Double Trouble: Reflections on Intimate Relationships and Stress
Author: Granite 5
Author: Granite 5
by Nick Duffell
www.creativecouplework.com -
relationship advice An article similar to this was published in Stress News, Vol. 18 No 1, Jan 2006. Couples today, therefore, load relationships with huge expectations, whilst hardly ever having the time to develop or even prioritise the arts and skills needed to deliver the happy fruits they await. Being in a loving relationship is one of the most rewarding things humans can achieve, but maintaining a relationship requires commitment, courage and persistence. Currently, the difficult task of relationship has become even more fraught with failure and has become a major stressor. Is this simply the fault of the culture or is this an inevitability, which is only now emerging? In this piece, I want to tackle this question from one specific angle: how humans organise the challenge of intimacy within their own body, by looking at the three principal centres involved in processing and exchanging the energy used in intimate relationships: head, heart and genitals. Head start Human beings are mammals, but ones that stand tall with a wonderful and unique blessing: the possession of the self-reflective neo-cortex. This gives us the ultimate advantage in evolutionary terms, because it means we can think about what we do, make plans and strategies, and review them, have a context for what we experience. This is why we are top dogs on the planet. But with this gift comes a curse. It means we predict the future from past experience and therefore we worry and generally give ourselves a hard time, sometimes for nothing. And because we do not run off into the wild when we sense an enemy but rather fire an excess of thoughts, feelings and adrenalin, we descend into internal conflict and stress, making our own lives a misery, taxing our nervous system and internal organs unnecessarily. Systemically, this fret facility is essentially a self-referring system, which tends to foster self-importance or egoism. Intimate relationships, however, have as their curse and blessing that they dont work well in an atmosphere of selfishness, or, speaking more psycho-dynamically, that they mitigate narcissism. To engage in relationship means that a person views the discovery of their lovers desires and the fostering of mutuality as a good matrix in which to thrive. Happily, our ability to reflect is a fantastic tool for crossing skin boundaries and dreaming into anothers reality. Potentially, it allows empathic access to the feeling state of another. We then can make attachments and genuine connections through the bond of mutual empathy, perhaps the greatest comfort humans can have. The primal pattern for this is our inbuilt expectation for nurture and protection when we are very young, since this large brain of ours means we are born premature and far more vulnerable than our other mammal cousins. However, this ability to go beyond present experience can also cause anxiety, according to what we expect and predict. Once the honeymoon period of intimate relationships is over, we frequently expect (and get) criticism and blame from the nearest and dearest, rather than the empathy we crave. We can soon build up a storehouse of bad experience, memories of when our desires for loving connection were thwarted, so we imagine the worst, play safe, withdraw or manipulate the other for the safest outcome. There is a simple reason why our expectations are always met in intimate relationships: we are unlikely to get unconditional acceptance once we are out of infancy. But it also involves several quite complex psychodynamic factors. In order to find a mate we scan for the best fit, both physically and psychologically. By some astonishingly precise and mysterious mechanism, we seek out not just someone with reasonable genes, but also someone who has a selection of qualities and aptitudes we have either not developed in our families of origin or have disowned. In order to encourage this chosen one we make a tremendous effort to show ourselves at our best, and keeping this up is not easy. In time, we relax and come off our best behaviour, and our partner is affected. Simultaneously, those attributes we originally associated with our partner, making us feel more complete, now begin to irritate us. The result is that we fall out of love and into trouble, and, because the same is happening to our mate, the trouble is doubled. The heart of the matter The heart has been associated with love and lovers ever since the first lonely goatherd strung a gourd to write a love-song to the maid who was breaking his poor heart into prehistoric pieces. Poets and popsstars continue without abate, as if the role of the heart in relationships goes without saying, yet demands to be sung. Even if it is not easy, everyone knows that coming from the heart produces a different quality in communication than being in your head. If we could weather all the mind-storms of couple-war and relate to each other consistently from the heart, everything in the garden would be rosy. But is there really something in this, or is it just a metaphor? The heart is a unique organ, one that is central to life, first to develop in the mammalian foetus, the only one that (given the right conditions) an live outside the body, and entirely similar in both genders. Usually considered but a pump, the heart is in fact a highly complex, self-organized information processing center with its own functional brain that communicates with and influences the cranial brain via the nervous system, hormonal system and other