I didn’t want to write this book. I wrote it because I had to. It wouldn’t leave me alone, it gave me no peace and confronted me at every turn. It wanted to be written, and apparently by me.
All my life I have been exploring relationships, even though it took me a long time to realize it. In the past I had all sorts of goals, plans and dreams, but very often, even when I was pursuing them with all my heart, things didn’t turn out the way I wanted. Life taught me very early on that I couldn’t control it. Instead, it just unfolded, and I was invited to be there.
Life has also taught me, against my will, that it is in constant change – one cycle after another – and that those changes are the true meaning of my life. It has taught me that in each and every one of those cycles some things are finished and die, and through this I am led to rearrange things, to re-evaluate matters and to develop further.
Once these cycles unnerved and frightened me, but gradually I learned to trust that something new would always come out of them. I learned to stay alert, to keep a sense of direction and to hold on to the meaning of my life. I learned to give up familiar patterns and habits which were holding me back. I learned to trust that the unknown path ahead of me might be the best part of the journey and that at the next crossroads another chance of happiness would be waiting for me. Nothing ever really ended.
And every time I resisted this process, the very resistance in me, the fault-line, the presumed blockage, turned out to be a signpost. Every time there was another opportunity to experience a deeper and more authentic feeling of fulfilment than ever before. Time and again I was forced to endure a familiar space becoming empty – only to make room for something new. But all of those apparently new aspects of my life had the same message. Fundamentally my life was always about exploring relationships and accepting myself – even though I was not aware of it for a long time.
When I was five I often felt lonely. Sometimes I was overcome by such a strange fear that I didn’t dare mention it to anyone – I had the feeling that life somehow wasn’t real. I watched other people and asked myself whether they were all in the know and it was only me that didn’t have a clue. I wondered whether the people around me were just actors who had agreed to perform a play and I was the only one who thought everything was real – the only one who experienced real fear or who could be really happy. Sometimes I asked myself whether it was the other way round – whether I was the only one who thought that something wasn’t real about this life and that this was the reason why I often felt lonely and strange while everybody else seemed happy and content.
At school I often had migraine attacks when I was with other people and had to withdraw to a darkened room. During adolescence, when I was in a crowd I would suddenly begin to hyperventilate until I fainted. At 18 I more or less fled my small home town and the Catholic Church in the hope of finding a sense of belonging and faith somewhere else.
In my early twenties I was offered the chance to work in Egypt as a journalist. It was strikingly different from the life I had led so far, on a cultural, religious and geographical level, and this piqued my curiosity. I was fascinated by the all-pervading presence of religion in everyday life. Life and faith seemed closely interlocked, but the price was high. While the muezzins’ chants haunted the streets of Cairo, everywhere I went I saw men with frighteningly greedy eyes and women who had given up on themselves.
By the end of my twenties my inner search had taken me as far as the Cape of Good Hope. But even in the land of black and white I couldn’t find clarity. Instead I became a tightrope walker between two worlds. I met people who were enemies to the core and yet had the same deep longings – irrespective of the colour of their skin.
At one point I wasn’t able to work out my own views on apartheid any more and didn’t feel able to carry on working as a journalist. Doing three-minute radio reports on the situation in South Africa seemed like raping the truth. The questions I raised in talks with radical right-wing Boers sporting the swastika or with black guerrilla fighters who had been tortured became less and less political and more and more psychologically oriented. I also talked to blind people about South Africa. They had learned to either smell or hear a different skin colour. To me all this was absurd. I only had one dream – I wanted to bring people of different colours together. To remain true to myself I ended my career as a journalist in South Africa and wrote a book to explore my complex and sometimes confusing encounters with black and white people on the Cape of Good Hope.
Back in Germany, my next apprenticeship in life was already waiting for me. The Berlin Wall had come down. I took a post in communications and later in personnel in a large former East German company in Berlin. After three years of working as a kind of pioneer for the restructuring of the East, I suffered a nervous breakdown on the day I was supposed to present our communication strategies to a larger audience.
The breakdown was only the culmination of a very slow process. For days everything inside me had been resisting giving the presentation. I had written the speech with the greatest of care, as you have to for presentations like that, providing diagrams, facts, figures and business jargon. But none of that had been motivating my work for a long time. Again it was all about people.
