 You Don't See Me
POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH
explains how our earliest relationships set us up to
fail as couples, and how standing by each other with mindfulness and
equanimity can help us find not only each other but true love itself. Love
always takes place in a couple. We come into life as a couple in the
sense of being inside someone else, and we are sustained in our earliest
form by a parent–child bond. The first gaze of the newborn infant is
into the eyes of its caregiver, and forever after we want to find
ourselves in the eyes of someone else. Regardless of whether we know it
or admit it, we are paired up. We get started in an imperfect pair and
we continue to make imperfect relationships for the remainder of our
lives. For these reasons and more, all couples should study the Buddha’s
first noble truth—life is inherently unsatisfactory—so they know, from
the start, that their relationship will be stressful and it’s not their
fault. Consider
a couple we’ll call Muriel and Kent. They sat facing one another in
their first therapy meeting with me, and Muriel said, “You don’t really
know me. You have ideas about who I am, but you don’t seem interested in
finding out what I really think or feel. We’ve been together for ten
years and I can count on one hand the times I have felt you really
wanted to know my experience or point of view.” Kent shrank back in his
chair and replied softly, “You always say that. I do my best. It hasn’t
been easy being in a relationship with you because you have all these
standards for how you want me to talk with you and what you think I
should say and do with our kids. I just feel really hemmed in and unable
to be myself.” Muriel
is thirty-eight and Kent is thirty-six. They’ve been married for eight
years and a couple for ten. They have two children: their six-year-old
son and Muriel’s thirteen-year-old daughter from a previous marriage.
They both meditate. Muriel has taken refuge as a Buddhist and belongs to
a local Vipassana sangha; she attends at least one weeklong retreat a
year and has a daily practice. Kent considers himself to be
“Buddhist-oriented” but hasn’t taken refuge and doesn’t go on retreat.
He watches the children while Muriel is on retreat and during the Sunday
morning sittings that she attends. Both try to practice “nonviolent
communication,” a skill Muriel brought into their relationship. Muriel
is a school counselor and Kent is a carpenter. They each like their
work, but Kent makes less money than Muriel and feels humiliated by
having to depend on her financially. Their leisure time is out of sync
because Kent’s work is seasonal and he has more free time in winter,
while Muriel has more time for family life in the summer. They came for
therapy because they hadn’t had sex for three years. Muriel says she
doesn’t “trust Kent emotionally anymore. He just doesn’t really talk to
me, seems to be angry or aloof all the time. I don’t enjoy his company.”
Kent says he “feels rejected and judged by her. Everything I do
spontaneously just seems to fall short. I don’t like who I am when I’m
with her and I don’t think she appreciates anything about me anymore.” I
can feel their passive aggression—their withholding, criticism,
stonewalling, and implied contempt for one another. It’s uncomfortable
to be in their presence because they seem not to like each other. What
could be happening with such well-meaning, upstanding, and careful
people that they have become alienated in a marriage that seemed very
promising when it started?
Emotional Habits and Projection
We
all develop habitual emotional patterns in our earliest pair bonds
(with a mother, a father, or other caregiver) that keep us from clearly
knowing, seeing, feeling those experiences that threaten us emotionally.
And we must surely have seen our earliest beloved—our original
caregiver—in an idealized way because we had to trust that person (no
matter how untrustworthy she or he might have been) to relax into our
own being as an infant. It’s no accident that many fairytales begin,
“Once upon a time there was a King and a Queen.” From our earliest
fantasies, we develop later wishes for a perfect partner, our “other
half” who will see, know, and accept us unconditionally. As
we mature through childhood and perceive some of the reality of our
actual emotional circumstances, we form a psychological immune system
sometimes dubbed “defenses” through which we perceive just enough
reality to keep going safely, but often not enough to change our views
of who we and others are. This, plus our early idealizations, causes us
to form hidden emotional templates that get us into muddles and troubles
later in life. When
we pick a partner or come to know our new infant, we begin with an
“idealizing projection”—assimilating the other person to our own
emotional and perceptional needs, often feeling the other will somehow
complete or heal us. Projection, a psychological term, simply means that
we impose our own hidden template on the ways we perceive another,
especially when emotions are charged. Idealizing our beloved is a normal
part of falling in love. But the other person must eventually fail to
measure up to our idealization because another human being cannot be a
figment of our emotional imagination. If she or he tries to be, that
person sacrifices her or his development, autonomy (self-governance), or
identity. Our beloved should break our heart in clarifying how she or
he is different from what we hoped and prayed for. The
broken heart of disillusionment, and the power struggles that ensue,
are the first opportunity for us to truly know our beloved. Obstacles to
doing so abound, however, because idealizing projections quickly morph
into devaluing and fearful projections once our beloved falls off the
pedestal. At that point, we begin to relate to the other person in terms
of our most unhealed and wounded emotional and perceptual templates.
