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

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

Original Welcome

Welcome to my blog.
So...love. What is it? Is it a liquid? A solid? A gas? Is it a state of being or a transcendence beyond anything science or religion can touch? Plato called it "divine madness". So is it a form of madness? An addiction or compulsion? Or a divinely outrageous creation of two souls gyrating and dancing within and beyond their bodies? My suspicion is "all of the above" and I don't see that as an easy way out of the conundrum. Rather it is an embracing of it.
Love is both knowable and unknowable. Some of it can be described behaviorally and scientifically, but to do so doesn't touch the actual personal and interpersonal experience of falling in love and being in love. So I'm fine with neuropsychiatrists talking about
the limbic system, oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin and hormones--the electrochemical
mighty mischief. I find the micro-architecture and processes of the brain enormously interesting, even poetic. But in the last analysis--if there ever is one--the language required to describe the inner experience of love is poetry, not science. Thus, my book, Love Over 60...love poetry that, I hope, speaks to lovers of all ages, and to scientists, philosophers and therapists. Finding myself at 60 single once again, I didn't think I could find love. I mourned for weeks about this. Then, I guess I got past that critical tear--the tear beyond which enough grieving has occurred to change our inner dynamics. I awoke one morning quite certain that I was indeed going to find love again. I called my son, Ben, and said, "I'm going to wake up a year from now next to the woman I love. I just haven't met her yet." Six weeks later, I met Andrea and, in the parlance of today, it was an OMG to the tenth power. Can science explain all this magic? I doubt it. But poetry can.
We have had an extraordinary three plus years together now and are just really getting started. Andrea is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and I am a leadership consultant with two certifications in Imago Relationship Therapy, the model Andrea uses. We both have been working in the realm of the heart for many years, although I certainly would not call myself an expert...and am not sure there is a person truly worthy of that term.

I have taken an avid interest in the brain, studying the works of Damasio, Le Doux, Schore, Siegel and others. So all through our romantic period, I had a joyful sense of irony knowing what parts of my brain were sucking up all the oxygen! Now that we are really creating a life together, I still find it fascinating, even as I write a poem, to feel, actually feel, what part of my brain is engaged. One of Damasio's books is titled, "The Feeling of What Happens". What a great phrase. The feeling of what happens throughout my body in this love is at least to some degree, what I hope I have mapped in Love Over 60.
So my intention in this blog is to explore the geography and geology of love, the science and the poetry of it, and above all, the personal experience of it from the sunlight to the shadows and back again. I invite you to join me in this joyful exploration.
C 2010 Bob Kamm

Posted by Love Over 60 Bob's Blog at 11/24/2010 7:25 PM | View Comments (37) | Add Comment

The Listening

As I write this, I'm sitting in a condo in Costa Rica, right on the Pacific. It's about 1:30 in the afternoon which means sane Norte Americanos are safely hunkered down in the a/c...unless you're a surfer, of course.

Whether you're in the States, Central America, Europe, wherever, the issues and challenges of keeping an intimate relationship worthy of that word are universally interesting to people. We're pretty friendly travelers. We like meeting new people and when we happen to share with someone that we have The San Luis Relationship Institute and do a lot of work with couples, they get curious and often end up sharing about their own relationships and asking for advice. Some are coy about how they approach the topic. Some will get straight to the point. Last night, a young man in his mid-thirties we happened to be doing a little business with down here didn't waste a moment. He was passionately interested in having a deeper connection with his wife...but the way that interest emerged was in his expressing some frustration over his wife not being as interested in doing many of the things they did together when they were courting, things in the outdoors he particularly liked. He asked what he might do to reignite her interest.

I took him out on the balcony to watch the sunset as I gathered my thoughts, looking for something in my Imago toolbox that might work for him (I'm a certified Imago Educator and Workshop Presenter). He is a very bright, hard working young fellow and was quite earnest in his question. We talk a lot in our practice about fully appreciating our partner as a separate individual with a unique point of view that will not always align with our own. When we're able to cross that open space between us--what we call the relational field--and see the world through their eyes instead of trying to get them to see things our way, we experience a shift of energy, often for the better, and often more empathy centered. So I asked my young acquaintance this question: "Do you think there are things your wife wishes you were still interested in doing with her...that you used to do more of when you were courting?"
He laughed, then dropped his head, then poked me in the chest in a friendly manner. "Wow, that's a really good point. So maybe we're both missing something."
"Chances are pretty good it's a mutual thing," I said. Now, we were in each other's company to do some business. This was not a counseling session and he was not my client. So I thought I'd just give him one suggestion in the form of a set of questions. "Do you really listen to her? Are you really attuned to her? Can you listen to her without judgment and without rushing ahead to a solution?"

He shook his head and readily admitted he wasn't doing his best work in that area...and that he did tend to rush ahead to find solutions instead of just letting her express herself.

"If you want your wife to do more of those things with you that you love, make sure, first of all, that you really show up for her, that you hear her and respond to her. If you do that, you'll likely find she'll be a lot more interested in rekindling some of those activities that used to give you so much pleasure."

As Harville Hendrix, our mentor, says, you could call this "the listening cure". We all want to be heard. Early in our relationships, we listen from a very deep place to everything our lover tells us. This ability resides in almost all of us, long after the romantic phase of our relationship has ended. The thing is to rejuvenate it and embrace it as a sacred practice, moment by moment, day by day. Practice...that says exactly what is called for. Practice listening empathetically with the same commitment you might apply to mastering your profession or your favorite past-time (golf is the obvious example that comes to mind).

This fellow was a young man, but we hear the same pain in folks who've been married for decades and over all have pretty good relationships. No matter your age, may you ask with love for the things you desire. May you listen with love to the things your partner desires...and may you both say, "Yes!" as much as possible.

C 2010 Bob Kamm

Posted by Love Over 60 Bob's Blog at 11/24/2010 7:11 PM | Add Comment