What an irony that we spend so much
of our lives longing for our “soul-mate” and then, when we find him/her, it
doesn’t take long before we begin finding fault and treating our partner as if
he/she is our competitor rather than our teammate. This is inevitable. Once the romantic period is over, our deeper
psychological dynamics from our early years reassert themselves. Unfortunately, there is no short-cut for
eliminating the powerful impulse to make our partner wrong and ourselves right. Its roots are tenacious. Being “wrong” as a child has such hurtful
consequences, we quickly learn to be “right” or at least avoid being “wrong” in
our parents’ eyes. The speed with which
we as adults throw up defensive arrays of verbal and behavioral countermeasures,
speak to the fact that we each grow up experiencing thousands of interactions
with our caregivers that follow certain patterns because our caregivers have
their own deeply grooved ways of being. Look, I loved my parents and they loved
me…and, like all of us parents, they were far from perfect. My mother had a subtle way of shaming me when
I made a mistake, did something outside her wishes or exhibited feelings that
caused her discomfort. My father resorted to teasing and
sarcasm. Both of them occasionally
engaged in frightening outbursts of anger along with swatting the back of my
head or my butt. No doubt, many of us go
through memorable moments of big, visible trauma. But the idea that we all suffer them, and that they are the principle cause of
distortion in our development is probably over-emphasized. However, what is true for nearly all of us is
that we are immersed in family cultures as children that have their own strong
color schemes, as mine did. That scheme
is quickly absorbed into our cells. We
are “stained” into adaptive responses by the sheer volume and force of
interactions and our powerful need to be safe and belong. We
accommodate because we actually are dependent as children. The simple ability to feel and express those
feelings clearly is often a casualty of this process. Consequently, as adults, anytime we sense
“wrongness” coming our way, we mobilize against it and the hurt it unconsciously
summons from those early years. You
could say our defenses are psychological white blood cells trying to kill an
infection. The density and vigor of that
counter-attack is one measure of the force of early messages.
If as adults we could just release the “fight
to be right” by thinking our way out of it (using solely a cognitive approach)
the world would already be a much calmer and more harmonious place. Taking on a new thought is relatively
easy. Changing our ways of reacting
emotionally and behaviorally is a much tougher undertaking. For the most part, we humans are not run by
cognitive, logical and linear processes. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize
documenting this in a field as seemingly logical as economics. The evidence is overwhelming that no quick and
easy fix exists. Sports metaphors such
as I cited in Part I, can be seductive for their simplicity. In basketball,
there is a play called a “kick-out”. The
ball-handler drives toward the basket hard as if he’s going to shoot. The defense “collapses” in around him, leaving
other shooters free on the perimeter.
The ball handler now reins in his desire to go for the two-point dunk
and instead passes the ball out to one of his teammates who is free of
defenders and has a clear shot at a three-pointer. Now imagine yourself driving hard toward the
idea that you have to be right in a given moment. And imagine that just as you are ready to
hammer home your point and make your partner wrong, ripping at the flesh of
your relationship, instead, you kick-out…releasing the need to be right and
refusing to engage in that struggle.
When you push less to be right, your partner has to push less, too, and
perhaps, with a little luck, you both let the issue go, realizing that the
energy beneath it is from the past and the consequences in the present are
relatively minor and quite workable.
It’s good to remember the “kick-out” option. It’s one of those touchstone ideas that might
help you let go once in a while. But
most of us know that once we’re triggered into “fighting to be right” it is
very difficult to just switch off that energy, which derives from our survival
endowments channeled through the family landscape. For real healing, there’s no avoiding the
depths. Long before modern psychology,
philosophers, religious figures, poets and story-tellers have had implicit
knowledge of this. Fairy-tales and contemporary
literature attest to the real “threat” hiding in the shadows, in the cellar or
attic, in an old house, at the bottom of a lake, the top of the beanstalk, in a cave, under a bridge, or close to natural
forces such as volcanoes, dark forests, the untamed sea. Unconsciously, the entire human race knows
where the nemesis hides. However, only a
small percentage of us appear to be explicitly conscious of it. The birth of
deception is self-deception. For those
of us trying to transcend early destiny, we know a great initiation is
unavoidable. We know the “monsters” born in those tender years when our brains
were not fully developed must be defrocked of fiction till the bare truth is
before us.
We can do this. Now we are adults. Our brains are fully developed (finally, by around age 25!) so we have the resources to experience fully what
was held in a kind of cryogenic freeze within us because it was overwhelming
for our tender, underdeveloped brains and beings. As Tara Brach has pointed out in a recent
article in Psychotherapy Networker, C.G.
Jung referred to this unprocessed pain of childhood as unlived life. He urged us to
be courageous and live out that unlived life so that we can integrate it and
move on. He is exhorting us to a hero’s
journey. The irony and the great challenge
are that we are wired to avoid the lairs of predators and the pain and fear they
cause. However, and this is key, if the pain and fear are already in us,
avoiding them means accepting that we are divided selves.
How can we heal a sundered inner
world? By surrendering to what the
Persian poet Rumi referred to as “the pearls of God,” meaning tears. Our unshed tears from those early events are
the waters of unlived life, held like crystals in caves high and low along the
fault lines of the soul. Their resolving
force awaits us, awaits the moment when we are ready to transform them from
solid back into liquid for the ride up and out of their subterranean holds into
daylight. Without this liberating adventure, the division within us as individuals will become a division between us and our partners.
Because this work is indispensable
to releasing psychological energy and literally rewiring the basis of personality, the Imago Dialogues embody, for
couples, the essential wisdoms and practices.
Developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen La Kelly Hunt, the Dialogues are
arenas that invite the emergence of the heroes hiding within us. They are crucibles for grieving and
empathy. When, in dialogue, we get
beneath an issue in the present and visit the subterranean depths of our own
divided inner world as it was wrought in our early years, we ride unshed tears
into the sun. Suddenly, our partner is
no longer a competitor with whom we must struggle to make our own needs
dominant. He or she is a witness to our
life. So touching is this moment, and neurologically
dynamic, that it leads directly to a releasing of clenched fists on the weaponry
of winning without any admonition to do so--we by living out the unlived grief,
our partner through the experience of profound empathy. Grieving and empathy are the two great
resolving alchemies of human life. By
taking turns as griever and witness over months and years, we emerge into daylight
over and over again until the shadows recede and we own the day, together.
