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 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