February has long been celebrated as a month of romance. As we know it today, St. Valentine’s Day contains vestiges of both Christian and ancient Roman tradition, so it seems only appropriate to write about love for the February Beyond Mastery Newsletter. In Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach reports a phenomenon that plays a part in the love story for most—maybe all—Westerners:
Several years ago a small group of Buddhist teachers and psychologists from the United States and Europe invited the Dalai Lama to join them in a dialogue about emotions and health. During one of their sessions an American vipassana teacher asked him to talk about the suffering of self-hatred. A look of confusion came over the Dalai Lama’s face. “What is self-hatred?” he asked. As the therapists and teachers in the room tried to explain, he looked increasingly bewildered. “Was this mental state a nervous disorder?” he asked them. When those gathered confirmed that self-hatred was not unusual but rather a common experience for their students and clients, the Dalai Lama was astonished. How could they feel that way about themselves, he wondered when “everybody has Buddha nature.” (Tara Brach, Ph.D,Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, pg. 11)
Brach goes on to comment that while all humans feel ashamed of weakness and afraid of rejection, our Western culture is a breeding ground for the kind of shame and self-hatred the Dalai Lama couldn’t comprehend.
Shame and self-hatred are played out over and over between men and women, from the bedroom to the boardroom. It is not just romantic relationships that are adversely affected by unrealized and unreleased inappropriate shame. Professional partnerships can be battle the ground for our wounded egos. Those who have trained with SCS likely witnessed Joel’s and my struggles. Working together rendered us as insecure as teenagers in love. We often argued like an old married couple.
My Internet search for “relationships” produced about 677,000,000 results.
We see evidence of the dynamics of puffed up egos fed by shadow shame and self-hatred playing itself out in politics, too, but I will not go there right now.
Some of the tools in the SCS/NLP materials provide valuable insight for relating. Recognizing common metaprograms, for example. If metaprograms are new to you, read more in Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication. It is our comprehensive training manual based on the foundation laid by Korzybski, Erickson, and others (including Virginia Satir, Fritz Perls, Gregory Bateson, and Paul Watzlawick). The foundational tools were codified into Neurolinguistic Programming primarily by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. Others—such as Robert Dilts, Judith DeLozier, and Steve and Connirae Andreas, were also among the early contributors. We have elected to do advanced study of NLP with Richard Bandler and John La Valle with The Society of NLP. (See Healing with Language)
If you would appreciate a free copy of Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication, email debra@scs-matters.com. I will tell you where you can pick up a copy, or I will send a copy anywhere in the continental US for the cost of postage.
But back to the topic of this newsletter…. If a matcher is relating with a mismatcher, a sense of being out of phase is likely to be very common. Metaprograms tend to operate through time and across contexts, influencing behavior in a wide variety of ways. A principal cause of interpersonal conflict is that we all tend to assume that others use the same metaprograms that we do. When we discover otherwise, we tend to think that the other person’s behavior is wrong, or that something is wrong with us.
One of the most important applications of the confirmation metaprogram is knowing how you know that someone loves you. It may be even more important for you to know what kind of information someone else needs to be convinced that you love him or her. Most people assume that others, especially a spouse or significant other, share their confirmation metaprograms. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Differences in the sensory modality or frequency of evidence is a major cause of interpersonal difficulty and the source of numerous jokes. Like the one about the man and woman divorcing after 75 years of marriage. When the judge asked why, the wife said, “In 75 years of marriage he has not even once said he loves me.” In answer to the accusation, the man simply stated he told her he loved her the day he proposed and had not changed his mind!
What we need or what we offer might seem reasonable to us but leave the other adrift in the sea of self-doubt.
While we all experience the world of love using our senses, which (assuming that we have all of them) include vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, we each have our preferred systems. Different preferred sensory systems also result in misunderstanding when unrecognized for what they are. People who process primarily auditorily use those words: hear, listen, resonate. Visuals ask you to look, to be clear, to imagine. Linguistic preferences can result in devastating relationship dynamics. A simple miscommunication of “Are you listening to me?” or “Why can’t you see things my way?” can trigger buried toxic shame.
We not only have a preferred sensory system, but we have a system we are least aware of. That system, unrecognized, can be the source of triggered feelings.
In Radical Acceptance, Brach quotes Mother Teresa’s insight after a lifetime of working with the poor and the sick. “The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis but rather the feeling of not belonging.” This feeling of not belonging is worsened by the shadow of shame and is difficult to address until it is recognized for what it is: a result of our upbringing.
Many of us grew up in imperfect families. We may have not had sufficient nurturing. I did not see my mother and father kiss until after I was married. Granted, I married young, but you get my point. Our families may have moved, uprooting our sense of community at crucial developmental stages. We were likely not blessed to be raised by a village, secure in the fact that we were loved not only by our parents and siblings but by an entire “tribe.”
Janice Clark said, “I don’t think you’re suddenly going to begin to look at the world with new eyes when you’re 80 if you haven’t been doing it when you’re 30.” Days and weeks or months and years unfold into a lifetime of communicating through hidden shame, resulting in patterns of relating that lead individuals to conclude things about a relationship that is not really about the relationship at all.
For years, I suffered silent feelings of inferiority to Joel. He was the college professor. I was the high school dropout. We projected lots of unhealed childhood wounds onto one another. We played out painful dramas. We blamed one another and ourselves for the failure to launch SCS Matters into the success we knew it was deserving of and the world could benefit from.
The past few years Joel and I have not been formally teaching together but we have continued to maintain a commitment to one another and to SCS. We have done that through our web presence. We reach out to each of those who studied with us in ways that is doable for this phase, and we welcome new connections.
I publish “Debra’s Wellness Tips,” “Wholesome Thougths,” and “Sacred Stories” each week. If you are not already receiving these, you can sign up at DebraBasham.com. We have been publishing the “Beyond Mastery Newsletter,” both contributing articles, since September 2006. You can read past articles in the archives. We each blog. You can sign up to receive our blog posts automatically from the homepage at SCS-Matters.com.
Brach says we long to belong and feel like we don’t deserve to. Richard Bandler says the best thing about the past is that it is over. Maybe Janice Clark does not know the truth that with SCS/NLP it is never too late to have a happy childhood and there is always time to live happily ever after.
May this month of love lead each of us to a deeper sense of radical acceptance so we can enjoy all of our relationships, especially the one within…