by Chris G Moon
Finally I reached out beyond those oppressive influences and, envisioning a beautiful light in my imagination, called out to my soul, asking that it give me the words to say. Because more than anything else at that moment, I wanted the Truth. And from the depths of my pain came a tearful appreciation for my wife, and an expression of how important she was to me. Every word of it was true, and although I had said pretty much the same thing before, it had had no effect. Before I had been saying the right thing, but only to manipulate my partner, because I was still protecting myself from her as if she were my enemy. She was wrong and I was right. If we had stayed there, I can easily see that we would have been stuck there for years. But by some incredibly good fortune, I forgot my personal investments and remembered what was important, and so surrendered to what was best for both my wife and me. The result was an internal shift, a sense of movement out of the deadlock and back onto the path of a relationship that worked. Will I remember to surrender the next time such an intense conflict arises? I sincerely hope so, but there is no way that I can realistically guarantee it.
It seems that the most important key to all communication is surrender. Once you surrender to the Truth (whether you call the Truth God, Heaven, the Universe, Love, Jesus, the Buddha, Krishna, Fred, etc.), your soul can guide you. It will put the words in your mouth, and take you step by step through the process to the light of union with your partner. Sometimes you will be guided to reveal a deep level of pain that you have carried seemingly forever. Sometimes it will guide you to reach out to the other with love, appreciation, and gratitude. Sometimes it will guide you to release your partner from the prison of your expectations. However you are directed, it will always lead you towards the centre of your being where you and your partner (and everyone else in the world) are one.
My suggestion to any couple experiencing the Disillusionment stage of relationship and are caught up in Power Struggle or control games is to seriously study the principles of conscious communication and understand them as much as possible. Then, in the heat of a serious conflict, trust your heart and soul to guide you, and your sincere surrender will put those techniques in the hands of your Soul—who definitely knows how to use them better than you do. As in all things, when you know what you want, the how is revealed. You might feel more encouraged to practice conscious communication if you were to realize the alternative. If you do not resolve the Power Struggle in a harmonious manner, you will be facing the possibility of pushing the relationship into the third form of misguided behaviour...
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REVENGE
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“Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
—“Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.”
The tendency towards revenge is usually present even in the early stages of Power Struggle, when you unconsciously try to hurt your partner in order to alleviate some of your own suffering. There is an icy pleasure that comes with revenge, but this behaviour can quickly become addictive. For one thing, it is simply too easy to turn your attention to getting even, compared to the effort it takes to rise above your pain. Why not just comfort yourself with the knowledge that your partner is suffering at least as much as you are? The problem is that you will add the guilt of hurting someone close to you to your pain, and this will tempt you to exact even more revenge on your partner. If you listen to some people in the throes of an especially violent divorce, you would question whether the two ever cared for each other at all. The fight over money and property, although rationalized with reason and logic, is almost always a vengeful attempt at punishment.
I learned how early revenge can appear in our childhoods from my son when he was three years old. Although he was one of the most easy-going three-year-olds in the world, Harmon did give us some difficulty in one area—he NEVER wanted to go to bed. If he could have it his way, he’d keep going until the early hours of the morning, with my wife and I heading off to bed and reminding him to turn off all the lights before he retired. Even if he did go to bed, he never slept until about eleven or twelve. One night I became determined that Harmon would go to bed at a normal hour. At eight o’clock I picked him up and put him into his bed. He came out of the room. I put him back. He came out again. I put him back. By nine thirty he was very upset and I was very tired. Through the whole ordeal, I had managed to remain calmly determined. I put him back into his room, and this time he did not come out. He cried for a while and I went to sit down in the living room, prepared to go back upstairs should he make another break for it. Finally he stopped crying and became quiet. Very quiet.
Too quiet. There is a certain kind of quiet which makes parents immediately suspicious, though it sounds like any other kind of quiet to the untrained ear. With this particular kind of quiet, you don’t dare go to sleep, or you might very well wake up with the house burned down all around you. I went back upstairs and opened the door to Harmon’s room. He was in bed, quietly tearing the wallpaper off of the wall. How did I know this was revenge? His face was peaceful, and when he looked up at me there was no anger in his eyes. I knew it was revenge from the way that I felt. I was stung by a deep hurt, the kind of hurt that makes you want to ask with teary eyes, “How could you do this to me?” My son must have felt that he had lost the struggle, and therefore had no recourse but to get even with me and thus hang on to some sense of personal power.43
There are simple signs to let you know if revenge is involved in your interactions with your partner. Whenever you feel that your partner’s actions are an attempt to hurt your feelings, whenever you feel stung, betrayed, or humiliated by your partner’s words or actions, there is a very good chance that the Power Struggle has turned into vengeance. Whenever you get a certain smug satisfaction from your partner’s discomfort, or worse, a sense of glee, you are seeking revenge on him or her. You may even hear a spiteful voice disguised in rationality using phrases like “I just want her to know how it feels when she does that to me,” or “Good, I’m glad he’s hurt. maybe he’ll know better next time,” or “This is the only way she’ll ever learn not to treat people that way,” or “Well he hurt me first.” We tell ourselves these things because we know revenge is not good for anybody, but we can’t be the bad guys. Therefore we rationalize our behaviour to make us look like the good guys, meting out judgment to the wicked.
