September 2008
When You Hear Your Partner, Are You Listening?
by David McCann, Ph.D. & Janis McCann, Ph.D. Hello, dear Friends, Associates, and Colleagues,

We write on Labor Day, September 1, 2008, a day devoted to working and labor.

On this Labor Day we might think for a moment about the origins of this particular holiday, designed as it was to celebrate the “working” or the “laboring” class, as distinct from the “middle” and the “upper” classes. And while the media are making a Big Deal out of the “working-class” origins of this or that candidate, as opposed to the “privileged” status of another one, we might remind ourselves that we are all workers. An old Latin expression, ‘To work is to pray’ (Laborare est orare), and Sigmund Freud’s words toward the end of his life, that there are only two criteria needed to determine if an adult is mentally stable—to be able to work and to love (“zu arbeiten und zu lieben”), lead us into our topic for today.

Love and work—what connects them so intimately? In this Newsletter—and the article that you can read on our Website (www.relationship-coaches.com)--we discuss an age-old issue of how hard we human beings have to work at affirming the forces of love, generosity, altruism and caring, against the forces of resentment, cruelty, greed, and indifference toward the suffering of others. We can think of no more important topic: in the Bible it is the contradiction between the voice of God as compassionate and loving, that part of ourselves that motivates us to go beyond what is, and strive for what could and should be; and the voice of “accumulated pain,” the part of us that is suspicious, guarded and protected, and believes that the best defense is offense—get the other guy before he gets you, and always leads to power and domination over the other.

This story begins with the Bible’s account of Abraham and his son Isaac—one of the most cruel and depressing accounts of emotional deadness that could lead a father to undertake a blood sacrifice of his son, ostensibly carrying out the commands of “God” that he hears in his head. Rabbi Michael Lerner, the founder of Tikkun Magazine, and an eloquent writer on the “politics of meaning” in contemporary America, has recently commented on this story of Abraham, emphasizing the psychodynamics of healing—not just for Israel and the Jewish people, but for all of humanity*. We have been inspired by Lerner’s interpretation of this Biblical tale, and we want to share with you our take on how it can help us deepen our understanding of the dynamics of love and hate in adult romantic relationships.

The story of Abraham and his son Isaac is a tale of inconceivable cruelty to children, for Abraham’s willingness to bind his son and take him to Mount Moriah for the blood sacrifice is the perpetuation of the cruelty and brutality to which Abraham himself was subjected in his own childhood. In an effort to shape up the child, Abraham’s father shipped him off to the home of Nimrod for “re-education.” It seems that the spiritually precocious Abraham opposed the worship of idols and, despite Nimrod’s efforts to reform him, when he rebelliously continued to oppose idol worship, he was thrown into a fiery furnace. Lerner notes that Abraham survived because of his “exceptional spiritual strength” which was deeply rooted in his belief that a power greater than material things governed the universe. Nonetheless, Abraham was left with deep trauma from this experience, and, as we have learned in centuries of psychological study, deep trauma in childhood tends to get passed along to the next generation.

Lerner’s interpretation of the Abraham story dovetails neatly with what we teach couples in our workshops and intensives: we can act out of fear, anger, and defensiveness, protecting ourselves by lashing out in hurtful ways that are rooted in the unhealed wounds we carry from of our childhood history of “accumulated pain.” Or we can resist the temptation to react; we can overcome reactivity that tends to be our Old Brains defending us at whatever the cost, and we can choose loving and caring behaviors, guided by the Voice of God within us.

There’s the rub, you might ask. How, exactly, do we do this? We have been working with couples for a combined total of thirty years, and on our own relationship for over thirty years, and we still can be flummoxed by the emergence of the cruel and mean, the ugly and indifferent, voices that want to erupt, when our own core values and deepest trust issues would embrace the voice of compassion and love within. Why would we continue returning to the “scene of the crime”? Why do we seemingly and endlessly repeat the same old wounding patterns upon ourselves and our loved ones that we’ve inherited from this accumulated pain from the past?

Freud called this the “repetition compulsion,” the tendency to repeat compulsively the painful patterns from childhood, almost as if there were an unconscious hope that if we revisit this old pain enough, we might be able to overcome and master the feelings of powerlessness and victimization that overwhelmed us as defenseless children. Freud observed small children playing games with toys, where the child repeatedly “lost” the toy, “found” it again, lost and found it over and over again, deducing that even very young children will compulsively “work through” the trauma of a loss by playing out that loss repeatedly. He saw the purpose of this to break the cycle of repetition in order to heal the wounds of the trauma.

This seems simple enough. Right? Wrong! There is nothing simple at all about this hugely demanding task of breaking the cycle of endless repetition. Returning to the Abraham and Isaac story, Rabbi Lerner suggests that the greatness of Abraham is not that he succumbs to that voice of pain and trauma within and thus could visit upon his child the wounding of his past (being thrown into the furnace); rather, Abraham’s true greatness is that “he doesn’t go through with it,” that he experiences a “moment of transcendence” when staring into the eyes of Isaac, and hence breaks the cycle, the “chain of necessity” and transcends the compulsion to repeat what was done unto him; instead he chooses to pass on to his progeny something other than what was done to him.

What makes this story so compelling for the modern couple is how it models one person’s choice in the relationship to break the compulsive pattern. It is the simple truth that most of us would rather run away from: the conflict and tension and pain we experience in the repetitive cycle—no matter how excruciating—can actually help us grow and heal. This awareness, this recognition, this “ah ha”-experience, may not be grasped by every couple upon first exposure to our work, because it is counterintuitive and may seem at first kind of crazy. “You mean to say”—we often hear from incredulous couples—“that our horrific fights, our venom-spitting disagreements, the impasses we come to, are all about healing?” And that is exactly the point: both in your partner choice and in the psychodynamics of your day-to-day experience, the traumas of two childhoods are being re-enacted and re-experienced in the most painful of ways; and all of this is going on in the name of progress, to heal the wounds of the past, to allay the worst fears of the present, and provide some basis for a hopeful future.

