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Issue 105 –

 Where Has Love Gone Part 10

Identification with the Good Parent
and Its Consequences

by

Hal & Sidra Stone

The identification of a man with the good father is a natural entree into a vast array of possible bonding situations. Let us examine a few of them to see how this works.

Dan and Ginny have been dating for about four or five months. They take a holiday trip to another city,  and Dan tells Ginny that he wants to buy her a dress as a gift. Ginny is thrilled and they go to a dress shop that she has heard about.

Dan is a good father type.  He is very giving and is always doing things for people. So long as he is identified with the good father,  he cannot say no.  He cannot set limits,  even when Ginny picks out a dress for five hundred dollars. Because she is very excited about  it,  Dan buys it for her.

Since the good father is his primary self and he is fully identified with this role, he is unable to set any kind of limits as to how much she can spend.  It never even occurs to him that he might do so.

Later,  after their weekend is over, he is furious with her.

She,  however,  never learns anything about how he feels, because he breaks the relationship and never expresses any of these angry,  exploited  feelings to her.  He feels that she is selfish and uncaring and that she has no concern for his welfare. If she cared at all about his feelings, he mutters to himself,  she would have asked him whether the amount spent was reasonable for him.

Good fathers must have corresponding daughters in their relationships with women. It may be a good daughter or an “I want” daughter.  Whatever the case, the father will have his daughter.  Because he was so identified with the role of good father, Dan was unable to embrace the other side of himself, which  remained a disowned self.

The other side would contain the selves that have to do with setting limits, being personally selfish, and being related to his own needs rather than to the needs of other people. If Dan had been in touch with the other selves, he might have established a very different kind of communication with Ginny.

He might have said to her: “Ginny,  I’d like to buy you a gift of an outfit you really like. You can spend up to three hundred dollars for it.” In this way, Ginny  would have had some guidelines.  Without them she was indeed thrown  into her hungry little girl, and the “I want”  daughter part of herself took over in the shopping situation.  Because she was identified with the daughter who was being taken care of, it could not occur to her to ask him how much he felt comfortable spending.

Dan’s feelings were constantly  being hurt by other people in this way. He would promise too much or give too much and then, at some point, the negative side of the father would come in and he would feel resentful and judgmental at the way the other  person was taking advantage of him.  What happens with good fathers and good mothers is that the world outside gets cared for, but the personal needs of the individual are neglected.  The inner child is neglected.

At his core, Dan’s feelings were hurt by the fact that Ginny spent so much money without regard to what he could afford. He could  not  set  limits  in  the  first  place,  and  he could  not communicate  the  hurt  feelings  in  the second place.  The result was heavy judgment and anger and the eventual end of the relationship.  At no point was he able to see his part in the interaction.  He remained righteously angry,  and terminating the relationship was the natural thing to do so far as he was concerned.

If there is one thing that negative fathers know how to do, it is to be righteous!

The identification with the good father and good mother is one of the most basic patterns that we find in relationship, and one of the strongest  contributors  to bonding  patterns.

Let us look at some other  examples of how these patterns affect  relationships.  In our  book, Embracing Our Selves, we cite the dream of a woman who is very much identified with this good mother/responsible mother self, almost to the exclusion of any other part of her being. Because of the power and clarity of this dream, we are repeating it here.

Marilyn, a woman in her thirties when she had this dream, had spent her life identified with the role of mother. The dream occurred at that  point  in  her  process  when  her  awareness  level was beginning to disengage from this maternal pattern.

“Sounds have become acute. There  is so much noise and confusion that I cannot rest. I finally become fully awake, and I look about me. It is as if I were in a strange house, and yet I know that it is my house and that I have lived in it for a long time.  There is a mirror across from my bed, and I glance at it. I am horrified to see that  I have grown old while I slept. The noise is deafening, and I go out to try to find where it is coming from.  As I reach the kitchen door, I realize it comes from there.  Around the kitchen table are many people, some young, some older by far than I am.  They are all dressed  in children’s clothes and are waiting to be fed. They  see me and begin to pound their, bowls on the table and call “mother” to me.

