I had spent most of the last ten years in self-centered pursuits. How could I possibly be a father? What preparation did I have?
After about ten minutes of "woe is me" in the present, things shifted. An image of my father showed up in my mind's eye...not my father as he was in this day, at the age of 58, but as he was when I was about four years old. The image was so clear, it was as if he were in the room with me...and I was that four year-old little boy. "Dad!" I cried, reaching up for him as that little boy. I was inundated with memories from that time...most of them about his absence and my longing to be close to him, to climb in his lap, nuzzle into his body, ride on his shoulders or just be in the same room with him so I could see and hear him. They didn't present themselves as memories, though...but as the present, as immediate reality and need.
Like most men of his generation, my father was a career man. We lived in northern New Jersey. He commuted by train into New York five days a week. Most of the time, when he was around, he was engaged, energetic, warm, playful and funny. Clearly, this was a far better situation than if he had been cold, distant and cruel. Still, it had its own odd curse. Since my father was such a magnetic person, my little boy soul could not help but yearn fiercely to be with him. But being the third of three boys, there just wasn't a lot of time left for me. So that was my deepest hurt with my father--needing to be close to a dynamic man who certainly loved me but just wasn't available enough. I was left gasping for the oxygen only he could provide.
I had known this intellectually for years. I wasn't a novice at psychology or therapy. But for the first time in my life, I was feeling it from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. I was that little boy.
I needed my dad desperately. There was no other reality.
After nearly two hours of crying, I was exhausted. The therapist hugged me and told me to go rest. The next morning, I was back. More tears. More images from the past as clear as if they were happening for the first time. I stayed with the little boy. I surrendered to his need. I was him and as him, felt helpless within this need that could not be met no matter how hard I reached for my dad or called for him.
After another two hours, it ended, cleanly. There were no more tears. I sat up, blew my nose and said, "That's it."
"What's it?" the therapist asked.
"I couldn't be a man because I wasn't done being a little boy. I needed my dad to come home and be with me."
"Well, that's very clear!"
I stood up. "I've gotta go," I said.
"Where to?" the therapist asked.
"Home. I've gotta go home. I've gotta go get a job and take care of my kid."
"Alright!"
We hugged and I was out the door.
Two days later, I got a job selling cars. This was not even on my list of "things I'd like to do". But I had a friend who had done it and told me I had the requisite people skills and there was good money in it. But I needed to make a living and right now. He turned out to be right. Within a month, I was making more than I ever had, and learning the art of selling. Some of it was repugnant to me. That just spurred my creativity so I could find other ways of relating to people without manipulating them. Some of it was quite satisfying. All in all, it was a legitimate way to make a living. Over a couple of decades, I mastered selling, moved into management and ultimately, beyond into consulting and the deep work of leadership development. I never looked back. I never had that feeling of needing my father as a four year-old again. I never again felt paralyzed in the face of life challenges. I had a firm grip on my manhood and did a decent job of raising my son, who is now a grown man and a father.
So, think about attachment. It was fierce attachment to Ben that both triggered the unmet need of my father and gave me the courage to face its force. That need is an intense dynamic which I would argue is common to all children. By fully processing the sorrow of not getting enough of my dad, I was liberated from it...detached, so that it no longer ran my life from its subterranean realm. I was also able to detach sufficiently from my unrealistic dream of fame and fortune so I could be a real and present dad. I would have to do some more work on that dream later, work that had to do with my mother, but the key factor at this moment was that my feet were planted firmly on the ground. I had been the victim of what we might call "the artist's conceit"...meaning that artists so often believe there is an intrinsic beauty and value in their work that the world should and will beat a path to their door eventually to embrace them. That conceit, in my view, is a projection of unfulfilled early needs.
I said in Part I that the fierceness of our attachment to our caregivers is beyond what most of us allow ourselves to feel most of the time. This was true of this situation following Ben's birth. If you had told me that I was going to have to cry for my dad as a four year-old for nearly four hours in order to stand up and be the father I wanted to be, I'd have been pretty skeptical. Having actually done it, there is no way anyone can talk me out of the value of those tears, and the truth that as children, our need to be close to our parents is the dominant force in our lives. There is also no way anyone could talk me out of my appreciation of how our extraordinary brains are capable of holding onto enormous old hurts in the hope that one day they will be healed. Frustration of early need sends the resulting pain underground, from which place it will run our adult lives until we are able to connect with it and grieve it in its original context. No amount of thinking or talking about it will yield the same result.
