The Passage of Time

Everest at Two

There are moments when I can hardly bear the passage of time, moments when I’ll look at my nearly-six year old and realize how young and small he really is but knowing that if these six years passed so quickly, how much more quickly will the next six pass, and the six after that. There are moments when I deeply long for unbroken sleep, but then I snuggle up next to my fifteen month old and revel in his smallness, knowing that, in what feels like a blink of an eye, he’ll turn two, then four, then six. Humans try to defy nature at every turn, but try as we might, we cannot defy time, which moves inexorably forward toward the end of a life and beyond.

My passion for paradox led me to study Jungian psychology; my life training in transitions has helped me develop an expanded comfort level with holding two or more emotions within a single experience. But still, at times, I resist. I wish for a way to stop time at my will, to hold onto the preciousness of their smallness and innocence. Paradoxically, I delight in their growth and wish for nothing more than to be able to witness each passing day and the ways in which my kids evolve more fully into themselves and manifest their potential. For as much as I feel the ache of nostalgia when I see photos of Everest at two or four, I celebrate the person he is today. If I froze him at four, I would never know the wondrous boy he’s become at six.

With each complete cycle of breath, I grieve on the exhale, pause, then celebrate on the inhale. And this is how it goes with transitions. We let go, we sit in the empty space, and we’re birthed again. We breathe into the pain of loss, the awareness that time keeps marching on despite our human desire to hold on, and we embrace the new moment which is ripe with possibility.

Everest at Six

It’s the polarity of opposites that creates the ache and ecstasy within me. It’s walking into Asher’s room when he wakes up from a nap and seeing him sitting up on his cozy little bed, his brown hair tousled, wearing just a lime green cloth diaper, the purest smile brightening his face when he sees me. It’s holding him close in the most delicious embrace and knowing that these days are finite, that he’s only this small and pure for a couple of years, then the relationship changes into something more solid and reciprocal, more challenging and fulfilling in a long-term way. It’s embracing the still point at the center of this polarity and tasting, for just one moment, the divine.

“What’s Wrong With Me?”

As I was rocking my baby to sleep for his nap this morning several hours earlier than his regular nap time, I remembered my first weeks with Everest and how uncertain I often felt as a new mother. As sleep has always been one of our most challenging areas (with both boys), I often consulted The Books to see if I could glean a new tip that would help me help my baby to learn how to sleep. They always said the same things, none of which applied to my son, but all of which reinforced the nagging feeling that unless my baby slept twelve hours a night and took two three hour naps a day, I must be doing something wrong. It took me several months before I grew my mother-legs, tossed The Books, and started to trust that my baby and I were doing just fine.

There are certain transitions that we expect to be hard: moving, breaking up, divorce, death. But for many other transitions like getting married, becoming a mother, and buying a house, the expectations and fantasies of pure bliss propagated by our culture make it challenging to acknowledge, talk about, and work through the difficult feelings that naturally arise. When my engaged clients realize that they’re not head over heels in love with their partner, that they don’t have the butterfly feeling they had in the beginning (or ever), when things about their partner bug them (often to the point of obsession), and they sometimes think about that jerk of an ex that did create a chemical explosion down to their bones, the contrast to the fantasy is so stark that they wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Maybe I don’t really love my partner.” When my  new mother clients feel so overwhelmed that they can’t feel their love for their baby, when they’re flooded by their grief about closing out their old life, when they ache with loneliness and they long for the one-on-one time that defined their pre-baby marriage, the contrast to the fantasy is so stark that they wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Maybe I don’t really love my baby or being a mother.”

There’s nothing wrong with you. There is, however, something terribly wrong with a culture that upholds getting married and becoming a parent as the pinnacle of joy and fulfillment in a person’s life. There’s something wrong with the message we receive from the time we’re cognizant enough to ingest information that defines love as a feeling of intoxication and motherhood as a state of unblemished bliss. When I encourage my clients to access the truth about their relationship and their feelings about motherhood they honestly don’t know what the truth is, so indoctrinated are we in the lies that lead to a litany of “shoulds” that lead to guilt and interfere with one’s ability to enjoy any aspects of these transitions.

The guilt is further amplified by our culture’s dysfunctional focus on the positive. Someone buys a house and the response is, “How wonderful! You must be so excited! When do you move in?” Of course, buying house is exciting, but it’s also a host of other emotions that aren’t inquired about. When you buy a house, you also have to endure the transition of a move. A first time homebuyer is often struck by the level of responsibility triggered by the purchase of something so large. Just as getting married and having a baby are the biggest commitments one can make, buying a house is the biggest financial responsibility one makes and, as such, initiates a new stage of adulthood. A first time homebuyer often finds him or herself clinging to remnants of childhood or the child-self as the largeness of the purchase looms before them. So alongside the joy and excitement are fear, grief, and uncertainty.

When the person dares to acknowledge these difficult feelings, she’s met with, “What’s wrong with you? You should be so excited.” So the person then wonders, “Oh, yes, what is wrong me? I should be excited and I’m feeling grief and fear. Maybe I’m making a mistake. Maybe it’s not the right house.” And then he has what we call “buyer’s remorse,” which has nothing to do with the actual house (just like engagement anxiety has nothing to do with the actual choice of partner in most cases) and everything to do with the pool of emotions that we think we shouldn’t feel and so displace onto the tangible object of the house.

