By Jeanne Denney
Lots of people think that I teach just about death, dying and grief. Well, I do. But the thing is, death taught me so much about all the rest of life, and almost every natural thing in it, that it was no longer possible to think about anything the same way. One of the biggest things that hospice work taught me about, though, was relationships. That, and…ok, years of therapy work with clients. Through all of that I began to understand relationships as organized energy, as pulsing, changing, forming and unforming bonds that had an almost physical reality without actually being physical. I learned relationships as nature. Relationships as both temporal and eternal. These are things our culture should teach very clearly. But, alas, it doesn’t. And so uneducated about our very nature, we bumble around, usually damaging mind, body and each other.
Through couples work, my own relationship “undoings”, the teachings of clients’ lives, I have come to see small and large endings as predictable and even a necessary and living parts of relationship. I could see that there was a deep conversation between beginnings and endings, that the formation of a relationship left very deep imprints on what came after, as if our nascent beginnings lay down tracks for the future. As I watched hospice patients and their loved ones navigating ending together, or couples in conflict, there was LOTS (and lots) of old stuff making bids for resolution. It was quite an education. A deep one.
There are predictable patterns in relationship processes we can learn. And there are definitely things we can learn to make them better. Since loneliness is epidemic and relationship trauma is on the rise, let me waste no time and offer a brief summary. Here are…
Seven things I wish every school child was taught about relationships:
Relationships are REALLY important. We need them to thrive or even survive. They are deeply connected to our bodies.
Relationships are energetic structures between people. They are part of nature.
These energetic structures are alive. They change predictably over time. They have to be grown and tended like tomatoes. When we don’t, the relationship gets sickly or can die.
A sick relationship, or one that “died” badly can make us sick if we don’t attend to it.
Control and domination hurts a relationship (which, remember, is a living thing). So do cut offs and “ghosting”. These are violations of connection that hurt everyone.
Some parts of relationships end and those endings are important. Some parts seem to be forever, especially so if we do our endings well. If you want it to have a deep aliveness you have to learn to tolerate and even cultivate good micro-endings.
Relationships thrive on well-paced rhythmic exchange, the somewhat predictable alternation between contact and “space holding”. We get a lot of our information on the other person through the pattern of this dance of “toward and away”.
Let’s talk about that last one for a minute. Our culture sees Toward and Away as Love versus Separation. Gosh this reminds me of another false opposition I like to rail about: Life versus Death. We are not only a youth focused, death-phobic culture, and we are also an ATTACHMENT focused, differentiation-phobic culture. That means that we think of attachment and closeness as more loving than holding space or giving distance. The “falling IN love” part is wonderful. The falling away is sad and horrible. Remind you of the Life is good, Death is bad bias?
But wait just a darned minute. Is this true? I bet everyone has had the experience of shutting down emotionally because someone is just too unrelentingly close or clinging or demanding or controlling (ah, the dark side of attachment). So somewhere along the line, an attachment that is not love can happen. That is probably about the place where space would naturally come into the picture for regulation, integration and rest but may have been resisted. Because relationships want to BREATHE (move, dance, modulate, exhale, inhale, pulsate) just like other living things. These delicate creations need to move BOTH toward and away to be vital. The loving opposite of dark attachment is actually the ability to tolerate and celebrate the beauty of someone’s differentiation process, even if they are differentiating from…US in that moment.
And can there be TOO much space? Well of course. We all know what that feels like too, don’t we? Waiting too long for a response, having our “bids for attention” ignored by another. Ghosting. Yuck. It stinks, doesn’t it? Being unwilling or unable to reliably engage in a rhythmic exchange of energy is another distortion of space. It damages relationships just as much. For some people the offer of more space means love. For others more attachment/closeness means love. And in these two differences so many relationships struggle.
The deeper truth seems to be that attachment and differentiation processes are both essential parts of love. Maybe love is that rhythmic, attuned communication that knows how to reliably honor the regular toward and away. Looked at this way, we usually don’t have to reject, replace or eject the other person or find a replacement someone to relate to. Maybe we just need to learn to do relationship dance: to find new roles, or tolerate another person’s changes as true. Maybe we need to ask not what I or you need, but what the relationship itself needs at any given moment . How much love does that take? Maybe a lot. But I can’t think of a better way to spend my time in this world than working toward that dance.
I could go on and on with stories. There is a lot more to say. You can learn more about relationship dynamics and fostering connection through my relationship audio program that will be available in a few weeks. Sign up for our email newsletter for updates.
