Attempting to get our intellectual, emotional, physical and spiritual needs healthily fulfilled in romance is one of the most challenging and frustrating endeavors in life. Another upcoming work, Frozen Feminine - Muddled Masculine, parses gender-based relationality in more detail. EBE maintains that romantic relationships provide the most effective crucible within which to heal unconscious emotive congestion, because, contrary to our felt-reality and beliefs that we are most afraid of not ever receiving enough love in life, our deepest fear involves actually receiving that love.
This fear of receiving love comes from how our strategic selves had to energetically close off our heart-fields to a significant degree from the pain of not receiving existential-level emotive bonding with caregivers. The strategic self is thus reasonably suspicious of trusting love as an adult, and relates to it from a distance in a context of control and security, and not risk.
In that way, it keeps its presence as a shield to minimize any pain that might come from getting too close to a love source that from its point-of-view sometime sooner or later will go away, in the same way love betrayed us as children when parents could not provide the actual nourishment our emotional bodies needed. The degree of both the pain of this and the strategic self’s resistances are existentially held and mostly unconscious.
That shield can be clearly evident in those who never let themselves get too close in sexual intimacy and so create non-monogamal and indiscriminate multiple-partnered sexualized lifestyles, most often framed within emotionally immature teenage-level spiritual or alternative philosophical paradigms. Or it can manifest as that which mysteriously keeps those who do make the attempt to forge longer-term bonds where the sexuality arises out of deeper landscapes of heart, spirit and mind, from experiencing healthy and enduring versions of relationships of that kind.
In these last two chapters, EBE will stand for the truth that emotionally mature people who have earned that state of consciousness by having undergone agonal self-authentication emotional body healing process are neither drawn to teenage level indiscriminate or multiple-partnered sexual relationships, nor to codependently-suffused mass consciousness-based forms of marriages based in security with promises of lifetime frames. All forms of both these patterns are sourced by the presence of emotively immature strategic selfhood in the partners who create them. True noncodependent monogamy, the only form of sexual intimacy emotionally mature people care to inhabit, is only made possible when the strategic self of the partners are deconstructed and the HOH of each is emergent.
Again, the strategic self only arose in the first place when the love that was not receive in childhood in our dependency phases thus creates defenses that keep us from receiving love fully in what is supposed to be our more independent adult phases, and only continues to have life while those wounds remain unhealed at the existential level. These defenses, in the form of the unconsciously extant strategic self, prevent true relationality.
We are actually nonrelational with others while we remain possessed by our strategic selfhood, which emotionally and energetically seals us out of actual heart communion with others. All of our confusion as to why brotherhood, love, or peace have been largely unmanifestable to any lasting degree in our species lies in the fact that no emotively mature agent of relationality has ever been operating in the personal, familial, and societal domains of our worlds. That agent of true relationality is our emotively mature authentic self, which has never been embodiable until now.
As said so often, we became our unnatural strategic version of self because of not being consistently felt to any deep degree in childhood by our caregivers feeling what we felt, why we felt it, and while we felt it. As a result, the premise of this chapter can be summarized as:
Non-resompathic-based ground with parents conditioned our experience of the basic existential-level template of relational space to the reality that our essential unguarded and lush emotive being could not transact relational space in ways that expressed its authentic and dynamic vitality. Our innocent and porous emotivity thus needed to be subtracted in relational space, because having that vulnerable expectation intact was so unmet and so existentially painful in its lack, we needed to become someone else than who we were in order to deal with it. Cutting ourselves off from our essential emotive seat in order to have relatedness with Other thus led necessarily to learning how to first inhabit all manner of relational space from will and mind, our secondary and tertiary aspects of being.
So in order to be able to transact horizontally across relational space with Other, we had to stop transacting relationship vertically with ourselves in our essential emotive being. That split necessitated the creation of a strategically-based version of ourselves as an energetic crutch, which happened so early and so slowly over time we never recognized it. And that it is that hidden truth that makes it impossible to ever create true relationality with ourselves and others without a vision that correctly diagnoses the causal dynamisms involved and offers a dharma of healing based upon it.
In other words, we have all been deeply conditioned from childhood to love people with whom we are not emotively connected, the base dynamic that underlies codependency in all adult relationality. Incompletion of the ego formation makes inhabitation of essential emotive-based relational space impossible.
Since no one in our species has ever come to any kind of relational interface priorly healed of unconscious existential wounding, relational space in our species has always and only been performed by emotively immature inauthentic strategic versions of humanity. This is why transaction of love is so problematic for us and why so much contention and suffering occur in human intercourse, all caused by wound-based unconscious motives that distort reality and see devils and enemies in others as outer projections of our own inner conflicts of unhealed selfhood.
It is because we have all been taught to be relational while embodying the strategic version of ourselves, our relational dynamisms with both self and others have always been driven far more by will and mind, inevitably also creating the codependence suffusing all forms of human relationality. Until the agent of human relationality becomes our emotively mature authentic self, all of our attempts to deal with what ails us as individuals and a species will be doomed to treatments of downline symptoms.
At this time, EBE sadly accepts the reality that only a fraction of one percent of the human population is ready, willing, or able to deconstruct the present emotively inauthentic version of themselves through EBE and create the healthy core of healthy Personhood.
Ironically, then, it is the unconscious defensive shield around the heart-field strategically designed to prevent the agony of losing love, which happened in nonresompathic ground with parents, that actually causes us to prevent real love from entering our adult worlds. This happens because the shield, based in fear of loss and a host of multi-layered defense dynamics causes us to draw to ourselves relationships with partners or configurations that recapitulate the non-connection we felt in childhood because caregivers couldn’t provide the heart-porosity of emotive resompathy we actually needed.
In all these ways, the reason emotively mature forms of love don’t transact in most adult intimacies is because there is a double layer of energetic shield dynamics in any relationship preventing actual energetic heart-to-heart contact, one set covering the heart of one partner and another set the other’s. This configuration is inevitable when the strategic selves of the partners are the ones doing the actual dance of relationship.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t experience love and connection in spite of these shields, of course. They are not homogeneously hardened like steel as much as they are like whirling eddies of energy that will allow hit-and-miss alignments of two hearts that ache to touch.
We are essentially made of love, so even powerful defensive strategies in strategic selfhoods can’t keep what we are essentially made of from transacting with another to some degree. But the reason our passionate relationships quickly lose passion or meaning or never happen at all is because the relationship itself had far more strategic self valences of the partners doing the dance than authentic self themes.
What is called Sacred Union in EBE, wherein two hearts vulnerably contact and remain in emotionally lush and sexually vital resonance can only occur when the energetic shield around the hearts of the strategic selves of the partners gradually falls away, allowing exposure of the hearts of the authentic selves. It is this pervasive presence of the strategic self with all of its unconscious defense layered on top of undigested emotional congestion from childhood that is the invisible cause of why deeply fulfilling romantic intimacy is so difficult to find and even more difficult to retain.
