The Psychic Space of Relationships

What’s clear is that when peo­ple come into one another’s pres­ence, they essen­tial­ly rub up against one anoth­er, trans­mit­ting sig­nals to one anoth­er that are per­ceived as a com­bi­na­tion of threats and wel­comes.  This is what it means to be in con­tact.  Some­times the threats out­weigh the wel­comes; some­times the reverse.  The threats and wel­comes are at var­i­ous lev­els of con­scious­ness.  There is much to learn from the vari­ety of wel­comes and threats that we offer oth­ers and that we feel com­ing to us from oth­ers.  We mod­u­late our behav­ior, again some­times con­scious­ly, some­times uncon­scious­ly based on the expe­ri­ence of being in con­tact, and this def­i­nite­ly includes the degree to which we feel we can ful­ly relax and be our­selves or must tight­en up to shield our­selves from the threats the oth­er per­son rep­re­sents.  At a cer­tain lev­el, it’s hard to fake it.  If we don’t like some­one, it might not show direct­ly, but it’s still present in the psy­chic space in which con­tact with anoth­er exists.  Sim­i­lar­ly, I might show a some­what cold or blocked “exte­ri­or,” but under­neath that I might hold a warmer place for anoth­er, and this too would be hard to hide, par­tic­u­lar­ly as a rela­tion­ship unfolds over time. 

There are pat­terns in the way we begin our inter­faces with each oth­er.  It may become clear to us, for exam­ple, how much barbed wire we typ­i­cal­ly put up with oth­ers and how much we bring gen­uine­ness and open­ness and an abil­i­ty to relax into a trust­ing envi­ron­ment where both par­ties feel they can be them­selves.   Peo­ple with a lot of inter­nal barbed wire may not gen­er­ate much trust at the begin­ning, or ever.  And peo­ple who start from a posi­tion of mis­trust, may stim­u­late out­right con­flict with oth­ers.  Peo­ple may have open­ings that enable trust to build over time, but if those open­ings are nar­row, that can make a rela­tion­ship high­ly con­di­tion­al to fol­low­ing cer­tain rules, some of which may be quite idiosyncratic.

When peo­ple begin, vul­ner­a­bly, to dis­cuss their expe­ri­ence of them­selves, own­ing the expe­ri­ence of the rela­tion­ship to anoth­er as self-gen­er­at­ed, access­ing and shar­ing their own inse­cu­ri­ties and also in that moment show­ing accep­tance for who they are and who the oth­er per­son might be, peo­ple can make great progress in their trust in oth­ers and in them­selves.  Attempt­ing to hide self-expe­ri­ence from oth­ers (and from one­self) typ­i­cal­ly gen­er­ates even more anx­i­ety and mis­trust, some­times to the point that a per­son goes into a kind of inter­per­son­al shock, which if it goes on long enough becomes a kind of con­tin­u­ing and shap­ing trau­mat­ic blow.  The per­son may become intense­ly self-con­scious or angry, for exam­ple, so that the whole prospect of rela­tion­ship is blown up.  The per­son leaves the par­ty with­out meet­ing any­one.  To oth­ers, the per­son may have sim­ply seemed mere­ly qui­et or shy, but inside that indi­vid­ual may be storm­ing with them­selves because they lack any mean­ing­ful way out of the fact of their expe­ri­enced shock.  They may want to be social but can­not be because when­ev­er they imag­ine rub­bing up against anoth­er per­son they are over­whelmed by a sense of threat and dis­so­lu­tion as a per­son rather than any sense of wel­come, excite­ment, won­der and con­nect­ed­ness.  None of that sense of threat may be con­nect­ed to an actu­al threat but the sense of shock per­me­ates and then oblit­er­ates every thought of con­nec­tion.  This is one aspect of trau­ma, begin­ning as an ear­ly shock or via a thou­sand tiny cuts over time.

The issues we face in our rela­tion­ships may osten­si­bly seem to be all about the oth­er peo­ple, but at their essence are real­ly about our­selves.  The prob­lems we find in our rela­tion­ships – why we can’t con­nect to some­one else, why we are in con­flict with them – reflect in some way those parts of our­selves that we have not yet found a way to expe­ri­ence, under­stand or accept.  They are the “bud­dhas” that stand in the way of our progress toward whole­ness and free­dom.  They are giv­en to us as obsta­cles, but they can also be gifts intend­ed to deep­en our under­stand­ing of our­selves and oth­ers.  Life sends us the parts of our own self we don’t know yet, in the guise of con­flicts with oth­er peo­ple.  Under­stand­ing this, if we find our­selves in con­flict, we search for the inte­ri­or mean­ing of it. We rec­og­nize the con­flict as a mir­ror.  In the end, we are like­ly to decide it is about us more than the oth­er from whom we are alien­at­ed.  When we are in right rela­tion to those alien­at­ed parts of our­self, then we find a way through, a way also that is giv­en to us as part of our pur­pose and being.