The Spiritual Practice of Commitment (Part 4)
Nurturing the Soul with Love: Building Authentic Relationships through Understanding and Empathy.
The more I ponder what it means to choose 100% for each other, the more I realize that it has less to do with specific details like where we would live, how much time we would spend together, what boundaries we would set in our relationship with others, and more to do with the idea of staying open.
A friend of mine often uses this concept, but I didn’t really understand what he meant by it. He also said that once I have an embodied experience of it, then I will understand it.
I had the same difficulty understanding what it means to feel safe inside. It was a strange phrase in my opinion. I could not get it.
Until yesterday.
I was walking in the afternoon. The pain inside was quite intense, and a kind of restlessness accompanied it. It felt like a child crying. I had to think about my own son. On Thursday, we had to go to swimming lessons, something that he usually loves to do. But then he started to cry and say that he didn’t want to go.
We were already a bit late, and I also wanted to go to the library. I saw myself raising my voice and telling him to get ready so that we could go. He refused. I went on with my controlling tactics: “Shall we go to the library first to get you some new books for the bedtime story?” He was still crying reluctantly. I heard myself saying, “Why are you crying? You like going to the swimming lessons…”
He obviously didn’t like it at that moment.
The controlling tactics continued: “I’ll bring my wallet and get you something from the vending machines at the swimming pool. You always ask me to get you something, but I never have my wallet with me. Now I’ll bring it with me. Shall we go?”
I felt ashamed of this one. It was pure bribery.
But he still didn’t cooperate.
I asked him, “What do you need? Do you want something so we can go?”
He responded that he wanted to go to the library for books first, then to a shop to get chips, and then we could go to the swimming pool.
And so we did. Everything was good until we got back in the car and I said, “Okay, now we go to the swimming lesson.”
And he started to cry. Almost to the brink of becoming hysterical.
That moment, I saw myself. I tried to control him, bribe him, and convince him that he liked the swimming lessons. However, it was obvious that he didn’t want to go, and his pain was expressed through his crying.
I asked him what he needed, but I only asked for something that I could bribe him with to make him shut up and do what I say. I haven’t actually taken the time to listen, because I had plans and things to do.
I did that in the car at that moment. I managed to find out the reason for the resistance — during the previous lesson, someone else had said to him that he was stupid. That remark was so painful that he now refused to go back.
We did go back, and I took all the time that was needed for this. Not because I wanted to force him to swim, but because I found it important for him to understand that when something like this happens, giving up something that he clearly likes is not the appropriate answer. That there are different ways to cope with children who say mean things to him. And that I was there with him as a supporter when he found it hard to deal with the situation (in this case, to talk to the instructor and find a solution).
How could my son feel safe with me when my initial reaction was to try to coerce, manipulate, and bribe him? When I didn’t take the time to listen to him because I was too busy with my own planning? When I didn’t acknowledge his feelings from the start?
I am only human, and life is busy. As an adult, I sometimes forget that being a child is a completely different state.
And so, when facing my inner child, why would I think that she would feel safe with me when I treated her the same way for so many years? “This is nonsense. It is in the past! Let it go! Get over it!”
You can tell that to a crying child until you turn blue in the face, but you will accomplish nothing, or even the opposite. This is not how children work.
“Suck it up! You’re a big girl! Stop being such a pussy!” (pun intended)
It works if your aim is to repress their voice and make them feel like they are not heard, or even worse, that they don’t have a right to be heard.
“You are so weak! Such a whiner! A crybaby! Can you please grow some balls?” (again, I am not proud of how I used to talk to my inner child)
“Why can’t you be normal like everyone else? Everyone is so happy and can play with friends. But you have to be different, don’t you!”
I didn’t know until recently that I fit within the Autism Spectrum. I blamed myself for being different and not fitting in. I didn’t listen to my pain, acknowledge it, or express it. I repressed it. I was mean towards myself, a real bully. The worst bully, the one that you can never escape from because they are always with you.
So how could I understand what “to feel safe within myself” means when I was the controlling, aggressive bully that was repressing my inner parts?
I sometimes think about the reason why therapy is so powerful. It’s actually weird that it is so powerful, because in the end, the client talks and the therapist listens and sometimes asks questions. So why is it healing?
Therapeutic alliance is the term used to describe the state of openness and acceptance, and the trust that is built between the therapist and the client. I know that state, being all too familiar with therapy. And the stronger the therapeutic alliance is, the more powerful its healing effects are.
That is where I have learned, in a therapist’s office, what it means to be truly accepted, truly seen, not judged, not reprimanded. That is where I could feel “safe” to open up and express my pain: the pain of my inner parts, all those parts that I have disowned, pushed away, and locked into dark spaces of my soul, away from my sight and the light.
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Children are amazing mirrors for us. This story about the swimming pool is a reflection of the deficient way I was handling the pain of my inner self, and a lesson on the better way to handle such pain.
It seems to me that it is not that complicated, really. Pause. Feel. Inquire. Take time. Acknowledge. Allow. Refrain from judging.
This sounds incredibly similar to meditating, isn’t it?
In all of my previous relationships, to a greater or lesser extent, I behaved towards my partners in the same way that I behaved towards my inner self.
My former husband didn’t want to come on holidays with me. We have fought about this for many years. When finally he confessed the reason why he didn’t want to come with me to Japan — he was terrified of flying — I scoffed: “Seriously?”
He also refused to come with me to the swimming pool to teach me how to swim. There were years of fights about this. When he finally told me the truth — he was ashamed that he had a patch of body hair on his back — I scoffed, “Seriously?”
How could he ever feel safe with me, to be honest, and tell me things as they are, when my way of reacting was bullying him?
I didn’t know better then. I was doing what my caretakers had done, and what I thought was normal to do. In the end, this is what I was hearing around me as a child: “Be strong. Stop whining. Life is hard, no one has time for all this emotional stuff.”
I think about co-committed relationships as a spiritual practice, a practice of creating a safe container where we can share our deepest fears and pains. This way, those fears and pains, just like a child, can be nurtured and receive the love, understanding, and guidance of us, their adult caretakers.
Where, just like in meditation, we can allow our truth and the truth of others without judging, trivializing, or pushing them away. This way, we can live an authentic life without feeling the need to hide.
Where, just like in meditation, we make a commitment that we will stay with what is. That we will not move, that we will not run away. That we will acknowledge what it does to us, what it does to the other. And we will look for ways that respect both partners’ truth on how to allow our needs and desires to be fulfilled.
Where, just like in meditation, no matter what the distractions are, we will redirect our focus. We will make the choice to come back to our senses (pun intended again), to ourselves. Where we understand that the gifts of such a co-committed relationship are more than companionship, sexual fulfillment, or material security, but it is the salvation of our broken souls.
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