The Conscious Heart (13 page)

Exploring whole-body responses can bring about great breakthroughs. As we worked with her pattern of getting defensive about feedback, it emerged that her father had deserted her mother, leaving behind four children, of which our client was the eldest. During her mother’s grief and anger at the loss of the marriage, she had become the substitute mother for the children. She had become strong and responsible, even bemoaning her mother’s wimpiness to us thirty years after the fact. As an adult, she tended to attract weak men who were not really there for her. In fact, she was deeply afraid that any fully engaged relationship would bring her the same grief and anger her mother had experienced.

As is often the case, she blamed her partner for a commitment problem that was really sourced within herself. That’s not to say he didn’t have problems on his end as well, but as long as he was busy defending himself from her criticism, he wasn’t motivated to look his own issues squarely in the face. As she learned to take the blame off of him and deal with the issue inside herself, magic began to happen. He became more able to make a commitment to her, and they met in the middle ground of mutual responsibility. They
both
closed their own back doors, instead of being obsessed with the other’s faults and flaws.

Making Unconscious Commitments

When someone sabotages a conscious commitment, it is always because they had an unconscious commitment to something else. For example, you may consciously commit to being sexually faithful to your partner, then a day later pay a visit to another lover.
It is clear from your actions that you are committed to infidelity.
The negative results you produce show you what your unconscious commitments are
. This concept is incredibly powerful—even life-changing—yet it is also one of the most difficult ones to grasp. We frequently get stiff opposition from our clients when we ask them to acknowledge their unconscious commitments. They often cling righteously to their position: “No,” they say, “I’m really committed to being faithful.” “No,” we say, “you’re really committed to being unfaithful, because that’s the result you produced.” Embracing the unconscious commitment and acknowledging that it’s what you’re really committed to opens up the possibility of change. It’s similar to the power of an alcoholic declaring, “My name’s John and I’m an alcoholic.” Declaring his powerful commitment to drinking gives John the power to choose a more conscious commitment to being free of alcohol
this day
.

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ssues from developmental stages at the very beginning of life are brought to the surface when we commit ourselves fully to a close adult relationship. A few minutes or a few months into the relationship, you will be acting like a two-year-old if you’re lucky, a baby if you’re typical. These regressions are normal and natural and are a problem only if they are ignored.

No matter if you’re twenty or fifty, you roll the clock back to zero the moment you make a commitment. You may meet and fall in love in middle age, but when you have a conflict, the reasons more likely lie in the first six months of your lives than in the first six months of your relationship. We have seen this basic truth emerge in hundreds of therapy sessions.

Assume, then, that when you make a relationship commitment, you start at zero, invoking issues from the moment of your
own conception. Here are some of the unconscious questions that emerge from the early developmental stages.

Conception

“Am I wanted? Do I deserve to be here? Am I feeling ineffective or unable to impact this situation?”

These are the issues that surround conception. They often reemerge when you are reinventing yourselves or the relationship. A couple may think they are fighting about financial investments or whether to buy a house, for example, when the real issue is a conception-era question.

People discover that they inherit attitudes and issues, along with their physical features, that impact their adult interactions. One couple had a repeated pattern in which he backed out of agreements at the last minute and she dutifully picked up the pieces. In therapy he learned that his father had wanted to back out of his relationship and had married reluctantly when pregnancy occurred. She knew that her mother never passionately loved her husband but covered for his alcoholism because she was grateful to be married at all. At first these clients were dubious about considering whether their current issues actually started before they were born, but as they discerned their inherited attitudes, their problem resolved. As therapists, we have found that acknowledging the authentic original issue allows the present-day problem to be resolved much more quickly.

Birth and Bonding

During the vulnerable time of our birth, we take our first body-snapshot of life in the world. Here we form questions like: “Is this a safe place where I can get my needs met? Are people reliably there for me? Is this a nourishing universe, or one of struggle and scarcity?”

For almost everyone these questions arise again in the early stages of a committed relationship. Making a commitment calls forth from your body and mind the questions that are as yet unresolved from your first bonding experiences. Birth and bonding questions can also emerge at any transition time in a relationship. For example, many people surface their own unresolved birth issues when their children are born. A couple we worked with recently became quite frightened that each would leave the other, shortly after the birth of their daughter. As they asked these birth and bonding questions, they realized that they both had felt abandoned early in their own lives and had formed an unconscious pact with each other that they would never be apart. Their daughter’s birth coincided with an increase in work demands for the husband, who had to go out of town more frequently. These trips had triggered the upset. After they identified and expressed their feelings, they spontaneously invented solutions to the problem of separation. They realized how much of their energy had been tied up in getting sad about upcoming separations, anticipating how difficult they would be, and the like. Both laughed ruefully when they realized they had abandoned themselves—and the present possibilities of celebrating their deep essence-connection—when they slid into this anticipation mode. They committed to fully enjoying each other when they were together and to expressing their feelings of fear and sadness so they could free their attention and return to enjoyment. They later reported that the separation issue had disappeared from their relationship.

The Exploration Stage

Developmental psychologists tell us that the second six months of life are about exploring. Crawling is the dominant mode of transportation, and we are trying to teach ourselves that it is all right to explore on our own and then come back to home base. Questions that arise during this phase: “Can I be me in this relationship? Is it
all right to grow in my own special way within the bounds of the relationship?”

