Pure Dialogue

for Annie

From

     the deepest place within me

                                 I am listening

                      I am listening

                                     to you…

                              from the place of firsts

                                        first sensations

                                            feelings

                                                 images

                                                       voices

             the place before words

                and the place where first words emerged

                                 from cooing and soft gazes                                    

                              when their meanings were wet

                                                            and clear

                            as the eyes of a child

                                 witnessing his first rain.

I am listening from

this place

                   of first encounters

                          the way small children do

                                         sitting on a curb

                                  close enough to hear each other’s breathing

                                             every little sound of lip and tongue

                                  close enough to lift an eyelash from a cheek.       

              

Listening and looking

from this place

                              I hear you

 I see you

            as you

              and only you

           discovering you

               as you discover yourself

       both

                the little girl

        raising a bouquet of lavender

                  to her father’s troubling gaze

                                 and the woman

                              who asks that I be a better person

                                         and face her

        with soft eyes.

In this place

              I feel your truth

                         in a way that is self-affirming

                                       free of judgment

                                                   or interpretation

                                and calls me to give you

                                                            all that is within my reach

                                     and much that is just beyond it.

I thought I was a winged being

                    but find I am just now

                                                   shimmying from my chrysalis.

                           

From the deepest place within me

                           I am speaking

                              I am speaking

                                      to you

             from the place of my first awakenings

                        to the love and hurt

                             my mother carried

                                    from her own first place

                             my father from his

                             my older brothers

                                          grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins,

                            my neighbors, classmates, coaches and teachers

                                              the town’s shop owners and policemen

                                                   everyone, it seemed,

                              each and all carrying

                                             their gifts and unassuaged needs       

   into their lives

                                           and mine

                            gifts and cracked pieces of themselves

                 that became the stones of my path

    the giant trees

                  slopes and cliffs

                       I climbed

                                 the rivers

                   glens and woods

         I crossed

to arrive here

     in this moment

in the glades

of your eyes.

From this place,

               my love,

  my words, pace, tones and gestures

               will be

                     to the best of my striving

            Love’s choices

                    so you can readily receive

                     what I share

discover me

               as I discover myself

and both of us affirm

that while you may

     unwittingly

                   rub against

              an abiding loss or injury

                              from those early days

                 you are free from blame.

                       The transgression happened long ago

and though it still lives in me

                  and often resists revelation

                             you

                                were

                                    not

                                 even

           there.

You were in your own first place

                         trying to hold on to

                                  your own truth.

                                                          

Speaking from my first place

               revealing the small boy

                         placing a spray

                                of forget-me-nots

                                   at the feet of his busy mother                                                            

              I can reveal what is real for the man

                             in a clean request

                        you can answer

                               or decline

                                     for you are as free to say no

                              as yes.

Now

    we meet

                 face to face

each of us arriving from

a place of firsts

   into this new one

                                       we create

                                         together

                        with willingness and wonder

                                  tenderness

                                       reflection and remembrance

each bringing offerings of

                              words

                                   waiting

                                          listening

                                                 silence

       this place

             where mingled tears

                              remake us

             to glisten

                            in the morning sun

      this place

             where we name each other

               as if whispering

                    Eden's first words

this place

                  where wild compassion

blooms

   from consciousness

         and from compassion

                                  connection.

 Bob Kamm 12/14

Winning and Losing in Love Relatiionships, Part II

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.

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