choice quotes from the free sample of richard schwartz's IFS relationship book "you are the one you've been waiting for", part 2: chapter 1 (part 1 was the introduction):
"Cultural Constraints to Intimacy"
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Conversation
"Sustaining intimacy wouldn’t be such a big problem if you had been encouraged by your family or culture to take care of your exiles.... It is likely that your family taught you the opposite—to lock away your parts when they felt hurt, needy, ashamed, or otherwise in pain."
Replying to
"Then our culture bombarded you with messages about how great it would be when you finally found your “soulmate.”"
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"Couples were once surrounded by communities of relatives and friends, by people who shared their values and helped them out. Today, couples are isolated, mobile units that are expected to survive on their own."
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"Not only is the couple isolated from its community, but each partner is often cut off from the other by the outrageous requirements of work or by the excessive demands of raising children far from the help of kin networks."
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"In this society, we leave our parents and our children leave us; the only person who is supposed to be with us forever is our partner."
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"Without a constant stream of affirmation from an intimate partner, most of us will experience these feelings to some degree: worthless, empty, like a loser, lonely, rejected, desperate, ugly, boring, insecure, and afraid."
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"These are unbearable emotions that we will do anything to avoid. What we call happiness is often relief about not being in those states."
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"Too often our partner becomes a life preserver, keeping our head above water in the dark sea of pain, shame, and fear in which we float. No wonder we feel so threatened and jealous if it looks as though our partner might leave us."
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"Our culture offers many other life preservers—television, Internet, shopping, working, smoking, legal and illegal drugs, alcohol, pornography, prostitution, plastic surgery, diets and exercise, fatty and sweet foods—all the common addictions."
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"As John Updike said, “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.” But these life preservers are flimsy—poor substitutes for human connection."
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"These distractions themselves become part of a vicious cycle that keeps us addicted to the search for head-above-water happiness and away from a more sustaining happiness."
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"The more we pursue [these distractions], the more isolated we become from one another—and ourselves—and the more afraid of the waves around us, so the more desperately we pursue them."
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"Take a few minutes to reflect on the following questions....
1. Are you aware of feelings of emptiness or unlovability inside you that you fear?
2. To what extent in your life have you expected your lover to make those feelings disappear?"
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"3. How much do you also rely on the distractions our culture offers, and which of those do you use?
4. Do you have any faith that you might help those parts of you yourself?"
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"Many reasons exist why most of us in this country contain a secret dark sea of lonely emptiness and quiet desperation. Later in the book we will discuss the psychological roots of this condition..."
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"...but it is also important to consider the sociological development of what historian Phillip Cushman (1995) calls the “empty self” that arose in this country after World War II."
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"American individualism lost its soul at that point to the huge pressures of industrial capitalism. Whereas before the war our individualism was tempered by a strong ethic of community service, afterward that changed."
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"The American Dream of ever-upward mobility, fueled by memories of the Great Depression and by increasingly pervasive national advertising, infected that war generation with a more selfish individualism."
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"Their baby-boomer children inherited that virus and, in addition, experienced little of the extended family and community-focused upbringing that their parents enjoyed. Instead, many of us boomers grew up in anonymous suburbs and drew our values from television commercials."
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"The result is the empty self, “a self that experiences a significant absence of community, tradition, and shared meaning.... a self that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger” (p. 79)."
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"Our empty selves have been conditioned to sate that hunger with material possessions, which has created a powerful economy that gives us the illusion that we are doing well. But our inner lives are not doing well."
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"[Y]ou'll be convinced that... The person who will heal you, complete you, and keep you afloat is out there."
"This is an impossible load for intimate relationships to
handle."
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"The striving for money and the isolation from a circle of caring people are enough to do in many marriages—not only because both partners are depleted by the pace of life and absence of nurturing contact, but also..."
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"... because to work and compete so hard, they each must become dominated by striving parts that don’t lend themselves to intimate vulnerability."
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"1. How much does your lifestyle allow time and space for intimate exchanges with your partner?
2. How isolated are you and your partner from a network of nurturing relationships?
3. How much does fear of poverty or competition with others drive your lifestyle?"
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"Another kind of happiness exists that you can feel steadily whether you are in a relationship or not. It comes from the sense of connectedness that happens when all your parts love one another and trust and feel accepted by your Self."
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"When you have that kind of love swirling around inside you, it spills out to people around you, and those people become part of your circle of love and support. You don’t need intimate others to keep you out of the inner dark sea because that sea has been drained...."
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"As author John Schumaker (2006) writes:
I never knew how measly my own happiness was until one day when I found myself stranded in a remote western Tanzanian village. I saw real happiness for the first time—"
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"So we’ve all been set up—victims of a cruel joke. First we are loaded with emotional burdens by our family and peers, and then taught to exile the parts carrying them. Then we are told to go out into the world and find that special person who can make us finally like ourselves."
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"Together we and our partner enter the striving, frenetic whirlpool American lifestyle that precludes time together, isolates us from community, depletes and stresses us out, and offers innumerable addictive distractions that further isolate us."
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"When we can’t make this impossible situation work, we feel like total failures—as though something is wrong with us. We don’t realize that we never had a prayer."
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