I am also convinced, from my own experiences and from what I see all around me, that the need for attachment is life-long in humans, though its nature changes with development and aging. Look at human history, at both our cruelty and our finest accomplishments. Look at it through the lens of attachment and all comes clear, from Caesar to Hitler, from communism to capitalism. None of it happens without the fierce need for attachment being unmet, distorted and driven into other areas where it writhes and dominates our lives with sub-optimal adaptations, including cataclysmic brutality. You will also see, laid plainly before you, what we need to do to end the cruelty and create cultures of compassion and connection.
C 2011 Bob Kamm (For more on my fatherhood experience, see my second book, Real Fatherhood: The Path of Lyrical Parenting, available at amazon.com and other book outlets).

Fierce Attachment, Part I

 


Two days before my father died, I felt him leave. I had just spent a few hours at his bedside. He was at home. Eighty-five years old. Until a few months before, he had seemed young for his age. Then, suddenly, it all changed. On this evening, he had slipped out of a diamond-hard clarity that had been the treasure of his last week, into delirium. With his eyes closed, he swung his legs over the side of the bed as if to get up.
I stood in front of him. He leaned forward until his forehead was resting against my stomach.
“Where you goin’, Dad?”
“School,” he said softly.
“No, Dad. You don’t have to go to school. Let me help you.” I bent over and lifted his legs. He lay back down. I caressed his forehead. He fell into silence.
An hour later, I left to drive home alone in my truck—a fifteen minute drive. When I was halfway there, I felt him go. It was as if someone had grabbed the skin at the edge of my chin and ripped it all the way down my torso. Tears came on so quickly, I had to pull off the road. Mind you, there were years when there was so much anger between us, we did not speak. Our relationship was complex, like so many parent-child relationships. If you had asked me at thirty if I would cry over his death, I’d probably have sloughed it off in the negative. But now, I was fifty-five years old. We were lucky enough to have had the time to work it all out and rediscover each other as grown men. In those sobs, I felt the purest truth. My attachment to him was fierce, fiercer than I had ever allowed myself to feel. I would simply not be me without him. It hit me in a way I had never experienced. The knowledge was straight, undeniable, painful, yet rich. Those were beautiful tears. I would not trade them for anything. I thought at the time that I had never before allowed myself to feel the full magnitude and meaning of our bond…and that this is likely true of most people.
His body lingered another day and a-half. But he was not in it.
Nine years later now, I feel my father in my own gestures, see him in the mirror, sense his presence in the shape of my thoughts and passions, hear him in the tone of my voice, my inflections, the words I chose to speak and write.
What really distinguishes humans? Is it our capacity for language? Abstract thought? Mathematics, Art, Music? I would say no. While our experience and expression of those things are certainly wonderful and unique among all known creatures, what really marks us is how fiercely the need to attach drives everything about human life. It is our primary survival strategy. How else would a creature as fragile and vulnerable as the human baby survive into adulthood? We attach first to our caregivers, but ultimately, to things spread around the 360 degrees of our field of being. We attach to our homes and hometown, to favorite places and memories, even trees, rocks, rivers, shorelines, mountains, to colors, foods, times of day, to equations, paintings and songs, to product brands, to certain sports, teachers, doctors, heroes, even villains and torturers as well as political parties, to our armed forces, our nation and, occasionally, our planet, to our clothes, toys and tools (whether high or low tech), to money, power, drugs, ideas, careers, identities, beliefs, ways of doing things and to dreams. Some of us even develop a stubborn attachment to actively denying that we are, first and last, creatures of attachment all the way through our lives…to that last delirious moment when we think we have to get up and go to our school.
