Couple in train - 1956,
Photo: Vivian Maier
The average age of the people I work with is somewhere between 35-40, but it can be even higher. Right now, I am working with a friend’s father who is already 75. Together, we are trying to understand how the mind, in collaboration with the brain, created the prostate adenoma that was diagnosed two years ago.
As I have said before, there are no recipes, universally valid causes, universal or saving truths.
People and their illnesses do not fit into boxes, dictionaries, media posts, or universally applicable limits.
Instead, there are particular perception errors, specific prediction errors, individual or collective thinking errors that need to be identified, embraced, and brought into the homeostasis of the present. Otherwise, they generate the same reality, the same framework shaped by the narrow dimensions of the mind's biases.
This is exactly what I do with my client. From question to question, we reach the relational theme, a delicate and painful topic. A significant piece in the etiopathogenesis of the prostatic dysfunction.
Awareness is not enough, understandings are not enough, acceptance is not enough for the brain to regress the adenoma starting tomorrow.
It is a process, a labor of confronting old and outdated impressions: about others, about relationships, and about oneself.
I did not ask for permission to share details, but hearing the client’s story reminded me of an incident, which I will also send him along with this post.
It refers to what I observed last year, a charming couple with whom I interacted during a vacation, both already over 60 years old.
During a morning coffee, from a brief verbal interaction, richly imbued with ideas, I found out that they were both in their second marriage, that they are each comfortable with themselves, that they are healthy, that they learned to "relate" late, that they sought support where they got stuck, that there are moments when each simply stays in solitude, that they learned to speak openly about their limits, that they decided to row the "boat" together, regardless of the state of life’s expanse, that they tell each other bedtime stories and that this might be the secret that makes their relationship so fulfilling.
Why didn't they talk to me about love?
Why didn't I seek to capture it between them?
Because in my understanding, and possibly theirs too, love cannot be photographed, captured, stuffed into frames or between human figures, it doesn't fit into words, phrasing (not even a musical one), in past contexts, or in evenings with a crazy drunken moon, like the new one today!
It is not an impeccable state but the joy of having flaws.
It is not a high state but one centered in the grateful and tangible dimension of the skin.
It is not something sweet but a bitter binding among the bacchic polyphenols.
It is not something extraordinary but the ordinary in the naturalness of an asphalt crack.
It is not dry sexual interaction, it is also communication and collaboration even in the sphere of sexuality.
It is not something exceptional but a detail that Life places in front of the Self at every moment.
I then discreetly studied them from a distance, and I was fascinated by the lively, present, attentive, fluid dialogue moving between them, like a wave that lives, that does not rush exhaustingly or roll to break on the shore.
I meditated a few days afterward on the theme of mature relationships and gathered some notes written on a napkin, as if I was not breathing in the century of technology and did not have my phone at my fingertips.
The result: some abbreviated scribbles that tore the paper in places, but this way I can jokingly mention Einstein, with his famous notes once sold expensively at an auction in Israel (not that I have any resemblance to the master).
To truly consolidate a healthy couple's relationship (regardless of age) I believe it is necessary:
-to be able to be with yourself for as long and whenever,
-to wake up from the dream of pleasure at any cost,
-to know your purpose, priorities, and mission,
-to overcome outdated fixations and habits,
-to transcend your inertia,
-to betray old images or fantasies about another (even these days, the Sun and Earth activate the genetic couple 33/19, inviting us chemically to overcome some cellular memories, to exit co-dependency, maybe not so much physical as mental and emotional – see R. Rudd’s book, “The Gene Keys”),
-to detach from the familiar in the other,
-to be willing to listen,
-to see beyond your long time into the long years of the other,
-to refine asemic calligraphies of egotistic thoughts until they become coherent words,
-to be brave enough to soften corners of unpleasantness before the other notices perceptual sharpness,
-to dare.
Balanced writings on this topic, I found in Harville Hendricks and Helen LaKelly Hunt.
The first one I read when my daughter was young: “Giving The Love That Heals,” the second during my divorce: “Making Marriage Simple.” Later, I took a course in Imago therapy, structured by the two, now highly publicized in the world of Romanian psychologists.
I leave an excerpt about commitment, as inspiration for the weekend, and encourage you to seek out their books.
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