Relationship- Bridge to the Soul

by Chris G Moon

  3. Within this conflict, what emotions can I express with absolute Truth? I am expressing an absolute truth when I make a statement that does not feed a conflict. If I am describing a feeling without making anyone else responsible for what I am feeling, I am stating an inarguable truth. On the other hand, saying to my wife, “I’m mad at you for coming home late,” can feed the conflict and therefore is an arguable statement. She may have a reason for being late that would diffuse my anger immediately. I am actually angry because of why I think she’s late. My anger may have been catalyzed by my wife’s tardiness, but it could not have been created by it. I have tons of anger inside me, just looking for an opportunity to happen. Her actions may have been an excuse for my anger but certainly not the cause of it.

  A more accurate truth would be, “When you didn’t come home on time, I became angry.” Even better, “Your being late helped me become aware of how angry I feel inside.” Or how about “I’m really pissed off! It’s not your fault—I’m just feeling really mad at myself!”? Taking 100% responsibility for your emotions allows you the opportunity to speak indisputable truths. Anything less than 100% leaves you susceptible to the weaknesses of blame, judgment, righteousness and defensiveness.36

  It is the nature of relationship crises that the problem appears to be coming from the outside towards us, but I have found that any conflict in a relationship represents a conflict within myself. Carl Jung coined the phrase “projection” to suggest that everything that we see outside of us is actually our inner process being played out on the stage of the outside world. In the trainings I facilitate, I sometimes have people check in with what they are feeling, and then look at the group they are in. Invariably, those that are feeling fear will perceive a very threatening group of people around them. Those that are angry tend to see a lot of faults in their group. One person who was feeling extremely peaceful and happy claimed that her group was populated by angels.

  I have repeatedly found the principles of projection to be true, and do my best to see all relationship conflicts as a reflection of my own process. If I am dealing with a deep sense of abandonment and loneliness—which is a very human experience—the person I am with will often appear distant and indifferent to me. Being 100% responsible for my feelings makes it possible for me to free myself from the trap of thinking that my source of unhappiness, and happiness, is outside of me. Expressing that responsibility with an absolute truth allows for a deeper understanding of what I am really experiencing.

  Anger is usually the first emotion to be expressed in a conflict.37 Anger usually blocks more important feelings, but it is good to be aware of it, and feel it as completely as you can without harming anyone38 with it. Along with anger, fear and sadness, are usually involved. Simply stating “I am feeling ________,” and stating the emotion that you are aware of, begins the inward journey. To say, “I feel like ________” or “I feel that ________,” or “You make me feel ________” are three examples of avoiding your feelings, and they often encourage argument.

  4. How can I respond to this emotion? With this question, you can choose to give up a tendency to react to the uncomfortable emotions and discover ways to respond that bring more peace, joy, and love into your life. Typically, no emotion can remain in your body for more than six minutes, unless you’re making a home for it there. You can give emotions a home by denying them, justifying them, fearing them, or indulging in their drama. However, if you simply focus your awareness on an emotion, without any judgment whatsoever, the emotion would begin to transform into a higher form of energy. A great way to respond is to verbally express what you are feeling with as much openness and acceptance as you can. This necessitates that you go past giving the history of what you’re feeling, and express the depth, texture, and effects of the emotion without falling into the trap of indulgence.

  More often than not, you will be doing this with the support of your partner. But there is the possibility that your partner will not be supportive due to lack of trust, or because she/he is in reaction to the emerging feelings. Since it would still be beneficial for you to complete your process and not suppress your feelings, I will describe a way to respond to emotions and feelings at the end of this chapter.

  5. What feeling is beneath this emotion? Once you respond to the emotion in an effective way, you may find that the problem has dissolved, leaving you with a sense of closeness to your partner (or whomever you were in conflict with). You just needed to feel all your anger, or your sadness, or your fear, and now you feel better. You’re on your way to more loving, intimate connection with each other.

  There are often times, however, when after you have dissolved the emotion, you discover a doorway into something much vaster. This is what I call the realm of “emptiness feelings,” the feelings we first became aware of as we began our struggle for complete “self-consciousness.”39 Such experiences as loneliness, helplessness, hopelessness, and feeling lost (to mention a few) are aspects of the human experience, but they appear to be so deep and endless that you may have a primal fear of feeling them. When we were children, throwing a tantrum was a good way of distancing ourselves from the depths of these emptiness feelings.

  These emptiness feelings are at the heart of your core beliefs. Expressing one of these feelings to the best of your abilities allows you to maintain an important awareness of both the experiencer and the experience. Why is this important? When first confronting these primary feelings it might seem as if you are facing an endless emptiness. This perception can be so intense that it could induce the fear that you will be consumed by these feelings. Imagine you were a drop of rain about to fall into the ocean. Could you maintain your sense of yourself as an individual drop, while at the same time being a part of—or one with—the ocean? When you approach the emptiness feelings, you are like that raindrop, and thus the fear of being consumed. But what if you could experience the feeling without fear, but rather with acceptance? Without the fear to feed your perceptions you could then, for example, see powerlessness not as an enemy, but simply as a part of your humanness. Then you could relax into the center of that feeling and discover the peace and joy of your soul, which resides there.