In that way, when we are attracted to another, some of the tones that resonate will be tones sourced in our undigested agony and defensive strategies present in us from childhood, what EBE calls our ‘trailing edge’ of being, and some will resonate from our strengths and emotively healthier aspects, which EBE refers to as our ‘leading edge.’ This is why romantic Love can be so confusing: it is because we are trying to dance to two very different melodies at the same time, one with discordant tones from trailing-edge unconscious emotional congestion, and the other with more chordal tones from our leading-edge soul-strengths.
This means that two highly defended people whose discordant tones match closely can resonate so deeply with each other the wounded-basis of the resonancy will make it feel like they were a match made in heaven, when the truth is that it is their wounds and defensive strategies that are resonating and thus feel ‘made’ for each other, making it a match actually made in ‘hell.’ The architecture of all intimate romantic relationships is thus comprised of the wounded and defended trailing edge versions of the strategic selves of the partners with unmet dependent needs from childhood dominating their field unconsciously, the essence of codependency.
The tragedy is that this wound-based resonance most often is not noticeable to the trailing-edge-dominated partners, coming as they are from vastly shrunken emotional body digestive systems that mistake actual crumbs of fulfillment for a feast, making the experience of true Sacred Union, the bond between two leading edge-filled beings, off their experiential radar screen while it is foreground in their intentional radar screen.
As such, the energy of the bond will be dominated by far more unhealthy codependent patterns and themes than healthy strength-based noncodependent attributes. Sadly but truly, this is the normal arrangement of all intimate bonds at this point in our soul journey as a species, no matter how much people believe they know what constitutes healthy intimacy theoretically or in their own experience, based as those personal truths are in incomplete psychological and religious paradigms that are either completely or partially blind to the hidden dynamics of the emotional body.
As such, in all of life in all of its venues the author has never encountered a romantic bond with anyone that did not have more wound-based resonances than strength-based, which also includes the author’s own past relationships, of course. This includes those of the many so-called experts in the field, especially the relationships of the so-called experts in the field, as they are the most committed to their premises.
Those premises are all based in outworn paradigms of human relationality, none of which possess emotivity-as-essence as the foundational principle, without which no metric for either emotive maturity or codependence exists. Again and as always, because we all do relationality within stratgic self contexts, even what partners or society call the best relationships owe their compatibility to resonance between wounds and defenses far more than the true strengths and vulnerabilities of the partners.
If you have taken in what this book has been saying so far, this offering should not be surprising, given the universal pervasiveness of how we have not understood what children actually need in childhood, have not understood what codependence actually is, have not known what effective individual and couple therapy and healing actually involves, and have not understood how the versions of ourselves we call who we are, are in actuality defended strategic forms of identity and not authentic selves.
As said, on average the strategic self comprises 70% of who you call you, leaving only 30% of whom you call you as that which flows from your authentic self. Again, romantic intimacy tends to lose vitality because in essence, the two heart-fields were never in energetically or emotionally healthy contact in the first place, wrapped as they were in the swirling energetic patterns of our unconscious and undigested wounds and defenses.
In this way, longevity of a bond is no measure of its health. Many bonds that lost vitality after a few months or years go on to last a lifetime, a reality most people tend to admire. But that longevity almost always occurs because of pressure to stay in the non-vital bond through guilt, giving up on one’s dreams, being slave to cultural and religious teachings that legitimate codependency, the hesitancy to hurt the other partner, or the abject terror of leaving the safety and security even non-vital codependent bonds offer to the strategic self’s need of pattern persistency and low risk.
It is within this kind of unhealthy container then that surreptitious affairs and secret sexual improprieties also fester and grow. Longevity is no measure of relationship health, and in most cases, is exactly the measure of the unhealth of the bond, due to how little most couples are in touch with the governing dynamics of their unconscious wound systems and how they configure their relational architecture to compensate for them.
When it finally sinks in that we are far more wound-mates than strength-mates in the absence of emotional maturity, the situation should be profoundly depressing to you. EBE, now offers a way to authenticate our way to Sacred Union through the healing of the individual-based emotional body congestion that creates false strategic versions of ourselves, and thus less than fully authentic versions of ourselves, our passions, and our destinies. As we heal in that way, the heart-field re-opens in the way it was when we first came into this life as infants and then becomes unmasked enough to transact with another’s in adult relational frameworks.
This understanding explains why our deepest fears array themselves around actually receiving real love, which can only resonate between two open and vulnerable, healed heart-fields. Virtually everyone experiences the opposite, that we crave real love in our bonds. But this craving, while true, is not real in the sense that it is overcrowded with compensation-based frequencies to try to make up for our unhealed wound-basis with caregivers where our relational space template was originally formed.
Our deep defenses are in terror of actually encountering a true heartmate because the risk is far too high if the bond erodes: the threat of the loss of real love feels like it would truly destroy us in a way from which it feels like we could not recover, which simply reflects what happened with caregivers in our childhood: real Love, expressed as Reality itself, in a very real way ‘betrayed’ us because we did not receive what our hearts actually needed, the ‘landing ground’ that would have been provided had we’d been able to feel caregivers feel what we felt, why we felt it, and while we were feeling it.
And because romantic intimacy brings together more elements of us than any other relational configuration, our emotionality, sexuality, intellectuality, and spirituality woven into one gestalt, it mirrors back to us to large degree the totality of the emotively-suffused environmental reality our primary caregivers imparted to us in our early years.
As a result, how we transact romantic relationship is the most significant expresser of our unhealed emotional body distress and projections. Friendships and other associations draw out our deeply defended emotive responses less. Only the risks inherent in romantic relationship offer the challenge to bring together the essence of the heart and our sexuality into one contextual energetic movement. This is why romantic relationship is the only adult experience that correlates to the totality of the child/caregiver dynamic, wherein more of our emotional ‘eggs’ are invested in romance.
In another sense, we fear opening to the capacity of reak love in adult romance because we have become so accustomed to the unconscious suffering created by the lack of love in our lives. We simply have found effective ways to cope with this lack, and do not notice how much we relate to crumbs of love-fulfillment in our romantic bonds because we have no other reference reality with which to compare it, becoming accustomed to the lack of deeply nourishing love in a way that seems normal. But this ‘normal’ experience of love is not natural to the human heart.
Changing over from our unconscious defensive posture against receiving love is thus incredibly difficult. We literally must dismantle one of the most loving aspects of ourselves, our self-protection, in order to become capable of being vulnerable, without which we can never receive all the heart-food of Sacred Union, for which we are naturally designed.
In EBE, convincing the strategic self to give up this protective role is thus extremely challenging, because from its reality, it sees such deconstruction as a betrayal of its love for your suffering being. In that way, we must deconstruct one form of love in ourselves charged to protect us from harm based in wounds, in order to draw another form of real love to us based in strength. As such, realizable, authentically vulnerable romantic relationship is the greatest threat to our defenses, because there are so many battle-fronts on which it must engage, combining emotional and sexual aspects of being into one gestalt the most critical.
Linkages between chakras 2 and 4 have never been adequately attained in our species because of the emotively dystrophic dynamisms inherent in strategic selfhood that infect chakra 3, the seat of personal power, that obstruct that linkage. This keeps second chakra, seat of sexual energy, and fourth chakra, seat of heart emotion, forever apart in direct experience, the lack of which keeps us fixated in teenage reactional forms as adults.
