A delight and a must-read
by: Dave Belden on August 7th, 2009 | 6 Comments »
Author Laura Munson
If you’ve been married or partnered for many years or know anyone who has been, you’re going to enjoy Those Aren’t Fighting Words, Dear in the NYT about the woman who refused to let her husband’s midlife crisis get a reaction out of her. She doesn’t say what prompted her own change of approach to life in general, including to her husband, but I would be staggered if she hadn’t clued in to some spiritual practice or tradition. If she invented it whole cloth on her own, she’s a genius.
The author, Laura Munson, has written about her life in Montana here, and people are leaving comments already about the NYT piece, including this gem:
My grandmother is a family therapist and was a close friend of Virginia Satir who once said “The problem is not the problem, but how you handle the problem.”
Aha! She writes in response to one of the comments:
It’s really about mid life breakdowns, in both me and my husband in different ways…but more, it’s about a method I used, and still use, to stay present and self-responsible. It’s not always pretty, but the more I practice it, the more powerful and freeing it is. I love that it’s in any and no religion. I love that I can take my faith base and plug it into my method. It’s as old as the hills, but fairly new to me.
Dave, This is an amazing article. I’m sure I could never have done what Laura Munson did. As a result, although I am flabbergasted by her stick-to-it-tive-ness and her insistence that her husband’s meltdown was not her own, I can imagine very few people being able to do what she did. It takes two to tangle, that’s for sure. But to step out of the way of your husband’s negative energy, to not take it on as a personal assault, when he says, “I don’t love you anymore,” is rational emotive therapy to the max!
I know I’m responsible for my own happiness. I know I can’t make my husband happy. But he can sure make it harder for me to be happy, since I am empathetic to his feelings. If the feelings were a rejection of me and our relationship, that might hit too close.
Where does empathy stop being useful? When do we need to pull back to the extent that Laura Munson did? Ouch!
I doubt I could do it either.
My guess is that Munson’s been studying Buddhism, because that seems to be the most popular current bearer of this kind of wisdom. I look forward to finding out–I’m sure she will become famous quickly!
But it makes me think of my own parents, who were intense experiential (as opposed to doctrinally fundamentalist) Christians, who once wrote a pamphlet with their thoughts on marriage. It was called “Husband and Wife Are One, But Which One?” and if you Google it there are several available, to my amazement. Their answer to the question about who should be dominant in a marriage was: neither. Their image was that if both were connected to God and leaned on God, neither leaned on the other. This enabled each to love the other more freely and with open eyes, not so dependent on each other. It must be 25 years since I read it so I am forgetting a lot. They had a graphic for their talks on the subject that showed husband and wife leaning on each other in a way they thought unhealthy, and then when each had their line to God above (trad imagery here) strong that pulled them upright like a string and they stopped leaning on the other. That came into my mind after reading Munson’s story.
It might sound lonely, to be that independent of one’s partner, and yet it was their spiritual practice and it worked for them. They taught that it actually enabled love to flourish more, and brought them closer together. Maybe another of life’s paradoxes. They had a remarkably happy and productive marriage for over 50 years.
I read the reader comment on Laura Munson’s blog page that “The problem is not the problem, but how you handle the problem” and I also read the other one which was from the same reader’s grandmother: “Don’t let the circumstantial ruin the transcendent.” It’s this one that points towards the “how” for the other one.
The circumstantial is what we deal with on an ordinary level 24/7. But if we deal with things in an ordinary sort of way, it means we’re extremely limited in our options because we are tied to, attached to, identified with the ordinary. This means we cannot see ourselves as separate from, or other than, some image of ourselves that includes and is determined by whatever we are attached to. These attachments we develop and our responses to them are what make up all the personal “baggage” we have to deal with all the time in our lives.
To be able to transcend these attachments, to rise above them, means becoming free of them so as to not be ruled by them. They are, after all, baggage that we have chosen to pick up and carry around with us. Not necessarily consciously – in fact, mostly unconsciously. But one needs something to transcend to, and usually this is found by following some sort of spiritual path, although not everyone needs to be following some established religious path to discover their spiritual guidance. It’s quite possible that Laura Munson has simply learned to listen to her own inner voice of guidance while riding and caring for her horses and while running her chainsaw and while caring for her children and while being close to nature – both the nature “out there” as well as her own inner nature.
As busy as Ms. Munson has undoubtedly been in her life, she has also undoubtedly spent a lot of quiet time alone – on horseback, in the barn or wherever – and whether she considers this time as meditation or not, that is probably what some or much of it has been for her. And that’s significant because it is out of such quiet, meditative times that insights, understandings and realizations arise from within. I only read a few of the reader comments on Ms. Munson’s blog page but I did notice evidence that some others seem to have also had similar experiences that were quite possibly based on insights gained more or less independently, without having studied Buddhism or following some other religious path. There are many helpful clues to the transcendent that are available to us in life, but only if we become aware of them. Unfortunately, most of them tend to get lost in the shuffle of the ordinary stuff of life.
Nancy, you wondered “Where does empathy stop being useful?” My response is that it never stops being useful. The ability to be aware of and to understand the feelings of another is a highly valuable capacity and should be refined into a fine art. But becoming attached to the feelings of another and become identified with those feelings or to your response to them is not a part of the fine art of empathy, but rather a distortion of it. Instead, one needs to always maintain an awareness of one’s own real self as an independent individual. To lose that is to diminish one’s capacity to be truly empathetic.
