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In this month's issue:
The Resident Quotation is repeated with each issue. It is chosen for its directness and clarity, and for its ability to combine thought and a basis for action in a way that is both reassuring and empowering. The current Resident, from the innovative, courageous and dynamic dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, exemplifies the essence and context of living dynamically: "There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. "It is not your
business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor
how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep
it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do
not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep
yourself open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open."
Temporary accommodation in Brighton, UK Until June 21st, 2003 my temporary address will be:
My telephone number there is: 01273 722038 To telephone me from the USA, use the toll-free number: 1-866-761-1392 I hope that by the time of the next issue I'll be able to pass on my new permanent address. Let self-understanding improve your relationships Relationships are not easy. Love, especially the form of love that typically takes us into marriage, is not a very holdfast type of glue. Her tinkling laugh too quickly turns into a hyena's shriek; his six-pack abs dissolve overnight into a six-pack beer-belly. To create and sustain the most fulfilling relationships we need to be forgiving of ourselves and tolerant of our partners. This difficult process is aided by generous helpings of self- and other-knowledge. If I know that your hurtful behavior toward me results from an unavoidable aspect of your personality, I am less likely to take issue with it and escalate the pain. For example, I once held the rather obscure belief that if I loved someone therefore they should do what I wanted. This seems bizarre until I realize that this is exactly the dynamic which many parents use to coerce their children into behaving the way they want them to. Translated, it reads: "I love you, even though you are completely and essentially unlovable, and the least you can do in return is to fall in line with my desires." Sure, mom! Despite the obvious benefits of knowing what we're dealing with, many couples show a distinct reluctance to find out where they stand in terms of the personal predispositions they bring into their relationships. This is odd, because they are attempting to avoid articulating the behavior they are manifesting. What do they think? That we haven't noticed how they need to control everyone in sight, or dive into the armchair at the first opportunity?! The problem seems to be that our predispositions have been so associated with blameworthiness that we feel forced to deny them even when anyone can see they're true. That's when trouble ensues. Far more useful to confront this one head on, before you concretize any form of partnership. Then you can protect you and your partner from future pain which might range from minor to very major indeed. I've compiled a simple test to help people understand this aspect of their relationships. It's free, and can be found at: http://www.santafecoach.com/DRC/drcpp-test.htm.
CONNECTION: THE HUMAN GROWTH FACTOR
This line, from the brilliantly innovative animated film 'Spirited Away', summarizes the theme of this article. The emotional threads woven for us by our friends are a potent source of strength and motivation. They provide protection and liberate us to grow into our natural way of being. I'm using the term "friends" in a very loose way. I mean all those life-enhancing aspects of people and things whose effect on us is to promote drives such as courage and creativity. Confusingly in many cases, those sources can also be a source of hurt, perhaps traumatically so. For the balance of this piece I will simply refer to them collectively as 'connections'. I hope these thoughts on connections might make it easier for you to manage yours. This means sustaining existing connections, minimizing the effects of painful ones, and being more selective in creating new ones. I begin my look at connections with a characteristic that is possibly the hardest to accept: we cannot break them. The enduring connection Having spent a good deal of my life trying to break connections, especially painful ones, I've been forced to conclude that it's actually impossible to do so. "Breakthrough", "Break away", "Divorce", "Split", "Separate", "Dump". The words are many but all mean essentially the same thing: we want to split something or some person away from us and leave it behind. Time and again I hear it in my office: "I just want to end it. I want him (her or it) out of my life so I can get on." It's not always a significant other who is the object of the projected banishment. Sometimes it is the place the client lives, the job they depend on, or their delinquent offspring. There are often constructive reasons for wanting to bring about major change, but there is a major objection to trying to end a connection: it cannot be done. There is no way we can get people or our associations with things and places out of our lives. They exist. We can ban people from our shores, our clubs, our professional associations; we can shoot them, gas them, kill them in a hundred different ways, but they're still there. Julius Caeser and Pocohontas are two random examples, dead but very much alive. "Ah! But they're historical figures!" I hear you say. Quite so. And each and every one of us has a history peopled with such figures. Whether it's Fred E***, the neighborhood bully and my personal tormentor when I was 8, or Ann H*** who sat next to you in school, they were real and still occupy a space in our rich casserole of inner psychological space. Our experience of them flavors and informs, to some degree or another, everything we do. Although we cannot break connections, we are not doomed to be choked by them. We can internally rearrange them and incorporate more and more positive connections so the detrimental ones are gradually reduced in power. We are all connected Everything is connected. Everything is made of the same universal stuff. Visit a low-enough level of sub-atomic structure and, so I understand, you can no longer tell where one human-scale 'thing' ends and another begins. There are no boundaries that we can recognize. Yet here in our daily life we only have shape and identity by virtue of our boundaries. There