We are also saying that this dynamic—the conflict and tension engendered by the repetitive and compulsive re-enactment of childhood wounding and trauma, are all part of the Royal Road to Healing and Transformation. While Freud and his contemporaries laid the groundwork for our understanding this by their pioneering researches into the psyche of the individual, they did not grasp the full implication of their work on childhood trauma and the repetition compulsion for the healing of adult relationships. That remained for a few stalwart pioneers of the late 20th and early 21st century, who began looking into the psychodynamics of committed adult relationships.

What they discovered was that this seemingly dark and ugly repetition compulsion in relationships contains the seed of transcendence within it. Like Abraham “transcending” the old tribal ways and initiating a new way for his people, so can we today choose to find that moment of transcendence in our personal relationships as well as our social, political, and economic relationships, in fact, in all areas of our lives. And through conscious and intentional effort, we can find the impulse toward healing that underlies the repetitive compulsion, and we can “work through” to the transformative potential.

We compulsively recreate the “scene of the crime” in our psyche, and hence we are unconsciously setting the scene for ourselves to consciously “get it,” to grasp with our conscious and aware selves the depth of the suffering and wounding we actually experienced as helpless children, and by so doing we are undertaking a reclamation project—reclaiming those parts of ourselves that have been so traumatized, so “frozen” or shamed into silence, that they are living like exiles within us. We are virtually “compelled” by our unconscious to go there, to revisit there, to look directly into the eyes of the suffering child within us, and to re-member—like bringing the dis-membered parts of ourselves back into the family. This is what happened to Abraham at the moment of transcendence—he remembered his own childhood trauma at the hands of Nimrod, he re-cognized (from the Greek word that literally means “to re-know,” implying that we knew it before) the lost part of himself that knew that something was amiss if he were asked to sacrifice his own son. Just as we need to recognize in our relationships that we have often become emotionally frozen, so “dumbed down” that we are numb and cannot feel the pain of the child within. When we are able to access that pain and know in our guts that we were once that suffering child within, then and only then, are we able to feel compassion for the pain of our partner, and for other human beings. At those moments of transcendence, we know that the emotional numbness that leads us to have no empathy for the other is not the way God, or Nature, intended us to be.

In sum, what Rabbi Lerner offers us with his interpretation of the Abraham-Isaac story is a deeper spiritual understanding of the dynamic within all of us that can plague us in our intimate relationships. When Abraham allowed himself to be commanded by what he perceived as “God”, directing him to take his bound son to Mount Moriah and offer him in blood sacrifice, he was really commanded by the voices of the “old gods,” the gods of the “accumulated pain,” he was taking a necessary and requisite step into the past and into his own pain, which he saw in the eyes of his son as he was bound for slaughter. And it was this step that allowed him to experience the moment of transcendence, to begin melting away the frozen sea within, that emotional deadness that was his legacy from emotional abuse as a child. Lerner’s insight is that it took that moment of gazing into the eyes of his bound and about-to-be-sacrificed child that freed Abraham from the prison of his own childhood and allowed him to hear the “true voice of God.”

The implications of this Biblical tale for healing the wounds in our most important primary relationships are several. First, we want to reiterate the difference between personal, individual growth, and deep healing. A basic tenet of our work is that our deepest wounding in childhood occurred in relationship; so, in order to truly heal these wounds, we must work them through in relationships, preferably in a compassionate, respectful, authentically present, committed, relationship. Much of the personal growth work that has been tabbed “New Age” can be helpful in getting us in deeper touch with ourselves; but it is mostly based on a paradigm of the individual. Our work stresses that the proof of the pudding is in the eating: the demonstration of personal growth work will always be the capacity of the individual to practice the principles within the relationship paradigm.

All too often, without help and skillful rituals and processes, which we call “dialogues,” we simply end up repeating the painful hurts or our past, and we end up oppressing others with this hurt, rather than transcending and healing the compulsion to repeat. We do not have to subscribe to any particular religious belief in order to hear the universal appeal of Rabbi Lerner’s “Force for Healing and Transformation” that he finds intrinsic to the Torah, or that a Christian might find in the Gospels of the New Testament, a Muslim in the Koran, or even a recovering addict in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Doing the “work” of engaging our partner in dialogue, with the full intention of staying connected, staying in process—no matter what—is some of the most important work we can do. Doing this work implies that every time we sit down to engage our partner in dialogue we state explicitly that we intend to stay connected and see the process through to the end. We must be very conscious and intentional about this: we can no more interrupt the process of dialoguing than we could interrupt an operation in mid-surgery—can you imagine jumping up from the operating table before the surgery is complete? Of course not, so we should not do it when dialoguing. At most, take a time out, but promise each other that you will return to the dialogue at a specified time (never assume that your partner knows when you will be returning: you do not want to play into his or her abandonment fantasies!). Every time we complete both sides of the dialogue successfully we are proclaiming to each other—and to the world around us—that we believe in our “human potential for transformation” (Lerner). We are reaffirming our sacred “labor” of loving, of healing our own psyches by containing the tendency to fall into noxious repetition (that repetition compulsion), and we are also healing our partner’s psyche, and lo and behold, we are also healing and transforming the world.

* Lerner’s books of note are Jewish Renewal; Politics of Meaning; Healing Israel/Palestine: A Path to Peace and Reconciliation; The Left Hand of God; Spirit Matters. The inspiration for this article is “The Voice of God vs. The Voice of Pain,” an exchange between Lerner and Julie Oxenberg in Tikkun (Sept-Oct 2008).