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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
JUDITH SHERVEN & JAMES SNIECHOWSKI
Judith Sherven, Ph.D. and James Sniechowski, Ph.D. are a husband and wife team uniting two of the country's most respected, pioneering, and sought-after authorities on relationship dynamics. Through their company, The Magic of Differences, their lectures, workshops and trainings continue to change the lives of both couples and singles, awakening them to a new vision of intimate relationship, and helping them discover the rich spiritual purpose for the challenges of real life love.
They are best known for their work in the study and understanding of differences in relationships and how to turn those differences into exciting catalysts for heightened intimacy in marriage, better communication in dating and greater respect and understanding in any relationship. They have appeared on over 450television and radio talk shows including Oprah, Sonya Live, 48Hours, The View with Barbara Walters, New Attitudes, and Entertainment Tonight.
Jim holds a doctorate in Human Behavior and is the cofounder of the Men's Health Network in Washington, D.C. as well as the ounder and director of the Menswork Center in Santa Monica. As an international leader and speaker on men's issues, he leads workshops and men's groups.
Judith is a clinical psychologist and was the founding director of the Institute for Advanced Training in Experiential Psychotherapy. She has been a psychotherapist in private practice since 1978.
Interviewer J. Steven Svoboda is a 39-year-old attorney who has reorganized his work life to allow him to devote the majority of his time to doing men's work. He co-founded and serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the Northern California chapter of the National Coalition of Free Men. Svoboda also founded and is Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, an organization devoted to developing legal approaches to stopping male circumcision. He also writes and performs solo theater pieces regarding men's issues.
Steven spoke with Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski in their hotel room during a break from their presentations and workshops at the Chicago Men's Conference on March 6, 1999.
Steven: What is the New Intimacy?
Jim: Let me start with the old intimacy. Historically, marriage and intimate relationships were based on gender stereotypes regarding what men were supposed to do and what women were supposed to do. And intimacy within relationships was generally experienced as sex and nudity.
For example, my mother and father were married for 65 years. They had a long, successful relationship. I rarely saw them talk to each other. I never saw them hold hands. I rarely saw them kiss, even the tiniest of pecks, but they had a very successful relationship. Under this gender role system, the closest emotional intimacy occurred between members of the same sex. But intergender intimacy was quite limited. That's what the old intimacy was. Now, The New Intimacy...
Judith: Over the last twenty to thirty years, those sexual stereotypes have been dissolving. We now have women who are CEO's, owners of their own companies, on the police force, and firefighters, and we have men who are househusbands, secretaries, and nurses. Much more freedom of opportunity is available for both genders to define their lifestyle without that kind of sex-based constriction. Consequently, in intimate relationships now, each couple gets to create their own particular union and there is freedom of choice but little knowledge of how to use it. And that's why we wrote the book The New Intimacy.
Jim: I'd like to add one more thing. Historically, marriages were arranged by either matchmakers or family or religion or community. What has developed primarily here in the United States, that has never happened anywhere in the history of the world, has been an increasing degree of personal freedom to select a mate on the basis of attraction and love. Never before in human history have two people been as free to choose each other. The New Intimacy is based on that freedom. Because often an attendant sense of responsibility is missing, that freedom may be abused. But if that freedom were not there, we wouldn't be talking about The New Intimacy. We'd be talking about the old intimacy.
Steven: What are the most important factors for creating The New Intimacy?
Judith: The most fundamental point in creating The New Intimacy sounds simple: You absolutely must remember that your partner is not you. You are two distinct people and therefore you're going to have different attitudes, feelings, and behaviors. Neither one of you is necessarily wrong or right. You both have values that are valid and important to you. Now, how do you celebrate those differences? How do you benefit from them by learning from each other, by growing together because you're spurred by the differences? And how do you use the inevitable conflicts as a tool to promote growth in a healthy, loving way?
