CHAPTER THREE
A “Toolbox” of Needed New Skills
and Capacities
A rewarding sense of identity or fulfillment in love today requires skills and capacities new to us as a species. This is a radical claim, but it follows from a related observation implied in previous chapters: Whole-Person identity and Whole-Person love both involve more than just thinking and acting differently. They require that we “hold reality” in fundamentally new, more complete—more whole-box-of-crayons—ways.
Making sense of needed new skills and capacities is critically important. Such abilities are what will let us make our way as the culturally defined guideposts of times past lose their former reliability. And the fact that these are abilities that we can practice means that just spending time with them can help us begin to engage our time’s necessary next chapter in identity and love. Needed new skills and capacities also provide essential insight into the foundational nature of the changes our times are about. They help us more deeply understand what defines Cultural Maturity’s changes and how the result differs from what we have known.
With this chapter, I will first describe a way in which holding reality in the more complete way that makes these skills and capacities possible can be directly facilitated. We will then turn to some of the most important of those needed new skills and capacities.
Parts Work
How do we best support Whole-Person identity and relationship? Practicing any of the new skills and capacities I will touch on gets us a long way. But it is also possible to draw on methods specifically designed to produce this result.
One of the most powerful I call simply “Parts Work.” When Parts Work is done well and a person is up to the challenge, it offers almost no option but to step into Cultural Maturity’s more sophisticated territory of understanding and experience—including Whole-Person identity and relationship.
Parts Work also helps us more conceptually. I’ve promised to more clearly define Whole-Person identity and relationship, to be more precise than just saying that each involves more consciously engaging all the crayons in our metaphorical box. Parts Work does just this. And it does so in a manner that addresses culturally mature perspective’s requirement that we think in deeper and more complete ways. The kind of “definition” that Parts Work provides goes beyond just rational description to draw on the whole of our cognitive complexity.
Any thorough description of Parts Work would require a book of its own, but a glimpse helps us more deeply grasp the implications of the needed more specific new skills and capacities.
1 A simple way to think about Parts Work is that it engages the various aspects of our psyches— the crayons in the systemic box—like characters in a play.
In doing Parts Work, the person first sits in what will eventually be his or her Whole-Person (culturally mature perspective) chair. He or she is then guided in placing various parts—a curious part, an angry part, a reasonable part, a scientific part, a spiritual part—around the room. Each part is given its own chair. Through conversations with the parts, the person is facilitated in learning to consciously hold and apply his or her larger—whole-box-of-crayons—complexity.
Parts Work helps a person learn to draw deeply on the diverse sensibilities and inclinations that make that person who they are. As important, it challenges a person to recognize that in each case the viewpoints that parts represent are partial. (At a personal level, they reflect limited life perspectives. At a more cultural level, they give us ideological beliefs.
2) Ultimately, Parts Work is about taking full ownership of that Whole-Person chair and through doing this learning to live from the new, more dynamic and encompassing reality it represents.
Two cardinal rules guide the work. First, only the Whole-Person chair talks to the world. (Parts don’t talk to the world, as is commonly the case with reactive responses and discourse that stops short of being culturally mature). Second, parts don’t talk with other parts, only to the Whole-Person chair (think of a wagon wheel with the parts being various spokes). In doing Parts Work, the Whole-Person chair defines identity and always has the last word.
Here are a couple of brief Parts Work examples pertinent to this book’s reflections, taken from work with clients:
Example #1: Mark was in his early thirties when he first came to me for therapy. Relationships thus far in his life had rarely gone well. While they might be quite close initially, after a month or so they would fall apart. He had yet to have a successful love relationship of any length. As he sat before me, he seemed unsure of himself, and also oddly distant.
After a few sessions to get acquainted, I introduced the concept of Parts Work. The first part Mark identified was a gruff old man. The old man wasn’t very open to talking—other than commenting that he really didn’t like women that much (or the idea of therapy).
Mark then identified a second part that had very different sentiments. It was not just attracted to women, it idealized them. It was quite romantic, indeed to an extreme. Mark was more fond of this part and commented that it was probably this part that had gotten him to come to see me.