This time the contrast was not between blacks and whites. As I was also responsible for the internal communication of the company I had become a kind of interpreter between East and West, between management and workforce. I had held coaching workshops and seminars on personality development and had often been asked by our director to mediate all kinds of negotiations. Again I was being challenged to bridge unmanageable distances between people via communication. Officially I was responsible for my employees and for the day-to-day running of my department. Deep inside I was once more driven by curiosity and the desire to bring people of different backgrounds together.
This time round I tried to meet those demands for a long time. Having a lot of energy, I scheduled myself 12-hour days and a packed diary of events. But I was chain-smoking my way through them and more and more often I was troubled by vague anxiety and a heart arrhythmia for which doctors couldn’t find a medical reason. It was as though I was playing a role which I could not let go of any more.
The nervous breakdown had enough impact to get me away from everything and allow me to recover my courage and trust in myself. Without knowing what I was going to do next, I resigned from my very well-paid job. That also meant saying goodbye to the sports car, fashionable penthouse flat, exotic trips and luxury hotels. I renovated a rundown old house and started living a quiet life, earning a living by doing small writing jobs for advertising agencies. I had no idea what the future would hold.
I was burnt out. I felt that I had searched all over the world for answers that did not exist. I was just 32, I had ended a rather erratic career with a nervous breakdown and was now living as a hermit after years of travelling the world. My quest was now reduced to two questions: How could I find fulfilment and do meaningful work at the same time? And how could I create better links between people?
I found a strange answer to those questions: I became pregnant. My intra-uterine coil had become displaced and fate gave me a child with enough desire for life to squeeze past the contraceptive device. And for a father, fate brought me a young man who knew neither doubt nor uncertainty and whose life experience and perspectives could hardly have been more different from mine. He was six years younger than me and used to life giving him everything he wanted without much trouble. He was youthful and attractive, nearly always in a good mood, and he simply wanted to have fun, increase the turnover of his company and enjoy business success. He wanted to do better than his older brothers one day – that was all he expected from life.
Until we met he was mostly engaged in enjoying a hectic social whirl and string of shallow affairs. I felt like a stranger in his world, and not only because I looked very different from the long-legged, lithe creatures he had surrounded himself with before he had met me. He didn’t embody any of my ideals either. I felt comfortable in his presence and he made me laugh, but neither of us was smitten at first. Nor was he the creative genius I had dreamed of – neither a gifted architect nor a famous wordsmith. He didn’t offer a shoulder to lean on and was searching neither for the meaning of life nor for a woman for life.
Up to this point I had always been on the lookout for a serious relationship, but in vain. Eternally hopeful, I had been in two long-term relationships and had had a series of flings. However, my heart had never felt at rest. I would have loved to have stayed in a relationship, to have given myself totally to another person, but I felt always torn away again. It was either the fear of being abandoned or the fear of being chained. Everybody who knew me was convinced that relationships and me just didn’t go together!
My new fiancé and I weren’t a spectacular couple. It was hardly the ultimate romance. In fact I barely knew him. We weren’t a dream match – everybody could see that. But we were soon to be parents – and it wasn’t long before everybody could see that as well. It was clear to me that I was going to have this child. And he was equally clear about it. ‘We’ll manage!’ he said. We left everything behind, moved to a different town and got married.
Two years later: Our daughter is taking her first steps. Our marriage is a middle-class valley of boredom. Mummy cooks the meals, Daddy goes to work. There’s no real connection between us. My husband comes home later and later and less often. I feel chained to the sandpit and the playgroup. We argue more and more. Our friends say they knew it would never work out.
Nothing is right, but somehow we don’t separate. We put up with it. We settle into habits, routines. We look after our child. In the beginning we muddle through, feeling emotionally and physically numb. Silences follow noisy battles for power. Then there’s a torturous cease-fire: comfortable day-to-day existence, secret affairs, career moves, house moves, hopelessness and new beginnings. Still we don’t split up. Every time we get to that point we are gripped by sadness and the sudden certainty of a deep inner bond. It’s nothing passionate, nothing raw, rather a quiet melancholic memory of our love, and it disappears just as quickly as it arrives.
