SEPERATING

    We are made to use our imagination, our energy, our passion, our intelligence; and we are at our best and deserve to be when we find ourselves with things, persons, processes that use that movement, that engage and bring out its richness and its range, which reaches all the way from friendship to creativity and love.

    When we engage ourselves with something that is not relevant, not caring, not related to our mind, feeling, imagination, spirit, creative self, the movement stops. So that when those engaging processes stop, we stop.

    There is a naturalness in this learning. Leaving is life giving, not only to oneself, but to another person or to that process that has died; because it follows that nothing can be alive for you that is dead for another person, and nothing can be alive for them that is dead for you. If the purpose of life is living, and using yourself, and moving, and knowing the range of one’s person, there is not only a sense in leaving what no longer works for you, but it is unnatural not to. So that in reality seperation is no issue at all, except that in morden civilization, for a variety of reasons, it is probably the biggest problem that people struggle with.

    We find ourselves as persons confronted by institutions, hence a historical moral tradition which lines up against movement; which lines up against the right to leave what no longer works for you, what no longer brings out the best in you. So that seperation is not only hard, but at times impossible because the values of our culture that we have swallowed are so strongly against it that we fight it in ourselves. This is the reason why most major seperations not only take years to come to but years to live with after we have made the choices and taken the actions that clarify the feeling. Many people, under the illusion of choice, stumble into their life commitments sometime in their late teens or early twenties. We stumble into those choices in ignorance and fear, and basically we spend the rest of our lives with those first choices of work, friendship and love; the millstone around our neck that we drag along in an attempt to make our lives tolerable at best, and we are proud that we can keep dregging it and stand up straight.

    Most of us think about seperation, maybe get part way into it, but very few of us follow it through. And even if we go through with the actions, we don’t understand it enough and don’t appreciate the process of what we have done enough to be able to feel better from it. Many of us, even if we are able to leave, cannot use the freedom we have chosen and we live in guilt; we look for people whom we can recreate our bondage with, recreate the illusions of love with. To understand the beauty of seperation and to understand some of the things that go into making seperation easy or difficult is very helpful.

    It is for every person to feel whether seperation is the right thing; it will only feel right if it does. It is only something you act on if you value that. No one can teach you to feel value; they can describe the value of it, but the feeling of it is yours. 

    Once we are born there is the issue that has to do with the quality of how we are cared for. When we feel that we are cared for in a related way by someone who feels us, we develop a sense of ‘basic trust’. If we experience our early life as being felt and related to, then that is internalized as our feeling of ourself. All of these feeling qualities I am mentioning here build on each other and are related. Later in life this trust generalizes into a trust in relationship processes; you trust what you feel, you trust your learning experience, you trust trial and error. All of this helps you deal with life, attack life, go with life, this is very helpful when it comes to seperation. If you have a basic trust, you are able to go with the hassle and the trouble of seperation until that becomes something else and leads you somewhere else. But if you have had parents who related to your early needs and your total dependency through role or how doctor so and so’s book told them to feed you and not through the feeling of it, you learn an essential distrust experimentally; and you fear, and you don’t go through the experience of learning. You only seperate from something when you are without it; then you feel the pain, the readjustment, the revolution of your body, the change in your committments and values and priorities. So it is hard to seperate if you don’t have essential feelings of trust; because how do you know that what you are giving up is not really good for you; and maybe you have really unrealistic fantasies about life and relationship. This type of unbalanced thinking permeates the thinking of mistrustful people, who don’t trust with good reason because they have a hard time with seperation, if they have not been given to in a feeling way.

    Our first experience of learning becomes an archetype of learning experience, and it also gives us our first experience at self control. This sense of autonomy, namely, I can handle myself. Later in life, in relation to seperation, a sense of automy, a positive feeling of being in control of your life is very helpful. However, children learning their early self control experiences with a lot of embarrasment and lack of feeling, develop an undue sense of self-shame and doubt, so that mistakes become terror and generalized later in life when it comes to seperation from any major life committment, and the one thing people will say to you is “mistake, you are making a mistake.” 

    The next stage in life’s way is the child’s early experience with what share she/he gets of the pie of love and attention in the family. If that is a fair slice and if the limits of the family members are taught lovingly, the child learns initiative, a sense of adverturesomeness, all adding up to others in the world, but not curbing one’s enthusiasm as a person. And if you have that when it comes to seperation it is tremendously helpful; seperation is adventure, it is change, it requires initiative and it feels good to leave what doesn’t work for you, what is dead.

    Children who grew up with people that expected them to do way more than is fair, have a difficult time with seperation. If you have been taught from year zero that other people’s feelings are more important and that you should do more for the other person than they do for you, it is very hard to reject somebody, or a situation, or a job, or a philosophy of life, or an institution. Because what right have you to do it, and the people who will fight you will say “you are not fair”, and if all you know of what is fair is that the other person’s feelings are important and yours are not, then you cannot stand up to this criticism and you fold, you stay in the trappings, you don’t seperate.

    There is also a stage in living which relates to the child’s experiences in playground and school, and that is a ’sense of industry’. If the child has positive experiences, if it feels good to learn things, to learn skills, to learn how to be with people, to learn how to kiss, love, fight, and makeup, and be a person, a kind of zest comes to one’s living which is of great help when it comes to seperation. Seperation is always a learning experience and to have not only faith in that but also an enthusiasm about it is very helpful.

    When childhood living is built on the bruises, injuries and rejection in these years, what is mostly developed is a sense of inferiority; with which is dealt with in many different ways. You can see how this sense of inferiority leads to screwed up concepts of what is fair which makes seperation very difficult; because “how can I leave something when I am dumb, ugly, fat, etc.”. We come to feel that we have no right to do what it is that we are doing because we are that inferior label.

     With a sense of identity you know the difference between soap-opera unrelatedness, the emotional drama of most of our lives, and “me”. With a sense of identity people are not as dependent on other relationships to help them through seperation. They don’t need somebody else to tell them that the change is valuable because they feel that their own assessment is enough. It is very helpful to have a sense of identity when it comes to seperating from people who are self pitying; like parents. In seperating from such parents a sense of identity really helps; because when you can feel the ‘rightness’ of the surgery that you have to do, you can go on with it. In other words, it is difficult to ‘hurt’ your parents unless you feel the value of ‘me’. 
 
        So separation is not only hard, but at times impossible, because the values of our culture that we have swallowed are so strongly against it that we fight it in ourselves. We can come to believe that to live with frustration and resentment is what it is to be a mature person; and the more frustration and resentment that we can live with, the more strength of character we have. Yet you can develop an idenity that helps you on knowing that your existence is ultimately grounded in something positive which is you, and know that seperation and endings are a healthy and natural part of one’s life.