After we had worked together over several weeks, a pattern became apparent. When Mark was initially attracted to a woman, the romantic part took charge. In effect, it was this part that was having the relationship. But within a short while the gruff old man would intercede. When he did, the relationship would become increasingly conflicted. Pretty quickly it would come to an end. When the old man was in charge, Mark was clearly not a very pleasant person to be around.
To get more deeply at what was going on, I suggested that Mark talk with the old man. Mark turned to him and asked pointedly: “What is your problem?” Mark then went over to the old man’s chair to hear what he had to say.
The old man’s response was simple and immediate: “When you let the romantic part take over, you do stupid things. I’m trying to keep you safe.” It turned out that the old man was interfering for what was ultimately a good reason. He was protecting Mark from losing himself in what was an ultimately limited kind of connection.
Mark and I talked at length about what it might mean to relate with a woman from his Whole-Person chair rather than from just the romantic part. At first the idea confused him. It also seemed less interesting to him than what he had known. He couldn’t see why this might be anything he would want. But he agreed to give it a try.
Over the ensuing weeks, Mark did further Parts Work to practice communicating from a more Whole-Person place. And he saw results. He found himself more willing to reach out to women and in general to relate to women in more caring ways. With time, he got the tangible reward of a new relationship that began to grow and endure in ways that relationships had not before.
Later Mark again talked to the gruff old man. Mark wanted to know what the old man thought about the new relationship. To his surprise, the old man had no objection. Indeed, he now liked that a woman was part of Mark’s life. Even more surprising, the old man no longer seemed so gruff, or so old.
As Mark and the old man talked further, the old man shared that in truth he had liked women all along. His problem was only with how Mark didn’t seem to know how to have a relationship without sacrificing his own identity to get there. He proposed to Mark that if Mark could love from his Whole-Person chair, he would not only be supportive of Mark having love in his life, he would be happy to help out in any way he could.
Example #2: Rebecca was in her mid-forties when she came to see me. She described a pattern of abusive relationships—often physically abusive—with conflict a consistent ingredient. She also described sticking with these relationships—including two marriages—in spite of the abuse.
In doing Parts Work, the first part Rebecca identified was quiet and unassuming. When Rebecca spoke to the part, it seemed passive, even submissive, in its responses. But as Rebecca continued talking with the part and reflected on times when its influence was strongest, it became clear that things were not so simple. While the part spoke as if it were a fragile victim to its circumstances, Rebecca noted a surprising result when that part took over. Somehow Rebecca felt, if not more powerful, at least more in control.
These feelings began to make sense when Rebecca talked about how relationships for her had tended to progress. Early on in a relationship, the part would act helpless in ways that certain men would find attractive. These were not men that would be ultimately healthy for Rebecca, but Rebecca saw that this was a kind of attraction that she could count on.
As Rebecca became more acquainted with this part, she found herself better understanding her role in the conflict that had so often been a part of her relationships. She saw that once a relationship began to be established, this part would often act in ways that undermined. Doing so would bring out the worst in the already not great men she had chosen to be with.
With refection, Rebecca saw, to her surprise, that there were ways in which the conflict that resulted had often served her. Certainly it helped keep her safe, guaranteed that the man would not get too close. It also brought reliable excitement. And it protected Rebecca from feeling alone. We talked about how two people who are fighting never stop thinking about each other.
With these observations, Rebecca began to have more insight into why past relationships had taken the forms that they had. She also better understood why she before had stayed in relationships even when she knew they were not healthy.
3Over time in our work together, Rebecca became acquainted with other parts of herself—a creative part, a more assertive part that encouraged her to better stand up for herself, a more intellectual part that expressed frustration that Rebecca was not doing more with her life. Rebecca began to explore what it would mean to more solidly live from her own chair. She practiced making boundaries to the part that had so often before taken over. She also began to draw more consciously on all her parts in making life choices.
Rebecca saw that when she did, life was not quite so predictable. But she also saw that she was coming to like herself much better.
As far as men, Rebecca came to recognize that having a man always there for her had stopped being important in the same way. She also found herself attracted to men who in their own ways were more complete. Every now and then she missed the always predictable excitements she had known in the past. But such feelings quickly passed as she recognized what more she had become.
