The Crucible of Relationship.
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Hello friends,
Visiting my hometown Hanoi before the Lunar New Year made me realize I've been in Vietnam for exactly one year. It invites a big reflection about life, relationship and work, which will be the subject for this week's Enzyme.
I remember an advice a mentor gave before I left US last January "Khuyen, knowing how much you like to get involved in way many things, it maybe better for you to pick one or almost two things. Focus on them for 6 months to a make a real difference. Rinse and repeat. In 2 years, you'd be surprised by how much you could accomplish."
For a millennial who seems flaky and scared of commitment, it was like a good advice. Hard to follow though.
Now looking back, I'd say that the last 6 months had been focusing on relationship. It was real, serious deep-diving work, with plenty of joy, challenges and rich learning. Most importantly, the compassionate bond formed between my partner and me was undeniable. It has made a difference in our lives.
2018 has been a surprisingly deep exploration in terms of relationship, a topic that I've been fascinated by.
Two people meet, enjoy each other's presence and get to know more intimately. Then suddenly there is a "relationship". Even if it's a social construction, it's as real as the horizon is real. Relationship, as ill-defined as it is, clearly has an impact on people's tangible life.
Being a nerd myself, I enjoy reading and thinking before I experience a relationship. While many people think that I'm crazy because "in love, you shouldn't be thinking so much", I often nod and disagree.
Well, that's love. Relationship is a different beast. Love is infinite, relationship is finite. One can love anyone, but relationship is highly conditional. Most importantly, they exist independently of each other. That's why it's possible to say "I love you, and I don't want to / cannot be in a relationship with you". It took me a while to realize that above statement is possible.
I think young people like me are in dire needs of learning about relationship. No one teaches us about it, and often we don't have a lot of good role models either.
This week, I venture to write about a teaching I received - relationship as a crucible for healing - and reflect on my own experience healing and learning through it. I hope it may help those of us who are dabbling in this to make sense of the quintessential human experience - loving & being loved by another being.
Relationship as a Crucible
I spent a fair bit of time thinking about relationship, particularly intimate ones. While the sound-nice reason is that relationship is essential to the human experience, the real reason is simply that I’m scared. In this domain, I’m rather clueless, and I don’t want to mess it up…
Things Fall Apart by XKCD
I’m not alone in this cluelessness. My dear friend Aida started this project 365 Days of Love out of a similar need. Consider how the globally-famed Western pop culture puts an uncanny emphasis on passionate relationship, the melodramatic “You complete me”, the heart-wrenching “I can’t live without you” or the piping hot scenes. It has done a fantastic job in inducing hope and a terrible one in exposing the uncomfortable reality.
I once heard a statistic that relationship failure rate (simplistically defined as “when all parties involved are totally burned out and quit for good”) is even higher than startup failure rate. Surprisingly, the latter receives a lot more public attention, while apparently the former has a much bigger impact on a person’s life. Also, January apparently seems to be the break-up month. Clearly there is a lot of learning needed here to improve the odd.
Yet, few talk about intimate relationship and rarely anyone thinks about some simple questions, one that I find myself asking at the beginning of my young adult life.
What is a relationship for? What is the point? How do we make sense of it?
There are many good reasons to get in and stay with a relationship. We look for someone to share emotional and physical connection, to learn to love and be loved. We may also look for a person to fulfill the practical expectation of family and society. Or if you are somewhat romantic, you look a partner to explore together in this lonely life journey, a soulmate for an ecstatic reunion etc..
The way to test whether any of those reasons is good for you is to see if it could motivate you enough to stay together in a time where the relationship drives you crazy. This is a hard test that I’ve been running.
In reflection, none of the above reason survives the test for me. When things get hard, these ideals don’t stand up.
Clueless, I asked for guidance from a mentor who has a long-lasting, loving and no less challenging marriage of more than twenty years. He told me once that the first phase of an intimate relationship is about merging together, which entails the smoothing the psychological edges of each person via consciously working to understand them. He then continued,
The purpose of an intimate relationship, at least at the first stage, is to be a crucible for the healing of each other.