I see my priest across the room with his back to me, and I think that surely he can explain this to me, but as I approach him he turns around and I see that he is wearing a bib and is holding a bowl too! I run back to the door to leave. As I pass the table,  I see my parents  there,  wearing bibs like all the rest.  I reach the door as a man comes in.  I know him to be my husband,  although he is not the husband I had when I went to sleep. He makes a pass at me and I feel relieved, thinking  at least he doesn’t think I’m his mother.  When I look at him, however, he is wearing knickers and his face is the face of a child.  I think that this is a nightmare,  and I run and shut myself in my room in order to wake up more fully, but I know I am not asleep. I ask myself over and over again: “What have I done  while  I  slept?”  Ray  comes  into  the  room (Ray  is  a therapist in the city where she lived).   I think that surely he can help me to understand this,  but he is crying  because he has hurt his knee and wants me to bandage it.”

We said before that to be identified with a particular self, and to have no awareness of this reality,  is to live in a prison. In this dream the unconscious provides a different metaphor. It  says that Marilyn has been asleep and she only now is beginning  to  awaken.  Being  identified with our primary selves is like being asleep.

We think we are awake (conscious), but in fact we are asleep, because there is no aware ego that is separate from the primary selves. Awakening comes when we separate from our primary selves and can begin to hold the tension of the opposition that exists between the primary self and whatever is on the other side.

In Marilyn’s situation, she begins now to become aware of her own personal,  more selfish needs. These must be balanced against the part of her that continues to respond as the mother.

Issue 104 –

Where Has Love Gone: Part 9

The Patriarchal Heritage and
Money in Bonding Patterns

by

Hal & Sidra Stone

Cindy and Ron are a very wealthy  couple who have been married for over twenty  years.  The relationship is one of strong bonding patterns  with very little awareness. He controls the money; she is the daughter to his patriarchal father in this and in many other matters.

On the other side, she is very much devoted to him and cares for him unstintingly from the mother selves. There is some awareness of these patterns  that exist between them,  but it is minimal.

Cindy’s  daughter,  Ann,  is a strong  feminist,  and  she resents  her mother’s “daughter” role with her father. The women are out shopping for antiques one day and a very attractive salesman begins to flirt with Cindy.  Ann enjoys this immensely.  Eventually Cindy finds a beautiful antique that she would like to buy but that costs in the neighborhood of  twelve  hundred  dollars. She feels, however,  that she cannot buy this without her husband’s permission and authority.

Ron, on the other hand, would not hesitate to spend any amount of money on anything he might want, and it would never occur to him to ask Cindy’s permission.  Ann is very annoyed with her mother because of her passivity and her seeming dependence on Ron.

When they return  home, Cindy tells Ron about the antique she wants to buy. Ann, however, tells him about the salesman and how he flirted with her mother. Ron goes into a very impersonal mode and comments in a rather withdrawn manner that,  in order to buy the antique,  he would have to sell some stock. He insinuates that this is a bad time to do so. This hooks Cindy immediately and she says: “Oh no-you don’t  have to do that.  It really isn’t that  important!” This settles the purchase of the antique.  It does not settle Ann’s anger toward her mother and father and what she perceives as his patriarchal  dominance.

The good daughter in Cindy is a powerful self and determines a great many of her personal interactions.  It is quite easy to see that Ann became an ardent feminist so that she would never become a “good daughter” like her mother. Interestingly enough, both Ann and Cindy are strongly identified with daughter  selves. Cindy is identified with the good daughter and Ann is identified with the rebellious daughter. Whether good or rebellious, both  are daughters and each role constitutes an imprisonment in that they are both in constant reaction to the father side of Ron.

The bonding patterns in Ron are interesting to explore in this situation.  From the beginning of the interaction he was clearly in the father self. His wife was playing the good and pleasing daughter and his real daughter was playing out her rebellion to what she perceived as his patriarchal  and dominating nature.

She gets back at him when she describes the way the salesman was flirting with her mother. Ann knows at some  level he is sensitive to this kind of thing,  and the rebellious daughter in her will do anything to bring about his downfall. His response to the situation is that he will have to sell some stocks in order to purchase the antique piece.

It is the response of a controlling father and a manipulating son. He has also withdrawn into an impersonal self (which can be a facet of the controlling father). Objectively speaking, what he says is patently ridiculous; he would spend ten thousand dollars on something that he wanted, without batting an eye. In  fact,  his  feelings were  hurt and his vulnerability was threatened when he heard about the flirtation.

Ron is very cut off from the child within himself,  however.  When a man’s feelings are hurt and when he is not aware that they are hurt,  the man goes into the father/power side to balance the equation.  The withdrawn  father takes over and, underneath it,  is a hurt child.  Ron’s withdrawn  father soon becomes controlling  father,  since this is his general way of dealing with any situation that threatens his vulnerability.