4Using Parts Work to Redefine Identity and Love
I’ve proposed that Parts Work, besides helping us learn to hold reality in the needed more complete way, also provides quite precise definitions for Whole-Person identity and relationship. This is definition of a functional sort rather than definition as rational description. But definition in this sense is what provides the needed precision in a culturally mature reality. Parts Work offers a concrete way to understand what needed changes involve and, in the process, clarifies just what makes Whole-Person identity and love different from what we have known.
Let’s start with identity. I’ve proposed that changes happening today in how we think about identity are as profound in their significance as those that gave us the modern concept of the individual. With them, we turn first pages in a fundamentally new chapter in how we think about who we are— and ultimately in what it means to be a person.
Parts Work provides a simple way to describe what becomes different with identity in this new sense. Our ideas about what it means to be a “self” in times past have been based on identification with parts and relationships between parts—for instance, a strong part as opposed to a weak part. In contrast, Whole-Person identity draws explicitly on a more conscious and encompassing experience of self, one based on holding and taking responsibility in the whole of one’s multifaceted complexity.
5The defining change with Whole-Person relationship is analogous. In two-halves-make-a-whole love, some archetypal quality in one person relates to a complementary archetypal quality in the other. Most often in heterosexual relationships this would be a more archetypally masculine part in the man and a more archetypally feminine part in a woman, but it can also be the reverse.
6 Whole-Person love is about relating and living from the whole of who we are, in ways that consciously draw on the whole of our complex natures.
We don’t need formally facilitated Parts Work to benefit from its lessons. For example, we can practice something similar by ourselves. When I’m driving, I sometimes imagine parts sitting in various places in the car. The fact that I am holding the steering wheel substitutes for the Whole-Person chair. It helps me stay in touch with who needs to be in charge as I imagine what various parts might want to say to me and how each might contribute.
We can also apply approaches that draw informally on insights from Parts Work. For example, a high school teacher could use parts language in the classroom to engage high school students about the challenges that dating can present. The teacher might say something like this:
“I’ll bet many of you have a part that finds the idea of being close with another person pretty exciting and might be tempted to do almost anything to get it to happen. And I’ll bet most of you also have a part that is afraid of reaching out, afraid that you will do something that the other person might not like, or that you might be rejected and harmed in the process.
“Notice that if either kind of part gets to run the show, the result is going to be problems. If the first part calls the shots, you could miss the communication needed if you are going to be a caring and respectful person and act in ways that violate. Our you could end up with someone who is really not good for you or choose to engage in levels of closeness you are not yet ready for. If the second part calls the shots, there is a good chance you will choose to push the other person away even if in fact you would like to get to know them. And if you do choose to get close and all does not go well, you may end up blaming the other person for a situation that you may in fact be just as responsible for.
“To engage possible relationship with courage and respect, you have to recognize both of these very different kinds of parts. And there is more, the learning that is ultimately of greatest importance. You need to be ready to make your choices from a larger place that is better able to appreciate what is ultimately best for you.”
The imagery of Parts Work can also be used to help us rethink beliefs of most any sort that stop short of today’s needed new systemic sophistication. I’ve noted that the cognitive changes that produce culturally mature understanding help us get our minds around any kind of question that we’ve before framed in the language of polarity. Parts Work can be applied to polarities of any sort—political left versus political right, thoughts versus feelings, science versus religion. In each case, the two sides of the pertinent polarity are best thought of as parts. The more systemic picture that the Whole-Person/Whole-System chair provides makes clear that answers that come from any polarized position are inherently insufficient. It also alerts us to how, when we identify with polarized positions (or simply replace them with compromise), the ultimately important question has yet to be asked.
7New Skills and Capacities
Let’s turn now to specific needed new skills and capacities. I’ll start with new skills and capacities necessary for the day-to-day tasks of Whole-Person identity and love and then briefly address a few that relate more specifically to the forms and structures of a culturally mature life. The significance of each of those I will describe follows directly from how reality changes with culturally mature perspective—put in Parts Work terms, when we are able to sit in Parts Work’s Whole-Person chair. Importantly for the possibility of success with the tasks ahead, so does making each of them manifest in our lives.
Skill #1: Learning to Draw on More Complete Kinds of Truth
Success with each of these new skills and capacities in the end depends on how effectively we engage the first. We can put it in terms of a question: On just what do we base our choices when one-size-fits-all cultural rules and two-halves-make-a-whole projections no longer serve us? We can ask the same question from the perspective of Parts Work. We want to know what remains to guide us when we step beyond the ready answers of parts and engage life from that Whole-Person chair.
