Elizabeth Gilbert said the
following about soul mates in Eat, Pray,
Love:
“People think a soul mate
is your perfect fit, and that's what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a
mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person
who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
What’s funny about Gilbert writing
this is that she actually wrote that while on a year-long self-discovery trip
where she stayed away from men and sex….then came to find that both independence
and romantic love are important. I
appreciate my alone time, my thoughts in the quiet, and self-reflecting. But I am beginning to realize that you can
get too comfortable with yourself, your ways, your habits, and while you can
change for a while on your own, and while it is important to do the work
independently, maybe it does take others to push you further. Maybe that’s why
we were built to be social beings, so we can grasp and grow from others. I know that the situations that make me squirm
have been where I need the most work…and continue to be.
I recently wrote about attachment
styles and that led me to research further…this
stuff is fascinating! If you can recall last week’s blog, keep what
I said in mind as you read this one.
I recently read a book called
(BARF) “Getting the love you want” by Dr. Harville Hendrix. And while the title makes me want to puke,
it’s just a spectacular book. It really
is. I highly suggest reading it if you
want to understand yourself.
First, here is a quote from
the book that leads me to believe more in the idea of soul mates, that is, in
the sense that Gilbert wrote about them….
“Much of nature has a dyadic or two-part
structure. According to quantum physics,
each particle that comes into being is paired with another particle. Furthermore, each particle is both a point
and a wave depending upon how it is viewed, which is why some physicists now
refer to particles as “wavicles.” Sexual reproduction in the majority of
species we know involves two entities; Noah included one of each on the ark.
Our DNA splits into two and then generates the missing half. Our cells divide into two. Anthropologists tell us that in the creation
stories in most cultures, people are first introduced as a couple, not as
separate individuals. Physiologists tell
us that our brains are complementary-right and left brain. Our language is binary: up and down, black
and white, etc. Our blood circulates in
oscillation between the right and left sides of our body. A recent discovery in
astronomy gives us another example of the dyadic nature of the universe, one
that is especially appropriate for our view of love relationships. We now know that most stars in the sky are
not solitary stars like our sun. Most of
them have a “companion star.” The two stars are attracted to each other by a
strong gravitational force but are kept from collapsing into each other by an
opposing centrifugal force. “
So what he is getting at is
that it is natural to have a need for someone else. But pay attention to that last sentence….The
perfect relationship, the one we seek, is called the “Passionate Friendship.” But
this passionate friendship often isn’t an easy road because there is a push and
a pull….
The premise for the book is
this, and I will do my very best to simplify big concepts, EEEK:
WHEN WE DEVELOP HOLES
We all have battle wounds
from when we were kids which means that most of us fill our lives trying to
fill them up or figure them out. Every
child needs an attuned parent to grow up and have secure attachments in their
adult relationships, but a lot of us didn’t have that, or sometimes what’s more
confusing, we had one parent who was attuned to our needs and one who
wasn’t. This says to a child “Now I need you, now I don’t,” and we unfortunately
bring these wounds into our adult relationships.
To understand this book, you
have to understand the concept of the OLD Brain and the NEW brain….. The book
says “The unconscious mind has great
difficulty distinguishing between past and present. When couples repair
connection in their present day relationship, they simultaneously heal the
trauma they felt as young children.”
Two people cannot connect if they live in fear of being abandoned or
overwhelmed by their partners. (We’ll
get to that in a minute, these people are called Fusers and Isolators.) What’s interesting though and really pay
close attention to this-the fact that the unconscious mind doesn’t know
past versus present is super important-makes sense why our coping mechanisms look
close to what they did when we were children, right? It’s hard breaking habits and patterns,
especially when new hurts look and feel like old hurts….our brains simply don’t
know the difference on an unconscious level.
That is because of the…..
OLD BRAIN
The “Old brain” refers the
portion of the brain that includes both the brain stem and the limbic
system. It is the hard-wired stuff and
determines most of your automatic reactions.
