Relationship- Bridge to the Soul

by Chris G Moon

  The frustration built until he reached a point of starting heated arguments every time she began to talk. No matter what she said, he would attack her with an opposing point of view. It didn’t matter whether he believed what he was saying; he would argue just to give himself something to say. Although he could see how shocked and hurt his wife was, he felt he had to be angry and argumentative, or he would cave in to his old pattern of sacrificial silence. His anger was the only weapon he had to combat his inner tormentor’s accusations that he was being a “bad boy” for speaking out. It often happens that when someone wants to rid themselves of the burden of sacrifice, they will indulge in behaviour which is opposite to their usual habit. My friend was simply not ready to face his guilt, and thus defended himself against it. The more upset she looked, the more his guilt threatened him, driving him to argue even more vehemently.

  After he calmed down and approached his problem in a healthier way, he discovered that his “bad boy” was really just someone who would question things if they did not “feel right.” In his family, questioning the authority of his elders was strongly forbidden, so as a child he had deduced that his questioning ways were a threat to his wellbeing in the family. In order to feel safe he decided to keep his mouth shut, and let others do the talking.74 This understanding only came about for my friend when he was willing to be the so-called “bad boy” without judging or defending himself. He re-experienced the sad emotion and guilt that so often accompany that part of ourselves, and kept asking to know the Truth about himself. This quest brought him to deep feelings of loneliness—one of the primary feelings one discovers in the emptiness within. By responding to the loneliness with a peaceful resolve to accept it, and thereby accept himself, his confidence grew in time and the need to argue diminished. He became a happier man as well as an effective communicator.

  Sacrifice can deaden your relationship in three ways. The first is that you can become so resentful of the feeling of being forced to keep sacrificing that the resentment will turn into a repulsion or even hatred towards your mate. You will typically think that she/he is expecting you to act in a way that brings no reward. A second destructive effect of sacrifice is that, in trying to escape the sacrificial behaviour, you may swing the other direction—as my friend did—and indulge in actions that are hurtful to the other. The third effect is burnout. You simply become exhausted by the burden of endless sacrifice and are strongly tempted to leave the relationship for your health or sanity. These results come about largely because of an unwillingness to honestly confront the real cause of the sacrificial behaviour.

  From the outside, it may be impossible to see the difference between a sacrificial role and a free act of giving. On the inside however, it is easy to tell them apart: when you’re in sacrifice, you cannot receive. You are merely performing an action to assuage and compensate for your truckload of guilt. It’s like paying off a huge financial debt. Not just huge but enormous.75 At first there may be a feeling of relief that you’re able to make your payments, but after a while the sense of never reaching an end to your debt starts to make you feel tired, drained, and poor.76

  It’s the same with sacrifice. There is no life to what you to what you give—no joy or enthusiasm. Maybe at first your sacrifices were appreciated, way back in the Glamour stage. At the Introspection stage, however, your sacrifices just aren’t enough. Being a loyal, attentive partner doesn’t get you the passionate appreciation it used to. It’s still expected of you, so you keep doing it—but there’s no more payoff, and you begin to realize that there never was any payoff for you. It was all for the role you were playing.

  In a relationship that is stuck, when you start hearing phrases like, “I’ve given you the best years of my life, and what did I get in return?! Nothing!” you can be pretty sure that someone is close to walking out, or collapsing under the sacrifice. Unfortunately, what that person gave was not the best.

  Giving from your heart is a completely different experience. You do not get emotionally drained, you do not feel resentful if appreciation is not forthcoming, and you are not acting to pay off your guilt. You are not expecting any results from your giving at all. You are acting from your heart, and are doing so because you know it is for everyone’s good to give in this way (remember that “everyone” includes you). If love, or the desire to know love, is your motivator, you will concern yourself with the experience of giving itself and will repeatedly see that it is in truly giving that you receive.