I used the perhaps overly philosophical-seeming word “truth” in naming this skill because truth is ultimately what we are talking about. But this is necessary truth in Cultural Maturity’s more systemic sense. We could substitute the word “measure.” CST uses the more general term “referent” and speaks of the need for newly “integrative referents.”
Needed new truths are different in fundamental ways. Most obviously, they are more encompassing. They require that we better take into account the whole of who we are and also the whole of whatever we wish to consider. As important, they necessarily involve new levels of responsibility. We’ve always been responsible for our choices, but in times past, culture as parent has made the larger portion of them for us. With Whole-Person love and identity, we become responsible not just for making good choices, but for determining what for us makes a choice good. In addition, these new truths require that we be much more comfortable with the fact of uncertainty. They necessarily leave behind the one-size-fits-all order and predictability that clear guideposts have traditionally provided.
Engaging truth in this more mature and complete sense highlights an apparent paradox that I noted in the first chapter. Needed new truths are at once more complex and simpler than what they replace. When we step into culturally mature territory, the measures on which we base our choices become more multifaceted. And at the same time, they are more direct, more bare-boned.
We find this with both identity and love. The choices of identity involve greater complexity because we recognize more possibilities. They also draw more consciously on our own complexity, the multiplicity of parts that make up who we are—all the crayons in our particular systemic box. But at the same time, identity’s choices become more straightforward. When we better engage all that is involved, truth becomes what fits, what works. The actions and choices that are most supportive and affirming of our particular life become truth’s bottom line.
It is similar with love. As far as complexity, not only do past rules fail us, the whole romantic ideal that before has given us our basis for choosing fails us. Suddenly, we must take much more into account, both in the world and in ourselves. But when we do, our choices again in important ways become more straightforward. With Whole-Person love, ultimately what we want to measure is simply what we share, the degree to which a connection is creative and vital. We feel love when a relationship in some way creates new life, when one plus one becomes more than two.
We can draw on a formal philosophical notion to describe truth in this new sense, but for the notion to work we have to radically redefine it. The Whole-Person chair in Parts Work engages us in what is ultimately a “pragmatic” enterprise. With both Whole-Person identity and Whole-Person love, truth becomes a simple reflection of what works. The difference from how the word “pragmatic” is conventionally used is that this is not simply a logical or expedient kind of pragmatism, but rather a “life-centered” pragmatism. The Whole-Person chair’s job is to discern the choices that are most life-affirming and to act on this most essential kind of information.
8Skill #2: Learning to Engage Identity and Love as Exploratory Processes
Whole-Person identity and love each require being more comfortable with change. Culturally mature perspective makes us more conscious of how identity and love are never ultmately fixed—they are processes. It also helps us appreciate how identity and love are in the end specifically “creative” kinds of processes. For them to work most powerfully, we must engage them as exploration.
With identity, the fact that culture’s answers can’t be enough means that any clear sense of self must involve learning and questioning. And figuring out what matters is necessarily a life-long process, not a one-time thing. We recognize a more limited version of this greater humility to change’s role in identity in the wisdom that can accompany personal maturity. With Cultural Maturity, we confront its importance in a more fully encompassing sense.
Whole-Person love requires greater comfort with change most obviously in how it makes changes ongoing role inescapable. This quote from Anne Morrow Lindbergh hangs outside my office door to help remind people that change in love is real, and also ultimately not to be feared:
“When you love someone, you do not love them all the time in exactly the same way…. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror at its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, or duration, or continuity, when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity—in freedom in the sense that dancers are free, often hardly touching when they pass yet partners ultimately in the same patterns.”
9A more exploratory picture confronts us too with how we need to be sensitive to just what love at different points requires of us. For example, with love’s beginnings, we’ve tended to idealize love at first sight. But while initial attraction can be nice, knowing another person for who they are rather than as a projected ideal can take time. When I look back over love relationships in my life, I see that most often I didn’t know the other person with any depth until many months together, and frequently years. And, even then, there could be major surprises.
