The Conscious Heart (15 page)

In
Conscious Loving
we referred to this wave as the Romance phase. It awakens the deep feelings in us that cause poets to reach for the pen and songwriters for the guitar. The first wave rearranges human beings from top to bottom. Everything from sleeping and eating to predictable emotions gets tossed by this wave of awakening. Without it, human life would be flat and dull. The trouble is, this wave passes by quickly, and most people do not know how to bring it back. Having interviewed hundreds of couples, we find that the first wave lasts about six months on the average. One couple said theirs vanished in a matter of minutes; another couple stayed in the first wave for over a year. Eventually, though, the wave passes because its energy pulls unconscious patterns to the surface—patterns that take over the relationship.

The Second Wave
Sleeping: Essence Is Obscured

Many people we’ve worked with compare the second wave to sleep. They felt a great awakening in the first wave, then promptly went to sleep. During the deep sleep of their conscious intentions, their shadows—those unexamined and unowned aspects of each person—emerged and obscured the real features of their loved ones. Old patterns took over, and intimacy dwindled—a fog came over the relationship.

When essence is obscured, the first symptoms are usually subtle and can be overlooked. The second wave can roll in the first time you don’t say what you want and instead go along with what you assume your partner desires. You can also usher in this wave when your partner does something you find irritating and you don’t tell the truth about how you feel about it.

This is the wave of power struggles: Whose version of reality will become dominant in the relationship? To the fore come our
deepest fears, such as abandonment or the loss of the opportunity to fulfill our potential. During the second wave we lose touch with our own essence and the essence of the other person. In fact, we are in a trance, replaying dramas usually rooted in early childhood.

How do couples become stuck in defensive patterns? If, as a child, you were wounded but survived by contracting, you’ll tend to repeat that contraction when you are threatened or under stress as an adult. For example, when Susan was young, her alcoholic father would rage at her and the other children; her response was to get very quiet and small, so as not to draw attention to herself. Now in her marriage, when her husband becomes annoyed and raises his voice, Susan cringes unconsciously and holds her breath—in other words, she freezes. Only after examining several videotaped interactions did she begin to see her behavior and separate the past from the present. The contraction was so deep and habitual that it felt natural to her. When Susan awakened from her trance and stayed present with her current experience, her husband’s sails lost some wind. He spontaneously lowered his voice, noticed her expressions, and asked her what she thought about whatever issue was causing the problem. Both partners can help to bring more essence to the relationship by waking up.

One central task of the conscious heart is to awaken from the second-wave trance. Nonverbal patterns produce the trance more rapidly and more deeply than does speech; glances, grimaces, and gestures communicate contempt and criticism so directly that the reasoning, boundary-making brain is bypassed. The child, and later the entranced adult, receives a direct blow to the psychophysical being. People take those looks personally, even though the logical mind knows that the partner is being defensive.

The trance will always repeat in the same pattern. One quality of trance is amnesia: When the pattern repeats, it surprises all over again. One of our workshop participants defined neurosis as “always being surprised by the same damn thing.” Many people have told us how difficult it is to see the pattern when they’re in
the middle of a drama. But when the drama clears for the time being, they forget the issue altogether. Until next time.

In the second wave everything we have learned from our families of origin comes to the fore. A month after his wedding, one of our clients—already in the trance—found himself initiating sexual flirtations with a number of women. He said, “It felt like I was watching myself do these insane things, like I was watching it through a screen. I loved my wife deeply and felt a deep commitment to her, but it felt like I had no control over these flirtations. I woke up when you asked me how this pattern was familiar. My father’s womanizing had dominated my family growing up. Hardly a day went by without some reference to it. Here I was, married to a woman I loved for only a month, and something in me was causing me to repeat the same pattern. I was blown away by how much power this pattern had over me.” This is the second wave in action. A pall falls over the relationship, in which the same trance patterns recycle. This man woke up in time, but many people don’t. They think their fog is the way life has to be and continue to retreat deeper into the old pattern rather than going forward into the next wave.

Just as in going to sleep, the early stages of trance are light and easily disturbed. But as the sleep deepens, it becomes harder to wake up. During deep slumber the third wave begins.

The Third Wave
Dreaming: While Deeply Unconscious, Primal Dramas Unfold

While you are asleep at night, your body may twitch and struggle with an imaginary opponent. In the waking dream world of a close relationship precisely the same process occurs when you are going through this most unconscious of phases. The central dramatic motivator is the struggle for control. Essence has become so obscured that the partners go on automatic; each tends to require the
very behavior in the other that drives them crazy, and both entrench the relationship in an escalating drama.

