One of my daughters gave me Diane Keaton's memoir for Christmas. Diane Keaton, especially for her role in Somethings got to Give, is one of my favorite actresses. I realize as I read her book, that she is a much better actress than she is a writer, but I give her lots of points for her honesty in how she has portrayed herself. So far (I haven't yet gotten to the end) the most poignant line I have read was written by her mother from one of her private journals:
"No one gets mad or even raises their voice in your household. What an indictment, but at the time I considered it the achievement of a good mother."
Complete harmony has been a priority for me since I can remember. Harmony in everything - within the family, between friends, at work. What began, same as for Diane Keaton's mom, as the mark of achievement if it was maintained, became an indictment. Unending harmony means that you have successfully achieved avoidance. Complete harmony is unnatural and there is much else that never develops while you are busy being harmonious.
I know where this came from for me. From where almost everything comes - childhood. My dad's explosive and unpredictable temper coupled with my mother's unending attempts to avoid those explosions set off a never-ending and ultimately unsuccessful juggling act to achieve and maintain harmony.
My own first marriage included about 15 years of close-to-complete harmony followed by 5 shaky years of below the surface lava flow and finally 4 years of destructive eruptions. It was messy, to say the least. And my learnings from the experience were retarded greatly by those first 15 years. You can build up an awful lot of deep layers of avoidance in 15 years. Those habits cripple your abilities to deal with what comes later.
So anyway, today I am trying to live without false harmony, without avoidance of reality and without the illusion that you only succeed if you never dispute anything.
It's not easy.
When you read that "you should just talk it out" when you bump into those potentially unharmonious events, no one tells you that this leads, most often, to a fight. One's spouse or partner, has not, in all probability, read the same insightful self-help books on raising one's self-awareness, as you have. And another thing, I live with the additional challenge (handicap??) of living with someone who is not even from the same culture as me and does not speak the same language either. You would not believe the minefields that creates.
Probably this is all penance for those 15 years of avoidance-fueled bliss that I sailed through back when I was young and un-evolved........
Recent Comments