To acknowledge the fierceness of attachment manifest in our very genes and brought fully into relief in our individual lives and our cultures, is to have the courage to say, “Yes, I need. I need others. I cannot fully be me without you, Mom, without you, Dad, without you, my brother and sister, without you my wife, husband, child, without you, my dear friends, students and beloved mentors. I need other hearts within which to place my own…and that I may welcome into mine. To be human is to need the solace of touch, the comfort of companionship, the safety of love…and to grieve ferociously when one to whom I have been deeply bound, dies.”
C2011 Bob Kamm

What Are Feelings For?

We humans! We feel happy, angry, scared, sad, surprised, hurt, disgusted. We have developed an enormous vocabulary and numerous nuanced ways of talking about and expressing our feelings. However, these six, appear to be the universal irreducible array from which all others—guilt, shame, disappointment, hope, joy, frustration, anxiety, loneliness, helplessness, to mention just a handful—are derived. Neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor tells us that contrary to what many may wish to believe, we are not thinking creatures that feel, but rather “feeling creatures that think.” This statement is based on her knowledge of the fact that our brain has evolved from an earlier feeling model and huge amounts of its real estate are heavily involved with sensing and feeling—the brainstem, the limbic system, most of the right hemisphere of the neocortex. But what are all these feelings for?
Logic, language and the ability to plan were among the most recent (meaning last) capabilities to evolve, yet they, too are heavily influenced by feeling. Dr. Antonio Damasio has shown us in his landmark book, Descartes’ Error, that we really can’t think without being connected to feeling. There is no such thing as pure, unfeeling logic. In his Theory of Somatic Markers, he clearly establishes how critical it is to be able to quickly, automatically reference the body, its sensing, feeling and stored experience, in order to think and make decisions. With the left brain, we can learn the technical aspects of composing music but it takes the feeling input of the right brain to choose one note over another in order to create a sonata that will strike the heart-chords in an audience. So feelings are not just nice…they are a critical enablers of thought. That’s one of their functions. Clearly, there must be others.
It was only in the 90’s that psychologists and neurologists en masse began such an investigation. Until then, Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” and its entire perspective dominated how we saw humans. Fortunately, in the last two decades, we have learned a tremendous amount.
Feelings serve our survival. We have the capacity for fear because fear generates enormous energy in our systems so that we will run from danger with all our might. We have the capacity for anger because anger generates enormous energy in our systems to fight to save our lives. You could ask, “Isn’t there a better way to accomplish these goals?” but Nature has already answered the question. She has favored this design for literally hundreds of millions of years. Actually, you could say billions of years because even ancient invertebrates have the capacity to flee from or fight with a potential enemy. So whether or not there was ever a different choice than the fight-flight axis is a moot point. This is the one Nature has chosen as workable through an astonishingly wide variety of creatures.
But what is the purpose of happiness? It also serves our survival. It is a state that we experience when our needs are met, including our needs for safety, food, mates, adequate rest, play and social companionship. It stimulates our vitality. As Allan Schore (Affect Regulation and the Repair of Self) points out, when infants experience elation in their interactions with their mothers, growth of the right cortex of the brain is stimulated. So one of the earliest functions of happiness is to stimulate the brain toward optimal development. As we gain control over our bodies and begin to move into the world, happiness is a feedback loop that validates choices that are good for survival beyond just avoiding predators. It is a building block of any community, beginning with the earliest family units and clans.
What is the purpose of being able to feel disgust? It teaches us, “Don’t eat that! It’s not good for you.”
What is the purpose of being able to feel surprise? It teaches us to be curious, to be open to new experiences we didn’t expect, to learn from them.
