Little did I know this afternoon as I went to pick up my four-year-old son, Alexander, that I was about to become a "couple therapist" for Alexander and his best friend Ben. Alexander and Ben had their regularly scheduled every-other-Monday playdate. And as I approached Alexander on the playground he said, "Mommy, I want Ben to come to my house." As Ben and his dad Steve came over to meet us, I told Steve, "Alexander wants Ben to come over to our house."

Thinking this was no big deal — the boys often went to Ben's house and taking turns was only fair—
I told Steve about Alexander's request. No sooner had I delivered the message, Ben chimed in, "I don't want to go to Alexander's house. I want him to go to my house."

"Mommy, I don't want to go to Ben's house. I want him to come to my house," declared Alexander, feeling hurt and despairing.

"I don't want to go to Alexander's house. I want him to come to my house," responded Ben with conviction. As I watched these two four-year-olds struggling with different desires that seemed irreconcilable and easily slipping into the powerlessness of blame, I said to myself, "What is the difference between what Alexander and Ben are doing with each other and what I witness most adults doing as they hit the wall in intimate relating?" Not a whole lot!

And so began a relationship process that lasted forty minutes facilitated by me with Steve in collaboration. Our task was to act as facilitators and containers for the boys until we either reached a mutually agreeable creative solution or we determined they could not come to an agreement and we should cancel the playdate for the day. For the longest time both boys were rooted in their reptilian brain reactions of not budging an inch and dismissing creative alternatives. I kept trying to give them the message, "Neither one of you is wrong. Both of you are right. You just have different desires that don't agree. Let's come up with a win-win for both of you."

I give the boys a lot of credit. They both hung in there through all the tension and discomfort. They allowed facilitation and containment. And they achieved a win-win. Faced with the likelihood that no agreement meant no playdate, spiced with a lot of prayer and the grace of God, the two boys finally agreed to get a take-out lunch and eat outside at a local playground. Playdate saved!

So started a model of relational struggle that shows up no more elegantly or easily resolvable in adults who are 24, 44, or 64! Steve and I found ourselves needing to work with all the delicate and strong emotions that emerged in the two boys, each unwilling to defer to the other. Anger, sadness, fear, disappointment and stubbornness emerged, all colored in a backdrop of blame. Many adults run from the conflict, tighten at the discomfort and never complete the journey to a creative resolution of the struggle.

While relationships are at the heart of a fulfilling life, we are remarkably uneducated about the journey it takes to reach the destination of the love we need. ALL intimate, emotionally involved relationships — best friends, lovers, parent-child, business partners — take us to the same place if we choose to follow the path of the heart and work with our triggers rather than numbing out, withdrawing or defending against them. We are neither given the context for how relationships grow nor the tools it takes to tend the relational garden.

For one, the word "relationship" is used in far too narrow a frame in ordinary circles. It implies a romantic, sexual liaison between two people, often of the male and female gender, with a long-term goal of marriage. All other emotional ties are cast aside, less important and less central. With this same narrow frame, we are not educated about the similarities between a primary love relationship and all emotionally significant relationships.

As we go deeper and get closer emotionally, all our issues of attachment, trust, and connection are brought to the surface from the bowels of our psyche. When we are emotionally invested in another person, we are vulnerable. And while vulnerability can lead to intimacy, historically for most of us, vulnerability has led to hurt, betrayal, abandonment and loss of love. This happens to us with our parents as children. It happens all through our development into our adulthood. And it happens in adult relationships.

There is something in our very chemistry that invites relationships to be a ground for emotional healing and a restoration of self-worth and love or a re-enactment of traumatic moments past. Sherry Cohen, a therapist in Newton, described to me how when we open our hearts we experience a post-traumatic stress response, PTSD. Pheromones, sometimes described as "psychic/energetic hormones" secreted by the body, are an active player in attraction and run wild as we connect with another person and open our hearts to love.

"Pheromones drive the sense of wanting to be with another person, of longing, of wanting to connect, of wanting to be physical and emotional. With pheromones come the excitement, the love and the sex, and the symptoms of PTSD. If people get close and get pulled in with pheromones," says Cohen, "their issues around attachment get pulled in too."

Our capacities for attachment, bonding, trust and constancy are often damaged in our development, so as we open our hearts, we experience a sense of chaotic attachment which is accompanied by PTSD. The fear of going too far, too fast, the experience of being overtaken by a deep primal terror that seems greater than one would expect as a rational adult, fixating on "doing it right" or on possible mistakes that seem to have larger than life stakes, repetitive thoughts and feelings replaying good or bad moments again and again and again all reflect the shadow of a PTSD response as we open our hearts.

