relationships – Page 2 – Becoming Human

Cacocracy

First read this.

Now aside from being brilliant and game-changing relationship advice (it won’t catch on though, mark my words – no one wants to hear the truth that their problems are of their own making, not someone else’s), I want to point out the following.

I am pretty damn sure that almost everyone reading this article, whether they are men or women, and almost regardless even of how strongly they agree with the advice given, in their gut sympathizes with the woman. In fact, I doubt very many people at all – even if, like me, they cried reading this on the train this morning, the delicious yet bittersweet tears of a human being feeling accepted and understood – I doubt that they pause really to think, to dwell on and meditate, the pain of the man.

Vaste swathes of the feminist movement, and of femininity generally, is deeply, indelibly in love with their victim complex. But it is not only women, it is the whole of our culture which is virulently hostile to the emotional, affective and sexual expression of (biological) masculinity and which carries around self-fulfilling stereotypes of “evil, predatory” males and “good, victim” females. And it is very, very hard to resist; to confront it as a man will gain you little recognition as it goes to the core of female neuroses which very few people wish to recognize, and the reaction is likely to be shutting you out of access to even that paltry emotional world of sexual and affective congress that you are allowed to aspire to inhabit. It is, in other words, not incentive-compatible to tell the truth.

We are wedded to the idea that we live in a patriarchy. Some cultural heroes contrast this to an imagined, prehistoric lost golden age of matriarchy. Yet it is a very deep truth, I believe, that both of these terms are meaningless. Male and female can exist in the universe only in equal measure. There can be small amounts of each or large amounts of each, but there cannot be different amounts of each. When neither can flow freely, each will flow in a distorted manner, and these distorsions will be different, but certainly not in any moral sense (there is, after all, no moral sense). And this is what we see – qualitative difference in the expression of the emotional pathology. But not quantitative difference.

I certainly feel compassion for the woman in this story, even if it is hard to feel compassion for someone who is insisting that I make a lie out of my life in order not too much to disrupt her excruciating insecurities. But I also see clearly that making that lie is not simply a least-resistance convenience, without costs. No. It is just as excruciating.

We live in a world where power-over is differently exercised by men and women, in different domains and different ways, but one is not triumphant and the other subordinate. They are simply at war and fight using the tools at hand. Neither can ever win, but they certainly can destroy each other. And this is a reign, not of men over women or of women over men, but of sickness over health or, if you like those terms, of evil over good. A cacocracy.

As the author says (and I hope you read it, but it bears repeating):

There are a few good things in the world. Love is one of them. Love is a gem. Love is one of those rare things in the world that is pretty much good all around. It arises free of cost and does no harm in the feeling of it; it only elevates and brings joy.

I know it also threatens. But for a moment let us please look not at how it threatens but at how it brings spontaneous pleasure. For a moment, why not ask how this gift of human consciousness might serve as the true starting point for relationships? Why not take a risk and see if we can operate on the principle of universal love? What might that show us?

What if it were possible for this man to have an infinite amount of love? What if his love does, in fact, grow the more it is exhausted, the way a muscle grows the more it is exhausted? And what if it shrinks when held immobile, the way a muscle shrinks when held immobile?

And what if your arrangements about sex were a separate matter? What if you were to grant him the freedom to feel what he feels and express it to you as best he can, including the understanding that he tell the complete truth to you, including the truth of whether he has been having sex with this woman, or kissing this woman, or touching her at all? What if you were to abandon all thought of controlling what is to happen next and abandon yourself to the truth, to seek the truth like a thirsty traveler, to lap it up with no thought of what to do with it?

What if we were to use our short time on earth to learn as much as we can about each other by telling each other the truth and listening to the truth? What if truth is painful only because stripping away illusion is painful? What if relationships are a set of dance moves learned in elementary school? What if we have it mostly backward? What if it turns out that what we consider the most healthy relationship is the one that cleaves most fearfully to its model of illusion? What if a “troubled relationship” is merely one that has begun to admit a little truth into its choreography of fairy tales? What if “trouble” is the beginning of “health”?

Exactly. What if trouble is the beginning of health?

One last point. In some comments on this article on Facebook, certain people were tempted to agree with the author on substance, but accused him of adding unnecessary “spiritual mumbo-jumbo” to his case.