No doubt you’ve noticed I left sadness as the last core feeling to address. Why? Because we seem to have quite a challenge with this one in our culture…and in many cultures. However, the truth is that sadness serves our survival as importantly as these other feelings. Sadness lets us know something is wrong, that we are lacking something or that we have been hurt. From that knowing, we can make adjustments, better choices, better plans, better relationships. When the sadness is deep enough, we cry. We are the only creature on the planet capable of deep emotional weeping. We don’t just shed tears. We wail. We sob. Our entire system is energetically engaged as fiercely as it is by the different energies of the other feelings. Each feeling has its own energetic state for a purpose. What purpose is served by deep crying? Actually, there are at least a few. Crying helps shed our systems of stress and pain. Fifteen years of research done by Dr. William Frey at the University of Minnesota established that there is a significant presence of ACTH—adrenocorticotrophic hormone directly associated with stress-- being shed in tears along with toxins that build up in the body during stressful experiences. In Frey’s research, this was true of emotionally shed tears and not true of tears shed from exposure to irritants, such as an onion. These latter tears depend on a different neural setup—the fifth cranial nerve which, if severed, will prevent the tearing reaction to irritants but will not interfere with the shedding of emotional tears. Emotional crying is clearly in a different category and has a different neural substrate. Studies have affirmed that most people do report feeling better “after a good cry.” This can readily be explained by the idea that the biochemical correlates of emotional pain are being excreted and our nervous system is shifting from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic mode, from fight and flight to rest. Of course, there are times when we don’t feel better, or at least not much better after a cry. This might be the subject of another blog post but for now, let me share this as an indicator of cause. My mother died 2 years after my dad. When I lost her, I cried hard numerous times. After the first three or four bouts, I didn’t feel better, simply exhausted. Gradually, however, as I went deeper and deeper into the grief, I surfaced feeling better each time. I was fifty-seven. I had both my parents for over five decades—certainly a blessing. At the same time, it left me with that many more memories and feelings of my bond with them to grieve than someone who suffered such losses at an earlier age.
I know there are some who believe that it’s not helpful to engage in deep emotional grieving, particularly over childhood issues. They apparently think that there is a bottomless pit of grief in which we will drown. Perhaps they fear we will become addicted to misery. Notwithstanding the fact that there are some people with specific emotional injuries who cry hysterically to no good, and who may, in fact, be addicted to misery, the general truth in my experience and study is that there is indeed a bottom to grief, and I believe the science (and logic) supports this. Wounds have specific dimensions. They are not endless. I know firsthand the experience, “I’ll never stop crying.” But I did…and we do. Those words are a way of expressing what it’s like being in the full force of the hurt. A person sobbing over a specific loss or set of losses is grieving towards health and away from addiction or compulsion. She is releasing dark energy whose structural origin may be the limbic system in the brain but whose life has made a home in every cell in the body. The bottom of a given wound certainly may be a lot deeper than many people want to think—which may be why it scares some when they experience this intensity first hand or witness a family member, friend or client surrender to it. Practice bears out that it is best to trust the body. The body generally knows how to be sad once we peel away the defenses. That sadness can, indeed, be deep and wide. But the body will allow us to experience only as much as we can digest at one time. We will stop crying. We will cry again, perhaps. However, when we are closer to the end than the beginning—when the chalice of a particular sorrow is more empty than full—there is a significant and positive shift in the energy state, disposition, clarity and power to act in our own behalf.
So we feel distressing sadness and we cry, to shed the pain. What other reasons might there be? We have the longest childhood of any creature. We can’t walk for roughly our first year. We can’t talk for roughly our first two years. During that time, we must be able to communicate when our needs are not being met and Nature has given us crying for that purpose. Interestingly, newborn infants cry without tears because the neural network (the seventh facial nerve) that enables them is not fully mature until roughly two to four months after birth. Nonetheless, their little bodies can readily engage in wailing as a key signal that something critical needs addressing. It is a potent form of shorthand before language develops.