It is crucial that you recognize these signs of revenge in your relationship and choose another course of action. If you examine why you are in your relationship, you will realize that you are not there to hurt anyone. It does not matter who “started it,” because no one is to blame. The pain inside you is calling to be accounted for. When the pain arises and you choose to compound it with more pain, you have lost your direction, and may need to review your purpose in the relationship. If you choose not to respond to the pain in a more mature way than you did as a three or four year old, you cannot mature emotionally; you will live your life defensively, without trust, and all the subtle forms of revenge will become a way of life. Remember, revenge is a two-edged sword that injures the one who wields it as deeply as their target. And although it is extremely easy to succumb to, revenge is not the path of least resistance. It is the path of greatest resistance to the love you want to experience. If you choose revenge, it will ultimately lead you in the deadly direction of Assumed Inadequacy,44 where the marriage vows change from “I do” to “Why bother?”
It would be wiser for you to examine the areas of your relationship where you (consciously or unconsciously) try to hurt your partner with words or actions. Coming home late and not calling to let him/her know can be just as effective a form of revenge as a spiteful statement or name-calling. Become aware of your weapons of revenge, and reveal them to your partner. Ask your partner what words or actions really hurt him/her, and make a promise to be more conscious of—and responsible for—your behaviour. Throw down your weapons and choose peace.
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A
WINNER WITH AN ATTITUDE
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“If you want a glimpse of your destiny, look at your attitude.”
—Anonymous
To end this chapter, I would like to return to the issue of pain. One of the biggest lessons that my relationship has taught me has been the necessity of developing a whole new attitude towards the pain that an intimate relationship can bring up. Beside the old heartbreaks and wounds that reach back to my infancy, I have also discovered deeper levels of primary pain that come from being in a human body. These seem to stem from the feeling of isolation that so many of us experience, regardless of how many friends and loved ones we have around us. The fact is that even the most emotionally balanced of individuals may experience loneliness, helplessness, despair, jealousy, and emptiness (to name a few) in their lives. I call this type of hurt “the pain of being human,” and will explore this later on. At this time I simply want to suggest that in order to benefit from our relationships we may want to develop a different approach towards pain itself, maybe something like…
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PROCESS
There are many signals that you are being offered an opportunity to relax into Process, the typical signals being feelings of anxiety, irritation, or anger. For now, let’s just say that any kind of physical or emotional discomfort is actually an invitation to directly experience Process. Here are the steps.
1. Notice your discomfort.
2. Locate where you are feeling it in your body.
3. Put your hand over that location to help you keep your attention there (optional).
4. Relax and accept the feeling completely, exactly as you feel it.
5. Relax deeper into it, as recognition grows that the feeling is actually an energy, vibrating, pulsating, or radiating in a specific way. It is neutral, neither good nor bad.
6. Relax into the heart, or center, of the energy and you will come to the peaceful, joyful power of your essence. Welcome that power to grow in your awareness, and let Process take you wherever it takes you.
7. Appreciate how amazing the experience is, and how what you thought was a ‘bad feeling’ is actually this wondrous power.
8. When you feel complete, think about the problem or conflict that seemed to be the cause of your discomfort. If you still feel anxious, irritated, angry, or in any way uncomfortable, you are free to react emotionally, or relax back into process.
9. As an individual grows in emotional maturity, he or she sees more clearly that there are always only two options in life: Accept what is (and respond with Process), or reject what is (and react with a fight, flight, freeze, or faint reaction). One option leads to peace, and the other suffering.
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11 And we all know how much fun this can be.
12 In case you didn’t know.
13 Like me.
14 Positive Discipline by Jane Nelsen, Ed.D., 1996, published by Ballantine Books.
15 Or childISH
16 From the outside of course—it’s a lot more hilarious when you’re an observer. Being on the inside as a participant really sucks.
17 Do you remember the kid in your neighbourhood growing up that would get laughs by loudly belching or passing wind? A client of mine had a husband who still did that. “Whenever we’re at a party or visiting friends,” she said, “he’ll let loose with a loud fart—and he still thinks it’s funny! He cracks up laughing every time!” My client was considering divorce at the time.
18 Everything in a child’s memory can seem bigger than it really was. Imagine some of the problems of inadequacy this could cause a man around certain important anatomical areas. I mean, if a boy thinks his father’s watermelons were that gigantic, what about other things his father had?
