Experientially-based relationships

To understand psychotherapy and " intimate" relationships (in this sense of " intimate" ) requires that we understand that in each person, any moment, there is a level of feeling which isn't just this or that, which isn't just an emotion or a thought or anything that is clearly patterned. Rather, this level of feeling is a complex maze of very many implicit aspects that are not clearly known and have never been separated or sorted out. When speaking and action is conducted from that level, what is said and done is uniquely formed, and new, and not a repeating or role patterns.

Without going into oneself in this way one could only " take positions, " that is to say, one can only present some role pattern, some canned and already known way of acting or saying. Even in our best love relationships we often take positions, we express what we think we ought to express. We try to be how women or men should be, and do not nakedly show ourselves. Indeed, to show ourselves takes not only overcoming fear and justified mistrust, it also takes the effort of entering into our own unclearly felt inside, something many people can't imagine and don’t know how to do. (We presented very specific steps of doing that in the Focusing Section of this book. )

Role behavior and avoidance, covering up, occur very swiftly, often before we even had a chance to see how we do feel. We express what we consider right (according to some role or pattern we believe in), and only that, instead of coming to know what we feel.

Or, we express what we really feel in so far as it fits, but not the rest. Or, we express what most promises to save the situation, regardless of what we do feel. In the split second between feeling and saying we change it, select it. For example, if the other person says something that threatens the relationship, we quickly say whatever promises to make it better, rather than whatever we do feel (which is, for example, that what the person said scares us, because it threatens the relationship).

And, even if we are " completely honest, " this is only saying what is right there. There is much more, if instead of taking only what is on top, we are willing to enter into that level of feeling which is not as yet clearly this or that. Only by doing so can one be honest in a meaningful way. Honesty isn't just saying every unexamined thing that comes to mind, since only some things, and often one-sided ones, are immediately clear. One must enter into what is felt and not yet clear, and allow that to open itself up and to see what is in that.

One does not necessarily do what one feels like doing - one allows what one feels to come up, which often changes it minutes later. One step leads to the next and then the third; often we cannot anticipate at the first step what the third will be like. Therefore, there is a flow and movement, so that what seems a hopeless thing at one point, opens up and changes and becomes several quite other things only a few minutes later. Without this process, there is often no way to move through stuck places, so that what could alter in a few minutes becomes instead the permanent condition of the relationship for however long the relationship lasts. To make this process happen, definite and specific ways are required (many of which are described in this book).

The reason why going into what is felt and not yet clear has this power of getting bad situations unstuck, is because much of what we sense and feel is already interactional, it is already by one person toward the other. So, to remove it from the relationship and keep it covered insures that the interaction cannot get beyond it.

In the kind of " intimate" relationship we mean, each person at least sometimes, goes into the feeling mesh that is there, and can say or do from it at least some of what is found there, so that, during such times, nothing is canned, nothing is routine, new forms of speech and action have to be invented. This kind of sensing into oneself, and expressing, moves beyond the older roles. It is a " zig-zag" between felt inwardness and roles.

Not all relationships need be " intimate”. Often that won’t be what we want at all. We are using the " intimate" kind of relation as an example, first to illustrate that something other than roles is possible. Shortly, we will apply the zig-zag structure to other kinds of relationships.

It had seemed impossible that there would be anything but roles and patterns, or else silence and inaction. Now it turns out that living beyond roles is possible. How was the puzzle solved? It was solved, not by an absence of words and actions, but by a constantly new invention of words and actions. And how was this constant or frequent invention of words and acts possible? It was by sensing into oneself between these words and the next, or between this bit of action or interaction, and the next bit.

It is now interesting to note that Turner, who considered living beyond roles as an impossibility except as a temporary interlude between roles, reported the great intimacy which develops between those temporarily de-roled people! He thought of this as lessthan roles, as a " least common denominator. " What if, instead, we think of it as more, so that instead of repeating the same few, canned, role-behaviors, these people invented new things to say and do, from their feelings. To put it perhaps too grandiosely, this is like inventing new culture every few minutes. To say this is to bring home that the process beyond roles is more, not less, than the few roles from which these people have been temporarily freed. Rather than not knowing what to say or do because the roles are gone, people can shape something directly from the feeling they now have, for nothing prevents them. The result of this, when done in interaction, is a closeness which no roles can give, for one comes into touch with another person's felt inwardness. The person, too, in such a relation, first comes to know inwardness in a way not previously known, as many facets come to be where only a hardly attended to, dull sense was before.

Human nature is therefore not any or all of those very different patterns we find in different places. It is not even an inward source of patterns, as if the new patterns and things to say and do were waiting there, to be noticed. Rather, the inside, too, stays dull and dumb or has only repetitious contents, unless it is lived out forward into new words and actions, or patterns.

How did we come to need such a role-sensing alternation? At one time, perhaps, the roles were sufficient for people and they did live fully forward in them. Perhaps long ago, when people found themselves wondering about their lives and anxious about it, they could say to themselves, " I am a …………, and a ……………, " and perhaps whatever they put into those blanks felt like it was them. Today this doesn't work for most people. The roles don't hold us up, they don't sustain us - we have to hold them up.

We hold up the roles, most of each day, and then we come exhausted to the one relationship we hope we can really live in - which puts a heavy load on that one relationship, if we even have such a relationship. It helps to see how unnaturally demanding we are in the one relationship, because in none of the others do we even expect to be ourselves. We get little experience of how to do that well and still leave room for the other person. The way we have roles now most of the time is to give up on sensing ourselves continuous with our felt living in the role. A few islands of such living are supposed to be enough for us, and we're lucky if we have them. Maybe most people don't.