Jim: We have a five-point plan for creating The New Intimacy. 1) The other person's not you. 2) Two people are always co-creating their relationship right from the very beginning. Either covertly or overtly, they are teaching each other what they expect, what they'll put up with, what their dreams are, and what their fears are. Two people are always empowered at a 50-50 ratio to co-create the shape and nature of the relationship. 3) Curiosity. If your partner is not you and you have the power to co-create the relationship, curiosity comes into play as you try to know the other person better and better. Curiosity becomes an aphrodisiac. It becomes a turn-on because someone really wants to know you.
4) Conflict is healthy and valuable, both emotionally and spiritually. Conflict is also inevitable in all long-term relationships. If you can learn to use conflict productively, which takes practice but is not too difficult, then it can offer an opportunity to learn about each other and to grow. 5) Receiving love. Because the other person is not you, they are going to love you in ways that you don't imagine and don't expect. That is their gift to you. You need to be open to receive love, especially when it comes in ways that we don't expect. Those are the five elements which will provide The New Intimacy in your daily life.
Steven: Isn't the fact that your partner is not you one of the most obvious things you could possibly say?
Judith: Yes.
Steven: Why do you say it?
(both Judith and Jim laugh)
Judith: Because so many people don't approach their marriages that way and therefore get caught in a cycle of divorce and remarriage. Because so many people approach their marriage based on a fantasy that their spouse will match their needs perfectly or the narcissistic idea that only what they want matters.
Jim: People come in for counseling, and they implicitly ask us, "Will you fix my partner so we can have a good relationship?" When I am trying to change you, I have a view of how things are supposed to be and I have some dedication to that view and I am trying to bludgeon you or manipulate you into complying. I am obliterating you psychologically and spiritually. I don't know that you're not me. And as simplistic as the idea is that your partner is not yourself, people forget it time and again.
Steven: What can we expect to happen if we're successful at The New Intimacy and we create this true love which you seem to be encouraging us to strive for?
Judith: 1) You are not going to be bored. There is always new excitement and sometimes tension and passion as the mystery unfolds. You are two distinct people who are changing together. 2) You can experience the comfort of trust, the confidence that you really have respect for each other and value each other. You truly do desire each other's well-being. You are there to grow and learn together and support each other in that growth.
Jim: My mother and father were together for sixty-five years. They trusted each other. In The New Intimacy we are talking about a trust of a different kind. I get to trust myself with you, in my fullness, and you get to trust yourself with me in your fullness. This means that I am bringing more of myself to you and you're bringing more of yourself to me. It is through that bringing to one another that trust grows.
Judith: Because you are appreciative of differences and you are expanding beyond your own self-centered idea of what's right and what's wrong, you will be developing spiritually as you move out of narcissism and into a larger perspective.
Steven: What should we do to cultivate this kind of trust in a relationship?
Jim: We all come into relationships with some sense that if you really got to know me, you would... laugh at me, make fun of me, leave me, etc. In The New Intimacy there is a demand that you risk. And the risk is that you bring yourself fully forward and see how the other person will respond. If they respond negatively, you at least have that information and can move on. If they respond positively, you are having both your positive and negative aspects loved with more of a fullness than has ever happened before in human history. But you must make yourself available to the relationship.
If you want to be trusted, give me something to work with. If you don't, I can't trust you because you're not showing up. What I want you to come forward with, that I have to work with, is whatever the truth is in the moment. People in relationships play games with one another and say things like, "Gee, if you really loved me you should have known." Well, I don't just know. I need for you to tell me, so that we can work together with whoever you are, whoever I am, and we can build the relationship that we have and want. And making yourself emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and sexually accessible.
Jim: Any time anybody denies an aspect of themselves, they create a walking time bomb. To mix a metaphor, it begins to fester, to become cancerous, emotionally or physically. I can never be fully secure in a relationship because I am always under the threat that my partner is going to leave me if he or she discovers my secret. Life becomes less and less a spontaneous, authentic experience. You lose the juice and life becomes a drag. Denial is destructive in all kinds of ways.