We need to make room for the idea that several emotions can exist simultaneously, and that this is especially true around transitions. Until we shift our consciousness around transitions, when the difficult feelings arise we’ll wonder, “What’s wrong with me?” The taboo needs to be broken, for each individual, in our families, our communities, and in our culture at large so that we can pass through life’s pivotal stages with the grace that will allow us to heal and grow instead of truncated by the guilt that we’re not fulfilling expectations based on pure and unattainable fantasies.

A Few Words on the Word "Ritual"

In response to my recent post on moving, I received several emails and comments on the Inner Bonding site about my suggestion to implement a ritual as a way to concretize the feelings activated by a move. While the person writing was open to the idea of a ritual, they all said that they had a hard time imagining suggesting the idea to others because it sounded to “hooey-wooey”. This is fascinating to me because the word connotes the antithesis of hooey-wooey in my mind; for me, it evokes grounding and connecting in a way that people have grounded and connected for thousands of years.

A ritual is, quite simply, any act that is done with intention. A ritual can also be an automatic act that is empty, like shaking hands when you first meet someone. You may not want to shake hands and there may not be any conscious intention behind the act, but you do it because it’s a ritual in our culture. But when I talk about rituals in connection to transitions, I’m talking about anything that will help you drop down into your body, to slow down into the present moment and access the answer to the central question of a transition: What is it that I need to let go of?

Does a ritual have to involve candles? No, but before you brush off the idea of candles, consider for  a moment how you feel when one is lit. Does a ritual have to involve prayer? No, but again, consider how you feel when you’re in the presence of true prayer. Lighting a candle and saying a prayer are ritual actions that people have enacted for centuries, not just something hippies started doing forty years ago. Instead of dismissing the word immediately because it sounds too much like something out of Woodstock, perhaps it’s time to restore the word to its original meaning, with roots in the word rite, as in rite of passage, which is really another word for transition.

Just for fun, I consulted Wikepedia on the matter. Here’s an excerpt:

Rituals of various kinds are a feature of almost all known human societies, past or present. They include not only the various worship rites and sacraments of organized religions and cults, but also the rites of passage of certain societies, atonement and purification rites, oaths of allegiance, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, school “rush” traditions and graduations, club meetings, sports events, Halloween parties, veteran parades, Christmas shopping and more. Many activities that are ostensibly performed for concrete purposes, such as jury trials, execution of criminals, and scientific symposia, are loaded with purely symbolic actions prescribed by regulations or tradition, and thus partly ritualistic in nature. Even common actions like hand-shaking and saying hello are rituals.

What determines the efficacy of a ritual is the intention behind it. If you’re using a ritual to protect against your feelings – as is often the case in the new age movement – nothing positive will be achieved. On the other hand, if you’re utilizing the ritual as an aid toward dropping down into your emotional body and accessing the wisdom of your Higher Self, rituals can be extremely effective in helping you move toward the questions that need to be answered in the midst of a transition.

A Warbler at the Window

One morning last week, as I sat down to write, I heard the unmistakable thwack of a bird hitting glass. With a sharp inhale and tears in my eyes, I crossed the room, peered outside, and saw a beautiful warbler on its back, shaking, its tongue darting in and out of its beak. My heart broke. I paused a few moments, then stepped onto the balcony and bent down beside it. Unsure of what to do, I walked back inside and called the local Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. The woman on the phone told me that birds often need about an hour to recover and that I should put it in a box and let it be. If, after an hour, it hadn’t flown, I should bring it in.

I found a box and, as carefully as I could, wrapped the little bird in a baby cloth, turned it onto his belly, and placed it inside. Then I left it alone. I didn’t want to leave it alone. I wanted to sit down next to it and stroke its soft wing until it recovered enough to fly. But on the Wildlife Rehabilitation website it said that animals in trauma need to be alone and that, despite our best intentions, they perceive any human contact as a threat. So I went downstairs and quietly came up every twenty minutes or so to check on it.

As I waited, I thought about death and how simultaneously natural and painful it is. Everest was concerned about the bird, but I could also hear in his explanations to Asher that his experience witnessing Mocha’s demise and death last spring has helped create more acceptance of death for him. He said to his little brother, “The bird might die, Asher. It’s just what happens sometimes. But it will come back in another body. It’s okay.”

And I thought, of course, about transitions. I thought about how transitions most be endured alone (for whether the warbler would recover or die, the event would be a transition in its life.) Loneliness, like existential fear and core grief, is one of the defining emotions for transitions. When we’re in the midst of getting married, pregnancy, new motherhood, moving, changing jobs, or retirement, we realize that no one can grieve the old life and make the brave leap into the new life for us. Transitions are initiations, and like the indigenous boy who is left in the middle of a forest alone to find his way into adulthood, so we are metaphorically left in the forest of the unknown, flooded with memories of what is no longer and grappling with fear of what’s to come.

My engaged clients often say to me, “How can my partner and I be walking toward the same experience – the wedding day – and feeling so differently about it? I feel like we should be closer than ever but it’s like we’re on two different paths.” My pregnant clients in their first and third trimesters share, “Ever since I got pregnant I’ve pulled into myself and withdrawn from everyone around me. I always thought I’d want to connect with my friends and family when I got pregnant, but I’ve just wanted to be alone. I feel lonely, but not necessarily in a bad way. I’ve just needed to be separate, to process this on my own.”