  The biggest help to ending sacrificial patterns is awareness and accountability. Being 100% accountable for our lives challenges us to see our sacrificial roles without blame. It is too easy to say that we behave the way we do because our parents or family forced us into it. Maybe the choice to act in sacrifice was unconscious. Perhaps it was made out of a need for love, or from a misguided attempt to give love. Maybe it was made for the sake of survival. Whatever the motivation behind our choice, it is absolutely crucial to recognize that the choice came from somewhere inside of us, whether as a mistake or a necessary choice. Once we accept that responsibility, we claim for ourselves the power to choose something better for ourselves.

  Awareness has a magnificent quality that can profoundly affect our consciousness. It has the potential to diminish whatever is not true, and enhance what is true. If you bring your full awareness to a negative emotion, the emotion will quickly dissolve into pure energy. If you focus your full awareness on a loving, joyful, or peaceful feeling, the experience of love, peace or joy will grow within you. How big it can get depends on how much joy you can contain.

  Being fully aware of the feelings and emotions that push you towards sacrifice will ultimately allow you to see that sacrificial roles are not conducive to loving relationships. As draining and unrewarding as they are, we continue our sacrifices because it is easier to do so than face the torment and guilt that lurks beneath our seemingly noble behaviour. It is a greater challenge to peacefully accept our sacrificial tendency as something that no longer serves us, turn away from it and experience the uncomfortable influences of the tormentor and “bad person.”77 Consistent awareness without reaction and a sincere commitment to be true to ourselves will gradually transform us.

  With time and willingness, you can overcome the gravity of the sacrificer/tormentor/bad person, and give to your partner what you truly want to give. In the giving you will come to know your essential self.

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  RELATIONSHIPS SWING LIKE A PENDULUM DOES

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  “It takes two to Tango.”

  —Proverb

  I would like to point out one last aspect of sacrifice before we go on to other traps in the Victim Prison. This last item is related to what I call the “pendulum effect.” The premise of this model is that if you are sacrificing for your mate, then you will see him/her as someone who takes advantage of you, the sacrificer, by not pulling his or her own weight. The degree to which one sacrifices will equal the degree of apparent indulgence in the other. Every sacrificer requires such an “indulger” to exist.

  How could you always be picking up after someone unless that someone was always leaving things around to be picked up? How could you sacrifice yourself to listening to someone chatter on endlessly unless there was someone to do the chattering? For every sacrificer there is an indulger and vice versa. If you are the sacrificer you cannot change your partner unless you give up your sacrifice. You cannot give up your sacrifice until you recognize that it is not your “job” to change your partner or compensate for his/her behaviour. If your mate indulges in anger, it is not your god-given mission to try and maintain peace. If your partner is addicted to gambling, it is not your job to make up for the lack of money in the house by overworking. His/her alcoholism is not your burden, so you are not required to relinquish your spontaneity and passion in order to provide a stable and predictable environment to compensate for your partner’s
instability and unpredictability. After saying all this, I will follow up by saying that, although it is not your job to compensate for your partner’s indulgences, your partner’s indulgences are your responsibility. That is, you have the power to respond to your partner without sacrifice.

  It’s easy to forget that both parties are 100% responsible for what happens in the relationship. Often you may see a situation where one person is working his/her buns off while the other one in the relationship is not pulling an equal share of the load. An alcoholic relationship is often depicted as having one long-suffering partner, slaving to keep the relationship or family together, while the other is indulging in selfish pursuit of pleasure. But in the last few decades, it has been shown that the sacrificer is equally responsible for the dysfunction in that situation. If you have sacrifice in your life, it will attract a corresponding indulgence.78

  This dynamic can be played out by two people, where one indulges while the other sacrifices; but if you want to see something really fascinating, ask each of those people privately which one sacrifices more. Most often, the reply will be that the one you are talking to is most burdened with the debt of living. Even if the one you are talking to may seem to be less active or productive at the moment, that is only because s/he is “resting” from a hard week at work, a tough month, a rough year, maybe even a miserable childhood. Indulgers will often justify their tendencies with a story of sacrifice in their life. This points to a very important understanding: sacrifice is not in the action. Sacrifice is in the mind. Washing dishes may be either a fun time or a horrendous drag. The experience is determined purely by the attitude. How to change the attitude? I start by wanting to, but I also recognize that I need some extraordinary help to pull me out of this lifetime pattern that began before I was even conscious of what I was choosing to do. I sacrificed myself for my family out of an instinct for physical and emotional survival.