But there is another function that is built onto the signaling one and it proves to be enormously important in human life. The capacity for sadness—including crying--is part of our over-all bonding endowment as a species. Because of our long childhood vulnerability, we need our caregivers to attach to us so they will protect and care for us. We attach to them to foster that process. This is a virtuous cycle that reinforces itself. Without such a bond and the protection, nurturance and stimulation it brings, it is unlikely we would survive into adulthood, given how long it takes for our bodies and brains to mature. Building on the work of Allan Schore and many others, Sue Gerhardt (Why Love Matters) clearly establishes that the very quality of our brains’ development is directly dependent on the quality of that attachment. How our brains become wired is “experience dependent” and the specific experience on which that dependency rests is, first and foremost, our interactions with primary caregivers. These are further enhanced by other family members, friends and agents of the culture such as teachers, coaches and parents of friends. Emotional bonds are the magnetic force of human society. One of the consequences and proofs of that truth is how bad we feel when bonds are broken. When a parent withdraws or is angry with us, or when a parent is lost, we are profoundly sad. But the value of sadness extends further as we grow. Decades ago, anthropologist Ashley Montagu pointed out that crying underscores the importance of social bonds and helps to build them. Losing a family member, a friend, a teacher, an ally, a leader all hurt and often deeply enough to move us to tears. When love is lost, when friendships are broken, when dreams to which we have become attached are shattered, when we move from a cherished place or lose a cherished keepsake we experience emotional pain that is physically palpable. Why? Those people matter. We are bound to them. Those dreams and places and keepsakes matter. We are bound to them. The sundering of a bond is one of the most important human experiences because the maintenance of bonds is one of our most important survival strategies. We are set up throughout our physiology for it. So we cry not only to shed pain from our systems, but in affirmation of what matters and to learn the lessons and experience the appreciations that come with completely feeling the sadness of loss. Those lessons and appreciations will help us make better choices and better choices serve our survival. Being emptied of that pain, we are at rest and wiser.
We sometimes ask, “Why do we have to suffer so?” If we were blasé about such things, there would be no society, just constantly shifting alliances between people who were all expendable and replaceable in each other’s eyes. Nature has given us all sorts of ways of feeling the importance of attachments to be sure that we who are born in high vulnerability can survive to perpetuate our species. Experiencing deep sadness when one has lost is one of those ways. Consequently a society that suppresses sadness and the tears that are integral to it is a society whose bonds are in danger. In such a society, the capacity for being curious about other people’s realities--whether they are infants, children, people of different political persuasions, different races, creeds, people from different parts of the country or just people who dress or cut their hair differently—that capacity is diminished. The same is true for the capacity to know oneself, to trust oneself and others, the capacity for kindness, for truly living the “innocent until proving guilty” principle and, perhaps most importantly, the capacity for empathy and self-compassion. As Martin Prechtel writes, in Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, “If done passionately, grief strengthens the World House…”
Consider what happens to the World House—the community of mankind and the planet on which we dwell—when we do not grieve. In my first book, The Superman Syndrome, I pointed out that Kal-El may be a man of steel, but steel does not feel. This is the result of an ungrieved catastrophe from early in his infancy. Notice how all superheroes have back-stories of catastrophe (the new X-Men movie, First Class, affirms this theme yet again). Their “super” powers are in fact nothing more than a grandiose fantasy serving to deny the helplessness experienced in that early victimhood. A society that raises its boys to be superheroes, emulating the warrior archetype, being tough, avoiding a show of “weakness” that might actually be real sensitivity, a society that raises its boys to mask sadness and by all means, tears, because “big boys don’t cry”—such a society is at risk because its men have a damaged capacity to feel what really matters—our bonds with each other. In such a society, bonds are highly selective. They do not expand through empathy and understanding. They are reduced to “us against them” thinking. The marketplace and politics of such a society are more likely to be dominated by predatory personalities, more likely to have a Darwinian social philosophy that believes the rich are rich because they deserve to be and the poor are poor because they deserve to be. This us/them dichotomy is more likely to lead a country to spend huge amounts of its treasure and blood on repression and war. We see this in societies on every continent and throughout history…and that certainly includes the present and past of North America.
Feelings serve our survival—all of our core feelings. They are equally valuable when they are serving their original functions. Giving primacy to some feelings over others is dangerous—whether it is vaunting happiness, as in a consumer society, or vaunting anger and fear as in a totalitarian society. It is at our own risk that we ignore or negate any important aspect of our humanity. In these difficult days, sadness has much to teach us about need, belonging, love, community and what is truly possible. We would be wise to sit at its feet and listen.
