House of Mirrors
Strangle,
with your best intentions,
a flawed reflection,
you try so hard
to love.
Your glorious inheritance
hatches from the rotten eggs
of your survival.
Relationships are incubators
that reveal the origins
of your armor.
Relationships trudge up
the root rot
of your family tree.
Relationships let you unburden
what will snap your back
alone.
Shed your dead vision.
Open your twisted mouth.
Flip off the rails
of your sheltered reality,
and repossess
the sweet sounds, and dancing colors
of the larger conversation
waiting for you.
Relationships are the highest degree,
and bravest way
to a deeper lovemaking.
According to Bruce Lipton, cell biologist and author of the book, the Power of Belief, we operate from our subconscious beliefs 95% of the time. This means that the ‘power struggles’ and ‘wars’ of our childhood get recreated in our most intimate relationships. Our subconscious, and thus our awareness, acts like a projector, broadcasting the movie of our lives onto the blank screen of our relationships. However, there is no need to fret. Relationships are our path to a deeper awareness. Relationships help us to awaken from the matrix of our own projections by re-experiencing them in our closest relationships, giving us a chance to reposesses them, so they can stop possessing us.
“Our subconscious, and thus our awareness, acts like a projector, broadcasting the movie of our lives onto the blank screen of our relationships.”
Our awareness is like the needle of a record player, it naturally follows the deeply etched grooves of our subconscious. This means that what we perceive is largely a reconstruction of an old song, a familiar tune. The antidote is to lift up the needle, and create a new record. Find a new groove that works for both of you. Esther Perel, famous author and seasoned couples therapist, states that the biggest block to intimacy is monotony and routine. Poet Andrea Gibson says that the greatest act of love we can preform is “to unknow” someone. When we can reimagine our partner as a fellow wayfaring stranger, we allow them to live outside the narrow frame of our shadows, judgements, and history. Inhabiting the beginner’s mind in relationships is like plowing deep furrows in the earth, and sowing seeds of curiosity and compassion, instead of harboring grudges, resentment, and preconceived notions.
“Inhabiting the beginner’s mind in relationships is like plowing deep furrows in the earth, and sowing seeds of curiosity and compassion, instead of harboring grudges, resentment, and preconceived notions.”
After the honeymoon phase, our partner quickly becomes a carbon copy of our deepest fears, old family dramas, and our deepest longing. When in fact, our partner is an unidentifiable, flying becoming. In trauma-informed IFS couple’s therapy, we will explore what parts of you are stuck in a dead way of seeing, and support them into a larger conversation of loving. Often times, the parts that are stuck resenting, fighting, stonewalling, hiding, freezing or fawning were put into that role at a young age out of necessity, out of a desperate attempt to stay alive, to retain love. Once these protectors are seen, held, and understood, they will jump at the chance to inhabit another role, a way of being that is more playful, connective, and curious.