The issue is not whether or not Cindy buys the antique. She has an opportunity in a situation like this to separate from a behavior pattern that has been with her all her life. She was the good and pleasing daughter to her parents,  and this was then transferred to her husband.  The problem was that she never felt like a real person.  How could she, when she lives her life as a daughter to everyone? Interactions like this one with Ron create a golden opportunity for her to become aware of, and to separate from,  these patterns,  to begin to feel like a responsible and fully functioning adult. The issue is not whether she buys or does not buy. The issue is, who is it that buys or doesn’t  buy?  What self is in the driver’s seat?

From Ron’s side, an equally important  opportunity becomes available. He has always been the responsible father, very much the patriarch and very much cut off from any relationship to his vulnerability.  It gets taken care of at an unconscious level by Cindy, but never has he been able to admit his own feelings of weakness, vulnerability,  and fear and to make these a part of the relationship.

Never has he been able to relax and allow someone else to take the responsibility of caring for him.  How different a relationship it would be if his own neediness were conscious and expressed! How different a relationship it would be if he were not always the knower and the one who had the final say in things.

Issue 103 –

Where Has Love Gone: Part 8

Money and Who Controls It: Another Natural for Bonding

by

Hal & Sidra Stone

Money, and how it is used in relationships,  is another major focus for bonding  patterns.  Our  cultural  conditioning  has created certain stereotyped  sex roles for men and women in terms of the way money  is used in a relationship.

Historically, the man was in charge of the finances and the woman took care of the home with the money that he gave her. It was certainly not a partnership.  Today things are amazingly complex because of the new role of women in society, because of broken homes and second marriages, and because of the  desire of many couples to meet the whole issue of money in a new way.

Let us look at a few examples of bonding patterns that are connected to money and the way it is used.

Don and Risa were spending a pleasant Saturday afternoon together strolling around a lovely shopping area near their home. They passed a Porsche dealer and went inside to look at a car with a price tag of over $40,000. They left after a time and went on walking, but Don was hooked, and, after a while,  he said to Risa,  “Gee,  I sure would  like to have a Porsche.” In  the  way  they relate  to  money,   Don  is the spender,  or the one who wants to spend, and Risa is the one who  is always setting  limits.  They have created  a natural bonding of mother I son in this respect.

We may safely assume that  the voice in Don that said “I want a Porsche” was,  in fact, his needy son who always wants things. Risa was immediately,  as always, thrown into mother. From her standpoint,  not only did she always have to set limits, but she also had the humiliation of not having any real voice in how the money was spent because it was his money.

This is a very common phenomenon in primary relationship, and, when it exists,  it automatically throws the woman into a daughter position, with very deep resentment operating in her at some level.

Risa contracted into her mother self and said from thatself: “Here we go again. We owe over ten thousand dollars on the car we have and now you’re talking about buying a Porsche.” There was a sting to the voice, for in this mother self, she was on the attack. All of her anger and resentment at not having control of the money was filtering through her reactions.

If we were to dig down to her real feelings, we would discover that her real reaction to Don’s statement was one of vulnerability and fear. They were short of money for a variety of different reasons and one of these was his profligate spending. She hated feeling the insecurity of financial deficit but could not communicate her feelings of fear and vulnerability.

If she could,  they would sound something  like this:”  You know, Don,  it really scares me when you say that, even though I know you’re not ready to buy the car. I really get frightened about money.” These feelings were not available to her, so instead, she slid into a natural mother bonding in reaction to the fear and she became the attacking mother. This is an amazingly frequent pattern in primary relationship.

Don naturally rose to the bait. That is what is so much fun about bonding patterns.  They are so deliciously predictable, unless they happen to be your own. Don had started off in the needy son and then he shifted into the more defensive son. He said to her: “Oh  I don’t  know.  If we sold our car privately I’ll bet we could work out a deal where our payments might be maybe twice what they are now. Besides, it’s a good tax writeoff.”

Risa escalated very quickly and brought in her resentments about the whole way that money was handled between them. She said, with considerable  anger: “Just do what you goddam please! It’s your money anyhow!” Don’s feelings were, of course, hurt by this, but he waslong past knowing this and leapt into the angry and punitive father,  telling her that she should mind her own goddam business and that he would do exactly as he wished with his money.