When a young person I am working with in therapy frets about whether someone they have just met is right for them, I often offer that they are asking the wrong question, or at least one that is premature. I also suggest that the right question is simpler. All they really need to know is whether they want to get together with the person again. If the young person is doing Parts Work, a quick conversation with the parts usually provides an answer to this more time-appropriate—and more exploratory—question.
In Chapter Six, I will briefly describe how we can think about love as a creative process more explicitly in the sense that it tends to go through predictable stages. We don’t need that level of discernment to be successful in love, but it helps if we can at least be more accepting of the fact that “love has its seasons.”
The recognition that love is best thought of as an exploratory process raises important further questions. We can wonder, for example, just what in times ahead will serve as the glue in the bonds of intimacy, the basis for love. I’ve described how two-halves-make-a-whole dynamics have offered not just that we fit together like two matching puzzle pieces, but that a predictable kind of magnetism will hold those pieces together. With Whole-Person love’s more exploratory picture, we lose such easy predictability.
Could it be that just as we are coming to the place of greatest potential for fully personal intimate love, we are losing any reason to take the risks? Clearly there is still sex. But for the task of really deep bonding, our erotic touchings are rarely enough.
The answer to how love in a more exploratory world could have a chance must lie with ways love’s new picture adds to what we have known. I’ve described how love that manifests from Whole-Person identity—love that is based on loving another person directly for who they are rather than as idealized possibility—is potentially much deeper. In this sense, love expressed from that Whole-Person chair is also more ultimately romantic. In addition, the fact that Whole-Person love is more consciously pragmatic, more attentive to actual needs that love fulfills (companionship, intimate bonds, parental cooperation, and so on) means that it can be much more resilient. Add to these factors how stepping beyond the one-size-fits-all cultural dictates of times past invites a greater variety of options in how we approach love and we find legitimate reason to be optimistic.
A related question concerns commitment. It is reasonable to ask what commitment looks like in a reality where change is such a constant presence. On first encountering the concept of Whole-Person relationship, people can express concern that the idea seems to leave out commitment. Ultimately, as we shall see, it does almost the opposite. Yet the question of just what commitment becomes with Whole-Person relationship is a good one.
Later we will examine how there can be many specific kinds of commitments, some more traditional, others less so, depending on the people and their particular circumstances. But Parts Work also brings attention to a more basic kind of commitment. With Whole-Person relationship, we commit to loving from that Whole-Person chair. We promise to do our best to engage the other person from the whole of who we are and also to do all we can to protect the other person from incursion by our parts. Such commitment requires that we hold experience more complexly than has before been necessary. But again, it is also about keeping things simple—in the best sense.
A more exploratory relationship to identity and love makes considerable demands. Fortunately, Cultural Maturity’s changes also make those demands more tolerable. Indeed, it can make them fascinating. And the rewards for taking on these demands are great—identity and love that are more complete, more vital, and ultimately more fun.
Skill #3: Getting Better at Knowing and Expressing Our “Yeses” and “Nos”
Nothing more defines culturally mature decision-making than the need to be more conscious and explicit in our discernments. Put simply, we need to do a better job of recognizing and articulating our yeses and nos. This is the case equally with identity and love.
Engaging identity as an exploratory process is in the end about nothing more than making ongoing yes and no choices. We venture forth and each step along the way note what works for us and what does not. Put in Parts Work terms, the Whole-Person chair is engaged in a constant process of discerning what choices are most life-affirming, and accepting or rejecting options accordingly.
It is similar with relationship. If you ask people what ability is most important to good relationship, most will answer something like “clear communication.” But we can be more specific, and we need to be if our concern is relationship in today’s new relationship landscape. Success at love more and more requires being skilled at discerning and articulating our yeses and nos.
In times past, traditional roles and relationship assumptions have delineated the most important yeses and nos for us. Today, as traditional guideposts abandon us, relationship’s yeses and nos increasingly become our responsibility not just to determine, but also to voice. Fail to do so and we quickly get ourselves into trouble. Clarity with regard to yeses and nos becomes particularly important if our interest is Whole-Person relationship.
10This needed new clarity brings with it an important implication that we can easily miss. It requires both men and women to give up traditional kinds of power. This is most obvious for traditional male power. For example, if a man takes on the traditional task of initiating, he has to be keenly aware of and deeply respectful of the woman’s nos. That means sincerely wanting to hear “no” if that is the woman’s honest response, and honoring it. In the old, more heroic picture, his task might be more to see if he could find a way around or through the woman’s defenses. In the new picture, not only are nos respected, the man makes every effort to be sure he is getting clear yeses every step along the way.