is the obvious boundary of our skin but there are also less obvious but no less powerful boundaries of social status, inherent capabilities, gender, nationhood and so on. In a way, it is the embodied boundaries which are our selves made manifest. It is also our embodied selves which have such difficulty with connection. We tend not to refer to it as connection, but as relationship, marriage, partnership, family, friendship, workplace, community, state or nationality. Each of these domains of connection carries its own threats and promises. Despite the boundaries, everything we do affects everybody else. As I am changed subtly by an encounter, so I introduce that change to my ongoing encounters. This results in those I have encountered being changed, and so it goes on. There is even some evidence that change can take place without a physical encounter. Tests done on the learning rate of rats has shown that once rats in one part of the world have learnt a particular technique, apparently totally unconnected rats in another part of the world learn the technique more quickly. Whatever the nature of the link, there is no question but that we are each connected to and therefore affected by every other person on earth. The more conscious we are of this, the more effectively we can use it in our daily lives. Connection is always two-way Any connection between live humans implies a two-way communication of something. If I shake hands with you, I leave with at least some of 'your' bacteria and dead skin cells on me, and you leave with mine. If I exchange glances with you in the street I'm left with a sense of a personality and maybe a sense of threat or promise. If I nurse you I receive your gratitude or maybe your contempt. This two-way quality of connection ensures that we can never leave another, never be left. On physically or psychologically parting, we are always left with something. We can gain from connection The rejuvenating effect of connection can sometimes be seen after a first date. It is common to hear the phrase: "We connected!" usually accompanied by a happy grin. We understand that there was more to this connection than a mere physical touch. It means we had our selves affirmed and authenticated in a way which might be mysterious but is undeniably real. It is almost as if we have psychic receptors specially shaped to invite and hold the transmissions from another. When we are dynamically aware, such connection is almost invariably a growth experience. It is love with a small 'l' and an acceptance of love which may grow into "the real thing" but which doesn't need to. It is enormously powerful. One such encounter each day and we thrive. No such encounters over several days and we shrink. People who have been deprived of such connections for a long period respond similarly to people who have been starved of food or water. They are shy of their need at first, and must take it slowly or else risk being overloaded and pushing the very thing they need away from them. This can easily be seen in people who are emotionally hurt and cry: "Get away from me!" when it is clear to all that nurturing contact is what they really need. They are simply unable, at that time, to absorb more than the minimum of the emotional nutrients available from healthy connection. Each connection creates a unique couple-mind I approach you as a 57 year-old man with a mass of different experiences emanating from the vicissitudes of my life. I receive you as you are, differently unique but no less experienced. We are each a mass of connections with others unknown to each other. Some of those connections may be to people, others will be to objects - books, art, placemats - while still others will be to abstractions such as thoughts, music, writing. When we collide, we create a clash of all these connections and in that clash is born a new entity, our unique couple entity, with its own couple-mind. This couple-mind is a whirling, sometimes conflicting, constellation of everything about us. It is easy to test the truth of this. Think about one person and dwell on your sense of yourself in that connection for a moment. Then think about another person. The quality of these two reflections is different. Your sense of yourself is different. For example, if I think of myself with X, I am charming. I accentuate my intuition and bask in their appreciation of my warmth. When I think of myself with Y I am pushy and challenging and bask in their recognition of me as a doughty collaborative competitor. Two totally different couple-minds. Two beneficial connections. Three people reinforced and enhanced by the love energies that we each draw from elsewhere and contribute to each other. That is what artists do. At their most effective they channel the unconditional love energy, filtering out the fear, and present us with a clear yet inarticulable impression of the truth of being human. It is also what scientists do, though many of them would shrink from such a generalized and untestable statement. The couple-mind does not need to be created with a physical human. Some experience orgasmic pleasure on encountering an elegant mathematical proof. Some find their hair standing on end and the tears flowing in the presence of an exquisite artistic statement. In each case it is the encounter with the essence of a person which results in the creation of a new couple-mind. This in turn synthesizes new perception in the individual. Connection is conscious and unconscious Up until now I have oversimplified human connection in order to show how ubiquitous and powerful it is. In each of us, however, it is made more complex by taking place both consciously ("Hi! I'm Stephanie!") and unconsciously (" " ). The problem with the unconscious connection is twofold. One, it is more powerful than the conscious connection; and two, we can only deduce it by observation. This takes time to learn and if we haven't learnt how to observe it we will be held hostage to its demands. For example, a young woman setting off to the city might wave goodbye to her parents feeling a typical mixture of sadness and excitement. She does not see her father collapse in sobs after she has gone. Yet when she reaches the city, the promise in her career that she had shown in her home town seems to elude her. Each time promotion or other sign of success beckons, she inexplicably finds herself turning away from it. Unconsciously, she is responding to her guilt and to her father's desire that she return to her place of origin. The drag effect of