Steven: It sounds to me like part of what your work is about is techniques to reduce the level of projection and increase the level of seeing the reality of the other person. One question I have for you is: What's so bad about that wonderful, lovely feeling that comes over us when we're in love and we see all this beauty? And even if it isn't all true, what's so bad about that?
Jim: Nothing.
Judith: Nothing in and of itself.
Jim: Nothing in and of itself. There is nothing bad about the chemistry and the rush of the newness of a relationship if you do not get lost in it and assume that is the only reality to the relationship. Because it will fade. Most of us want that high feeling because by the time we've become adults we've become so desensitized that we need our emotions to be ratcheted up in intensity in order for us to be able to have any feeling at all. We tell people to ride the emotional rush, and enjoy it, and love it. But know that it will end. And then what are you going to do?
Judith: We must stay conscious that although the other person is beautiful in their own way, in due time, what we may see as negative aspects are going to come up as well. We will start seeing the ways that they are a slob, or annoying, or routinely late, or refuse to take out the trash. That is part of them too. Sadly, so many people get lost in the fantasy that the other person is this ideal and then when the reality shows up they're ready for divorce court.
Jim: If you're in reality and know that a cute eccentricity may have its own dark side in due time, then when it shows up it's not a deal-breaker and then you can co-create the relationship further.
Steven: Is the dark side something we can expect to come up if we start trying to love someone?
Judith: Guaranteed.
Jim: Guaranteed.
Judith: All of us have been wounded in our childhood and our adolescence, some of us arrive with divorces behind us, and we all suffer tragedies in different ways. The dark side is definitely going to be part of a real love relationship.
Jim: And if it's not, if you hear a couple saying, "We've been married for ten years and we've never had a fight," either one or both of them is emotionally numbed or dead. Two human beings cannot live together in the intensity of a dwelling, let alone a relationship, and not step on each other's toes on occasion.
Steven: You urge people to come out from behind their shadow by asking for emotional support with their needs and feelings that are difficult. Isn't there a danger of overwhelming a partner with this? Shouldn't we be setting some limits on how much we're going to share?
Judith: I think you're raising some good concerns. And you're right. If somebody starts bombarding their partner with needs, that is overwhelming. Now, it raises the question whether the person who is discussing their needs in that way really wants to get his or her needs met, or is unconsciously sabotaging the relationship by being overwhelming and pushing his or her partner away.
Jim: Your partner is not your therapist. Your husband or wife is not your therapist. Your lover is not your therapist. If I am going to be so needy that I overwhelm my partner, I have to look at one of two things: Am I so needy that I need professional help? Or is my partner unable to deal with me?
But it all depends on where you are in the relationship. If you're not yet married and you're feeling overwhelmed by the other person, then you've got pretty good information to determine whether you want to stay. If you are married and there is some sense of obligation and bond, then you have to ask yourself: How did I get myself into this? What am I doing that will help me to understand why I'm becoming overwhelmed? And you may have to say, I cannot fulfill all that, this is unreasonable, this is part of some fantasy, and it must stop.
Steven: Aren't there times when you want to minimize conflict with your partner?
Judith: The impulse to minimize conflict might be a kind of emotional cheating on the relationship. Because if I am consciously working to keep conflicts between Jim and me at a minimum, I'm holding back. I'm giving in in ways that I don't want to, I'm smiling when I'm unhappy, instead of trusting that the conflicts are important and I need to be bringing myself more fully to the relationship. If we are constantly in conflict, then we've got some deeper issue going on, which might be that we can't tolerate the intimacy. All we can tolerate is fighting and yelling and being in an adversarial mode.
Jim: Am I minimizing conflict because I'm afraid of conflict or because I don't know how to deal with conflict? If you know how to handle conflict successfully, what happens is the trust grows and the conflicts don't escalate because I can talk to her long before the disagreement escalates into a conflict.
Steven: What is Conscious Creativity?