If a transition is to be navigated with consciousness and completion, there must be a time in which we withdraw or separate from the people and world around us. Within the crucible of solitude, we cut the ties that bind us to the old life and attend to the critically important world of emotions that the transition activates. We grieve. We acknowledge the fear. We find a way to surrender to being out of control. We recognize that no one can do this for us and we stop trying to find a way to abdicate responsibility for the challenges that arise. Within the crucible of silence, we slow down, we find stillness, and we let go. In this release, we realize that we will find the wings that will allow us to soar into the new life.

And so it was with the little warbler. In Peter Levine’s book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, he says all animals undergo the same process in response to trauma: they energetically release it and move on. They may need to shake or shut down for a period of time as a bird does when it hits a window, but it doesn’t hold onto the trauma longer than it needs to move it through its body. This is exactly what I witnessed: first the warbler shook, then it shut down, became very still, and waited either to leave this world or to fly off to the next moment.

After about an hour, I went back upstairs to check on it. It will still huddled in a corner of the box. I decided it was time to take it to the Center, so I gathered my things and came back out to get the bird. But when I bent down to pick it up, the bird hopped. It shook out its wings and I could see it wanted to fly. I lowered the sides of the box and away it flew to the nearby aspen tree as if nothing had happened. I’ve thought about the experience many times over the last week, but the bird will never think of it again. It happened, it worked it through, and it moved on. We have a lot to learn from animals. Nature abounds with lessons on the art and science of letting go.

Friday Quote: "The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments"

While Arnold van Gennep introduced the term “rite of passage” to the West in 1960 through his book Rites of Passage, William Bridges brought the three-stage roadmap of transitions to mainstream culture with his book, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, in 1980. If you’re interested about deepening your understanding of transitions, both books are must-reads. Today’s quotes come from Bridges’ more recent book, The Way of Transition: Embracing Life’s Most Difficult Moments (2001), in which he chronicles his wife’s dying process and his own parallel transition. Here are a few of my favorite passages (but really the entire book should be read because nearly every page contains gems):

“After I began working with people in transition, I found that ending and losses are the commonest first sign that people are in transition. These endings tend to be signaled by one of several experiences:

* a sudden and unexpected event – like Mondi’s [his wife's] death – destroys the old life that made you feel like yourself;

* the “drying up” of a situation or a relationship that once felt vital and alive;

* an activity that has always gone well before, suddenly and unexpectedly goes badly;

* a person or an organization that you always trusted proves untrustworthy and your whole sense of reality comes apart;

* an inexplicable or unforeseen problem crops up, at the worst possible moment, to disrupt the ordinary functioning of your life.

“The irony is that people naturally view such events or situations as disasters to be averted, as probelms to be solved, or as mistakes to be corrected. But since they are really signals that the transition process has commenced, making them go away is no more than turning off that alarm that woke you up.

“Whatever its details, an outer loss is best understood as a surrogate for some inner relinquishment that must be made, but one that is difficult to describe. What it is time to let go of is not so much the relationship or the job itself, but rather the hopes, fears, dreams, and beliefs that we’ve attached to them. If you only let go of the job or the relationship, you’ll just find another one and attach the same hopes, fears, dreams and beliefs to it. And, on the other hand, you may find that you can let go of those inner attitudes without actually terminating the outer situation.

“Since a loss is best seen as the cue that it is time to let go of the inner thing, one of the first things a person in transition needs to ask is:”What is it time for me to let go of?” The danger is that the person will fail to grasp the inner message and conclude that the outer change is the whole story. I myself had done that by believing that “moving to the country” and “finding my new career” were ends to themselves. Fortunately, my struggle took me long enough so that I had time to discover that what I had to let go of had far less to do with vocational activity and geography than with the programming that had carried me through the first forty years of my life.” (pp. 14-15)

“In the West, we associate development with learning and adding to what is already there – as I realized with my meeting of consultants during the winter after Mondi died. But there is an older (and, I believe, deeper) wisdom that tells us that it is by unlearning and stripping away what is there that we grow.

“We lack institutions which are based on a pedagogy and offer a curriculum of un-learning. The educational programs that are available emphasize learning, not unlearning. And the religious and therapeutic centers, where such things might happen, all have their dogma which the initiate is meant to learn. Where can we go to dis-identify with all that got us as far as we have gone in life?

“Yet life runs a perfect curriculum, and the tuition is modest. If you miss the offerings this year, you can catch them next year. Again and again, it offers us a correspondence course in letting go: Introductory Letting Go, Intermediate Letting Go and Advanced Letting Go. Life does so not because what we are identifying is bad, but because we are ready for something else, something further, something in some way deeper.

