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The Paradoxical Nature of Love Relationships

“Pain and bliss, love and hate, are like a body and its shadow”    —     Ikku

Night/day, Light/dark, life/death, and similar pairs are interdependent.  Neither stands alone; each has meaning only in relation to other.  Opposites turn into each other with unpredictable frequency.    

Consider how this works in love relationships.  The very trait that attracted us to a lover in the first place turns into its opposite;  “quiet and sensitive” becomes “never shares his feelings”.  What you now find so irritating is the underbelly of what attracted you in the first place.    It’s not his fault:  he didn’t change after you met him. 

The problem lies in our insistence upon one side of the coin without the other.  Pleasure and pain mutually co-exist.   The problem with pain is aversion, and the problem with pleasure is clinging.  The solution is to include your whole life: the parts you like and the parts you don’t.

Pareidolia in Subjective Experience

‘Pareidolia’  refers to the tendency to see faces in a cloud — to  perceive specific, often meaningful, images in random or ambiguous visual patterns. 

We see faces in clouds because the human brain is organized to perceive faces.   But pareidolia also relates to one of the most basic functions of the brain/mind:  it organizes information into patterns and then applies those templates to the unfolding field of experience.  New experience is always and necessarily filtered through the template of our past experience.  This is what Daniel J. Siegel calls the “top-down” construction of experience.

In this broad sense, pareidolia reflects a basic feature of human subjectivity:   What we perceive as real is inherently biased by the organizing principles, ideas, and views in the mind.   The implication of this idea is profound: No experience can ever be completely objective or “just as it is”.  As the philosopher Heisenberg posited in his famous ‘uncertainty principle’, the process of observation itself intrinsically affects the nature of what is observed.

In the domain of human relationships, there is a similar phenomenon.  Our past experience is encoded and then becomes automatically superimposed on every new situation.   This becomes transference and projection in the domain of human relationships.  

Practicing With Insecurity

I continually find myself in the ruins

of new beginnings,

uncoiling the rope of my life

to descend ever deeper into unknown abysses,

tying my heart into a knot round a tree or boulder,

to insure I have something that will hold me, that will not let

me fall”.

….excerpted from A Daily Joy To Be Alive, a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca

Intention and Attention in Contemplative Psychotherapy

Both the intention and attention that we bring to our experience has an important influence on the way reality takes shape.      In the words of one famous quote, “man’s mind mirrors a universe that mirrors man’s mind”.   We can literally watch this process as it unfolds,   the future downloading itself into our experience moment by moment.   

The processes of Intention and Attention converge when we listen deeply to our own process (or when we listen deeply to another in psychotherapy).  Even when there is no explicit intention to attend to one thing over another, there are always unconscious intentional currents at work which influence what surfaces in the mind.   There can never be a moment which is entirely free from the bias of our assumptions and views.

We can use the metaphor of pushing and pulling to explore these ideas.  If we think of the past as a push and visualization or intention as a pull, push and pull come together in the present moment by influencing how we interpret and respond to events in an ongoing fashion.  In the act of bringing awareness to the present moment, the next moment is already changed because of the alteration in view.

By and large, psychodynamic psychotherapies emphasize the causal role of the past in the present, with little emphasis on the shaping impact of awareness going forward.  It was left to New Age spiritual psychologies to fill in that vacuum with various forms of “thinking from the end”:  the fundamental idea that consciousness manifests that which it focuses on. Visualization, affirmation, positive thinking, and prayer, for example, are said to “create” whatever outcome is desired.    (This is said to be The Secret, although its actually quite widely known).  In metaphysical terms, energy follows thought.  

Attention and Intention converge in the shaping of our experience.

http://www.drmarjorieschuman.com/intention-attention-contemplative-psychotherapy/

Rupture and Repair in Intimate Relationships

                               ‘Love,’ by Ukrainian sculptor Alexander Milov

Most emotional problems that erupt between intimate partners stem from wounds that were incurred with parents and siblings in the formative years of childhood.  The tension between the desire for, and fear of, intimate connection can twist couples into painful knots. In order to untangle emotionally charged issues, it is necessary for each person to see how each their patterns of attachment are challenged by the partner’s. 

By gaining some perspective on the reactive patterns that get reciprocally triggered in one another, it becomes possible for the couple to come to an empathic understanding that is inclusive of the pain of both.   Each partner needs to recognize the source of his or her pain – where it originally came from – and convey it to the partner in a way that allows the pain to be shared.  In this way, relationship problems can actually become an opportunity to develop a deeper intimacy based in mutual empathy, respect and compassion.

Finding The Opportunities in Problems

As Margaret Mead once said,  “We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems”.    Unfortunately, we often block our ability to recognize the opportunity by focusing our efforts on making the problem go away;  by seeking a way out rather than a way through the difficulty.  In the language of mindfulness, we get caught in aversion.  Aversion is a form of resistance, and it causes whatever we are resisting to persist.

This predicament is illustrated by the experience of the Chinese finger trap.  When we insert our fingers into the little contraption made of straw,  the harder we try to escape, the more the finger trap tightens.   The counter-intuitive trick is to push the fingers inward, allowing the fingers to be removed.  

