Your partner only plays a role in your script
The true point of a relationship will always be to balance the inner conflicts of both partners. For that reason, being in a relationship is the best thing both can possibly do – regardless of what it is like at the moment. You should be glad that your nearest and dearest presses your buttons so precisely that it sometimes hurts. You might as well be grateful for it, because if you want a fulfilling relationship it is essential to pay attention to those parts in yourself that hurt, are destructive or restrict your room for manoeuvre. You might still resent this idea, but if you wish to find real strength in your relationship then for the time being you have no other choice than to deal with the bottom of the iceberg.
This might appear masochistic, but once you are familiar with it, you’ll be fascinated, for in each and every negative, painful and destructive part of yourself there is a fundamental power which can help both yourself and your relationship. It is just waiting to be rediscovered and unleashed.
For that to happen, first of all you need to be willing to be responsible for your fear, your negativity and your pain. This doesn’t mean hurling yourself into an abyss of doom and depression, it only means refocusing your attention. In your day-to-day life with your partner, from now on stop focusing on what they are doing and concentrate on your own responses to it. Once you have learned how to monitor yourself in this way, you need the courage to be really honest with yourself. So far everybody who has followed this path has been surprised and sometimes frightened by the things going on inside them – all the prejudice, the shame and resentment that has kept them from finding love and happiness. But as soon as you are willing to surrender to your own investigations, something will start to change inside you – very subtly you become gentler and more empathic.
If you are prepared to change in this way and continue with it in your everyday life, you will realize that what initially appears to be a passion-killer will ultimately free the path towards real love. Our iceberg is a great thing to have – it’s not some sly monster manipulating us from the depths. It is a treasure chest. In it our whole life is stored – every breath, every emotion, every thought – as if on an unlimited-capacity hard disk. It is our whole being. And we should give it our full attention and our love. We should have the most passionate affair with it that we can possibly imagine. We should have the relationship of our life with it.
The iceberg is always working for us, even when our conscious mind doesn’t see it like that at all. It is a most divine, precise and ingenious instrument and reaches far beyond anything we can comprehend and initiate with our conscious mind. We think that the little conscious part that is visible above the waterline is our loving self. Here we make decisions, take action, fall in love and apparently yearn to stay with someone until death do us part. But what we are actually doing is completely different. Here, at the tip, we plan how our life should be. Here we create strategies to avoid our pain and weakness, but in fact they exclude endless possibilities and real love.
As soon as something becomes uncomfortable, we want to change it. When something hurts, we look for the means to soothe the pain. We always rush away, mostly from ourselves. If we don’t feel the way we think we should be feeling, we run off into all kinds of addictions or look for a person who might be able to change things. As soon as life is not the way we think it should be, we immediately start developing strategies to bring about improvement. We want to be richer, more successful, more accepted, more beautiful – but there’s no way we’re prepared to admit that we feel helpless, inadequate, ugly or wrong.
This mechanism can be detected much more easily in individuals than in couples. The minute a love affair is over or there is a bit of slack time in their life, most singles are already on the lookout for the next relationship. I once had a friend who chatted up a woman every time we went to a bar or restaurant and then handed her his card on leaving. He was always busy either attracting women, fighting for them or grieving for a lost relationship. From the perspective of this book he was primarily distracted from himself and his deep inner loneliness.
But couples too have their avoidance strategies. Out of the fear of a real encounter, of perhaps having to tolerate a certain distance and silence on the path to real closeness, they fill up their private diaries with endless events, and their family life is packed with invitations, meetings with friends, trips out, social commitments and hobbies. Time and again couples have told me that they do a lot together but don’t know each other at all. I have met several couples in therapy where one partner has a lover who is part of their circle of friends. When they meet, along with their unsuspecting partners, it’s just about some secret touching under the table or in the hall.
Some external commitments can be the result of a deep relationship. When two people gain a great deal of strength from each other, they can actively pass some of it on to others. But for most couples whose diaries are bursting with appointments, it is all about distraction. They twitter and flutter like a mother bird leading possible enemies away from the nest. A busy life not only keeps others away, it also distracts us from what needs our undivided attention – our fear and our pain. That is what we need to understand, to nurture and to learn to love. That is what we have to confront with courage.
As I mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean that we have to plunge into an intense therapeutic process. This kind of work very rarely needs a therapist. We don’t have to do anything really, nor do we have to change. All that is needed is an inner awareness, a willingness to feel our real feelings in every moment.
