Resolving Relationship Problems
Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings during a
Shifting into Your New Consciousness Group 3/12/09
(Names are changed to protect privacy of participants.)
(To Randy) “It’s like you haven’t found the basis to be loving on your own terms. For you, what constitutes being loving is doing what other people tell you being loving is. And since it doesn’t feel congruent to you, you’re not good at doing it. But you don’t seem to recognize that your own feelings and the way you feel like expressing them, is a true and valid expression. It is your contribution and your gift. And unless you are starting from there, regardless of how the other person responds, then you have nothing to offer.
You both (Randy and his wife) have been leaning on each other to define reality for yourselves. Because you’re listening to her description of you, you see yourself as being deceptive, bad, and inadequate. Or else you just dig in your heels and say, ‘Well that’s the way I am.’ I’m sure she’s doing something similar in relation to you, having talked to her personally. She was letting me define reality for her almost immediately, because I told her something that I thought, and she had to get me to change my mind. That’s because the moment someone says something that rattles her view of things, then she’s got to make them stop because she is so uncertain about her own take on reality. The challenge for you to work on for right now is defining yourself from your own internal experience.
There are two things happening at the same time in your relationship, which makes things confusing. There is what she considers to be her needs, which is probably not in reality in the first place. And then there is your lack of ability to express your emotional feelings toward her. So both things are happening at the same time, and they are not related, but just triggers for each other. And you’ve confused the two. Probably your emotional withdrawal is very much related to feeling pressure, probably beginning with your mother, would be my guess, so it’s a defense system. It’s a putting up of walls, and because it’s a defense against feeling controlled, it becomes a power-struggle between you and Donna. So you need to more and more withdraw from the reactivity in relation to her, and strictly work on yourself from your own perspective, and know that her response to you probably has little to do with reality. You feeling controlled by her is an unhealed issue in you. There’s some weakness you have in relation to women, there’s some limiting decision in which they have all of the power, and you have none. And then everything you do from that point on is a reaction to that and a defense system against that. And from that position you can’t really give her anything.
If either of you changed radically it could have a really big impact on the other. Both of you are coming from major defense systems in relation to each other. Both of you have walls up. They’re triggering each other and exacerbate each other. It means that you’re not vulnerable, and she’s not vulnerable. And you trigger her and she triggers you. So from that place it’s a really, really painful situation. If she were to heal the unhealed issues in her, so that she didn’t have the channels blocked, then you could do something and she could receive it. And that would make a big difference for you because you wouldn’t feel so unworthy. It wouldn’t trigger the feeling that nothing you could possibly do would make any difference. And then from your end, if you could be vulnerable and allow her emotionally in, she probably wouldn’t be trying to get to you so much of the time.
The way things are now, you can’t go beyond a certain, very limited point toward her because you have a wall up; and Donna needs you to come way beyond a certain point in order for her to think you are giving her something. So if you add as far as she thinks you should come, plus the wall that you’ve got, it’s a huge chasm, an impossible thing. Now if you were a person who was actually able to be vulnerable emotionally in relationship, she would still have a negative response to you, as if you weren’t doing the right thing. But it would be less extreme because you wouldn’t have the wall up. And the same thing goes in the opposite direction. If she weren’t controlling, you would still not be very emotionally available, but it would be less extreme.
This often happens in relationships in which there are interlocking neurosis or limiting decisions. You’re attracted to a person with the exact structure that will trigger you, because the limiting decision causes you to believe that that’s the only kind of person available to you for an intimate relationship. And you probably wouldn’t recognize a person who didn’t have that dysfunction as a potential intimate partner. So you would be attracted to a person similar to Donna as long as you have the dysfunctional structure that you built. And it’s similar for her in relation to men. And so you attract each other, and that’s the expectation that you both have. And so then it’s not only your dysfunction, but it’s your dysfunction plus hers. And for her it’s her dysfunction plus yours.
You’re saying, sometimes you doubt yourself and wonder if you are really that bad. It’s never about being bad. It’s dysfunctional perhaps. It’s defended perhaps. It’s certainly not something you’re doing on purpose. There’s no moral judgment in relation to how you’re behaving. Both of you have been morally judging each other, which makes it impossible. What we’re really dealing with is major dysfunction on both parts. It’s something that needs unwinding, sorting out, and healing. It takes compassion — you having compassion for yourself and for her, and the same from her end.
