December 2003 January 2004

Our Democracy is in Danger of Being Paralyzed
Bill Moyers

Reclaiming Local Media
Paul Cienfuegos

What You Need to Know About Electronic Voting
William Rivers Pitt

Will the 2004 Election by Stolen With Electronic Voting Machines?
William Rivers Pitt

Myths of the Hermit Kingdom
Eric Sirotkin

Heresies in Pursuit of Peace
Eric Sirotkin

The Empire Strikes Out
Kenny Ausubel

Relationships and Culture
Nita Simons

The Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon

Tai Chi and Qigong
Bill Douglas

A Relationship Practice
Kayla M. Starr, MPH

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

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A Relationship Practice

By Peter Moore, MFCC, CGP

Recently I have been treating an increasing number of couples in my practice. This might be because I have survived having several of my sharp corners knocked off in my own relationship journey!

There are various principles which can help us as we come to difficult places in a relationship, and there are practices which, when used, tend to de-escalate conflict. They also pry free the precious nuggets buried in relationship impasses.

The first principle, of which all others could be viewed as variants, was described by Sigmund Freud as the repetition compulsion—that tendency in us to find ourselves in situations which, on a feeling level, seem to mimic previous painful or difficult situations. A central idea behind this is that feelings can be repressed—they can be made unconscious—but this doesn’t mean they go away. They live on in our bodies as autonomous entities, ready to be triggered by events in the present, which remind us of the original situations in which we felt these feelings.

The problem with this is that usually we are unaware of the original situation and how this is connected to our present difficulties. When this happens in a re-lationship we are convinced our partners are entirely responsible for our upset and we naturally try to get them to understand this and to change their behavior. Unfortunately the very manner in which we try to do this will almost invariably be the exact opposite of what would tend to make them want to change. You, or someone you know, may have yelled at the other something like, “You’re not listening to me!” Since when has yelling been a good motivational tool? The other person might shut up, but the quality of listening might be severely impaired or non-existent as they try to recover from the attack.

The quasi-instinctive tendency to attack when hurt is what drives this behavior, but the extremes to which we can find ourselves unintentionally or intentionally hurting the other indicate that a spontaneous and unconscious age regression has occurred. If you think of fairly common toddler behavior when presented with a frustration, this might give you an idea what devel-opmental stage relationship power struggles are stuck in.

The common wisdom of relationship coaches is that you cannot expect im-provement if you let the toddler in you run the show. Also common to all approaches, whether explicit or not, is some self-soothing strategy which encourage our adult selves to provide limits and caring and act as advocates for the toddler part.

Harvelle Hendrix, who wrote the best selling Getting the Love You Want (1988, Holt & Co.), has operationalized some of these insights. When practiced, these provide couples with a framework for moving out of defensive stuck positions and into undefended sharing.

The partner who has some feelings they want to get across must first explicitly ask the other if they’re ready to listen. This immediately requires what I’ll call the “sender” to be containing their own feelings sufficiently that they are in a sense negotiating a short-term contract. This is very different from simply stating feelings without an explicit agreement from the partner that they are ready to listen.

All through this process there are many places where one or both partners will find themselves resisting, despite their intentions to heal the relationship. If handled with compassion and perhaps humor, the resistances can be acknowledged and then let go of, with a recommitment to the process. Why would it be hard for the sender to ask if the “receiver” is ready to listen? If the triggering event was the other’s perceived tendency not to listen, then the sender, in making an explicit request, is in danger of having their desires fulfilled. Why dangerous? Because to have a desire fulfilled we have to become undefended, and vulnerable—in short, to have our hearts and the front of our bodies opened up. This is not easy, especially in a passionate committed relationship.

The reason for this is explained at length by Hendrix, drawing on ideas from Core Energetics. There is a positive side to the repetition compulsion: it is not just a matter of endlessly repeating past trauma; rather it is an opportunity to heal old hurts, and grow and mature. The survival self, in other words, our defensive self—which numbed us out so that we could carry on despite overwhelming feelings—wants to know that we can really get our needs met by not changing a bit. So it keeps putting us over and over again in similar situations—for instance, picking similar partners—because our patterns must be right: “If it’s not working, do the same thing in the same way again; perhaps this time …” Such misguided hope must be squarely faced and the utter failure of our survival self’s strategy to achieve anything beyond survival—like fulfillment and growth—must be confronted.

When we can compassionately notice that our old ways have failed, we become better able to risk moving into what is for us uncharted territory. In this sense, noticing that we are in the same relationship impasses as we have experienced before is a step toward realizing that the repetition compulsion is the soul’s way of unnumbing our childhood hurts and putting us in a situation where we can try something new.

To return to the practice, after the receiver has agreed, the sender then grad-ually opens up in the following fashion. Notice how far away this is from attacking or saying what the other has done wrong. First, the trigger and the feeling is shared with “I feel …,” to be filled in with one of the three primary negative feelings: sad, mad, or scared. During all of this the receiver mirrors back what has been said and adds something like, “Did I get that right?” For example, sender: “When you raised your voice at me, I felt frightened.” Receiver, breathing and centering, might reply, non-defensively: “What I heard you say is that when I raised my voice at you, you felt scared. Is that right?”

Second, again mirrored, sender states their defensive reaction—in Core Energentics, their Mask, “And I react to my fear by withdrawing.” Third, the sender then states the intention behind their reaction concerning their deepest fear. “And the reason I react by withdrawing is to try to avoid my deepest fear that, if I tell you my feelings, you’ll turn away and I’ll be left alone, and then I won’t know who I am anymore, I’ll get panicky.” Notice, as the sender is listened to and mirrored, and as he or she follows the format, the sender is deepening into their own experience. Fourth, the sender states what the childhood hurt is around this deepest fear.

The third and fourth statements bring the sender to the layer of the personality called “the Wound” which surrounds the radiant Core of the personality. On top of the wound are the raw, unprocessed feelings, and on top of that is what we present to the world, our persona or Mask, which in this example is withdrawing. Sender: “And my deepest fear—being panicky, left alone, being lost—reminds me of when my family split up when I was four and I survived by going numb.” Once the childhood hurt is reached and the initial statement is made and the partner has mirrored it, the partner asks, “Is there more?” This question is repeated, after mirroring each subsequent response, until the sender says something like, “No, that’s all.”

The beauty of this approach is that the sender’s process is useful and generalizable to other situations, at least in terms of self-awareness. We may not want to share all of these items with a boss, co-worker, or employee, but asking ourselves these questions can deepen our own process. In this way, we can bring more compassion and understanding to ourselves and therefore those around us.

Peter Moore graduated from Oxford University, and, since 1980, has pursued his interest in healing. Included with his study of a variety of modalities is certification and postgraduate training with Siegmar Gerken Ph.D., and John Pierrakos M.D., the founder of Core Energetics, an approach which attempts to unify the personality on the levels of body, feelings, mind, will, and spirit. Peter is a licensed marriage and family therapist with a practice in Eureka, CA, and can be reached at (707) 442-7228.