Souls Undressing
 

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This is an excerpt from the book SOULS UNDRESSING: 

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"My client, a young woman (let us call her Fanny) enters the room in a state of near-ecstasy. That’s an easy one to diagnose - she must be in love.

The ‘symptoms’ are blatant. Her smile swollen to an unnatural dimension, her eyes starry, her facial skin practically pulsing with life, her entire being seems to be inches above ground. And if all of this was not enough, now comes an angelic voice which announces, as soon as she hits the armchair, ‘I am in love!’

As her symptoms become enhanced, so does my fear of the conversation which is to ensue.

I am reminded of the title of one of my favourite books, Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom. The title alludes to the fact that therapists can easily kill love – for the simple reason that one of the most important tools we use in therapy is conscious awareness. And this is something that love is allergic to.

I would hate to be the hooded executioner of love. So I respond cautiously. However, her vibration sweeps me along, just as an audience at a concert turns ecstatic within seconds of hearing the first familiar bars of their favourite music. She tells me that they are not ‘a thing’ as yet, nothing has been declared, but they are spending a tremendous amount of time together and send hundreds of messages through the periods of separation. Her elation mingles with fear. It is not failure she is worried about – she is almost sure that they will soon be a couple. She is much more worried about what might come later. She is a very intelligent young girl with tremendous awareness. Even now, as she dangles her legs from the pink cloud of love up in some romantic sky-vault, she can sense that she had been down this road before. Previously we had done a lot of work on the termination of her previous relationship. The beginning was quite similar. Similarly idyllic. Now she is worried – she does not want this relationship to run along the same arch.

’You know, if I think about it honestly, this is not the only relationship that started this way. There were others before. Then once I felt safe, they soon turned boring. I started looking for excitement elsewhere.’

‘You would like to preserve this initial euphoria?’

‘Yes! Of course I know it is impossible. And… another part of it is that this period of longing is not always a dream journey, either. I am scared rigid that he might get on top of me.’

‘Get on top of you?’

‘I don’t want to want him more than he wants me. The very idea is frightening.’ Her face is now suffused with alarm. ‘Every time he takes a few minutes to react to my message I am instantly scared and start having thoughts like I am not really the woman he wants, he doesn’t love me, he doesn’t want me… And then I immediately start working on dismantling everything inside me that I feel for him.’

She pauses to think.

‘Nothing can be worse than loving him more than he loves me.’

‘So this wonderful period of longing does mingle with quite a lot of uncertainty.’

‘Well, yes… and the safe period mingles with boredom. That’s even scarier… What if this relationship turns out to be no different than any other? What if the same thing happens again? What if it turns boring and I will be there once more, desperate to find new excitement? He is so special I really don’t want this to happen with him.’

These two ‘ways of being’ really stand out for me. The longing, so filled with fears and the boredom of safety. It makes me think of a classic method used in Gestalt therapy.

‘How would you like it if we acted out these two periods, these two selves in you, in physical space? We could use two chairs. One represents the Fanny who is filled with longing and fears, the other the Fanny who is safe but is yearning for new excitements. The idea is that you sit in the chair of the self you are talking from.’

She likes the idea.

‘I adore this longing! It is so exciting! You saw how I was when I arrived…,’ says the Fanny of the longing chair. She is filled with enthusiasm and joy, just like at the beginning of our session.

‘At the same time I am scared rigid!’, she adds rapidly.

‘I get scared the moment his message is late. It is awful…’ Her face changes rapidly, it is now more worried rather than anything else. ‘I want to have no doubts at all, I want to be sure he loves me…’  She ponders this for a while. ‘Not just that he loves me, but that I am the one he loves most of all in the whole world! It is frightening if I am not…  I want to sit in the other chair as soon as possible.’

She moves into the other chair. Now I hear the Fanny who has got what she wanted. Now she is safe. This is a softer voice.

‘It is very peaceful and pleasant to sit here. Even if I don’t get a text I know he is mine. That he loves me. That we are together and belong to each other.’ She smiles and her voice turns even softer. ‘This is really reassuring, but… usually there is some excitement missing… you know, whenever I am in company and there are lot of guys, even if I am not interested in any of them, it is important to feel that I get their attention. So I can know that they find me interesting. Even the ones I would never think of having anything to do with. I need to know that I am interesting!’

I notice her intonation.

‘You NEED to know that you are interesting.’

‘Yes, I NEED to! Because if I am not… that is… frightening, that cannot be…” – and she says this with an urgency of despair. ‘It is important to prove, to show, how good I am. If I don’t, something starts to vibrate inside me. I feel I am missing something.’

We talk at length about this. She discovers a number of things. And she gets more and more tense. She now says with a face set with a determination springing from despair, ‘But I know I am good! I know I am the best for him, too! It is no question!’

‘You can easily prove that you are good. The best, in fact.’