Judith: Conscious Creativity is a tool which can be very valuable in working through conflict. It is the process of changing the paradigm and opening up to new realities. It occurs when you start with one reality and rather than thinking that that's the only way to see an issue, you open your mind to learn more about the situation. You open your mind to the other person's point of view and use the new information to consider changing your mind. Then you both can get creative and try to resolve the situation in a way that works for both of you.
Steven: Can you give an example?
Judith: Let's say Jim watches Monday night football each week and I hate it when he watches it because I feel abandoned. Rather than thinking that any "normal" person would agree with me and that if he makes football more important than I am, I'll have to leave him, I can open my mind to his perspective. I might learn, for example, that when he was younger he wanted to play professional football. But he never told me that because he knows I don't like sports and feared I might even have laughed at him for wanting to play pro ball.
Then I could use the new information to learn that while football is not more important than I am to him, it is one of his big loves. I could get creative about resolutions. For example, I could ask Jim for a regular Friday night date so I know we'll have that time just to ourselves and on Monday nights I can volunteer at the hospital I've been wanting to work at. Jim's interest and even our conflict over football could actually have a hidden benefit for me but if I don't delve into it applying Conscious Creativity, I don't get to learn about it. Einstein said you can't solve a problem in the same frame of mind that created it, and Conscious Creativity offers a way out of that box.
Steven: Something you said just now reminded me of something very interesting in your book that is contrary to advice I've seen elsewhere. You describe complaining about your relationship to third parties as having an emotional affair. Can you explain that?
Judith: It may be helpful for some people to talk to a close friend, a therapist or a minister to clarify their issues and get a handle on what they are feeling. But then the person should comeback to their spouse to present their feelings and their issue. It is cheating on the relationship if I am going to my mother or anybody else and dumping my feelings, expecting to find some resolution or comfort or support elsewhere. I need to be going to my spouse and giving all that I have, my anger, my disappointment, my hurt feelings, and my desire for it to get better.
Conflict is not tragic. Loving, healthy conflict is like good fertilizer. It stirs things up and it can be a little smelly but it helps the relationship grow in a new direction from where it's been headed before. Really all I'm doing if I come to Jim and say I'm unhappy about something is saying, "I love you, I love thisrelationship, and I want it to get even better."
Jim: And you love yourself.
Judith: And I love myself enough to want it to be better.
Jim: I would ask myself why I can't articulate my issue with my partner. Being compassionate with ourselves, we must understand that few, if any, of us get training in these things, so that's one reason. If I can't work it out with my partner, I need to learn the skills to be able to do it instead of going to someone else. People tell their therapist things they won't tell their husband or wife. Now they are having an emotional affair with their therapist for $100 an hour.
Steven: You talk about fighting quite a bit in your book. Tell us a little bit about how to fight fairly.
Judith: The basic point in fighting fairly is you have as your central focus the well-being of the relationship and the well-being of yourself and your partner. So you're not going to deliberately do anything nasty or hurtful such as name-calling or bringing up old baggage. Your intention is not to win at your partner's expense. Your intention is to create a new understanding between the two of you so that both people benefit and so does the relationship.
Jim: Your intention is to promote the well-being of the relationship. When a conflict arises, the other person's behavior has crashed into my understanding of reality in such a way that I am being moved off center. I now have to engage in some kind of renegotiation or reassessment. Fighting occurs as a way of stating that I feel wounded, hurt, or disrupted by your behavior. The onlyway we are going to reorient and restabilize is if we do it together. If people get in conflict intending to dominate and win, we are well beyond fair fighting and we're into killing, physically or emotionally. And it's an entirely different game.
Steven: Do you think that conflicts can actually bring a couple closer together?
Jim: We know so.
Judith: We know it in our own relationship. We've been married to each other for eleven years, and we understand each other at deeper levels because in resolving conflict we had to be curious about one another's motives and feelings. We get down to deeper levels of awareness about what's going on between us. And there is more and more love.