The problem with this is that some people are just convinced that human beings are a wretched, mean creature, always selfish, never to be trusted. They hold this view of me, and, presumably, also of themselves (at least I hope they are at least consistent to this very minimal degree). These people will never be persuaded otherwise. There is no hope whatsoever that they will get what the author is talking about unless they can open their eyes to the glory of what surrounds them, figure out that this glory is also inside of them, and finally understand that it is inside of everyone. Yet one can only point it out, and hope. This is what the author does, and I hope I am adding my voice to his.

The prison of fear

Recent developments in my life have brought me into relation with the theme of fear in relationships, which is often the deepest level of our conditioning, underneath pride, anger, resignation, sadness and all those other various emotions with which we mask our ultimate feeling of vulnerability and abandonment. Continue reading “The prison of fear”

A spiritual manifesto

When I married my partner, almost to the day five years ago, we, like many couples who are dissatisfied with traditional concepts of marriage, were faced with the challenge of how to formulate our marriage vows and our marriage contract to reflect what it was we at that time really believed was the meaning and content of the commitments we were entering into. We didn’t find a lot of resources out there to help us do that, because every alternative we found – be it polyamorous, Wiccan, or other new age notions – seemed to be envisaged, by its adherents, as a new orthodoxy. That is, it was characterized by a bunch of behavioral prescriptions and once-for-all negotiated space but it did not go to the heart of the sacredness of human relation and of the human person, nor did it reflect truly, for us, the deep spiritual urges underlying the wish to enter into a relationship and to bring up children. So we did our best to find words.

Five years later, and I see the problem in a different light and from a number of new angles. I want therefore to try to propose a solution to it, and I hope I can count on the support of some of the very wise people I have met over the intervening years who have a similar clarity of vision as to what it is that is actually going on in the space of human relationships and its meaning within the context of humankind’s spiritual evolution.

I believe it should be possible to distill, out of the various experiences and movements that have brought us an immense new global consciousness of our human potential, some principles which are perfectly universal and to which any person who has seen beyond her or his conditioning and glimpsed their true nature will find it natural to adhere. Indeed there is no effort of adherence required, merely an effort of formulation. This article is trying only to introduce the concept and some basic ideas; on the basis hereof I hope together with others to arrive at a text which can really find a natural consensus, because it seems to me that on all essential points of it all authentic persons and teachers would agree.

What are the key elements of such a declaration?

Firstly, it seems to me that it must be in the first person. The ancient Hebrews (basing themselves on the even more ancient Sumerians) formulated their code of laws in the second person and credited it with divine sanction. We have been living with it and all its inadequacies for over three thousand years. Its manipulative and paternalistic character as well as its primitive nature are plain to see.

Our new set of principles will not be imposed on us from outside, it will simply emanate from our soul; and it will not serve a purpose of organizing society around a set of ethical precepts, which is a worthy but separate purpose. It will rather serve to communicate and reach out, and its effects will be only in the private sphere.

The new set of principles must be based on a complete renunciation of any claim on the life of another person. We have recognized the evil of slavery and of many social injustices; with the same passion we must recognize the evil of traditional prescriptive family institutions, chief among them marriage. It is a Faustian bargain which 21st century man can no longer tolerate. It predates on mankind’s desperate desire to achieve some measure of spiritual advancement and consolation, and should in its traditional form be simply outlawed: the law should recognize, at it does in so many other areas, that a contract written under such oppressive conditions cannot be binding. This is the principle which has underpinned humanity’s progressive emancipation ever since liberal thinkers began challenging the moral precepts of the church and the inherited social order.

Marriage is not a divine institution, but a contract between two individuals subject to a high degree of social incentive and coercion; marriage as a contract is, however, in almost all cases based on a collective misrepresentation, a social psychosis; even if such misrepresentation is innocent, it seems to me that (whilst I recognize that children enter into the institution without contracting or being able to contract to do so, which is the only remaining justification for a legal marriage regime I can see) all marriage contracts should be voidable by the automatic application of contract law. There is doubtless a need to reformulate the institution of marriage in order to protect the interests of children, rather than abolish it entirely; with this I do not take issue. However, such an altruistic concern is hardly the foundation of marriage law today.

Whilst marriage law is the easiest target because of the institutionalized nature of marriage, an adherent to the declaration will undertake, of course, to recognize patterns of manipulation in all of her or his human relations and both to admit them and to seek to go beyond them, vis a vis children, colleagues, friends and lovers.

The declaration must also be objectively multilateral and subjectively unilateral. There are no parties to the agreement, not even those others who happen to subscribe to the same text. The benefits I accord to you are the same benefits I accord to every human being, not only to those other human beings who are as “enlightened” as myself and still less to one single human being. (Philosophically speaking they may, indeed, not stop at the species boundary either; but for our purposes I think there is no need to develop this).

