CHAPTER IV

DEEPER ISSUES ACTIVATED INSIDE

1. Basic Relationship Patterns within You

The transformative potential of your relationship with Bill may be greater than you realise. Every important human bond activates many levels of the personality, and some of these levels are unconscious and unrecognised. All of us bring our own inner issues and preconceptions into a relationship with another person. A relationship involves not only the chemistry between the two personalities, but also our unconscious images of what it is to be a man or woman. These inner images are partly shaped by our experiences of the first man and woman we meet in life - father and mother. But perhaps more importantly, they also reflect profound hidden truths about our own essential characters. The less aware we are of these deeper aspects of ourselves, the more likely we are to enact and project them blindly - and sometimes destructively - in our relationships. The inner images of man and woman which we all carry are really pictures of our own needs, expectations and potentials. They may be coloured or even distorted by childhood experiences, but fundamentally they belong to us as individuals. They have both positive and negative features, and we have the freedom to express both. Because people are by nature complex and multifaceted, we have more than one of these inner pictures of masculine and feminine within us. And each deep relationship we encounter in life could activate a quite different aspect of our inner world, presenting us with very different challenges and bringing very different responses out of us.

The relationship which you and Bill have created, because it is an independent living thing, will have an effect on the inner world of both you and your partner, triggering unconscious images of masculine and feminine in ways which you may not always be aware of. It is as though the two of you are living with a third person who exercises a subtle but powerful influence on how you feel and behave when you are together. This is the real alchemical work of the relationship, for both of you will be changed by the energies which have arisen between you. Some of its effects might feel very positive, and others might be extremely disturbing. Most human interaction involves a mixture of both. It is likely that sooner or later this relationship will stir up old childhood patterns and feelings, because the inner images of masculine and feminine which you and Bill bring into the relationship are coloured by the past. This gives you both a chance to discover untapped potentials in yourselves, as well as facing and healing hurts and wounds from early life. You and your partner could respond to the activation of your inner world in a creative and productive way, using what you learn about yourselves to make important changes in your attitudes and manner of self-expression. Or you could blame everyone and everything in sight for your discomfort, and make a general mess out of things if you so choose. You and your partner may not be able to unbake the cake you have made. But you have a great deal of choice in terms of how you deal with what this relationship activates within you.

A Youthful Spirit Bound by the Needs of the Heart

Whatever you may consciously define as feminine, there is an image within you of woman as adventuress, playful companion and eternal girl. This image is powerfully activated in you by your relationship with Bill. The image of the eternal girl is best portrayed in myth by the Greek goddess Artemis, mistress of the Moon and of wild nature. This goddess personifies an untamed feminine spirit which can love and be joyful yet belongs to no man as wife or chattel. The mysterious and changeable nature of this mythic figure reflects a quality which is part of the fabric of your feminine self. Even if you have denied it in your life, your inner image of woman is not the stable, responsible figure of the wife and mother who presides over home, family and domestic duties. This may present you with certain conflicts about committing yourself to your relationship with Bill, whether you are conscious of such ambivalence or not. You have a longing not only for freedom, but for the feeling that life's potentials and possibilities will always be open to you, and that you will throughout life be in a process of becoming, never of crystallising or stagnating. Satisfying this longing while at the same time honouring your emotional need for stability and continuity within your relationship may require a delicate balancing act.

The image of the eternal girl within you also describes a craving for romantic excitement and adventure. You may not feel wholly alive unless you are in the thrilling stage of beginning something whether it is a new relationship or a creative project. Because you crave the new, you need to be careful to provide yourself with a creative life outside your relationship, preferably a field of work which presents you with new and imaginative projects and challenges. Your restless spirit can easily feel bored and confined, and you will inevitably vent your frustration on your partner, directly or indirectly, if you do not provide yourself with change and challenge through your work. It is possible that you perceived a similar restlessness in your mother during your childhood, although she may have concealed this beneath a more dutiful or self-sacrificing manner. Because she may have felt trapped and unhappy, you may on some level fear commitment because you too might be imprisoned. Thus you may be too extreme in your pursuit of change and freedom in an effort to avoid the frustration you saw in her life. At the same time, you need to be careful not to stifle your irrepressible spirit beneath too heavy a weight of responsibility. Your gifts do not lie in patience and endurance so much as in inventiveness, creative imagination and a capacity to infuse life with joy and meaning.