David, the insight that your parents gained through their experience of Christianity is really quite beautiful and right on. To lean on one another is to be tied to, attached to, identified with and dependent on one another in an unhealthy way. It is only lonely to be independent of one’s partner if one is also distant from one’s partner. The seeming paradox is that to be fully aware of one’s independence – one’s ability and need to stand alone – actually provides for the freedom and openness to become even closer to another than one could otherwise possibly be. It is only from this position that one can truly love another unconditionally.
If one’s love for another depends upon getting something from the other – such as support while leaning – then it’s simply an exchange, a business deal that could fall apart as soon as the other one does not perform up to expectations. “I’ll give you my love in exchange for you holding me up. If you quit holding me up, I’ll quit loving you.” What’s really being loved here is being held up by someone. But to know that you can stand tall and straight on your own, and that you can give loving support to another if needed or lovingly allow the other to stand tall and straight if able – that is very empowering. And the real support always comes from within – from that transcendent source. Someone observed that “an atheist is someone with no invisible means of support.” One doesn’t necessarily need to be a theist, though, in order to be aware of one’s invisible (transcendent) source of support.
One’s own inner sense of support is the only reliable source of support there is. Once you really find it you will have it forever; no one and nothing can ever take that away from you. Even if you find yourself in a situation or circumstances where you need help from another – physical, emotional, mental – you will actually be able to more easily accept such outer support and more readily benefit from it if you have a strong, unshakable sense of transcendent, inner support. It is only through one’s sense of inner support that a real sense of dignity arises.
This is such a helpful response. Thank you, Carl. I wish my parents were alive to hear it. I had such a strong response against elements of their response to the world when I was in my twenties, (and what I rejected then I still do reject), that it is has been a long process for me to get back to appreciating what was truly wise about their approach, which has often entailed my rescuing valued experiential wisdom from the theological or political language it was embedded in.
You’re welcome, Dave. May I suggest that your parents still live … through you. And I suspect that they also struggled with (within) themselves. They surly did the best they could during their experiences here on Earth, and probably accepted, embraced or rejected many things – about themselves, each other, their parents and the world – along the way, just as you are finding yourself doing.
I also suggest that you’ll find that your own way will be easier if you can come to not only accept, but fully embrace and even love, who your parents were and are for you. This is quite possible to do if you do so in varying ways depending on what it is you are considering.
Consider that there are some aspect of your parents that you can easily accept, embrace and even love as being really positive influences in your life, including that they gave you your life, whether through what they taught you or through them serving as exemplars of certain behaviors. Consider also that there are some aspects of how they lived and behaved that you might easily accept as being strong influences in your life, even if they may have been lessons in how not to do things – lessons in how not to live and behave, as negative exemplars, so to speak, demonstrating how not to be in this world – at least for yourself. And then there are undoubtedly many things to consider that seem to fall somewhere between these two extremes – things that appear to be mixtures of these influences or that my simply fall into the gray areas that you are still struggling with yourself. But all of these things – the positive, the negative, the gray and confusing – all of them have provided the most significant influences in your life and have served, and continue to serve, as a basis for who your are, as well as for who you can become.
And it is this aspect of who you can become that is most significant for you – for each of us. So, what you do with your past influences is very significant. Rejecting any of it is ultimately unhelpful because it is an attempt to ignore or to struggle against something that is unavoidably a part of who you are. Ignoring something that is part of one’s self is always limiting, and fighting against anything actually gives that thing strength in an “equal but opposite reaction” sort of way. The alternative is to come to some understanding of how things from your past have factored into who you currently are, as well as being open to what further lessons you might be able to learn from them.
In your younger days, you responded to all of these influences as you were able to at the time. As you have been maturing, you have been able to reprocess some things because you have gained new tools and new understandings to work with. You are not the same person you used to be – you are evolving. And, based on such a view of yourself, there is no reason to believe anything other than that you can and will continue to evolve. All of the suffering that comes from the pain of the past arises from our attachment to the things of the past, whether it’s our attachment to what we view positively or our attachment to the pain we experienced in reaction to whatever we view negatively. Only by letting go of all of these attachments can we open to new possibilities that are available to us.
To accept the negative experiences from our past does not necessarily mean to condone them. It’s not, for example, at all helpful to condone abusive behavior of any type that we might have had to endure. It is helpful, though, to accept everything from our past as the basis from which we have learned all of our life lessons – as well as from which we can continue to learn. We can continue to learn because we are constantly changing, and we are constantly changing because we continue to learn. And the new lessons, the new insights and understandings, we gain from our old experiences (including all of our old reactions) may be very different from the old lessons. But we need to let go of our attachments to those old lessons in order to open ourselves to the new lessons that are waiting for us to discover them – that are waiting to help us move towards becoming who we were meant to be.
In re-viewing the past, there should be no judgment, neither positive nor negative, neither of your parents nor of yourself. Simply recall how things were in the past, be aware of how things have been more recently, be aware of how things seem now, and then be open to where things can go from here. It’s how and where you go from here and now that is most important.
Amazing. If only more people could find support to do this.