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Essence in Relationships
– How to get there
Once in a workshop, a woman
asked us if her longing to be in deep and intimate
relationships was co-dependent. I answered that there is
never a problem with longing. Our longing to be in a deep,
intimate, sustained sharing with someone is natural and
healthy. The problem is that the longing often lacks
consciousness.
Most often, we enter our relationships full of fantasies and
naiveté, like adolescents. And often, the beginning of a
relationship is a wonderful time. But it is also a dream
state. Sooner or later, problems arise and when they do, we
naturally think that the problem lies with ourselves, with
the other person, or with the relationship. Then we may move
on, or become depressed and give up on the possibility of
love, or even worse, we remain in the relationship, perhaps
even for years as the love dies and the energy goes flat or
even nasty.
We may not realize that love takes deep work and awareness
of ourselves. It takes awareness that relating deeply with
another person will bring up deep unconscious issues. We are
not born knowing how to love. We are born knowing how to
have sex and how to be spontaneous and alive. But turning
aliveness and attraction into love is a totally different
story.
There are four major areas where more understanding can make
the difference between disaster or Deeping love.
The first involves an understanding that initially we relate
to the world and to others much like a child with dreams and
expectations. That child consciousness needs to be
transformed into mature consciousness.
The second involves a more profound understanding for the
nature of attraction and how and why dramas develop the
longer we are with someone in an intimate relationship – any
intimate relationship.
The third involves understanding how and why our sexuality
changes as we go deeper in a love relationship.
The fourth involves understanding the roles that nearly
always develop between lovers (and friends) as time goes on.
Most of us naturally have ideas how people should behave and
how the world should be. We hope and even expect that we
will be treated in a certain way, especially when we open
and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. This is the “entitled
child” inside of us. When someone close to us does not treat
us in a way which feels respectful, loving, attentive and
generous, we feel betrayed and our trust with that person
gets frayed. Relationship, any deep relationship, is going
to challenge us to drop our entitled child and come to terms
with how people and life really are.
In a relationship, there are going to be times when we feel
abandoned, disrespected, ignored, not considered, not
listened to, pressured and perhaps even abused.
These are times when we have important lessons to learn
about life, lessons which empower us and help us to grow up.
For instances, there are times when we have to accept the
other person the way he or she is and feel the pain of that.
Other times, we have to set limits and express our hurt or
anger if we feel treated in a way which is disrespectful.
Other times, we have to follow our life energy even if it
causes discomfort or fear in the other person rather than
compromise for harmony. Learning acceptance, setting limits,
finding the courage to live our life is empowering. Staying
in the entitled child hoping that the other person changes
and becoming resentful when they are not as we want them to
be is depressing and stressful.
For those of you who go back a bit, you might remember that
Dracula and Hannibal Lechter were monsters in two different
movies. When two people go deeply into a relationship, it is
predictable and guaranteed that at a certain point, they
will trigger each other's deepest wounds and sore points.
This is actually the sign of a good relationship, a real
relationship. One person's behavior will push the other
person deepest buttons and vice versa. But, at that point,
each person sees the other as a monster who can not be
trusted and who has to be protected against, who is abusive
or insensitive or inconsiderate or selfish and who needs to
change for the relationship to work.
The wound which the other person is provoking always has its
origin in some deep primal wound. And even if we are aware
and have worked on this wound, when our loved one provokes
it, we no longer see the other person. What we see
unconsciously is an abusive or unresponsive or inattentive
parent or authority figure from our past. We cannot
understand how the other person can be so blind as not to
see and understand our pain and sensitivity in this area.
What follows in these moments is drama, conflict, hurt,
misunderstandings, endless discussion, anger and then deeper
mistrust and alienation.
When we understand that this is the true nature of
attraction, we can be prepared for conflict or discomfort.
We can even welcome it even if it hurts. But we also need a
way to work through situations when conflict or pain arises.
Our experience is that if each person becomes aware of his
or her own particular sore points and can recognize when the
other person triggers them, we can begin to share more
consciously. For instance, if we have had a controlling or
overbearing parent, we can know that most likely, we are
going to get triggered by a strong mate or friend. We are
going to get triggered when we feel controlled, supervised,
criticized or patronized. The other person becomes a monster
and we become angry or shocked or some combination of both.
On the other side, we may have had a parent who was
irresponsible and collapsed. We may find ourselves in a
relationship with someone who has a tendency to go into
shock, space out and even “fuck up” when he or she feels
stressed. But whenever we feel the other person is not being
responsible or present, we feel betrayed and abandoned.
Once we know our source wound – in other words, once we know
the root of these emotions, we have the awareness to do the
necessary inner work and take the energy away from drama and
reaction. Our work is to feel and express (when possible)
our fear or pain without trying to change the other person.