Jim: When we get into a conflict and my objective is the well-being of the relationship, she is the other half of the solution. I deeply need her to accomplish my own objective. We can yell and scream. But when all that settles down, I need her in order to know that the resolution is going to be beneficial for both of us. And so the conflict brings us even closer.
Steven: You frequently mention your own relationship in your book. Is there anything more you can tell us related to the points you're making that stems from your own personal history?
Judith: I was single until I married Jim at the age of forty-four. I had a very successful profession as a psychologist. I knew that I could not develop myself or live my life to the fullest as a single woman no matter how many men I dated. There was something about marriage that offered the intensity and challenge that would be the catalyst for the kind of awareness and the kind of spiritual development I wanted for myself. And I found it with Jim. Our marriage fulfilled that quest.
Jim: I have been married three times. And I had had a number of relationships with women before meeting Judith. There is something about getting married that is radically different from just living with someone or going with someone. Is it the public announcement? Perhaps. Is it the utterance of the vows? Judith and I wrote our own ceremony and we wrote our own vows. I would suggest that to anyone who is getting married because I actually had to think about what it was I wanted to vow to this woman. It made the connection and the promise that much more intense. The word that comes to mind is "obligation" but I don't mean it in a negative sense. I feel a sense of honoring myself and the words I spoke in relation to this woman. I have never had a relationship in my life that has permitted me such growth and such a capacity to become an emotionally mature adult male.
Judith: And at the heart of all of our vows was the principle of respecting one another's differences.
Steven: It has been my experience that most relationships that are truly conscious and really work are a sort of microcosm of peace between men and women. Often with such a relationship it seems the principles you're talking about become internalized, either consciously or subconsciously by the people in the relationship. Do you have any thoughts about that?
Jim: As Judith and I have developed and practiced fair fighting and conscious creativity, we don't struggle as much as we used to. We are getting to know each other better and better. I have become sensitive to the areas where she's sensitive and vice versa and so the conflicts don't happen as often.
Judith: Males and females are the only building blocks that society has. Our relationships with each other in the work place,in romantic relationships, as neighbors, are all aspects of the same principle. Marriage is a microcosm for world peace or World War III. Each couple gets to define whether they are helping move us along toward peace or whether they are helping continue the kind of warfare that we see all over the world.
Steven: One way of promoting the peace that a lot of people use is splitting the difference, compromising when a conflict comes up. You don't seem to be great fans of that.
Judith: No, we're not fans of that at all. Our definition of compromise is I'll give up something I don't want to give up if you will give up something you don't want to give up just to call a truce. We might get the anger settled down but we're both now lacking. We're going to be resentful, we're going to be unhappy and you can count on the anger that is now brewing to percolate up and show itself in some other new way.
Jim: Compromise only happens in a situation where the participants want to dominate and win. If they do not want to dominate and win, if they want the well-being of all parties in the relationship, compromise doesn't work. Compromise only happens when two people do not see their relationship as the objective. At some point you have to stop the fighting.
Steven: You talk in your book about the history of dating, starting back in the Victorian era. What roots of the current situation with relationships do you see in this history of dating?
Judith: One of the reasons that we wrote the chapter on dating was to help both men and women to have compassion for themselves and for the people that they are dating. In the nineties, we are in a relatively new situation. We have very little experience with the kind of freedom and choice that men and women have today. Just a hundred years ago, people were either involved in arranged marriage or were subject to the Victorian tradition of calling. Calling offered a little more choice but still the young woman's mother or aunt was chaperoning the young couple and marriage was all about social class and polite behavior.
People today want so much more from their relationships than ever before in world history. They want more spiritual meaning and they want their sex life to be better. They want so much more but they have not been getting any sort of training in how to date effectively and how to be successful in marriage.
Jim: We are in a desperate time with regard to intimacy and relationships. The role structures that have been in place for hundreds of years are dissolving. There is a deep cry in the country for spiritual fulfillment, and with the collapse of religious values many people can't turn to religion for that fulfillment. People are struggling to find meaning among themselves. So as a result, we find ourselves in a transition period of profound proportion, comparable in intensity to the movement out of the dark ages into the Renaissance. We are going to have to develop rules for an understanding of behavior that are not yet in place.