A fundamental principle of the dynamics of romantic relationship is that once the physical aspect of sexual union is possible, the defenses must work overtime to make sure we either over-sexualize/under-emotionalize, or under-sexualize/over-emotionalize our romantic unions. Putting together fully vulnerable emotional energetics and fully activated sexual energetics is the very quintessence of what our defenses abhor the most.
Couples who feel they bring together emotionality and sexuality using other paradigms don’t realize how much underlying emotional truth never makes it to the conscious interface of the bond, rendering what is conscious to be limited in depth and scope. Fully linking the heart and genitals within one evocative movement with one committed partner is the unconscious terror our strategic self defends against, because it recapitulates the totality inherent in our original relational template with caregivers.
As such, our defenses cleverly devise creation and inhabitation of polygamous, polyamorous, or promiscuous relational strategies so rampant in our pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-spiritual worldviews in order to avoid fully linking heart and genitals. Second chakra and fourth chakra linkage in monogamy requires a far fuller healing of the heart, wherein a far fuller blossoming of inhibition-free, guilt-free sexual expression occurs than people in non-monogamal paradigms could ever manifest. Only emotively immature adults fixated in teenage sexual expression patterns are drawn to polygamous, polyamorous, or promiscuous relational forms.
This separation of second and fourth chakras, almost universally so for men, has been a feature of chakral architecture for all of our history as a species, and explains why putting together heart and sexuality, the essence of romantic bonding has been so problematic for human beings for so long for both genders. The rise of feminism in the late 2oth century tragically gave permission and support for women to adopt this male-dominated split of chakras 2 and 4, the paradigms governing feminism never sophisticated enough to include either emotivity-as-essence or chakral dynamic elements in its worldview.
Over the centuries, many have become so frustrated at the failure of romantic intimacy to last or even blossom fully, that they then pathologize the idea altogether, calling commitment to share sexual expression and love together with one person an illusion only gullible people fall for, or calling monogamal patterns hopelessly codependent by nature. As they do this, they unwittingly come from a prior already ensconced disconnect between chakras 2 and 4 that creates the opinion in the first place.
From this state that is deeply unconscious to them, they thus justify the promotion of open sexual forms of promiscuity and cite anthropological support for such mating patterns instead of recognizing the soulful-based reality that noncodependent Sacred Union is not only possible, but our birthright as souls-in-flesh as well.
Those who do become cynical about love and committed monogamy in this way simply trumpet the depths of their unhealed wounds from childhood where the causal ground of their attitude is completely and invisibly lacking in their awareness. This is exactly where the strategic self wants it to be, so it can continue the split between heart and genitals, preventing fully vulnerabilized emotions and their expression through the dynamics of lusty sexuality, in order to avoid further risk of pain in an already overloaded emotional body crammed with undigested conflict.
This split between emotional energy and sexual energy expresses along gender lines. In the yang, men tend to over-sexualize and under-emotionalize, not opening fully at the level of the heart during sexual union, no matter how sensitive they may be in other areas or other times in their life. As representative of yin, women before feminism tended to under-sexualize and over-emotionalize, and criticized by men for doing so.
But because a woman’s challenge is actually more in alignment with emotional body transaction dynamics, women tend to be healthier in their ability to combine both and thus suffer much more from how ‘off the radar screen’ emotive closeness is for most men in their sexually-dominated valences of being. It is this suffering that then dampens women’s deeper and more expressive sexual responses, to which men then have difficulty, never realizing how critical the man’s own lack of emotive vulnerable closeness ability is at cause for the woman’s secondarily-created diminished sexual interest.This is a horrifc example of men as victim of their own unconscious issues.
Lacking this realization, men tend to judge the woman for having the problem, when it is their own misunderstanding about heart and sexual dynamics that is the problem. And often, women are unclear about what they are feeling and why and thus may have difficulty articulating the situation as it lives in them. In that case, they will often over-pathologize men and energize the strategic self’s Amazon archetype of their power, supported as it has been by feminism.
As such, as embodiers of yin dynamics, women can more naturally ‘make love’ in all interactions with a mate, in all day-to-day activities. For so many women, then, specifically sexualized forms of love-making precipitate out of an already emotionally-suffused connect with their partner that happens throughout many different expressions of the bond. As representative of yang, men split emotional connect and sexual contact into different compartments of being, and find it hard to understand why their partner is reluctant to have sex with them when the cause is because the woman has not felt her partner close in other emotively energetic venues of the bond.
In EBE’s form of Sacred Union, all sexual expression secondarily comes out of emotional body dynamisms already transacting in the bond. Only in emotionally immature men and women are there two separate tracks, one sexualized and the other emotionalized, starting out in two different ‘locations’ in the being and then trying to melt together downstream in some dissonant hit-or-miss landscape. In an emotionally mature person, sexual energy follows emotional connect, precipitating out of the closeness.
This is why men are so confused by what women want, because they have no experience of sexual expression coming out of an emotional location in the being, as do more women. Instead their sexual expression comes out of a separate sexual location in the being. Men travel a sexual road to closeness, while women travel a closeness road to sexuality. In that way, in EBE’s terms, women are more naturally healthy, the more mature orientation, to which of course healing of unconscious wounds must still be added.
But in its reasonable mission to correct patriarchal injustice in social, commercial, religious, political, and business domains, feminism inappropriately stretched its pervue to include intimate interpersonal domains. Women are now encouraged to match men’s deep-seated and eons-long disingenuity in casualizing chakra 2 activity away from chakra 4 dynamics, all the while congratulating themselves for such a betrayal of women’s more natural and healthy abidement with chakral 2 and 4 linkage.
This has muddled the domain of intimacy even more turgidly. Women who have sold out their more natural abidement with chakral 2 and 4 linkage in the name of equality with men and so match sexuality’s split from emotivity, now also match men’s pathology, and like them, must undergo more work to ever heal and get back to their naturality in this domain.
All of this means that in general men, and in particular sex-for-sex’s sake-conditioned women, have an extra step to learn to even begin to meet more emotively-mature women on the ground on which they are already standing, and usually waiting painfully and impatiently. This is exactly why so many heterosexual women can give up on trying to establish emotional intimacy with men, and seek more openly sexualized relationships with other women: they are not homosexual by nature, but seek closeness in ways men are just too emotionally immature to ‘get.’
As discussed far more deeply in Frozen Feminine-Muddled Masculine, the vast majority of overall suffering in the world, and most specifically in families and intimate bonds, can be specifically traced back to the lack of what EBE calls the Adamus archetype in men wherein charkas 2 and 4 are unified within a personally embodied state of emotional maturity. This lack of true Adamus valences in fathers also has an enormously destructive effect on the psychosexual development of both sons and daughters and thus infects every new generation of men and women with specific impediments to the children ever being able to transact Sacred Union as adults.
As the yang dynamic’s role is to lead, in the sense of the yang beginning each moment and the yin completing it in a non-patriarchal contribution of equality. That yang leads initiatively does not make yang superior in any way, as yang needs the completion dynamic of yin as much as yin needs the intitiation dynamic of yang. Only when men learn to manifest the Adamus archetype devoid of any and all patriarchal dynamisms will women finally have more space to begin to get what they need in intimacy. EBE is dedicated to making that day come sooner than later.
