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

How to Express a Feeling

 By the time we reach adulthood, we have heard a lot of "don't" messages from our culture. This begins with our primary caregivers but quickly fans out to include other adults in our lives...and other kids who have already become agents of the culture. These are powerful shaping experiences. One of the many results is that as adults trying to actively be in a love relationship, we have lost or hidden away the capacity to express a feeling in a straightforward manner.
In our work, we frequently hear people go down the wrong road by using this phrase: "I felt that..."
What usually follows is the word "you" and a criticism or indictment of their partner. In other words,
criticism comes through masquerading as a feeling. "I felt that you disappointed me" is not a feeling.
"I feel that you are never really going to understand me" not a feeling. "I feel that you'll never do the things I need you to do so I can feel respected" not a feeling. All of these are criticisms. When you point your finger at your partner, they put their fingers in their ears.
So how do we express a feeling? Ask yourself how young children do it. They say, "I feel really hurt," "I feel sad," "I'm mad," "I'm really scared," "I feel bad," "I'm so happy!" They just say the feeling. There is no "that".
They say the feeling and feel the feeling at the same time. As adults, if we really want our partners to hear us and be empathetic and possibly change some aspect of how they interact with us, we have to unlearn the Language of Hurt which is "you, you, you," shame, blame, criticize in a variety of disguises...and sometimes undisguised contempt! We have to relearn our natural language, the Language of the Heart, the Language of Healing by owning what lives in us and is so painful. It is painful for a lot of men to say, "I'm so sad, I could cry for a week," or "I'm really afraid...I'm afraid I'm going to be alone." It's very painful for a lot of women to say, "I'm angry. I'm just so angry!" We could go down the gender difference trail further but for our purposes here, not necessary. Because, frankly, it is painful for most adult human beings to just say their deepest feeling out loud at any moment, unless they are happy...but a lot of people even have trouble saying that, as if there is an inner voice telling them it's not good to be too happy, an unwelcome residue of our Puritan founders.
Some people joke and tease about the phrase "inner child" or the phrase "how does that make you feel?"
The truth is, we make fun of them because they make us feel uncomfortable...because nearly every last one of us is carrying around an emotional heritage that includes some very painful memories. Yet, until we get fully real with ourselves and our partners, until we claim our right to express our hurt, to tell the story of what we experienced as vulnerable children, we can not experience true intimacy as adults. It is a great and sad irony that vulnerability set us up for hurt as children...but without vulnerability as adults, we cannot be intimate. We must risk telling our story in its true form, or face the greater risk of living a life under cover.
C 2011 Bob Kamm