What the Hell is This?

Recently I was astonished to find myself calm and centered in a room where the unspoken undercurrents were almost deafening. With that feeling-knowing that the animals have, I could perceive what I had heretofore considered a threat — coming from a number of different directions — but instead of clenching, I released the holding places in my body. Glad to be in the presence of someone immeasurably dear to me, I savored the present moment, letting twinges of insecurity pass through me like a momentary shiver, remembering that loving also involves releasing.

*

From the time I was a wee slip of a girl, I’ve suffered from searing jealousies so powerful they seemed to bring with them the threat of annihilation. Perhaps there was originally an instinctual element at play: to be neglected or forgotten by one’s caretakers as a completely dependent child, after all, can mean one really doesn’t survive. The underlying fear, anyway, feels that deep and primal. It’s not just run-of-the-mill fear, it’s visceral terror. Inspiring some uneasy nausea to boot. Over this nearly intolerable baseline emotion there’s an equally painful acquired overlay of shame, of self-blame: Why am I not deserving? What fatal flaw do I have that prevents me from mattering?

I can look over my elementary and secondary school years and see how having these emotions percolating in my young psyche created an infinite regress of reactivity, a heightened propensity to take every instance (and later every intimation) of not being the chosen one as a fundamental threat as well as a core criticism. Having my little playmate Caitlin decide she wanted to play with Laura, for instance, rather than with me, felt tantamount at the time to taking out a big eraser and rubbing me off the planet. And that barely even approaches the degree of pain and humiliation I experienced in my teens when my friend Katie was perennially preferred to me by our clean-cut church cohorts. So when my first love started spending quality time with one of my best friends, I looked the other way — dreading but at the same time refusing to entertain the worst. The mere thought was intolerable to me. Of course the inevitable happened, anyway, and I was in such an agony and felt so worthless I wanted to throw myself in the river and drown.

Time and time again I found myself confronting these same overpowering emotions as an adult. Granted, I could have decided to actively avoid situations and people that would bring them up; this is often considered the healthy thing to do. Find friends and lovers who don’t evoke your jealousies or will never do anything that threatens your sense of security. This is what my mother did, I think, in marrying my father. She wanted none of the drama of her parents’ endlessly painful marriage; she longed for safety, and she found it in a partner who would never even do anything unpredictable.

But transcendence can’t come from avoidance. Safety doesn’t necessarily bring about growth. My soul, at least, knew what it wanted. It wanted to face down and even befriend its dreadful green-eyed monster, not lock it in the closet.

I didn’t consciously figure this out until recently. For a long time I blamed myself (as is the trend) for gravitating toward everything and everyone “wrong.” When in fact everything was all right.
*

“If you do not love too much, you do not love enough,” said Blaise Pascal (or so quoth Rob Brezsny), a man so sour on human relations I would have thought him incapable of making such a statement. Women Who Love Too Much: that was a bestseller by Robin Norwood full of cautionary finger-wagging about catering to The Wrong Men. What does it mean to love too much? And are these two talking about the same thing?

I doubt it. Obsessive behavior, groveling, desperation, and tolerance of abuse may be considered manifestations of “love,” as well as misguided efforts to change the other person, but I don’t think that’s what Pascal was talking about. No, it’s something other than the compulsive enslavement to one’s own unresolved emotional dramas and residue that can act as the golden thread, leading one out of the labyrinth of neurosis.

But it takes spools and spools of it.

Byron Katie spins out the gold simply and beautifully in one of her workshops with a participant upset by the interest the man she’s been dating has in another woman.