  If you look at the pendulum model, you can deduce that the further you are away from the centre, the more extreme the levels of sacrifice and indulgence. Since they are in a symbiotic relationship, if you end one you also end the other. I have found that whatever side I’m swinging to, I can always call on the power in the centre to help me. In the centre I find the power of my soul—or essence—giving me all the support I could ever need. Since my soul doesn’t judge me or punish me, I can trust it to lovingly guide me out of the indulgence or sacrifice.

  Once you become consciously aware of the sacrifice, you can focus on the power at the centre and ask for love to guide you out. Sacrifice is in the mind. Only love can reach into the mind and transform the pattern of giving without receiving (sacrifice) and taking without enjoying (indulgence) into an experience of true giving and heartfelt receiving. All that we need do—indeed, pretty well all we can do—is allow the love of our soul to guide us back to our centre, where the love abides. Practice, practice, practice.

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  FUSION—THE TIES THAT BIND

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  “A cage went in search of a bird.”

  —Franz Kafka

  My wife and I had been married for three months when it happened. Su Mei was in her first trimester and not feeling well physically or emotionally. I was sitting at a desk in the hallway of our house, doodling on a piece of paper when she walked by behind me. Immediately, I jumped up and looked around for the vacuum cleaner, as I had suddenly decided to do some house cleaning. Then I would do the dishes, chop some wood for the fire, fold the laundry and...and then I realized it was 11:45 P.M.! Five minutes earlier, the big job I was contemplating was pulling back the covers and going to bed. Now I was seconds away from renovating the living room! Then I recognized what I was feeling. I remembered when I was seven or eight, and my mother was going through some very unhappy times. I felt cut off from her, and somehow to blame for her unhappiness, so I deduced that it was my job to cure her. She was always commenting on the perpetual disorder and mess in the house (small wonder with eight kids and a dog), so I figured that maybe if I kept the house clean, she would cheer up. If she were happy, I’d feel more secure, and maybe she’d like me again—maybe even love me! Twenty-five years later I found myself once again in the presence of an unhappy mother, and through all that time I had never come up with a better solution than cleaning the house. Before I was even aware of my motives, I was unconsciously reaching for the vacuum cleaner.

  When we urgently need a parent to love us, while at the same time feeling that we are not worthy of that love, sometimes we will do anything—no matter what the cost to ourselves—to make sure that parent doesn’t exclude us. In my case, I threw away every part of myself that I deemed unattractive to my mother and did my best to become the perfect son. I became her charming little helper, and in that way moulded myself to meet what I thought were her needs. I threw away huge chunks of myself so I could fit her requirements, and clung to her—emotionally, if not physically—like a kitten halfway up a curtain. This is an example of fusion: it is a tremendous sacrifice we make to ensure that we are not abandoned. We sacrifice ourselves.

  Fusion can start as early as three years of age and continue until we approach adolescence, so it’s easy to see how it could become a major aspect of who we think we are.79 Imagine a child throwing away her aggression and willfulness to please Dad, rejecting her intelligence to seem harmless and dependent on someone much wiser than she, becoming blind to her artistic qualities to assure Dad she would be a practical little girl, becoming less outgoing so she could stay closer to home, or rejecting her solitude so that her father would be proud of how popular she is. Imagine if all this and more had been the choice of one child? How quickly would she become a one-dimensional human being with very predictable characteristics? She would have thrown away every aspect of herself that did not fit what she thought her father wanted from her. And what her father wanted from his daughter would be what he felt he was lacking in his life. Like a half of a broken heart, he would be searching for the other half that would fit him perfectly, and she would try to shape herself into that other half so that they could “bond.” Think of the incredible sacrifice that she would have to make in order to “belong.” That is the price of fusion, an inauthentic form of bonding. Its motive is need and its glue is sacrifice. It is not in fact bonding at all—it is bondage.