But men are not alone in this need to rethink power. Indeed, in an important sense, today’s needed new clarity requires of women an even greater giving up of traditional power. We’ve seen how the fact that archetypally feminine power tends to be less explicit is key to its great ability to affect. Women (and men who make use of archetypally feminine power) are taught not to reveal their intentions, something I’ve observed with the common guidance given to women that they should “play hard to get.” I reflected in an earlier footnote on how I often work with young men who find themselves totally bewildered by today’s changing rules and expectations. The fact that the information they need is so often kept out of sight can make their task almost impossible. Clear yeses and nos mean the woman, like the man, must be willing to lay her cards on the table. She doesn’t get to have it both ways if she wants her nos to be respected.
11I’ve promised to elaborate on some of the complexities that must be included in our considerations if today’s conversations about gender and sexuality are to have the needed sophistication. These reflections on the need to be more conscious and explicit with our yeses and nos highlight a couple of these complexities.
The first is simply how rapidly assumptions and expectations are changing.
I recently passed a young woman on the street wearing a tee shirt that proclaimed “There is no fine line.” It would be wonderful if this were so, if there were a clear set of rules that everyone agrees on. But, in fact, our yes and no assumptions are in rapid flux. And even with the more delineated rules of times past, there was much less agreement than we tend to imagine. In our conversations about gender and love, we must be humble to how easy it can be to miscommunicate even with the best of intentions.
The second added complexity relates to the less explicit ways in which archetypally feminine power has often been expressed. Not only can we miscommunicate because expectations are changing, we can miscommunicate because in the old reality, communicating clearly— indeed, often just knowing consciously what one wanted and might want to communicate—was not how things were done. In this context, the needed clarity as far as both yeses and nos becomes an even greater challenge. We can easily miss this further complexity because of how distanced we are from the archetypally feminine in our time.
I should be clear about something I am not implying with this emphasis on good communication and sensitivity to yeses and nos. Today, we can hear proposals that come frighteningly close to advocating legal contracts for each step toward possible intimacy. This is not what I am suggesting. I can’t imagine anything more deadening to intimacy as exploration. What I am suggesting is that communication in relationship needs to be much more conscious and nuanced—more personal, more deeply engaged, and more demanding of responsibility—than we’ve assumed before. An ethic that unquestioningly respects nos combined with a commitment on everyone’s part to make yeses and nos explicit should with time get us where we need to go.
Skill #4: Avoiding Overwhelm
A further needed new skill relates to a kind of discernment that takes on new levels of importance with Cultural Maturity’s changes. We need a keen sensitivity to the resources that at any moment we have available to us. A formal CST notion—what it calls Capacitance—lets us be more precise. Capacitance describes the amount of life we can take in before things become too much. Think of a balloon, that if blown up too big, threatens to pop.
Attention to Capacitance becomes newly important with Whole-Person identity and relationship. While it is never a healthy thing to be stressed beyond what one can handle, being overwhelmed makes staying in one’s Whole-Person chair almost impossible. Parts will step in to protect us. The flip side of parts limiting us when they take over is that their taking over provides protection from realities that are too big for us to tolerate. If Whole-Person identity and relationship is important to us, living our lives in a way that honors Capacitance becomes essential.
The topic of Capacitance is often a focus when I work with people wishing to develop culturally mature abilities—how to discern it, how to manage it, and how, when we lack needed Capacitance, we can avoid doing harm to ourselves or others. We can think of attention to Capacitance as another essential aspect of commitment in culturally mature relationship (certainly in relationships with others, but also with oneself).
I’ll share a Capacitance-related story that graphically brings together the themes covered thus far in this chapter, most obviously the importance of clear yeses and nos, but even more, and in a particularly striking way, what can happen when systems are overwhelmed and parts intercede. It also highlights a further kind of complexity that we need to acknowledge if today’s conversations about gender and sexuality are to have the needed sophistication.
The story comes from early in my twenties and involves a particularly confusing and unsettling sexual/relationship encounter. I’d gone out with a young woman of about my age for around a month when she invited me back to her apartment. She initiated hugging on the couch and then invited me back into her bedroom, She suggested we take off our clothes and we slid into bed together.