pathways(Childre). Recent advances in Neurobiology, Attachment Theory, and Gender Psychology, though working in different reas, are developing remarkable similar conclusions about the primacy of the role of the heart in human activity. The bottom line is that there is a brain, situated in he upper portion of the heart, that has far more influence than has been previously considered. Neurologists have recently discovered that emotional signals, which arrive through the older parts of the brain, have a far higher impact on cognitive activity and autonomic functioning than previously imagined. Astonishingly, it also extends out from the body, apparently to a range of about five feet, suggesting that it is designed to monitor or affect the environment outside the person it serves. Can a lover or a cat detect it? In Gender Psychology we sometimes say: hearts want to connect. But closed hearts will retreat in fear. Paradoxically, the key to intimate relationships is to be voluntarily vulnerable, whereas our survival instinct is to defend against weakness at all cost. Freeing genital love If we were to limit our definition of intimate relationships we would have to suggest that it implies a duo created when individuals chose to have sex together, generally to the exclusion of other pairings. Therefore, however civilized our sensibilities, and despite societys tendency to marginalize these private organs, we cannot exclude the genitals, whether partners are of same or different genders. Couplehood is a genital affair. The size and shape of the male genitals in mammals are complimentary to the location of, and governed by the form of, the females. It is her genitals that call the evolutionary shots. We might add that there is an energetic attraction and directionality between them, in which the male wants to give and the female to receive. Otherwise none of us would have been born. There is obviously a strong connective internal field between our heart and genitals after all it is the heart that fills these organs with blood when arousal for lovemaking occurs. A Dutch psychologist and bodypsychotherapist, Willem Poppeliers, has made a study of these connections and its effect on sexual and family development. His revolutionary Sexual Grounding Therapy is based on the premise of an energetic steaming within the body connecting heart and genitals, and able to link with that of another being of the opposite sex to form a complete and satisfying flow. We might call this the energetic set-up for copulation. But when a couple learns to relate within this flow, the ideal somatic conditions arise for their children to learn how to regulate and balance their own energies, whether loving, aggressive, active or reflective. However, success is not so easy, Poppeliers shows us, for each gender has a different priority of charge. In the male the initial or positive charge is in the genitals and in the female it is in the heart. The direction of flow naturally follows the electro-magnetic pattern, like a battery, from positive to negative terminal. Individuals within a pairing need to have evolved a properly regulated internal flow and to be able to harmonise together. But on examination, it frequently turns out that she is feeling unheard and otherwise generally unreceived. Her default position is to want to give with her heart and have her emotions received, in order that she feels relaxed or safe enough to open up to him genitally. Here is a classic relational impasse at work, which is reinforced by the bodys energetic field. Without wishing to stereotype, it is as if men need genital contact in order to be ready for intimacy, and women need intimacy before they are ready to open up genitally. Couples have to live in this difficult dynamic. Mature individuals will organise it, hopefully more with compassion and compromise than conflict or sacrifice. When a couples emotional field has developed a difficult history, the negotiation around having sex can be too much for either party to tackle, for it involves many strong feelings, chief of which is fear. Mutual genitality then goes on hold or ceases altogether. Under these conditions, men can loose incentive to working in developing a strong and flexible heart, which we say is their evolutionary task, as much as inseminating females and protecting their offspring is their instinctual goal. Women may give up on asserting themselves, feeling that anyway they are past their erotic sellby date. This situation regularly produces extreme stress. With luck, couples recognize it and come into couple therapy, rather than drift apart and give up. As men age their penetrative energy tends to soften. If the heart remains undeveloped, they may shy away from wanting sex altogether, because it is just too painful to approach. This is one of the hardest conditions to resolve in couple therapy, since the prime genital desire seems somehow akin to the natural impulse to become and evolve. Consequently, even with the best therapeutic aid, transformation is unlikely to occur. Conclusion
Intimate relationships, therefore, involve the whole physical and energetic panoply of the miraculous human animals that we are. Imagining, however, that we can leave their cultivation up to our instinctual reflexes is asking for trouble and stress. On the other hand, engaging in the psycho-spiritual adventure that a sexual partnership invites, in the challenge of bringing it to conscious maturity, means we have to develop skills and be willing to grow up to live our full potential. No wonder its so hard! Learn more about
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