‘Yes! I know it will work again this time! It’s just…’

A great sigh. She crumples up a little.

‘What is happening with you now?’

‘It is tiring… Very tiring…’

‘It is tiring to prove that you are good.’

‘Yes… bloody tiring.’

Her voice goes soft and her face dejected.

‘No wonder I want to switch off from it all sometimes. At times like that I need to be totally alone.’ She falls silent. And stays that way for a long time.

‘The people around me probably wouldn’t believe how much I need solitude. That is the only way I can get re-charged…’

‘If I am getting you right, you can easily prove to yourself and others that you are good, which gives you a great lot of pleasure but is also very tiring. It requires constant effort...’

‘Yes…’, she says with another sigh. Followed by an outburst.

‘I would be so happy if I could feel I am good without having to prove it… that I am special and valuable… without proving… I don’t want to have to prove anything. I want it to just be that way. Just… to be loved…’ Her eyes, previously so bright, are now all tears.

‘To be loved regardless of all,’ I mirror, after a brief delay.

‘Yes. To be… just loved.’ Another sigh, slightly more desperate.

‘It feels as if I had to prove every single minute that I am valuable. That I am loveable… that I am worth being loved.’ Again, I see tears in her eyes. They quietly whisper, ‘If only…’

Looking at her I hear her earlier sentence echo in me and see the face that said it.

‘Nothing can be worse than loving more than I am loved.’ I share this with her. We talk for a long time. She tells me how as a small child she had longed for her mother’s love, which she usually could not attain the way she wanted to. She has extremely painful memories of how her feelings overflowed and how she would raise her arms for an embrace and get only icy coldness in response. Causing grievous harm to the soul.

‘Nothing can be worse than being the one who loves more.’

How does something like that ever heal? Bit by bit she had learnt to notice and gather in signs that she was valuable. From others. From her dad, her classmates, her boyfriends – anyone. Her sense of humour, her playfulness and her razor-sharp intelligence helped her become the favourite wherever she went. Her father’s favourite daughter, the most popular girl among her friends, the most desired young woman in the eyes of men, an excellent student, a special artist.

Erick Fromm believes that the difference between a mother’s love and a father’s love, at least in the symbolic sense, is that maternal love is unconditional, while paternal love is tied in with performance. And what can you do to get unconditional love? Nothing. That is its beauty. That you get it just for existing. You don’t need to do anything. It is your birth-right.

And that is also what’s frightening about it. If it is not there, there is absolutely nothing on earth you can do to get it. Well, there does seem to be a makeshift solution of a kind. For instance, you can reach out and take a bit of conditional love off the shelf instead. Luckily, you don’t need to go to mummy or daddy to get that. Vendors of conditional love are everywhere. If you are smart you can get some from them.

Well, Fanny was smart. She was never granted the yes she had desired most. But she was extremely creative in gathering in other types of yes and her soul feasted on them. This is what she was afraid of losing should she enter a stable relationship.

If you say yes to one thing, you also say no to a number of other things. This is a sad rule in life. Both paths entailed lots of yeses and also lots of nos for her.

Hmm… yeses and nos. I believe the costumes of our soul are born from dramatic encounters. The clash of the yeses and nos. As in Fanny’s case. What were the yeses I was granted as a child? And where would I have liked a yes? Whose recognition, whose love, whose attention was it I longed for? What are the yeses I will never receive?

A yes is never lost, but it does become transformed. As Mark Twain put it, ’If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don’t like stoves.’

This is how our soul becomes tangled after we learn all about what is possible and what is impossible, about desires we entertain and rejections we suffer, after we learn from our experiences of hot and cold stoves.

This must be what happened to Fanny, too. Her soul treated the initial wound with a pretty tangle, but now this was preventing her from meeting other souls in a clean and genuine fashion.

‘It was really shocking for me to experience with the two chairs how tremendously my relationships had been influenced by my desire to prove myself and to secure the feeling that I am valuable. All my life,’ says Fanny.

Now I ask her to stand up and look at the two chairs from the outside. She stands there overwhelmed. She says, her voice breaking, ‘Phew… this is the movie of my life… right in front of me… this is how I go round and round between the two chairs…’

I too, am touched to have seen how this revolving motion has taken shape in front of us like a stage play. An astounding snapshot of the way in which the course of a life is spelt out from the curious tangle of yeses and nos. A thought from Kierkegaard springs into my mind, ‘A person who goes astray inwardly has less room for manoeuvre; he soon finds he is going round in a circle from which he cannot escape.’

Is that what is happening now, too?

‘I don’t want it to be like this!’, Fanny goes on, with a painful poignancy in her voice. ‘He is so different, so special… I don’t want this to happen again…’"

 

This was an excerpt from the book SOULS UNDRESSING: How the Ability to Unlearn Can Change the Way We Live and Connect