The Conscious Heart (21 page)

Breakup or Breakthrough: How We Confronted a Sexual Crisis

Love is an ocean without shores. You have to jump in, never to come back. You have to give up your life; you can never have your life back. This isn’t a path for cautious people
.

—KIRPAL SINGH

I
t is useful to regard any trouble spot in a relationship as an invitation to make a deeper commitment to creativity. In our work we have noticed that people often create a conflict just as they are about to make a creative breakthrough. It’s as if they administer a test or challenge to themselves to see if they have the courage to break through to the next level of expression. Many even contemplate ending the relationship. When we helped them sort out what was really going on, however, the threatened break
up
turned out to actually be a break
through
trying to happen. They were on the verge of inventing a larger version of themselves: building a dream house, making a baby, launching a creative project.
They were insecure about making this leap into the unknown and retreated into the zone of the familiar—the old drama that they unconsciously knew would keep them grounded.

In our own relationship we have also generated dramas just before expanding into greater creativity. Here’s the most striking example so far.

We’ve developed a special new year’s tradition in our relationship; as each year begins, we spend a week focusing on our life-goals. These can be both project-goals—such as writing books, conducting seminars, and making large purchases—and process-goals, such as enjoying ourselves, learning, and expanding into new frontiers of ourselves. Usually during the first week of January we set aside an hour each morning to brainstorm and refine our goals. Then we type them up and put them on the wall in our respective dens. Often we modify and add to them as the year goes on.

This particular year we had set some very large goals. One of our project-goals was to purchase a house near the beach in Santa Barbara. It was more than a house: Both of us love that part of the world (it’s where Kathlyn grew up), and Kathlyn’s parents, now in their seventies, make their home there. Moving there from Colorado represented a major life-change, as well as the uprooting of our friendship network and a number of changes in our business office. It also coincided with Gay’s fiftieth birthday and his retirement from university teaching, which he had done for twenty years. Our plan was to live in Santa Barbara during the winter and spring, then spend the summer and autumn back in Colorado. Would all these changes trigger shifts in our relationship? We were about to find out. In fact, we were about to embark on a journey that would test our ability to use all the skills we teach: truth, responsibility, commitment, creativity, wonder, play, and gratitude.

Gay begins the story: “A few weeks after my fiftieth birthday, I began an adventure that is unique in my life-experience. To set the stage, I should tell you that things had been going very well in
my life for a long time. My health is excellent, my children are launched, and my bank account is such that I am free to focus on what I most like to do. Kathlyn and I have had many years of happiness and creativity together, which have resulted in several co-authored popular books, a successful business, and a circle of friends around the world. Further, I should tell you that for many years I have taught a course over cable TV on developmental psychology. Many times I have lectured on the adult developmental stages. I devote an entire class to each decade, so I know all the intellectual information about the decade from fifty to sixty. According to the psychologist Erik Erikson, the developmental crisis of people in their fifties centers on ‘generativity versus stagnation.’ You are faced with many choices—to expand, to grow, to challenge yourself—or to slide into stagnation.

“Now I know what Erikson is talking about. In one sense I have it made. I could retire and sit on a beach if I wanted to, yet my work is compelling enough to make me want to keep doing it. So as I approached my fiftieth birthday, I could feel a real sense of satisfaction about the way I’ve lived my life. Yet at the same time part of me felt like I was rusting a little. I was aware of a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, some internal danger signals that told me I was beginning to lose a creative edge. For example, Kathlyn and I would be giving a lecture to an enthusiastic audience, and though they were obviously enjoying it, I knew I was just going through the motions. I found that I could go on automatic pilot, and the audience would still respond very favorably. They didn’t seem to notice—but I sure did. This feeling was anathema to me; I had always prided myself on being on a growing and learning edge. Aliveness and creativity were probably the most important sensations in my body that let me know all was well. And I was losing my ability to feel them.