  To help you better understand fusion, perhaps a mental picture would serve. Imagine the parent you are most fused to is standing in front of you. Then visualize that you are somehow inescapably bound to that person. Perhaps you each have tentacles like two octopuses tangled with each other. Perhaps you are fused together at the hip like Siamese twins. Maybe a huge chain is wrapped around both of you. A female client came up with the scenario of half her body caught in a huge leg-hold trap that was chained to her father. One very popular image of fusion is that of an umbilical cord attached at both belly buttons. Whatever the image, the form of bondage is representative of the emotional attachment that keeps you in a state of sacrifice from which there seems to be no escape. The person caught in the fusion may feel frustrated by the containment, straitjacketed or smothered—as if the parent were sucking away the very air around him/her.

  For most people a survival mechanism will kick in, causing the individual to push away from this inauthentic form of bonding and flee to independence from that parent. This attempt at breaking away tends to take time, and intensifies as the child approaches adolescence. But the fusion is not broken, and you discover this as soon as you enter an important relationship with someone of the same sex as the parent you were fused to. You gradually begin to realize you are relating to that person in the same way that you did with that parent. You even begin to feel like you are living with that parent.

  To summarize, then: when, as a child, you lose the sense of bonding—or human love—with one or both of your parents, you become torn between the need to belong and the sense that you are not good enough to b
e loved. Therefore you mould yourself around what you think will cause that parent to keep you close, throwing away aspects of your personality in order to form an inauthentic form of bonding called fusion. When you break out of the stranglehold, you do not necessarily dissolve the fusion—you temporarily distance yourself from it. As soon as you spend time around a person towards whom you feel some degree of dependency (e.g. a sexual partner, an authority figure, a creditor, etc.), you will find yourself behaving in a way that does not really benefit you or make you feel good about yourself. But you would feel too fearful of being excluded to act any other way.

  At a certain point your fusion to your parent(s) is largely transferred to your partner, and its smothering effects tend to be felt most strongly in the Introspection stage. The person experiencing it will often feel that s/he does not have a life of her/his own, and is tempted to blame the partner for taking that life away. If this happens to you, it is important to realize that what is happening is a re-experience of an old feeling. The temptation to push away the partner is actually a re-visitation of the desire to reject the parent to which you were fused. It is not always necessary to throw away your relationship to end the fusion.80 Along with awareness, your willingness and determination to reclaim the parts of you that you threw away will assist you in healing the wounds of fusion. Be aware of the physical and emotional sensations of the fusion, and notice how familiar they are—how long you have been carrying them inside you.

  Imagine that you were given the opportunity to paint a picture of your emotional fusion to your partner. See the picture in your mind as best you can, so that you can now see what you have been doing emotionally. Whatever your partner’s mood, you had to adjust. Wherever his/her moods have taken your partner, you had to go as well, surrendering your choice to the fusion. Be aware of any feelings of resentment, fear, frustration, or anxiety that may be present as you view this scene. Next, state your intention to be free of this bondage, calling upon your determination to fuel your will. Either verbally or mentally express to your partner that it is no longer true to continue this false relationship, and that what you are choosing is what is best for both of you. Then visualize a picture of you breaking free from the bondage. Experience all the feelings connected to this image, and then paint a third picture of the two of you—how you will appear once the bondage is ended. If there is still conflict or lack of peace in this picture make note of it, then draw another one in your mind. You may need a number of pictures until you can envision both of you as you are really meant to be in the relationship. The reason for this is that, even when ended peacefully, the severing of the fusion can cause adverse reactions in both of you as you seek to establish foundations based on Truth. Typically, people caught in the fusion trap have a very deep fear of losing their false security, and one will be less willing to let go than the other. It takes courage and trust to be yourself in any relationship, and your determination to do so will set off a chain reaction that is not always pleasant. Drawing pictures in your mind (it may be more effective to put them down on paper, in clay, or represent them through some other artistic medium) allows you to intuitively see what lays ahead for you.