"It's hard for people to connect around all of this," notes Cohen. "Pheromones are most up in a new relationship because of the level of excitement and risk. Getting close to another person can be a beautiful and exciting time and it can be a terrifying time."

Some have the context with which to view this passage into intimacy and find resources, inner and outer, to weather the initial storm. Many lack the roadmap, and respond to the intensity of feeling in both themselves and their partner by disconnecting after going deep. Pulling away, numbing out, dissociating, experiencing a sudden "change of heart," even abandoning entirely the person who was once the object of such passion and love are all reactions to the terror of intimacy and opening the heart.

Why are there often such dramatic estrangements in families? Why do accomplished professional adults often melt into three-year-old terror in the presence of their now elderly father? Why do lovers get close and then abandon each other? Why do best friends like Alexander and Ben eventually and perhaps inevitably end up in an intense intimate fight? Close relationships invite us to go deeper into our woundedness, into our primal terror, and either run for the mountains never to be heard from again or find the inner and outer resources to create a new kind of intimacy and safety that allows us to heal.

In order to rise to the challenge of relating we first need to find a home in our own hearts. Our own hearts may feel homeless, both in our chests and in the world at large. Engulfment and abandonment are two of the most primal fears that arise as relationships start. We move into the dark night of the soul reliving early experiences of aloneness, rejection in our vulnerability, smothering, emotional invasion, and neglect.

In the March/April issue of Spirit of Change I wrote in depth about the ways our hearts become untouchable and defended against love in "The Traumatized Heart." Until we establish an emotional anchor or home base, it is difficult, if not just too frightening, to reach out and do an emotionally involved relational dance with somebody else. Our heart may yearn for connection, but as the possibility of love gets closer, we may find ourselves experiencing a dissociated heart.

A friend of mine told me a sad story of a love affair her friend Jean had with a man who pursued Jean with great passion for the first year of their relationship. He bought her beautiful clothing, took her to the finest restaurants, even asked her to come visit him in Greece, offering to pay for her plane ticket. Jean was deeply touched by the seemingly constant attention she was receiving. The man had plenty of time for relationship, was financially independent and retired from his business, and seemed to really cherish his new love.

After dating for about a year, the man decided to move to Greece and asked Jean to come along. Thinking she had finally met the man she would share the rest of her life with, she sold her home, gave up her job and accompanied him to his new life in Greece. My friend would periodically check in with Jean, and discovered she was having a hard time in her new life. The bubble had burst. Her once devoted partner now stayed out late and seemed to have little energy to give to their relationship. In fact, he seemed more interested in almost everything else than Jean.

"What did he want...a cook and housekeeper?" Jean told my friend. Had he had a change of heart? Jean could not understand this sudden shift from emotional connection to disconnection. Her great love seemed to vaporize just as magically as he had appeared. She finally gave up and moved back to the States, confused and needing to put back together the pieces of her life. Her once great love seemed to be demonstrating a dissociated heart.

One of the things I have found most sad about many people as they explore the mysterious terrain of love is that they don't really know their hearts in a sustainable, grounded way. In my own life I have met countless men who declare love, attraction and passion in one moment, only to disappear from the scene in a heartbeat as though one moment had no relationship to the next. I often asked myself, "Are they being deceptive? Are they insincere? Or do they simply not know their own hearts?" After much deep thought I realized most of these individuals were sincere in the moment. They simply could not "connect the dots" from one moment to the next. As people pursue and get closer to what they seemingly want, they often encounter terror and run way. There is a famous line from the world of Werner Erhard decades ago, "When you get what you want, can you take it?"

How can one build safety and trust in relating if one moment's truth has no relationship to the truth of the next? What does it take to train our hearts and minds for relationships to be more like marathons, a long term journey, rather than a short-term hit or fix? What have we done to our social fabric, to the way we raise our children that intimacy is so terrifying, and seemingly life-threatening in a primal way? These are important questions we need to take to heart and address for love to become safe and sacred, as well it should be.