C2011 Bob Kamm

What We Need to Feel Loved

 


In my last post, I made a correlation between what we know we need as children to feel seen, to feel felt, to feel gotten. The general answer is consistent emotional availability and timely, appropriate responsiveness from our caregivers. By appropriate, I mean a response that addresses our needs within the context of our developmental moment. In infancy, we need holding and rocking much more than we do at age four. Timeliness is critical because as babies, we don't have the capacity for patience. We cannot rationalize (the left hemisphere being largely as yet undeveloped) why it is taking Mommy so long to feed us or pick us up or warm us. For the total package of what we need, I tend to prefer the term "emotional resonance" and include all of the above in it.
We can build on this theme and go further to say that as infants in particular, we have a powerful need to be held, touched and physically cared for. We also have a powerful need to gaze into the eyes of caregivers who are gazing back at us with love. Further, we have a built in need for play, which will include touch and a variety of pleasantly stimulating facial expressions and vocalizations. Speaking of vocalizations, it is probably an infant can read its parents vocal tones with some degree of nuance. He has no words or ideas for anger, fear, sadness or happiness but the odds are, he can feel the difference and loud voices expressing a disturbed state are received as a kind of "disturbance in the force" to borrow an apt term from one of our modern myths, Star Wars. All of these kinds of interactions will tend to stimulate our brains toward optimal development on all fronts.
So doesn't it make sense that a fulfilling adult relationship would have among its core components the same experiences, recalibrated to our adult developmental moment? Sex is an adult need, but it is not the only or even our most important physical need. We also need to be held and touched in non-sexual ways that let us know we are deeply cared for and connected to our partner. We need to gaze into a face that gazes back at us lovingly. When we consider this, it underscores that even a facial expression can be violent, even though no violent action is taken. Our lover looking "daggers" at us can be deeply wounding. Or, more mundanely, their just screwing up their face, rolling their eyes or smirking in disapproval of something we think, feel, say or do. A blank stare when we need a feeling response can do violence. The utter absence of gaze due to depression can do violence. Loud voices with angry edge in them no doubt do violence to our hearts, not just our ears, whereas loud voices expressing joy do the opposite. The failure to provide a caress or hug when one is especially needed is a kind of violence, just as too much caressing and hugging can do similar damage. We also need our partners to be playful in innocent ways that are silly, fun and stimulating without teasing or sarcasm, both of which can be deeply hurtful. The absence of playfulness is a kind of quiet violence upon the spirit. So let's hear a round of applauds for grownups who can still make faces at each other and cavort to their favorite music!
It is important for us to feel and think into these ideas. If we weren't all carrying around a lot of childhood injuries, our partner's disapproval or emotional absence would not carry as much charge. But the truth is, we all do carry those some of those injuries. When Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt exhort us to rid our relationships of all negativity, we have to broaden and deepen our understanding of negativity to include how we touch, when we touch, how we look or don't look at each other and when we look or don't look, also how much we play with each other and the quality of that play. These are essential to feeling loved. Now that is the nutshell of this post. If you want some of the science, read on.
There is a growing mountain of evidence that our adult ways of being in relationships, especially love relationships, are, to a highly significant degree, elaborations of templates laid down in our brains in the womb, at birth and in the first three years of life outside the womb. The challenge for all of us in the rearing and healing arts is that there is no explicit memory of the events that were so powerful in shaping personalities--the laying down of critical setpoints for feeling /not feeling and reacting/not reacting. Douglas Watt, neuroscientist at the Neuropsychology Department, Quincy Medical Center in Quincy, Massachusetts, has called these early years before the left hippocampus begins to record explicit sequential memories (the who, what, where, when, why and how data), "unrememberable and unforgettable". They are unrememberable because of the immaturity of the left hippocampus and temporal lobe which will ultimately collaborate in recording explicit memories. They are unforgettable because they are deeply imprinted in the developmental systems as they exist at any given moment. The memories are in neurons and synapses, in brain structures, in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and, most likely, the very cells throughout our being. These memories carry enormous energy, in spite of our lack of access to them through conventional remembering using words or idea and data points. They are the early music of our lives--primal sonatas from which symphonies will later be constructed.