The text will need to take a form in order to underpin community but it cannot be rigidly formulated or breed hermeneutical bureaucracies. No one need ever tell another what it means or does not mean. No one will certify whether or not my behavior conforms to it in practice.

It should be and can be, I believe, perfectly ecumenical and even scientific. The basis for it is our understanding of how the self is formed, developed in psychoanalysis, and how it acts, developed in psychology more generally. To complete the picture, a simple extrapolation of liberal and humanistic principles on which there is wide agreement is enough.

And what are the advantages?

My hope is that the manifesto will constitute common ground on which spiritual people can build their relationships and communities. Communication can take place around it. Some may consciously decide to derogate from it, and they may have their own reasons for doing so. However, relations between spiritual people may hereby come to take place on a basis which is explicit, not in the shadows of hoped-for shared values and unelucidated conflicts of interest. Simply put, if you adhere joyfully and willingly to the principles set out, a lot is possible between us; if you do not, I am forewarned of the difficulties ahead.

The manifesto will be only a basis, a kind of framework law or constitution. Much will come on top, much that is specific to individuals, couples and groups. However, as a basis for communication and a source of shared understanding from the outset of human interactions, it is an invaluable shortcut which will slash the opportunity costs of building community. I envisage its use across the web as an invitation to authenticity and real dialogue: in social media whether, like Facebook, general in scope or devoted specifically to meeting new people.

I would also like to add that I am not “against” manipulation and even its past institutionalization, I perfectly well understand the circumstances under which it has arisen and the role that it has played and continues to play in human society. It can be argued that the institutions in question, although I qualify them as evil, are in fact a bulwark against greater evil and as such a least-bad social choice. This is not a debate I am entering into. I speak here to persons wishing to leave behind the childhood of the human race and become autonomous, empowered, enlightened individuals. For such people, these legacy institutions are inimical to spiritual growth, and this is the real point. Compromises with civil authorities doubtless need to be found. However, at the heart of what our human relationships are really about, we can all choose. I invite to this choice.

And so finally, what could this manifesto look like? It would be nice to have something memorable, a sort of Aquarian decalogue. It needs to start with my attitude to myself. As I imagine it may be difficult to sum up what needs to be said in ten short headlines, there may need to be a paragraph accompanying each to clarify the meaning, not perhaps for those of us to whom these spiritual principles are intuitive but certainly for those for whom they are not.

I don’t want to write it here as I first want to gather ideas. But let me try, to make it concrete, to give something of the possible flavor:

I understand the origin of my emotionality in my childhood experience
I take responsibility for my own experience of the world
I acknowledge my conditioning and do not seek to defend it
I distinguish between my inner feelings and what is going on in the outer world
I communicate my feelings without blame or criticism
I communicate my needs and wishes without making demands
In managing our common interests and those of those who depend on us, I will treat you with fairness and respect and honor the differences between us
I honor your need for touch and your sexuality
I honor your vulnerability
I speak my truth and listen to yours
I do not instrumentalize or objectivize you
It is my honor to delight you and to serve you

…..

Your thoughts and views are very welcome!

Important update to our terms and conditions

Recent events have led me to realize certain ingrained patterns in how I relate to important people in my life, and the need to change these.

I have been, in the past, a person with an excessive concern for how other people are feeling, in general and about me. I usually looked for the ways I might be at the origin of their distress and, if I was able to believe I was, how I could put matters right. I needed their affirmation that they still loved me. Seeing human distress, in fact, far from prompting genuine concern and compassion activated a narcissistic script making me see the sufferings of others only in terms of my own. This tendency opened me to manipulation. It comes right from my early childhood and describes my infantile relationship with my mother.

Manipulation, I begin to realize, can take many forms. The word itself sounds very evil. The act, though, is quite conditioned and automatic. People typically manipulate others in order to force them into assuming roles which were absent in their childhood in order to provide themselves with psychic security. Thus, for example, the manipulation practised by a schizoid personality allows them to maintain control and to keep present in a defined role the persons who represent persons absent in their childhood. Such a personality cannot abandon control because to do so would constitute an abandonment of the ego to the flames of its primal dissociation. They will also choose to associate with those who are easiest to manipulate and therefore afford the least risk of destabilising their psychic balance.