I was struck with how easily the sexual connection progressed given that it was our first time together. Her body was highly responsive to my touch and the broad smile on her face and the sounds she made as we moved together made it pretty clear that she was enjoying the connection as much as I. We made love several times, enthusiastically and often wildly.
As we lay there afterward, I asked her how she was doing, expecting something on the order of “wow, that was amazing.” Instead she sat up and said, “I think you raped me.”
I could not have been more startled at her response and hardly knew what to say. I remember fumbling for words and being able only to come up with something defensive like—”What? It was your idea and you could have said no at any point. And you certainly looked like you were enjoying yourself.” After a long, awkward silence, I just got up and left.
If nothing else, this story highlights how complex and problematical circumstances can become even without any obvious ill intent. When I now look back, I think I better understand what happened. She was not terribly experienced with relationship, and I suspect the intensity of the physical connection overwhelmed her. I also suspect that she was in a part when she so enthusiastically got things started (as we tend to be, particularly at that age). When things got to be too much, another much less friendly part took over to protect her.
I felt sad about the experience afterward. She had seemed a good person and in spite of the unfortunate direction things had gone, I never felt that she had been consciously manipulative or had intended to deceive. I suspect that if we had been a bit older, things might have progressed quite differently. There is a good chance we could have better communicated, weathered the circumstances, and even continued to be friends. Put in the context of this chapter, imagine how differently things might have gone if Whole-Person perspective had prevailed, parts had not interceded, and needed yeses and nos, whatever they might have been, had been better recognized and clearly articulated.
I noted that this example illustrates another of the complexities that we need to include in today’s conversations about gender and sexuality. In the great majority of instances when someone experiences violation, they are to be taken at their word and believed. But it is also the case that in many different ways, psychological dynamics can interfere with our ability to see clearly.
Skill #5: Learning to Manage Asymmetries
I include the next new skill less because of its specific significance than because it helps with further understanding what Whole-Person relationship requires of us. It is perhaps again best put as a question: How does Whole-Person relationship change when one person is fairly adept with Whole-Person relating and the other person is less so?
The answer might seem surprising. In fact, very little changes. It turns out that Whole-Person relationship does not ultimately require two people. Mutuality is wonderful, and with it much more becomes possible. But this can’t always be the case. Any time we engage another person from Parts Work’s Whole-Person chair, we can usefully think of the result as at least a form of Whole-Person relating.
The implications of this observation are going to be different depending on the kind of relationship. For example, when a relationship is between a parent and a child, significant Capacitance difference is what we expect. And significant discrepancies in Capacitance—and more specifically, differences in people’s capacity for Whole-Person relationship—need not be a great problem when relating with neighbors or someone we encounter at the grocery store.
With a life partner, the challenges presented by significant Capacitance differences are going to be of greater consequence. They may even point toward a relationship being ultimately unworkable. Certainly they call for particular care if the connection is to work. But the basic notion that nothing really changes still holds. This observation acquires added relevance with the recognition that at different times we are all going to be more or less capable of Whole-Person relating. In the end, being overly concerned with whether our partner is always in their Whole-Person chair is good evidence that we are not really in ours.
Skill (set) #6: More Structural Skills and Capacities
Most of the new skills and capacities I have described are most pertinent to how we go about making everyday choices. But some of the most important new skills and capacities relate more to the choices through which we give our lives structure. In times past, we rarely questioned life structures fundamentally. Culture told us what jobs were to be preferred, the kind of house it was ideal to live in, and what love should look like, whether when dating or in marriage, Today, as cultural dictates becomes less explicit and options multiply, we need to choose more consciously if the structures of our lives are to work.
Here I will focus primarily on the structures of relationship, though because relationship structures so often determine broader life choices, in the end they are just as much about identity. When I work with individuals and couples around relationship issues, I give particular attention to three structure-related concerns. For ease of conversation, I will call them simply the “rhythm, boundary, and container” aspects of relationship. They are significant because they address structures systemically, not just in terms of possible forms, but in terms of underlying organizational principles. They overlap, but each provides a somewhat different vantage for getting beyond traditional expectations and crafting life structures appropriate to the lives of particular people. We can think of the ability to consciously ask questions of the rhythm, boundary, and container sort as another needed new capacity.