“The alternation of letting go of an old world and beginning a new one is the rhythmic pattern underlying life itself. The heart is nothing more than an organ that does that with our blood. Our lungs do the same thing with the air we breathe. The air does the same thing with blood – leaving it behind when we exhale and reentering it again when we inhale. The earth lets the fallen rain go back into the atmosphere and then reincorporates it after it falls again. The ancient wisdom from Ecclesiastes that tells us that there is a time for living and dying is an affirmation of this basic alternating current of the universe that drives the blood and the breath and the weather, although we sometimes imagine that it is a precursor of modern relativism.” (pp. 80 – 81)

The Potency of Labor

Each life transition carries one or two core issues. The wedding transition triggers issues around intimacy and commitment. Moving activates our childhood experience of comfort and home. Losing a job or enduring a career transition often triggers issues around identity and security. And labor and new motherhood activate our issues around mothering: our relationship with our own mother, the ways in which we mother ourselves, and our fears about becoming a mother to a little one.

A few nights ago I was privileged to speak with a dear friend who was in labor realm: minutes, hours, or days away from starting labor. Knowing that their “due date” had passed, I called to check in with them to see how they were feeling, and they said they were on the way to see a reflexologist who has a 99% success rate in helping initiate labor. Upon realizing that she would likely be starting labor soon, my friend suddenly felt overwhelmed by fear, excitement, and grief. I had been speaking with the daddy-to-be (who’s been one of my closest friends since high school) and, seeing his wife falling apart next to him, he asked if I could speak to her.

She immediately burst into tears. I smiled and said, “Good. These tears are good. Keep them flowing.” She cried for several minutes then said, “I’m so terrified. And excited. And overwhelmed. And sad. What if I don’t know how to be a mother? What if I can’t sustain the commitment? What if…?”

Given her painful relationship with her own mother, she had addressed many of these concerns and fears throughout her pregnancy. But with the vulnerability of labor just breaths away, the fears and grief descended upon her at a new level. And that’s how it’s supposed to be. Transitions strip us of our normal defenses and offer an opportunity to accelerate our healing and growth. Sometimes we’ll only be able to access these deeper layers of loss, grief, and fear in the midst of a transition (which is why I always encourage my bridal clients not to stop the tears on their wedding day despite the culture’s insistence that she shouldn’t ruin her makeup).

My friend cried and talked and cried some more. Mostly I just listened and held a compassionate space for her to release. Once in a while I would say something like, “You’re going to be a wonderful mother,” which would trigger another layer of fear and grief. “But what if I’m not? What if I don’t like being a mother? What if it’s too hard.” I told her that there would inevitably be times that she wouldn’t like being a mother and that it would feel too hard, but that she had already proven through her marriage commitment that she had worked out acting on the part of her that wants to run things get hard. As someone who is devoted to her process of healing, I have no doubt that when the spiritual tests of motherhood arrive – as they always do – she’ll address them with consciousness.

When we allow it, this is what arrives in the tender and raw realm of the liminal zone of transition: moving day, wedding day, labor day, the day the firstborn leaves for college and the day the youngest leaves home, summer and winter solstice, birthdays and transitional holidays, dusk and dawn, death. We must resist the habitual tendency to avoid the painful feelings ingrained by a culture that shuns the idea that grief and joy live in the same chamber of our heart. We must learn to embrace the spectrum of feelings initiated by life’s transitions so that we learn, slowly and patiently, that the more deeply we delve into the fears and grief that arise, the more easily we’ll be able to embrace the new life, the new identity, the new season, the new day. Life offers endless opportunities to practice the art of letting go, and when we approach each transition with consciousness, we become more fluid in this most challenging and ultimately rewarding aspect of life.

The Story of Matthew: Part 2 or “The Transition of Healing”

During transitions, our false beliefs and ineffectual core habits are often revealed. This can take us by surprise, especially around transitions like getting married or having a baby where the cultural belief tells us that we’re supposed to feel only happiness and excitement. When we find ourselves consumed by fear and anxiety and overwhelmed by the running commentary in our mind that is constantly nit-picking our partner or obsessing over practical details, we wonder: “Am I making a mistake?” or “Maybe I don’t really want to become a mother?”  or, in the case of a starting a new job or moving, “Maybe I should stay at my old job (or house or city).”

As I’ve said repeatedly, unless there are red-flag issues in the relationship (physical or emotional abuse), chances are very high that you’re not making a mistake. The fears and questions that arise during pregnancy and early motherhood about your adequacy as a mother are one hundred percent normal. The doubts that surface during all major life transition are a part of any thinking person’s process of letting go of the old and adjusting to something new. It can be challenging to believe that these “negative” feelings are normal when everything in our society says otherwise. What is required is a cultural revolution in our thinking about transitions, not a denial of the feelings themselves.

For embedded in the difficult feelings are often kernals of truth that, when attended to and worked with consciously and diligently, can transform from grains of sand to pearls of wisdom and healing. I’ll give you an example based on yesterday’s post about a man I’ve been working with for about a year on the issues that were triggered three months before his wedding. Through our work with Inner Bonding, we were quickly able to identify the core belief that caused him to shut his heart down to his then-fiance (they’re now married). (I’ll be referencing Inner Bonding more frequently as it’s one of the most powerful tools for working with the beliefs and core issues that arise during transitions. For more information about it, please email me directly or visit the Inner Bonding site.) The belief for my client was: “I’m not good enough.”

Slowly, over the last ten months, we’ve been working to excavate this belief by the roots. My client, who I’ve called Matthew, has been able to connect with the ten year old and fourteen old parts of him that believed that he needed others’ approval to feel good about himself. In other words, his self-worth was inextricably tied to receiving validation and approval from his parents, friends, teachers, co-workers, bosses, and girls. When he was rejected or didn’t measure up in someone’s eyes, he formed the belief of, “I’m not good enough.”