Understanding this is one thing, and may help to evacuate some of the anger that the person who becomes aware of being manipulated will feel. The manipulator is acting on an automatism, and doing so because the weaknesses in your own personality make that a comfortable strategy to address (or rather paper over) their own unresolved childhood needs. However, being “understanding” is what comes easiest to the masochist. It sounds good, but it will in no way help. Understanding of this kind does not proceed from the heart and compassion and is difficult to separate from the need to feel understood, to be affirmed in ones identity as someone understanding. This reopens the doors to the same strategies as before.

Even if one is alert to manipulation and resisting it, it is hard to resist not only because of the constant temptation to give in to it in order to buttress ones self-image, but also both due to its obstinacy and unconscious nature on the part of the originator and due to the anger it activates in oneself.

Nonetheless, at whatever cost, one must resist manipulation. It is only by resisting it systematically that the light can be focused again and again on the fact of the manipulation and eventually force the manipulator first to see and then to acknowledge what they are doing and to understand its roots. However, even this sounds like a suspect excessive concern for the welfare of the other. The primary reason to resist manipulation is in order to overcome the pattern in oneself which gives rise to its ubiquity.

The mechanism of manipulation relies on values implanted during early childhood in the superego as to what is “good”, “decent”, “clean”, “normal” and so on. So long as one harbors inappropriate ideas as to what is “good”, ideas which it is easy for the manipulator to uncover and decode, one is open to being manipulated. There are almost infinitely many of these. They have originally all served the purpose of coercing the child into behaving in a manner thought by the parent to be fitting, convenient or decorous. Thus: tidiness, not raising ones voice, thinking of others, eating up ones plate, not displaying ones genitals: any standard which one cannot or does not wish to live by in the contemporary world but the absence of which generates childhood guilt, will do. When you feel guilty because your superego condemns your behavior, you feel bad and I am in control. I now pull the levers which will allow me to get you to do what I want.

Guys, I’m done with this. Done with being understanding. If anyone out there needs to be understood (read, has a fragile ego which they need me constantly to reinforce), well sorry, go see a shrink. I’m not in that game. Yes, I understand. However, please appreciate that I do not care.

In my world, I need grown-up people, as partners. That’s why, if you are over 18, then regardless of age, gender or existing allegiances I’m changing the terms and conditions of having any kind of relationship with me unilaterally and with immediate effect.

1. You are required to recognize that you have problems. I have problems, and so do you.

2. You are required to understand that your problems are your problems. I really don’t care about them and I am unwilling to take the slightest responsibility for them. Any attempt to insinuate that I play the slightest role in their ontogenesis or maintenance will result in angry reminders of the above, and I am more determined to resist it than you are able to persevere with it, so better accept this and give up now.

3. You are required to work consciously and in a determined way to overcome your problems. I do it, you gotta do it too.

4. I do not give a damn what relations we have had in the past, or what experiences we have shared. None of this gives you any rights over me. Pay attention to me in the present. If you want me to be seduced, seduce me. If you want me to admire you, be admirable. If you want me to cuddle you and reassure you, show me at least something that impresses me as to your honesty and vulnerability, so that I can relate to our common humanity and this can catalyse my limited supply of compassion.

5. I’m doing whatever I want. What I want is determined and interpreted exclusively by me. In any case, you may have whichever view of it you wish. Interdependencies will be managed on a basis of equal opportunity for you to do the same, however, in application of rule 2 above, your failure to make use of this opportunity is not my problem.

6. We can, I hope, go beyond these rather cold rules together into the heart of what really matters. This is my deepest desire. But only as two adults. I need to trust you, and I am afraid that my trust is very fragile. I need to know I am safe from manipulation. Safe I, of course, am. But I need to know it. These are sacred spaces, to enter with reverence and lightly. Otherwise, the gates are closed. As ever, I sooner die there of emotional starvation than give access to barbarians.

7. Albeit that all of the above is non-negotiable, perhaps, having agreed, you have something to add. If so I’m listening.

Relationship as therapy

“L’enfer,” said Sartre, “c’est les autres” (Huis clos, 1943). And yet, as he recognized, it is a hell we in fact make for ourselves – a hell which results from a lack of any other perspective on ourselves than that furnished by those around and close to us, and an inability to dissociate our own emotional state from theirs. Plenty of us find ourselves in this hell, with no means to escape it. And yet, we continue to seek intimacy and we freely subjugate ourselves to the disciplines of life in community for reasons which frequently cannot be reduced to merely rational, material considerations or the workings of the “Selfish Gene”.