“All this was happening beneath the surface and beneath my ability to articulate it. I knew something was going on down in me, but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was. Then a watershed event brought it all to the surface.

“I was among a large number of friends gathered at the fortieth birthday party of a friend of mine. A superb band was playing loud roadhouse blues, my favorite type of dance music. I was dancing wildly with Kathlyn and others in a crowd of perhaps fifty people. Suddenly across the room, as if bathed in a shaft of radiance, I saw Kristin.

“I had known Kristin for a year or so, having first met her at some of the trainings (mainly for mental health professionals and transformationally oriented people) that Kathlyn and I offer. She was just beginning her doctoral work in the field of body-centered psychotherapy, the field in which I am a contributor of some of the primary books. Up until then I had looked upon her with somewhat fatherly feelings, since she was about the same age as my daughter. I had also been very impressed with her intellectual strengths, her natural healing gifts, and her sunny demeanor.

“Now, on the dance floor, I saw a different Kristin. Her long auburn curls shimmered in the soft light, her lithe body moved to the music with the grace of an earthy ballerina, and her low-cut dress revealed aspects of her to which I had previously been oblivious. Suddenly every cell in my body felt alive. I felt a wave of light and bliss cascade through my body; actually, it seemed beyond my body, surrounding me like an aura. It was as if I had been living at 50 percent when a sudden shift took me to 150 percent. I had been in love before: once at sixteen, another time at twenty-nine, and finally with Kathlyn at thirty-five. This was something different. I had no context to put it in. Being a psychologist, I was fascinated as an observer as well as a participant. It felt like some part of me was waking up at long last. It certainly had a sexual component, although it reached into areas of myself that felt spiritual as well.

“I have an agreement with myself to tell the truth about any feeling I have within ten seconds of feeling it, if it’s physically possible to do so. This is based on my conviction that true relationship is possible only with complete transparency. Most of the time this agreement means I say something like, ‘I was scared when you didn’t come home when you said you’d be there,’ or, ‘I’m angry
that you dinged the fender.’ Reporting my feelings and body sensations keeps my body relaxed and my mind free of noise.

“So I motioned to Kristin, who was close by, to dance over my way. ‘I want to talk to you about a feeling I just had. Can we talk?’ She nodded over the music, and we went to the sidelines.

“ ‘I’ve had some fatherly feelings for you and an affection for you for a long time, but just now on the dance floor, I felt a strong rush of energy that feels anything but fatherly. In fact, it feels like a powerful sexual feeling. I’m scared to tell you about it, because I don’t know how you’ll react. I don’t know much more than that, but I wanted to tell you so you didn’t get any mixed signals.’

“ ‘Great,’ Kristin said, beaming. ‘I feel that for you, too. I’ve felt it for a long time.’ ”

For Kristin, that moment, though surprising, seemed to come from issues she had been exploring over the prior months: “I see that in the months before Gay first spoke to me about his sexual feelings toward me, I had been exploring in depth the relationship between my talent and creativity and my unconscious commitment to feel victimized by those same things. I had been working on manifesting a partner who would be delighted in creating a radically alive relationship with me, yet I had created relationships in the past where it looked like I was the creative one and he was the practical one. I looked carefully at my unconscious resistances to a relationship that catalyzed creativity in both of us. I then committed to clearing up anything in the way of creating a relationship of equality where we both committed to aliveness and vast creative expression.

“Three weeks later at the party, when Gay revealed his feelings toward me, I felt elated that he communicated this and also that my new commitment had produced results so quickly. However, I hadn’t imagined that it would involve such a prominent psychologist. Over the years that I had been attending trainings and assisting Gay and Kathlyn, I saw them consistently live the principles they teach. I became greatly impressed with Gay’s immense
energy and passion for living. To me Gay was a friend, teacher, supporter, and creativity explorer. I had also felt a great mix of both daughterly and sexual feelings toward him.”

Gay recalls: “Omigod. I felt a knot form deep in my belly. I waved to Kathlyn oh the other side of the room and motioned her over to where Kristin and I were talking.

