Transcending Abandonment: A New Approach to Intimacy

You can also read this article in Psychology Today here

This is Part Four of a four-part series titled “You Cannot Be Abandoned.” You can find Part One here.

Karla and I agreed that I would propose within six months and we would have our wedding within a year of that date. All of this happened fourteen years ago. We have been married since and now live near Rome, Italy, with our two children.

Letting Go of Resentment 

When you choose resentment over love, you open the drama. You then stay in the drama until, hopefully, you finally make the decision to choose love. For some, this can take a lifetime. For others, it never happens. They spend all their years in what I call “incarceration” in my book Love and Suffering: Break the Emotional Chains that Prevent You from Experiencing Love.

I know it’s not easy to resist the temptation of resentment. You have a natural human tendency to become angry when you feel another person has wronged you. You then either direct this anger inward (resentment) or outward, toward its perceived source (revenge).

I encourage you to let go of this anger and choose love. While anger is the emotion you feel when your life is not as you wish it to be, love is what aligns your life with what it can become. 

Choose love and you’ll have a front-row seat as myriad paths open to bring greater happiness and meaning into your life.

Renewal

When Karla and I reunited after that year-and-a-half break, I had an entirely different way of interacting with her. I believed in her, knowing that if she were to leave because she was unfulfilled in the marriage, I would be okay.

I had learned that while I want her in my life, I don’t need her to be with me: simple yet far-reaching words that changed the course of my life and our relationship. 

Her leaving me wouldn’t be what I would want, especially if we had children, because I love her. Yet like Gloria Gaynor, I would survive. My signature abandonment – phobic responses of the past to any of her comments signaling discontent, such as “So are you saying you might leave me someday?” were no longer necessary. 

I learned that a marriage, like life itself, offers no guarantees, and I could now live with that. I knew I would do whatever I could to develop a healthy relationship with her, and I also knew it was not solely up to me.

I had been under the thrall of incarceration—judging Karla as unstable, and ultimately becoming unstable myself. Love illuminated my incarceration; more accurately, love illuminated itself, and my path forward with Karla. 

The Simplicity Beyond Complexity

If I stopped judging her, I realized, I could trust her again. I could love her again with reckless abandon, as I had before she had ever left me after our first year together. 

Yet with more depth. Not the simplicity of the love we shared in our first year of knowing each other, but a simplicity beyond complexity; a simplicity forged by what we had been through, created by all the suffering we had experienced together.

Love is spectacular; amazing; radiant; ineffable. Love is within each of us. The only way you can realize this love is not to pass out of, but through, your current situation. 

Love doesn’t mean staying with the wrong person; it means recognizing that you may have been the wrong person. It means accepting that you can only be righted by recognizing your suffering, your fear, your resentment; by forgiving; by becoming grateful for your learning and for your teachers; by detecting your incarceration; and, finally, by allowing love to transcend all of these obstacles that life, and you yourself, place in front of you.

If you are able to make it to the simplicity beyond complexity, the simplicity you return to is different. In this state, the love you experience is no longer the naïve, innocent love you once knew. It is not the idyllic love you have been unsuccessfully attempting to integrate into your life alongside your career and the other competing demands on your time. 

The simplicity beyond complexity is a radically different construction of love—entirely unique to you and rooted in the personal values you have strengthened over a lifetime. When you experience this love, your past suffering shifts from something you struggle to avoid to something you hold in your heart with sublime gratitude, with the awareness that it has enabled you to become the person you are today.

What Acceptance Produces in Your Life

Karla and my reconciliation and the life we’ve created together since has only been possible through acceptance. I had to accept that her reality was not mine and never would be; I had to accept and embrace how she sees the world differently than I do.

An individual’s acceptance of themselves and their life situation is linked to positive mental health outcomes such as childhood adjustment and marital happiness. Acceptance also leads to increased compassion toward and less blaming of others (accepting one’s life as it is reduces the tendency to cast blame), increased productive action, and less distressing negative emotions. These effects extend to myriad life situations such as a recent divorce or treatment for alcoholism.

Acceptance has been found to reduce anxiety and generally lead to a higher quality of life. Another recent study discovered that people who practice acceptance are more helpful toward others and experience more future happiness in their lives.

How can you expand your capacity to see others through the lense of acceptance? How can you stop seeing them as yourself projected onto them, but in their own light, with their distinct motivations, with what stimulates happiness and suffering within them? 

Practice acceptance and you will experience a sea change in your life as you stop fighting against and begin embracing what is as a foundational stepping stone toward what you can create.

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If you desire more friends, instead of crying about how no one listens anymore, start listening.

Use your phone as …. a phone. Call the people you care about and let them know you are there for them.

Make the decision to transform your relationships by provide the people you love with both Quality Time and Quantity Time.

How do you take time out of your life to consider how you can develop more meaningful relationships with others?

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