In the third wave the partners’ patterns tend to polarize. The fog of the second wave solidifies into masks. The forceful partner becomes the dominator; the shy one sinks into the loner role. Unacknowledged fear creates this distance, escalating it until the partners look like strangers to each other. They cannot imagine how they made such a bad choice. Since most of us don’t know how to shift from fear to love, the first tendrils of fear grow into a tangled bramble through which it seems virtually impossible to see each other clearly.

In one session Martha said to Greg, “I’m afraid I don’t love you anymore. I’m afraid you don’t love me.”

“I try really hard—I do all these things for you,” said Greg.

“You just try to control me all the time, tell me what to do, criticize what I’m wearing. That’s not doing things for me,” she responded sharply.

As she spoke, Greg yawned and felt weary, slipping from fighting into the fainting pattern of the Four F’s. His shoulders hunched and his chest collapsed as he said, “What’s the use, I might as well give up.” When Martha leaned forward, her brow furrowed. She was holding her breath. We asked her what she was experiencing in that moment. She discovered that when Greg collapsed, she would lose awareness of her own experience and focus exclusively on comforting him. She tended to freeze when she was afraid, then flee into his feelings to separate herself from her own fear. Rather than register her concern, he would sense her withdrawal from her own experience and assume she was abandoning him. He would get desperate, and she would feel more controlled and withdraw further. Without knowing how to recognize their dream-state personas, they had gotten more and more distant from each other, until they questioned their basic connection. In the third wave people can get colossally stuck. Dream states can be vivid and compelling; we can be sure that we can fly and that cars turn into helium balloons. While dreaming deeply in the third wave, the
partners are tossed and churned by dramas they don’t realize they’re creating.

We often inherit feelings and impulses that our parents and grandparents have denied in their lives. Wounded parents who are unable to see the essence of their children simply pass on the wound. Essence is obscured before it has a chance to become fully rooted, and the children then see themselves in distorted ways. Many of the creatively gifted people we have worked with seem to share a common trait: Close relatives or friends belittled or ignored their talent. That early lack of acknowledgment implanted deep roots of self-doubt, which later sprouted into persistent critical voices that linger into adult life and build into relationship riptides in the third wave.

For one artist the strong and consistent belittling he received from his older brother fueled a perfectionism that drives him to exceed each previous achievement. None of his paintings quite measure up to his standards. His wife holds herself a little separate from his frenzy of perfectionism. Her intuitive skills were ridiculed in her family, where she was forced to conform to a common standard of mediocrity. Rather than criticism, she is vulnerable to approval or to withheld approval.

In their relationship they express a responsible/playful polarity. He acts responsible and vigilant, always keeping an eye on the bottom line—whether she is feeding the children adequately, whether the dog’s water dishes are full. She acts flighty and free, flitting from one interest to another, lighting on projects long enough to lift them into life, then moving on before the heaviness of completion pulls her down again. Her playful persona wants him to lighten up. His responsible persona wants her to follow through and take some of the burden. As we worked together, each of them began to see how they required the very behavior they resented. He realized he couldn’t continue to act superresponsibly if she took full, healthy responsibility. She realized that she required his regular disapproval to ground herself. Each of them realized that they were missing balance. Each expected the other to supply their missing parts.

As each of them began to claim and balance these unowned parts, an underlying urge to control emerged in both of them. He controlled situations by constantly redirecting their energy. With high and shallow breathing, darting eyes, and a clipped verbal tone, he made the following moves over the course of fifteen minutes:

• commenting on something wrong in the house

• noticing that the light was glaring and getting up to adjust the blinds

• noticing that the children in the other room were making too much noise

• commenting on a spot on his wife’s blouse

• wondering out loud if the oven was on

• commenting that the phones were too loud

• getting up to move the furniture

• getting more water

She controlled by spacing out, so that he had to pursue her to make contact. She holds herself with an arch in her neck, as if her chin were perched on the edge of a table, her head poised delicately above her body—and lightly above it all He speaks like an infrared sensor, honing in on what’s wrong. Neither of them was aware of their verbal interplay or body language until we pointed it out to them; it was as if they were deeply asleep.

Many relationships stagnate in the eddies of the third wave. Routine replaces renewal, and diminishing expectations overtake the possibility of wonder. Our culture tends to reinforce this wave by promoting the view that people need to compromise, that romance withers, and that partners need to learn to settle for less. But in our explorations with couples, we have found that people can shift from power struggles and dream dramas to seeing and supporting essence.

The Fourth Wave
Awake and Dreaming: Essence Develops and Becomes the Backdrop of Struggle