The Conscious Heart (10 page)

“When I started my relationship with Kathlyn, I was thirty-five and ready to make some major revisions in my personality. I realized that my loner script, which had worked well for me as a survival strategy growing up, was now costing me. The more I defended myself with it, the less intimacy I enjoyed. I began to study Kathlyn’s style of being with people. She touched them a lot, listened to their feelings, cared for them in ways that I felt were mushy. But as I tried on some of her ways of being, I found I liked them. They gave me a softer, more tolerant way of connecting with other people.”

Meanwhile, Kathlyn was studying Gay’s style: “I noticed that Gay was completely comfortable being by himself, whereas I often got scared when alone and kept myself busy to avoid the fear. Gay could go into a room by himself, write for several hours, and come out feeling happier than when he went in. That was tough for me, and I could see that my discomfort was keeping me from being as creative as I could be. On the other hand, he avoided parties, small talk, and schmoozing, often feeling drained and grouchy if he had to make more than a polite appearance at a party. At first I criticized him for being a lone wolf, but later I began to admire him for it. I tried creating boundaries for myself. Instead of saying yes to every demand on my time, I adopted Gay’s ways of saying no to the dozens of people who were always trying to get his attention. I feel like I am so much more of a whole person now that I have more of a balance between my autonomy and being close.”

Then we began to question whether our adapted rhythms were our essence-rhythms. In other words, did Gay’s essence really thrive when he was alone, and did Kathlyn feel most in touch with herself around other people? Or had these styles evolved in response to our early familial contexts? Gay spent much of his childhood around adults who carried on their grownup routines. He learned to create a rich inner life while on car trips with his mother and aunts. Kathlyn, on the other hand, was the middle child between two boys, who did pretty typical boy activities like building forts and racing around the neighborhood on bicycles. Kathlyn particularly adored her older brother and adopted a “me too” style in order to be included.

Probably our essential natures led us toward these adaptations. Certainly Gay requires a certain amount of alone-time to feel in touch with himself that Kathlyn doesn’t require. But we have found, as have our clients and workshop participants, that the dance of unity-autonomy is the baseline in all relationships. It is such a strong pulsation in the relationship that everything else is built on the subtle exchanges and tides of moving closer and getting separate.

Once we had clarified the source of our particular rhythms, we could give more attention to our day-to-day dance of closeness and separateness. We realized that we had been expecting this dance to be symmetrical, like a minuet. We had imagined that if we really cared for each other, we would want to be close and then alone in a completely harmonious rhythm. We were startled, to say the least, to discover that the dance is almost always asymmetrical. We almost never operated at exactly the same pace. For example, one of us would swirl in for some closeness just as the other was withdrawing into a book.

Subtle changes in breathing and expression that we unconsciously read in each other give us clues about each other’s needs. Sometimes we read them accurately and sometimes not, based on our ability to see essence clearly. We’ve found it’s a lot more effective for each of us to tell the truth about the sensations and
thoughts that signal our own preferences as they occur. A simple communication like “I notice I’m feeling some pressure in my forehead, and I’d like to take some time to sit out in the garden alone” can save days of mind-reading, sabotaging, and distancing.

The important thing to remember is that all of us have needs both for closeness and for alone-time. If you come from a background where you developed an ease for being by yourself, your learning edge may be to cultivate that same ease for being with people. If you are by nature comfortable with closeness, your learning edge may be to get comfortable with yourself as your only company.

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OMMITTING TO
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XPRESSION AND
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RUTH
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ELLING

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n our families of origin, people did not tell the truth about their feelings. Instead of speaking about their fears, sadnesses, dreams, and desires, they often hid them inside. Like most people, they had had no education or modeling about telling the truth about feelings, and they probably didn’t know how. Many family members turned to addictions such as smoking to mask these hidden feelings, and many died from these addictions.

A participant in one of our workshops described the power of her commitment to authenticity and how it changed her relationships. “I was abused as a child, both sexually and physically,” Rosemary told us, “a pattern that repeated in my marriage. After two years and my first black eye, we went for short-term counseling. But I went into complete denial in spite of nonstop verbal battering, continued beatings, and my husband’s threats to kill me.

“I had numerous affairs during my fourteen-year marriage. The affairs stopped prior to my becoming pregnant with my daughter. Then seven years later I met someone and wanted to have
another affair. I began to question why I was having affairs. The answer was: I was looking for an escape from the battering without having to change myself. I wanted the situation to change and for me to stay the same. I wanted my house, my routine, my perceived sense of security, and my projection of a successful marriage to all remain the same. Most of all, I’d always viewed myself as a happy person, and I wanted that to remain the same. I was very afraid that if I started to cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop. I was afraid of the cost of getting out, and the benefits did not seem worth it.

“Several years ago some girlfriends encouraged me to start a women’s group with them. The purpose of the group was for us to look at ourselves as women completely honestly. I joined the group for camaraderie, not realizing I had any issues.

“I told the group I was interested in having an affair with someone I had met. I expressed concern about that wish. I had thought that kind of behavior was behind me. The group encouraged me to look at my reasons for wanting an affair.

“My disclosure was followed by another member coming out about her bulimia. I was impressed by her bravery and honesty. It made it very safe for me. I felt that her truth allowed me to come out, both to myself and to the group, about my battering.

“I did it on a Tuesday night. On Wednesday morning I called a domestic violence program and got myself into it. Getting out of the battering did involve giving up my house and my luxurious lifestyle. I also spent two years crying and feeling a lack of joy in my heart. Reading
Conscious Loving
as part of my healing, I began taking responsibility and telling the truth to myself and to everyone else I came into contact with. I am still amazed at the benefits. The joy is back. I believe I am capable of achieving anything. I no longer walk on eggshells, constantly fearful of what is going to cause the next blowup. More than once I thought I might not survive a choking. That is no longer a concern.”