Old brain asks “Is this safe?” The only thing your old brain seems to
care about is whether a person is someone to nurture, be nurtured by, have sex
with, run away from, submit to, and attack.
Your old brain takes images that say whether someone is a stranger, if
there are dangerous episodes associated with that image, or whether pleasure
has been associated with it.
Your old brain has no sense
of linear time.
NEW BRAIN
The “New brain” is the
cerebral cortex, the part of you that is conscious, alert, and in contact with
your daily surroundings.
So here is the deal…a lot of
the decisions we make regarding partners happen without even knowing it. We often pick people based on our old
brains. Your old brain reads signals and
bases the findings on your parents within a matter of seconds without your even
knowing it. The reason that you often
find yourself with someone like your parents, or with people who have the exact
characteristic that scares you is because your old brain believes that it has
finally found the candidate to make up for the psychological and emotional
damage you experienced in childhood. Then with our new brain, we think “Why did I
do that? I knew better!”
Here is an example of how our
New and Old Brains are at war….
WHY DO OPPOSITES OFTEN ATTRACT?
Let’s use two examples, even
though there are many in the book….
ISOLATOR: A
person who protects his or her autonomy could be someone with an insecure
mother or father. Maybe the parent impeded
on the child’s independence and the child always fears becoming engulfed. This person is likely to become an “isolator.” They unconsciously push others away. They keep people at a distance, need a lot of
space, want freedom, they don’t want to be pinned down to a single relationship.
FUSER: This is a person who experienced the opposite, who felt abandoned as a child, who didn’t
have a lot of stability, someone with wishy-washy parents. Fusers crave attention, physical affection,
they will need stability. They have an
insatiable need for closeness. Divorce
fills them with terror, they need reassurance, verbal contact, etc. and they feel abandoned and unloved when they
don’t get it.
These two people often wind
up together and get married.
On a conscious level, it
makes little sense that if you have a fear
of being suffocated or losing your freedom that you would wind up with
someone who has an insatiable need for affection, just like it makes little sense
that if you have a fear of abandonment, you would seek out an isolator. But
according to the book, it happens and it’s because your old brain tries to
recreate the conditions of your childhood in order to correct the wounds. The
really awesome thing though is that because
your old brain has no concept of time, if you can fix the outcome with the
person you are with currently, you can heal the same wound from when you were a
child—because your brain doesn’t have a concept of time.
Obviously, a cycle is going
to emerge and it might be very hard. The
relationship might end because of the push and pull, only to try a relationship
with someone else, and that ends, and so on and so on. Patterns emerge. A person who gets freaked out by closeness is
going to pull away, causing the person who needs closeness to panic and pull
more until the Isolator runs away. But
what the Isolator doesn’t realize is that the Fuser has the key to helping him/her
heal his or her wounds, just like the Isolator holds the key to healing the
Fuser’s wounds. This takes me back to the quote about soul mates…if it’s too
comfortable and no one is pushing the other to be more, then what is the point?
Are we stars in the sky with that force
pulling us toward each other and yet there’s something keeping us apart? What if we can fill those holes with each
other, with one swift motion, together?
What is this “Passionate
Friendship?” Hendrix boils the
phenomenon down to 4 sentences….
Phenomenon of recognition-This is when you click, you feel like you have known
each other forever. You bond naturally.
Phenomenon of timelessness-It feels like you have known each other forever, even
if it hasn’t been very long.
Phenomenon of reunification-You feel filled up. This happens because, for
example, a person who is not at ease with his or her sexuality will wind up
with someone who is sexual and free. A
person not attune with their feelings will wind up with someone who is very
expressive.
Phenomenon of necessity-This is when you can’t imagine the other person not
being in your life.
Maybe this is what Bono meant
when he said “I can’t live with or without you,” and maybe Ovid was an
Isolator in love with a Fuser when he wrote “So I can’t live either without you
or with you.” The push and pull seems to be
a theme throughout history. Maybe Hendrix
is right and there is something to this…maybe this is what a soul mate is.
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