Rattling Your Soul Cages
Page Three--~ by Virginia Lee
An Interview with John Welwood
Reprinted with kind permission from Common Ground.
CG: Why is it so difficult for some people to make a commitment and
easy for others? Is it a fear of intimacy?
JW: There's no one answer to a question like that, just like there's
no one reason why people have affairs. People are very unique and
everyone has their own dynamic. But often the fear of intimacy has to
do with some unresolved connection with their parents, an emotional
tie that hasn't been severed. In a way, they're already committed
elsewhere. Or they're afraid of recreating the same dynamic they had
with Mom or Dad, especially if a daughter was dominated by her father
or a son by his mother. It could be that a man who was always a good
boy to his parents doesn't want to have to play that role for his
wife. In therapy, we have to honor the fact that someone honestly
isn't ready to make a commitment and see if that dynamic can be worked
with. If someone is willing to ask themselves why it is so difficult
to make a commitment, then the old identity can be deconstructed.
CG: Why do people sabotage the love that they want so much?
JW: Again there are many different dynamics to this issue. In order to
really let love in, it melts. It's like letting sunlight nourish the
seed. The fear starts to dissolve those outer defenses. So, the one
who wants to stay hidden in their shell is the one who's going to
sabotage a relationship. It's too threatening to let down those
defenses. CG:Is it possible for someone to love too much? What is your
advice to someone caught in this dilemma?
JW: Loving too much is a way of saying that a person is grasping onto
a relationship. It means that a person is more attached to holding
onto a relationship than to taking care of themselves. It's another
example of trying to get something out there that you don't have in
here. That's the biggest delusion in relationship - seeing our partner
(or potential partner) as the source of our happiness or of our
suffering.
Rattling Your Soul Cages ~ by Virginia Lee
An Interview with John Welwood
Reprinted with kind permission from Common Ground.
CG :If intimacy is indeed a sacred and natural state, then why is it
so elusive?
JW:I don't think intimacy is a natural state. It's sacred, but not
necessarily natural. Intimacy as we know it is a very recent cultural
phenomenon in human history. People assume that we have had intimacy
for thousands of years, but we haven't. It used to be that you could
be married and live with someone your whole life and never have a
single personal conversation. You must understand what a new concept
intimacy is and that's why it is so difficult for most of us. We have
no teaching about it, no guidance, no models, no history. For
thousands of years, people stayed together for external reasons.
Marriage fulfilled a social and economic function. Its purpose and
intention as always created by the family, and in a childlike way,
couples did what they were told. Marriage was not about intimacy.
I define intimacy as a mutual recognition and sharing of who you
really are with someone. That's a very new concept in what I call
couple consciousness, and has only been possible since the Industrial
Revolution when people could leave home and make their own living.
People didn't even really begin dating until the 1920s, 1930s and
1940s. Then we got a very adolescent, romantic model of relationship
through Hollywood cinema, followed by the Ozzie-and-Harriet sitcoms of
the 1950s.
This adolescent stage peaked in the 1960s, when people began to
experience "free love" through the sexual revolution, characterized by
rebellion, experimentation and idealism. Then the divorce rate soared,
signaling the beginning of what I call the adult stage. If the child
stage means doing your duty, and the adolescent stage is about
expressing your feelings, then the adult stage is characterized by
consciousness and responsibility. I must credit the women's movement
of the 1960s with this transition of consciousness from the adolescent
to the adult stage by asking the question: What is it to be a woman?
And with that came a deluge of pop psychology books.
Before that, psychological language and concepts weren't even
available. Our parents didn't have the benefit of those communication
tools, which meant that they didn't know how to talk about what was
going on in their relationships. How can there be intimacy if a couple
can't even talk about what's going on between them? So, intimacy is
not something that's handed down; it's not in our genes. It's not
something we know how to do naturally. It's a human invention and
that's why we are all having such a hard time. That's why we need to
bring consciousness to it.
End
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