And only when an Adamus archetype exists in a father will children begin to receive the valences in their psychosexual development that only such a father can impart to them. Only an Adamus dynamic in a father can impart a template of yang-based masculine being to sons, and provide an Elektra-complex-mediated yin-based femininity in bas-relief contrast to the father’s masculine energetics to daughters.
Without this influence, neither sons nor daughters, nor by extension, the next generation of men and women, will ever move beyond the same crippled dynamics of gender-based being that we have embodied as males and females for thousands of years as a species.
The best way to understand EBE’s picture of romantic union philosophically is to explain what it sees as romantic relationship’s three main phases that owe their dominant theme to the relative maturity of the partners: the first is shrink-to-fit, the second rise-to-negotiate, and third is link-to-co-create. Because almost all romantic unions are mired in some form of the first phase, we have never been shown how to navigate the second, which thus precludes attainment of the third. These three relationship phases correlate to our inner codependent, independent, and interdependent individual maturing phases, respectively.
These three phases are thus defined and differentiated by the presence of an authentically created ‘I,’ the HOH in EBE. Since an authentic ‘I’ cannot be created until we heal unconscious emotional body congestion to some large degree, we all enter relationships in our middle and late teens with some unwhole version of ‘I’ unsure of its own deep value and worthiness.
As said earlier, while our emotional bodies remain congested, we could not but otherwise need love ‘from’ others or a romantic partner to make up for how we lack deep and abiding self-love. When one’s emotional body is decongested to large degree and emotionally mature non-narcissistic egoistic self-love is then emergent, we then no longer ever need love from others, we then need love with others.
Again, the difference between needing love from another and needing love with another is the best way to describe the difference between emotively immature codependence and emotively mature interdependence. As such, an unwhole, unworthy, emotionally congested strategic ‘me’ version of selfhood or ‘we’ version of selfhood creates the codependent shrink-to-fit phase, a growing worthy ‘I’ creates the more independent rise-to-negotiate phase, and a fully worthy, decongested authentic ‘I’ creates the capacity for interdependence, the true noncodependent intimacy creatable in the link-to-cocreate phase. In this way, codependence is normal for everyone at this stage of planetary consciousness evolution. Codependent romance is the norm, the only dynamic we are really capable of as we enter adulthood.
The shrink-to-fit phase is characterized by a hidden question in both partners: the consciously expressed ‘I love you’ statement of romance is actually an unconsciously held ‘You love I?’ This is because each partner’s ‘I’ is not yet embodied of its own true self-worth, even though this reality is not conscious to us while we are in the midst of saying it.
We are all conditioned so deeply, and also feel it is representative of our feelings to say, ‘I love you,’ before we ever create an authentic ‘I.’ Until that authentic ‘I’ of emotive maturity is forged, when we say ‘I love you,’ we are thus actually asking, ‘You love I?’ This dynamic lies at the heart of our codependent patterns of romance.
The emotive congestion held within ‘You love I?’ thus forms the basis for all our strategic effort in codependency to ‘get and keep’ Love. As we will see in more detail shortly, that codependent dance is unconsciously engineered for both partners to either ‘give to get Love,’ ‘give in to get Love,’ or more generically, strategize in some way to get and keep the Love. In contrast, the emotional independence phase in one’s individual EBE practice manifests itself in the intimate relationship phase of rise-to-negotiate.
This is the phase we enter as we learn to express the growing HOH-mediated ‘I’-ness while struggling to open up vulnerably against the grain of our defenses in the crucible of our romantic relationship. As we progress with this, we begin to negotiate our needs and truths openly. The risk of losing our partner no longer causes us to strategically manipulate or control that partner to ensure that s/he remains in partnership.
In this way we begin to develop a self-worthy, noncodependent and strong enough ‘I’ to ‘risk-the-loss-of-the-Love.’ This rise-to-negotiate phase is thus characterized by our willingness to not have our relationship to an entirely new degree and depth. This is not an invulnerability that we power ourselves through, but a fully felt openness to feeling the pain involved.
This kind of awareness and courage is very rare, where two people are strong enough to feel, and not just know or acknowledge, all the feelings that are going on for them, while at the same time stay in touch with the desire for a bond that may go away at any time. Only someone with a growing sense of authentic ‘I’-ness is able to do this fully, let go vulnerably into desiring continuity to the bond while at the same time being emotively willing to have it end.
So as we deconstruct our strategic selfhood in the rise-to-negotiate phase, the question of ‘you love I?’ in regard to Other is slowly replaced with the dynamic “I love I’ in regard to self. Taking this newly forming ‘I love I’ into our bonds, we then slowly become capable of embodying an authentic ‘I’ enough to authentically be able to express ‘I love you’ in emotively mature ways in the link-to-co-create phase.
In the link-to-cocreate phase we learn to serve the Love we feel with each other and demonstrate a willingness to have a healthy relationship with relationship, neither strongly consciously or unconsciously grasping nor consciously or unconsciously pushing it away. And as said, being fully vulnerable to the reality of actually receiving what we most desire is one of the most terrifying risks we can take. In this most mature phase, we are strong enough to be able to move through this formidable existential challenge.
A review of these phases is noted in the following chart.
In summary, what human beings call romantic expressions of love is about combining our emotional-spiritual and sexual-physical natures. Combining these two aspects will feel like putting all the risk of love into one basket, which is why the potential for both real hurt and real growth is so deep. To minimize that exposure, we find strategically unconscious ways to reduce our vulnerability.
In that way, codependency will manifest in two very different patterns. One pattern is needing a love interest too much, grasping at it, and the other will be needing it too little, pushing it away. The first is a way of medicating using a need for too much closeness, and the second medicates with a need for too much distance. These can be summarized as locked-in codependence and locked-out codependance respectively.
Locked-out patterns manifest when we seek to avoid the risk that accompanies combined emotive-sexual themes in romance by employing some external sheltering behavior, by avoiding it altogether or by breaking it up into smaller versions through compartmentalizing a person and our desires. The most common forms of locked-out external sheltering behavior-based codependence are different forms and expressions of promiscuity and celibacy. Locked-in codependent patterns of closeness is what is usually understood as codependence. In EBE, of course, codependence is the default state of relatedness of intimacies of all kinds in the absence of rigorous emotional body enlightenment practice. Here we seek to avoid the risk of combined emotive-sexual romance by entering that relationship employing some internal sheltering mechanism linked to an over-gripping mechanism to minimize the risk of rejection and pain.
This over-gripping will keep us from not exposing ourselves to our fullest sexual or emotive vulnerabilities. Locked-in patterns occur when we hold deeply onto someone, using unconscious strategies to make sure that the object of our Love never goes away. Locked-in codependence thus always involves hidden defenses. We only over-grasp something when we are not being fed or nurtured by it: if we were actually fed or nurtured by a bond, then we would not need to over-grasp it.