When Christina came to me she was busy all the time either helping others or looking after relatives. If in the session I managed to ask how she was, tears started to roll. Every time those tears surprised her and every time she was very moved when, for a moment at least, she sensed how she really felt. She made some jokes about what she called my ‘witchcraft’, but all that happened was that for a brief moment, in response to a very simple question, she attended to herself.
It is these simple honest questions that take us straight to the heart of the iceberg. I’ll describe this transformational process in the second part of this book. For now, just remember that everything that you need to know about yourself, all the pain, all the fear, turns up at exactly the right moment and in exactly the right place for you. All you need to do is remain alert.
Christina, the eternal helper, just needed to stop for a moment and look at her life from a different angle. She needed to ask: ‘What does all this tell me about myself?’ There were needy people all around her and she was the mother of all mothers. With that little question she might have remembered that she had had to play this motherly role earlier, in her family of origin. She might have recognized that time and again, whether in her own family, with her friends or in her neighbourhood, she had embraced this role. And perhaps she might even have recognized how much she was looking for it and yet how it made her suffer at the same time. She might have realized that sometimes she actually hated it. Maybe in the end she might have felt her own deep neediness, cried all her unshed tears and, with this new awareness, managed to break the cycle.
The more often we stand back and take an honest evaluation of our life, the more quickly we will realize that we are following the same script over and over. I have lived in various countries, for instance, have moved house about two dozen times and have changed jobs and partners numerous times, only to humbly learn this one lesson: no matter where I am, no matter who I am with and what I am doing, my experiences are always dependent on my way of looking at life.
Everybody in this world lives out their own personal script. We can change the location and the actors – partners, jobs and places – but the emotional climate and our way of dealing with life will remain. We change the screens on which our movie is shown, we change the set on which it is filmed, but time and again the scripts have similar plots and the actors play similar roles, because we are the writers and directors of our own movie. But we have usually forgotten that.
If you look at your everyday life you will discover examples of this everywhere. I have a friend, for example, who, when meeting someone new, always asks herself whether they can be trusted. She is worried that they might talk behind her back or find out too much about her.
I once went on holiday with another friend. We just wanted to relax for a few days. But we had hardly entered our hotel room when we began to see things differently. I was on the balcony enjoying the lovely view and the fresh air. She was thinking that the room might be quite noisy at night, as it was close to the restaurant. We moved rooms. Later we went to the sauna. After a long walk in wintry weather I felt really comfortable there, but she left after only a few minutes. Later she explained that she found it quite unhygienic. Hadn’t I noticed the smell of the woman next to us? And the unattractive feet of the guy on the bench above? No, I hadn’t.
We don’t see the world as it is – we see our own view of it. Deep inside the iceberg, in our inner projection room, all our sad old stories are still being played out on an endless loop. But we haven’t been to this inner projection room for ages. Most of us have forgotten that it exists. But there is a small hole in the wall behind us, just as in the cinema. From this tiny hole the film is beamed up to the tip of our iceberg on a giant screen, complete with surround-sound and 3-D vision. It’s so perfect that we don’t even realize that it is only a movie. And the story is so thrilling that we keep forgetting to eat our popcorn.
In this sense Christina relived time and again – completely unconsciously – the story of her own childhood. In her adult life, as in her childhood, there were both small and big men in her family who needed her help, her nurturing and her attention. She rushed from mission to mission and at the end of the day she was usually so exhausted that she hadn’t got the energy to figure out what her own feelings were. Every emergency during her day was real; the increasing neediness of the men around her seemed to require her help alone. When I asked how she was, and thereby found the little hole in the projection room, for a moment her tears brought her out of the movie to the place where the real script was being written. She could then attend to herself and discover her own story, and bit by bit she managed to understand why she was so angry at her husband…
As we watch our movie, at the very moment when things get tense, when it seems that the leading man and lady aren’t going to live happily ever after, that’s when our partner walks in front of the screen. And before we realize what’s happening, our projector makes them the baddie and they get the lead in our unprocessed, never-ending story.
That’s what happened to Christina. For a long time she hadn’t been able to see her husband as he really was. One day he had walked straight across her screen and since then he had been playing the leading role in her old home movie. Christina complained that he didn’t care about anything and never noticed what she really needed – even though from the very first moment he had been the most empathic and understanding man she had ever met.