As infants, our brains become wired by our interactions with our caregivers and other individuals. Sue Gerhardt, in her wonderful book, Why Love Matters, does an exquisite job of detailing this, synthesizing the work of many others. She shows us how critical the quality of facial interaction is between caregivers and infant in arms, as well as the frequency and quality of being held and physically cared for, being cooed and spoken to and the speed, consistency and appropriateness of caregiver responses in satisfying a baby's needs and returning him to a state of calm and joyfulness. She writes, "...the kind of brain that each baby develops comes out of his or her particular experiences with people. It is very 'experience dependent'..."One of the most dramatic examples of this has emerged from studies of Romanian orphans. Those left in cribs and beds with practically no human interaction basically have no developed Orbital Frontal Cortex--a critical part of the brain in social relationships. What more horrifyingly eloquent testimony could we need to make the point?
Dr. Allan Schore of UCLA, tells us that the single most important stimulus to the development of an emotionally intelligent brain is the quality of facial expressions the baby experiences coming from his caregivers. Human babies are wired to read these expressions in detail for their global meanings as well as their subtle and specific nuances. When they are deprived of that interaction, or when that interaction is often scary, they develop problematic attachment and anxiety. I'm not sure it is necessary to single out caregiver facial expressions from the array of critical interactive elements, but Schore's point is important.
To put it succinctly, the quality of caregiver interactions set up a lifetime's worth of wiring in our brains before most of us can remember a single event.
This may make the possibility of transformation toward a greater wholeness in adulthood seem like a distant grail. But fortunately, we have also seen that through the slow, steady application of processes like Dialogue that bring calmness and welcome grieving, transformation can indeed happen. Pain can eventually be released even from those early imprints, albeit as physical sensations--pain in the muscles and viscera, pain that should properly be called "the pain with no name" because it does not conform to our usual vocabulary for feeling, other than to use wordslike hurt. terror and helplessness. This pain is real. I have felt it myself...and while going down into it is certainly no picnic, it can be profoundly resolving. This is generally only likely to happen after we have dealt with those issues of explicit memory first, progressing gradually backward and downward from the prefrontal cortex into the limbic system and even into the brainstem where our earliest experiences have left their marks in total body processes.
As the science advances and we are called to broaden our understanding of what emotional resonance looks like, we are also called to open to the irrefutable reality of those early hurts that, like silent children hiding in the dark corner of a classroom wait to step forward and be fully known. It is hard to imagine how a therapy will be considered valid in the not too distant future without credibly addressing these original deficits in a way that can be scientifically validated.

C2011 Bob Kamm

Dialogue as Emotional Availability

Andrea and I just had the privilege of assisting Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt in an Imago Couples Workshop at their ranch in New Mexico. This is the second time we have done so—part of our ongoing commitment to learn at the feet of our founders and other senior members of the Imago community to raise the level of our own work with couples.
Harville said something that is not new yet struck me differently than before. He said that we know quite well by now what children need from caregivers to retain their wholeness. The jury is not out on this. There has been more than enough research. “Children need their caregivers to be consistently emotionally available.” He was clear to distinguish between constant and consistent. No parent is likely to be perfectly present all the time, nor do children require that. But they do require people who are more rather than less consistent, more rather than less attuned to their children’s needs and more rather than less responsive to those needs.
So the obvious struck me in a new way. If that is what we need as children, why would we think our need as adults would be any different? What we need from our intimate partners is consistent emotional availability and responsiveness. It’s good if they have a satisfying career. It’s good if they make a reasonable income. It’s very nice if they buy us flowers, jewelry, clothes or cars. It’s very nice if with our two incomes, we can live in a spacious house in a pleasant neighborhood. It’s also nice if they can afford the high-tech gadgets that have become the common accoutrements of modern life. It’s very nice if they have a reasonably strong IQ and can make their way in the world. But those things are not necessary to create a deep and enduring connection. Consistent emotional availability and responsiveness is the element without which relationships wither and die.
