I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

Fear not - I shall not play the role of Mercury this morning, leading you down a morose journey through the very bowels of the Underworld.

This will not be that. This will be something else entirely.

I had a discussion yesterday with a friend who derives most of her psychological thinking from Oprah, as is fairly common practice these days. As I listened to her analyse a very depressed person we both know quite well, I was horrified to find her stopping at the very first level of looking at the problem, and even worse, declaring the cause as fait accompli, excluding all other possible causes.

But most disturbing of all, I heard her do that as though she had no part to play in the current problem she was analysing and diagnosing. As if her relationship with this person were not in some way a very mirror of the issues in question for both of them, a little act within the larger play itself, a microcosm reflecting the larger tragedy at work here.

And I probably lost half of you with that statement. Why should anyone else's problem be a reflection of me??? The problem's out there, with them. Not in here, with me.

I am fine.

Tis a lovely illusion, that, but illusion is all it is.

To illustrate, I could say that the problem is a heavy drinker, and the immediate cause has been pinpointed as an unhappy childhood, too many parental expectations which one has largely failed to live up to, and this is all that needs to be addressed.

If that doesn't work for you, then the problems is a broken marriage.

Or, whatever has resonance for you. The deal is, we are stopping on the surface of things.

Ahh, if life were only so simple.

I realized that this sort of failure in analysis and resultant rush to quick fix is quite dangerous when dealing with something as fluid and tender as people's psyches.

I don't mean failure in therapy. The danger I am addressing is when we, as a friend or loved one, examine someone's behavior from our safe distance of normalcy, as though we are in possession of that very thing for ourselves. In our arrogance, we then decide we know what the problem is after we look at the mere surface of things. Men, women - we all do this, when faced with someone else's issues. We listen attentively for a while - 5 minutes for some, 5 years or more for others - and then we drag the ol' hammer out of the tool box and start banging away when the first recognizable pattern asserts itself.

And it is this very thing against which I am cautioning strongly.

Because you gotta' mine deeper for the ultimate cause of suffering, in any form.

But then here's where it gets tricky. If you are working with someone
who seemingly has a problem that you feel a need to help them with, know
this:



You have the problem too.

I'll give you a moment to howl your indignation over that one.

Ready to go on?


It's the truth, though. We attract what we are, even if we can't see it on the surface. In fact, it's almost never there on the surface. It's underneath, as though we were sending out invisible signals to one another. If I have attracted someone in my life who is alcoholic, it
doesn't mean I am alcoholic. Don't go literal on me here. You gotta' go past the surface of things. You can't see the vast complexity and intoxicating beauty of life under the sea by sitting on top of the water and catching the odd glint of fish here and there.

You gotta' go deeper.

In working with a friend on their issue, I am just as assuredly working on
mine also. When you keep mining, when you keep digging, and you really undertake this work, you finally
arrive at a place where you breathe deeply and exhale, "Oh shit."



This is because you have arrived the level where you face yet again a problem that has plagued you for a long time, and you know it.

The man who is drinking all the time does so to dull his pain. We know that. His pain's source is in a bad relationship, we know that. This is too easy.

But what we aren't asking is, 'why does this person attract these very things to himself? What definition of love or partnership is in serious need of evolving here? What superficial qualities is he attracted to that keep him from the love he requires?'

We should be asking these very questions of ourselves.

Oh, not married or in partnership currently? Don't fall for the surface of things. Just because your superficial situation isn't the same doesn't mean the underlying issues aren't. People work on love in their lives from a number of angles. People who struggle with intimacy can do so from within marriage, and from the outside.

But, it's a lot easier to look at our friend's mess than our own. Our shit....well, it's our shit, isn't it? and it will always be there. It's not as interesting as someone else's shit.

So let's look a little further at our friend's dilemna, and we learn that really he has married his mother.

Not literally. He married something that looks the furthest away from his mother he could get. But surprise! This was just an illusion. Underneath this relationship, he is being brought right into conflict with the issues his mother left him.

Still no trouble here. I got it, Sharon, I got it. This is all easy.

Until we look at why WE are engaged in even examining this. Why we can even see it in another.

Because this same struggle is surely contained within ourselves.

Oh shit.

Are our relationships perfect? Have we worked it all out for ourselves?

If so, then this sort of thing would hold no charge for us, wouldn't be attractive to us.

Oh shit.

Go to the next level.

Ahh, now here we see where the person in question has been so strong and skillful at constructing their illusion, they have married someone with whom they knew early on they were incompatible, but so intent on having the picture the way they want it to look, they carefully ignored every one of those cues. And, desperate to hold on to the illusion that things are working, they ignore every sign that it's all going horribly wrong. He steals money from her. He drinks her life savings. She is busy pretending that when he doesn't drink, it's all fine. It's just the booze, see. If we could just cure that.... He continually believes that she will recognize him as a full male, as a full partner. When this doesn't happen, when she shoots him down yet again, he retreats into the bottle.....

Once we accept that a relationship is really broken, then we can look at it and work on it. It's this notion that somehow it's really under control except for my partner's odd behavior from time to time that keeps us from doing the work.

Ok I've diagnosed them.

Then I have to do the frank self-exam here. Why am I interested in this? Do I try too hard to control? Do I construct worlds where everything is working out, even though when I interact with my partner, I always end up angry? And is this anger arising from trying to control something which has never actually been in my control?

Oh shit.

Kahlil Gibrain said, "Think not that you can direct the course of love. If it finds you worthy, it will direct you."

I say, where control is, love is not. And I am one who struggles mightily with trying to control love.

See how this works? It's not enough to analyse their stuff. You can't sit there comfortably in the audience, watching the drama unfold, thinking you are safe. Surprise! You aren't in the audience! You are on the stage as a character in this play too. So you gotta' always be looking at why you are on the stage with them. Why are they on stage with you?

You must eternally keep mining for the cause of suffering. This is why depression exists. If you won't consciously do the work, life will shut down around you and FORCE you to do the work.

To get lost in the set, or the circumstance, is to be lost in illusion. The feelings, the movement of the psyche and the heart, that's what's real. No matter what myth you find yourself emerging from, its bones and carcass lying on the beach as though it were the very belly of the whale from which you had arisen, you will take the struggle and your emotions forward, for these were carved on your soul.

Life is in the experience of it, not in the props surrounding you.

So, be fearless. Be Oedipus, not in dying in tragedy, but in the embrace of the journey. Ask the questions whose answers one shudders to know, but which will ultimately free one from everything.

Who am I? Why am I here now? What is my role?

And why are you here in my life at this moment?