There was a younger brother in Christina’s life who had always been the centre of their mother’s attention and love. He had seemed weaker than his older sister and so been continually mothered and nurtured. In the course of time, his big sister had become completely deprived of love and care, but all her attempts to draw attention to herself were in vain. In her, weakness was not accepted. The only thing that attracted her mother’s attention and devotion was when she looked after the weak brother too. Thus as a little girl Christina learned the rule that trapped her as a grown woman: she only got attention when she helped men. And in order for her to be able to help men, they had to be weak. But if men are weak, there is no real place for a grown-up woman.
You might say that nobody would imitate childhood scenes like that. You might think that normal healthy people would never suffer from such delusions. You might consider it a miracle if we ever met anyone who would play our old games with us, let alone met them all the time. Well, these emotional dynamics may be unlikely and even unreal, but day in, day out, they dominate our perception. We all create our world in exactly the same way that Christina did. And no matter who turns up in our life, they immediately get slotted into a role in our old familiar film.
In Christina’s case this occurred primarily with her husband and their son, but also with the other men, young and old, in her neighbourhood. They all were mothered in an unconscious bid for love and attention. And as we all choose the most comfortable life every time, they gratefully accepted this treatment. So Christina took on the role of nurse, helper and carer in her family. For her, closeness was always linked to incompetence and neediness. But this closeness created dependency, and some tried to escape from it. In time her son became an idle good-for-nothing and her husband withdrew.
Through this behaviour both men became so similar to Christina’s brother, her mother’s favourite, that for the grown-up Christina they became more and more the object of her powerlessness, anger and resentment. By playing her game they had become exactly what she had never wanted to experience again.
Both Christina’s husband and son had great potential and intelligence and would have benefited greatly if Christina had found the courage to be herself and to create her own life. To do this, however, she would have had to take the risk of being loved for her own dreams. But if she had stopped suggesting by her constant mothering that the men were weak, everyone in the family would have grown and moved forward.
At some point during our work Christina realized that she had repeated the same pattern in her own family that she had rejected so strongly in her mother’s and that this behaviour had earned her very little attention and acceptance as a woman.
In Christina’s story the past had quite a strong influence over her current relationships. Above all, she repeatedly discovered neediness in people which urgently required her help – an emotional neediness she never had allowed herself to indulge in. Only her occasional tears showed how empty, vulnerable and helpless she felt.
Psychologists call these dynamics ‘projection’. On our way towards truth it is important to fully comprehend what projections are. The word stems from the Latin proicere, which means ‘to throw away’. When we project, we throw something away from ourselves and onto another person.
In so doing, we analyze another person instead of ourselves. We say things like ‘They need help and attention’ or ‘They are weak’, thereby projecting our own unmet needs for help and attention or our own weaknesses onto the other person. We might say ‘They don’t care’ or ‘They’re inconsiderate’ or ‘They’re never there,’ thereby projecting our own lack of care for ourselves and with it our own inability to care, our own helpless withdrawal and our own separateness onto the other person.
Why do we do this? And how can we do it so accurately without even noticing? The answer is always the same – it’s the way the ingenious bottom of our iceberg contributes to the healing of our old wounds. Way back as children we were unable to provide ourselves with fairness, acceptance, attention and healing. Receptive as we were, we simply took everything on board and adapted perfectly to the family system. Sometimes this was so painful that we even banished the experience from our memory.
The reliable iceberg, however, stored all this pain up for us and time and again sends it up in ways which are bearable for us, so that we can use it to our advantage. Sometimes we can’t tolerate the truth, though, we can’t deal with it or accept it, and so we project it onto others. Then we blame them for things that are rooted in our own pain.
Once we understand that we ‘throw away’ our hurts in this way, we can consider those who have ‘caught’ them with curiosity, in a spirit of research and compassion, rather than rejecting them, blaming them, fearing them and judging them. Once we start seeing ourselves in what we reject in our partners we will find what we were unable to see in ourselves – and then healing is possible.
Once you engage with this concept, the whole dynamics of a relationship are turned around. The old films from the bottom of the iceberg don’t have to be projected to the tip any more. Your relationship with your partner becomes a kind of underwater camera. Whatever you yearn for or stumble over on the surface with your partner shows you the stories hidden away deep down in the bulk of the iceberg. And in time – though you might not be able to imagine it yet – you will delight in everything that comes up between you and your partner and be relieved that it can finally be examined.