Steven: Do you think there is any difference between the ease with which men and women have been able to start making these transitions you're talking about?
Judith: My experience is as a psychotherapist working with both men and women and, with Jim, co-leading workshops and trainings around the country and internationally. It looks to me like men and women are having an equally difficult time transitioning out of the sex role stereotypical behavior into self-defined freedom. Both genders are understandably afraid of intimacy. To be really loved for all that you are, for your brilliance and your limitations, may be thrilling, but it's also anxiety-making.
Jim: What we are talking about has much earlier roots. In the Middle Ages, Christianity imposed upon the people rules which were disseminated through a hierarchy of priests that led all the way up to the Pope and then to God. Then Martin Luther said, "I want to talk to God directly" and began what we are now experiencing. When Judith said you can create your own relationship in your own way, this is a sort of reverberation of Martin Luther's statement that he wanted to talk to God directly.
When science emerged, the principle evolved of gathering data to learn what the world is like. In a sense, Judith and I are like scientists. We are urging people who are building relationships to gather the data from one another and build the relationship accordingly. Don't work from a set of injunctions that insists on a particular kind of behavior. Create it yourself. Of course, this requires consciousness and involvement and that requires training. Judith and I are providing a new vision as distinct from a new strategy. If you have a shift in vision, your strategy will follow.
Steven: Would your principles be applicable not just to lover relationships but to two friends who want to get closer or to two family members?
Judith: Absolutely. The principles and the vision apply to any relationship in which both people want to open and deepen their connection. We have people who have read the book call us or email us, and thank us for opening up their vision of the fact that their children are completely different from them. This radically changed their relationship with their children. Others say they now work better with their coworkers because they are not caught any longer in the fantasy that everyone should be doing the task just like I do it.
Jim: They free themselves from the fantasy that the other person is me. The other person is not me. Life becomes a lot more interesting that way because I am not trapped in my own limited view.
Judith: A lot of people say we need to have tolerance. But tolerance for me is a lot like compromise. I don't like you or I don't like your ways but I'm going to tolerate you. A better way to proceed is to say, "I don't like your ways but let me start looking at it from a different angle so that I can learn more about you. I can find out how your way is meaningful for you, which might shift my feeling about you." Hmm. It's annoying me but it's very precious to the other person. And that opens me up, much more profoundly than is implied by the concept of tolerance.
Steven: You have been open about the fact that you have had conflict in your relationship. As you have developed these principles, have you seen any change in the level or frequency of conflict?
Judith: Absolutely. It happens with less frequency and it happens with less volume. (We can both yell pretty loudly. Jim is louder than I am.)
Jim: When a conflict occurs, it takes a tenth of the time it used to take to resolve it.
Judith: Right. And there is more tenderness and connection available in the resolution.
Jim: A conflict means to us that both of us are distorted as to the issue and both of us have a piece of the truth. If we weren't in conflict, there would be no distortion or minimal distortion. Because the distortion is there, I know I need her vision because my vision is distorted and she knows she needs my vision because her vision is distorted. I also know I need her truth and vice versa so that I can really trust the resolution is for the purposes of the well-being of the relationship and I can trust that she is going to be satisfied. Because I know if there is not satisfaction for both of us, we haven't yet resolved it and we need to keep working.
Steven: You have so many delightful stories about your own relationship in your book. You want to tell us one?
Judith: When Jim and I were on our fifth date, we were in Laguna Beach, having dinner. We were sitting at a place that had an outside patio and the palisade dropped to the ocean. There were the rocks and a little bit of a mountainscape and it was cold. She had a big Mexican shawl which I wrapped around both of us. And the sun was setting.