Similarly,  psychological problems often require of us that we find a way to not resist a situation that is making us feel trapped.  When we can bring about this attitudinal sleight of hand, we optimize the probability of finding effective solutions.  The best way out is always through.

Problems and solutions are two sides of one single coin.   The challenge is to relax in a way that widens our frame of view.   Solutions to problems often emerge once we see what we need to see.  Like the Chinese finger puzzle, we are most often caught in some counterproductive effort to free ourselves from some trap we find ourselves in.  We need to inquire deeply about what is keeping us stuck;  what we are holding onto that we need, instead, to let go.   (Of course, this is easy to say, but harder to do).

In this paradigm for working with psychological problems, we begin from the place of understanding that problems have innate intelligence in them by virtue of calling our attention to what we most need to see.  Analogous to pain in the physical body, they call our attention to underlying wounds.  When we bring mindful awareness to our experience of suffering, we can begin to recognize the psychological structures in which we are trapped.    Psychological healing can then occur as a function of bringing awareness to what is unconscious.

‘INQUIRING DEEPLY’: Mindful Awareness in Relational Psychotherapy

NOW AVAILABLE:  Mindfulness-Informed Relational Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis:  INQUIRING DEEPLY (Routledge Press, 2017).

INQUIRING DEEPLY  provides a refreshing new look at the emerging field of Buddhist-informed psychotherapy.   It  blends the knowledge of contemporary psychoanalysis with the wisdom of Buddhist view, examining how mindfulness can be integrated into psychodynamic treatment as an aspect of self-reflection rather than as a cognitive behavioral technique or intervention.

INQUIRING DEEPLY explores how mindful awareness and systematic self-reflection can be used strategically in psychodynamic treatment to amplify and unpack psychological experience.  In so doing, it both clarifies important dimensions of psychotherapy and illuminates the role of ‘story-teller mind’ in the psychological world of lived experience.

BUY NOW

Marjorie Schuman
Clinical Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
Santa Barbara, CA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marjorie Schuman, PhD specializes in a mindfulness-informed, psychodynamic, and relational approach to psychotherapy which blends the knowledge of contemporary psychoanalysis with the wisdom of Buddhist psychology. Currently in private practice, Dr. Schuman also serves on the faculty of the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies.  She is a long-time practitioner of Buddhist Vipassana meditation and, in 1995, co-founded The Center for Mindfulness and Psychotherapy in Santa Monica.

Coming Into Being: The evolution of subjectivity in psychotherapy

NEW ASPECTS OF OURSELVES COME INTO BEING THROUGH OUR CONNECTIONS TO OTHERS….

Deep connection is how human beings change, heal, and evolve.  It is how the psychological self first forms during psychological development, and it is a process which is ongoing throughout the self-delineating experiences of adulthood. 

Psychotherapy contributes to transforming the patient’s self by fostering new experiences of self-delineation:  the therapist sees what is valuable in the patient and this seeing is instrumental in bringing forth that potential.  The patient comes to see him or herself in the eyes of the therapist.   New structures of self are birthed in intimate moments of meeting.

 In psychoanalytic language, what we can say is that psychotherapy provides new (corrective) relational and attachment experiences:  needed selfobject functions of empathy, mirroring, and validation.   Taken together, these provide “earned attachment security”.  Pragmatically, what this means is that the therapist looks for and supports the core of what is sane in a person — their strengths as well as their constructive intentions — to help them discover strategies that support change and growth. We see who the person has the potential to become and, in that seeing, those qualities are invited into being.

These are the “corrective relational  experiences” in psychotherapy which are essential in helping the patient learn to contain experience, modulate feelings, and rest in a place of going-on-being.   While mindfulness practice also facilitates this change,   it may often be difficult for patients to access deep layers of psychological wounding and metabolize the associated trauma without the support of a healing connection.

As people grow and develop, change occurs not only as a function of what they choose to do but also as function of who/what they come to be.  This process of healing in relational psychotherapy is one of co-creation, always reciprocal albeit asymmetric.

Contemplative Relational Psychotherapy

Relational suffering is basic in human life. Sensitivity and reactivity to what others say and do (or what they don’t say or don’t do) dominates much of our experience. Notwithstanding the fact that interpersonal problems are quite salient in the lives of most people, this is not generally a point of focus in mindfulness meditation practice.

In my view, psychotherapy provides a unique opportunity to explore relational suffering in a way that honors both the Buddhist wisdom tradition and relational/psychodynamic models of the mind. For some years, I have been focusing on how to blend these two strands of understanding into a coherent, integrative psychotherapeutic strategy. I call this approach “contemplative relational psychotherapy”. It incorporates mindful awareness into a depth approach which is both psychodynamic and relational, and it involves a contemplative dimension I call “inquiring deeply”.

In contemplative relational therapy, we can explore relational suffering as it presents itself in the here and now of psychotherapy, we can engage in a process of dialogue which explores how our experience is psychologically organized, and we can discover how to be more skillful in relationship with others.

The purpose of this discussion forum is to explore this important interface between awareness practice and our work as mental health professionals. I hope this will become an unfolding conversation which will illuminate our clinical thinking and contribute to the sharing of our collective wisdom.

Patience Is the Companion of Wisdom

“Patience is the companion of wisdom”

                                           — St. Augustine

First we must contemplate the wise thing to do;  then we must have the patience to wait for the right moment to do it.