19 How did anyone ever find the time to count them?
20 I still say that it should be sixty degrees, so in this case my wife was obviously wrong.
21 And of course, sexuality—or did I mention that already?
22 I wonder if there is some kind of principle in effect here. Some scientific equation, such as “The level of maturity will decrease in direct proportion to the length of an argument multiplied by the loudness of the voices.”
23 I think it is extremely important to fully experience our anger, but in a harmless way. There are many fine therapists that offer various approaches to fully experiencing one’s anger in a healthy and healing fashion. *
*I cannot think of the names of any of these therapists offhand (I hope they don’t get mad at me for this).
24 I’ll never tell what it was.
25 For a while, anyway.
26 Rationalize = Rational Lies.
27 And as we all know, anyone who sleeps with the enemy does not get a good night’s rest!
28 Of course, you could then argue that it’s a blue and red hat while your partner insists it’s red and blue, in which case you really don’t get the point of this book.
29 Of course I would never accuse my wife of leaving all the lights on, because I know it’s my two children that are the culprits. Now I know what my father really meant when he said, “my life has been a lot brighter since you kids came along!”
30 You might say that once they stopped focusing on the electric bill as the problem, they started to see the light!
31 Or he might have run out for some whipped cream, but that’s for another book!
32 My technique of study is very simple—fall on my face, get up and fall on my face, get up, etc.. It works on the principle that even falling on one’s face has one moving forward.
33 The longest arguments are conducted by two people who are not quite sure what it is they are arguing about.
34 Talk about sleeping with the enemy!
35 If you are a Buddhist, you might ask yourself, “How would the Buddha or Guan Yin see my partner?” If Christian, “How would Jesus or Mother Mary see my partner?” Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. can simply use the compassionate leader of their spiritual path.
36 None of which are any fun at all.
37 It is with any conflicts I’m involved in, anyway.
38 Including yourself.
39 Jean-Paul Sartre stated that the two experiences that follow us from birth are guilt and nothingness. Now there’s a cheerful thought.
40 There always are.
41 This of course is a very basic explanation. For a much more thorough exploration of the ego’s mental development, you may want to read Michael Washburn’s two books Ego & the Dynamic Ground, and Transpersonal Psychology in a Psychoanalytic Perspective.
42 Basic Buddhist principle: All desire comes from you. All attachment comes from desire. All pain comes from attachment. If you reject your pain you reject yourself. Advice: Love your pain.* *If it’s not a Buddhist principle it ought to be.
43 You may think I was just being paranoid, believing that my son was out to get me, but revenge shows up in us at a very early age, before we are even aware of what we are doing.
44 Which we will cover in the next chapter. I bet you can’t wait!
CHAPTER 4
INTROSPECTION
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“I’m starting with the man in the mirror. I’m asking if he’ll change his ways.”
—Michael Jackson, “Man in the Mirror”
There is a point in our lives where we come to realize that, contrary to The X-Files, the Truth is not “out there.” No one is going to fulfill our needs, no one is going to make us happy, and no one is to blame for the hurts we experienced in our lives. After looking at every external possibility, we gradually come to the conclu
sion that there is only one place left to look for the causes and effects of our life experiences: within. Beyond the encounter with disillusionment is the next step in the soul’s process of its evolution, which I have called the Introspection Stage.
My daughter, Tara, is five years old at the time of this writing. She loves to draw pictures of people, but primarily little girls. Typically her little girls are bigger than the houses she draws.45 Tara still seems to perceive a largeness in herself that is reflected in her drawings, although she will probably lose this sense of grandeur as she begins to relate more and more to the world around her. The houses will grow and the little girls will shrink. It reminds me of an experience that I had when I was five years old, sitting on the curb on a beautiful sunny day. Suddenly I became aware of the world—how enormous it was, and how small I was in comparison to it. I remember an intense melancholy overcoming me, gradually pushing out the blissful peace that had filled me just a few seconds earlier.
Looking back on that incident now, I wonder if my sadness emerged from the loss of some inner connection I was enjoying before I “woke up” to my external surroundings. I do know that it was after this experience that I became more and more aware of what was going on around me—the emotional changes in my family, the establishment of friends as more or less permanent and important fixtures in my world, and the sense of a world that was expanding daily. In effect, I was becoming consciously oriented towards the outside world, and the sense of smallness that had been growing in me without my conscious awareness was now a very real self-perception. My external orientation became involved with the pursuit of bigger and bigger goals in what I believe was an attempt to recapture the lost feeling of “omnipotence” I had enjoyed as a child. However, no accomplishment or personal victory could ever satisfy the longing, and I was ultimately left with the old perception of myself as basically unimportant—a small dot in a large cosmos.