The ways in which we go about making life a hell for each other, and some of the reasons why, are notably addressed in a debatable but still suggestive branch of psychoanalytic theory called transactional analysis, well known through the books Games People Play (1964), What do you say after you say hello? (1975) and I’m OK, You’re OK (1969). These present rather gross simplifications of character dynamics and certainly do not constitute a complete theory of the underlying psycho-biophysics of emotions (which is still very poorly understood). Nonetheless, transactional analysis captures in terms which are easy for a layman to understand the basic dynamics of emotional interaction in repeated games.

In Games People Play, a number of easily-recognized patterns of interaction in relationships are described, which can be readily observed in our own experience. Many of us know, for instance, the frustration of trying to persuade or encourage someone to do something eminently reasonable or desirable (lose weight, give up smoking, change their job and so on), and being met by an inexhaustible barrage of semi-logical objections to it – that is, objections which adopt the rhetorical form of logical argument but without any substance – which eventually cause us to give up. This is the game Berne called Why Don’t You? Yes But (YDYB). Other common games include those in which the interlocutor is invariably cast as responsible for the interviewee’s misfortunes, those in which self-pity trumps all other considerations, games of entrapment, of emotional blackmail, and so on. Contrary to what Berne believes or cares to admit, however, all of these games are clearly marked by infantile interaction and are easy to interpret in classical psychoanalytic terms. They all constitute a projection onto the interlocutor of motivations and properties attributed to a primal figure such as a parent and the acting out of the interaction in terms of the scripts learnt in childhood to defend against these motivations when they were threatening and to solicit them when they could be reassuring. In other words, they are resistances to the threat to the ego which the interlocutor poses by virtue of his or her otherness.

Although it does not seem to have been widely recognized, the scenarios which arise in a psychotherapeutic and in a relationship setting have a great deal in common. In fact, psychotherapy is essentially relational in nature and relies on transferences of the type referred to in order to decode the nature of the neuroses which derive from the infantile experiences. A psychotherapeutic relationship has, of course, a defined framework and a conscious directionality and motivation which are presumably lacking in most general-purpose relationships. It hopefully also rests on an asymmetry of roles and on a greater emotional maturity on the part of the therapist. The point I would wish to make is, however, that also the general relational context provides ample material and opportunity to decode and self-decode the nature of character neuroses. It does so at less cost and with more ubiquity and it can certainly be advantageous to deal with transferences, resistance and conflict in a relational setting in a way which affirms and develops the authenticity of the participants to the relationship rather than – as appears anecdotally to be the norm – by avoiding conflict and shutting down communication.

From a spiritual point of view we may go further than this. The search for a partner in life and love is the basic spiritual drive which we all share. It is rarely thought of as a drive for therapy but it is homomorphic to this drive because the direction it takes expresses our desire for completeness and self-transcendence, to find Otherness in the Other, l’alterité dans l’autre; to replace neurotically constructed, ego-defensive reality by the base of otherness in which our self finds creative and autonomous expression. Because it is so colored by our prior experiences and insecurities, and by the embedded psychosocial violence which underpins these, the search for a partner no doubt frequently results in the most inappropriate pairings which do nothing to advance the spiritual growth of the partners (or their offspring). Quite on the contrary, such relationships frequently constitute a mutual Faustian pact to avoid confronting ones tortured inner child. Yet we also see from our experience that relationship is the enabler of spiritual growth. The experiences that have helped us grow as individuals all have names and faces attached to them.

In the end it is up to us to allow our relationships and our personal spiritual growth to interact in such a way that they are self-reinforcing; and to be lucid enough to draw conclusions in those situations which have become unproductive for us as human beings and to make decisions in consequence. Regardless, though, of the prospective longevity of a relationship, relationships offer us at all moments the opportunity to learn about our resistances to change and to look beneath them to the elements of our psychic makeup which determine them – provided we can separate what is objective and reasonable in our assessment of the relationship from our subjective emotionality in connection to it. This is not easy because such emotionality takes many forms which are difficult to recognize, especially to ourselves. Emotionality can look very “unemotional” or it can take a disguised emotional form (such as compassion) – the form it takes depends on our character and how we learnt to manage existential threats when we were children. My emotionality is no better than yours, however convinced I may be that I am being reasonable and you are not. Both are windows into the psychic injuries which we have endured. Relationships are not a contest, and the almost universal search for power within them can only frustrate the potential they have to bring healing and self-development. This has, therefore, to be seen for what it is – behavior learnt to defend ourselves from infantile threats that no longer exist, and a violence against the integrality of the very other whom we cherish and seek.