War was officially declared, and the full impact of the bonding hit home for both of them. To complete the drama, that night he wanted to make love and that, of course, was the farthest  thing from Risa’s mind and body.

Negative bondings make us feel bruised and injured and, until we separate from them,  we are not likely to achieve a good sexual connection. Don went on the offensive but underneath was his vulnerable child feeling quite abandoned and needy because Risa had withdrawn from him.

This  feeling of neediness on the part of the vulnerable child,  when unconscious,  often translates itself into sexual desire. From Risa’s position, sex was unthinkable.  Don went into yet a deeper rage, telling her that she was frigid and that she should see a psychiatrist,  and that he did not know how much longer he would put up with her “crap.” The fact that they had  made love the two previous evenings was quite beside the point.

These negative bondings cause reason to be thrown out the window.  They are very difficult and very sad,  and yet the way out of them is clearly mapped once we begin to see the nature of the bonding and the disowned selves that are connected to them.

To step out of the bonding  dance and to learn from it requires several different steps on the part of Don and Risa.

First of all, both need an awareness level that can witness what  is happening.  An awareness level could help Don to witness  the rage and vitriolic anger he has fallen into once again, for it is a pattern that has repeated itself over and over again  in their  relationship  and  in the  marriages  that  had preceded this one.

Don also needs to begin to see the way that he sets Risa up in these situations.  To do this he would have to become aware of his manipulative son and his disowned  business person.  So long as he disowns his inner business person or fiscal conservative, Risa has to carry this for him. If he had his business person available, he wouldn’t be seduced by the Porsche in the first place.  He would be able to evaluate the finances  and  not make  her  responsible  for  his own fiscal conservative.

Risa, from her side, has no idea of how she constantly falls into the fiscal conservative and the contracted  mother.  The voice in him that is always wanting things consistently hooks into her mother self.  From this place she has no connection to her vulnerability and fear as we have pointed out before, and so the interaction  between them remains in this bonded  state.

Where has love gone? It has disappeared and in its place is grief! The  amazing thing  is that when the awareness level kicks in and when people begin to catch hold of their disowned selves and see how the other person is carrying them, the feelings of  love can be restored.   There is no guarantee that a relationship is forever.

When people begin to separate from bonding patterns,  relationships  usually either  improve dramatically or they end. However,  if the relationship does end, it ends in a very different way because both people have gone through major changes. The ending is a natural  part of their developmental sequence.

Every primary relationship needs a psychological divorce. By a psychological divorce, we mean the ability of an aware ego to disengage from the bonding  patterns.  At one point in our own relationship Hal had the following dream:

I’m getting a divorce from Sidra. The judge asks me: “Why are you getting a divorce?” I answer him: “Because we’re so much in love!”

In relationship,  we need love and we need a consciousness process;  Both are essential. Separating from the bonding patterns supports a different kind of love, and that new kind of love, in turn, supports the desire to separate from the bonding patterns.

Issue 102 –

Where Has Love Gone: Part 7

Personal and Impersonal Energy: A Bonding Natural

by

Hal & Sidra Stone

The way that people use personal and impersonal energy is a major contributor to bonding patterns in relationship. We have spoken a bit about this, but now we wish  to add further to your knowledge of these particular energy  patterns.

Let us, first of all, define what we mean by these terms.

Personal  energy refers to a way of being with people that is related, friendly, and warm. Most important, the recipient  of personal  energy generally experiences a true  contact with the other person. When we use personal energy, people feel received by us; they feel personally acknowledged.

Impersonal energy, on the other hand, is objective. It is focused more on ideas than personality. It is less concerned with whether or not a person is being received. With personal energy, we tend to move out toward the other person. With impersonal energy, we hold back more; we are more contained. Impersonal energy might be described as more objectively based and certainly having less to do with feelings.

These two contrasting  energies create a bonding field day in relationships. Let us see how this might look.

Maurice and Beth Ann are married. In addition to being very  much  in  love with  each other, they are  also  very different from one another. Maurice is a high school teacher in the physical sciences. Beth Ann is an elementary school teacher. Her friends would describe her as warm, loving, caring, and always available for personal contact. Maurice is not at all personal, does not express his feelings easily, and many of their friends would call him aloof.

In the intimacy of their bedroom, Maurice is able to let down and show his more feeling and vulnerable sides to Beth Ann. She is able to bring her more impersonal  energy to the work situation in planning her time and taking care of the necessary details, but that is the only place her impersonal  energies are available.