The over-grip represents a need for a constant ‘hit’ of a drug, and is never an authentic expression of actually being fed by an emotionally nourishing heart-food. And what causes us to not be adequately fed or nurtured is the inner defensive shield around the heart always present in unhealed emotional bodies by default until effective proactive emotional growth facilitation occurs. Only someone filled with unconscious ego-defenses designed to prevent us from feeling alone and unworthy will thus grip so tightly to another. Our inner defense that actually keeps our heart too far from the heart of our partner is simply masked by how too closely we strive to over-grip the drug our partner represents in our codependent behavior.
EBE makes a clear, definable, and self-validating distinction between unhealthy codependent dependency and healthy interdependent vulnerability. This distinction is not well understood, quantified, or even recognized by psychology or most traditional or modern relationship experts. It is dependency representing unmet needs in our childhood, not vulnerability, that is thus manifested by the tight grip we maintain to keep a partner.
As described in Frozen Feminine-Muddled Masculine, there are four steps in the movement from unhealthy needs and vulnerabilities to healthy versions: needing love from another; wanting love from another, wanting love with another, and needing love with another, from unhealthy to healthy. Only those who learn to become authentically vulnerable by deconstructing their strategic, unconscious defenses, can ever attain and experience the seminal difference between needing love from another from rabid emotively immature bases, and needing love with another in more fully blossomed states of emotive maturity.
As we mature, our healed hearts naturally let go of the codependent grip they have on the relationship. Emotively immature adults fixated in teen phases of psychosexual development use this insight of letting go of the over-grip to another as a truth-in-service to justify their flight from the terror of closeness, and delude themselves it is part of actually growing up.
Such pseudo-intellectual justification of being too afraid of real closeness only expose adults who employ it as tragic posers watching themselves in the mirror of their own immature ego, and not mature beings moving vulnerably and courageously with the risks inherent in life in general and in relationship specifically. Only when we finally learn to create core self-love as the result of a years-long agonal deconstruction of our strategic defenses and exploration of and healing of vast acreages of unconscious conflict do we qualify to be able to let go of over-grasping of Other.
If we are interested in manifesting interdependence, or true intimacy, we must be willing to process and heal both versions of locked-out and locked-in risk-minimizing patterns within the bond of the romantic relationship. Only in such a rise-to-negotiate phase, in which play-outs of these defensive reactions are allowed to surface, be processed and healed within the relationship, will we then heal the wounds that lie at their cause.
Paradoxically, the locked-in version of codependence, either homosexually or heterosexually expressed, actually provides us with the best opportunity to heal unconscious wounds related to our mistrust of love, because the patterns of the grip we have on another point directly to the depth and degree of our starvation we are experiencing in our emotional body that is at cause for a grip. This requires partners to work with the mutual grip they hold on each other. If both are willing to deal with this, they have a chance to heal themselves very deeply in the framework of the bond.
The deeper the childhood wounding brought by a partner into the locked-in version, the less likely the relationship will survive the rise-to-negotiate phase. Unless new ways of relating to each other occur, taking into account the emerging new strengths of the partners as they are discovered, the partnership will likely dissolve. In such a case, EBE is so effective in healing the wound-based connections between the two partners that very little is left of the codependence that characterized the bond.
The challenge in addressing how we relate to our relationships in these ways is that our fear-based romantic patterns, promiscuously codependent or monogamally codependent, contain such perfect, custom-designed medicative remedies for numbing us to our true feelings and issues, they often make us feel like the relationship is the best thing we have ever had. This is what makes it so difficult to disengage from the grip of relating dependently, and why breaking our addiction to these relationships represents exactly the same challenge to demedicate that we experience with any other substance or drug. The withdrawal experience is the same.
Anyone who proclaims ‘his/her life is over,’ or ‘life without the partner is not worth living,’ is trumpeting the degree of a codependent drug, and not from healthy heart-bond. The fact that the rabidly codependent model of ‘Romeo & Juliet’ so deeply represents healthy love is a monumental testament to the pandemic poison inherent in our paradigms of romantic love. In such cases, the former partner was the codependent replacement for the lack of a healthy self-life of the person, and should be seen as rabidly immature, and not extolled as any proof of one’s real or eternal love.
Healing our romantic patterns involves two paths: one involves a ‘willing-to-have’ modality and the other involves a ‘willing-to-not-have’ modality. In the willingness to have, we need to be willing to have our partner fully, not to strategically split our emotional ground from our sexual, to minimize our risk by not landing fully in both. Using a willing-to-not-have modality, we must then face the fear that if we open fully, the partner may vanish, literally or emotionally. This willingness will expose our own fears at cause for our need to medicatively hold onto the relationship.
In general, then, codependence is the addiction, and the partner with whom we are bonding represents the medication. The addictive pattern is always within us and the medicative pattern is outside of us.
As such, almost all relationship theory and practice teach us to treat the symptoms of codependence by utilizing outside-to-in manipulations and strategies that counterproductively end up masking the real problem. We will never structurally improve our relationships by better learning how the opposite gender communicates, how to get our partner to act differently, by learning men are from Mars and women are from Venus, by creating more time for intimacy, by remembering to do the little things for each other, by more candlelight dinners, by continuing to buy more books teaching us how to get it right, or by finding the perfect partner.
Neither can we ever structurally improve our relationships by participating in the trivializing of romantic love in our current culture through its legitimization of codependency in movies, books, talk shows, and countless other artistic and entertainment-based venues.
One of the worst examples of misbegotten therapeutic guidance is the popular idea that it’s healthy to fantasize during lovemaking. This view, held by so many psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and therapists of all kinds, legitimizes the shutting down of emotional vulnerability and honesty with our partner. In this way, fantasizing during sex is a flight from the threshold of reality by inhabiting a false construct reality projection in the mental body that professionals stuck in mental body frameworks believe is perfectly healthy.
Such disingenuous guidance by therapists clueless as to what constitutes emotional maturity is simply a juvenile and powerful way to ensure we are somewhere else with someone else in the mental body and so not emotively connected to one another during lovemaking, a classic way to avoid the fears associated with real closeness. If we truly felt how vital, authentic, exciting, and satisfying lovemaking is when both partners stay rhythmically with one another during it, we would never split our hearts and genitals apart by bringing fantasies of another into the bedroom.
In addition, a common counterintuitive form of locked-in codependent shrink-to-fit dynamisms can be described as an ‘expand-to-dominate.’ Initially in the romance, the differences between the two people are minimized, and the personal values they hold are almost always edited as they shrink-to-fit to ensure approval so as to get and keep the love that is blossoming. But later those differences emerge, and as a result, there is an attempt to dominate our partner in countless subtle ways.
Expand-to-dominate does not necessarily mean taking a dominant role, in the same way shrink-to-fit does not necessarily mean taking a submissive role. Shrink-to-fit is a stage wherein we are a smaller version of ourselves with the subconscious strategy of getting or keeping a certain partner, and can manifest as either being dominant or submissive. Likewise, expand-to-dominate can also take either form, as an outwardly dominant controlling role or a more hidden, quiet, manipulative role. Another way of saying this is that the parts of us that initially shrank to get and keep the love we wanted then compensate for that and jockey for some dominance to compensate for the prior shrinking.
