"The second and usually longest phase in relationships is conflict, as the light of romance is replaced by the shadow of tension. In this phase the romantic image of you gives way to the reality of you. We do not know ourselves, nor can we integrate our experience until we meet our own shadow and befriend it by struggling with it. How can we know our partner until we do the same with her? How can we love what we do not know? If we truly know ourselves, nothing anyone else does is ever entirely strange or unforgivable."
"What was cute in romance may become acute in conflict.
This phase is a totally normal, necessary, and useful part of the process of building a lasting bond. Without the struggle it entails, we might be lost in one another and thereby lose ourselves. We need conflict in order to evolve from romantic projection to mature self-affirmation. It is the phase of love that corresponds to the detachment phase of the heroic journey."
"This is the phase in which we hear ourselves saying to our partner and our children the very words we heard our parents say to us long ago. This is when we carefully train our partner to help us reenact our earliest and most bitter disappointments, hurts, and losses. In this phase we instinctively bring up the issues we are now ready to grieve and reenact the past to show what happened to us and to master it with the mirroring help of somer illusions, as the psyche continually adjusts itself to newly revealed truths."
"The way to the center is through the extremes. We move from the extreme of romance to the extreme of contention in order to reach the center of commitment, according to the cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Nature, too, moves from the lushness of summer to the dead of winter so that we may exult in the liveliness of spring."
Working Things Out
"The difficult demands of love turn out to be the only ingredients of wholeness and adulthood. This is because we can work cooperatively with our partner to make things better and/or we can build our own self-nurturant powers if a partner fails to come through for us."
"Defending our position is the opposite of addressing it. And commitment to a relationship entails addressing, processing, and resolving our personal and mutual issues."
"Our conflicts can have wonderful results for us if we show mutual respect and use tools that help us cooperate rather than strategies that show we’re right. To work problems out cooperatively is to turn conflict into commitment. Working things out is one threshold on the heroic journey to intimacy: a painful challenge that leads to change."
"Most of us have such a hard time being with each other, yet love involves a choice to keep working things out. When we refuse to do that or do it only reluctantly, we do not really love anymore. We may still feel a bond of sentiment or history or obligation, but that is not love, nor will it be enough for happy and effective relating."
"What makes relationships so perplexing is that they are not based on logical, discursive thought but on ambiguous and confusing feelings and needs that elude the mind and stagger the heart. Love works automatically at times, but mostly it works because we work on it"
"Some relationships will never work, and when we waste our energy trying to rejuvenate them, we simply end up feeling depleted. Thus, it is not selfish to want to let go of a relationship that does not make us happy. This is not to say that we should drop a relationship at the first sign of pain. Anyone can feel the difference between endless volumes of pain and occasional chapters of it."
"Cooperation—partnership—is the heart of conflict resolution. We are not working individually for the ascendancy of our own positions. We work together for the health and happiness of the relationship."
"In a relationship, one person may be ready to deal with an issue as soon as it comes up. Another waits awhile in order to incubate a response. We need to respect each person’s unique timing and not take it personally if a partner does not respond as quickly as desired. It is like the speed at which a phone message we leave on an answering machine is returned: It does not reflect how much the recipient of the message respects us. It is entirely about his own timing. One person calls back the minute he gets a message, another waits a day or more. It is about personal style, not a question of insulting or respecting us."
The Past in the Present
" We humans memorialize our past. But eventually our archaic needs intrude, bill in hand, to present their unpaid claims. We deal with our past issues so that they do not come up over and over in our present relationships—or if they do, we notice their appearance and take responsibility for it."
"How can we tell whether the issue that is troubling us in an adult relationship is a present-day issue or a carryover from the past? By mindful self-examination. If Mother so absorbed and contaminated my experience of women, what chance do I have to see this woman as she really is? When I feel a familiar panic, experience an anger that surprises me, or react with more intensity than fits the circumstance and do not know why, then I may surmise I am not really seeing my partner’s face but my mother’s. This becomes especially clear when I feel more uncomfortable and hold on to pain longer than fits my situation."
" We live in the present of this and now rather than the past of never again or the future of not yet. Touching, frightening, or humbling recollections linger in our memory a lifetime long. We are never through with the past. The humdrum yesterday yes, but not that morning long ago when someone left us so suddenly, not that afternoon someone stayed with us so loyally, not that evening someone touched us so wrongly, not that night someone wept with us so strongly. The past is not through with us. No, not ever gone the all of then, not yet shall fade the all of this"
"Opposites are not disjunctions but two ends of a spectrum. Thus male and female—like mind and body—are not a dichotomy. As a man I contain a spectrum of gender identity that includes the feminine. The opposite is true for every woman. What is more, masculine and feminine qualities complement each other, and to combine complementary energies is to embrace the entire spectrum between them."
" For male-female couples, division along gender lines is particularly fatal to harmonious relating. Yet the fractures between men and women are not owing to their differences but to the fact that they have not worked through their early life enigmas; let go of their egos; or learned to address, process, and resolve their issues. In fact, in Roman mythology, Venus and Mars produce a divine child named Harmony, the result of a union of love and aggression, the two central organizing powers of the human psyche. This suggests that to tolerate Venus/love and Mars/anger in a relationship can lead to harmony."