You also have a very strong need to function as an independent person with an active mental life, and too rigid or conventional an image of womanhood may ultimately prove very frustrating for you. Although you might enjoy family life, and could no doubt handle the emotional commitments and responsibilities involved with care and reliability, you may also have a certain amount of ambivalence about the doors to the future closing on you because of such bonds. It is possible that your mother may have married and had children at too young an age, before she had had a chance to explore life and test her wings. You may have sensed a quality of angry frustration and irritability in her which has left you feeling anxious and insecure, although the source of that anxiety may not be clear to you now. This rather fearful feeling about life may make you take on too much responsibility too early as well. Therefore it might be important for you to carefully examine whether you really need to carry as much as you do for others at the expense of your own free spirit. You need to learn the art of expert juggling, for your longing for security within this relationship is evenly matched by a resistance to any ties from which you cannot extricate yourself voluntarily. It is possible for you to have your cake and eat it too. But you must first recognise your own complexity, and arrange your life according to your needs and values rather than those espoused by other, more collectively minded folk.

The Dilemma of Self-Sacrifice

You might find it difficult to give yourself the kind of freedom and open possibilities you require, because there is also a strong need in you to merge with others. You have a deep fear of separateness which could make you deny your own free and joyful spirit. Perhaps you saw a similar fear expressed by your mother during your early life. It seems she experienced deep conflict between the playful, adventurous side of her nature and her great need of closeness with those she loved. This may have driven her into martyrdom or passive acceptance of suffering. Her initiative may have been blunted and her hope in the future crushed, and she may have opted for a life of sacrifice which has made you feel unconsciously guilty and obligated to her. Because of your own longing for closeness, you have a great need to feel at one with your partner. But if you witnessed unhappiness or manipulative behaviour in your mother you may attribute it to her emotional dependency rather than what she chose to do with that dependency. This could make you deny your own emotional needs in order to avoid becoming unhappy like her. But it is not necessary for you to sacrifice either your longing for closeness with your partner or your desire for creative challenge and excitement. Perhaps your mother's difficulties sprang not from her need of others, but from a basic albeit unconscious refusal to take responsibility for her own life. If you are prepared to take charge of yours, and can pursue the creative channels which inspire you, you can also express your emotional needs within your relationship without feeling helpless and dependent. It is important for you to acknowledge both your great desire for freedom and your deep need for emotional intimacy. For both reflect valid and necessary aspects of your inner nature.

The youthful feminine spirit within you offers you a quality of enthusiasm and optimism which age and circumstances can never destroy. This untamed and self-possessed inner image may, however, raise problems between you and Bill. For by its nature any relationship will, over time, root itself in the familiar and the everyday, sometimes at the expense of the excitement and sense of new possibilities you crave so much. It is up to you to make sure you provide yourself with avenues for the new and the adventurous to enter your life through your creative and intellectual pursuits. If you leave it up to chance, fate or your partner, and follow the dictates of a more conventional voice, you will find yourself facing the same sense of claustrophobia which probably made your mother unhappy and unfulfilled. You cannot afford to remain unconscious of your own restless and untamed spirit. For it will sooner or later erupt anyway, or you may inadvertently push your partner into acting out your need for freedom so that you can have it yourself as well. But if you are prepared to juggle your complex needs with grace and humour, you can enjoy the rewards of the youthful spirit within you while preserving happiness and stability in your personal life as well.

2. Basic Relationship Patterns within Your Partner

Bill also has within him images and patterns of response which are activated by the relationship. Thus your partner is also receptive to the transformative potential of the bond, -and even if this sometimes involves conflict and uncomfortable self-confrontation, he could experience deep and positive changes as a result.

Still Waters Run Deep

Whatever your partner as a man may consciously define as "feminine", there is an image within him of woman as seeress, sorceress and, on the dark side, destroyer. This image is powerfully activated in him by his relationship with you. The image of woman as seeress is best portrayed in myth by those goddesses who preside over the underworld, such as Persephone, the Queen of the Dead, or Hekate, goddess of enchantment and magic. These ancient and archetypal figures describe a depth and intensity of feeling and an insight into the invisible side of life which are in fact potentials of your partner's own personality. Because the underworld in myth is a place of mystery and of hidden power and secrets, it may be difficult for Bill to accommodate this aspect of his nature into his conscious life as a man. More likely he will project it onto the women in his life, and find himself both fascinated and threatened by what he experiences as their hidden power over him, emotionally and sexually. Your partner may also have experienced these qualities in a darker or more difficult form in his relationship with his mother during his childhood. Thus he may also have complex reasons for fearing the power of this inner image of woman. But ultimately it belongs to Bill, and can offer him great richness, depth and insight if he is able to own and express it.