“She arrived, smiling and out of breath from the dancing. She knew Kristin primarily as an enthusiastic young student of our work and an assistant at our trainings.

“ ‘I’m very scared to tell you this,’ I said, ‘but I just had a very powerful feeling come up with Kristin.’ I explained to her what had happened.

“I watched fear and worry cloud her face as I talked. The more I talked, the more intense it seemed to get. It scared me to see so much feeling mounting up in her.

“She said she was angry and scared and hurt. Her eyes moistened as she gestured toward Kristin’s lush and trim figure. ‘There’s no way I can compete with that,’ she said. She also said a few judgmental things, implying deficiencies of character on my part, and I felt the conversation veer sharply toward an argument. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘I’d like to be appreciated for telling the truth. It would have been easy to hide all this or do something sneaky. I feel like I’m being punished for being honest.’

“I’m glad I said this, because it brought everybody up short. We suddenly had to look at whether we were more committed to telling the truth and hearing the truth or to being right. We nipped ourselves in the bud and brought the conversation back to speaking the truth and listening to it nonjudgmentally. This was the first of many dozens of times we would catch ourselves going toward criticism and then returning to generously listening to the other person’s feelings.

“After a conversation that lasted about twenty minutes, we all had acknowledged our various fears, angers, hurts, and feelings of aliveness. We agreed to keep each other up to date, and I returned to the big group on the dance floor.

“Later, as we were going to bed, I raised the crucial question to Kathlyn: Would she object strongly to my having a sexual relationship with Kristin? Absolutely, she said. ‘I’d be out of here in a minute.’ That was the show-stopper comment of the evening, and I could think of nothing further to say. I went to sleep.

“The next morning I woke up furious. I think I had an unspoken expectation that my fifteen years of being a faithful husband and an all-around good guy had built me up some credit. I think I had expected Katie to say something like: ‘Hey, why don’t you two go outside and plant a big smacker on each other? Let yourself feel it to the max, and then see if you actually want to have sex.’ I had wanted a ‘follow your bliss’ injunction and instead got a critical response. Venting my anger, I went on a passionate rant: I cited numerous instances of my saintly acceptance of her, times in which I had gone overboard to be helpful and supportive. I recalled how pleasant and reasonable I’d been when she wrecked my Saab. I mentioned the times I had insisted that talk shows take us as a package instead of just me. I proudly pointed out how I always put the toilet seat back down. I soared to great heights of outraged victimhood.

“It was a world-class self-righteous tirade, and a major run for the victim position. I hadn’t figured out how stupid all this sounded, so I continued my rant: ‘Why not cut me a little slack here? Gimme a break! After all I’ve done for you, the least you can do is give me room to have a little sexual attraction.’

“Hearing my tone of voice during this tirade finally woke me up from my trance. I realized I was projecting all my old anger at my mother onto Kathlyn. When I tuned in to what was going on in my body, I saw that what was running was perhaps the deepest issue of my life: the war between my aliveness and my mother’s anger at my existence in the world. I had Kathlyn in the role of policeman. I had made her responsible for my aliveness and was projecting onto her that she was trying to squelch it. As soon as I figured this out, I felt a lot more at ease inside. My task became to take responsibility for this issue rather than project it onto Kathlyn.
It was about me, opening up to my full aliveness and creative energy, not about Kathlyn trying to keep me from it. In the midst of blaming her, I shifted to taking responsibility for it.”

Kathlyn recalls her response in these pages from her journal: “That night on the dance floor is studded with several visual images: of Gay standing with his arm around Kristin, who was dressed in a low-cut black lace top, of Gay with a wide grin, of the room shrinking and turning gray. I had lived in our relationship with the agreement that we shared our sexual feelings about other people and had settled into a kind of security of trusting that we had decided to be monogamous. When Gay announced his attraction and desire, I felt that ground break open and shake me to the core of so many assumptions on which I’d been standing.