He spent the next twenty years operating from that belief. Like many people, he developed a pattern with women that went like this: He felt excited about a girl for a few dates, then lost interest. For the girls that lasted beyond a few dates, he would feel open and available up to a point, and then he would shut down. If the girl broke up with him, his interest was piqued and his heart would open again only to shut down again once the relationship resumed.

He seemed to escape this pattern for the first eighteen months of his relationship with “Donna.” He was soaring on the wings of love, totally open and ready to commit to her for the rest of his life. Then, three months before his wedding, a series of events avalanched to activate his core belief of, “I’m not good enough” and he shut down his heart. We’ve been working with the various aspects and offshoots of this belief, like “Donna isn’t safe and if I open to her she’ll reject or disappoint me” ever since.

Sometimes the work of excavating a false belief needs to progress slowly. Matthew is so fused with this belief that it’s like a tenacious weed that has wrapped itself around his core self: if he pulled out the weed by the root too quickly, it would feel like his core self was collapsing. Since he’s lived with this belief for so long (and I would hypothesize that the belief began much earlier than age ten), it’s part of the internal structure or building block of his psyche. Like a gentle gardener, the work has to be slow and methodical, perhaps pulling out the top portion of the unwanted weedy vine before carefully digging into the ground to unearth the root.

Here’s how the work goes: Together, we remove a small portion of the belief, and he grieves. When we go too quickly, he starts to panic and has a hard time catching his breath. I bring him back into his body and help him find his breath. Through the six steps of Inner Bonding, I help him dialogue with this wounded part that believes he’s not good enough. I encourage him to invite his internal Wise Man into the dialogue so he can access the truth. He practices on his own between sessions and when we speak again, we work side by side to remove another segment of the false belief and replace it with the truth. He doesn’t feel safe to open his heart to his wife again, but when he truly knows that his lack of safety is caused by his fusion with this false belief, he will be able to make the choice to open again, and thus feel the love that’s been blocked for over a year.

Healing is, in itself, a process of transition. We identify the thoughts, beliefs, and actions that are no longer serving us and actively work to release them and replace them with the truth and new, loving behavior. But like all transitions, it’s so rarely a linear process that we can complete in a couple of weeks and tie up with nice, pretty bow. It’s dirty, messy, and scary. It is, in fact, a hero’s journey, where we must descend into the underworld of our psyches, facing our deepest fears and the false structures on which we’ve predicated our identities before returning to the light of day with the pearly gifts of a new version of ourselves in hand.

***

Sheryl Paul, M.A., is regarded as an international expert in transitions. In 1998, she pioneered the field of bridal counseling and has since counseled thousands of people worldwide through her private practice, her bestselling books, “The Conscious Bride” and “The Conscious Bride’s Wedding Planner,” her websites, www.consciousweddings.com and www.consciousmotherhood.com, and her blog, http://conscious-transitions.com. She has appeared several times on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, as well as on “Good Morning America” and other top television, radio, and newspapers around the globe. Phone and Skype sessions available internationally for all types of transitions and ongoing counseling.

The Faces of the Wounded Self

Matthew called me three months before his wedding and told me the following story: “I’ve been with my fiancé for two years, and until last month I was madly in love with her. I couldn’t wait to see her at the end of every day, I loved getting phone calls from her, I didn’t care what we did as long as I was with her; in short, I was in bliss. I never felt that way about anyone. I knew early on that I wanted to marry her and that feeling never wavered… until about a month ago.”

“What happened a month ago?” I asked.

“I don’t know. All of a sudden I developed this pit in my stomach and it hasn’t gone away. Now I dread seeing her. I feel like I don’t love her anymore. Sometimes I’m not even attracted to her. Is it possible that I’ve fallen out of love?”

I told him that it was highly unlikely that he would suddenly fall out of love. After learning more about his relationship with his partner, it was clear that she hadn’t changed a bit and there were no serious red-flag issues, but that he had become overtaken with a pernicious fear that grew each day inside his mind. Instead of becoming curious about the fear, he tried to avoid it by staying busy, ignoring it, rationalizing it, and talking to his father several times a day about it. While he did gain some insights through the conversations with his father, the avoidance tactics didn’t touch the core of the fear. “I just want it to go away,” he moaned to me. Like most of the clients who come to me for pre-wedding counseling, he had formed the false – yet understandable – belief that since he was feeling this way around his fiancé it must be because he wasn’t supposed to marry her. I reassured him that, as far as I could tell, the feelings were trying to communicate something vastly different.

I decided it was time to introduce him to Inner Bonding. A highly left-brained, achievement-oriented person, he told me in the first session that he was generally “out of touch with my feelings.” As is often the case with people who perpetually ignore their emotional life, the feelings became somatitized in the body in the form of  physical symptoms. For Matthew it assumed the form of “the pit.” I asked him to close his eyes, find a comfortable position (at his office desk chair, of course), and breathe directly into the pit. After a few minutes, I asked him to speak from the pit. “What does the pit want to tell you?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“Is the pit scared?”
Without a moment’s hesitation he said, “Yes.”
“What are you scared of?”
“Of not being good enough.”
“And what would happen if you’re not good enough?”
“I’ll fail.”
“And what would happen if you failed?”
“Failure would be a disaster.”
“A disaster to who?”
“Everyone. My fiancé, my parents.”
“How old are you right now?
“About ten.”