It is possible that in childhood your partner experienced a deep underlying depression or sadness in his mother, even if on the surface she managed very well. Probably this parent possessed an emotional intensity and depth which found no outlets in her life. Such deep passions, if left repressed and unexpressed, can easily lead to depression and resentment. Your partner's mother may also have unconsciously attached her deepest feelings to him, expecting too much from him emotionally because her needs were left unsatisfied in other ways. This quality of emotional intensity applies to Bill as well, for his own powerful needs and passions can, if unacknowledged, cause him to experience cyclical periods of dark moods and unhappiness. There is a very sensitive, serious and complex aspect of his nature which needs the right food for nourishment - an exploration of the hidden side of himself and of others. It is in the mysterious realm of the unconscious that your partner's inner life unfolds itself best. His childhood experiences may have made him recoil from such depths, particularly because they do not lend themselves to easy verbal explanation and analysis. But he needs to find a way to live this intensity, for if it is denied he will inevitably experience the repercussions in his relationship with you.

Your partner also possesses great pride, and his need for self-sufficiency and self-control may make it difficult for him to own and express the more intense emotions which belong to his inner nature. Bill may also have perceived this quality of pride and self-control in his mother during his childhood, for it is likely that she masked her unhappiness and emotional frustration beneath hard work and the scrupulous discharging of responsibilities to her family. This parent's competent, withdrawn and perhaps critical manner may have fooled everyone, including her, about what lay smouldering underneath. It is also possible that your partner experienced quite a lot of loneliness and confusion during his childhood because of the "double messages" of need and rejection which he sensed from his mother. It may not be easy for him to reach out to others and let them near him emotionally - even though his own emotional needs are very great and he may believe that he wants closeness with you more than anything. Your partner may need to be careful not to inadvertently reject you because he himself unconsciously expects such rejection. For just as he was probably given "double messages" in his early life, he also tends to give them to you now because of his pride and fear of being hurt.

The Dilemma of the Healer

Qualities of tenacity, self-control, and an almost ferocious self-sufficiency sit side by side with the depth and intensity of your partner's emotional nature. He has the gift of being able to channel his passions into plain old fashioned hard work in a concentrated and dogged way which many people might well envy. Because of this combination of intensity and commitment, there is not much he cannot accomplish if the goal matters to his heart. But he may also take on too much and work too hard, using mundane responsibilities and material goals as a defence against depression and feelings of isolation and loneliness. It is possible that his mother also possessed great strength and self-discipline, and it is also likely that she was psychologically the stronger of the two parents - to a degree which may have been burdensome to her, although she may not have acknowledged this openly. Probably she took responsibility for the practical functioning of the family, holding the mundane side of life together because she felt it was her task, and suffering accordingly because her own passionate emotional nature was given no fulfilling outlet. Depression and suppressed resentment seem to be ongoing themes both in your partner's childhood and in his adult life, for the sense of lonely hard work which he no doubt experienced very early in his mother is one which he carries within himself. Yet if Bill feels resentful toward you because you do not seem to offer him the support and companionship he so much needs, it may well be because he does not allow you to. Your partner's deep and perhaps unconscious conviction about life is that whatever he really wants, he will have to supply it himself, and in the end others always let him down. Perhaps he needs to give you the chance to demonstrate that, while this may have applied in his childhood, it is not a reality in his present life - unless he makes it so himself. Thus your partner's inner image of woman contributes qualities of great depth, intensity and passion to his emotional and instinctual nature. The rather volcanic quality of his feelings can bring great richness and vitality to his life and his relationship with you. His is a complex nature proud, difficult to know, and mysterious in its aura of banked fire. And like the little girl of the nursery rhyme with the curl in the middle of her forehead, when his emotional life is good it's very very good, but when it's bad it's horrid. Your partner's emotional sensitivity no doubt opened him up to the unconscious undercurrents of the family in childhood. This is an ambiguous gift. While his capacity for insight into human nature is very great because of this almost psychic perceptiveness, he may also have seen too much too young, and has had difficulty in processing and coming to terms with the more convoluted dimensions of human love. His dilemma is his propensity for depression and despair, and a cynicism about human nature which may make him close the doors to the love which is offered to him and the love which he himself feels. Yet the inner world, like the domain of Hades in myth, is full of untold riches, and some of life's greatest mysteries lay accessible to his profound curiosity about why people are what they are. If Bill can learn to live his inner image of woman through an openness to and understanding of these depths, he will feel extraordinarily alive. And he will also be able to avoid projecting the darker and more mythic elements of his childhood and his own instinctual nature onto you, who are, after all, not the mythic ruler of the underworld, but simply another human being.