Your relationship is like a mirror directly in front of your nose. Wherever you turn, the mirror turns with you. Your relationship always mirrors the part that you cannot see and the place you can’t discover yourself. Whatever is happening in your relationship is an expression of your relationship with yourself. Everything is a reflection of your own inner landscape. The people around you act out exactly the qualities you carry hidden inside you. Your most intimate partners as well as your most intimate enemies reflect the core of your being. No one can love you if you haven’t loved yourself. And no one can harm you in a way you cannot harm yourself.
We can only dissolve this mirage when we identify those parts of our iceberg that others are acting out for us. Once we have dragged them up into our consciousness, we can understand and finally integrate them – which is always the final step. It is about perceiving that everything we believe is external is in ourselves and thus taking it back. Only then do we finally feel that we have everything that we need for our life and that we are just as complete as anybody else.
The question ‘What does it have to do with me?’ should be your constant companion in this process. It immediately creates understanding and closeness. And by focusing on integrating all the parts of our personality in every human encounter, we also become more compassionate, flexible and positive. We broaden our understanding and our natural charisma and expand our control over our life.
Neediness, pain and inadequacy are the issues in sentimental early evening soaps. But deep down, in the projection room of our iceberg, there are late-night movies featuring really evil villains. Villains are not very popular, but in every really enthralling thriller they have a main role. Can you think of somebody in your life you really don’t like, someone you condemn or even hate? Somebody who was really once quite close to you but who has cheated on you, humiliated you or abused you? This person is your shadow. They represent a completely isolated part of your iceberg hulk – an aspect of your self-rejection and your self-hate. They show you something that you condemn yourself for.
What can it possibly have to do with us when other people do things that hurt us? When our partner is hardly ever at home, cheats on us, treats the children badly or is always emotionally blackmailing us? When our boss humiliates us in front of everybody, exploits our goodwill, takes away our power and replaces us with someone else? Or when we have to take a particularly inconsiderate and stubborn adversary to court? All this immediately triggers anger, pain, helplessness, guilt and fear in us. But often we hide away from the destructive self-hate reflected by those conflicts.
Dealing with the shadow requires a lot of courage and honesty. But once we are willing to look at it more closely, we will always be able to identify it. It is exactly the opposite of what we’d like to be, what we believe ourselves to be or what corresponds to our role in our family or society. Sometimes, in particularly clear moments, we recognize, when dealing with the shadow, that we are envious or jealous or lacking exactly what the representative of our shadow owns. But such insights are rare exceptions. Mostly we reject the shadow categorically and are trapped in a complete polarization: either our shadow has power, success, freedom and influence or it has compassion, care, justice and honourable intentions. And if our shadow has one, we will feel linked to the other.
Every person has a shadow. And shadows always turn up where things are moving in an extreme direction. The more at ease we feel, the more extreme adversaries will turn up in our life and the more frequently and intensely we will have to deal with those we detest so much – feminists and traditionalists, blacks and whites, Christians and Muslims, nuclear protestors and nuclear advocates, stern parents and rebellious children, divorcees and their ex-partners. Once the willingness to communicate grows, however, the boundaries become softer and more vague. If the split is cemented further, on the other hand, the power struggle becomes more intense.
Often we can watch these dynamics at work during a separation. Two people who once got together and married in the spirit of true love eventually get divorced and embark on bitter warfare.
What is it, down there in our iceberg hulk, that we detest so much that we hide it away and never connect it to ourselves? Very early in life we probably did something that caused pain either to ourselves or others. It is likely that we were actually just doing something when something bad happened, and so we unconsciously formed a link between the two. As I said before, children don’t have a clear boundary between themselves and what is happening around them. So maybe we were absorbed in a wonderfully engrossing game when one of our siblings had an accident. Then maybe a parent said something like ‘You should have looked out for them.’And so inside us a link was formed that said: ‘Whenever I play happily and am carefree, something terrible happens.’ After that we thought the carefree part of ourselves was ‘bad’ and banned it from our consciousness. And later in life we found ourselves reacting overcautiously and responsibly and condemning carefree, jolly people as irresponsible.