  6. Is my feeling, or that of my partner, familiar to me? Typically you will sense immediately that the feeling you are experiencing has been inside you—in exactly the way you are feeling it—for a long time. At first you may think that you had never been that powerless, or that valueless, in your whole life; but with openness comes an awareness of the history of that specific feeling. It becomes a familiar one that you can sense as very old—sometimes even ancient. Getting that sense of familiarity makes it easier to let the other person off the hook for “making” you feel it.

  Of course there are some people40 who will insist that even if it is a familiar feeling, they would not have to feel it if that so-and-so didn’t do something to make them feel it. Sure, I’ve felt unworthy and valueless ever since I was a kid. Everybody feels that sometimes. But you don’t have to make me feel more insignificant! The point is that the feeling came first and, wanting to be healed, began to rise up into your consciousness. When that happens, a neutral situation—and all situations are neutral—was interpreted through the experience of valuelessness. The trick of the ego is to make itself think that the situation came first, but it is always the feelings and emotions that come first, followed by a situation to help you become aware of them.

  Now there is always the possibility that you are not in touch with any emotions or feelings. In this case the other person will be expressing them for both of you. If you listen closely, you can identify what it is that the other is experiencing. If you can’t identify any feeling, keep asking your partner to tell you more until you finally do understand. Once you identify it, you can recall a time when you felt like that, and the feeling will come more into your awareness. This will allow you to begin to “join” with your partner.

  7. What is the history
of this feeling? The word familiar has its roots in the word family. It is in the family environment where you first developed your beliefs, these being constructs of thought, picture and feeling. It is also in the family that you first began to consciously experience feelings and emotions. Emotions such as anger, sadness, and anxiety are a mental reaction to the experience of the uncomfortable feelings.41 These were all experienced in your childhood with members of your family around. The most significant figure is the caregiver (usually Mom, sometimes Dad or a relative) followed by the authoritarian (often Dad, sometimes Mom or a relative). Brothers, sisters, and other relatives follow. You can have significant emotional experiences, both positive and negative, with any of them that will be instrumental in forming personal beliefs. When it is time to grow past that belief, the painful feeling attached to it will emerge and be projected onto a suitable situation, which often appears as a crisis—such as a conflict with a significant person. You can see why it is important to recognize the history of your feelings, so you can be aware of the opportunity to transform the limiting belief into a much more loving one.

  Sharing this history with your partner in communication provides a twofold reward. First, it takes the other person off the hook as your antagonist, and allows him/her to be on your side. Since the history of that feeling proves its existence before you had met the other person, s/he can no longer be blamed for creating the feeling in you. Second, sharing the history of your experience allows you to be more clearly aware of it in detail.

  8. Can I respond to this in a loving way? Once you have consciously chosen to face your deepest feeling, you can begin to dissolve the fear into your love intention. There is no place you go where love won’t come to find you. For example, if you can bring your full focus to the feeling of powerlessness and give it your acceptance, you are choosing love instead of fear.

  By making a conscious choice for love in the midst of a seemingly overwhelming feeling, you are choosing something greater than the feeling, while at the same time consciously maintaining a sense of who you truly are. I have found the results of such a choice to be truly phenomenal and sometimes frightening. I always thought I was most afraid of painful feelings. After learning to respond to them peacefully, the pain was always transformed into the rebirth of an inherent gift which I had lost and forgotten, an important life lesson that made my purpose clearer, and access to a greater level of fun and creativity. The result is so beautiful that it becomes a matter of whether I can stand having it that good! In truth, I am more afraid of love than I am of the emptiness. Like my friend Chuck Spezzano used to say, “How good can you stand it?” The answer to that question is a moment to moment choice.

  While I was discovering the power of such a choice, another wonderful realization occurred to me. Whenever I chose to respond to pain with acceptance, I discovered my wife right there with me, making the same choice. Since then I have become aware that every time I choose to be completely responsible for my feelings, my wife is beside me, sharing the same pain and bringing love and acceptance to it with the same level of commitment as I am offering. Soon after discovering this miracle of partnership I came up with a simple shortcut, which I must admit I do not always take.

  The shortcut is:

  a) Be aware of the emotion behind the conflict and sink into the acceptance of simply feeling it, as well as the emptiness feelings below.

  b) Love my wife.