I’m always amazed at how readily the wounded self makes itself known. With the slightest loving attention, Matthew’s ten year old child spoke up and offered us a kernel of wisdom about one of the causes of the pit. Of course this voice had been making itself known through Matthew’s feelings, but it took actively asking him about himself for him to reveal the false belief that Matthew is carrying around. Like an actual child, when we surround our wounded self with love and approach it with a true intention to learn and explore, truths unfold like flowers in spring.

We took some time to talk about the expectations of his parents growing up, how he had always complied to their unspoken expectation of him being good and succeeding, how there really wasn’t room for failure. He said he always got good grades and when he didn’t his parents would talk to him about why and how he could do better next time. “What was considered a bad grade?” I asked. “Anything less than an A,” he replied.

Matthew’s conditioning “not to fail” was so deeply ingrained that he could barely see it as an unhealthy and unloving belief. It was only when I helped him contact an older, wiser male figure that he started to bring in the truth about this belief system. Even so, the faint tendrils of a belief system rooted in truth were tenuous, at best; as we started to end the session, he said that while he felt good during the session, he wasn’t sure he could do this on his own. I told him that Inner Bonding, like all processes and types of spiritual work, is a practice. If he commits to spending time each day, as many times a day as he can with his Inner Child, Loving Adult, and Wise Man, the process will become more and more fluid, the pit will transform into pearls of wisdom, and he will start to experience more joy and excitement about his upcoming wedding. On the other hand, if he ignores his feelings and continues in the same vein as he’s done his whole life, he will continue to approach his wedding day – and, more importantly, his marriage – with dread.

***

Note: I wrote this article about nine months ago. I’ve been working with “Matthew” weekly on the various strands that have contributed to him closing his heart down to his now wife. While he’s sure that he made the right decision to marry her and knows that these issues would arise with any woman he was with, he’s had to move slowly to remove the false belief that it’s not safe to open his heart to her, and that if he does so he’ll be rejected or disappointed. In tomorrow’s post, I’ll explain why it’s important to move slowly when we’re deconstructing beliefs that have been with us for our entire lives.

Moving… with children

Last week, I blogged about the emotional aspects of the moving transition and how to contextualize what is triggered when we move. I mentioned that I would talk more about how to help children transition through a move using context and rituals in a way that is meaningful for them.

We’ve moved twice with our son, Everest. The first move occurred when at two years old when we relocated from Los Angeles to Denver. Given that moving is almost always emotionally challenging for adults and given that Everest is a highly sensitive child, I knew that we had to prepare him as best we could in every way possible. I wanted to impart to him the three-stage context of transitions in a way that would penetrate his little two year old self. I knew that I needed to allow him to grieve and let go of the current life so that we had the best possible chance of him embracing the new life.

As Everest has always been highly verbal and visual, I decided to make him a book that would depict our move. Through one of the online photo resources, I created a book called “Everest on the Move”, which included photos and text that walked him through his current life, showed the house packed up and the movers coming, and then showed photos of his new life in Denver (which we had taken on one of our house-hunting trips). We read the book about a hundred times before we moved and two hundred times once we arrived in Denver.

We also role-modeled for him the appropriate emotions attached to each stage of the move. While packing up, if something triggered my own sadness, I would cry and explain to him that it’s hard to say goodbye to a home and a city. I cried when I said goodbye to dear friends. I cried on the final day when we stood in our empty house, the house that had sheltered us for many years, that held the memory of my husband proposing to me, of getting pregnant, of losing my cat of eighteen years, of birthing our first son.

Cradled inside the grief lived the excitement about the possibilities of our new life, so I talked about that as well. We were thrilled to own a home for the first time, delighted to be leaving the aspects of Los Angeles that instigated the move, and excited to explore a new city. As we packed up together – and included Everest in as much of the packing as possible – my husband and I talked about everything we were looking forward to exploring in our new life. Who knows how much penetrates the psyche of a two year old, but we felt it was important to bring everything into the open to help Everest start to name his internal experience.

Now, I would like to report that all of this preparation paid off and our son glided through the transition smoothly and gracefully, but that wasn’t the case. As often happens with us sensitive types, transitions are the times when we’re most prone to anxiety, confusion, grief, and helplessness. We can’t always work it out in the nice neat linear stages that I present on this blog: i.e. process all of the grief and letting go and anger during stage one so that when we cross over the in-between stage of the liminal we can embrace the new life with excitement and joy. Life is more of a spiral process than a linear one, and transitions don’t always follow these three stages in order.

Everest regressed quite intensely after arriving in Denver. (And so did our highly sensitive cat, by the way, who wouldn’t come out of my bedroom closet for two months except to eat and use her litter box.) Where Everest had been reticent of other children in Los Angeles, now he downright avoided them. He refused to go the park because he was overwhelmed by the kids screaming and running on the play structures. I had to bribe him to go to supermarket with me. Furthermore, he started reacting to my husband in negative ways, often screaming, “NO, DADDY! NO, DADDY!” every time he walked into the room. It was painful for all of us.