Rosemary’s situation was extreme, and her response courageous. Many of us are concerned that telling the truth will get us into trouble, not realizing that the lack of truth has already stirred
up a storm of debris. When Rosemary told the truth, to herself and to others with whom she felt safe, she began to unwind the barbed wire of her pattern. We do not promise you that you will have no fallout from telling the truth. But we do promise, as Rosemary experienced, the fresh breath of joy, the power of making a free choice.

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OMMITTING TO
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ISTENING

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n our original families nonjudgmental listening was virtually unheard of. Gay recalls an insight in his first counseling class in 1968, when he was twenty-three: “We did an exercise where we simply listened and paraphrased what the other person was saying for five minutes of conversation. Sometimes called active listening, the intent is to summarize what the other person is saying without putting your own opinions or spin on it. It was one of the most illuminating and difficult five minutes of my life. When it was my turn to listen, I had a very hard time summarizing what the other guy was saying without giving my opinion. I realized that my listening was so contaminated with judgments and criticisms that I had little free space to hear what the other person was saying. When it was my turn to speak, though, I felt a surge of exhilaration in my body after a couple of minutes. In fact, I felt slightly dizzy. I think it was the first time in my life I’d ever been listened to consciously for five minutes. In my childhood we didn’t ever ‘just listen.’ We listened in order to criticize, to give opinions, to poke holes in the logic. But we didn’t ever just listen. I found it incredibly liberating.”

Learning to listen became very important to our relationship. It probably took us the better part of five years to master listening, to the extent that we could do it even in the heat of differing opinions. We consider it so important to the conscious heart of relationship that it is the first skill we teach in
Part Four
.

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ESPONSIBILITY

S
ourcing responsibility was perhaps the toughest commitment for us to honor. In spite of our good intentions, education, and native intelligence, we still had a strong tendency to run for the victim position when we felt threatened. When we were upset, it always looked like the other person’s fault.

It took us a long time to realize that relationships only exist between equals. Each of us has 100 percent responsibility to create our connection because we are each whole beings. People get into trouble when they stop acting from full creative participation. If you take less than 100 percent responsibility, it’s easy to feel that other people are at fault. As one of our clients said to his wife, “If you’d just stand still for a moment, I wouldn’t feel so chaotic!”

It’s usually easier for us to recognize what we call a victim role, taking less than 100 percent responsibility, than it is to acknowledge the problems caused by taking more than 100 percent responsibility. If you’re drawn to criticize or correct your partner, especially if it’s for their own good, it may be difficult to see your actions as an attempt to control. The truly uncomfortable confrontation with yourself comes from recognizing the helpful suggestions and debris collection as the disrespectful gestures they are. When we take more than 100 percent responsibility, we communicate to our partners, “You are not capable, and I need to take over here because I’m right.”

We found only three maddening role possibilities if we weren’t taking full, healthy responsibility: persecutor, rescuer, or victim. Only three choices—but the combinations, skirmishes, and escalations they generate can look at first like real connecting. Some people even mistake the dramas caused by playing these roles for a relationship.

Relationship is not possible within these roles, only entanglement and encumbrance. As Edna St. Vincent Millay once said,
“It’s not one thing after another. It’s the same damn thing over and over.” In our own relationship, we would interlock around one major theme and then repeat endless variations of it before we caught on. Our pattern looks like this: During surges of expansion or growth, we sometimes both get scared and don’t realize it immediately. We know this is the Upper Limits Problem, but that intellectual knowledge alone doesn’t break the pattern. It’s as if the adrenaline rush knocks out the capacity to name feelings. As we roll along in the pattern, Gay handles his fear by getting more controlling, taking a persecutor role. Kathlyn deals with hers by adapting and trying to please; by taking the rescuer role, she ignores her own needs. Neither of these strategies allows room for a different point of view; both presuppose mind-reading and interpret behavior without checking out the assumptions. We also crowd each other with these strategies, so each of us feels our freedom is limited by the other.

Then Gay will say or do something that Kathlyn interprets as criticism, but she won’t say she’s angry until hours or days of withdrawal later. After a heated exchange of accusations, we both make the move to wonder, finally saying, “Hmm, what does this have to do with me?” We have also extended that to “What do we still have to learn from this pattern?” As soon as we make the wonder move, the other person starts looking like a friend again, and the logjam breaks up.

Each time this happens, we learn a deeper respect for the original perspectives that the other adopted early in life and continues to revert to under stress. We learn to love the old wounds of feeling unlovable and the old fears of having our creativity limited. Living in these process commitments over time has created a solid sense of safety during the big waves in our relationship. They have been unflippable rafts to rest in. Committing to sourcing healthy, full responsibility removes us from the life-and-death zone of close combat. It allows us to say, “Oh, we’re doing this pattern again,” rather than, “You’re ruining my life,” and to proceed to: “What about this needs to be loved right now?”

Recently a colleague who’s been married for thirty-seven years publicly stated that she had not finally committed to the relationship until about twenty years into it. “I’m in now,” she said quite peacefully, and her commitment was clear in the resonance of her voice and in her steady gaze at her husband. At first, we were astounded—twenty years seemed an awfully long time to waffle. But then her candid observation made sense. We ourselves had each held the ultimate trump card for many years, secretly or openly: “I can always leave. I can call off the game.” Only by choosing, committing, to be here right now could we begin to flow into bigger questions: “How can I use this conflict as an opportunity to support my partner’s essence? How can I remember who we really are as these ripples of heated feeling flow through?”