Often a particularly pervasive atmosphere in families or societies has a severe impact on a child’s development. This could be the degenerative disease of a parent, constant arguments leading to divorce, an imbalance of power between the parents, strict rules, ethnic persecution or narrow religious and moral boundaries. In such an atmosphere things that are completely normal for children will be condemned as ‘bad’ or ‘evil’. Nakedness, for instance, will be held to be a sin and physical exuberance immoral. A neighbour’s children of a different skin colour or religion will be arch-enemies, and being noisy will make Daddy ill.
It’s equally repressive for a child to have to choose between Mummy and Daddy, between the weaker and the stronger parent. Children want to love everybody in the same way, at all costs. But if they are forced to make a decision, either because of arguments, separation or the weakness of a parent, then they have to split part of themselves off. The part which still loves the other parent is ‘bad’ and not allowed to exist any longer, even though the parent might have left the family or want to leave, or might shout at Daddy or beat Mummy up.
Extremely strict rules and prohibitions in a family also contribute significantly to the forming of a shadow. The child tries to act within those boundaries and behave correctly, but in spite of its best efforts, its natural strengths and desires will rise to the surface and then have to be pushed back down into the ‘bad’ forbidden realm of the shadow. Later in life, when all those natural desires surface again, they are distorted and disfigured as greed, hate, revenge, gluttony or promiscuity. Sometimes they lead us to live a virtually double life.
While I was writing this book, the name Michael Friedmann made headlines. Friedmann was a public institution in Germany – the vice-president of the Central Council of the Jews in Germany, a lawyer, a member of the Conservative party and a media personality – and he claimed a particularly high moral and political ground, always aiming for the highest standards in justice, religion, morals, retribution and credibility.
With so much emphasis – and in his case public emphasis – on virtue and responsibility, it’s easy for life to get out of kilter. Such inner demands put pressure on people and this causes a constant inner imbalance. After a while all the forbidden desires build up and break through particularly forcefully. In fact this apparently incorruptible high priest of honesty was accused of drug misuse, sexual excesses with prostitutes and having contacts in the underworld. One of the prosecutors declared that the Friedmann case would keep the tabloids happy for several weeks.
From this book’s perspective, Friedmann had an entire ‘shadow cabinet’. The faultless public image he had created as a kind of chief moral inquisitor meant that unconsciously he was forced to permanently judge himself according to his exaggerated standards. No space was left for the human weaknesses and fallibility from which vitality and compassion can arise. His desire for immediate, authentic physical contact was also obviously huge. But his natural physical impulses were not allowed to unfold freely. It seems that he had dissociated himself from their unruly power so strongly that eventually he could only overcome this rift by taking drugs. Only under their mind-expanding influence was he able to connect with his physical self – but still not in an authentic way, only via excessive promiscuity in a secret underworld distorted by drugs.
Michael Friedmann’s future won’t be easy. But if he faces it with courage and confronts his true self, then he could emerge from this crisis with a real strength and vitality which could move the hearts of a society for which so far he has only functioned as a paragon of virtue.
Friedman wanted to do the right thing, but he took it all too far. This phenomenon can be observed with many celebrities and politicians. Increased power and public exposure don’t often go hand-in-hand with increased personal growth, authenticity and integrity.
‘Integrity’ is a word often used in political and economic contexts. If you want to live a life of integrity, of real personal fulfilment and honest expression, if you want to touch people with your heart and soul, then you will not be able to get away with integrating your unconscious parts little by little. A shadow which has not been integrated back into the personality will have a profound effect, and this is particularly noticeable in public roles. In this sense, when choosing the right candidate for public office, it is important to focus on the person’s character rather than experience.
In a relationship we very often aim to change our partner. Their otherness unconsciously reminds us of our old pain and guilt. Consequently we try to get them to see, do or feel things the way we do. I could list you at least a dozen qualities of my husband’s that I once considered good reasons for a divorce. But today I see them as important impulses for my own personal development and growth.
One of the most beautiful ways to fill your marriage with strength and life is to recognize the otherness of your partner as your own biggest desire. I am only able to write this book today because I now allow myself to have qualities that for a time I angrily rejected in my husband. I am only able to write these pages because I am irresponsible and reckless, don’t care about security, have no serious interest in the wellbeing of my family and what they think of me and have selfishly withdrawn from everything and recklessly transferred all responsibility for our family life to my husband.
Of course I am not really advocating inconsiderateness, recklessness or irresponsibility. It is not about becoming the way we thought the shadow once was (and maybe really was), but about adding something to our own being.