With this understanding, love flows. When we see the other
person as the problem and focus our efforts at convincing
him or her how dysfunctional they are, love dies.
Many of us long for sexuality which is alive, spontaneous,
deep, sensitive and frequent. And often when two persons
come together, it starts out that way. The energy is strong,
the bodies are alive and open and both people feel as though
they are in heaven. But with time, things change. We may
become critical or mistrustful of each other, or feel
inhibited or simply less interested. When change sets in, we
may even try different techniques to try to bring things
back to what they were – holidays, sexual rituals, drugs,
porn, or whatever. Nothing wrong with any of that but, in
our experience, it misses the basic point.
As two people go deeper in intimacy, vulnerability also
deepens and buried fears and insecurities usually arise.
When this happens, our sexuality also changes. This is what
we call “second level sexuality”. “First level sexuality”,
what we may have enjoyed in the beginning, is high energy,
orgasm focused, passionate, and often also contains some
degree of compensation for shame, inadequacies,
insecurities, and fears connected to our sense of self and
to our sexuality and also some degree of cover for a
feelings of deep inner loneliness. In “second level sex”,
our shame and fear is surfacing and we can no longer hide it
or run away from it. Moving from level one to level two is
healthy and growful because it invites us to know ourselves
in a deeper way and it is the road to deeper intimacy as
well. But we may miss the uncomplicated sexual high of level
one. And we may also not understand or know how to
communicate when fears and insecurities arise in love
making. Often, we may not even be aware that we are afraid
or in shame, but our body knows and will fail to respond or
function the way we would like. Men may come fast or can't
get an erection; women may have difficulties with orgasm or
the problems.
If we know that this stage is most likely going to come if
we decide to open more with someone and treat it as an
opportunity to deepen our lover and intimacy with the other
and with ourselves, we can use this development in a
positive way. But it is a challenge because to recognize and
to share our fears and shame around sex is difficult. For
this to happen, we have to be willing to let go of our
addiction to level one sex. That is also not easy. Sex can
be one of the most favorite ways of avoiding deeper inner
spaces. It can be just like a drug and when fears and
insecurities arise, we can easily get frustrated and blame
the other person or ourselves for the loss of energy. In our
experience, in any relationship, both people mirror each
other's state of fear, shame and dysfunction. It usually
shows itself in different ways and also one person may be
more successful in his or her compensations, but deep down,
the wounds are equal in strength.
When we can begin to accept and even share our fears and
insecurities in this area, trust grows. As trust grows and
as we become more comfortable at accepting and sharing our
fears and shame, we enter into what we call “third level
sex”. In this level, the emphasis is clearly on connection
rather than on the sexual high. There is a foundation of
deep love and trust and there is space to handle whatever
comes up in sex. At this point, orgasm and high energy can
happen or not, or the sexuality can be more silent and
non-active, dysfunction can happen or not, it doesn't
matter. It is the love and connection that matters and there
is a willingness to go through whatever it takes to deepen
that.
A final area of understanding that adds consciousness to
longing is in the area of roles people get into the longer
they are in relationship. It happens very often that one
person takes on the role as the caretaking parent while the
other person becomes a regressed child. As a caretaking
parent, we can either be giving or rejecting depending on
our nature and our mood. As a child, we can alternate
between being obedient and well behaved or rebellious, again
depending on our mood and nature. This situation usually
happens totally unconsciously and automatically. But unless
these roles are brought to consciousness, they can destroy a
relationship.
Many of us long to get the love and caring that we missed as
a child and when we enter into relationship as an adult, we
carry this longing with us. It can show itself by our
becoming self-centered, demanding, lazy, spoiled, pouting,
moody or irresponsible. All of this behavior is a cover for
deep inner feelings of shame, loneliness and fear which need
to be felt. When we play the role of the parent, we are also
using the role to cover our shame and fear. It may give us
some ego fulfillment because we feel needed and useful but
it is essentially an avoidance and breeds resentment and
suffering.
This kind of “bonding” as it is called, can be a love
killer. It is exhausting to be responsible for another
person and it is demeaning and humiliating to feel and
behave like a child. In our experience, most relationships
become bonded to some extent because we have these
tendencies inside of us. But if we can notice them as they
arise and begin to watch and feel as we play these roles, it
makes all the difference. With this kind of awareness, we
develop the power to choose not to play them. And when we
know that the survival of our love depends on being
conscious of these roles, we are motivated to confront them.
There are other aspects of our learning how to love, but
these are four of the most important ones. Relationship is a
constant challenge to learn to know and love ourselves. It
is an arena where we can grow because our longing to have
and share love is so strong. To bring love into our lives,
we need to deepen our consciousness. To find and sustain
love, we have constant work to do, understandings to acquire
and feelings to move through. It's our experience that when
two people want to keep their love alive, there are
continual challenges. There is much to learn about ourselves
and there is no better place to learn it.
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