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"Till Love do us part"
Author: Granite 5
Author: Granite 5by Nick Duffell and Helena Lvendal-Srensen co-founders of the centre for gender psychology. marriage guidence An earlier draft of this article appeared in Connections magazine June 1999 To work as a psychotherapist is a great privilege. Not only do you have some chance of helping someone, but through the window of their story you also get endless chances for insights into the problems of life. We had worked with many couples in crisis and probably did some good. We were both psychotherapists, trainers and workshop leaders, supposedly experts at communication and listening, but, at home it was a different story. We were not beginners at relationship. When we met we both had failed marriages behind us, but we thought that this time it would be different. However, after a brief "honeymoon period", we seemed to be alternating between furious rows or civil frigidity. Despite our experience, we kept falling into bottomless conflict, showing each other sides of ourselves which we didnt like acknowledging. Our relationship which once promised love and friendship now suffered from battle fatigue. It was very painful. We felt like failures and hypocrites. Why didn't we give up then? Perhaps because it happened so fast that we still remembered the love between us.... perhaps because we thought we owed it to the kids, who had already suffered from the break-up of their family.... perhaps because we were too exhausted to run off and try again. Probably it was a mixture. But eventually we looked at one another and asked the obvious question:" What is going on?" We knew from our work that the challenge of intimacy had many people beaten, and many were resigned, or concealed their shameful secret - sometimes even from their partner! We looked around at friends and colleagues and the picture was very much the same. Divorce rates, single-parent statistics and the ubiquitous " lonely hearts " columns, seemed to confirm the notion that we were not alone. It was then that we remembered the joke about the child digging in a manure heaped stable. His logic was: 'With all that shit there must be a pony in there!" So we decided to search for the pony. In other words we began to question whether our relationship trouble was something we were meant to run into. Could it be that rather than heading for failure we were revealing things about ourselves and the nature of intimacy that could only be achieved through the medium of discomfort? Following this lead we discovered some very specific things. We noticed that what had initially attracted us to each other had now become the very things that exasperated us. Helena's optimistic and relaxed attitude to life, once holding great lure for Nick, now appeared to him as unbearable naivete and lack of responsibility. Nick's ability to discriminate, make decisions and act on them, had been a bonus, but now Helena felt totally controlled by them. And worse: it was as if each had the perverse power of bringing out the most unpleasant, uncooperative, and of course unconscious, side of the other. Nick found himself acting like the tyrant he had sworn he had left behind. We saw ourselves becoming possessed by family demons. Nick magically began to resemble Helena's controlling father, while he felt deprived of her maternal caring. We had begun to discover some of the ways that the Relationship was refining us, by facing us with what we weren't dealing with in our own lives. What about love? It may come as no surprise that our sexual life had suffered. We saw sex becoming a medium where our relationship issues would surface however we tried to separate it out, whether by avoidance or indulgence. We had certainly fallen out of love and into disappointment: "You are not who I thought you were..... this is not how I wanted us to turn out...... if this is what we do to each other, we can't be right for one another...." In Denmark, where Helena was born, they speak of love as the Bees and the Flowers. It helps us think of how flowers attracting bees with their seductive fragrance resembles the delightful experience of falling in love. But this is just the initial stage of the more complex art of making and refining honey. Human beings are complex and multifaceted. Torn by seemingly conflicting needs, urges and longings, we struggle to integrate the different aspects within ourselves. Had Nature decided to wait for individuals to 'sort their stuff out' before releasing the fragrance of the sexual urges, the species wouldnt have survived. So she plays a very beautiful trick: falling in love. Then we fall out.... it's the next stage, and it hurts. If at this point nothing holds the two people together, such as children, marriage, or joint finance, the only sensible action seems to be to end the relationship and go searching for honey somewhere else - all too often just to repeat the same story over again. If there are factors preventing a fast get-away after the initial "honeymoon" period, relationships often become stuck in patterns of resignation or resentment. These can prove amazingly durable, although lacking in mutual love and joy. In order to do more than just survive this next stage, we had to learn to grieve this apparent loss of love, together. So much energy had gone into blaming each other for the pain and fear we experienced: If you would only stop...... or do more of.... then everything would be as it used to be..., and so on. We were desperately trying to change the other. Meanwhile, the Relationship was nudging, us to change, like a mother bird tricking her young to jump off the edge when its time to learn to fly. Rather than fleeing the other, we sensed that we had to abandon the images that we had of ourselves, each other, and of what we supposed love to be - including the fantasy that someone else had the ability to provide happiness and make one feel good about oneself. The pursuit of intimacy is scary and dangerous: the barriers each person puts up to stay safe, and maintains over a lifetime, have to be willingly lowered and opened to let the other in. Why should anyone take the risk? At the same time our hearts and bodies were full of the yearning for connection and the shared grief of the loss of what had once been. Despite our extensive therapeutic training, we, like everyone else, had no training in intimacy: it was like dancing in the dark. Considering all odds, we realised that we werent doing too badly. Pursuing a relationship consciously meant taking on a huge task. For this we would need courage and to let go the notion that we were failures - no wonder so many of our parents generation had settled for a quiet life! The intimate relationship was going to reach the parts that even therapy failed to find. All this made a terrific difference to our ability to tolerate what was happening, and to generate compassion towards each other. We began to think about how best to help other couples benefit from what we were learning. So we set about translating our experiences into psychological models through which we could offer men and women a means of learning and gaining support. Hence the Dancing in the Dark workshops were born. At the outset couples would be amazed and encouraged to know that others shared remarkably similar problems - in short that relationship was a minefield: you needed courage and attention, as well as love. As well as presenting our psychological understandings, we used music, poetry and storytelling and ritual to approach the subject in many different ways. We found that our presence as a couple who had known their own difficulties in relationship meant that the atmosphere in these groups was much more creative and less heavy than other therapy type groups we had known. And many people were genuinely able to get this new context in one weekend. Later, we began to notice a specific pattern occurring in the workshops. Invariably, as we progressed, universal men-women issues would come up, and we would spend time in gender groups. This corresponded with our own findings: that deepening understanding of and identification with ones own gender was crucial to fully embrace the challenges of the opposite sex. Consequently, we developed twin programmes called The Ways of Woman and Images of Masculinity, which have both proven popular and useful. Now we see the task of relationship rather like yoga: it can stretch and strengthen you if you are committed to practice; it hurts if you dont. The pursuit of intimacy, of gender awareness and the practice of conscious sexuality we see as a spiritual path. Claiming our true natures as men and women is a means of bringing soul into the world. Following this path does not lead to equality, or comfort, but to peace, partnership and the delicious blending of opposites, the celebration of the endless flow of turning Yin and Yang. About the authors: Nick Duffell and Helena Lvendal-Srensen, co-founders of the Centre for Gender Psychology, are psychotherapists, Sexual Grounding Therapists, freelance trainers, and co-authors of Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy, HarperCollins Thorsons 2002. Nick is the author of The Making of Them. Nick and Helena specialize in training Creative CoupleWorkers in the UK, Europe and Scandinavia. For information on professional training and public workshopss including Dancing in the Dark, Images of Masculinity, The Ways of Woman, Boarding School Survivors, etc., please visit www.genderpsychology.com Find out more about marriage guidence
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