You’re not struggling in your relationships because of your mommy issues, daddy issues, or attachment style.
The struggle, pain, and profound disorientation are a feature, not a bug. And that's good news.
You’re not struggling in your relationships because of your mommy issues, daddy issues, or attachment style.
(Well, not just because of that.)
You’re struggling in your love-relationships because love is a pressure chamber by design. Wisdom traditions for centuries have pointed to the hot cauldron of intimate partner love as one of the most potent ingredients for self-actualization and radical personal transformation.
As Jungian analyst Marie Von Franz stated, “love with its passion and pain becomes the urge towards individuation, which is why there is no real process of individuation without the experience of love - for love tortures and purifies the soul.”
Archetypally, Eros is an adolescent god who shoots an arrow and activates our desire for love. Often we forget that the (cute?) arrow is a weapon. It’s not coincidental that when love enters the room the wound begins to surface.
The struggle, pain, and profound disorientation are a feature, not a bug.
The Greeks talked about Hieros Gamos, or the “sacred union,” between masculine and feminine. The Jungians talked of the anima and the animus (the animus as the unconscious masculine side of a woman, and the anima as the unconscious feminine side of a man). And the kabbalists talked of the cosmic union between the feminine dimensions of God (Shichina) and masculine dimensions of God (Zaranmpin).
Any way you slice it, mastering harmony and “sacred union” between two beings energies, polarities, or dialectical tensions is an active, alive, enlightenment path. This has been seen by many wisdom traditions as THE central task of one's time.
It makes sense it's hard.
It makes sense that it brings up stuff other parts of your life don’t.
It makes sense that the fears it reaches feel stronger and more powerful.
It makes sense that, at times, it feels like a full-time job navigating this underworld.
It’s meant to.
It may just be the super-effective, spiritual transmutation tool the deepest part of you has always wanted.
P.S. Important to note the work of sacred union is an inside job first, and then it moves to partnership and community and cosmos. Sometimes doing the sacred work of tending to Union means breaking a partnership (more on this in a future post…).
_________
You can click here to work with me via online psychotherapy .
Photo via Arianne Clement Photography