Jim: One of my favorite classes in school was astronomy. I started to describe to her how the sun works in physical and chemical terms. And she tapped me on the shoulder and she said, "Jim, I don't care. I just want to watch it set." And I said, "OK, only on the condition that some day, you let me tell you how the sun works because it's precious and poetic to me." And eventually, a number of years later, I got to tell her how the sun works. And it's one of our most treasured moments. It was a moment that was so endearing.
Steven: You are a co-founder of the Men's Health Network.
Jim: Yes, men live on average seven fewer years than do women. Men work at all the most dangerous jobs. On-the-job statistics with regard to injury and death fall heavily on the male side. Males have more heart attacks. Male teenagers commit suicide much more often. Males fare much worse than females after divorce.
Steven: Both of you have written about the fact that domestic violence is committed by men and women. Both of you present atmen's conferences.
Judith: And we have also presented at battered women's shelters. We're out there in the community.
Steven: Jim, do you see the work of the Men's Health Network as related to the intimacy work or are they independent?
Jim: No, I don't think they are independent. The fundamental notions of The New Intimacy are that the other person is not you and I have to show up and let you know who I am. Just like women, men are raised with loads of fantasies. One of the fantasies men are raised with is that we are tough, we don't really need to take care of ourselves, and if we make any complaints, particularly physically, we stand the chance of emotional castration by being called wusses and wimps and sissies. The connection between the Men's Health Network and The New Intimacy is that we are making a call to men to come forward and announce who they are. When you feel strong, be strong. When you are not strong, that's okay. We will honor both. You can experience the fullness of your being. And then we say to women, be tender when you're tender and be not tender when you're not tender so you also get the fullness of your being. Otherwise we have to go into our relationships with some aspect of our self behind a mask. So that if I'm not feeling well, I can't admit it because I don't want to scare "the little lady" and then I'm dying seven years before the little lady. She may not have been scared but now she's abandoned. These concepts can be very dangerous because they make us playthings of the concepts instead of authentic people. Instead, it is much richer to live fleshified relationships with one another that are full emotionally, physically, spiritually and conceptually.
Judith: In our extended workshop, we work hard to involve men and women in the real-life experience of understanding each other's fears and hurts. Very often, women are surprised to see how emotionally vulnerable men are willing to be when they feel safe. Men expose not only their fears but also how they have felt deeply wounded in their lives, and how they can feel really afraid of women. This comes as a great shock to a lot of women.
Jim: For example, we did a workshop where there was a forty-year-old female advertising executive who had never been able to sustain a relationship with a man and wanted to very much. She left the workshop with what was for her the stunning, almost shocking realization that men can be afraid. Before the workshop, she was convinced that men absolutely are never scared. So because they are never scared, she used to be enraged at men because "those bastards get along without fear" and she was terrified. As a result of her recognition and realization that men can be afraid, she is now engaged and on her way to being married. That opened the door for her.
Steven: Do you have any final thoughts you would like to add?
Judith: The most important byproduct of couples developing The New Intimacy for themselves is that their children get to grow up in a home where they experience their mother and their father valuing each other for the distinctly different people that they are. The children see their parents resolving conflict in a way that is mutually beneficial. Once they have developed respect for the differences between themselves, the parents will automatically be able to respect the differences that their children embody. So the children will get to be loved for who they actually are instead of having to distort themselves into little robots seeking to please Mom and Dad by denying their own differences. Or having to act out their fear and hatred of those "others" who are different, like we saw at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado between the jocks and the trench coat mafia.
Jim: When a person can actually live and develop, as an unconscious competence, the idea, "The other person is not you, "the world around us becomes much more vivid and alive. If we all get this idea, we might actually begin to approach peace on Earth. That doesn't mean I have to like you. But if I know that you're not me, that begins to open up the possibility of dialogue. As soon as I forget that, then whenever you behave in a way that I don't expect, I will try to annihilate you or manipulate you just to get you out of the way. This is a formula for peace.
Judith: And it will certainly bring down the divorce rate.
Jim: That's right.
©2000 J. Steven Svoboda
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