*

Woman: I want Roger to break up with Francesca…
Katie: Is that true? Go there (laughs). Just a question.
Woman: (Pause) I don’t know.
Katie: Do you care about him?
Woman: (Long pause) Only if he does what I want. (Audience laughter; Katie and the woman start laughing too)
Katie: Is it beginning to make sense why he wants another relationship? (Everyone laughs uproariously)
Woman: (Laughing) No!
Katie: (Laughing) Not at all! You want him to break up with this woman. Is that true? Is that what you want?
Woman: No…I don’t think so.
Katie: So how do you react when you pretend to believe that thought?
Woman: Um…pretty hysterically, pretty dramatically.
Kate: Isn’t it juicy? Don’t you love it? (They laugh)
…

Woman: Roger shouldn’t fall in love with another woman….
Katie: Is that true?
Woman: (Long pause) Mmm…that’s a hard one…(sighs)..God…
Katie: He shouldn’t fall in love with another woman. Can you really know that that’s true?
Woman: No.
Katie: So how do react when you believe that thought?
Woman: Oh…God…I want to kill him. I want to kill myself, actually. (Starts crying softly.)
Katie: (Gently) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I really understand this. You know, that’s why I’m a lover of what-is. It’s so painful when I’m not. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing we can do about it. It is what it is. And where the pain really comes in is, we’re all lovers of reality, we’re just not aware of it yet. We want what is. And the term is unconditional love, you know. I call it just “sanity.”

*
We tell tales, we write stories (often based on our past), and leave out at least half the truth. Radical honesty like Katie’s dismantles that frame, dissipates the plot, allows us to see without those superimposed interpretations. Can we really say we know what’s best? Would we honestly want someone to be with us if it weren’t the right thing for them, or for us?

Freed up, we become more generous with each other. We recover that initial “too-much” love that led us into a full confrontation with our vulnerabilities.

*

When you dive fully into a feeling that’s unpleasant and fear-based, like jealousy, surrendering to the waves, at first it seems like a vast ocean that will drown you. Who would want to swim in that cold, cold water?
‘
But when you don’t actually die, you become curious: what is this I’m feeling, and where did it come from? The emotional reaction always has, for me, had its source in those vulnerabilities from a much earlier time — episodes of humiliation or of being left out (e.g. by Caitlin). Once I’ve really let myself feel the original dramas, the ancient terror and the shame, I find that the present becomes much less overwhelming and much clearer. Now is not then, and you are not my daddy. What I am so desperate for is back there, on the playground. The nightmare fades in the light of day, and I see you for the first time.

Taking the emotional charge off whatever is happening, de-personalizing it, I can look at everyone involved as themselves rather than as characters in my tragic story. I can better see their own fears and their own needs, and feel compassion toward their own situations. Seeing them, I can relate to them as something other than my highly charged and unresolved projections.

Like anyone, they just want happiness, after all, an end to fear, and to be loved. Single mothers may worry whether they’ll be able to provide for their children, and if they’ll grow old alone. Other women may struggle with their weight and a cultural image of beauty that largely excludes them. Still others may hide beneath independence and a brassy exterior a deep woundedness. A man, for his part, may fear for his freedom and yearn for a greater purpose — unsure, perhaps, what any further entanglements will cost him (emotionally and otherwise) and whether he is viewed as a mere commodity.

Relieved of my intense vulnerability, I find that I want them all to be happy, not to be afraid, and to feel loved.

I want the man to feel free…as free as my overwhelming love for him is. I want him to live his adventure, whether or not I ever get to caress his beautiful loins again. How do I know he should fall in love with someone else? He does if he does. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can only bless him, and wish for the best outcome for everyone. This “sublime generosity” (Rumi) wells me up until I’m full from the inside out.

The next time I dive into jealousy, I find that I am only swimming in a pond.

*
The common wisdom is to contract rather than to expand, to protect against further triggering of old pain. Reject those who seem so much as inclined to reject you. Don’t go there! Don’t let it happen again! But I consider turning around and walking toward my demons to be a spiritual practice. Once again I’m reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke:

And if we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

My green-eyed monster is only a very scared and hurt little girl inside me who needs my love and compassion. And the wolves and sirens and pirates that appear to threaten me in others are, at heart, just other small girls and boys trying to find their way the best way they know how. There is no dragon. There are no bad guys. There is only us.

Happy New Year, everyone. May you transform all your dragons.