One Sunday  morning Beth Ann receives a call from a friend who is very upset and in need of help. Being the warm person that she is, her first reaction is to invite her friend over to talk, which she  does. This happens quite spontaneously, and as soon as she hangs up the phone, she has a funny feeling. She has not talked to Maurice about it, and she feels guilty because she knows that Maurice likes his privacy, especially on a Sunday.

At this moment she enters into a full blown guilty daughter attack. Such a pattern is guaranteed to bring  out the punitive father in the man. She thinks of going to her friend’s  house. She thinks of cancelling. Within seconds she is totally frazzled, in a full daughter bonding to the withdrawn/impersonal  father in Maurice.

Interestingly enough, all this is going on inside of Beth Ann. However, Maurice is a part of the bonding pattern, too, even though he knows  nothing about what is going on in this particular situation. They have danced this energetic dance many times before.

Let us examine this bonding pattern from Beth Ann’s perspective. In her family upbringing, the modeling that she experienced  was all personal. The  family environment was very loving and caring; few limitations were ever set. Her mother was almost saint-like in her willingness to help people, and her father was passive and accepting. She had two brothers, the older one of whom was quite withdrawn,  a bit of a recluse.

Beth Ann was the center of the family, the real star. The problem was that she had no experience with impersonal energy. She had  no ability  to separate  herself from the feelings and requirements of another human being, one of the  gifts  of impersonal  energy.  She blended  with people totally  when she was with them, and their feelings and problems and lives became her feelings and problems and lives.

The problem was not that she said yes to her friend that Sunday morning. The problem was that it was not she who said yes! Her  primary selves said  yes,  and  since  she was identified with her primary  selves, there was no self on the other side that could bring a balance into her life.

Of course, Beth Ann married  her disowned self; we all do.  What  is necessary is that we appreciate why  this  has happened.  We must learn to recognize what it is that we have disowned, so that  we can begin the job of embracing  that energy  and making it a part  of our reality. Otherwise our partner remains forever stuck with our projections.

When Maurice finds out what Beth Ann has done, he is very angry. He is not used to showing his anger, and so he withdraws into his favorite place, his impersonal self. Impersonal energy does not have to be experienced as withdrawn. It can be used in a way that is simply an objective, straightforward way of being. However it  is seen in relationships in its withdrawn  form  with remarkable  frequency.

Men  are particularly expert at this kind of withdrawal, and if a woman has no connection to her own  impersonal  energy, she is repeatedly  forced into a pleasing and guilty  daughter.

For many men, the identification with the impersonal and withdrawn father is an amazingly effective way to punish naughty wives  and  turn  them  into  victim  daughters.  It  is also a beautiful way to keep a man away from the reality of his own vulnerability.

Beth Ann was in a full daughter identification when she told Maurice about the call, so it would be natural that he would hook right into the father side.

From Maurice’s perspective,  it is clear that his primary selves are more impersonal and rational. He has disowned the feeling and more intimate selves that are carried by his wife. In his family  upbringing, feelings were not safe to express. His control side emerged as a primary self when he was very young, as a way of protecting his vulnerability from a disturbed family environment.

To fulfill himself, and the relationship, Maurice must separate his awareness from his primary self and begin to embrace the selves on the other side. Otherwise, Beth Ann must forever carry these parts for him. At yet a deeper level there lies his vulnerability. When he discovers what Beth Ann has done, his inner child feels hurt and abandoned.

From the standpoint of the child, the most insignificant appearing incident is experienced as total betrayal, as abandonment. If we are not aware of this, we can see what chaos this unconscious vulnerability can play with our lives.

We can see in this example the remarkable opportunity that relationship gives to  us. The very  things that exist between couples that cause disturbances and upset and trauma, when looked at from a different vantage point, bring with them the possibility of redemption.

Maurice  says to Beth Ann: “I can’t stand it when you are so weak and when you can’t ever say no!” Yet her very inability to set limits, the way she blends, her compassion and  feeling, all of these selves are begging for redemption  in him.  He has not been able to reach them in his personal life before the marriage. Now he has his chance to heal himself, if he can but step back and see Beth Ann as the teacher that she is for him.

Relationship as teacher! That  is the key over and over again.

It is not enough for Beth Ann to keep falling into the daughter role with Maurice. He is her teacher and when she recognizes this, then she can say to herself: “There  is something in Maurice that is missing from me. I must discover in myself the ability to step back as he does, to be less personally involved, as he is. Then  I will have more choice in my life as to whether I say yes or no to a friend.”

