" Out Beyond Idea of Wrong Doing and Right Doing, There is a Field... I will meet you there..." (Rumi)
Everyone has marriage stress. Marriage is socially comfortable but psychically demanding, because marriage demands awareness and conscious change in response to the partner's needs. That's the way it is and that's the way it's supposed to be. What we need to accept and understand is that conflict in a relationship is natural and is supposed to happen. Its the way of nature. Conflict needs to be understood in terms of the psyche trying to survive to get its needs met and become whole.
The good news is that we marry people who have the "keys" to our own spiritual growth. Therefore even when relationships aren't easy, they are purposeful & productive. Marriage is the single most powerful spiritual path there is. The spouse is a mirror into our soul. If we don't like what we see in the mirror, its time to get serious about changing our perceptions.
Often folks believe that if they are having problems there is something fundamentally wrong with the marriage. Not so! It is fundamentally "right" for a every marriage to have problems. Ignorant of the process of healing childhood wounds through conflict in current relationships, society has made "incompatibility" grounds for divorce. This arises precisely out of a childlike wishlist for conflict free relationships which is a distortion of the natural process. Divorce does not solve the problem. We may get rid of the partner but we keep the problem, carting them into the next relationship.
One of the major healing functions of marriage is to heal childhood wounds and we "should" learn how to find the middle path of peace by constantly negotiating with our partner "who is a completely different person" than ourselves. The conflict starts in this life where it left off in past lives. The person you marry knows you very well, from past lives. Having reconnected "where we left off" we can from the present-life start point, consciously, start to make progress again. Each marital conflict is a step up in self knowledge. Each conflict is the next lesson in finding agreement, building trust, healing old wounds, and learning how to love.
We don't really understand "love" until the end of marriage, after we have resolved hundreds of intense conflicts, and learned the path of tolerance, acceptance, compassion, & trust in the Divine. So, that's why marriage must have conflict and lots of it!! Everyone has the specific marriage conflict which they uniquely need to work on, to build those compassionate, loving, tolerant, spiritually aware conflict-resolution skills.
Everyone gets the partner they have asked for. Everyone gets the partner they deserve! The key to "enjoying" the conflicts is to appreciate that only conflict carried through to resolution can build "conscious" peace as opposed to passive conflict free peace. We can get unconscious peace through denial or suppression. That's always an option but spiritually it's a waste of a lifetime. Many of us were raised to believe that conflict in marriage is wrong; that everything should be peaceful & in agreement all the time. That's actually impossible, given the deeper purpose of marriage. If you want to do the most meaningful spiritual work of your life, get married and work consciously through each conflict, as it arises.
Humanity’s yearning - whether man or woman, is essentially the same. All of us seek connection. We cannot experience life in its fullness unless we have an intimate relationship with another human being. Each person needs a “Thou” to become a fully realized “I”. But in our Hurly burly, mad dog-eat-dog world, the individual ego transcends the relationship and therefore we have more of “ Me vs You” instead of "I and Thou".
Most people experience their first relationship difficulty in the first years of life. In order to experience strong and safe connections with the parent as a caregiver, children need attuned parents. Attuned parents hold you when you need comfort and physical connection. You are fed when you are hungry and you are soothed when you are irritable, afraid or in pain. The attuned parent also allows you to express the full range of your emotions, joy, playfulness, frustration and anger rather than suppress them. Children raised by attuned parents are more likely to create satisfying love relationships in adulthood. Because they had such a safe and nurturing bond with their caregivers, they are not swept away by exaggerated fears of abandonment and engulfment.
Regrettable many of us had unattuned parents and we bring the resulting unmet demands and fear into our adult relationships. Not only did we experience disconnection from our parents we feel disconnected from our innermost emotions. In the broadest sense the unattuned parents either neglected us by failing to attend to our needs or they intruded upon us by trying to meet their own unmet needs thru us. An unhappy childhood where the yearning for the caregivers love was unmet by parents too preoccupied with their own world, leads to fears and an active discomfort in adulthood in acknowledging feelings of love, dependence and vulnerability. The sense that nothing is truly stable, that circumstances can change in a heartbeat stays with them. The unhappy child turned adult still yearns for a close love relationship but also fears it, the feeling of becoming dependent on another person makes them uncomfortable. They are unable to fully trust the partner driven by a deep seated fear of abandonment that plays on their mind. Hence two people wounded at childhood cannot connect if they are constantly defending themselves against a barrage of negativity or they live in fear of being abandoned by their partners. They are likely to be friendly and relaxed on the outside but inside have deep psychic wounds that cause them anxiety within the relationship. This psychicly wounded child turned adult constantly puts their partner thru "tests", trying to discern whether their partners love is real or ephemeral. This untrusting behaviour can do serious damage to an otherwise perfectly good relationship.
Soothing the pain defuses the anger that no longer intrudes on the relationship. Mirroring is a powerful tool for creating an I-Thou relationship. To mirror your partner you have to turn down the volume of your own thoughts so you can LISTEN attentively. You have to switch the channel from “me” to “you”. In effect you are telling your partner I am no longer the sole person in this universe. I am acknowledging your separate existence. Your thoughts are important to me. Many people spend much time and energy trying to get their partners to think the same way as they do. It is important to understand that one does not have to agree with the partner. It is important that you affirm the logic of your partners thinking to see your partner as the other and not as an extension of yourself.
To unattuned parents, who could not transcend their own world view, the fact that different points of view could be equally valid was beyond their comprehension. Whether or not we were understood was dependent entirely on the mood and presence of mind of the adults around us. They could diminish what we had to say, ignore it, counter it and also shame us for even daring to express it. So conditioned are we to receiving such behavior that we carry these images into our adulthood and sadly perpetuate this pattern in our daily lives. Mirroring stops this destructive behavior in its tracks. When you mirror each other, you both get to experience what it is like to have someone pay close attention to what you are saying, understand what you have to say and honor your uniqueness. And because the brain does not differentiate present from the past, your unconscious mind perceives the attention you are receiving as coming from a caretaker not just from your present day intimate partner and the rupture in the connection just got a few stitches as repair. The partner’s keen interest in our thoughts helps repair those feelings of neglect from long ago. This in turn helps us to feel safer in our partner’s presence and we then discover parts of ourselves that had been hidden from us since childhood.
Love Heals all is a well known sentiment and it can heal even the deepest emotional wound - the ruptured connection between you and your caregivers. But it needs to be a mature and patient love that does not manipulate and distort and needs to take place within the context of an intimate Relationship. With this comes the realization that one is just as important as the other and has an equally valid view of the universe. Yet together they form a greater whole, kept connected by the pull of mutual love and respect. They Mirror the interconnected universe.