This feeling is not the answer to my inner search but it has a magical and magnetic power over me. It is like a secret code which I need to break. We both start actively looking for this feeling. We start to explore it. Somehow I begin to sense that a relationship is about something completely different from finding the right person. Something inside me says: ‘Don’t give up!’ Somehow I discover that the abyss that is between me and my husband is the same one that separated me from other men in the past. Finally, when I’m desperate and honest enough, I have to concede that it’s is not his fault, and it wasn’t the other men’s either. At this point of our marriage I feel as if I am in the middle of a township in South Africa or by the old wall between East and West – wanting desperately to bring people together even though they are as far apart as they could possibly be.
Now my husband and I meet more often at the boundaries of our wounds, talk to each other and slowly begin to view the world with curiosity rather than fear and defensiveness. I start researching relationships and read every book I can on the subject. I attend workshops and start my own psychotherapist training. More and more often my husband and I dare to express our individual truth to each other. Saying out loud how distant we feel from each other actually makes us feel closer again. With increasing courage we talk to our friends about our dismal marriage and find that other people aren’t doing any better. That’s such a relief! Now we begin to feel closer to each other and to others.
My husband is at home more often now, while I have started working again, this time as a fully trained psychotherapist. I am working with people who have reached a dead end in their jobs, just as I did as a manager. Finally, it is people who are at the centre of my work.
I begin to understand that everything we have dealt with ourselves can be passed on to others. My zigzag search for a fulfilling job now makes sense. And at the same time my marriage is beginning to come to life again. Success and fulfilment arrive in tandem.
Yet again the various aspects of my life somehow converge miraculously. The problems in my marriage lead me to a seminar with Dr Chuck Spezzano. I find myself sitting there, with 150 other people, and all I know is that he is a renowned relationship specialist from America and has written many books. I haven’t read any of them.
By about ten minutes into his lecture I am feeling so moved that I can’t hold back my tears. That guy up there seems to know everything about me. He must have been an invisible spy in our house for years, because every case story, every example, every joke shows that he knows my husband and me inside out. And he mentions important relationship mechanisms and rules in such a matter-of-fact way – theories that I have mulled over for a long time but never really been sure of. I am shaken and touched and at the same time liberated.
For three days I abandon myself to my tears and a stirring deep inside. Then I realize that I have received an answer to the most important questions in my professional and my private life. Whatever problem life has presented me with, it has always boiled down to how I love myself. Both my marriage and my work have pointed me in that direction, but never has it been shown to me as clearly and in such detail. I have always known the answers, but I have never trusted them. But when Chuck Spezzano focused on them, a new world of understanding finally unfolded and solidified inside me. Now I am happy and eager to explore it further.
My way of working changes once more. And my relationship with my husband changes once more. We tackle the next layer of our marriage. We explain even more clearly how alien we have become to each other. In return, we give each other understanding and support, rather than fighting. The new awareness of our differences and desires means we need fewer words, but at the same time our communication improves radically. Our friends can’t believe it. ‘Who would have thought…?’ Our new-found strength and love can’t be hidden. We now routinely come across as new lovers.
At the same time, hardly a day goes by without somebody telling me about difficulties in their relationship. More and more men and women seem to be stuck in a dead-end street. Sometimes I feel bruised and battered by the sheer weight of it. Yesterday they’d be talking about the weather; today there’s nothing but separation and bitterness. ‘My wife has just left me. She’s moved in with her lover.’ In some cases there are four young children, in others both partners are having an affair. Sometimes there’s just emptiness between them, at other times a war zone. It is a bit like an epidemic, a slow but unstoppable disease that ends more and more often in death by divorce. Relationships are ending more quickly, more frequently and more and more spectacularly. I see it happening to my friends, neighbours and colleagues. None of them wants to split up but they have all given up on their relationships and feel under pressure to take the final drastic step.
Among my clients the issue emerges only indirectly, and often furtively at first. Many men come to me for help in their quest for success and fulfilment, but after one or two assessment sessions we usually find that everything revolves around relationships – relationships with their colleagues, their workmates and bosses and, most surprisingly for my clients, their partners. At that point many of them sigh deeply, then they lose control and the tears begin to flow because the true centre of the storm has swept right through their bedroom.