One of the things that makes this more difficult to appreciate is the fact that the redemptive energy is seen in its more negative form. Beth Ann’s feeling side tells her that she must not be cold and impersonal like Maurice. Unless she understands that the impersonal energy is channeling through   the  withdrawn father, she will have a difficult time staking her claim to this impersonal energy. We each need an understanding  of bonding patterns  to be able to appreciate the quality in the other person that is causing the problem for us.

The ability to embrace in ourselves the opposites that are carried by our partners and friends shifts relationship dramatically. There is much less stress, more conscious time with one another, and the  development of a much more profound  intimacy.

The  work  we  do  to  understand  this amazing process of bonding is well rewarded. It can heal old wounds. Relationship itself changes dramatically because there is the excitement of joint exploration that brings an added dimension to the interaction.

There is plenty of misery in the world of personal relationship, and particularly primary  relationships. It seems clear from our experience, however, that a lot of the misery can be cleared away if people are willing  to do the  ongoing  work  necessary  to develop consciousness  in relationship.  It doesn’t  happen  automatically.

Issue 101 –

Where Has Love Gone: Part 6

The Energetic Reality of Bonding Patterns

by

Hal & Sidra Stone

The  interactions  between  people in these bonding  patterns are not  just  psychological;  they are also energetic. When Laura is in her disapproving  mother,  Sam’s awkward son is literally  pulled forth.  These bonding  patterns are experienced as a very real physical event between two people, even though the people involved may not know what is happening in physical terms.

We call this an energetic linkage. One of the best examples of this occurs in the interaction between the withdrawn  and impersonal father of a man and the daughter side of a woman.

Typically,  when a man’s feelings are hurt, he withdraws into an impersonal father. Usually, the woman goes into  a daughter  self in response  to this  withdrawal, feeling quite bereft and trying very hard to get the man to feel again, to respond to her in a more personal way. She can see that he is withdrawn on a psychological level. She may even recognize that his feelings have been hurt and that this is how he handles the situation.

What  is generally  not known is that  there  is an actual withdrawal  of physical energy on the part of the man. The woman is literally suffering from a loss of physical contact, because a strong energetic interaction is a real warm physical connection. The woman may actually feel a chill or a loss of balance when this interaction  is interrupted. It is a decisive shift in the energetic linkage between them.

This is one of the reasons why  women get thrown  as deeply as they do into daughter roles when the man pulls back energetically into the withdrawn  father. It is like being in the midst of a delicious dinner and having it suddenly taken away from you.

Women who have been raised in families in which the father has been unavailable emotionally – and this  is very common – are familiar with this withdrawn father/victim daughter bonding pattern,  and they enter into it quite easily in their relationships. It involves a dreadful, physical feeling of loss and a desperate willingness to do anything whatever to reinstate  the previous  feelings of well-being.

Women who come from families in which this is not the pattern, and in which they are accustomed to being met emotionally  and energetically  by their fathers, are less likely to fall into this particular bonding pattern  but will instead react to the man and help pull him out of his withdrawal.

A wonderful example of the energetic reality of bonding occurred one evening a number of years ago when there were no children  at home. We were alone and we were sitting on the  couch facing  each  other,  feeling the most wonderful energetic connection between  us.

Our  heart  areas felt like vibrating  machines, they were buzzing  so strongly. Suddenly, Hal became aware of the fact that the buzzing  had stopped. It was like an emptiness, like being dropped out of paradise. He asked Sidra what had happened. Sidra told him that she was trying an experiment. She had visualized one of her daughters  in her bedroom,  while still trying to maintain the contact with Hal. The act of visualizing her daughter had totally broken the energetic connection between us.

This was a remarkable experience for both of us.  It helped us to experience the physical reality of the bonding energies and the great power of the energetic connection between Sidra and her children. It helped Hal to understand with absolute clarity that so long as the children were around, this connection would exist. It is perfectly normal and natural and without it, the children would grow up incorrectly.

What Hal further  realized was that if he wanted to feel Sidra’s full energies, then he had to do something to take her out of her home environment. Rather than complain and enter into a bonding pattern because his vulnerability had been triggered,  he would  have to use his impersonal energies  through an aware ego and  act.  This  was a very profound  insight  for both  of us and marked  an important shift in our relationship.