The key understanding is that a strategically smaller version of our self is at the helm of our being, as the personality characteristics manifest as a need to over-grip the hold one has on the other partner to ensure continuity of the relationship. Role-playing is thus the theme of shrink-to-fit, expand-to-dominate phase in which partners not only begin repeating parental themes of behavior with each other, they actually create a relationship role personality of their own. It is then this role personality itself that has the relationship with a partner who is doing the same.
Thus, the more real aspect of a partner, comprised of whatever it is that partner really thinks deep down about the bond and the other partner, recedes further and further from the actual interface of the relationship. This development happens so gradually that the partners usually don’t notice that it is happening until one day they wake up to a stranger.
When this happens, the usual explanation is that the partners have grown apart because they were growing in different directions. But more often the explanation of what has happened is that each partner, through long term shrink-to-fit or expand-to-dominate strategic versions of themselves gradually became a stranger to him/herself.
This was done by slowly transforming into a false self that is far removed from our authentic self and so causes us to create a relationship role personality whose attributes are projections of unhealed childhood dynamic themes. It is this mechanism that explains why we create that false role: it is a form of the part of us that was left behind in our rush to secure love, the part we edited because we were afraid that by showing it, we would be rejected by our partner.
So it is not necessarily the love or spark that goes away in longer term relationships: it is the false ‘I’ in both partners that the codependent love was predicated upon that erodes. As it does, the felt-reality that it’s the love that’s eroding is mistakenly projected on the bond, rather than recognizing that what is falling away is only a strategic role version of ourselves.
If there is not much of the bond left as this role erodes, that means the bond itself was largely created by the strategic falsenesses of the partners. If there is something substantive left, as we recognize strategic aspects are falling away, we have a chance to really look at what is going on within ourselves relative to family-of-origin projections on adult relationship.
In these ways, if we had never shrunk-to-fit initially as we discovered deep mutual resonances with a partner, the love that did grow would remain and find newer and fuller means to express itself. Fully being with what is actually going on in ourselves under the surface in terms of unconscious emotional body drives that explain our behaviors and reactions, is critical to be able to actually work at our authenticity in the bond.
Being authentic in the bond cannot occur unless we proactively seek out the ‘why’ of virtually every behavior and reaction we have in the relationship, to uncover how unconscious emotional body wounds work their surreptitious effects on how we define, relate to, and process our experience of the reality of the bond in the rise-to-negotiate phase of maturing relationship. Without this kind of inquiry, by default we will codependently lock into playouts and projections of unmet dependent needs from childhood.
How many couples, young or old, make that kind of proactive effort? How many couples are even aware that unmet dependent needs from childhood always undermine the vitality of any relationship? Psychology is no help, confused as it is about the true nature and cause of codependence. Adult sexualized bonding is never meant to carry the burden of unmet dependent needs from childhood: that is the job of effective emotional body healing to deal with, in the absence of how ignorant we have been about what children actually need in childhood.
This fundamental and hugely obvious and basic truth about the inevitability of codependently projecting unmet dependent needs from childhood onto sexualized relationships in the absence of healing unconscious emotional body congestion must find its way into our educational systems as the linchpin issue in addressing all of its downstream playouts: teenage pregnancies, unwanted and thus neglected or abused children starting an entirely new round of unmet dependent needs, sexually transmitted disease challenges, and 50% divorce rates.
So the reason why the bond loses vitality is that it never really had it in the first place: both partners come to the interface of relationship with less than a whole ‘I’ and so the love could not help but wilt later. Sustainability of true healthy passion is only possible when two authentic ‘I’s’ mutually share in the dance of intimate, co-creative union.
The shrink-to-fit phase is thus the place where the vast majority of romances remain, often for a lifetime. This occurs because our revelatory-based religiously contexted cultures see the relationship or the marriage as being a structure ‘bigger’ than the partners who comprise it and cause it to be in the first place, and the artificial ‘thing’ that needs to be served above all else, usually by staying together while unhappy, supported by outworn religious paradigms that teach it is ‘sinful’ to divorce. Slave to such orientations, intimate relationship will never be healthy, no matter how ‘happy’ the partners are or how long the bond lasts.
In shrink-to-fit locked-in codependnce, two people thus baby-sit and thus caretake the unmet needs from childhood in the other in the name of love and security and giving to the partner. While this seems to the partners to be the epitome of compromise, commitment, and fair play, it is instead a caretaking game that ensures the unhealthy status quo is maintained. Upsetting that status quo by inhabiting real feelings and needs will threaten the stability of the bond and thus expose the fear lying beneath the surface of the relationship. It is one thing to be lonely with no one next to you and another to be lonely with someone by your side. For our sacred emotional truths to see the light of day, we have to confront this arrangement so that we can move on to the next phase of romance.
The next most mature phase, rise-to-negotiate, is not about negotiating needs, in terms of ‘I’ll do this to serve this need or desire in you if you will serve my need or desire in this other area.’ This is the sterile ground of the level most couple therapy available today works. Transmutational couple work is not about negotiating needs: it is about discovering which of our needs are narcotically provided for in the bond, not about learning to communicate better with a partner, but learning how to communicate better with our own set of unconscious emotional body wounds.
Letting this distinction fully land in consciousness will open a door into an entirely new world of romantic relationship ground, one where all the dreams of love we as a species have had since our beginning have room to manifest. This ground is where we do not fall in love, but rise to love, and in that rising, give love enough room for it to grow and to take us along on a journey whose destination will involve experiences one could not have predicted before attaining a level of emotional maturity.
So if both partners are willing to work through individual emotional body healing, the relationship can move into the middle phase of romance: rise-to-negotiate. This rise is the struggle to make each partner’s truer authentic self manifest more directly against the grain of shrink-to-fit dynamisms by the invitation to deepen emotional vulnerability, sexual expression, and spiritual partnership in the crucible of romantic intimacy. It is the phase in which we become willing to temporarily lose our codependently-supplied benefits in the relationship in order to manifest more authentic truth within the bond.
This is the healthy phase of condition-setting, in which each partner must own what they want from the bond while at the same time, be willing to look at how what each one wants might be based in their own emotional congestion so as not to have a wound-based desire fulfilled. This is why only negotiating each other’s wants without investigating whether those wants are coming from codependent emotional wounds or independent emotional strengths only legitimates and strengthens the degree of the codependence. No means to access whether or not what we want is coming from unconscious compensations for our unmet needs from childhood, no means to make the bond less codependent: it is that simple.
That virtually all modern relationship counseling does not see through to this truth, that only effectively having a way to proactively address, access, and heal conflicted emotional content in the unconscious will serve to make a bond less codependent and more healthy, shows how deeply the experts don’t understand the governing dynamics of codependence.
As the rise-to-negotiate phase progresses, each partner must honestly communicate his/her hurts, feelings, and needs to the other even if that openness hurts the other. This breaks the pattern of unhealthy caretaking which justifies that the partners are not fully honest with one another. Doing this depends on how thoroughly we understand that we, as human beings, are not capable of acting outside of our own self interests. This understanding allows us to give up the dangerous practice of what we call sacrificing for the other in all of our relationships, as said.