this connection prevents her from fulfilling her potential. It is famously said: "You're allowed to leave home but you're not allowed to enjoy life when you've gone." We aren't allowed to say that where we are is a lot better - and the pie is tastier - than where we were cared for as children. Yet this is true for most of us. Just try saying: "Life's a lot better now I've left!" to those who brought you up. It seems so very cruel. Yet if our parents have done a good job our lives will be a lot better than theirs. We will be wiser, wealthier, healthier and therefore happier overall. However, in the interest of maintaining the connection we will protect our parents from what they may experience as a painful truth. Sometimes, in our efforts to give our early home life the appearance of being better than our current existence, we will sacrifice some or all of our own adult life. This dynamic, of introducing self-defeating behaviors or 'symptoms', so others may feel better about themselves, is very common indeed. It is a potentially dangerous side-effect of connection. Our protection lies in our awarenessof both conscious and unconscious connections. The war between connection domains It's clear that connections exist in different domains: in couples, families, friendships, workgroups, schools and other communities, towns, states, nations and so on. They also exist internally, between different parts of ourselves. This multi-domain existence, common to all of us, is fraught with conflict. The simple level of conflict, for which many societies have institutionalized tolerance, is when we disagree with the acts of 'our' nations. We may find ourselves affronted by the daily news of what is being done in our names, but we aren't banished or removed from society unless we take illegal steps to make our presence felt. Family and work life is much harsher. Typically, a significant disagreement here will be met by an immediate threat to cut off your life support. In the workplace, this might mean being fired, but in the family it is a much more subtle process. The shunned one will rarely find their food and water needs cut off, but they could be subjected to a constant rejection of their truth to an extent which amounts to what Alice Miller called 'soul murder'. We quickly learn as children to separate tolerated individuality from that which threatens our parents. We will therefore moderate our behavior to the extent that we feel we need to maintain that connection. This sets the standard for our whole lives. We constantly struggle to maintain our autonomy without sacrificing too much in the way of healthful connection. We form alliances, conduct diplomacy, make new friends, and even go on the attack, as we unconsciously seek to maintain balance and forward growth in a demanding and threatening conflictual environment. It's my belief that juggling our priorities in all this is one of the things we do while we sleep. No wonder we sometimes wake exhausted! Growth versus connection It quickly becomes obvious that to some extent growth and connection are in opposition to each other. How can we grow if we have to stay connected? Yet, how can we grow if we separate ourselves from our connection to our soul-nutrients? A good model occurs in nature. Trees go on developing throughout their lives, sending their roots ever deeper and their branches ever further. They achieve this by integrating past growth and connection into their present stature. Even if trauma or disease should break a root or a branch, these decompose and are once again reintegrated into the tree. Certain roots and branches are de-emphasized as others meet the tree's needs more economically. So it makes sense for us, too, to seek to integrate every connection into our growth. While we may grow psychologically and physiologically more distant from them, we can continue to draw strength from the constructive component in any connections we have made. How to make connections work for you The way to make connections work for you is to seek out and nurture beneficial ones, while allowing others to gently diminish in significance. Dynamically, this will enable you to maximize the constructive energy you receive through your connections and to minimize the destructive. It's important to remember here that we must take the rough with the smooth with our connections because we have no way of filtering out unwanted effects. Most people are a mixture of positive and negative and some will want to use us as negative 'dumping grounds' while keeping their positive energies to themselves. This means we must put a great deal of care into selecting those people and things we encourage to create couple-minds with us. Here are some hints to help you structure your connections to your own advantage:
By the way, by 'over' we typically mean that our daily lives are no longer affected by historical connections the way they once were. However, when we start to recall them, wow, there it is: that old feeling of hurt, anger, joy, or whatever. In other words, we're not actually over anything, we've simply managed to diminish its impact by overlaying it with more constructive experiences.
You are a swirling constellation of internal and external, conscious and unconscious connections mingling with and bouncing off others' constellations. Our communal swirl takes place within hierarchies and networks of ever larger and more complex domains. This is not a simple place to survive. We are remarkable for our ability to do it at all. So. Be kind to yourself and to your connections. Set a general constructive direction for yourself and then sit back and let your unconscious lead you. Understand that just as a river's connections - streams, tributaries, geological features, rainfall - guide and control its direction and pace, so your connections guide and control you. You are not a free agent. With care, however, you can move yourself away from soul-deprivation and into the general direction of growth and fulfillment. You deserve it. We all depend on it. ------------------- Oh yes! If you want to know what the quotation from 'Spirited Away' referred to, go and see the film. I don't believe you'd regret it. cjc
"I've
been absolutely terrified every moment of my life, and I've never
let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do."
Georgia O'Keeffe, Artist, gardener, and very independent soul.
Copyright ©2003 by Christopher J. Coulson. All rights reserved. Christopher
J. Coulson |
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