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It’s worth noting that most of the time healing is not simply “I’m broken, please fix me up” or “you are broken, lemme fix ya” but rather “I thought I was fine, but you broke me open and made me realize how much of a mess I am. Now let me do the healing work.”
Cruel, I know…
Nevertheless, with this framing we can at least understand and accept how the process will bring out the part of us that we often ignore, dial up its intensity until we cannot bear anymore. Only then, if the crucible is strong enough, some breakthrough may happen. What drives one’s crazy is also an invitation for transformation.
Let’s use myself as an example.
Fear of Losing Oneself
Usually in a relationship, one person will be afraid of losing oneself and the other losing the connection, or fear of engulfment vs fear of abandonment. The dynamics often goes like this: I’m afraid that I’m losing myself so I’m pulling away, while you are afraid you are being left alone so you try to lean in.
Thanks goodness I have read about it and thus have some mental preparation. In practice, it is still challenging though.
Having been a happy loner most of the time, I experience a relationship as intrusive, while the other sees it as “not close enough”. It takes so much time! Only recently did I realize that the deeper operating assumption is “Most relationships are taking away from me the limited resources I have for life”.
Sometimes the choice to be or not to be in a relationship comes from a level-headed place. “I’m too busy for a relationship now”, “I want to focus on career” or “I need to heal myself first”. You probably heard or used these reasons before.
Most of the times though we aren’t that aware of the deeper assumption behind our action though. That’s how internal conflict happens, and things get tricky. “I’d love to be with you, but when I let you get in closer I get really uncomfortable and can’t help pushing you away” or the opposite “I should not be with you, but I can’t help it.”
Welcome to relationship, the land of weird and confusing actions.
Responding to Anger
Another personal example of unlearning reactive pattern is about dealing with anger, something that I’ve written at length about here and here. Most of my anger is directed inward (self-blaming), and I’ve done a bit of self-therapy work to heal this.
With an intimate relationship, it gets 100x trickier. For example, when my partner gets angry or even just raises her voice at me, I’ll get triggered.
The first step is to not blame myself nor reactively fight back when someone gets angry. This takes darn a lot of work, but with practice over time it gets easier.
The next step for me is to choose to stay rather than withdraw. It’s not easy, for I’ve internalized the belief that anger is bad for everyone and should not be dealt with directly. I mean, isn’t it obvious that talking right in the midst of the anger is not the best time?
It turns out to be the exact opposite: withdrawing actually worsens the problem. My partner’s operating principle is that “when I’m upset at something, I want you to bear witness, own up to it and even console me” In a way, it’s her unconscious form of shit-testing: “only when you can stand up for yourself in this heated moment that I can trust you”.
It becomes clear why my withdrawal will make her even more fuming: I was failing her trust. What comes after for her is even worse: doubt about the relationship, then self-hatred for making the wrong choice to be in it, then sadness for hurting the other person. That whole slew of emotional unraveling is simply triggered by my withdrawal. Holy molly…
Again, it’s not anger but fear. Fear of facing anger, of making other angry, of wasting my life on such a difficult relationship rather than other priorities… All of which have to be brought to the fore, thoroughly and calmly experienced before they release their grips on me. It’s even better to do this whole processing in the moment, for withdrawing could make things worse.
That’s a lot of work that I didn’t sign up for. It has been good though. In a sense, I’m ready, so the opportunity to learn presents itself.
In my case, the fear of anger is a wound that came from being scolded at as a child. Healing of that wound requires me to see it clearly yet gently.
The byproduct of this process is a sense of inner freedom and an increased capacity to respond. I became not as much triggered by anger, and I can choose to respond in-the-moment rather than merely react. I could choose to stay present, to probe deeper into what’s happening on the other side, to express a need for space or to propose a timeout. It was challenging and totally worth it.
With each layer of healing, more strength and compassion are released. Strength as I feel more capable of directly facing those challenging interpersonal situations, and compassion as I feel the pain of the angry person more vividly and am willing to soothe it.
Both are important. Without strength, I can’t handle even if I want to. Without compassion, I’d act just like the angry person who spreads hurt out of his own pain.
Read the full post here on Medium.