Like Muriel and Kent, we may feel betrayed. The person whom we loved now
seems to fail or reject us. As we did when we were children, we feel
powerless and then we do what we can to protect ourselves, like
retracting our interest and intimate contact. Take
Kent, for example. He grew up as the younger son of a father who was a
very successful architect. Unwilling or unable to express love directly,
Kent’s father was distant and aloof with his children although kindly
and protective. Kent admired his father’s success and apparent gentle
kindness. But his father never praised Kent or seemed to see what was
favorable and creative in his son. Kent suffered greatly and never felt
he measured up. Now Muriel has stepped into the internal spot of Kent’s
father. Kent shrinks away from her advice and suggestions because he
feels she disapproves of him. Unconsciously, Kent feels that Muriel
forces him to choose between his autonomy and her love—a double bind in
which he is damned whichever way he turns. Although Kent is unaware of
it, this double bind repeats what he experienced with his father. From
Muriel’s side, she was the competent and ambitious first daughter of a
mother who had drug and alcohol problems and never found a way of life
that worked. Muriel’s mom was warm and affectionate, but she was
irresponsible, disorganized, and often turned to Muriel for advice. Now
that Kent resists Muriel’s ideas about family and communication, he has
stepped into the internal role of her mother, leading Muriel to see him
as irresponsible. Repeatedly she says that Kent “won’t stand up and be a
father.” She tries to give him the same kind of advice that seemed to
work with her mother. Because Kent is aloof now, Muriel also feels
rejected (a contrast to the warmth she’d felt when she helped her
mother). The most painful part for Muriel though is that she feels
superior to Kent, as she did with her mother: she feels as though she
knows and understands life, their children, and the world better than he
does. This is a bitter pill for both Muriel and Kent. The projections
creating the biggest obstacles for this couple are from the parents of
the opposite sex of the partner, making Muriel and Kent unsuspecting of
their strong tendencies.
Karma, Equanimity, and Love
I
am a Jungian analyst, a psychologist, and a couple therapist who’s
written books about couples. Also, I’m a longtime practitioner of
Buddhism and a meditation teacher. Carl Jung said that psychological
karma is unconscious emotional patterning that is passed along the
generations in families. With or without words, our emotional
communications unintentionally transmit both our most painful wounds and
our unlived lives to our children. We long for our children to heal us
and we often push them to carry out the dreams we didn’t fulfill for
ourselves. As a result, there is an intergenerational transmission of
relational pain in every family. From
a Buddhist perspective, though, karma is the way our intentional
actions—including our speech and some of our thoughts—create
consequences in our lives. As the Buddha taught, often we cannot clearly
see these consequences because they are complex and entangled. The
emotional history of Muriel and Kent, as seen from the outside, reveals
how their actions are linked to fixated unconscious mental formations,
something Jung called “unconscious complexes.” In Sanskrit, the word for
such a fixated tendency is sanskara,
which metaphorically means a deep mark or cut in a stone. These rigid
motivational patterns constrain our perceptions and feelings in ways
that lead to repetitive actions and ideas. From a Buddhist perspective,
such patterns may carry over not just from early conditioning in this
lifetime, but from a previous lifetime we do not remember. An
intimate relationship offers innumerable opportunities to discover how
an unconscious complex has captured our mind. To do so requires some
fundamental skills and a vow, a setting of our intention. To truly love
someone whom we have promised to love, we must vow to remain interested
in them. Even in times of acute emotional pain, we promise to remain
open to seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing what is being expressed by
our beloved. Although we cannot fulfill this promise perfectly, we set
our intentions to be an attuned witness, accepting and forgiving him or
her just as he or she is. We all want a partner who witnesses us
accurately and inquires into our experience, is a companion in our daily
activities, and joins our life story with a desire to know and
understand us. This is what I call human love,
and it rises far above our instincts for sex and survival or our
desires to procreate. True love requires that we become mindful and
accepting of our beloved, opening the door to doing the same for
ourselves. Mindfulness
practice provides the foundation for love to become a true spiritual
path. The ability to concentrate allows us to focus our minds even in
times of emotional stress, and equanimity refines our ability to remain a
friendly audience to any and all experiences. Equanimity can itself be
known as love because it is the matter-of-fact, gentle acceptance of
things just as they are. I often teach that relational love equals
equanimity plus knowledge of the beloved. Equanimity allows us to relax
and keep open, and concentration refines our ability to pay attention to
our beloved’s words, needs, feelings, and gestures, and to remember
them. Together, equanimity and concentration are the necessary supports
for any communication or listening skills we attempt to bring to
conflict resolution; without mindfulness, our skills fall apart when we
are triggered into habitual reactive patterns. As
Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein has suggested, the spiritual path of
love could be nominated to be the ninth of the eightfold paths. Becoming
a mindful and attuned witness to our beloved—keeping open even during
emotional pain and a desire to withdraw—is a worthy test of our
spiritual practice.
Polly
Young-Eisendrath, a psychologist and Jungian clinical associate
professor of psychiatry at University of Vermont Medical College, has
written fourteen books, including The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance.
SEE ALSO: A
special collection of writings and teachings from
Thich Nhat Hanh, John Welwood, Sylvia Boorstein, and many more.
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