12• Rhythms
When I work with a couple, one of the things I often first ask about is the rhythms of their relationship—how much time they spend together and spend apart. In my experience, when two people get the rhythms of relationship just right—when they spend just the right amount of time together, and when they are together, do the things that most matter to them—everything else tends to take care of itself.
Needed adjustments can be very different depending on the people and their life circumstances. For example, if a couple works and has children, the time they spend together can frequently be much less than they might imagine. Just noting this fact can take things a long way. The solution to relationship issues in these situations may be no more complicated than each person making the other more of a priority.
In other instances, just the opposite can be the case. The issue may be too much time together rather than too little. This is often the situation when there is significant conflict in relationship. Conflict may be serving to provide needed separation. At least getting started with a solution can be just as simple: more time for separate activities—a regular night out with friends, now and then a trip alone, whatever works.
One of the best indicators of a healthy relationship—and the possibility of successful Whole-Person relationship—is just how fully rhythmic the relationship can be. Closeness and separateness each in their own ways require Capacitance and create vulnerability. Low-Capacitance relationships tend to keep things at a safe middle distance. They don’t let things get too close, and neither do they allow for fully separate identities. High-Capacitance relationships can transition from being very close to being wholly separate to again being close without major catches in the process.
• Boundaries
Another thing I often ask about earlier on as a therapist is how comfortable people are with boundaries. I addressed more everyday boundaries with our look at the importance of clearly articulating yeses and nos. But being conscious in making boundaries of a more structural sort is just as important. As with rhythms, it is surprising how often when people get boundaries right, everything else takes care of itself.
The recognition that it is important for your partner to have his or her private thoughts—and you to have yours—can be thought of as a structural boundary recognition. And structural boundaries can also be more concrete. Having a “room of one’s own” in which to be creative, keep one’s special things, and live with those private thoughts has saved many a marriage. Whole-Person relationship requires greater sensitivity to the importance of structural boundaries—both establishing good ones and honoring the structural boundaries of others.
The importance of boundaries can be difficult to grasp for some people. We can think of boundaries as some opposite of freedom. And we tend to identify intimacy with the dissolving of boundaries. But, in fact, real freedom requires good boundaries, and intimacy is not possible without them. The image of a cell’s outer membrane helps capture the essential relationship between yeses and nos of a more structural sort. The cell must be able to let things in for it to be vital. But these must be the right things at the right times if the cell is to maintain its integrity. Real yeses become possible only if a person is comfortable with and effective in establishing needed nos.
• Containers
Container questions are the most explicitly structural. Marriage provides one common answer to this kind of question, as do familiar categories we use in the process of getting to know someone, such as “dating” or “just being friends.” But as cultural assumptions become less cut and dried, these stop being the only right answers. With Cultural Maturity’s changes, it becomes ever more important to be creative in how we think about our container options. Whole-Person bonds invite—indeed, demand—that people create containers that more specifically honor two unique people and their unique connection.
Recently I worked with an older woman who bemoaned how limited her options were in growing up. She had felt that she had really had two only choices. She could be married with a husband who was the provider, a house with a white picket fence, and the proverbial 2.2 children. Or she could be a “spinster.” She commented how lucky women were today to have so many more possibilities. Fortunately, she was someone who was sufficiently stubborn by nature that she had always found ways to structure her life so that it worked for her in spite of how culture had defined her options.
Relationship-related container questions ask about the choices and agreements that might be most consistent with two people’s needs. They concern the appropriateness of traditional marriage, whether a couple wants to have children, where people wish to live, how each person chooses to spend their time, and the physical spaces that might best support how each person lives, loves, works, and plays. With Whole-Person identity and relationship, very traditional containers may work just fine. But we also may want to try out different options. Actor Jack Nicholson once observed that he thought the best arrangement for a marriage was living just far enough apart that it took a vigorous walk to get together. It is surprising how often people I work with think that sounds like a pretty good approach.
13Capacities and Possibility
All these capacities are new and require levels of responsibility and sophistication that have not before been needed. But they also make much more possible. And in important ways, they can make things simpler. When we successfully take them on, very often the more everyday specifics of being together take care of themselves.