2019: Joyful Livelihood
It always struck me that word has meaning and tangible effect in the world. That someone telling you “I love you” or “You are a terrible person” can physically affect our body. That a stream of words in our memory can bring a slush of sensation to our flesh. It’s both amazing and crazy.
The mind-matter connection seems to be a thing, a very real thing indeed. Word turns out to be one of the most profound technology mankind has ever invented. One word can send a nation to war and bring another to peace. Not bad for some vibration that comes from one’s throat or finger pressing on a keyboard.
Which is why picking a few words as a theme for your year can be a worthwhile practice.
2018 has been a transition year of moving from US to Vietnam, changing city and focusing on a relationship. It took a lot of energy, which meant little was left on this “practical” question of livelihood.
This phrase, Joyous Livelihood, came to me a while ago when I was thinking about having to make money and what to focus on this year. No, it’s not as simple as “making more.” Let me explain.
Graduated from a great college, I’m probably the top 0.01% of the luckiest people who don’t have to worry too much about money money money and familial obligations. so are free to explore. Thanks, God, for all the good karma.
While some savings have saved me from financial burden, I still think of money sometimes. It’s crazy that even though I technically don’t have to think about it for at least a year, these thoughts still appear. Hello, uncontrollable monkey mind.
There is something gripping, obsessive and even anxiety-inducing about seeing your bank account draining gradually. The good thing is that now I feel a lot more compassion with people dealing with money stuff. Mad, blissful or meh, we are in this money world together.
As a mentor once told me, money, sex and power are the three topics that most people carry plenty of shame and other unconscious obstacles around. They all need to be worked through, and this year is the time for money work.
Diving deeper into livelihood will mean I’ll encounter some unconscious beliefs and even childhood wounds about money, which maybe painful. Greed, stinginess, fear and jealousy, all these yucky emotions are bound to come up and hopefully transform into generosity, courage and love.
Business as relationships
The common association with money is business, or a thing that maximizes profit. This is too simplistic and uninspiring, let alone dangerous when taken as a sole purpose. Another definition that I like more by the late Peter Drucker is “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer”. This one captures what a business does, but it doesn’t say much about our life and its meanings, something that matters to me and a lot of people.
Here is a definition from my teacher Mark Silver that helped “Business is the relationships you have around your livelihood”.
“Business is the relationships you have around your livelihood”. Credit: Heart of Business
That includes all the ways you make a living, which means you’ve got to deal with money, unless you are a monk who has no possession. Even in a self-sufficient community where you grow your own food, someone must pay for the electricity and Internet right?
This definition of business highlights an often neglected component: the quality of relationship matters. How much is this based on trust, mutual support and good will? Does it enrich, ennoble or even enlighten everyone it touches? It’s not just the relationship with suppliers and contractors, colleagues and bosses, shareholders and board members as you seen in the graphic above. It’s our relationship with business and the sustainability of life itself.
So how can we grapple with “relationship”, this fuzzy terms that once in a while will drive all of us nuts? Here’s one framework by the Buddhist teacher Ken Mcleod that can help. Is it about mutual benefit, shared aim, emotional connection, or a combination of all? Business as relationships have to be at least about mutual benefits. That’s for another post though.
Plenty of fascinating areas for exploration, yes?
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Read the full post here on Medium.
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
"One cannot serve two masters at the same time FOR TOO LONG." - Charles Eisenstein
Charles spoke about this in his later reflection about how inner conflict develops. An example of serving two masters is the explicit mission vs implicit agenda, say "developing young people into mature servant leaders" and at the same time concern about looking good. Listen more on that topic in his course, Living in The Gift,
On a scale of dry to wet, [anything you want to praise] is Niagara bloody Falls! - Anonymous
Saw this on Twitter the other day and thought of sharing a nice joke / praise ;-)
Lastly..
A picture about transcontextuality (Nora Bateson): my grandmom whose husband died in war, my mom whose husband cancer death initiated her Buddhist journey and me wearing the cool green cardigan someone threw away in America. Here
Khuyen
P/s: Let's have a conversations about life if you are feeling stuck. I'd love to be helpful.