We must thus summon the courage to express the ways in which we are not nourished by the relationship and then be willing to look at whether or not this undernourishment is a result of our own emotional congestion or represents a healthy need of a healthy adult. When we do not express a truth about our partner for fear of hurting them, it is not them we are afraid of hurting: what we are afraid of is feeling our own pain in causing them pain.
In that way, when we withhold any truth about our partners about how we feel in relationship with them and tell ourselves we are being unselfishly Loving for doing so, we must realize that we are actually being selfish to avoid feeling how we ourselves hurt to have to hurt them, and as such, are completely self-serving while we tell ourselves we are serving the other.
It is this willingness to not withhold any truth whatsoever with our partner, and at the same time being willing to admit that the truth may be a projection or distortion of our wound systems, that is the heart of the work in the rise-to-negotiate phase. Finding out which truths come from strengths and which from wounds can only happen if both partners are in emotional body healing practice.
Without a means to do self-to-self differentiation within a self-to-self crucible in a more ‘vertical’ individual healing process, trying to use the bond within a self-to-other-based more ‘horizontal’ self-differentiation crucible, will only skim the surface of addressing the health and authentic vitality of the bond and its partners.
It is only in this way using this mechanism provided by EBE that we discover which satisfactions are an unconscious medication, and which are actual substantive and healthy heart-food, and with that, the transmutation that goes along with realizing how much we formerly experienced as a meal were in actuality the crumbs of a drug high.
The actual engine that drives the rise-to-negotiate phase is the idea that we must embrace the fact that adult intimacy involves conditional forms of Love and never employ unconditional love into the mix. This is one of the most misunderstood and poisonous elements of most relationship expert guidance, the inclusion of unconditional love in adult relationship models. As said, any adult who either desires unconditional love from a partner or tries to provide unconditional love to a partner is displaying the degree s/he is codependently projecting unmet dependent needs from childhood into the adult relationship ground. Only children need unconditional love, from their parents, in the experience that the parent’s love and presence will never go away no matter what the child does or feels. Adults who need unconditional love in adult relationships thus trumpet the presence of childhood wounds from how this did not happen for them then.
Emotionally mature adults want to be loved conditionally, want to be cherished for what makes them them, and want to be seen for who and what they are that makes them different than others. And if they can’t meet healthy conditional needs of their partner, they want to know so they can investigate what can be changed by their own growth, or if it can’t, can let go of the illusion that the bond actually serves the highest good for both.
When two people are attracted to each other enough to create romantic relationship, they always bring with that attraction certain conditions and values, i.e. the partners were attracted to each other because of certain qualities and conditions in appearance, personality, emotional textures, and values. In some specific conditional way, we decided our needs were met to some significant degree by the specific qualities of the other.
Our fulfillment was based on the conditions that the partner looked this way and not that, felt about things one way and not another, and valued life in this way and not that. There are always specific values resonation of this sort, all of them conditional and for which we are not apologetic. It is why we were called into love with them in the first place.
What is it that makes us think that our conditions should vanish as we continue to spend years with our partners? The same kind of expectations for conditional qualities and specific needs should be no different in five or fifteen or twenty-five years into the bond than they were at the outset. This does not mean that the conditions don’t shift and change with time, only that the conditionality itself, is always operative.
Why do we think it is shallow of us to expect that our partner should not gain fifty pounds if that was a value that would have affected the original attraction when the relationship began? Why would we just accept that a partner now wants to have open sexual liaisons with others if that would never have worked for us in the first place? Why are conditions important at the outset yet taught as inappropriate later?
We’re thus made to feel that we are not being ‘unconditionally’ loving towards our partner if we don’t accept his/her newly acquired weight, addictions, unfaithfulness or change in values that were precluded in the relationship in the first place. In EBE, romance is always a function of values resonation, whether these values are healthy or unhealthy, in the form of either addicts sharing the same needle or egoists sharing a healthy love.
Conditions related to our own fulfillment factors must remain high in the bond for both partners as we change and grow in vital romantic relationship with the other. To say, ‘I will remain with you no matter what happens or no matter how you change your values,’ is the voice of fear-based codependency, not the voice of healthy mature love or mature spirituality.
This confusion exists because we mistake the ‘I will love you no matter what,’ which is a function of healthy commitment and Love, with its codependent expression of, ‘I will remain with you no matter what,’ which manifests as enabling behavior, as we stay and support stagnating nourishment factors for either ourselves or our partner. In other words, it is time to end how our emotionally immature religious paradigms poison our intimate relationship theory and practice in almost every direction.
So we can continue to love our partner but may not remain with him/her if we think we must shrink-to-fit or sell out our healthy needs and values to do so. But both sides need to always be examined for their possible basis in unconscious emotional conflict. Wanting to leave a relationship because we have the felt-reality that our needs are no longer being met may, in itself, be an emotional congestion-based ploy to avoid the next healthy challenge for that person to grow and heal.
This is why proactive individual self-to-self healing of unconscious emotional wounds is so necessary to fully understand what is actually happening with two partners in relationship. Doing such work allows us to find out at any one time which of the realities in the partner conflict are based in emotional congestion. This will finally give us a criteria of resolution other than just keeping score on who’s doing what to whom when, often taught as the algorithm of negotiation in romance conflict. Only by negotiating the possible unconscious, emotive congestion-based motivations behind what both partners desire allows health in the romantic bond.
In summary, despite how we have been conditioned in our culture, only healthy conditional love will work in keeping a romantic relationship vital. Believing or requiring a romantic partner to love us unconditionally is always a case of codependently asking the romantic partner to give us what our parents did not in our dependent phase of development.
The rise-to-negotiate phase in EBE thus has many challenges. First, there is our ability to honestly express the fact that we are hurt, angry, or frustrated by what our partners are doing or not doing. This may sound easy, but in truth it is difficult to do constantly; in every moment and situation where we are triggered, regardless of whether or not it is convenient for us to do so. Every moment that passes in which we are not expressing our truth increases the chances that we will either minimize or over-express its truth later, which will only increase the chances of our partner defending against hearing that truth from us.
To not let thirty seconds go by without telling our partner what is going on in us in response to what s/he is or isn’t doing is a cornerstone of the rise-to-negotiate phase. And to be able to do that we first have to learn to actually know what we are feeling immediately and in the moment. This is not something many people can do; but EBE will help those who can’t do this create that access, and deepen it for those who can.
This level of immediacy is rarely taught as such even by the theorists that say we need to be honest with each other. The depth and velocity of such honesty is a function of how much we really are in touch with our feelings about what our partner is doing or not doing. Again, doing this is not easy. This is why self-to-self individual EBE-type work is so critical because it is so effective in putting us in touch with how we feel about everything, consciously and unconsciously, and the relative health of those realities.
In a mundane practical sense, we thus must always give ourselves permission to be angry with our partner, while at the same time be guided quickly to be at the level of hurt that underlies the anger to make the movement productive. In that way, hurt is always the foundation for anger. It is impossible to be angry or frustrated about anything that doesn’t in some way hurt us. If we had learned this truth early in life, we would have learned never to make being angry something negative, instead seeing it as a red-flag or signal that we are hurting deeply and begin to look for that hurt.