In adult relationships one of the struggle-points is whether it is all right to grow in separate and autonomous ways. One woman went through a huge struggle with her husband about whether to go back to junior college. She had interrupted her education for marriage and pregnancy. Now, with her children in school, she wanted to go back to finish her degree. He mounted fierce resistance, arguing in favor of preserving the roles they had occupied for the past decade. She persisted with her drive toward autonomy and enrolled for a full load of classes. At the end of her first day of classes, she came home happy and energized, only to find her husband flat on his back with a ruptured disk. She dropped her classes and took care of him for three weeks, during which time she contracted a serious respiratory infection.

As she sorted through these events in counseling, she realized that his back problem was a largely unconscious way of trying to keep their roles from changing. She also realized that she feared her own autonomy, and the possibility that they might grow in separate ways. While in the grip of these fears, she had seen no alternative but to drop out of school. Fortunately she saw the pattern in time to change it and got back into school the next semester.

As she talked over her fears with her husband, he began to realize the extent of his own anxieties. He had taken such pride in being a solid provider for his family that he didn’t realize how threatened he felt by her growing independence. He had never given himself the option to explore other interests or to take time off from work. The eldest child of a working-class family, he had taken on the helper role while he was still in school, when his father’s latest get-rich-quick scheme left the family on the verge of homelessness. Now he began to consider that he was still outrunning his fear of economic collapse. This resulted in his giving himself more time to explore his lifelong love of gardening. His wife was delighted to support this interest. They shifted to a deeper
essence-connection by letting their relationship encompass their individual passions.

The Authority Phase

During the toilet-training stage, many of us get into a power struggle with authority that is never resolved and comes to dominate our later lives. The questions that emerge from this developmental era: “Do I have to do it their way? Who is boss? Do I keep my agreements voluntarily, or do I need policing from others?”

One of the quickest ways to put the brakes on growth in a relationship is to get into an authority interlock, in which one person plays cop and the other plays criminal This pattern is visible in about one-third of the couples we have counseled. A common scenario is the tidy-messy conflict, where the more orderly partner polices the messier partner’s habits. Many people don’t initially realize that it takes two to play cops and robbers. You can’t have a criminal if there’s no judicial system.

We often ask couples who attend our workshops to bring pictures of themselves taken at home. Here’s what we saw in one case: His photograph showed him standing in his home office, which was immaculate, airy, and primarily beige and white geometric shapes. His wife’s photograph showed her in her art studio at the other end of the house. It was difficult to see her work table through the stacks of canvases and other materials that covered every possible surface and spilled over onto the floor. She was beaming; he stood with arms crossed and a severe expression. We sometimes jokingly categorize people into two types: the happy idiot and the sharp pencil. This couple certainly illustrated those labels. But it’s also important to recognize that the sharp pencil and happy idiot have much to teach each other if they can separate their old anger at authority figures from the current learning opportunities. Cops and robbers was fun as kids and can be fun as adults if you play and appreciate rather than judge and control. In
our relationship Kathlyn fills the sharp pencil role and Gay the happy idiot. As each of us has expanded our range, we’ve come to deeply appreciate our complementary skills and to relax fairly easily out of power struggles.

The Sexual Feelings Era

On the heels of the authority phase comes the time when our sexual feelings start to develop. This awakening of ourselves as male and female occurs simultaneously with the development of wonder and creativity. We begin to move in an expanded world beyond the family and to play actively with running, tricycles, forts, and other “pretend” games. Our questions during this three-to-four-year-old time include: “Is it all right to be fully sexual? Is it safe to feel all my feelings? Is it safe to communicate about them? Will my creativity be supported or stymied here?”

In adult relationships issues from this developmental stage often come to light when we feel sexual feelings for people other than the one to whom we’re committed. In a healthy relationship sexual feelings are felt, acknowledged, and expressed in straightforward ways. You say, “When we were at the party tonight, I felt some sexual attraction for Jerry. I have no intention of acting on it, but I wanted to let you know I was feeling it.” If your partner is committed to an authentic relationship, he or she will appreciate you for saying this.

Issues from this era also emerge when we feel our creative or sexual impulses are being stopped. People may interrupt their partner’s passionate speeches to go check the wash, stop a spontaneous song with a question about a tax return, or deaden wordplay with a reminder about not being late for the dentist. In this era we become intimate and friendly with the zone of the unknown, or else we tighten down around the security of routine.

The Power of Acknowledgment

When these developmental issues arise, you can best deal with them by noticing them in your interaction patterns and in your whole-body responses. For example, at birth Kathlyn experienced some trauma as a result of her forceps delivery with anesthesia. But she eventually resolved the residual pattern: “I noticed several cues that pointed toward birth issues. Whenever we would be getting ready to go to the airport for a trip, I would get very anxious about being late and missing the plane. We have noticed how similar the experience of taking an airplane trip is to the birth process. You start in an open space and enter into smaller and smaller corridors until you’re strapped into a small space where the pressure increases and there’s a lot of roaring and forward momentum that you absolutely cannot control. Often chemical fumes appear as the plane is getting ready for takeoff, which invariably made me nauseous. I would start trying to hurry Gay and would get impatient if he wanted to make a last cup of coffee to take in the car. I noticed that getting mad or getting worried didn’t help, but talking about my body sensations and what they reminded me of did shift my anxiety so I could participate again in the moment.