In the darkest hours of our marriage my husband really was hardly more than a rare guest in our family hotel and never asked me what I thought about his withdrawal and his life without us. I was a mother hen and a kind of sergeant major of the household. He was only half there – but so was I. I lacked what he had. He lacked what made my life worth living. Today I can make use of his clear boundaries for things that are beneficial for both of us. And at home he is now present with his light-hearted and carefree ways, so that our life in general has become much more relaxed and fun.
Our family members very often act out the most important parts we have disconnected from so that we can integrate them and heal. Our parents, our siblings and later our partner and children all represent parts of ourselves that we simply have to own again. ‘But some things are unforgivable,’ I hear you say. ‘The story of your husband and his recklessness is just a harmless example. After all, there are women who cheat on their husbands with his best mate. There are men who desert their wives and children. There are wicked mothers-in-law, neglectful mothers and fathers who beat up their children. And we should try and own some of that?’
I could quote dozens of similar examples, but would prefer to suggest that it’s better not to dwell on the most despicable behaviour. That will only distract you from what this is really about – your life and your relationship.
So I am asking you now to look at the person who at this very moment triggers the hottest anger in you, someone you find absolutely detestable and really want to get out of your life. Now have the courage to ask yourself honestly: ‘What do they have in their life that I would like to have? What do they allow themselves that I would not allow myself? What are they free of that I am trapped by?’ If you are really truthful, you’ll discover one of your biggest desires in the answer, and one of your greatest talents, something that you once had and at some point experienced as bad or painful, something that you were never allowed to develop in your family.
When we look honestly at our shadow, we not only discover our greatest loss but also something that our whole family of origin was lacking. Whether it is light-heartedness, courage, a fighting spirit or the ability to create wealth, whether it is playfulness, the seeking of physical pleasure, earthiness or an unquenchably free spirit, no matter what quality our shadow represents in reality, let’s finally take it back, let’s give it space in our life and then we will gain a strength that will not only benefit us but also our whole family of origin.
Our iceberg continually challenges us to grow and develop. If we courageously dive down to its depths, we not only find our so-called evil villains, but also painful lessons that our family hasn’t learned for generations. Let’s reclaim the lost parts of ourselves, let’s grow up and then we can give our own family what we never received. You have no idea how liberating this can be. And you have no idea how overwhelming your feelings will be once you have made peace with your shadow.
When we attend to the deep hulk of our iceberg and recognize its infinite diversity and potential, every relationship with another person suddenly offers a path to discovery and self-development. I have only outlined a few possibilities here with the inner child, the projection, the mirror, the shadow and the old family patterns. There are numerous other strategies and processes within our iceberg that have not been mentioned. It is not that important to know every one of them.
If all this has given you the impression that you will be facing an entire lifetime of self-analysis, or that you will now have to view your whole childhood as a tragedy and your parents as abusers, don’t despair. If my stories and their sometimes complex implications have confused you, or you couldn’t follow them, it doesn’t matter! I haven’t told you all this in order to make you analyze every aspect of your childhood. I would simply like to motivate you to become present in your life again. There’s no need to undergo an agonizing analysis of the past – every moment of the present will show you what to do, as long as you are willing to really be yourself again.
In this chapter I intended first and foremost to induce something in your consciousness to change. That’s why I explained everything to your conscious mind. You don’t need the details, but your conscious mind needs a fundamental understanding of the processes within the iceberg, otherwise it will perpetually undermine your path towards compassion, closeness and love in your relationship with doubts and intellectual arguments.
It will be enough if I have been able to communicate just one message in this chapter, namely that your partner may not be responsible for your sad, lonely, cut-off, helpless and maybe even hateful feelings. This insight alone, without any understanding of the psychological details involved, is enough to revive your relationship. Even if you can only half-understand it, your relationship can benefit from new hope and strength, and you can become softer and more open.
I haven’t only seen these emotional dynamics with the people who have come to me as clients. I have also experienced the same thing with my husband, and for that I am infinitely grateful. I have been able to open up to the real intention of my unconscious mind and have learned that all his strategies, all his stubbornness only served one purpose – to heal our old wounds and to connect us so closely that our icebergs could melt. Whenever in the course of our life and our marriage we have embraced and warmed our icebergs with our consciousness and love, parts of them have dissolved and become part of the ocean. And that is their real goal.