"Maturity means redesigning our models to accommodate the full archetype: True men have warmth, caring, humor, the courage to show their feelings, vulnerability, no fear of touching without being sexual. Real men can show or learn to show all five A’s. They are not always in control, not always potent, not always on top. They do not have to be violent or retaliatory. Being a man is loving as much as this man can. As long as I hold on to being in control, I am not discovering the riches of my manhood."
Introvert or Extrovert?
"Though gender differences certainly exist, it may also be true that characteristics we ascribe to a partner’s gender, or to our fears about it, actually reflect the partner’s introversion or extroversion. Understanding a prospective or present partner may mean reckoning with the differences between introvert and extrovert. These two inborn psychological typologies are equally healthy. One is no more superior to the other than brown hair is superior to black hair. Indeed, the world needs both to function creatively. But the five A’s are given and received differently by extroverts and introverts, as will be seen in the description that follows."
"An extrovert is animated by the company of others; an introvert is depleted by it. An extrovert seeks people with whom to socialize; an introvert avoids socializing. An extrovert is in danger of burning out; an introvert is in danger of isolation. An extrovert gives priority to immediate experience; an introvert gives priority to understanding over experience. For an introvert the inner alarm of physical sensation urgently warns: “I have to get out of here.” For an extrovert, the inner alarm blares: “I have to be with someone.” Both these reactions may feel compulsive to the person experiencing them."
"In a relationship, these opposing styles can lead to conflict. I am an extrovert; you are an introvert. I jump in without looking, and you see this as foolish. You look first and pause, and this feels to me like timidity and lack of spontaneity. When I feel bad, I seek people out; when you feel bad, you want to be alone. I believe you are rejecting me, and you believe I am invading your privacy. I want to go; you want to stay. I come home to talk; you come home to get away. I welcome questions and appreciate them as a sign of interest in me; you resent questions and find them intrusive. I reveal myself and my wishes and feelings easily; you see this as superficial or dangerous. You keep things to yourself; I see this as secretive and as a sign that you do not trust me. I need to keep talking to clarify my thoughts. You do not think well on your feet but require long, silent cogitation. In a strange town, I ask directions of someone; you look at the map to find your way.
"If I am an introvert, you may be angry at me because I do not want to socialize with friends as much as you do. But if you accept my introversion as a given of my character, you will understand my need for aloneness and not take my absence so personally. In short, type is a fact not a fault."
Practices
GAUGING HAPPINESS-' If you are unhappy in a relationship, it may not be your partner’s fault. It may be because you do not believe you have a right to happiness."
ADDRESSING, PROCESSING, RESOLVING -"Make a commitment to yourself and to your partner that you will bring up all your concerns rather than covering them up or disregarding them."
REPORTING IMPACT0- "Anything our partner does that gives rise to a feeling in us deserves a report about that feeling and its impact on us. We say, “When you did/said this, I felt this.” We say it mindfully—that is, without blame or expectation; it is simply information. No one causes a feeling, but actions and words are the catalysts of feelings. The other partner listens—without offering an immediate solution or becoming defensive—and asks, “What do you fear? What do you believe about me or about this? What do you want from me right now?”
FINDING A CENTER- "Successful agreements require responsibility In a relationship in which one partner is substantially more responsible than the other, it can seem as if the one needs to get the other to change."
DISTINGUISHING CONFLICT FROM DRAMA -"Conflict can be worked out with the tools we have been learning—addressing, processing, and resolving. Drama does not respond to these tools."
HONESTLY SEEING- "Probably the only issues that we treat matter-of-factly, without melodrama or strong reaction, are the ones with no connection to our past. Admit to yourself that there is an element in most of your charged issues that harkens back to your past. List in your journal some ways you may be keeping the past alive so that it sabotages the present."
"When we find ourselves reacting sharply to someone’s behavior or words, we may be acting appropriately or we may be overreacting. When this happens, it is helpful to “S.E.E.”—that is, to ask ourselves, “Is it my shadow? Ego? Early-life issues?”
"Shadow: The shadow is the part of us that we disown, repress, and deny while we project it onto others."
" Ego: As we have already seen, the ego is neurotic and inappropriate when it is driven by fear of not being accepted or by arrogance, retaliation, or entitlement. We have a bruised ego when we say: “How dare you do this to me?” “I’ll get you for this!” “Don’t you realize who I am?”
"Early-life issues: We may be reacting to early unfinished business if we find ourselves thinking: You are replicating what was done to me in childhood. I see you recreating a scenario from the past that is highly charged for me. I am reacting in the present to a stimulus from the past."
HEALING AND HELP - "Success in any relationship is not the absence of conflict but the ability to be in conflict mindfully, for example, without attachment to the intrusive mindsets of ego: fear, desire, control, judgment, or illusion."
If you are interested in this book, you can email me (kh.nebulishvili@gmail.com) and I'll send the PDF version of this book :)
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