The Care and Feeling of a Relationship

If I could design a curriculum for the education of our children, and even a professional development track in the adult world of work, I would require a mandatory course of study in the care and feeding of relationship. Relationships are so central to both the leaning and the functioning of our lives and our world. And nowhere in the structures of the "real" world are models of love and sustainability put forth with the same urgency as learning English, Math and Science. In this course of study, people would explore the importance of acts of kindness in feeding the connection that exists between any two people. Expressing appreciation regularly, almost like a meditative practice, sincerely from the heart, nurtures the bond between any two people. Even viewing the relationship as a living organism that needs to be fed and cared for like any other living creature, would be a breakthrough.

People would be taught about the importance of creating emotional safety as a foundation for relating intimately over time. Emotional safety is a rare experience in our world. Until we have experienced it, how can we internalize it or pass it on to those that we love? Part of creating emotional safety is offering a fundamental commitment to a relationship that all issues are workable and neither person will be the first to leave. When hitting the walls that all of us inevitably hit, if we can't work through them in ourselves or with the other person, then the appropriate response is to find a third party, a facilitator, who can help soften the conflict and enlarge the relational playing field for healing and growth.

A living laboratory would offer opportunities to explore emotional expression and exchange. People would learn to speak and listen from the heart and experience both hearing and being heard. Discovering the vulnerability and passion of expressing anger, the courage and strength involved in expressing vulnerability and the importance of remaining emotionally present through receiving all thoughts and feelings would be lessons along the way.

Healthy, boundaried and abundant touch and affection would be restored to the relational playing field. An emphasis would be placed on restoring our primary sensory experience in relationship. People would learn how physical relating often cuts through our defenses. When used respectfully and appropriately, touch can prevent countless fights, experiences of pain and disconnection, and mutual powerlessness when two people cannot verbally connect.

People would learn the art of relationship choreography, balancing relationship process work with fun/play/activities that allow time to be in relationship and enjoy it. Pacing would be a central area for study, since many of us have not been given models of how it can be or opportunities to find our own internal pace. Rather than being process averse, people would discover the value and even the long-term safety of talking about the relationship, talking about individual feelings and needs, learning to make requests that can be received respectfully whether the response be yes or no, and checking in regularly on how things are going so that fine tuning can be done.

And finally, relationships would be presented as a co-creative project I would encourage each of the two parties who choose to relate to consider what they really want in their lives and how the relationship can be a vessel to both hold and realize these deep desires. Developing a vision and refining it over time would be a fundamental task of relationship. Then learning how to balance conscious creation with allowing the organic evolution and unfoldment of the living organism the relationship could be studied as an art form.

Commitment as a Support Rather than a Prison 

In our short-term oriented, have-it-now society, so many of us are commitment phobic. This past fall as I decided to look for a roommate, I encountered person after person who could not make the one year commitment I was asking for, to live at my house. I was amazed how scary, vulnerable and uncertain people's lives were, and how sincere responsible people could not project ahead even twelve months to know where they needed to be. I eventually decided to give up the search. Perhaps the universe was telling me I did not really need the extra roommate. I could not go forward without a reasonable commitment.

While fear of commitment is rooted in fear of entrapment, of losing freedom, of forfeiting unknown possibilities, commitment is fundamental for sustainability of any human relationship. Ironically, commitment creates more freedom. Commitment creates a foundation, a structure, a container. And structure holds possibility, just like a rhythm, a heartbeat. Commitment is like planting a seed in the earth. If the seed in not planted, nothing can germinate and grow.

Commitment offers the possibility of steady presence and of energy being invested towards a relational goal. Commitment builds an emotional foundation for unfolding, opening, growing, deepening a connection between any two people. There is a Goethe quote about commitment that I used to have on my refrigerator many years ago, noting that once we are committed then God can do his/her magic in our lives. Once we are committed, the spiritual forces of life can support us. And commitment is a choice we make everyday — to be present and embodied in relating. It is not something we take for granted.

I make jokes with my friend about how I come from the "Ain't No Mountain High Enough School of Relationship." Commitment is when the heart puts down a stake in the ground and says, "I will do whatever it takes..."

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Linda Marks, MSM, has practiced heart-centered, psychospiritual body-centered psychotherapy for sixteen years.  She is founder of the Institute for Emotional-Kinesthetic Psychotherapy in Newton, and author of LIVING WITH VISION: RECLAIMING THE POWER OF THE HEART (Knowledge Systems, 1988).  She has taught and spoken nationally and internationally, and has been a leader in the emerging field of somatic psychology.  She lives in Newton, MA with her four year old son, Alexander.  Linda's new book EMBODYING THE SOUL: DANCING INTO LIFE is due for release in the spring of 2001.  You can contact her at (617)965-7846 or LSMHEART@aol.com

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