The truth is that we were all reeling from this life-altering transition and none of us were handling it very well. And it’s only been in hindsight that I’ve realized that Denver wasn’t, in fact, our new beginning at all, but was an extended liminal zone. About a week after arriving in our new house, I remember sitting on the front steps and realizing that we would be moving to Boulder within two years. (We had initially wanted to be in Boulder but my husband found work in Denver, so we decided to give it a try.) Denver was a vitally important stage in our lives and our transitions, but it wasn’t an easy one. My husband was in a career transition, my son struggled to find his place in our new life, and our marriage endured its darkest time as I confronted some negative areas of myself that needed attention and transformation.

We lived in Denver for a year and nine months. In May 2006, we moved effortlessly to our home in Boulder and from the moment we arrived, everyone blossomed: Everest came out of his social shell, Daev and I re-connected more deeply than ever (and shortly after conceived our second child), and even our kitty was thrilled to run around our land.

Sometimes the liminal, in-between zone lasts a long time. It’s often where we do our deepest and most painful work, and it’s often difficult to see what’s happening when in the midst of it. Based on my life’s work, I was expecting Denver to be the logical third, rebirth stage of our transition. I thought we had adequately grieved the old life and were ready to embrace all that Colorado had to offer us. But we weren’t ready; Denver was an extended second stage of our transition, a sort of holding pattern or purgatory of our marriage, our adjustment into a new career for my husband, and our son’s struggle with the outside world. We had to sit in those difficult places for a long time, painfully watching the jagged rocks of our old life and ways tumble around inside ourselves until finally, when we arrived in Boulder, the new resources and ways of being emerged, as smooth and alive as the stones in the creek that runs through our land.

***

Sheryl Paul, M.A., is regarded as an international expert in transitions. In 1998, she pioneered the field of bridal counseling and has since counseled thousands of people worldwide through her private practice, her bestselling books, “The Conscious Bride” and “The Conscious Bride’s Wedding Planner,” her websites, www.consciousweddings.com and www.consciousmotherhood.com, and her blog, http://conscious-transitions.com. She has appeared several times on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, as well as on “Good Morning America” and other top television, radio, and newspapers around the globe. Phone and Skype sessions available internationally for all types of transitions and ongoing counseling.

The Story of Brian and Beth: Examining Our Expectations of Marriage

My work with clients seems to arrive in themes. This week’s theme was, “How do I know that we can sustain a long-term marriage when I have so few healthy role-models around me?” As I was falling asleep last night, I remembered a section of “The Conscious Bride” that was edited out for space reasons. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting excerpts from that unpublished chapter as an attempt to answer the crucially important question of what it means to be married today and how to move forward into marriage with faith and vision. The first excerpt can be read here.

***

Despite the growth in the sexes, men and women still approach each other with expectations of what their partner is going to provide and fulfill. Without the obvious divisions of labor–I’ll do the fishing if you fry the fish–the expectations with which we enter marriage become more difficult to recognize. To some extent, most of us enter marriage with the unspoken, and usually unconscious, expectation that our partner will be the answer to our problems, our salvation, our freedom, the missing piece to our puzzle. Even if we are both engaged in purposeful work and both in touch with our inner world, we still carry the legacy of the old marriage model that says, “You will complete me.” And in the first months or years of a relationship this expectation may be fulfilled. Falling in love does create a temporary reprieve from the normal struggles that inform all of our lives. The problems arise when the “love drug” wears off and the simple act of being with our beloved no longer lifts us out of our daily struggles. At this point, the illusion is shattered. Where we once ran toward our partner saying, unconsciously, “You are the answer to my problems!”, couples in the early years often find themselves running away from their partner, thinking, quite consciously, “You are my problem.” When we notice that we have fallen into this trap, that is the time for an honest examination of the expectations we each carry concerning the piece we think our partner will fulfill. As Mikael says:
“About four years into my marriage I realized that I had been carrying resentment toward Sophia because she was failing to meet my expectations of what a “good” wife was. A good wife was supposed to be a gracious hostess, provide a loving, harmonious, peaceful home environment, be cordial and courteous to my work associates, offer sound business advice, welcome me when I came home from work with a kiss and a hot meal and, on top of all that, provide an exciting sex life! I can see now how backwards that list is, but it was the list that I carried into the marriage without even realizing it. Lately I have started to see that, almost from the moment I met her, I superimposed these expectations onto her, so that when I related to her I wasn’t really seeing her but rather who I thought she should be. A lot has changed since I have begun to let go of these expectations and realize that ultimately I am needing to provide many of those things for myself. I am learning what it means to really love Sophia and not some idea of what a wife is supposed to be.”