In that way, to call anger a negative emotion is to call the hurt that sources it a negative emotion. If we all began expressing our hurt instead of anger with each other, our difficulties would resolve far more quickly. Showing one another how much we are hurt puts us and Other in a space that allows a more non-defensive posture of openness and love.
Mutually expressing hurt-to-hurt communication with our partner is the only way to really experience heart-to-heart connection with them. Couples that access the mutual hurt sourcing all of their conflict will be able to learn all the lessons that their relationship is designed to teach them. At the same time, they learn to be closer and closer to each other as the resonation within the bond grows stronger and stronger.
And as said, men tend to naturally respond to a woman’s ‘I want you sexually,’ and women tend to naturally respond to a man’s ‘I want you emotively.’ This misconnected motive base is the reason why so little authentic fulfillment is sustained in romance. Men who learn to balance their yang nature and become more yin-like in their ability to vulnerably embody their hurts and needs, finally give women what they have always wanted. Likewise, women who balance their yin nature and become more yang-like in their ability to vulnerably embody their sexual and emotional power, finally give men what they have always wanted.
So the rise-to-negotiate phase requires open, conditional Love which involves risk and a commitment to the healthiest version possible for that partnership. In rise-to-negotiate we replace caretaking with caregiving, thus empowering our partners to be honest even when that honesty hurts. Both partners are willing to be angry to create healthy boundary-making so that partners never play victim to each other. They become mutually dedicated to helping each other find any unhealthy motives for any and all individual and bond-based patterns of behavior.
In these ways, fledgling egoists negotiate motivations with each other, not so much their intentions, actions or outcomes. An emotively mature individual would rather have an unpleasant healthily motivated outcome in the bond and not a pleasant, unhealthily motivated outcome.
Thus, it often happens in this maturing phase that a partner is actually angry with the other for giving him/her ‘nice’ responses or outcomes because s/he lacked the authenticity needed for further growth. Very little relationship theory and practice includes this level of honesty to the degree that a partner would rather do without something that is fulfilling to him/her if it’s not healthy for his/her partner to provide it. As such, each partner acts as advocate for the health of the other. This is the most vital role for people who truly love each other; to advocate for each other’s deepest expression of emotively mature authenticity.
How many couples or individuals do you know who are ready to embody such a premise in their romance? Why have we never been taught how to create deep, committed friendships with our ex-wives or ex-husbands? Our current paradigms have only helped create victimhood and stagnation in romantic relationships, no matter how we gloss this over with behavioral change. Our current versions of relationship don’t just need polishing: they need to be relegated to a well-deserved former Dark Age that no longer has applicability to this, the Bright Age.
Two people in individual and couple emotional healing who are successful in this rise-to-negotiate phase can then move on to the third, and most mature phase of romance: link-to-co-create. It is here where a couple begins to harvest all of the work they’ve done to expose the core of their hearts to themselves and so now are able to share with another more deeply than they thought possible. The only reason love has been so problematic for humankind is because we have never been able to fully bring our emotive authenticity to our relationships so that there is actual energetic contact between hearts that have been stripped of the strategic energetic ‘wrap’ that formerly surrounded them.
As said, one way of describing the difference between codependent and interdependent relationship is that in codependent bonds, partners have the experience that the other fills them up, and in interdependent bonds, partners have the experience that each other fills them out. In interdependency, partners cause each other to expand and grow just by being in one another’s presence. And in codependency, partners provide addictive satiation to what is lacking in the other.
An apt metaphor that describes this is imagining a codependent couple walking side by side putting one of their legs each in a burlap bag, as if they are in a three-legged race, while an interdependent couple walks side by side without the burlap bag. The codependent couple is constantly tripping and falling as they walk and the interdependent couple simply enjoys walking together without falling and tripping.
Again, the only way to ensure moving from codependence to interdependence in the horizontal ground of relatedness, a journey we all must undergo if we are willing to truly experience authentic Love, is for partners to create independence and emotional maturity vertically within themselves first. This is why it is unrealistic to think that relationships can be improved in any essential way in the absence of each partner making the healing of their family-of-origin issues their top priority of life.
The link-to-co-create phase of romance is thus where we begin to manifest shared life projects based upon the values each partner brought individually into the bond, forged together in the heat of the rise-to-negotiate phase. Ideally, this is also the appropriate phase for having children, as raising children is the most sacred of the couple’s ‘projects.’ If children were raised in an atmosphere of relentless and loving emotional honesty by emotionally mature parents who were core-happy in health with themselves and with each other, they would have healthy love and Personhood modeled for them from infancy on. Because modeling is the only way in early childhood to learn how to develop an authentic self, they would then do so and pass on authenticity to the next generation.
Thus, link-to-co-create opens us to the opportunity to finally serve the love in romance. The magic mirror of insight available to us in romance is that if something is not healthy for one partner to do for the other in romance, then it is not healthy for the partner to receive it. The truth of this principle must become the ground on which that romance is built so that there is a capacity created to serve the love in the true dance of intimacy. In this way, balancing the yang-yin aspects of ourselves in the crucible of romance helps create our deepest and most authentic versions of ourselves.
As such, link-to-co-create relationship allows us to navigate and explore four different avenues of relatedness with a partner: the yang of the man with the yin of the woman; the yang of the man with the yang of the woman; the yin of the man with the yang of the woman; and the yin of the man with the yin of the woman. EBE helps couples to understand what kinds of healthy activities and energies comprise each of the four, and focuses on which may be underexplored in the bond dynamics.
Other than the more common default role dynamic of the yang of the man and yin of the woman, the yang of the man with the yang of the woman can be expressed in sports and hands-on manifestation projects; the yin of the man with the yang of the woman can be found in a more robust sexual role taken by the woman, or the man learning to be vulnerably open to the enormous wisdom of the yin in any situation analysis; and perhaps the yin of the man with the yin of the woman expressed in artistic or more spiritual-based co-experiences. Exploring all four of these avenues of connection is a hallmark of interdependence.
It is also important to note that the movements from codependency to independency to interdependency are not mutually exclusive. In most cases, all three are present and being worked through in a romantic relationship at any one time. As we rise-to-negotiate, we take the shrink-to-fit aspects of ourselves that are afraid to be willing not to have, into the middle stage of independence. As we do so, we move other independent aspects afraid to be willing to have through to link-to-cocreate.
So to experience all the magic romantic love offers us, the more we must vulnerably expose our own hearts to ourselves to be able to more deeply join with the hearts of others. EBE never creates love, it frees up love as the expression of that which we are already made. Our essential nature is already spring-loaded as love, ready to burst forth like a fountain as we slowly remove the congestion that prevents its natural expression. The best context to learn such a process is in the crucible of romance, where both the risk and the rewards for our hearts are the greatest.
If this treatment of the emotional body-mediated context for romantic intimacy strikes a chord with you, the upcoming Frozen Feminine-Muddled Masculine will take you further in the journey into the heart of intimacy.
In the end, without the healing that occurs in EBE dharma that target the vast unconsciousness of the wound-based motivations beneath our conscious intentions and expressed actions, the elusive magic and the enlightened mundanity of gender-based intimacy will never blossom into the forms and expressions intended for our experience by Divine Being.