What about FEELINGS/RELATIONSHIPS?

RELATIONSHIP MYTH #1: "EXPLORE YOUR DEEPEST FEELINGS"

http://www.nomorefakenews.com/archives/arc...ew.php?key=3352

THE CRAZIEST JOKE IN TOWN

MAY 16, 2007. Most people have no idea what their deepest feelings are, and wouldn’t recognize them if they floated in on a barge decorated with a thousand wreaths of gardenias.

In the psychological jargon, “deepest feelings” translates into “what makes me feel most vulnerable.”

You can see a husband and wife sitting on a talk show, can’t you? They both look exhausted and teary, drained and helpless. And this is supposed to be a good sign. A sign of a breakthrough. The two people aren’t the same as when they walked out on the stage.

But so what? It doesn’t take a genius to reduce two confused human beings to tears.

Softening two people down to marshmallows doesn’t bring about a “rescue” of their relationship.

A person’s deepest feelings emerge when he/she is CREATING, and those feelings come into a state of visibility then and only then.

So what does that say about love and relationships? It says that these two forces are created, too.

If you’ve got something else, you’ve got a problem.

And no amount of “exposing feelings” is going to solve that.

The best thing two people can talk about together, if they need to, is re-starting the creative engine of each of them, when it slows down.

Even if you define love as a lightning bolt that strikes both people irrevocably in a moment, what happens when that moment is long gone? What’s happening five years later? The film director, John Cassavetes, once described love as an old-fashioned clock. It runs down, and you have to wind it up again.

Create it again. Start the river moving between two people.

Each person is creating for himself/herself, and both people are creating together.

Leave any part of that out, and you’re in a fix.

What they show you on TV is a set-up. You get two people out there under the nights, and one person has been very nasty to the other person, and the host of the show will somehow start repairing that. Well, why are these two people still together? One is being a complete shit to the other. What’s the problem? Leave. Get out. Separate. And let the victimized person try to figure out how to avoid making such a bad choice the next time.

I know. That solution is much too simple for entertaininment television. People want to see suffering and pain and injustice. So why not just give one person a toxic drug that drives him nuts and let him attack the other person? It would offer about as much insight, which is to say, none.

“He said he was going to buy me a new car, and then he got drunk and smashed up the old one, and I had to pay for it. What can we do to solve this?”

I don’t know. How about two mind transplants?

At least with Jerry Springer, you know what you’re getting. Two or three goofballs who are already fairly crazy and are acting even crazier for the camera. But with the more “sophisticated” shows, there is a pretense that sage advice is being doled out. Newsflash. It’s all moronic showbiz.

Think of any bad relationship this way. You’ve got two people, and nearby there is a muddy swamp filled with mosquitoes and old car parts. Neither person is creating what he/she wants in life. The idea of doing that has disappeared. So they’re slowly lumbering around, trying to avoid an even deeper misery. As the years pass, they move into a well-rounded hypnotic state. Finally, without noticing it, they enter the swamp.

There is a solution for this? There is a fixit doctor who is going to make this work? You can bet the farm against it.

Reality dictates nothing. Changing reality is a one step up from reality itself. Creating reality is THE option.

Along with myth #1 comes a corollary: “Communicate EVERYTHING.”

This is a real whopper. It’s about as effective as self-performed intestinal surgery. Only, in the long run, it’s a lot more boring. Usually, in the communicate-everything league, one person takes the lead. Not just once, but day after day, week after week, year after year. The “communicator.” Something has made this person into the most introspective creature in five galaxies, and the introspection then turns into a Volga River of me-ness and me-feeling-this-ness. The River turns out to be endless. Each new “revelation” is swept under the tide for tomorrow’s next gush. Such people are often products of therapy.

In other words, the society is basically going crazy when it comes to relationships.

And then, to cap it off and make the population think there is some kind of wonderful payoff near the end of the line, we are fed images of very old people, together, sitting on their porches, barely able to speak, but assuredly “full of wisdom.” They made it through. They triumphed.

Really? Wisdom?

Show me two people at 85 who are each still creating a storm, and I’ll think about wisdom. Then, we’re in the major leagues.

Here is the secret. Most people want to believe that a relationship is the grand solution to abandoning the act of creating. The former stands in for the latter. The irony is, a relationship is one of the great tests of the capacity and determination to create.

So the grand solution---using a relationship to cover over a lack of creating power---doesn’t work. It just turns a more powerful searchlight on the basic problem.

Tap dance around that, put on a blindfold, take a pill, turn on the latest relationship guru on TV, read the latest self-help tome, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got your bottom-line electric crackling inventive energy, or you’ve got your boredom. It’s the game of the week, every week. That choice.

Near the beginning of this piece, I said that only through creating does a person discover what his deepest feelings are, as they emerge. Minus creation action, focusing excessively on what you are feeling now, or were feeling, is a shadow game with no resolution.

When you double that game with two people chasing shadows together, the effect is even more numbing, in the long run.

In the process, people are discarding I CREATE and substituting I FEEL.



JON RAPPOPORT