It is not an easy task to uncover our expectations. As Mikael shared, they are often buried in our unconscious, inherited from the role-modelling of our parents and other important adult figures in our lives. Sometimes it takes several years for a deeply rooted belief to surface, as Brian and Beth discovered. Fifteen years into their marriage Beth realized that she had not been looking at Brian as a person but as an image of what he would provide. She also became aware of the ways in which she conformed to Brian’s image of how she was supposed to behave. Alongside their spoken wedding vows lived a host of unspoken agreements about the ways in which they would fill in each other’s holes. When Beth became unhappy in the marriage and withdrew her side of the pact, Brian was devastated. Where was his wife that was there to make him feel better and take care of him emotionally? The two entered a year long period of intense struggle, where Brian was seriously contemplating whether or not he wanted to remain married. Beth talks about her side of events:

When we married there was an expectation that we were supposed to complete each other. An image was given to me that we were like a puzzle and where you have pieces missing the other person will fill them in. I believed that, so clearly if I’m hurting somewhere it’s his job to fix that, and it was my job to do that for him. We did a pretty good job of that for several years! The message was that if we loved each other we would do this filling. At one point, about three years ago, I realized that it wasn’t loving for me or for him to continue in the patterns of trying to fill him up and asking to be filled up. I just didn’t want to play anymore. We had agreed mutually to that but I was changing. I told him I didn’t want to do that anymore and he had no idea what I was talking about. He was furious with me and there was a long time where I didn’t know if he was going to stay or leave. It was the most desperate time in our marriage.

Brian fills in his pieces:

“Before I married Beth I had this idea that when I married her life would be heaven. I would be able to take this feeling I had felt with her in our early months of courtship–of completeness and wholeness and euphoria–and have it forever. I believed for a long time that marriage was the vehicle that was designed to bring me a sense of fullness. When that feeling wore off I thought that there was something wrong with the marriage, that she wasn’t the right person for me. What I clearly knew was that this feeling of euphoria I had been looking for wasn’t there at all. And I was miserable in a lot of respects. I was miserable in the sense that I kept thinking it was Beth’s responsibility to fill me up. When I wasn’t satisfied emotionally, sexually, spiritually, occupationally, or mentally I always thought it was someone else’s fault. I began to conclude that there was something wrong with our marriage, or with Beth. It was a lot easier to focus on the marriage and on Beth because I wasn’t in a place to start taking responsibility for myself. Over time my frustration with my lack of fulfillment reached a critical point and I was ready to leave. I was literally on my way out of the marriage when a book fell into my hands that changed my life. My major breakthrough came when I realized how in virtually every relationship I had I was looking to the relationship as a means of taking or getting something from someone else rather than giving. I wanted everyone else, mostly Beth, to make my pain go away.”

Brian and Beth each came to realize that the way they were approaching their marriage was not working. As Brian learned how to fulfill himself emotionally and spiritually and Beth learned how to put herself first so that her loving actions for Brian were motivated by a genuine desire to give as opposed to a need to please, their marriage transformed dramatically. The expectation that the function of marriage was to fulfill the other partner had proved detrimental to their relationship. Now they both view marriage as the most sacred of all relationships, a daily opportunity to express love and grow as individuals. They came to realize that it is not the relationship with the other person that creates the sense of well-being, but that the well-being exists within each person and it is the challenge as individuals to learn how to access this inner peace. Then the marriage, instead of becoming the vehicle through which each partner is trying to get their needs met, becomes the place where two individuals learn about themselves and the obstacles that bar the way from becoming more loving, purposeful people in the world.  Where it was once an illusory “answer” and then a source of discontent, it is now a place of nourishment and creativity. As Beth says:

“Loving Brian is an expression of who I am. I believe that marriage is designed to require the very deepest in us, and to require complete commitment and devotion. It is also designed to give the greatest joy that we can have in this life.”

And Brian:

“The sense of fullness I have now is far richer and more solid than the sense I had when I was falling in love. When I was falling in love I was only happy when I was with the other person. Now I believe that the sense of euphoria must come from within each individual and that the relationship is the medium where that euphoria, love, and creativity can be expressed with one another.”

Each marriage is a unique relationship that requires constant commitment, courage, and creativity to maintain its vitality. A marriage, like a baby, is a particular configuration of two distinct personalities, a relationship that is born on the wedding day and continues to grow for a lifetime. As we stand on the threshold of creating the new paradigms for healthy marriages, we can remind ourselves that we are pioneers setting out on an exciting road, one never before undertaken. On this fresh terrain there are few footprints we can follow–which can be daunting in that we don’t know where to look for inspiration and guidance, but can also be liberating in that we are being handed an opportunity to create a marriage specifically tailored to suit our individual selves. As we come to realize that the old models are outdated and we have not yet developed the new paradigms, we realize that we are, as a generation, in the liminal phase of the relationship between the sexes. The liminal, as we learned through the wedding process, in the in-between time where nothing and everything exist simultaneously. With regard to marriage, we are standing on shifting ground, which will inevitably lead to instability as we find our way, but we are also in the midst of profound possibility. Our generation carries the mixed blessing of creating a new paradigm for marriage. It is an awesome task

Each day is an opportunity to re-affirm your vows or create new vows as the marriage evolves. Each day is an opportunity to choose consciously that yes, this is my life partner, and today I choose to share my life with my beloved husband/wife. Each day is an opportunity to examine honestly what is working and what is not working in the marriage, an opportunity to have courage to plunge into our own selves and discover where we may be contributing to the conflicts. Simply put, each day is an opportunity to express and receive love, and an opportunity to explore the ways in which we are preventing ourselves from loving. As we stand on this undiscovered threshold, we know that there is no right or wrong way to have a marriage, no standard against which to compare ourselves. There is only your marriage, and the unique ways that you and your beloved learn how to walk through this life together.