The Imago Dialogue is a process whose purpose is to help us find our way into this kind of resonance with each other and maintain it. In case you’re not familiar with it, a brief summary:
In the Imago Dialogue, one person speaks at a time. The speaker or “Sender” expresses himself without blame, shame or criticism of his partner. He tells his particular story with a particular focus on his feelings, what is moving in him emotionally at the moment. He understands that nearly any big reaction in the present is being fueled by some injury or deficit in the past, for which his partner is not responsible. His partner may have “pushed his button” but “didn’t put the button in his chest”.* He tries to deepen down into that past and feel that feeling. He sends his experience across the space we call “the between” in digestible word flows. The listener or “Receiver” mirrors back word for word what he sends. There are a number of reasons for this but I’ll touch on just two. When the Sender knows what is coming back, it helps him to be calm and own his feelings rather than be reactive and accuse or project onto his partner. Second, word for word mirroring lets him know that he is being seen and heard for the separate person that he is. The Receiver gives no interpretation but plays back the Sender’s language in a state of emotional resonance. This last point struck me very clearly as I watched two videos, for about the sixth time, of Harville and Helen Dialoguing. In one, Helen was the Sender and in the other, Harville. Their mirroring of each other was not flat or emotionally neutral. It did not come across as an exercise of the head alone…just meditatively repeating the words back with no tone. There was tone and it was actually very gentle and loving. It had emotional resonance with what was being sent.
The Receiver periodically asks, “Did I get that?” and “Is there more?” In other words, she is being completely present to her partner and demonstrating a curiosity and desire to receive his entire internal experience. When the Sender says there is no more, the Receiver gives a summary mirror of all that has been sent. This is not word for word but neither is it interpretive. Again, with emotional resonance, it sends back, “So what you’re saying is…” and selects from the Sender’s language to put together a synopsis. The Receiver then checks in with, “Is that a good summary?” so that if she misses anything that is critical to the Sender, it can be resent.
Next, the Receiver validates what she has heard. “You make sense…and what makes sense is…” When Harville does this in the first video, he says, “You make a lot of sense” with a real emphasis on the “lot of”. Again, it is not emotionally neutral. It is emotionally resonant with what Helen has said.
Finally, there is empathy which may sound like this. “Looking at you and hearing this, I see (or I imagine) you are feeling (whatever the feeling seems to be in simplest terms—sad, mad, scared, glad, surprised)…is that what you’re feeling?” The Sender responds either yes or with a different feeling, which the Receiver mirrors and then asks, “Are there any other feelings?” And finally, “Those feelings make sense.” Once again, watching Helen and Harville, I was struck by the gentleness, care and love in their words.
Andrea and I have facilitated and witnessed such Dialogues with a lot of couples and discussed them with a lot of members of the Imago community, which is quite large and comprised of many therapists and educators. But never has it been so clear as at Harville’s and Helen’s workshop this past weekend that every step of the Dialogue is about being emotionally available and responsive, which is exactly what we needed as children and what we still and will always want and need as grownups. That emotional availability calms and soothes and makes it safe for the Sender to grieve past deficits, which certainly is transformative. Mirroring and validating are more than rote intellectual exercises, although they may seem that way in the beginning as people are first learning to use them. Over time, they become an organic part of a couple’s interaction and they are full of the honey of emotional availability and responsiveness. Quite clearly, so is the empathy portion of the Dialogue. It isn’t intended to be an intellectual guess about the Sender’s feelings. It arises out of the Receiver’s profound connection throughout the process to where she can see, hear, sense and feel the emotional pitch and tone of what her partner has been sharing.
It strikes me as especially important to embrace this process as one of emotional resonance that engages all the major parts of our brain and being from beginning to end, lest we miss the critical element in all of it, which is to give our partner what they likely received in deficit as children—to be seen, gotten, heard and fully understood on an emotional level by a caregiver with an open heart and responsiveness fine-tuned to their needs, age and situation at any given moment.
In its advanced and purest form, every aspect of the Dialogue is saying implicitly, “I’m here for you. I’m putting my own stuff aside so you can really feel me feeling you and getting you as the person that you are, not as an extension of my own needs.”
Of course, this takes commitment and practice. What great undertaking doesn't? This is an endeavor that calls the heart forward step by step because of the beauty of connection that is the reward for those who gradually master it.
C 2011 Bob Kamm