Together with these long-suppressed feelings, they experience a deep insight. They have finally arrived at the top of their career ladder, yet what they are doing is a long way from their original aspirations and needs and has become an end in itself. And they can see how far they have moved from their partners and families in the process. And how they wish to reconnect their personal and their professional goals. Very often, when the draining partnership difficulties are finally allowed to take centre-stage in the talks, the single-minded career focus breaks down. Suddenly my clients want to talk to their partners again and even bring them to the sessions.
In my practice I am confronted more and more often with relationship problems that I have experienced myself. More and more couples come to me feeling just as hopeless and despairing as I once did. Hardly anybody wants to separate. Hardly anybody understands how their relationship got into such a state. But most have given up on it and are full of guilt and worry about their children.
Now I find I have turned into a relationship specialist, even though I have never consciously chosen to do so, nor advertised myself as such. It just happened the way a riverbed is gouged out by the flow of the water. My marriage was the source; books and workshops the first snowmelt floods. Chuck Spezzano was a deluge, and my clients a constant stream. They became my teachers. With each of their questions I realized that what I had experienced in my marriage had its own hidden rules. That private and professional relationships and racial conflicts are all ruled by the same laws. That relationships can only be understood, and lived, when plumbed to their depths. That the problems in a relationship have to be understood as an opportunity to heal. That separation doesn’t bring healing, only delays it.
This book is meant to carry the river further. It is my way of expressing my gratitude for the gift of love in my heart. I will rejoice to the bottom of my heart if, though it, I am able to reach people whose relationship is in trouble, communicate to them some of the hope, the love and the courage that I have found and encourage them to try and rediscover those things in their own relationships.
This book is for people who are in an established but unsatisfactory relationship. For people who are in a love triangle or facing divorce. For people who are cheating on their partners or being cheated on. For people who leave their partners time after time or who are left time after time. For people who are hoping to make their relationship better but don’t want to go to couple therapy or haven’t found the right therapist. For people who have been on the path of suffering for a long while.
If this is you, maybe you have become cynical and just see your marriage as a matter of routine. Maybe you have given up all hope of finding intimacy with your partner. Maybe something inside you wants to recapture your old feeling of love. Maybe you are desperate because you have a secret lover and are haunted by guilt and concern for your children or your partner. Maybe you are already contemplating divorce but are frightened of saying the word out loud or of being kicked out of your home.
Whatever is wrong with your relationship, in my experience there are only two ways of dealing with it: either you feel so suffocated that you believe running away is your only way out, or you repress even the slightest unease and behave like the three monkeys who see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing. Check out what fits your situation…
Are you drained and dispirited?
Does everything seem OK on the outside but inside you feel frozen and dispirited? Are you sometimes overwhelmed by a dull feeling of ‘Is this it?’ Is everything just – but only just – ticking over? Does it seem as though you and your partner are acting out a charade? Is your partner the last person to know how you really feel? Are you afraid that other people might notice how dishonest your relationship is? When you are out for dinner or with friends do you presume that other people are much happier than you? Are you trying harder and harder but getting nowhere? Has your sex life died a death – is it just a mechanical process or do you require new tricks to work up some interest? Do you feel drained? Do you have a lover? Are you dreaming of true love or at least a thrilling affair? Are you worried about your children? Are you scared of having to leave your partner? Frightened of losing your dream? Fearing the truth in your heart?
Or are you in an eternal rush?
Are you much too busy to deal with your relationship? Do you dislike any discussion about feelings? Is your inner life nobody’s business? Are you sometimes scared of being abandoned? Do you think your partner doubts their feelings for you? Do you suspect that they have a lover? Have you discovered that they have? Are you throwing yourself into more work, new hobbies and countless activities so that no time is left for your partner? Do you feel excluded, beleaguered or driven out of the house? Do you feel that nothing you ever do is good enough for your partner? Are you succumbing to affairs that you don’t really want? Are you numbing yourself with alcohol, food, drugs, TV, computers or other addictions – addictions which get stronger in good company or when you are alone?
If some of this or all of it is true for you, then you don’t need to finish your relationship but to do a lot of work on yourself. You need to make an honest decision to heal. You don’t need a Mr or Ms Right, but to be ruthlessly honest and courageous in confronting your relationship. And you need willpower, understanding, patience and a lot of practice.