|
By Nancy Colier, LCSW 
The Challenge of Contradiction
Nature abhors a vacuum, or so they say. Similarly, it seems that human beings abhor contradiction, particularly in the context of intimate relationships. People attempt to package their feelings as positive
or negative, believing that contradictory feelings cannot and should not co-exist. In approaching their relationships, people use the word
but to connect their contradictory feelings, as if the positive wipes out the negative and vice versa. In fact, for a relationship to succeed,
and not
but must be the approach we take when linking the inconsistent feelings that are at the heart of all relationships.
All relationships resolve in contradiction. Why then is it so difficult for us to accept contradictory feelings inside ourselves? First, we are trained to believe that consistency is the basic nature of all things, that there is an answer to all questions, one answer. Human beings ask the question “Is it good or bad?” Science asks the question “Is it true or false?” Religion asks the question “Is it right or wrong?” We like simple, clean, straightforward answers. If it’s both simultaneously then we are in for a more complicated consideration, a more unsettling resolution.
We seek to obliterate internal contradiction because it causes discomfort and pain. As humans, we are always trying to grasp pleasure and avoid pain. It doesn’t make sense that we can feel both love and hate, appreciation and disappointment, relief and frustration, all at once. In relationship, when we open to our full experience we must face the truth that
all of these contradictory feelings exist in our experience of our partner. Such an openness of vision means accepting that we are receiving certain joys
and being deprived of others. This can be quite painful and unsettling to live with.
People use two primary strategies to eradicate internal inconsistency. Either we make the relationship all good or we make it all bad. While the path to all good requires different methods than the path to all bad (and appeals to different personalities), both paths are attempts to right the inconsistency, to manipulate the experience in order to feel just one way.
To make our experience consistently positive, we must disconnect from our negative feelings, the parts of the relationship where we are not getting what we want. Having successfully wiped out the negative, we can remain in the relationship “pain-free.” Denying the negative however, can come in many forms. For example, feeling guilty all the time for our negative feelings is one way of not experiencing them. The “I shouldn’t feel this way, it’s not fair to him” brand of thinking. Similarly, internal criticism can serve as a way, ironically, of denying negative feelings. Telling ourselves that we are ungrateful, overly demanding, impossible to please, and thus somehow to blame for what we are not receiving, is yet another strategy to reject the legitimacy of our pain and thus eradicate the anxiety that contradiction arouses.
Making the experience consistently negative, on the other hand, requires rejecting the parts of the relationship that bring us joy. The “He’s a louse and I don’t know what I’m doing with him” brand of thinking. In this approach we focus only on the problems, not allowing ourselves to acknowledge or appreciate the reasons we are actually in the relationship.
So what’s wrong with resolving contradiction in whatever way possible? Why not decide to feel clearly one way or the other? The problem with denying a part of our internal experience is that it prevents us from being able to fully experience our lives, to fully enjoy what is working in our relationship or change what is not. We cannot cut off a part of our experience without damaging the other parts. We cannot put a blanket over the negative without blunting the positive. So too, when we bury our experience we create an underlying resentment. It is this buried resentment that will destroy the relationship, not the acknowledgment of our contradictory feelings.
By suppressing the painful parts of a relationship we are destroying our chance to improve the relationship. We become paralyzed because there is nothing to fix and yet we are unhappy. Acknowledging the negative alongside the positive offers an opportunity to improve the situation. The difficulty has to be felt first before it can be corrected. While it may seem counter-intuitive to allow in the negative, it is the denial of pain that prevents us from actually becoming happy.
On the other hand, the denial of the positive aspects of a relationship creates a different kind of stuckness. When we are committed to making our partner all bad, it is, ironically, more difficult to leave him or her. As long as we are unable to acknowledge the positive feelings, we end up staying in the relationship as a way of bringing life to the positive. Rather than making the positive real by acknowledging it, we make it real by staying together. As long as we are not honoring what we do love in our partner, what we are receiving, we are not free to choose a path, whether to leave or stay. The positive is all tangled up in the staying together and this creates a paralysis of its own.
Celebrating Contradiction
And not but is perhaps the most important concept to keep front and center in an intimate relationship. Contradiction is truth; there is always both positive and negative existing simultaneously. When we recognize difficulty in our relationship, we must relate to that difficulty as an addition to the positive, as an
and. It is not a
but, not something that eliminates the positive.
When we operate from a place of
and, we can stand back and look clearly at the entire landscape of the relationship, make room for the full spectrum of our experience. From this place of clarity we can make free choices. By laying out what we are receiving
and what we are missing, we can choose if we want to stay in the relationship and/or how we want to stay in it. We can determine if what we are receiving is that which matters most, and conversely if what we are giving up is acceptable to give up. Being able to allow the whole relationship to exist with all of its contradictions, all its
ands, allows us to get to know ourselves, our truth, our priorities. It helps us determine our “non-negotiables,” those aspects of a relationship or life that we are unwilling to do without. Further, in recognizing the places where we are sacrificing, we can more fully appreciate the places we are receiving. We generate compassion and appreciation for ourselves when we are able to accept the whole picture that is relationship. It is a compassion borne of awareness, recognizing the profundity of the choices we are making. Free to acknowledge and experience our partner’s value in our life, we can now fully appreciate our relationship, which is ultimately what makes it work.
About the Author...
I am a psychotherapist in private practice in Manhattan. As for specialties, I work with all of life's challenges (and joys) and have specialties in relationship issues, peak performance and creative arts, as well as spiritual concerns. I work from an Eastern spiritual perspective, seeing therapy as a process of uncovering the innate wisdom and well-being in every human being. Last Update: 3/19/2009
|