  Of course my scientific mind finds this too simplistic, maybe even airy-fairy, but when I forget I have a scientific mind, it works surprisingly well! After all, being my perfect mirror, Su Mei is always reflecting back to me exactly what I’m feeling inside. If I am feeling pain, I will see it in her. By loving her, I am loving my pain and thus I am loving myself. 42 My model suggests that the willingness to feel your feelings responsibly is the key to communication, and thus an effective route through Power Struggle. It may seem to you that your personal makeup is designed against doing just that. I will go into the possible reasons for that in the next chapter. For now, I simply want to establish an understanding around the importance of feeling. If you are positive, you will simply not want to feel, and if you are negative you will think you are already feeling. All I can say is that truly feeling your feelings with an intention to bring peace to them will allow you to feel closer to, and more in love with, your partner, friend, relative, or the guys at work.

  There are two more things I want to share with you regarding the adventure of conscious communication. The first is that sometimes people who use these methods claim that they seem to work initially, but don’t hold up in the long run. One client stated that they sincerely followed the guidelines and were rewarded with wonderful results, only to be caught up in the “same old shit” the next day. As this was the same result I experienced, it led me to see that the waves of conflict can come in twos, sometimes—but rarely—threes. It is best to be prepared for that second wave, and keep trusting the communication/feeling process. When aligned with your sincere intention, it will always lead you to a better place.

  The second point I want to share is that I have tried to memorize these guidelines; I have taped them to my refrigerator door, bathroom mirror and kept them by my bedside table. I have even taught courses on effective communication skills over the past ten years. Yet when an intense emotional issue arises in my close relationships, my notes are rarely around and my memory all but completely fails me. Conflicts are so packed with pain, emotion, anger, pride, fear, and guilt, that the temptation to revert to primal defence mechanisms can be overwhelming. In those times, willingness to be wrong seems to be the equivalent of daring my partner (i.e. “the enemy”) to blow my brains out. Being totally accountable for my behaviour and that of my partner’s is like admitting that I’m the bad guy and should be punished while at the same time relieving my partner of any culpability in the situation. When it comes right down to the intense heat, numbing coldness, or overwhelming emotionalism of a Power Struggle, it is difficult to keep a clear head. The guidelines, if remembered at all, seem flimsy or trivial, and we can lose sight of our heart’s goal altogether. So what’s the use of offering these pointers?

  The above principles and guidelines are intended to open our minds to the possibility of absolute resolution of any conflict. Many of us never conceived of anything greater than compromise in interpersonal communication. We grew up with the slogan that relationship was a matter of “give and take,” whereas this model offers the possibility for “give and receive.” I don’t want to take anything from my partner—I’d feel like a thief. I’d much rather receive what she offers me freely. But even after reading these principles thoroughly, you may believe that it is only an ideal, something that works in theory but has no place on the planet, much less your own relationships. I encourage you to put these guidelines to the test. Listen to your partner as if it was your own mind talking to you. Take an emotional risk. You have nothing to lose but your righteous position and the uncomfortable tension of interpersonal strife. With the appropriate intention, these guidelines have worked for myself and many other people over and over again. I know their value.

  I also know that when emotions and fears arise, doubt infiltrates our commitment to a harmonious resolution. That is why it is vital for us to continually ask ourselves the most important question throughout our attempt to communicate; as a matter of fact, it is probably the most important question in the world: “What do I want?” As you penetrate the deeper levels of the human mind, you find that all things manifested in the world are done through will. It is our heart’s willingness to see the possibility of a complete and transformational resolution of conflict in any given situation, and the determination to accept nothing less, that ultimately allows the Truth of who we are to manifest itself and thereby resolve any problem. I have been in a number of unsolvable situations whereby I scratched up enough courage to commit to that Truth, and I have been witness to miracles thereafter. S
ituations that showed no signs of hope, much less resolution, were somehow concluded successfully, with both parties emerging as happy winners.

  There were also many times when I had no such courage. More than the Truth, I wanted to remain safe behind my walls, or else I wanted to be right more than happy. In those times I sacrificed loved ones and turned them into enemies, withdrawing from or attacking them without compassion. The result was never harmonious or satisfying; its reward was the isolation of separation. These unhappy results did not occur because of mistakes that I made. Mistakes are an inevitable part of learning. No, they ended up unhappy because of what I wanted from the communication.

  Therefore, there is one last suggestion that has saved my ass on more occasions than I can remember, and it is that when all else fails…surrender! Once, an issue arose in my marriage that brought us to the brink of divorce. The attempts at communication had gone on for a month, and even with my precious notes, I kept hitting the brick wall of despair. When at last it looked like the only thing to do was call a lawyer, I suddenly remembered the quote, “Love your enemy.” Following that another quote came to mind, this from Julius Caesar: “l have seen the enemy and the enemy is me.” I looked at my wife and realized that I had made her my enemy—the source of what threatened my safety and well-being. Really what was threatening my peace was my own destructive tendencies, such as my self-doubts, unworthiness, pride, feelings of isolation, jealousy, loneliness and yes, my self-hatred. It was these and other such inner demons that threatened my happiness, and in that moment I realized that these judgments and limitations could not be the Truth. Only feelings and thoughts that inspired love, happiness, and a true communion with my partner could point to the Truth.