Liebe Dich selbst – in English?! What you as a reader will take for granted is very special for me. After this book became a huge overnight success in my native country, just by word of mouth, and was hailed as the ultimate book on relationships, it was translated into many different languages. But English… I got goose-pimples when I read my own words in English for the first time! I also felt deeply grateful.
Over the course of my life English has become the mother tongue of my soul. It started off as a pure coincidence – the first book that gave me a glimpse of my inner world was written in English. A friend of mine gave it to me, but I did not want to read it. For one thing, I found it too difficult. Apart from that, I thought it was probably irrelevant psychobabble. But the book kept lying around and often seemed to say, ‘Hello! Read me!’ Eventually my resistance lessened and I actually started reading it.
Not knowing the English language very well, I understood very little rationally. But in a strange way the book’s message went straight in at a deeper level. While I was reading it, something opened up in my heart; it made me see the world through totally different eyes. All of a sudden I realized why I was the way I was. All of a sudden I could feel that there was so much more inside me than my eyes could see and my mind could grasp. Later on, I experienced many more such coincidences: people, books, tapes and CDs found their way to me via complicated routes. All of them were in English. All of them had a healing effect on my emotional life. All of them gave me consistent guidance, until one day I realized that the word ‘soul’ was much more familiar to me than Seele in my mother tongue. Sometimes it was like living in a parallel world that I was not able to share easily with others. Ultimately, I felt an ever-stronger need to communicate in my own words everything I had learned in this other language. While I was writing this book I sometimes hoped I would be able to give something back to the English-speaking world which had for so long been a teacher of my soul. I am infinitely grateful to have received this opportunity now.
My thanks go to Michelle Pilley, publisher at Hay House, who shared my belief in this project from our first meeting and who to this day is promoting it in a very personal and warm-hearted way.
And to Dr Chuck Spezzano, my first great (English-speaking) teacher in relationships, who can read now how much my life has been changed by his Psychology of Vision. At our first meeting, a few boxes of Kleenex nearly prevented me from even listening to him.
It was at the worst point of my marital crisis that I came across a small leaflet announcing that the ‘author of many books and a renowned relationship specialist’ was holding a workshop in Germany. At that point I had nothing to lose and I thought, ‘A doctor who has written many books on the subject probably has a lot to say. Maybe this is your last chance to save your marriage.’
I went to the workshop secretly, on my own, and after the first few minutes I was thinking, ‘Good God, what am I doing here?’ There was a box of tissues by every chair and the relationship specialist at the front looked like an evangelical preacher. Everything inside me was urging me to run away. ‘No, I’ll never cry in front of all these people,’ I thought. ‘After the break, at the latest, I’ll be out of here!’
To cut a long story short, I stayed until the very end and kept having to grab tissues out of the box. It was as if the guy up there was talking about my very own dismal marriage. As if he had heard every single one of my hopeless thoughts. And as if he was absolutely certain that he knew a way out of this mess. He opened my eyes to a completely new way of looking at my relationship. When I came home, I no longer saw the wrong husband and a hopeless marriage doomed to failure, but a great opportunity to finally heal all my old wounds.
I have described the effects of this first encounter in this book. And I still consider it the greatest gift I have ever received. How much love, trust and intimacy have developed between my husband and me since then.
Years later, when my husband and I had not only left our major crisis behind but were moving forward together, we met Jeff and Sue Allen and learned about their work on relationships. In our first workshop with them Jeff told us the story of his own marriage, which over the years I have retold to countless clients of mine in order to clarify what is so often misunderstood: I do not advocate clinging to your current partner at all costs, but letting go in order to finally forge a true relationship.
Jeff and Sue’s story illustrates this paradox particularly clearly. Those two had come to a point I was familiar with in my own marriage: a totally bleak outlook with divorce apparently the only option after years of living parallel lives. Jeff, a dedicated mariner, was away somewhere in the Gulf as the captain of a large vessel. He was a kind of Lonesome Cowboy who didn’t like ‘all that relationship stuff’. Until one morning he woke up on his ship and realized that his hard shell had a crack in it. He was flooded by insecurity. The strong and independent captain collapsed like a punctured tyre. Feelings were surging to the surface that Jeff had kept hidden from the world – and from himself – for a long time.
When he tried to get in touch with his wife at home – whom he had kept at bay emotionally for a long time – he found a strange coincidence had taken place. His front as the strong and independent husband had collapsed at exactly the moment that his wife at home finally had found the courage to let him go.
Sue had always been the dependent one, the needy one in the relationship. She had always been on at Jeff to come home, to be a reliable partner and father. But the more she had pushed him, the sooner he was off again on a ship to the other end of the world. Finally, years of hopelessness had led to something shifting inside Sue and she had found the courage to let go and focus on her own life. It made no sense to be angry and demanding any longer. She decided not to worry any more about what would happen to the children without their father. All of a sudden she felt liberated and ready for the first steps on her own.
Then the telephone rang. It was Jeff, 3,000 miles away on his ship in the Gulf. He said, ‘I know. I could feel that you had left.’ But that wasn’t all. He had resigned from his job and was already on his way home.
With my husband and me, the turnaround was not as dramatic as with Jeff and Sue. But basically we had experienced exactly the same thing. Only when I had found the courage to let go of my husband and the familiar but empty security, only when I had stopped my nagging and whingeing and said with deep conviction, ‘We will have to separate’ – only then did a space open up in which my husband could slowly move towards me again.
And that is the point I would like to make with this book. It is about the path towards yourself. It is about healing your own wounds. It is about trusting that you can face all your fears and anxieties. Only then does the neediness stop, the clinging, the nagging, the running away, the cutting off, the shutting out. Only then can love arise and unfold – all on its own, without even any grace.
Jeff says about this turning point in his life:
I realized this was an important point in my life: I could either go on living a seemingly safe and independent life and distance myself from everyone who meant anything to me, or I could return and have the courage to admit to myself how hungry for love and affection I really was. I could return and dare to take my place as a hurting, dependent partner in an honest relationship.
I chose to return to the UK and begged Susie to take me back. Luckily, she refused! I spent four months living on my own, in what could only be described as a pitiful state, but it gave me the heaven-sent opportunity to deal with much of my repressive childhood and the emotions involved. I could at least move forward to the point where I could offer the potential of being a partner willing to learn.
Thank you, Jeff, for not hiding behind the front of a relationship expert at our first meeting but showing yourself as a human being willing to help because you knew our pain. Thank you, Jeff and Sue, for showing me and confirming to me how hearts and relationships can heal – and how much a couple can give to other people when they not only choose this path themselves but also share it with others.
Wuppertal, December 2006